Relativistic Absolution

I have a horror of absolute statements.

It might even be a phobia, now that I ponder it.  It starts with my experience of certain people: my father was fond of absolute statements, as was the first person I took on as a partner after I started my own company.  Both of these people have something in common: they believe that if you state something with enough confidence, people will believe you.  It didn’t much matter whether the something was actually true or not.  This actually works, sort of, especially on strangers.  Unfortunately, people that have to listen to you on a regular basis quickly learn that the more confident you are (and the more absolute your statement is) the more likely you are to be full of shit.

So I myself learned to be more cautious when I state things.  With the result that many folks (including some of my closest friends) think I’m “wishy-washy.”  I dunno; maybe I am.  I certainly don’t like to be wrong, although I think many people think I feel that way because of pride, or a need for superiority.  The truth is, I just feel bad when I’m wrong.  If I tell you something, and then it turns out I was wrong, I’ve misled you.  That makes me feel crappy.  You came to me for information (and, the older I get, the more that happens, obviously), and here I went and told you the wrong thing.  Makes me feel like a right bastard.

In addition, my whole philosophy of life reinforces the concept that absolutism is useless.  Again and again in this blog I’ve talked about how I believe in two competing things at once: from my initial post on what I (only half-jokingly) mean when I claim to be a Baladocian, to paradoxical views on reality and perception, semantics, uncertainty, quotes, parenting, hype, and grammar.  (Wow, that list was even longer than I thought it was going to be when I started to write it.)  With that many posts about how two seemingly contradictory ideas can both be simultaneously true, is it any wonder that I tend to stay away from statements that pretend there’s only One True Way to view the world?

But if I had to pick one single reason why I don’t believe in absolute statements it would certainly have to come back to ... a book.  Now, there are five books which I think of as having changed my life.  Four of them are fiction: Stranger in a Strange Land, Cat’s Cradle, Legion, and The Dispossessed.  None of these are perfect—charges of sexism against Heinlein are mostly true, and Blatty’s books require a strong stomach in places—but each of them caused some fundamental shift in how I viewed the world.  The characters of Valentine Michael Smith, John (a.k.a. Jonah), Lt. Kinderman, and Shevek all have something in common: they are all thrown into strange settings (Earth, San Lorenzo, a supernatural murder, Urras) and their attempts to grapple with the bizareness they’ve been thrust into generate philosophical ramblings in addition to essential plot points.  The plots of these books are very good, but that’s not why I list them here; in terms of sheer plot, there are many other books I like better.  No, it’s the philosophical ramblings that are the important bits.  Smith’s handling of money and religion, Kinderman’s views on the impossibility of evolution, John’s exploration of truth and lies, Shevek’s reflection on language and possessions ... these are the aspects which challenged my worldview and caused it to shift, sometimes in large ways, sometimes in small.

But perhaps none of these shook up my brain patterns as much as Quantum Psychology, a book by “science fiction” author Robert Anton Wilson.  I put the term “science fiction” in quotes, because, although some of what RAW (as he’s often affectionately known) writes is definitely science fiction, much of it can’t be categorized so simplistically, and quite a lot of it (including Quantum Psychology) isn’t really fiction at all.  In fact, Quantum Psychology reads like a textbook ... but a textbook for a class like no class you’ve ever taken before, nor are particularly likely to, for that matter.  I find it difficult to believe that quantum psychology has ever been taught in a college setting, even in the most liberal of institutions.

And yet, after reading it, you’ll wonder why not.  Well, you’ll also know why not—primarily because few teachers could present it and few students would “get” it—but you’ll still marvel that we don’t all have to learn this stuff.  At least I’m pretty sure you will.  I know there are people who are simply not wired to handle this sort of introspection, and, if you happen to be such a person, I fancy you’ll proclaim it to be pretentious tripe.  And that’s no reflection on you personally.  Maybe one day in the future it would make more sense.  Or maybe you can’t get past RAW’s dismissive stance on the world’s religions (in the same way that staunch feminists will have serious problems looking past Heinlein’s rather primitive portrayal of women in Stranger in a Strange Land).  Or maybe you just don’t care to dissect the universe that much.  That’s okay.  As always, I refer you to the masthead.

