Lost in the woods

Last week we got a tree. It looks like this now:

It's displaced me from what Girlfriend "affectionately" calls my "nest," that alcove by the window which was just the right size for a big, squishy chair or a decorative conifer. I guess they'll take turns.

It happened that the closest Zipcars to our house was taken the day we decided to get the tree, so we went along the trail to the metro station, where the next closest ones were. The trees on either side of the path were bare for the first time that I'd been around to notice, and I could see pretty deep into the forest. Something square caught my eye. Bricks, apparently. An oven? A fireplace? What looked like a foundation around it. We didn't have time to check it out just then, but it made for an interesting change in our impression of the formerly impenetrable woods, which had seemed to contain nothing but spawn points for deer. It's easy to forget that forests aren't necessarily old, and this one had sprung up where something had apparently been built. Had someone lived there? Had there been a road there?

On the way back from dropping the car off, we had more time, so we veered off the trail to see what we were looking at and maybe take some pictures. It would have been silly to expect too much, but I will admit to harboring some residual fantasies from my interest a few years ago in ruins photography. I wasn't hoping for anything spectacular, but some pictures of an old house abandoned in the woods, two stone's throws from my own house, would have been tremendously neat.

An aside, to point out the first thing I learned, which is something I knew objectively but have instinctively forgotten lately because I've been playing Skyrim: it's really hard to get anywhere when you go off the path. Sandbox games may have taught me to make a beeline for the floating triangle in the distance, but in real life bees make lines because they don't have to push underbrush aside. And on the subject of floating rectangles, once we were in the woods we didn't end up exactly where we had set out to go anyway.

Which was odd, because we did sight a square pile of bricks and go more or less directly toward it. But it wasn't an oven or a chimney, it was just... bricks.

And nearby were more bricks.

Also one of these:

But mostly the woods were just full of bricks!

The bike trail had once been a railroad track, so we figured this must have been the remains of some railroad-connected building, but that was as far as we could speculate. Chunks had fallen pretty helter-skelter. This one block may be what I mistook for a fireplace from the path, but I never did get my bearings that precisely.

Not everything was strewn around like that. Some foundations were in place, particularly some walls around a hollow that looked like they went pretty deep. Maybe this hinted at the purpose of the whole mess of structures, or would hint if I knew anything about railroads.

A culvert? Was there a bridge here? Only just now am I regretting not going deep enough into the woods to look at this from the other side. But in my defense, it was cold, and we were nearly out of sight of the path, and the bricks just kept going.

So the mysterious bricks remain mysterious, at least to me, and my dreams of ruins are... well, not ruined. Tempered?

The next day, our trudge through a Maryland forest still fresh in our mind, we decided to do what any reasonable people would do: we watched The Blair Witch Project. Which I'd never seen, despite being the perfect age to have been scared bejeezusless by it when it came out. Now that I am a fogey, I was able to watch it and keep most of my bejeezus, but that last image did get under my eyelids as I tried to go to sleep that night.

And when geese go overhead (it's weird to me to have geese still going overhead this late in the year), I imagine their honking as an ongoing argument, the one in front shouting, "We are going south! We've been going south!"

Oh, Christmas tree

There is a tree in my living room because Jesus. Sometimes the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Atonement seem a bit distant or abstract, but I have a pretty tree with lights on, and I can be thankful for the excuse to have it.

My favorite phase of the Christmas tree life cycle is actually when the lights have gone up but the ornaments haven't. That's the phase we are in right now here: the lights went up the night we brought the tree home, but except for the star on top, there are no other decorations. Not that I will regret when the decorating process is finished, but there's no rush.

Because our living room window is perpetually foggy at night, the view from outside is blurry and lovely.

I like the cold months at the end of the year. November is November, and even before the invention of NaNoWriMo it was always (for me) the month of my birthday and then Thanksgiving. Then December is Christmas, aesthetically if not strictly temporally. Yes, screw Black Friday, shopping season, and aggressive holiday creep. That stuff doesn't come into my living room, though.

I've gotten to the part of my 12 Dancing Princesses retelling where I describe the wondrous underworld (which comes later in the story than usual), and the Christmas aesthetic has definitely influenced that. (Aw, now I've gone and spoiled all my imagery, says half of my brain. You can't spoil imagery, you idiot, says the other.) It's funny how things come together that way--I needed some seed. I wonder what would have filled the spot if it wasn't December. Maybe nothing. My underworld would have been all the blander in that case.

