malvasia bianca

I stopped playing SpaceChem two and a half months ago, but somehow other blog posts intervened, so I’m only writing about it now. Which I could use as an excuse for the complete lack of insight that I’m going to display, but the truth is: I don’t think I would have anything useful to say about the game if I’d written about it while it was still fresh in my mind.

I was really addicted to SpaceChem when I started playing it, and I wasn’t the only one: both Liesl and Miranda had moments when it kept them glued to the iPad. It’s a very good game: I like the programming that’s at the core of it; I like the way challenges build on top of one another; I like the sense of accomplishment when you start a puzzle, realize your standard bag of tricks don’t work, and have to invent some sort of new technique to solve it. And, within each puzzle, there’s a pleasant enough range of possibilities: frequently multiple approaches to a solution (it was quite interesting comparing Liesl’s solutions to my own), and you could go back and try to optimize your solutions if you so choose.

The iPad is a good platform for it. Though the iPad version wasn’t executed perfectly, and there were some real head-scratchers, most notably the lack of a mechanism for resetting a puzzle. It’s bad enough being frustrated enough at a puzzle that you want to start over from scratch, but having to spend a couple of minutes getting to where you can start over is pouring salt into your wounds. So, in comparison to the iPad game I’d been obsessed with over the previous months, it definitely had its warts, but that’s pretty stiff competition.

So: why did I stop playing SpaceChem? Part of the answer is that it didn’t fit so well with my playing schedule: I was doing a fair amount of my iPad game playing in the middle of the night while looking after Zippy, and SpaceChem isn’t nearly as good a fit for that time as Ascension was. I would say that I thought the challenges were excessively linear, except that they built on each other, forcing you to discover new ways to approach problems, in ways that were rewarding and that would have turned to frustration with a less linear approach.

Though puzzles didn’t always strictly build on each other: new puzzles removed possibilities as well as adding them, by removing possible implementation choices. That frustrated me at times, though I’ll also freely admit that it was necessary to make the challenges workable.

I also didn’t always enjoy the constraints of the playing field itself, finding ways to fit my wiring into the space provided. Also, I often didn’t enjoy the puzzles involving multiple reactors: sometimes, that was an interesting challenge (on more than one occasion having me take an approach for quite some distance before realizing that my strategy simply wouldn’t work at all), but often that made puzzles drag on, and just finding ways to place the reactors and pipes was boringly annoying.

I guess that’s really the issue that the linear progression had: it meant that I didn’t have control over the game’s pacing. So if I wasn’t in the mood for the time investment (and, perhaps more importantly, mental investment) of a multiple-reactor puzzle, then I didn’t have much choice: either struggle through it, or put the game down. And one day, I chose the latter, and never picked it up again.

I still think SpaceChem is kind of a great game in its own way. But it’s also one of the very few games that I’ve played (at least since my Apple ][+ days) that has a well-defined endpoint that I made a fair amount of progress towards but stopped before reaching it.

A while back, I mentioned that I’d written a little microblogging platform called ‘fragments’. At the time, it was a little unpolished; since then, I’ve cleaned up the code a bit (most importantly, separated the content from the guts of publishing, though presentation is probably more interwoven with the latter than would be ideal), enough so that I don’t mind putting it up on github. I’d be surprised if anybody else found it useful, but you never know; if somebody else out there wants a way to write extremely spare and unlinked small posts, is running their own web server, and wants to write posts in a text editor instead of through a web interface, then have at it!

If anybody is looking at the source code: the main way in which it’s not representative of how I normally program is the fact that most classes don’t have unit tests. This sometimes happens to me when I’m gluing stuff together: there’s not much in the way of logic, and the ultimate test of a fair bit of that code is how it looks in the web browser, so I’m not sure where unit tests would be useful. In situations like that, though, I do like to throw in some kind of overall acceptance test that at least detects whether or not I’m inadvertently changing the HTML output. And, of course, it’s much smaller than software that I work on at work! Other than that, though, it’s reasonably representative: functions and classes are pretty small but there’s room for further shrinking, I’ve taken a bit of care to remove duplication, but I wouldn’t present it as anything like a shining, polished gem.

I’ve also added a front page for the site, so you can see the fragments (at least the most recent 20 ones—no pagination yet) without having to go to the feed. (Incidentally, Safari isn’t correctly doing feed autodetection right; I’ll look into that eventually, but if somebody happens to why that isn’t working, please tell me.)

It’s turned out differently from how I expected it to be. In particular, I labeled it as a “microblogging platform” above, but you’ll see if you look at the front page that that isn’t accurate, that “miniblogging” is more the size posts are turning out. Also, in the original post, I talked about “mosaics”; support for them is still there, but I’ve only written one, and that one was a proof of concept instead of something that I really felt compelled to do. So, instead of figuring out how to represent mosaics on the front page, I just left them off the front page entirely, and am not advertising the mosaics RSS feed, either; I’d be surprised if I ever write another one, though who knows.

What does seem to be the case is that the fragments blog is turning into my ‘morose blog’. Something about the fact that it feels hidden—very few readers (almost all of whom are people I know and feel quite comfortable talking to in person), combined with a complete lack of comments and an almost complete lack of analytics—makes it feel more private than it actually is. (Because I don’t want to kid myself: it’s on the web, it’s accessible by search engines, so any mistakes I make there will be available to be uncovered!) The result of which is that I spend some amount of time digging into in-person interactions, and the in-person interactions that I think about the most are ones where I feel out of place. That gives entries a morose tone, to the extent that I end up backtracking on that within the blog itself, because I certainly don’t feel like a morose person the vast majority of the time! Still, I think I’ll stop backtracking/apologizing for that within the blog: this paragraph is the context you’re going to get for the tone, the fragments themselves should be minimal and unapologetic.

And, unless something changes, this post and its predecessor is all the talking I’m planning to do about the fragments blog: it’s been a successful enough experiment that I’ve added a link to it to the right-hand column on this blog, and I imagine the fragments will spur ideas that play out here in a larger scale, but in general I’m going to leave it tucked away. No more discussion of it here, no automatic forwarding of posts there to Facebook or Google+ or whatever. I doubt that the vast majority of you reading this would find anything at all interesting there: it’s primarily targeted at myself (which, admittedly, is the case for this blog, too!), and I don’t think people who haven’t interacted quite a bit with me would find anything of interest there.

Our current TV is really showing its age, so I’m planning to buy a TV next week; any advice, whether about specific models or attributes to look out for or good places to go for reviews or good places to buy them from? I imagine I’ll spend less than a thousand dollars on the TV, the place it will fit is approximately 47 inches wide, it’ll get used for TV, video games, and movies. I’ve been assuming I’ll buy a receiver at the same time (our current setup is from before the HDMI era), though one of my coworkers today was arguing that receivers aren’t necessary today, that you can do enough switching between devices and driving of speakers (of which we have 5 + subwoofer) from your TV; is that true? (For what it’s worth, I’ll have 4 HDMI devices that I want to plug into it, and that will probably change to 5 within the next couple of years.) Also, currently I use optical audio cables; has HDMI rendered that obsolete, or are there good audio protocols that travel over optical cables but not over HDMI? Anything I should be asking about but am not?

Any advice is appreciated.

I never participated in the Blogs of the Round Table back when Corvus was running it (at least I don’t think I did?), but I was quite happy to see that, with Corvus’s blessing, Critical Distance is relaunching that feature. So I thought I would take a swing at this month’s theme (provided by Corvus himself), which says:

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

The problem is, I disagree quite strongly with the premise here: I have a very hard time accepting the gloss of “fundamentally different” with “a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion”. My gut feeling is that there’s a core to myself—the way I think, the way I relate to people, the way I approach problems, what fascinates me—that would persist if I were of a different class, religion, race, sexuality and gender, and that this alternate David would be much more similar to me than a random atheist upper-middle-class white male who isn’t entirely sure whether bi or straight is a better label for his sexuality but leans towards the former. (Though, if we accept the third possible labeling of my sexuality as “besotted with Liesl”, then yeah, that narrows things down quite a bit.) I have a hard time even typing the following, given the considerable amount of respect I have for Corvus, so I’m sure I must be misunderstanding him, but I think I find that gloss to be actively offensive on a political level: am I supposed to accept the notion that somebody else would be fundamentally different from myself by virtue of being Muslim? I don’t see any good arising from that line of argument.

Which does raise the question of what I think “fundamental differences” really means. The contrast that the theme gives is kind of interesting: it contrasts “fundamental differences” with “external circumstances”. And that contrast I’ll agree with; it’s just that I think of class as an external circumstance, religion as largely an external circumstance, and race as only important because of external circumstances. Gender and sexuality are more interesting, but for both of those the weight that society places on them has a huge impact on how they affect us. So what all five of those have in common (and are different from the examples of exploring alien worlds and swinging broadswords) is that they’re all categories that have a strong impact on how the societies we live in view us, how people treat us before getting to know us (with that impact continuing after people do start to know us as individuals), that that impact makes itself known from the moment we’re born, burying into our own psyches.

So, in particular, I certainly don’t want to get genetic deterministic: who we are is strongly shaped by external factors as well as genetic traits. But there’s a lot more to external factors than broad societal divisions—one’s friends and family, for example—and there’s a lot more to genetic traits than whether one of 23 pairs of chromosomes falls into the broad bucket labeled XY or the broad bucket labeled XX. (Or into neither of those buckets at all, and of course not everybody’s gender is best expressed by those chromosomes.) I realize that I live in a society where the checkmarks that I get in Corvus’s classification mean that I don’t get actively reminded of how society treats differences in that classification as frequently as people who get a different set of checkmarks in that classification do, so if somebody who gets a different set of checkmarks wants to make a case that those checkmarks really are what I should associate with the idea of fundamental differences, I will do my best to listen with respect and an open mind. (I’m certainly curious what the friend whom I had coffee with this afternoon will think about this post—she has a rather more informed insight into how fundamental a difference gender is than I do.) But right now the idea seems pretty strange to me.

Setting that aside, I’ll try to play along with the theme a little more. Though then I run into another possible difference: are games really most powerful when letting us identify with somebody fundamentally different from ourselves? That’s not implausible, but on reflection I’m not sure I agree: maybe games are most powerful when they allow us to learn something new about ourselves. I’m not sure which way I go on that, and upon rereading I’m probably misinterpreting that statement: I guess it’s saying that, when games are exploring differences, then that exploration is more powerful the more fundamental the difference is. And that sounds plausible enough.

So: what games have allowed me to “experience being other than you are”? That’s kind of an easy question to answer: I have a hard time thinking off the top of my head of any games that did any sort of fleshing out a character where I felt that the character was particularly similar to myself. Looking through the last 25 games I’ve played, Professor Layton was the only one that had a character that I particularly identified with; I was just watching Miranda play Portal, and it’s also not a bad example of a game where I feel a bond with the main character, albeit one whom we don’t learn much about. (I realize that, above, I haven’t given any specific examples of what I actually do consider to be fundamental differences or similarities; as those two games suggest, though, my enjoyment of solving abstract puzzles feels more important to me than my class, race, religion, or gender, though I would never suggest that other people should feel that way about themselves.) Actually, non-narrative games often speak to me more strongly than narrative games do: in some sense, I feel more myself when playing go or Tetris than basically any narrative game, and the same goes for Rock Band. And that last example has an interesting relationship to Corvus’s list of characteristics, given that, when I’m playing myself in Rock Band, my avatar is sometimes gay and sometimes straight. (Always myself, though; and yes, my relationship with music also feels more central to myself than my class, race, religion, or gender.)

But there I go again, refusing to answer the question at hand. Hmm, if I’m looking for game experiences where I felt rather different from the character I played in game, I guess Catherine was the best recent example? Which was a fascinating game, and my fascination was indeed driven in part by that difference. Not so much because of the specifics of Vincent’s nature, though (and certainly not because of any of the characteristics from Corvus’s list, where Vincent actually lines up well with me), but because of the way of dividing up the world that the questions in the game revealed: what an odd list of dichotomies to present, what a strange set of priorities it implied!

And what a strange topic for the BoRT. But it’s gotten me to write something; is that the covert goal here? Which, actually, makes it similar to Catherine: in both places, much of my interest is being presented with a foreign set of dichotomies, one that seems so misguided to me that I’m actively forced to think about something else. And there’s good in that, certainly.

Update: I felt uncomfortable enough about this post to follow it up with another where, I hope, I step back in several ways.

While reading Lifelode, the character who could see others’ possible futures really grabbed me. After I put down the book, though, I realized: that character didn’t grab me because that image particularly stood out in the context of the book, she grabbed me because of where my head has been recently.

Because, looking back, I’ve been thinking about contingency a lot over the last half year. The place where this appeared most strongly in its abstract glory was the way my fascination with Ascension has played out: as I said at the time, “always, always be aware of the web of possibilities”, and that’s a web that I’ve been feeling as an almost physical presence around me for months now.

That web has manifested itself in many ways. My mind has been focused on sex more than normal recently; the specific direction in which it’s been probing the most, though, has centered on my identifying as bi more than two decades ago. Within quite short order after that, my life went in a direction that means that I’m not actively exploring the ways and extent to which I am attracted to men (or at least not actively physically exploring that!); how would that aspect of my life be different if I hadn’t gone in that direction twenty years ago? I have not the faintest idea. This is a mostly abstract question for me, but the one thing that prevents it from being a completely abstract question is my being told the summer before last by a friend of mine that he ended up being quite surprised by what he learned about his own sexuality a few years back (when he was noticeably older than I am now); I certainly don’t expect that to happen to me, but it’s a reminder of the possibilities that surround us, possibilities that in many cases we’re not really aware of.

Then there’s last year’s job search. Any job search is going to lead to you being confronted with possibility after possibility, and this one, despite its short length, was no exception. Fortunately, the possibilities in question were quite happy, and I ended up having a choice between either staying in a job that I basically enjoyed or selecting from multiple new possibilities that all seemed quite interesting. But: the job offer that I accepted was with a company that I didn’t even have my first interview at until I had an offer in hand from another rather attractive company; if my current employer been even a single day slower in that process, I would be working somewhere else, doing completely different programming, with a different number of quite different coworkers, taking the train to work every day instead of walking to work every day.

And certainly many of the details about why I enjoy my current company aren’t at all what I expected: again, surprises, possibilities that I wasn’t even aware of. In particular, my coworkers are reminding me of the power of contingency, of futures unfolding: as I get older and stay in the tech industry, I spend more and more time with people who are younger than me; and the fact that Miranda was born when I was 28, while not making me anything like a young father in historical norms, does mean (given the mating habits of the circles I move in) that my kid is noticeably older than the kids of most people my age. Being an active video game blogger also means that I spend a lot of time interacting with and being aware of the lives of people who are quite a bit younger than me; though it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that a couple of the bloggers I feel closest to are my age or a bit older.

Actually, many of my current coworkers are fairly close to me in age. But, of the two coworkers whom I’ve spent the most time with socially, one is five-eights of my age and hence has (from my point of view) basically all of the interesting parts of her life ahead of her (including events that I have no reason to think about in the context of my own future); and the other, while quite close to me in age (younger but, from my point of view, within the margin of error), has had some changes in her life over the last few years which make one (make me, certainly!) unusually aware of how paths can diverge, how one’s life can play out.

It’s not just this job change, though: whenever I think about job searches, I remember my last academic job search. At one point, I had a job offer in hand for a school that I would have enjoyed working at, an offer that I was going to accept: that school pressured me a bit more than I wanted, though, and a few other schools wanted to fly me out for interviews, one of which seemed like a better fit for me and sent signals that they thought I would be a good fit for them as well. That plus a non-academic job possibility that seemed interesting gave me the courage to turn down that first job; eventually, though, none of those jobs panned out.

