As I mentioned in a concurrent facebook update, I am in a programming study group (headed by a professor). There my peers and I imitate and strive to understand various techniques for domesticating Visual Basic. Sometime in the future, I could use what I’ve learned to test out of one or two classes. At our last meeting, we practiced connecting an Access database to a UI and adding basic features. I must admit that his enthusiasm for visual basic far surpasses my own. Granted, it can support a great range of programs. The simplistic employee tracking software that the Convention Center uses very probably operates on a Visual Basic skeleton. But, I feel more impressed by C++, perversely because I am doing more legwork. Access feels even more distant, perhaps attatched to future duties under gainful employment or contract.

What could I possibly document that demands a database? The professor, Ron rather than professor Kessler (disarmingly informal always), has offered both of the standard examples: a customer list and an inventory sheet. I’ll admit that I maintain a great many lists and seasonally sort them. These are long-term purchse lists and potential consumption schedules. Transferring 20 kb of notepad text, though, into an mdb file would not compact it in memory and somewhat reduce its flexibility. Idiosyncratic sorting is the point and, understandably, beyond SQL’s power.

Tonight, I found an opportunity. As you know, I play zynga’s Mafia Wars on Facebook (in addition to other fool click storms). Fighting (mugging) employs one’s strongest items down to the limit of one’s friends. An attack offers an expandable section detailing the items used to attack as well as the items the victim used to defend. This serves as a tool to focus efforts to grind out ‘good’ loot. Obviously, if the weakest item I used has an attack of 30, grinding for items with lower stats (and consequently, a lower energy cost) will have no value unless I add enough crew members who must grasp the weapon for lack of more powerful alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no way to check one’s own items used in defense against mugging or robbery (which has been reinstated some months now). I can prevail on strangers to attack me and hope they report back by my promise of reciprocation (mainly I ask the favor before adding them). Alternately, some people have made spreadsheets of their stuff and, with constant maintanence, can casually calculate their lowest impliments. I only briefly flirted with the idea since, by that point, I had one hundred crew and twice that many of each item type (weapon, armor, vehicle, and – subsequently – animal).

Further, at that point, I didn’t feel the luxury of grinding for items warranted. I focussed on achieving solid mastery in the first two locations with brief diversions to unlock the properties in Moscow and Bangkok. Then I plowed into the consumable missions until I had enough of each to weather all the mastery levels. Boredom dominated, but was better than the alternative of grinding for them whenever my stocks ran out since the energy requirement increases with each mastery at rates exceeding energy increases in the same number of levels. I continued in that vein until mid-July when I found myself free from consumable tyranny. I could grind whatever I wanted, high level loot, cash for mastery related loot inflation, or just to complete mastery normally. Dubiously timed, a week later, zynga unlocked the latest location Las Vegas, which demanded a return to property and consumable grinding for a week or so. To styme complaints about grinding single jobs for the best loot, zynga made Las Vegas items drop – at low rates – from any job. Having lain a solid foundation, I returned to the question of how to proceed.

As built, neither type of grinding excludes the other. Las Vegas’s top loot drops just as plentifully from the most money efficient job as from the least. Bankok, in contrast, offers the same ratio of payout to energy cost across all its jobs. But, the real clinching factor wasn’t freedom so much as a new incentive. Mugging is productive but even less entertaining than grinding and robbing gives paltry return. Las Vegas introduced tournaments which are a series of fights (sans mugging’s loot) that offer the opportunity to bet on oneself with enticing odds (depending upon unexplained factors, likely fighting stats). Zynga has shown a greater commitment to popularizing the fight aspect (no new content investment needed). The concurrent special event is four boss fights with three levels of mastery. This altered focus has even broken my habit of putting 3/5 level skill points into energy as they now only flow toward stamina. All these conspire to increase the import of loot so I can win or shrug off fights.

So, while buying required items, I noted that some from Las Vegas probably figure in when I attack. I checked whether I used it but gave up after a few moments. I moved on and rejected making a personal table again. Excel is notoriously bad for sorting since – to my knowledge – it can’t move whole rows based on the values in one of its cells. Realization dawned that Access was exactly the salvation I had postponed for. So, several hours later, I finished deformatting all the item stats into excel compliant lists and later imported those into a nearby copy of Access. I’ve not finished by half though, because we have yet only studied how to interact with a single table database. (I separated them by category.) Perhaps by this time tomorrow.

People, our personalities, are not monads. This parallels Trait centered psychology. Perhaps personalities arise from the combination of neuroticism, openness, ect. Some express more agreeableness than others who are conscientious without being agreeable. Yet, Behaviorists rightly note that people may adopt somewhat different personas in different environments. The exact metaphysical ratio of permanant to dyamic traits doesn’t interest me. I believe that we have a variety of Aspects – perhaps even all aspects – that tamp one another down or fall from center stage. This is the complexity we expect in fictional characters. And real people, too I guess. Geekdom chafes the uninitiated because its adherents proclaim they are satisfied with mostly one Aspect. Zealots, political or religious, strive to be Good all the time. Mind, I am not saying that they should not, so much as can not. You aren’t a DEMOCRAT. You are a Social Liberal, though sympathetic to the anti-abortion movement, and often a Fiscal Conservative, except on the issue of Education which deserves as much as possible. And so on.

We certainly don’t look to understand the tremendous Syncretic compromise of our relatives’ personalities. Understanding that shhe is religious is enough solace for most days or enough to excuse ourselves from the conversation. So, it may seem a contradiction for me to simultaneously deny a “spiritual” aspect to reality (ex: Heaven) while still feeling a fascination with magic or fear in familiar, yet dark spaces. These are simply two aspects of my personality and Empiricism hasn’t managed to grind Animism into dust yet. The trick to Pascal’s Wager, though, isn’t that I can’t believe that there are “things we can’t explain;” the problem is the insistence that those elements are more important than what we can explain.

My mother does not share the anxiety of these Aspects conflicting. She remains largely comfortable accepting modified Astrological influences and spirits. Mind, she is an intelligent woman. That doesn’t mean that all other occultists are fools. I strive to emphasize that she believes without compromising her rational flexibility, as must a fanatic of any persuasion. She and my godmother especially favor a medium who lives in Miami. I have heard the anecdotes of her consultation but won’t repeat them here. Outside of our family the significance is lost and would require unneccessary background. Let it suffice that the advice was evocative and convinced my mother. Still, she primarily consults her on the auspicious nature of important decisons (like when she transferred between city governments). Last week marked a stark change, to my knowledge.

Thursday, I sat before my computer in a mildly unchaste moment when my mother shoved open my door. Shoved because my sister brought a cat into our household and I won’t countenance its distraction, certainly not while in a compromising position. Earlier in the year, I closed my door but that reduces air circulation. Luckily, putting a shoe at the base allows me to leave a crack thinner than its head. This is what she shoved aside.

She came in searching the floor for something. She chose my shorts and asked if they were dirty. I affirmed, mystified. She left without commenting about the rest of my room, a common point of contention. I quickly made myself presentable and went to ask what was up.

She had gotten one of Rick’s, her husband, clothes and draped it over a chair in the kitchen where my sister sat watching soccer, perhaps. I joked about the request, asking if it was for genetic material. My mother looked pained and decided she wouldn’t tell me what was up. I swallowed my curiosity and told her that was alright, assuming that she would tell me later. My eye passed over a box, on the table, that had come in the mail earlier that day. I headed up.

Troubled, I decided to table my earlier objective. Within a minute, my mother came into my room again, this time muttering and gesturing with a small plant in her hand. I stood up as she made her way around my bed, though she couldn’t make the full circuit since, I don’t like using the four pillows she insists I have, I had thrown them on the ground on the far side. I exited into the hall and heard her clearly.

In spanish, she was saying “you can not stay here” over and over whilst waving the plant in a circle as she walked the whole second story. The plant was a four inch vine in a small, uncapped jar. In a moment, she came out and passed it in front of me and then behind before continuing into her room. I kept my face as neutral as possible. I wasn’t laughing and neither was my sister when I went down, though she seemed to take the ritual more lightly. She explained that my godmother had mailed the plant at my mother’s request from the medium. She did mention that she was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Yet, I’m not sure if Monica joked when she said, “Don’t be skeptical, otherwise the spirit could attatch to you.” I countered that I could well roleplay for my mother and tried to keep from judging the episode.

She and I silently faced the kitchen television while waiting for my mother to finish. She came down and made another pass over me and Monica. Finished, she placed the plant outside our front door. She claimed success and the harrowing experience of cold as she recited over her target, Rick. Appearantly, he had recent trouble sleeping and would wake in the middle of the night, just thinking about work. She said the waking was a sign that a spirit was dogging him and the plant would leech it away. Further, my godmother, a woman of nearly the same age as my mother, had exorcised her own house – perhaps more than once – and even given a tip on interpreting the medium’s advice about how to dispose of the plant safely.

