malvasia bianca

Since I finished rereading the Earthsea books more than a month ago, I suppose it’s time for me to say something about them. To be honest, I’m feeling a little intimidated by what I wrote last time; I should have done a better job of taking notes right after finishing the books. Ah well.

I don’t think I have anything to add about the first four books. A Wizard of Earthsea is still my favorite of the series; I imagine it will be comfort reading for me until the day I die. And Tehanu is still my next favorite, and I like The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore more than I did when I was a kid.

And the question remains: after Tehanu, what next? I’m happy to accept the notion that the sayings “weak as woman’s magic” and “wicked as women’s magic” are signs of sexism instead of accurate representations of how magic works in the world: that’s the way these things normally work in real life, after all. But how do we make an interesting story starting from that? What else about our understanding of the world might need to change? And what do we do with the human/dragon story from Tehanu?

The obvious thing to do (at least about the notion that women are as talented in magic as men) would be to write a story about a girl going to school at Roke, being confronted with prejudice, and valiantly overcoming it. Which is all well and good, but I’m glad Le Guin didn’t go that route; it would be rather too straightforward. Alternatively, I’m sure there could be interesting stories written that take their example from, say, battles in the US over the last century or two over this issue, but that really doesn’t excite me too much, either.

Which means, I guess, that we’re left with picking at that and other loose ends, enlarging the scope of the differences, and seeing what happens. Tales from Earthsea is a transition book in this regard. Three of the stories are really quite charming, without any obvious grand ambitions (though gender issues certainly play a role in them). One (re?)writes the early history of Earthsea and Roke, in ways that I find unsatisfactory (if only because it’s supposed to take place a mere three centuries earlier). And one looks like a straightforward “girl overcoming prejudice” story, and then pulls out another dragon at the end.

Which brings us to The Other Wind. Did I really write my previous notes before reading that book? If so, I’m impressed: the Kargad problem is, indeed front and center. (Quite possibly I wrote some of the notes after reading that book, though, and just ran out of steam before talking about it explicitly.) In particular, harmonizing the Kargad belief in reincarnation with others’ belief (and, in fact, direct experience of) a (rather depressing) afterlife is, well, important but a bit difficult, no?

And Le Guin obviously felt the difficulty. One thing that occurs somewhere in the last two books: magicians are talking about what happens if you start to cast a spell and then have second thoughts. You can’t just stop and pretend that you didn’t say anything: instead, you have to explicitly undo the partial spell that you’ve spoken. Which is what Le Guin is doing here: the afterlife that played such a large role in the first and third books turns out to be a mistake, an artificial construct that has to be undone.

Which she does. And she does it well, unweaving the various plot strands that were out of place, reweaving them into a newly coherent whole. I enjoyed the book much more than most books I read, and more than its predecessor.

But there’s a real cost, too: the strands she unwove were quite deeply embedded into the fabric of the story. So even though I’m willing to accept that those strands were out of place, she’s had to reweave vast amounts of a fabric that I (and others) have known and loved for decades. That is a loss by itself; I don’t have enough experience with the new fabric to have any confidence that it’s an improvement.

I hope that, the next time I reread these, I actually remember what goes on in the fifth and sixth books, so I’ll be able to reread them with a more critical eye. Maybe I’ll like them more next time (it happened before with Tehanu); I suspect, however, that I’ll continue to be uneasy with them.

(Are more Earthsea books coming? Hard to see what she would do next; I’m not sure the world could survive another earthquake like this.)

For the non-EU flights in Schiphol (at least where we were), they place a metal detector at each gate, instead of having a central bank of metal detectors that everybody goes through. And I can’t figure out why. This seems like the worst possible solution from a queuing theory point of view: you get your best utilization when you spread out the arrival of people into queues, but what they do instead is to artificially delay people from entering the queue and then process everybody all at once. Which means that it takes ages to actually get onto the plane once they start calling rows.

So what’s going on here? Imagine if they took those metal detectors and put them all in a big, shared bank: you’d show up, there would be a hundred or so metal detectors that you’d go through, and you’d never have to wait in line for more than a minute or two, I’d imagine. So what benefit do they get out of their current arrangement? Does it somehow use staff more efficiently? If there is any gain there, I don’t think it’s a huge one, and I’m sure they could improve both time and staffing with a smaller number of shared metal detectors. Is there some benefit in having most of the airport before the metal detectors instead of after metal detectors? Yes, I suppose, since you can actually see your friends and family off at the gate; I’ve gotten so used to not being able to do that that it hardly registered, but I guess that’s a good idea. Is there something about the construction of the airport that makes a shared bank (or multiple shared banks) of metal detectors impractical? Not clear to me one way or another. Something else I’m missing? Or is it just a mistake?

I now have braces. Or a brace, perhaps I should say: it’s only on my lower jaw. Not for cosmetic reasons: though I am, of course, shockingly vain, my teeth are really pretty straight. But I’ve had annoying amounts of buildup behind my lower front teeth for years now, and even going to the dentist three times a year hasn’t been good enough. (As measured by the discomfort I feel during cleanings.) They suggested braces, and the teeth in question are a bit crowded together and don’t line up as straight as they could; in the past the dentists in my current office haven’t seemed to be excessively inclined to fleecing me (certainly loads better than my previous dentist), so I thought I’d give it a chance. Still, I don’t know if I’m being stupid here or not. Or maybe it will work but I’m getting most of the benefits just out of the slight shaving of the sides of the teeth that they just did – it’s much easier to floss already.

I decided to go with Invisalign – like I said, I’m shockingly vain. It popped right on; I pop it off for eating, but other than that I’m supposed to wear it all the time. Which seems okay – actually, the most annoying affect is that, because I’m brushing my teeth right after eating all of a sudden, it means that most of the day my mouth tastes like toothpaste. And I miss snacking. But I can deal, and it should only last about five months: I’ll have ten sets of molds for my teeth, changing them every two weeks, getting progressively straighter and straighter. Nice technology.

What a glorious day yesterday was: the seventh Hikaru No Go DVD came out, and the ninth book. And now I have to wait another two months for the next DVD, another four months for the next book. Aargh!

We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through the ear-reddening game. So we did. Funny what she remembers me telling her about; it’s not like we’ve actually played go since I first taught her several months ago. She’s asked twice if we can play again this weekend, though.

The CD database that Max uses lists the artist for Deep Voices as “Various Whales”. Yay.

Last week, I went to a talk by Mike Cohn on “Agile Estimating and Planning”. Good timing: I’d been thinking that I should get around to reading his book on the subject. Which I won a copy of at the drawing after the talk; apparently my recent remarkable good luck has (correctly) decided that I have enough iPods and should start winning other things instead.