Which I am extremely grateful for: there were some unpleasant aspects of that experience at the time (unsuccessful job searches are never fun), but even in the short term it worked out fine, and in the long term I’ve had zero reasons to regret that sequence of events and many reasons to be actively grateful for it. Still: things could have been quite different. And I’m not at all sure why things turned out the way they did, and in particular why I didn’t end up getting offered the job that seemed like a better fit: I didn’t have the courage to really probe that failure at the time, but my best guess is that my subconscious was dubious enough about me continuing with academia to sabotage my performance in that interview. A fortuitous series of events, even if I’m not sure why things happened the way they did or just how much chance was involved.

Contingency is one half of where my brain has been focused over the last year; the other half is narrative. Again, returning to Ascension: when I play that game, when I’m doing well in it, it’s because I can tell stories about how the game has gone so far and will go in future turns. (Not traditional stories about characters and what not: stories about the gameplay events and ways in which cards’ powers relate to each other.) The same goes for how I’ve been playing other board games; and the worlds created by my obsession from the first half of the year, Minecraft, are all about starting from contingency and crafting a narrative out of what you’re presented with.

And the same goes from all of the other examples above. In fact, my brain latched on to the narrative aspects of job searches before it latched on to the contingent aspects of those searches; and, while I say above that I’m quite glad that I left academia when I did, I’m sure that, if matters had turned out differently, I would have crafted a narrative that led to that result being the inevitable course of events instead. (I spent more than a decade and a half crafting that narrative, after all!) It’s not at all difficult to see one of the aforementioned coworkers as an example of the wonderful power that appears when you tell your stories properly, either.

In all of these examples, then, I’m not dealing with a web of possibilities as a manifestation of chaos. That web of possibilities is instead a manifestation of unexpected possibilities of coherence, of beauty. And narrative is the way that my brain is currently choosing to express that coherence, to help me understand its existence and meaning.

Why is my brain particularly focused on these topics right now? It could, of course, be pure coincidence—one lesson this year is that brains just do weird stuff some times, sometimes quite a bit weirder than I’m entirely comfortable with!—but let’s take a lesson from the narrative side of that focus and make a story out of that sequence of events instead of treating it as unexplained randomness. I turned forty near the start of last year; round numbers are an excuse for introspection, so it’s probably not entirely by chance that I’m looking back more than usual right now.

And looking back in a certain specific way. Forty is a traditional age for people (men in particular, perhaps?) to have a mid-life crisis; my guess is that the above is how my brain is choosing to express some of those symptoms. It’s a natural time for me to be looking back at what’s happened; being around young coworkers encourages that, and having a daughter who is going through major transitions of her own, forming certain mental habits in ways that I expect will strongly influence her life over the next years (decades?) is quite something to behold. (I didn’t expect middle school to be as much of a phase change as it has been, and I certainly didn’t expect the details of how it’s playing out.)

Also, Zippy’s decline and death happened this year (his decline started earlier, but it made itself year much more strongly this year than last year), so I’ve been getting hit by age as well as youth. And what both Miranda and Zippy have in common is: I’m realizing that we only have six more years living with Miranda (and she’s already much much more independent than she had been), and all of a sudden we don’t have any dogs to look after. So Liesl and I right now have quite a bit more freedom than we had over the last twelve years, and a dog-free window of opportunity to experiment with the even greater freedom that we’ll have in the quite near future when Miranda leaves. (Six years once seemed like a long time to me, but no more; compare that in particular to the twelve years that we’ve had with Miranda so far.)

Side note: one funny thing about looking at my mental state through a mid-life crisis lens is how unlike a traditional mid-life crisis it is in many ways. I’m wondering about different possibilities, and even wondering about possibilities of an explicitly sexual nature: the truth is, though, that my brain doesn’t even seriously consider any possibilities that wouldn’t have led to my spending decades with Liesl in the past and continuing to do so in the future. If I think about it intellectually, I can point to the unlikeliness of the coincidences that led to our meeting and falling in love, in the same way that I point to coincidences that led to me having the job that I have; but it’s a purely academic exercise, my brain is essentially unable to take seriously possible past histories that wouldn’t have led to us spending the last two decades together or spending the next four decades together. (The same thing goes for Miranda: an important part of what makes her her is formed out of 46 coin flips, so there’s a lot of room for randomness to manifest itself, but I am completely unable to imagine what it would be like to have a child who is not Miranda.)

Another traditional aspect of mid-life crises: looking back with some amount of regret. That I am also completely lacking in: there have, of course, been negative surprises over the last four decades as well as positive surprises, experiences that I didn’t enjoy at all at the time; not so many of them, though, and my brain is happy enough to not worry about them in retrospect, to see them more as sources of information and curiosity than anything else. And I don’t see any reason to think that my best years are in any sense behind me: I’ve had a good run so far, but very little that I did in the first two decades of my life had an impact beyond my immediate friends and family, and while I’m happy enough with what I’ve done over the more recent two decades, I don’t see any reason to believe that I can’t do a lot better over the next several. My life may be half over: but having four decades ahead of me is a long, long time!

My lack of regret doesn’t mean that I want to be blase about the future, however. As I said above: let’s make a story out of the random events in my past, and then let’s extend that story to see where my life might gracefully go next. I would be perfectly happy if my brain could spend the next year churning away on that issue, coming up with a grand plan going forward. Not a plan for the rest of my life, certainly, or anything even approaching that, but maybe a broad sketch for the next decade that will help me have an impact in ways that I haven’t so far?

Or maybe my brain will learn something from responding to the rolls of dice, the draws of cards in board games (the unfolding of moves in go!) and step beyond that narrative crutch. The way you can go isn’t the real way, the name you can say isn’t the real name; if I can move from being the ever-wanting soul who sees only what it wants and turn to being the unwanting soul who sees what’s hidden, I’d be happy with that as well. Mystery of all mysteries indeed.

I’ve been a Jo Walton fan for a while—all of her books are quite good, and Tooth and Claw is rather wonderful book if you’re a fan of Victorian novels and dragons—but Lifelode got to me in a way that none of her previous novels did. It’s a fantasy novel, and makes contact with many standard fantasy tropes; but those tropes are addressed in a way that’s always at least slightly askew, in a way that I found refreshing and fascinating. And there’s quite a bit in the book that I’m not familiar with at all in terms of standard fantasy tropes.

I think what got to me the most was its take on seeing the future in the form of viewing multiple possible appearances/actions that a person might have. (Will have? I’m fairly sure that they’re presented as possibilities in the book, but I could be wrong.) It’s not emphasized in the book (indeed, one of its strengths, like any good fantastical work, is the strength of the world-building in directions that aren’t the main themes of the book) but these views of the future directly ties into my brain’s current obsession with contingency. I think I’ll write a separate post about that one, though, because my response to this aspect of the book has rather more to do with where my brain is than with the book. (In particular, my brain right now is at least as focused on contingency in the past as on the future.)

Then there’s the title concept of a ‘lifelode’, a sort of true calling. Which is a little bit of a banal idea, and one that smacks too much of the notion of “hero of destiny” that infects fantasy literature. (And science fiction, and video games.) The good thing about Lifelode‘s approach to the concept is that it accepts a wide range of possible lifelodes as equally worthy: for example, looking after a household or making pots are as respected lifelodes as anything else. Also, the book at least addresses the possibility of people coming late to an understanding of what their lifelode might be; which is good, because if you’d asked me what mine would be, there are decades when being a math professor would have been the answer, which in retrospect has clearly proven not to be the case.

Partly because of that last experience, this is perhaps the area of the book that I’m mostly dubious about: I fear that it smacks of an essentialism that can be actively harmful. But it’s also one that I find seductive, and that I don’t understand at all in the context of my own life: I’m fairly sure that there’s a certain coherence in my activities and interests (both in my various employments and my various outside interests) that hints at a lifelode of sorts, but I’m not sure exactly how to put my finger on it, or indeed whether it would be an actively good idea to put my finger on it. And I’m also not sure whether analyzing that coherence in terms of a lifelode would be useful, harmful, a curiosity, or a distraction! So: lifelodes are something my brain likes thinking about right now, but is that good?

I support rather more unconditionally the book’s openness towards relationship possibilities: a society accepting of both primary marriages and very strong side relationships, of communication among the various parties necessary to make that work, and also the way the book nonetheless showed the unquestioned love, devotion, and focus from another that we all need sometimes. Side relationships are not, in general, the way my brain works at all, but I was thinking some about what ‘family’ meant a few months ago; that context has waned and that part of my brain has calmed down quite a bit since then, but still: I like to see an open discussion/acceptance of more possibilities of what it means to be a family.

Also, on the relationship note: one character gets described as “flirting as easily as he breathes” partway through the book, in a context that points out how unusual that is within the village where the book takes place. Which really struck me because I hadn’t noticed his behavior being all that unusual, and it made me realize that I’m more blind to certain aspects of “men hitting on women” behavior than I’d like to be. And also got me thinking about my own flirtatious behaviour: flirting was, for better or for worse, something that I think I basically didn’t do at all back when I was in search of relationships (and, to the extent I did it, I’m positive I was horrible at it); it’s something I do more now in a few contexts, with a few people—it’s fun and is essentially a zero-pressure activity for me now that I have no desire for anything at all to come out of it—and I suspect that, with the right sort of person, I’m probably no longer tragically awful at it? (I could easily be wrong on that latter bit; I suspect I would be awful at it with most people, and that I’d be rather worse at it if it mattered to me now, but that’s fine.) But reading that line in the book makes me wonder: do I flirt more often now than I think of myself as doing?

And then there’s the whole concept of moods. In the book, moods are presented, in part, as being brought through the air; also, it’s possible to set up defenses against being overly affected by these airborne moods. Which is a lovely idea, concretizing the notion of being swept away by an unwelcome mood (or a welcome but unexpected one!) for no clear reason, and of realizing that you’re acting in a way that you’d rather not be and trying to figure out what to do about it. These airborne moods are, at least at times, sent by gods (or by people acting on behalf of gods); I really like how the concept of personified gods seems like one end of the normal fantasy spectrum as you start the book, but then the personified gods turn out to be less and less like what the word ‘personified’ would make you think even as the book shows you more and more of how people become gods. (And that’s also tied to an unusual feature of the world’s geometry—there’s a bit of a Flatland, or really more Sphereland, vibe to the book as well.)

Like most fantasy novels, it talks about changes of an excessively cataclysmic nature, but here too it comes at it from an unusual nature: on the one hand, presenting these changes as part of an ongoing rhythm (so more a vibe of Buddhist changes of eras than a climactic victory of good or evil versus the other), but also shows how these changes can be delayed and caused to take uncommon courses without negating the idea entirely. Huge changes in fantasy novels generally have a strong martial feel; in Lifelode, though, that martial feel takes an Aikido vibe, with an emphasis on redirection rather than blocking/counterattacking (and also rather than evading them completely, of course), and with the acceptance of circularity.

A short book (which is refreshing for a fantasy novel in of itself!), but one where every ten pages turned up an idea that was both interestingly unusual for the genre and tied into something that I’d been thinking about.

After which, I decided I’d been remiss in reading Walton’s recent work, so I decided to catch up and go through Among Others as well. Which was a delight from start to finish: I ended up livetweeting my reading (and being gratified by how many of the people I know like quotes that speak favorably of interlibrary loans), because I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which speaks so directly to the experience of being a (very!) bookish teenager in the late 70’s. (I wasn’t a teenager by then, but I was close enough that the literary references were almost all familiar.) And, specifically, a bookish teenager whose tastes run strongly towards fantasy and science fiction but who is willing to dive into other specific recommendations, including those from adults you meet whose tastes you learn to trust.

Here, by ‘specifically’, I mean: author after author is mentioned, book after book, including the delights of discovering a wonderful book by a new author, learning that they’ve written more, finding somebody to talk about that author, and going to the library and checking out another ten of their books. (Or: putting in an interlibrary loan request for every single one of that author’s books.) All sorts of wonderful little touches, like the protagonist’s enjoyment of Tiptree, then discovering 50 pages later than Tiptree was a woman, and her having opinions about specific Tiptree stories instead of about Tiptree in the abstract; or her giving Plato a try on the recommendation of a (much) older friend, really liking the Symposium but being more dubious about the Republic, and relating the latter to The Dispossessed and Triton. It’s one thing to recognize a similarity of feelings and experiences in the abstract; but it seemed like on every page of this book I’d run into a specific artistic encounter that I went through myself 25 years ago. Amazing.

During this week’s Rock Band practice, the song I spent the most time with was I Wanna Be Sedated. Like I Love Rock and Roll, it’s filled with simple power chord progressions, and after that earlier song, I thought I understood the basics of power chords reasonably well. Music with a lot of power chords frequently sticks to I-IV-V: so you pick a fret, play an E power chord on that fret (I), slide your hand over to the right and play an A power chord on the same fret (IV), and move your hand up two frets and play another A power chord (V).

In particular, I Wanna Be Sedated starts off moving between the fifth fret on the E string and the seventh fret on the A string; so there’s our I-V, I guess IV is left out? It stays in that vein for a while, then mixes things up a bit: we see the seventh fret on the E string (II, or ii—it’s an open fifth, I guess I’ll go with II), has an excessively transparent key change that slides your hand up a couple of frets, and also spends time on the second and fourth frets as well (another key change, I guess?).

At this point, my readers who know the song and know a bit of music theory are laughing at me. (I was expecting yesterday’s post to be the one this week to lead to the most feelings of lingering shame for me this week, but nope: turns out that music theory is a more powerful force of shame for my brain than sex.) Because the above is quite incorrect; I figured that out eventually, but it took three or four times through the song before I realized that I’d made a mistake. The first curiosity was wondering about that II in the absence of a IV; and I also was trying to figure out why the shift down to the second and fourth frets didn’t actually sound like a key change. And, as my subconscious was pondering those issues, I realized that the song started on the 7th fret of the A string rather than on the 5th fret of the E string; if we go with my prior analysis, that would mean that we were starting on V.

Which, of course, the song isn’t: it’s starting on I. So if the chord that I’d previously (mis)labeled as V is actually a I, then the chord that I’d previously alleged was I is actually a IV, and that alleged II is really a V. In other words, instead of the song spending a lot of time going between I and V, it spends a lot of time going between I and IV, building up a rather pleasant amount of tension before finally throwing a V in there. (In fact, the fifth fret on A is an E chord, the fifth fret on E is an A chord, and the seventh fret on E is a B chord, so we have the same E-A-B progression that we saw in I Love Rock and Roll, just on different strings/frets, and with the E chord an octave higher.) Basically, there’s another pattern that you can use for power chords to get the I-IV-V progression: I is fret N on the A string, IV is fret N-2 on the E string, and V is fret N on the E string. I guess you use this if you want the I to be on the top, whereas you use the pattern I talked about in the first paragraph if you want I to be on the bottom.

The one thing I got right: yes, there is a key change halfway through. (That one is so ludicrously exposed that even my brain is unable to misinterpret it.) So we get the same pattern but shifted up two frets, on the seventh/ninth frets instead of the fifth/seventh. The stuff on the second/fourth frets isn’t a key change at all, though: the second fret on the E string is an octave down from the ninth fret on the A string, so that’s just I reappearing, on the bottom this time instead of the top. (And the fourth fret on the A string is the exact same chord as the ninth fret on the E string—V in both cases—with the position presumably being chosen to minimize the amount of vertical distance that your hands need to travel.)

Fun stuff: I enjoyed playing the song, I enjoyed learning something in the process. The main technical deficiency that it pointed out was my alternating strumming abilities: Dan Bruno confirmed my suspicion that I was supposed to be alternating strumming those power chords, and while I’ve been practicing alternating strumming individual strings, I haven’t been practicing alternating strumming power chords at all. Something to work on (and something I can practice outside of game), which is good; I imagine I’ll return to the song regularly over the next few weeks to if/how I’m improving.

And if my brain can get more consciously attuned to how familiar chord progressions sound (and feel!), rather than having me depend on mathematics plus lingering doubts from my unconscious, that will be awesome.

