March 2007 Archives

As it so happens, today’s morning news on NPR included a review of the movie The Lookout. I was gratified to discover the reviewer had essentially the same things to say that I did. He brought up Memento, he praised the naturalism, and especially, he recognized the acting but praised the movie above all as a triumph of writing. Our only point of disagreement was our opinion of Jeff Daniels’ performance.

If I were a professional reviewer, our agreement would be somewhat disappointing; it would mean I hadn’t seen anything or understood the movie any better than my colleagues, that I was somehow extraneous. But I’m not a professional, so I’m delighted to discover I can, at least in isolated cases, perform as well as one. (This would not be true across the board. I am largely ignorant of camerawork techniques, for example, so I would miss important qualities of a more visual movie.)

A more skeptical part of me insists this is a case of a blind pig occasionally finding an acorn. Nevertheless, it’s rewarding to find I can produce something interesting to read even when I don’t truly feel it’s interesting enough to write down. Good reason to continue exercising the keyboard.

Although I am obviously in no position to confirm the claim, I’ve heard that the pain of passing a kidney stone is comparable to that of giving birth. The similarities don’t end there. Like a baby, a kidney stone changes everything, from major concerns to behaviors you didn’t even know you had. Further:

It makes you walk funny.

It wakes you in the middle of the night, demanding attention.

You become reluctant to go to restaurants, movies, and similar public venues, for fear of upsetting the people around you. When you do leave the house, it takes twice as long to go anywhere.

Sex pretty much ends.

The potty, however, becomes a matter of grave concern.

Every minor change is cause for extended discussion, interesting only to you. Major changes are cause to call the doctor. Immediately.

Expenses you didn’t even realize existed appear from nowhere.

You become prone to expressions of gibberish, although admittedly in a different tone of voice.

Deep down, you know you brought it all on yourself.

We saw The Lookout last night in a preview screening, encouraged particularly to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who we enjoyed in Brick, a movie that transported the noir idiom to a high school. We were not disappointed.

Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, whose life as a high school sports hero has collapsed after a car wreck left him with brain damage. He now struggles as the night-time janitor for the small-town bank in Noel, which makes him useful to a gang of bank robbers wishing to break in just after the local farmers deposit their harvest money. The movie unfolds as Pratt becomes embroiled in the bank robbery and battles his inner demons to find self-respect. Complicating his decisions are a wealthy family and a father with high expectations, sudden acquisition of a girlfriend, Pratt’s guilt over killing and maiming friends in the crash, and Pratt’s own neurological limitations.

The audience will be tempted to compare The Lookout with the highly experimental Memento, whose protagonist suffers from an inability to remember anything for more than a few minutes. Pratt, too has trouble with memory, though not so exaggerated, as well as bursts of anger, inappropriate speech, and a left hand that won’t always cooperate. Unlike Memento, however, The Lookout treats brain damage only as a significant plot element, and not the very premise of the movie. Memento depended entirely on its gimmick. A good gimmick, and very successfully exploited, but a gimmick nonetheless. Pratt’s disabilities are less pronounced, more plausible, and more human, made doubly so by Gordon-Levitt’s performance.

As good as Gordon-Levitt is, he is bettered by Matthew Goode as Gary Spargo, the charismatic gang leader who recruits Pratt for the bank job and generally serves as the voice of evil. (Villains have all the fun.) The casting generally is excellent, including bit parts like the bank manager and the puppy-dog deputy who patrols Noel at night. My only exception to casting is Jeff Daniels, who seems to be coasting a bit as Chris’s blind roommate, Lewis, assigned by the rehab office.

Top honors, however, belong to the script, which could easily be overlooked beside the fine acting. Action moves briskly, and the movie is populated by just enough characters. The dialogue is tight, but never so tight as to sound practiced or pat, except during Spargo’s recruitment speech, which should sound practiced. Like Pratt’s disabilities, character motivations are plausible and humanly shaded. Case in point: when Pratt’s new girlfriend, Luvlee, is forced to confront her part in the brewing trouble, she neither becomes Pratt’s salvation, which would be easy to script, nor his ice-hearted betrayer, which would also be easy. She just chickens out and leaves town, never to be seen again. Very realistic, very human, very satisfying. Only at the end does exceptional writing succumb to temptation and rush to a tidy, upbeat little package. A somewhat grimmer ending, but only somewhat, would reward the audience better.

Full confession: I had to skip a few minutes in the middle of the movie. My tests aren’t in yet, but all signs point to a developing kidney stone, which makes sitting for long periods painful. My wife, feeling guilty for taking me out in the circumstances, asked whether going to the movie was worth it. I have to say it decidedly was.

