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The Race

The mermaid-things retired to the far side of the inner lagoon, where the arms of the island stretched out to skinny sandbars, barely a pace across, and almost touched each other. Looking at it now, Johnny wasn’t sure how The Slyph had fit through the gap. On the deck, the humans (and Bones) gathered for their own huddle. Roger started to strip off all her clothes. Johnny looked at her with some surprise, but Larissa pointed out that clothes would just be extra drag, and Roger nodded curtly. Aidan was giving Bones a complicated list of ingredients to gather, and fiddling in his own pouches for the rest.

“What are those things?” Johnny asked, to fill time and keep his mind (and his eyes) off Roger’s body.

“Scalas,” Roger replied, pulling off a boot.

“I believe the proper plural is ‘scalae,’” Aidan said. He pronounced it “skah-lie.”

“The proper plural is ‘bitches who are going to get their fishy little asses beat,’” Roger answered with a snort. “Now, are ye ready to help me out here?”

Aidan nodded. “As soon as Bones returns with the remainder of the components I need for the rite, I can brew it in a very short amount of time.”

“Good.” Roger was now pulling pants off and Johnny was studiously looking elsewhere. He noted that Aidan seemed to view Roger’s body the same way Larissa did: he looked, but he didn’t respond. Perhaps, as a priest, he was celibate. Larissa glanced at him, but said nothing.

Less than a minute later, Roger was naked again, fiddling with her ponytail. Her smallish breasts were thrust forward. Not that Johnny was looking, of course. Bones was back, laying out all sorts of bits and bobs in neat little piles for Aidan to sort through. To a wooden pitcher, Aidan added three different kinds of powder, some silver things that looked like ball bearings, a dollop of the gunk they used to grease the fan, a piece of the pemmican that he cut into some intricate shape, and the guts out of one of Roger’s flares and the smallest of the ship’s barometers. The Water Guide’s hands were a blur, so there might have been other scraps as well, and those liquid words chimed out, softly and smoothly. At the end, Aidan raised his hands into the air, the chanting crescendoed, and Aidan clapped, but it was a thunderclap, and, indeed, when his hands drew apart, a little black cloud formed between them, and it actually began to rain into the pitcher, and one brief, jagged fork of lightning arced down into the mixture, and the sound that accompanied it wasn’t thunder, but the electronic sizzle of a large bug zapper, or the flat crack you get when you attach the jumper cables to the last battery terminal. Gradually the little cartoon thundercloud dissipated and its rain tapered off. Aidan raised the pitcher and raised an eyebrow at Roger. She threw her arms wide and planted her bare feet firmly on the deck, tossing her head back with closed eyes.

Roger upended the pitcher over her, covering her entire body with the glassy liquid that oozed out. None of it hit the deck; it seemed to inch over her body as if sentient. It was entirely transparent, but you could still see it somehow, sparkling in the half-light. When it had covered her entire form in a thin sheen of aqueous film, Roger took a deep, gasping breath and lifted her head. As she opened her eyes, the stuff, whatever it was, became invisible. One second you knew it was there, even though you couldn’t actually see it, and the next it was as if it had never been.

Aidan turned her around and inspected her from every angle (again, seeming to be oblivious to her attractions). “Roger, my dear captain, you are officially, completely, and by the grace of Shallédanu, slick.”

Johnny looked back and forth from captain to Guide. “Meaning ... ?”

Roger smiled her devilish smile. “Meaning I shall slide through the water like shit through a seagull.”

“Ah.” Johnny paused a moment, hesitant to breach the subject, but knowing he must. “And, if you, you know ... don’t win ... will they really eat you?”

Roger strode over and slapped Johnny on the back; Johnny was well used to this by now, and it hardly hurt at all any more. “Aye, faster’n ye can say ‘Jack Ketch,’ that they will.”

“Ah. And, what if, you know ... we don’t particularly want you to be eaten?”

Roger chuckled. “Well, I’ll take that as neighborly concern on yer part, Johnny me boyo, and I’ll thankee kindly. It’s a risk I knew I’d have to take, and I’ll take it gladly to get us where we’re goin’. But don’t count yer good captain out quite yet, if ye follow my tack.” Roger winked.

Johnny rolled his eyes. “What do we need an ‘opener’ for anyway?” he asked.

Aidan stepped up. “To open the way for us. We thought we’d have to ask for both a pathfinder and an opener. But apparently you can be our guide, so we were able to negotiate a much less dangerous bargain. Trust me, son, compared to the compact Captain Roger and I thought we would have to make, this is quite reasonable. There’s always a chance that Roger could lose, yes, and we would have to face very grim consequences indeed if that were to come to pass, but the deal that was struck means that I can do anything in my power to help her win now. Actually, any of us can, although I suspect the majority of the burden will fall on me.”

“Yes, but why can’t ... look, maybe I could be the opener too. I ... well, I opened something to get here. Twice, even. Sort of.”

Roger and Aidan exchanged unreadable glances. “This I did not know,” the Guide said. “It is good information to have ...”

“Although ye might have mentioned it sooner,” Roger mumbled under her breath.

Aidan ignored her and continued. “Good information to have, but I don’t think it helps us in this particular instance. Not just any opener will do for this task, Johnny. Anyone can get into a place between places. But getting back out again is more difficult, and almost always requires intervention from the natives.”

“Mister fancy-pants here means to say that we need the tubs o’ fishguts out there.” Roger waved a hand at the monstrous mermaids in the distance. “All ways here are their ways.”

Johnny stared at her. “Did you just quote Alice in Wonderland?”

Larissa stepped in. “Through the Looking Glass. The Red Queen to Alice: ‘I don’t know what you mean by your way: all the ways about here belong to me.’” Johnny reflected that this was possibly the most normal thing Larissa had said since they entered the sewers.

Roger stared at the little girl, confused. “Well, I don’t know queens from quarterdecks, but, yeah, it’s exactly like the little missy says. All the ways are scalas’ ways, and nobody opens ’em but them as know their secrets. And, by the bye, I’d not let on to Miss Ugly out there that ye have the power. Else ye may find yerself being an opener in their employ yerself, if ye catch my spur.”

Roger strode over to the deck railing, put two fingers between her lips, and gave a piercing whistle. Bones was hopping up and down on the crossbar beside her, flapping his wings and screech-squawking. Aidan whispered as he passed Johnny: “all the ways are scalae’s ways” and then rushed to join her at the rail. Johnny shook his head at Larissa. “They’re all crazy,” he said.

Larissa answered simply: “Everything here is crazy.”

Johnny considered that for a moment. “Yep, you’re right. Can’t argue with that. Let’s go be crazy too, I suppose.”

Larissa followed, but slowly.

Chapter 18 concluded

2012-02-26T19:49:00.000-08:00

Around the backside of the “desert island” (which turned out to be bigger than it looked from afar), there was an enclosed area of water. “It’s a lagoon within the lagoon,” Johnny breathed. Aidan gave him a sideways grin.

Roger pulled The Sylph into the smaller lagoon and let it float aimlessly. She rejoined them in the bow and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking towards the inner shore. “I think we’ll be able to pick up some water here, after.”

Johnny looked back at the island, surprised. To him it still looked like a roughly circular pile of sand with a single tree growing in the middle of it, no bigger in circumference than he could walk in ten minutes or so. Where could there possibly be water? He opened his mouth to ask, but then realized that was a tangent that wasn’t likely to get him anywhere, not to mention that there were more interesting avenues to pursue.

“So ...” he ventured. “Who exactly are we going to talk to?”

Roger just smiled enigmatically and cast her eyes toward Aidan. Johnny turned to the Water Guide to repeat his question, but the young man had already turned his back on them and was holding his staff over his head in both hands, looking out over the water. The mumbling was low this time, but still retained all its fluid qualities. Suddenly he began to twirl the staff, parallel to the deck, hands nothing but a blur as they manipulated the hunk of wood so fast it almost resembled the rotor of a helicopter, the stroboscopic effect making it appear to spin in reverse. Then, in a split-second move, the staff stopped, pointing straight out to the ocean-like lagoon, and Aidan brought it down sharply until it struck the railing. A rippling wave of force seemed to shoot out of the end of it, and Johnny could see the wake it left in the water, and a shimmer in the air as it shot off into the distance. Aidan turned and put the butt of the staff back on the deck, leaning heavily on it. “That should get their attention,” he said.

Johnny reached out to help steady him. “You okay? You’re dong a lot of that ... whatever it is you do.”

Aidan gave him a quick smile to show he was fine. “Not to worry, son. That last one wasn’t as strenuous as it looked. Just a quick hail to grab the attention of the locals.”

Indeed, the water below them suddenly seemed to be teeming with life. A few of the flying fish that Johnny had last seen during the overground trip into the selvage shot up and did some fancy figure eights before dropping back into the water. Here and there a large, red crab claw popped up and waved at them. Several fins broke the surface and shot back and forth; some appeared to be fish, others dolphins or porpoises. Even the little blue water snake around Larissa’s wrist had raised its head and was tasting the air with a flickering tongue.

Suddenly a bigger, darker fin rose up, way out in the open water, but speeding towards them so quickly it almost seemed mechanical. By the time it reached the edge of the inner lagoon, all the local aquatic life had decided it had business elsewhere. The little blue snake ducked its head into its coils and went back to doing its impression of a bracelet. The fin shot straight at the ship; when it was within two feet of the hull, the head of the creature emerged from the water with a mighty splash.

Johnny wanted to call it a mermaid. Certainly that was the first thing to spring to mind. But, if it was a mermaid, it was some monstrous version. The main part of the body wasn’t that of a fish: it was a shark’s body, gray with just a hint of blue, and white on the underbelly. The large dorsal fin that had announced the coming of the creature looked perfectly at home on the thing’s back. It had arms, though they were also covered in sharkskin, and they ended in long hands with obscenely long fingers that looked more like gnarled twigs. The thing had human breasts, so Johnny supposed it must be a “she,” but those too were covered with the leathery skin—even the nipples were covered over in gray, although surrounded by white rings where areolae should be. The rough skin covered the neck and lower jaw as well, then began tapering off, and most of the head and face appeared to be layered in human epidermis. The shape of the face was mostly human, although also somehow triangular and sharklike. The eyes were beady black dots, exactly like a shark’s, and the hair was long and black and stringy, interwoven with seaweed and small seashells, but not in an attractive way—more like the creature just let any sort of garbage collect in it. Johnny’s mind was reeling with trying to take it all in, and then the thing opened its mouth. There were rows of ragged teeth: not the perfect arrowhead shapes that you might expect to find in a shark’s maw, but jagged little blades of ivory, pitted with age and set at crazy angles so that it seemed impossible the thing wouldn’t tear out its own gums when it closed its mouth. The nightmarish vision hissed at them, a warning or perhaps a challenge, but Johnny was already backpedaling. The teeth had been more disturbing than any sound it could make.

And now others were rising up, but they were not shark-mermaids; they were other creatures. One had the dark mottled brown hide of a moray eel, and brown fisheyes with blue rings around them; one had white-blotched black tentacles and the horizontal pupils of an octopus; one had the forehead protrusion, spikes, and luminous eyes of an angler fish; here was the blue-green shell and eyestalks of a lobster; there was the silver-blue scales and slightly ovoid pupils of a marlin, set into large, reflective cyan sclera. And, on each one, the long, lank hair, always some dark and dingy shade; on each, the frightening fingers and teeth; and each carried a hint of its progenitor in its facial shape, from the bullet-like head of the moray to the heavy lower jaw of the angler, and the bulbous and vaguely squishy head of the octopus.

When the lead creature spoke, its voice was like rusty hinges and oozing sea muck. Johnny could hear the howling ocean wind and the clacking together of bits of gravel and shells and old shark’s teeth rendered perfectly smooth by the sea.

“Why have you summoned us?” it said.

Aidan looked down at them gravely. “Shallédanu lei shonta,” he said.

The lobster woman shook her body to make a sound like lobster claws snapping; the octopus woman thrashed the water with her tentacles. The shark woman said: “Your benedictions hold no sway over us, priest! Spare us the niceties and get to the point.”

Roger stepped forward. “We need an opener.”

The moray woman just gnashed her teeth loudly, but the others made a tittering, screeching sound that Johnny eventually comprehended as laughter. Roger calmly waited for them to finish. “And why would we give you such a thing, landbound one?”

“Ye’ll give it me when I earn it, and I’ll thank you not to call me ‘landbound.’ I was born to the waves, same as you, and I live for them, same as you. Not my fault the gods give me these things”—here Roger slapped her leg—“instead of proper fins like you ladies have.” Apparently Roger saw the creatures as female, although that was still too much of a leap for Johnny’s brain to make.

“Born to the waves, you say?” shark-woman asked.

“Aye, same as you. Straight from me mother’s womb into the water, and had to swim for me first breath.”

Shark-woman’s beady black eyes flashed. “We have no need to breathe the air as you do.” It was obviously a point of pride.

“Six o’ one. Ye had to swim to get somewhere when ye popped out ... or were ye hatched?” Roger raised an eyebrow.

Shark-woman hissed again, but the others repeated their eerie laughter. It was clear Roger was scoring points, somehow.

There was a pause while the creatures considered. They looked at each other, but did not speak aloud. Johnny wondered if they could communicate telepathically. Finally shark-woman spoke again. “You say you can swim, then?”

Roger snorted. “Best swimmer with two legs. At least as far as you’ll ever see.”

Shark-woman smiled, and Johnny shuddered. “Then challenge us to a race. Beat us, and we’ll give you your opener. Lose, and we’ll pick our teeth with your bones.” That screeching, grating excuse for laughter rang out again.

Roger appeared to examine her fingernails. “Oh, sure, challenge you to a race. What, all of ye then?”

Shark-woman shook her head. “No! Choose any one of us.”

Roger nodded. “Still and all, I did say I was the best swimmer with two legs. I’d say none of you gals has any legs to speak of at all.”

At this, all the monstrous mermaids dove and flashed their tails at the watchers to show that Roger was indeed correct: threshing shark tail, wavy eel tail, stubby angler tail, powerful marlin tail, curling lobster tail. Only octopus-woman had anything approaching legs, but she bunched her tentacles together as if she too had a tail. After much splashing, they righted themselves and were staring up at the humans on the deck again.

Roger spread her hands. “See my ketch? You all have me at an unfair advantage. Wouldn’t matter which of you I chose. It still wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

Marlin-woman pointed at Aidan. “The guide,” she said softly. Her voice was just as grating as shark-woman’s. Now the others picked it up, and repeated it as if chanting: “the guide, the guide.” The sound of their voices left a feeling on Johnny’s skin as if he’d touched a snail.

Roger looked at Aidan, as if considering this suggestion. “Why, yes, I suppose me bucko here could put a charm on me that might even the odds. I don’t know ...” She rubbed at her chin, speculating.

Shark-woman threshed the water with her tail. “Hasten, landbound! Do you mean to challenge or not?”

Roger put up a hand. “Hold yer line there missy! I’m considerin’. Ye did just say ye was going to eat me if I lost, did ye not? I reckon that means I ought to be awful careful what I say long about now, don’t it?”

Johnny took a look at his companions. Aidan was staring at a spot on the deck just in front of his feet. Larissa was gazing at Roger, her face unreadable. Bones was bouncing up and down on top of the crates behind them, hyperactive as always, but in a small, contained space so as not to disturb anything. And Roger was back to scratching at her chin, practically pulling on an invisible beard. This was not a characteristic habit for her, so far as Johny knew. And there was something in her eyes ...

“Very well,” she said finally, taking another step forward and putting a gloved hand on the deck railing. “I’ll challenge one of you, but only if ye’ll grant me one boon.”

Shark-woman hissed yet again. “No more conditions! We’ve given you all that you asked for.”

Roger leaned down and fixed the creature with a steely gaze. “I think ye’re mistaken, missy. I’ve not asked for aught. Ye offered all that’s been said so far. I’ve got but a single request and ye’ve yet to hear it.”

The mermaid creatures grew suddenly stiller, to the point where Johnny couldn’t imagine how they kept their upper bodies above the surface of the lagoon. Their different eyes all flashed, although they studiously avoided looking at each other this time. Finally shark-woman spoke. “You speak the truth. You have not yet made a request of us, and we are bound to hear it. If we agree, we will accept the challenge. If we do not, we will leave here and you must continue your journey on your own.”

Roger smiled again. “Oh, I think ye’ll agree to this request all right. It’s right up your alley. I call for a race with no rules. Pick the start, pick the end, and first one across the finish line claims the prize. Whatever happens in between is fair play. Do we have an accord?” Roger plucked off her right glove, reached over the railing and offered her hand to shark-woman. The creature thrashed over and reached out those long fingers. Quick as a flash, they scratched Roger across the palm, and several drops of blood fell into the water. Roger did not seem at all surprised by this, and used the small knife which had somehow sprung into her hand to slice into shark-woman’s hand before she could retrieve it. Some black, tar-like goo remained on the blade when Roger straightened up; she had to wipe it forcibly onto the deck railing.

“Very well then,” Roger said calmly, making the knife disappear again. “I’ll take the lobster wench. Pick yer endpoints and I’ll have Aidan slick me up. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a contest.”

>>next>>

Amor Fati

2012-02-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
— Douglas Adams

Some people believe in destiny. The idea that the threads of our lives are woven together in a tangled skein is an attractive one, and reappears throughout history: from the Moirai of the Greeks and the Norns of the Vikings to the Wheel of Time in Robert Jordan’s series of the same name, which gives us the quote “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and we are only the thread of the Pattern.” The reason this concept is so tempting is that it accords with our experience of the world. If you stop and think back on your life, you’ll see a hundred different coincidences, a hundred different times where, if one thing had gone only slightly differently, your whole life would be in a different course. In fact, looking back on one’s life at all the little things that had to go just so to lead you to where you are now, it’s enough to make anyone ponder whether there might be something to this concept: call it fate, destiny, fortune, karma, kismet, call it random chance or divine providence, say que sera, sera, or say the Lord works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, or say the universe puts us in the places we need to be, but any way you slice it, it’s hard to pretend there’s nothing behind the curtain.

For instance, say I had not dropped out of college: then I wouldn’t have gotten my first job as a computer programmer. I might have become one later in life, maybe, but it wouldn’t have been the same. Say I had not accepted the offer to leave that job to form a two-man company with one of my former co-workers, which only lasted a few months ... well, then, I might never have ended up going back to school to finish up my degree. I know for a fact that if I had not accepted an invitation from a friend of mine attending college in the DC area to come spend a week with him that I never would have moved to our nation’s capital, where I spent 18 years of my life. I know this because I had already applied (and been accepted) to another college; it just so happened that I had missed the deadline for fall admission at the college of my choice and I was going to have to wait until the following spring. But this school my friend was attending still had spots open—not for freshmen, but, then, I was a transfer—and a surprisingly decent English program, and so it became my alma mater.

And that’s just the beginning.

Somewhere out there in the wide world is a woman whose name I can’t remember, born in Hawaii, with the dark skin and exotic beauty to prove it. She went to high school in Los Angeles, and her sister (or her cousin, or her best friend—I forget) went out with one of the guys from Jane’s Addiction. Somehow she ended up moving across the entire country, and wound up in Fairfax, in Northern Virginia, just outside DC, working at a cheesy little college pub. And, if she had not come out of the back room that day, and had she not been so pretty, and had she not smiled just so, and had she not looked at me and my friend and said “two applications, then?” ... if all that confluence of chance had not come together at that exact moment in my life, when I was just giving my friend a ride around to various restaurants so he could find a job as a cook, since it just so happened that he didn’t have a car, and just after an exhausting two or three weeks wherein I learned that my experience was enough to get me any number of programming jobs, but there was apparently no such thing as a part-time programming job (at least not in that place at that time) ... if all that chaos theory had not converged on that exact moment in time, would have I cut off my friend’s “no, just one” with a resigned “what the hell, sure, two applications”? Probably not. And if I had never taken that job, I would have never engaged in the childish electronic prank that introduced me to the computer salesman who became my first business partner, which eventually led to my starting my first company, which eventually got me a consulting job at large corporation, where I eventually met the woman who is my partner to this day, and who is the mother of my children, who are essentially the entire point of my existence.

That’s a lot of “coincidences.”

When business for my company dried up, and my meager savings was running out, another friend of mine just happened to mention a job that he had interviewed for but had decided not to take, but mentioned I might like it there. Turns out I did, and I spent three and half years there, meeting some folks who are still some of my favorite people of all time, and having a really great job where I got to learn a lot of stuff, and teach a few things, and have a great deal of freedom, which was important, because I was coming off of working for myself for 13 years, and I’d utterly lost the ability to wake up early (not that I’d ever really had it, for the most part), or wear shoes at work, and I had 13 years worth of ponytail between my shoulder blades.

The story of how I left that job and came to the great state of California is yet another of those sets of bizarre, interlocking coincidences. Last week I told you what I thought of corporate managers telling you you must take PTO when you’re slightly sick and you want to work from home. As Bill Cosby once said, I told you that story so I could tell you this one. I’m not going use any names here: if you know me, you most likely know the person I’m talking about, and if you don’t know me, you most likely wouldn’t recognize the name anyway.

When I first started at this job I’m talking about, the first job after running my own company for 13 years, I had a boss who lived in Boston and showed up for a couple of days every other week. Despite not being around very often, this person was one of the best bosses I’ve ever had. I was given very clear directions, never micromanaged, trusted, encouraged ... the only criticism I ever got from this boss was to step up my game, to take more responsibility, to stop worrying about stepping on anyone’s toes and take the lead on things. This company was a subsidiary or a larger, public corporation, but our boss kept us insulated from any politics and let us do our own thing. There was only one layer between our boss and the corporate CEO, and that VP and our boss seemed to get along just fine.

Then the synchronicity dominoes started to fall. The VP left, and was replaced by a real asshole of a human being, one of those corporate jackasses who believes that being a jerk is a substitute for leadership. In less than a year, the replacement was gone as well, apparently unliked by everyone, including the CEO, but it was too late: my boss had also submitted a resignation, and I was destined to receive a new manager, who would end up being one of the worst bosses I’ve ever had. And I once worked for a twitchy Vietnam vet with a bad coke habit.

This new boss was a micromanager, never trusted, didn’t understand how to encourage and pushed bullishly instead, had no respect for the culture of the company, and basically ticked off every mistake that a corporate middle manager can possibly make. It was like this person had a manual to go by: Sow distrust and dissension among employees? Check. Freak out and yell at people in front of co-workers? Check. React to problems by increasing the number of useless meetings? Check. I swear, somewhere out there is a book that tells these people exactly how to act, because the number of them who all do the same stupid things over and over again can’t be explained any other way.

It was Memorial Day weekend of 2007. I was feeling a bit under the weather, but there was a big project going on at work that I knew we’d all regret if I fell behind on. This new boss wasn’t my favorite person, but I still loved the company, and I wanted to do my best to make the (completely artificial) deadline. That Friday, I sent my email saying I wasn’t feeling well, but I was going to soldier on. Then I got to coding. When I checked again, on the holiday itself, I discovered a snarky email from my boss, advising me that if I was sick, I should take PTO and not work from home.

I promptly replied that I was deeply sorry that I had attempted to make progress on our big project, and I assured my boss that it wouldn’t happen again.

I then went to check my spam folder, because that’s where all the recruiter emails invariably end up.

If you’re a technogeek like me, you know that once that very first recruiter finds you, there will follow a never-ending stream of offers for jobs in your specialty, jobs not in your specialty, jobs nowhere near the vicinity of your specialty, and non-specific vague pretensions of maybe possibly having a job for you one day so they’d just like to stay in touch. Mostly you just ignore them ... until you get ticked off with your current work. Then you realize that you’re sitting on a gold mine, tucked away in your spam folder.

I had always lived on the East Coast: 22 years in Tidewater, on the VA-NC border; 1 year in Columbia, SC; and the aforementioned 13 years in the greater DC metro area (partly in Northern VA and partly in Southern MD). But if anyone asked me where I really wanted to live, I always said California. I later expanded to the West Coast in general: Oregon is lovely (although, as it turned out, practically impossible to find a tech job in), and Washington is not a bad choice either (lots of tech jobs, but perhaps a bit colder than I’d ideally like). But really it was California that had caught my interest; two trips to Borland out in Scott’s Valley and a couple of visits to San Francisco to visit an architect-turned-tech-entrepreneur friend of mine had cemented Cali—and the San Fran-San Jose corridor in particular—as the place to be. So when I went looking for recruiter spam, I figured I might as well find something that said “California” on it.

There were only 3 or 4 recruiter emails, as it turned out ... a light dusting compared to what I normally had. One of them said “Santa Monica, CA.”

Now, I didn’t know where Santa Monica was. And I was too much in a huff to look it up. But I knew where Santa Clara was, and I knew where Santa Cruz was, and I figured ... how much farther away could it be?

Pretty far, as it turns out. Santa Monica is in Los Angeles county, and is (along with Venice Beach and Marina del Rey) one of the beach cities of LA. As it turns out, my partner used to live in (or just outside) Santa Monica. All that I was to find out later, though.

It was Monday (Memorial Day) that I sent a random email back to a random recruiter that I plucked out of a spam folder; on Tuesday, I got a garbled message from someone with an unintelligible accent—on a hunch, I called back that same recruiter and it turned out to be him; on Wednesday, I was talking to the recruiter’s boss, who was telling me about a company which had very high standards and was willing to pay full relocation; on Thursday, I had a phone interview with the folks who would eventually end up being my new bosses—this was conducted on my cell phone, while I was driving through the middle of downtown DC, trying to avoid the hideous traffic on the Wilson Bridge; on Friday, I was talking to someone at eBay corporate about a plane ticket; the following Monday night I got on a plane; Tuesday, I had what was possibly the best job interview of my career (probably second only to the one at the corporation where I met my partner), and they made me an offer on the spot; on Wednesday, I received a signed offer letter in my email; and on Thursday, I handed my boss a brief resgination letter. So, to wrap up the discussion from last week, that’s under two weeks from the time my corporate middle-manager boss pissed me off over something stupidly trivial until the time I had a better job for about 25% more money (although, admittedly, part of that was simply to cover the higher cost of living in LA), and my old company lost 3 and half years’ experience and half their tech department. Something for you corporate folks to chew on.

But the real lesson is, as far as I’m concerned (and as far as my family is concerned), when something is meant to happen, it will happen, and often with blinding speed. I could tell you the story of our new house, for instance, which includes passing on it when it was overpriced, it disappearing from the market and then, strangely, reappearing for a cheaper price, and even a prophetic dream ... but I’ve babbled on for quite a while already. No need to beat a dead horse, I think.

I’ve long felt that whatever force that runs the universe, be it divine, karmic, quantum, or ontological, be it moral, predestined, anthropomorphic, cyclical, or merely mechanical, has been quietly and efficiently doing His/Her/Its job for me, or on me, putting me where I am today and seemingly with the inexorable goal of geting me to where I will be tomorrow. As you can see, I’m an epistemological conservative, but still I can’t help but believe: all that effort that whoever/whatever puts into seeing me to my assigned place ... that’s a lot of pointless expended energy, if there really is no purpose behind it.

