Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - November 2002
A hard man is good to beat
Gales this month! Winds of 80 to 90 mph in England. One of my trees got beaten up, and lost one big branch, so there's now only half the tree there was before. Apart from that, I was lucky, not real damage. Last month, it was earthquakes. So what's next month, plague of frogs? Gotterdammerung? I can hardly wait.
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
A member of the web site asked me "Between the Camel Corps and the Weapon it appears that my favorite Valkyrie has had her head in the clouds for quite a bit recently?"
He's referring to three stories I've put up recently, two about Mwynwen, and one about The Weapon. And one of the most important features of these stories is that they involve a superheroine that flies.
So where does this come from?
Where does anything come from? Surely these stories don't come from nowhere? Surely your mind takes stuff you've read, stuff you've heard, stuff you've seen, and reworks it into something that's a bit new, but based on a lot that's old? Is there anything new under the sun?
How far back do you want to go? We all know the Superman myths, although if you haven't been following it for a decade or two, you won't know that a lot has changed. Before Superman, there was Icarus, and before Icarus there was the Greek pantheon of gods. And The Birds by Aristophanes, which you might not have heard of, but I'm sure you've heard of "Cloud Cuckoo Land".
Flight has been the dream of humankind right back through the ages, and the mechanical contraptions of Da Vinci, Montgolfier and the Wright Brothers haven't changed that dream. We still wish we could fly.
But I won't dig back that far. I'll just go back a couple of months; you'll have read in this newsletter my happy announcement that I've implemented Yenc decoding of pictures, in response to requests from members. Yenc is a method of encoding pictures so they can be posted on Usenet. When I implemented that, suddenly a whole bunch of pictures that couldn't be seen by many people, became viewable. And more recently, I added multi-part uuencoded picture to the viewable list, which added even more.
Two of the newsgroups that benefitted most, were alt.binaries.pictures.comics and alt.binaries.pictures.comics.reposts. So I was checking these two newsgroups to make sure that the new software was working correctly. And I got interested. Because comics have changed, a lot. A better term would be "Graphic novels" or "Illustrated books", and you can buy the better stories on Amazon.com.
It isn't "biff" "KABOOM" "Wallop" any more. It's good storytelling, and snappy dialogue. There's action, but there's also characterisation, and emotion, and you can feel involved. And hey - I can do dialogue. I don't think I'm much good at choreographing fights or sex scenes, but I can tell a story, and I can do dialogue.
Look at Preacher, and Transmetropolitan for example. I won't try to describe the plots, but I'd recommend them both. And look at "The Death of Superman", and "Kingdom Come". And folks on this web site might be interested in Wonder Woman and Supergirl, Mary Marvel and the Aurora Universe. And the more of these stories I read, the more I thought, "I can do this, and I can do it better". Well, maybe I did it better, and maybe I didn't, but I sure as hell did it different.
My first thought was that I didn't want to use characters developed by someone else. It's called fanfic, and it's a complete cop-out, in my view. I can see the advantage, the reader already knows the character and her capabilities, and you don't have to do a whole bunch of non-plotline explaining. But it's a cop-out, and it also limits you. You're stuck with what you received. And it doesn't even work too well either - suppose you decide to write a Supergirl story; which one will you be writing about? The Golden age Supergirl Kara Zor-el, or the more recent Matrix, or the young teen in the sports bra, or the one that became Lex Luthor's girlfriend? They all have different powers and characters, and so you haven't actually benefitted from the reader's pre-knowledge. And anyway, not all your readers will have that pre-knowledge.
So, I decided to start from scratch. Well, almost from scratch, because Linda Daventry is too good to leave out, and I decided to have her along for the ride, plus a few of her friends. But Linda, Sharon and Harry are just ordinary folks (well, maybe not ordinary, but you know what I mean), the key character is Mwynwen. By the way, with hindsight, the choice of name was a bad one, because it's hard to remember, and even I had to keep checking the spelling (which is why people call her Min, and if you're familiar with the Goon show, you know where Min came from). Oh well. And the bodybuilding nuns of St Hilda's got mentioned at one point, so maybe they'll turn up some day. Inspector Cameron, now he's an interesting character. Older and more cynical than even Linda Daventry, pissed off with his superior officers, and rather fancies Mwynwen, who is half his age and under his command at that, which puts her off limits. He came out of "The Sweeney", I think, Inspector Regan (thanks to Heck for pointing that out). He might be worth a story or two, I bet he has an interesting past. And I wonder what Mwynwen and Linda used to get up to at school together?