I’d gotten my previous take on the subject from others’ books and from a presentation by Ron Jeffries; back when (a previous incarnation of) my team used to estimate regularly, we followed Ron’s 1-point, 2-point, 3-point idea. (Well, we did until we dropped 3 and added 1/2, but the result is almost the same thing.) Mike Cohn, however, uses much larger numbers: 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100.

That’s for story points; he recommends estimating tasks within stories in terms of hours. (I can’t remember if Ron talked about estimating tasks at all.) And he made a good point about why you should use artificial points instead of real time units for your story estimations: if you use real time for both, you’ll be tempted to expect, say, the time estimated for the tasks making up a story to add up to the time for the entire story. Which makes sense, except that you estimate a story before you’ve broken it up into tasks (you don’t do the latter until somebody has decided that you’ll work on it), so when you do the task estimation, you’ll have thought much more about what’s involved in implementing the story. And you can’t convert between “hours that you’ve thought a lot about” and “hours that you haven’t thought much about”, which you’d be sorely tempted to do if you use hours in both situations.

Mike came about his expertise on the subject honestly, by the way: he was VP of engineering at a company that had adopted Scrum, and that had a fair number of teams working on not-very-long-lived projects. So teams had to estimate stuff, and he imposed the rule that, each project, you had to do something different when you estimated. There was enough discussion going around that people had an idea of what teams with accurate estimates had done in the past, but the rule meant that they couldn’t just stop and declare victory, they had to keep on trying to find ways to improve. A nice example of evolutionary process improvement.

Anyways, after the talk, I asked him about his versus Ron’s recommended range of estimation values. Part of his answer was that maybe the right thing for somebody working in the trenches is different for the right thing for a VP of engineering. More generally, people are going to ask the team how long it takes to implement a feature that’s larger than a simple story; they need a way to answer that. Which is a good point – I don’t have that clear a view on how Ron recommends estimating features larger than a single story. (I should ask, shouldn’t I?)

There’s still a tension there that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Unless you go with long iterations (and Mike prefers two-week iterations, which already doesn’t seem long enough), I don’t see how you can fit stories that vary anywhere near a hundredfold in length into a single iteration. Now, stories at the extremes (especially the large end) are bad, but still, a 1- to 13-point range (or whatever) seems too wide to me to fit within an iteration. But a story that can’t be done within a single iteration isn’t really a story, is it?

So maybe there are there levels needed: features, stories, tasks. Each with their own (non-convertible, as above) estimations. But that’s too much estimation. Given that, I’d actually be tempted to drop the task estimation instead of the feature estimation: isn’t it kind of pointless to spend time how many hours a task will take? Just implement the damn thing! In the previous incarnation of my team, we did break down stories into tasks (we should get back to doing that, it was useful), but we didn’t estimate individual tasks, and I never felt the lack. Maybe I was missing something, but it still seems funny to me.

Actually, though, it’s entirely possible that we were subtly shifting things by a level (and making them too long, to boot.) Because the truth is that a lot of our stories were technical: we weren’t clever enough (and weren’t working with a Customer representative to give us a nudge) to break work up into small, customer-visible units. So maybe what we called stories were really tasks? I don’t think that’s quite accurate, but there’s enough truth to that to make me nervous; something to think about more.

Since Stuart brought it up (see his blog post on the talk if you want another take), I might as well talk about another question I had. Mike presented some very interesting examples (you can see his slides, by the way) of studies that showed that, when people were given extra, irrelevant information, their estimates for tasks increased. (My favorite example was when group A and group B were given exactly the same text, but in one case on a single piece of paper while in another case spread over seven pieces of paper.) To which I asked: that’s neat, but which estimate is more accurate?

I freely admit that I asked this solely out of methodological purity: even though the studies didn’t give any evidence about the relative accuracy, I know which way I’d bet. (Well, one of the studies sort of did give evidence: they gave three teams the same tasks, but told team A nothing about expectations, team B that the customer hoped it could be done in 500 hours and team C that the customer hoped it could be done in 50 hours. All teams insisted that the hopes had nothing to do with their estimates, but team A ended up with an estimate of 456 hours, team B with 555 hours, and team C with 99 hours! Scary, that: a trap that I fall into all too often myself.)

But, the more I think about it, the less sure I am which team’s estimate is the most accurate. Take, for example, the study where team A was told to estimate requirements 1-4, team B was told to estimate requirements 1-5, and team C was told to estimate requirements 1-4 but were also given the future requirement 5 for purely informational purposes. In this case, A and B both estimated 4 hours (even though B was told to estimate strictly more work than A) while C estimated 8 hours (even though they were told to estimate the same work as A)! Looking at that, I don’t see at all why I should believe that A is the most accurate – they give the same answer as B, which is within the margin of error but clearly odd. What seems more likely to me is that A and B are estimating in terms of “hours we haven’t thought much about” while C is estimating in terms of “hours we’ve thought more about”, which we learned earlier can’t be converted to each other!

Anyways: good talk, a good reminder that we should get back to estimating once matters get a bit more under control, and I ended up with a book and enough sets of his planning poker cards that we can use them in our future team meetings. If you have a chance to hear him, I definitely recommend it.

Liesl is playing through Bust-A-Move ’99. And there’s this one song that’s the most insanely perky, catchy song ever. Dah da. Da da da dah da. Da da da da da da da dah dah dadadadah…

Wii version next month!

Elite Beat Agents is a music game for the DS. It takes its mechanics and much of its style from a Japanese game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan; apparently, however, Nintendo of America thought that my country’s youth would prefer secret agents to male cheerleaders dressed in black, and American pop to J-pop. (Imagine that.)

The cool video game bloggers all disagree with NoA on that score, and I suspected that I’d prefer the original, too, but I didn’t feel like ordering it from an import store. And the US version has gotten reasonably good reviews – clearly its sense of style hadn’t entirely vanished in translation.

I was a bit dubious about the idea of a rhythm game on the DS, but the mechanics turn out to work rather well. Numbered buttons appear on the screen, with shrinking circles surrounding them; you’re supposed to tap the buttons when the circles shrink to the size of the button. There are also some paths which you have to move your stylus along as the speed of a ball. Pretty basic stuff, kind of artificial, but I’m not sure it’s any more so than any other rhythm game out there. (It just doesn’t have an alternate controller hiding the artificial nature.)

It begins with two difficulty levels opened up; I tried the harder one. And I was glad I did: the first few songs were quite easy. Fun, though – I didn’t mind the music, and the illustrations that went along with them were pretty funny. (My favorite one is when you play Leonardo da Vinci trying to woo Mona Lisa with your fabulous drawings and inventions.) Five or six songs in, though, it starts getting harder: I was working just to survive the songs, let alone to get a good rating on them. (Depending on how you’re doing during the story interludes in the song, you’ll get a good result or a bad result in the interludes: Mona Lisa may like you or spurn you, etc.) The last three, plus the one where you’re a car company heir dressed as a ninja sneaking into your competitor’s factory to retrieve some plans, are all really tough.