Something to think about, anyway.

Taking a Sick Day

2012-02-12T01:32:00.000-08:00

I’ve spoken before of my distaste for American corporate culture, and I’ve no doubt I will again. Corporations have many unfortunate practices, the vast majority of which are just very creative ways to shoot themselves in the foot. It always amuses me to hear free-market zealots explain how corporations always act in their own self interest ... I could spend hours telling you stories of companies doing stupid things that cost them vast quantities of money, just from my personal experience. Sometimes this happens because, while an idealized corporate entity might always do what’s best for itself, a corporation in the real world is run by people, and people do silly things. But often it just happens because of tradition, because of momentum, because it’s “common knowledge” that this is the way things are done and nobody bothers to question it or double check to see if it’s working or not.

Let’s talk about one such policy and why it’s dumb. This particular one is close to my heart, because it played a very important role in my life (although that’s a story for another blog post). I’m not sure what book on corporate management is hustling this hoax, but it must be a common one since I keep running into it. Let’s say your company has no problem with you working from home under normal circumstances. But what happens if you wake up feeling a little under the weather and decide it makes better sense to you to stay home and get some stuff done rather than go to work and spew your germs around?

Your manager has a fit, that’s what.

For some reason, most corporate middle managers seem to think that you must take PTO when you’re sick, even though they have no problem with you working from home at any other time. I’ve yet to have anyone explain this to me in a way that actually makes any sense. Generally it’s something about how you need to get your rest and so you should take the PTO.

Let’s examine all the reasons why that is utterly moronic.

In the first place, we corporate workers don’t want to work from home if we’re really sick. If you wake up with a really bad flu or somesuch, you want to lay in bed and moan all day, in those rare intervals when you’re actually conscious. But of course that’s not every day when you’re sick. In fact, that isn’t even the majority of days when you’re sick. Most days when you’re sick you don’t feel well enough to suffer through that vicious commute, you don’t want to stray too far from your medicine and your familiar bathroom facilities, and you figure it’s safer to be at home just in case you suddenly get worse, but, all in all, you’re still plenty alert enough to do most corporate work, which (let’s face it) doesn’t require a whole lot of brainpower anyway. What am I gonna do at home all day? Watch daytime TV? Bleaaaghh. I could be reading a nice book, perhaps, or playing mindless video games ... or I could be getting stuff accomplished for your company. Which one really makes the most sense, from the point of view of the always self-interested corporation?

This, of course, exposes the real reason that corporate managers don’t want you working from home while you’re sick. It’s because they think you’re going to do a half-assed job. Basically, they’re telling you that you can’t be trusted to know when you’re alert enough to do a good job. This is stupid for a lot of reasons. First of all, if you really can’t trust the person, you should just fire them. But obviously that’s not true: you trust them enough to let them work from home in the first place. So now you’re saying that maybe they can do okay when they’re out of your sight sometimes, but they’re not really bright enough to know when they’re too sick to work. And the problem with treating your employees like children is that it causes them to act like children. If you deal with people with a lack of respect, giving them the message that they’re not mature enough, they will inevitably start doing petty things to live up to your expectations. Enforce ridiculous rules about office supplies and they’ll start stealing paper clips; institute draconian time-off policies and they’ll start calling in sick to go out drinking with their friends; treat them like you expect they can’t keep track of their own time and they’ll start miscounting hours and being more “flexible” about what constitutes work time. If you want people to act like adults, treat them like adults. This works for your children, too, in case you didn’t know that already. (And, if you did, why did you think it wouldn’t work for your grown-up employees?)

But perhaps the biggest problem with this silly policy is the dilemma it puts the employee in. ‘Cause here’s my thinking on the matter: If you tell me that I can’t work from home if I’m sick, I have two choices. One, I could take the PTO and stay home and not work. Or I could say, screw it, and just come in anyway. I mean, I may not want to deal with the commute, and it might be more convenient for me to be near my own toilet, but when the alternative is to take PTO (which, due to other silly corporate policies, is a very precious resource), I might decide to forego the convenience and just bring my germ-laden ass in to the office. After all, I’m not that sick (if I were, the question wouldn’t have come up at all). And it’s no skin off my nose if I get a bunch of your other employees sick and they have to take PTO and all their work starts falling behind. No, the only pocketbook that impacts is the company’s.

So look at what this policy is costing you. It costs you forward progress on potentially important projects. It costs you morale as employees are insulted by your lack of trust. And it costs you countless lost work hours as you actively encourage your workers to spread their germs throughout the office and create a domino effect. And what do you have to put on the other side of that corporate balance sheet? The possibility that you saved a half-day’s time due to someone not doing a full day’s work? Are you really coming out ahead?

What about the possibility that your silly policy inspires someone to just quit and go find another job? You may say to yourself that the chances are good that their next corporation will have the same policy, so they won’t quit over something like that, but a) you don’t know that for sure, and b) people often aren’t that rational. Don’t tell yourself it can’t happen. I’m living proof that it can.

Poetry in the Raw

2012-02-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

I do occasionally mention that I have children. In the spirit of not putting personal information about one’s family out onto the Internet, I have refrained from mentioning their names. However, their names are more than just handles for easy identification; they’re a sign of another parenting principle that I and my partner believe strongly in.

Now, typically when I write a post and tag it with “parenting” (such as this one), I’ll happily admit that I’m trying to convince you that my way is the right way. (And, if you don’t like that, look up at the title of the blog again.) So I feel compelled to point out that this one is different. This time, I’m saying “look, this is the way I do it, but it may not be right for you.” It’s okay to disagree sometimes, you know. That’s what makes the world such a beautiful place.

So, these are the names of my children: the elder son is Random, the younger son is Perrin, and the daughter who is yet to be is Merrick. The links will explain where the names come from, if you’re interested. I’ve tried to find places to link to that are as spoiler-free as possible, but be careful where you click on those pages, and certainly don’t read the “Chronology” on the Perrin Aybara page if you’re worried about that sort of thing.

I’m sure you’ve cottoned on the what these names have in common. Yes, they’re all fictional characters, and, more subtly, none of them are series protagonists, although they all rise to prominence in their stories. Actually, that’s more of a coincidence—we picked the names mainly for their euphony, and of course their primary characteristic: they’re all pretty unusual names. In fact, one might suspect that I had deliberately gone somewhere to check out the 1,000 most popular baby names for the past 12 years and made sure ours weren’t on them. (And, of course, one would be right.)

But why? I am certainly no celebrity: I am not Gwyneth Paltrow, nor Penn Jillette, nor Robert Rodriguez (though I quite like “Apple” and “Rocket” ... “Moxie CrimeFighter” may be a bit much though). So I don’t even have the excuse of being rich and crazy. Perhaps I should leave the unusual baby names to the stars; after all, as that link points out, “the richer the parents are, the less likely you are to be teased.” My kids don’t have that protection.

In fact, the assumption that unusual names will be a burden to a child seems to be a common one. Casual Internet comments and Saturday Night Live skits aside, there is serious research that tells us that unique names are bad for our kids. Of course, the great thing about research like that is that it nearly always works both ways: for every article I can find telling me that “when individualism is taken too far, the result is narcissism” or that ”a 1960s study of psychiatric records found that those with unusual names were more likely to be diagnosed psychotic,” I can find another that tells me that “names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person”^* or that “young adults today report that they feel buoyed by an unorthodox appellation.”

Should I try to draw some conclusion from the fact that the author quoted in the first article, as well as the author of the second, are both named Jean, while the auhor of the third is Carlin, and the fourth was penned by a man with a middle name of Marion? Should I furthermore wonder why that second Jean (full name “Jean-Vincent”) now chooses to go by “JV”? I can recall hearing some author speaking on NPR a few years ago, telling me that children needed stability and wanted to fit in, and that unusual names jeopardized that. Spoken like a true “Bob,” I thought.

No, I should probably not engage in such speculation. Like any debate that appears to be black and white, the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle. As one of those articles points out:

No one can predict whether a name will be consistent with a child’s or a teen’s view of herself. The name could be ethnic, unique or white-bread, but if it doesn’t reinforce her sense of self, she will probably be unhappy with it and may even feel alienated from parents or peers because of it. An Annika with iconoclastic taste will be happy with her name, but a Tallullah who longs for a seat at the cheerleader’s table may feel that her name is too weird.

In other words, we could be doing our kids a favor by giving them unique names, or screwing them up, and the exact same thing is true if we give them common names. The way we look at it, they can always choose to be Randy, Perry, and Mary later in life if that suits them better. At least this way they have a choice.

Plus, one can never predict future uniqueness. I’m sure that if you were an expecting parent in 1984 who saw Splash, you probably thought that “Madison” was a pretty cool-sounding, unique name for your soon-to-be baby girl. Little would you guess that it would suddenly enter the top 1,000 most popular names at #625 the very next year, and eventually reach the top ten in 1997, where it remains to this day. (In fact, it was one of the top three girls’ names from 2000 to 2006.) For that matter, we were just informed this past week that, not only is our elder son no longer our pediatrcian’s only “Random,” he’s actually now one of three (the oldest of the three, at least, so he can still claim to be the “original,” for whatever that’s worth).

So far it appears that my firstborn is happy with his name. He’s just barely a teenager at this point, but he has resisted all efforts to be made into a “Randy,” and he always gently but firmly corrects the common mishearing of “Brandon.” Whether other kids make fun of him for his name or not, I don’t know—I suspect not as much as they might have, since he’s never attended public school. The schools where Random has gone are filled with names of kids that make his stand out less: Sasha’s and Connor’s and Thor’s and Skyler’s. But, even in public schools, some of those articles suggest, a combination of increasing ethnic diversity and less social emphasis on conformity means that unusual names are not the rich fodder for teasging they once were:

“Kids today are used to a variety of names, so it is almost too simple for them to make fun of each other for that,” says Taffel. “Cruelty is more sophisticated now.”

Comforting words indeed.

But you know what the most telling quote from any of these articles is, and the one that I think sums up my own parental view on the matter is?

If parents give a child an offbeat name, speculates Lewis Lipsitt, professor emeritus of psychology at Brown University, “they are probably outliers willing to buck convention, and that [parental trait] will have a greater effect on their child than does the name.”

That’s me in a nutshell. I don’t want to give my children names that help them conform, because I don’t want them to conform. I want them to stand out. I want them to feel as if they have a built-in leg-up on being recognized for their unique qualities; we often tell Random that he’s the “best Random in the whole world,” and we can tell each of our children the same thing without any accusation of favoritism, and not even that big a chance of being incorrect. We’ve always taught our kids to think for themselves, not to blindly follow instructions—even though we regret that sometimes. But our children are intelligent, articulate, and forthright, capable of high-order reasoning, with impressive vocabularies for their ages. And, so far at least, they like their names.

I’ve written before about treating my children like people, and I closed that blog post with a quote from Frank Zappa, a guy who named his children Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva. Obviously I feel a kinship with the man, even if I don’t care for his music. His quotes on parenthood are numerous and inspiring (at least to me), and I grace you with another one here.

The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents—because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

My children are anything but boring. And it all starts with their names.

* “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”

** The title of this week’s post is a quote from W.H. Auden. The full quote is: “Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”

Perl blog post #4

2012-01-29T13:44:00.000-08:00

This week I decided to write about my trials and tribulations getting a new version of Test::File out, so hop on over to my perl blog and read all about it. Probably more so if you’re into the whole technogeek thing, but there is a reference to my eldest in there for anyone who knows me and is willing to suffer through the technobabble.

A Game for a Younger Man

2012-01-22T18:08:00.000-08:00

You guys may remember that, ever so long ago, I talked about my love for a game called Heroscape. In that blog post, I pointed you to a video review (actually a 5 part series) of the game by a guy named Tom Vasel. If you followed that link, and if you watched at least the first couple of minutes, you heard Tom say this:

I can play it with children, I can play it with teenagers, I can play it with other adults, and it is an absolute blast.
—Tom Vasel

And that has always been one of my favorite things about the game. I’ve played it with people as young as 5 or 6, up through people as old as 50 or 60 (into which neighborhood I myself am headed at a pretty good clip). Playing with folks my own age is a lot of fun. Playing with the younger folks (say, 15 to 25) is fun too, although I think they tend to be a lot more competitive, and therefore more cutthroat. But, to me, playing with the really young kids is the best. They have such a great hunger to try everything, and such a huge imagination, and such a pure joy in doing well. It’s awesome. And, if you managed to get all the way to the end of part 5 of Tom’s video review, you heard him say this:

And that’s another great thing about Heroscape: it’s the fact that it gives you great stories to tell.
—Tom Vasel

And that’s definitely true. Some of my favorite Heroscape moments of all time were with very young people. For my elder son’s eighth birthday, we played a six-way game among myself and kids ranging from 7 to 10. Some wanted the biggest dragons they could find. Some wanted the cheapest squads so they could start with the largest number of troops. One kid picked the cowboy sniper, planted him in the very center of the map, and just picked off people every round while the other players busied themselves with trying to kill each other. It was an awesome game, which I didn’t even come close to winning (mine was the second army decimated), but I had so much fun, playing referee and helping them with their strategies and answering their questions about how best to capitalize on the special powers of the units they’d chosen. And that’s just one of many great moments I’ve had with my son and his friends, or other kids I’ve played with at our local game days.

Of course, I also mentioned back in that first Heroscape post that my son is fairly ambivalent about Heroscape these days. My elder son, I keep calling him, which of course implies that I have a younger son (which I do). What about him?

Well, he’s only 5 (although he’ll be 6 in March). He has actually shown a great interest in playing Heroscape, and many is the time I’ve had to track down missing figures in amongst the piles of his toys. But, so far, his interest has translated mainly into a desire to help me put the maps together, and to jump the figures around the map. He just wasn’t ready yet: he lacked the patience to listen to the rules, the discipline to wait his turn, and the composure to deal with losses to his army without freaking out. So I’ve waited.

Until yesterday.

I don’t know why, but yesterday I just decided that he was ready. He hadn’t said anything, I just decided to ask him if he felt like playing a game. Perhaps it was the fact that he had been banned from video games for some particularly bad behavior on Friday and didn’t have much else to do. Perhaps it was the advances in his vocabulary lately that have demonstrated he is in fact growing up a bit. Perhaps I just sensed somehow that it was finally time. Whatever it was, I asked him after his afternoon shower if he wanted to do something special with me, and he said “what?” and I said “play a game of Heroscape” and his face just lit up.

Now, I should get one thing out of the way early. I’m not the kind of parent who just lets my kids win. I never throw games intentionally. First of all, I think getting kids too accustomed to winning makes them unable to handle losing gracefully. Secondly, I think it’s insulting. If you’re not bringing your A-game, you’re telling your opponent they’re not worth it, and they usually recognize that. And if you think you’re going to skate by because your kids are young and you’re such a great actor, you’re not all that bright. Kids are extremely perceptive, and they know you as a parent better than they know any other human on the face of the earth. You may get by with it once or twice—or more often, if your kid is particularly oblivious or you really are a better liar than most—but eventually they will cotton on, and then where are you? No, better to be honest from the get-go: play them like you mean it, or don’t bother.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do a few things to give them a fighting chance. After all, you know how to play the game, and they don’t. To a certain extent, that gives you an unfair advantage right there. Basic courtesy says you have to help them out a bit. After all, the point is to help them learn the game, right? Sure, you could “teach” them by beating the tar out of them, but that’s a bit like “teaching” them to swim by tossing them into the deep end of the pool. What I do for my kids when I’m teaching them a game is that I spend a lot more time helping them develop their strategy—I don’t tell them what to do, I just give them lots of options and explain the advantages and disadvantages of each—than I do working on my own. As a result, their strategy tends to be pretty decent (while still staying their own), while mine is fairly scatterbrained, so that gives them a bit of a leg-up.

In this particular game, I decided to give my son a few other simple advantages, and here I’m going to give a few Heroscape-specific details, so if you don’t play the game, this might not mean much, but just bear with me and try to ignore that.

First, the map. Now, I don’t always play on perfectly symmetrical maps (which are considered more fair, since they’re the same no matter which side you end up getting); in fact, sometimes I like to play on a non-symmetrical map and give the side with the advantage to the less experienced player. In this case, though, I just wanted to slap a map together super-quick, and I happened to still have the pieces of a map from National Heroscape Day separated out, so we built Fire Isles. Since this is a map that has some lava in the center, my son decided to bring a primarily fire-based army, which would shine under those conditions. Since I wanted him to have a bit of an edge, I decided to field an ice-based army, which would suffer pretty badly from not having any snow on the board. But I should be able to overcome that moderately easily.

He chose the following army:

for a total of 625 points. I chose:

for a total of 605 points, which put me 20 points in the hole. Now, I could have taken Marcu or something to fill out the other 20 points, but I figured that was easy enough to overcome as well.

So my son has an army that can dominate the center of the map: few of his figures have to worry about taking any lava field damage, and his Obsidians (a.k.a. “lava dudes”) can actually stand in the molten lava and throw it at people. Plus his fire elementals, which are normally a pain in the ass because they can burn their allies, have a lot more freedom of movement here, since the vast majority of his team is fireproof. The only ones that aren’t are the elementalist, who is necessary to get the most out of the elementals, and the water elementals, who are not as useless as they might seem: there’s a thin strip of water on either side of the map, and they can use their “water tunnel” ability to hop around from one water space to another, and they can shoot water blasts from the sidelines.

Whereas I, on the other hand, do have to worry about taking lava field damage, the molten lava is strictly off-limits for me, my ice elemental will never get to heal, and my poor yetis effectively have no powers at all. Plus I’m shy 20 points. But, still, I’m thinking that my greater experience and longer attention span is likely to mean I’ll crush him, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t mind if he loses, but I at least want it to be close.

So I decide that I will use order markers, and he won’t. Now, if you don’t know Heroscape, order markers are a pretty crucial part of the game. You have to choose which units you’re going to move and attack with ahead of time: you choose a 1, a 2, and a 3, and your opponent does the same, and that’s a round. Next round, you get to choose 3 new ones (or the same ones, if you like). It means you have to think ahead, and anticipate your opponent. I’m thinking my 5-year-old is not quite ready to do that yet. So I’m not going to cripple him that way, but I could just not use the order markers at all (which is what I did with my elder son). Instead, I decide that I will force myself to observe the strictures, while he’s free to do whatever he likes.

And this turns out to be the right decision, as it was a fairly close game. I led off with the big white dragon, as I’ve had many folks do to me: jump right into the middle of the map and start turning people into popsicles. It’s an aggressive play and I didn’t show him any mercy. He countered by sending the lava dudes into the center of the map and started flinging lava right and left. I left poor Nilf in the same spot just one turn too long, and he went down at the beginning of the second round, having taken out only two lava dudes for the trouble. Sure, there was some luck involved—one of the lava dudes rolled an impressive 4 out of 4 skulls at one point while I countered with a dismal 0 out of 5 shields, which knocked out the bulk of Nilf’s life points—but both of us were playing hard and playing smart. Understand that I didn’t advise him to put his lava-slinging dudes into the center of the lava pit. All I did was explain what they could do, and he chose how to deploy them.

After the loss of Big White, it was pretty much downhill. I got my frost giant into the thick of things, while trying to move the yetis up as flankers, but the water elementals flanked my flankers and blasted everyone who came near them. Brunak moved up to engage Frosty, big sword against big axe, and his defense of 7 proved impossible to crack. Once the giant went down, I brought the GIE up while my son mowed down the last of the yetis, but it was too little too late. The fire elementals swarmed him (side note: a fire elemental attacking an ice elemental is a crazy dice-rolling frenzy—the GIE gets to roll for ice spikes as the FE moves adjacent, then the FE rolls for burn damage, then the FE attacks and the GIE defends) and brought him to half-dead before he took them out, then Brunak hopped over and blew him away with another all-skulls-vs-whiff roll. Final score, unwounded Kurrok and unwounded Brunk, along with one obsidian guard and one water elemental, vs a lot of dead bodies.

Understand that I actually offered very little advice throughout this. I expected to need to help with strategy and all that, but I really didn’t. A couple of times I showed him where he could move up and get a height advantage that he hadn’t noticed, but he caught on to that trick pretty fast. And at the very end, I started helping him choose the best way to take me down, because it was obvious at that point that I was going to lose and I just didn’t see any point in dragging it out. But, other than that—and the other handicaps I’ve already described—he beat me fair and square, and he deserved his victory. And then he got to run screaming through the house about beating Daddy. Priceless.

One last note for any of you that may be inspired to do some Heroscaping with your own kids: Tom Vasel tells us exactly what to do with the “basic game” in part 2 of his review at about 0:35. I concur with this fervently. The basic game is worthless. I just played with a five-year-old and he had absolutely no problem understanding the “master” game. The only place we “cheated” was in letting him skip the order markers; everything else was strictly by the books. When he pleaded to let his slow-moving lava dudes have just one more space so he could engage my dragon, I said, nope, sorry, you’ll just have to wait until next time. He was disappointed, but he got over it. Other than the order markers, the only place we fell down was that I kept forgetting to let my frost giant roll for his battle frenzy power, but I didn’t do that on purpose to help my son out ... I honestly just forgot. I never play with that stupid guy anyway. And that sort of thing happens all the time in Heroscape: there are lots of powers flying around, and sometimes one just slips through the cracks. It was my job to remember, and I didn’t. My loss. Anyway, it might have made the game a bit closer had I remembered, but he still would have won. I was just outclassed, that’s all.

Point being, he had no problem with the advanced rules at all. I had to read him the cards, of course, ’cause he can’t actually read yet. And I might have to remind him about a power the first time or two he used it (“now, don’t forget to add 1 to your attack with that water elemental because it’s on a water space”), but he quickly figured that out and didn’t need it after the first few times. Kids have no problem with the different characters having different powers. That’s the way it is in cartoons, and video games, and card games like Pokémon ... why should Heroscape be any different?

So that’s why I did with my weekend. Fun and, I’d say, productive. This one’s going to be my strategy gamer, I can tell. I can hardly wait.

* Yes, I know they’re technically called “Dzu-Teh.” They’ll always be “yetis” to me.

The Great Red Dragon

2012-01-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get a wild hair to reread something I’ve read before. Generally I take myself up on this proposition. A few nights ago, as I was going to bed, I had a sudden desire to reread Hannibal. Dunno why; something about the way Harris describes the inner workings of Lecter’s brain is just cool.

But of course if I want to reread Hannibal, first I need to reread Silence of the Lambs. And, if I want to reread Silence of the Lambs, I need to reread Red Dragon.

I never read Red Dragon until after I’d read Silence of the Lambs, and I never read Silence of the Lambs until after I’d watched Jonathan Demme’s excellent adaptation of it. Typically, I find movie versions of full-length novels to be inadequate (unless the novel is crap, in which case the movie can be superior), but both movie and book in this case are top notch. The acting in the movies is one of the high points: the ever-dependable Sir Anthony Hopkins is the quintessential Lecter, of course, and I don’t even mind the change in casting for Starling. I just think of Jodie Foster as the young, hopeful Clarice, and Julianne Moore as the older, jaded Clarice. Works out well.

Of course, Red Dragon is a bit lesser known (both the book and the movie), but there’s a lot to be said for both. On the cinematic side, Ed Norton is certainly always dependable, and Harvey Keitel makes a smidge better Crawford than Scott Glenn. But honestly, it’s the supporting cast that makes the movie for me: I can’t read about Freddy Lounds without seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman in my head, and Reba will always be Emily Watson to me. (Interestingly, there is a much earlier take on Red Dragon called Manhunter, but it doesn’t work nearly as well, despite the fun of watching a pre-CSI William Petersen as Will Graham. I mean, I like Brian Cox, but Hannibal Lecter, he ain’t.)

On the literary side, Will Graham is an interesting character. He’s perhaps not as enduring as Clarice Starling, which is probably why he was replaced in the later books, but there’s a fascinating aspect to figuring out how his brain works. There’s less Lecter, and more Crawford, than we would see later, but I’m okay with that. Introducing Lecter as almost a background character just whets the appetite for Silence (where he’s still not the primary killer), and finally Hannibal, which is the ultimate goal. And Crawford is an interesting character is his own right who’s fun to read; this is required background to understanding him in Silence, I’d say. The plot is strong, the starring killer is both terrifying and strangely sympathetic, and the tension is worked up very well, which Harris would only perfect in his later works.

So I’m rereading Red Dragon. I’m almost done with it, in fact (all Harris’ novels are quick reads). You know what’s striking me most particularly this time around? How really utterly old the book is. Makes me feel old. But mainly what I’m getting is a contrast with how much the genre has evolved since then, quite possibly because of Harris’ early efforts.

Simple example: nowhere is the phrase “serial killer” used in the book. When Harris needs something to call Lecter, he uses “mass murderer.” Today, we’d only use that for someone who kills multiple people at one time, or one after another on a spree. Although the phrase was supposedly invented in the 70s, apparently it wasn’t common parlance when Red Dragon was written in 1981.

Another indication is the way in which Graham is treated. Remember: Graham is not a psychiatrist or psychologist ... he has no formal training at all, because there are no profilers, no concept of profiling as a way to approach criminals. The only time “profiling” is mentioned in the book, in fact, is in reference to profiling the victims.¹ The type of behavior we’re used to seeing on shows like Criminal Minds was still something strange and fascinating: the way people look at Graham, the way they stare at him, or fidget uncomfortably in his presence, reveals that what Graham is doing is completely outside their experience. Even Crawford seems in awe of him, and perhaps a little unnerved by him.

It’s also interesting to me that this is the earliest book I can think of where we find out who the killer is very early. Most crime novels that I’m familiar with from the 70s and before are classic whodunits—the point is to figure out who committed the crime. But Red Dragon follows what is now almost more commonplace these days: we know who the killer is from the beginning (or very early on at least), and the tension in the novel comes from flashing back and forth between killer and detective, as they circle ever closer to each other. I suppose this would be what Wikipedia calls an “inverted detective story”, and it claims numerous instances before 1981, but it seems to me these were the exceptions: Agatha Christie’s novels were all whodunits, and even going back to Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s Dupin, the audience didn’t know the killer before the end. And some of the examples that Wikipedia cites (such as Dial M for Murder) are vastly different from the style of Harris’ novels. Can we credit (or blame) Red Dragon (and, ultimately, Silence of the Lambs) for the invention of the profiler-vs-serial-killer story that we’ve now seen again and again: Copycat and Se7en and The Bone Collector, Criminal Minds and Touching Evil and Dexter, Kiss the Girls and The Blue Nowhere and The Alienist. And those are just the ones I actually liked ... according to Serial Murderers and their Victims, films depicting serial killers jumped from 23 in the 80s to over 150 in the 90s, and over 270 in the 00s. And that’s not even considering what I’m sure is a similar rise in books and TV series. Was Red Dragon an early model for this new subgenre?

