Pinging visuals
So I don't think I've ever really talked much about the Ships at Sea storyline, because it's a mess and it's difficult to even know where to tackle it from. I wrote two bits which were about to dissolve into Action Scene (at which I fail), and have reworked the pertinent bits of the plot as they apply to Theodric a few times, but it's all still very nebulous.
Today, while browsing my way through some interesting science links, I came across this page, discussing earth's magnetic field and what would happen in the case of a pole reversal.
Left: Earth's magnetic poles. Right: What those poles would do during a reversal, because it's nothing so clean as south becoming north and vice versa.
Now... layer another tangled mess on top of that, where past and future are doing the same unraveled yarn ball as the poles. It might look something like this:
Where orange is south, blue is north, red is the future and green is the past. And linear "present" time is roughly 1600, deep in the age of tall sail ships and human calculated navigation to get anywhere. And all of those exploding points have a tendency to errupt into being, meander around like large drunk hurricanes, subside, and then reform somewhere else. Without much warning.
So yeah. Navigators. Being mathematical geniuses and complete and utter batshit insane goldfish were sort of the job prerequisites. =P
....now if only I could figure out how to describe all of that WITHOUT the pretty visuals. v_v
Today, while browsing my way through some interesting science links, I came across this page, discussing earth's magnetic field and what would happen in the case of a pole reversal.
Left: Earth's magnetic poles. Right: What those poles would do during a reversal, because it's nothing so clean as south becoming north and vice versa.
Now... layer another tangled mess on top of that, where past and future are doing the same unraveled yarn ball as the poles. It might look something like this:
Where orange is south, blue is north, red is the future and green is the past. And linear "present" time is roughly 1600, deep in the age of tall sail ships and human calculated navigation to get anywhere. And all of those exploding points have a tendency to errupt into being, meander around like large drunk hurricanes, subside, and then reform somewhere else. Without much warning.
So yeah. Navigators. Being mathematical geniuses and complete and utter batshit insane goldfish were sort of the job prerequisites. =P
....now if only I could figure out how to describe all of that WITHOUT the pretty visuals. v_v