Traditionally, she would leave it in a seldom visited “meadow.” My mother was set to go to Belize the next day, so my godmother had okayed leaving the plant in the trunk of her car while it had its front fender replaced. She drove around with hers for a few days with no ill effects. She has emailed from her hotel but didn’t mention whether he feels better. If I ended here, the punchline was a couple sentences ago: “hur, hur my mother is crazy.” But, I can’t. Obviously, the experience deserves a mention in my journal (if I were using regularly). But that’s not the end of the story.

I went up to take a shower and fought to think of anything else. Monica’s wretched advice stuck with me. I had no problem adopting a solemn expression, my mother wore her own while chanting, a sign of seriousness. The internal logic of the ritual is simple enough as well. My mother had asked for some used clothing because she wasn’t sure if I would go along with the whole thing and dirty clothing can substitute for an absent member. If I were totally skeptical, you wouldn’t be reading this. If I attracted some fallout, I would ascribe it as a coincidence, if that.

No, the punchline to this story is since then, I have had interrupted sleep. I may actively stay off-beat of any circadian rhythm, but I don’t wake well before I should. (I go to bed in the middle of the night, so I’ve been woken at the crack of dawn instead.) And yet, I’m not waking in a cold sweat. On Friday, my sister drove them to LAX an hour before I had to wake for work at 4,30. My mother probably looked in, but left my door open. Some time later, but ahead of my alarm, my sister’s cat came in to nuisance me. I spent the weekend at my father’s house but don’t remember if the pattern held then. On Monday, my phone woke me with its continual, plaintive whine that it was running out of power. Yesterday and today, my stomach insisted it was digesting a breakfast well before I habitually eat and certainly before I should have been out of bed, given my sleep time.

There’s not a lot to say beyond that. I see that there is a temporal correlation only. My stomach has jumped the gun before, though not woken me so effectively. (Normally I just turn on my side to forestall an eventual ulcer on the back of the lining. That way it only burns through each wall a third as fast.) My phone is terribly bothersome when it realizes it is close to expiration and the timing is about right. My problem, it seems, isn’t that I doubted too much but that I doubt and believe simultaneously, each castigting the other for disturbing me.

Six days ago, someone offered a quest on E2 for a comic book script about ‘GammaGirl.’ I only found out about it three days ago and recorded some thoughts yesterday at work. With her name and the demand that she have powers as the only constraints, there are an enormous combination of elements possible even if I keep within superhero tropes. (I idly thought I could make gammagirl a screen name unrelated to anything about her.)

Her name and the quest title, The Great Gamma Ray Comic Book Script Quest, connote gamma ray powers or origin, but that is no certainty. For example, gamma could signify the third letter of the greek alphabet, if she is third in some sense. Beyond that, Wikipedia doesn’t give anything else interesting for gamma. The flashiest scientific use is as the Lorentz Factor in special relativistic equations. These describe time dilation, foreshortening, and subjective mass for objects traveling at high fractions of light’s speed. But while nice, her power has less priority than the setting where she operates.

A hero’s setting exists in the intersection of its particular location, timeframe, and level of influence by the fantastic. As I don’t live in ‘the big city,’ there is little point in aping Metropolis and other uninspired sandboxes. Plus, if she can’t fly, I don’t need skyscrapers. Modern stories are nice but utopian futures with less need of heroes (as though we need superheroes) make exotic locales more justifiable. Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen strives to seal up our past by treating all fiction as documentaries. As of the latest publication, that even includes 1984 and Metropolis (the film).

The intersection with the mundane divine and our history distinguishes X-men from Watchmen. Marvel has legislative reactions to Mutants but it is a decidedly modern phenomenon. Moore’s acolytes admire his deep understanding of the cultural (and subjective psychological) impacts of exemplarhood on our world. Ellis’ Planetary series purports to explain the great similarity between his modern world and our own by involving suppressant conspiratorial factions and self-exile of the greater peoples. Mignola treats the fantastic from a more traditional angle. Nevertheless, one of my favorite scenes came from Conqueror Worm, wherein someone describes the Nazi project to bring back one of the Dragons by launching (ritually deconsecrated) dead bodies into space.

This isn’t meant to instruct as much as do justice to thoughts I abandoned at work. As I have short breaks and lots of distractions otherwise, I had to focus. Better than exploring how many elements are possible and then testing their permutations for ripe material (x-ray vision, Edwardian Era (pre WWI), and ‘civilized’ cultures confront the consequences of killing their supernal members (Joan of Arc) while savage nations have not).

Instead, I set myself the task of reporting the matured stories of intuitive combinations since those already passed through the filter of my interest. I only succeeded in noting two and record them here as well as others. Normally I would abstain from revealing my options but the impending deadline means that you can’t really type it faster than I and I need to write about it any way I can. Strictly speaking, writing on paper is much faster (and I wouldn’t have repeated that introduction for the third time) but I also need to keep my computer on.

Perhaps I’ll write about it at length later, but must beg off due to impending departure. I am legally downloading an ISO image of Visual Studio for the programming classes I am taking. However, I didn’t realize it is 4.4 gigabytes big. Microsoft provided a download manager, but it is still taking forever.

The only story template I finished writing about took a page from “society should cut Lex Luthor a check.” The  author notes that scientist Luthor (not businessman Luthor) invented sleeping rays and synthetic kryptonite but constantly imperiled the great city. It would be saner to coopt him and share a cut of his patented weapons. That makes sense for him as well as the penurious Spiderman. But, what would bureaucrats pay to (Superman’s) Parasite or Matter Eater Lad? Frankly, it suggests a story about qualifying for her super subsidy. But, is it like getting a hunting license? Marvel’s Civil War most recently hashed the trope of holocaust registration/Patriot profiling/ect.

That pessimism bores me. Yes, it makes for an exciting story (maybe) but it isn’t realistic. You’ve gone to the DMV at least once, the employees may act harried or lackadistically, but they aren’t avaricious for control. But Nicholas, the elites are the power trippers, not the furloughed wage slaves. Sure, and I have heard – edited – reports about their behavior to support that. Still, even Congress must follow the mean curve to a large degree. Reportage selection largely falls into this. Whenever I hear someone give blanket statements like, “politicians are liars,” I respond “only the ones you notice.”

I agree with a simplification used to describe three attitudes. The optimist thinks (the future, people, his life) is good and will improve. The pessimist sees a downward trend. The insurance salesman thinks the future will be more of the same with few enough outliers that shhe can afford them.

So if I were to subsidize capes & black hats, it would be with an eye to how we presently qualify for subsidies. This suggests an experience like Kafka’s Trial, but others are possible. If payouts are high enough (and what won’t you pay Bruce Banner?) third parties might get involved to earn a cut for connecting supers with grants. Then it might evolve into an Uberlympics’ sponsorship.

The other story I noted at work takes gamma as the third element. I know of two works that Alan Moore failed to complete: Big Numbers and Twilight of the Superheroes. The latter depicts his projected epilogue to the DC mythos where groups of heroes have created a declining feudal system over America. His version spins the tale of the rebellion following the disappearance of Captain Marvel.

I would link to his proposal, but the site I noted is gone. When geocities’ closure was announced, I regarded it ambivalently. I didn’t have one; no one I knew had one. Hur hur duhr. In retrospect, I should have gone through my link list and saved all the pages hosted there. I seem to have lost a gallery of Garbage Pail Kids cards, the List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés, a big list of varied links, and the novella inspired The Thing. God damn.

I agree with Moore that most powers lend themselves to Defensive political structures. Before I found Graeme Snooks’ interpretation of historical relations, I agreed with James Dale Davidson’s. He and a columnist called Lord Rees-Mogg described a Logic of Violence derived from relations among power-holders. These relations reflect incentives held and projectable via the technology, climate, and lay of the land. Basically, where a group of individuals are better able to rebuff others, they form Defensive political structures like the Feudal relations of Europe. Where a group of individuals holds the power to injure others or their property effectively, they will form Offensive political structures. These are historical empires and modern nations, but also typify the relations of a feudal lord to his local subjects. Sue Storm is generally defensive, whereas Cyclops’ far reaching lasers are offensive. Mind, this paradigm doesn’t describe history with the consistency demanded but is an inspiring series of concepts:

Inequality of Power and the Form of Government

When farming multiplied the incentives to employ violence, it not only created government, it created a new dilemma about how to control government. The occupational specialization necessitated by farming created for the first time, significant gaps in the megapolitical power of individuals. Unlike the primeval hunting society, in which all men were armed with weapons for felling large animals, and were well trained to use them, the majority in most agricultural societies lived behind the plow. The plow is not an effective weapon. Neither is the artist’s brush or the potter’s wheel. The development of metal weapons gave a soldier a major military advantage over an unarmed farmer. As a consquence, power in an ancient grain-farming state like Egypt became highly centralized. Whoever had a preponderance of expensive weaponry could control the irrigation system and thus hold a life and death control over the peasants. Indeed, there was a strong tendency for the system to become more closed and stratified as time passed.

