The Gaming Outpost

Yesterday was ten ten ten, if anyone cares who did not notice it.  I noticed it, but didn’t particularly care.  I’m good at spotting patterns, so they’re all to common to my mind.

I’ve been delayed today by the instability of my computer.  The room temperature has been flirting with eighty most of the day, and things got so bad I had to dig out the emergency repair disk and do a restore point just to get the user accounts back onto the system. I’ve had it crash several times per e-mail response, and am at this point simply hoping that between the slightly cooler room temperature, ice packs, and fan, I’ll be able to get through the rest of the night without losing the computer yet again.

Today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article also deals with stability–temporal stability, whether the history of the world in the movie can stabilize given certain suggestions it makes about its reality.  Yeah, that’s a pretty vague statement, so I guess I’ll just point you to The Time Traveler’s Wife part 19:  a question of stability and let you figure out what I mean from reading it.  To turn a phrase, Able was I ere I saw Alba.  She just might have made a mess of the whole story.

I could go on about other problems, but there’s not much point to that, so let me instead go deal with them.

–M. J. Young

The room temperature here is flirting with eighty degrees–it has hit that number at least twice, although right now I’m looking at a fraction above seventy-eight.  The computer has become markedly unstable, and crashed half a dozen times in the past four hours, frustrating my efforts to publish and announce the appearance of The Time Traveler’s Wife part 18:  death foreseen, the latest of the Examiner temporal anomalies articles, this one considering what would have to happen for Henry to travel to the point in the future at which he can watch his own death.  It’s not as simple as it sounds, but it’s not entirely impossible, either.

To the computer problems we can add the plumbing problems–the leaking commode still resists my efforts to repair it, although in all honesty I have not managed to grab the time to attempt the next repair due in part to the fact that someone who does not like to be mentioned online has been sick the past few days, and thus requiring at least some of my time and attention as well as inadvertently interfering with my access to the bathroom.

With all this, I am genuinely worried about my ability to have the analysis of Hot Tub Time Machine ready on schedule.  I have four more installments of The Time Traveler’s Wife to post, which means two more weeks, and then I will have to post something the following Monday, for which there is nothing confirmed as ready.  It isn’t that the film is all that complicated–it’s that despite being a fun film and a clever story it fails in so many ways temporally that it’s hard to get it all to text in an orderly and readable way.  I’ve got three parts drafted and have barely begun addressing the problems, but moving forward keeps sending me in circles:  must explain this to get to that, that to get to this, and so on.  It’s going to be a challenging series to write.

In other news, a reader has informed me that he is sending copies of several other time travel films, including the Spanish one that’s gotten a lot of attention, a British one with a documentary-sounding name, a Black Adder special, one about a wizard traveling to the future and back, and one more that slips my mind.  I will be adding them to the pile, but I already have a request for one of those already there, so I guess I’m covered for a while as long as I can keep up the pace.

There are a lot of other problems, but I’m not the only one in my circle thinking that life is a bit more trouble than it’s worth, and of myself I know that I lack the competence to change that in any direction, so I’ll be continuing what I’m doing for the immediate future.

–M. J. Young

I’ve been less than well the past–well, I don’t want to guess how long, but it’s been reflected in my posting gaps in the forum, although they also reflect the fact that my computer has also been less than well.  Today was a bad day–only moderately bad medically, but a very bad day financially which has left me in the position of having to postpone a doctor’s appointment a week so there will be money for the co-pay and forestall refilling a prescription with the hope that I will manage without it for that week.  There will be other cutbacks as well, as I hold my breath and hope that nothing else goes wrong.

A very localized electrical outage delayed my work today, after which I was not feeling well enough to do even all the basics.  Mercifully it is Thursday, which is generally a light day anyway, so I am not pushing quite as much into tomorrow as I might have been.  But I am ducking some of my work.

The temporal anomalies Examiner series has fallen in popularity; I suppose that the readers are tiring of the rather long analysis of this film, but still I have published The Time Traveler’s Wife part 14:  a doctor in the house, speculating on how Doctor Kendrick’s name ever got into that predestination paradox without Henry having told it to Clare.  I do hope some of you will take the time to read it, and perhaps offer comments on whether I missed something.

As for me, I’m going to attempt to hold things together tonight and return tomorrow.

–M. J. Young

I’ve been to see a doctor a few times lately, and the diagnosis seems to be that I’m allergic to anything that touches my skin, if it does so enough.  So my allergy meds have been upped to deal with this.  My computer has also gone to see its own doctor, and now there is a new theory to pursue as soon as I have time to do a few home tests.  My home time has been limited, though–I’m not the only person who is ill here, so there are additional demands on my time.  On top of that, the water system started leaking, and it seems it’s not just a pipe junction but a main pressure tank.  The plumber is plumbing it now, and hopefully it will be plumb within the hour, but to the tune of a substantial number of clinking metal discs.

And it happens that last Thursday’s post was the 911th in this Blogless Lepolt series, so it seems a good time for trouble.