We listened today to a podcast of a Ken Burns interview, mostly concerning his upcoming documentary on World War II. The host introduced the documentary with an explanation that the interview was being aired well after it took place, delayed by the controversy surrounding the documentary. That pricked my ears up. Though Burns handles some big subjects, he approaches them with an all-embracing perspective, occasionally shading into a wishy-washy “everyone’s right” sentiment. I’ve never known him to rile any but the True Believers of one or more extreme views of history.

The controversy mentioned in the interview’s introduction proved to be over the use of a few four-letter words. Literally, a few: three points in the show use them in reporting soldiers’ speech. Big, hairy deal. I suspect the host exaggerated. Allowing three f-words to delay airing the documentary itself is mighty silly, but plausible in the realm of bureaucracy, especially concerning the FCC, with its bizarre “we can’t tell you whether that’s illegal until after you air it” policy. Allowing three f-words to delay airing a discussion about the show in which they appear is, I suppose, possible, but only remotely.

Still, somebody has raised a stink about f-word in a show about World War II, possibly involving a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit. Whether or not anybody will pay much attention, someone cared enough to interfere with the appearance of f-word to interfere with a very uncontroversial documentarian. Saving Private Ryan faced similar objections. Apparently, some people feel it’s okay to show human beings killing each other in gruesome ways, but not to show them cursing over the fact.

What’s wrong with these people?! If, as Santayana claims, a fanatic is someone who redoubles his efforts while losing sight of his objective, I think the label applies. The whole point of censoring f-word is to protect impressionable minds from exposure to themes considered suitable only for mature audiences. If an impressionable mind can’t handle an obscene word removed from its natural context, it definitely can’t handle the obscenities of war and genocide. It’s bad enough that a vocal element of society wants to sanitize history; knowing they want to sanitize it for specious reasons drives me nuts. Knowing that the powerful FCC actually takes its cue from this mentality is terrifying. Stupid mother-f-worders.

I could just cry. I went to see a urologist today, after feeling suspicious pangs in my left side.

I had a kidney stone a few years ago. I didn’t know what I had until I went to the emergency room, doubled over with pain, as though someone had taken a broom handle and sssswhacked! me as hard as possible on the left side, right in the soft space between ribcage and pelvis. The emergency room staff knew immediately what it was, before running tests for safety’s sake, and I learned that day exactly where my left kidney is.

The pain was memorable, intensely memorable. After the fact, I was able to recognize what had seemed to be gas pains in the same area, or kinks from sleeping on a saggy mattress, as warning signs.

Now I have similar pains in the same spot, and I’m just miserable knowing I’ll have to go through it all again: drinking until I’m ready to puke, pissing it all out again in an attempt to pass the stone, a month with a thread dangling out of my privates, attached to a stent in my urethra. And it all hurts. Sometimes it hurts a lot, sometimes just a little. Sometimes something shifts slightly inside, and hurts like hell without any warning.

But worse than knowing that I’m about to go through it again is the suspicion that I’ll go through it again and again as I age. The urologist warned me that about 50% of kidney stone patients have another in their lifetime. I vowed right then that I would be in the other 50%. And I’ve been so good about the doctor’s instructions. My stone was calcium oxalate, which could result from too much calcium, too much oxalate (a product of digesting caffeine), or too little water. I was told not to reduce my calcium intake, so I didn’t. I drank caffeine regularly, but not in large quantities, before the stone; afterwards, I cut even my meager intake by half. I followed the doctor’s instructions of finding where my tolerance level is for drinking excess water, and I’ve drunk that much every day for four years, right on the edge of feeling ill. Every day. So it’s looking like the kidney stones are largely out of my control. And if they’re out of my control, I’ll get another one. It's like warming up for the constant pain that some people describe as being part of old age.

Fear isn’t quite the word for it. Dread works. I am filled with dread at the thought. A stone in the heart is nothing by comparison.

I opened yesterday’s entry with the news that I’d bought some new stuff. I don’t spend much money. I’m miserly by nature, and I find I don’t much want most of the stuff money can buy, so three purchases in a day is an oddity. Also oddly, I got chatty about them…or at least about the book and magazine, since the computer game isn’t up and running yet. I’ve been thinking about it, and realize both uncharacteristic behaviors have a common driving force behind them: the book is done.

