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by M. J. Young

Digressions and Divergings

February 2, 2012 in Blogs

As the groundhog seeks and probably finds his shadow, telling us that there are six more weeks of winter rather than, as my father often observes, a month and a half, I am nearing the end of the present Examiner temporal anomalies series, posting Blackadder Back & Forth part 12:  divergence, which tries, unsuccessfully, to find a version of multiple dimension theory that will give us the results we find in the film.  Meanwhile, my mind wanders to several other subjects.

One of those is a silly bit that ought to be written somewhere.  It is said in the Multiverser Referee’s Rules, in the appendix describing a few characters, it says, “Most famous of the Alchemist’s equipment quirks is his pockets.  There is a 60% chance of any small object being found in them.”  This past weekend that statement got a shot of adrenaline.  As you perhaps know, the Alchemist, also known as the Architect, is my original game persona.  I was at a birthday party this weekend, and there came a moment when we began opening presents.  As the first of the wrappings was removed, the child’s mother was for a moment holding the trash, and I said I thought I could help with that.  I promptly pulled a full-sized intact thirty-three gallon black plastic trash bag from my pocket and handed it to her, which was then used for the remainder of the day to collect party trash.

It would be reasonable for you to wonder why I had a trash bag in my pocket, and perhaps I ought to let you wonder, but it might help your understanding of this mysterious character if I offer the explanation.  I had used such a bag to transport several presents on the long journey in the car, to keep them contained, clean, and intact in the rear, and to carry them inside.  Once they were inside, I removed them from the bag and was left holding, well, the bag.  Not seeing any good place for it and not wishing to turn a useful object into trash, I balled it up and stuffed it in my jeans pocket, where it remained for an hour or two until it was needed.  That, then, is how those objects wind up in his (or my) pockets.

On another note, a week from tomorrow we have a Collision rehearsal, the first of the new year.    I’ve talked with the drummer and expect everyone to be there, and even wrote up an extra brass part for an experiment.

My brain is rattling through several other matters, but they don’t matter, so I’ll move forward.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

A Man Who Wouldn’t Be King

January 30, 2012 in Blogs

Of course, the position has not been offered, so there’s no point in debating whether I would be a good king or not (I would not; I lack both the administrative skills and the charismatic leadership qualities).  But Edmond Blackadder seems to think he’d be a good one, and uses his time machine to make it so.  How like is that?  We consider the problem in the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article, Blackadder Back & Forth part 11:  king, seeing that it is possible but extremely complicated.

I’m going to note that after a week or so hiatus Eric Ashley has struck again, offering us Practise Bits:  Rail, which I discovered too late in the evening to read before posting this so I can’t yet comment on it as I have dinner cooking and people in need of transportation and forum posts to address and more, miles to go before I sleep, but it’s open on my desktop and I might even attempt to print it and take it with me (although I’ve found that printing articles here does not always work so well).

So with that I’m moving forward.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Some Things Can’t Be Fixed

January 26, 2012 in Blogs

In case you were wondering (which probably you weren’t) the car was repaired and is back on the road.  On the down side, the price–well, I had given a number that I said was the ceiling above which I wanted to be alerted, and they were only three quarters of the way to it, so I ought to be pleased; but there were some other unanticipated expenses which would have been easy to absorb had it not been for the huge car repair bill.  It has put in jeopardy an anticipated trip to visit family this weekend which on one level we cannot afford to have put in jeopardy.  So I’m scrambling to cover things.

Meanwhile, today is Thursday, and I uploaded another article to the temporal anomalies series at The Examiner, Blackadder Back & Forth part 10:  repairs.  There might be ways to fix the past, but for several reasons Edmond cannot do so the way he does it.

Not yet having received 11 Minutes Ago and finding a bit of extra time on my hand Tuesday evening, I have started working on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.  I don’t much like it–I mean, it’s a decent fun movie, but as a time travel story it’s going to be a lot of trouble.  On the other hand, having seen it several (many?) times when my boys were younger, the single viewing with a notepad already made might be sufficient to cover the details.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Stuck at Home

January 23, 2012 in Blogs

It was still autumn when I mentioned that the brakes on the car were making the kind of noise that means minor repairs are in order.  At the time I was brushed off with “I don’t hear anything.”  Thus when they started making the kind of noise that makes me nervous to drive the car last week, that got a “Why didn’t we know this sooner?”  Because of the delay, the vehicle needs a couple of shoes, a couple of pads, a couple of rotors, and a caliper; and because it needs that much and calipers are apparently not standard stock, the car with disassembled brakes is spending the night at the shop to be fixed in the morning.  We’re not going anywhere tonight; hopefully we can manage without it.