Middle-Class Topography

Why were the greek city-states not as despotic as ancient Egypt? We believe that the answer lies with the differences in megapolitical conditions. It was not so much more compelling to Greek ears than elsewhere. Nor was it because they were the first to think of democracy and equality. As we have seen, democracy and equality really were primitive ideas – because equality of power was a feature of primitive life. The uniqueness of Greece was that local conditions of climate and topography made it easier for Greek citizens to arm themselves and retain real military power. Because of this, more people were able to retain a voice in the political process in a more economically advanced society.

Davidson, James Dale and Rees-Mogg, Lord William. The Great Reckoning: Protect Yourself in the Coming Depression. Simon & Schuster, NY: 1993. (page) 64.

Most empowered individuals then can form Defensive arrangements in an area, but can’t generally unseat one another. (This is why Batman versus Captain America debates can’t reach a conclusion.) Superman-level heroes may demand some tribute from his inferiors but not enough to rule America effectively. Think of all the local law enforcement officers, and the legal courts. He may form a competing IRS, but not a department of agriculture. Human governments are terribly vulnerable and, as noted above, will very likely pay not to have Mount Rushmore dropped in Boston Harbor.

However, a dynasty depends upon stable relations. Charlemagne led Europe to ‘unity’ under the Christian banner. But, not only did his sons decide to divide it into personal realms, they lacked the charisma to compel their subordinates to the same extent that their father did. (That demands qualifiers, but not for the scope of this post.) Gamma girl will then be the granddaughter of Alex the Great, whose child(ren?) will bicker after his death to our heroine’s chagrin. Very probably, I will construct a tragedy. She is foolish and terrifying but happened to be around when America sloughed off a more manageable liability. Or, I could descend into stereotype and have her confront the paucity of her parent’s virtue and agree to aid the rebels. That is so trite I can’t say it without hoping she acts as a double agent to stab at the rival that fronted the rebellion. It’s an option.

The third environ I see avoids the organic fantastic for technological marvel. Several have considered the unemployment of vigilantes in a utopian society. The First World’s wealthy members would save themselves from age and then let the technology trickle down enough that criminals would focus on illegal activities that can’t be stopped by hyperspeed or what have you. Perhaps gamma girl ventures to Ethiopia to set up shop there. That enables either the Man Who would be King or Superman’s Peace on Earth plots. Or, she could stay within Jetsonville and peddle her power, provided it has a useful application. Consider a child who can exclusively see in the gamma spectrum. We would consider her permanently blind, but more aware future people might sense the correlation. She then helps decommission the aging uranium reactors, or hunts down the Libyan nuclear program. That sounds like a mushy story though.

If I had written this in my journal I may have thought of more options since I can write faster and less self-consciously than I type. Nevertheless, with such a tight deadline, there isn’t time for more brainstorming. I will probably choose one of those three to develop and dialog out.

I’m having a dandy vacation from school for about one more week. It has stopped raining, so I can see North Tustin from my window, which is pretty cool. I must remember to check in a month because I have no idea whether that is normal. The clarity of the houses struck me more than anything else.

I complained on the Third of contracting the flu. I suffered a runny nose and coughing for perhaps ten days, when it subsided. Unfortunately, a few days later, my sinuses started leaking into my throat again and I have been coughing non-stop until this morning. I only have these opportunities to confront my Luddite aspect. I refuse all medicine for the flu because it is viral. Plus, if I take medicines to suppress my symptoms, how do I know when I don’t have any sinning symptoms to suppress any more? In the case of antihistamines, it is when my mucus becomes a cement that I cough out in pellets. This has happened before and I refuse to repeat the experience. I sympathize that my family had to listen to the grating discharge, but I am more comfortable coughing than feeling as though crusts are building up in my throat. Body horror is my weakness. Luckily, it’s probably over, so I won’t avoid certain activites that take longer than the twenty minutes between the bathroom breaks from drinking liters of water.

As noted in my last post, I have generally ignored my commitments with this pleasant unstructured day. While I am keeping daily notes, if I forget to for a while, the quality suffers. Nevertheless, I am working. Earlier this month, E2 announced a Science Fiction Quest. Serendipitously, I had been wondering about the relations a post-apocalyptic community might have with a nanotechnology-using repopulation effort. Haiti’s tectonic plate broke in half soon after and I saw a ‘contradiction’ to my favored answer. Because (certain types) of nanotechnology obviate labor in general, survivalists would have no place in the Singularity’s economy. They could try to be artists but how many of us read the Spartan poems about their horses and wives? The attitude obviously doesn’t carry presently because our social incentives encourage us to sympathize with the Haitians.

Perhaps it is unwise to offer my opinion as I am more antisocial than the clamor about me. Nevertheless, I am not the only one to regard continued aid with skepticism. Surely, you have heard the caution to restrict impulse charity to approved NGOs, for fear of scams and Haitian corruption. Specifically, I mean the money that the administration will inevitably offer to, essentially, rebuild the whole city of Port-Au-Prince. Just giving them truckloads of money ensures it won’t be done organically, though those in the green city movement salivate at the potential of Radical Change otherwise impossible for major cities. (Which, of course, are those that need it the most.)

One of the opinion pieces that I would have cited, if the Wall Street Journal hadn’t hid it behind its subscription wall, treated the physiological future of the Haitians. One of the Doctors without borders whose vlogs CNN airs noted that an inordinate number of victims are receiving amputations or diagnoses of spinal injury. Like as not, the ill lit corner of my mind adopts the mask of Eugenist and warns of endless demands for aid otherwise. Inevitably, in shouldering the burden of rebuilding, American diplomats may feel some responsibility to subsidize the disabled population as well. Yes, I am uncouth for pointing this out, but we should not. America doesn’t have the money to satisfy its self-image as world’s savior in arms or alms. Utopian egalitarianism will always fail until that Star Trek era of infinite matter & energy for all.

Despite the taste of my sneaker and the nice transition back to the story I should be writing instead of this, I must lament the lack of a Utilitarian Catalog. You recall that the Utilitarian will want to devote his\er efforts (after self-maintenance) to the greatest good for the greatest number within a reasonable future without incurring unreasonable suffering. To do that effectively, sh\he would need a catalog of all the world’s ills and victims, ranked. Sure, you could give to Unicef and be reasonably certain it will be spent on deserving suffering. However, a utilitarian ought not feel comfortable relying on Unicef’s limited scope. If you and I took its beneficiaries list, and then rhapsodized for an hour looking for the gaps (cleft lips, non-NAFTA South American farmers, Mongolian towns with a median age of sixty, child sex slaves in America, Afghani farmers below subsistence despite growing wheat, manatees carved up by speed boats, ect), we wouldn’t have scarped out a majority of Need’s iceberg. When the Starbucks barista asks for their pet heart-tugger, you should turn to the Catalog and see what it rates. When every website and newspaper and television show turned into a Haiti peddler, I knew that other charities would feel a level of impoverishment.

I like to think of myself as an Egoist, so I have no business telling people of other ethical faiths how to act more sincerely. Nevertheless, I would like it for my own use. At the moment, only one charity meets my standard of desert: Wikipedia. Still, it would be nice to know the objectively most efficient target should I expand to a second.

As far as the Catalog itself, obviously it couldn’t be a book. As utilitarians donate to number one, it would drop as diminishing returns set in and two came to the fore. Only a website has the flexibility needed but I haven’t found it out there yet. Perhaps the UN has something similar, but like UNICEF (oh, duh), it will not exhaustively document every need. While I see the objection that you needn’t get every poor person, actually, you do. The undocumented sufferer is likely the worst off. Further, the UN hasn’t the political luxury of ruthlessly rating the need of various supplicants with the rigor a utilitarian ought demand. I don’t think that the Haitians are going to stop working forever in fake traction beds. I just don’t think they have been number 1 in the Catalog for a while now. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Anyway, for the quest I am writing a short story about a couple inconvenienced by the neighboring Transhumanists. I will also node about Cortex Command. The trick is finishing within the next six days.