As the end of this too-long and too-slow project arrived, Eileene asked me the natural question: “So what are you going to do next?” I don’t know. Worse, I can’t immediately think of anything I’d be interested in doing. I’ve focused on the book so long, reading almost nothing but folk tales for a couple years. Freed from a sense of obligation to keep reading more folk tales, I’m suddenly hungry for new ideas, new books, new shows, new hobbies.

It’s distressing to discover how few new things I’ve touched lately. Between housework, writing, and staying active in a WoW guild, there wasn’t any other free time, and of those three activities, only the last involved any novelty. Even WoW has been getting stale lately, which no doubt contributed to my decision to stop playing and find something else to play. I want my evenings free for something else, anything else.

Well, spring is on the way, and we needn’t stay cooped up in the apartment all the time. Maybe I’ll surprise Eileene by finding date ideas on my own. If she didn’t read that last sentence.

We went on a small shopping spree last night, stopping in Best Buy and Barnes & Noble. Atypically, I bought not one but three things for myself: an issue of Games magazine, a book of mathematical curiosities in the vein of Martin Gardner, and the Caesar IV CD. This last was the real prize. Growing increasingly frustrated with the way World of Warcraft only needs a handful of players to figure out how to succeed in encounters, and how I’m never able to advance quickly enough to be among that handful, I’m looking for a new pastime. I’m a big fan of the Caesar-Zeus-Emperor series, and Caesar IV looks to fill the bill nicely.

Or rather, looked. Upon loading it into my machine, I found it wouldn’t run. A consultation with Eileene quickly determined that the problem was my graphics card, which can’t handle the wifty new 3-D graphics.

That was a real bummer. Granted, my graphics card is aging, but the underlying engine for the game as a game is quite simple, and, apart from graphics, places few demands on the system. Playing some of the older titles, which use virtually identical programs, on my system, which is just as old as my graphics card, demands artificially slowing the game down just to allow me to see things happen. This wouldn’t mean much in a video game, but when a sedate city-building strategy title goes too fast to watch, you know it’s got a fairly simple code.

So it’s disappointing to see Caesar IV demand so much in the way of graphic power. Super-juicy graphics can be critical for some games, especially the ones that seek to place you in the game, as a first-person shooter does, or Black and White. Graphics are much, much less important for management sims. For these glorified spreadsheets, a clean, pleasant design is all you need. Simple esthetics worked just fine for Sid Meier’s SimGolf, for example. Players don’t need—and largely don’t want—to see every pore on every villager’s face in a city of ten million inhabitants. Gorgeous graphics are welcome everywhere, of course, but if the price of gorgeous graphics in a game that doesn’t demand them is not being able to play, then gorgeous graphics are out of place.

I will get to play eventually. We’ll swap computers around here until I’ve got all the components I need, but… that just shouldn’t be necessary, because it’s done to indulge a feature that's unnecessary, except to the marketing deparment of Sierra.

We got slagged by an ugly, pelting, ice-and-slush snowstorm last weekend, just as my parents arrived for a visit. It was a final gesture of winter weather from a winter that had largely been absent from the year. We topped 70°F on two separate occasions this year, and, while we had some heavy rains, this was only the second snow; the first didn’t reach us until early March.

With the attention global warming has been getting in the news, it’s not surprising to see people discussing weather oddities in terms of global warming, whether positively or negatively. Freakishly warm January weather makes shopkeepers and bus riders insist global warming is responsible; freakishly late snow makes them announce global warming is exaggerated. Neither method of thinking is correct, and not just because the data sample is too small to be meaningful.

Even laymen understand that a single three-day heat wave does not a global warming trend make. Still, there is a sense that, if the world is warming, then the weather will get steadily hotter from year to year. On the scale of a lifetime, this is broadly correct, but, if the world is rapidly heating up, what we should really expect to see is wild swings in the weather.

Imagine a pot of water. If you take a spoon and stir it steadily around the pot, you will disturb the water considerably for a few seconds, but as you continue to stir, the water will settle into a consistent pattern of behavior, namely circling the pot with your spoon. Because your spoon will not stir the water with perfect precision, and because fluids, like water, are chaotic media (that is, small changes in one region can generate large and unpredictable changes elsewhere), you will create small eddies in the rotating water. But because your spoon continues to stir regularly, such eddies will quickly be re-assimilated into the overall pattern of circling water.