After which I unlocked the third difficulty level, and had to start all over again. Again, the earlier songs were really easy, but the later levels were quite tough. This time, though, when I got frustrated with the later levels, I went back and replayed them on the second difficulty level; they’d magically gotten quite easy in the interim. Which is a good sign on the gameplay mechanics: there is a real learning curve, you do get better as you go along, and getting through the tough ones is more of a matter of skill than luck.

And by the last level on the fourth and hardest difficulty setting, I needed all the skill I could muster. I think it took me something like three hours to make it through that level, and the part of my finger where the stylus rests was starting to get sore. But I never (well, almost never) felt that it was being unfair: I just had to do a better job of memorizing the tricky bits, and not losing my concentration over the course of the four or five minutes that it took to get through the song.

Liesl likes it, too: she’s banging her head against the third difficulty level now. (Or maybe she’s just finished that, I can’t quite remember.) When I finished it, I thought I’d go out and get the Japanese version, but I’m holding off for now; I’m in the mood for more J-pop (my entire collection of which consists of the two Katamari soundtracks, plus a greatest hists collection by Tsuji Ayano containing the excellent theme song from The Cat Returns – any other recommendations?), but the one video I’ve watched of a level on the Japanese version didn’t immediately grab me. And I have enough other games on my maybe-play list that I should give other genres a try.

Recommended; not as wide a range of songs as DDR, I suppose I like the controls in Guitar Hero a bit more, but worth playing.

I’ve finally finished backing up all my CDs which are filed under the letter B. Of which there turn out to be 176, approximately a third of the collection. The distribution:

panini$ ls | cut -f1 -d- | uniq -c | sort -rn
     62 bach
     29 beethoven
     24 britten
     14 beatles
     10 brubeck
     10 berio
      6 bartok
      5 bruckner
      4 brahms
      2 bobs
      2 biber
      2 bernstein
      2 berg
      1 bush
      1 blue
      1 blades
      1 ben

Most of which are obvious, but some notes: “bach” includes two by P.D.Q. Bach; “bush” is Kate Bush, “blue” is Blue Scholars, “blades” is Ruben Blades, “ben” is Jorge Ben. (The latter two being Liesl’s, actually, so I’m less familiar with them.)

I wonder if Bach by himself will beat out all other letters of the alphabet? My guess is that S will edge him out; we shall see.

A random factoid from Cheaper by the Dozen:

Also of exceptional general interest was a series of tricks whereby Dad could multiply large numbers in his head, without using pencil and paper. The explanation of how the tricks are worked is too complicated to explain in detail here, and two fairly elementary examples should suffice.

1. To multiply forty-six times forty-six, you figure how much greater forty-six is than twenty-five. The answer is twenty-one. Then you figure how much less forty-six is than fifty. The answer is four. You can square the four and get sixteen. You put the twenty-one and the sixteen together, and the answer is twenty-one sixteen, or 2,116.

2. To multiply forty-four times forty-four, you figure how much greater forty-four is than twenty-five. The answer is nineteen. Then you figure how much less forty-four is than fifty. The answer is six. You square the six and get thirty-six. You put the nineteen and the thirty-six together, and the answer is nineteen thirty-six, or 1,936.

On Mary Poppendieck‘s recommendation, I’m reading Cheaper by the Dozen. Two paragraphs into it and I’m already a fan!

I want to write about the Earthsea books, but before doing that, I thought I’d dig up some old notes on the topic. As far as I can tell, these were written in 2002, just after the fifth and sixth books came out. I’d read the fifth book; doesn’t look like I’d read the sixth book, but who knows. (It ends rather abruptly—I guess I stopped in the middle of writing it.) I haven’t edited it at all, except to fix some typos. (But probably some remain; rereading this is tiring. I’m pretty sure I won’t have the energy to write this much new stuff…) Sorry about the weird font/size changes below (might be browser-specific, who knows)—I can’t figure out where in the CSS they’re coming from, but they’re not intentional.

Some thoughts on the Earthsea cycle:

• My favorite book in the cycle has always been The Wizard of Earthsea. (It’s my favorite of all of Le Guin’s books.) I’ve thought for a bit about why that’s the case; here are some reasons why I like it so much.
  1. It’s a coming-of-age story. Stories like that have always pushed my buttons, for whatever reason, and they continue to do so even now that I’m actually of age. (This is doubtless one reason while I’ll always have a soft spot for Heinlein; Orbital Resonance is probably the main reason why I still consider buying John Barnes’ books.)
  2. The world building in the book is very well done. I love the map at the beginning of the work, the way magic works, the key role that language plays in the world. (I suppose that having a world built out of language is a good way to appeal to bookish types.) There’s enough history and legend to make the world rich, without impinging on it excessively.
  3. It’s a school story. I’m a faculty brat, I’ve spent all my life (30 years so far) around colleges, and odds are that I’ll spend all the rest of my life around colleges as well, so school stories are about the real world for me. God help me, I even like those early Wodehouse school stories—Mike at Wrykyn certainly isn’t up to the quality of the Psmith stories that follow it (to put it mildly), but I’m still happy to dig it out if I want some comfort reading.
  4. It’s a story about exceptionalism; like lots of bright young things (and like lots of young SF readers), this resonated with me when I was growing up. Of course, I look at that sort of thing a bit more critically now than I did when I first read the book, but I’d be lying if I claimed that it didn’t resonate with me still.
  5. There are some nice personal, humanizing touches in the book. Ged’s pet otak revives him by licking his face; or there’s the strong friendship that grows between Ged and Vetch, and later Vetch’s sister Yarrow as well. These don’t take up a large portion of the book’s pages, but they’re there, and several key plot points involve them.
• So why don’t I like the next too books in the cycle as much? (It’s obviously not going to be as useful to compare the more recent books with The Wizard of Earthsea. Let’s go through the list above.
  1. All three books are coming-of-age stories. The second and third books are, of course, stories about Ged as well as stories about someone coming of age, but there’s a strong coming-of-age component in them. (Though we see less of Tenar’s life than of Ged’s, and still less of Lebannen’s.) So they don’t seem like they should be too lacking in that score, but yet they are for me to some extent. I wonder whether I’d like other books that are coming-of-age stories in which there’s an older character whom I already care about from earlier works.
  2. The world building in the second books suffers from the problem that later books in an SF/fantasy series always do compared to the first book, in that they don’t have the advantage of novelty. Of course they do continue to develop the world further and introduce new aspects of the world (I like the map in The Tombs of Atuan a lot, too, though the Dungeons and Dragons player or text adventure player wishes that we could explore even more of it), but it’s just not as new and fresh as in the first book. There’s nothing new in them that hits me the way that the magic system (and the key role that words play in it) hits me from the first book.
  3. They’re not school stories. Sigh. Though I suppose that it’s just as well that not all books in the world are school stories…
  4. They are, however, about people who are just as exceptional as Ged. Tenar is an interesting case: are we supposed to believe that she really is the n’th reincarnation of somebody very important, or that that’s just a false belief of the people who chose her? (I’ll say about that more later.) Even if that’s a false belief, though, she still is exceptional. Lebannen is an interesting case in a different way: he’s exceptional both by birth and inherently. And this really does start raising my political hackles—the United States has been kingless for more than two centuries now, so can’t we get over having fiction in which people of royal birth are so exceptional?
  5. The personal touches just aren’t there as much in the latter two books. In The Wizard of Earthsea, Ged says that he won’t set himself apart from other living things after his otak revives him, but we don’t see a lot of that in the other two books. We get a reminder that Vetch and Yarrow are two of the people who know Ged’s true name in The Farthest Shore, but that reference just feels like it’s tacked on. (Maybe I’m lying; look down a few paragraphs.)
• I keep on thinking that, the next time I read these books, I’ll start to really appreciate The Tombs of Atuan, but it never happens. Not that I don’t enjoy the book, mind you, but I don’t love it or even have a particularly strong reaction to it either. Maybe I’d like it more if we got to see more of the maze explored; but I suspect that would be pretty jarring compared to the tone of the other books.

