In which I hardly spoil The Hobbit at all

I'm going to have to almost beg some of my friends to read this post, since after my post about The Dark Knight Rises my reputation for spoiling things has approached mythic proportions in certain circles. So here goes: Guys, come oonnn. Every single one of you has read the damn book.

That said, if you haven't read The Hobbit, go do that. Seriously, just go. Don't use the internet until you've finished it. Your life will be better for it. I'll wait.

With that out of the way, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a positive experience on the whole. It also made me sad. Sad because I came away convinced that while Peter Jackson--no, not Peter Jackson, since we can't truly know the minds of the creative people involved*--but some entity or force, either a person or the emanation of commonalities in multiple persons' psyches--we'll call it Fred--brought The Hobbit to the screen as an act of artistic love; and a second entity or force--we'll call it Satan--compelled the story to be stretched into three long movies in a naked grab for money.

This is not actually what I expected. I thought of the Peter Jackson who shopped a two-movie Lord of the Rings for years until Robert Shaye made the brilliant--but then bold--suggestion that the films be a trilogy. When I first read that The Hobbitses would be not two movies but three, the article included some gushing by Mr. Jackson about all the extra material he was excited to be able to fit into the newly trilogized series. I now suspect that Mr. Jackson was compelled by Satan to say this. About 10-20% of the film's run time is padding and cruft that I can't believe anyone was excited to be able to include.

The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Okay Film is a prolonged battle between Fred and Satan, with both gaining and losing the upper hand at various points. The arc of the movie is a happy one, inasmuch as Satan solidly controls the movie in the beginning but Fred manages to prevail in the end, with only a brief resurgence just before the credits to promise that there will be a sequel.

Fred's influence on the film meant that the worst of my fears were averted. I had worried that there would be no differentiation in tone between The Lord of the Ringses and The Hobbitses. Instead, where Fred had his way, at least, there seemed to be an awareness that LotR belongs to the genre of Epic Fantasy while The Hobbit belongs to the genre of Fantasy Adventure. This is a difference that makes a difference. For example, Tolkien's habit of having his characters spontaneously bust rhymes was suppressed in the LotR movies. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Musical, not every song that Tolkien wrote shows up (by a long shot) but some of the characters sing, and they do so more spontaneously and with more coordination than anyone in the LotR movies did. There's also a slightly cartoonish veneer over the whole thing, which is not wholly unwelcome... but I'll get to that later, because it is mostly unwelcome.

Martin Freeman is definitely a servant of Fred, and Fred's power is at its apogee when Freeman's Bilbo encounters Andy Serkis' Gollum. In fact, this movie actually excited me about the character of Gollum in a way that the LotR movies didn't. LotR Gollum was innovative and praiseworthy; the Riddle Game would have been a brilliant scene if Andy Serkis had been on screen himself in grey makeup.**

Satan's influence on the film meant that I was disappointed in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most pervasive effect of Satan's influence was--believe it or not--the CGI. Basically all the goblins, trolls, wargs, eagles, staircases, hedgehogs, and bunny rabbits are fairly obviously digitized illusions. It seemed pretty blatant that after demanding eight hours of movie, Satan was not willing to shell out for bigatures, props, and makeup on the scale of LotR. (After all, we were all going to see the movie anyway, and aren't computers 10 years better than they were 10 years ago? That has to be enough.) As a result, the movie mostly works, but it never inspires the awe that its predecessors did because it is mostly fake. See the aforementioned cartoonish veneer.

The inserted character Azog, who is apparently set to be the series' visible Big Bad (allowing for Smaug to be handled more intelligently, like Jaws), is particularly unconvincing, which is a particular shame. He also feels thoroughly obligatory and joyless... and pretty detachable. He may not be as much an attempt to pad out the movie as to create a throughline in an otherwise episodic story, but the attempt is misguided. If I were a betting man I would bet that his prominence was ramped up in post-production to fill the void left by the Necromancer, who presumably was going to be the villain of the first half of The Hobbit but will now be contained instead in the second third.

The writing is uneven, in places as insubstantial as the CGI, but I expected weakness there. I am really surprised to have been so visually disappointed by The Hobbit's superfluities. It is true that a lot of the superfluity is super-superfluous. Elijah Wood, in particular, seemed to have just wandered onto set on his way to pick up his check. There are several characters who we are apparently just supposed to be happy to see, and we don't do much more than see them.

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

Finally, a lot of fuss has been made about the framerate. I can't speak to it. What I saw was obviously old-fashioned 24 FPS, and if anything, it actually ended up blurrier than other movies I've seen. So if you can, I guess, try the 48 FPS, maybe. I don't know. All the reviews I read complained about it. It's probably the future, though, so get used to it, I guess.

* And certain people insist that copies of The Silmarillion burn when Peter Jackson touches them, and he wants to cancel Christmas to make more room in the year for warg attacks.
** Not to minimize the contributions of the digital puppeteers who created the physical performance. It's beyond me to say where Serkis' decisions end and the animators' decisions begin.

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.

50,000 words later

One of Girlfriend's friends and coworkers dubbed the period after November "NaNoNoMo," and although I immediately asked Girlfriend never to say that again, the term keeps coming up in my head. NaNoWriMo is done, after all, emphatically. Everyone I know who started, finished, including myself. My Arthurian saga has grown by another 50,000 words. While this installment is unusually talky and will probably shrink, rather than grow, in the revision, I'm glad I forced the ideas through the pressure-fired chaos engine of an arbitrary and unreasonable deadline. Even though I thought I had a plot in my mind, more or less, I surprised myself three times (by my quick count) with spontaneous decisions, made either at the keyboard or in the bathroom, that turned out to be my story.

I had intended, setting out, to make this installment about the reign and death of Uther Pendragon. When I finally got the crown on Uther's head around the 40k mark, I realized that he wasn't going to die this month. I had written a book in between the beginning of my story and the beginning of my plot.

So that was fun. A weekend later, I've got work to do (which is a nice change from the week before) and a lot of freedom (which is unnerving after a tight-packed month). I can get back to my 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, which I should have finished in October, or really in July. I can relax.

Oh, right. Christmas.

A NaNoWriMo-style update

I can't really blog today. I have to write 16,114 words by the end of the month.

See you next week.

Fatuousity

I like words a lot. It feels a bit pretentious to just assert that, but it is the case (and maybe it's also the case that I'm pretentious). I appreciate the ways words express our thoughts, obviously, but I also like the way words carry ideas with them. I can take two words without any preconceived image (walrus, gargle) and when I put them together (walrus gargle) they create an image, or several. Now I'm imagining someone distilling arctic wildlife into a hygienic mouthwash. I didn't seek out the words for that particular effect; it just happened.

There's a dark side and a danger to this. Words carry meaning, and they can combine to create new meaning, but this isn't the same as creating truth. I suspect those of us who live especially on words are particularly susceptible to forgetting this. Obviously, just because I recently envisioned a pinniped-flavored mouthwash does not mean such a thing does, could, or should exist. Most people get that. But if the words I string together at random are abstractions, it gets more dangerous.

Suppose I said, "Shame is the resort of cowards." Its provenance is the same as walrus gargle. I can make a sort of sense of it, and I think it's baloney (or bologna?), but if I insinuated it into a book of quotations, a certain sort of person could confuse it for a profundity.

If you're not careful, you can pull this on yourself, and convince yourself of all sorts of ridiculous things.

So what set me off on this ramble? Well, in my wanderings on the internet I encountered this article on Slate. (I confess I encountered an article mocking it before I read the article itself.) The article, by literature professor Andrew Piper, is headlined: "Out of Touch: E-reading isn't reading," and is excerpted from his book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. It's actually an interesting read, in its own way--at least to someone who does not regularly read this sort of academic spun-nonsense confection.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose that an editor came up with the flatly declamatory headline. It was probably meant to attract traffic by irritating people like me and getting us to blog about it. But the damage is done. And the rest of the article is an amazing irony engine: it argues the inadequacy of the experience of e-reading (since it lacks the physicality of dead-tree books), but there isn't a shred of substance in all the words he strings together.

He says, "The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine." Okay. It could. That's not actually a chronological assertion, I guess, just an erudite way of saying "Here comes a quote from St. Augustine." He relates Augustine's conversion, in which he picked up a nearby Bible, read part of Romans 13, and converted. Piper finds significance, I guess, in the fact that Augustine picked up a hardcover Bible instead of just reading the passage on his iPhone--it's not really clear. "No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one," he says, and that's that.

