In which we ponder size

Final-editing Nostrum has been mostly fun. I’ve said this before, but I really had no idea that the original series was quite that long. When you put it all together it will easily be over two million words, quite outpacing War and Peace, the inevitable albeit perhaps tired length standard. It’s more like Game of Thrones length if you need a more modern comparison, and, sadly, just as incomplete. Except I make no pretense of ever adding new episodes. I might, but I doubt it. I don’t know enough about debate anymore to talk about it in such depth. There are also, unlike GOT, neither dragons nor naked people in Nostrum, a real oversight on my part, I admit, but they did not have those in debate back in my day. The last episode I was working on, 110 or so, was published in March of 1999. Which means that it was written before literally all of next year’s novices were born.

I’m nothing if not relevant and up-to-the-minute.

Anyhow, I’m still pushing to get it out by September as a free e-book. Whether anyone wants it or not is another question, but nobody writes that much and doesn’t take care to preserve it, if possible.

I’m mostly packed for NDCA. Needless to say, the three pairs of socks are the easy part; it’s the decision about which devices that challenges the mind. I noticed with a tear that CP had ported the LD and PF data over to tabroom, where I will not be working on it. Sigh. There seems to be a long stretch of restaurants behind the tournament hotel, which is a good thing. I do hope there’s an Indian restaurant, as I have a feeling all judging all those PF rounds is going to put me in the mood for some rogan josh. (No, not chicken tikka masala, a thoroughly English dish that’s never really appealed to me.)

Needless to say, the interwebs are rife with impassioned pleas and condemnations and whatnot over who’s not getting into the national tournaments for whatever reason. I just happened to notice this by accident as I was trying to get some transportation data on the Utah trip. All the usual suspects are pretty much in place, bandying about half-truths and suppositions and serious concerns willy-nilly, which really doesn’t serve anybody in the long run (and, most likely, doesn’t get anyone into TOC in the short run). Although the means have changed, it has ever been thus. I think back to all the nonsense on the old ld-l (excluding, of course, the magnificent announcements about this week’s Nostrum), and how there were times you just had to turn it off or go bats. Probably before computers the airing of the grievances was conducted in hieroglyphs on papyrus scrolls. I have a little patience with the adolescents involved, blaming it on their youth; the adults, on the other hand, ought to know better, not necessarily to hold the opinions they hold, which may be correct, but to jump into the playground and declaim them as fervently as any 16-year-old. Seriously now. (Not to mention those with no portfolio whatsoever.) It’s a master class in internet trolling that repeats every year or so over some horror or other, real or perceived. I guess the folks in San Juan Capistrano feel this way every year around St. Joseph’s day. They expect the swallows, but sometimes they forget to wear a hat that day, with the inevitable results…