  The Ged/Tenar interaction is pretty interesting; ultimately, I think, everything works out for the best for Tenar, and Ged is trying to do the right thing for her (as well as for himself and for all of Earthsea), but on the other hand time pressures force him to try to manipulate Tenar just like Kossil is.

  One quality which really distinguishes this book from the other two in the trilogy is that it basically all takes place in one location. Reading the book with eyes informed by feminism, it’s hard not to see that as reflecting women’s (stereo)typical association with the home. Which isn’t necessarily good or bad—one can proceed from that to either “why don’t women get to gallivant around like men do?” or “why should fiction spend so much energy talking about men gallivanting around instead of women staying at home?”

  And when I said above that the second and third books in the trilogy didn’t have the same personal touches as the first one, I think I was lying. It’s probably true that Ged doesn’t have such touches; but there are some friendships in this book that are very important to Tenar, namely her friendships with Penthe and Manan. (Though “friendship” isn’t quite the right word for her relationship with Manan.)

• So what about The Farthest Shore? A book with more world-shattering (and, in some sense, mystical) aspects than the other two. But what the book mostly did to me is start me on a game of “spot the allusion/influence”. Before reading the books, I’d read a survey of criticism about Le Guin’s works called Dancing With Dragons, by Donna White, which said that one of the constant themes throughout Le Guin’s oeuvre was Taoism. I’d never noticed that before, but now that I see it mentioned, it’s pretty obvious. This theme in Le Guin’s work is becoming more explicit these days: she’s published her own translation of the Tao Te Ching, and her novel The Telling is easily read as talking about Taoism and it suppression by Communist China.

  At any rate, now that I’ve got this in mind, it’s not too hard to see Taoist influences right from the beginning of the world, with all the talk about maintaining the balance of the world (Note to self: check Le Guin’s terminology, and see if I have anything in particular to say about Ogion here), but it really makes itself explicit in The Farthest Shore. In particular, the things that Ged says to Lebannen when they’re in the boat together after Ged rescues Lebannen from slavery remind me a lot about the Taoist conception of the ruler. (Not that I’ve recently read the Tao Te Ching to check up on this.)

• In general, The Farthest Shore has a particularly mystical and millenial vein that, this time at any rate, makes me want to track down parallels/allusions. (Not that there aren’t allusions in earlier books that I’d like to unravel: e.g. Yarrow’s name reminds me of yarrow sticks; can we make anything out of that, with her as some sort of fortune-telling vehicle?) For example: Lebannen is some sort of great saviour figure. Can we relate the sea voyage to famous episodes undergone by other such figures, like Christ on the mountaintop or Buddha sitting under the Bo tree? Both of those figures underwent temptation during those periods; it’s hard for me to see such a close parallel in that respect.

  Or what about the Old Speech? It seems to me pretty clearly Indo-European (in particular, Sanskrit derived); c.f. (Note: Insert reference and explanation). Given that this is the case, what are we to do with (dragon’s name!)’s addressing Lebannen as “Agni Lebannen”? One might naively think that Agni is simply a greeting, along the lines of “hail”. But Le Guin, I think, goes to a bit of care to raise the possibility that it is, in fact, a title, since later in the book Lebannen is unsure whether or not it’s a greeting or a title. And, of course, Agni means “fire” in Sanskrit and is the name of the god of fire in Hindu mythology. I’ll have to check (Note: check…), but I think that Agni pops up right at the beginning of the Rig Veda, which is the oldest of Hindu religious texts, and that goes along reasonably well with the millenial aspect of the book. (Not perfectly, mind you: it would go along with the creation of Earthsea a lot better.)

  Later books give more grist for this mill, so more about that to come.

• What about these allegedly non-existent personal touches in the third book? Here I really do think that they’re not there in the same way that they were in the first book. Ged is more or less on his own, but that’s to be expected; Lebannen spends most of his time with Ged, so he can’t develop much of a link with others, and he’s too in awe of Ged for them to really get close. I suppose there’s the bit where they’re with the boat people (Note: check name), but that’s hardly the same as Ged’s relationship with his otak and with Vetch from the first book, because in both of those cases Ged was saved by people whom he already had a relationship with.

  Still, the main reason why I thought about this question isn’t so much to explain why I like The Wizard of Earthsea more than the second and third books but to explain why, these days, I quite like Tehanu as well. Which brings us to:

• Tehanu. Oy. I’d read this twice before; my memory says that I hadn’t particularly liked it the first time and had liked it the second time but felt that it was too politically motivated to fit in well with the original trilogy. (I have no particular reason to believe that my memory is accurate in this case, however; it’s been a while.) So I went into this book with a bit of trepidation.
• But it’s now my second-favorite book in the Earthsea cycle; so I want to explain what I like about it.
• Recall the state of Earthsea at around the time of The Farthest Shore. Things had been going downhill for a while; Ged’s returning the Ring of Erreth-Akbe hadn’t had the hoped-for curative effect, and in fact things had been going precipitously downhill at around the time of the beginning of that book. And the story of that book tells how Ged and Lebannen get rid of the cause of the immediate problems, and give us reason to believe that Lebannen’s ascendancy to the thrown will go a long way to putting everything at rights.
• The beginning of Tehanu is more or less contemperaneous with the beginning of The Farthest Shore. (I’m not sure how exact that is, but I don’t think it matters: certainly it starts during the time where things are getting much worse.) The thing is, though, in The Farthest Shore the awfulness of the situation never hits home to me. Sure, magic is going away, and that would probably seriously bother me if I were a wizard; I’m not, though, so while as a reader of fantasy novels I of course realize that that’s not good, it doesn’t really strike a chord. Or bad things happen to Ged and Lebannen—Lebannen is enslaved, they almost die from thirst, etc.—but they’re the sorts of bad things that one expects to have happen to heroes of fantasy novels, and so again they don’t bother me too much. (Let’s see, Ged and Lebannen are almost out of water, and we’re only half way through the book. Are they about to die? Seems unlikely.)
• In Tehanu, though, we see this much more directly. Tenar is a woman who, despite her storied path, lives a fairly normal life. This provides a much better vehicle for seeing how her world is going to pieces. There are people wandering around Gont causing trouble; her son is off who-knows-where, and might actually be one of the bad guys; those in power can use it for their own petty ends without fear of retribution. What happens to Tehanu at the beginning of the book is truly horrible; but even once we accept that, Handy is still always there in the background as a very real threat to Tehanu and Tenar. Once Tehanu is saved from Handy largely because the King’s ship is in the right place at the right time (and because of Tenar’s storied past); another time, both of them are saved from Handy and his companions largely because Ged is in the right place at the right time. If either Lebannen hadn’t ascended the throne when he did (and taken the actions as kinds that he did) or Tenar hadn’t been who she was or if she’d just been a little less lucky, Tehanu might be taken away from her to who only knows what awful fate, and Tenar might be killed as well.

