Kara Dreamer (obsolete) ⚧ @kara_dreamer@witches.town

wow, Fawlty Towers always gave me a bit of trouble but now it's almost unwatchable to me

please please please tell me that _some_ furry artist has drawn a "Madonna and Child" composition, only it's a wolf holding a lamb

tried downloading a few things, didn't have luck with any...the Adobe Illustrator Draw app came closest maybe but it was _too_ oversimplified, in that annoying way common to so much mobile software in general, where "simplified interface" turns into "we're not gonna put any text on the screen to let you know what icon does what, and we're not gonna let you configure _anything_"

is there any kind of drawing program for android that's oriented towards _drafting_ more than freehand drawing? I'd like to make straight lines and simple curves, using some kind of "cleanup" mode perhaps of a crude hand drawing

#unpopularopinion am I the only one who thinks that "Mirror, Mirror" from the original Star Trek was maybe a disastrous mistake? Like, the episode itself is probably one of the better TOS eps; it's not bad. But boy oh boy did it open the door to a thousand unwanted followups and imitators. Mirror universes are up there with time travel among the worst-abused devices for plot generation. It's not the AU itself that's necessarily the problem...ok, sometimes the AU _is_ the problem, and Trek's AU of itself is to Star Trek what Underfell is to Undertale, almost comically grimdark, or wannabe grimdark.

I think I gave my girlfriend the whatever respiratory thing was that felled me last weekend (and is still hanging around a little, making chest congestion.) she sounds awful

A film which I don't think is exactly good but that's been a source of minor fascination to me is Woody Allen's first proper feature film, a pseudo-documentary about a petty criminal called "Take The Money and Run".

and Jan Timman's mom learned math in school from Euwe, who once won a class sandwich-eating contest (!) Now it's slightly tempting to model my fictional "Anke" on Mrs. Timman, assuming I can find out more about her https://witches.town/media/hD6xy8Ym73kqht4769s

well, damn, Max Euwe had an animal helper of his own, looks like (and somehow I knew Euwe was more of a dog person) https://witches.town/media/Qzq9F3qJILAhFTZEnHY

well, that's enough of that long and rambling monologue. say good night, Chess, or whatever your real name was! https://witches.town/media/Gp3NSsEWqDhMFC-xwzk

I haven't thought things out much further than that. (I'm still not quite sure just what all these events should build up to, honestly...) and I'll probably get no further with this new variation on the old idea. But I feel like I've made a step forward nevertheless, in realizing that I didn't have to trap myself in "realism" by constraining myself to the perspective of a real person involved in real events, that I could invent a totally fictional character and start taking the story further in the direction of fantasy if I want.

Chess the Cat takes an immediate liking to the girl (let's call her "Anke", just grabbing a name from a hat.) It's a cat's prerogative, of course, to take an immediate liking to a stranger--much to the consternation of Alekhine himself, who's not pleased that his furry companion (and secret helper) suddenly wants to start sitting in a Dutch schoolgirl's lap instead of his own.

And now, in this new version of the story, it's Anke, not Euwe, who first discovers that the cat seems to know how to play chess. And really well, too.

The 1935 championship took place in various cities around the Netherlands, so I imagined this schoolgirl deciding, what the hell, I'll play hooky (maybe with a friend, it's always good for truant children in stories to have someone dragged along for the ride) and follow my favorite teacher around and watch him contend with the fearsome Alekhine. Of course Euwe finds out almost immediately that his pupil is wandering around Holland to watch him play chess instead of staying in school or whatever, but I can't imagine he'd be able to bring himself to do anything about it.

And here's where Chess the Cat comes into things.

I mentioned earlier that Euwe taught mathematics during his chess career. During the period including the 1935 chess championship, his school was the Municipal Grammar School for Girls in Amsterdam. Hence I began to hatch the idea of an OC, one of Euwe's students with whom he'd struck up an informal mentoring sort of relationship outside of class, teaching her chess--but with some ambivalence, I imagine, knowing that the professional chess world really had no place for her. (You think pro chess is sexist NOW...)

last night, though, it occurred to me that I didn't have to write the story from the perspective of Max Euwe. why not, I thought, write the story from the perspective of an outsider? if my own information about the 1935 match was limited and superficial, then why not give the narrative to someone whose information about the match is _also_ limited and superficial?

that's about as far as I'd taken the idea, in my head, until now. I figured that in order to write this story the way I originally intended I'd have to have a LOT of inside information about the 1935 world chess championship, and that's been hard to come by. So far as I know there's no one book about it. Garry Kasparov's "My Great Predecessors" has some information; so does a 2006 biography of Max Euwe. But I was imagining I'd have to dig through old newspaper articles, maybe even have to seek translation from Dutch of primary sources, in order to get the verisimilitude I wanted for a silly story about a chess master's intelligent cat.

I cooked up a little plot in which Euwe accidentally spies Alekhine playing over a game with his cat--like, he sees Alekhine sitting alone with his cat and his chessboard, and it becomes clear that the cat's not just sniffing and pawing at the board randomly, but is clearly picking out well-reasoned moves and variations. Euwe confides this to his friend and unofficial "second" Salo Flohr (who assisted Euwe because he _loathed_ Alekhine), and Flohr talks Euwe into, well, forcibly but temporarily separating Alekhine from Chess the Cat, arranging a little catnapping, justifying it to themselves as preventing Alekhine from some weird form of cheating.

I started imagining a story from Euwe's perspective. He'd been somewhat pressured into issuing the challenge to Alekhine, I'd found out, and I imagined that after a dismal start Euwe must have been thinking he'd been talked into a big mistake. And I imagined Euwe starting to get annoyed, after losing his fourth game, with the constant and inexplicable presence of a cat in this humiliating episode of his life. (I've picked up the rumor that Euwe indeed disliked cats, but I've not found any proof.)

And then, I imagined...what if Euwe accidentally discovered that the cat was actually somehow _helping_ Alekhine?