He continues in this vein: words, words, words. Touchscreens are worse than turning pages because "kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience."

At his most cogent, Piper's argument echoes the ancient scribes who scoffed at the idea of putting spaces between words. Having to figure out for yourself where one word ended and another began enforced deeper thought about the text, they would say. And, says Piper, "Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant." But at its most entertaining, the article spins its semantic wheels with hardly any friction at all. The closing paragraphs are an intensive course of eyebrow calisthenics, starting with the assertion that "Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus," and concluding, "the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand."

Look, I love books too. I can't count the books I can see without turning my head here in this chair in my living room. I do appreciate the flutter of a softcover book. Sometimes it's even useful to be able to write in the margins. But a book is its contents, not its shape.

It's harmless, really, and I don't want to be too mean. I probably wouldn't even be writing about it if I hadn't also learned this week about the bizarre "Allocutions on the Wall of the Harvard University Library," a collection of quotes that are apparently quite popular in China, and spuriously claimed to be written on the wall of... you get the idea. The inscriptions are emphatically disavowed by Harvard's actual university librarian, but a lot of Chinese people allegedly take them seriously.

The sayings themselves are exhortations to work harder, like "Happiness may not be ranked, but success will at the top," and, "Enjoy the unavoidable suffering."

This is something worse than silliness, because it shapes people's thinking. And these are just words conjured in a syntactic imitation of wisdom. With an appeal to the authority of the wise and diligent vandals of Harvard University, they assumed the illusion of history, weight, and veracity.

Words have power, and they can come out of nothing. There's something rightly frightening about that.

NaNo update Mo

NaNoWriMo is on, and every year is a new adventure. This year I'm freelancing, which means managing my own time. It also means that instead of just having to write one thing, I have to write several, some of which I'm getting paid for. So, I confess, I'm quite a bit behind this year. Of course every year I have my birthday to throw me off. In fact, every year I'm behind pretty much until the end.

I decided to go back to my Arthuriana. It's taking some time to get back on track with it, which I actually hadn't anticipated. I had forgotten just how long it's been since I wrote the installment that came last in the continuity--what I wrote last year (and finished belatedly) was more of a prequel.

Sigh. Things got complicated, and I forgot them. I really should have spent October reading my own book.  The good news is that it's mostly come back together now, and I've got some plot going again. I've had to stop dropping hints to Girlfriend about what I have in store for my alpha couple, because of the anguished sounds she makes. "You know how this is going to end!" I told her.

Meanwhile, on Friday we went to see Skyfall, which was a worthy investment of our time. It's not quite good all the way through, but it's surprisingly good for the first and last third, which made the whole experience very satisfying. In fact, quality-wise, the structure of the last three Bond movies is somewhat recursive.

I tried to go deeper into that thought, but I really shouldn't. It's silly.

A pumpkin again this time

Another Halloween, another hollow fruit. I considered a watermelon this year, but they aren't in season. I also considered a few different kinds of squash out of apparent necessity, seeing only small and moldy pumpkins at the Home Depot where we happened to be looking for pumpkins and storm supplies.* We decided to have a go at another store, though, and they had plenty of pumpkins, so we bought one.

I've tried to be arch or clever with my Jack-o-lantern designs for the past few years, maybe because I had housemates to impress. This year I tried a design or two that amused me but I settled on something more sincerely creepy. Maybe because I've been reading so much Lovecraft. But this is what I came up with:

Not bad, I think. Thought you might like to see.

Sweet dreams.

* We're fine, by the way. The power stayed on, obviously, since it's still on and now I'm posting to my blog. There's a swampy patch in the basement, but we've had worse.

Avant le déluge

Why am I still sick?

It's getting less amusing. I guess it was never amusing, since it started with me throwing up in bed. Or, possibly, I got sick and got better briefly, and this is the sequel; but if it is a sequel, it's a sequel like The Two Towers, and was in post-production while the first installment was in theaters.

I think there's something to the sequel theory. A lot of the plot points have changed, and the original villain has been replaced. Fatigue and coughing aren't nearly as intimidating as nausea. Which is a negative for a movie but a positive for an illness.

I might be staying home from judo if promotionals weren't next week. As it is, I've still got things to learn, so I go. Specifically, I'd really like to learn how to do this before the test:

It's hard!

If those problems aren't immediate enough, we've got some kind of Voltron hurricane aimed at the upper east coast, throwing people into a panic. I mostly expect that the impending doom is overhyped, but I did buy water and matches today.

NaNoWriMo is approaching fast. I've had some breakthroughs talking to Girlfriend about her story, but I haven't actually figured out what I'm doing. I could continue with Myrddin, although that story is getting too big to write in one-month increments at a one- or two-year interval without producing major plot holes. I could also do something in the fantasy world that spun off from the D&D campaign that everyone seemed to like, but I haven't gotten a handle on the characters yet. I've also considered a sort of Lovecraft-inspired modern thingamajig, but I don't think I could ramble well enough to NaNo if I wrote in a modern idiom.

Indescribeable horror on Netflix

As I continue to delve into the works of H.P. Lovecraft, my primary happy impression is that he clearly got better with practice. I hit a vein of quality around "The Call of Cthulhu" onwards.

CoC was interesting enough, although most of it has seeped into the popular culture already to the point that, if you have an interest in Lovecraft, reading it the first time is almost like re-reading it. (It is also possible that I read the story in the CoC RPG rulebook and then forgot, which would explain the sensation.) It's a good example of most of the best and some of the worst of HPL's writing: vivid cosmic forces, lightly sketched humans. Lovecraft often seems to treat characters as a formality; in CoC humans mostly exist to relay information to the reader. On the other hand, he gets over his accustomed aversion to actually describe what, you know, the story is about. Cthulhu actually gets as good a description as we could want, which is why it's possible to crochet tiny ones, if we want to.

I indulged a bad habit while reading it, and kept thinking about how it would work as a movie. Last night I found out that someone else thought the same thing, but better. In 2005 the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society made a movie of "The Call of Cthulhu." It's on Netflix.

Which I would have thought would be a horrible idea. I think an attempt to adapt the story straight into a movie wouldn't have worked, but the HPLHS borrowed a page from Lovecraft's own geometry book, a drew a line that was straighter than straight--so straight that it cut through space-time. They made the movie as it would have been made if it had been made at the same time as the story: so, in 1928. Which means it's a silent film, which is a brilliant stroke. (I wrote "a brilliant stork" first. It is not that.) For one thing, it gets around the sparseness of HPL's dialogue. It distances. And yes, it makes me feel smart to like it.

They also made the special effects plausible circa 1928. This, too, I found brilliant, ultimately. It doesn't do Lovecraft's monstrosities justice, but neither, really would modern CGI. They might create something believable, something with tentacles, but of course that would be half the battle, and winning one half would be losing the other half. After all, the point is more that you can't register what you're seeing, not the tentacles and so on. Dated effects almost fortify your suspension of disbelief in this day and age.

So, in summary, if you have Netflix, watch The Call of Cthulhu. It's only 45 minutes long.

Not being up to it

Grumble grumble. Still sick. Just barely, but just enough. For a while now I have been vacillating over whether to compete in a judo tournament my club is holding a mile from my house. I hoped to fight, but then this flu or what-have-you happened, and I spent the two weeks ahead of the tournament convalescing instead of getting my act together. So my act is not together, which is disappointing. However, when I went down to the venue yesterday to help lay the mats out, and doing that made me dizzy, I felt justified in passing this tournament up. But, bah. I am frustrated.

At Thursday's judo practice we had some mock matches to prepare people for the upcoming tournament. The experience made me more determined to compete on some level, somewhere, because I realized that I'm awful under pressure. When my turn came up and people started watching me, the world got a little blurrier. The echoing corridors between my brain and my muscles spontaneously filled up with cotton. All this just because we were pretending for a minute that it mattered. So this is something I ought to get over, not only in judo but generally, if possible.

Projects are advancing, even if nothing got finished this week. NaNoWriMo is coming. I need to figure out what to write. (And I should finish 12 before November starts.)

Cooling issues

It's gotten to the point where you could fry an egg over my laptop's hard drive. I'm considering renaming my power settings "Over Easy," "Over Hard," and "Bacon."

It all started when... well, it all started when I bought my laptop five years ago, but this isn't that kind of story. (Anyway, if the moral of this story is that HP laptops have a five-year life cycle, I really want to punch someone.) So let's say it started when the fans of my laptop cooler died, and soon thereafter I developed an urge to play Guild Wars 2. In the fullness of time my money was gone, and GW2 was on my computer.