Historiography is the study of the discipline of history, or how people record and come to understand history. It is pertinent to note that newspapers and others have taken to making decade retrospectives these past few weeks. They are justified in doing so, but their limits reveal their selection. Obviously, George W Bush’s administration dominates the American decade and how it is reported reveals volumes about the author in question. Similarly, a primary focus on American events (again acknowledging space limitations) speaks to a limited view. Any representative memoir for the Ones would need to at least touch on more of the dynamic events that occurred.

In that vein, I will avoid the format my host favors: a chronology. I am incapable of producing one because I have stopped making useful notes. This suggests an existential query, how will anyone know I was alive this year at all? From here, I will chide myself with the scant evidence I have produced in this ninth year of the second millennium in Anno Domini.

The candidates I most wanted to rely on are ‘newsworthy’ text files that, ideally, I take notes during the entire week on. When I first began the practice last year, I made the lazy error of only recording the week number. This year, I had only a short reprieve because at week fourteen, year nine and eight would only be distinguished by internal context and Microsoft’s valuable metadata. I opted for ‘9 week 5,’ so the whole year comes in sequence. I confront the annoyance of a more complex naming scheme in another type of record that should be ‘9 12 29’ but I only thought of that just now. Otherwise, I have been using my favored notation – European, 29 12 9 – which causes all sorts of problems with Sorts. As much as I cringe at all the retyping this involves, I can not shirk the superior organization.

The weekly notes feature some different styles of organization as well. Each mostly indicates the amount of time devoted. Sometimes, though, I wrote them on Sunday so it became a struggle to remember what happened on Monday and if it was actually during the other weekend. The task was harder when I didn’t have an externally enforced schedule to segment my days. The current vacation feels like the eternal present, although I have exacerbated it with sleep arrhythmia.

The most common form is a mass of keywords representing events, what I finished reading, what I have watched, and only occasionally some thoughts about events. The better formed files have two more lines. One notes the books I am currently reading, even if only distractedly. The other notes significant websites I visited. All too often, I only noted the newgrounds games and movies I liked. An example, 9 week 31:

The March, another sleep fouling morning and afternoon, Marta’s last ruination, Monica’s friend watches Who Framed then Big Fish, I started 1919 from wikipedia, I officially give up on the Everyman schedule for two months now, Uumpect, cat jumped on my face at night, I admitted I’m a potential bug eater, credit card finds monica at our forward base, NOD32 upgrade, I missed the Colony but Sat 8am, cd testing again, papi gave me Tata’s opener at last, car inner light dimmer switch, finally replied on mafia boring, I need to sinning register, W and rejected commentary, Miriam, Celi beat back her lymph cancer, Fables: Storybook Love, downloaded itunes podcasts, yank, I bought it all finally, she put my registration in my glove compartment, dvr means colony ep 2, carwash, bike ride & carlos offers ticket, genius bar & sears, IRA vs Taliban, Brad arrives, colony and californication finally, Sun Quincineiera 5,00pm past la palma?

So what does any of that mean?

I finished reading E L Doctorow’s The March.

I had decided to practice the ‘Everyman’ sleep schedule but kept it poorly. I didn’t take my naps at the same time every day, making the transition increasingly difficult. As noted four later, I decided to give up. Unfortunately, the author I consulted suggested two months of dutiful, normal sleep before trying again. By the time the opportunity came, school made it neigh impossible to have breaks that also jived with workdays. (I fully intend to document my experience, yet twenty weeks have elapsed.)

Some friend of Monica, name unknown and now gender unknown, came and watched movies.

I took notes about what occurred during 1919, intending to make an Everything2 article about it.

On Facebook’s D&D Tiny Adventures, I created Uumpect, a genasai warrior whose name parodies the font Impact.

I hadn’t started sleeping (and spending virtually the whole day) with my door closed yet, so Monica’s cat jumped on my face.

I published “The other, other right meat.” I’d link to it, but it’s a few posts below, so you can find my radical liberal environmentalist sentiment.

Papi confided to me (or I heard through secondhand gossip) that someone had spent … I am not at all sure how that went at all, actually. It seems as though Monica bought something in Costa Mesa (our forward base, my father’s home) that prompted either a call from MasterCard or Papi turned it up in the bills he scours. While I relish some comeuppance, really, it impacts me when their negative mood shortens their patience with my habits or situation.

The rest continues on and wastes your patience. These are meant to be mnemonics for a post that I should write the week following. Obviously, this is foolhardy as I have only done it twice. The better weekly form involves noting what happened each day, as it happens or at night before sleep. I only did so once, and only partly, for 9 week 41:

Fri – - – work; papi installed the fan but I had to vacuum

Sat – - – y—ing all day; The Surrogates; bought my first woot shirt, a sequoia; finally tripped on the sinning paint cover and scraped my elbow

Sun – - – papi finally read the water purification article and related an anecdote about the foolish shooting range lawsuit, writing more on mafia wars, papi cleaned house,

Unfortunately, I only noted fifteen weeks: 1-5, 25-33 except 27 and 32, and week 41. However, I did experiment with a more demanding beast, daily notes during the year’s first week and three closing April. But only the twenty-second and third match what you imagine they should look like.

I plan to leave at 2:00 to a bus station to reserve it for Araceli for Friday or whatever, at 3:30 we need to arrive at physical therapy; if there is a big gap, I may go to recycle our bottles and so on. I need to finally store all my clothes, I just ran out of shirts on the rack.

It turns out she meant she would call the bus station so I ended up annotating more (African) events during 1846 and eating lunch concurrently, Monica came to eat as well and watched a rerun of project runway; we left to phy therapy a tad late (so I could finish my sandwich). I read more from the most recent issue of the Economist and we returned.

I parked in front of Gloria’s house; I sent Coryr out again; no one has spoken on Mafia; I just finished reading all the webcomics; it seems appropriate to do some pushups and situps when I finish watching the Zero Punctuation episode in a few seconds. The reason I ought to do it now, as opposed to more annotation (Miriam is downstairs), is because I am somewhat committed to watching three more hours of television content today: Mythbusters at 6,00 (it is currently 5:30), Lost at 9:00, and the Unusuals right after.

While these qualify as posts unpublished, they are only a shadow of my full day. I tried that foolishness for a few days following February second. Unfortunately, I was still on Everyman time and neglected to take down dates or even put AM and PM. I conceived of this as a challenge to see whether I could emulate Buckminster Fuller’s full life documentation. Annoyingly, I took this as an opportunity to try out a tiny notebook that my mother foolishly gifted me. ‘Foolishly’ because it measures 3” x 5.” I like to open bound books and notebooks only 90°, to preserve the binding. Spiral wires are more forgiving, except to their first and last pages. Seeing someone bend magazines or sinning books so the covers meet is like seeing someone’s arm twisted or hearing someone grind a car’s manual transmission. I witness the abuse of a valuable object. So, the small size becomes smaller as I decide to hold the book awkwardly and I confronted that dread foe of the exhibitionist, a sense of (affronted) privacy. So I stopped. Before turning to the next though, let’s look at a representative sample:

12 finished cereal, bring back my car, abuela returned. 12,06 eating again. 12,17 cooking Canadian Bacon, peanut butter banana sandwich tomorrow. [[earlier, I noted that I should carry a highlighter to distinguish between events, commands, and musings.]] 12,36 I didn’t cook it long enough to melt the fat like on normal bacon; I added little bits of Monterey Jack. 12,42 finished eating, going to call therapy now and play it by ear. 12,54 appointment at 2,00, on computer now. 1,56 we left late because of (one?)

It was just as thrilling to interrupt my thoughts and activities to ‘confess’ what I was doing as it is to read it. As I am on the subject of this Twittimitation, I created an actual twitter account during early December. With these harrowing confrontations of my reticence, I only plan to update it with pithy observations. As of late, these come less quickly than I like, but that stems from the fact that I am barely writing anything at all.

I’ll admit, I overstated my case above. The point of this tremendous list of how I failed to record what I did on my summer vacation isn’t about that foolish plea for Posterity to notice me. I referenced the problem when complaining about rebuilding my week from just a few days later. I look back on a year with my fleshy memory cells, but primarily with these external annotations. I inwardly scoff when people say “where did the time go?” You spent every second just as fast as I (unless you are an astronaut). The trick is keeping perspective of all that happened in between those visits by maturing youngsters.

