THE NOVEL-READER IN PERDITION

letting rats fall into the rice pot violates the buddhist concept of nonviolence, ahimsa. and this is one of the more dauntingly advanced cookbooks i've ever seen

ingredients: 1 grain of dust.

Happy birthday, Frantz Fanon! (July 20, 1925)

One of the most enduring and influential anti-colonial theorists of all time, Frantz Fanon became acquainted with racist colonial violence growing up on the French Caribbean colony of Martinique. During World War II, Fanon enlisted with the Free French forces, and experienced further racism from Europeans during his time fighting fascists on the continent. After the war, he studied psychiatry as his political consciousness continued to grow, and in 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, which discussed the psychological impact of colonialism on Black people. He worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria for a time before deciding that he could no longer support the French colonial project in Africa and defected to join Algeria's National Liberation Front in its struggle for freedom. He continued to put out a number of influential texts, including his last and most famous, The Wretched of the Earth. In poor health, Fanon died in 1961 at the tragically young age of 36, but his legacy is outsized for his age, having influenced a bevy of revolutionary figures, including Che Guevara, Malcom X, Kwame Ture, and Huey P. Newton.

It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.

No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---

Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.

The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?

No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.

Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.

Words were exchanged between friends – the house of human companionship was established in secret – eons passed – eons passed – eons passed – eons passed

A) The house was diminished!

B) The house was strengthened!

C) The house was swept away!

Lace Monitor Lizard (Varanus varius), family Varanidae, QLD, Australia