The earth is similar to this pot, although its behavior is more complex, because the range of input is more complex than a single spoon. Regional differences of heating, such as between land and water, or polar and equatorial latitudes, drive the weather’s engine, along with some input from the earth’s rotation. The interactions between these regions are chaotic, because the weather exists in fluid media—the air and water. But because the sun heats regions more or less consistently from day to day, and from year to year, the flow of these fluids has built up considerable momentum. The seas and atmosphere continue to rotate at a consistent speed, and in a consistent direction, producing consistent weather. Hiccups occasionally erupt when the natural variation of any cycle swings to an extreme, but the critical point to note is that these hiccups are infrequent and short-term, lasting little more than a year at most, and occurring every few years on a continental land mass. Irregularities are quickly drawn into the slow, predictable swirling of the usual weather patterns, just as a chance swirl in the pot disappears into the general rotation.

If the patterns by which the sun heats the earth change, however, hiccups in the weather will not be drawn back into the normal weather patterns, because the thermodynamic engine which powers the weather is no longer pulling the weather in the same direction it used to. Indeed, the new rhythms will themselves create such disturbances, just as you would create a lot of turbulence if you started stirring the spoon in a different direction in the pot of water. The planetary equivalent of this turbulence is freak weather, which can be hot or cold, according to the particular path and point of origin of the turbulence.

That’s the kind of thing we’ve been observing of late. Instead of a devastating flood every few years, we’re seeing two or three floods every year, somewhere in the world. Instead of a vicious blizzard somewhere in the country every year or three, we’re seeing multiple blizzards every year, accompanied by equally freakish warm pockets elsewhere in the country at the same time. Hurricane count is up by a factor of five. The weather is no better or worse than it was in my childhood, but even in my lifespan, it’s become more extreme. And that’s something to worry about when considering the hazards of global warming.

I don’t often play video games, but Star Wars Battlefront, for the Playstation can provide some useful stress relief. The game pits 200 rebels (but only about thirty at a time) against a like number of Stormtroopers, or, if you prefer, clones against battle droids. Unfortunately, your 199 teammates are not the swiftest X-Wings in the fleet, if you catch my drift. They often do more harm than good. Other than screening enemy fire, they don’t do much good at all.

After a long search, I found the basic training manual for the troops. Here is an excerpt from the officer qualification test. Fortunately, the other side seems to get the same lessons in their manual, or I’d fear for the fate of the galaxy.

1. You realize your head is directly in front of the barrel of a friendly sharpshooter’s gun, spoiling his field of fire and placing you at risk of friendly fire. What should you do to remedy the situation?

(A) Leave immediately, walking around the sharpshooter if necessary.
(B) Leave immediately, walking directly through the sharpshooter’s position, shoving him continually for the next thirty seconds to ensure he cannot draw a bead on anything, including you.
(C) Nothing. Directly in front of a sniper is the ideal position to stand.
(D) Clear the sharpshooter’s line of fire by dropping a grenade at your feet.

2. You find a teammate squirreled up in a sheltered nook, from which he is slaughtering Stormtroopers as they exit a spawn point and press through a narrow doorway. A dozen enemy bodies piled in the doorway attest to the effectiveness of his tactic. How should you best assist him?

(A) Circle around to destroy enemies leaving the spawn point by a different direction.
(B) Stand nearby, announcing “I hear something” every three to four seconds.
(C) Stand directly in the doorway, creating a human shield.
(D) Throw a grenade into the nook, in case your teammate somehow fails to dispatch the thirteenth Stormtrooper to approach.

3. You are traveling with a squad of five soldiers through narrow, twisting hallways. The near-simultaneous announcement “I hear something” from all four teammates alerts you to a Stormtrooper around the next corner. What tactic should you adopt to deal with the Stormtrooper?

(A) Sidestep around the corner, guns blazing.
(B) Stop and point your blaster at the nearest wall, announcing “I hear something.”
(C) Drop a grenade at your own feet, hoping to catch the Stormtrooper once he finishes throwing his grenades and comes to attack you.
(D) Scatter all your grenades, hoping at least one of them fails to bounce back and kill your entire squad.

4. You come upon an enemy spawn point. Friendly sniper fire has cleared the area of defenders. What is the best way to capture this base and hasten victory?

(A) Occupy the base, capturing it.
(B) Shout “Cover me,” and run off, looking for Stormtroopers to kill, leaving a live spawn point behind you.
(C) Stand just outside the base radius and wait for backup.
(D) Abandon the base, occupy the nearest gun turret, point it in a random direction, and wait for Stormtrooper spawns to kill you.

5. In the chaos of combat, a live enemy grenade drops at your feet. How should you deal with the hazard?

(A) Run for cover, or at least distance.
(B) Alert your teammates by shouting, “Grenade! Grenade!” but do nothing else.
(C) Walk directly into the nearest wall, hoping to burrow through before the grenade explodes.
(D) Drop your own grenade, creating an anti-explosion, perfectly negating the enemy grenade’s effect.