Now, back in the day, my laptop would overheat playing the original Guild Wars if I wasn't conscientious about propping it up properly, so it seemed reasonable that the sequel might run hot, too. Additionally, I recalled that I had never, in the machine's five-year life, removed any dust from it. Now that I look into laptop maintenance, I find that going five years without cleaning your laptop is like going five years without cleaning your baby, if dirty toddlers caught fire. (They don't, right?)

I went to the internet and found people with similar problems being advised to blow compressed air into the vents in their laptop to get the dust out, so I did that.

Perhaps the impertinently directed blasts of cold air angered the fire elemental which animates my laptop. (They have those, right?) Anyway, things got hotter instead of getting colder.

I revisited the advice I found on the internet, and found other people issuing dire warnings to never just blow air into your laptop at random, you crazy fool. It just makes things worse. So now I know that.

Apparently what you have to do is open your computer up and get at the heat sink assembly and, if you've treated your laptop like I have, remove the rodentlike mass of dust with tweezers. So I unscrewed the panels on the back of my laptop. I found hard drives. I found a battery glued to a circuit board. I had to go back to the internet to figure out how to get at the heat assembly, and what I found, everywhere I looked, was that for my type of laptop, the HP dv6700, in order to access the heat assembly you have to disassemble the laptop entirely and detach everything from everything else. The inner workings of this machine are encased in layers of armor serving no apparent purpose except to keep dust in, and non-HP-employees out.

If my livelihood did not depend entirely on this machine, I might make the attempt. I have spent hours finding instructions for how to do it, with all the different kinds of screws labelled. In the mean time, I am playing Guild Wars 2 while soothing my machine's fevered brow with medical ice packs (and also a new cooling stand). Otherwise, the game just doesn't play.

The other day my laptop opened up a seam and spat out a screw--literally spat, with allowances made for the lack of literal lips. I think my laptop is daring me to crack it open.

As if to inflict empathy with my laptop's plight, on Wednesday I was afflicted with a miserable fever. It took me a while, but through trial and error I discovered that if I got too hot, I threw up--this while my body was shivering, begging me for blankets, mind you. Vomiting at least made the chills go away, but I learned that I could choose between being cold and being ill. So I started applying the ice packs to myself instead of my wretched computer, with similar success--that is, limping but very real success.

Anyway, that got steadily less terrible as the week went on. I have to profusely thank Girlfriend, who dealt with me like a saint no matter how pathetic I got or what I threw up on, and all while suffering through a less violent incarnation of the same disease.

Looking back on this post, I have to say that if you knew about some of the turns of phrase I came up with but didn't use, you would thank me.

Update: Girlfriend's parents are coming to visit today (imminently, in fact), which means someone has to vacuum. Luckily, we bought a vacuum a month ago for just this purpose, after the old one died a slow and ineffectual death--but we hadn't used it until today.

Guess what safety feature our new vacuum cleaner has. Guess. Yes: a thermal shutoff. And to further protect me, the thermal shutoff is on a timer, so the vacuum can't turn back on for 30 minutes, regardless of the temperature.

I don't know why the damn thing shut off after three minutes of use, or again 33 minutes later, but clearly Hoover thinks that I am too dumb to vacuum a carpet without burning my house down.

Good thing I had a broom and a dust pan, because who doesn't like frantically trying to sweep a carpet?

Libraries, later

I don't think of libraries nearly as often as I ought to anymore. When I was but a lad my parents had a system in place by which I had to read an amount of time equal to what I spent watching television and playing video games. The library was a regular destination then. I needed a constant supply of books to keep pace with my constant intake of video games. Normally I paid the reading forward, but every once in a while I would rent a game for the weekend and go on a four-hour jag that left me deep in the hole, frantic to get a big block of reading done before my OCD found me and broke my knees. The genius of the system, which I think surprised my parents plenty, was that it was mostly self-enforcing.

This was the period that I tore through series books: Choose Your Own Adventure, The Hardy Boys, and Fear Street were staples of my literary diet, and you can bet I never paid for all that reading. It was that era when I developed the tendency to never be "between" books.

Looking back, I think college, of all things, broke me of recreational librarying. As an English major I always had something to read, and it being college we were all expected to buy our books and write in them so the school could buy them back for cheap. My fiction and nonfiction needs were covered by academic mandate. When I wanted a book for recreation in college, it was probably a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook. These were reference materials, so even if the college library would have accommodated me (which I doubt), I really needed to own them. At any rate some of these books ended up in pretty sorry shape. A chair leg gouged a large hole out of the spine of my Dungeon Master's Guide. My general philosophy of tidiness at this time was that the floor was flat, and so were books, so it made more sense to walk on them than to pick them up.

After college I lived in the University District of Seattle, which is the land of the secondhand. The secondhand economy of Seattle's U District was not even remotely limited to books. Old furniture was abandoned on street corners--the garbage trucks ignored this; it was simply assumed that someone would want it and take it away. We furnished our house by harvesting the sidewalks at the end of every school year. Every summer I would find a propane grill that was slightly less broken than our current one, and roll it home. Half of the clothing stores sold artisanally marked-up secondhand clothes (in constant supply as people grew out of them every freshman year). At one point we took in newborn kittens for a local shelter, simply to ensure that the kittens were secondhand when they were finally adopted out.

Books were used in Seattle, and hence cheap, but in Seattle I also lived with a series of people who owned books I hadn't read. So what I didn't buy used I mooched outright. That situation continues to today, when I live in Maryland. Sometimes it is worth it to leave the house, but as I write this I can see literally years worth of reading material from where I sit, literally without turning my head. That's just how booky this house is.

So it's not that surprising that it's taken me this long to get anything out of my local library here in Hyattsville. I was, and remain, dismayed by the lack of bookstores in the area, but we have a nice library, which Girlfriend convinced me to look at.

The library is to thank for our recent watching of Shadows of the Vampire, which we couldn't find for love or (little enough) money through normal channels, at least not on short enough notice. The local library has a reasonably eclectic, erm, library of DVDs that beats the pants off of Netflix in terms of the wheat/chaff ratio.

Also, there are books. I actually find that I've forgotten how to browse a library. At least, I used to be comfortable with going into a library and not being sure what I would bring home, like some men are with bars. As I got older, and my tastes have become less forgiving, or more stodgy, I've gotten more used to setting out with a specific object in mind and subsequently being either satisfied or disappointed.

Considering that, it's nice to find intriguement (intriguedness? intrigual?) somewhere between satisfaction and disappointment, and to go with someone beside myself with the nerve to hand me a reprinted 19th-century book on secret societies. I don't know whether it will be good or bad, but it's almost certain to be worth more than nothing, and likely to be gristful in any event.

10 steps forward, 10 steps back; and you're 30 steps from where you started

I began this blog post preparing to share a particularly macabre dream I had last night, probably resulting from am overdose of politics and Lovecraft, late hours, and the onset of a cold. It may simply be best to spare you, on second thought. So I will. Spare you, I mean.

I have had a frustrating series of breakthroughs in my story 12, each of which required serious rewriting and deleting. At least the story is getting shorter, and I'm almost equally sure that it's getting better. It makes me wonder, though, if rewriting and unwriting are inexorably part of my "process," or if I'll learn someday to outline. Yet discovering as I write is part of what excites me, which I think means I will always be doomed to discover as I write that something I have written was wrong. And maybe I'm really just wishing I could get around the trouble of revision, which is silly of me.

Many of my leisure hours (though surprisingly few, compared to some people who write on the subject) have been consumed by Guild Wars 2. It's hard to know what to say about it except... it's really, really good. An odd thing that separates video games from almost any other medium is that direct sequels are so often better than their originals. Perhaps it's our varying expectations of originality. But it's something I noticed first with Halo 2, which was just... better. Something I probably would have noticed earlier if I had been older earlier.

It's been a week, and more productive than many, in spite of my worst efforts. I actually get a Sunday. Good for me.

"Old Bugs," and how to make a point badly

One thing I will say about Lovecraft,* he is good enough that his misses are educational. I keep coming back to a story I didn't like very much, as a good example of a sort of literature I don't like very much, that being the fictional polemic.

