Busy

The past weekend was rather busy. Maryanne was gone all of Saturday morning, but thankfully I was able to get some household chores done while she was gone. Saturday night we went out for a birthday celebration to Erin's Snug Irish Pub; it was a less pleasant experience than I had hoped for, though probably what I expected considering what I had heard from other people.

Saturday afternoon some friends helped us move some furniture, including moving our sofa sleeper to our basement family room, and picking up some used furniture we had bought at quite a bargain.

After such a busy weekend I expected to sleep better, but I was still awoken by last night's thunder, and didn't sleep well after that.

Mood: Tired
Music: The Doors: "Riders on the Storm"

"Good news, everyone...."

Given enough time and enough LEGO bricks, some amazing and amusing things can be built, including this.

Mood: Amused
Music: ZZ Top: "Tush"

Tribute

In the aftermath of Brett Favre's retirement there are all kinds of things paying tribute to him and his career. Even on the Internet, adoring fans are taking the time to create things such as this.

Mood: Pensive
Music: Three Dog Night: "One"

Changes

They say in the Midwest, if you don't like the weather, just wait, because it will change.

So today, the first full day of spring, we're getting socked with a winter snow storm.

I recently posted that I had read a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. Unfortunately, I finished it mere days before he died. It also turns out he should be called Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Speaking of things dying... my MP3 player, and old Rio Forge, is now inoperable. It boots, but it can't read any of the music loaded on it, and it fails to reformat. Barring any miracles I will be in search for a new one. I currently have my eye on the Creative Zen, and the Sandisk Sansa Fuze, e280, and Clip. If anyone has any recommendations, I'd be willing to read them, with the caveat that I will not buy an iPod.

Mood: Thoughtful
Music: The Rolling Stones: "Start Me Up"

Sprung

I think we can safely say spring has sprung. Not only is today the first day of spring, but yesterday I saw both a robin and a red wing blackbird, both sure signs of spring.

Mood: Pleased
Music: The Who: "Won't Get Fooled Again"

Gygax

Normally I would hyperlink this, because it's so long, but since it's hosted by the New York Times, and registration is required, I'm not going to put anyone through that. Quoted below is the text of an op/ed piece written by Adam Rogers, a senior editor at Wired, in regards to the death of Gary Gygax.

Gary Gygax died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.

You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good” or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.

Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of “Star Wars” from memory.

Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too.

We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.

Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.

Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?

Mood: Thoughtful
Music: Journey: "Wheel in the Sky"

Supreme Decision

I found an interesting op/ed feature regarding today's Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller. The case itself could very well become one of the most important decisions the Court has ever made.

Mood: Thoughtful
Music: The Beatles: "Long Tall Sally"

Switch

Here's a list of reasons to switch from the Mac to PC computing platform.

While we're on the topic: is anyone else really sick of those Mac commercials with the "stuffy" guy portraying a PC and the "cool" indie guy portraying a Mac? Those, along with all the iPod hype, are making me not want to buy anything made by Apple.

Mood: Cranky
Music: The Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Crosstown Traffic"

Reading Material

I've been reading a bit more science fiction recently, partially in an effort to learn more about the genre while I rework a couple of my short stories into a longer work of science fiction. More on that later.

I started with Caviar by Theodore Sturgeon. Believe it or not, it took me a while to get the pun in the title. I was somewhat familiar with Sturgeon's work, having read his short story Killdozer! as well as seeing the episode of Star Trek he wrote. Good stuff there.

I then read Soldier, Ask Not by Gordon R. Dickson, not knowing at the time it's technically book two in the Dorsai cycle. I'm familiar with Dickson's Dragon series (e.g., The Dragon and the George), but found his science fiction quite a bit different, but interesting nonetheless.

Next was another anthology, Pendulum by A. E. Van Vogt. I didn't realize it was an anthology until several pages into the second short story. I was new to his writing; the first couple of stories were not very impressive, but then things picked up.

I'm currently working on Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke. It's very good so far. Now some might wonder why I'm reading this and not 2001. One reason is because it was in a tub of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks I borrowed from my mother; I want to work my way through that before I turn to any of the books I've bought recently. I'm hoping by doing that I can stave off the desire to buy any more books soon, because I managed to fill up our bookshelves again.

Mood: Thoughtful
Music: Emerson, Lake & Palmer: "Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression, Part 2"

Martial

This is utterly fascinating.

I wonder if the Wisconsin school is close to Madison....

Mood: Intrigued
Music: Rare Earth: "I'm Losing You"

A Wish

I find myself wishing again that the NFC Championship game earlier this year had ended differently.

I'm sure we can all wish that the Packers had won and advanced to the Super Bowl, eventually beating the Patriots, so that if Favre still had decided to retire, he could really go out on top, with another Super Bowl ring, to so cap a stellar career.

Even if that weren't possible, or even anything remotely resembling it, I wish for Favre and for the fans that his final play in the NFL hadn't been an interception. If the Packers had to lose that game, I would have preferred that it been by the Giants' own offensive merit, and not the result of such a glaring mistake.

In the end Favre has nothing to be ashamed of, and he shouldn't have any regrets. As he said himself, you can't be perfect all the time; you don't appreciate the wins and the good times without the losses and the bad.

The sting of the defeat in the NFC Champship and the loss of Favre to retirement will eventually fade, and then we will speak of some of the blunders Favre made over the year, only to be reminded of the many more spectacular plays he made over a truly illustrious career. Then we will come to speak of how Favre helped rebuild the most storied franchise in the NFL. Then we will come to speak of Brett Favre in the same breath as the likes of Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, and Vince Lombardi.

What better honor, though, if Favre could have ended such a brilliant career with one of those spectacular plays.

Mood: Pensive
Music: The Beatles: "Magical Mystery Tour"

I am...

A new trailer for the forthcoming Iron Man movie has been posted to YouTube.

Sweet.

Mood: Excited
Music: Black Sabbath: "Iron Man"

Historic

Yesterday was a momentous day.

The biggest news, of course, was that Brett Favre stated he will be retiring.

The lesser news, that I discovered today, is that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died.

Mood: Sad
Music: The Beatles: "In My Life"