The Gaming Outpost

Last night I got clear of the regular work, but was too tired to delve into any serious writing. My schedule has been hard on me, having me up early and to bed late and trying to make up for it with a nap in the middle, and by the time I was finished with the Corinthians list posting, I was too zonked to think very clearly.

What I did instead was restart that annoyingly dull movie, Primer, and finally watch it straight through. I’ve got something of a sense of the thing now, although it’s going to take a lot of work to unravel it entirely. I do know this much, though:

• The writers are rather clever in misdirecting the viewer. They give the impression up front that they are going to tell the story in order, but ultimately leave out key points and plug in missing information later. Most of the uncertainty about the timeline is created by this technique.
• The characters make some critical mistakes in how they do things, most notably by trying to make as few changes as possible in the AB timeline when it is the CD timeline which should concern them.
• In the end, they create an infinity loop. I have not yet determined whether they can actually get to the end, given the anomalies they create prior to that.

As I say, I’ve a lot of work to do on this, but I’ve gotten a start. I am expecting my wife to take my son back to Delaware tonight, so I might get another run at it. I didn’t time the film or look up the time, but since I started it near nine-thirty and the brief credits were rolling before eleven, it must be under ninety minutes.

I wound up waiting relatively long at a pickup errand last night, and put some of that time into editing the Romans notes. I hit a major disruption when I discovered that I had failed to print (or else misplaced) twenty pages (I print the documents in batches, two-sided, ten sheets at a time, to avoid misfeeds, or at least prevent these from disrupting huge numbers of pages). The notes broke mid-sentence, so I set it aside and took a nap for most of an hour. I’ve got the reprinted pages in the output tray of my printer now, and since I printed the first eight chapters and am editing somewhere in chapter six, I’m thinking that I need to start printing the last eight chapters before I need them.

I got some excellent feedback this afternoon on part of the second edition rules, which I’ve noted for future implementation. I really am working.

–M. J. Young