But if you’re the sort of person who’s bothered to read this far (which of course you must be) I bet you would find QP just as fascinating as I did.  Now, there are many vital concepts to be learned from this book, but one of the most fundamental is also (perhaps unsurprisingly) one of the earliest presented: E-prime.  I’ll let Wilson explain it:

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the “is of identity” from the English language.  (The “is of identity” takes the form X is a Y, e.g., “Joe is a Communist,” “Mary is a dumb file-clerk,” “The universe is a giant machine,” etc.)  In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words “is” or “to be” and the Bourland proposal (English without “isness”) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

Okay, that’s what it is ... but what’s the point of it all?

The case for using E-Prime rests on the simple proposition that “isness” sets the brain into a medieval Aristotelian framework and makes it impossible to understand modern problems and opportunities.  ...  Removing “isness” and writing/thinking only and always in operational/existential language sets us, conversely, in a modern universe where we can successfully deal with modern issues.

Okay, so the problem appears to be with our friend (and nemesis) Aristotle again.  Remember him from the balance and paradox discussion?  He’s the fellow who told us there were four elements (when there weren’t), and five senses (when there weren’t), and two possible truth values ... when we know the world is more complicated than that.  Well, it turns out that Aristotle had another potentially problematic habit: that of describing how the world actually “is.”  Or, as RAW puts it, “the weakness of Aristotelian ‘isness’ or ‘whatness’ statements lies in their assumption of indwelling ‘thingness.’”  But the truth is, again, more complicated.  If you think about it, it doesn’t actually make any sense to talk about what something “is.”  We can talk about things we’ve seen, or otherwise experienced, or we can talk about our opinions on the world or the things in it, or we can talk about how things act, or how we remember they acted.  But what something “is”?  Once you let go of your Aristotlean prejudices, it doesn’t actually make any sense.

RAW givs us a few examples of where “is” can lead us astray.  “That is a fascist idea.”  As long as the proposition is put thus, it’s bound to lead us into an argument.  We could fight over the technical definition of “fascist,” or we could argue about the intentions and/or beliefs of the person who came up with the idea, or we could debate about whether people’s perceptions on whether or not it’s fascist override any consideration of whether it actually is fascist.  Now, what if we restate the proposition in E-Prime?  “That seems like a fascist idea to me.”  Well, not much to argue about there, is there?  I could claim you’re lying, I suppose, but honestly: why bother?  If it seems like a fascist idea to you, okay.  It doesn’t seem like a fascist idea to me.  Glad we had this little chat.

So, see how “that is a fascist idea” is an absolute statement, while “that seems like a fascist idea to me” is properly qualified?  And also how the absolute statement is problematic, while the qualified one is just fine?

I could go on (as RAW does), but just think about it.  Think about the last time you had an argument with someone, and see if the word “is” wasn’t intimately involved somehow.  “That is a very bad idea.”  “Republicans are all in the pocket of big business.”  “Gay marriage is destroying American family values.”  “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  “This movie you recommended is crap.”  “You are so frustrating sometimes!”  The “is” is the part that makes it an absolute statement, and the worst part about that sort of absolute statement is that it involves us making judgement calls for things we can’t possibly back up, stating opinions as facts, and describing the very essence of things, when the nature of the universe mandates that all reality is mediated by our senses, so that the best understanding we can ever achieve is still just a mental picture of that reality.

Now, note that I don’t actually write in E-Prime—neither in general, nor even in this particular post.  In fact, go back and look for the places where I’ve used “is” (or “are” or whatnot) and notice how those statements are the very ones that provoke you, that are confrontational, that make assertions that I can’t actually prove and challenge you to apply your brain instead of just accepting whatever I say at face value.  If I had written this entire post in E-Prime, that would have made it very difficult for you to disagree with anything I said.  But maybe I wanted you to disagree.  Maybe I wanted to shake you up and make you think.

So, even though I think that E-Prime is a fundamental concept that everyone should understand, I personally believe that not using E-Prime has some value as well.  But, of course, that’s just my opinion.

Chapter 19 (begun)

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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; 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 one 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, aye, 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.





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What is this?

Chapter 18 concluded

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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 inner lagoon and let it float aimlessly.  She rejoined them in the bow and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking towards the shoreline of the island proper.  “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 composed of 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 waited calmly 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 a 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 right 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.”


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What is this?

Amor Fati

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 of 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 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

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

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

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

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:

• Brunak
• Obsidian Guards x2
• Kurrok the Elementalist
• Fire Elementals x3
• Water Elementals x3

for a total of 625 points.  I chose:

• Nilfheim
• Frost Giant of Morh x1
• Greater Ice Elemental x1
• Yetis x2^*

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 Brunak, 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

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

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

Chapter 18 (begun)

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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 expect a lot out of him ...”

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’?”





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