Remember When We Supported the Troops?

It was easy to support the troops when they were far away. Now they're back. And according to the Veterens' Administration last year, they're killing themselves at a rate of 22 a day. Don't just say you care about vets today. Talk with them. Make sure they're OK. And do it for the other 364.

Suicide in the Trenches
By Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Veteran's Day, Remembrance Day, Armistace Day

11/11/18, the guns fell silent, leaving a generation dead, crippled, stunned.



We need to remember the consequences of our actions, care for who have been hurt in our service. To all of you who served, I salute you. Until there is no more war, we should be mindful of those who gave, and not just those who gave everything.

And I'm Back

"The whole matter began, as far as I was concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927.... Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore story taken so seriously and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions."

H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness."

Hurricane Irene has made a mess of a fair amount of Vermont, but there was some wisdom in buying a house that's been in the same place for a hundred years. A bridge near us is unsafe, and there is currently only one way to get into or out of Bennington. The Woodford Bridge collapsed, to there's no way to get into or out of Bennington to the East. That'll take some time to fix.

Stepping back a little, my summer classes are over, and my computer died, and had to be replaced. So I don't currently have a program to update my website, or upload pictures to my blog. On the upside, I did finally get to play Fallout: New Vegas. It is an excellent game, and I will be playing it again.

But I'm finally decompressing from the summer, and am back to writing. I'm overdue on a story I've been asked for (never turn someone down when they ask for a story), but it is coming together, and I expect to have the first draft done this week. Then it goes to the on-line workshop, and then the physical workshop.

It's good to be back in the saddle.

Viva Las Vegas!

OK, not my first glimpse of New Vegas, but the first dramatic enough for a screen capture.



So I give you "Viva Las Vegas," the Dead Kennedys version:

Bright lights city gonna set my soul
It's gonna set my soul on fire
Got a whole lot of money that's ready to burn
So get those stakes up high
There's a thousand pretty women waiting out there
They're all waiting the Devil may care
And I'm just a devil with love to spare, so

VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!

How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty four hours in the day.
Even if I ran out of speed, boy
I wouldn't sleep a minute away

Oh there's blackjack, poker and the roulette wheel
A fortune won and lost on every deal.
All you need is sonar and nerves of steel, so

VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!

Viva Las Vegas with the neon signs flashing and
The one arm bandits crashing
All hopes down the drain.
Viva Las Vegas turning day into night time
Turning night into daytime
If you see it once, you'll never be the same again.

Gotta keep on running
Gonna have me some fun
If it costs me my very last dime
If I wind up broke
Then I'll always remember
That I had a swingin' good time.

Oh, I'm gonna give it everything I've got
Lady Luck's with me, the dice stay hot
Got coke up my nose to dry away the snot, so

VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA LAS VEGAS!
VIVA! VIVA!
Las Vegas!!!

So what's this disk thing for, again?

I purchased the special edition of Fallout New Vegas the day it came out. I have loved the Fallout games that came out on PC, played them repeatedly, and generally consider them to be some of the best computer games ever made.

But I was going through a lot of effort to get through Chemistry. And I knew that that distraction of a really awesome game would be a drag on my studies. So I tortured myself by leaving the game sealed for two months.

The day after Chemistry ended, Thursday the 9^th, I opened it. The special edition goodies are really cool. A deck of cards, a special platinum chip, chips from various casinos in the game, a graphic novel about what happened just before the game pulls you out of a shallow grave, and the game itself. Happy, shiny! What I've been waiting for! My reward for all that hard work (I mean besides a grade and a shot at a career). I placed the disk in my drive and got ready to install.

Oh. I have to create a Steam account in order to verify the game. I didn't have a lot of luck with Steam the last time I tried one of their games, because I'm still on a dial-up connection.

Yes, I could join the rest of the world and go to some sort of speedy internet, but that's going to cost me some $240 a year to play a game I paid $80 for. Does that make sense to you?

So I start the Steam up, create a new account, one with a password I can remember, which takes some time. And then the verification procedure, after which Steam tells me that the server aren't ready. Lovely. I restart the process, made easier by the fact that I don't have to create a new log-in this time. And the servers are still too busy to acknowledge me. A third try, and I've got it! YAY for me! As Steam starts to download the game to my computer.