I recently (re)read The Mad Man, by Samuel R. Delany. Which is a book that I’m still trying to figure out: on the one hand, it’s one of the most life-affirming books that I know, but on the other hand, it’s pornography, and pornography where the protagonist spends a fair amount of time drinking piss. Which, if you’d asked me earlier, wouldn’t have been qualities that I would have expected to link together.

Though, now that I think about it, perhaps I should revise my expectations. I might also use the term ‘life-affirming’ to describe the Kushiel trilogy, for example; and, while that series is not pornography, there’s quite a bit of fucking going on it. No piss drinking that I can recall, but lots of pain inflicted as part of the sex in those books; still, the result is something that I very much see as on the side of the goodness in humanity. I’m fairly sure that, by the end of this blog post, it will be clear that that isn’t a coincidence, that there’s a reason why my brain interprets both books that way.

Anyways, back to The Mad Man. Like I said: pornography, piss drinking. The latter is far from the only sexual act in the book, or far from the only substance consumed: the protagonist spends a fair amount of time going down on other men (as does Delany himself, of course), so semen certainly shows up frequently. (One might even say that it spurts forth.) In fact, in general, if a substance comes out of a body, it gets consumed in this book: while the protagonist is not in this number, a couple of the side characters have a fondness for eating shit, to the extent that we run into people in the book who claim never to go to a bathroom, they just hold things in until they run across a friend who will dispose of their waste products for them.

I suspect it’s a manifestation of Delany’s love of symmetry (or a hidden desire to be a management consultant?) that he completes the quadrant: we’ve sexualized the production and consumption of solid and liquid waste products, and we have semen: if we wanted to make the latter solid, what would we do? The answer, of course, is to have characters who have stretched their foreskins to abnormal extents, and who like to whack off and then leave the semen hanging around in there for a few days; eventually, it apparently takes on a more solid, cheese-like texture, becoming a different sort of delicacy to be consumed by its aficionados. (The protagonist becoming one of those aficionados.) Who knows, maybe that is a thing, maybe this is simply Delany reporting.

Because report he does. I said above that the book is pornography, and if I had to pick a single genre label for it, that is the one that I’d choose. But it crosses genre boundaries in ways that, for example, his Equinox doesn’t: and one of its other themes is to provide a picture of what life could be like as a gay man in pre-AIDS New York City. And what life could be like is: you can get laid all you want, and if there are particular behaviors that you eroticize, you can easily find people to engage in it with you, should you so choose. So, for example, he goes into a fair amount of detail about a bar that regularly had evenings devoted to the consumption of piss, with loving descriptions of the care taken to make sure that your clothes are wearable, the way people replaced urinals in the bathrooms during those evenings, the effects on your insides of having large amounts of urine flowing through your system.

Of course, pornography is (frequently) devoted to entirely imagined portrayals of sexual excess, but that’s not what’s going on in the above descriptions. For one thing, they’re called out as reporting instead of pornography within the book itself: while the book describes a trip of the narrator’s to that bar, it frames that trip in the context of a letter from the narrator to a less-cosmopolitan friend of his, giving context about the possible life of a philosopher that the narrator is describing, with the tone of: you clearly don’t realize what the range of quite reasonable possible behavior for a gay New Yorker is, so I’m going to explain it to you. (And, as I do a bit of googling, Delany didn’t even construct a fictional bar as a composite of real examples: the Mineshaft, the bar he described, existed and was much as he said.) It’s explicitly marked as reportage in the context of the book, and Delany these days clearly feels that it’s important for him to speak out accurately about the variety and quantity of sex available for those desiring it: the interview that leads off The Polymath has him talking about a typical day of writing in the early sixties where he’d work on a novel for a few hours in the morning, then go to a bathroom in Central Park and blow four or five men, then go home and write some more, then go to a movie theater for more sex, then grocery shop and go home and cook dinner for his wife, then write some more, then go off to the trucks to give another five blow jobs. Easily hundreds of sexual partners a month, thousands a year.

Those movie theaters show up a lot in The Mad Man, too, and he’s written a quite good nonfiction book about them, too, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. That book is partly about the destruction of those theaters, and what we’ve lost by that destruction. A theme that comes up in The Mad Man, too; and while I won’t say it’s the reason for their destruction (or for the shutting down of the Mineshaft), AIDS is one of the main ways in which the city government justified their actions in that regard. The Mad Man straddles the boundary of the appearance of AIDS, and explicitly addresses that transition.

Addresses it not just in terms of what was lost in terms of institutions, but in much more personal terms: of having friends suddenly die, of living in fear not knowing that you’re going to die, of living in resignation assuming that you must be infected, given the number of people you’ve fucked, so what’s the point of taking precautions? And it’s written in (in my view entirely justified) anger at the scandalous paucity of solid research into what behaviors lead to what levels of risk of catching the disease. There’s way too much unsupported “sex is scary and bad, especially gay sex” talk out there, and on the sex-positive side way too much “sex is very dangerous without a condom but safe if you have one” talk out there; Delany’s survival (those thousands upon thousands of men he’s gone down on weren’t wearing condoms) gives anecdotal evidence that the truth is rather more nuanced than that, but anecdotal evidence isn’t research. The Mad Man contains, as an appendix, a 1987 Lancet article entitled “Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus among Male Homosexuals”, which is a start; Delany claims that it hasn’t (or at least hadn’t at the time the book was written, say by 1994) been followed up in anything approaching an appropriate fashion. That is part of the context of the sex acts that are featured in the book: Delany wanted to write about people having (lots of!) sex in ways that could plausibly not lead to their getting AIDS.

So yeah, there’s reportage in there, and well-done polemically-informed reportage at that. And, uh, reportage that’s kind of hot. Which is one of the interesting things about the book: trying to figure out what’s pornography, what’s fiction that’s describing people that fuck a lot but in realistic rather than fantastical ways, and what’s reportage. That division isn’t simply something I’m reading into the book: as I mentioned above, the book explicitly addresses the existence of reportage, and it also explicitly addresses pornography, in the form of events told by narrators who prove later to be unreliable.

And this variety of narration, coupled with an even wider variety of sexual acts that are described, means that when reading it, I’m always asking myself: is this something I like to do? Is this something I would like to do, but haven’t done? Is this something that I kind of think I would like to do but I’d need to get drunk to have the courage to do it? Is this something that I think is hot to read about but that I really wouldn’t want to do in real life? Is this this something that is so obviously fictionalized pornographic excess as to be too ridiculous to even think about in real life? Is this something that I wouldn’t want to do about in real life, but am completely comfortable with the idea of? Is this something that I’d honestly rather not think about too much, but that when I do think about it seems fine if that’s what you’re into? Is this something that seems wrong to me? There’s stuff in the book that I’d put into each of those categories, and mercifully little that I would put in the last of those categories; and one side effect of (re)reading it is that the number of acts that I’d put into the next-to-last of those categories is shrinking.

Which is one of the reasons why I find the book so life-affirming. It sends a strong message that: whatever you’re into (well, almost whatever you’re into), that’s okay, and you’ll find somebody else who is into that, too, you’ll find sexual satisfaction. And that’s a glorious statement! And another message, that worrying too much about fitting yourself into boxes or what the correct labels are to apply to yourself just isn’t necessary. For example, we frequently see in those theaters (and elsewhere) men who label themselves as straight but who really enjoy being (frequently!) blown by other men; the novel may gently poke fun at them for that label, and suggest that those men would be happier if they weren’t so attached to it and could take a more honest look at their lives, but ultimately the fact that those men are finding sexual fulfillment is what matters.

Also, the book is equally strong on the flip side of that message: whatever you’re not into is fine, too. Even if you label yourself as gay, that doesn’t mean that you have to be into doing anything that another man wants. So there’s little or no anal sex in the book, for example (mirroring Delany’s own preferences), and generally characters in the book have a fairly strong leaning towards going down on other people or towards having other people go down on them. (Delany generally prefers the former.) It’s fine to want to do A a lot, to never want to to B, to want to do C once or twice a week, to be happy enough to do D if you’re with a partner who prefers it but to stay away from it otherwise, to have wanted to do E ten years ago but to not be into it these days, to not be quite sure yet if you want to do F or not. That, coupled with an equally strong message that people with complementary preferences are out there somewhere, is something that I find rather wonderful.

So far, I’ve been mostly focusing on different kinds of sex acts. But, of course, there’s a lot more to sexual desire than the act itself: doubtless there are people out there who would be happy to fuck anybody with the appropriate set of orifices/organs/desires to match their preferences in sex acts, but most of us get turned on/off by other specific physical characteristics and behaviors as well. And this too is a strength of Delany in general and of The Mad Man in particular.

Any Delany fan is well aware by now of the frequency with which Delany’s main characters get turned on when seeing somebody else with heavily bitten fingernails; this is one of Delany’s own fetishes, but it also goes back to the life-affirming nature that I mentioned above: whatever you are into is okay. (Though, just to be clear here: I am not saying that I approve of all forms of sexual behavior, consent is crucial to me. I’ll get to the intersection of desires with politics in a bit.) There is no need to feel shame; think about where your desires might come from, if you wish, but if you have a preference for something, that’s fine. I honestly can’t remember how much bitten fingernails show up in The Mad Man, but there’s one key character who has quite the interest in the details of feet, for example.

And equally life-affirming (actually, probably more life-affirming) is the converse: there’s going to be something out there who is into you, even into aspects of yourself that society suggests you should be ashamed of; and, for that matter, just because society marks something as negative (or as positive) doesn’t mean that anybody should care about that one way or another! (Again, I’m talking about sexual attraction here, not politics.) The book reinforces that last point in a rather direct way: a lot of the people that the protagonist has sex with are homeless. (And not some sort of pornographically fantastic attractive young homeless people, either: homeless people who have had a rough time of it, who have been aged by the process.) It’s not that the protagonist has a fetish for homeless people; he just doesn’t care about that the way that society expects him to. I don’t want to portray the book as autobiography, because it’s not, but this isn’t some sort of abstract political statement: Delany has been living for the last twenty years with a man he met while the latter was homeless. (See Bread & Wine for some of the details about that one.) Think about what’s important to you (sexually, yes, but in a partner more generally), and try to see that without being blinded by what society tells you. (And, for that matter, try not to get too attached to those initial hypotheses if you haven’t actually checked them against your behavior and feelings towards real people.)

That’s the physical side of attraction, of eroticization; what about the mental side? This is actually the area in the book that gave me the most pause, as it turns out. To take one example, I hope I don’t make a habit of calling people stupid in the real life, but I’m sure I’d be more likely to do that than to, say, drink piss; when reading and thinking about those two actions in the book, though, I end up realizing that the former bothers me rather more (and at a more fundamental level) than the latter.

It is very much to The Mad Man‘s credit, however, that it’s helped me think through these issues, to understand where my boundaries lie and what’s good about my disquiet, but also to appreciate the positive aspects of what he’s describing. In general, if you’re calling somebody stupid, you’re just being an asshole. (At best: at it’s all-too-common worst, it’s actively destructive, potentially to the point of leaving scars for life.) I’m coming around to understanding, though, that in an explicitly marked fantasy zone, that can be okay behavior.

In general, I’m not hugely into talking dirty as an actual part of sex (though I’m pretty strongly into verbal play in general, and I’d be very unlikely to be attracted by somebody who didn’t appreciate and wasn’t capable of some level of verbal gymnastics), but I can see (I can feel!) the pleasure of talking dirty. Also, in general I’m not into power play in sex (and there my sexual preferences mirror my non-sexual preferences), but I’m not so blind as to deny the existence of that one, either. And, to be honest, I suspect that I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with being on the submissive side of a sexual power dynamic, though I’m also perfectly happy giving it a miss and I doubt that I’d want to either go too far in that direction or make that a particularly frequent part of sex.

So: if modeling power relations turns you on, if insults are part of that, and if for that matter you get turned on by being called stupid, then that’s totally up to you: your preferences are your preferences, your turn-ons are your turn-ons, and if you find a partner willing (even eager) to play a complementary role, then that’s great. (That partner just won’t be me!) Unlike some of the stuff I’ve talked about above, I’m not going to uncritically accept most power dynamic sexual preferences as being innate to your brain chemistry (in general, I’m sure there are exceptions); but even if it is the case that those sexual desires are shaped in part by societal forces that I think are bad, even evil (which I’m also not going to uncritically put forth!), that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to try to repress those sexual desires. Work with them, figure out how to find pleasure; and if they bother you, confront that, figure out what’s going on, and it’s my (quite uninformed) guess that you’ll have more luck dealing with what bothers you in areas outside of sex first.

(At least that’s my current tentative working hypothesis. I really do not claim to have a well-informed opinion about all of this, and I’m almost positive that there are ways in which I’m being a condescending asshole here. And just typing the words “brain chemistry” above reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a couple of months ago that I should pick up again: she has a much more directly informed opinion about how brain chemistry would affect some of these issues than I do!)

Returning to our specific example: in the grand scheme of things, calling somebody stupid is a relatively mild form of power dynamic; Delany confronts some power dynamics that are a lot worse, and where I’m glad that it’s a black man who is writing about them. The more intense the power dynamics get, the more he goes out of his way to emphasize the boundaries of where they’re acceptable and where they’re not, to emphasize that enjoying something in the context of sex does not in any way mean enjoying something in a different context, and that desiring a label in the context of sex does not mean that that label is either welcome or accurate in other contexts. And even with that, there was one place in the book where I was intensely grateful a certain bit of narration was revealed to be false within the book’s internal context, a bit of internal pornography. Which relates to the distinction I mentioned above between sex acts that you’d enjoy actually doing versus sex acts that you get turned on by reading about them: just as (consensual, always consensual!) interactions during sex are in a different space from interactions in other contexts, so too are explicitly fictional descriptions of behavior different from real-world behavior.

Phew. Quite a book; quite a lot to think about. It certainly hits on my taboos—I finished my most recent reading of the book more than two months ago, and it’s taken me most of that time to accept that, yes, this book really is important enough to my brain that I’m going to write about it even if that means writing about characters who are turned on by eating shit. (And this hesitation isn’t purely academic: one real-life friend had asked about the book a couple of times, and when I finally gave in and started talking about it, got squicked out in quite short order by my description.) And, as is obvious from those last few paragraphs, it hits at issues that I’m still not comfortable thinking about.

But the book has also helped me become surprisingly comfortable with a wide range of scenarios, and did so a way that points uniformly towards acceptance of and glorying in the wonderful variety of human behavior. And, equally important, in a way that paints a wonderfully optimistic picture of opportunities and acceptance that’s out there for you! Delany’s world is a fascinating one, and one that I like more and more as I’m getting to know it better.

We first saw Zero Patience when it came out; I guess that means in 1994? I’d had generalized fond memories of it since then: what’s not to like about a musical about AIDS where the main characters are Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor: he drank from the fountain of youth and is working as a taxidermist in a Toronto museum) and Patient Zero? Though that sentence is more insensitive than I’d like—I’ve been fortunate to not have had any close friends die of AIDS, others may have quite a bit not to like about the situation—but still. I’ve listened to the soundtrack over and over since then, enough to remind myself of the movie’s basic plot and of the fact that Pop-A-Boner is a wonderful song, but I hadn’t actually seen the movie in the intervening 17 years.

Which omission we remedied last month. And: a wonderful movie, as it turns out. (With a lot of very attractive men in it, no surprise there.) And one that is moving in ways I hadn’t expected: I’d forgotten the details of the subplot involving George going blind (and I have a different context for that subplot than I did back in 1994), and Richard Burton’s transition over the course of the movie touched me much more than I’d thought it would.

But, for me, it still comes back to the songs. So:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQI5B3AK4o

First and foremost: Pop-A-Boner. I am a sucker for that sort of close harmony, and the lyrics are charming and witty; seeing it doesn’t add too much to listening to it, but the participants are certainly easy on the eyes. I don’t have a lot to say about this song, but it has been and will remain the main reason why I listen to the album as frequently as I do.

