Mondaily

EMG

I had an interesting, seriously nostalgic moment filling orders on Saturday, putting together a pack of 'Dragon' stationery. As it began, so it ends. Good progress on orders.

Some bugs have popped back up at PA that will need some attention. *frown*

Have uploaded Ursula's calendar five times now, and am ready to make some adjustments and try number 6. *muttermuttermutter*

Torn World post today will be a look at the origin of the time shattering.

Art and Authoring

I worked further on the Green Fairy piece, more fiddly foreground details, and I added another figure in the background. Haven't scanned yet.

Have some phone pictures from our trip to Cordova!


This is Child's glacier. It was rainy and chilly, but we still got to see some car-sized pieces calve off!


This is the million dollar bridge. It is VERY SCARY to drive across.

Home and Health

I hand over a whole lot of money this afternoon to get the siding for our house ordered! We scrutinized everything this weekend, made some choices, waffled over the HUGE pricetag, and finally decided to go for it. Between this and the car, it's been a pricey summer. The car, so far, has been worth every PENNY. The seat alone is so superior and wonderful that I get where I'm going feeling like I've just had a massage or a hot tub or something. My back deserves a nice car.

We watched Kung Fu Panda last night and enjoyed it enormously. It wasn't as good as Up, but I cried much less (not at all, to be honest). Very cute and funny. We laughed out loud a great deal!

Planning

I have two more reports on my desk to finish today and three to draft. I have to REUPLOAD Ursula's calendar and finish and upload Rachel's this afternoon. I'm at work, but I should get these reports finished and I can do stuff on my own time and answer phones. Tonight is workout night, dinner, an hour on orders, and then some couch time. I'm watching Avatar through Netflix and really enjoying the show. Giant, slobbery, flying, 6-legged bison! What's not to love?

Torn World - Time bubbles, and the effects of the Upheaval

One of the problems with simply saying that areas of a continent were all moving at different speeds is the idea that these areas are all on the same planet, circling the sun at the same rate. Does the day become elongated for a select few? But that defeats our proposal that they don't realize that they have moved at different rates. As far as the inhabitants of any bubble are convinced, they are moving at a normal rate; the sun sets and rises in the cycles they were used to, the moon moves through its phases in the sky. Nothing is stretched out or compressed within the bubble.

So how do you explain such a phenomenon?

Parallel realities.

Picture close alternate realities, stacked tight together in a pile. Now, drop a bowling ball in the center. Each shard is at a different level that it was, in line with shards from different panes of glass, or even between panes, and in each of these levels, time is flowing at a different rate. So each shard, or bubble, actually existed in a parallel universe, where a different amount of time had passed in terms of revolutions around the sun, etc. The boundaries of the bubbles, while they existed (and some may, still!), protected the inhabitants of this shard from crossing the fractured surface of the shard. As the planets and suns come back into incidental alignment in their different panes of glass again, the shards can snap back into their original planes, drawn by microcosmic telltales embedded in matter itself, and the bubbles disperse.

That realignment, or 'popping of the time bubbles,' would come with violent weather as the membrane between the area and the outside world shattered, and in cases where physical faults may be, earthquakes and volcanic eruption would occur.

The plates of glass analogy is not perfect, but it is a useful visualization for the process, and helps explain why time within a bubble is not stretched.

What did the boundary/bubble edge look like when it was intact?

The actual bubble boundary would be a slipzone between two speeds of time. Proximity to it would make most non-temporal-stable people (basically everyone but the Northerners) ill at some distance (as much as a mile or two), nauseous, dizzy, sort of altered, as if inebriated, with symptoms increasing drastically as you got closer. The sheer unpleasantness of it would drive off most people from approaching it. Visually, I imagine a shimmery sort of haze or thick fog.

The Northerners would have seen Others clustered along this boundary, as well, and kept their distance for that reason, even if their temporal stability saved them some of the other side effects.