  For me, this depiction of how bad things have gotten before Lebannen ascends the throne and of how Lebannen’s actions begin to set things right is much more powerful than the depiction of parallel events in The Farthest Shore. In the earlier book, we’re told how bad things are; in Tehanu, we’re shown much more directly how bad things are.

• But there problems with Earthsea that aren’t necessarily going to be fixed by Lebannen. Tenar, as a woman, has no property rights: her son can disappear for years, run off and be a pirate, and then come back and expect his mother to serve him and even take over the farm from her if he wants. We start to see how women with an affinity for magic are treated differently from men with an affinity for magic: we meet a witch, and nobody knows what to do with Tehanu.

  This is, I think, at the core of the complaints that Tehanu is too political. Personally, novels informed by politics don’t bother me inherently at all: I see no reason why we should avoid certain topics just because they happen to have a political interpretation. The facts that novels didn’t traditionally look at certain aspects of women’s life and that feminism pointed out that this has political implications is no reason to continue this avoidance out of fear of being political. Furthermore, I see no reason to avoid addressing politics explicitly: I spend a not-insignificant portion of my intellectual life thinking about political issues, and there have been times where I’ve spent portions of my life acting for political causes, so why would I want these issues to be out-of-bounds in the novels that I read?

  But the issue of women’s magic raises more issues than that: to the extent that it’s a rewriting of what happened in the earlier novels in the series, that has the potential to bother me in a way that writing a novel about these issues set in a new world wouldn’t. I don’t think that Tehanu is too bad in that regard, though. For one thing, the issue of women’s magic, while an important aspect of the novel, isn’t so central and so clearly resolved as to make whatever conflict it might set up with the earlier novels be a strong taint on my enjoyment of this novel. More importantly, though, it’s not at all clear to me that Tehanu‘s treatment of women’s magic conflicts with the earlier novels in an essential way. On the one hand, it is true that, in The Wizard of Earthsea, we saw the saying “weak as women’s magic”, and that women weren’t considered worthy of studying in Roke. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that, in Earthsea, women’s magic actually is weak: it just means that it’s a commonly held opinion in Earthsea that women’s magic is weak. So while I wouldn’t encourage authors of series to blithely decide that common knowledge about the world that has been accepted in earlier volumes in the series turns out to be wrong, there’s a big difference between that and showing that facts that have been presented in earlier volumes in the series are now wrong.

• Another aspect of Tehanu that I really like is the way that it deals with personal relations (and, for that matter relations between people and animals). Tenar’s relations with her friends and neighbors, with Tehanu, with Ogion and Ogion’s friends and neighbors, and with Ged are on every page of the book. Incidentally, when I read The Wizard of Earthsea, I got the impression that Ogion lived much further away from other people than when reading Tehanu; I’ll have to go back and look at the earlier book to see to what extent that assumption is supported by the text.) We see how Tehanu is healed by personal contact with Tenar, with a very few other people, and with animals (and how much further healing is still necessary). And we see how Ged on the one hand needs to draw away from people and on the other hand is healed by Tenar (and by goats, and by Tehanu and Tenar’s friends). Some aspects of this are a (less extreme) reflection of the difficulties that Tehanu is going through in this book; other aspects of this mirror Ged’s healing in The Wizard of Earthsea by friends and animals. (But, just as the depiction of the troubles in Earthsea in Tehanu is much more powerful than the depiction of those troubles in The Farthest Shore, the depiction of Ged’s healing by personal contact in Tehanu is much more powerful than the depiction of that healing in The Wizard of Earthsea.)
• This hits upon one of my pet peeves about sf: the narrow range of acceptable plots, and the irrelevance of those plots to my life. When I was younger, I wanted to go off on exciting adventures, fall madly in love, save the world from disaster, and make discoveries of vast importance. But these days I’m much more interested in local concerns. I have a richly textured life, closely tied into much more immediate matters. I’m 31 years old, I’ve been in my current relationship for 11 years (and married for 4 of those years and effectively married for 4-8 of them, depending on how you count); so I’ve already quietly fallen madly in love, and the way that played out didn’t have much to do with what I read in sf novels. I have a two-year-old daughter who is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering; there’s a lot of sf out there about being a kid, but precious little sf about having a kid. I’m still young enough that figuring out what sort of life I want to live is of paramount importance to me, especially now that I’m in the middle of a tenure-track job search (though I’m sure that there are people much older than me for whom that’s also of paramount concern), but the way that I envision my personal version of the good life is very different from the way I approached that as an adolescent (and that I see in most of the sf that I read).

  So any sf novel that deals with these issues at all is a breath of fresh air. I don’t think that, in general, John Barnes’ Earth Made of Glass is nearly as well-written/compelling/whatever as his earlier A Million Open Doors, but his portrait of a marriage falling apart was very moving to me. (That was before I had almost any contact with such issues at all; last year, however, some close friends of my wife’s and mine split up after 9 years together, and my wife’s parents are getting a divorce after 34 years of marriage. I’ll be a different person the next time I read that book.) (I seem to be referring to John Barnes a lot. And I could refer to him more: I just finished rereading One for the Morning Glory, and in that novel “weak as women’s magic” would have to be true by virtue of being an old saying. Pity that he seems to be going downhill these days.) In Tehanu, these sorts of personal concerns are front and center, and I can’t think of any other sf novels that deals with them as well.