There are some other fun anachronisms that I don’t remember standing out so starkly the last time I read it. There’s a reference to attendence being up at drive-ins.² A character refers to Hispanics as “chicanos.”³ Firemen wear asbestos suits.⁴ And I can only assume that the term “guest star” wasn’t in as common use as it is today, because Dolarhyde’s reference to guest stars reads as rather disorienting now.⁵ But that’s going to be tough to avoid with any contemporary setting. The march of technology inevitably makes many plot devices irrelevant (see, e.g., TV Tropes’ discussion on cell phones). But these are pretty minor; overall, Red Dragon holds up remarkably well for being written in the cusp between 70s and 80s.

This has been an enjoyable reread, and I’m looking forward to moving on to the next two books in Harris’ trilogy.⁶ The curious feeling of dislocation I get when reading it reminds me that there was a time when serial killers were fresh and interesting subjects for novelization, unlike nowadays when it’s old hat. Of course, as I mentioned above, I actually like all those particular serial killers books and movies, despite the plot device being hackneyed at this point. I think we owe Harris a debt for opening up a new sandbox for authors and filmmakers to play in. I look forward to seeing what new fictional serial killers will be spawned from Hannibal Lecter’s fascinating mold.

[Update: I just finished the book this morning. I noted there was a significant difference in the endings between the book and movie that I hadn’t remembered. Obviously I can’t discuss this without revealing spoilers, but I would encourage anyone both reading (or rereading) and watching (or rewatching) to think carefully about those differences and what they respectively mean for the character of Graham. I think the differences in impact are pretty big.]

1 Chapter 34.
2 Chapter 32.
3 Chapter 31.
4 Chapter 50.
5 Chapter 20.
6 The prequel, Hannibal Rising, is also good, but I probably won’t reread that one this time around.

Perl Blog Post #3

2012-01-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

It's a Perl week again this week. Check out the other blog should you be so inclined.

Chapter 18 (begun)

2012-01-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

The Bargain

“So,” Johnny ventured, “where are we now?”

Roger had left the wheel and come up behind him again. “Breen Lagoon. Didn’t we cover this already?”

Johnny gestured out at the expanse of open water. “This is a lagoon? This is a whole ocean!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I thought that was the lagoon back there.”

Roger snorted. “That’s just the selvage.”

Johnny looked blank. “The what?”

Aidan broke in. “The margin. The verge.”

Larissa chimed in. “The edge, they mean.”

Johnny looked back out across the water. “But ... I thought a lagoon was a ... you know ...”

Larissa supplied, “A stretch of salt water separated from the sea by a low sandbank or coral reef.”

Johnny pointed at Larissa. “Yeah, that. What she said.”

Roger grinned. “Not this one.”

Johnny nodded. “No, of course. Not this one. This one is a ... is a ...”

“Place between places,” Aidan chipped in.

Johnny sighed. “So ... where are we going, actually?”

Roger slapped him on the back, hard. “We have no idea!”

Johnny rubbed his shoulder and stared back at her. “Doesn’t that make it difficult to know where to go?”

“Aye, that it does.”

“What about your dad telling you should always know where you’re going, or whatever that was?”

“Wellll ... mayhap I should rephrase. We do know where we’ll be fetchin’ up, ye know. It’s just that we don’t have any idea at this precise moment how to get there.”

Johnny threw up his hands. “And how do we figure out how to get ... wherever we’re going?”

Roger put her hands on her hips. “We have Aidan for that.”

“Aidan again?” Johnny looked over at the Water Guide. “Seems like we keep asking him to do things ...”

Roger snorted again. Loudly. “Well, why under Shallédanu’s skirts did ye think we picked him up in the first damn place?” A ghost of a smile flickered on Aidan’s face.

Johnny looked back and forth between the two of them. “I thought it was something about monsters ...”

Aidan put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “I did my part with the muck monster, Johnny, you may recall. And, even though it seems like I didn’t do much for the remainder of the trip upstream, I actually did lay a protective charm on The Sylph here. And now that we’ve passed into the lagoon, I have other duties to attend to.” He looked back at Roger. “Although, you know, Captain ... this won’t be all my doing. I can but arrange the meeting. Negotiation will be your department.”

Roger’s eyes sparkled. “Bring it on, me hearty. My line is taut.” She turned back to Johnny. “I was mostly pulling your leg about the monsters, back at the beginning. I didn’t really think we’d need Aidan for that, especially before we e’en set sail! Which just goes to show ye even a pirate captain with years behind the wheel can stand to learn a thing er two.” She winked at Johnny. “No, the real reason I thought we’d need a Water Guide on this trip is that we had to float all the way up a river through a swamp and then get into a lagoon so that we could figure out how to get to the ice fields. Ye see the trim here?”

Johnny looked up at her. “Wait, did you say ‘ice’?”

Roger cocked her head to one side. “Aye, I did,” she said slowly.

Johnny closed his eyes and reached out with his new sense. It was still there, so cold ... if the door in the sewer pipes had seemed like a light, this seemed like an icy draft. He was still making mental analogies for things that he had no words for, but this was a decent enough description. And, just like it can be difficult to find the source of a draft in a room sometimes, this was tricky to locate as well. He concentrated harder; he could hear Roger talking to him, but he shut her out. It was easy, since his hearing was dialed down again. He cast his mind out, in all directions; throwing his arms wide, he spun around in a circle until he knew he had a fix on it, then brought his arms together and opened his eyes. Larissa was standing with a hand on Roger’s arm. Roger had her mouth open. Aidain was studying him with a considering expression.

“There,” he said simply.

Roger closed her mouth. “Are ye sure, Johnny?”

He nodded. She looked over at Aidan, who was still giving Johnny that calculating look. He glanced up at her. “Oh, yes, I’d say that would make the negotiations much more palatable. We’ll still need them to open the way, of course, but if we require only action, with no information, they will demand less in return.”

Roger grabbed Johnny’s shoulders and looked him full in the face, her grin bubbling up and her eyes alight. “See, Johnny, I knew ye were here to help us out, and now ...” Suddenly she leaned in and kissed him, full on the mouth. Johnny felt her tongue lightly brush his lips. Before he could properly react, it was over, and he was beet red. Roger gave a short, triumphant scream. “Yes! Those bloody whores’ll never know what hit ’em!” She gave Johnny a quick, bone-crushing hug and dashed off back to the wheel, still whooping with joy.

Johnny looked up, still trying to process what had just happened. Aidan was now smiling at him with kind eyes. Larissa was studying him, her head tilted ever so slightly to one side. He opened his mouth to speak, but his brain was reeling.

“Wait ... did she say ‘whores’?”

>>next>>

Happy ... Whatever

2011-12-25T00:12:00.000-08:00

You know, once upon a time it was considered polite not to instantly assume that whoever you were speaking to shared the same religion as you. Consider the possibility, at least, that they might have an alternative viewpoint, and respect that viewpoint by tempering your message. Do that nowadays and you get in trouble. For instance, if I were to wish you “happy holidays,” I would, according to the carefully crafted outrage evinced by the majority of the personalities on Fox “News,” be aligning myself with those who are waging a War on Christmas. So I won’t say that.

I will, instead hope that you have a very merry Christmas today, and may God bless you and keep you. I also hope that you are in the midst of a happy Hannukah, as it enters its 6th day at sunset tonight; shalom, and peace be on you always. I hope that you had a lovely Yule (or Solstice, if you prefer that term) three days ago, and wish you merry meet and blessed be. I wish you a joyous Kwanzaa starting tomorrow, and in case I don’t see you that week, Habari Gani? A happy Pancha Ganapati to you on this, the orange day, and may the Lord of Categories bless you. And for Monday, the 26th, I’ll wish you a happy Zartosht No-Diso or Boxing Day, depending on whether you happen to be Zoroastrian or Canadian. And if you subscribe to a religion that doesn’t have a holiday at this time of year, or you subscribe to no religion at all, I still find that this lull, as the one year winds down and the next prepares to launch, is a beautiful time to contemplate the blessings of family and good fortune, and be hopeful that the new year brings us new opportunities and even more of life’s bounty.

Of course, my thoughts about the new year may be premature, if you subscribe to a different calendar system. If you happen to be Chinese, I’m about 23 days early. If you happen to be Jewish, I’m more like 259 days early (or perhaps 95 days late). If you happen to be Muslim, I’m more like 36 days late (or 318 days early), but of course that will change significantly from year to year (in 2008, I would have only been off by 9 days).

Man, this all-inclusiveness is hard. Maybe we should just come up with a generic way to say all that ... something like ... oh, I don’t know ... “happy holidays” or something. It’s just a thought.

While you ponder my thoroughly original suggestion, I will give you a <insert holiday here> present, which may be either early, late, or totally on time, depending on the holiday you inserted. Every year, I tend to be surrounded by Christmas music: my partner loves to listen to it, my father (a record collector who focusses on early rock-n-roll music) loves to make CDs of it and send it to us, and of course radio stations and even cable music channels love to devote large blocks of time to it. It’s sort of inescapable. And every year I bitch about it. I’ve developed a bit of a reputation for hating Christmas music. And that’s sad. I don’t hate Christmas music. I just hate the Christmas music I keep hearing.

There are any number of problems with the Christmas music you typically hear this time of year. Almost all of it has one or more of the following characteristics, all of which bug the shit out of me:

It’s sappy. Yes, yes, we’re supposed to be counting our blessings and celebrating serious religious events and all that, but does everything have to be so heartwarming all the damn time? It’s enough to make you barf.

It’s goofy. When it’s not sappy, it has a tendency to swing too far in the other direction. This is true of many of the songs my dad scrapes together for his CDs; he favors classics like “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” or “Santa Claus is Watching You”. Now admittedly, these sorts of songs are pretty funny the first time you hear them, but they drop to “vaguely amusing” by the third or fourth time, and it’s not far to “eyeroll-inspiring.”

It’s tired. There are certain number of Christmas songs, and by this point, we all know them all, by heart. Why can’t we hear something new for a change?

It’s uninspired. “Something new for a change” is often interpreted as “a crusty old carol redone by a hip new artist.” Okay, sure, it might be vaguely amusing to listen to the Madonna version of “Santa Baby” ... once. And if I hear one more listless retread of “Jingle Bell Rock” ... bleaagh!

So I set out to correct this problem. I went and scoured Amazon for good Christmas songs: songs that were new, and fresh, and fun, but not too silly, and just plain fun to sing along with. Now, your interpretation of “fun to sing along with” might not match mine, of course. I like some pretty songs (I picked an Enya, after all), but mostly I like my stuff to be more rockin’. It doesn’t have to be death metal, or even hardcore punk, but for the most part I’m looking for a little bit of kick, ya know?

There’s also some wiggle room on “not too silly.” Everyone has a different sense of humour, and a different tolerance for irreverance and surrealism, and a different opinion on what constitutes bad taste. I’m sure my father, for instance, would be fairly disgusted with “My First Christmas (As a Woman)”, and he probably just wouldn’t “get” the South Park songs. But if you share my love of, say, Monty Python, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Tim Burton films, you’re probably pretty safe with the below.

To my knowledge, only 8 of the 25 songs I picked are not original to the artists singing them. Three are “traditional” songs, but they’re mangled enough to give them a freshness that made me deem them worthy. Three are songs which were originally song by animated characters^*—they’re Christmas songs, and you’ll probably recognize them, but they should be surprising nonetheless. The other 2 are remakes of songs that you’ve likely never heard before anyway; I just chose them because I happened to like them better than the originals. Also, only 3 of the songs could even remotely be considered serious. All three are right in a row so at least you can get past them quickly. But I felt that even those three added something special; hopefully you’ll agree.

The coolest thing about this list of songs is, of course, that, since I just downloaded them all of Amazon and burned them onto a CD, you can too. Links helpfully provided. Arrange them in the order presented though; I carefully researched the optimum playlist order for maximum smoothness and coherency. Fingers off the shuffle button, pally!

Download, and enjoy. It’ll run you about 25 bucks. But it’s totally worth it.

Yuletidal Pools
[featuring Michael Bublé]

Happy Birthday - Mojo Nixon
I Won’t Be Home for Christmas - Blink-182
Oi to the World! - No Doubt
Last Night (I Went Out with Santa Claus) - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Elf’s Lament - Barenaked Ladies
You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch - the Whirling Dervishes
Halloween on Xmas - the Coffin Caddies
Christmas Time in Hell - South Park
Christmas at Ground Zero - “Weird Al” Yankovic
Grandpa’s Last X-Mas - the Vandals
Christmas Don’t Be Late - Powder
Christmas Is - Run D.M.C.
The Twelve Days of Christmas - Bob & Doug McKenzie
Shot My Baby for Christmas - the Vaudevilles
Santa’s Coming Home - Cocktail Slippers
Christmas Wrapping - the Waitresses
Mr. Heatmiser - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Carol of the Bells - South Park
White Is in the Winter Night - Enya
Peppermint Winter - Owl City
Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight) - the Ramones
My First X-Mas (As a Woman) - the Vandals
I’m Getting Pissed for Christmas - Bamboula
Is Zat You Santa Claus - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Merry Merry Merry Frickin’ Christmas - Frickin’ A

* Okay, for those nitpicky music historians out there, yes, I’m aware that you can make an argument against all 3 of these being “originally sung by an animated character,” in that a) you could consider claymation different from animation, b) if the song is used in the background of a cartoon, then an animated character is not technially singing it, and c) if the character singing it was not animated until well after the song was released, that doesn’t really count as being sung by an animated character. But I felt it was a sufficiently descriptive umbrella term. So sue me.

Reading Week/Writing Week

2011-12-18T19:52:00.000-08:00

This week is a reading week for me.

So, remember last time we talked about writing, I said that I was trying to figure out what to write about next? I believe I managed two more sputtering installments after than, then nothing further. And my partner has lately been wondering aloud what’s going to happen when she finally gets to the last installment of my novel and then there is no more? How would you feel if you were reading along and suddenly the book just stopped and said, “Stay tuned! more to come ... whenever I get around to it”? Might be a bit frustrating, eh?

So I’m trying to get back into it. There are various things I do to recapture my mood, get back into the groove, so to speak, after taking a break. What I mentioned last time was reading through notes, and dream logs, and things like that. I’m doing a bit of that this week as well. But mainly what I’m doing is rereading the novel so far.

I do this a lot. No, I mean: a lot. Almost every time I post an installment of the book, I’ve reread the previous few installments, anywhere from 3 to 8 of them. This not only helps me get back in the swing of things, it helps me recapture my voice, re-establish my style, pick up where I left off. Renew my acquaintance with my characters. Revise any rough spots I find. Find things I never knew were there.

This is key. I talked about this a bit in my discussion of art-as-dialectic. Remember (or perhaps reread) the story about my writing professor finding things in my writing that I didn’t even know were there? Well, that was when I was young and stupid. Now I’m older, and moderately less stupid, and I find that I can find those things in my own writing. Not while I’m writing, of course. But when I go back and reread, I can find them.

It’s like I’m two different people: the author, and the reader. As the writer, I concern myself with writing what feels natural: I worry about flow, I worry about realistic dialogue, I worry about plotting (although probably not as much as I ought to). But, when I put my reader hat on, I start looking at the text very critically. Does it make sense? Are the words well-chosen, or do they make me stumble? Are there any places where the visual can’t match up with the words because the author didn’t lay it out properly (think “The Writer” sketch from the old Carol Burnett show)? And, perhaps most importantly, what is the author really trying to say here? what is his message? his theme? his moral, if he has one?

I’m not much for morals, overall, but I do believe that Art (capital A used advisedly there) has to reflect our lives in some way: it has to tell us something about ourselves, or else it’s not truly Art. Now, whether that something is advice on how to do things better, or simply a reflection of something we have known (like seeing a close friend in a fictional character), that part doesn’t matter. But the writing has to be saying something beyond its mere words.

Now, when I’m a writer, I don’t put much effort into that. But, when I change roles and become a reader, I look for it. Hard. I dig for it, and I expect to find it. And I nearly always do. I may not be trying hard (when I’m a writer) to add it in, but some part of me is: call it my subconscious, or my instinct, or my higher being, or whatever you like. I often feel that that part of my mind is a whole separate entity, poorly understood by the rest of my brain, and he (at least I assume it’s a “he”) should get all the credit for the creativity going on here ... I’m just a spectator for the most part. Oh, I do a little of the work—the stitching together of the disparate pieces into some coherent whole, mainly—but mostly I just kick back and watch the genius at work. Then I remember that he is me and when I call him “genius” I’m really calling myself a genius, which is far more immodest than I feel about the whole thing, so then I scramble around for a rephrasing ... but you get my drift.

So if you ask me what my story is about as its author, I have no opinion. Besides, as I pointed out (in that same blog post), it doesn’t matter what I think as the author. What you think, as the reader: that’s all that really matters. Of course, when I become the reader, then I do have an opinion, and I could tell you what it’s all about. But I’m not going to, because you would be tempted to take that as the opinion of the author (which it wouldn’t be), and then you’d try to see the same things in it that I (reader) see as opposed to finding your own things in it. But finding those things helps me (writer) put together a more coherent story, because if I can just get some consistent themes lodged in my subconscious (or whatever it is), then they’ll come out in the writing, even if I’m not trying to put them there.

See?

Well, maybe that’s all too confusing. But, the point is, every now and again I need to go all the way back to the beginning in order to completely immerse myself in the story, and not only rediscover my voice, but also make new discoveries, find new viewpoints, make new connections, and that helps the story be richer. So that’s what I’m doing this week. Hopefully soon that will allow me to produce the next installment of the Johnny Hellebore saga.

Assuming you care. But I’m also assuming you wouldn’t have bothered to read all this deranged rambling if you didn’t.

Drag Reduction

2011-12-11T01:40:00.001-08:00

Ever so long ago, I explained my opinion of blogs. At the risk of pretentiousness (not that it would be the first time), I’ll quote myself:

I mean, realistically, what are the chances that you’re actually going to miss that one-in-a-million blog posting anyway? As soon as it happens, all of your friends with too much time on their hands are going to send you a link to it anyway.

Prophecy, that was. Here’s that one-in-a-million post now, and, sure enough, one of my friends with too much time on his hands sent it to me. Well, to be fair, he sent me a link to another blog post, which wasn’t quite as interesting (although it had its high points). But primarily that post was notable for providing a link to this post: Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect.

Now, I encourage you to read that full article, especially if you are, like me, a programmer (or, really, any job which requires sustained creativity). But, in case you decide not to, I’ll give you a brief summary:

We all have different tasks that we do as part of work, or even as part of life. Some of these tasks are productive, get-shit-done sort of tasks. If you are a working programmer, that means essentially coding new programs. If you are an architect, it means drawing up blueprints, I suppose; if we’re talking about home improvement projects you do on the weekend, it likely means interior decorating, landscaping design, creative carpentry, etc. But many of the tasks we have to do are just administrative, have-to-do-it-whether-we-like-it-or-not tasks. For programmers, that’s answering emails, going to meetings, filling out corporate forms and surveys and annual goals for career development, etc ad infinitum. I’m sure architects have similar jobs. For our putative home decorating weekend warrior, it’s fixing the toilet, weeding the garden, and traipsing through Home Depot looking for the right size screws. The article refers to the first type of tasks as “thrust tasks” and the second type as “drag tasks.”

Thrust tasks tend to be long tasks (although interesting), and drag tasks tend to be quick (although often mind-numbingly boring). Because of that, our natural job queue prioritization wants us to do the quick tasks first. The quick ones can be knocked out more easily, giving a greater sense of accomplishment—more things checked off your todo list. We also have a natural desire to get the boring stuff out of the way so we can concentrate on the good stuff.

But it turns out there’s a problem with this approach: the drag tasks eat up all our time and the thrust tasks are always relegated to the back of the queue. Either they never get done at all, or they get done in dribs and drabs, with the leftover time after all the drag tasks are completed.

And the long/short dichotomy isn’t the only thing that distinguishes thrust tasks and drag tasks. It turns out that you can get better—more efficient, more productive—at drag tasks ... but only up to a point. Let’s face it: answering your email or weeding your garden is repetitive, and yet each email or weed is a little bit different. Just different enough that you’re never going to but so good at it. While the thrust tasks are the things you can not only get better at, but they actually deepen your experience and improve your overall performance in your chosen field.

More importantly, the longer you spend on your thrust tasks, the more productive you become. And not just in the linear, spend-twice-as-long, get-twice-as-much-done sense. The author suggests that spending twice as long produces 4 times the results. This is of course unproven (and probably unproveable), but every programmer knows that long, uninterrupted stretches spent on coding tasks do indeed return results far beyond the simple accumulation of extra time spent. You start to build a rhythm, and, when you really hit your stride, your productivity is blinding. And that in turn means that when you only attack your thrust tasks a little bit at a time, in the leftover slots after your drag tasks are done, you’re achieving your lowest possible efficiency.

So that’s the “thrust” and the “drag” from the title of the blog post; what’s this about “10x”? Well, the article refers to a popular concept in software development (which is supported by many studies): a good programmer is an order of magnitude (i.e. ten times) more productive than a bad programmer. In fact, some people say that a good programmer is 10x more productive than an average programmer, who is in turn 10x more productive than the bad programmer. Less academic support for that, but it’s one of those things that many of in the software biz feel to be true—there’s a certain amount of “truthiness” there, as Stephen Colbert would say.

Of course, that would mean that if you’re currently an average programmer, and you want to be a good programmer, you’ve got to improve your productivity tenfold. That’s a tall order. How can you go about doing it? Take a page out of physics: increase your thrust, and reduce your drag. Arrange your schedule to allow for significant chunks of time for your thrust tasks, even if that means putting off your drag tasks occasionally.

So that’s what the article says in general. What did I get out of it for myself, in particular?

Well, a couple of things. First of all, it identfied and delineated for me a problem that I’ve had off and on for years, and am actually undergoing currently in my present job. When I move from one big task to another (thrust tasks, we’re talking about), it takes me a while—sometimes months—to “get into” the new project. At the beginning of the endeavor, I generally fill up my time with drag tasks, leaving little time left over for concentrated, extended effort on the actual project work. Gradually, either my interest peaks or my survival instinct kicks in if the project starts to fall behind schedule, and I dive deep into the work—all the drag tasks just fall by the wayside, I ignore my emails, skip meetings, drive my bosses crazy by procrastinating endlessly on paperwork, but I don’t care, because the work has siezed me by the throat, and it’s all I can think about, and I stay up late working until I can’t keep my eyes open any more, and then I eventually complete the job in a final exhausting flurry of activity, and then I start doing nothing but all those drag tasks I was avoiding all that time, and the whole cycle starts all over again. I see now what my problem is. I’m not giving my thrust tasks enough time and attention to reach critical mass fast enough, so I end up with too little work up front and too much work on the back end. Instead of trying to do all my outstanding drag tasks every day, I’d be far better off saving them all up for certain days: allot one or two days a week to be nothing but drag tasks so that there’s plenty of time left over for uninterrupted stretches on the thrust tasks. This would lead to greater efficiency overall.

The second thing is that I’m approaching my one day a week working from home all wrong. See, we have a policy at my workplace that everyone gets to work from home one day a week (well, after they’ve had a brief breaking-in period where we get to know them and trust them). This is a pretty great privilege for a corporate environment (meaning large public corporation, which happens to be the type I work for), and it’s a privilege that every general manager we’ve ever had was desperate to take away from us. If you’re lucky enough to work in a smaller corporation, or one of the few tech-liberal giants (I think Google probably qualifies), you might not see where I’m coming from, but I’ll bet if you work in a more traditional business environment, even a tech-heavy one, you know exactly what I mean. People who understand programmers and how to manage them (remember that I ran my own small company for many years, so I include myself in that group) understand that treating them like adults is not only a good way to get them to be productive, it’s the only way to get them to be productive. Treat them like children and they will not only act like children, they’ll work hard to actively undermine you and screw you sideways. And telling people that you don’t trust them to do what they’re supposed to do when you’re not looking at them is definitely treating them like children. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure there are categories of employees where that’s appropriate, and that’s why your basic average corporate middle manager has that attitude. But for programmers at least (and I bet many other types of folks), this is a recipe for disaster. So we very luckily have a have a head-of-tech (what would be our CTO if we were an independent company instead of a little piece of a larger giant) who understands this and protects our privileges very jealously. Which is awesome.

Of course, we all have to do our part as well. To help our CTO out in his never-ending war to keep management from fiddling with our work environment, we all have to make sure we don’t abuse our privileges. Thus, when I work from home, I actually end up answering my email even more than I would if I was in the office: essentially, I’m so desperate to prove that I’m just as responsive when I’m at home that I end up being even more responsive when I’m at home. The least little task that comes up, I immediately jump on it and complete it to prove that I couldn’t possibly be doing a better job if I were onsite. But see what I’m doing: I’m using up all my work-from-home time—quite possibly the best chance I have at long, uninterrupted stretches of concentration—on drag tasks. I’m screwing myself, and my company, by sacrificing productivity for the perception of responsiveness. Not that perception isn’t important, of course, but, hey: there are limits.

So, handily, I see several opportunities for improvement here, all thanks to this blog post I just happened to stumble across. And after 25 years at the professional programming game. Just goes to show you you’re never to old to learn a new trick or two. Of course, learning it and putting it into practice are two different things, so we’ll see how successful I am at that, but I’m pretty excited to try out my newfound principles. I think I was already a pretty good programmer, but I’m also pretty sure I could be great. Just gotta increase my thrust a bit. And now I think I know how.

Perl blog post #2

2011-12-04T23:41:00.001-08:00

I've done another Perl blog post this week, so you non-techies will just have to deal with it. You techies can just hop on over and read it.

Perl blog post #1

2011-11-27T01:26:00.001-08:00

Yes, I threatened to do it, but you didn’t really think I’d go through with it, did you? Well, hah! to you, I say. If you happen to be technogeekly inclined, specifically of a Perl flavor, then you may wish to wander over to check out my very first Perl blog post. Or you may not; it’s entirely up to you. But you apparently keep on reading this one, so you may as well read that one too.

In case it wasn’t clear, I can only write one blog post a week—I can barely keep up with that, so there’s no point in imagining I could manage two. So on weeks that I write one over there, you get nothing over here. Sorry. Then again, I suppose there’s little point in imagining that you care that much ...

If You Meet the Hype on the Road, Kill It

2011-11-20T00:22:00.001-08:00

There is a principle known as Occam’s Razor; no doubt you’re familiar with it. Ask most people what Occam’s Razor is, and they’ll happily tell you:

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

Actually, this is a bit of an oversimplification (but then, we’re fond of those, as I’ve written about before). Perhaps a more correct formulation might be:

Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.

At least that’s how Wikipedia chooses to present it, although it notes that the actual words that Mr. Occam (supposedly) said were:

Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.

