harvest face
A single dark arc cuts across A harvest face, oranged by thick atmosphere ‘tween it and me, hung low and solid in the east, its face turned partly away to face its bright lord.
Ars Artis
creations & musings on creativity by Chris Krycho
In which Jaimie Krycho kicks off a piece of serial fantasy:
She was standing on his shoulders. Literally.
Sifani might have marveled at the strength and breadth of them, if Lorin wasn’t such a great buffoon. A beautiful buffoon, but a buffoon nonetheless. If he was aware of the fact he certainly didn’t care.
He grunted beneath her weight and looked up at her from below, waiting until she looked back to make eyes at her legs. That was just to stoke her temper, Sifani reminded herself firmly. He did excel at that.
“Do you see anything, my milk-tempered maiden?” Lorin asked sweetly.
Sifani dug her heel into his shoulder bone for good measure.
Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, “Of Beren and Lúthien”, The Silmarillion
Poetry breeds poetry, I have discovered. And not just in poetry. (The best prose is poetry, after all.)
On Avid and Sibelius
Avid, the company that currently owns Sibelius, has decided to shut down the main development office and outsource development to a much smaller team in the Ukraine. You can read my general thoughts about the results of selling small, successful companies to bigger ones here:
There’s a takeaway here for developers. If you care about your product at all – and I’m assuming you do, because if you’re just in it for the money, you’re probably not making the kind of product I buy anyway – then don’t sell. The moment you sell your company, no matter how good the sum, you’ve sold out. I’ve seen it happen too many times to believe otherwise.
Today, I published an open letter to the executives at Avid, imploring them to take the right step by their customers: sell the product back to its inventors, Ben and Jonathan Finn, who have already offered to buy it twice.
Sell Sibelius. It is public knowledge that the Finn brothers have offered at least twice to purchase the software back from you, in the dual interests of maintaining the momentum of the software and of taking care of the employees you have let go. Selling it back to them is the right move – for your customers, for the product, for the developers, and most importantly, for Avid. The goodwill of your customer base and the trust of your own employees are not small things in the long run.
Dear Avid: Please Sell Sibelius→
Will this – or any of the similar efforts being made in the broader Sibelius community – make a difference? The truth is, it’s unlikely. But it’s worth a shot.
Moon shadows dapple
Moon shadows dapple the asphalt
As it rolls away beneath my feet
Outdone now and again by lamplight
Till golden shadows give way again
To silver glimmerings through tree-limbs