Ahhh, another fine winter day.
Working on translating some truly incomprehensible code today. It's kind of fun copying things over and just trusting that it will all work out. If something goes wrong, obviously I'll have to dig in a figure out what was really intended here, but for now I can just copy structure. It did spur me to figure out how to handle gotos in python, which was fun. Turns out you can just use a benign exception in a try-catch block to achieve basically the same effect.
Read some more The Farthest Shore last night, I keep reading more than I intended because it's just so good. Got to the part with the titular farthest shore, so much great imagery with Selidor and the Dry Land and whatnot.
This book may be equal to the first one... except for the king stuff. I still feel like that doesn't fit with everything else going on here. Maybe asking for a fantasy world to be monarchy-skeptical is a bit too much, but this book's cosmology overturns so many other conventions of the genre that it feels odd that it sticks with tradition there.
Like, I guess the question that sticks in my craw is: why do you need a king? The only argument the book has launched in favor of royalty was a vague feeling of chaos in that one port town, but that really seemed to be more due to the Evil Wizard's Curse than the lack of a singular figure of leadership.
It feels at odds with a lot of the core ideas being presented. Lebannen going on to become the king because he was there to swing a sword at the evil wizard's ghost doesn't really seem... fitting? There's this tension between like... this is a fantasy story where a prophecy is fulfilled so a king can sit on the throne and bring peace to the land, and also it's a world with realistically drawn people who have social dynamics and the order of the world is threatened by a single individual craving too much power.
It's good kings vs bad kings again. A good king has been humbled and walked among the people, while a bad king etc etc. At the end of the day: I just don't buy it.
Anyway, I do love how the Cob stuff shakes out. The way that this singular achievement turns out to be a trap not only for all the others in the world who are drawn into it, but also for the person who cast the spell and opened the hole into the afterlife in the first place. He's also completely lost and unable to really see what's going on. Even the promise of immortality is something so sweet to those who live mortal lives that it leads them astray. It's good shit.