Speaking of bland, I started playing Skyrim again the other day, after talking to friend who enjoyed it more than I did. I realized that I had somehow gotten sucked into spending all my time in-game doing the things I found most boring. Inventory management, clearing out generic bandit strongholds, trying to distinguish between grey-and-grey moral quandaries--screw it all. I'm playing at an entirely different pace now, and I'm finally seeing why people like the game.

Part of the trick is more deliberate characterization. My original character was too much like myself, and too much of a blank, for me to make him sufficiently amoral. But moral paragons don't belong in a game where you can rob someone blind by putting a bucket over their head.

In RPGs I do recreationally some of the same things I do pseudoprofessionally as a writer, namely characterize. In both cases, I apparently need to be repeatedly reminded of the importance of distancing myself from my characters.

I really thought I was better than needing to be reminded of that, but maybe that's something else I need reminders about occasionally.

"Blog grist" is a thing now

Urgh. I'm (re)discovering that it's harder to have something interesting to say every week when you have a regular job which doesn't, itself, furnish material. Unfortunately the creative writing has to slow down a bit to make room for the paid work.

As if I wasn't feeling somewhat uncreative, one of my friends is currently putting the finishing touches on a new human being. Or perhaps... just a first draft? There is a lengthy revision and expansion process which she and her co-author have not begun yet.

Truth be told, I don't really have much to say about this week. Everything of any interest has been either freelance work or politics, neither of which I want to make blog grist.

My personal Skyrim meta-narrative is becoming kind of existential and depressing. Having traveled the length and breadth of the land, from Windhelm to Markarth, and beyond the edge of the world at Winterhold, my hero has found no cause or person worth fighting for.

Sometimes a title doesn't come to you in time

I completely forgot to spring forward last night. On the other hand, I got to bed early. Somehow I usually find myself awake at the DST changes. One of the consequences of getting to bed on time was that I neglected to get a blog post up by the end of Saturday. My apologies.

The big news this week is that the freelancing has paid off. I use "paid off" in the metaphorical, antithetical sense that it has supplied me with substantial work, not that it has paid me, but the money is forthcoming. I secured a rather large website proofreading gig that will be the equivalent of full-time work for more than a month. Consequently I am relearning some of those adult survival skills, like time-management.

Ironically, because of my contract, being employed doesn't feel all that different from being unemployed. It was a busy unemployed, after all. There is less concern about money. It will be nice to be in the black again.

I gave it a little thought and decided that it wouldn't do to talk about my freelance assignments in extensive detail here. At least, I don't think it would be professional of me to to talk about "their" work (as it becomes when they buy it from me) with the same degree of flippancy with which I talk about "my" work.

I'm re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring for what I'm realizing is the first time. I read most of The Two Towers and Return of the King last year or so, but I realized that I hadn't started from the beginning since the first time back in 2001 or so, which is much longer ago than I realized.

I always maintained that Fellowship was flawed, with issues of tone, pacing, and scope. I don't quite disagree with myself, but keeping in mind some comments of Girlfriend's, and just now having left the house of Tom Bombadil, I see how the book functions better on its own terms--terms we hardly ever engage it on, knowing where the story is going.

The comparison of Robinson Crusoe comes to mind: a novel that felt compelled to tell you about the protagonist's backstory in its entirety before getting into the "plot." The novel was a new thing at the time and you couldn't just dump people into it. I suppose the same was likely true of epic fantasy before LoTR: you didn't take your characters directly from obscurity to world-scale events in an unfamiliar world. Of course now we do that all the time, jaded and genre-savvy as we are. We tend to go too far, I think (or maybe only I do) and regard everything that happens in Emond's Field or the Skywalker homestead as filler. (Do we ever shed a tear for Luke's friends, stood up in Tosche Station with an armload of extra power converters?) Tolkien, at least, begins with a quest that works better in relation to what comes before than what comes after.

Still playing Skyrim. I returned to the main plot and actually met a character who might be interesting, and a plot that might be interesting, too. About where they steal a page from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Then, you see, there are these dragons...

Is it great? No. But so far I've been more excited to see butterflies than dragons, and maybe with some plot that will change. Unless, you know, the butterflies are coming back...

Plans have been made to visit Seattle in June. Or was it July? Plans have been made. It's exciting, and at this moment feels closer than it actually is.

