quiz results (silly things to do on a Sunday morning)

'Cause I'm a lemming (thanks, vassilissa), and 'cause I was actually hoping for the result I got. I'm not sure I agree with it, but I didn't cheat. And I like it.

( I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way. )

More quiz results

Found via jess79.

I think the conceit of this one is exceptionally clever, because it was something I thought about while I was reading His Dark Materials, and I know if I'd read HDM when I was ten or eleven, I would have spent a lot of time "playing daemon." And I like my answer. I'm not convinced it would turn out to be the right answer, were I to find myself in Lyra's Oxford, but it's certainly an answer I can live with.

( Now what we need is a Daemon Name Generator. )

For the geekily-inclined

This is the best 404 error message I believe I've ever seen.

non-linear narratives

I am going to try very hard to ask this question in a way that will make sense. Bear with me.

I'm wondering what reasons there are for telling a story out of order. Let me be clear: I mean REASONS, not DEVICES. For example, you can have a narrative that starts at a wedding and is a series of flashbacks interspersed with the ceremony to show you how these two people ended up marrying each other (and trust me, if I were actually writing that story, their motivations would not be romantic). But that's not a reason to tell the story out of order; it's a device to structure that non-linear sequencing.

What I'm after is why. WHY does a story need, as some stories inarguably do, to be told in a nonlinear fashion? What are the thematic and structural underpinnings that will show the reader the choice is about something other than showing off?

Am I making any sense at all?