A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: a very short review

For a long time, I've been thinking about reading some of David Foster Wallace's work. Wallace is frequently cited in the same paragraph as writers such as Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, etc.: "important" authors whom you "ought" to read.

But Infinite Jest just seems infinitely intimidating; each time I get near it I feel exhausted and have to go read something else.

For 6 months at least.

So I thought: maybe I can approach Wallace in easy steps, and picked up A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

It's definitely much more approachable, but I'm not sure it's much of a stepping stone.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a collection of seven essays that Wallace wrote fairly early in his career, around the time that he was teaching at Illinois State and working on Infinite Jest.

The seven essays are all non-fiction, though, and are sort of all over the place.

There are two essays on Tennis. Wallace relates that he was an avid tennis player as a youth and played seriously and competitively for most of his life. They're fairly interesting, although personally I'm not really all that interested in tennis.

There are two essays on post-modernism: one is an investigation of the literary aspects of television, the other is about H. L. Hix's Morte d'Author: An Autopsy. These are simply dreadful essays. They are dense, arcane, opaque, but most of all they are dull, dull, dull.

There is an essay about David Lynch and the making of Lost Highway. Ugh. Perhaps if Wallace had chosen an appealing director and an appealing movie? But then, that wouldn't be Wallace, I guess.

The high spot of the book, for me, were the other two essays.

Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All is an essay about attending the 1993 Illinois State Fair. Somehow, this essay manages to be crude, raunchy, smug, elitist, laugh-out-loud funny, insightful, and kind, all at once.

Sometimes even in the same paragraph!

The horses are in their own individual stalls, with half-height doors and owners and grooms on stools by the doors, a lot of them dozing. The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stableboy's boom box. The horses have tight hides and apple-sized eyes that are set on the sides of their heads, like fish. I've rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and show horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed and more or less odorless -- the acrid smell in here is just the horses' pee. All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them. Their tails whip around in sophisticated double-jointed ways, keeping the flies from mounting any kind of coordinated attack. (There really is such a thing as a horsefly.) The horses all make farty noises when they sigh, heads hanging over the short doors. They're not for petting, though. When you come close they flatten their ears and show big teeth. The grooms laugh to themselves as we jump back. These are special competitive horses, intricately bred, w/ high-strung artistic temperaments. I wish I'd brought carrots: animals can be bought, emotionally. Stall after stall of horses. Standard horse-type colors. They eat the same hay they stand in. Occasional feedbags look like gas masks. A sudden clattering spray-sound like somebody hosing down siding turns out to be a glossy chocolate stallion, peeing. He's at the back of his stall getting combed, and the door's wide open, and we watch him pee. The stream's an inch in diameter and throws up dust and hay and little chips of wood from the floor. We hunker down and have a look upward, and I suddenly for the first time understand a certain expression describing certain males, an expression I'd heard but never truly understood till just now, prone and gazing upward in some blend of horror and awe.

The title essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is similar in many ways; it is an essay about taking a seven day luxury cruise through the Caribbean. It's mellower, quieter, more reflective, almost melancholy, and all of these things lessen the overall result. Wallace is either having fun, or he's not, and the result certainly comes through in his writing. But this essay, though perhaps less hilarious (and certainly less raunchy) is also more insightful, and more kind; perhaps it is just a result of him getting older? (Though: the two essays were written only 3 years apart, the first when he was 31 years old, and the second when he was 34, so I don't think age had much to do with it.)

I'll still don't know if I'll ever try Infinite Jest, or The Pale King, or The Broom of the System. Maybe someday.

But at least I feel like I understand David Foster Wallace a bit better.

Conversations with Friends: a very short review

Sally Rooney's Normal People is on everybody's Top Books list nowadays, but before getting to that I decided to start with her first book, Conversations with Friends

I loved this odd little book!

I'm definitely not the target audience for Conversations with Friends; it's absolutely a Millenial's book, and that generation gap hit me like a hammer. Plus my gender is wrong, I'm on the wrong continent, the main characters of the book are wholly unlike me, etc.

Still, it's fresh, exciting, immediate, and thoroughly a joy to read.

I liked it so much that I was willing to overlook lots of Rooney's quirks, such as doing away with quotation marks for dialog, or telling significant parts of the story via text message, or having a character whose emails are sent in all lower case.

