The Gaming Outpost

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

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

I ought first to extend holiday wishes to all my readers.  It is likely that this will be the last Blogless Lepolt entry before Christmas, and other seasonal holidays are happening already, so without offense to those who do not celebrate, a blessed Christmas to those who do, and appropriate greetings to all who celebrate some other holiday at this time.

Entirely inadvertently, I completed the Examiner temporal anomalies series on Warlock just in time for the holiday break.  Warlock part 8:  fixed explores the problems in a fixed time solution to the film, delving into some of the more serious implications of fixed time theory in the process.  On Monday I will begin the next movie.

I should also mention having read Eric Ashley’s most recent, Practise Bits:  Meet, which has some interesting aspects to it, but I don’t really have time to address any of them at the moment.  Today is the major Christmas shopping day for us.  We don’t have all the lists, but we are aware of presents that need to be purchased, need to acquire a tree, and have today in which to do it.  It is unlikely that I will have time to return, but we will see what we will see.

–M. J. Young

I lost part of today to something more on the order of a general malaise than an illness, and am looking at a clock ticking down the final minutes of my available time while thinking of all the things I wanted to do before that time expired.  (I am also looking at a new version of this posting software which does not appear to permit me to type in HTML, which is frustrating me; but I remain a minority in that preference, I expect, so the fact that I can’t see how to switch to coding is probably because the designers don’t want me to.  I am reminded of a restaurant that went bankrupt a few years back because the perhaps arrogant celebrity chef who created the recipes refused to allow salt and pepper on the table with which the customers might spoil the perfect flavoring of his creations.)

In any case, the solution to my time problems I fear is that I will be leaving as soon as I finish this post, and dealing with the forums tomorrow.

I have also resolved most of the time problems in Warlock (oh, look at that–it appears that the coding appears in-line when you click the buttons; I can handle that) with the penultimate Examiner temporal anomalies article in the series, Warlock part 7:  return, which explains what problems Redferne might cause when he travels to his own time, and why it must not be a problem.  There is one more, which will come on Thursday, and then I’ll turn my attention to Blackadder Back & Forth on Monday.

Eric Ashley continues to be prolific.  We had some discussion about whether a self-destruct in a lifeboat made sense, but otherwise Practise Bits:  Exile was an action-packed and compelling story.  It was followed by Practise Bits:  Exile 2, which is the first article to be posted in our new “Fiction” category, and I admit that I am as surprised as the character that he survived what was described and seems not to have broken anything important.  Then, moving away from the fiction category, he gives us his opinions on several authors in C.J. Henderson; John Ringo; Andrew Klavan; Rick Riordhan, mostly favorable.

–M. J. Young

Simplification.

That’s what today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article does with the time travel in Warlock, looking at two distinct ways in which the first trip to the future could be the “original” history.  It is entitled Warlock part 6:  foreknowledge, which suggests one, but it finds flaws with both and notes that it leaves us still with most of the problems already identified.

I’ve been keeping up with Eric Ashley’s work as well.  Practise Bits:  Feast took my brief description of dinner at a buffet that included steak and turned it into a story of a starving man feasting.  Actually, Eric, it is generally better for those who are truly starving to eat a considerably lighter breakfast, that is, meal that breaks the fast; a heavy meal atop of digestive system that has been shutting down can be very problematic.  But I enjoyed reliving dinner nonetheless.  As for Practise Bits:  Translate, it is a clever solution, but I don’t think Wycliff translators would approve “See the bunny of God”–at least, not unless there was evidence that the culture had made sacrifices of rabbits as part of their own religious practices.  The fawn, the calf, the kid might all be better, as there is a good probability that if they eat these creatures they have at some point used them for blood sacrifices, or at least given part of the meat to a deity.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Dojo brings a verser into a martial arts training facility in a world that seems a bit like Dark Honor Empire beta–modern technology with feudal law, but done differently.  It also shows the superiority of the monotheism of Christianity over eastern dualism, if briefly.

I’ve got food cooking, I hope (new slow cooker on its first mission), and forum threads to check, but hopefully am on top of everything for today.

–M. J. Young