My original design for Mwynwen was to give her a whole range of powers, and you can see the hooks for those in the earlier chapters, if you look carefully. But as the story progressed, I realised that if she just had this one capability, the power of flight, then that's all that you need for a rattling good yarn. And I worked out a plausible explanation for how come she can and the rest of us can't. And the rest of the Mwynwen stories are working out some of the consequences of being able to fly. I don't think there's anything like Mwynwen in any of the comics.
Most superheroines can fly faster than sound; Mach 30 is no problem, and they can often work up to a decent fraction of the speed of light. Or even multiple lights. Mwywen has a top speed of 100 knots, that's 115 mph. That, of course, is a drastic limitation, but it makes her more human, gives her more problems. Likewise, in order to get decent altitude, she has to work very hard, or find an updraft. How do superheroines navigate? Mwynwen follows railway lines. Mwynwen doesn't have super-strength, so she has to get Linda to hit the villain with a hockey stick. She doesn't have heat, x-ray, flame, telescopic or whatever vision, but I guess if she needed to see a long way, she'd have a little pocket telescope with her. I can't really imagine her wanting to burn anything, but if she did, I think she'd use a box of matches. I think this makes it all more interesting. More importantly, she doesn't need some alien creature from outer space threatening to eat the world; just some bent accountant, or a wicked kidnapper to fight against. I never found these super-villains plausible. Luthor (current incarnation) is slightly interesting because of his ambiguity. He's a corporate villain. The Joker is implausible, Harley Quinn makes no sense, the Penguin is just the Joker again. The comic books, in my view, aren't doing good villains, because we can't relate to them. That's why Mwynwen's villains are so ... ordinary.
And she isn't invulnerable. Well, neither are Supergirl etc, there's always some vulnerability, otherwise you can't get the necessary tension in the story. Mwynwen takes that to extremes, of course. She's just as vulnerable as you are. Hit her with your fist, and she goes down and stays down. So, she has to keep from getting hit, it's as simple as that. Just like everyone else.
There's a school of superheroine writing, which I see in various web sites, that goes roughly like this: "Oh wow, I'm so strong, this is so cool." And most of the story is given over to this. I can see that the writer is finding this good, but it gets a bit wearing after a while. And I think it's entirely unrealistic, too.
Run up the stairs two at a time. Now sit down, and work out what you just did. The co-ordination, the balance, the total confidence that you can do it. The Daleks couldn't climb a flight of stairs, and they were going to conquer the universe? Well yes, they were, because the reason we make stairs is that we can cope with them so easily, whereas on the Dalek world, they just don't have stairs. What I'm trying to explain, is that we do some things very easily, and so we take them as read, totally for granted. It isn't "Oh wow, I can run up stairs two at a time, this is so cool." It isn't cool, it's just something you've always been able to do, and when the day comes that you can't, you know you're old.
Likewise, I would think that any capability that you use all the time is something that you wouldn't actually think about. You'd just do it, you wouldn't tell someone else you were doing it, you wouldn't even think to yourself that you're doing it. "Oh wow, I can stand on one leg while I move the other one forwards, this is so cool". Sure, Mwynwen enjoys flying, like a bicycler might enjoy the sensation of speed as she speeds round the track. But she wouldn't go on and on about it.
Flight is interesting in itself, and Mwynwen is especially interested in it. So that gives me the possibiility of exploring the problems of human-powered flight, and how you can best make use of it. And, since it's this site and me writing the stories, there's sex. How is that changed when you can fly? What's that like from the two points of view? And that's one of the reasons I wrote the Mwynwen stories from multiple points of view, which is something that is rarely done, because the change of point-of-view can be confusing to the reader, unless you do it right.