"Old Bugs" is a deviation from form for Lovecraft, being a fictional harangue about the evils of alcohol. Not being particularly interested in the American interbellum period, myself, I tend to forget about the temperance movement, Prohibition, and so on. So it came as a surprise, but shouldn't have, that H.P. Lovecraft, in addition to his other uptightnesses, was a teetotaler.

The story, written in 1919, takes place in the distant future of 1950, where alcohol is illegal and only available at the seediest of speakeasies alongside hashish and opium. The title character** is a thoroughly wretched drunk who is far fallen from prior respectability. The story is contorted a bit to give the impression of a major reveal, but the upshot is that in spite of being a lifelong thrall to the demon drink, Bugs heroically prevents [spoiler] from starting down the same dark path.

It's worth pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia (by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz) calls "Old Bugs" "a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody."*** It may well be, although the humor went by me, and I think the sin Lovecraft commits is basically the same either way.

It's not the argument itself I want to talk about, although it intrigues me a bit to see how Lovecraft portrays drinkers as wretchedly addicted, to a man. Was the concept of alcoholism as something that some people are prone to and others aren't in circulation in the 19-teens, I wonder? Even uninterested as I am in recreational drugs, some of the imagery (men licking spilled whiskey off the floor in a bar where they're presumably already being served) makes me wonder if the excesses of D.A.R.E.'s rhetoric existed through the ages with its target changing with the circumstances.

I enjoy and appreciate arguing and making points. I don't like seeing polemical points made overtly through fiction.

Now, I was going to go off about my frustration with the practice--but then I remembered that tales as venerable as "Little Red Riding Hood," wouldn't I? What am I saying if I condemn "Old Bugs" for making a point through fiction but let stand stories that are genuinely persuasive or thought provoking.

There are two points I won't settle for from myself:
1. It's wrong to do it badly, but it's okay to do it well.
2. It's okay as long as you're making a point I like.

My conclusion is that fiction is useful for demonstrating "truths," but not for demonstrating "facts." If an author says "what if such-and-such?" and proceeds honestly from there, the reader will usually follow. True, the author may only have presented an intriguing thought experiment in this case, but that is the limitation of not using facts. If an author simply says "this is so" in the context of fiction, there is no argument. The author is simply saying "because I said so" and there is a very narrow range of subjects on which I will take a fiction author's word. It's a good habit not to trust a nonfiction author either if you can manage it.

* There are actually many things I will say about Lovecraft, but today I will say this.
** One also forgets that "Bugs" was once a "name."
*** It's also worth granting that this story was not published until after Lovecraft's death, so we shouldn't judge him too harshly by it. I hold it to be unfair to judge an artist by what they choose not to release to the public.

Remembering remembering September 11

The front page of every news site I look at today makes prominent mention of the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I find myself asking, for the first time I can remember, whether remembering the attacks should be a yearly observation.

I try to remember a comparable event. Only John F. Kennedy's assassination comes to mind. Perhaps someone who knows can inform me: were there memorial observations a year later, on November 22, 1964? Ten years later, in 1973? In 1974?

My intent here is not to diminish JFK's death (if it turns out that we did not observe it so consistently afterwards) or suggest that we should lay off the 9/11 memorializing. I just mean to say that the way we have continued to mark the date, especially without it actually having been made an official holiday*, strikes me as unusual.

Last year I set down my memories of the day of the attacks. Today I went back and re-read them, to remind myself. These things do slip away if we don't mark them. As I get old enough to notice myself forget things that happened to me, I realize that memories are not self-sustaining. We mark what we choose to remember.

I remember that in 2002 I was already disappointed in how quickly we had lost what good had come of the attacks: a sense of unity and purpose, a shared conviction that America was worth protecting, imperfect though it was. People had sworn that "everything had changed" and then, largely, gone back to the way things had been before. Not everything changed, but some things did, and as might be expected of murder, the deepest changes have mostly been for the worse; but eleven years on I think that, when we said we would "never forget," we might actually have meant it.

* Correction: apparently it is. I confess that I had not known. Apparently "Patriot Day" was created on December 18, 2001.

Clayton astutely pointed out that Pearl Harbor Day (December 7) is the closest analog we have. By contrast, though, it was designated in 1994, almost 53 years after the attacks.

So, to be honest, I'm disappointed that September 11 was immediately made an official holiday. If it were not, I would suggest that it be made one now, and it would perhaps mean more. I would prefer a name that didn't taste so strongly of euphemism, as well. But perhaps it says something better about us that the events are remembered, while the empty words disappear. There are quite few mentions of "Patriot Day" today.

First impressions of the unnameable

I wrote this on Saturday (on time) and it turns out I forgot to actually post it...

Having developed an appetite from It, I've started working my way through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, compiled for the world's behorrification by the Cthulhu Chick. (For free, by the way. Certain contemptible schmucks have taken this same ebook and attempted to sell it for a profit, but it started out free.) Besides being something I just felt like, it seemed like a needful step in my writerly education.

Like most people of a certain age and disposition, I felt pretty familiar with Lovecraft's work through derivative media. My first conscious encounter with the "Lovecraftian" was the video game Eternal Darkness, which scared the bejeezus out of me and my college roommates back in the day. I played Call of Cthulhu and had great fun, in spite of the terrible mechanics of the tabletop edition we had at the time. By the time I read Robert Howard's Conan stories, I could see the Lovecraftian influence without having ever read any actual Lovecraft.

I did not intend to read the entire collection, but each story has been at least imaginative enough to entice me to try the next. Lovecraft's writing surpasses his stereotypes but also embodies them shamelessly. More than once (most egregiously so far in "The Transition of Juan Romero") he does indeed resort to flatly refusing to describe the action. What he had in mind may be too terrible for the human mind to bear its description, but it's easier to think sometimes that he didn't have anything in mind at all.

There's also the racism. Lovecraft's attitudes as they appear in the story are more than dated; as the accounts run, he was intensely racist for his time. Actually, I'm inclined to say he was more pathologically xenophobic than racist in the mundane sense. At least the racism as such in the stories (so far) is not as appalling to the modern mind as some of what comes up in Robert Howard's works. Either way, it's something the modern reader just needs to get past, and it's worth the getting past.

That said, I am also repeatedly surprised by Lovecraft's imagination. It's not all academics coming slowly unhinged in the face of tentacled monstrosities. He has a broader range of subjects than his reputation, and commands a variety of terrors. I would give examples, but I worry that that would go to far toward spoiling whatever story I named.

Addendum: I am glad I hedged about the racism I found so far in my reading, because almost immediately after posting this the first time I encountered stories which might be referred to as the "meat" of the racism-based Lovecraft objection. What I will forgive, for the sake of my own reading enjoyment, is the oblique racism of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and stories like it. At his best, Lovecraft plays far enough afield of the recognizable world that it's not worth worrying about the possible origins of his terrors. (Is it really fair to say that he wrote about interbreeding between humans and monsters because he objected to miscegenation, or is it more likely that miscegenation disturbed him because it reminded him of much more terrible couplings which he could imagine?) What is probably too poisoned to be read for its own sake, however, is "The Street," which, it should be pointed out, is only slightly fantastic. Here we are treated to the quaint racism of a hundred-years-bygone America, when the eastern bounds of Europe were sufficiently alien to frighten a sheltered Anglo-Saxon. "The Street" was an interesting read in its own way, but not in the ways that Lovecraft must have intended it.

Things going well, for the most part

I'm excited lately. I'm not sure if I have a reason. It could just be that I've changed (re: dropped some of) my medication, and a little bit of my ADHD is coming back. It could be that I'm replacing the missing stimulant with caffeine, though I'm actually hardly drinking any more than I did before. It could be, and I hope it is, that some things are going right.

I successfully extracted my health insurance from the bureaucratic barathrum that held it out of my reach for 72 days, at final count. There's a story there, but it may be the sort that diminishes in the telling. I am not Franz Kafka; this tale is outside my expertise. Suffice it to say, in brief, that I called and I called and I called, and the whole process felt like fixing a broken VCR by swatting it with a rolled-up newspaper. Eventually something went "clunk" and the mechanism moved.

The immediate upshot was that I could go to judo last night without being afraid that I could bankrupt myself by dislocating my pinky toe. I had a good time, skinned my knuckle, tore the knee of (one of) my uniform pants, and got sore. And it is wonderful to have a body capable of picking other bodies up and throwing them down again; it is wonderful to have a body capable of self-repair when the same is done to it.

