Wait. . .what?

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team. 

lingers uncannily;

high level sources say

issues abound.

Death or delinquency,

government vacancy

can't be abided by

morals unsound.

Every Kentuckian

needs a congressional

rep that's alive and not

gone to the ground.

Yet still in the interim,

search for the sign that one

octogenarian's

sorcerers are just a fact of the setting. they're not evil because they're sorcerers and they're not sorcerers because they're evil. sorcerers exist because of ancient pacts or boons or a chance of biology or simply being born in proximity to magical places, and that's clear in all of the sundered house mythos. i think speculating that the ancient versions of the sundered houses got their magic nefariously is falling into the "some things are Just Evil." we can't assume that because the human sorcerers of modern aramán are engaging in class warfare, their ancestors were wicked.

there are sundered houses who took the heroic position of defying the shapers during the shapers war. the priestly houses are rotten not because sorcerers are rotten but because wealth and resource hoarding and the dismissive carelessness they treat mortal life with is evil. otto einfasen isn't evil because he's an einfasen, he's evil because he took a commoner girl's head off with a hammer. and there's endless nuance to be found here: the einfasens are nominally allied with the protagonists, but it doesn't render them heroic, they're still canonically authoritarians. the royces are complicit in every evil done by the sundered houses for the last 70 years, but they are inexorably tied to the heroes in a positive way and are making active efforts to break away from the evil system.

additionally: assuming that the primordials were bad because they wed the shapers is a big leap. the shapers murdered them. thaisha saw the desecration of tehana's shrine in favor of trozhna as wrong and insulting. if it were one evil covering another, it would not have been impactful to notice the desecration. the primordials might have been a neutral or evil force on the world, we don't actually know, but they are a part of the foundation of the world, so it's more likely that forces of nature are simply a neutral concept.

aramán is a setting where evil consistently is shown to be an active choice. even the shapers. there is no indication that they were just born bad. they chose to come to aramán, kill the primordials and repress the population, turning them into playthings in their sibling squabbles as they bent the world to their will. those are the reasons they are evil, not because they come from Evil Land.

Are you a Soldier? On a quest for justice or revenge? Ready to fight and flee and raise your weapons?

Are you a Seeker, searching for something lost? Something that needs to be found before it is too late.

Or are you a Schemer? Do you have a day job that needs work and night shifts that keep you up until dawn doing the hard work it takes to change fates?

Show me your results! I wanna seeeeeeee