You are what you eat

It's almost Saturday again, and I'm trying to think of something to post other than that nothing much has changed since the last time I posted. I've made incremental progress on a lot of things. I've been researching video games (no, really) for another article pitch, and brainstorming adventure ideas. Plugging away at Nenle and Death. At least some parts of it have gotten to where I want them.

One disappointment is that the whole 72-hour response thing I expected from Paizo turns out to be a very old estimate. Like other venues, the normal wait can apparently get into months. So, I am still waiting, and coming up with other ideas mainly as a change of pace from other sorts of writing.

I've wanted to take a page from Alexandra Duncan's book (her metaphorical one, not her real one) and make a list of my media intake over the year. Where it seems to get tricky is that I haven't finished anything since the beginning of the year. Should I add something to the list when I start it, or when I finish it? What if I stop? Also, what if people who give me presents read my blog? What if I don't get around to reading or watching or playing everything I have? That's not really a what-if at all. I think I will always have a backlog of media, as I find things interesting at a significantly faster rate than I take them in.

On further thought, I figure I might as well try it. I can always take it down if I decide it's too much trouble. So, the guideline I'm using is that if I go to it twice, or finish it, it's on the list. This is to keep things off that I pick up once and never go back to. Things (like League of Legends) that I only do once but am pretty certain I'll go back to make the list too, though I'm more lenient about video games than books or television, and if I don't get back to the media in question in a reasonable amount of time I'll take it off the list. Anyway, I'm not going to claim to be reading Pope's translation of The Odyssey because I'm far from sure I'll pick it up again. Not to speak ill of Mr. Pope, of course, but in this day and age a little bit of that sort of thing goes a long way.

Lately I've been watching The X-Files. Almost at the end of season one. Skipped the episode about the Jersey Devil because of some sort of technical issue, or possibly boredom. Girlfriend and I came to the show as a compromise. We were looking at Netflix. I wanted Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she wanted Law and Order. I think we found a pretty satisfying middle ground.

I remember coming to that show very late (it premiered when I was eight). I think David Duchovny was gone already at that point. I liked it then, so I'm generally liking the older stuff a lot. Not that it's all good. There was the bit with the sentient computer that communicated entirely in sinister computer puns. And I think that "Born Again" and "Roland" may in fact have been the same script used two weeks in a row.

I was singularly impressed with "Beyond the Sea," which, as the 13th episode, I believe would have been the series finale if things hadn't taken off. It would have been a good one if that were the case. For one thing, it turns out that I really like Brad Dourif (and by "really like" I mean that when he wants to, he terrifies me). Mostly, or largely, though, it was a meditation on evil and skepticism and desperation that completely ruined my mood in the way that good art sometimes should.

I  haven't spent nearly as much time as I've wanted to playing Skyrim, which is almost certainly a good thing. My opinion, on the whole, has been going up. Just after I started complaining that the world was too safe, I started hitting monsters that scared me, and even ran away from the end of one boss fight to come back to it in a few levels. I still don't much care for anyone I've met yet though.

Skyrim as actualization tool, Skyrim as game

Skyrim has come to occupy an interesting place in the reward centers of my brain. If you've read the contract I put in my last post, you'll see that I'm not playing video games until I get a certain amount of work done. I've been holding to that, so every time I actually get to fire up the Xbox 360 is a declaration of victory, of sorts: that I have imposed a certain amount of order and productivity on another day, in spite of being accountable to no one but myself for how I spend my time. It's hard to overstate the significance of that. When I was unemployed in 2006 and 2007, the task of managing my own time (and my depressing failure to do so) crushed me beyond any hope of productivity. That period has grown to monstrous proportions in my mind. (It's worth remembering that I had more than being unemployed to be upset about at that point of my life.) I need to remind myself occasionally that it was really only two periods adding up to less than five months.

I say this in part to explain that another element of my victory consists of how little Skyrim I've played since Christmas. I could very easily have completed the game by now and be feeling very bad about myself. But I have played enough that I feel like I can talk about it.

While researching for an article on Dwarf Fortress, actually, I stumbled on this neat blog post. It reminds me of some speculation I did back in college about story in video games but haven't done nearly enough of lately. The upshot of the post is this, and what I've played so far bears it out: Skyrim could do without a main plot, and overarching plots are becoming a vestigial feature--even a detriment--of open-world games. The future is one of player-defined objectives.

I am excited for the game that fulfills this prediction, though the cool future is always a few steps further away than it looks from here. The game worlds--at the very least the ones put together by Bethesda--are becoming rich enough for players to create their own goals. The system of receiving and completing quests feels imposed at this point. It constrains some goals by specifically defining them, and delegitimizes others by not mentioning them.