• So that’s why I like Tehanu. It’s not flawless by any means: in particular, the ending is a ridiculous deus ex machina. But it has enough good points to launch it into a solid second place in the series in terms of my enjoyment and to make it, in some ways, one of the more refreshing sf books that I’ve read.
• Now that we’ve finished Tehanu, on to the last two books. To summarize some of my concerns before beginning the books:
  1. How will they change my view of Earthsea compared to the view encouraged by the first trilogy? After reading Tehanu, it seems likely that we’ll start seeing more of a reinterpretation of women’s roles and their ability to do magic; how much damage will that do to my view of Earthsea? Will anything else get changed around? If so, how naturally will I be able to rework my earlier conceptions?
  2. What about the millenial issues raised by The Farthest Shore? After The Tombs of Atuan, reuniting the ring of Erreth-Akbe was supposed to make the world better, but it didn’t. After The Farthest Shore, Lebannen’s ascension to the throne was supposed to make the world better; judging from Tehanu, his presence seems to be an improvement, but it’s too early to be sure. Frankly, if this cycle of “world going to pot, seeming improvement, but then the world goes to pot in an even larger-scale fashion, but then another seeming improvement” continues even one step further, I’m going to be pretty annoyed. But it’s hard to imagine that the cycle will shrink in scale overly: Tehanu is supposed to be a pretty remarkable person in ways that aren’t at all clear to us yet, and that will require a fairly large canvas to play out on. (The obvious thing to do would be for her to become the first female student in Roke and end up as the Archmage, but that would probably be too obvious to actually happen. If Le Guin were a normal author continuing a series past its natural stopping point, that’s exactly what would happen, but I have enough respect for her to hope that she won’t fall into that trap.)
  3. What about the reference-tracing that I got started on in The Farthest Shore? Are we going to see Taoism continue as a prominent theme? (As I mentioned above, that would fit right into her recent work.) Will we eventually figure out what “Agni” means?
  4. And that ending of Tehanu stuck out like a sore thumb; what’s up with that? Notice (and I’m not sure if how much of this I really did notice this at the time and how much of it I noticed in retrospect while reading the last two volumes) that the view of dragons has changed throughout the first four books. In The Wizard of Earthsea, dragons didn’t come up too much: as nonhuman animals go, they’re certainly the most important, and they can speak the Old Speech, but they’re used in The Wizard of Earthsea as fairly typical bad guys. In The Tombs of Atuan, they don’t show up directly, though we hear that Ged’s been talking to them; but by The Farthest Shore, the dragons are helping Ged, and their transition to powerful forces for good is helped along in Tehanu. (Or are the all powerful forces for good; doubtless the ones helping Ged and Tehanu are exceptional dragons just as Ged and Tehanu are exceptional humans.) What about that story in Tehanu about a woman who was really a dragon; where did that come from, and what was it doing in Tehanu? It and the ending of Tehanu (both the fact that Tehanu and Tenar and Ged were saved by a dragon and the fact that Tehanu, like dragons, can speak the Old Speech untaught) would seem to draw a fairly tight link between Tehanu and dragons. Given that Tehanu can speak both the language of humans on Gont and the Old Speech, one natural interpretation would be that she’s both human and dragon. (And how does her being horribly scarred by fire play into that?)
• So the stage is set for my reading of the last (or perhaps “most recent” would be a better term) two volumes in the Earthsea cycle. So: on to Tales from Earthsea. This is a collection of 5 short stories (not necessary all that short: one or two are novellas) about Earthsea, that took place at various times (though none of them are telings of legends that have already been alluded to: this isn’t Anne McCaffrey that we’re talking about here).
• But, before those 5 tales, there’s a foreword, saying when those tales fit into the history of Earthsea. (And, for that matter, after those 5 tales, there’s a traditional appendix to an sf epic giving facts about the history/culture/language/whatever of the world of that epic.) And this foreword contains what, to me, is currently the single most disturbing bit of rewriting what I’d assumed was the case about Earthsea. Namely: the school on Roke is only about 300 years old. (Where the present is, more or less, the time of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu.)

  I’m not sure quite why this bothered me so much, but let me take a stab at it. For one thing, the system of magic, in all of its intricate elegance, is central to the cycle; and Roke is central to that system of magic. Roke Knoll is the heart of Earthsea (was it the first part of land to appear? I’ll have to go back and check); the Immanent Grove is also important, though I’m not sure that got brought out until the two latest books. (If you only take your information from The Wizard of Earthsea, it’s not clear that it’s any more special than, say, the tower where the Master Namer lives.) Of course, Roke Knoll and the Immanent Grove could have been there before the school, indeed they doubtless were there before the school even in retrospect, but they do lend an aura of timelessness to the place.

  For another thing: as I’ve already said, I have soft spot for school stories, so perhaps it’s not surprising that anything that changes my conception of how a particular school works would bother me more than is warranted. My model of Roke is as of a very old school; but even in the United States, we have schools that are more than 300 years old, and in Europe some of them are three times that old. So while a 300 year-old school isn’t exactly a spring chicken, it’s also not old enough to qualify, to me, as truly ancient for a school.

• So that’s an issue raised by the foreword. But: what about the stories themselves? The first and last stories are rather long, the first being about the founding of Roke, and the last being a link between Tehanu and The Other Wind. The three stories in the middle are shorter pieces, less profoundly linked to the rest of the cycle, and thoroughly delightful. I don’t have a lot to say about those three stories: the squeaky stories get the consideration, I suppose.
• The first story is called “The Finder”. As mentioned, it’s about the founding of the school on Roke. It takes a while to get there, though, and in the interim does some interesting recasting of how magic works in Earthsea.

  I’d always thought of magic in Earthsea as an essentially verbal process, and furthermore as a more or less scientific one. The verbal part isn’t too hard to explain, I suppose; the scientific part is shakier in retrospect, perhaps, but there surely there has to be something systematic in those books of lore and in the curriculum at Roke? (I don’t know why I’d think that—spell books with no particular scientific system implied have a long history.) At any rate, I certainly have a hard time reconciling that notion with the fact that some people can carry out magic and some people can’t. (Though I do have to wonder: are there non-magicians in Earthsea who have learned to speak the Old Speech? (Other than the dragons, of course.))

  But throughout the stories in this book, we see a magic that is carried out much more through feel. And in the bits before the school on Roke was founded, that’s especially important: there really wasn’t such a systematic study of magic before the school came along. At least, there wasn’t one extant right before the school came along: there are some scattered books here and there, but that’s about it. Indeed, people are scared of magic and have tried to suppress it wherever possible. (This takes place in the interim period between strong kings; so the sort of chaos that is going on is somewhat similar in feel to that going on at the beginning of The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. So Roke, while somewhat old, isn’t as old an institution as the kings in Havnor; Roke’s presence itself served as a stabilizing force that, to some extent, replaces that.) So, while there is still magic in Earthsea, it isn’t woven through the texture of life to nearly the same extent that is painted in the trilogy.