The harder quirk to overlook, in my reading at least, was the super-naturally self-aware nature of our narrator, Frances. I know I'm not the most introspective person, but there's just no way that a 21-year-old character could be so vividly in control of her own consciousness like this:

When we rang the bell, Melissa answered the door with her camera slung over her shoulder. She thanked us for coming. She had an expressive, conspiratorial smile, which I though she probably gave to all her subjects, as if to say: you're no ordinary subject to me, you're a special favorite. I knew I would enviously practice this smile later in a mirror.

Or

Although I couldn't specify why exactly, I felt certain that Melissa was less interested in our writing process now that she knew I wrote the material alone. I knew the subtlety of this change would be enough for Bobbi to deny it later, which irritated me as if it had already happened. I was starting to feel adrift from the whole setup, like the dynamic that had eventually revealed itself didn't interest me, or even involve me. I could have tried harder to engage myself, but I probably resented having to make an effort to be noticed."

Rooney uses this technique throughout, to tell what is really an inter-mingled story of four very vivid but separate characters from one character's sole narration, allowing our heroine Frances to divine what is in every one else's mind and reveal it to us in passages such as these.

Do people really have such preternaturally accurate reading of each other, especially when they are barely 21?

I guess so; after all, Rooney herself was barely older when she wrote Conversations with Friends, and she clearly has tremendous insight into what makes people tick.

Anyway, why quibble!

Conversation with Friends is wonderful, Rooney is wonderful, that's all I have to say about that!

Game Day

Yes, there's a game today.

But lately, I've been thinking about other games; I barely watched any professional sports in 2019 (though: go Leicester! go Jamie Vardy!)

Meanwhile, perhaps because GDC is just around the corner, a round-up of other types of gaming:

• The Digital Antiquarian: Master of Orion

  So, Civilization is the more idealistic, more educational, perhaps even the nobler of the two games. And yet it often plays a little awkwardly — which awkwardness we forgive because of its aspirational qualities. Master of Orion‘s fictional context is a much thinner veneer to stretch over its mechanics, while words like “idealistic” simply don’t exist in its vocabulary. And yet, being without any high-flown themes to fall back on, it makes sure that its mechanics are absolutely tight. These dichotomies can create a dilemma for a critic like yours truly. If you asked me which game presents a better argument for gaming writ large as a potentially uplifting, ennobling pursuit, I know which of the two I’d have to point to. But then, when I’m just looking for a fun, challenging, intriguing game to play… well, let’s just say that I’ve played a lot more Master of Orion than Civilization over the last quarter-century. Indeed, Master of Orion can easily be read as the work of a designer who looked at Civilization and was unimpressed with its touchy-feely side, then set out to make a game that fixed all the other failings which that side obscured.

• How Tabletop RPGs Are Being Reclaimed From Bigots and Jerks

  “Sometimes a game will touch on something that may affect your players, because it (or something like it) happened to your players IRL [in real life],” she said. “Rape is probably the most obvious example of this, but gaslighting, torture, and animal death are others. And playing with those can be hard!”

  The content warnings aren’t there to stop people from playing tabletop games that touch on those themes, they’re meant to give people a framework for including them responsibly. The process is similar to how a well-run BDSM community treats consent. There’s lots of communication and before, after, and during sessions and checklists that help players and partners find create a list of their dos, don’ts, and maybes. A BDSM scenster’s checklist helps consenting adults understand limits before they start fucking. An RPG players checklist does much the same.

  According to Evil Hat, setting boundaries early leads to better games. “There’s no way to know every player’s past and there’s no reason anyone should be obligated to disclose their entire personal history before a game gets underway," the company told me. "So instead, a content warning and the use of Safety Tools (like the X card, Script Change, or Lines & Veils) creates an atmosphere of trust and respect. You’re setting the boundaries: ‘Hey, we’re all here to have fun—but if the game suddenly crosses a line and stops being fun, let’s pause or redirect that so we can get back on track and make sure it’s enjoyable for the whole table.’”