I’ll admit it is exceedingly difficult to keep that sort of stuff in mind. When I was younger enough that I didn’t drive, I would daydream during stretches on the freeway, mostly about what was passing by. Often that would take the form of hyper-destructive ‘I have telekinesis and throw SUV’s through buildings et cetera.’ Another, relevant, daydream involved trying to visualize the distance we travelled. Not the total distance, but just a smaller amount like a mile or two. You have seen the helpful signs that list the miles to the next exit. So, I would note one and start ‘laying tape.’ I could see the sign receding behind us for a time, but we might go over a rise or turn and I would still have to project its hypothetical location moving back at the same speed as the car. I could never keep it for farther than, perhaps, half a mile. The ‘tape’ would seem to reach a limit where lengthening it more would seem to have no effect: I lost perspective. The same glass ceiling blocks attempts to visualize a billion dollars, or the cells on the back of my hand. Arguably, walking two miles could make it clearer than sitting in a vehicle travelling at seventy miles per hour. Still, when I walked (briskly, of course) four times around the track for a mile in middle and high school, the linear distance still felt occult and unwieldy. So too with the passing days.

I’ll admit, I felt some of that foolish shock this Christmas in noticing that my (female) cousin’s voices had changed, probably deepened. Partly, I’m missing the point because it has to do with updating my representation of them. I treated this in an older post here, so I’ll be brief. We would remember every day if we had really emotional experiences through the whole time. (And those would mash together too unless they engaged different emotions each time. “Yeah, I went to Paris for a week, but had to swim back until the pirates captured me and I was afraid they would go from ransom to killing, then I broke out and landed in Bolivia, where I won the lottery, and then Tarzan and Batman fought to seduce me, but I ignored them because I only just started to read the whole Harry Potter series, and then I nearly died in an auto accident driving back home and saw Jesus and all the Mormon angels, and then, and then, and then.” I had fun stringing that together.) I’m inclined to say that pulp adventurer would have a better chance of resisting the “golly you are sure big,” because change is such a predominant part of hiser life. The rest of us deal with a great amount of routine. We wake in the same bed, take one of two paths to work – at most, and eat one of the classic livestock cuts (“Turdunken again? When are we going to have emu, mom?”). Soooo, that is why noting down what happened is so important. I may not feel the miles under my feet any longer, but I can look at miles of ink spilt or one megabyte of text and fake that sense.

Before I turn to another device, I should clip a loose thread. I stated that the latter daily notes were blow by blow reflections. The first few reflected an altogether different approach. One of my ‘oft referenced’ files is called ‘immediate use,’ but I treat it more like an immediate deposit. I use it to place notes I intend to use somewhat later, but seldom do. The result is a mishmash that indirectly shows the evolution of my interests, albeit defunct or idle forms. In an attempt to circumvent this unmeaningful stockpile and instill a more aware attitude, I opted to use each day to document which sites I visited and copied in the more eloquent paragraphs of whatever I read. Sure, I could go through my browser history – and sometimes do if the memory and site was distinct enough – but a fair number are spammy, like deviantart, which classes each user as a separate site. I gave up, but with the right organizational strategy I may incorporate it eventually.

I shouldn’t, but often blame that habit of filtering depositories. I maintain a normal notebook as a journal. But it is too big to take to work, for those occasions when I operate the elevator, so I have a smaller work journal. When I have forgotten the work journal, I often resort to writing on a napkin (they stock a kind well suited to my needs). Should I copy what I wrote verbatim back into my normal journal; would that bore me? I maintain the aforementioned text files about weekly events. So, even if I made a comprehensive file for stream of consciousness, events, and what I’m looking at, I would feel divided about whether and how much to trade with my physical journals. Of course, more writing is better, but the anxiety I created forestalled most writing in general and doomed that experiment in particular.

I use a 180 sheet spiral bound notebook that I began the fourth day of last year and haven’t yet picked up this year (oh, ho those are timeless puns). I could list the sort of entries I most often relied on, but that isn’t entirely the point. Revealing patterns in my writing may entertain, but involves more history than historiography. Instead, I’ll illuminate via a ruthless mathematical device: statistics.

The vertical values are plain by the legend: days elapsed in between journal entries. The numbers on the bottom indicate the month and its frequency indicates the number of posts made during that month. From the outset, I admit a major compromise in the way I compiled the data. If you add all the days elapsed, it should miss 365 by the number of posts. Where ever you see a data point but no column, that indicates I wrote another post the very next day. I could have made that ‘one day elapsed,’ but that would seem to punish me. A week where I wrote every day would show seven days elapsed, even though I didn’t miss an opportunity. So, to keep it consistent, I always subtracted one day, even when I didn’t write the next day. Perhaps, a more honest legend would have been ‘consecutive days without writing.’ In the end though, the graph is exactly the same but just shifted one up for all data points.

Nevertheless, the graph does reveal an important seasonal trend. I wrote least during periods of least responsibility. The lowest month was June, which correlates with when the rest of my family went on vacation. I even forgot about my birthday until they came back and reminded me. I can’t tell you what I did because, appropriately, I didn’t write anything down. Very likely, I surfed the net and whomped on Cortex Command’s AI. My best month was September. Unsurprisingly I was in school and using my journal to plan out homework, both essays and programs. However, school (and elevator duty) incentivize journaling because they are the most entertaining thing to do during lulls in activity. At work I can get a tremendous amount of reading done because I have nothing to do for eight hours straight (barring interruptions). At home, the offered content on the internet presents a temptation that I resist only with effort or boredom.

I decided against checking the frequency for my work journal. The option of manning the elevator only comes up once a week and isn’t always offered, so its delays are unrepresentative to my overall writing effort and more reflect my work schedule.

One entry, the second, in my journal deserves mention. I read through the journal I had just finished and made a brief index for it. While cool, putting it in a totally different book makes no sense if they aren’t kept in sequence and the conceit isn’t known ahead of time. So, I conceived of an alternative to mucking up the inside back cover. I could, but haven’t yet, reserve one spiral notebook solely as an index. A table of contents would be nicer but I don’t focus that much on any given day. It might begin with a list of what I should do, then some unpleasant event to vent about, and finish with some meandering possibilities about how to handle my current project. And then, I do the same thing the next day or, possibly, copy straight text out of a library book.

I can surmount the problem of ordering my journals, but with some uncomfortable compromises. These past few years, I have used a single notebook to completion (supplemented with my work notebook). But, before then, I used to write in several at once depending upon which I found most conveniently. So a chronological path jumps between two or three sources for a few years. Less helpful is if I miss an early journal and have to index it after much newer material. There are more complaints, but I must recognize that if I include the date (which I scrupulously put) in addition to the page number, the index itself resolves all these difficulties of future reference by explicitly showing the chronological order of entries within the space of a couple sheets rather than spread across books as is the present status quo. It doesn’t make it easier to compile the index, but at least future reference is much easier. I may yet put that into practice.

The preceeding has been, as Hamlet is made to say, “words, words, words.” The most engaging references are visual. I sympathize with the injunction to take loads of pictures, of myself, my surroundings, and anything out of the ordinary. Their value is unquestionable. Pictures from our Europe trip are superb mnemenotics. And, I know the gap of forsaking pictures. We may be a couple thousand feet from where we used to live, but I have no idea what the inside of that house looks like anymore. It is a shame that it has traded again since then so I can’t use the excuse, “Remember when you bought this house (ten?) years ago? Could I look around to rekindle my memories of when I used to live here?” Of course, I don’t need to go there. My parents took plenty of pictures that I can look at for reference. Wary of forsaking change, I made a (one minute) video of my room the year before.

Unfortunately, I have ignored the more personal subject, myself. One set each month seemed like a reasonable goal last January; but, I failed to take half that many. Further, I usually only remember to charge my camera after a change, like cutting my hair.

My more favored visual media is pencil. My journals occasionally have doodle addenda. While these illuminate the passage, few are of any consequence. Only two projects received much dedication. I drew several versions of Supheter, my character embodied in D&D sessions. I noted the more engaging project in my report on Cortex Command. I do admit that most involves deciding elements of the larger story rather than drawing the next segment at all. However, close to the semester’s end, I reevaluated the climax for the first episode and gave it a much more meaningful conclusion. I let myself fuss about layouts and word balloons in abstract rather than mocking them up. Until I commit to inking a real version or using a stylus with Flash, the project bangs on the metaphoric glass.

Those, however, only represent the mandate of my muse. This semester of drawing forced me to produce even more work. That journal contains portraits, rooms, and horrid contour drawings. (Those are hand-eye coordination exercises, wherein the artist draws without referring to the page at all.) They haven’t digital copies yet. Because she asked us to use graphite layers to simplify ‘shading,’ I am concerned it may dirty the glass more than usual.

Deviantart reminded me that I did upload another collection. Way back when I still ground out turns on the Conquer Club (risk imitation), I made some potential submissions. In fact, I made a big, blank world map in anticipation of playtesting it with real pieces. When I grew bored, I used it to cover my books from dust. A couple months ago, I hung it over my laptop, so it is silly of me not to have remembered. Hidden in plain sight. I use another site to distribute forgettable creations, Flickr. Besides my stock logging, I primarily use it to show people stuff.

