The Gaming Outpost

I am exhausted and frazzled, despite having gotten to sleep ahead of schedule last night.  I was awake early, by my count, and struggled to get out of bed to get the car in for a scheduled and long-overdue tune-up.  Rather than have them drive me home to do a small amount of work, I arranged to visit my friend and pastor a couple blocks away, where we spent longer than I expected catching up on events in our lives and the theology which drives us.  He is one of the few friends with whom I connect on that level.  But the car took longer than anticipated, and when it was ready there was a rush to finish a few errands before racing to rehearsal.  I’m not sure what happened with everyone in Collision, but the pianist and I focused on the new parts for the five new songs, and I think we accomplished a great deal we could not have done as well with the full band.  Hopefully next week we’ll get the others there.

Meanwhile, I almost forgot that I had an Examiner temporal anomalies article to upload, and rushed to do it in the middle of everything else, getting Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 10:  partying in place and announced in what might be record time.

I know that there was something else I intended to mention, but my fogged brain can’t remember what, so I’ll turn my attention to the recent writings of Eric Ashley.  Practise Bits:  Advisor has a bit of a comedic element to it, as the hero summoned from another dimension is an accountant who knows how to correct the financial woes of the empire.  In Practise Bits:  Indispensable our idea of the scriff sense which gives you a straight line vector to your equipment is utilized by a clever character to coordinate a major battle.  Of course, it might be interesting to see what the character does in his next world when all those fragments of cloth and metal scattered across thousands of square miles go with him, scattered across thousands of square miles and reminding him when he relaxes that he needs to find them.

Don’t mind me; I’m tired.

Good night, I hope.

–M. J. Young

Have I mentioned that Collision has a concert this weekend?  I notice that I have, but I’m not certain I gave all the details.  The Silver Lake Community Church has invited us to play an outdoor concert for an “ice cream social” to which they are inviting the community.  I am inviting whoever in the area wishes to come hear us, with the caveat that if it rains the whole thing is pushed into next week.  It starts at 6 in the evening and runs to 7:30 or whenever we are finished, and the ice cream is free.  The church is on Silver Lake Road near the corner of Dubois, zip code 08302 but I’m not entirely certain which municipality that actually is.  We have one more rehearsal tomorrow night, although I also have a rehearsal for Sunday’s church service (a different ensemble with about 75% overlap between them) tonight.

I’m also pretty loopy at this point, because I got up early–well, early for me, on maybe three or four hours sleep–to take the car for repairs.  The little coolant leak in the heater has become something of a gusher, and since we’ve been meaning to replace the heater fan for a couple years now and they’re going to have to deconstruct the dash to fix the leak anyway, our failing old car is going to have a mostly new heater in it by tonight.  At least, that’s our earnest expectation and hope.  It also desperately needs front tires, oil, and a tune up, but there’s only so much money for car repairs and everything else, and when you’re getting thirty miles to a gallon of coolant you’ve got to address the problem.

The early start means I also uploaded today’s installment in the series, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 4:  edit.  This one brings Millie into the story, who travels to the past specifically to kill the three famous protagonists but fails to do so because one of them is not there and at that moment not anywhere at all.

I’ve also been trying to keep pace reading Eric Ashley’s work.  As Nikolaj observed, Practise Bits:  Farmer is a peaceful story of a man who “invented” wheelbarrows in the world he visited and traded them for lessons in farming, so he could make a life in a hard world.  Practise Bits:  Team starts a story of a rescue mission, in which the hero is trying to save the life of a little girl.  There’s an interesting layer of conflict here, because it’s obvious that the little girl’s family deserves whatever comes to them, but not that the little girl herself ought to be the target.  In any case, the man’s team has rescued a group of people from a mob and is trying to get them out.  Meanwhile, Practise Bits:  Team 2 is not the second team but the second part of that story, which flows into the telling of the story and an audience.  It gives Eric an interesting character group for his games, a team that he can bring into a story if needed, although I suspect such a team would overwhelm most player characters at least in the early adventures.

I’m unlikely to get a nap; I’m also unlikely to get much done in my condition.  I hope to be back on track soon, but then like Aslan, I call all times soon.

–M. J. Young

As promised, I have completed the drafts of an entire temporal analysis of the movie Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which began running today at The Examiner with the appropriately entitled first part, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 1:  a movie.  I outline the entire plot of the movie as we see it, so if you haven’t seen or can’t find it you’re not going to be totally out of the loop.  I can’t promise that reading my pages will be as enjoyable as watching the movie, but hopefully some of the fun of the film will come through over the course of the series.  For my next trick, I hope to start work on Source Code, but I’m not sure when.