All six point nine gigabytes.

Which will take until the heat death of the universe on dial-up. Which is weird, because I've got those six point nine gigabytes of data on this shiny physical object sitting in my disk drive. The bit I paid for. Steam doesn't care. It wants to download the game from their servers. Well, there must be a way to get it to acknowledge the disk, right?

After a few days of poking around Steam's website, I discover that there's a command you can use if you want to install a game from disk rather than download it. Well thank God, because I was starting to get a little frustrated. This was my reward for finishing a class on Wednesday, and it's now Saturday.

Only the command doesn't work. Steam thought about it, and spit back an error at me.

So I have my disk, which I have paid for, and all that data which my computer cannot access. Thanks Steam!

Eventually, after a week of screwing around, I went to the Grotto with my CPU, (YAY, walking around with my CPU doesn't make me nervous!) and spend four hours downloading the game. Which I had on disk. Did I mention that I have the game on disk and that Steam either couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge this?

But I got the game downloaded, started it up, and it's fine. I'm playing it. But really Steam, why can't I, a moderately average user except for my dial-up connection, get the data off this shiny disk thing with all the data already downloaded onto it? And what happens if, in ten years, I want to play the game I paid for again, and Steam has gone the way of the Heat.net?

The Dreams Haunt Me...

For two running nights, I've dreamed of playing Fallout: New Vegas. Yay. If I was the sort to believe in personification, I'd be wrapping this bad boy in tin foil.

I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I'm rereading the best novel about Vegas ever: Tim Powers' Last Call.

But there it sits, wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer, untouched except when I put newspapers under it to confirm the date.

Chemistry Makes Me Sad

I love the Fallout games. They have some of the best stories being told in computer games today. The retro-future background combined with the blasted post-holocaust wasteland is simply excellent.

The most recent game has come out: Fallout: New Vegas. Being the enormously geeky fan that I am, I've bought the special edition. And I can't play it. Or rather, won't play it. With Chemistry requiring so much of my time, I simply can't afford to get sucked into a game experience that I know damn well I'm going to love. And so it sits, still in plastic, waiting for me to open it. And it's going to stay that way until the end of December.

Why Computer Games Aren’t Perceived as Art Yet, and Why That’s Unfortunate

A friend on Facebook is annoyed that Roger Ebert doesn’t think computer games are art. He’s enormously into computer games, and thinks that should be treated as art. The problem is that they won’t be, not for some time. I've identified four major reasons for this.

1) Grind. The leveling and power-gaining apparatus of most plot driven games (RPGs) (first person shooters tent to rely on acquisition of equipment) are such that they require the player to engage in dozens, if not hundreds of combats that are not germane to the plot. As such, grind and random encounters place the main plot on hold. At this time, great works of art are analyzed in such a way that everything is important. See the creations of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Wordy they may be, but in modern critical thinking, nothing is wasted, and everything in them contributes to the overall effect and greatness of the text (using “text” in the semiotic sense, the work of art as a whole). Nothing is repeated, nothing is there specifically to make the text longer. In any other art form, repetition of minor elements that do not contribute to the overall effect is called padding, and is understood to the impact of the text. In computer games, it’s expected.

2) Impermanence. The Microsoft Windows platform is at least polite about backwards compatibility, although God and Heinlein help you if you try to work with one of those games with XML memory usage, or proprietary memory extender. Games created for Windows are generally workable, however it’s quite possible that the average user won’t be able to get it running and not know why. One of the tenets of great art is that it can withstand the test of time. How can we introduce our friends and colleagues to good, older games if we can no longer play them?

The game industry itself has little interest in games that are not recent. It’s very bang and bust–make a big hit, get the money, and then the game is forgotten for the next new shiny one. Sometimes, there’s an extension or additional downloadable content, and a game gets a gold, Platinum or Game of the Year edition. Yet good games are seldom available again after a major media shift. If you own a game on 5.25" or 3.5" disks, you’re probably out of luck. If the game was on an Amiga, or any other no longer extant computer architecture, you’re almost definitely out of luck.

