Dragon Magazine & Other Fantasy Stuff
As some of you may know, I’ve been subscribed to Dragon Magazine for about a year and a half now. Sometimes I find articles that look extremely boring. Often there are good ideas that are unimplementable due to strict over-dming; this is the most common category. Finally, there are those articles that just blow me away. I read this magazine for the last category, as I find that I like to focus on characters rather than on worlds, which is quite unlike my usual forté. This surprises me. My issue is that I often feel obliged(SP?) to read the entire mag through and this stops it from being as enjoyable. But if I don’t I feel as though I have wasted it. So, to settle my conscience a little, what do you lot do when you read a magazine? Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
There was an advert in this issue for a sci-fi book club, the usual compulsory-buying ones. It was only available in the US, and I had no intention is signing up, but the headline on the page really brought back memories; it went something like this: ‘Stand fast, fight hard’. That just says it all. I recently got an old CD player in my room and have been playing my computer game, gaming, filk and the occasional misc. piece through it. The same thing happens when I play some of those pieces. I’ve also been messing around with some traditional MIDI game music, and it takes me to another world. I don’t like to be affected emotionally by music because it is an illogical process that I try to transcend. But it is still happening. But the music makes the rest of my house angry and frustrated if they get close to it, and such an antynomous (correct word?) situation is beyond my skill to explain.
I need to get reading again. I’ve been off school today because it’s been an inset day and I found myself getting bored. This hasn’t happened for a long time. My usual book consumption levels are dropping and this is not a situation that I wish to continue. I think I’ll set aside a reading time in the evening that I’ll try and stick to pretty rigidly if I can, the eventual conclusion being that I am gradually getting back into the habit. Although my reading skills in school and the like have not degraded, Matt, Peter and Rosie are just about faster than me in things I am actually trying to understand (and I have always considered myself to be a very fast reader), because I am having trouble comprehending on the fly and am re-reading pages a lot more. This is not at all good.
Which brings me on to my next point, in a roundabout fashion: L-Space. Since recently learning the true significance of Einstein’s theory of relativity (correct me if I’m wrong here), that energy and matter are interchangable, I can now properly understand the L-Space equation, which is particularly prevalent in my life because the second and third terms have particularly application to my way of thinking:
Books = Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass
I’ve been doing some more research and found the following:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/safeperl/mert1404/simsite.cgi?page=LSPC
This is written for a roleplaying system, but it’s still very interesting.
http://www.lspace.org/about/whatis-lspace.html
A nice, simple definition page. Go read.
The coolest thing about l-space is that it applies to any book, film, game or indeed real life (I’m really getting into italics today). That means that theoretically one could move from Middle-Earth over to Houen (Pokémon). Practically this isn’t possible because you need a huge amount of books to open the portal, and this hasn’t been acheived yet. I would write more – go read the link above! You can see that I’m very excited about all this. After all, I ALWAYS prefer a librarian over a bookseller of any form.
So, it’s time to go off and read The Colour of Magic. Let’s hope it improves.
I subscribe to quite a few magazines of various types – news, entertainment, history, culture – but I rarely read every article in them. I usually read the articles that really interest me, then skim the other ones or, if the articles are about things I’m not at all interested in, skip them entirely.
My thought is, if a magazine has one or two articles per issue that I find interesting, I’ve not wasted my money. And I always find at least one article I like.
One or two per issue, eh? That’s interesting. This is a monthly, 90-130pg magazine though. That advice is extremely reassuring. Thanks.