I think that my Friday super-rehearsal went well.  Nick was late.  Honestly, Baxter and I were also late, but Jonathan was practicing when we arrived and we weren’t that late.  We worked with vocals for something around two hours, then took a break to await the arrival of the pizza and Nick, and then returned to work each song several times until it was nearly three in the morning and we had done them all, including a quick run-through of the praise choruses we plan to have as the sing-along set we were asked to lead.  By the time we finished, my right hand plucking fingers were starting to blister, a thirty-year-old fuse blew on my Ampeg B-15 bass amp, and my left hand index finger was doing something it had never done before–I’m still not certain whether I exhausted all the acetylcholinesterase required to relax the muscles that flex that finger, or all the acetylcholine required to contract the muscles that straighten it.  I figure it was not a potassium problem because it did not feel cramped, as happens when the potassium is not there to replace the calcium and shift the muscle from contracted to relaxed, so it had to be in the neurotransmitters that cause the minerals to be released, and probably in the process that should have contracted the straightening muscles.  You don’t care about that, but maybe you learned something from it.

Incidentally, I have confirmed that the outdoor ice cream social at which we will be playing is an open event, in the sense that the community is invited.  It is scheduled for Saturday, September 10, from six to seven-thirty, outside behind the Silver Lake Community Church on Silver Lake Road near the corner of Dubois in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey.  So if you’re in the area and would like to hear how bad we are at our new debut, you’re welcome to come.

I have been reading what Eric Ashley has been writing.  I could quibble with Practise Bits:&nbps; Temporal and Practise Bits:  Temporal 2, particularly in that I coined the term “sawtooth snap” and he does not seem to use it the way I define it, but then, it’s his fiction and if he wants it not to make sense that’s his choice.  Practise Bits:  Friend was an interesting bit of politicking in a corrupt universe.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Journeys took us on a rough sea voyage made the rougher by the pessimistic prognostications of some wizards who seemed to get the wrong message from their auguries.

–M. J. Young

I have more on my plate at the moment than I can juggle, and I’ve never been very good at plate juggling; even with juggling balls, I can handle two easily and three not at all.  But the plates are spinning, and I can’t get hold of them.

I crossed a milestone this morning, finishing an analysis of the script for A Long Tomorrow; already I’ve received a thank-you note and the bulk of the promised payment (which will take a couple days to make it from PayPal to my bank account), but I have promised to answer any additional questions so the work might not be complete.

I uploaded the final installment in the Examiner temporal anomalies analysis of Next, Next part 7:  divergence, which gives consideration to whether any kind of multiple dimension theory could be used to have the protagonist see the actual future of another world, coming to the conclusion that our previous conclusion is correct.  I have, somewhere, a theory article to post on Thursday, but I do not yet have a complete analysis of Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which I need to finish by Monday or have something else ready to run instead.

Meanwhile, I perhaps foolishly agreed that Collision could perform in less than a month, and that with a new drummer who just really started with us, and difficulty getting everyone together even once a week.  The drummer is pushing for a couple of all-night rehearsals, which are going to cut into my time significantly, although the first will be not this week but next week because the keyboard player is out of town this week so we’ll keep our rehearsal shorter.

I’ve also got some car pressures this month.  The locking mechanism for the tailgate has finally died, and will be replaced when we have money at the end of the week; but I have to register two cars before the end of the month, and the one that has to go through inspection needs exhaust system repairs, which is the only thing they still inspect, so I’m going to be scrounging to get everything working on that end; there’s also an insurance payment overdue on that.

On the brighter side, Eric Ashley has provided us with two more fiction entries in the Gaming Outpost library.  The first, Practise Bits:  Waiting, is different because the main character seems to be a sentient rock or island of some sort, living at an extremely slow rate while people, like insects, race over its surface.  The second, Practise Bits:  Legend, is set in a strange universe, but if there’s a dimensional traveler in it I don’t know who it is.  It is an interesting character sketch, though, and worth reading for the setting, too.

We had enough of a rain storm yesterday that several bridges were still out today, and you have to know your way around to get around.  The particularly odd thing in the midst of it was that when our driveway was under several inches of water the well stopped pumping water to the house, and we were without water from sometime midday Sunday until midday today.  The plumbing company sent someone over who took the cover off the relay, jiggled it, and got it working, admitted he had no idea what was wrong or why it was working now, and charged us nothing but the promise that we would call if there was more trouble.  Thus far there hasn’t been, but I did have to make a laundromat trip yesterday which again got co-opted into an extended shopping trip that left me exhausted and ate all my time.  Hopefully I have enough time left today, and enough energy, although I was up unreasonably early to await the plumber, and am running down quickly at this point.

–M. J. Young