Blackadder finally makes it home in this week’s Examiner temporal anomalies installment, Blackadder Back & Forth part 9:  home?, in which the issue is whether it is possible for the time traveler to discover that he has changed the past.  The film isn’t over, though, because Edmond will recognize the damage done and will make another trip attempting to repair it.

I have not started work on the next film (the one to follow Watchmen, which is ready to run), but I am not at the moment certain which it will be.  I have been stalling the start of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III:  Turtles in Time partly because I’ve been otherwise engaged, partly because I already know the story and think it’s not going to make a very interesting series, and partly because I’m not sure how much interest there is in it.  Meanwhile, someone wrote pressing me to analyze a film called 11 Minutes Ago, so I ordered it from Amazon (it really seemed cheap of me to suggest that he do so).  It sounds interesting, perhaps challenging, in that it appears the time traveler keeps hopping back earlier and earlier, which means that he’s rewriting his own history as he goes–definitely the dangerous way to do it.  It’s supposed to arrive around Thursday, so maybe I’ll do that one first.

Well, work awaits.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

A Late Stop

January 19, 2012 in Blogs

I got an early start this morning.  Someone needed a ride to an early doctor appointment I had scheduled, so I was called upon to drive on a few hours of sleep.  After that, the restaurant we had chosen at which to lunch was no longer there, and I gladly embraced the suggestion that we travel the half hour home plus half an hour in the opposite direction to lunch at that wonderful restaurant I mentioned a month or so ago (and Eric Ashley immortalized in one of his articles, Practise Bits:  Feast), The Golden Corral.  It was early afternoon when we exited, contentedly full.

As long as we were by the shopping centers, though, there was one thing my passenger needed for work, so stopped at a store for a quick errand.  A few hours later we left, but had to make another stop for another necessity, and by the time we were home, the morning daylight had given away to evening darkness, and the day was spent.

I turned to my office, but I do not do so well on lack of sleep as I did in my college days (and I did not do as well then as I tried to believe), and was accomplishing nothing if you don’t count clicking a mouse button with my eyes closed.  I was forced to retire for a nap, and by the time I was again functional there was very little left of “today”.

I did manage to upload the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article while it was still Thursday on the eastern seaboard.  I had a couple extra hours, because even though there are independent editions of the e-paper for cities around the country, the central office is in a more westerly timezone and so articles posted to the national edition, at least, are timestamped by the clock there.  In this installment, Blackadder Back & Forth part 8:  legions, the intrepid duo make the last stop of their first trip, encountering their own ancestors at Hadrian’s Wall.  I did not mention it in the article, but apparently the joke of the scene is about making the Roman armor progressively shorter until David Fry’s suit leaves his underpants showing from beneath.  I more appreciated Hugh Laurie misidentifying the approaching Scottish attackers as a moving orange hedge, but then, I thought that the credits listing of “Hordes of Scots” playing the part of “Scottish Hordes” (or was it the other way around?) was almost as funny as the standard gag credit in the Elizabethan series, “Additional Dialogue by William Shakespeare”.

Speaking of Mr. Ashley, his latest contribution to the reading material here is a rather atmospheric piece about a vampire hunter, entitled Practise Bits:  Bitter.  I’m not certain whether the character is inspired by me, him, Lauren Hastings, or David Marcoe, all of whom have done the modern vampire scenario, although for me it was Chicago, not Philadelphia, and the character is not Lauren because it’s clearly a man.

Well, I’m obviously rambling a bit, a side effect of trying to clear the nap out of my brain, but there’s more work ahead so I’d better move ahead to where it awaits.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

The Wellington Impact

January 16, 2012 in Blogs

In today’s installment in the Examiner temporal anomalies series we examine the impact Blackadder has on history when his time machine has an impact on the Duke of Wellington–quite literally.  Blackadder Back and Forth part 7:  Wellingtons suggests that this would have been significant, but not in the way expressed in the movie.