Speaking of trouble, the latest entry in the temporal anomalies series at The Examiner addresses the first trip Henry de Tamble made to the past, the first time he made that trip–the time when there was no future from which someone could come explain it to him.  That history is discussed in The Time Traveler’s Wife part 4:  the first time is the worst time.  It was also a bad first time for me, because the site is changing to a new system, and in the process they have disabled most of the tools I always use to post my articles and left me with the supposed user-friendly interface for those who are content to have their articles formatted by point-and-click.  It took longer for me to do that (my articles are written in HTML and post quickly if I can post in HTML), but I got it done.

I have been pushing to get everything done, and not doing so most days; but perhaps today will be different.  In fact, the water’s back already, the computer seems stable, and I’m not yet exhausted from the early start.

–M. J. Young

Well, things are not quite running smoothly.  In fixing my computer the shop found a flaw in the primary hard drive, which meant replacing it, reinstalling the operating system, and then returning it to me with the task of reinstalling all the other programs I use week in and week out for e-mail, FTP, documents, spreadsheets, and stuff I can’t now even recall.  What’s worse, it’s only a little better.  Something is still seriously wrong with it.  I might have to replace the whole machine–which is not something I can reasonably afford to do at present, so we’ll have to make due.

On the bright side, the new temporal anomalies series at The Examiner is doing better than the last one.  That’s not going to pay for the computer, mind, but at least it keeps my in computer paper.  The Time Traveler’s Wife part 3:  the first time is the first time constructs a timeline, pulling together fragments of clues on the timing of events and the ages of the characters to fit it all roughly to a credible if in some ways fantasy calendar.

On the dark side, I’ve had a long day, not all trying, some of it pleasant, but enough of it behind that I want as little as possible ahead.  Thus I am short circuiting whatever is left to the minimum necessary and putting this tired brain to bed.  If the world is still here tomorrow, I will deal with it then.

–M. J. Young

This Blogless Lepolt entry is the one after nine-oh-nine, if anyone knows that reference.  At least, it is if my numbering has been maintained accurately all these years.

I will be without a computer, probably from late this afternoon probably until late Sunday afternoon.  The memory increase and RAID driver (that’s probably a redundancy, and I hate redundancies like “PIN number” (may have have your personal identification number number?) but I don’t know with certainty that the “D” of “RAID” stands for “driver” and not “drive”) have not resolved the issues satisfactorily; it is not clear they have helped at all, although the heat of the past few days has contributed.  I am frantically attempting to get as many things situated before I shut down as possible, having gotten an early start on the first cool day of late, but am certain I am forgetting something.  I might have access through computers of other family members, but I won’t have access to the files and reference materials that are so essential to so much that I do, nor will I be able to reach my e-mail.  I will be able to send Tweets via cell phone, if there is anything significant to report–at least, I think I will, and I expect to test that when I’m done here, by way of announcing the computer absence to those few who follow me there.

Meanwhile, I have posted today’s Examiner temporal anomalies piece, suggesting that under fixed time theory Clare is not the big event of the meadow, making the film much less romantic.  Thus we have The Time Traveler’s Wife part 2:  a fixed time heartbreak, and a reason to explore replacement theory as an alternate solution.

I will see you, Lord willing, Monday or possibly late Sunday, one place or another.

–M. J. Young

I find myself racing against the expectation that the computer is going to shut down once again.  The temperature in the room has been creeping up–only the middle of the eighties at the moment, but I’ve had several cold shutdowns, forced restarts, and freezes, despite setting an ice pack against the lower intake.  With all still ahead of me, that’s not encouraging, even with a second ice pack in place.

So during one of the crashes that have interrupted this writing, I have arranged to take the computer to see a professional, hopefully to be diagnosed and treated between Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.  Here’s hoping.

Also not encouraging is that I have been less than entirely healthy this week.  It might be partly psychosomatic, but when they want to biopsy skin from sensitive regions, they first stab you several times with a needle and then come after you with razor blades, and if it doesn’t take you a couple days to recover from that you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

Also frustrating me is that I not only have not finished the Examiner series on The Time Traveler’s Wife.  Worse than that, I’ve written sixteen columns and am not at all certain how many more I need to write, or even whether I will have to insert one or more near the beginning.  But if I can hold the computer together today, maybe I can do more tonight.  I did post another about Primer, this one considering whether fixed time might resolve any of its problems, appropriately entitled Primer question 5:  fixed time theory.  I’ve also started tracking daily traffic to the Examiner articles, although the information available to me is only total views of all articles, so it doesn’t tell me what’s popular.

I know that the forum people are missing me.  I have been keeping up on the non-game posts, which I still maintain are the priority, although at this point “non-game” seems to include a lot of games in which I am not a participant but merely an overseer of sorts.  I have enjoyed what I’ve read, and particularly since these don’t require as much time or work from me even when they move fast.  Hopefully the computer will remain stable so that I can get back here in a couple hours and finally catch up on those, and then maybe even figure out what remains to be discussed for the temporal anomalies stuff.

–M. J. Young