The second song that had stuck with me is the Butthole Duet. I can’t find a video of it to embed here, which is very sad: if there’s one thing better than a musical starring Patient Zero and Richard Burton, it’s a song in a musical that’s sung by the assholes of Patient Zero and Richard Burton!

I’d mostly liked the song in the past because I thought that idea was very amusing; musically, it’s fine, but nothing special. (Though the harmonizing in the bit about assholes, phalluses, and patriarchy crumbling is nice.) In the context of the movie, though, it’s quite a bit more poignant than on the CD.

Just listening to the song, you learn that Richard Burton isn’t into anal sex (at least receptive): he wants to be open-minded, but dislikes the idea at a fairly fundamental level, and puts an overly intellectual spin on the situation. Patient Zero, of course, approaches the topic with more enthusiasm and in a much more straightforward manner.

Which is all well and good, but the movie’s framing adds quite a bit to that interpretation. To begin with, before the song starts, Richard Burton shows up in bed covered head to toe in plastic. Which is great for a laugh, but it adds more depth to the scene in a couple of different ways. For one thing, he’s not rejecting the idea of anal sex out of hand: he’s presenting himself as willing to give it a go, he just wants to make sure he’s protected. (And, of course, looking ridiculous and de-eroticizing the situation in the process.) Which leads to the other thing, that there are (at least) two reasons why he’s reluctant: the scene opens up with him not wanting to die from having sex, and it’s really only as we get to the song that he starts to be more honest about his feelings, that he might have other reasons for his misgivings. And even the nature of those misgivings needs exploration: as he sings, “my taboos run very deep”: how much of his misgivings are culturally conditioned taboos versus personal preferences that are inherent in his nature?

So we start from Richard Burton presenting himself as wanting to give it a go but not wanting to die as a result; that facade starts to crumble almost immediately, but picking out what’s really going on in his feelings is hard, he has mental defenses that mean that it’s probably not even particularly clear to himself what’s going on. And, as somebody who overintellectualizes a lot of situations and who started first having sex at a time when AIDS was relatively new and was a death sentence, I can very much sympathize with this: it’s one of the tragedies of AIDS (albeit a small tragedy in the grand scale of that disease) that its presence makes navigating your sexual feelings, your sexual awakening that much harder. The emotional waves that sex is tied up with are bad enough when you’re not used to dealing with them (and if you’re pretty uptight to begin with), and of course non-AIDS diseases are problematic enough, and (switching over to straight sex) pregnancy is staggeringly important; antibiotics and contraception made those manageable, but then AIDS came along.

But even that isn’t the end of the story: just listening to the song misses the framing that the movie provides at the end as well as the beginning. Because Richard Burton really is starting to fall in love with Patient Zero; I’m not sure exactly what the two of them would work out physically, but my guess is that they’d find something that worked for them. Getting Richard Burton’s feelings about sex out on the table is important, but that doesn’t mean that he has to be ruled by his initial fears: talk things out, try things out, and something good will come of it. Again, though: AIDS makes this a lot harder. (Setting aside, of course, the fact that Patient Zero is a ghost who will disappear again soon!)

The last song I want to talk about is the one that plays during the opening, Just Like Sheherazade. Again, pleasant enough to listen to, and I actually didn’t think about it too much while I was watching the movie, either.

In the weeks since then, though, my brain has been coming back to it more and more. Because that song is all about telling stories, and that’s what my brain has been obsessed with over the last year. It first hit me when I was trying to figure out what was going on with my job search; since then, though, I’ve watched my feelings shift in different directions in response to the different stories I’m telling myself, I’ve seen mysterious behaviors on my friends’ parts come into focus once I learn what stories they’re telling themselves, I’ve seen the problems (and the potentially productive clashes!) that arise when different participants in an interaction are telling different stories about a given situation. So yeah, Sheherazade: tell a story.

And, of course, that’s a very powerful theme for a movie about AIDS. Because if you try to pretend that AIDS is simply a disease, that we can understand what’s going on by looking at it through a scientific lens (indeed, if you believe that the notion of a scientific lens is unproblematic in that context), you will be acting willfully blind. (In which light, I suppose it’s no coincidence that the movie has a subplot about going blind.) Because wherever sex and gay people show up, the country’s (I say writing as an American, though of course it’s a Canadian movie) puritanical streak will raise its head; and also wherever sex shows up, desire will start to swamp reason; and AIDS is not just any disease, if we don’t figure out how to cure it or at least control it (which we very much hadn’t back in 1994), lots of people will die, your friends will die, maybe you will die. It’s impossible to think about AIDS without multiple stories playing out in your heads; and you’d be sticking your head in the sand to think that you can do science without being affected by these stories, that (for example) the people participating (or wanting to participate!) in your experimental drug trials don’t have stories that are powerful, that are worthy of respect and admiration, to forget that they’re entrusting their lives and the lives of their friends and lovers to the success of your research.

Which means that, indeed, they may have zero patience for stumbles, for missteps, for prejudice, for greed. But wishful thinking isn’t enough: whether that lack of patience will transform into progress is not so clear. And it’s a mercy to occasionally relieve that lack of patience with a return to the pleasures of bathhouses, bodies, and three-part harmonies.

This weekend’s Rock Band 3 practice was spent playing I Love Rock and Roll over and over and over again; call me a simpleton, but I really enjoyed it in ways that bear on the way it feels (physically, not emotionally) to play it.

It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords possible: I-IV-V, where I is an E power chord (open E string, index finger on the second fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D string), IV is an A power chord (open A string, index finger on the second fret of the D string, middle finger on the second fret of the G string), and V is a B power chord (index finger on the second fret of the A string, ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, pinky on the fourth fret of the G string). So you move your hand between those three positions, with the occasional flourish thrown in.

And it’s the details of those hand movements that got to me. The I-IV transition is performed by shifting your entire hand up a string, reflecting the fact that each of the bottom four strings on a guitar is a fourth up from the next lower string. (Or, alternatively: the tuning on a guitar is chosen exactly to express that I-IV power chord shift; this is different from a violin, for example, where adjacent strings are separated by a fifth instead of the fourth.) Also lurking in this transition is the fact that you play the second fret on the D string in both chords: the chords in question are open fifths, so this expresses that if you go a fifth up from IV, you get back down to I, meaning that an E shows up in both of them.

Next, the IV-V transition. Here, the chords are a whole step apart from each other; that’s expressed in the simplest way possible, by shifting your left hand up two frets while playing the same strings. (So, in particular, the two chords have no notes in common.)

Finally, we go from V back to I. Power chords are open fifths, so the the two notes that make up the I are simply the E that’s its root and the B which is the root of the B power chord that’s the V in this sequence. (In any of these chords, the third note is repeats the bottom note an octave up.) In particular, B shows up in both chords, and in both chords, you’re playing that B with your index finger: and when making the V-I shift, you keep that index finger in place, but shift the positions of the other fingers. (Actually, when you make that transition in the song, it throws in a G (third fret on the E string, which in that context I play with my ring finger) between those two chords, but you can leave your index finger in place while playing that G as well.) This gives that transition a different feel from playing the I-IV-V power chord sequence in keys other than E: if you weren’t starting from an open string, then the V-I transition would involve sliding your whole hand left and up, so none of the fingers would stay in the same place.

So: your hands move less than you might expect, and that fact reflects something about the relationship between the chords involved, that they’re rotating somehow around the B. It’s not the only place where my hands moved less than I might expect: there’s a little flourish that you perform several times, and when I first ran into that in practice mode, I was a bit stymied by it. Eventually, though, I realized how little my hands had to move when performing that flourish, and it became much easier. (This unfolding of quiet simplicity happens to me all the time when learning bits on pro keys; not as often in the past on guitar, though I imagine that will change as I get better and have to deal with more notes.) That flourish sometimes comes after a I and sometimes after a V; in both cases, though, it’s approximately as easy to play, and in both cases that B you’re playing with your index finger is a key note.

Some other bits that struck me while going through the song:

• The flourish mentioned in the previous paragraph involves a pull-off; I can go through the motions well enough for the game to score me as playing it successfully, but when I play it unmuted and plugged in, I sound a lot worse unless I’m very careful and crisp with my finger movements. So clearly something to work on.

• Sometimes, when the guitar part comes in after being quite for a while, you play I, and sometimes, you play V. Which I hadn’t really noticed when listening to the song (my pitch recognition can clearly use some work!), but once I was aware of that possibility, I could tell which chord to expect: not so much because I recognized the notes but because my brain could feel that the V-I resolution was coming up. Which gave me a lot more appreciation for the Suzuki practice of listening to songs on CD over and over again before playing them: that’s what I’ve effectively been doing by going through every on-disc Rock Band 3 multiple times on multiple instruments before I first started playing them on expert pro guitar, and it’s seeping into my understanding at a subconscious level of how the songs are put together.

• The song has two sections involving lots of alternating strumming. In one of them, where I had to shift which note I was strumming, I had to practice at slower speeds; I eventually managed to play it successfully at 95% speed but not at full speed. Close, though, and I’m glad I’ve started practicing hard bits slowed down and going through the whole solo separately. (I’ll need to do that more and more to have any chance at not embarrassing myself as the solos get less straightforward.)

  In the other (much longer but much simpler) alternating strumming bit, though, I managed to keep my streak going for quite some time; listening to myself plugged in, I wasn’t quite as regular as I would have liked, but still: progress!

• One of my disappointments when playing Beatles Rock Band was how hard it was to play guitar while singing: those are songs I know well, songs I should be able to sing on autopilot, but I generally couldn’t manage that while playing expert guitar. I was curious how much that had to do with the fact that doing two things at once is hard and how much had to do with the artificial nature of Rock Band fake plastic guitar.

  As I started to get comfortable with the guitar part for I Love Rock and Roll, however, I noticed myself singing along with the song during easy sections and breaks in the guitar part; so once my guitar playing got decent, I pulled out a mic stand, turned on a second controller, and had the game score me on both simultaneously. I got 90% on pro guitar and 95% on vocals (expert in both cases), and while I can do better playing either side of that by itself, those scores are more than good enough to support the hypothesis that the structure of real guitar playing allows my fingers to work more on autopilot so I can devote more of my brain to my singing. Which isn’t to say that the two didn’t interfere: it was definitely a good thing that I didn’t have to sing during the aforementioned flourishes, and when alternating strumming bits showed up I generally stopped singing while my brain focused on establishing the rhythm, though I did manage to get back to singing after a few measures of the alternating strumming.

A great way to spend half an afternoon. And I’m only three songs in! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the songs are like in their full glory.

As is doubtless clear from this blog, for the last several years most of my time interacting with art has been spent with video games. And that’s been wonderful, no question. What is less clear from this blog, however, is the extent to which that wasn’t always the case: while I’ve played video games regularly since we got our first computer, I used to read a lot more than I do now, and music has been quite important in my life at times, especially during high school.

Music is forcing its way into my life again, and I’m very glad for that. But I keep on looking wistfully at my bookshelf, and asking myself why I’m not spending more time with them. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently, and in particular it’s well past time for me to revisit Systems of Survival; or I’ve been talking with a friend of mine recently about Buddhism, thinking it’s time for me to revisit that. (I suspect I’m the only person in my circle of bloggers who studied Pali for a couple of years in college and who has 45 volumes of the Pali Canon sitting on his bookshelf; I’m particularly fond of the elephants on the spines of those books!) It’s not that I don’t read books at all, and in fact sometimes an author will still grab me and I’ll read several of her books in close sequence; but it’s far too common for me to go multiple weeks without finishing a book.

And that’s not good. So I have to make more time to read. Regularly carve out time in the weekends to read; but I should also carve out a weekday evening a week to read too, I think.

That, of course, means that something has to go, especially since I’m spending more time than I had been on music. So, the first step: re-examine my long-term ongoing projects. Do I want to continue studying Japanese, do I want to continue learning guitar? The answer to both of those is yes, so they’re staying.

Do I want to continue to read and write blogs? I certainly want to continue to write; in fact, I’m hoping that I’ll start blogging more about books! I don’t want to stop reading blogs, either, but that’s clearly an area where I can do more pruning, and constrain my blog reading more: I don’t want to have evenings where I start reading blogs, then do a bit of this and a bit of that, and end up feeling unhappy with myself. (I’m totally fine with spending evenings doing bits of this and that if I end up feeling happy with myself, though: sometimes I’m just feeling blah, and should recognize and embrace that.) That alone may actually be enough to help me carve out one evening a week.

Do I want to continue to play video games? That question gave me pause, but I think ultimately the answer there is a clear yes: Christopher Hyde I am not. But, as with reading blogs, I should be more aware of what I’m playing. It’s time to stop playing games just because I feel that I should, and instead to play games that I feel are calling to my soul in some way. So fewer sequels, more returning to old favorites (I just got a refurbished Dreamcast: here I come, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue, and of course the PS3 Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remakes), and when considering new games, I’ll lean towards games that I hope will speak to something deeper within myself (Child of Eden, presumably preceded by Rez HD; Dragon Age 2). (Actually, if my brain is telling me to spend more time on music and on Buddhism, then Child of Eden is probably a rather good fit!) It’ll be a while before I start any games, though: I imagine I have at least another year of Rock Band 3 in front of me, Ni No Kuni DS will probably take me a couple more months, and one non-Rock Band game at a time is my limit.

And then there’s the possibility of new creative projects forcing themselves upon my brain. Fortunately, right now I’m at a bit of lull in terms of feeling that I need to program something at home (doubtless helped by the fact that programming at work is rather interesting); if that changes, though, I’ll embrace it and re-evaluate. Hmm, thinking about games, I wish I were spending more time playing board games, too; and I should be spending more time with non-family members outside of work. In college, I watched movies a fair amount; I miss that, but I’m comfortable enough having that stay by the wayside for the time being.

So: a balancing act. But it always is, and it always comes down to: what is my soul telling me to do? Right now, my soul is telling me to draw strength from friends, and that the friends I’ve been neglecting the most are books.

For those of you who haven’t been following my progress on my other blog, I’ve now gone through all the songs in Rock Band 3 on hard pro guitar. Which has been a wonderful experience: as I’d expected, hard pro guitar is where you transition from a stripped down simulacrum of playing guitar to really making music. In medium pro guitar, you rarely play more than two notes at once, and quite a lot of notes are missing; in hard, however, you’re playing full chords pretty much all the time, and while they’re still leaving out notes (quite a few of them in the case of the complex solos), enough notes are present that you can hear the song quite clearly in what remains (at least outside of those complex solos). Or, to put it another way: if you plug your guitar into an amp and remove the string mute, you can enjoy listening to yourself, and you really are playing the song along with the game!

Of course, with that richness comes challenges: hard difficulty asks you to learn much much more on a technical level than previous difficulty settings. Looking back, I started playing pro guitar around March 12th; I started medium on April 3rd, so easy took three weeks to complete. I started hard on June 19th, so medium took two and a half months to complete. Which is longer than anything else I’d tried to do in Rock Band other than my attempt to ascend the pro keys leaderboards, but I didn’t make it to expert until December 4th, meaning that I spent five and a half months on hard, learning quite a lot along the way.

The first thing that I learned was the very existence of power chords: not having any real knowledge of rock guitar in advance, I didn’t realize that, in a lot of rock guitar, you’re playing three note chords that are open fifths instead of major or minor triads. In retrospect, I’m a bit embarrassed that I’d gone so long without being aware of that fact: clearly my ears need a lot more training! But now that I’m aware of them, I’m finding power chords rather fascinating: open fifths are, indeed, powerful to listen to (a fact that is getting reinforced by the current piece I’m learning on the piano, the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering, in which the entries of the second, fourth, and (amazingly) sixth voices all have open fifths that are simply glorious), and on a physical level power chords give my fingers something interesting to do (and in particular force me to be comfortable moving up and down the fretboard) without requiring too much in the way of precision.

