We went hunting for lilsquishy's gryphon today, up around the steelworks where they leave red-hot dragonscale ingots to cool in the rain, and you can taste the metal sharp and sweet in the air, like the flat of a knife laid against your skin. Found him, too, sleeping thing of metal and graffitti and sharp edges, crouched in the twilight under trees that creep up and devour fences, bits and piece of rusty chain link buried in their trunks.



The steelworks always puts in me the desire to forge, but we got home from questing too late. So there was Italian food, and a horrible movie to mock, and then after everyone else went to bed I hacked together the feedback system for That Damn Robot. (Rule One of closed-loop controllers: easy to write, sisphyean to tune.) Been too long since I stayed up all night coding (since before Boston), and now that I'm done and pleased with myself and everything is mistysoft with dawn, I don't quite want to go to bed. There's something numinous about the translucency of hands held to the window, of light caught in cloudy silver on each stitch in the curtains and shadowblue's blanket, of the transfer curves still uncurling like smoke under my fingers. Things are a little softer, and a little more real. You can see the end of it from here.

Or maybe it's just sleep dep. :)