Take one quest early on. A village girl's two peevish boyfriends both ask me to deliver letters to her forged in their rival's name. This is a "quest," so it is in the official list of things I can do and remains there until I do it. I can help the first one by smearing the other, or I can help the second one by smearing the first, and those are my options. In my game, the quest remains uncompleted, and probably will remain so.

Now, if I had my own way perfectly, I would tell this girl that both of these guys are pricks. That's not an option, and I can even understand how you might not be able to walk up to a stranger and say that to them. But if that weren't an option, my next choice would be to destroy both letters and not get involved. To me, that would seem like a conclusive choice, but it wouldn't "complete" the "quest." Whatever narrative I construct for myself, there's a loss of satisfaction in seeing, in text, that the game doesn't acknowledge my decision.

So while I enjoy Skyrim, I'm constantly butting up against the boundaries of its narrative structure. I'm also finding myself comparing it--much to my surprise, unfavorably--to Fallout 3.

For many of these same reasons, I found Fallout 3 frustrating and never finished it. Comparing the two games, however, there are some places where Fallout 3 clearly wins out, and I hope maybe a lesson or two can be learned before we make the Truly Open-World Game of the Future.

First of all, there's the characters. Interesting characters are a pretty elementary thing in good storytelling. In the first three hours or so of Fallout 3 I remember meeting at least a half-dozen characters who I can still remember several years after playing. I liked Amata, I felt sorry for Butch, I worried about the Overseer, and I was sorry to leave all of them. I liked the hideous ghoul bartender Gob and the quixotic sheriff Lucas Simms. I felt bad about getting Lucas killed by Mr. Burke, who I found more than a little creepy. Conversely, in Skyrim, I'm sorry to say I don't really care about anyone I've met so far. I hope this changes.

The world of Skyrim is pretty and all, but I felt more comfortable in the depopulated Capitol Wasteland. It didn't seem so strange there that, given a little patience, I could meet every inhabitant of a large city. Skyrim has more people but it feels more like a world in miniature, with populations and distances more noticeably scaled-down. Similarly, I never thought twice about the ubiquity of bandits in what was essentially a Mad Max pastiche. In Skyrim, I have to wonder about how anyone can farm less than a five-minute walk from not one but two bandit fortresses.

All that said, I'm really looking forward to getting my allotted work done today so I can grab my ancient Nord war axe of frost and clear out another bandit stronghold. Maybe after that I'll even get back to the plot.

Merry Belated Christmas

Christmas has come and gone. Parents and friends visited, extended families seen. Tree acquired and decorated. I enjoyed both Christmas dinner with Girlfriend's family and post-Christmas brunch with my own. Christmas remains my favorite season. I know that doesn't make me particularly special, but I'll add my voice to the chorus.

I had the opportunity to observe some of the family's newer members, and I noticed more than I think I ever had before how simultaneously jading and heartwarming a child at Christmas can be. I witnessed true, unvarnished joy, elicited by the satisfaction of un-self-conscious greed. We grown ups know that there are right things and wrong things to be happy about, and that interpersonal duties require that we never become fully absorbed in our own pleasure. Contrast with a five-year-old, concerned with nothing beyond what else he gets, at the moment he gets it.

In terms of my own haul, this Christmas has given me cause to reconsider my original plan of getting a job. It looks like I'll actually be needing that time to give adequate attention to the things I got. The acquisitional highlights of the season include another year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Batman: Arkham City, and freaking Skyrim. Preliminary assessments estimate these items to comprise approximately two zillion hours of media. Also, my parents gave me a Kindle, which contains a theoretically infinite amount of text. I started down that road by acquiring Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey for free, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for 95 cents. That strange little device has revived my likelihood of reading books that I had previously written off as just too big--not in terms of length but in terms of weight. I certainly would have re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by now if my neck didn't cramp at the mere thought of carrying it to and from work every day.

But, since neither Skyrim nor indiscriminate reading comes with health insurance, I grudgingly retain employment as Plan A.

I spent some time this week watching the meteoric collapse of Ocean Marketing, but I think that affair actually merits a separate post, and it seemed appropriate to do the Christmas post first.

Two blog-related items of of minimal importance:
1) This blog is approaching its 1,000th page view, which is both neat and pathetic.
2) I've decided to experiment with labels. It sounds like fun, and what's the worst that can happen? It might even make the blog more organized to future readers.