Platforms, with one exception, are even worse. A limited number of PS3s can play PS2 games, and those were the first wave available. The current ones cannot. There’s a strict list of Xbox games that can be played on the X360. Only Nintendo made its most recent generation (the Wii) fully backwards compatible with its previous generation (the Game Cube). Much of the computer game industry does not take game longevity seriously, apparently believing that no one wants to play a game more than five years old. I can think of three franchises that have moved older games onto newer platforms: Wing Commander (now dead for a decade), Fallout, and God of War. I’m sure there are others that I’m not familiar with, but these updates remain the exception rather than the rule. If the industry itself regards games as cheap, throw-away trash to be forgotten in a few years, why should anyone else regard them differently?

3) Insularity. In order for an art form to be taken seriously, it must be taken seriously by people whose opinions matter to people other than gamers.

There is no language of critical apparatus within the video game community. There are awards and reviews, but there really isn’t anyone writing about the underlying structure of the games, dissecting them in a public forum to see what makes them tick.

It took Alan Moore and Watchmen to make critics look at (some) comics with a more serious eye. It wasn’t until this decade that Pop Matters started publishing books of essays on television shows (thank you Joss Whedon and Buffy). Computer games are going to have to wait until the generation that came up playing them become tenured professors and start writing critical essays about them. And even then, they will need a champion, a well-respected individual who comes lays out a difficult-to-refute case that video games should be considered art, and then hammers the point. ST Joshi did this for HP Lovecraft.

4) Complexity: Much modern criticism is celebrity-based. There is discussion of a Kurosawa film, the oeuvre of Scorsese, a Joss Whedon series. This singling out of individuals who are responsible for the brilliance of a film undercuts the contributions of the hundreds, or thousands of people who made minor contributions small but telling contributions to the completed work. It can be said that the director of a film deserves praise for all decisions, because they selected competent individuals whose artistic sense agreed with their own, but the fact remains that the director does not make all decisions, and film is very much a collaborative art form.

Modern criticism is based on literature, where a single individual is responsible for the creation of a work. It is easier to praise the individual at the helm of a film, as it were, because it is often impossible to say who made a particular decision. Was it the director of photography that suggested a particular shot? Did the actor or the director suggest an affecting line reading? Listening to commentary may help, but the creation of the work is so moment-based that the individuals involved sometimes disagree on a decision.

How much more difficult it is in computer games? Does the praise for a particularly beautiful set piece go to the Project Coordinator, the Lead Artist, or Visual Coordinator?

That said, I think analysis of computer games is important, precisely because it has become such a pervasive commonality in our culture. What are the underlying themes (and yes, these things affect us whether we realize it or not) that are being underscored in individuals minds as they play Modern Warfare 2? How is that likely to affect individuals attitudes toward armed conflict when they are asked to vote for or against involving their country in such a conflict? How do Mario game players perceive non-game intellectual challenges, such as at work? I don’t know, but these questions cannot be answered in a satisfactory fashion until games receive serious, rigorous, scholarly attention.

Trifecta of Excellence: A Game, A TV Series, and A Book

Despite several near-disasters, it's been a good week. Wednesday could have been very bad, but it turns out I am competent enough to replace the motherboard of my own desktop.

This week has been very good to me is the excellent media I've been soaking in. It's difficult to get excited about new stuff these days, because so much stuff out there is crud. I'm pleased to mention three excellent examples of the media I spend a lot of time with: a books, a television series, and and a computer game.

The Fallout Game of the Year edition has been wonderful. I have already played through the main plot of Fallout, but I missed a large number of the side-quests, and the additional content offered by the downloadables has been amazingly fun. Killin' inbred hicks from Maryland? Yeah, I can get behind that. Murdering slavers in the industrial wasteland that was once Pittsburgh? Surprisingly fun. Me and my Power Armor getting abducted by a giant tin-toy alien mother ship? That was pretty cool. The game has a lot of interesting story and development. The plots and subplots are solid, and are sold to you in different ways. Not a lot of repetition in Fallout 3, although sometimes, the combat is a little overdone. Random encounters add length to the game, but not a lot of interest. Fortunately, it never becomes a Diablo grind of waves upon waves of monsters that exist solely to die, give you experience, and drop stuff for you to sell.

