TES Fanfic: here it is.

I actually wrote this before I wrote yesterday's blog post, which is why it sounded like the fanfic was in the post. Sorry if that disappointed anyone.

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Diary Entry #1:

Everything happened so fast the last few hours. Yesterday, I got paid employment carrying supplies over the mountains. I thought it was either smuggling or bringing secret military supplies to an outpost or something, because the guy who hired me was a thief or some other sort of petty criminal … which … I suppose … is what I am, too.

We got ambushed just below the tree-line. After that things got crazy. Executions, Dragons, escape.

To stand where I am standing today, I killed eleven men. Two Imperial guards. The rest were like you, at my feet. Bandits.

The first bandit I met, I tried to just walk away. Leave well alone. He came after me with his weapon in his hand. I was nearly killed. Just before that, I had met the first person I saw since my escape. Friendly hunter. He sold me some food. I was not ready to fight. But I did. That fight, it got my hunting spirit roused. I ran up the mountain, and I surprised two more bandits. I didn't try to be friendly this time. The third one was on top of a ruined tower. I shot him and he fell. I don't know if my arrow killed him or the fall. I didn’t stay to find out. I wanted to know what was at the top.

At the top was a sort of ancient temple. I crept around, until you spotted me. You didn’t say anything. You just shot me in the arm. It hurt.

This morning, you had something. You had a sort of life. You had your two friends who came to defend you; you had this place, up here in the snow. All this beauty even thought the cold will kill you if it can. You had your own belongings, your freedom, your life.

I killed your two companions. This was not easy, especially with you shooting at me whenever you got the chance. One of your arrows went through my boot. Grazed the arch of my foot. I nearly fell.

When your second friend, the big elf, died, I turned around. There was a block of fallen stone between us. Looked like a dragon head. But you were on a ledge, in front of a buttress. You had nowhere to run and hide. I dropped my sword and ax, and took my bow off my back. Lucky it was undamaged. My arrows were less lucky, but I had five or six good ones.

I shot you. I think you were surprised. It hit you in the gut, which is not where I was aiming but I was hampered by the rock that protected me from your arrows.

Why didn’t you run? You saw your two friends die. You got shot. You could have run away. I would have let you go. You kept shooting... slower. I shot you again. This time your armour did not slow it down. It looks like it killed you right away.

I wanted to ask you why didn't you run. I wanted to ask you “WHO ARE YOU?” It was too late.

You still look angry, even with your eyes dead. You must have been beautiful, once. Big strong Nord girl. I was curious. I didn't come here to kill you.

Well, the snowstorm it is clearing a little. So I sit you up against the wall, on your ledge so badly chosen to fight from. You can watch the view, so beautiful, while your blood freezes. So cold. I kiss you goodnight, Nord bandit woman. Your lips are cold already.

I say to myself: “I will hide, rather than kill; whenever I can, I will go by unseen.”

[Clothilde (left) watched by her faithful huscarl Lydia]

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Barely half an hour later, I was killing again, back in the rush of the hunt, my blood hot with joy. I think I may be a bad person.

For the TES Fans. I try my hand at FanFic

I got Skyrim installed yesterday. It runs really well on my three-year-old upper-mid-end system if I keep anisotropic down to 2 or 0. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, maybe the rest isn't for you.

I played Oblivion for the immersion, which after 5 years of modding is amazingly deep and detailed. In Blivvy I generally began with a character backstory, so I could develop a playing style that would be different each time. In Skyrim, I've gone back to my preferred style for the first playthrough. By nature I'm bookish, an alchemist, cook, trader, smith. In combat I'm a sniper. I like to stay hidden and take my enemy by surprise.

So I rolled up a young-ish Breton woman. I find it very hard to play male characters in 1st person RPG. I don't really know why, but I think it has something to do with the archetypes. The boys are all Alpha Males or Alpha Male wannabes, it's all about superiority for them. I find myself not caring about what happens to them. Each time I played a male in Blivvy I abandoned the character the first time he died.

My Breton woman is called Clothilde, and she has a strong French accent. I don't show her accent in the writing; just a few bits of odd diction. I think she speaks and writes well in several languages, so she knows how to spell. I worked out a lengthy and detailed backstory for her, and then began to play.