I was up late the night before that working on 12 when I had a breakthrough, or an inspiration, or just a couple good ideas. I should keep this in mind in the future as evidence that you really can find a solution for a story that's stuck by sitting down and writing at it for a while. I wish I could explain exactly what I thought of, but I should just put it in the story. Anyway, sometimes, occasionally, writing actually is exhilarating, and it has been once or twice this week.

I've been talked into playing Guild Wars 2, which is also exciting. That would entail playing with friends, and it was also explained to me that the game allowed you to combine skills with other players' on the fly in a manner reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, which made my heart sing. Actually sing. I need to see someone about it.

I also finally remembered to throw some money at the Kickstarter for The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. You should too, if you haven't (and soon--the deadline is September 7), because it's going to be good, and Bryan will be in it. They even shot some of the movie already at this year's GenCon. Here, watch this:

Now I suppose it's possible that that makes no sense to you, in which case I apologize. A little.

The last thing, I guess, is that I'm leaving tonight for New York to visit my parents. My plan for the weekend consists of visiting, taking advantage of the pool, and little else.

Adventures in adventuring

I hit a dubious milestone during my time in Cape Cod. You may recall way back in January, when I submitted my first pitch to Paizo. A few weeks ago I finally heard back that it was rejected. I was confident enough in my vision for the adventure that I think it's the worse for them if they don't buy it, but I'm exercising my prerogative and they theirs in that. Rejection does mean that I have the rights to the pitch, which makes me wonder if I want to go into adventure publishing for myself.

I wanted to try my hand at a Pathfinder adventure but I didn't want to beat my head against that door; if they didn't like what I had, I would take my ideas elsewhere. I didn't want to go out of my way to have new ideas amenable to their pitch format, and I certainly didn't want to wait seven months to hear back from them if I could help it. So this probably would have been the last I thought of pitching anything to Paizo, except that I stumbled back to their submission blog in a clicktrance the other day and found this.

At the beginning of August, just before I got my rejection, they changed the submission process. (Note, I'm not saying they changed the process out from under me; this isn't health insurance.) In fact, they changed it to something that made a lot more sense. In Mike Moreland's own words:

We found that asking for a few hundred words of prose didn’t give us a good sense of how an author would actually perform when tasked with writing encounters, designing stat blocks, and mapping, all of which are vital skills any freelancer needs to possess...

Which is kind of what I was thinking as I wrote my pitch. So what they're looking for now is actual miniature adventures instead of prose summaries. I didn't think I would, but ideas came to me. I think I actually might.

My regular (or erstwhile) players would hate me if I sprung what I'm planning on them. Mostly because spiders. It's basically an exercise in seeing how many spiders I can fit in an encounter. My desire to experiment with spiders may be the result of reading It. Something about tapping into visceral horror. Maybe also something about living with a lot of people who can't stand spiders.

RPGs aren't just about inflicting pain on your friends/acquaintances. They're about facing terrible things and beating them. GMs and adventure writers should be purveyors of high-quality victory. That's what I'd like to do.

Arguing with fortune cookies

My first day back from vacation nobody, understandably, wanted to cook. Consequently I'm still working through fortune cookies, and I have to say that this last batch has been a bit odd. The old tricks don't work so well. (You know the ones I mean; "Do not hesitate to look for help, an extra hand should always be welcomed... in bed.")*

That's the sort of thing you expect. Of course there was the one time my grandma got "Pass the check to the person on your left," but that would make less sense if it came with take-out. But the one I got the other day, and really wish I could find now, said, "Evil as a force cannot exist to the healthy mind."

Does that mean to you what it means to me? Because my reading of that is that only crazy people could believe in the Devil. I think my cookie was trying to pick a theological fight with me.

I don't even believe in evil as a personal force, but I know people who I think do. It's not a conversation I've had recently. It's not that I'm personally insulted, but... pretty cheeky for a cookie, don't you think?

The next day I had a fortune cookie with (or maybe for) breakfast, which said, "Today is probably a huge improvement over yesterday."

Why, yes, cookie, at least so far... in the realm of cookie fortunes.

* Before you judge me, I swear that that, minus the coda, was the first fortune I saw on fortunecookiemessage.com when I went looking for a "normal" fortune.

Back to something

Sometimes, as good as it is to be gone, it's better to be back. Sometimes I suppose the opposite is also true. At any rate I am back, and happy to be so. The summer, defined here as vacation season, is over.

Hanging out with my grandmothers the past week entailed a decent amount of time spent watching the Olympics, an alternately intriguing and appalling affair.

Intriguing, because some people have gotten shockingly good at some odd things. Teenage girls busting out acrobatics that I dismiss as fanciful when I see them in video games. People moving at impossible speeds. And it does warm some hidden patriotic organ of mine somehow to know that an American swam the fastest, even if I never attached any importance to the activity before and probably won't again, except maybe four years from now.

Appalling, because I find myself watching network television again, and all of my mechanisms for surviving that environment have atrophied beyond recovery. Was I really able to sit through six commercials at a stretch when I was a younger man? I am not what I used to be.

Now that things are boring again, maybe there will be time to do things worth writing about.

Summertime, and the livin' is crazy

Summer is a crazy time. On Wednesday night I got back to Maryland from Cape Cod, by way of a layover in Philadelphia. On Sunday I'm leaving again to go on a tour of my grandmothers in the Carolinas. In all this I'm trying to find time to work--to work work, mind you--and also to write.

I didn't finish my 12 Dancing Princesses story, which I'll just call "12" for now until I come up with something better. That sort of diligence didn't really seem in the spirit of the vacation I was taking, but I'll keep at it. I actually think this story will be cool when I finish it. I like it.

Over the last six weeks I've been having a Kafkaesque experience with Maryland's state health insurance plan. It's not such a great story in the telling. The upshot is that the enrollment department's game plan is apparently to tell me my paperwork is out of date and make me fill it out again, and repeat, until (I guess) I give up or die. So I am currently, technically, uninsured.

So between being out of town and knowing that I'll have to sell my kidneys if I break my arm, I haven't done much judo lately. I can console myself by watching it on the Olympics, although that itself is a strange experience--NBC, assuming nobody in America cares about judo (I guess), has left most of the feeds raw. But I can be excited, at least, by the news that an American has finally won a judo gold medal. I can also look forward to picking through NBC's three-hour feed to watch that happen.

I have now watched The Dark Knight Rises twice since I last posted about it. It was a very good movie but did not flirt with greatness like its immediate forebear did. I am satisfied. Now I can start devoting my anticipation to The Hobbit, which I hear has now been racked out to three movies. No doubt there will be more to say on that.

How to watch judo: A guide for the layperson

This isn't what I normally do, but I've been excited about judo in this year's Olympics, especially since Kayla Harrison stands a good chance of winning the United States' first ever Olympic gold in the sport. And some of the write-ups I've seen of the sport have been sloppy or downright wrong, like the one in my hometown newspaper. Even last year's commentators seemed resigned to the idea that no one watching had any idea what was going on, and that's sad.

Judo is a deep and exciting sport, and I think the public deserves at least an attempt to explain it. Most of the information out there on martial arts generally is geared toward learning how to do it—what I hope to do in this post is to give someone who has never learned judo enough information to watch the sport and enjoy it, without having to sign up for lessons or learn Japanese.

The beauty of judo is that it has relatively few, simple rules, but the sport that grows out of them is wonderfully complex. You don’t need to know the Japanese names of all 77 throws in the Kodokan syllabus to follow what’s going on. Hopefully, you just need to read this post.

So what the heck is judo anyway?
Judo is a combat sport, like boxing or wrestling. The goal is to defeat your opponent by throwing him onto his back, pinning him down, or using a submission hold to make him give up. The techniques of judo are descended from the empty-handed fighting methods of Japan's warrior class during the country's long, long feudal period. Despite its violent origins, the essence of judo is control. It is not a bloodsport—the first thing players learn is how to avoid injury.

There is no punching or kicking in judo. Apparently this needs to be emphasized, because my local paper claimed that judo players use throwing, joint-locking, and striking. So here it is again, to be clear. There is no striking in judo. There are no shivs in boxing. There are no flamethrowers in soccer.

What the heck is going on in a judo match?
I'm going to go through the different phases of a judo match and explain what to look for in each of them. These aren't official phases, like innings in baseball, but the players will be doing different things at different times and this should help you follow along.

A Judo contest is held between two players on a padded mat. The judo uniform is a heavy cotton jacket and pants similar to traditional dress in Japan. This uniform is one of the reasons that Judo plays out so differently from wrestling or MMA fighting: it gives the players something to grab onto as they try to move their opponent.