(Only he said it in Latin, ’cause that made him sound smarter.) What you might notice about these successive phrasings is that it gets less and less emphatic. First it’s “usually,” then it devolves into “other things being equal,” and finally ends up at “beyond necessity.” Any way you slice it though, the point I’m making should be obvious: there’s a huge difference between the simplest explanation always being true, and it maybe possibly being true, unless necessity dictates otherwise.

Happily, as a Baladocian, I’m perfectly happy to believe both at once: the simplest explanation should be true, but it needn’t be. I’m pretty easy-going on several sayings like that. Here’s another one:

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

I absolutely agree with that ... especially the “probably” part.

The other day I was talking to a good friend (and co-worker) of mine, and he pointed out that he’s always highly suspicious of techniques (or processes, or solutions) that sound like a religion. If you think about it, that’s just the “too good to be true” thing all over again. In the computer world (you’ll recall that I’m a technogeek by profession), we run into this all the time, and I’m sure you’ve experienced it too, even if you’re not technical yourself. Got a friend who owns a Mac? Then I’m sure I don’t need to explain the Cult of Apple to you. And technology is full of those: there’s the Cult of Microsoft to battle the Cult of Apple, likewise the competing religions of vi and emacs, the people who so slavishly follow Excel that they use it for everything, from grocery lists to corporate databases, and on and on and on.

When I was a young (and foolish) programmer, I fell into such a cult myself: the Cult of OOP. OOP, or object-oriented programming, is a way to write software that is usually contrasted with procedural programming, although these days it’s more fashionable to compare it to functional programming. If none of that means anything to you, don’t sweat it—it isn’t crucial to my point. The point is, when I first had OOP explained to me, it didn’t sound that cool ... it sounded sort of simple and obvious, actually. Then I read a book on it—not even a very good book, as it happened, but enough to make me understand what OOP really meant. And, let me tell you: the skies opened up, and angels came down and blew their golden trumpets, and golden rays of sunlight lanced down, and all the darkness I had ever known was lifted, and I did see the light. Glory, glory, hallelujah. I didn’t know it, but I’d been converted.

Back in those days, OOP was just getting started: I really got in on the ground floor of that cargo cult. There weren’t loads of people wandering around proclaiming that OOP was the One True Way of programming ... not then. That would come later. If they had been around then, I, like my friend, would have most likely turned up my nose. But, as it turned out, now I’m one of the evangelists.

And here’s the thing: so is my friend. Because, you know what? OOP really is better. Not the “One True Way,” of course, because nothing can ever be that, but, given a system of sufficient complexity, that needs to be built at an average level of abstraction, OOP is almost always the best way to go. Call me a religious nutjob if you must, but it really is true. OOP lives up to the hype.

And yet there are still people out there who dig in their heels and put their fingers in their ears and go “LA! LA! LA!” and refuse to listen to the advantages of OOP, because those of us who know how to use it are just so goddamned enthusiastic about it. It’s very frustrating to someone like myself. Or my friend—I’ve seen him fighting with people who stubbornly refuse to listen to him when he’s extolling the virtues of OOP, and I know that expression on his face. It’s irritation, plain and simple.

So imagine how I feel when here I am explaining to him about something that I know really is a whole new awesome way of doing things—agile, perhaps, or TDD—and he’s telling me he’s suspcious, because he smells dogma. Well, sure: I’m suspicious of crazy zealots too. God knows, when my other friend (and co-worker) tries to tell me how awesome his iPhone is, I mentally close the door in his face, just as I would for any Jehovah’s Witness (or Mormon) that shows up and rings my bell. But, dammit: this particular stuff I’m talking about is different!

Of course, now I just sound whiny.

The title of this blog post is a reference to a saying attributed to 9th century master Lin Chi:

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

What this actually means, of course, is up each individual to determine, but a typical interpretation explains that the “Buddha on the road” is our conception of what Buddhism actually means, a symbol of the instruction of teachers and masters. And we must “kill” that external image, because enlightenment can only come from within. As the Buddha also (allegedly) said, as he was dying: Be lamps unto yourselves. Which (purportedly) means, don’t listen to what others tell you to do, work it out for yourselves. Of course, there’s a paradox here too: if we don’t listen to the authority of others because the Buddha told us to ... I talked about this in reference to quotes, but perhaps the best way to illustrate the words of the Buddha is with the words of another great philosopher: Steve Martin.

Now let’s repeat the non-conformists’ oath:

I promise to be different!

I promise to be unique!

I promise not to repeat things other people say!

Good!

The hype of whatever the latest technical methodology is presents us with a similar paradox. Popularity is no measure of quality—in fact, it’s more often the opposite. But, then again, if a new thing really is as awesome as these things generally claim to be, how do you expect people to react? Won’t they want to go around telling everyone, trying to share the good news with as many people as possible? Exactly like ... a cult. Which makes us suspicious.

I mentioned two things that many technical people find cultish: agile and TDD. There have been many screeds against both: Steve Yegge (who I mentioned last week) has a really famous one knocking agile, and here’s one plucked at random from a Google search which talks about TDD. Note how both use the word “cult” freely—gleefully, even. Both of these articles are very very wrong ... but, then again, they’re both right. They’re right about how people slavishly follow things they don’t fully understand and how stupid that is, even as they slavishly rant on, Dennis Miller style, about things that they don’t fully understand. I’m into paradoxes and all, but this is enough to make a guy’s head spin ...

In case you do happen to be a technical person, I’ll point you at one last article. This is a blog post by J.D. Hildebrand (an old friend of mine, as it happens), where he talks about how agile started out fighting the system, and now has become the system to be fought against. It happened, if I may paraphrase J.D. (who is indeed paraphrasing others, to some extent), because people joined the cult. They didn’t question what they were adopting, they just heard it was the latest cool thing and they picked it up and followed all the instructions to the letter.

This is wrong. One must always question. One must always be skeptical. But does that mean that one must turn up one’s nose at things just because they are touted by the masses? If we sneer at all those mindless drones, just to be hip, without truly knowing the facts, how are we any better than they are? A suspicious mind is not the same as a closed one.

A Tale of Two Bloggers

2011-11-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

So, if you know anything about this blog (like, say, if you’re capable of reading the name of the damn thing), you know that I don’t have a high opinion of blogs, not even my own. I gave a fairly complete explanation of why in my very first post, which was nearly two years ago, but I haven’t talked much about it since. But recently I was reading a blog post that made me remember why I hate blogs, so I thought I’d revisit the topic.

The funny thing is, I didn’t hate the blog post. Nor did I hate the blogger. In fact, I have great respect for that particular blogger. And yet ... it’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the whole concept.

Let me tell you about two bloggers whose posts I read occasionally. I don’t read any blogs regularly (for obvious reasons), but, every once in a while, someone whose opinion I respect will say “hey, there’s this cool blog post you should read,” and then I do, and sometimes I agree. Since I’m a technical guy, mostly these blog posts are technical in nature, blogged by fellow technogeeks. And, of course, blogs being what they are, often you end up seeing the same names over and over again on these sorts of things. Some folks are just better at this whole blogging thing than others, and you start to recognize their names. Now, if you happen to be a technical person yourself, you’ll probably recognize these names yourself. If you’re not, just mentally substitute the names of some bloggers in whatever field you follow; I’m sure the points will apply just as well.

The first person I want to mention is Joel Spolsky. Joel has a fairly popular blog that he’s been writing for over 10 years now. He’s written on many, many different topics in the software industry. He’s a working programmer, but he’s also run his own company, so he can hang on both the engineering front and the business side. Joel is a smart, smart man. I mean, he’s developed a lot of wisdom in 20 years in the software biz, but he’s more than just street-smart: he’s a very bright guy from the get-go. He’s also very close in age to me, we’ve spent roughly the same amount of time as professional developers, and we’ve both owned our own shops. In general, when Spolsky has something to say, I listen.

And here’s the thing about Spolsky’s blog posts: they’re either brilliant, or moronic. There is no in between. In fact, quite a few of them are both brilliant and moronic in the same post (see also my thoughts on balance and paradox). There are various reasons for this. Probably the main one is that his first job in the technical field was working for Microsoft. Now, from everything I’ve been able to determine, from both reading stuff and talking to people, is that working for Microsoft (successfully) involves drinking some Kool-Aid. I’ve read (or talked to) people who worked for Microsoft and loved it, people who worked for Microsoft and hated it, people who reported on Microsoft for a living, people who studied Microsoft and its employees, people who had friends at Microsoft, people who just interviewed there, people who volunteered for them online, people who had to interface with them, etc ad infinitum. Microsoft is a huge presence in the software industry: it’s pretty much impossible to spend as much time in the business as I have and not run into many, many people with personal experience with Microsoft. And, you know what? They all agree about drinking the Kool-Aid. Oh, the ones who loved it there don’t actually call it that, of course. But you can see the red stains on their lips just the same.

And the thing about Spolsky is, he didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, he friggin’ gargled with it. And, see, if Spolsky just went on about how great Microsoft was, that would be okay with me. I mean, I’d roll my eyes (I have definitely not partaken of that particular brand of Kool-Aid), but, you know: support what you love. I can dig that, even if I disagree with your personal choice. But Spolsky doesn’t just love Microsoft: he hates anyone who doesn’t also love it. Basically, form where he sits, if you don’t think Microsoft is the greatest thing since the invention of the microcontroller, you’re a moron. This makes him hard to take sometimes, and leads him to some conclusions that make me think that I’m not actually the moron in this equation. If you see where I’m coming from.

The second person I wanted to talk about is the person whose blog post actually inspired this post: Steve Yegge. Steve has a blog going back to 2006 (and one before that going back to 2004), and, while his output isn’t as high as Spolsky, his quality makes him just as well-known in technical circles. He’s famous for “drunken rants” (his words, not mine) where he sets propriety and common sense aside and just tells it like he sees it. While Steve has never worked for Microsoft (that I know of), he has worked for both Amazon and Google, so he’s got some insight into two of our other tech monsters. Also unlike Spolsky, he never seems to have drunk the Kool-Aid—of any flavor—and is famous (some would say infamous) for criticizing his employers (whether his blog posts count as constructive criticism or not is in the eye of the beholder).

Yegge has a flair for peeling the veneer off of polite conversation and revealing the true face underneath. He comes off as a bit of a jerk, but not the kind of jerk you want to punch: the kind you want to cheer for. The anarchist who’s sticking it to the man. The guy who’s not afraid to point out that wearing a necktie all day is probably cutting off all the oxygen to your brain. The guy who works at the bottom, but is not afraid to tell it like it is to the man at the top. Yegge has roughly the same amount of wisdom that Spolsky has, but he’s not so much deeply intelligent as he is just damned entertaining. Not to say that Yegge is a stupid guy—certainly not! Just pointing out that his insights are less intellectual introspection and more common-sense-is-not-so-common revelations.

Now, the opinions of either of these guys are absolutely worth reading. If you’re a technical person and you’ve never read a blog post from either, you either haven’t been around long enough, or you’ve got your head buried in the sand. More likely you’ve read a blog post from both, and even more likely you’ve read several of each. There’s a lot of them out there, and many of them are great. I highly recommend them.

But here’s why they’re still poster children for why blogs suck.

Reading a Joel Spolsky blog post is like listening to a speech given by a learned professor of a quasi-scientific discipline (paranormal psychology, perhaps, or cryptozoology). You try to listen very intently to the brilliant parts, and just sort of ignore the insane parts. Reading a Steve Yegge post is like listening to a drunk guy you just met who’s climbed on top of the bar and is listing off all the people that make the world suck, and, in the middle of cheering him on, you realize he’s a bit of a bigot. It’s like “Yeah! Yeah! Fuck yeah! Wait, what?? Dude, get the fuck down from there and shut the hell up!!!”

In both cases, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance going on. You realize that here is a someone who knows a hell of a lot about your discipline, who has just as much experience as you do (if not more), whose opinions actually matter ... and yet they’re still capable of being just as short-sighted, just as prejudiced, just as downright stupid as you are (if not more). Why in God’s name should I have to suffer through thousands of words from these people? Half of them are going to be gold, but the other half ... man, I need those hours back. Not just the hours I spent reading them, but the hours I spent shaking my head over the stupidity of them, and the hours I spent ranting about the audacity of them, and the hours I spent explaining to my friends and co-workers the unsoundness of them. And that last part is hard, right, because everyone thinks these guys know what they’re talking about. ‘Cause they have blogs. Popular blogs, even.

But, the thing is, ANY MORON CAN HAVE A BLOG. (Speaking from experience here.) And popularity is no measure of intelligence or correctness, as I hope I don’t need to explain. And, as I say, both of these guys are smart, and experienced, and entertaining, which makes it even worse. Because they absolutely are worth reading, about half the time. It’s just the other half that makes it problematic.

You know what I think the problem may be? Editors. Or lack thereof, to be more precise. Back in the days before any idiot could slap together a blog and call themselves an expert, the bar to publication was convincing an editor that you had something worthwhile to say. Now, I’m not saying that system was perfect. On the contrary, it effectively suppressed the thoughts and opinions of millions of people, and many of those didn’t deserve that. But the point is, many of them did. And it’s impossible to tell the difference, now. And even the ones who did manage to convince an editor that they had something to say worth sharing with the world often had many of their words cut out, and I bet you many of those words deserved it too. Never underestimate the value of a good editor.

So, when I tell you that you shouldn’t read my blog, what I’m really telling you is this: I’m a guy. Just a regular guy. I’m pretty smart, and I’m fairly experienced in a few areas, but I’m still just as stupid as you are. I’m no better than you, and I don’t deserve to be listened to any more than you do. And there’s no editor over here monitoring what I’m saying to make sure that, in the end, it’s going to be worth your time to read it. When you read this blog (or any blog), you’re taking a chance on whether you just wasted half an hour (or so) of your life. Is that chance worth it? Well, I suppose you must have figured it was, since here you are. But don’t forget to bring your salt. And, in the final analysis, use your own common sense to decide how much of what I say is valid, and how much is my own demented rambling.

Because, after all, I’m just a guy, and this is just a post on a blog titled Do Not Read This Blog. What did you expect?

Happy Birthday to Me

2011-11-06T11:59:00.000-08:00

Seeing as how yesterday was my birthday (yes, that's right, blog fans: your humble author is a Scorpio), I'm giving myself the day off. Around here we have a strict your-birthday-lasts-the-whole-weekend policy. And I plan to enjoy the one time of the year when everyone has to do what I want for a change. So go find someone else's crazed rantings to read for this week. Next week, you can come back.

Assuming you haven't wised up by then.

Further Tales of the CPAN

2011-10-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

It’s been a CPAN weekend.

Now, several months ago, I talked about uploading my first module to CPAN. I basically said then that I had no idea why it had taken me so long to finally get off my ass and upload something.

Well, now I know. Because as soon as you start uploading crap to CPAN, people expect you to actually support it. And, man ... that takes time.

It’s not that big a deal, really. You don’t have to support your modules, of course, but I think I explained in some detail the whole “pride of ownership” thing, right? And people judging you by your CPAN modules? So you do end up feeling a sense of responsibility for making things work if other people are trying to use your code and having problems. Plus you’d hate for your fellow Perlites to come along and think you were a slackass who never responded to bug reports.

So I try to keep up, and I try to make things work well. Besides my first solo module, I’ve also been named comaintainer of another module that I’ve contributed heavily to, plus I agreed to take over yet another module that had a bug in it and its author had gotten out of the Perl game. I’m still working on the first official release of that last one; I’ll probably have to spend part of what little remains of my weekend working on it, in fact. There’s some weird problem in one of the test files, which I changed from the original because I found a bug in there, which I found when I tried to fix the original bug ... I’m dealing with three modules here, and I’m already starting to feel a bit overwhelmed! How do people with a buttload of modules handle it? Crazy, man ...

Actually, a big part of what I’ve been working on this weekend is repository surgery. If you’re not a technogeek like me (and assuming you’ve bothered to read this far (which I don’t know why you would (but then I don’t know why you’d bother to read at all (reminder: see name of blog)))), perhaps you don’t know what I mean when I say “repository.” It’s where you put your source code, for your software, when you want to keep track of all the history of it. Now, as it turns out, some code that I originally wrote a long time ago, and have taken with me to various jobs, is actually being used by somebody other than me. Not via CPAN, because I’m too much of a lameass to have put it up there, of course, but by a former co-worker who got it from me directly. And recently (okay, like 3 weeks ago) he emailed me to ask me if he (or I) could put it up on CPAN now. And, since I’m a bit less of a lameass now, I thought that was a pretty good idea.

So step 1 is to get the thing into a repository. And, while it’s not absolutely necessary, I really would prefer for that repository to have the complete history of all the code. But the code in question is only part of a larger repository that’s in an older format (i.e. Subversion) instead of the newer format I use nowadays (i.e. git). So I have to convert and trim it down and move it over, and it still won’t be fit for release onto CPAN until I at least clean up the test suite a bit. But I made a good start on that this weekend. It’s not done, but ... well, it’s a start.

I’ve also been considering starting another blog. Something a little more focussed on Perl, that perhaps might be more interesting to my fellow Perl travelers. Which, on the face of it, is ridiculous. First there’s my opinion on blogs in general, which certainly hasn’t changed. And then there’s the fact that I barely have enough time to write this blog every week, much less write another one. But, hey: I’m not gettin’ any younger ovah heah. I’ve been doing Perl for about 15 years, programming professionally for over 20 (roughly half my life, at this point), programming in toto for around 30. It’s not that I have a burning desire to be famous or anything. But there’s a certain freedom that comes with recognition in your field, and I think it might be nice for a change to comment on a post on the Internet or somesuch and have people know that you actually know what you’re talking about instead of having a knee-jerk reaction of “who is this guy again?” I dunno, maybe it is all selfish self-aggrandizement, but it seems at least worthwhile, if not strictly necessary.

If nothing else, it’ll give you twice as many options for ignoring me.

Heroscape Forever

2011-10-23T23:22:00.001-07:00

So I’ve talked about my two favorite games: Heroscape and Pathfinder. Pathfinder is still a relatively young game at the time I write this, having just recently celebrated its two-year anniversary. Heroscape, however, was released in 2004, and, at the end of last year (2010), Wizards of the Coast discontinued it.

If you’ve followed my recounting of the saga of Pathfinder’s ascension, you’ll recognize that WotC is the same company that was responsible (in my opinion) for the downfall of Dungeons & Dragons. Is this coincidence? Probably not.

Now, don’t get me wrong: the original WotC—the one which invented Magic: the Gathering, the one run by Peter Adkinson—was a decent company. I didn’t care for all the blind purchase crap that CCGs brought to the table, but there was always a sense that Wizards at least had some respect for its customers. The fact that the OGL was developed before WotC’s sale to Hasbro (although released after it) is significant, I think. Hasbro’s leadership made a huge difference in the way Wizards was run. And, as I mentioned: Peter Adkinson was soon gone from the company he founded.

Heroscape was created by Hasbro as a game to be sold in Wal-Marts and Targets, but it had a collectible aspect to it. That caused a huge dissonance between manufacturer and retailer. For instance, some Heroscape units are “unique,” which means you can only have 1 of them in your army. Some, on the other hand, are “common,” which means you can have as many as you like (and, in some cases, like orcs or zombies, you really need a lot of them to make the best of their abilities). So here’s Hasbro producing a “wave” of new units, half of which are unique and half of which are common, and here’s Wal-Mart purchasing “wave 4” or whatever, not realizing that half their product is going to sell out at a frightening rate while the other half is going to sit around forever. And Wal-Mart is never going to purchase “old” waves. Wal-Mart doesn’t do “old.” It’s always “new” “new” “new.” But, if you’re just discovering the game around about wave 4, you really want to get some of wave 1, not to mention waves 2 and 3. It was a marriage made in hell, and on one of the deeper levels.

So eventually Hasbro decided to shuffle Heroscape off to their subsidiary that actually dealt with weird collectible games, the ones who were more comfortable dealing with local gaming stores than big box retailers. And, if they could have shuffled it off to the WotC that had existed at the time that D&D 3e came out, that might have even been a good idea. But that WotC was long dead. The new WotC was in the position that every successful smaller company bought by a huge corporate giant finds itself in: the definition of “success” had changed out from under them, and they were under constant pressure to perform better, produce more profits, increase their bottom line, reduce their “waste” ... note that I don’t know this personally, but I’ve been in that exact corporate situation time and time again (and I’m in it yet again in my current job), so I know exactly how it goes. Uncomfortable company meetings where they tell you that you made X tens of millions of dollars this year, which was short of your “goals” by 10 million dollars, so you better buckle down and do a lot better in the coming year. Or else things will get ... bleak. Whatever fun there had been in the work (and, in a gaming company, I would imagine there’s even more fun in the work than usual) is mercilessly wrung out and drained away, leaving only the cracking whip of the corporate overseers, and the constant whisper, as in D. H. Lawrence’s excellent short story, “There must be more money!”

And so, Heroscape’s stay at WotC was predictably short. Eventually they proclaimed that they were focussing on their “core competencies” (how many betrayals and abandonments have been masked with that facile corporate doublespeak!) of D&D and Magic. And Heroscape, one amongst many other games in the Wizards stable, was no more.

Now, just last week I talked about what happens when a game is discontinued. If you didn’t read it (and don’t care to), I’ll quote the relevant bit:

But the truth is that a dead game loses ground quickly. There are no new expansions to attract the old fans, and nothing whatsoever to attract new ones. In fact, if you’re just getting into a game, why would you start with a game (or a game version) that’s been discontinued? Doesn’t make sense. New products will come out for other games, or for the newer versions, that will leave you behind. Technology will move on, advances in systems will be made, and you ... you will be left, eventually, playing a 20-year-old game with your two other curmudgeon friends while everyone else laughs and calls you “luddite” under their breath.

So, yes, it’s true (as always) that we’ll always have the expansions we’ve collected over the years, and there’s nothing keeping us from playing the game as it stands today, but, nonetheless, it’s a bit depressing knowing that we’ll never see any more new expansions come out, knowing that the number of new Heroscape fans that are created in the coming years will be miniscule at best.

Unless you could do something about that.

Making up homemade stuff for games (particularly expandable games) has a long and storied history. Tweaks to the rules, generally called “house rules,” probably started with card games (particularly poker), and then expanded to venerable board games, like Monopoly and Risk. When D&D came out, it was “expandable” in the sense that it was a set of rules that tried to model reality (and not even the real reality—a fantasy version of reality), and thus was always incomplete. D&D “expansions” were essentially new rule books, covering new environments, new fantasy archetypes, new combat styles and weapons, and so forth. Thus, house rules were customized expansions.

Magic: the Gathering made it a bit more complex. Sure, you could have house rules. But that didn’t replace the continuous expansions. If you wanted customized expansions (generally shortened to just “customs”), that meant making up your own cards. Now, on the one hand, you could see that, right? You’re sitting around playing a card game in which almost every card is different, and you have dozens of combinations to choose from, but every once in a while you find that you need that one extra card to make the perfect combo. Except that the company that makes that game hasn’t invented that card yet. So you invent it. What the hey: you’ve been playing this game so long that you know all the cards’ text by heart; you can easily make up some card text of your own. Of course, it’s more complicated than that: Magic cards don’t just have text: they have pictures. Often very beautiful pictures. So you’ve got to have a picture too, and maybe you’re not an artist, but maybe you can find someone to draw it for you. And still, at the end, you’ve got to print out your custom card and make it look all nice and official.

When M:tG first came out, that wasn’t very easy to do. Nowadays we have cheap color printers, and places like Kinko’s and Staples that will professionally print things for you for little or nothing. Printing your own Magic cards is a snap, if you can create them first. And even that isn’t as hard as it used to be: PhotoShop, and its open source cousin the Gimp, is everywhere, and more and more people are learning how to manipulate images while said manipulation becomes easier and easier.

But what about a game like Heroscape, that has prepainted plastic figures, and premodled plastic terrain pieces? How could you possibly come out with customs for that?

Surprisingly, people have always done it, ever since the game was first announced. It turns out that the scale that Heroscape uses (which is more or less 28mm) is not that uncommon. Many other games are roughly the right scale: HeroClix (and all its fellow ‘Clix games, like HorrorClix and Mage Knight), D&D Miniatures (and its brother Star Wars Minis), Dreamblade, Sabretooth’s short-lived Lord of the Rings game, and, more recently, Reaper’s Legendary Encounters line, and two from Rackham: Confrontation and AT-43. And those are just the ones that come in prepainted plastic. If you’re willing to use metal or resin, and/or willing to do a little painting yourself, the possibilities really open up.

So, all you need is a figure (preferably prepainted plastic), which you might have to do a little surgery on to “rebase” it (the figure bases for some games fit well with Heroscape, while the bases for others are completely unworkable), and then a copy of PhotoShop or Gimp to create a new card for it. A little bit of photography to get a picture of the figure to composite into your card art, a little bit of playtesting to make sure your new figure works well with the existing units—not too powerful, not too wimpy, priced appropriately—and Bob’s yer uncle. You’re all set.

Now, of course, hundreds (or thousands) of different fans all doing that at once creates a chaotic scene. Everybody’s coming up with similar ideas going in radically different directions, using the same figures for radically different concepts, with radically varying levels of quality in the art, the text, and the playtesting. There’s no way you could keep a dying game alive that way.

But what if you could get a smaller batch of fans together, perhaps divide them up into groups: the people talented with coming up with new units that don’t break the game would design the new units, the people talented with PhotoShop and Gimp would make the new cards, the people who were nitpicky about the wording being just right would edit the text, the people who could be the most critical while actually playing would be the playtesters ... maybe a few people to oversee the whole thing and make sure nothing got too out of hand and everything proceeded according to a grand plan. If you could do that, then maybe ... just maybe ... you could keep a dying game alive. It would never have the life it once had, and your efforts could never reach more than the most hardcore fans, of course, but it would be something.

Hasbro released 10 “waves” of figure expansions for Heroscape before handing over to WotC. Wizards released 3 more. I’m very proud to be part of the group that has recently “released” Wave 14.

That’s the figures taken care of. Now if only we can think of a way to do some new terrain ...

Destination: Pathfinder

2011-10-16T23:49:00.001-07:00

Last week, I went into some detail about the history of D&D, both from a corporate and personal perspective. If you haven’t read that yet, you need to, or there’s not much point in reading this. Not that there’s ever much point, of course. But even less point than usual. So go read that before proceeding.

Okay, so remember I told you what happens when someone tries to take a free piece of software and make it proprietary? Someone forks it. Netscape was forked to make Mozilla (which begat Firefox). AT&T’s original Unix was forked to make BSD when they claimed System V was proprietary. And, when you take an open game and say, this next version isn’t open any more, someone’s bound to fork it. And that someone was Paizo.

