The Latest Stuff

Just an update on what’s been going on.

First of all, April was lousy. No major tragedies, mind you; just of a lot of little grinding unpleasantnesses, including the joy and pleasure of getting a tooth crowned for the first time.

Some people find that they feel pretty good the day after getting a tooth crowned. Other people might find that the pain lasts for couple of months. I am not the former, alas, but also not the latter (and there was great rejoicing). And you know how toothaches seem to move around in your jaw, so that it’s not always clear which tooth is actually the culprit? I was more or less convinced for a week or so that I’d be getting a second crown immediately after the first one. This now seems not to be the case (and there was great rejoicing).

All of my hopes for Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ book Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word. I’ve been getting up early every day to spend time in study ever since Easter Tuesday (including Saturdays and Sundays!), and I’m regularly astonished by the blindingly obvious things he pulls out of each line of the text—blindingly obvious after you’ve seen them—that I had never noticed before. I’m keeping notes of my reflections; some of them may appear here in the future. (As some kind of indication of the depth of Erasmo’s writing…50 days after Easter, I’m not quite to the end of the third chapter of Matthew’s gospel.)

Finally, I’m still working George’s Saga, my RPG, in which George, a naive but promising young man of low birth and high destiny, encounters such characters as the grim Sir Fred, Hogworth the peasant, Cyneros the dark wizard, Magister Mayhem, and Princess Floribunda. The game is becoming increasingly goofy. When George applies to Magister Mayhem for quest, he is told:

Magister Mayhem looks at you sourly. “Another adventurer,” he says.
“Just what I needed. Well, at least the Sewers have been restocked.”

He harrumphs a bit more, and then says, “OK, let’s take it from the top.

“The town of Floobham is in desperate straits. I’ve not had breakfast,
and everyone knows that I get nasty when I’m hungry. So you just go
down to the sewers, and see if you can find me a Tasty Egg Maguffin
in one of the chests. Bring it back to me, and I’ll see what else I
can think of.”

He doesn’t look enthused at the prospect. As you turn to go, he adds,
“I’m sure a naive but promising young man like you will have no trouble
finding the entrance to the sewers. You can, heh, keep anything else
you find down there.”

Later, George travels the short distance to Floob Castle, where Princess Floribunda is in dire straits. George goes speedily, eager for a quest that doesn’t involve sewers.

It seems that one of her father’s guests has unleashed cosmic evil within the castle. The princess could resolve the problem easily, she says, had she her magic ring…but she dropped it, and it fell down a grating, and, well, it’s in the palace sewers:

Sewers. More dirty, stinking, filthy, rat-infested sewers. Just what you
needed. You take a deep breath, out here where the air is clear.

“Very good, your Highness. So how do I get into the sewers?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” she says, still staring at the grating.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the palace.”

She turns to look at you.

“Good luck,” she says. “You’ll need it.”

Boston

Turns out, I know two of the people who were running the Boston Marathon today: Tina, a lady I often lector with at mass on Sunday evenings, and her husband. Fortunately they are unhurt.

May the civil authorities quickly determine the responsible parties; and may no one speculate foolishly about who they are until we’re sure.

And may God bless the injured and their families.

George’s Saga

I realize I’ve been kind of missing in action over the last several weeks; and the reason is that I’ve been spending pretty much all of my free time working on George’s Saga with my sons. George’s Saga is a computer RPG with simple, old-fashioned graphics that I’m doing mostly for fun as a Java programming project. It’s come an amazing way in the last three weeks; and there’s lots more work to be done before we’ll have something that anybody else would be interested in playing. But I’m having a ball, and learning a whole lot at the same time.

George’s Saga is rather different from Ramble, another incomplete RPG I wrote a few years ago. Ramble was primarily influenced by Angband and other “Rogue-like” RPGs; it used small graphical tiles, had a single player character, and was keyboard-driven in an Angband-like way. George’s Saga, by contrast, is point-and-click mouse-driven, with multiple player characters and larger graphical tiles. From a user-interface perspective, it draws heavily on Avernum: Escape from the Pit, which I played on my iPad a month or two ago; I enjoyed Avernum very much, and the user interface was a big part of it. From a graphics perspective, it’s reminiscent of the original Ultima series of games, especially Ultima III, though with more colors and bigger tiles. From a humor perspective, it’s probably going to resemble the DragonQuest series more than anything else.

At this point it’s very much a work-in-progress. There is no story to speak of as yet. There are two player-characters, George (a farmer) (that’s him, up there, as drawn by my eldest) and Sir Fred (a knight). There’s an overworld map with a number of castles, none of which have anything inside them; a small town (which I only implemented today) filled with people who won’t talk to you, not because they are unsocial but because conversations aren’t implemented yet; and two small dungeons implemented mostly as a place to experiment with monsters. (Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.) The player characters can wear armor and wield weapons, including ranged weapons, but the combat system isn’t even a quarter baked. (On the other hand, ranged attacks are nicely animated.) They can also loot chests and carry items, but there aren’t that many items for them to find or carry.

So, early days.

I expect that George is going to occupy my time for a while yet; I might have more to say about him over the coming days or weeks.

Arrrrrrgh!