• Kentucky Route Zero on the Switch is a beautiful, sometimes infuriating dream

  For seven long years now, players living in the more text- and PC-focused rays of the gaming sphere have been periodically receiving strange, often-bewildering transmissions, occasional invitations to walk along America’s rough and mysterious subconscious roads. Released in fits and drips for the better part of a decade, Cardboard Computer’s magical realism road trip odyssey Kentucky Route Zero has been “coming out” since its first act dropped in 2013, beguiling players with its sleepy, quasi-somnambulistic approach to topics ranging from the obsessions of mid-century American playwrights, to the intricacies of computer game design, to the mounting and soul-eroding effects of looming medical debt. And now, amazingly, that process is over: Kentucky Route Zero is now out, fully and finally, and with a home console version containing all five of its acts (and various ancillary materials to boot).

• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order beat EA expectations by selling 8m copies

  "Respawn delivered an expertly crafted high-quality experience with outstanding gameplay that thrilled players, made many of the game of the year lists and sold beyond our projections for the quarter," EA exec Andrew Wilson added.

• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Ninth Sister fight - tips on how to beat this dangerous boss

  The Ninth Sister is one of the key antagonists in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and after an unfortunate encounter in the first mission, we all know that we’re going to have to come up against her later on in the campaign. This boss fight is trickier than any you’ll have come across so far, and requires careful footwork and a good understanding of this powerful foe.

• The Pedestrian Is A Good Platformer, But Great Puzzle Game

  there are key setpieces throughout The Pedestrian where you’re asked not to run blissfully across a single sign, but to stop and arrange a while bunch 0f them together in a particular order so you can then run through them unimpeded. This involves a lot of drawing in the air with your finger, hard thinking then some trial and error, before finally completing a puzzle, running free like the wind for a few seconds then running headfirst into the next puzzle.

  This gets a little frustrating, because the world behind The Pedestrian is a lovely one! It’s downright whimsical, with backgrounds bustling with life and cheery music that whisks you through each environment like a feelgood 90s sitcom. The game spends so long torturing you in the foreground that I wish we could have spent some more time with the background instead.

  But I get it, the signs are the game here, and the puzzles that drive them are fantastic. Things get hard surprisingly early on, but they never feel impossible because everything you need to do is clearly labelled and designed, to the point where even at my darkest most frustrating points I still felt like I was at least on the right track, and just hadn’t fully explored all my options yet.

• 'A Plague Tale' Audio Design: Not Only Squeaks

  Creating an impactful soundscape for a game is a real challenge. How about an Audio that will not only serve the story but bring it up to the next level. With all the constraints linked to a small development team with a small budget taken into account, A Plague Tale: Innocence's Audio Director discusses his approach to Sound Design in order to offer a memorable and immersive experience.

  How to strengthen a scene? How to support gameplay? How to help a player to focus or to understand a level? Overall, how to give a game that thing that makes it special?

I've entered the V-NAND future

I've got a pair of (relatively) old computers at home that I use for a variety of things.

One thing that I use these computers for is to keep extra copies of backups of the other computer data in my life (my wife's photo collection, her documents, a backup of my parents computer, etc.)

For years, I've used trusty old HDD drives (a WD 4TB drive in one machine, an ancient but amazingly reliably Seagate Barracuda 7200 500 GB drive in the other) as these extra storage devices for holding data that I'm trying not to lose.

Recently, I've upgraded both machines to contain Samsung QVO V-NAND SSD devices.

Nowadays, a 860 QVO 1TB internal device is just over $100, which is a wonderful price for the functionality.

It's still early days with my use of these devices, but so far I have no complaints whatsoever.

If you're looking to upgrade an older computer, consider one of these!

California has a new primary date

Ever since I can remember, the California Presidential Primary Election was always held in early June.

This year, it will be March 3, 2020.

This week, we got our "Official Voter Information Guide" from the California Secretary of State, which is the office that operates state elections.

The guide was rather confusing, because there was next to no voter information in it!

From what I can gather, the March 3 election will have two items on the ballot:

1. Select your preferred presidential candidate (from some list not yet known, or at least not contained in the Official Voter Information Guide)
2. Vote on Proposition 13. This turns out to be most of what is contained in the Official Voter Information Guide. Proposition 13 is a bond authorization measure, put on the ballot by the California State Legislature.

The Official Voter Information Guide also contained a number of pages about the 2020 Census, and refers you to http://californiacensus.org, which is a somewhat operational website with some cursory information. I'm not sure why the Secretary of State didn't refer us to https://census.ca.gov/ instead; that seems like a much better website.