Now, you may recall from last week that Paizo was the company that Hasbro spun off from WotC to handle the continuing publication of Dragon magazine (and its cousin, Dungeon). So it was, originally, a small publishing company with a very narrow focus. Obviously you can’t build an entire business off publishing two magazines with a limited appeal. (Note that Dragon—and, to a lesser extent, Dungeon—had a very wide appeal to players of D&D, but of course that’s still a pretty small percentage of the total population.) So they worked on expanding that. Remember how I said that one of the reasons the OGL was a good idea was that games need ancillary products like adventures in order to flourish, but publishing adventures is too unprofitable for a larger company? so smaller companies can take on that task and fill out the ecosystem? Well, all of a sudden Paizo was a smaller company, and their business was publishing. Why not publish adventures for D&D?

So they did. And they decided to publish regular adventures. One of the annoying things about adventures is that they’re always for “adventurers of X-Y levels.” So, what do you do if your characters aren’t those levels? Wouldn’t it be cooler if there was an adventure that started out for first level characters, and then, as you gained levels, there’d be another adventure for higher level characters, in the same world, and then another adventure for even higher level characters, and so on up through the highest level characters that people normally play before they get bored and start over at first level again? Sure it would. And you, of course, would want a subscription to those adventures, which should come out every month or two, just when the GM is getting ready to prepare for the next installment of her campaign. And, hey: who better to come up with a subscription to adventures than the company who’s already publishing D&D magazines?

Paizo called them “adventure paths.”

They tried a few other magazines, but they didn’t work that well. They expanded to producing GM products, and selling miniatures, and a web storefront, and that was working okay. But when Hasbro came out with 4e and proclaimed that Dragon would be moving to online-only content and that Paizo’s license was just ... cancelled ... well, that was a pretty hefty blow.

So Paizo had to figure out what to do, and figure it out fast. Possibly their adventure paths could keep them afloat, along with all the other things they had going on, but that was problematic too. Because these would now be adventure paths for a “dead” game: D&D 3e. They couldn’t publish 4e adventures, because the 4e license didn’t allow it. Now, many people will tell you that it doesn’t matter when a company cancels a game, or comes out with a new, incompatible version. You still have your old copy, right? It’s not like WotC is going to come to your house and burn all your 3e books! (I can’t tell you how many times I read that moronic piece of pablum in gaming blogs and forums.) You can keep playing 3e all you want ... they say.

But the truth is that a dead game loses ground quickly. There are no new expansions to attract the old fans, and nothing whatsoever to attract new ones. In fact, if you’re just getting into a game, why would you start with a game (or a game version) that’s been discontinued? Doesn’t make sense. New products will come out for other games, or for the newer versions, that will leave you behind. Technology will move on, advances in systems will be made, and you ... you will be left, eventually, playing a 20-year-old game with your two other curmudgeon friends while everyone else laughs and calls you “luddite” under their breath. And as far as subscriptions to adventure paths for such a game ... well, let’s just say they’d be “shrinking” at best.

So what could Paizo do? They had all this 3e/3.5e material floating around, and they wanted to keep producing it ad infinitum. There would never be another version of D&D, as far as they were concerned. There would never be a 3.6e, or a 3.75e. Well, not from Hasbro, anyway. Except ... except that 3e and 3.5e were OGL. So we didn’t actually need Hasbro for a new 3.Xe version of D&D. It couldn’t actually be called D&D of course—the OGL didn’t extend to the actual trademarked name—but it could work just like it, maybe have a few improvements here and there, be essentially the same game, only better and with a different name. If only someone would do that ...

So Paizo did it.

It was inevitable, really. 4e was such a disappointment to so many people. Not just me; I could point you at dozens of other blogs that agree with me. Sure, many people thought it was okay; a few even loved it. But with so many people so disappointed, and the OGL D&D just sitting there ...

And, just as I said that all the things wrong with 4e might not have mattered if the game itself was good enough (but it wasn’t), so it was that all that Paizo did might not have mattered if they hadn’t managed to get it right. Because it wasn’t enough to repackage the same tired 3.5e rules and slap a new name on it: if they wanted to put out a new game with a new name, it had to offer something that 3.5e didn’t have.

And, as I said, 3.5e had a lot. It was an improvement over 3e, just as 3e was an improvement over the previous versions. But it was far from perfect. It had its warts. And Paizo fixed just about all of them. And they did by holding a giant, year-long, open playtest. That is, they put out the new rules for free, for everyone to look at, and they opened up special sections on their web forums for feedback, and they actually listened to what people had to say. And, man, does it show.

I’ll give you 3 simple reasons why Pathfinder is better than 3.5e (never mind why it’s better than 4e—that’s not hard to do). Again, if you’re not an RPG gamer, this may not mean much, but I’ll see if I can make it make sense.

First, they eliminated “dead levels.” In D&D, there have always been levels for certain classes where you advanced to that level, but you didn’t get anything much for it. You got to rub out a couple of numbers on your character sheet and write in some new, bigger ones. Some classes were worse than others in this respect: for fighters in 1e, for instance, every level was a dead level. 3e/3.5e was much better, but still, many classes, such as fighters and barbarians, had a dead level every other level. It meant that playing (or at least advancing) those classes was boring half the time. But Pathfinder fixes that, by giving you something (even if it’s just a little thing) to look forward to every level.

Secondly, they fixed the maximum skill ranks problem. In 3e/3.5e, you have skill ranks, and the most ranks you can have in a skill is your level + 3. Except for cross-class skills, where it’s half that. Every level, you get skill points, and 1 skill point equals 1 skill rank, if it’s a class skill, or 2 skill points equals 1 skill rank for cross-class skills. Oh, and at first level you get 4 times as many skill points. If all that sounds complicated, that’s because it is. Pathfinder eliminates skill points and just gives you skill ranks every level. The number of ranks in every skill is now your level, and class skills give you a +3 bonus if you put any ranks in them. This simple, elegant change works out to almost the same mathematically, but it’s so much simpler to deal with. Pathfinder is full of things like that.

Thirdly, they changed the way favored classes work. In 3e/3.5e, races have favored classes (humans can pick any class), and taking levels in your favored class eliminates XP penalties for multiclassing. Yes, if you want to multiclass, you get penalties. In Pathfinder, though, there are no penalties for multiclassing. Instead, favored classes (which can be chosen by anyone, regardless of race) give you an extra hit point or an extra skill rank (your choice) every level you take that class. In other words, they changed the stick into a carrot. Much nicer to encourage people to stick with one class by offering them something shiny than to try to impose penalties (complicated math penalties, even) on them when they don’t.

Notice I said “thirdly” and not “finally.” That’s because there’s lots more reasons why Pathfinder is an improvement over 3.5e. Consolidation of skills (no more having to waste skill points on both Hide in Shadows and Move Silently if you want to be sneaky), races get two bonuses and one penalty (instead of one and one), simplification of grapple rules (and combination of them with other combat maneuvers such as trip or disarm), feats at every other level instead of every third, removal of limits on cantrips/orisons, elimination of XP costs for magic items and spells, capstone abilities for all classes, simplification of some of the more stupidly complex spells (such as polymorph) ... I could go on and on. I suppose Pathfinder isn’t a perfect game either, but it seems to have no new flaws, and it fixes many (not all, admittedly) of the flaws that 3e/3.5e brought to the table. What more could you ask for?

In the end, it’s easier for me to make the character I want with Pathfinder. It’s more flexible, and it continues to make sense. I wish the combat could be more streamlined (and I plan on experimenting with combining True20 with Pathfinder to help address that), but that’s my only major complaint with the system, and that was inherited straight from D&D, from 1e all the way through to 3.5e. So, overall, Pathfinder is a mighty fine system, and I’m glad Paizo has blessed us with it. The core books are gorgeous, there’s only two of them (making it cheaper for the base set than D&D), and you can get PDFs of them as well, which are also well-crafted. I still love D&D, and as far as I’m concerned I’m still playing it. It just has a new name now.

The Path to Pathfinder

2011-10-09T02:24:00.000-07:00

Between talking about Heroscape and Darwin’s World, I’ve already explained my personal history with D&D, and I started to explain about the various editions of D&D. I covered 1e (that’s first edition), and 2e, and then I said 3e (the d20 edition) was perhaps the most popular, for several reasons (but then I only mentioned one). I also noted that I don’t technically play D&D any more: I play Pathfinder. I think perhaps it’s time to clear up what all that actually means. Go and review the other two blog posts if you missed them the first time around.

Back? Okay, so there are two open questions from all that. First, what’s the other big reason that D&D 3e was so popular? And, secondly, if I love D&D so much, why do I play Pathfinder now? Well, as it turns out, the answers to those two questions are related.

While I talked about the edition history of D&D, I didn’t talk about the corporate history, and that turns out to be important too. D&D was started by Gygax and Arneson, and they formed a little company called Tactical Studies Rules. (Technically, Arneson wasn’t one of the partners, and there were a couple of other guys involved, but we don’t need to be that detailed.) Tactical Studies Rules became TSR Hobbies, which became TSR, Inc. Gygax, often considered the father of D&D and, by extension, the grandfather of all RPGs, was eventually forced out of the company he helped found, and TSR became more about business than about gaming.

One of the most annoying habits that grew out of this changeover was the litigiousness. Early in the company’s history, they were sued by the Tolkien estate, and, as a result, there are no longer hobbits, ents, or balrogs in D&D; instead we have halflings, treants, and balors. But it’s almost as if this experience scarred them somehow, because not so long after that, TSR started suing other people. First any gaming company that published anything that used D&D gaming terms (like “hit points” or “armor class”), and then later on they actually started sending cease and desist letters to individuals operating D&D fan sites on the new-fangled world-wide web. Here’s a tip for any of you budding entrepreneurs out there: threatening to sue your customers is not a good business model.

Soon TSR was all set to go bankrupt and D&D would be lost forever. And then, along comes ... Wizards of the Coast.

So, remember in my discussion about what led up to Heroscape I mentioned CCG (collectible card games)? and, in particular, the grandaddy of all CCGs, Magic: the Gathering? Well, that was Wizards, or “WotC” as they’re (sometimes affectionately) known. WotC had its own fall from gaming grace to corporate sludgehood, but that is chronicled elsewhere and doesn’t directly impact the story. The important bit is that someone over at WotC figured out that trying to shut down the people who were spreading the good word about your product wasn’t that bright of an idea. The fans, whose word of mouth you counted on to attract new customers, and teach their children your game instead of someone else’s, that much was obvious. But what about those other companies? the ones who wanted to produce products that used your game’s rules? They were downright taking food off your table, weren’t they?

Well, only if you actually wanted to print those products yourself. And, it turned out, you didn’t. The sorts of D&D “add-on” books that these smaller gaming companies were putting out were niche products: the type of thing with a maximum audience of a few thousand. There’s no way a big company can make a decent profit on that. And, anyway: the more products that are out there utilizing your game’s rules (as opposed to someone else’s game’s rules), the more people want to play your game, because your game has the most support. So it turns out that you actually want to encourage people to develop add-on products, not try to sue them.

And someone over at WotC (typically Ryan Dancey gets the credit) had a brainstorm. The world of software was exploding with creativity because of the whole open source movement. What if we could apply that to PnP RPGs? Thus, open gaming was born, and D&D 3e was issued under the OGL.

It’s true that D&D 3e was markedly simpler to learn and to play than 1e or 2e (still not simple, mind you, but simpler). It’s true that certain rules, such as multi-classing (the ability to be, say, both a fighter and a wizard, as opposed to having to choose one or the other and be stuck with that choice for your character’s entire career), were much less restrictive and appealing to a broader swath of gamers. It’s true that the art was better, and the books were higher quality. It’s true that many of the warts were removed, and the game was overall fairer to all concerned: being a wizard wasn’t quite so much like double-entry accounting, and being a fighter was more interesting than just saying “I attack!” over and over again. But in my opinion (and the opinion of many other folks who follow such things), the real reason for the success of D&D 3e was the Open Game License.

All of a sudden, little RPG publishing outfits were publishing D&D add-on products instead of trying to come up with their own games. The stuff that WotC couldn’t make money on, but that you had to have for a full-bodied RPG ecology (e.g. adventures) were coming out in droves. And everything pointed back to the “core rulebooks” ... every single one of those products by someone other than Wizards had a big blurb on it saying “this product requires use of the D&D 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual.” That’s $60 a set back to Hasbro every time someone new wants to get the latest adventure or newest campaign from Mongoose or Alderac or Green Ronin.

Yes, that’s right: Hasbro. Because WotC got sold just like TSR got sold, and Peter Adkinson left just like Gary Gygax did. Slightly different reasons, and certainly Adkinson made out better in the end than Gygax ever had, but the pattern is clear: it starts out being all about the games, and it ends up being all about the money. And, eventually, that kills it.

The problem, of course, was that Hasbro was a big corporation, and it just didn’t understand this whole “open gaming” thing. You mean other people—other companies—can use our intellectual property? And not pay us? Insanity! It didn’t seem to make a difference that D&D was more popular than it had been since the late 70’s (really, more popular than it had ever been), that whole new generations of gamers were signing up, that the ironic hipsters who thumbed their noses at “old-fashioned” D&D and sported flashy new games like GURPS and Storyteller and Hero were suddenly wholesale converting to the d20 craze, that the money-losing propositions were being fronted by other companies. If Hasbro couldn’t have all the money, then, dammit, no one else should be able to either.

This is my opinion of course. Many people say that Hasbro/WotC’s release of a new edition that wasn’t quite a new edition—dubbed “3.5e” by everyone in what would soon become at least partially a derogatory tone—is what killed it. Certainly many people saw 3.5e as a blatant cash grab: tweaking the rules just enough to force everyone to drop another $60 for the core rulebooks all over again. And it certainly did cause some confusion in the ancillary publishers: should they be releasing add-on’s for 3.5e, or still for 3e, or ... ? It was a bit like what would happen if Apple were to release a new version of the Macintosh without letting the software vendors have an advance copy first. Of course, Apple would never do such a silly thing. So there’s no doubt that 3.5e didn’t do D&D any favors. But it wasn’t what killed the game ... at least not for me.

That would be 4e.

The first moronic thing Hasbro did was to completely reverse course on the OGL. D&D 4e has a license that it’s released under, but it can’t be considered “open” by any stretch of the imagination. All of a sudden no one can produce D&D material except Hasbro, and all the reasons to stick with D&D instead of looking at new games are all gone. That’s why I say Hasbro’s short-sightedness and lack of comprehension on long-term profitability with an open model are the culprits. You want to know how stupid they were? They took away the rights of Paizo Publishing to produce Dragon Magazine. Now, Dragon had been published continuously since 1976; it was originally published by TSR directly, and WotC bought that as well, and Hasbro itself had spun the magazine publishing off of Wizards soon after they bought it, looking to “streamline” and “maintain core competencies” or somesuch bullshit. And now they were killing one of the greatest ambassadors that D&D ever had, so they could publish online content without “competition.”

But, you know what? All that would have been fine. I could have forgiven them all that and much more, if not for one measly problem: 4e sucks. Now, that is certainly not a unverisally held opinion. There are those out there that feel that 4e is a much better game than 3e/3.5e. More common is an attitude that they’re just two entirely different games which happen to share the same name, perhaps unfortunately. But what I personally believe is even more common is the attitude that I have. Not that I’m stubbornly holding on to my old edition, refusing to get with the times like some RPG version of the classic Luddite. I loved 1e, but I loved 2e better. When the raft of core bolt-ons for 2e came out (the Player's Options books; what some called in retrospect 2.5e), I loved that even more. When 3e came out, I loved that best, until 3.5e came out and it was so much better than I never even complained about having to spend yet another $60 for what was suspiciously close to the same set of rules I’d just purchased a mere 3 years before. And, when 4e was announced 4 years later, I was excited all over again. I had no reason to believe 4e would not be just as awesomer than 3.5e as each previous edition had been over its predecessors. When 4e was released the following year (2008, that would have been), I eagerly bought a boxed set of all 3 core rulebooks and tore into them, anxious to see what they had to offer.

And I was disappointed.

There are any number of reasons I could give you. If you’re a gamer, I can say that mainly it comes down a lack of options: genericization of powers essentially eliminates spells, many of the races and classes that I’d come to consider “core” were gone, and most especially the complete excoriation of multi-classing, which meant that it was now harder to build whatever character I dreamed up. New editions are supposed to make that easier. If you’re not a gamer, let’s just leave it at: this was not the same game. 3e is not the same game as 2e, to some extent, but there is a fundamental connecting thread running them. 4e, for me at least, cuts that thread and moves into a whole new, weird space. It has some good ideas, and some subsytems were improved, but overall I just didn’t want to play it after reading the rules. It left a flat, metallic taste in my mouth, like trying to eat your favorite food when you have a cold.

Now, being a software geek just as much as a gamer geek, I can easily tell you what happens when someone takes a piece of open source software and releases the new version under a proprietary license. It’s quite simple: somebody forks it. Which means, they take the last version that was free, and they improve it a bit here and there, and then they release it under a new name competing with the original. So when Netscape gets bought by AOL, you get Mozilla (and, eventually, Firefox). And when D&D’s OGL gets co-opted by parent corp Hasbro to produce 4e, you get ... Pathfinder.

Next week I’ll get more in depth into how Pathfinder came into being and why you should care. Well, if you’re a fan of D&D’s 3rd Edition (either 3e or 3.5e), you should care. Keep that breath baited!

Proscription Drugs

2011-10-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

I believe that we, as human beings, like to simplify things.

The truth is, we live in a complex world. The laws of physics that we know about are far beyond what most of us can comprehend, and most physicists agree that we don’t know all of them yet. The intricacies of the human body are no less baffling to all but the most learned biochemists and neurologists and geneticists, and, there again, there are still mysteries which counfound even them. History is full of factual ambiguity; philosophy is full of moral ambiguity; literature is full of contextual ambiguity ... is it any wonder that we need to find a way to reduce things, simply to cope with living in the universe we find ourselves in?

Of course, the danger when simplifying is that we may oversimplify. I’ve discussed before how we “know” that there is no black and white in the world, and yet stubbornly persist on perceiving most things in absolute terms such as “true” and “false.” (In fact, you might even go far as to say our view of balance is itself a paradox. But that’s straying too far afield from my point.) Let’s take a field at random ... oh, let’s say ... English grammar.

How many of you out there know that it is wrong to split an infinitive? Go on, raise your hands proudly and be counted. You know the rules of grammar, right? You were taught this stuff in school. Splitting infinitives is just one of those things which is downwright wrong.

Of course, “right” and “wrong” would be just like “black” and “white” ... right? And we know there’s no black and white in the world ... right?

Now let me ask you this: for those of you who didn’t raise your hand about the split infinitive being wrong, why not? Did you trot out that chestnut about the English language contantly evolving? Don’t get me wrong, that’s true, but what it implies is that splitting infinitives used to be wrong, but now it’s okay. And I’m not sure I agree with that.

Wikipedia, of course, is pleased to present us with a history of the issue, and the executive precis is that not only is there no rule against splitting infinitives today, there never has been. Some folks came along and said they didn’t like it, and gave some great examples of instances where it really is quite awful to do. But somehow we took “here’s a technique which is often abused and needs to be carefully examined” and turned it into “never do this!” We oversimplified.

What brought this to my mind today was reading an online post from someone (whom I greatly respect) who dismissed a suggested wording change because it used the passive voice. And we all know that passive voice is wrong, don’t we? After all, Microsoft Word marks it as a grammar error, so it must be wrong. Except it’s not. Passive voice isn’t wrong. It can be used very poorly, I’ll grant you that ... but isn’t that true of practically any grammatical construction?

This one in particular dates to the classic Strunk & White. They gave us all sorts of great advice on how to write more clearly. Except that most of it was pretty bad advice, unfortunately. And, if you’re not the sort of person who’s so inclined to click on perfectly good links that I drop into my blog posts, let me quote you the most important sentence of the article, at least as regards the proscription on passive voice: “Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.” That’s right folks: in the section of Strunk & White that tells you why you shouldn’t be using the passive voice, only 25% of their “bad examples” are even passive themselves. And this is a book that many people regard as definitive, in terms of grammatical correctness!

But, regardless of the correctness of the examples, the point is that even Strunk & White don’t say “passive voice is wrong.” They say “it should be avoided, wherever possible.” If you want my opinion, even that’s too strong a statement, but let’s overlook that for now. How did we get to the point where, in a discussion about what the best wording for something might be, the very thought of using a passive voice construction is dismissed with such casual prejudice? Not even worthy of consideration?

In another discussion (same web site, different interlocutor, far less respect), someone chastised me for ending a sentence with a preposition. I cheerfully responded with the quote, commonly attributed to Winston Churchill (although most likely apocryphally), that that was “nonsense up with which I would not put.” The response, given in some distress, was that Churchill was known to suffer from “mental illness” (which is utterly irrelevant, of course, whether true or not), followed by a plea to “save the language.”

Seriously?

Ending a sentence with a preposition is not only incontrovertibly wrong, but so utterly wrong as to spell the doom of the English language as a whole?

No, unfortunately, it’s not even wrong at all. This “rule” stems from a fellow named Robert Lowth, author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar, and, once again, even he doesn’t say “never do it.” He says, in fact: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.” See? Not “wrong.” Just “sounds better the other way.” In his opinion. As a clergyman. Who wrote “an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to” in a sentence about not ending things with prepositions.

I could even point you to several other lists of mythical grammatical rules such as these, as well as many others (don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, never use double negatives, etc), but the point is that, even when the proscription doesn’t reach the level of “rule,” we still can’t resist stating it as an absolute.

Let’s take the case of adverbs. Mark Twain says “I am dead to adverbs ... they mean absolutely nothing to me.” Graham Greene called them “beastly” and said they were “far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.” Elmore Leonard has started a “War on Adverbs” and says “to use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin”; Stephen King apparently concurs when he notes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs” and that by the time “you see them for the weeds they really are” it’s too late. Because of these types of opinions, any number of web sites will tell you that you should never use adverbs or that you should ruthlessly expunge all of them from your prose.

Of course “never” is an adverb, as is “ruthlessly.”

For that matter, all four of the authors I quoted above, railing against adverbs, use adverbs themselves ... in fact, there are adverbs in all four quotes. As with the proscription against the passive voice, the first problem with advising people to get rid of all their adverbs is that most people can’t identify them. “Very” is an adverb, as is “always,” or “far,” or “sometimes,” or even “not.” Imagine trying to write a piece of prose of any appreciable length without using the word “not.” No doubt you could do it, as an exercise, but it would be painful, and your piece would most likely sound tortured in at least a couple of places.

Getting rid of all adverbs is such a patently ridiculous idea that some of the smarter know-it-alls have scaled back their advice. “Not all the adverbs,” they hasten to clarify. “Just the -ly ones.” So, you know, just get rid of all those ”-ly” words. Like, you know: friendly, silly, lovely, beastly, deathly. Those sorts.

Except those are all adjectives.

Yes, that’s right: when J.K. Rowling was criticized for an overuse of adverbs, for the sin of putting one right there in the title of her final Harry Potter book, it was a bit of an embarrasment to realize that “Deathly” was actually an adjective, modifying the noun “Hallows.” At least I hope that author had the good grace to be embarrassed over the faux pas.

In some cases the advice gets watered down to the point where people tell you to get rid of all your adverbs that end in -ly unless they make the sentence better. But, at that point, the advice has little to do with adverbs, and should instead apply to every word in your prose.

Personally, I love adverbs. Sure, overuse of them is bad. Overuse of anything is bad: that’s built into the definition of “overuse.” Blanket statements about expunging them (ruthlessly or not) are just moronic (even if they do come from one of my most treasured literary idols).

But, as always, it is our human nature to want to simplify the “rule” to make it easier to remember. What’s simpler? “don’t overuse adverbs, or use them in cases where a stronger verb would serve the purpose equally well, or use them redundantly, or attach them too often to ‘he said’ tags”? or “don’t use adverbs”? What’s easier to teach: “don’t split an infinitive when the number or quality of the words between the ‘to’ and the verb cause the infinitive itself to be weakened,” or “never split an infinitive”? What’s the cleaner aphorism: “don’t use the passive voice when the agent is known and the active voice is stronger, unless you specifically want to de-emphasize the agent, but not merely as a means to avoid responsibility for the agent or to pretend that there is no agent at all” or “don’t use passive voice because MS Word underlines it in green”?

And so we take a complex but useful piece of advice and turn it into something simple and profoundly useless. We take a reasoned approach that glories in balance (and occasionally even paradox) and make it black and white: do this, don’t do that.

It makes it much easier to be able to correct other people with all our mistaken impressions.

The Curse of Alexander Graham Bell

2011-09-25T23:58:00.001-07:00

Talking on the phone has to be the worst form of business communication ever invented.

I know I’ve railed before about people not being to communicate via email, but today I want to approach it from the opposite side. When people refuse to use email to answer your questions, how do they want to communicate? Inevitably the answer is the phone. And I just don’t understand it. I really don’t.

I’ve got a vendor right now that I asked for some information about their product. And he desperately wants to call me. I mean, I can feel his drool coming over the wires, you know? And I don’t know how many different ways I can explain to him that I don’t want his fucking phone call. I don’t need to hear his cheery voice, and he ain’t gonna make me want to buy anything more than I already do if I could only hear his wonderful sales pitch. I want information. I want technical facts that I can study and digest, and then figure out what questions I have (if any).

If we have a phone conversation, we have to do it at a time that’s convenient for him. Because my best working hours are after dark, that means it definitely won’t be convenient for me.

If we talk on the phone, I will have no record of the conversation. I will have nothing to go back and reread (hell, nothing to read in the first place). I will having nothing that I can revisit and understand better the second time, or think of new questions, or connect with something else I’ve read.

I will not have time to plan my questions and compose my thoughts. I will have to think on the fly, and whatever I don’t think of, won’t get asked. Unless we schedule yet another phone call.

If I do think of good questions, the best answers I can possibly receive are whatever he can deliver on the fly. He doesn’t have any more time to ponder answers than I did to ponder the questions, and that means incomplete answers, evasive answers, or, at best, “let me get back to you on that” answers. If he has to pass the question along to someone else, I have to wait for another phone call for the answer, and I don’t even get the benefit of seeing the third party’s email address as I would if he forwarded my question on to his tech department and CC’ed me.

God forbid he should have some sort of accent that would make it hard for me to understand him. Some of the most frustrating business communications of my life have been on the phone trying to make heads or tails out a strange accent while trying not to sound like a prejudiced asshole. I mean, I fully support every nationality and every language being involved in my industry, and I’m one of those crazy hippie liberals, so I rejoice in diversity. But that doesn’t help me understand you if you’re new to my language. And you know what? Your accent is not a problem in your email.