Our phone service went out this morning, along with our Internet service. AT&T is going to send a technician on Tuesday. (!) Things will be quiet around here until all is resolved.

Back from Chicago

I’m just back from a week in Chicago, at this year’s Tcl conference. If you left a comment on a recent blog post during the last week, I might just have responded today.

I visited St. Peter’s in the Loop a couple of times, and hey, Julie, they have two copies of your book in their bookstore.

Out of Exile!

After eight (8) months, we are back in our kitchen! There are a few little things still to be done, but we have actually eaten some homecooked meals in the new kitchen this week. Woohoo!

No pictures, yet, as there are cardboard boxes everywhere still.

Junk Folder

I just discovered that someone close to me, someone who shall remain nameless (to protect the guilty), someone who has become known for not seeing e-mails that have been sent to, um, him or her, has been using the Junk folder in uh, his or her, e-mail program as a place to put e-mail messages that, hmm, he or she, wants to look at later.

Let me say that again.

This individual has been using the e-mail program’s Junk folder as a place to stash messages to look at later. (A note to the tech-savvy in my audience: remember what they say about making assumptions.)

We have had a frank and honest exchange of views, and I have agreed that this individual’s use of the Junk folder was based on a plausible model of how to do things, and this individual has promised not to do it any more.

Bootstrapping the Interior Life: Rosary

See all posts in this series.

I actually picked up the Rosary before I returned to the Catholic Church. A non-Catholic high school friend had gone on a trip to Rome, and since I was still Catholic then had brought me back a rosary from the Vatican. (He also brought back a photo of a statue of a pope that he and his sister thought looked like me. I have no idea who it was, really.) I didn’t pray the Rosary at that time; but in the year leading up to my return to the Church I pulled it out, and began to figure out what it was all about. I was doing a lot of business travel that year, and having the Rosary with me was a comfort.

The Rosary is probably the Catholic devotion; it’s also the one that non-Catholics look at and say, “Oooooh: vain repetition!” But that’s missing the point of the Rosary.

Yes, it’s a repetitive prayer: five decades (the usual daily allotment) has five Our Fathers, fifty Hail Marys, five Glory Be, a Hail Holy Queen, and a variety of other things depending on just how you do it, because there’s more than one way. But it isn’t about the repetition; it’s about the five daily mysteries: five scenes or periods from the New Testament upon which to the meditate. The prayers to Our Father and to our Blessed Mother aren’t just words; we mean them sincerely. But at the same time, they serve to give our bodies something to do while our souls are attending to the mysteries. And in addition to that, you can offer up your Rosary, or individual decades, for your prayer intentions.

So in one small package you get:

• A devotion that takes a reasonably fixed period of time.
• An opportunity for meditation upon the things of God.
• A chance to intercede for your loved ones.

Which is to say, a way to spend time with God, that helps you focus on God, such that you don’t have to do all the work yourself, and when you’re done, you know you’re done. It’s the perfect antidote for planned spontaneity.

I won’t try to explain how to say the Rosary here; there are scads of websites and oodles of books, and frankly, though I’ve been praying it for years I’m no expert. But if you’ve not tried it, it’s well worth a try.

9/11/01

It’s Tuesday. It was a Tuesday, eleven years ago, that I came downstairs for breakfast, in a hurry to get to work, and found my wife watching the news on TV. “Will, a plane hit one of the World Trade Center buildings.”

I didn’t get it. I thought it was a small plane, an accident, I wondered how a small plane had gotten into that airspace to begin with. It took a while for Jane to make it clear that the plane was a 747, and it was a while longer before I realized that it wasn’t an accident.

I think that the penny dropped as we watched the second plane hit the second tower. And then, as we watched and listened, the first tower collapsed.

It wasn’t an accident; it was a terrorist act, an attempt to scare us and break our wills, to break our country. It was deeply, deeply wrong.

So the lightning; now for the lightning bug.

In recent weeks (a phrase I could have written with equal justice at any time in the last ten years) I’ve seen scorn, bile, foul language, and vitriol in on-line forums and comment boxes. Much of it is directed at shutting down voices the commenter doesn’t like, not by reasoned argument, but by shouting and fear. It’s an attempt to scare the speaker, to break his will, to take him out of the dialog.

This isn’t the lightning; it’s only the lightning bug. It doesn’t kill people. Purveyors of combox hatred aren’t mass murderers. Still, the lightning bug does resemble the lightning in its own small way. And it, also, is deeply wrong.

Victory! Victory! Victory!

So I’ve been working on this novel for the past year or so, with the intent of reading it to my kids. They knew I was working on it, but they didn’t know anything about it. A couple of weeks ago, I judged that it was, if not finished, at least ready to share with them; and just a few minutes ago we finished it.

Now, I’ve read them many, many novels, by many different authors. I didn’t make any kind of fuss about this one; I just told them the title, and read it to them. And when we were done, my eldest asked, “Is there a sequel?”

I said, “No, I haven’t written it yet.”

“You wrote that?”

In fact, it took a while to persuade them that I am, in fact, the author.

Color me very, very pleased.

(For the record, it’s still not quite done; whilst reading it to them I identified a number of over-used phrases, typographical errors, continuity problems, and such like. I’ll keep you posted.)