6. You are at the bottom of a smooth ramp, which will cause any grenade you throw to roll back down and kill you. What weapon should you use instead?

(A) A weapon that isn't a grenade.
(B) A grenade.
(C) A different grenade.
(D) All your grenades, in rapid succession.

7. While running across an open area, you are shot by a sniper from long range. You may have seconds to live. How should you spend them?

(A) Dash for the nearest cover.
(B) Stop running, stand absolutely still in the open, and attempt to locate the sniper.
(C) Fling all your grenades in a random direction, while you still have a chance.
(D) Roll off the sky platform and plummet to the planet below, denying him the kill.

Eileene has recently become a fan of Dragnet. She’s always liked police procedurals, and this is the grand-daddy of them all.

As the first of its kind, Dragnet is nowhere near as sophisticated as what they’re airing today. And while this is most evident in the forensic science, it applies across the board. During interrogations, for example, suspects may put up some resistance. So Friday gets tough: instead of asking questions, he barks them out, often with an addendum that “This time, we want answers.” That’s all it takes. No threats of violence, certainly no actual violence—that would violate the suspect’s rights, and Friday plays it by the book—no threat of jail time, just a somewhat sterner voice, and the suspect caves in, stiffly reciting the words, “Okay, okay, I’ll talk.” It’s like the show wants to be film noir, but doesn’t get film noir. It’s got tough guy talk, but no actual threat behind it. It’s got sin and vice, but only in bad guys, not in every human being. It’s got rapid-fire banter, but not icy-cool innuendos of sex, greed, and violence between ultra-cool people, just exchanges between the ultimate squares, who speak rapid-fire only because they’re reluctant to waste time on frivolous conversation at the taxpayers’ expense.

But as silly as the show gets, it’s hard not to admire its painful earnestness. When Dragnet gets satirized, as it often has, I notice that the satire is done in the same vein as Star Trek send-ups, with a grin of approval. Sure, it’s cheesy, but in a good way, with some good bits hidden inside all that grade-A dairy. If the show were more self-conscious, less willing to expose itself to ridicule, the good bits would never make it to the screen.

My parents are visiting us this week. I’m not a very good tour guide, because I am neither very familiar with New York City, nor a big fan of the portion with which I am familiar. While the Big Apple certainly welcomes tourism, it does not exist purely for tourism, so unlike Orlando or Williamsburg, there’s no big red line painted on the sidewalk from the airport to the hotels to the real points of interest. Sure, you can find Times Square and the Empire State Building, but there’s nothing to see there that you can’t find in any other big city. The best places in New York City are the little ones, hand-picked for you by someone you know from their own experiences. So whenever friends visit us, Eileene has most of the good ideas of where to go, from which I select something.

This time, we’ve settled on a trip to Ellis Island and an art exhibit called “Bodies.” I know nothing of Bodies except that my sister-in-law enjoyed it with her fiancée, and that it has one exhibit mapping the blood vessels. It sounds nifty.

The artist(s) drained a corpse of blood, then pumped some kind of epoxy or resin in its place, then put the body into a vat of solvent that would liquefy the human tissue and leave the resin behind. The final result is a free-standing cast of the space within the blood vessels. It must have been a terribly delicate prodecure.

I brought up the subject of personal remains once before in this blog, wondering aloud why people would object to having their own corpse disposed of in any but a traditional fashion, with all the parts intact. This exhibit is a perfect example of reasons to consider other options. Most onlookers will pause momentarily, think “Huh. A model of our veins,” and move on. But a few, possibly children ripe for inspiration, will see it and go: “Coooool….” and go on to do something amazing. How could anyone prefer being worm food, or a jar of ashes, to being the next medical genius’s muse?

Our neighborhood is slowly succumbing to gentrification. This is odd, as it’s already upscale. Three-story houses are the norm, and what can only be called mansions line North Mountain, just across the railroad tracks from us, and the parking lots are lined with Mercedes and BMWs. We can afford rent because we live at the bottom end of this neighborhood, a two-story right next to the tracks…and because our landlord is my father-in-law. And Toyotas are low-end but acceptable here. So that’s fine.

Right down the street from us are some mid- to upscale shops: a Williams Sonoma, yoga studios, childrens’ designer fashions, a toy store stocking educational toys instead of guns and Barbies, a theater that straddles between art flicks and childrens’ flicks, and a grocery called Kings charges 20% to 50% more on pretty much all its merchandise than our usual grocery. We don’t have kids, nor do we practice yoga, but otherwise we like having these shops handy. So that’s fine, too.