Chase’s album has a couple pictures of me during our D&D sessions. He also recorded an entire session on camera, but I understood it went straight into storage. (Size precludes sharing.) My sister may have caught me once or twice in family gathering photos. I admit that, as camera man, I seldom remember to take more than one of myself. I justify the absence by relying on my self-portraits. Nevertheless, unposed shots are my absolute favorite. While participants may resent it, I try to catch them before they can group hug and tooth show.

I did shoot one video myself. At Froi’s wedding, Manolo gave a speech as the best man. So he would have a copy, I taped him. Unfortunately, he compromised his computer so we had to restore it to day one. Even worse, he kept his ‘account’ password protected. We did save all the ‘my documents,’ but his is unreachable because we haven’t the ‘authority’ anymore. I don’t recall if I uploaded a copy because it was on his camera and so sinning big. I can report one novel recording. I made an audio file of me singing. One of the songs I have engraved into muscle memory is the ‘Modern Major General’ parody from the last episode of the show Reboot. It turns out, I misheard some of the words when I first learnt it, so I have multiple takes where I stumble reading the divergent lyrics.

There are more, trivial records online. I discovered (forum based) Mafia on Conquer Club and still hope to play it in a group some day. I saved the entire log of conversation for the first four or so games, to analyze who might be town or mafia or cult. I used my datarealms account, but it pines for when I finish some episodes of my Cortex Comic. Such is the difference between wanting the perks of a writer and wanting to write as a hobby or job. Earlier in the year I announced which book I had just finished, as a Facebook status. Now I pollute with their brand of ads. Soon after I joined, I cordoned it to only those who play Zynga’s games, but with the new rules, I think it has seeped out to everyone again. Perhaps I should check but it isn’t as though I don’t ignore the great majority of my ‘friend’s posts.

I sent seventy five emails this year. This semester saw fifty. Of those fifty, over half are from me to me. Actually, it would be more but I deleted some because yahoo doesn’t sense when I am sending it to myself so I end up with two copies. I resorted to this primarily when I worked on papers at school or had to print one out here. Since I moved into my room, venturing around the rest of the house is exceedingly annoying. My battery has devolved to the stage where it lasts twelve minutes. It is my fault for leaving it plugged in all day. I don’t need it’s portability for the common use; I value it for when I transition between my parent’s houses. Five years ago, during some of the LAN parties at Kevin’s house, I drug around my family’s tower and that was a major pain. When I move into my own abode, I will trade up for a desktop.

Various agencies update their records of my activity. School has its grades (and updated its host to a more convenient system, to the chagrin of the professors). SFFCU gives me all sorts of receipts, bank statements, and credit card bills that I should shred but mainly stockpile. The credit card bills are the least useful, as I tell to everyone who will listen. Because I pass the credit union on the way home, I can deposit my pay and clear my balance without using a nonperforming checking account. That is why I will never take out a line with any retail outlet for a one time benefit. Common sense suggests that the libraries I patronize should keep a record of my rental history. Since the Patriot Act scare nine years ago, most systems live like they have Anterograde Amnesia. I guess it cuts down on their storage overhead. Sigalert is another agency that absolutely should keep archives of the data stream it transmits. Sure, I want to know how traffic is right now. However, if I am going to leave some time within the next two hours, but I want to ditch rush hour traffic, their site is no good. I can’t sit there for the next two hours hitting refresh. The moment I see some reduced flow, it is too late and I will hit a bigger dam by the time I reach there. A long time ago, I managed to find a site that did host pictures of freeway traffic for several years in hourly segments. Fool that I was, I didn’t save the sinning address and don’t really expect to find it again with so many fool traffic news reports cluttering the search results. If you know of such a site I would be extremely grateful if you share the link.

We have just about reached the end. Microsoft formats this to the end of the fourteenth page. So, dead last is the worst record: those unshared. At various points during year nine – and elsewhen – I began some posts and gave up the moment I got tired. For example, I began a review that would have contrasted the reality shows True Beauty and 13: Fear is Real. I still despise the inept and largely dishonest ethical basis of the former. However, in disgust, I stopped watching it. Typing the potential article felt less urgent. It was easy to let it lie. At least it is saved, even if I don’t publish it.

That, as much as keeping up with the Lloyds, prompted this (weeklong) effort. My own posterity is undoubtedly assured. Despite the meager rate of documentation, I am perhaps average for my generation (substituting journaling for tons of vlogs or photos). In contrast, my grandmother has a bunch of pictures, but because she had to leave middle school and work the rest of her life, hers is currently an oral history. I must write her biography this year. And that of my father’s parents, but she lives with us so it is more convenient. I would like to leave it at just interviewing her, but that forsakes a lot of nuance. Some years ago, I made a tape recording of a family friend some weeks away from his death. It was obviously too late and I didn’t have posterity in mind, so I went with the strongest association I had. He was with my mother’s father as a political prisoner in Cuba. His answer left much to be desired, but in retrospect he had lived decades since then. It would have been nice to press him about his life in general and perhaps make a copy as a gift for his family. Ultimately, there was a conflict of interest.

With my own relatives, I have the opposite concern. I want to know everything, which makes the project feel unwieldy. Most advice is geared toward genealogy hobbyists, who focus on finding the whole tree and perhaps regard stories as a happy, yet incidental, surprise. The rest treats biographers’ methods which may be as impersonal as studying MLB’s journals and such or some interview techniques. They strive to make a compelling narrative, focusing on unusual anecdotes or ‘formative experiences.’ That too can underrepresent my subjexts. Should I try to get a blow by blow account; let her just tell stories about whatever she wants for an hour; or use her as a way to look at life in Cuba, Florida, and Orange County through different periods with her particulars as ‘secondary?’

I looked through a couple of historical societies’ websites but didn’t notice a mission statement declaring what is of historical value. How do I know what to preserve? Sure, it isn’t likely that I will donate these to a similar group, but it would be nice to have some suggestions about what to focus on. Likely, a text on historian’s methodologies will confirm my suspicion: everything is of value. Because of the dissertation system, new graduates must fragment out into whatever isn’t covered yet but has a good body of suggestively similar opinions. On the other hand, what would my descendants want to know about her? Regardless, the interviews are valuable in themselves. The biography serves as an index for them more than a concerted effort to memorialize her. That would take too long and I might lose other sources before I am ready.

Artificial Stratification

Sigmund Freud still commands a strong audience despite the dated nature of his analyses. His case study, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, particularly embodies this problem in the divergent fashions he dealt with Dora’s illness. The main consists of finding a huge number of potential symbolic connections he spun around her behavior and dreams. Only his technique shines through to assist the frail, yet challenging woman under his care. His therapy fails to capture Dora because his brush with therapy is almost always subsumed by his interpretive indentification of problems.

Freud brooks no facts in his all-consuming quest for relating Dora’s dreams and memories to his paradigm. Dora relays she saw a painting of nymphs the day before Herr K’s fateful proposal. Freud gives so much significance to the recollection of nymphs in conjunction with her second recurring dream that Freud ‘discovers’ a new sin that Dora has no memory of:

“ ‘Nymphae’ as is known to physicians but not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora […]. But anyone who employed such technical terms as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae,’ must have derived his knowledge from […] an encyclopedia – the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. […] [One of her symptoms] must have been inflicted as a result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.” (91, 94).

Freud commits a plethora of fallacies in the above passage. The translator notes that the german word for nymph and the anatomical term he prefers are the same. Rather than rely on a word association supplied by Dora, Freud uses his ‘not very common’ knowledge to supply the preferred meaning. Nymphs populate many paintings depicting woods because the Greeks considered them wood spirits. Very likely, the artist titled the painting and included the term Nymphs. Instead, Freud commits his most common error: projecting his interpretation onto Dora. The exclusive term implies, to him, that she browsed an encyclopedia for names of the genitals and other sexual topics. Strangely, this trounces his earlier discovery that Dora’s governess and Frau K spoke candidly on sexual topics. Their influence was no small import in earlier interpretations and Freud even made a game of testing how much she knew. In light of his turn of phrase, the likely vocal communication might have supplied the hypothetical connection. But, Dora denies having read the encyclopedia for more than learning about appendicitis. Freud considers this no obstacle because the memory is repressed, unconscious. Manufacturing an event based on his interpretation of a word exposes a deep hypocracy in Freud’s method. He regards his interpretation as the only possible one of the word and its source, necessitating the repression. Another interpretation exists – wood nymphs – and makes his conclusion less likely by half. The patient’s testimony oftentimes serves as little more than grist for relating their lives to his paradigm about the tripartite self.