Which exact list of presidential candidates will be on the March 3 ballot?

Will there be a separate election in early June, for issues other than the Presidential Primary Election?

How did this proposition come to be numbered 13? How are propositions numbered, anyway?

What is californiacensus.org and how is it related to census.ca.gov?

Oh, I'm just full of questions, aren't I?

Thoughts from a trip to Tucson

We spent the long Martin Luther King Day weekend in Tucson and the surrounding area.

The Sonoran Desert is spectacularly beautiful, with its Saguaro and Organ Pipe cacti, its unusual animals (Javelina, Coati, Caracara, etc.), its mountains and valleys.

It does actually rain in this part of the world! An enormous storm crossed Southern Arizona on the day we arrived. Traffic was slow, roads were washed out, and there was over 6 inches of snow on the mountain tops.

People in Arizona do a lot of driving. Gas is cheap, there are no tolls, and the rental car facility at the Phoenix airport is the largest one I think I've seen. The cities are all sprawled out, with small downtown areas and literally miles of suburbs. (Speedway Avenue in Tucson, runs some 25 miles from East Tucson to West Tucson).

We flew in and out of Phoenix. Tucson has a nice airport, but there was no direct flight we could take, and the connecting flights meant that we would have had a 4.5 hour plane trip to get all the way to Tucson, as opposed to a 100 minute plane trip to get to Phoenix. Since it barely takes 90 minutes to drive from Phoenix to Tucson the choice was easy.

The most straightforward way to get from Phoenix to Tucson is to hop on the freeway, but a much more beautiful route is found by taking Arizona 79, also known as the Pinal Pioneer Parkway. This lovely road runs a simple straight path through a Saguaro-forested high desert plain. For large portions of the drive you are completely in the wilds, with no billboards, power lines, businesses, or much of anything else to distract you. Way out in the middle of the drive, if you pay attention, you'll come across the quiet memorial to the spot where the famous movie star Tom Mix crashed his car and died.

We took Arizona 79 because I was hoping to get to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, but we ran out of time for that side trip, sadly.

The Tucson Jazz Festival is very nice. The Tucson Jazz Institute's Ellington Big Band is a traveling competition band of high school jazz musicians who have won a number of awards. Christian McBride and Inside Straight played a great show; McBride also sat in with the TJI band for two fun opening songs and did those kids ever enjoy that!

The Fox Tucson theater has been beautifully restored and is gorgeous inside. Even sitting in the balcony we had comfortable seats with a great view.

The Desert Trails B&B is a beautiful spot in a wonderful location. John and Steffi are lovely hosts. At night the stars come out and the coyotes call.

The Casa Grande National Monument was an unexpected treasure and a lovely stop.

The food in Tucson is great, just as great as all the guidebooks and travel magazines say. We had excellent meals at the 1055 Brewing Company, at Reilly Craft Pizza, at Zinburger, and could have had many more great meals if we’d had the time

The Mount Lemmon Scenic Byway is just as remarkable as everyone says. The views are incomparable and the road is well built and easy to drive, with many pullouts and vista spots, even on a Sunday afternoon during peak season. After the recent storm, there were still several inches of snow at the mountain top and children were everywhere, happily sledding and making snowmen.

While driving the road, we enjoyed listening to the interesting Mt. Lemmon Science Tour, a nicely-presented audio tour of the things you see along the road. The audio tour is well-paced and timed to match your driving time, and easy to re-sync if you lose track or stop at a pull out or vista stop for a while.

You can't see the famous Davis-Monthan "Boneyard" from street level, but from the vistas atop the Mount Lemmon road you can get a great idea for the size and layout of the facility, particularly if you have a decent pair of binoculars.

The Gates Pass Road is fun too, and we enjoyed the views from the vista point at the top of the pass in Tucson Mountain Park.

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is very nicely arranged with nice easy pathways and clear signs. The animals seemed well cared for and we enjoyed the quiet aviary. I think we probably should have stayed to see the Raptor Free Flight demonstration, but it would have extended our 2.5 hour visit to 4 hours and we were in a hurry to move on.

There were beautiful arts and crafts at the Casa Grande visitor center, at the Desert Museum gift shop, and at Mark Bahti's arts store. There looked to be several other fine places that we didn’t have time for.

