>      >> FWIW (which may be nothing), I really disliked this bit. IMHO Traveler
>      >> is supposed to be set in a more-or-less technological universe.

>      >That struck me as the poster's intent, really.
>      >"I want mystery, I want inexplicable, I want strange and wonderful."

>     Yes, that's sort of the space I wanted these to be in - we don't know
>     everything, we may never know every thing, and here's something that
>     we don't know yet.

And that's the great thing about individual TUs - we can all put things in or
leave them out as we choose. If it works for you, go for it.

>      >Why not just make them both audio and psionic? That way audio recordings of the
>      >crystal's music can be made, but they don't have the same impact as the real
>      >thing, so aren't popular or useful (unless you're in withdrawal...).

>     With respect to withdrawal, I should think that if you're going to go
>     the psi+audio route, it'd be the _psi_ component that makes them
>     addictive, and the audio component won't do squat for you. When you
>     need a nicotine fix, a picture of a cigarette just doesn't do the trick.

Agree on the psionic component being the one that leads to addiction, but perhaps the music
serves to focus the mind in a certain way that are necessary for the psionics to work?
Hey, I'm waving my hands madly here :-)

>     Which is another mistake, because in context at the time, 'philosophy'
>     was a common 'shorthand' for 'natural philosophy', which was the
>     closest thing to what we'd call 'science' now.

Shakespearean analysis is not usually a topic I stray into, but I'll throw in some random
thoughts. Recall that in the play both Hamlet and Horatio were students at Wittenberg,
where Martin Luther was made professor of theology in 1508 (and nailed up his 95 theses
in 1517). The Anabaptists made their home there too (until Luther booted them out). The
University must have been a hotbed of argument and discussion, so it's not, I think, too
much a stretch to imagine that the two friends simply followed different teachers, and
Hamlet is just making fun of Horatio. (And if anyone out there doesn't understand the
joke about the 'diet of worms' later in the play, now you do.)

>      > But as I understand it, the original emphasis was on "your":

Anyone who saw the Royal Shakespeare Company's celebration of the 400th anniversary of
Shakespeare's death (recently screened on PBS in the US) might remember the sketch about
'To be or not to be' and decide to *not* discuss the point :-) (If you didn't see it,
there are ten words in the first two lines of the speech, and they end up with nine
luminaries on stage, each arguing in favour of putting the emphasis on a *different* word.
Yes, it's played for laughs. "Hamlet the Dame"!)

Jonathan