• I’d earlier been looking for Taoist influences through the books. And, in that light, I see Gelluk’s search for wondrous things via mercury as a sort of analogue of historical Taoism. At least I think that’s what it’s called: the point being that, from the point of the west, Taoism is typically thought of in terms of the Tao Te Ching, with the Chuang Tzu being a distant second and the Lieh Tzu a similarly distant third. So this is a small core of quite old texts that are quite old and that are also quite philosophical in nature.

  But, in China, there was a long, living tradition of people who called themselves Taoists, and thousands of texts that these Taoists wrote. And the issues that many of these texts are concerned with are far removed from those of the Tao Te Ching: one primary theme, for example, is alchemical recipes designed to produce pills that will make you immortal. (And these are coached in esoteric language whose surface meaning should be rejected in favor of other meanings to be decoded.) It’s easy to read Gelluk’s search for mercury in this light; and to give it an interpretation whisn’t look too favorably on historical Taoism. (Which, honestly, is fine with me: I have four or five different translations of the Tao Te Ching in my house, and have gone so far as to try to decode some of the ideograms from a bilingual edition, but books on historical Taoism just leave me cold.) (I should note, though, that le Guin gives a much more favorable impression of historical Taoism in The Telling.)

• Anyways, the latter part of the story concerns the founding of the school of Roke. And we find that women were a large part of the school at its inception: at the end of the story, we see the seeds of what will lead to the exclusion of women from Roke, as well as more interestingly) exclusion of areas of magic that are more associated with women’s work. At first, this way of working in feminist messages kind of bothered me; then again, colleges in the United States have undergone much more profound changes than that over much shorter periods of time, so from that point of view it’s not so unrealistic. (Though we certainly hear more about changes that go in the direction of not accepting members of a certain group to accepting members of a certain group compared to changes that go from more accepting to less accepting; but maybe one could find examples of institutions becoming less accepting soon after their founding.) (But excluding topics of study as being lower in status rings true to me.)
• In general, the stories in the book paint Roke as a much more venal place than I’d had the impression that it was. For example, in The Wizard of Earthsea, we see Ged getting free passage to Roke and being enrolled there just on the basis of Ogion’s word and Ged’s talents; and he gets sent to the Ninety Isles because they need him to protect them from dragons. But in the stories in Tales from Earthsea, we see students having to pay their tuition, and people who want wizards from Roke having to pay Roke for the privilege.

  This is certainly a dissonance. Having said that, it’s one that I suppose I can accept in retrospect. For one thing, we’d already started seeing many people on Roke as being, in some ways, close-minded in The Farthest Shore: for example, Ged may be a Taoist sage, or perhaps a Bodhisattva concerned with the whole world’s suffering, but most of the other Masters on Roke seem happy enough to let the rest of the world fall apart as long as it isn’t affecting them directly, even though you’d think that the alleged disappearance of magic would bother them a bit. For another thing, it did seem to be the case in the earlier stories that magicians trained at Roke did frequently end up serving lords; this can simply be read as power being naturally affiliated with power, but it’s not too hard to imagine that money might change hands at some point. Finally, modern elite schools pride themselves on their egalitarian nature, and have scholarships available for the deserving poor; why not Roke? (There doesn’t seem to be work-study programs for the deserving poor at Roke, however.) Though I bet that, if Le Guin had had that in mind when writing The World of Earthsea, we’d have seen that come up at times in Ged’s relations with the other students more explicitly than it did; Ged’s and Jasper’s fighting is analogous to that, but not quite the same thing.

• In general, we really do start seeing in this book places where Le Guin probably didn’t have Earthsea completely planned out when writing the original trilogy (and, in particular, The Wizard of Earthsea). Le Guin is very good at recasting my way of looking at Earthsea by filling in (presumed) gaps in her own earlier planning; nonetheless, the cycle would probably be stronger if that work had been done at the beginning. (Which is a ridiculously stringent criterion to ask, given the amount of time that passed between the writing of the first volume and the most recent ones (note: how much time?); but that’s the price to pay if you’re doing a nontrivially interesting continuation of an earlier series rather than starting one anew.)

  So what are some of the gaps? Perhaps one general transition is making aspects of Earthsea apply more generally than they had been. If we wanted, we could see the recasting the roles of women and dragons in this light, as making aspects of Earthsea apply not only to men but to humans or not only to humans but to all sentient beings.

  Similarly, the rules of magic are supposed to apply more generally as well. We already saw some of this in the first trilogy: in The Wizard of Earthsea, waters that are far enough away don’t respond to spells because they don’t know their own names, but in The Farthest Shore the magic still works, it’s just that wizards don’t know the right names. But then:

  What about the questions raised by The Tombs of Atuan? The Kargish people certainly seem to believe that the world works in a fundamentally different way than the other people of Earthsea. (Or at least than the people in the central lands of Earthsea do: some others on the fringe also feel differently, albeit in different ways than the Kargish people.) They don’t have the same tradition of magic. They have old gods (note: check terminology), or at least they did before the god-king came along. And they believe in reincarnation.

• This is a real problem. We could, of course, just say that the Kargad people are deluded, but that would be pretty boring and probably politically distasteful to Le Guin (and to me, for that matter); can we find a way to harmonize the Kargad point of view with the standard point of view in an interesting way?

  One place to start is with the old gods at Atuan. This is a different sort of power, one associated with darkness, and one associated with a particular place. If we want to find other such places, they’re there in other parts of the trilogy: the best candidates turn out to be Roke Knoll, the Immanent Grove, and the Stone of Osskil (or whatever it’s called). These don’t match all of those criteria, but they’re all powerful locations in their own ways. At least I think they are: just how powerful was Roke Knoll in the trilogy? It shows its mettle in the two most recent books: it’s a sort of place of truth, or at any rate where people show their true forms.

I haven’t kept up my go book collection recently, but I was once a serious go book collector: as far as I can tell, I have copies of all but five books in go that were published in English before the year 2000.

I am pleased to report that the list is now down to four: I have acquired a copy of Goh or Wei Chi, self-published by Horace F. Cheshire in 1911. Didn’t cost too much, too – I just had to wait a decade for a copy to show up on sale at AbeBooks.

If any of you has a copy of Sakata’s Tesuji, something called Go: Rules of the Game (author unknown, published by Hausemann and Hotte), Kumabe’s Let’s Play Go Today, or Slomann’s The Game of I-Go, please let me know. I’d also be happy to acquire a copy of Iwamoto’s Go Para Principiantes, an apparently laughably bad Spanish translation of Go for Beginners.

I didn’t realize that it had been four years since I added Divine Intervention to my list of movies to check out, based on a review in The Nation. (The link won’t work unless you’re a Nation subscriber, alas. Which I would recommend you all do, actually, despite that annoyance.) That list never got too long, so fairly soon after I got around to subscribing to Netflix, I added the movie to the queue.