I was aware of the existence of barre chords, and expected them to be a bit challenging at first; they proved to be a pain, both metaphorically and literally. The game’s training mode has a set of barre chord exercises, and the first time I tried them, it hurt too much for me to make it past the halfway point of the set. I made it further the second week, but even then I couldn’t finish the last of the exercises, which asked me to shift between barred E major and minor and barred A major and minor chords, on at least two different frets. Also adding to the difficulty was my uncertainty as to how to play barred A major chords: the game tells me to use my top three fingers to hold down the non-barred notes, but I had a hard time getting that to work. (My guitar consultants on twitter said that playing all three notes with your ring finger was more common, and that worked better for me.)

I confronted that difficulty head-on, practicing barre chords every night unmuted for a few weeks. And, sure enough, they became less of a disaster: the next week, I managed to make it through that problematic lesson, and fairly soon after that I managed to make it through barre chords in actual songs without too much trouble. Though, in retrospect, I stopped practicing barre chords outside of game too quickly, and should get back to them: they’re a core technique, they needs to be rock solid, and when I tried those lessons today, I made it through them all acceptably but not flawlessly and my hand hurt. So clearly there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

The other technique that I’ve been practicing outside of game is alternating strumming. I haven’t been doing anything fancy there, just spending two or three minutes strumming as quickly as possible on each of the strings. And it’s made a big difference, though there’s still room for improvement: I’m not as fast or as regular as I’d like, and I suspect my muscles are way too tense. Definitely glad I’ve been doing that.

And there are other techniques that I’ve been exposed to, all of which have quite a lot of room for improvement. I’m better at non-barred chords than barre chords, but not wonderful, and there are many more chord variants out there for me to learn. I enjoy scales when I run into them, but I’ve only barely begun to memorize them. I’m still a lot worse than I should be at playing arpeggiated chords. I don’t get the point of dropped-D tuning: it never feels easier to me. (It probably doesn’t help that it’s most heavily used in metal, which I don’t enjoy listening to and wouldn’t enjoy playing even if it used a standard tuning.) I need to experiment more with how hammer-on/pull-offs sound when plugged in.

But at least I have been playing songs plugged in. Not all the time, and rarely for very long, but if a song is in a standard tuning and isn’t solo heavy, I’d generally give it a try unmuted and plugged into the amp. (After practicing it a couple of times in the standard game mode, of course.) Sometimes, it sounds okay; sometimes it sounds dreadful. I haven’t been diving into playing unplugged, but that’s going to change with Expert.

In fact, a lot is going to change with Expert. You’ll notice in the above that there’s a lot of talking about techniques that I need to get better at, and very little talk about actual music. Which, in its own way, is actually a sign of how rich the game is: it asks me to do enough that I have to concentrate on the details of what my hands are doing, even performing abstract exercises outside of game, instead of going with the flow of the art of the music. And I’m willing to do that exactly because I can now see the art of the music in front of me, and I’m learning quite concretely what I’ll have to do to be able to bring out that art.

And, when I get to Expert, I’ll be asked to play the full guitar parts for pieces. At that point, it will (I suspect) no longer feel satisfying to me to treat the game as a game, to play each piece well enough to get three or four stars and then to move on to the next piece. So what I’m planning to do is pick a subset of the available songs (whether on-disc or DLC, I’m looking for suggestions for the latter) and really dive into them. Play them until I can get the notes right; play them unplugged until they sound good; play them unplugged until they actually sound like they sound in the recording. (I know essentially nothing about how to produce the range of available sounds from an electric guitar.)

If I can get to something I’m happy with after playing a song after an hour, that’s fine, but I’m imagining, even hoping, that there are songs that will reward me practicing them for weeks, that I’ll occasionally return to for months on end. And songs that suggest specific techniques that I should practice outside of game; my next-door neighbor is a guitar teacher, maybe I’ll sign up for lessons with her?

Actually, I’ve already dipped my toe into playing songs on Expert, trying out the first two songs on the disc, and the experience has been wonderful. They’ve already suggested more techniques that I need to master, and brought home just how little I know about producing sound on an electric guitar. They threw extra power chord variants at me, and it made a huge difference being able to hear what those variants sounded like; I ended up playing through each song several times experimenting with different strumming variants, trying (and failing, but learning!) to mimic what I was hearing coming out of the speakers. (And the one time I went back to a song muted after playing it unmuted was a bizarre experience indeed.)

Also: I was pleased how quickly I was able to learn the songs I was playing. Don’t get me wrong: they were both simple songs, each made out of perhaps three basic building blocks. But each building block had its variants, and I had to recognize what harmonic cues meant that I should switch building blocks and memorize what variants appeared when. A very rewarding experience, much more so than the simple effort of trying to get a not-embarrassing score on a song in game before moving on.

So: that’s Rock Band. What about the rewiring, though? For one thing, my taste in what I do in the game has changed. In past entries in the series, I’d mostly concentrated on (non-pro) guitar: I went through songs on the other instruments, but only once per song/instrument combo, and generally stuck exclusively to guitar for DLC.

And I still play non-pro guitar at times—it’s how Liesl and I go through new DLC, there’s been a ton of good songs showing up recently, and I fully support non-pro guitar as a way to listen to new music. But, in general, there are three other ways that I prefer to play the game: on pro guitar, on pro keys, or, to my surprise, on vocals. (Both solo and harmonies.)

There’s a lot going on with that latter choice. Part of it is that vocal harmonies are something that I can share with Liesl, and they’re rather more intimate than playing non-pro guitar/bass together. And part of it comes from psychological triggers. But what all three of those modes have in common is that they’re a lot more musically richer: and I’m finding that I really appreciate that. I want a deeper experience, I’m seeing musical forms that I’m not familiar with as a way to experiment and grow, and, well, I’m breaking down my sense of shame more broadly (those psychological triggers again!), and it turns out that singing is an area of my life where I’m happy enough to perform badly in public. (Or in private, I’m not actively seeking out exhibitionism.) It’s definitely an area where I have a lot to learn: I’m not taking singing as seriously as I am guitar, but I start to actually feel antsy if a couple of weeks go by without me singing at all.

These increased desires to make music have spread beyond the game as well. We bought a piano a couple of months after moving into this house, and it hasn’t been rare for me to sit down at it and play something (usually show tunes, but sometimes Flanders and Swann, sometimes Studio Ghibli music, sometimes classical music) on it. But it also hasn’t been uncommon for me to go for months without touching the piano, and I certainly haven’t put in concerted effort to work on pieces.

More and more over the last few months, however, I found myself sitting down at the piano; and, at some point, I decided: I’m enjoying this, I used to be a not-completely-incompetent harpsichordist, let’s get my fingers working again. So I decided to work on a piece that I used to actually be rather good at, namely the 3-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering: I haven’t practiced it every day, but I’ve done so often enough to make steady progress.

And wow, am I glad that I’ve been doing that. It feels so good to get a somewhat thorny piece back into my fingers, to be able to play another page or two a week without tripping up multiple times a line. Then there’s thinking about phrasing while I’m doing that, playing around with different conceptions of what the music should be.

But then something quite unexpected happened: just when I got to where I was making an acceptably small number of mistakes and was thinking it might be time to move on, the way I was listening to the piece completely changed. All of a sudden, I became much more able to pick out the voices aurally and conceptually, and a lot more possibilities appeared than I’d been aware of before.

Which, honestly, scared me a bit, and I’m still poking at the piece somewhat gingerly. And, in the meantime, I’m working on learning the 6-Part Ricercar, so I have the more straightforward challenge of getting that piece into my fingers while dealing with the musicality of the 3-Part Ricercar. Though “straightforward” is the wrong word for getting the 6-Part Ricercar into my fingers—there’s way too much going on at once in that piece for that to be an accurate description of what’s going on there! And, for that matter, it’s not like I’m not paying attention to the musicality of the 6-Part Ricercar: as I mentioned in the power chords paragraph above, I’m fascinated by places where open fifths show up in that piece. Still, it’s different, and I’m glad I have both sorts of challenges right now. (And I should go to Paris this spring to visit my harpsichord teacher!)

So I’m making a lot more music than I had been. Which is part of a broader manifestation that I want to be surrounded by music. Every once in a while over the last few years, I’d read an article talking about how multitasking is impossible; those articles would frequently bring up listening to something while working, I’d note that I have a lot harder time listening to music while working than I once did, and I’d idly wonder whether that had always been the case or whether my brain had better reconciled those back when I was in school. (I listened to music all the time when working when in college.)

And now, I will say: my brain had changed away from being able to listen to music while working, and it has recently changed back. Not that I never find music distracting: lyric-heavy music poses problems, and it’s certainly the case that I’m not getting as much out of the music as I would if I weren’t working. (And we really should get symphony tickets, or tickets to some other local concert series. Both in general and for Miranda’s sake: she’s getting a good exposure to show tunes and to opera, but I think she’d enjoy chamber and orchestral music if given the opportunity.) But in general I’m finding that, these days, I prefer my life to have a soundtrack, and I’m very much enjoying both diving into the hundreds of albums I have lying around and discovering new artists. (And I’d love recommendations on the latter front, please leave some in the comments!)

Except that sometimes I am finding music distracting in startling and unexpected ways, to the extent that there are several albums that I quite like that I’m finding are quite unsafe for me to listen to work. The first albums that I recognized as such are Mika’s albums; they make me want to break into song (break into falsetto!), which my coworkers would rightfully be dubious about. But, rather worse, listening to them also makes me want to kiss somebody. And that’s something my coworkers would be more than just dubious about, and (given that she’s not one of my coworkers) “dubious” would not be the word that Liesl would choose to describe such actions even were they interested!

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that latter effect. It’s not the thematic content of the songs themselves: last week proved that Brasta Ghibli (a fabulous fabulous brass rendition of Studio Ghibli themes) has the same effect on me, and there aren’t any lyrics there. It’s more that listening to that music fills me with joy, and an overabundance of affection (?) is one way that my brain decides to interpret that emotion.

Three months ago, I went through a manic phase; there were plusses and minuses to that experience, but I’m very glad it happened and, on balance, I miss it. I’m still not at all sure what caused that to happen or why it went away, but, in retrospect, it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that I was writing about Rock Band in the blog post where I first mentioned it. (And also not a coincidence that I was blogging about sex; I’ve got one or two more of those posts queued up too.) So if music can help me turn that switch back on when I want it, that’s great: it would make me very happy to have access to that mental state in a more controlled fashion.

Phew. And I’m only done with hard pro guitar: just imagine how I’ll be feeling when I’m in the throes of expert! Maybe I’ll get inspired by Taeyang and start dancing (I’m quite glad that ash-panic’s tumblr has been turning me on to K-pop), maybe I’ll stop blogging here and spend more and more time singing or at the piano. (Actually, I hope I won’t stop blogging, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I dialed down my video game playing soon, about which more in a bit.) Hopefully I’ll manage to stay productive enough at work to be happily employed; we’re a musical bunch, fortunately, and programming is also a creative outlet, so I’m not particularly worried on that score.

When Steve Jobs died, I felt I should write about him. Probably about Apple, really: I don’t know anything about Jobs, but Apple (the company and its products) occupies a surprising amount of my psychic space.

It took me quite some time to get around to writing the post, however; and, when I started typing, I realized why. To dig into Apple’s place in my psyche, I had to explain my history with Apple products, and indeed with computers in general. And, as it turns out, that takes a while. The result is a post where the tail is rather wagging the dog; interesting to me, at least, but one that could most charitably be described as ungainly. (Feel free to skip ahead to the Apple bits.)

At any rate: the computers I have owned, and why I am fascinated with Apple.

Prehistory

My parents bought us an Apple ][+ in May 1982; I was in fifth grade at the time. That was the only computer we had at home through at least 1989, when I went off to college (my brother got a computer when he went to college a few years earlier); hard to imagine these days. I’m not sure when my parents got a second computer, and I know they continued using the Apple ][+ for several years after I left home, at the very least to run a program they wrote to help manage their finances.

I programmed some on that Apple ][+ (the high point being a text adventure that I wrote), but my memory is that I didn’t program particularly seriously on it. I used it to write papers (and for some other writing projects, I went through a phase when I wrote short stories and a novella). And I played quite a few games on it, high points being various Infocom games and the first four Ultima games, but I also think fondly of Robot Odyssey, Le Prisonnier, Lode Runner, and Wizardry.

In 1987 (my junior year of high school) I started hanging out more at Oberlin College, and I spent quite a bit of time in the various computer clusters in the school library. I got to be a rather fluent VAX/VMS user, and (presumably through some of the math courses I was taking?) started hanging out with some computer science majors. They got me interested in learning to program in C and Scheme, and in the 1988–1989 school year I started using Unix more. I also remember helping one of them install GNU Emacs on that VMS cluster. (At the time, the computer science’s Unix cluster actually had Gosmacs installed instead of (or at least in preference to?) GNU Emacs.)

Oberlin College could send e-mail to other institutions via Bitnet, and had a DECnet connection with a half-dozen or so other colleges. (DECnet was pretty cool.) It also had Usenet feeds. It was not yet on any of the TCP/IP-based networks that became the internet.

College

When I went off to college in the fall of 1989, my parents brought me a Macintosh SE/30; I used it to write papers in non-technical subjects, play games, and do some amount of programming. (I wrote my papers on technical subjects in LaTeX; I’m honestly not sure whether I mostly typed those on my Mac or on one of the clusters mentioned below.) Continuing my habits from the last two years of high school, however, I spent much much more time on the various computer clusters around the college. I begged an account on the math department’s Sun workstation cluster, though the sysadmin and I had an iffy enough relationship that I didn’t spend very much time there. I begged an account on the computer science department’s Sun workstation cluster as well, where I spent more time. (There were probably Ultrix machines in that cluster, too?) And I got a part time sysadmin helper job on the general school cluster. (Mostly Ultrix machines, initially with dumb terminals but X terminals showed up fairly soon.)

I probably spent most of my time on the general school cluster: programming, playing around, and doing system administration work. Coming out of that, I was much more comfortable on Unix than in any other computing environment, and had installed various bits of free software (mostly GNU tools of various sorts) over and over again. I also had a friend from Oberlin who was then working at the Free Software Foundation, so I was getting a strong free software philosophical dose from him as well.

I took a couple of computer science courses (an intro theory course, a compilers course), but not many: mostly because I could learn how to program computers just fine on my own, partly because I had enough other interests competing for my course time. Also, at that time Harvard’s computer science department didn’t have the buzz that I’d gotten from Oberlin. (Though there were students and faculty members that I learned a lot from, don’t get me wrong.) I was into programming languages and compilers at the time: I did some sort of undergrad research project on compilers, I was a course assistant for a few courses on programming languages and compilers, and I spent three out of my four summers during that period doing programming-related work. (One summer at MITRE, one at DEC, one being a course assistant at Boston College; the fourth summer was spent at a math research program whose main benefit was that I became a not-hopelessly-incompetent cook.)

During this period, I had access to TCP/IP-based networks: ARPAnet had evolved into NSFnet, with the internet coming. The web poked its head out right at the end of this period, but it certainly wasn’t clear to me that it was anything more than a peer to the various other network protocol that were floating around at the time.

Life as a Mathematician

Then, after a year’s interlude, I went to math grad school in 1994. I still had my old Mac, Jordan bought a new Mac (that I played Marathon on), Liesl bought a 486 machine running Windows 3.1 (I played Myst, System Shock, and Dark Forces on that), and at some point I was given an X terminal that I could use at home. Most of my computer time was spent on the math department machines, though; and I essentially wasn’t programming at all during this time period. Also, a friend of mine gave me an NES, which started me on a spiral of depravity that I still haven’t emerged from. (One of the first things I did after getting my postdoc acceptance letter was to get a Nintendo 64; good thing my thesis was almost completely written by then…) Actually, though, my dominant leisure activity during that time period was reading books, I averaged more than a book a day over the course of grad school.