As I said before, you win a judo match by throw, pin, or submission. A partial throw or pin—I'll explain this later—is worth 1/2 point, and 1 whole point is all you need to win.

The beginning: grip fighting.
The first thing a player needs to do is get a good grip on his opponent. A judo match can begin with a few seconds of tentative grabs, blocks, and pull-aways, as each player tries to get leverage over his opponent without letting his opponent do the same. When someone has a good grip, he'll attack.

The meat: attacks.
Now the players try to throw one another. (It is possible, but extremely difficult and rare, to catch someone in a submission hold while standing; and obviously you can't pin someone while you're both standing up.)  There is a lot of movement here as the players try to get each other off balance. Generally, you can avoid being thrown a certain way by setting your weight against it, but that opens you up to another throw. The players exploit this by attacking with combinations of throws, one after the other.

Pay attention to the players’ postures. Both players want to stay mobile and upright, where they are well-balanced and able to attack. A player leaning one way or another is vulnerable to a throw. A player with legs set wide and their hips low, often keeping their opponent at arm’s length, is in an extremely defensive posture, and will have a hard time attacking.

There are at least 77 recognized judo throws, but you don't need to know them all. I certainly don't yet. All you really need is to recognize three main types of throw.

1. Major throws. Someone on the receiving end of a major throw can catch some serious air. These are throws where thrower turns his back on his opponent and pulls him over a part of his own body. This includes the shoulder throw, which is the classic "judo throw," e.g. the throw you've seen if you've only seen one judo throw in your entire life.
   
   That’s throwing someone over your shoulder. Sometimes the throw goes over the hip or the leg instead, bus the result is about the same.
   
   It’s easiest to catch someone in a major throw as they are moving forward, or pushing forward.
    
2. Leg reaps. These are where the thrower wraps one his his legs around one of his opponent’s legs and sweeps it out from under him. In a way, these are the opposite of the major throws, because it is easiest to catch someone in one of these when they are moving backward or pulling you. The most common reap looks like this:
   
3. Trips. Tripping is a perfectly valid attack in judo. Trips are subtle attacks that require good timing. Players often attempt trips to provoke a reaction that opens their opponent up for another throw. Honestly, you probably already know what it looks like when you trip a guy, but here's how it goes in judo:

There are a few throws that don’t fall into these three categories, but they aren’t common. If someone pulls out something interesting and esoteric, now you at least know enough to turn to the person next to you and say, "Hey, that was an interesting and esoteric throw!"

For the throw to be worth a full point (and end the match) the thrower has to throw with speed and force, and the throwee needs to land on his back. If one of these doesn't happen, the thrower gets 1/2 point (or no point, if the throw was really sloppy) and the match continues.

Going to the mat: Grappling
When one or both players are on the mat a whole other dimension opens up. Sometimes a player will try to stand back up rather than engage a formidable grappler on the mat. This is where pins and submission holds become a factor. If the action comes to a standstill on the mat, the referee will separate the players and stand them back up to continue the match.

There are two defensive positions you should recognize on the mat.

1. The “turtle” position is very defensive. The player “turtling” essentially curls into a ball so he can't be thrown, pinned, or put in a submission hold. The player attacking will try to turn the turtling player over, or find a way to attack his arms or neck. The referee will often halt the match when a player proves unable to break this position.
    
2. The “guard” position is where a player is on his back and has the other player between his legs. This allows the guarding player to control his opponent’s hips and provides a lot of offensive options. A player in this position isn't pinned, even if his opponent is on top.

Pins in judo are fluid; the pinning player can change position, as long as he is still holding his opponent down. The person being pinned will usually buck and roll, trying to make enough space to get free. Holding a pin for 25 seconds gets 1 point; 20 seconds gets 1/2 point, and 15 seconds gets a tiny fraction of a point that's only good for breaking ties.

There are two types of legal submission holds in judo: chokes and arm locks. The player on the receiving end of one of these can tap the mat three times to signal that he gives up.

Judo has a lot of techniques that involve choking an opponent with his own jacket. If you see a player on the ground working his hands into his opponent’s lapel, that’s what he’s trying to do. They can also choke by wrapping their arms (or legs) around their opponent’s neck.

(An interesting point about choking in judo is that the players don’t try to close off their opponents’ air supply—they try to cut off the circulation of blood to their opponents’ brains by squeezing the sides of the neck. This works faster than attacking the windpipe, and it’s also safer for the person being choked. As a result, players caught in chokes often choose to keep fighting until they pass out instead of tapping. They usually come to a few seconds after the choke is released, a bit disoriented but uninjured. But please, please, don't go strangling your friends now because you read here that it was okay. People do die from this when it's done wrong—judo players know what they are doing.)

An arm lock is a technique that will break the other player’s elbow if applied with enough force. The elbow is the only joint that it’s legal to attack this way in judo; elbows are pretty durable, and they have a lot of nerves in them so a player knows when they need to  tap out. Judo players—especially Olympic-level ones—can tell when they’re caught, so arm locks hardly ever result in injuries.

When you see a player trying to get control of one of his opponent’s arms, he is probably trying for an arm lock.

At the end.
A lot of Olympic judo matches last until time runs out. If nobody has a full point, whoever has the highest score wins. If there's a tie, the match goes into a "golden score" period, which is perhaps a more civilized name for "sudden death overtime." Essentially any score at all is enough to win the game at that point. If that ends and there's still a tie, the referee and two judges vote on the winner.

What the heck are they saying? Some Japanese phrases you'll hear the referees shouting.

The terminology of judo is in Japanese, and though I've avoided using Japanese terms so far, there are a few you'll need to recognize.

“Hajime!” means “begin.” It’s the starting bell.

“Matte!” means “stop.”

“Ippon!” means that a player has won the match.

“Waza-ari!” means a player has gotten 1/2 a point.

“Yuko!” means a player has gotten a fraction of a point for a 15-second pin or a not-very-good throw.

“Osae komi!” means that one player has pinned the other. The clock starts on the pin when the referee announces it.

“Shido!” is a penalty. If the match ends in a draw, the player with a penalty will lose. Some things that can get a player a penalty are: putting their hands in the other player’s face, retreating from the other player, trying to “fake out” the other player with attacks that aren’t serious, or grabbing the opponent’s uniform in certain very aggressive ways without trying to throw. The first penalty called is just a warning. The second a player gets gives a yuko (fractional point) to the other player. A third turns that into 1/2 point.

“Hansoku Make!” is something you shouldn’t hear. It means that a player has broken the rules and is disqualified. Some things that can disqualify a player are: grabbing straight for the opponent’s legs, attempting an illegal submission hold such as a knee lock, or using a flamethrower.

There's more, of course. There's always more. But if your eyes haven't glazed over by this point, you've learned enough to watch some judo! Pick someone and root for them.

Addendum: The scores don't make sense! What the heck do the numbers mean?
For some reason, most scoreboards don't like that an ippon is 1 point, a waza-ari is 1/2 point, and a yuko is 1/∞. The scoreboards try to show the scores using whole numbers, which makes for a hybrid solution that's confusing for everyone. So forget what you know about math. A yuko is scored as 1, a waza-ari is scored as 10, and an ippon is scored as 100. Pretend they never invented numbers without ones or zeroes in them. 1+1=1. 10+1=11. 10+10=100.

Bat-ticipation

The other day I re-watched Batman Begins again, having re-watched The Dark Knight not too long ago for the fourth or fifth time. I was struck again by how much better TDK was than BB. While Begins was a fun and interesting look at how one might build the Batman character in a mostly/relatively realistic world, it wasn't great. You know, not great-great. I probably enjoyed it only slightly more than Superman Returns, all told, though I'm given to understand that I'm the only person in America who thought Superman Returns was any good. Begins was weighed down by overwrought dialogue and scenes that mostly read as the-scene-where-we-establish so-and-so, followed by the-scene-where-now-this-happens. TDK was really just a higher caliber of film. I'm also repeatedly surprised by how detachable it is from its predecessor. The actors are (mostly) the same but look at the city, the tone, the plot threads. It's like the movies are from two closely related but distinct continuities. Is there anything that happens in Begins that you need to know about to follow TDK? Posterity might forget that TDK was a sequel.