Freud succeeds primarily when he subsumes his wish fulfillment to the gritty task of therapy. One fashion this occurs is in his reliance on the Socratic method. Very often, Freud led the session by asking Dora to relate her thoughts on particular feelings or dreams. Before he received the recurring dreams, he generally treated her relationships with her family and the K family. Eventually, this inspires her to take on the task of understanding herself outside his paradigm. “For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives that presumably underlie them.” (86). Of course, she is more interested in conventional motivations rather than infantile prototypes for her symptoms. She weighs the different motives behind waiting and then revealing Herr K’s proposal. Freud, in contrast, complains of lingering surprise at her “having felt so deeply injured” (87). On the face, these mark the difference between the behavioralist and psychoanalytic schools of psychology. Her focus concerns how her conscious – yet contemporarily inattentive – thoughts propelled her various decisions. Freud insists that all important factors reside in the unconscious. Her id’s unquestionable acceptance is buried underneath three or four unconscious resorts to sensory transference, the reinvigoration of her Electra complex, and so on. Nevertheless, these tangential objections have evidently expanded her self-awareness. Her perception of the complex relationships around her show intelligence, but she failed to turn the searchlight upon herself. At Freud’s insistence, Dora admits that her own illness may have been learned through imitating her father and cousin’s illness and finding the technique effective. There is no question that a great portion of our personalities come from the earliest experiences. Freud argues most effectively when he strays from finding parallels to his own thought in favor of values Dora actually holds.

Much as Freud deviates from expectations, his approach in this and other therapies show a marked improvement over his peer’s approach to understanding neurological disorders. Despite centuries of classifying hysteria as a female exclusive disease, Freud stood with his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, in recognizing cases of male hysteria. In this fashion, both considered a disease as a collection of symptoms independent of any particular victim. He erred, however, by substituting an inherited paradigm for another inferred from unrepresentative cases. While studying people to understand general human behavior makes sense, Freud’s enduring theories came from strikingly idiosyncratic sufferers. This ironic inclination to distance himself from the (less afflicted) patients actually under his care explains why Freud’s greatest satisfaction came during the penultimate session. Then, he stood agape that Dora completely missed the significance of his connection of her infant foot dragging and an expectation that she should be pregnant. In contrast, the final session moved her as he showed her how she likely identified herself with the scorned maid that her father abused. Freud could only have resolved Dora’s problems by resisting the desire to flaunt his ideology and concentrating on her problems.

Sunday, I went to a wedding reception. My father supervises the inspector-engineers for the LA County Sanitation District. (The city of La Reina de Los Angeles has its own Sanitation Department.) One of these, Froiland Urfano, asked my father to serve as his best man. 58 year old Philippine immigrant has worked with him for twenty-five years. This event marked his second marriage, but his bride’s first, so they splurged with an open bar and inviting 175 people. Some cancelled their reservations early so my father substituted my sister, her boyfriend, and me.

Unlike virtually every other occasion, the wedding was extremely close by. My father’s condominium is five or so blocks from the termination of the 55 freeway. Froi chose the ‘Turnip Rose’ in a building that sits at that intersection where the 55 transitions into Newport Boulevard. Given the opportunity, I delayed more than necessary and arrived as the entourage had begun taking pictures in all the permutations: only the bridesmaids, only the groomsmen, each group with the bride and/or the groom plus the whole family.

My father wore a tuxedo chosen by the wedding planner. His coat had a half mandarin collar over a grey vest. Beneath that, he wore a white shirt, and, to his chagrin, a pink tie. The groom wore a similar outfit but he and Kun-shan maintained the Asian tradition of changing clothes several times. Froi later affected a grey coat with red piping.

I chose a look I saw in the movie Scotland, PA, albeit during a funeral scene. I wore all black except a thin white tie. The convention center relaxed its policy on facial hair last week, so many of my peers arrived with goatees. I considered growing my first full beard but confronted the realization that desire sprang from contrariness and curiosity. Nevertheless, not shaving allows for a bit more sleep, so I skipped the treatment then. Besides, I have been growing some longer side-burns already. After bathing, I decided to compromise and now sport an Amish beard.

My sister arrived ten or twenty minutes after me because she and her date worked until an hour before the wedding began. Monica brought a short, white sundress with orange flowers on it. Tom joined a black pixel tie with a light blue long-sleeved shirt that he resolutely kept at his elbows.

When I arrived, Kun-shan had on a normal strapless bridal gown of light peach. A royal blue strapless dress followed during dinner and during the money dance. Rather than damage the gown with pins, I believe they used stickers to hold up the bills. After dinner, she put on a red dress which may have had a collar. She may have changed another time, but I left soon thereafter. I woke six hours later to prepare for work. Mind, I begin Monday at 4:40, so the party undoubtedly continued.

Let’s return to the moment the reception opened and the guests tramped inside from the courtyard. My father had introduced me to Dan, the third and newest supervisor. Though it escaped me at the time, he looks like David Letterman, down to the gap teeth. Inevitably, age asks youth about education, so I told him I am studying History. He asked why the Roman Empire fell. He expressed concern that ‘the basis of our civilization, incorporating so many people just collapsed.’  Surprised, I gave an unsatisfactory answer comparing [Edward Gibbon’s] theory against Graeme Snooks’.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I own but avoid) is the famous exposition of the opinion that ‘decadence’ ground down the structure. I guessed that he cited the death fixation via gladiatorial games. The Wikipedia entry’s author(s) clarify that he believed the Romans entrusted their vassal Barbarians with all the important work and took to navel-gazing Christianity. While there are criticisms of his argument, understand that he published the three volume work in 1776.

Graeme Snooks, in Ephemeral Civilization, instead emphasizes the lack of growth after the Emperor Trajan. I made some ineffectual sounds about soldiers and land and gave up (so we could take our seats). Snooks classes the Empire as one of the conquest societies (as opposed to a trade or industrial society). In particular, the economy funded and drew predominantly from military conquests. So, when the Legions conquered a region, the officers were given governorships over the area and locals conscripted into the army. When the Empire failed to conquer new lands, the strategy soured and introduced proximate causes: tax evasion, provincial resistance, and so on. The military hierarchy could no longer promise its members adequate rewards for attrition warfare and so on. Though I think it the best of the interpretations I am aware of, it is one of many.

The reception proceeded, much of the rest pertains to the unified families rather than me. Perhaps I may relate the intricacies of her courtship, as revealed in five speeches given by Froi’s children and sisters, some other night.

In addition to playing tabletop D&D with my friends, I participate in the pale shadow that Wizards of the Coast licensed to Facebook. I have described encountering and rediscovering the ‘app,’ but not playing it. Basically, this resembles a card-based game wherein my character of the moment submits to drawing the cards of a particular adventure’s deck that (via simulated die results) determine whether he receives loot or blows to the face. I repeat this – distributing and buying equipment to maximize success – until he has graduated past the tenth level. The program retires the character and lets me pass on the particular benefits of that generation. Obviously, the GUI only barely resembles this analogy and incorporates a few other nuances.

One is the buff and healing of fellow player’s characters, which I can neither use nor rely on any longer. I am the last of my social circle still putting time into it. The majority that did, quit some months ago and haven’t pushed past the fourth generation. Only Chase pushed beyond me, likely from beginning earlier and in sympathy with his brother Brent. Brent no longer uses it because he beat the game, as much as one can. He reached the twentieth level and either tired of the long summited plateau of perks or received his virtual cookie and was told to buy the real thing. The difference in between us all has been attitude or interactive strategy.

With the limited interaction, boredom or ennui (confrontation with meaninglessness) easily sets in. My path has been perfect to keep my interest despite evolving needs. Besides reviews off site, the first thing I read about playing D&D Tiny Adventures resides in its forum. Like most boards, it had a nostalgia thread on top, but more useful than any other. The originator asked people about whether they named their characters based on a theme (eg: successively using all the characters in the Wheel of Time series). While the replies escape me, I absorbed the idea that I should prepare a set rather than take the intuitive route – use the names of characters I actually roleplayed. That became the first warning to be stoic and bemused about any particular iteration.

I settled on a pleasing solution affording me uniqueness, propriety with irony, and a large set to draw from. I chose to modify the names of various font types into fantasy-esque names for each.

I made a grave mistake soon thereafter. Despite distancing myself from the character’s progress, I took too great in interest in the adventures themselves. Occasionally, I toy with the prospect of DMing an rp campaign. Chase’s example showed that store-bought material could furnish a complexity that a novice might omit. Cory somewhat made this mistake in his vampire chronicle when he sent us across Canada or something like that. Appearantly, he hadn’t planned out challenges for the trip and collapsed under Rob’s badgering of “and then what happened?”

