Kevin Hearne: Ink & Sigil

I've always had a bit of a suspicious relationship with Hearne's urban fantasy. The protagonist of the Iron Druid series was rather a jerk, which frequently made it hard to root for him — even if it appears that Hearne was playing the long game and had his misdeeds result in consequences.

Ink & Sigil, while set in the same world, has a new protagonist, a sigil agent, a human given the power of crafting special sigils with special inks by Brigid (the First among the Fae), partly to take up the slack from the aforementioned irresponsible druid. Very much inspired both by Taoist Fulu and Celtic sigils, the protagonist can work limited magic by drawing a sigil on paper, and then having the subject look at it. However, aside from having to possess the knowledge of crafting the sigils in the first place, they only work if done with special inks particular to a given sigil, so there's a good dose of alchemy involved as well. This specific combination is something I haven't encountered in urban fantasy before.

The plot arc was decent, with a definite peak towards the end which kept me glued to the Kindle turning pages, though it wouldn't have been enough to keep me up at bedtime. Nonetheless, a perfectly well crafted story and dramatic structure.

The setting — while in the Iron Druid world, this story is specifically set in Glasgow, and Hearne relishes in the Scottish dialect and colorful language, as seen by an outsider. With his usual over-the-top approach and frequently rather immature humor, there's just so much energy and clear love that concerns about coming across as a caricatured stereotype didn't linger long in my mind. So yes, the vocabulary is very colorful and refreshing, the characters are drawn with very vivid colors, and there's plenty of opportunity for Hearne to name drop locations, drinks, fountain pens and whatnot.

Another refreshing change is that he protagonist is an elderly gentleman, though one who isn't completely clueless about modern things — and while I'm not as old as the character, it is always hard for me to imagine that we are starting to have many an elderly grown-up who grew up with nerdy and geeky stuff, so having an elderly Glaswegian printer know about Magic the Gathering really isn't nearly as incongruous as one might at first blush think.

Very little is left to imagination about the author's view of social issues and the current politics in the US through some comments the characters make. There is an effort to draw a parallel between the supernatural crimes happening and real-world issues, so overall there's a pinch of social activism involved, but if anything, I appreciate this.

Finally, the book does not require knowledge of the Iron Druid series, and it neatly tells a tale of an adventure which is tied up by the end of the book, although it clearly leaves plenty of opportunity for recurring characters and longer story arcs as well.

The Dreamwidth Experiment

 

I miss LiveJournal. I increasingly have moral objections to Facebook, and find it personally harmful to my mental health. Hence my attempt to come back to Dreamwidth, inspired by another person's attempt to do much the same. Facebook's atrocious new interface finally pushed me into giving alternatives a try.

Once I left LiveJournal due to all my information being available to the Russian state, and being subject to Russian censorship on sexuality, human rights issues, politics and whatnot, Dreamwidth was the obvious go-to alternative. However, a fraction of my LiveJournal community made the move (from my circle of 50 or so people, maybe three moved and friended me back here.)

I then poked around Blogger/Blogspot, Wordpress, and have been spending the last years hoping for something better, without finding anything.

So, I posted about this in the other person's thread on Facebook, and a few times on my own wall, with a few sympathetic responses, but no obvious interest.

Further, coming back to Dreamwidth was a bit of a time-capsule shocker. It's as if nothing has chanced from the days of LiveJournal. Fine, the editors are the same rich text and HTML editors we've had for a decade, but I'm fine with that in general, though it's already a bit of bummer. But nothing has been obviously changed in the UI. And the limitations of the editors begin to show themselves. You want to add a picture to your post? Well, find a hosting service (or use Dreamwidth's), upload your photo there, copy the URL, put the URL in the post, edit the properties to specify how many pixels wide you want it to be... No. Or you deep-link images from elsewhere, with the high likelihood that they will eventually disappear, breaking your blog entry.

I very much love the ability to do markup on my text. Emphasis, blockquotes, italics, different typefaces, headings, all are things I wish Facebook had. But having to go back to manually crafting the layout and embed pictures is annoying to me; at the very minimum today's editors should provide drag-and-drop and interactive resizing and repositioning with dragging image corners or images around. And while I am possibly willing to put up with going back to steam power, I predict that there is next to no chance that a younger generation, or people who didn't grow up writing HTML have any interest in posting in this kind of environment.

Which, unfortunately, leaves me right where I started. How to keep in touch with people, how to have dialogue with people, when there's no way to do this in person?

 

(Source of image is steampunker.de. I did add the link in the image properties, but somehow it doesn't seem to display that or the description?)