Anyway, watching this was part of a lead-up to The Dark Knight Rises. I've resolved to see it on Friday because I've spoiled myself enough for it already and I don't think I'll be able to go one day after it's come out without finding out every damn thing that happens simply by being on the internet. I expect every dimrod and nimwit who went to a midnight showing will wake up Friday afternoon and plaster the internet with OMG BATMAN DIES FROM A BOMB THAT EXPLODES IF HE LETS GO OF IT AND SO HE SWIMS IT TO THE BOTTOM OF GOTHAM HARBOR WITH IT DON'T SPOIL THIS ANYONE!!!?

That is my fear.

One story that I don't worry is going to give me unwanted insight into Rises is this nonsense about Bane representing or corresponding to Bain Capital. Some Democrat tried to draw comparisons between the two because Bane and Bain are homophones and wouldn't it be great if that meant something? Then Rush Limbaugh decided to weigh in, or hit back, or whatever it is he does these days. What baffles me is how he can think the Dark Knight franchise is carrying water for the Obama campaign, when if he couldn't read a neocon allegory into The Dark Knight he just wasn't trying. Maybe that's the answer. And not to brag but I thought of the whole Bain/Bane connection several months ago and decided not to mention it to anyone because it was stupid.

The tickets are purchased. Tomorrow I will go and see this movie with my girlfriend and then eat a delicious hamburger, probably while we gaze devastatedly across the table at each other pondering how Christopher Nolan pulverized the last of our faith in the human race.

Plans and rationalizations

Having a girlfriend and parents in education--and keeping a freelancer's hours oneself--means that summer is once again vacation season; a state of affairs I have regarded as rightful since a young age, like Santa Claus. The irregularity of my habitation should explain the irregularity of my posting as of late; at least, I throw it to the bench to plead for me. Do not cross-examine it too harshly.

Next Saturday I will be in Cape Cod, at my ancestral estate, where there is no internet. I should perhaps endeavor to post something that weekend anyway, from a Panera at least. The flip side of the freewheeling freelancer's schedule is that there are no true vacations, only changes of venue, so I will have to catch gulps of WiFi when I can.

The exciting development of the past couple days is that Girlfriend has simultaneous job offers from three schools, each one a worthy one to the best of our knowledge. She is forced to play the Lucy Westenra between them--not a bad situation, all told, but why can’t they let a girl work at three schools, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? The real answer, as in Miss Westenra's case, is that there are only so many hours in the day, so you have to disappoint someone. (And lest I seem too glib by far, it really is a shame that there aren't three of her to go around.)

Girlfriend is also attempting a truncated JulNoWriMo (which would seem to stand for "July Novel Writing Month," which only almost makes sense), and I find her a compelling example. My current plan is to get the draft of Nenle and Death done in the next couple days, and use the remainder of the week to draft another short story that's been a long time in coming, but in this case never started: my riff on The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I recently encountered an influence that filled out my vision for the story, but it would probably be telling too much to say exactly what that is.

I want to set a more vigorous--even rushed--writing pace if I can. I received a sharp jab from a recent post by an author whose opinions I have been following. It's worth a read, if you're one to read about writing. The upshot is this: the idea of perfection is a danger to a writer. It keeps stories from being finished, and it keeps writers from growing. Now, Kristine Kathryn Rusch is no fan of the MFA style of literary criticism, and she actually does me the favor in her next post of tearing into that school of thought more vigorously than I can fully agree with (When following any pundit, I think it's wholesome to find the limits of your agreement.), but the admonition to get over yourself and just write bears repeating. In a year or so I will probably be sharing how someone else said the same thing and prodded me out of another period of artistic torpor. If I ever have the authority I will probably start saying the same thing. Or perhaps the pendulum will have swung all the way by then, and I will stand astride a pile of self-published kruft crying, "For God's sake, revise, you fools!"

And, really, I haven't been in such a torpor of late. I'd been making actual progress and enjoying it. It's alternately frightening and exhausting, but in between, it's pretty great.

A walk through the ghost trees

Some people wanted to know if I ever got my dwarfpire situation sorted out. (See the end of my last post for the beginning of this story.) Copper ballista arrowheads were slightly more effective than bare wooden arrows. One was enough to knock the vampire down, after that the other arrows just shot over him without hitting him. I gave up on the ballista, and sent miners into the space above the vampire's cell. They mined through their floor/his ceiling until they caused a cave-in. Dropping the ceiling on him did the trick; the vampire mayor was really and sincerely dead.

Now, on to stuff that matters. Last week was a wonderful reunion with college and Seattle friends on the Washington coast. Fun was had; games were played; drink was drunk, and so were we. A Burning Wheel campaign was begun that I hope will find a way to continue; I'm getting better at creating characters that intrigue me. I hope the other players at least find him tolerable.

The house we stayed at was nice, if slightly architecturally surreal. It had no front door. It hovered on columns over a wall-less garage space, from which a spiral staircase took you up into a laundry room. The other door was a glass sliding door opening on a balcony facing the beach. Either of these would have been the back door of a regular house. It was a beach house, so I suppose the side facing the beach was the front.

And how was the weather?

Typical for the Pacific Northwest, I guess. That's the house we stayed at, in the middle.

Not that it stayed that cloudy the whole time, but as I said, we passed more time with games than with frolicking. I did, however, get a chance to walk a little way along the beach and had a pleasant scenic surprise.

You see, the whole beach that you could see from the house pretty much looked like this:

Just out of sight, though, there was a stream that ran into the ocean. Girlfriend and I followed it into what was, for me, the nonsocial highlight of the week.

Here is the stream itself. You can see some of the coloration from the silt, or clay, or whatever the water was full of. In person it was quite vivid and striking: the water was yellow at the edges, then red into carmine, and finally a deep, deep indigo where the blue from the sky took over. The stream cut into hilly forest on the far bank:

You could just see that yellow rock face in the distance from the house; that's what we had set out walking to get a better look at in the first place. But the stream, naturally, kept going, and it had been eating away at the shore for a while.

The trees that the water had undercut were all a ghostly white, essentially driftwood that hadn't drifted anywhere. One fallen tree branched into the bank like it was trying its hand at being a tributary.

The stream had driven people away too. The abandoned posts of several docks marched into the forest, where one supposes houses had stood until the ground fell out from under them.

At least, I assume these supported something because they all come up to the same height. As you can see from some of the lower stumps, someone had cut everything down along the bank, perhaps to get this wood. (A little more searching suggests to me that this used to be a bridge. To where, I wonder.)

Opposite these cliffs the trees came right up to the bank, so that's as far as we went inland. A little farther on, a couple of boys were setting off firecrackers, taking advantage of the natural amphitheater. I wondered if they had climbed through the trees or come from the opposite direction.

It turns out that this area is where the Moclips River empties into the ocean. It's odd, and somehow refreshing, to come to a place and explore it without knowing its name. The whole place felt unspoiled, even though it obviously wasn't. I wish I found places like this by accident more often.

I art when I video game all the time

A friend from college lured Girlfriend and me into Washington D.C. proper, where we ducked into the Smithsonian American Art Museum to look at the Art of Video Games exhibit. Why, yes, we are nerds.

Without being too harsh, it was not what we had hoped for. It partly came down to a grammatical quirk. I had wanted to see art from video games, perhaps concept art, stills, and things of that nature. What I got was more an exhibit explaining how video games could be art themselves. So, you see, it was something like picking up The Art of War expecting it to contain reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry and Guernica. Something like, but not exactly.

The problem really was that we were well ahead of the exhibit. We needed no convincing that video games were legitimately art, in the same sense that movies are. The question of whether video games deserve to be in a museum is like the question of whether a cheetah deserves to be in a zoo. It's not a matter of classification or merit. Onla a small subset of art is best experienced in a museum.

You'll hear no complaints from me if you assert that video games have narrative, evocative, salutary potential. The booklet accompanying the exhibit, according to Girlfriend (who read it), was a bit breathless about this, praising the medium's achievements with a convert's zeal.

Anyway, we weren't the intended audience, really. In this (and perhaps only this) we were more sophisticated than the mainstream museum crowd. I would have liked to see a room full of stills from Myst, instead of a large cabinet where it could be played, accompanied by a paragraph on how immersive it was.

It was a nice, nostalgic afternoon, though, of the sort I am likely to miss this year when other people go to PAX. And this is not to say that I didn't see or learn anything new. I had not known, for example, that Doom 2 was the first game to employ a "game engine." Girlfriend also pointed out the unusual number of major installments in video game history that are #2 in a series.

Speaking of the narrative potential of video games, though, I've been sucked back into Dwarf Fortress with the last few batches of updates, and more of a story has come of it than I had expected. Though it's not completed, I will share it with you.

