Today’s Hitherby Dragon, like the best of them, is whimsically heartbreaking. Not everybody has a Del Monver to call.
Category: Rebecca Borgstrom
Brendan Talks About Things He Doesn’t Understand
Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:
“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”
Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).
That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?
According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.
Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.
Just when I think Hitherby Dragons has spun off into total incomprehensibility, back it comes with stuff like this. Awesome.
On a less happy note, I had been wondering for a while why almost all of Rebecca Borgstrom’s protagonists are brave children in great danger. I suppose her column today is an answer of sorts.
Why Hitherby Dragons is great
“‘The targets for assassination are chosen by the wisdom of the crystal unicorns,’ Yasha says.”
Ah, damn. Hitherby Dragons has 367 entries today–actually yesterday–which means it’s officially outstripped Anacrusis, with its mere 365. Anacrusis started first (July vs September 2003), but Hitherby posts on Saturdays, so that was guaranteed. By math.
What you have to understand is that Hitherby Dragons and Rebecca Borgstrom are superior to my writing and myself in every possible way. I live in Kentucky; Ms. Borgstrom lives in Seattle. I have nearly completed a Master’s degree in CS; Ms. Borgstrom has her doctorate. I took AP classes; she registered at UCLA when she was 12. I want to design games someday; she writes for White Wolf, and already wrote Nobilis, the greatest damn game I’ve ever read. Her daily fiction work is usually about ten times as long as mine, without feeling like it, and every one is invested with the kind of psychotic whimsy I’d love to capture once a month. Anacrusis has 40 subscribers to its LJ feed; Hitherby Dragons has 161. It was described as “a webcomic without words” before I even thought of Anacrusis that way.
So I nurse just this tiny little coal of envy in my heart for Ms. Borgstrom and her extraordinary stories. In case you can’t tell!
You should be reading Hitherby Dragons. I have run out of words trying to find superlatives for it. I will steal them instead, by quoting Penny Arcade’s Tycho (in reference to Checkerboard Nightmare): “It’s so good that it’s depressing for me to read it. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. How am I supposed to stand out against that level of quality?”