The Gaming Outpost

I reported last week that I was sick but mostly recovered.  Apparently my disabilities for the week were not yet complete, however.  On Thursday my foot began to hurt, and to swell, such that I began using my cane, and trying to stay off it as the pain moved into the leg.  Concerned that it might be serious, I allowed myself to be taken to the emergency room Saturday night.  I don’t really know whether cellulitis is serious, but I am on an antibiotic and an anti-inflamatory, which seems to have reduced the swelling and the pain such that I am on one crutch mostly as a prophylactic and have not taken any of the narcotic pain medicine that was also prescribed.  That does not actually explain my absence yesterday.  Rather, I was invited to go for a ride to pick up the prescriptions and have a meal (I’m tempted to call it “linner”, which is not a word but which I have often used for that meal which is both lunch and dinner, in the same way that “brunch” is both breakfast and lunch), and as things were progressively added to the list this short trip ran from about three in the afternoon to sometime after midnight.  On the positive side, we picked up the viola our friend with the knack for designing and building instruments repaired for us (and got to play with some of his musical toys while visiting); oh, I I’ve managed over the past week to catch the first three episodes of Torchwood, a series I have long wanted to see and have found to be better than anticipated.

Despite my hobbling, I think I am not as bad off as Redferne, who discovered his own corpse in his own grave.  Of course, the real problem there, from a time travel perspective, lies in the fact that he also discovered the third part of the grimoire buried with him–and therein lies a major time travel problem for the story, because–well, best to let you read Warlock part 3:  unburied, the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article.

I’m looking at three new works from Eric Ashley.  Practise Bits:  Mentalist has someone psionically searching other universes from the comfort of his office.  Practise Bits:  Letter is chapter two of last week’s Practise Bits:  Magic.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Spellblade combines fantasy magic, high-tech weaponry, and swashbuckling swordplay in a compelling adventure of good versus evil.  Well, at least, that’s what the movie poster would say.

–M. J. Young

I’m right on the edge of being sick, and so hoping to clear out as quickly as possible.  I almost forgot to post this, but that may be because it seems an age ago that I posted today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article, Source Code part 10:  completion, which is only the penultimate article in the series, the conclusion coming on Monday, if all goes well.  This one looks at how Stevens solves the crime and saves the world–a perhaps strange sort of victory.

I will mention the recent work of Eric Ashley, who has added Practise Bits:  Eats to his descriptive efforts, describing food, and also Practise Bits:  Arch, in which we meet an engineer who apparently does not know how the Brooklyn Bridge was built but who figures out how to do it eventually.

G’night, I hope.

–M. J. Young

Sometimes why I’m watching a movie, I suddenly say to myself, That’s a mistake; that could not have happened that way.  The thing is, I did it while watching Source Code, only to discover after the fact that it was not a mistake–it was, well, as the title of the article suggests, Source Code part 6:  first clue, a hint that what we are told is not the reality we are seeing.  That is explained in more detail in the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article.

Speaking of that which was not what I thought, today took me to the emergency room with our sick family member.  We called the doctor’s office, but he said intravenous fluids were likely going to be required so it made more sense to go to the hospital directly–and our brilliant diagnostician was correct.  However, it chewed up enough of my time that I did not make it to rehearsal and it looks like I’m leaving a lot of other tasks unfinished.

I did have opportunity earlier (like, yesterday and the day before) to read the latest contributions from Eric Ashley.  Practise Bits:  Dragon does not contain a dragon, but does contain a vengeance that might not have been exceeded by one.  Practise Bits:  Fracking is a dialogue piece, a business meeting between a man in an unusual business and a security consultant of sorts, in which Eric comments on the modern economic world via a surrogate universe.

A bit of a joke passed my way earlier, and I’m intrigued to note that according to the Geek Zodiac I am a Time Traveler.  What makes this more humorous, I suppose, is that the person who passed this information to me was sending it as a general Tweet to all his followers and probably would not have known that my birth year falls in the Time Traveler sign.  I also took note that my son Kyler is a Wizard.  The others are interesting, too, but he is the one known to people here, so he gets special mention.

Well, as I said, my day has been badly battered and I’ve less than enough time for what remains to be done, so I’d better sign off and look elsewhere.

–M. J. Young

Happy Halloween.

The back of my mind tells me that I ought also to say happy birthday to Eric Ashley, although I’m not completely certain which day is his birthday or why I think that.  He has contributed more articles to the archives here, but we will return to those.  Halloween has left me exhausted.  I distributed one hundred forty-four cans of soda and then turned people away.  A dozen root beer vanished first, but I had two dozen root beer; a dozen grape were gone before the second dozen of the root beer vanished, both of those outcomes surprising me, and the dozen orange was next.  After that it took a while to finish another dozen, but we went through a dozen lemon-lime, a dozen cola, a dozen citrus, a dozen ginger ale, another dozen lemon-lime, a dozen diet lemon-lime, another dozen cola, and finally a dozen diet cola.  I write this so that I can remember next year to get more soda, and particularly more grape, orange, and root beer, as they were more popular than I anticipated.  In fact, we were so popular I could hear kids around the block shouting about where is the soda guy, so if no one is giving away cheap soda in your neighborhood I recommend it as a treat they remember.

I have since fallen asleep, and hope to be back there again soon, so I’m going to attempt to make this short.  (Too late.)

Today’s temporal anomalies article at The Examiner, Source Code part 5:  first divergence, uncovers an interesting aspect of the divergent dimension aspect of the film:  when Colter Stevens creates that first new universe, he creates another Colter Stevens who will create an identical first new universe plus additional slightly different new universes, and thus there is an expanding number of new universes blossoming toward infinity.

Getting back to Eric, he has given two new contributions.  The first, Practise Bits:  City, is probably hard science fiction but feels like science fantasy with its alien landscape and creatures (although the back of my mind–there it is again–says I wondered whether a world with gravity that low could maintain a breathable atmosphere).  The other, Practise Bits:  Searcher, gives first explorations of an alien world by an arriving interdimensional traveler.

I have one more thing I must do before I return to bed–that which was once the Romans list and then the Corinthians list has since become the Galatians, Ephesians, and now Philippians study, and I owe them tonight’s post.

–M. J. Young