Downtown Tucson is nice. Parking was cheap and safe. The streets are clean and people walk around comfortably.

We didn’t find time to ride the new streetcar.

If you decide to go to Tucson, mid January is a nice time. Locals told us that the gem show makes the city a bit crowded.

There is indeed a small wine growing region in the Sonoita ("Son-OY-tah") and Elgin area, mostly growing hot-weather Southern Mediterrean grapes like Tempranillo and Aglianico. We stopped at Callaghan (pronounce the 'G'). The guests at the winery had brought a collection of friendly dogs.

The Ramsey Canyon Preserve is beautiful and a vivid, startling change from the desert valley floor. Beyond Ramsey Canyon stretches the Coronado National Forest, with many additional trails to explore, though we turned back after a 2 hour hike due to time restrictions.

It was a challenge, though, to feel completely enchanted with the wilderness vistas, as the US government law enforcement blimp hovered over the forest preserve. The blimp "is an aerial platform for radar equipment used to detect aircraft illegally entering the US (Hermann Zillgens and Associates. 1991). They provide radar data for US Customs, the DoD, and the FAA. They operate year round, 24 hours per day within approximately nine hectares (23 acres) of the South Range."

There are law enforcement checkpoints on most roads south of Tucson.

Some restaurants and shops have signs asking you not to bring your weapons into the store, most don’t.

On the Mount Lemmon road a man was parked in the pullout, firing his pistol into the side of the hill.

Two patrons at a corner store were having a loud conversation about how much they hate California.

A man told us not to park our car at the Saguaro National Park trail head because our car would get broken into (we decided to go hiking elsewhere).

If you decide to take the Pinal Pioneer Parkway between Tucson and Phoenix, you'll end up passing through Florence, AZ, a small town that sits about midway along the route. I think that Florence was once a hot spot for the immense copper mining industry that is spread across Southern Arizona.

Nowadays, Florence has a county prison, a state prison, and a federal Homeland Security ICE prison. The three prisons sit one after the next on the main road, presenting nearly a full mile of heavy barbed wire and elevated guard towers. There are probably more prisons here; the first suggested Google search for "Florence AZ prison" is "How many prisons are there in Florence AZ?" I don't think there's any way to avoid this stretch of Arizona 79 unless you decide to avoid the entire scenic parkway entirely, which is probably a perfect example of the phrase "throwing out the baby with the bathwater".

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow

Wow, is it really 2020 already? I've been blogging less, I guess.

Sorry about that.

Time is passing for everyone; over the last 18 months, the Grateful Dead lost both their songwriters, Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow.

Robert Hunter was, by far, the better songwriter; songs like Truckin', Uncle John's Band, Scarlet Begonias, and Friend of the Devil will, I hope, still be sung a hundred years from now.

John Perry Barlow was, however, and trying to take nothing away from Hunter, the more interesting man. He thought a lot about public policy and political issues, and published some very interesting essays.

Among those essays, he's definitely best known for A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, in which he attempted to take the deep-rooted American notions of Free Speech and extend them significantly farther:

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

He worked much harder on this idea, and, I think, gave it a pretty interesting and well-considered foundation, in his subsequent essay, Selling Wine Without Bottles: the Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

The Declaration and the Economy of Mind were deliberately polemic and provocative, but the organization he helped co-found, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, remains one of the most interesting technology-related organizations that we have.

These are not easy ideas, and I've always thought that Barlow deserved more credit for focusing attention on them, and getting others to at least think about them seriously.

Among his other writings, I was always quite partial to The 25 Principles of Adult Behavior, which still hold water some forty years later, and, I suspect, will still be good ideas centuries from now.

After his death, the EFF held a John Perry Barlow Symposium, and the Duke Law and Technology Review has now published the proceedings. There are some pretty interesting essays in the proceedings, it's definitely, as they say, food for thought.

This is good; these thoughts and ideas deserve to continue to be discussed. We haven't got it all figured out, just yet.

And I think that is a sentiment that Robert Hunter would agree with, too. As he wrote in Ripple:

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near, as it were your own?

It's a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken
Perhaps they're better left unsung
I don't know, don't really care
Let there be songs to fill the air

Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty
If your cup is full may it be again
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of man

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone

Let's all keep on talking.

Happy new year.