I can’t remember if I moved my old (9 years old at the time!) Mac with me when we went to Stanford in 1998; we moved Liesl’s computer, but I’m not sure if we ever turned it on. In general, I did my computing on the machine in my office at the math department; I can’t remember its specs (though I believe it had 4 GB of hard drive space?), but it was running an early Red Hat Linux version. I still wasn’t programming significant amounts: I was busy being a mathematician and a parent (Miranda was born in 1999), trying to figure out how to teach well, and playing video games, doing the latter almost exclusively on consoles instead of computers.

Returning to the Apple theme that triggered this post: during this period, my interest in Apple was quite low. I had a Mac, but barely used it; I certainly wasn’t going to use Windows machines, but really my focus was on Unix. (So, in terms of recent computing deaths, Dennis Ritchie’s is a lot more relevant.) I was at least partly anti-Apple at the time: the Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom had boycotted Apple because of their use of user interface patents, and that had an effect on me.

Transitioning

In 2002, academia and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t as good a fit as I had thought. Fortunately, the Stanford math department was willing to let me hang around for another year; so I spent half my time that year teaching calculus and half my time brushing up my programming skills. I learned C++ and Java (object-oriented programming was far from dominant when I was an undergraduate), and contributed a fair number of patches to GDB.

It also became clear that I wouldn’t be able to depend on my employer to provide my computing resources; so I bought domains to use for my various internet presences, and, for the first time since 1989 (13 years!), acquired a new computer. It was a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, a behemoth that was barely portable (and that, fortunately, I rarely needed to carry anywhere); we set it up to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and I spent the vast majority of the time on the Linux side.

Also, befitting my academic nature, I started reading books and going to talks. A lot of the books that I read were C++-specific (and I learned a lot from them, C++ is an extremely interesting language); in terms of non-language-specific books, the refactoring book had a big impact. The talk that had the most impact on me was one that a couple of researchers in a local corporate think-tank (?) gave about their experiences with something called “eXtreme Programming”; that was my first exposure to Agile software development.

The GDB work led to consulting work at a startup called Kealia, and I started working there full-time when I left academia in the summer of 2003. We got acquired by Sun a year later; soon after the acquisition, I became a manager, albeit a manager who spent a lot of time programming.

Agile

I spent a lot of time trying to understand Agile software development over the next five or seven years. At first, I was just trying to do this on a personal level, practicing refactoring and trying out test-driven development. Kealia’s legacy code provided some interesting challenges on the former front; the company also already had a bit of a testing culture when I showed up, and we experimented with going farther in that direction. And becoming a manager got me interested in other aspects of Agile: the more explicitly people-focused aspects, the planning aspects. And, as part of planning, the idea that programmers don’t make all of the design decisions (which was quite a change from working on GDB!): other people have a better idea of what the end users really value, what will work well in their context.

As an academic, I’d been quite ivory tower (at least aside from my interest in teaching); that changed. I was working at a startup which got acquired by a larger company that had suffered a lot over the last few years; part of startup life is trying to figure out how to make your business work, and Sun was trying to figure that out at a larger scale. Sun also put enough resources behind StreamStar (Kealia’s video server project) that we had quite a lot of room to experiment with different business strategies, trying to find one that would stick. (Far too much room: the fact that Sun didn’t cancel StreamStar years before I eventually left was a sign of Sun’s own management problems.)

My boss was a big fan of Clayton Christensen’s disruption theories, and I got to see both sides of the difficulties of disruption first-hand. Sun was a large company that was already far along the path of being disrupted by commodity hardware running Linux, and was trying to figure out how to deal with that; StreamStar was trying to disrupt the existing broadcast television infrastructure, replacing it with IP-based solutions. In neither case did we navigate the difficulties well, but I have quite a bit of sympathy for both sets of difficulties: surviving being disrupted is extremely difficult, and when it comes to broadcast television, you have to deal not only with the existing technological infrastructure but with the existing broadcasters and existing content providers. So it’s not surprising that we failed to disrupt broadcast television delivery, whereas Youtube was much more successful with its end run around the last two issues.

During this time, I won an iPod (one of the hard-drive based models), and a couple of years later, an iPod Nano at company raffles. I wouldn’t have bought the first iPod on my own, but its presence made my jogging a lot more presence; I probably wouldn’t have bought the iPod Nano on my own, but I was quite surprised how much more I liked its small size, the lack of skipping, and the general elegance of its design.

Our Dell laptop died in 2006, and had been showing its age enough by then that I was already planning to replace it. For my own Linux use, we got a Sun Ultra 20; to have a computer that Liesl could use and that I could run iTunes on, I got a MacBook Pro. This was the first model after the Intel transition; I felt more comfortable going back to the Mac instead of having a Windows machine around, and the fact that there was now Unix underneath MacOS was a real bonus. (Incidentally, back in 2003 I’d turned down a job offer working on GDB for Apple: I like Unix and the GNU toolchain, but I wasn’t really interested in specializing in the latter.)

At some point while I was at Sun (probably in 2008), I got an iPod Touch. That was really a revelation to me: it was wonderful having a little computer in my pocket, one that was already fairly versatile and was becoming more so every year; I had Wi-Fi access most of the places I spent time (there was even spotty Wi-Fi available from Google when wandering around Mountain View), but I could tell that having a phone network provide almost constant network access would be so much better.

But more than that: Tweetie made me sit up and take notice. That was the Twitter client that eventually became the first-party Twitter client; and despite running on this quite small device, I far preferred using it to any Twitter interface I had available on computers that didn’t fit in my pocket. That didn’t make much sense to me; clearly there was something going on with design that I didn’t understand and that could make a real difference.

At this time, I was also getting more and more tired with having Unix on my desktop. I love Emacs, but it’s stuck in the stone age in so many ways: what really drove that home was once when I fired it up on a machine where I didn’t have my standard .emacs file and realized that, by default, Emacs put the scroll bars on the left. That may have been a perfectly reasonable decision when it was first made, but it wasn’t any more and hadn’t been for at least a decade; did I really want to be working with tools that were so willfully ignorant about design conventions? GNOME had helped civilize X Windows, but it had only brought the experience up to a minimally acceptable level, and even so there were too many non-GNOME applications around.

Reaching the Present

So, when I started work at Playdom, I asked for a Mac for my work machine: that way I could have a Unix command line and tools combined with a GUI that accepted the idea that design was a virtue. Which the IT department was oddly hostile to: you’d think that a company with a large contingent of graphics artists that deploys software to Unix servers would be a natural fit for Macs, but Playdom had its quirks, and its IT department was definitely one of those quirks.

At around this time we got a second Mac laptop at home, and I got an iPhone. (My first cell phone; I am a luddite at times.) The Ultra 20 died; I decided that I wanted to continue to run a Linux server (e.g. to host this blog), but that I would prefer to interact with it through an ssh connection, so I got a virtual machine at Rackspace. Also, I was getting older, and carrying around a laptop during GDC 2010 put a surprising strain on my back; the iPad had been announced, so I decided I’d get one the next time I went to a conference. Which happened sooner than I expected, since I decided to go to GLS later that spring.

My back thanked me for the iPad purchase; but my psyche thanked me as well, to a surprising extent. I found that I preferred reading e-mail on the iPad to reading e-mail in a web browser, and that I far far preferred reading blogs in Reeder than through Google Reader’s web interface, whether I used the latter to go to the blogs’ web pages or stuck with the RSS feed. In both cases, the iPad acted like a wonderfully adaptable piece of paper: the words I wanted were right there, with enough style to be pleasant (unlike the Google Reader web interface) but without any surrounding crap (unlike blogs’ web pages). Having a screen that was much smaller than computer monitors that I was used to, and that was in portrait mode instead of landscape mode, turned out to be excellent for letting me focus on what I was reading. (As it turned out, I even slightly prefer reading blogs through Reeder on my iPhone over reading them through a web interface on a standard computer, despite the rather-too-small size of the former’s screen.)

In early 2011, one of our laptops died; rather than replace it with another laptop, we got an iMac and a second iPad. Our current technology roster is an iMac and a MacBook (one of the white plastic ones); two iPads (one from each generation); three iPhones (one from each of the last three generations, though the oldest one is being used by Miranda as an iPod Touch instead of as a phone); a virtual machine located elsewhere running Linux; and half a dozen game consoles. (My rate of technology purchases has increased enormously since 1998.) Also in 2011, I started working at Sumo Logic; as is typical in startups around here (at least judging from the ones I’ve interviewed at), it’s largely a Mac shop for development (with deployment happening on Linux virtual machines), and my coworkers generally prefer various Apple products for personal use, though there’s more variation on the personal side.

So: that’s the computers and other technology that I’ve used over the course of my life. Apple played a large role when I was young and more recently, but in the middle there was a long phase where my norm was Unix + GNU toolchain, with a strong free software ethos. Why did I shift out of that, what’s behind my recent fascination with Apple’s products and, increasingly, Apple as a company?

Habitable Software

The first is the concept of “habitable software”. I talked about this last year: the idea is that there is software that my brain shies away from using, and there’s software that I actively look forward to using, where the thought of using it relaxes me or brings a smile to my face.

I actually think that console gaming gave me my first nudge in this direction. You stick the cartridge into the machine, you pick up a controller with a relatively constrained set of inputs, you turn on the machine, and it just works. Note too that a console controller, unlike a mouse and a keyboard, is explicitly designed for the task at hand: yes, gamepads may have a few too many or too few buttons and sticks for a given game, but at least it’s focused on the domain of playing games. (Hmm, maybe the controller/game match is why I think back on text adventures with so much fondness?) I keep on installing Windows on machines with the thought that I’ll finally play the many important PC games that are missing from my background; and I keep on deciding that no, I really don’t want to put up with the crap that PC gaming makes you deal with.

But shifting from X Windows back to the Mac also gave me a huge shove towards being sensitive to habitable software; and going from the Mac to iPhone/iPad software like Tweetie and Reeder was, in its own way, just as large a leap. Every time I use X, I find something that feels wrong; a Mac feels neutral, but I don’t generally look forward to turning it on; Tweetie and Reeder make me actively happy. It’s not just software that I’m learning from, either: I was surprised how much happier I was with the iPod Nano because of its small size, light weight, pleasant screen, and lack of skipping.

The Unix command line also makes me actively happy. It’s wonderfully coherent; for certain tasks related to writing and, especially, deploying software, it’s just what I want, I love the interface that it presents to me. So it’s no coincidence that I do my programming on machines where a Unix terminal window is one key combination away, and that I use virtual machines running Linux to deploy software on: I feel completely at home in those contexts when working on those tasks.

Designing Software

Habitability is how I like to express the importance of design in software to me as a user. But I’m a programmer as well, so I see design from that side as well.

When I was younger, I spent much of my programming time concerned with tools for programmers: thinking about programming languages and compilers, working on GDB. In those contexts, I didn’t have to think too hard about design: I was an acceptable proxy for the end user for the software, so if something felt good for me, then that was good enough.

That’s a relatively unusual subset of software, however; as I started to work about other kinds of products, I realized that my design instincts wouldn’t do a very good job. And, at the same time, I got interested in Agile: and one of Agile’s main tenets is that design concerns (personified as the “Customer”) are paramount when deciding what to work on. Not that the technical details aren’t important as well—you get great benefits from keeping your code flexible and well-architected—but ultimately it’s not programmers’ jobs to decide what’s important to present to the users.

Even though it carves out a space where design can happen, Agile isn’t actually very good at giving you advice at how to design well: specific recommendations are much more focused on the programming side of things (e.g. refactoring, test-driven development) or the programming/design interface (estimating, iterating) than on the design side of things. Also, my talents and instincts are much stronger on programming than on design: I still have a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve got some understanding of what’s involved in writing code that’s clean and functional from a technical point of view, whereas I have much less understanding of what’s involved in developing a product that people are actively happy to use.

And, to produce really great products, I’m not convinced by Agile’s engineering/customer representative split. The Lean concept of a Chief Engineer who’s immersed in both worlds seems much more powerful to me, and I see around me wonderful pieces of software written by single individuals, or startups (including Sumo Logic!) run by people with both a vision for what they want to produce and the technical chops to help bring that into existence.

Apple can probably be argued as providing evidence on either side of the argument about that split, but there are clearly individuals who made a huge difference in its products. Apple also points out how ludicrous it is to label the designer as the “Customer” if you really want to produce something new and great, and at the limits of the analytics-focused mindset that I saw so much of at Playdom; in general, Apple’s approach to iteration seems interestingly different from yet related to Agile norms. And their systems approach gives Apple many more design knobs to turn than they would if they were exclusively a software company. (Or exclusively a hardware company, of course.)

Business Success

Back in my academic days, I didn’t care about practical applications of my research. When I started working for startups, though, that changed: if you don’t have your eyes on how you’re going to make money out of your startup, you’re doing the wrong thing. (Not that startups don’t have a heavy dose of ego satisfaction in them, of scratching your own itch.)

Once I started paying more attention to making money, it turns out to be totally fascinating: if you like complex systems, capitalism is full of them. Just figuring out cash flow: where money is coming in, where money is going out, the difference between those two in quantity and in in time. So many possibilities there!

Apple’s business success over the last decade is staggering, of course. But they are fascinating far beyond their simple profit figures: the consequences of their systems approach to design, their use of their savings to buy vast quantities of parts from their component vendors (and even to allow those vendors to purchase tooling!), the role of their physical stores, the list goes on and on. There’s still a stereotype of Apple as making overpriced products, but their competitors are finding it very difficult to build products with the hardware quality of the iPad or MacBook Air while maintaining any sort of profit margin at all.

Of course, lots of startups aren’t focused on being profitable: Silicon Valley is full of company that are trying to get eyeballs, hoping that profitability will come somehow, and perfectly happy to sell the company to somebody else who can worry about that problem. We see echoes of this in the Android / iPhone fight, and these days I’m generally more interested in making money than having users without a good business model; but the iPod shows that you don’t always have to compromise, that you can win on both fronts.

Disruption

I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory above: living in Silicon Valley, there’s no end of startups trying to remake an industry, no end of once dominant companies that stumbled, got bought, died.

Apple looked like it was following that latter trajectory; it pulled out of its decline like no other company. And did so in a very interesting way: not only did it disrupt other industries, it also disrupted itself, with the iPhone cannibalizing iPod sales and with the iPad cannibalizing laptop sales. This is extremely difficult to do: existing successes almost always lead to institutional antibodies that attack new products, leaving that success to newcomers.

Over the last decade, we’ve all become aware of disruption; the companies that can figure out how to repeatedly harness the powers of disruption will be the ones that flourish (the ones that survive at all!) over the next few decades. They will have to learn from Apple. And if I’m going to continue to build a career working at exciting companies, I’m going to want to learn from Apple, too, to help me figure out what sorts of qualities to look for the next time I’m on the job market, to pick employers that will disrupt successfully!

Repeatable Creativity

Disruption aside, though, there’s something amazing about Apple’s run of products over the last decade: one interestingly new product after another. I wish I knew how they did that.

It’s easy to ascribe this to a solo genius theory; but, while I don’t want to minimize Steve Jobs’s contributions, I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Pixar is another relevant datum: they’ve also managed to be consistently creative, and they continued to do that after Jobs sold the company to Disney. Perhaps because of the domain, people don’t credit Jobs with the same influence on Pixar’s repeated creative success as they do with Jobs; but, to me, the two companies suggest that Jobs has learned something about helping groups to innovate repeatably in a way that goes well beyond his personal contributions.

Over the last couple of years, stories have come out about some sort of Apple University, which seems to be trying to systematize those ideas. This reminds me of Toyota’s conscious efforts to improve themselves as a learning company; Apple is, sadly, much more secretive than Toyota, but I hope more of Apple’s methods will become public over the next decade. And, of course, I hope that Apple will be able to continue to innovate over the next decade, that their innovation really is due in part to a systematizable process.