Rome is one of the best TV series I've ever watched. Although it's got some historical inaccuracy, mostly for the sake of drama and the convenience of keeping the same actors, it also is steeped in history. It's the little details that are so fascinating: watching the Town Crier read out the news and then pause to advertise a sponsor; seeing the swirl of ethnicities and peoples in the dirty streets of Rome; feeling the rise and fall of family prestige based on so many minor factors. It's delightfully complex and horrible and relentlessly human all at the same time. The sets are gorgeous, the acting top-notch. The plots got a little bit soapy toward the end of season two, but entirely enjoyable. This is excellent television.

When the Santa Fe Good Taste Factory recommends something, I listen. If he recommends something, it's usually quite good. Not that my other friends don't have good taste, but the Good Taste Factory suggests it, I'm guaranteed to like it. The Gone-Away World arrived in the mail during a period in which I was having trouble reading books, partially because I was reading some crap I felt obligated to read and report on. And I'm having trouble with my own writing, which always effects my reading. The Gone-Away World is not the sort of book I usually read. I like strong plots with muscular prose, something with a sense of where it's going. Gone-Away World is loaded with digressions, strange introspection, a semi-halpess protagonist who wanders through his own life. However, the prose is brilliant. A quote: "Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously, the tree of nonsense if watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster." I went on this ride with author Nick Harkaway because I was seduced by his prose, and the funny, strange, human way he has his protagonist think and put things together. An excellent book, probably the best one I have read this year.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

It took me two days to read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's been some time since I read a Pulitzer Prize-winner. I've read Executioner's Song and intend to read Klavier and Clay, especially since Michael Chabon has a story in an upcoming Lovecraft tribute anthology. I expected some excellent writing.

Just after I'd cracked the book, I walked down to the post office with it in my hand. I never go to the Post Office without a book, and I think you know why. On that day I was told twice, both time by older (over 65) individuals whom I did not know that the book was depressing. I did not retort that because I had read a lot of Harlan Ellison post-apoc stuff, I was expecting hugs and puppies. I like post-apocalyptic stories. I've enjoyed the Fallout games, as well as Canticle for Liebowitz, I am Legend, Gate to Women's Country, as well as Beyond Thunderdome, Damndation Alley, and various other films. I would call myself well-read in the genre, but I've got some background in it.

Unfortunately, The Road tugs on a heart-string I don't seem to have. As with Dan Simmons' Children of the Night, the story tugs very heavily on the child in peril theme. Which, apparently, doesn't work with me. So there is a dimension to the story that was clearly missing for me, especially as the whole book is the relationship between the unnamed man and his child.

However, I had a lot of difficulty getting past the inconsistencies in the story. One might say that the story is a fable, and therefore the details don't matter, but the details do matter.

Problem; they are constantly discovering dried corpses. At the same time, it is constantly raining. Now, it never rains when they discover the dried corpses, but some are leftover from the cataclysm (never mentioned). How is it that these dried bodies survive in such a wet environment? Wet encourages rot, unless all the microbes are gone. Which, I suppose is a possibility. There are no living trees in the book, no living plants at all, and no animals, either. To me, it seems strange and unlikely that all the plants are gone. Without them, what is producing the oxygen that the humans breathe, especially after large areas were burned, consuming much oxygen?

Ecosystems change, adapt, and abide. The real problem with a nuclear war or other major disaster is not that it will destroy all life on earth, but that it will wipe out humanity. We are far more sensitive to changes in condition than the entire ecosystem of the Earth. Mass extinctions have happened before, and life always has found a way.

The Devil, as they say, is in the details. And while the plot of The Road was engaging, and the use of language clever, the above details threw me. I try not to be a hard-science asshole, but this bothered me, and lowered my opinion of the book.

As post-apocalypse literature, I thought it was OK. Gate to Women's Country beats it by a country mile.

Long Time, No Post

Well, I haven't been keeping up with this blog in June. I do have an excuse. Over April and May I managed to crank out the initial drafts of four stories. I'm not saying they're awesome stories, but the bones are laid down, and now the polishing begins. And I've got a special market in mind for an older story, and a kind hired gun has helped me to clean it up. So back to the grind.

In my copious spare time, I've been going here:



And doing a lot of this:




It's been ten years since a good Fallout game, and I'm really enjoying myself. I wish Bethesda could have introduced a few new elements, which would have created a sense of difference between the East Coast and the West Coast. I also understand that they were relaunching a beloved franchise, and didn't want to take a lot of chances. That said, though, I'm enjoying the heck out of myself.