What isn’t fine is the slow mutation or outright disappearance of stores that don’t fit the yuppie mold. I first noticed it when the A&P suddenly lurched up the quality and price scale. Having fresh-baked baguettes on hand is nice, but so is a gallon of milk for under $4. We could already get the rolls from Kings; now we can’t get the milk anywhere without a trip. With the change in the grocery market, I started taking stock of other changes. Business is drying up at the jeweler I rely on to change my watch battery, slowly moving to a much glitzier jeweler around the corner. The deli guy at my favorite sandwich place confides he may not be around much longer; I won’t be able to get a classic Italian and a Pepsi there, but I’ll still have my choice of arugula-nouveau sandwiches with imported European seltzer down the street. A shop where I used to get greeting cards and wrapping paper just moved out, shortly after a second ritzy stationery shop moved in next to the toy store. Stone Cold Creamery has elbowed out a smaller, simpler ice cream shop, and I refuse to take my business anywhere that requires the entire staff to sing their thanks every time they get a lousy $1 tip. An Irish import shop that I used several times for Christmas shopping had to move across town, to be replaced by an art studio.

So stuff that’s nice to look at is easy to find. Stuff that I actually want, not so much.

I suppose we should have realized something was up a few years ago when “concerned citizens” decided to force out a discreet little sex shop by pressuring the town to refuse a license renewal. The shop couldn’t be hurting land values that much, since it was so discreet that I didn’t know it existed until the story hit the newspaper. There was no justification, legal or otherwise, for kicking out the store, so the town government just remained mum while it let the license expire and just…didn’t get around to renewing it. That was the earliest step I can remember in the slide from useful goods to status symbols.

I’m telling you, folks: if nobody stands up for the porn shops, there will be no one to stand up for you when gentrification kicks down your own door.

Although college broke me of rising with the dawn, I remain a morning person at heart. I’m most energetic in the mid-morning, mentally and physically. I’m more likely to take on projects then, happier to deal with people, and I’m even smarter—I think through problems fastest around 9 or 10 am. All of which makes it odd that I’m at my most creative on evening walks.

I exercise by walking, preferably in the late afternoon, but often after supper if I’ve been busy during the day. And it’s on these walks that I have my best ideas, whether ideas for how to structure a chapter or ideas to spring on players in a role-playing session. Tonight was a lovely night, with clean spring air, and I had five distinct ideas for my campaign and this blog.

I credit the quiet.

Hermit though I may be, there’s time alone and time alone. Home is full of distractions. We haven’t hooked up our television, but Eileene works at home, and she downloads television shows, especially British shows unavailable on DVD here in the States, to watch while she works. I myself leave the radio on until 10, when the programming switches from news to a call-in program, and we’ve pretty much got the internet connected 24/7. Throughout the day, I’m surrounded by chores of one kind or another: housework, writing, or other. When I’m working, I’m thinking about the task at hand. It’s possible to think while washing dishes, but not to think very hard. Likewise, when I’m playing. I’m thinking about play. My almost daily walk is a block of time when there’s absolutely nothing to think about but whatever pops into my head.

We don’t value quiet enough, and it’s getting worse. Neither of these observations is original, but they are true nonetheless. We’ve collectively wrung our hands at diminishing attention spans since the dawn of television, but the information revolution, with iPods, Blackberries, and cell phones make it possible now never to have some quiet. Sometimes I wonder how many great inventions, high works of art, or spiritual insights we’ll lose because the people who used to have them increasingly consider constant input, with no time for digestion of that input, the normal state to live in.

There's an animation festival going on in the city. Although the festival is aimed largely aimed at kids, the animation itself is high-quality stuff, including several classic animated shorts we watched back when we had access to That's Rentertainment!, a wonderful video store in Champaign, IL.

It's a pity that Americans persist in thinking of animation as something fit only for children. Disney played a part in creating that attitude, with its films sanitized of adult themes, but I place the blame at the doorstep of Joseph Hannah and William Barbera, who pioneered animation's full-scale entry into television. Because TV had to operate on a much shorter production schedule, and typically on a much smaller budget, Hannah-Barbera had to cut every possible corner. Naturally, the end result was lousy. Fred Flintstone's car drove past the same bush dozens of times in a brief scene, and program after program, so nobody would have to be paid to draw another. When the Superfriends speak, only their heads move, bobbing stiffly, because there has to be some motion to let the viewer know who's talking, but moving anything else costs money. Scooby-Doo doesn't run into a tree, but runs off-screen to produce a *bonk* noise, followed by a cut to a still shot of him lying dazed at the base of a tree. Only kids, who didn't know any better, kept watching.