Meanwhile, I have completed the draft of a short series on Watchmen, and posted the anticipated episode titles to the index site.

Friday we had an interesting meeting at a diner whose bar crowd was too loud for our preference and whose prices reflected the fact that they drew a clientelle there for the nostalgia.  Most of Collision was in attendance, plus a few family members of the members.  John, the drummer I had hoped to introduce to the rest who chose the location, did not appear and has not been in contact with me since; I am again beginning to worry about him.  Hopefully it’s nothing serious.

We have illness in the house, and already my effort to get my work completed has raised ire that I should be able to skip work and attend the sick; but Monday is a bad day for that, so here I am.

–M. J. Young

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Maybe I Don’t Exist, Either

January 12, 2012 in Blogs

It has in some ways seemed a quiet week.  Behind the scenes I have been struggling to communicate something sensible about Watchmen so it will be ready to join the Examiner temporal anomalies series when the current film finishes its run.

That series continues today with Blackadder Back & Forth part 6:  Sherwood, which deals with an interesting conundrum:  how do you evaluate the impact on history of the premature death of someone who historically may never have existed and certainly did not do all that is credited to him?  It is fun to meet Robin Hood in our fictional stories (at least two of my players currently in the forum are visiting his world at the moment), but we can do that because everyone in a fictional world is fictional.  Meeting him in Blackadder’s world only underscores the unreality of that fiction; and killing him–well, I digress.

I have a meeting tomorrow evening which may delay me or interfere with my presence here entirely.  All five members of Collision are gathering about an hour north of here at a diner which happens to be a few blocks from my mother-in-law’s home but which was chosen by the guy who is farthest away, drummer John Mastick.  He is very much into fifties nostalgia, and there is a nostalgia diner there of which one of his friends speaks highly, so in addition to meeting for the first time with the rest of the band he hopes to enjoy visiting the place.  I am not nostalgic, and despite the fact that I have driven past the place perhaps hundreds of times and been inside once (to rendezvous with a member of the household needing transportation), I do not remember the name, but that I think it was called The Century Diner before it received its nostalgic overhaul.  To save on gas (his, not mine) I will be going a bit out of my way to take lead guitarist Kyle Baxter, and expect keyboard/vocalist Jonathan Maness and drummer (yes, the other drummer) Nicholas “Nick” Rhoades to meet us there.  I have no idea what exactly we are going to do, because I have never been particularly competent at unstructured social situations (dinners, parties, riots), but I hope that our gathering will help us connect with each other a bit more solidly–not that we suffer from any real disconnection, but I’m not sure how well we know each other at this point, and particularly John, whom I have seen I think maybe thrice since my wedding, last at his wife’s funeral, and who is known to the rest of the band only as the guy who really wants to play drums with us badly enough to be willing to drive three hours each way.

Today seems rather relaxed.  It’s early, and although I am planning to wash a batch of dishes and make a complicated dinner, I don’t feel much in the way of time pressure at present, and I might even take another look at my work on Watchmen to see whether there’s anything left to say.

–M. J. Young

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Trouble in Spacetime

January 9, 2012 in Blogs

As Blackadder and Baldrick travel to the future, our Examiner temporal anomalies series follows them with Blackadder Back & Forth part 5:  space, only to discover that they have nowhen to go.  There being no past, there can be no future, and our story crashes.  Don’t worry; apparently neither Blackadder nor his writers were aware of this, and so they continue their journeys in our next article.

My day didn’t exactly crash, but a substantial chunk was given to a family adventure, viewing a rising full moon in a heavily overcast night sky over a dark ebbed ocean, and as we returned westward from the shore snow found us at our dinner stop.  It was not a major delay, but I do seem to be running late.  Too, my youngest has come home with the request that I ensure he gets to work in the morning, so I can’t stay up too late.

I have started work on Watchmen.  There’s not that much to it in temporal terms, but what there is can be entirely confusing.  Just the one conversation between Jon and Laurie about her affair with Daniel which he does not yet know about but already knows he will learn about later in the conversation is enough to confuse any temporal analyst.  It will be a short series, but a rough one to write, I think.  After that, my sons have tracked down our copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III:  Turtles in Time, so I’ll probably turn my attention to that bit of humor next.

