The Gaming Outpost

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

I owe an apology to James T. Marsh, whose fascinating article Spellblade I misattributed last time.

As I continue the Examiner temporal anomalies series with Warlock part 4:  when, I find myself exploring the impossible solutions to the problem created by the fact that the book cannot have been in the grave in the original history.  Had it been hidden somewhere where it would have become available later, or sooner, time would have collapsed and our story would never have been told.  Hopefully the article explains why.

My own time was disrupted, as once again a quick drive to the local convenience store turned into the beginning of a much longer string of errands; but I anticipated this, and did what I could to be ready for it.  Hopefully I am not now too tired to do what remains for the day.

The prolific author to whom I misattributed the previously mentioned article remains prolific, giving us four more that I know to be his.  Eric Ashley has given us Practise Bits:  Djinn, in which the wish for world peace brings the beginning of world disaster (although honestly I was expecting that wish to bring the death of every living creature); Practise Bits:  Formation in which the movements of the soldiers are the spell components for the magic; and Practise Bits:  Fibonacci and Practise Bits:  Fibonacci 2, in which it is dancers who form the patterns that raise the magic.

–M. J. Young