I'm passionate about animation, and when the subject comes up with my friends, there's always someone to defend Scooby-Doo: "Scooby-Doo was great!" Why? Well...he just was. To which I say: thppbt! Technically, Scooby-Doo was no better than Clutch Cargo, the ancient cartoon in which nothing moved but the characters' mouths, where a film of the voice actors' actual mouths had been inserted into a cut-out region of the characters' faces, with the net result that the animated mouths slid around the faces in a vaguely creepy fashion, like Alicia Siverstone’s lips.

TV Cartoons got a lot better in the past ten years or so, but there's still a long way to go. Animators still struggle with tight schedules and small budgets, but make up for it in new ways. Background and character design is, if not better, then at least original. The writing is a lot tighter, too. Perhaps kids raised on a higher quality of cartoon will learn to recognize higher quality cartooning. I look forward to a day when people whose vision is not clouded by nostalgia can watch Clutch Cargo and Scooby Doo and wonder aloud what the diffrence is.

Clive Barker has come out with a sequel to Abarat, a young adult fantasy novel that takes its heroine, Candy Quackenbush, to a world with an island composed of an island for each hour of the day. I started reading the sequel, then realized I’d have to go back and reread the original, or at least skim it. I couldn’t remember much at all from Abarat, apart from a mean wizard with lots of hats, a creepy midnight island, and a squid hat that became incontinent in death. (Don’t ask.)

Picking up Abarat today, I remembered why I didn’t remember much of it: the story is thick with powerful imagery, but saddled with a plot that doesn’t seem headed anywhere particular, nor reach a conclusion any more complete than the often temporary resolutions of smaller plot arcs throughout the book. Which is not to say it’s bad—I enjoyed it, mostly—it’s just hard to recall the colorful images without a plot to hang them on.

Abarat will always be linked in my mind with Everway, a highly experimental role-playing game by Jonathan Tweet. The rules are quite simple, even sketchy (especially when it comes to magic), but the real experimentation lies in the central role of graphic images. Everway encourages players to rely on pictures, rather than statistics and skill lists, for inspiration. Character, location, and even plot design starts with the selection of a few cards from a thick deck of cards with fantasy illustrations. The tone of the illustrations is not what you might expect: although a few cards depict staples of fantasy and RPGs, half-naked dragonriders are conspicuously absent, while mundane images like a crowded marketplace or a farmer a leaning on a plow are fairly common. With a few intriguing pictures in hand, you can tell the skeleton of a story, and build from there. Only later are numbers brought in to allow practical handling of abilities that the back story implies.

I associate Abarat with Everway in part because I encountered the book at a time when I was studying the game. Mostly, however, it’s because of the common reliance on imagery. Abarat has a couple dozen illustrations by the author, stylistically resembling certain Everway cards. Significantly, Abarat and Everway also share a desire to pursue a less hyperbolic form of fantasy than you find in swords and sorcery: there are wonders to see, yes, but they needn’t be epic in scope to entertain. I enjoy this approach to fantasy, and wish there were more of it. Even the geography is similar, dividing the universe into discrete episodic packets. There’s nothing in Everway to prevent you from creating a long, serial campaign, but the cosmology favors a sight-seeing tour, hopping from sphere to sphere, solving a problem and moving on, like Candy Quackenbush (or Captain Kirk), staying just long enough to observe the local curiosities.

Naturally, anyone who enjoyed either Abarat or Everway should check the other one out. The latter can be hard to find; sadly, all that art proved too expensive to support in a niche product, and its author is now editing the D&D line, never to be seen in imaginative RPGs again. But copies still float around, and a few plucky web pages try to keep the setting vital. Both are excellent daydream material, the kind of thing you can cannibalize for your own stories, literary or otherwise.

Spore, the ambitious protein-chain-to-spacefaring-race game scheduled to come out of Maxis, hasn’t produced much news for a long time—nothing big enough to whet the appetite since the big E3 2006 demo of the creature editor, plus a brief peek at the creature and space phases. That’s rough on the fans who want to see everything, including notes jotted on bar napkins, as soon as possible, but I’m not one of those..

A little more worrying is a creeping suspicion that no news is to be found because it’s bad: development is caught up one a serious snag or three, and Maxis doesn’t want to report how things are going until the problem is resolved. If so, the decision to keep quiet is understandable, and not just out petty vanity and refusal to admit to problems.