On the home front, if Gaming Outpost is home, we have more from Eric Ashley.  In Practise Bits:  Knife he explores the other side of whether and when women might be soldiers.  (This should not be confused with his earlier piece of the same title.)  Practise Bits:  Hunt puts a high-tech warrior on the track of giant spiders.  Practise Bits:  Ride reads like an interlude connecting parts of a longer story; but then, he gives this to us as writing practice, and it helps to practice all the parts.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Should I Eat a Good Breakfast?

January 5, 2012 in Blogs

Decades ago I participated in a folk song gathering at a local church elsewhere; the assistant pastor thought that he could connect with teenagers by getting together to sing fifties-era folk songs with seventies-era kids, but I liked to sing and I liked learning songs and I wasn’t as picky about them then as I am now, so I went.  I only remember fragments of them now.  One of those fragments, though, was a clever song about being old, and in one verse it ran:

…I get up each morning and read the obits.
If I’m not there, I know I’m not dead,
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Well, I got up this morning because my youngest was off work yesterday and came home ostensibly to see us but also to do his laundry, and he needed a ride to work half an hour away when the ride is smooth, but when he didn’t make it to the car until after six-thirty I knew that not only were we going to have to deal with the slick roads from the overnight dusting of snow, we were also going to catch all the school buses we would have avoided ten minutes earlier.  I did get him there before too late, although not exactly on time, and I returned home and have been trying to figure out whether to start my day or get another few hours of sleep.  While I’ve been trying to figure this out, I’ve tackled a good part of what constitutes starting my day.

That includes having uploaded today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article, Blackadder Back & Forth part 4:  Elizabeth, in which the real question involves the impact on history when William Shakespeare abandons his literary career and instead invents the ballpoint pen.

I did not read them today, but then, he did not write them today, and it’s too early for him to have added anything today; but Eric Ashley continues to provide fiction bits for our enjoyment, and there are two more since I last posted on Monday.  Practise Bits:  Dialogue is a conversation in which one person is trying not to be persuaded to become involved in some battle on behalf of another.  Practise Bits:  Civilization raises the interesting notion that it is somehow civilized for men to go to war and women to stay behind.  I wonder what the Israeli army thinks of that idea, and think that perhaps Eric needs to explore it a bit more clearly–he seems to assume that the reader will understand why that arrangement is more civilized, and I’m not certain I do.

So now I’m trying to decide whether to push forward into the remainder of today’s tasks or strip off some of the clothing I donned for the purpose of braving the pre-dawn cold and crawl back into bed.  But I’m not going to decide that before I get this posted, so you’ll just have to try to figure it out.

–M. J. Young

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A Long Time Ago

January 2, 2012 in Blogs

It occurs to me, as I create the indexing entry on my private bookmarks page for this blog, that I ought to wish everyone a happy new year, even if I am a day late for wishing a happy New Year, if you catch the distinction.  I’ve never been much of one for special days, but this one tends to remind that time has been passing, and it has been a year since we started the last year, what is in some ways a long time when you are very young and perhaps when you are very old.  May the year ahead favor all of you.

The thought of long periods of time is on my mind because today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article deals with what I think is the longest leap to the past I have seen in any time travel movie, to the Jurassic era.  Thus Blackadder Back & Forth part 3:  long discusses the potential impact of killing a tyrannosaur, citing related articles on other films.  I have some concern that I have not yet begun watching the only not-yet-anaylyzed time travel film I can find on my shelves, The Watchmen, in part because the director’s cut version which was sent to me is very long, perhaps three hours if I’m remembering aright, and in part because my rule has always been to analyze the theatrical release, not the director’s cut, and that’s not what I was sent.

Speaking of time, it was several years ago that I shared a platform with Dave Simpson at Ubercon (along with Kevin Siembieda and Mike Stackpole), but we keep in touch sometimes at the con and sometimes through Facebook.  He has invited me to participate in some online panels in association with Gamers on Games.  There are a few technical issues to resolve, but I’m hoping to be able to do this.

I also took the time to read Eric Ashley’s latest contribution, Practise Bits:  Endstates.  I did not exactly read it twice, but I read the first part when it first appeared and then when he expanded it I re-read enough of the first part to figure out that I had read the beginning but not the end, and tried to find where the new material began.  I don’t think I missed anything, and it was a good read.

I have much to do and not much time, so I’m moving to something else now.

–M. J. Young

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