Bad Apple

During the mid-90’s, I was down on Apple. I hoped that had gone away with the new decade, however: their user interface patents had gone away, and they were active open source contributors, though that clearly wasn’t the company’s main focus.

Unfortunately, those problems have come back in spades. By far the one that I find most distasteful is their aggressive use of patents: I think software patents are bad for the industry, bad for the world, and while I’m more and more bored by other companies that seem to largely be trying to produce knockoffs of Apple’s products, I very much support allowing those companies to do so.

Apple’s recent systems are also much more closed than computing platforms I’d used before then. I would expect that to bother me; for whatever reason, though, it actually doesn’t particularly. Certainly it would if I didn’t have ample access to other computing platforms, or if the tools to develop for iOS platforms weren’t so readily available; and while Apple teeters on the edge of behaving in a manner I find unacceptable in their application approval process, for whatever reason I generally think they’re okay. (I’m actually more worried about Amazon’s behavior in that regard.)

I’m being ungenerous in saying this, but: these days, when I read Richard Stallman complaining about Apple’s closed systems, part of my brain interprets that as RMS wanting it not to be his fault if other people don’t have software they want to use: RMS has made an open system, it’s other people’s fault if they don’t take advantage of that. These open systems are, in all serious, a great good: but actually having good software on your computer is also worthy, and having software that’s a joy to use is a great good. It’s fine if having well-crafted software for the non-programming public isn’t RMS’s concern, there’s no reason why it should be; but I see him as a single-issue voter whose issue is no longer dominant to me, and who is willfully blind to other issues that are important to me.

To those of you who have read this far: I salute you. And to those of you who don’t like Apple’s products, who don’t care about what Apple has done as a company: that’s great, there’s no reason why others’ interests should be my own. And there’s no question that company has flaws, does things I really don’t like. But I’m fascinated for many reasons by what Apple has done over the last decade, and I fully expect to be trying to sort out the implications for much of the next decade.

Some Jobs-related posts that I particularly enjoyed:

• John Shook asking Was Steve Lean?
• Another lean-focused post, this time from Evolving Excellence
• Horace Dediu on what Steve Jobs didn’t do.
• A podcast reminiscence from John Siracusa.

And now Zippy is gone. Which I’d been worried about: his body had been slowly falling apart for years now, and it wasn’t at all clear to me that we’d know when to make the decision that the time had come. (Zippy’s decline pattern was very different from Yosha’s.) But on Tuesday, my subconscious was sending me strange signals, and when I got home and looked at Zippy, it was clear that he’d gotten a lot worse over the previous few days. He wasn’t miserable yet, but we didn’t want to wait until he was either in constant pain or completely unable to walk, and neither of those was too far away. And indeed he got worse on both fronts between Tuesday and today; I’m glad we didn’t put this off for another week.

Even at the end, he was the sweetest person I’ve ever known. It’s been wonderful being with him over the last seventeen years, seeing what changed and what stayed the same. When we were living in Somerville, he was always very mere; and throughout their shared life he was always quite happy with Yosha being the dominant dog in that relationship. But when we moved out here and Miranda was born, Zippy got another purpose in life, and developed a little more backbone: it was his job to help raise the new puppy.

Yosha’s death was very hard on Zippy for a couple of months: Yosha was the love of his life, and Zippy had never spent more than a few hours in a row apart from Yosha since he was three months old. (And he would go for months, maybe years, without even that happening.) So he spent a lot of time hiding away in the darkest caves that he could find: underneath sofas had always been one of his favorite places to spend time, but he got more creative for a little while. Fortunately, as he got older, he also got tougher: when he was younger, the slightest twinge would set him yowling, asking to be taken to the vet, but when his body really started to go wrong, he held up amazingly well. He was blind and mostly deaf for the last couple of years, and the Cushing’s meant that he wasn’t very steady on his back limbs and that he was achy, but he stayed in remarkably good spirits the whole time.

Liesl found a mat that helped Zippy stand up in the kitchen; that made a big difference. And glucosamine kept the worst of his achiness under control. Over the last four or so months I’ve only slept through the night a couple of times, because he would wake me up with aches and/or a need to pee, but it was manageable. He wasn’t moving a lot, mostly wanting to cuddle with us or hang out in known spots (or to eat human food, which he could do a lot more after Yosha died), but he was happy.

But those problems also made it clear that the end was approaching; and now it has come. He will be missed very much, but it was clearly the right decision. And I’m sure that we’ll get other dogs in the future, but not just yet: I’d like to remind myself what life is like without having to always make sure that we’ll be home at appropriate times to look after dogs, so we can find out what parts of that life we want to make sure to preserve. And when we do get new dogs, we’ll be very lucky if they’re as wonderful as Yosha and Zippy were.

I bought Ascension to have something to play with coworkers on the way to DEF CON: there’s no iPad Dominion port, so this seemed like the next best thing. That was a little over 100 days ago; how many games have I played since then? I’m pretty sure I haven’t averaged 10 games a day, but 5 games a day wouldn’t surprise me at all; so let’s go with 500. Mostly against the AI, of course, but a fair number against other people.

So I’m pretty obsessed with the game: I’m writing this post not because I’m done playing it but because my playing the game has reached a steady state where I mostly only play during idle time in my day. I see its mechanics everywhere: some friends and I were toying with the idea of designing a game a month or two ago, and whenever they suggested a new theme, bits and pieces of Ascension mechanics would immediately come to mind, fitting themselves to that theme. But there’s also the surprisingly tactile feel of the iPad port, the way it lets you express the different gameplay actions by flicking cards in appropriate directions. And there’s the number of games I played in the middle of the night, passing the time until a round of achy Zippy squeaks subsided.

My obsession really took hold when I became fascinated with Arbiter of the Precipice. Most games have growth as their strategy for improvement: you get more and more powerful, but the new powers are layered on top of the old. With the Arbiter, however, you’re explicitly curating your hand by pruning less powerful cards. If you’re really successful at that pruning, you can end the game with a deck that contains none of the cards that you started with, but that contains powerful enough cards (and cards allowing enough further draws) that you can go through your entire deck every turn, grabbing the best cards off the board in the process.

That curation by pruning is still my favorite strategy: if you can pull it off, you can dominate with it like no other strategy. (Though a pure Mechana Construct strategy can come close if all the cards fall right.) But you frequently don’t have that choice: you have to live with the cards that appear on the board, the cards that remain on the board after your opponent has taken her turn. Which initially frustrated me in comparison to Dominion, but now I very much appreciate that aspect of the game: it’s all about contingency, about living in a web of possibility, about your feel for how your current hand and the cards on the board affect that web. A month ago, I wished I could reason better about that web, trying (failing!) to turn those possibilities into probabilities; these days, I just play by feel, going in whatever direction the cards are pulling me.

It’s a quite different game with three or four players than with two. When your turn comes around again in the larger games, the board will look completely different: not only do you want to actively curate your hand, but curating the board by banishing cards lest your opponents get them becomes increasingly important. And games take fewer turns, so you have less time to build your deck, you have to be prepared to jump on monsters when they appear. (You can’t count on constructs you’ve played hanging around, either.) The contingent nature of the probability web really reveals itself in those situation; I’m starting to get my footing with three players, but I still have a lot to learn; four-player matches are a complete mystery to me.

Playing with humans instead of AI opponents adds yet more wrinkles: the AI is more focused on maximizing its score improvement every round, while humans are better at building up latent power in their hand. So games with other people are more vicious, more visceral: your opponent is much more likely to grab that expensive card that you had your sights set on, where you’d just drawn a hand that would enable you to purchase it on your next turn.

And, with humans, there’s the different flavors of online multiplayer. Most of the time, my games with friends are spread out over the course of days, making a move every few hours: delightful, painful anticipation. Sometimes, though, we’re online at the same time, and blow right through a game. At first, I preferred that, but it’s really a double-edged sword. Because Ascension cards are a very low-bandwidth mode of communication with a friend: without even text chat, let alone voice chat or talking face to face, I’m left wanting to say more, I’m wondering why we’re playing together online instead of hopping in a car and spending time together in person.

I think I used to care more about game narrative than game mechanics, but the half year I spent playing almost nothing other than Minecraft and Rock Band 3 flipped that preference around. And Ascension feeds into that in spades: it’s an exposed presentation of a handful of mechanics (buying cards versus defeating monsters, cards that give you extra draws, banishing cards from your deck, banishing cards from the board, constructs versus heroes, the ticking down of the clock, cycling through your deck, the limited and random selection of available cards to purchase), you can go through a game in five minutes, and you can explore those mechanics through hundreds of games over the course of a month. (I’ve played Ascension many more times than any other board game.) So you spend a lot of time getting to know those mechanics, getting a feel for the implications of the different choices.

And mechanics beget narrative; if the mechanics are sparse and orthogonal enough, that narrative in turn begets metaphors for your life outside the game, even suggestions for how to live. Build up your hand, increasing your powers in the future. Do that as part of an explicit strategy of curation: pay attention to the mixture of techniques, set up reinforcing possibilities, prune actions that once served a purpose but are no longer as valuable. Seek out techniques that bring immediate value while not closing off further possibilities. But don’t be afraid to take immediate profit when opportunities present themselves.

Be aware of the most glorious success possibilities; be aware of the unlikeliness of succeeding with a strategy that focuses on them, even if the cards on the board seem to support such a strategy. (Mechana Constructs as a metaphor for startups!) But also: it’s up to you how you interpret success, whether you prefer a strategy that maximizes the chance of winning by at least one point or a strategy that has you winning somewhat less often but where those successes are truly glorious. (Arha Templars as a metaphor for lack of ambition: they’re the one card I refuse to purchase outside of the endgame.) Losing one match isn’t much of a setback if you’ve gotten something out of that loss: just jump right back in and play another one.

And always, always be aware of the web of possibilities: know what your hand suggests, know what the state of the board suggests, but be (painfully!) aware that that’s only a suggestion, that the future may bring something quite different from what you hope. And be prepared to find unexpected good in that change! So don’t get lost in that web of possibilities, that web of fantasies: constantly re-ground yourself in the actual cards in hand, in the actual cards in front of you, in the actual person you’re playing with. Or people: and as the number of people involved increases, life gets more complicated, contingency and incomplete information forces itself upon your awareness, to an extent that is at first unpleasant but that has its own beauty once you accept the transience of your plans.

And, as the name of the game suggests, you’ll eventually reach enlightenment if you study it assiduously enough? Seems a bit far-fetched to me, but much less so than it would have two or three months ago.

I’ve started another blog (or blog-like thing), “Malvasian Fragments”, whose intent is to give me a space to explore nascent thoughts, thoughts that are too long for Twitter but aren’t well-developed enough to fit in this blog. (Insert snark about the lack of coherence of a lot that does show up in this blog!)

The contents would probably fit in fine on Tumblr, but I decided not to go that route, for better or for worse. For one thing, all things being equal I’d rather have my writings show up on platforms that I control; for another thing, it lets me experiment with form more than I could otherwise. The posts on the fragments blog are extremely bare, completely devoid of bloggy apparatus such as links (not even links to the next/previous posts) and comments; I’m curious to see what effect those formal concerns will have on the content. It lends itself to a feeling of isolation, reinforcing a certain morose nature of the posts there; I’m okay with that for now.

The software allows me to assemble these fragments into “mosaics”: those mosaics consist of chains of fragments, with optional nesting. Part of my motivation there comes from my fascination with sutras and commentary: the form supports that, though it supports other compound forms as well. To be honest, I’m not at all sure how often I’ll write mosaics: if my brain is in a mode where it’s thinking about writing content of that length, I may find that my brain is really composing a post for this blog instead. We’ll see; the possibility is there.

Right now, it exists only as RSS feeds: one for fragments and one for mosaics. (Both feeds contain the full text for the posts in question, so there’s very little reason to actually go to the website.) You can go to the top level page for the site and the index pages for fragments and mosaics, but you’ll currently get a blank page if you do any of those. I plan to fix that at some point over the next month or so, but doing so isn’t a top priority for me. (And I’m not at all sure what those aggregating pages should look like in the first place.) I’d also like to improve the presentation of fragments and mosaics on the iPad and (especially) the iPhone; doing that is a slightly higher priority.

As is probably clear from the above, I rolled the software for the new blog myself. It’s all quite straightforward, using a markdown-to-HTML converter plus a bit of Ruby glue. (I used atom-tools to generate the RSS feeds.) It uses plain text files as the source, and spits out flat files that are served up by Apache: no databases, no run-time web page generation. I imagine I’ll throw it up on github once I’ve teased apart the presentation parts from the text for the fragments themselves. Though I’m also not entirely sure what I’ll get out of doing that: I doubt anybody else will ever want to use the software, and it’s not particularly representative of my programming style, in particular containing rather fewer tests than I normally write. It’s certainly nice how easy it is to roll your own blog these days, it’s just a few hundred lines of code in total if you don’t count the libraries that I’m depending on.

In general, I expect that the audience for these fragments will be quite small: certainly I doubt that most people who read this blog will find anything interesting there, and I’m not committing to writing there long-term at all. It’s probably only for people who know me personally, and not even for most of them; there’s a pretty good chance, in fact, that I’m the only audience member for the fragments! If interesting thoughts come out of my writings there, those thoughts will make their way over here.

I’ll use this as an excuse to write down all the places where you can find me. Besides this main blog and the new one, other places where I write are:

• Twitter.
• My linkblog.
• My gaming diary.

You can also find me online playing games and talking about games on Thursday evenings with the Video Games and Human Values Initiative. (Which I highly recommend, the conversation over the last few months has been great.) I’m malvasia bianca on Xbox Live and “davidcarlton” on Game Center; I have PSN and Steam accounts, but never use them, so I’m not even going to go to the effort of looking up what the account names are. And I have accounts on Facebook and Google+, though the content there is a subset of the above, so there’s no particular reason to link to me on either of those networks. (In particular, my Facebook wall consist entirely of forwarded Twitter posts and links to the posts on my various blogs.) If you’re particularly obsessed with the minutia of my life, you can look at the list of games I’m playing (all of which eventually get mentioned on this blog anyways) and books I’m reading, but I recommend seeking professional help instead of going that far.

I recently listened to the first episode of the Border House podcast (there’s also a transcript available if you prefer), which focused on romance in BioWare games, leading off in particular with a long discussion of the romance options in Mass Effect 2. I very much enjoyed their discussion, but I also got the impression that they came out of the game with a somewhat different take than I did; looking back at the game (especially in light of my Catherine obsession), I’m rather impressed with the way the game allows you to constructed nuanced stories without falling into wish fulfillment. And yet, somehow I seem never to have talked about that aspect of the game on this blog; so: my Mass Effect 2 romance.

I play the series as FemShep; in the first game, I romanced Liara. Who survived to continue into the second game; I was looking forward to seeing how that romance would deepen. Among other things, because Liesl and I have been dating or married for twenty (wonderful!) years now; one manifestation of video games’ adolescent nature is the almost complete absence of games exploring long-lasting relationships.

That is, of course, not how Mass Effect 2 works out. I went to see Liara; she was happy to see me, but surprisingly distant. Or, perhaps, not so surprising: I’d been dead for a couple of years, and I’d gone gallivanting about the galaxy for a bit before stopping by and saying hello. A lot had happened to her in the mean time, and in particular there was a big project that she was quite a bit more focused on than on me; to make matters more complicated, that project involved rescuing somebody who was clearly very important to her, and with whom she might or might not have been romantically involved.

