Today is the Ides of March by the old Roman reckoning. It is, of course, most famous as the day of the year when Julius Caesar was assassinated, but long before that it was a day of special importance on the Roman calendar: the traditional start of the campaigning season, when the winter rains (and snows in high country) were over, and the ground was dry enough for Roman legionaries to march forth and hack Gauls, Etruscans, or Samnites to pieces. This was the Roman national sport before they ...| bondwine.com
There is a peculiar form of human idiocy, unusually common on the political Left but not, alas, unheard of in any segment of society: the assumption that if a person has listened to what you are saying, they must necessarily agree with you. And therefore, if anyone disagrees with you, it’s because they were not […]| Bondwine Books
Nowadays, we usually take in written language by reading it silently. This was not always the case. For thousands of years after the invention of writing, texts were normally decoded by reading aloud: a considerable help in puzzling out the meaning of a continuous scribble without punctuation, even without spaces between the words. Indeed, the […]| Bondwine Books
To tell a story, you need a way of delivering it from your brain to the brains of your audience; that is what ‘telling’ means. Throughout history, there have been only three main methods of delivering a story: the spoken word, the written word, and various kinds of dramatic performance. Each of these three can […]| Bondwine Books
For convenience, I am pinning this post to the top of my home page, so that readers interested in my monograph on ‘Seven Layers of Story’ can read the individual chapters in the right order. Here are the links: A Critical Problem Translation, Adaptation, and the Layered Model The OSI Model and the Story Model […]| Bondwine Books
In the earliest days of electronic computers, each computer stood completely alone. Each new machine represented a unique design, with its own architecture, operating codes, and methods of storing data. The early computer engineers were staggeringly ingenious in coming up with different ways of representing binary information. On different machines, ones and zeroes were represented […]| Bondwine Books
Seven is a significant number, for reasons that have nothing to do with luck. It has been said that the human brain is not equipped to deal directly with numbers larger than five; but that appears to be more a fault of the human visual cortex, which needs to mentally divide larger collections of objects […]| Bondwine Books
The late Ursula K. Le Guin complained that when she taught creative writing classes, there were always students who had a fine command of prose mechanics, but no notion of what a story is or how to tell one. She never could find a way to explain to such students what it was that she […]| Bondwine Books
‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’ ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’ —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Do not be alarmed by the title of this essai. The problem I propose […]| Bondwine Books
If you have been linked to this post, then it is my honour to inform you that IAARPOWWTICTURLOAIOSOMDFW. Which, of course, stands for ‘I Am A Rotten Piece Of Work Who Thinks It’s Clever To Use Really Long Online Abbreviations Instead Of Spelling Out My Damn Fool Words’. Fancy not knowing that!| Bondwine Books
Today is the Ides of March by the old Roman reckoning. It is, of course, most famous as the day of the year when Julius Caesar was assassinated, but long before that it was a day of special importance on the Roman calendar: the traditional start of the campaigning season, when the winter rains (and snows in high country) were over, and the ground was dry enough for Roman legionaries to march forth and hack Gauls, Etruscans, or Samnites to pieces. This was the Roman national sport before they ...| Bondwine Books
The Fiction of Tom Simon & the Lies of H. Smiggy McStudge| bondwine.com
This is the first in a five-part series on the ‘Fantasy Big Bang’ of 1977. You can find the other parts of the series here:| Bondwine Books