Sometimes, serious play problems can only be solved by fundamental changes in the model, and reporting that the game will do X, only to report later that X didn’t work, so the game will do Y instead can devastate pre-game interest. Fans expected X, got excited about X, and will consider Y a failure, even if Y proves a better idea than X was in the first place. That’s not fair, but it’s true.

Also, a serious problem can cause production delays. A respectable game company fixes the problems before going to market, however long it takes. Better to arrive on the shelves a year or even two years late than to deliver a broken game. Nonetheless, a late delivery creates bad feeling in fans with attention spans shortened by video games and unable to bide patiently until the game actually hits the shelves. Also not fair, but true.

I’d prefer to hear about design problems in detail, but I’m more forgiving of the editing process. Of course the first model won’t work quite right, and watching how new ideas are fit together to fix it up is fascinating. If, however, a company feels that watching electronic sausage being made will alienate customers who equate quality control with a failed product, it’s best just to stay quiet, as Maxis is doing. No news is merely no news. Companies, and designers, who succumb to the temptation to promise the moon, insist everything is on schedule, and would rather fail than admit that success is difficult, and finally resort to insulting the buyers by claiming the finished product is just fine the way it is, and that all promises were met, melt down spectacularly. Unfortunately, they drag everyone around them, and the industry as a whole, down several notches as they go.

[Insert your own observation about the White House here.]

I had a bad day yesterday. Usually when someone speaks of a bad day, they mean a day of unpleasant, usually unfortunate events: car problems, trouble at work, injuries, unwanted news. This was a different kind of bad day. Nothing terrible happened to me that wasn’t already in me. I grappled with demons of self-doubt and lost.

It happens. Everyone’s got their own neuroses. Mostly we deal with them and move on, but sometimes we slip up. In my case, I’ve got lousy work habits. If I care too much about my writing, I lock up, dissatisfied with everything I put on the page; if I care too little, I blow it off. Either way, nothing useful gets done, I get frustrated, then I get discouraged. Obviously, this can spiral out of control. Keeping to the zone of caring just enough is easier said than done.

Yesterday, I cared too much. I worked hard and still didn’t have anything good to show for it. For the past couple months, I’ve been working to an explicit schedule with concrete deadlines. Mostly, it’s given me good results. My output is way up. When I miss a deadline, though, or even feel like I’m about to, the sense of failure can be crippling. Yesterday, it was clear I’d miss one. The feeling that I couldn’t keep up compounded with a building sense that I can’t keep up with my World of Warcraft guild either, and that by the time I get to the end content, I’ll only be piggy-backing on the shoulders of players who have mastered it long ago, rather than contributing in any significant way. The twin frustrations did me in.

By the time Eileene got home from a business meeting, I was deeply upset with myself, and ready to lash out at pretty much everything. That wouldn’t be fair. Instead, I put on a mask of civility, and explained to Eileene that it was a mask of civility, and why I had it on. She understood. We dined together, and then she left me to my snit. Perhaps it worked. I don’t feel good today, but I feel better. My work hasn’t been good, but it has at least happened.

I’m grateful for Eileene. Having fun together—and we do—is great, and what makes our relationship worthwhile. But I’m most thankful to have her when I’m at my worst. Love is a wonderful thing. There’s more reason than mere tradition for books to be dedicated to spouses.

I have beside me a library book titled 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, which is precisely what it is. It’s one of a set. Another volume offers witch stories, another ghost stories. I have not checked whether others exist, but I certainly will.

The stories are quite short; each volume is under six hundred pages, and they’re great fun to read. Genre fiction is a natural venue for the short-short story. Unlike the deep examinations of the human condition that go into high literature, genre fiction revolves around the neat idea. What if some guy lived his life in non-consecutive days, waking only once a month for three thousand years? What if we developed effective teleportation devices, but they were only economical at distances under a hundred yards, or on masses smaller than a kilogram? Why do vampires consume only blood?

Ideas like this deserve toying. A precious few prove a rich enough vein to produce material for long discussions, masters’ theses, novels, or dozens (thousands!) of stories, but the vast majority are only worth a few minutes’ contemplation. That’s okay. As long as quickies like this are only presented as quickies, and not milked to death like Dune and its many sequels, they can provide just as much interest and mental exercise as a bigger idea. I still think as often of Niven’s irreverent “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (speculation on problems that Superman's abilities must cause his sex life) as often as I do of Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (an exhaustive treatment of self-reference in mathematics, art, music, Zen, and its ontological and epistemological implications). Both are personal favorites. And because quickies are so short, you can explore three neat ideas while waiting for the bus. Don’t like one? Wait five minutes, and you get another. Breath mints for the brain.