I’m not sure if the game let you explore that last question; my guess is that it didn’t, and certainly if something like that were to happen in real life, I would ask the question. But I would ask the question with a sinking feeling in my stomach, I’d be very afraid of what the answer is. Now, to be sure, I was also clearly very important to Liara—she’d gone to considerable lengths to rescue me as well, and in fact that’s how this other person got captured. (I’m not sure if that was made clear by that part in the game, or if it’s something that only shows up in later/external back story.) But my position and Liara’s were clearly asymmetrical: a lot more time had passed for her than for me (like I said, I’d been dead for two years!), and I would never tell her that she shouldn’t have moved on in the interim, indeed I quite likely would have done just that if our positions had been reversed. So: no foul, not the slightest bit of blame; that doesn’t mean, however, that the situation didn’t suck, that it doesn’t feel awful to see your love moving on past you, caring (to an uncertain but frightening extent!) about somebody else.

(Incidentally, one of the things I learned about from the podcast is what happens if you date one of the other characters in the original game: apparently, if you dated Kaiden, he sends you a letter at some point apologizing for having dated somebody else during the time while you were dead. Which, as several podcast participants pointed out, is ridiculous: having your partner be dead for years is in fact a pretty good excuse for dating somebody else! But it’s also very human to me: I can imagine Kaiden being in love with Shepard, wanting eventually to move on after Shepard dies, going on some dates, and realizing that he has a lot more healing to do. (And I feel sorry for whomever he went on a date with!) It’s a different reaction from Liara’s, but to me a no less realistic one; and, in fact, it may not be all that different from Liara’s, because the efforts that she went to to rescue Shepard show that there was something important going on there, and she may simply be feeling a bit numb from circumstances, trying to tie up loose ends and do the right thing by this other person.)

So: no Liara. And, honestly, through most of the game, I assumed that I simply wasn’t going to pursue a romance option. The person I loved apparently wasn’t in love with me any more; I needed time to process that, and in the mean time the galaxy needed saving. So let’s just get on with that, instead of worried about whether or not I’m getting laid.

I did talk to some (but not all, or even most) of my other crew members enough to trigger romance options if those options were present. Jack was one of them: I found her fascinating (because of her anger? her difference from me? her tattoos?), and I got far enough in the conversation tree so she felt compelled to make it clear that she wasn’t interested in me romantically. Which I salute the game’s developers for doing: one thing that bothers me about romance options in video games is how frequently they turn into wish fulfillment, that of course the person you’re interested in will reciprocate if you just do the right things. That’s just not the way that romance works in real life: sometimes you’re interested, even very interested, in somebody who’s not romantically interested in you (even if they may like you very much in other contexts!); it really sucks, but you also have to deal with it and move on, trying not to be an asshole in the process.

Though, to be sure, I don’t think I actually could have pursued a romance option with Jack, even if the option had been there, despite my fascination. Her horrible childhood made me uncertain of how emotionally mature she was; that combined with the fact that I was her captain set up an unbalanced power dynamic that I wasn’t at all comfortable with. (Of course, in real life, just the captain aspect alone would have made me unwilling, but I could have let that alone slide in a game context.) Still, ultimately: it wasn’t my choice.

And then Thane came along, and my heart just went out to him: his wife’s death, the problems he’s had with his son. (Which is another aspect of the game that I like: I’m not just Liesl’s husband, I’m Miranda’s father, and that latter bond is also extremely important to me; yet so few games explore parenthood.) And his dreamy spirituality; also, judging from my choices, I clearly have a thing for aliens! I think my willingness to pursue romance with Thane came more from the former factors than from the latter factors, which I’m not particularly comfortable with: I don’t think that a need to save / console somebody is a healthy foundation to build a relationship on. But it was good enough for me at the time; and, after all, I needed to be consoled, too.

So, Thane it was. But, of course, that’s not the end of the story: the final game in the trilogy is coming out next year, and in the mean time there was the Shadow Broker DLC. There, I helped Liara sort out her troubles, and we started talking again. Which, I assume, means that in the third game I’m going to have to choose between Thane and Liara. (Or maybe not: the series has surprised me once before, so maybe it will surprise me again!)

And, as is probably obvious from the above, my choice (if I’m given a choice) is going to be Liara. Which is a testimony to the strength of the game: I know which way my character’s heart goes, even though I might want to deny it. And the main reason why I want to deny it is because I’m going to feel like a complete asshole for dumping Thane: he hasn’t done anything wrong, and in the conversations he makes it quite clear that Shepard is extremely important to him, a sort of life companion role. Returning to the Kaiden example from above: these are the pitfalls that our brains leave for us, these are the minefields that you step into if you’re dating somebody who has recently been forcibly ejected from a relationship that was extremely important to them, where they clearly have issues remaining to process. For better or for worse, feelings in relationships are frequently asymmetric in complex ways; it is to the series’ credit that it allows players to confront these sorts of issues should they so choose, instead of presenting romances as wish-fulfillment exercises free from consequences.

Quite a game. Until writing this, I’d been thinking of Dragon Age: Origins as the BioWare game with the strongest relationships, and indeed the individual relationships in that latter game do have rather more nuance than individual relationships within a single game in the Mass Effect series. But, as I’m discovering, Mass Effect‘s serial nature packs quite a punch; I’m very curious (and more than a little bit nervous!) to see how the series’s designers will weave these threads together in the conclusion.

Liesl, Miranda, and I are a rather traditional nuclear family: living on our own (well, once with two dogs, more recently with one, sadly soon to be none), without any relatives within thousands of miles. It wasn’t always that way, though: for four years, Liesl and I shared a house with our close friend Jordan. And for the first six years that we lived in this house (starting from when Miranda was four), Miranda was extremely close friends with a family that lived two houses down, to the extent that, some weekends, it seemed like she spent more time with the Garcia-Tobars than she did with us. I wouldn’t label either of those groupings as extended families—in particular, there was never the same commitment between them and us that Liesl and I have for each other (and had for several years before we actually got married)—but there was a constant undercurrent of casual intimacy and togetherness.

Neither of those groupings lasted, however: Jordan and I took academic jobs on the opposite side of the country when we got our Ph.D.s, and the Garcia-Tobars moved to Crete. Both friendships are going strong—Jordan visits the Bay Area frequently for conferences and knows that we’ll happily drive over to pick him up for dinner on a moment’s notice, and the Garcia-Tobars recently moved back to the Bay Area with Miranda and Vi picking back up like they hadn’t been apart. (Skype video calls are great for staying in touch if you’re half the world apart from each other!) But it’s not the same as having them be right there without even thinking about it.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t have lots of good friends, and lots of good friends living nearby! I don’t make friends particularly easily, but we’ve been living out here for 13 years now, and there are several people we’ve met in the interim that we quite enjoy spending time with, that we care quite a lot about. (And, for that matter, several friends from our prior lives who have moved out here, too.) Also, so much of my life for the last several years has been spent online that many of the people I feel most drawn to live somewhere else entirely: there are certainly several people that I really wish I lived closer to so I could just spend time with them making dinner and chatting.

At any rate: if we wanted to spend every weekend hanging out with friends, we could. The thing is, though, we don’t do that. Not that we’re recluses by any means (though that tendency is pretty strong in me!), but there’s effort involved. We have to make plans, to pick times in advance, to compare calendars, to plan a meal for everybody, to (generally) pick a game to play to provide a social context. I enjoy the results, but it’s an active choice, an active effort. And it lacks the casual intimacy that we had when we were living with Jordan: we’d know we’d see each other on a regular basis, we’d cook food together, we’d hang out together and chat about what was on our minds (and we wouldn’t worry about not seeing each other if we were busy for a few days!), our lives would permeate in ways that only happen to me with Liesl and Miranda these days.

There are, of course, people outside the family that I see on a regular basis without having to make an effort, namely my coworkers. And I’ve been very fortunate in where I’ve worked since moving out here: I’ve always had coworkers that I’ve quite enjoyed spending time with. In general, though, work is work and home is home, and while sometimes I do socialize with coworkers at home, contact at work doesn’t generally translate into a blurring of boundaries.

Part of that is an explicit strategic decision on my part. Startup culture generally involves spending quite a lot of time at work, including during activities that would normally be family / social occasions. (Meals in particular.) The problem that I have with that is that it doesn’t augment my family interactions, it instead supplants my family interactions: every dinner I have with my coworkers is a dinner that I’m not having with my family. (Unless, of course, I invite coworkers home, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) And that is a tradeoff that I refuse to make.

And part of it is my introverted tendencies: too often, given a choice, I’ll eat lunch by myself at my desk rather than with coworkers. I don’t actually consider this a good thing, and I shouldn’t have given into this tendency nearly as often when I was at Sun, or when I was at Playdom. I started getting better about eating communally at Playdom (and playing games over lunch sometimes certainly helped); fortunately, at Sumo, there’s a strong presumption that everybody eats together (and the smaller company size makes a huge difference, it’ll be interesting to see how that changes as the company grows), and that’s helped me be a lot less actively antisocial. (Again, playing games helps; there too, I’m curious to see how that will change as the company grows.)

In general, coworkers within Sumo are surprisingly close to each other, but there are of course stronger and weaker interpersonal ties within the company. I’ve been particularly fascinated recently with one trio of colleagues: the three of them have been quite close for a while, and now the four of us are finding (I think a bit to all of our surprises?) that I seem to fit rather well into that group, too. So the result is that, over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot more time with them than I had been doing with friends and coworkers, with much more of an undercurrent of an assumption of togetherness than I’m used to over the last several years.

I’m still trying to navigate this, and figure out what it means to my life. Just considering the four of us: a group of four people has a lot of subsets, and in this particular case I think all but one or two of those subsets has its own distinct character. I’m still the newcomer to the group, and my evenings and weekends are (I think?) significantly more constrained than those of the other three; I very much enjoy hanging out with them at the end of work days (my work days, which don’t always end at the same time as theirs) or in stray bits in the middle, but it’s not exactly clear to me where I should be blurring boundaries in my life to help ease this process.

In particular, one boundary is between them and between my actual family, namely Liesl and Miranda. (And Zippy!) I imagine Liesl and Miranda would get along well with all three of them, but I’ve only tested that so far with one of them; probably I should drag the whole trio home at some point to figure that out. (We’ll all be getting together over Thanksgiving, at least, I’m certainly looking forward to that.) Of course, dragging home three people makes the house rather more crowded than dragging home one person, and who knows how Liesl would feel if I made a habit of that; but it’s something to talk about, not something to shy away from in fear.

So: the groupings that I’m part of are in an abnormal state of flux right now. And maybe the sign that I see this as abnormal is, itself, a bit odd—this kind of give and take would have been completely run-of-the-mill when I was in high school or college, say. But it’s been quite a while since either of those are the case; I guess thinking about this doesn’t make me so odd, then, or at least doesn’t rank too high in the grand scale of my idiosyncrasies? But that’s the short term; my family ties are changing on a longer scale as well.

Because: Miranda turned 12 this year. When she turns 18, she is presumably going to head off to college. I certainly wouldn’t try to predict exactly what the future will bring, but right now it’s a reasonable assumption that we’ve spent two-thirds of the time that we’ll ever spend in close proximity with her.

Which is bittersweet: Miranda is a wonderful, wonderful person, but of course she’s a wonderful person who is going to make her own life, who isn’t going to be tied down to Liesl and me any more than we’re tied down to our own parents. Concretely, what it means is that Liesl and I are going to have space to fill in our lives in the not-too-distant future that we’re not at all used to having to fill now.

All sadness about Miranda’s distantly impending departure aside, I’m not at all worried about this: Liesl and I very much enjoy spending time together, we’re hopelessly in love with each other in ways that don’t depend at all on Miranda’s mediation. And having a bit more freedom to explore that sounds nice!

I am curious what will arise out of that freedom, however. How much will we use that space to deepen ties between the two of us (doing the sorts of things we used to do when we were dating, perhaps?), how much will we use that space to deepen ties with other people, how much will we use that space to figure out more who each of us is as an individual?

And it raises questions that I’m not at all used to thinking about. We’ve been living in Mountain View since before Miranda was born; we like it here a lot, and one of the reasons why I’m glad that I left academia is that it let me set down roots sooner rather than later. Recently, though, I’ve been surprised to realize that my roots here aren’t quite as deeply set as I thought: I imagine that we’ll be here indefinitely, and certainly we’ll be here for as long as Miranda is living with us, but there are other cities that I miss, and for that matter I miss the idea of big city life at all to some extent. And there is one particular luminous city that has its hooks in my brain to an extent that I should probably confront at some point; it’s a city that Liesl enjoys visiting but doesn’t feel the same visceral pull towards that I do, which makes exploring that particular attraction a bit more, uh, interesting? than it would otherwise be. Also, as I said above: some of the people I’ve felt closest over the last few years are people I largely know electronically, which raises another set of possible tensions to explore.

A long way off, and I’m certainly not spending too much time thinking about any of the details of how our life will change once Miranda is gone. Liesl and I have done a very good job of constructing our life together so far, and whatever happens in the future will be something that I’ll welcome with open arms. Everything flows, nobody steps into the same river twice; but those rivers have their own coherence, are networks with their own wonderful strength and power.

The short version of this post: don’t bother reading it, read Kate Cox’s take on Bastion instead. That is the post that I wish I could have written: I could have come up with some (not all!) of the ideas there, but doing so would have felt a lot more academic to me, and I certainly couldn’t have carried it off with a tenth of the conviction.

Because, while I enjoyed playing Bastion, somehow it never clicked for me. Which frustrates me, because in the abstract I’m willing to accept that it’s probably a quite good game. Lovely art in its own distinctive style; the music was pleasant and, in some cases (Zia’s song) rather more than that; the core game play was quite solid; and the themes of the story were unexpected. Not to mention other nice touches: I particularly liked the narrator’s description of your actions, and how that subtly shifts to describing the world more broadly.

So I’m more or less convinced that my lack of appreciation of the game is entirely my fault, not the game’s: I can write the above paragraph, but it’s all a checklist, not something that comes from deeper within me. And this frustrates me! I wish I knew why it was.

Some of it may be that I’m much more focused on gameplay these days than before my year of board games / Minecraft / Rock Band 3. And I though the gameplay in Bastion was well done, no question, it just happened to not be particularly to my style, and I didn’t see it as particularly reinforcing the narrative. (Anybody want to disagree with me on that last one? I’d be curious to read a post taking the opposite point of view.) Some may just be the timing: in general (and setting aside my weekend Rock Band binges), I play video games at best every other night, and frequently while playing Bastion it was every fourth night; so it took about three weeks for me to finish the game, and I wonder if it would have made more of an impact if I’d played through the whole game over the course of a single week. Or it may be my social positioning: these are important themes, but not ones that are as close to my heart as they might be?

Or it could simply be the random vagaries of my mood; and I’m somewhat curious how I would feel about Bastion if I went through a second time on New Game+. Not curious enough to actually do so, however…

I’ve had my eye on Ni No Kuni DS ever since it was announced: I love Studio Ghibli, I generally have a favorable impression of Level 5, and the book sounded wonderful. I’d been idly waiting for news to trickle out about a U.S. release of the game; recently, there was an announcement that the PS3 version would be ported, but I’m less excited about that. So I figured: if I’m going to play the DS version, I should just order it; and, actually, I suspected that it would be at a good level to test my Japanese skills.

It showed up a couple of weeks ago; and I will say: I’ve been playing video games for a long time, and games from the mid-80’s in particular had glorious packaging, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen packaging like this, the book is just amazing. Here are some unboxing photos (sadly, taken with a not-very-good cell phone camera), just to give an idea of what’s in there:

The top of the box, with the wrapper on

The top of the box, with the wrapper removed

The box opened, with the top of the book visible

The contents of the box

Side view of the contents of the box

From those last two pictures, you can see just how large the box and the book are: there’s a standard DS box as part of the packaging, and it’s a lot smaller than everything else.

Next, some pictures of the book:

For those of you who are really curious about the game, I’m planning to keep a diary of my experiences with the game on my other blog. Of course, being the bookish sort of person that I am, I haven’t actually started playing the game: I’m still struggling with the manual! (The regular DS-style manual, not the book.) But I’ll get into the game proper one of these weeks. (Months? Depends on how much I look at the book first, I guess.)