And, what is possibly the worst thing of the whole sad, sorry situation is that there’s no upside at all. Really, none. If we can’t communicate via email because we absolutely must sit down in a conference room and waste everyone’s time talking face-to-face, that’s still annoying, but at least we can talk about making a personal connection. I still say the value of being able to see your body language is marginal at best, or at least is easily balanced out by the extra precision and thought put into a written communique, but I can’t deny that there’s some value in being able to smile at you and shake your hand, even in the forever lost time of polite chitchat ... all that goes into you and I being able to see each other as real people, and being able to act like we’re friendly even though we both know we’ll never actually be friends. Physical presence definitely has an upside. But what’s personal about a phone call? How is a disembodied voice a personal connection? I gotta tell you: being able to hear your tone of voice doesn’t even begin to cover the disadvantages of not having your words in front of me to peruse again and again.

In fact, the whole tone of voice thing is often more of a disadvantage. It means that I have plaster a fake smile on my face and act nice. (Yes, even though you can’t see me, you can tell whether I’m smiling or not. You can hear a smile over the phone quite easily.) In an email, I can curse your name and wish horrific evolutionary dead-ends on your family tree the whole time I’m composing wonderfully polite rhetoric with which to impress upon you my graciousness. And, if it’s not polite enough the first time, I can delete it all and start over, and over again, until I get it just right. On the phone, it’s much harder, and I only get one shot at it.

Overall, the phone is not just inefficient; it’s downright inferior. And yet my vendors want to call me, and my boss wants me to call people, and my boss’s boss wants me to call people, and everyone’s ticked off at me when I express my preference for email. It’s enough to make you think the world is out to get you.

Or at least tie you down and force you to talk on the phone.

Roleplaying After the Fall

2011-09-18T23:48:00.001-07:00

My elder son has become fascinated with post-apocalyptic things. This is primarily because of the purchase of Fallout: New Vegas, which enthralled him for several months. Then there was Fallout 3. Then, for his birthday, among the many other video games, Bioshock.

And, somewhere in the midst of that, he decided that he wanted to stop the fantasy roleplaying we had been doing (we play Pathfinder, which is an evolution of the grandaddy of roleplaying games, D&D) and start some post-apocalyptic roleplaying. Which meant that I had to go on a world-wide search for a good PA RPG. We settled on Darwin’s World, which is a pretty neat system, and all the books are available via PDF, which means that you can just download a new book when you need it instead of having to go to the gaming store and buy it. Which is convenient (if expensive).

Pen-and-paper (PnP) RPGs (as opposed to RPG video games) are an old love of mine. I got my first edition (1e) copy of D&D when I was quite young, although I had no one to play with. That didn’t stop me from poring over the books again and again until I learned all the rules. Later, when my brother was old enough to play, I took on the role of game master (GM) and ran my brother through many homemade dungeons. Ah, the days of graph paper dungeon making. You do all that stuff on computers nowadays.

It takes a lot of effort (and time) to put together a world for roleplaying. When I was younger, time wasn’t a problem. The older you get, the less time you have. This is partially because you have to do silly things like work for a living, but it’s also because your time sense slows down as you get older, which in turn makes time appear to go by faster. This is something we all intuitively understand, but it turns out there’s actually a biological reason for it. I heard on some NPR show that, by the time you’re 25 years old, you’ve already experienced about three-quarters of the virtual time you’re going to get in your life. Which is depressing, if you think about it. I try not to think about it.

But it definitely means that it’s harder and harder to scrape together the time to plan all that stuff out, if you happen to be the GM. And, when you’re roleplaying with your kids, you’re always the GM. It’s fun, and I’ve always believed that RPGs are educational in many ways, so it’s definitely something that you want to encourage in your kids, especially if you have some experience in it yourself. But it’s very time-consuming, so we don’t play as often as he’d like. Or as often as I’d like, really.

PnP RPGs are not necessarily better than video game RPGs—they have advantages and disadvantages. When you play a video game RPG, whatever system the game uses is programmed into it by its creators. This is good, in the sense that you don’t have to think about it very much—hell, you don’t even really need to understand it, or at least not the internal mechanics of it. With a PnP RPG, you need to know the mechanics pretty well. Which is more of a learning curve (although learning all that stuff is part of why it’s educational: the biggest question that comes up when trying to teach your kids math is “when am I ever going to need to know this in real life?” and PnP RPGs provide an answer for many of the math concepts that inspire that question), but when you have to understand the system thoroughly, it means you get to adjust it. If there’s something about the system you don’t like, you just change it. Of course, you need to understand the consequences of changing it, and you have to make sure you don’t break anything, and then there’s even more sneaky educational opportunities. But it all takes time.

If you don’t know much about PnP RPGs, I’ll take it slow for you. The first thing you have to know is that almost all RPGs make use of polyhedral dice. A four-sided die is called a d4, a 6-sided (which is the one you normally think of as a die if you don’t play RPGs) is a d6, and so on, up to the d20, which is the largest die size used by the original D&D. D&D 1e used all the dice, more or less equally. It required that you understand quite a bit about various probability distributions and bell curves and stuff like that: almost everything I know about statistics, I learned from D&D. After a decade or so, they decided to update the system a bit and then we had 2e (that’s second edition, if you’re keeping up). 2e wasn’t a whole lot different from 1e, at least in terms of simplicity.

Of course, the whole time that D&D was going through 1e and 2e, the rest of the RPG world was coming up with new systems. The folks over at Palladium came up with the system that eventually led to Rifts, Steve Jackson invented GURPS, there was the HERO system that was originally designed for Champions, and of course White Wolf made a splash with Storyteller, which debuted in Vampire: The Masquerade and ditched all the dice except the d10. And there were countless others—these are just a few of the more popular ones I’ve played. Many of these systems were easier to use than D&D. After changing owners a couple of times, D&D was ready for a big system change, with 3e, which introduced d20.

The d20 system is now very popular, for several reasons which will probably have to wait for its own blog post. One of the big ones is that it focuses on the d20 (hence its name) for almost all its rolls, which right there makes it easier to learn than all the previous editions. Darwin’s World started as generic d20, graduated to d20 Modern, then branched out into Savage Worlds and True20 rulesets. So now you can get Darwin’s World in any of 3 flavors. But the d20 Modern version is the default, which means that, if you choose to use one of the other two, you have to do a fair amount of converting from one system to another.

So even if you didn’t follow any of what all that stuff actually means, you can see that there’s a lot of work involved. We chose to use the True20 version, because it plays a bit faster than d20, especially for combat purposes, and combat is where my impatient young scion tends to get frustrated the most. So it seemed like a good idea at the time to try to streamline that. I didn’t realize how much on-the-fly conversion I was going to need to do.

So that’s what my weekend has involved. Last weekend was his birthday, so of course we were scheduled to do some roleplaying, and then I came down with a vicious cold that kept me home most of this past week, and we postponed. Now, trying to get caught up with work and chores and family errands, I’m also trying to get caught up on roleplaying duties. I just wrote a program to convert a d20 Modern stat block (that’s a laundry list of what a roleplaying monster can do) to True20. It isn’t perfect, of course, but at least it’s fast. Hopefully I can tweak it a bit as we go on. And our gaming session tonight involved a lot of “wait, where did we leave off again?” and not so much “here’s what happens now!” but it was still fun. And hopefully we’re now in a better position to do some more PA roleplaying soon.

But I wonder how long this fascination will last. It’s held on for a while now, so maybe it’s a keeper. I wonder when the last time I watched Road Warrior with him was ... we should do that again. And I’m sure there’s some good PA books that I should be introducing him to, but it was never my bag the way it is for him, so I’m a bit underfunded in the recommendations department there. I discovered there’s a radio adaptation of the seminal classic A Canticle for Liebowitz available; perhaps I’ll point him at that.

And I’ll keep on working at getting this new system down. He deserves to have as many great memories of roleplaying as a kid as I do.

Chapter 17

2011-09-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

Breen Lagoon

The water wasn’t brown any more. Johnny thought that was weird, and then he thought how weird it was to think that all water that wasn’t brown was weird. He’d been here too long. At least he thought he had ... of course, really, he had no clue how long he’d been here at all. He should ask Larissa.

Larissa was looking out over the water as well. The straggly mist kept you from making out too many details far away, but you could see the water directly below the boat clear enough, and it was blue. A deep, clear blue, cool and inviting. Johnny felt like he could see straight to the bottom, although he couldn’t actually make out any bottom. Which only made him feel like the water must be very, very deep. There was no sign of fish or any other aquatic life; all the floating plants were long gone and the “shore” they had crossed to get here was lost in the mist. Larissa’s eyes seemed fixed on a rocky crag half hidden by the haze, ahead and to their left. From the look in her eye, Johnny guessed she wasn’t really ready to talk about the passage of time (or lack thereof) in this strange place he had brought her. It was a calculating, cataloguing look that seemed to be enumerating impossibilities and filing them away for later consideration.

Roger was back at the wheel. She was guiding the ship slowly, partially because of the mist, Johnny supposed, but probably also because of the waves. There had been no waves in the swamp, of course. And Johnny wondered if an airboat, regardless of its impressive size and unusual qualities, was really the best craft for this particular journey. He supposed it would have been impossible to get to this point in a ship with a large draft, but, if those waves got much bigger ...

Aidan was sitting in the bow of the ship, staff across his knees, head bowed. He seemed exhausted by what he’d done to get them here. Johnny squatted down beside him. “That was very impressive,” Johnny said.

Aidan raised his head a bit and smiled a weak smile at Johnny. “Thank you,” he replied. “But I’m just a vessel. Shallédanu lei shonta.”

Johnny nodded. “So ... where are we now?”

Roger’s voice came out of nowhere, startling him. “Breen Lagoon. The place between places.”

Johnny looked up; Roger had come up behind him and stood over him, looking out over the misty water. He noticed that the ship was now drifting on the waves, since no one was manning the wheel. “The place between places?” he asked.

“A place between places,” Aidan corrected.

“Well, it’s the only one me da’ ever told me about,” Roger said.

Aidan tried on his weak grin again. “Your da’ was a well-traveled man, Captain, but there are a few places left that he’s never seen.”

Roger snorted. “If ye say so. Well, whether it’s the only one there is or not, it’s the only one we could get to, I’m pretty sure o’ that.” She waited for Aidan to correct her, and seemed satisfied when he made no attempt to do so. “So here we are. About to ram right into that there hunk o’ rock, unless our Guide here can get these waves under control.” She looked at Aidan with some challenge in her eyes, but she offered her gloved hand to help him up.

Aidan accepted her offer and let her pull him forcibly to his feet. He put out his staff to lean against; he still looked unsteady and weak. Johnny rose as well; Larissa had sidled down the railing to join them at the front of the boat, where they could all see that The Slyph was indeed drifting straight for the jagged spur of rock that thrust above the still fairly gentle waves. The rock was too small to be considered an island; it was probably no bigger around than a small house, although it towered perhaps fifty feet above the surface of the water. Now that they could see it more clearly, they could tell that nothing grew on it, although it had a collection of seabirds perched in its various clefts. Most prominent were huge, shaggy brown pelicans, which looked more like caricatures of pelicans than actual birds. They were each as heavy as a person, easily, and their throat sacs hung as low as the bottoms of their broad chests. There were black and white birds that Johnny thought looked like gigantic seagulls, but Larissa murmured “no, more like an albatross.” And, in the very highest reaches, some of the soft gray birds with the feathered batwings, which were so far the only evidence Johnny had seen that there was any living species shared between swamp and lagoon.

Aidan took all this in, then looked right and left to see if there were any other upcoming crises he needed to be aware of. Nothing but mist as far as the eye could see. Turning back to the rock, he raised his staff once again, and began chanting in his strange liquid language. His voice cracked a bit; suddenly Bones was there, uncharacteristically quiet, and upended a pitcher of water over Aidan’s head. Instead of spluttering angrily, though, Aidan seemed to gain strength from being drenched, and his voice grew a bit stronger. Suddenly the ship seemed to settle down into the water somehow, as if it had suddenly gained weight, or grown a significant portion of hull below the waterline. It slowed its pace, and the waves now seemed to be breaking against the sides of the craft instead of carrying it along. Roger turned around and hauled ass back to the stern, where Johnny heard the great fan start up. Instead of moving the ship forward, she turned it, hard, and it spun slowly, until it was broadside to the rocky outcropping. Gently it bumped up against the rough stone, which Johnny could now see was pitted and twisted so much it looked like coral. Several of the birds fluttered in an ungainly fashion as the ship touched their perch, and two or three of the closer pelicans positively glared at them.

Roger reappeared, her hands on her hips and her pervasive smile returned. “Just had to make sure we didn’t snap the sylph off The Sylph,” she said. Johnny understood: if she hadn’t turned the ship, the figurehead might have gone into a hole or crevisse in the rocks and gotten severely damaged.

Bones was handing another pitcher to Aidan, who took a long draught before returning it. “Thankee, Bones, you were very helpful there,” Aidan said. Bones bobbed his head and clicked his beak, then scampered away.

Roger stepped up to the Water Guide. “Good job, Aidan,” she said in a low voice. “I thought ye weren’t up to the task for a mite.”

He didn’t return her smile. “This isn’t an ordinary job,” he said.

She let her face grow serious for a moment. “I know that, matey. I appreciate ye takin’ it on. ‘Specially not knowin’ where we’ll be fetchin’ up.”

“Oh, I think we both know where we’ll end up.” Aidan looked directly into her eyes.

Roger’s smile broke back out. “Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we?” Weirdly, she clapped Aidan on the butt. Aidan just shook his head at this and said nothing.

“Let me skin this tub around this here rockpile and we’ll see if we can see a bit better,” Roger said as she headed back to the wheelhouse. Ever so slowly the ship pulled away from its position, scraping its side against the rough promontory. After she got it disengaged, Roger gunned the throttle and swung the ship around the outcrop. The birds watched them impassively, their heads turning in a weird synchrony. The ship paralleled the rocks for a few moments, then suddenly swung out of the mist.

It was like they had gone from swamp to sea. The air was hot, but not the sticky, oppressive heat they had left behind. This was equatorial, open-ocean heat, with a sea breeze carrying the tang of salt. The blue, blue water stretched all around them, as far as anyone could see. Pockets of mist were everywhere, and off in the middle distance was a small patch of sand with a single palm tree—a cartoon version of a desert island. Johnny breathed in the sea air and stared around in wonder. Larissa looked with her wide eyes but said nothing.

>>next>>

Vacationus Persistus

2011-09-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

That's right, boys and girls: I'm still on vacation. I was going to try to get something written for you anyway, but it just hasn't turned out that way. Don't cry into your spilled soup though; I'll have something for you next week. Promise.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

2011-08-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

Well, after over a year, vacation time is here again, and, in the words of the immortal Go-Go's, I got to get away. Or, in the words of another band which should be immortal: I'm going on a big vacation, 'cause I deserve some fun. So sad for you, no blog post today. Avail yourself of this opportunity to reread my inaugural post and remind yourself why you shouldn't care.

Chapter 16

2011-08-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

Upriver

Things soon settled back into the bizarre rhythm that passed for normal on the ship, while the strange pirate flag flapped continuously overhead. Everyone ate whenever they were hungry, all at different times. Everyone likewise slept whenever they were tired, again at different times. There was but one bed on the ship anyway (and that was the hammock in Roger’s cabin), so if you got tired when someone else was already sleeping, you just made a makeshift pallet of whatever you could find. As always, it was impossible to tell how much time passed. It might have been days, if there had been such a thing as days in that place.

The time began to be liquid, each moment melting into the next and running backwards into the previous. Johnny began having trouble remembering what order things had happened in, much less how long ago it was. There was much time spent at the wheel, some time spent standing in comfortable silence at the railing with Larissa, some time spent chatting amiably with Roger (who was still trying to teach him how to fence, and still mostly failing), some time spent watching Aidan perform some sort of ceremony in the bow of the ship, which wasn’t quite prayer and wasn’t quite invocation and wasn’t quite ritual. Random scenes jumbled together in Johnny’s mind.

“Are there cannons?” he asked Roger.

“Cannons?” Her tone was puzzled.

“You know ... big guns.”

“Piffletwat. What do we be needin’ guns for?”

“I dunno. I just thought pirate ships had guns.” Johnny shrugged.

“Ye know, I never actually said The Slyph was a pirate ship.” Roger’s eyes twinkled.

“Oh. Well, I just ... oh, c’mon! What is that thing if it’s not a pirate flag?”

Roger glanced up at the fleur-de-lis-pierced skull. “Aye, ye got me there, boyo. Buccaneers we be, I can’t deny it. But there’s other ways to get what ye want besides shootin’ a fella.”

He stared more closely at the trees. There were flashes of bright colors accompanying the monkey shrieks, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of Bones’ wild brethren. They were mostly larger than Bones, some with even longer tails, all with the same parrot beaks and combination wing-hands. Where Bones was red and blue, these were red and blue and green and yellow and white, and even a few touches of pink and orange and purple here and there. They burst forth from the heavy undergrowth near the edge of the river for the first time and swooped and dove around, screeching loudly.

Bones scampered up Johnny’s back and screeched right back at them. “Worms, curs, and scoundrelous scallywags!” he added, for good measure.

Johnny was taken aback, and laughed in spite of himself. Larissa said nothing, of course. “Friends of yours?” he asked Bones.

“Lazy lagabouts!” Bones squawked. “Bring the bosun ‘is starting rope!” Apparently he felt this was sufficient comment on the topic; he took wing and disappeared around the corner of the deckhouse.

Johnny smiled at Larissa, who was still staring out at the banks of the river gliding by. He noticed that the little blue snake was still wound around her wrist.

“So, what does that mean?”

“What, ‘Shallédanu lei shonta’?” Aidan asked.

“Yeah, that. You say it all the time, and I’ve even heard Roger say it a time or two.”

“It’s a brief orison. A benediction, a request for the goddess to lay her blessing on you. Means, may the Lady of the Waters see my hood.”

“See your hood?”

Aidan smiled his small smile. “May she recognize that I come with bowed head, is perhaps a better translation.”

Johnny nodded.

Roger poked him with the wooden sword. Again. “Ye’re woolgathering again, my little he-wench.”

Johnny’s mouth fell open, then he snorted. “Oh, I’m your ‘he-wench’ now, am I? Is that pirate talk for ‘boy toy’?”

Roger flashed her teeth at him. “Oh, ye’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Now pick up that waster and show me ye can block with it, or I’ll have you over my knee and show ye what he-wenches are good for.” And then she lunged at him.

Johnny opened his eyes. Something was wrong, but at first he couldn’t put his finger on it. Then he realized: the ship wasn’t moving. That was certainly unusual. He rolled out of the hammock and came out onto the flying bridge. He was about to thumb the brass speaker to ask Roger (or Aidan, if he was on the wheel) why they’d stopped, but then he saw Roger and Larissa down on the deck. Roger glanced up and waved to him. ”‘Hoy there, sleepybones. Come watch the show.”

He followed their gaze and saw Aidan in the bow of the ship, holding his staff over his head with both hands. He was chanting in that liquid language with its ancient tones, and the floating plants were swirling in little circles around the ship, some clockwise, and some counter-clockwise, alternating. As he watched, fish started to rise up out of the water. They were mottled, darker brown on tan, narrow, but heavy and long. Their open mouths were full of jagged teeth, and Johnny knew these were the barracuda. There were a dozen at least, all around them, standing on their tails and dancing slowly to and fro. Suddenly smaller fish, flourescent green, shot up between every pair of barracuda, pectoral fins thrust out like wings, and began gliding in complex figure eights around the predators. They were obviously flying fish, but flying fish shouldn’t be able to stay aloft like that, much less turn and swoop in those intricate patterns. This amazing tableau continued for a few breathtaking moments, then the ship shuddered and actually rose up from the surface of the water. Johnny could hear the water being thrashed about underneath the ship, then the whole strange menagerie began to move forward.

Johnny had learned to recognize the local flora well enough to know that the ship was now moving over solid ground, or at least as solid as the ground ever got in this swampy place. The barracuda continued to dance along, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were leaving their watery home behind. The flying fish continued to weave in and out among them. After a few mintues, they reached the edge of what seemed like a large, open body of water. The terrestrial plants gave way to the more familiar floating vegetation again, but it seemed less thick here than in the river. Johnny could actually see the surface of the water in various places. Suddenly the ship was thrown forward and hit the water with a huge splash. Looking behind them now, Johnny could see that the ship had been borne on the backs of twenty or so serathodonts. They were like a cross between an alligator and a dinosaur, with little evil eys set back in their crocodilian heads, dark blue and glistening, and walking on their hind legs. They turned and began strolling casually back they way they had come. The flying fish left off their figure eights and soared back towards the river. The barracuda, apparently freed from their spell, now fell back to earth, snapping at the flying fish and the serathodonts and each other, then twisted their way back to the river, moving like sidewinders. Soon the whole piscine parade was lost in the distance, and Johnny turned back around to find Aidan leaning wearily on his staff while Roger pounded him on the back in apparent congratulations.

Johnny descended the ladder to the deck and made his way through the maze of crates to the bow. “Ye did it!” Roger was saying over and over. “Aidan, me bucko, ye really did it!”

“What the fuck was that?” Johnny managed.

Roger turned and grabbed Johnny by the shoulders. “We’ve crossed the head of the river,” she said, a fierce light burning in her eyes. “We’ve reached the Breen Lagoon! We’re almost there now, by the goddess. We’re almost there.”

Johnny looked around. Wherever “there” was, it was certainly somewhere different. Not only were the floating plants not abundant enough to completely cover the water, but he could make out the occasional outcropping of rock, and there was a thin mist hovering over the surface. The sounds of screeching parrot-monkeys and hunting burrikits were gone, replaced by an occasional whistle of unknown origin, and faint yipping from far ahead of them. The smell was less muddy earth and fecund vegetation and more clean water, with the faintest hint of salt. When he consulted his new sense, the door behind them was just a pinprick of heat on his back, and the thing ahead was an icy spike in his core that sang to him, calling him forwards.

He felt as if they were in a place now between two worlds: the swamp world, with its muck monsters and burrikits and serathodonts and barracuda was behind them. A fresh new place lay before them, its dangers as yet unknown.

>>next>>

Fictional Pondering

2011-08-14T23:49:00.000-07:00

I was going to have another half-chapter or so of the book up today, but I didn’t actually get anything written. I’ve been busy trying to figure out what to write next, which isn’t particularly easy for me. Now, I mentioned when I told you what this book thing is all about that a lot of what I’m doing here is just writing my way from one crazy dream idea to another. Which is true enough. And, honestly, at this point, I know which dream idea I’m writing away from, and I even know which dream idea I’m writing my way towards. But the problem is how to get there.

Unfortunately, the next dream idea in the queue is almost the end of the book, and I need some stuff in between here and there. And thinking up stuff isn’t my strong point ... I mean, that’s a big part of the reason why I’ve never published anything I’ve written, right? No great ideas.

So I’ve been spending my time today going through old dream logs, and old roleplaying game campaign notes, and old stories, and anything else I can think of, waiting for inspiration to strike. And a lot of it was quite inspirational, don’t get me wrong, but nothing that will really help me get to the next plot point (whatever that may be). So my search continues.

I did run into the story/novel I wrote a mere chapter and a paragraph of before I started on Johnny Hellebore. I’d totally forgotten about it. It wasn’t a bad idea, just not a great one (story of my life). But there might be something salvageable in it, so perhaps parts will show up in the JH saga at some point. Weirdly, my story notes indicate that I was planning to put Larissa in that story as well; perhaps she was fresh in my mind from that attempted recycling when Johnny came along and needed a companion ...

Anyways, mostly I’m sure you don’t care. Other than the fact that I don’t really have a blog post for today. And even then you don’t care, if you’re smart. But if you’re not smart—or, I suppose, to be less of a jerk about it, if you’re stubbornly insistent on reading this blog after all warnings to the contrary—then rest assured I’ll have something next week.

Chapter 15

2011-08-07T23:19:00.000-07:00

When he came to, he was draped over Roger’s naked back, staring upside-down at her muscular buttocks as she walked. Her shoulder was digging into his gut, and he could feel a breast pressing up against his wet shorts. Overall his first reaction was visceral. He tried to distract himself by casting his mind back: how had he gotten here? He must have drunk more than he should have. The damned wine was so sweet; it didn’t taste alcoholic at all. Less potent than the artan it may have been, but in the quantities he was putting it away, that hardly mattered. He could remember an indulgent half-smile on Aidan’s face. He could remember Roger telling him he was “squiffy,” and him cackling at that madly. He could remember Bones squawking along with his laughter like a lower primates’ version of call-and-response. He couldn’t remember Larissa participating, but that wasn’t surprising. Roger was going up the ladder now, which meant that her grip on his upper thigh became even tighter, the view of her lower back became even more fascinating, and her chest thrust into his crotch rhythmically. He gave up trying to remember how he’d gotten here and concentrated on thanking whatever divine force had engineered it.

The ride ended abruptly in a sucker punch of vertigo as Roger flipped him over into the hammock. How she could manhandle him so easily, he couldn’t imagine; she was certainly fit, but he outweighed her by a good bit. Yet she stood over him, hands on her hips, not even breathing hard. “I see ye’re awake now,” she commented.

Johnny opened his mouth, then realized the folly of that maneuver and just nodded.

“You want me to get them pants off’n ye?”

Johnny stopped staring at her breasts and said “hunh,” primarily to buy a little more time while he considered this proposal. Obviously the right thing to do would be to refuse politely. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to let her ... I mean, she did offer, right?

He noticed that Roger’s eyes were sparkling, and he had a sudden surety that she knew what he thinking, somehow. He flushed bright red. She voiced that throaty chuckle that made Johnny’s hair squirm, and suddenly his wet shorts were way too tight. “Oh, my bonny cabin boy,” Roger said, winking at him. “Ye’re a gorgeous laddie, ye really are, and ye’re plenty man enough at this age. I’ll not refuse ye if ye ask me again when yer head’s a mite clearer. But right now it’d be like taking advantage of the town simpleton, and I’m just not that sort of woman.” She lifted the arm closest to her and raised his hand to her mouth. She kissed the tip of his index finger, then ran her tongue along the underside of it. Lowering his hand, she placed it on her right breast, then squeezed his hand with hers.

She replaced the hand gently on his bare chest and touched his cheek briefly. “Sleep now, boyo. Mornin’ll make a fine mush of yer brain, I’m sure. So catch yer winks while ye can.”

For all the dirty thoughts that were whizzing around his head, the body part that Johnny fixated on as he drifted off to sleep was her smile.

Underway

Johnny didn’t feel like he had a hangover. His tongue felt too thick, granted, and maybe a bit fuzzy as well, but he didn’t really have a headache. Nor did he feel sick to his stomach. The fact that it was exactly as light as it had been “last night” was old hat by now, and he didn’t even feel particularly disoriented. “Morning” hadn’t made a fine mush of his brain after all, it seemed.

He walked out onto the flying bridge. Aidan waved at him and smiled. Johnny waved back with half-lidded eyes and then descended to the deck. Roger gave him her standard grin from her position at the wheel, but Johnny didn’t really want to make eye contact. He walked around the deckhouse and discovered Larissa leaning on the railing, watching the swampy landscape float slowly by.