And regretted it. I had no memory of the review by this time, so I was left with a vague idea that it was some sort of artsy Iranian movie which Stewart Klawans loved but I would think was really boring. Which is both unfair and wrong: for one thing, it’s Palestinian (oops), and, for another thing, I haven’t even seen any of these well-regarded Iranian movies that have come out over the last decade, and for all I know, they’re fabulous. (I guess I should add one of them to the queue, too?)

Before I could decide that it was a mistake, though, the movie showed up in my house. So after a bit of waiting around (and going on vacation), I finally couldn’t avoid the fact that this movie was sitting there, waiting to be watched. And I put it in the DVD player.

Surprise, surprise: it’s an arty Middle-Eastern movie. Starts with kids following and killing somebody in a Santa Claus outfit, then switches to a scene of somebody driving down a street, waving and smiling at everybody while insulting them from behind closed windows. And then it switches to somebody carrying dozens empty bottles up to his roof for unclear purposes. But, somehow, I kind of liked it. And then police showed up (or something), and he ran up to the roof and started throwing the bottles at them. A few more scene transitions, some fantasy elements, some actual bits of continuity between these scenes, and I was hooked.

I mean, it’s not the best movie ever, or anything. But I’m very glad I watched it: a lot of pretty scenes, funny vignettes, and it hangs together quite nicely. I added Elia Suleiman’s other movie to the queue: that one I am actively looking forward to.

• The life of a Mii.
• Neat pictures. (And a bit more discussion.)
• Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1.
• I do not like that my government does evil.
• Planarity is a neat idea. Though I admittedly didn’t feel like playing it for too long. I played Boomshine for a while, though: it’s sort of a humane version of Missile Command where you only get one shot but have cascades, I can’t figure out any real strategy, but I played through all the levels twice anyways.

A few short flash games that I’ve run into recently. (All via Game|Life.) Nothing fabulous, but I enjoyed spending a bit of time with each.

• Binary turns out to be kind of fun. Not great: aside from the limitations of the subject matter, I found it went too quickly from a bit too easy to a bit too hard. Also, while I can imagine trying it at those levels until the “a bit too hard” level was just right, or even too easy, there didn’t seem to be a way to skip the earlier levels. Still, I enjoyed it, and now I have the fact that 11100000 = 224 memorized, and my twos complement skills are less rusty than they were.
• There is, to put it mildly, not a lot to The Ham Game, but it was a one-button control idea I hadn’t seen before.
• PLANned is a nice little puzzle game. It didn’t take me all that long to go through all the levels, but I had to think a few times in the process.

I’ve been back from vacation for more than two weeks now; I really should find some time to clear out the backlog of blog posts to write, shouldn’t I? Maybe if I write them down here, that will give me some incentive to knock out several of them over the weekend.

Things to talk about:

• Video games: I’ve finished Elite Beat Agents, Phoenix Wright, and Elebits.
• Random leanish stuff. Queues at the airport, maybe some thoughts about things I don’t understand about Lean Product Development, maybe something about Chief Engineers.
• The Earthsea series.
• A talk I just went to by Mike Cohn.

And that’s just off the top of my head; probably if I went to my saved item list in Reader, I’d find a few more things to write about.

Actually I know of one example of the latter right now; it won’t take long, so I’ll just go and do it now…

My apologies if you’ve had problems accessing the blog the last few days – our ISP had AC problems. Should be fixed now, but we may be ISP shopping soon. Any recommendations for good colocation facilities in either the Bay Area or Chicago? I’m not sure what our monthly bandwidth is – last time I checked, it was around 200GB/month, but I’ve heard somebody claim that it might be more like 500GB/month these days.

At least the down time cuts down on the blog spam… Though Akismet is doing a fabulous job on that score, I must say.

Given that I’ve been back from vacation for a week, I suppose I should get around to blogging about what I did during those two weeks. After all, there’s nothing more fascinating to read than bloggers talking about trips they’ve taken!

Which, among other things, included playing video games. Bringing us to the topic of today’s post: Big Brain Academy.

Short version: much better puzzles than Brain Age, but I nonetheless gave up on it much quicker. Like that game, it’s focused around your taking a test alleging to measure how smart you are. This game’s test consists of a series of puzzles from each of five areas (think, memorize, analyze, compute, and identify); there are three choices of type of puzzle for each area, so you’re not seeing the same sort of puzzles over and over again.

And the puzzles are, by and large, much more novel than those of its predecessor. Some are counting variants: e.g. they show you a 3-D shape built out of cube, and you have to count how many cubes were used. Which you can do laboriously, but you can speed up the counting by mentally regrouping it into something approaching a rectangle or rectangular parallelepiped, at which point you can multiply. There’s one where you’re given a sequence of moves either of a dog or of some walls (which may or may not push the dog) and have to figure out where the dog ends up. There’s one where you’re given a picture and a bunch of pieces, most of which can be assembled to make the picture; you have to pick the proper pieces to use. Fifteen in all, each at three difficulty levels, and I enjoyed all of them.

Despite which I only played the game twice. (Or maybe three times.) I started playing it on the plane ride over – I was having a hard time getting to sleep, and there was too much ambient noise for me to be able to play Elite Beat Agents. A couple of hours later, I’d gotten gold or platinum medals in all the puzzles on all the difficulty levels. Basically, the game shows you everything it has right up front; it doesn’t have a huge volume of stuff, so if you don’t want to do that over and over again, you won’t be playing it for very long. And while I was better at some puzzles than others, there weren’t any where I either particularly felt like honing my skills, or enjoyed playing over and over again without improving my skills.

I feel a bit silly complaining about having game play available, but I think its predecessor made a better choice in slowly doling out the play modes, and encouraging you to play it a bit once per day. I could easily imagine playing it daily for a month if there were a bit more structure, and more stuff to look forward to. As it was, I got about as much out of the game as I was going to in a single plane ride.

I also miss its predecessor’s quirks, in particular the random drawings you had to do. And I have no idea why they didn’t include sudoku levels (or make a standalone version of that): Brain Age had a quite good sudoku interface, it would have cost them next to nothing to throw a few hundred sudoku levels into this game, and I doubtless would still be playing the game if they’d done so. (Liesl was still playing Brain Age until recently for exactly that reason.)

Ah well; I suppose I’m not exactly the target audience. It’s sold more than 4 million copies in Japan, so clearly somebody likes it.

(On which note, in this week’s Japan sales charts, you have to go down to the 36th spot to find a non-Nintendo console with two games. In the top 50, the DS has 34 games, the Wii has 6 (5 in the top half of the chart), the PS2 has 6 (5 in the bottom half of the chart), the PSP has 3, and the PS3 has 1. And the last two weeks have been relatively good for the PSP. It was pretty weird seeing Sony announce not one but two really cool things last week; I can’t think of the last time that happened. Of course, they balanced that out with the whole “no, we lied, the PS3 won’t be backwards compatible with the PS2 after all” thing.)

I am happy: I’ve managed to max out everything on Grow Cube.