My fortress had a vampire. Some dwarves were waking up mysteriously pale, and one was found dead in his room, completely drained of blood. So the search was on.

It was the mayor. I found out by accident that he had come to the fortress under a pseudonym. Examining his history revealed a suspiciously long list of previous residences. Most damning, he couldn't remember the last time he had drunk alcohol, which in a fortress that was practically afloat in booze, was almost proof positive that he had developed an unnatural thirst.

This was dismaying. Here was a mayor who had made himself more useful than mayors usually do. He had come to my attention by single-handedly striking down a rampaging minotaur. Nonetheless, he had to be removed. I convicted him of the murder of the dead dwarf. He was sentenced to 200 days in prison.

Here's where things get tricky. One, in Dwarf Fortress your control over the dwarves is tenuous. I could not, for example, set the mayor's sentence; that was up to the sheriff. Two, you can't just off a dwarf, generally. I couldn't sic the militia on him, but clearly the justice system wasn't going to handle him either.

I spent his jail term building a deathtrap: a mechanical series of glass spikes operated by a lever which I could order the mayor to pull. Unfortunately, when his sentence was up, the mayor didn't get straight to lever-pulling. In fact, his first act as a free dwarf was to chow down on the sheriff. Then, perhaps as an apértif, he helped himself to the fortress's most distinguished chef. This deed, at least, had witnesses. Then he proceeded to my deathtrap. Which, it became apparent, didn't work. It was a simple design error; he stood too close to the lever and the spikes didn't reach him.

At least he was occupied for the time being, diligently pulling the lever back and forth. It gave me the chance to lock him in the room, but I couldn't just keep him there. As the most charismatic dwarf in the fortress, he kept getting re-elected mayor, garnering support, I suppose, by whispering through the keyhole.

We were onto Plan C. I had the dwarves cut a hole in the ceiling directly above the vampire nee mayor, and then ordered them to fill the room with water.

I should have figured that dwarfpires don't drown. There was nothing for it; I had to let him out so the sheriff could arrest him again. The effect of opening a closet completely full of water was about what you would expect.

Justice, which had been Plan A, was now plan D as well. For the mayor's two additional murders, one of which had ten witnesses, he was sentenced to... 400 days in prison. Of course.

So I needed a Plan E. When he was tied securely in his jail cell, I removed the door and built a ballista in the jail cell opposite, so I could fire giant crossbow bolts directly at him. I had my siege engineer sharpen logs for the purpose, figuring that if a 300-pound wooden stake wouldn't fix my vampire problem, nothing would.

I hope that was wrong, because after five wooden ballista arrows, fired at a space of perhaps 15 feet, the vampire is thoroughly bruised and not much else. And that's where I stand now. I'm hoping that copper arrowheads will have more effect, because I'm running out of options.

The Middle.

Gripes and birdsong

The little finger of my right hand has been a study in scarlet, so to speak, this weekend. I'm learning about anatomy. Which is good because Thursday's judo class wasn't all that rewarding otherwise.

Apparently a finger can dislocate and relocate all at once, or at least so quickly that by the time you turn you head to see what the popping sound was, it's where it ought to be again, looking all innocent. (And by "relocated" I mean to its original position; my finger didn't migrate.)

Anyway, ow. My finger is close to the size and color of its opposite again, but I wouldn't mind if it could hurry up again. It makes it hard to grab things or type. Also, the "p" on my keyboard is being troublesome, so that when I write "paper" it tends to come out "aer" and so on.

Oh, what a world, what a world.

Entirely unrelatedly, I have half a mind to try JulNoWriMo--that is, NaNoWriMo in July. It would be exciting and/or foolish because I have absolutely no idea what I would write. One advantage/disadvantage is that it would require me to finish off the story I'm writing now by the end of the month. That would be a good thing to do if I could anyway. So, as you can see, I really am ambivalent.

Yesterday morning I was in Philadelphia, awoken by an intriguing bird. It was cycling from song to song not unlike a car alarm, and it just kept going. I understand that some birds advertise for mates by showing off their extensive musical repertoire. If birds really go for that than this one must have been neck-deep in ladies. He went through what seemed like easily 100 songs.

I got to thinking about whether there were trends or memes in the world of birds. It reminded me of the internet, with people gathering and disgorging vast numbers of words and phrases stripped of context. I'm not sure it increases the odds of mating in humans, but we do it anyway.

This particular bird stuck to bird songs, but I do remember the mockingbird that picked up my mother's alarm clock and things of that nature. I was reminded of the impressive Superb Lyrebird, who adopts his songs indiscriminately. This one, for example, that picked up the sounds of construction at the zoo.

Birds don't understand us or what we do, as a general rule, but apparently they think some of our noises are cool enough to repeat. Is it all one to them, or do they know that human sounds are different from the other songs they pick up? Are these bird memes? Do birds repeat people noises because they're nonsensical to them? Do they think we're hilarious?

The metaconflict: Artist vs. plot

Back in college my friend tried to get me into Evil Dead. I wasn't impressed. Besides the fact that I didn't (and still don't) like horror movies, Evil Dead just didn't seem very good. My friend tried to impress on me that there was another story going on: that a bunch of film students without much in the way of equipment or experience went into the woods and made a whole movie, with plot and editing and makeup and a script and everything.

I didn't see that story, even though I see how he did. I didn't have the interest in the mechanics of film as such to analyze how or if they were done. Besides, I figured, the story of "someone made this thing" necessarily underpins basically everything.

Lately I've noticed myself paying attention to that "someone made this thing" narrative, though, and today I remembered Evil Dead.

If you watch my blog's sidebar (and I don't really know why you would) you've seen that I've been working my way through The X-Files. Girlfriend and I have been watching it in large gulps, almost always while one or both of us are working. As a long-running show, it had its good episodes and its bad episodes, but we noticed an odd and very unscientific correlation: the better written an episode was, the more likely that characters would survive and the problem would actually be resolved. Some weeks, it seemed, the writers stumped themselves completely with whatever terror they had thought up.

Of course, every writer faces this problem to some extent, but most of the time not coming up with a smart solution meant shoehorning in a dumb solution. The structure of The X-Files had the advantage (drawing, maybe, from the horror branch of its genealogy) that failure was an option. The entire supporting cast of an episode could die without upsetting the status quo. There was no guarantee that Mulder and Scully would solve the mystery, either. If the writers wrote themselves into a corner, they didn't necessarily have to write themselves out again.

Sometimes, when an episode didn't seem brilliantly written, Girlfriend and I would start watching the other story--the one about television writers on a deadline trying to think up a solution to their premise in time to save the supporting cast. They won some; they lost some.

I only recently realized how often I do this, though.

Yesterday Girlfriend and I got to see the Folger Shakespeare Theater's production of The Taming of the Shrew (on the very last day, no less). I didn't have any particular need to see The Taming of the Shrew as such, but well-produced Shakespeare is often worth the trouble. We were particularly interested in how they would "handle" it, because there's so much in the play that, taken at face value, is offensive or even disturbing to modern sensibilities. So we went out fully expecting a sort of gladiatorial theater: Folger Theater vs. The Taming of the Shrew; a fight to the finish, perhaps even to the death.

I'm glad to report that both combatants survived. However, there was no clear winner. The theater's strategy was bare-fisted; rather than cut the play deeply they tried to pin it down by laying interpretations on top of it. Two choices in particular were, in retrospect, like breaths of fresh air.

First, a lot hung Petruchio's sincerely exasperated and regretful delivery of "He that knows better how to tame a shrew, now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew."

Second, after the scene where Petruchio denies Kate a a hat and dress, they added a dialogue-less scene in which Kate, alone, discovers that Petruchio has given her an even better dress (well, really a nice duster and a pair of pants, since the whole thing was western-themed). As a rule, I dislike such brazen insertions, but in this case I'll concede that it was welcome.

I'm not sure there's any way around Kate's speech at the end, though. Ultimately we and Shakespeare's audience just have different ideas of what constitutes a happy ending; we have different conceptions of the natural state that needs to be restored. To the first audience, that Kate was unequivocally submissive was an unequivocal good. Petruchio's responsibility, they might have said, was to be a fair and loving master, not to share power. Try as we might to find an ambiguity to hang our own ideas on, Shakespeare didn't give us one. Because ambiguity is a flaw in a happy ending. So, because our ideas have changed, the ending of The Taming of the Shrew is unambiguously uncomfortable.