“Um, hey,” Johnny said.

Larissa arched an eyebrow, and he thought he could detect the barest hint of a smile, but she said nothing.

“So, um ... was I ... I mean, did I ... ?” Johnny floundered. Larissa’s eyebrow climed even higher, which Johnny wouldn’t have thought possible.

Johnny thought he might be blushing. “Yeah, never mind, I guess.” They stood in silence for a while. The gentle breeze of the ship’s passage actually felt very good on Johnny’s face. He hadn’t realized how stuffy he’d felt, and it was only now that the danger was past that he realized he had been feeling a bit nauseous after all.

One of the little light blue snakes twirled up the vertical post of the railing, practically a blur. It shot up onto the crossbar, slithered along it for a bit, then wrapped itself tightly around Larissa’s wrist. Johnny watched the whole thing with interest. After a moment in which Larissa made no move to dislodge the little reptile, Johnny asked, “Are you going to throw it back?”

Larissa pointed down at the plant-covered surface of the water. Cutting through the duckweed and bladderwort and water lettuce, easily keeping pace with the ship, was a large fin. Although it moved like a shark fin, it was obviously a large fish: the thin membrane of the fin stretched across four or five stiff spines. The color was a mottled brown, very similar to the color of the water. As Johnny watched, the fin folded neatly down and disappeared, although he couldn’t shake the feeling that the fish itself was still there.

“The anterior dorsal fin is much too large, of course,” Larissa commented. “And they don’t generally swim just under the surface like that. Nor are they colored like that, and of course they aren’t freshwater fish, as I mentioned before. But it certainly does appear to be some variant of barracuda.” She glanced at the snake wrapped around her wrist. “Obviously it’s impossible to say what a ‘swamp barracuda’ might eat, but one could surmise.”

Johnny nodded.

They stood in comfortable silence for a while, then Johnny happened to glance up at the front of the boat. There was a flag that had never been there before—hell, the flagpole had never been there before. Despite the fact that Roger appeared to be a pirate, and her ship appeared to be a pirate ship, there had never been a pirate flag flying over it. But now ...

It wasn’t a traditional Jolly Roger. Oh, there was a white skull all right, but the background was a dark green instead of black. And instead of the crossed bones underneath the skull, there was a red fleur-de-lis with golden edges. The center point of the fleur-de-lis protuded through the top of the skull like a spear and its roots were clenched between the bony teeth; the petals stuck out of the sides of the skull like bizarre ears. Johnny stared at it, his mouth open. “Where did that thing come from?” he finally managed.

Larissa did not look at the flag. She inclined her head aft; Johnny couldn’t see Roger from where they stood, but he knew what Larissa meant.

He looked back at the banner flying above. It flapped in the wind rather smartly; Johnny looked back at the river underneath, layered in its vegetal blanket, then at the trees he could see on the shores. They were zipping by with a speed that was nearly alarming; Johnny felt a twinge of nausea after all. He looked back at the planks of the ship. Obviously Roger had decided they were going to really start moving now.

He cast his feeling out, upstream. The door was still behind them; it wasn’t fading, exactly, but it seemed more like a twinkling star than a steady light. And ahead ... he could almost feel it, then his sense just slipped off it. One thing he could tell: if the door behind him was a heat, the thing ahead of them was a cold, like someone had left the door to the North Pole ajar, and arctic winds were blowing through with wild abandon.

Reluctantly he turned his back on Larissa and walked back to the wheelhouse. He could almost feel eyes on his back. Were he to turn around, he knew that gaze would be merely curious, nothing more.

He sat beside Roger, who wore her habitual grin. “Better this fine mornin’?” she boomed over the roar of the fan.

He started to point out that this wasn’t “morning” any more than it had been “night” when he’d passed out in the hammock, but knew that wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He stared mostly at his shoes, still not ready to look her in the eyes.

He closed his mouth and just nodded.

“You heave up at all?” Roger sounded genuinely interested.

“Nah,” he said.

“Impressive!” She slapped him across his shoulder blades, startling him, and almost making a liar out of him right in front of her. “Ye really know how to hold yer liquor for such a young pup!”

“Yeah, I ...” Johnny swallowed to try to settle his stomach a bit. “I’ve heard that before, actually.” He took a quick peek at her face. She seemed fascinated to see what he would say next. “Listen, about last night ...”

This was not a conversation that Johnny had ever had to have before, but he felt that it was the other person’s job to break in at this point, telling him it was nothing and not to worry about it. Perhaps he’d seen too many romantic comedies. Roger stayed stubbornly silent.

“I just feel like I should apologize ...” he tried again.

Now she did butt in. “Now, now, boyo, ye were stirred up lookin’ at me body. Don’t apologize for that! Ye risk causing insult if ye steer that course too long.” He looked at her now; her smile was still there, perhaps a bit more gentle than usual. “Ye’re a man in his prime”—she paused and eyed him appraisingly up and down—“or at least near enough to droppin’ anchor in them waters, and I’ve been told I got a pretty fine fettle.” She winked. “The wonder would’ve been if ye hadn’t stood up to attention.” It took a moment for this crude expression to sink in, and then Johnny blushed.

Roger punched him lightly in the shoulder. “So clear yer pretty little head. But I meant what I said last night, Johnny boy. If ye come around askin’ sometime when ye ain’t four or five sheets to the wind, ye may find a little more luck. And if ye don’t come askin’, I won’t take no offense.”

Johnny swallowed hard. “Um, thanks,” he said.

“I feel like I gotta lay it out plain for ye,” Roger continued. ”‘Cause ye come from away. But that’s pretty common amongst us folks ‘round here. Ye press the flesh where ye can find it, ’cause tomorrow ye pay the piper, and ye never know when ye might come up short. Hell, we were almost sunk on the way to Aidan’s, nought? I reckon his gimcracked Goddess was good for somethin’ after all.” There was a tremendous splash behind the boat, and the ship rocked to and fro just the tiniest bit. Roger laughed loudly and raised her voice even more. “Aye, missy! I hear ye! Shallédanu lei shonta and all that.” She made a complicated hand gesture with her free hand.

“So, basically what I’m tellin’ ye is: sail for today in case today is all ye get. Ye ketch?”

Johnny looked up at her and smiled. “Yer a cheery lass, ain’t ye?”

Roger guffawed and slapped him on the back again. “Aye, that I am, Johnny boy.”

The slipstream around the deckhouse formed its vortex right where they were sitting. The wind ruffled through Johnny’s hair and made Roger’s ponytail fly straight out behind her, almost reaching the fanblades. No one spoke for a moment.

“Man,” Johnny said finally, “we’re really hauling ass, eh?”

Roger nodded. “No need for dawdlin’.”

Another pause. “It’s dangerous up there, isn’t it?”

“Johnny me boyo, it’s dangerous right here. You know what they say about life? She’s a brilliant helsman, but she still kills all her passengers.” Roger nudged him in the side.

Johnny couldn’t help but return her grin. “Well, sail on then, cap’n. I’m ready.”

Roger squeezed his knee and twisted the “wheel” a little harder. The Slyph shot through the plant-covered water even faster.

>>next>>

Chapter 14

2011-07-31T02:51:00.001-07:00

Making Wine

Aidan had brought all he needed for the journey with him, so from the clearing they returned directly to The Sylph, where he began stowing away gear while Roger guided them expertly out of their mooring.

“So ...” Johnny hardly knew where to begin asking questions. “What exactly do you do, Mr. de Tourneville?”

Aidan grinned at him. He had a very easy grin that lit up his whole face, although he seemed to use it much more sparingly than Roger. “Save you from muck monsters, apparently. And call me Aidan, son.”

This mode of address struck Johnny as odd, somehow ... perhaps it was just that Aidan seemed not so much older than he was. He was no more than twenty-five, surely: fresh-faced and clean-shaven, barely taller than Johnny and not much heavier either. Perhaps it was a religious thing. “So, are you, like, a priest?”

“I’m a Guide,” Aidan replied. “I believe I mentioned that already, didn’t I?” He winked at Johnny, then glanced over at Larissa. He said in a stage whisper: “She doesn’t talk much, eh?” He stuck out his hand at her. “Aidan de Tourneville, milady. And you are ...?”

Larissa took his hand and shook it. “There doesn’t appear to be enough indigenous wildlife in this area to support a predator of that size. What does it eat?”

Aidan looked taken aback. “Pretty much anything it likes, unfortunately. But not us. Not today, at any rate. Tomorrow, who can say? But hopefully the Goddess will watch over us.”

Larissa stared up at him with her wide eyes. “And what goddess would that be?” she asked.

“Shallédanu, Goddess of the Waters. She is omnipresent, in this place.” The Water Guide looked back at Johnny. “She’s a curious one, eh?”

Johnny nodded. “She is that.”

Aidan didn’t seem perturbed that he had not learned Larissa’s name. “Well, at least our journey is off to an auspicious beginning.”

Johnny frowned. “Being attacked by a giant homicidal creature is an auspicious beginning?”

“Surviving being attacked by a giant homicidal creature is, surely. Much better than the alternative, no?” He looked around. “I assume this craft has a tub on board?”

It seemed like skinnydipping in the boat’s hold was some sort of tradition when bringing on new crew members. Johnny was more prepared this time, however, and had found a pair of shorts among Roger’s extra clothes which could double as swimming trunks. Larissa just took off her shoes and rolled the loose pants up above her knees; she sat on the side of the square opening of the tub and trailed her bare legs in the brownish water. Roger and Aidan both seemed perfectly comfortable being naked. Aidan’s body was lean and pale, and he sported several serious scars: on his right shoulder, the left side of his ribcage, and his right hip, among others. Johnny continued to try to avoid looking at Roger’s body, but her lack of modesty was starting to put him more at ease.

There was less washing this time and more friendly chatting and socializing. Roger and Aidan exchanged ideas about the upcoming weather and their general course. None of their navigation talk included any directions such as “west” or “north”; it was all “upstream” and “leeward” and “deasil.” Johnny was only half paying attention. Mainly he was looking more closely at the fiery columns of the tub and trying to figure out how it worked. The fire was only in the corners; between the columns there appeared to be some sort of invisible barrier which kept out wildlife but not the current. The water was quite warm, although he suspected that was some function of the tub more than the natural temperature of the river. He could see shadowy forms swimming on the far side of the barrier, but nothing clearly—the barrier might seem invisible, but it did make things on its far side appear dimmer.

At some point, Roger called for Bones to fetch “some grub” and suddenly they were having a dinner party in the pool-sized tub. There was the usual greenish cheese, dried fig-like fruits, and jerky-esque pemmican, but Roger evidently felt this was a special occasion, because she had Bones bring out several things Johnny hadn’t seen before: a type of small citrus fruit that Larissa hesitantly identified as a kumquat, some sort of crusty bread that was hard as a rock on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, small green pea-like beans (uncooked but still quite good), and some form of pickle that looked like mushrooms and smelled like the clove cigarettes that some of the night people in DC smoked. Bones provided cups, and they just scooped water out of the tub. It occurred to Johnny that he ought to be discomfited that they were drinking water they’d just been bathing in, but of course the water in the tub was still flowing past with the slow current, so it was theoretically just as fresh as the water that they’d been drawing from the river for the entire journey.

Johnny tried a little bit of everything, and it was all good. Larissa seemed more hesitant, sniffing the offerings and eyeing them critically. Aidan and Roger were positively festive, the former complimenting his host repeatedly, the latter calling out colorful pirate phrases such as “heave to with the hard tack, swabbies” and “belay forestalling them fungus afore I have ye keelhauled!” Gradually the proceedings wound down and everyone became a bit more pensive.

Aidan was now leaning back with his elbows on the side of the tub, his lean body extended nearly horizontally, just under the surface of the water. He paddled aimlessly with his feet, his toes occasionally breaking the surface. “I think,” he announced, “it is time for some wine.”

Johnny looked around with interest. “We have wine?”

“Not yet,” Aidan said, winking. “Bones, my good man. Fetch me a pitcher.” Bones squawked and streaked over to Aidan, sitting up on his back legs in a manner more reminiscent of a dog than either avian or primate. It cocked its head and stared at the young man, who was now giving detailed instructions. “Your best pitcther, mind. It must be solid silver—you have such a thing?” This was directed at Roger, who nodded. “Good. The silver, then. And fresh cups. And then look in the left-hand pocket of my robe and bring me the gray pouch you find there.”

Bones streaked off with another squawk. Johnny swam over to Aidan and perched on the side of the tub as he had done once upon a time in his family swimming pool. “You’re going to make wine? Doesn’t that take ... well, a long time?”

“And distillation equipment,” Larissa added softly, as if she were just saying it to make herself feel better and didn’t expect anyone to pay any attention to her. She was right about that, of course.

Aidan grinned. “The important thing to know about wine, my dear boy, is that it’s mostly water. And I, of course, am a Water Guide.”

Johnny was starting to think that the inhabitants of this world used the word “guide” in a way that was quite different than he was used to.

Bones streaked back with a hefty pitcher nearly as big as he was and a soft gray bag with a rawhide drawstring. Aidan took the pitcher (“thankee kindly, sir” he said to Bones) and scooped it through the water. From the pouch, Aidan removed a handful of small round objects, like colored ball bearings. Most were a dark blue, but several were red, and a few were white.

“What’re those?” Johnny asked, still fascinated.

“Berries,” Aidan announced.

Johnny wrinkled his brow. “So the blue ones are blueberries, I suppose ... the red ones are cherries?”

Larissa spoke up. “Not blueberries: juniper berries. Although where one finds a conifer in a swamp I can’t imagine. And definitely not cherries ... something else. But they’re too small.”

Aidan nodded. “I take the water out of them. Easier to carry, and they don’t spoil this way.”

“But they don’t look like dried fruit ...” Johnny started, before realizing that this was almost certainly a futile line of inquiry.

“Dried?” Aidan seemed genuinely puzzled. “What, you mean like the derries?” He gestured at the fruit Johnny had been calling figs. “No, I just ... take the water out of them. And the red ones are hawberries.” Larissa looked slightly dubious, although she nodded.

“And the white ones?” Johnny asked.

“Snowberries,” Aidan said, tossing the pile of miniature berries into the pitcher.

Even Johnny couldn’t let that go. “Snowberries? As in, snow? You have snow here?”

“Strictly speaking, snow isn’t required for snowberries.” Aidan’s tone was mild.

Larissa opened her mouth, but Johnny already knew what she was going to say, and he knew they weren’t going to get anywhere complaining that people oughtn’t have words for things they’d never experienced, so he cut her off. “Snow is made of water, you know.”

Aidan arched an eyebrow. “Well of course I know that. Shall I make you some?” He scooped up a handful of water and blew on it, hard. The water shot out of his hand and swirled around, each drop maintaining its individuality so that it was more like dust than splash. The cloud of droplets floated upward, defying gravity, then began to sparkle. Finally there was a puff, and then several snowflakes fell down onto Johnny’s unbelieving face. They melted instantly of course, but there was a split-second when he could actually feel tiny pinpricks of cold against his skin. He stared at Aidan. Larissa’s face was neutral. Roger chuckled in the background.

Aidan ignored all this. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes.” He reached into his pouch again, and took out a smaller handful of yellow powder. He sprinkled this into the pitcher slowly, mumbling in that same liquid language he had used against the muck monster. A luminescence began to appear above the pitcher, ephemeral, like the yellowish-green lights Johnny sometimes saw shooting off to the edges of his vision if he rubbed his eyes too hard. And, like those phosphenes, the lights seemed to slide away if stared at directly, and yet irresistably drew the eye toward them. Straining his ears, Johnny thought—or imagined—a fizzing sound, a muted version of bubbles escaping from soda, or champagne.

Slowly the light subsided, and Aidan poured from the silver pitcher into the simple wooden cups Bones had brought. The liquid had changed from the brown tealike color of the river to a rich indigo, with a hint of effervescent yellow somehow buried in its core. Aidan poured four times, and then Bones poked him with a much smaller tin cup. Aidan chuckled and poured a dollop for Bones as well.

Larissa stared at her cup but didn’t drink. Roger and Aidan each took a long draught and made nearly identical lip-smacking “ahh” sounds. Johnny sipped his cautiously.

To describe it would have been impossible. It was slightly sweet, but it definitely had the bite he recalled from stealing sips from his mother’s wine glass when she wasn’t looking. It was fruity in a way that he had never tasted before, sort of a raspberry-blackberry-boysenberry, but wrapped up in the odor he associated with his father’s gin and tonics (he’d never dared sneak a taste of those, but the smell had always stayed with him), and yet none of that, and all of that, and more. It was dry, and cold, and it seemed to dance on his tongue. He stared at Aidan, amazed.

Aidan smiled back at him. “Not too shoddy, if I do say so myself. Roger?”

Roger had adopted Aidan’s pose on the side of the tub to their left. She arched her back, thrusting her small breasts up into the air. “Vurra nice, me bucko. Not artan, of course, but a pleasant enough change. Ye make a fine cuppa, Aidan.”

Johnny started to drink again, more eagerly this time, but he stopped himself. “Is this going to get me drunk?” he asked. “Like the artan if I drink it too fast?”

Aidan pursed his lips. “Well, it is wine, and it will surely make you tipsy if you drink enough of it. But it doesn’t have nearly the alcohol content of that curious concoction that our fine captain favors.” He looked archly at Roger, as if he’d just delivered a real zinger of an insult to her. Roger merely pshawed him with a lazy wave of her arm.

This was good enough for Johnny. He drank the rest of his cup in big gulps, and then he started in on Larissa’s.

>>next>>

It’s Just Semantics (Except When It’s Not)

2011-07-17T13:38:00.001-07:00

As an English major and aspirant writer, I know that the words we choose are vitally important. As a professional programmer and longtime corporate denizen, I know that changing words around doesn’t actually change the reality of the situation. Boy, it’s a good thing I believe in balance and paradox, eh?

The question of whether the phrase “it’s semantics” is invested with concern or derision is a delicate one. In my role as a parent, language is most often a tool used by my children to try to get out of following one of our (very few) family rules. For instance, rule #1 is “don’t step on things that aren’t the floor.”

“What about the ground?”

“Obviously you can step on the ground.”

“Well, what about the carpet? That’s not actually the floor.”

“Look, don’t play semantics with me. I ain’t raising no lawyers!”

In these types of instances, I’m nearly always fighting to make the point that the exact words don’t matter as much as the ideas behind them. Use a little common sense, man. Don’t try to twist the words.

On the other hand, in my role as a writer, whether that’s for work, for personal stuff, or in my delusional life where I am writing the next great fantasy series, the exact word you choose is crucially important. The shades of meaning that separate two apparent synonyms become vital: maybe the audience will understand roughly what I mean either way, but “roughly” just ain’t good enough. If you can’t write any better than that, you should just give it up right now.

And then there’s my role as a business programmer. And here’s where it gets tricky, because suddenly both viewpoints are simultaneously important. On the one hand, I have to deal with people who have technical ideas which are disastrous, but they think they’re brilliant just because they changed a couple of words. On top of that, I work for a corporation. It’s not full-on Dilbert by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly does happen that our corporate overlords will try to dress up a bad idea in pretty words and think we’re going to be fooled. (All corporations do this ... they just can’t help themselves.)

And yet ...

And yet all too often I find myself in a situation where words really do matter. The most common one is when choosing language at the beginning of a project. You would (probably) be quite surprised at how vital it is to get definitions straight for a project. Simply choosing the wrong word can cost a company thousands (if not millions) of dollars in lost time and miscoummunication. How could that possibly be, you ask? Simple—I’ve seen it happen time and again. The business means something very specific when it uses a word, but somehow that’s miscommunicated to the technical people. They start using the same word to mean something very different—always closely related, of course, but still different in some crucial way. Suddenly the business people and the technical people aren’t speaking the same language. And it spreads, and it gets all mixed up: mostly the new technical people learn what the words means from the other technical people, so they have the second defintion, but every once in a while one will learn it from a business person (or have their definition corrected by a business person) and now the technical people are miscommunicating with the other technical people. Same thing happens with the business people, some of whom pick up the alternate definition that the tech department has given the word as a matter of self-defense for not losing their sanity when trying to talk to engineers. Now no one is on the same page, not even the people in the same department, and specs get confused, mistakes get made, assumptions are propagated, work is delayed ... if you’re fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to realize there are two definitions, then every single time you see the word, you have to find the person who wrote it and ask them which way they meant it. And sometimes they don’t even really know: they just meant it whichever way some other person meant it, so now you have to track down that person and ask them. Trust me, such a little thing as what a word means in a particular context can have a profound financial impact on a project, not to mention its impact on the frustration level of the people working on it.

And words have a tendency to get stuck. Once a bunch of people all agree on a word and its meaning, you will be using that word forever. Doesn’t matter if tomorrow you find out that the word is completely wrong. Doesn’t matter if what the word really means is something completely different, and will confuse anyone who happens to understand the proper definition. Doesn’t matter if the word is already being used by someone else for something entirely different. At the point at which three or more people all use a word to mean X, it will mean X to those people forever, and no attempt to change the word will ever be successful. So not only is the word important for what it means today, but it’s important for a long time to come.

And because I have this pet peeve about making the same mistake twice, I do a lot of correcting people when they use the wrong word, or use the right word in the wrong context, or use a word that isn’t going to mean what they think it means to everyone else in the company (even if the people who are going to get confused don’t happen to be in the room at the time). Because I’ve seen it go wrong before and I really don’t want to see it again. And then I’m on the receiving end of that frustrated “it’s just semantics” lecture.

And I’m going: yes, I know. And I agree with you. Except for right now. ‘Cause, right now, the words are important.

This is a frustrating position to be in, because it makes you look inconsistent, or worse: hypocritical. “Wait a minute,” people will say to me. “When I tried to correct your word yesterday, you said it didn’t really matter which word I used. Now you’re up my ass nitpicking my language. What’s up with that?” And I find it difficult to explain. Partially because it’s a true paradox: both are true at once. And partially because it’s a matter of balance: you need to know when to lean one way and when to lean the other.

You see, the truth is the words really don’t matter. All that matters are the ideas underneath. Changing the way you describe an idea doesn’t actually change the idea. A stupid idea is always going to be stupid and it doesn’t matter how you dress it up. A good idea is always going to be good regardless of how badly you describe it. The fundamental nature of the idea doesn’t change regardless of the words that are used to express it.

Except there’s a problem. An idea exists in my mind; I don’t have any way to instantly transfer it to yours. There’s only one way that I can share my idea with you: I put it into words. Then, as any college student of Communications 101 knows, I have become the transmitter, and you the receiver, and the idea is the signal, and there will always be noise. Noise comes in many forms, but often the words themselves are a form of noise. Because words are an imperfect form to stuff an idea into. Words are slippery, and no two people are going to have exactly the same combination of denotation and connotation for every word they use in their conversations. So if I use the wrong word, you get the wrong impression, and suddenly you have the wrong idea: it’s not my idea any more. It’s similar—perhaps extremely similar—but not exactly my idea. Of course, it’s not your idea either—as far as you’re concerned, it’s my idea. It’s some shadow of my idea, mangled in transmission, not really anyone’s any more, but with a twisted life of its own.

So obviously the words do matter. My choice of words is crucial, because it’s the only way I have to make sure the idea doesn’t get warped out of true on its way to you. It’s going to get warped, mind you—nothing either of us can do about that, it’s just the nature of the beast—but perhaps, if I can just find the right words, it won’t get warped too badly. Perhaps it will still be mostly my idea ... close enough to still work.

So I suppose the trick is to know when choosing a different word will help the idea come through more clearly, and when you’re just fiddling with the window dressing. I try to figure out which is which every day, and I bet I get it wrong a lot. But I keep trying, because the words are important.

Except when they’re not, of course.

The Demon Sony

2011-07-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

So, it looks like I’m spending my entire weekend playing Little Big Planet. This is because the past three years’ worth of Little Big Planet costumes, objects, decorations, and building materials, collected by three out of four humans in our household in quite serious fashion, were on the PS3 that finally broke down. And Sony, in their infinite brilliance, designed the PS3 so that you can’t retrieve data off a dead machine. Clever, eh?

Now, you may say to yourself, but a PS3 just has a standard hard drive in it, right? Just pull that sucker out and hook it up to a PC. Easy enough, but then you can’t read it, because Sony has encrypted the entire drive. Copy protection for their games, don’t you know. No problem, you might think. Put the old hard drive into a hard drive enclosure with a USB interface and treat it as an external hard drive on the new PS3. Nope, doesn’t work: not only is the hard drive encrypted, it’s encrypted with a key taken from the hardware chip in the machine. In other words, hard drives encrypted with one PS3 can’t be read by another PS3. Again, copy protection. Well, you say, I heard that Sony just invented a new data transfer thing so that you can copy directly from one PS3 to another ... Nope. You have to be able to fire up the old machine in order to start the data transfer. How convenient for their customers.

Not that Sony is particularly concerned about their customers. As we can tell from the fact their security is such a joke that a handful of anonymous hackers took them down for 26 days. Think about that for a minute. All the press reports I’ve heard want us to be pissed off at whichever hacker group fired off this attack (although we still aren’t completely sure which one it was). But screw that. I want you to think about it. A multi-billion dollar company with employees and offices worldwide got pwned by what was most likely six to ten nerds hanging out in their moms’ basements. It’s sort of like if your bank came to you and said “Well, all the money in your account just got stolen by a couple of teenagers in ski masks. We’re real sorry about that. These criminals must be stopped!” Would you really feel sorry for your bank, taken advantage of like that by evil kids? Or would you wonder why this giant institution that makes tons of money off you isn’t taking more seriously the idea of keeping your shit safe?

On the positive side, at least it probably cost them a billion or so. Serves ’em fucking right.

So we waited for 26 days to be able to get back online, to be able to get stuff from the Playstation Store and play online levels with the world and whatnot, and then almost as soon as it’s back our PS3 goes YLOD. Of course, I didn’t even know what that meant until it happened to me, but apparently it’s quite common. Certainly a Google search for “ps3 ylod” turns up nearly 2 million results. It stands for “yellow light of death” (in a nod to the infamous Windows BSOD), and it’s called that because the little light on your PS3 that’s usually either red (if it’s off) or green (if it’s on) turns to yellow and it won’t boot up. It results from overheating, which is, again, something Sony most likely could have prevented with a little tighter quality control issues. (And, if you think they couldn’t have, riddle me this: why is it that the newer models don’t suffer from this problem? Obviously it’s possible to avoid it.) Sony itself offers you nothing to help with this problem. If your machine is still under warranty, you can get a new machine, but, of course, your data is just lost. If you’re not even under warranty, you’re really screwed.