I've done two Mwynwen stories, and there might be more, I don't know yet. But in the middle of writing the second story, I thought up another superheroine, The Weapon. And before I could think about a third Mwynwen, my Muse demanded that I write about the Weapon. You can't argue with your Muse.
Again, The Weapon is partly inspired by Wonder Woman and Supergirl, Mary Marvel and the Aurora Universe. And, unlike Mwynwen, she seems to have a whole range of superpowers, and they're pretty extreme. Actually, she doesn't have any superpowers, I'm just exploring the various consequences of her internal construction. The key vulnerability is, of course, her almost total lack of experience, and the consequential emotional nakedness. So she doesn't know what is the right thing to do in ambiguous situations. Kitten stuck up tree - sure, no problem, although even that turns out to lead to a tricky situation. But anything more complex, and she's unable to work out what to do. So - she can't be damaged, at least not by anything I can think of right now, and to see why, read up what she's made of. But she can be so totally wiped out emotionally that she'll rush off in a sulk at the center of the sun for hours, crying. So she really needs Duncan. And he, of course is another possible vulnerability.
This again is different from most superheroes. Batman has Robin, but Robin is just a sidekick, helping the plot along. Black Canary has Oracle, but actually either of them can function pretty well without the other. Other superheroes have sidekicks. But Duncan and the Weapon really do need each other in order to function. Duncan, on his own, is just an ordinary middle-aged man, trying to get through the working day. So, here we have a team that consists of one man, and one, well, not really a woman but looks like one, and what do you suppose would cement the two of them into a single unit? Sex, of course, the same way that sex cements the human male/female pair into a family unit. Or, if you prefer, you can call it love. Or maybe there's sex and love (I'll be exploring that in the second The Weapon story). I'm an absolute sucker for writing love stories. And where did that oath come from, "My strength is your strength. My power is your power. I will love you and protect you and obey you. Until the end of time"? I don't know. Maybe partly from the Green Lantern, but I don't know where it came from. It just sounded right. But it doesn't rhyme! Hey, I never said it was poetry. It's an oath. The Green Lantern oath is ultra-tacky, anyhow.
Originally, my intention was for her not to have a name, not at all. But I found that writing around the lack of name got more and more clumsy, so eventually I cracked, and gave her a name. Well, no, she still doesn't have a name, but she's called "Wendy". To understand the distinction between having a name and being called something, you either need to read Lewis Carroll (look for Haddocks Eyes) or understand about pointers in C programming.
Her lack of experience (she's only two days old when she hooks up with Duncan) shows up in other ways too - emotional immaturity, impulsiveness, frequent need for reassurance, constant demand for attention, all the other things we see in young children (and in some folks old enough to know better). She's intelligent, smart as a whip. But, because of her origin, she totally lacks wisdom.
She has a mission, a reason for existence. The war, where both sides believe they are in the right, and you can't really tell the difference between them, and your only hope is to stay out of the war (I'd guess a lot of wars have been like that). I haven't begun to explore the consequences of that yet. And the Weapon stories stand on their own - there's no links with any of my other characters (so far, I can't promise about the future).
At the time that I'm writing this newsletter, I'm part-way through the second Weapon story. I'm not going to tell you what it's about, partly because I'm not too sure myself just yet. My current thinking is that it's going to be a drastically original development in the "War on Drugs", proposing some ideas I've never heard suggested before.
Or maybe it won't be - my stories often go in directions I hadn't originally thought of.
Hang on tight - Mwynwen and the Weapon are flying ...
My thanks to the web site member who asked the question that inspired this article.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
The email service is free to members. And there is no advertising
The big news is that I had two computer crashes. First the backup went down (drive failure). So I got that going again, by replacing the failed drive, and as I was re-copying all the data over to it, the main server went down. These are the servers that store "Older Newsthumbs", servers 4, 5, 6 and 7. That means that the Newsthumbs now only goes back to the beginning of this year, which is sad.
