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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1894813" data-attributes="member: 1025">I’ll preface this by saying that Bandeeto and I immediately agreed that had we been judges in this competition, we’d have had to recuse ourselves from judging this. Piratecat writes us better than we play ourselves.  He’s funnier than we are.  Bandeeto might have thought up Pufferdoves, and I’d surely have needled him about them, but it would have been Piratecat who would have decided when and where they exploded.  It’s an astonishing piece of portraiture. Of all three of us actually. Without Piratecat, it’s just not the same--he is our bench. And also our shifty-eyed sandwiches, and our presentation to the Queen, and our exploding rains of feathers. And much as I enjoyed that, I wondered how somebody who didn’t know us would feel about the piece. I though surely Macbeth might have the edge there. Macbeth's story is strong, beautifully told, and full of wonders. But when I thought about it, I realized that Piratecat's story works not only because it’s about wonderful me me me-- and my beloved curmudgeon-- but also because it resonates at more than one level, without being too literal about it. Example: If you took the word “bench” and replaced it with the world “messageboard” and replaced “coat of paint” with “server” you’d have something a lot of people around here would find extremely familiar, and the depth of feeling that people have about that something would be pretty strong. A place to get together whenever and share old war stories. A place to dream about the past, and wonder about the future, and laugh about why things happen the way they do. I don’t mean that Piratecat literally meant that, but that it’s something he felt comfortable writing about, because he knows that that kind of feeling is a true, strong thing, and he’s invested a lot of energy in it recently. It's a feeling that other people can participate in, without needing to be Sialia or Bandeeto. It’s a good story because it is deeply personal, for all that it is light and humorous. It’s about some things that can stand the test of time, because they are inherently good things. And it’s also about how even strong, good old things need some attention now and again. It’s been seven years since Bandeeto graduated from school and we left Piratecat’s campaign. Perhaps not quite the century that the Wizards in the story have had, but sometimes, it feels like it. The story was itself a fresh coat of paint.</blockquote>

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