So I went online and found someone who does electronics and specializes in fixing these sorts of problems. And he fixed it. And it worked ... for a while. Then it started having a whole different problem, and now it won’t even come on at all. I took it back to the same fellow, and he says the GPU (that’s the graphics processing unit) is fried. And you can’t replace it. So we’re back to being just screwed.

So we bought a new PS3 Friday night. It’s another $350 down the drain, and now we have to rebuild all our saved stuff. The only saving grace is that anything we actually purchased is still available for download, so at least we don’t lose all the money we’ve dropped on Sony over the past three years. Just all the time we spent unlocking levels and collecting stuff.

While Little Big Planet is the biggest loss for us—three quarters of the humans in our house are fairly well addicted to it—it’s the not the only one. Since my friend Benny first showed me a tower defense game on his iPhone, I’ve been obsessed with that class of games, so of course I have PixelJunk Monsters, one of the best examples of the genre. Looks like I’ll be starting over on that one too. My elder son will be starting over on Half-Life 2, Portal (both 1 and 2), and Fallout New Vegas. My younger son has already started fresh on Costume Quest (a very cute little game; if you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out). And those are just the biggies. There are countless other games in which all progress has been erased.

Now, my general attitude towards video games is that they’re time wasters. I learned long ago (when my college roommates pointed out to me that I’d lost a whole day to Phantasy Star IV, in fact) that I can’t afford to spend too much time on them. And I try to teach this attitude to my children as well. It’s just a game, I tell them. And so it is. But it still pisses me off to lose all this time just because a greedy company cares so little for me and my data. It reminds of what may possibly be the most awesome footnote ever written, which appears in the book Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. In it, there is a character named the demon Crowley, and he happens to have a computer. There is a description of said computer, which leads to this footnote:

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should be considered lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: “Learn, guys.”

I mean, seriously: if demons are cribbing notes from our software EULAs, I think there must be something wrong here.

So today I’m quite down on corporations. Not that I’m ever up on corporations, of course. But even more so today. And, as I’ve spent about 48 hours now trying to keep my children from killing each other as they try to work together to restore all their LBP swag, I’m a bit tired as well. Not the way I saw spending my weekend. Video games are supposed to be fun, right? Thanks a bunch, Sony. Now I’m even cursed by my gaming consoles. Sigh.

On Conferences, and Travel

2011-07-03T23:50:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a conference (I was traveling this time last week, which explains why there was no post, not that you care, I’m sure (and, if you do, you aren’t paying attention to the title of the blog—wake up, people!)). Now, I understand that there are some business folks who attend conferences regularly: salespeople, or marketing reps, or ... well, salespeople, I suppose. Anyone whose business revolves around networking (in the social sense, not the technical sense) has a very valid reason to travel long distances to hang out with people they don’t really know, I suppose. Us technogeeks are a slightly different story though.

On the one hand, we more than anyone have a need to stay current with what’s going on in our industry. The tech world changes at lightning speed, and it’s hard enough to keep up with either hardware or software, much less both. This is one reason techies are news freaks (see Slashdot) and gossip mongers: it’s not just idle curiosity—sometimes the latest news from Microsoft or Google or Oracle changes our entire job function. A conference is excellent for that sort of thing.

On the other hand, there are all sorts of logistical issues. Tech areas can be radically different and radically arcane, so it can be difficult to put together a set of presentations that will have mass appeal. People at different levels of experience have radically different needs as well, so that complicates matters even further. Often people chosen to speak are not well known, and often the people who might be well known are not great speakers.

On the other other hand—which turns out to be the biggest hand in this case—technogeeks don’t generally like meeting people. Hell, most of us got into this business because computers were much easier to talk to than humans. I’m sure many of my colleagues look at the prospect of being alone in a room full of strangers in roughly the same light that you might look at being alone in a cage full of tigers. It’s not quite that bad for me, but I freely admit that there’s a fairly long list of things I’d rather do than sit in an uncomfortable airplane seat for six hours (each way) in order to spend four nights in an uncomfortable hotel bed in between long sessions of uncomfortable mingling. On the scale of introvert to extrovert, I’m a little of both. I’m very extroverted around people I know; once you get to know me, you’ll probably find that you can’t shut me up. But I’m not that guy who brazenly walks up to people and introduces himself. When it comes to hanging out with crowds of strangers—even crowds of people just as geeky as me—I relapse into introversion.

And at the convention I just returned from, I was quite comfortably in the middle of the geek scale.

It’s YAPC::NA, which is the North American version of the “Yet Another Perl Conference,” which trades on the Linux tradition of “yet another"s (such as yacc and YAML), even though it’s more accurate to say that YAPC is the Perl conference, and any other such conferences are “yet another"s themselves. YAPC::NA is, in fact, the original YAPC, so it really is a bit of a misnomer.

It was quite a good conference for all my whining above, and I’m glad I went. This was my first time going, even though I’ve been using Perl for many years now (since ‘96, approximately). Partially my delay has been financial (even though the conference itself is cheap, the airfare and hotel stay can be prohibitive, depending on which city is hosting), and partially just reluctance to wander off and hang out with a bunch of people I don’t know (as previously mentioned). But this year the company I work for is footing the bill, so most of my excuse is gone. I was hoping to present a talk, even, but my submission wasn’t accepted. No worries; that saved me the hassle of standing up in front of a bunch of strangers and pretending I was more interesting than the next guy.

I got to meet many of the Perl luminaries, which is nice. Among those I actually got a chance to speak to were Matt Trout, Piers Cawley, and Ingy, as well as others I saw from afar, including Stevan Little, and, the progenitor of Perl himself, Larry Wall, who was there with his wife and two of his children. During Larry’s talk (which opened the conference, naturally enough), he said “I’ve always taught my children that it’s okay to be weird, so of course now I have weird children,” which is definitely something I could relate to.

So I chatted a bit, and learned some things there, and I attended some talks, and learned some things there, and I went to both of the “bad movie night” after-hours gatherings, where I had the pleasure of seeing the MST3K version of It Conquered the World (even though it didn’t) and the live action Aeon Flux with the RiffTrax commentary (which was far more enjoyable than the first time I watched it, when I had to actually listen to the characters speaking). Overall it wasn’t a bad outing, and I think I got my company’s money’s worth out of it.

I am glad to be home though. When I travel for business, I often try to arrange to take my family, but it wasn’t economically feasible this time. You’d think I’d enjoy some time away from the family, and I admit I often think that I will, particularly when they’re all yelling at each other and expecting me to play referee. I might say to myself, well, at least I have that week off coming up, and I’ll get some peace and quiet for a change. But then I go off and a funny thing happens: I wish they were there. As annoying as it is to be packed into a small room with all of them, and as even more annoying as it is to be packed into a small vehicle with them for travel purposes, I generally find that I wish they were around when they aren’t. I suppose it helps that I don’t think of them as obligations, but more as pals. I like hanging around with them ... well, most of the time, anyway. When I’m on my own, I think how nifty it would be if they were there with me, and I could chat with them about all the things going on. I’ve never actually cared much for being by myself ... in fact, I’ve never lived alone. (In fact, the last time I counted roommates I’ve had over the years, I got to 30 without even trying very hard, not even including anyone who could be considered “family,” and, if you don’t think your family counts as roommates, you should rethink your perspective.) Now, I did share a hotel room with a coworker (who I can’t say I know well enough yet to call a friend, but I suspect that one day I will), and that definitely made it bearable a lot of the time, but I still missed having the family around. I’m very comfortable around them. I’m much more relaxed, and my introverted side is a bit more muted, and I think that helps me open up to people. Perhaps next year it’ll be possible to bring them along. I wonder how much different the trip would be with them.

Still, I’m glad I went. If nothing else, I got to be part of Piers’ human theremin. (The YAPC videos aren’t up yet, but you can check out the Bobby McFerrin experiment that Piers was cribbing off of. Admittedly, Piers wasn’t able to add the melodic counterpoint that you see in that video, but then McFerrin didn’t tell me about cool ways to introduce my kids to programming either.)

Curse of the Computer Gods

2011-06-19T22:15:00.000-07:00

You know, the hardware gods hate me.

I currently have 7 corrupted hard drives with valuable data on them, two dead laptops and one I’m trying to reinstall to, and any number of other bits and pieces I’m too afraid to throw away. I’m sort of getting tired of recreating files at this point.

I’ve started saving my data on Dropbox to help alleviate this. These days, everyone wants you to store your data “in the cloud”; I’m a little leery of that overall, but the nice thing about Dropbox is that it stores your data in the cloud and on your local machines. All of them, even. So even if the Dropbox folks disappear tomorrow (which is always a problem with these ventures), I’ll still have multiple copies of it. That beats my old solution, which was bidirectional sync’ing with Unison. Which worked okay, but it was a pain in the ass if you made changes to the same file in two different places, and it doesn’t work at all if you can’t get Unison installed on a machine. Another nice thing about Dropbox is, worse comes to worst, you can always use a browser to get at your stuff. Of course the downside is that you have to have enough local storage space on every machine to hold all your stuff, but hard disks are cheap. About the only thing I can’t reasonably put on Dropbox right now is my music. I’d have to pay for the premium service to fit my 25Gb of MP3’s there, and I’d have to have 25Gb of space lying around on all my machines. Which is problematic. On the upside, I can get to my files from my phone, even. So that’s nice.

Still not sure what to do about the music. Amazon has a music vault service, but it has limited space, and you have to use their proprietary programs to upload and to download. Not a very good option. Google supposedly has a similar option, but too similar to be any better. There are also streaming options like Subsonic, but the way they work is to stream your music off one server (which must always be available) which you can then access from other servers. Moderately convenient, but it doesn’t solve the problem of what happens if the hard drive on that server bites the dust.

I also have several external hard drives, including two Passports. They’re convenient, but I don’t want to have to lug drives around with me everywhere I go, and it still doesn’t solve the problem of what happens when the drive goes belly up. Or when technology outpaces it: I have another pretty hefty USB hard drive that none of the newer computers I try it on will read. Sort of like all those Jaz disks I have that I’ll never see the data on again.

And don’t even get me started on the tape drives.

I’m a technology guy. I’ve been programming professionally for more than half my life; casually for nearly 75% of it. I’ve built my own machines, installed hardware in everything from laptops to servers, even worked as a hardware technician for a while in my youth. And I still hate dealing with hardware. As a programmer, if there’s some piece of software I’m missing, I can always write it. Now, granted, I may not be willing to write it; there are many classes of programs—hardware drivers, GUI applications, music players, spreadsheets, etc—that I wouldn’t bother wasting my time trying to create. But I could write them if I wanted to, if I had the will and the gumption and the time. But if there’s a piece of hardware that I’m missing, I have little choice but to go out and buy it. And, even if I had a degree in Electrical Engineering and the brains (and will and gumption and time) to put together my own circuit boards, I’d still have to go out and buy the components. You can create software from nothing. Hardware requires stuff. That’s why it frustrates me.

And the stuff is always changing. I long ago gave up trying to keep track of all the latest technologies. Many technogeeks (including many of my friends) do so, of course. It’s like being a car guy and knowing what all the latest engine technologies and all that are coming out. You can know all that cool stuff if you really want to, but it requires a significant investment of time and effort, and I just don’t have the patience for it. Besides, I can just ask my friends and cheese off the time and effort they’ve already put into it.

The Internet (and, more recently, the “cloud”) have promised us a new technology life, a life free from the concerns of operating system or CPU. We’re getting to that point, but we’re not there yet. I’m looking forward to it, myself; we’re a multi-OS family around here, and, at any given time, there are several Linux machines, Windows machines, and Macs floating around the house. I mostly like to work on Linux, but I’ll admit that its desktop apps have always lagged behind the Redmond giant. I despise Windows, but there are some Microsoft products I like: Excel, for instance, pounded the nails in the coffin of Lotus 1-2-3 with both authority and flair. Word’s always been a bit of a bloated whore, but Excel has always been a slick app, and, while Google Spreadsheets has managed to recreate some of its flash—and even surpassed it in a few small ways—honestly, it still lacks a lot of Excel’s magic. And, of course, there are still programs that just only work on Windows, although those are growing fewer and fewer with the passing of the years. Mostly it’s specialty programs, such as the excellent mapping program for one of my favorite hobbies. So I like to have some Windows machines around. And, while I’ve never been able to make myself love the Mac the way many have (primarily because it’s not keyboard-friendly enough for me—which is really an understatement: Macs are downright keyboard-hostile), I’ll admit to occasionally envying its ease of hardware use and a few of its programs (I’d love to be able to produce presentations in Keynote, for instance). So why shouldn’t I be able to have all three operating systems running? And be able to access the majority of my useful files from any of them?

I think we’ll get there eventually. For now, I still feel like I spend just as much time configuring computers as I do using them, which pisses me off. But that’s my curse. I have offended the gods of hardware, and they do exact their price. Perhaps I’ll go sacrifice a chicken. Or a lolcat. Something.

(In case it wasn’t obvious, I’ve spent most of the day reinstalling my laptop and didn’t really have time for a proper post. So you got this crap instead. See title of blog.)

Family Ties

2011-06-12T23:43:00.000-07:00

Got some family stuff going on today, so no blog post for you. So sad, I know.

The Diamond Flame

2011-06-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

In my very first post I explained why you should not read this blog, but, in case you don’t want to go back and read that, I’ll recap it for you: blogs are full of other people’s crappy opinions, and mine is certainly no different. But every once in a while I take a break from regaling you with my crappy opinions and write some fiction instead. If there were a reason to read this blog (and I’m not saying there is), it would have to be for the fiction, assuming that sort of thing appeals to you.

I’ve been blithely rambling on for about 13 “chapters” now (although admittedly they’re mostly arbitrary divisions) without ever once explaining what the thing was supposed to be, so I thought I’d take a moment to do that. The explanation is a bit late at this point, but perhaps I’ll go back and put a link to this post on each of the chapter parts so people won’t have to wonder what the hell is going on if they stumble into the middle of it.

Spoiler-free short version: The fiction is basically a novel, called The Diamond Flame, and it’s meant to be the first in a series of books about a boy named Johnny Hellebore. I won’t go into any details about who he is or what happens to him (that’s the joy of reading, I think), but let me offer a few similar titles so that you can judge if the thing is your cup of tea or not. In rereading the content (which I do quite often), I would say the book is most similar to novels such as The Talisman or Shadowland, or possibly the (still ongoing) series Abarat, although I’ve heard Barker intended Abarat to be his Eyes of the Dragon, so to speak, which would make that a poorer comparison. (Note that these three titles are penned by three of what I refer to as the pentagram of my literary idols.) Specifically, it is designed as adult fiction, and definitely not children’s fare like Harry Potter or Perseus Jackson, although it has some similarities to those series as well.

The longer version would be this.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Since I was very young, I can remember writing stories. I was actually never very good at telling stories, but I always tried to write them. Longhand in notebooks, or on my grandmother’s manual typewriter—it didn’t much matter, I just wanted to write. Once I got a computer, I started using that, and that’s how I write exclusively these days. I wrote a lot of short stories, some of which are decent, although none of them are really good, and I started at least two novels that I can recall. But I never published any of my fiction, and I still haven’t. Now I’m over 40, and I suppose there’s at least an even chance that I never will. But I also firmly believe in never giving up your dreams, so perhaps someday ...

Then again, maybe this is just my personal mid-life crisis.

There are two primary reasons that I never pursued my dream of becoming a writer. The first is that I became a programmer. Now, Stephen King once said (as apparently Somerset Maugham did before him) that you don’t become a writer because you want to; you become a writer because you have to ... because, if you didn’t write down all the stuff trying to burst out of your brain, your head would just explode. I think that’s true, but perhaps too specific. A creative outlet is required for a creative person, but it does not necessarily have to be the first thing that you fixate on. We see this all the time, with singers who take up acting, actors who take up singing, directors who take up painting, ad infinitum. I’m just a writer who took up programming. And don’t let anyone ever tell you that programming is all logical and not creative. That’s bullshit. Writing a software program is like writing a story in many ways: you start with nothing, and then you create, trying different approaches, experimenting with different techniques, and, in the end, there is something. Sometimes it’s beautiful. More often it’s just adequate. But, either way, it’s yours, and you made it, and you’ll always feel a bit proud of it, even if you know you could have done better.

So my creative urges found an outlet, in an unlikely place. I actually only took up programming because I was decent at it, and I figured it was a great way to make money while I became a famous writer. And then I ended up running my own software company for 12 years. Funny how those things work out.

But probably the more important reason why I never became a writer is that I never had a great idea. Oh, I had several good ones; just never a great one. I was always a good writer, if I do say so myself, but pretty writing without decent ideas behind them isn’t very publishable. In fact, you’re better off if you have good ideas and can’t write worth a damn. My own idol King was recently criticized for noting that this was true of Stephanie Meyer; I’ll agree with him and go even further and call out another very popular author, Charlaine Harris. In my opinion, neither Meyer nor Harris writes particularly well, but I’ll freely admit to being jealous of their brilliant ideas. I only wish I had come up with something as innovative as either of these ladies. But, alas, I never have.

Until, perhaps, recently.

One day about a year or so ago, I woke up from an unlikely afternoon nap with my younger son to find a picture in my mind: a picture of a teenage boy, dark-haired, slightly ragged-looking, and I knew his name was Johnny Hellebore. And I became fascinated with this character. The name alone was classic, in some sense ... a name worthy of a comic book hero, reminiscent of both Johnny Blaze and Daimon Hellstrom. I had no idea who this boy was, or why he had invaded my light dozing, or—assuming he was a comic book hero—what sort of powers he might have. But he kept running around my brain, and he soon acquired a companion: Larissa, a little girl who had first appeared in a D&D campaign I ran in the early 90’s. Then followed a few more half-dreams about Johnny (and occasionally Larissa), and then a few more dreams which weren’t really about those characters at all, but somehow seemed that they might be shoehorned in nonetheless, and then I was writing little scenes and vignettes, completely disconnected, and then ...

And then I started a blog, for some insane reason, and suddenly there was a place to actually put all this stuff I was writing. Of course, that required making some sort of coherent whole out of it. So that’s what I set about doing. Most of the content of this “novel” is really just me writing my way from one scene to another, trying to make them all fit together. I think I’ve achieved some amount of success with this. In fact, I suspect—although of course I may be wrong—that this may be the best thing I’ve ever written.

So, if you think this is something you might be interested in, I encourage you to start at the beginning. Feel free to backtrack occasionally; you may find that I’ve gone back and revised things slightly (mostly for grammar and phrasing, not so much for content). Each post has a link at the top to the previous entry, and one at the bottom for the next entry, so it should be moderately easy to navigate through it. And, every now and again, I post a new half a chapter or so. You can also find other posts like this one—me writing about the process of writing—by searching for the “metafiction” tag. If you find any of this entertaining, feel free to post a comment. I know, I know: I keep telling you not to read this blog. But this novel just may constitute an exception to that.

Happy reading.

Chapter 13 (concluded)

2011-05-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

There was a sort of trail, and it was mostly solid, although there were patches of muckier bits along it. The trees were closer together here, and they crowded out the constant light. In amongst the trees, there still seemed to be watery areas, although the wading birds were nowhere to be seen. The atmosphere was darker and more oppressive here, and they walked close together. Even Roger was more quiet than Johnny had come to expect from her.

The hill and the dock were far behind them now, screened from sight by the swampy forest. The leaves of the trees would rustle alarmingly from time to time, but there was still no sign of the creatures that caused it. Roger kept a sharp eye on the upper branches.

Suddenly, there was a low burbling sound that Johnny knew by now was a hunting burrikit. Roger stopped and flung out a hand. She needn’t have bothered; both Johnny and Larissa had frozen immediately. Even Bones, normally hyperkinetic no matter what the circumstances, had become a quivering feathered statue. There was a flash of orange twenty feet over their heads, in the trees to the left of the path, and then a bundle of fur and teeth shot out of the leaves and sailed over them, landing on a low branch that stuck out over the trail.

This was Johnny’s first close-up view of a burrikit. It had the tufted ears and bushy “sideburns” that he associated with a bobcat or lynx, but its fur was a bright orange, the color of a creamsicle. The whiter fur (really an extremely pale shade of orange) under its chin reinforced that color scheme. The same whitish color was found in rings on its long, arched tail, which looked like it belonged on a completely different animal: a ringtail cat, or a coatimundi. Its claws were extended: vermilion daggers digging into the branch to maintain its balance. Sabretooth fangs with an apricot tint stuck over its lower jaw to just below its chin. Its eyes were the only thing that weren’t some shade of orange: they were a dangerously glowing greenish-yellow. The low growling purr that filled the air was chilling; Johnny wondered how had it had ever reminded him of a Disney character.

Roger reacted immediately. She raised her arms above her head and actually took a step forward. “G’wan! Git!” she shouted.

To Johnny’s surprise, Larissa grabbed the sides of her jacket and also threw her arms out, flapping the insides of her coat at the beast. “Makes you seem bigger than you are,” she said softly. Johnny shrugged and started waving his arms around as well. The burrikit leaned back, but didn’t retreat. Roger kept waving with one hand, but put her other on the hilt of her sword.

Just as it seemed violence was imminent, the cat’s tail flashed once and it disappeared, leaping up into the treetops and shaking the branches wildly with its passage. Johnny let out a long breath. “That was lucky ...” he started, but Roger was looking around with concern.

“No,” she said, “something’s not ...”

The air was split by a hideous noise. It was somewhere between a foghorn and a moose call, with a dash of shrieking baby thrown in for good measure. The bass vibrated in Johnny’s breastbone, but it cranked rapidly into a register that was so high it was almost painful, then dropped immediately back down. It made Johnny shiver, and that was just the noise. When the creature appeared, the unearthly sound paled in comparison.

It was at least seven feet tall, possibly eight. Its skin was a shiny black, wet with swampwater and draped with bits of greenery, as if it had just sprung up out of the water where it had been lying in wait. The hide was leathery and pebbled, and Johnny knew Roger’s thin rapier had no chance at all of peircing it. It was generally humanoid, although it seemed to have no neck—its head was just a mound on top of its shoulders. Its eyes were balls of green flame, with no whites or pupils, and its open mouth sported metallic fangs that were six inches long. Its claws were the same, except much longer: probably two feet of flashing bladelike talons.

It strode through the tree trunks onto the path, still emitting that bizarre howl, and chaos erupted. Bones gave a terrified shriek and shot into the trees. Roger’s sword was in her hand, and she expertly parried the first swipe of a claw, but still the force of it threw her backwards into the trees on the other side. Larissa disappeared behind him and off the path to the same side that had spawned the creature. Suddenly Johnny was alone with it. He noted clinically that it had no snout; no nose at all, really. No facial features whatsoever except those eerie green balls of fire for eyes, and a great open maw full of deadly teeth. Then he turned and ran.

The three of them had now taken off in three different directions, three of the four lines that would form a giant X, with the fourth being the path along which the creature had made its entrance. It was theoretically random chance that would determine which of them it would chase after. Johnny knew from the crashing and snapping of tree trunks behind him who had “won.”

He hit a small clearing and stumbled in a shallow pond. He went down hard, although the ground he hit was soft enough that he didn’t break anything. There was a tree root under his face and he tasted a bit of blood in his mouth, but he knew it wasn’t serious. Not nearly as serious as it was about to be, anyway. He rolled over frantically. There were tree branches and vines and Spanish moss above him, and the same fading-twilight sky as always, but only for a moment, because suddenly everything turned black as the beast filled his vision.

There was a clang of steel that Johnny though must be a rapier hitting the thing’s hide; it swatted vaguely behind it, and Johnny heard an “oof” and more crashing into bushes. A flurry of branches and nuts came flying down at the creature’s head, and there was a parroty squawk of “leave off there!” but it paid no mind to that either. It lifted one arm up high, and the glossy silvery-black claws flashed in the light.

And then Larissa screamed.

Thinking back on it, Johnny would decide that this was the single strangest sound he had ever heard in his life. First there was the fact that it was Larissa. He had never heard Larissa scream, not even that one time when he was sure they were going to get sliced up by a jittering addict too far gone to realize they couldn’t possibly have any money to give him. Johnny himself had given a little scream when the knife had come lunging at them, before a timely police siren had sent the junkie running, but Larissa had never made a sound. And secondly, it was a bizarre sort of scream, almost unnatural. Generally when you heard someone scream, you knew they were scared. But this, this was ... different. He couldn’t tell if she was frightened, or angry, or frustrated, or if she was perhaps a superhero employing some sort of sonic power; he had a sudden vision of a young Donald Sutherland raising his arm and emitting an eerie shriek, but he couldn’t place it, because he had never known that in his late night cable surfing he had stumbled across the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The piercing screech echoed across the swamp; the fluttering of panicked birds filled the air. The beast standing over him roared its strange roar again, as if answering a challenge, then the talons flashed toward Johnny’s face and he instinctively closed his eyes.

The howl of the monster rose in pitch, as if in frustration, and Johnny decided to open his eyes to see why he wasn’t dead yet. The thing’s arm had become entangled in the vines above them, and Johnny instinctively rolled to his right just as they finally snapped. The metallic-colored talons embedded themselves into the marshy ground where his head had been.

He was half covered in water and mud now, and the thing was turning towards him again, but suddenly he was very calm. If he could walk through a solid steel grate, why should he let this beast skewer him where he lay? He reached for the alien sense inside him and let his body go completely slack. The claws came down again, and passed directly through his body, but it offered no resistance. The thing’s arm was now completely through his chest, but he knew it had not pierced him. He reached up with one arm and put his hand inside the creature’s arm; the monster shuddered and howled, and actually retreated a few steps, taking its arm with it and holding it close to its body as if Johnny had hurt it somehow. The eyes flashed around the clearing, looking for something, and they lit on a robed figure which had stepped into the open area while Johnny had been distracted. The monster hesitated, and the figure raised a wooden staff and began to chant.

The words were slippery in Johnny’s ears, no language that he had ever heard before, yet he knew it was ancient; older than Latin, older than Greek. It was a language that was old when Phoenician and Sanskrit and Sumerian were being spoken. The words were soft and lyrical, falling over themselves in a waterfall of susurration that Johnny found comforting, but the creature backed away from them, its howl subdued now, its fiery green eyes tracking back and forth in confusion. Suddenly it turned and crashed away through the trees; Johnny could hear its progress in snapping tree trunks for a few moments, and then there was a loud splash and silence.

Roger appeared in the clearing, nursing a bruised arm and limping slightly. Larissa was on the opposite side, also stepping forward cautiously. Bones floated down from the branches to land lightly nearby. The chanting faded away, and the figure in its pale blue robes strode forward and offered Johnny a hand. “Thanks,” Johnny said, his voice shaking a bit as the man drew him to his feet. “I think you may have saved my life there.”

The man smiled. He was clean-shaven, with sandy brown hair and deep, blue eyes. “My pleasure. I could hardly allow you to be eaten by a muck monster on your way to see me, now, could I?” He must have read confusion in Johnny’s face, for he added: “I am Aidan de Tourneville. I’ll be your Water Guide.”

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