Folding dragons

Wow, check out this highly detailed origami dragon! (Warning, people of the future — that’s a Yahoo AP photo link, and probably will expire at some point. Get yer oohs and aahs in while ya can.) It’s from an origami convention in Tokyo last Friday. Impressive as hell, though it departs somewhat from the simplicity that I’ve always (perhaps irrationally) considered the heart of origami.

I prefer something like Joseph Wu’s Eastern Dragon (which he’s finally diagrammed!).

<sigh> I visited Pearl River Mart after work today, looking for a Mao cap (looked pretty decent on my head, but I didn’t like the stiff cardboard rim), and saw all sorts of lovely origami paper there, and thought about how long it’s been since I stopped folding out of a desire to keep my clutter level down. Maybe I’ll start again, and make sure I give it all away.

(Was it at a Worldcon that I got part-way through designing an origami Cerebus? I wonder if I can reconstruct that from memory....)

(Links via Slashdot.)

Everness

I read John C Wright’s The Last Guardian of Everness last week. Liked it a whole lot, even though it didn’t quite live up to the blurb. Some of the best fantasy I’ve read in quite a while.

Wright likes to dig up old names (though not nearly as obscure and witty as the names Gene Wolfe digs up for his characters and items), so I figured googling for “Everness” might turn up something illuminating. Turns out it’s the title of a poem by Borges. Here’s the English version:

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass.
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe:
Whoever though its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only from the sunset’s farther side
Shall view at last the Archetypes and Splendors.