The lesson I learned here, is if you're going to put a lot of eggs in one basket, don't let that basket be too big. Those servers were holding two terabytes, and A) maybe I should have had three of them, not just two, and B) two terabytes is too big and clumsy. I can copy about six gigabytes per hour, so a terabyte copy takes about a week. I think from now on, I'll limit the servers to be only one terabyte each. Now I can put that in a 1U case, it'll be a bit more expensive that 2 terabytes in a 2U case, but just as space-efficient, and it'll be smaller baskets.
Other than that - one of my Windows machines stopped working. It just packed up, I don't know why. That's no problem, though, because I don't keep any data on that, it's all on a Linux server. So I just made up another Windows box.
I'm seeing 50,000 to 60,000 pictures per day here.
I don't make these up. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their
contact details - go find your own spammers!
All Natural Jimmy Enlargement
How about Tom, Dick and Harry?
I have used the website testing technologies here at the Safe Shopping Network
to test thevalkyrie.com for security,
usability and performance. You will be pleased to know that it did quite well.
The reason I did the test is because we are currently searching for sites with
high scores to add to our very popular (over two million shoppers per month)
directory of tested safest shopping websites.
Excellent spam! But you don't get the $350 you want from me ...
The essence of the Flor de los Reyes is a mild to medium bodied cigar of
hand-crafted perfection. With uncompromising flavor and aroma, FLOR DE
LOS REYES is crafted from the finest selection of Dominican Republic
tobaccos, Sumatra wrappers and Dominican Republic binders to produce an
exquisite masterpiece of quality that is both beautifully sophisticated
and superb.
My mouth is watering. But I don't smoke.
Most people think a big Idaho Potato on a good
day is about as big as a lady's fist. They can
be 3 to 6 times that big!
Well, I never knew that.
Seize DOES Matter
I agree, carpe dien.
We currently have several running; Nicole Bass, Andrulla Blanchette, Sheila Burgess, Christine Envall, Marilyn Perret, Julia Santana, Peggy Schoolcraft, Larisa Hakobyan.
We're also sponsoring individual events, and funding athletes to go to events with grant dollars.
We're also doing free hosting and free bandwidth for many of our sponsored women. Bandwidth can mount up to a large bill when you're running a popular web site.
And we're sponsoring Heather Foster, Kara Bohigian, Priscilla Ribic, KerryAnn Allen, Linda Cusmano and Jodi Miller.
Member | Posts |
| mikeac | 5163 |
| manc1973 | 4644 |
| lament2syn | 3995 |
| boomer444 | 3521 |
| pamela69 | 3437 |
| gman292 | 3241 |
| Diana the Valkyrie | 3073 |
| mit19237 | 2963 |
| evan100 | 2624 |
| bro5252 | 2517 |
| gaily304 | 2417 |
| ginny2442 | 2368 |
| Storm | 2091 |
| tre1313 | 2048 |
| alphacentaurian | 1805 |
| hiram2000 | 1772 |
| TomNine | 1754 |
| cry2cin | 1602 |
| buffy18976 | 1454 |
| rainer0000 | 1390 |
This month is men's chat month. Mike, Mark and TKO are the top three.
In October, we had 3530 posts to the boards.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A major debate on Iraq and the Middle East has propelled the Politics board into first place by a very wide margin. And on the L&C board, we had a major ding dong about a new web site, now down. | Homoancient is very active on the L&C board |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month | Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| As usual, Fistman is top. The FBB board is ranked high again ... | ... but the Lift and Carry board is very active too. |
Here's something that there should be more of
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of October 2002, there were about 590,000 pictures (32 gigabytes), 81 gigabytes of video, 6300 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 113 gigabytes.
There's now two newsthumbs servers.
| server | Million pictures | gigabytes | Million Text files | gigabytes | Million total files | gigabytes |
| Older 5 | 8.5 | 687 | 13.7 | 34 | 22.2 | 722 |
| Latest | 4.5 | 490 | 6.5 | 10 | 11.0 | 503 |
| Total | 13.0 | 1177 | 20.2 | 44 | 33.2 | 1225 |