Skyrim is pretty good. There are a few niggles in the gameplay and quite a few minor glitches that I suspect will be sorted out by patching over the next few weeks. The influence of the Gothic series is evident everywhere you look, both visually and in gameplay - even in the design of dungeons. I also utterly utterly hate scenarios where "YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONE" or "YOU ARE THE LAST REMAINING…" but I got around this by having a character who is a misfit, and who rather dislikes all this too.

When I saved last night, she was standing on top of High Hrothgar with her recently appointed Huscarl, Lydia,  having been taught some new tricks by the old men of the mountain. I imagined her turning to Lydia and saying

"What the fuck? I feel like a total fraud. An interloper. Three days ago I was a petty criminal, and a smuggler. I was saved from execution by accident, and I have killed more than ten people, human beings, in the last two days. Now some guy I met yesterday morning gives me a Title! And a retainer! And these old guys up here in the cold with their all mystical attitude are acting all impressed because I got some special power. It is stupid. I want a drink. Let's go get drunk."

Lydia is a Nord, and a simple, plain, loyal warrior. I'm pretty sure she didn't listen to most of that. I rekon she just heard the last two sentences. She'd reply:

"Okay. We passed an inn on the way here. Just before all those damn stairs."

… more tomorrow.

Benefits of staying off the path

Here's an argument for educational reform that even a politician can understand:

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged, memorably framed by Edison I think, that we don't know a millionth of one percent about anything. I assume that most people would agree that the sum of human knowledge is pretty big. Too big, in fact, for any one person to know, let alone understand, all of it. Indeed we frequently choose to approach a problem or project by collecting a team of people each of whom brings different knowledge and expertise, so that we may be sure that we have all the knowledge required to address the problem.

If this technique is so effective — and it is — then our education system should prepare for it. And, I hear the dear politicians protest proudly, it does. Up to age shmeu everyone learns the basics, and then each child gradually specializes until by age smee they are ready to enter higher education fully prepared for their narrow specialization that will make them such a valuable contributor in the future.

This is a really strong argument when you know exactly what the future holds. There have been times in the past where we (almost) have. Those times are looooooong ago now, and getting ever more distant and an ever faster rate as Moore's Law drives us ever faster into the future.

If the next generations are to be ready to face this unknown (and I suspect, unknowable) future, then we need to ensure that their range of knowledge is as diverse as possible, and furthermore, their range of approaches, ways of thinking, is as broad as possible. (Quick! Everyone out of the box!)

Diversifying their range of knowledge is the bit that I think the politicians can handle. We can tell them about it without their needing too much hand-holding. It goes as follows:

If you impose a national curriculum, that every child must follow up to age shmeu, (even if it then diversifies into specializations that are also imposed at a national level) then the greatest possible sum of all their knowledge is barely greater than the knowledge of one child. I understand that you want equality of opportunity and that ensuring that desire means assuring that the same level  of education is available to every child, but it does not mean that the same education should be given to every child. Supposing you defined 10 different national curricula, and distributed them at random around the country. You would increase by an order of magnitude the total knowledge of your nation. It follows that if there were 100, 1000 curricula, you add two, three more orders of magnitude.

Are you out of your mind? 1000 different curricula?

Here's the part that will make the politicians sad: education has to be disestablished. Disestablishment is the separation of any institution from the institution of the state. In other words, you remove all Government control, and indeed most central control from education. Personally I think that individual teachers should set the curricula of their own classes and teach it as they choose. Naturally this makes comparative testing (competition) invalid. Individual teachers might use examination as a means of tracking progress, but a national exam "at the end" is nonsense. The politicians panic. "How can we prove that everyone is getting the same level of education?" they scream in horror. "Are you doing that now?" is all I can answer.

Ensuring that every child gets the same opportunity becomes a very different process. It would require inspectors who would check classroom by classroom, if need be, child by child, to observe that education is happening. The children are learning. Developing their ability to think, to express themselves, to engage with one another and to engage with the problems that they face in their daily lives, and some of them, with the problems of the wider world.

The validity of this model of education is that it seeks to prepare for the unknown future, by maximizing diversity. Compare with validating an education on the basis of how it prepares children for today, which is what politically motivated education does. Education is currently conceived, in most countries, on the basis that you can measure the progress of children's education through identical examination, and that you can measure the success of an education by how easily each school leaver gets a place in University or lands his first job. To call this a rather narrow view is to be very British about it.

Surely an education should be judged on its ability to prepare you (inasmuch as this is even possible) for your life.

So education needs to be free, not equal. So it needs to be off the path, as far from straight and narrow as possible.