Assignment
Look, you don't use your brains, and you'll be left with mush. You're lacking and you're slacking.
Well, you say, what's the point? Bad translations, brokenly mimeographed pages, a few bent-spined books, memorizing conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to footpounds, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of oxidizer, steam, peroxide, and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers. Destruction--oh, and demons, yes, including Maxwell's--lurking deep in the woods right alongside those fairy tales you read once. It's easy to at least reduce it all to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control, preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis (gotcha there, didn't I?) the whole way to apogee and perigee. And then you throw the whole thing under the uplifted feet of the economists because, after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, those were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control--secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say (now we're into history!). Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of the playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical (recess!).
Therefore:
---
Equivalence.
(Expound.)
---
This is your topic. I expect an essay by this Friday of any length, style, or organization so long as it is on the given subject (herein: equivalence).
Do a little work. Move mass over a distance (that's work, you pencil-pushers, key-pressers, mouth-movers). Exercise your mental muscle. Increase bloodflow. Click those neurons. Reverse the isolation process that leaves single neural cells in your brain glowing alone, disconnected, isolated, like dismembered constellations or dying glowworms: reconnect and reconvene. You'd be surprised what you can remember, even so long in the thereafter. Or hereafter, depending.
Why bother?! I hear you cry.
Well, you're not in school anymore, many of you, which is a shame since a few of you have a certain amount of aptitude for it. The Academy and the Library feel downright neglected--you ought to hear them whine like I hear them whine (still giving lectures Monday mornings at 10:30 in the Academy for those who might be interested and who have the comprehension for it). So we can't very well give you grades, I suppose.
But what's better than extra credit?
Passing essays will have their essayists rewarded with one (1) token to be used to ward off one (1) curse.
Yes. You read that correctly.
One (1) token to ward off one (1) curse.
It's not like it's the first time we've offered a reward for something. Don't look so shocked. I can see your faces from here. Close your mouth. Don't drool. Or do, but do it under controlled, laboratory conditions.
If you should be so rewarded, use it wisely--if your essay should so be up to our exacting standards, of course. You may use it to buy your own freedom from a curse or that of one other person from a curse. Your reward may not be begged, borrowed, bought, sold, or stolen. They're personalized to make sure they'll work.
This is not a trick. This is a guarantee. And it will be so proven this Saturday when the best essays and their essayists are rewarded and awarded.
You pays your money and you gets your choice. You uses your token and you stops your curse.
Think about it.
Equivalence.
Do I miss academia? No. But write the damn essay.
[ooc: This is the first of the City's One Word Exams!
Each Monday a Deity will post a single word participating Citizens will use as the topic of their paper. Citizens have from Monday to Friday to post their paper to the Network. On Saturday, Citizens with high quality compositions will find themselves in the possession of a quarter-sized Curse Token (it can appear in their pocket, under their pillow, etc) that can be used only once to get themselves or one other character out of an unsavory curse. The magic words: Replay for [name here]! Isn't that handy dandy? So if you want one, get to work and write write write! Responses don't have to follow an essay format, they can be 5 paragraphs or 1 sentence. We're leaving who receives a token up to player discretion so please be fair about whether or not your character deserves a token. Characters can participate in all 4 rounds but players are limited to only 2 tokens per character. Tokens cannot be bought/sold/stolen, they will work only once for the character who owns them or for whoever the character wishes to use them on. Deities will be trolling! Their trolling does not influence whether or not your character should receive a token.
So, like the instructions say: write write write!]
Well, you say, what's the point? Bad translations, brokenly mimeographed pages, a few bent-spined books, memorizing conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to footpounds, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of oxidizer, steam, peroxide, and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers. Destruction--oh, and demons, yes, including Maxwell's--lurking deep in the woods right alongside those fairy tales you read once. It's easy to at least reduce it all to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control, preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis (gotcha there, didn't I?) the whole way to apogee and perigee. And then you throw the whole thing under the uplifted feet of the economists because, after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, those were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control--secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say (now we're into history!). Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of the playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical (recess!).
Therefore:
---
Equivalence.
(Expound.)
---
This is your topic. I expect an essay by this Friday of any length, style, or organization so long as it is on the given subject (herein: equivalence).
Do a little work. Move mass over a distance (that's work, you pencil-pushers, key-pressers, mouth-movers). Exercise your mental muscle. Increase bloodflow. Click those neurons. Reverse the isolation process that leaves single neural cells in your brain glowing alone, disconnected, isolated, like dismembered constellations or dying glowworms: reconnect and reconvene. You'd be surprised what you can remember, even so long in the thereafter. Or hereafter, depending.
Why bother?! I hear you cry.
Well, you're not in school anymore, many of you, which is a shame since a few of you have a certain amount of aptitude for it. The Academy and the Library feel downright neglected--you ought to hear them whine like I hear them whine (still giving lectures Monday mornings at 10:30 in the Academy for those who might be interested and who have the comprehension for it). So we can't very well give you grades, I suppose.
But what's better than extra credit?
Passing essays will have their essayists rewarded with one (1) token to be used to ward off one (1) curse.
Yes. You read that correctly.
One (1) token to ward off one (1) curse.
It's not like it's the first time we've offered a reward for something. Don't look so shocked. I can see your faces from here. Close your mouth. Don't drool. Or do, but do it under controlled, laboratory conditions.
If you should be so rewarded, use it wisely--if your essay should so be up to our exacting standards, of course. You may use it to buy your own freedom from a curse or that of one other person from a curse. Your reward may not be begged, borrowed, bought, sold, or stolen. They're personalized to make sure they'll work.
This is not a trick. This is a guarantee. And it will be so proven this Saturday when the best essays and their essayists are rewarded and awarded.
You pays your money and you gets your choice. You uses your token and you stops your curse.
Think about it.
Equivalence.
Do I miss academia? No. But write the damn essay.
[ooc: This is the first of the City's One Word Exams!
Each Monday a Deity will post a single word participating Citizens will use as the topic of their paper. Citizens have from Monday to Friday to post their paper to the Network. On Saturday, Citizens with high quality compositions will find themselves in the possession of a quarter-sized Curse Token (it can appear in their pocket, under their pillow, etc) that can be used only once to get themselves or one other character out of an unsavory curse. The magic words: Replay for [name here]! Isn't that handy dandy? So if you want one, get to work and write write write! Responses don't have to follow an essay format, they can be 5 paragraphs or 1 sentence. We're leaving who receives a token up to player discretion so please be fair about whether or not your character deserves a token. Characters can participate in all 4 rounds but players are limited to only 2 tokens per character. Tokens cannot be bought/sold/stolen, they will work only once for the character who owns them or for whoever the character wishes to use them on. Deities will be trolling! Their trolling does not influence whether or not your character should receive a token.
So, like the instructions say: write write write!]