Foolishly, I copied and pasted each encounter’s flavortext into a file for later study. While seemingly simple, mid-level adventures have thirteen encounters and high levels feature eighteen. The whole became unwieldy and unreadable, not in the least because the system reused encounters no matter the level. The game chafed under the class “work” rather than amusement. I quit the task midway into the second generation.

In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered copying the encounters at all. Others had done so already. The second character gets to inherit one item from its previous incarnation. Like many new players, I stressed about this and another aspect: potions. The program lets a character carry two potions during an adventure. Two types exist those that increase a particular statistic, whether strength or resistence to undead, or those that heal the character. The first time I played, I checked in every ten minutes to witness the encounter update. Then I’d copy the flavortext and sweat about whether to use a potion or not. My stoicism had crumbled under pointless obsession.

Finding the Tiny Adventures Wiki dispelled all that. Its contributors have uploaded every encounter (story and random), piece of equipment, and character class ability. They even revealed the different generation perks. For some reason WotC kept these a mystery, which works against them. Knowing that I could eventually inherit some of my ending money encouraged sticking with the game. Keeping it a big unknown fostered disappointment and ennui, especially after the third generation unveiled “ironman” mode. That gifts the user a character that retires when its character fails an adventure through death. Ordinarily, death (x<0 hitpoints) sends the character home to heal. Instead, you can have your character retired with midlevel equipment via underconservative choices. The wiki page dispelled the disappointment of similar features by fostering hope.

My relationship evolved in other ways with the app. I debated whether stat potions and then even healing potions are worth the price paid. I tried every class and resisted revisiting some when their best and otherwise unequipable items turned up. These struggles informed my current strategy.

The strongest character is one who has the highest mean ability modifiers with a given set of equipment. This informs most decisions. Which item do I pass on to my next generation? The wiki reveals the base ability scores and, depending upon gender, this could be two or three 10s or 11s. The best item plugs these gaps, preferably via a crown. Encounters reward crowns least frequently, so later items of greater frequency(amulets and bracers) will tempt less juggling. Shouldn’t I use items that beef up my hitpoints? No, I thought so too, though and kept wasting gold on troll skin armor (+10). The character loses hitpoints when he fails; using equipment that increases ability modifiers might have ensured success instead.

There is one exception to the above principle, story encounters. The wiki documents the scores each tests, so a dedicated player can check in just before the encounter updates and redistribute items to maximize the modifier. As I don’t care to time out this reappearance, I just leave them. As I am finishing up my ninth iteration, I sell all my useless equipment to bump up my gold inheritance. In fact, I will test a new technique. Normally, I end wearing my best equipment since these are tenth level encounters. I get to pass on a quarter of my gold. So, I saved the loot from the first levels to replace all the elite armor. Likely, Sam Bole will fail a lot more encounters. But, he is too close to retirement to chance wasting the opportunity.

My next and final character will be a rogue, so I will have played with every class. The male’s dump stats are Intelligence and Constitution. I will inherit a ring to plug int and use the five thousand inherited gold pieces to buy whatever will fix my con. While I would like to have used a woman for variety, the female rogue has three dump stats instead of two. His name will derive from Haettenshweiller. It isn’t as popular a font as Calibri or Tahoma, but the name I chose is cooler than “Cal Ebree” or “Ted Oma.”

But for the opportunity to throw lots of gold to the last character via a naked, final adventure and writing this review, I have no interest in playing Tiny Adventures any more. The stoicism necessary to play a game with almost no interaction nulls my interest. The real benefit comes from justifying visits to Facebook, which I would otherwise visit less frequently. Besides checking on Sam Bole, I check our D&D group’s page for updates and comment on other’s status updates or renew my own with whatever book I am reading.

Still there is one final word on maximizing the encounter survival: potions. They are not worth the gold paid at any level. I didn’t intuit this because I had stopped checking what stat the encounters tested. The wiki has noted the two most likely for each terrain type. Since these seldom last more than a quarter of the adventure, I didn’t bother studying. But, I wanted to know when it was worthwhile to buy healing potions. Seeing the answer pushed me toward the realization that succeeding individual encounters benefits more than lasting to the final one.

To test, I noted the total gold awarded for each adventure, grouped by level, for two generations. I averaged the three or four adventures per level to hide the idiosyncracies resulting from completion or early death. In writing this review, I noticed my first character’s encounter notes could have been used to further dilute outliers. But, it isn’t altogether important since the success rate (and rewards) reflects the strength of the presiding strategy rather than a general reflection of the adventures themselves.

So while you could buy healing potions as soon as the fourth level (on average), it isn’t really conscionable until the sixth level because the hero would spend all his income on the potion itself. The stat potions are even worse value because – during the four encounters each lasts – the adventure will test it once or never. Money buys potions or equipment, so equipment’s permanent benefit justifies the expense.

Wizards of the Coast likely hopes we will use potions or test our luck with potions or iron man mode because of the scoring system. Encounter success under these conditions or higher challenge ratings net a higher score. What they ignore is the very point of a scoring system in the mind of the player. The app fails to maintain scores into the new generation. Somehow I suspect others parallel me in not writing down my scores so I can measure how lucky I am now compared to two weeks ago. They show our friends’ scores, but these are incomparable when we are different levels. I wouldn’t even mention the “feature” if it didn’t reflect the generally foolish design of the whole game.

And yet, Tiny Adventures figured largely into my visits to Facebook. I would log in every three hours or so (90 minutes for the adventure, 90 minutes to heal) to send himer back out. Now, I am only returning to check and comment on my friends’ status updates. I did it before incidently; but, without other justification, the whole feels like an exercise in stalking. This realization came before its time because I failed to make the right character. I inattentively pressed a Fighter character rather than a rogue. In protest, I decided to stop early.

I have some options at this point. I can visit Facebook less frequently, just daily. Tiny adventures holds no value, but it gives some structure to my schedule. Or, I could try some other game app. Mafia, which I tried months ago in sympathy with the forum version of the game, blows chunks. Scrabble is nice but demanding, in time and effort. I guess I will check out Mafia wars. My cousin does not shelter his friends from occasional, obscure updates (Mark is looking for a tie and a rubber ducky). Chase also mentioned he plays it, so now is the best time to try it. Facebook runs counter to a solitary experience.

I have now orbited our local star twenty three times, as we regard it. However, I almost didn’t remember until just before. At the start of June, both my parents went on their respective trips with their partners. My father went to Florida and the Bahamas for a week. My mother left to Spain and a Mediterranean cruise including Italy, Greece, and Turkey. She returned two weeks after my father. This was a long, peaceful time for me. Even better, my friends and I managed a D&D session each weekend. There were ample distractions (and lack of reminders) about the pending Holiest of subjective Satanic holidays.

Describing her cruise would make a nice transition, but that isn’t possible. She told me about it, but as a summary and highlights only. (Writing this has been a good reminder that I need to ask to copy their pictures.) Any vacation longer than a week subsumes so many events and minor surprises that describing it to another is hopeless without extensive documentation. I have tried keeping travel journals twice (in Europe and Australia); but after the first days, my interest flags. We pack our days and arrive to bed tired and in line for the shower. Spending an hour hunched over the uncomfortable escritoire – often in the way of the television – can’t compete with vapid relaxation.

Nevertheless, my mother always brings back curios, perhaps for us to remember her trip by. Both my parents bought shirts, which is nice. I had been putting off buying more for a while because entertainment > clothes. But, shirts don’t satisfy my real request. This is a cafepress era. I can buy a shirt that says Harvard without graduating high school. I can buy a jacket that says FBI in official colors despite working at a crooked gambling parlor. And, anyone can buy a shirt that says Costa Rica, Greece, or Red Dirt Hawaii. Still, the shirts my mother brought were thankfully better than I expected. The Istanbul shirt hides the word in a letter grid that also has other (anglicized) Turkish words. The Barcelonan shirt says Barcelona, but over a matte web of its city layout.

So, when my mother asked me the day after I brought her home from John Wayne what I wanted for my birthday, I gaped in surprise and stammered that the shirts would be just fine. She said no, so I had to work. Any year where she hadn’t left, she would have reminded me during late May or so and I would have made a list of prospective gifts. During April, I even noted an improvement to submitting the list. Normally, I send an unedited version of my personal buying lists to her with updated prices. Unfortunately, she runs into trouble when I put, for example, a Sandman trade paperback. Amazon has the weird compulsion of only listing outdated editions of the graphic novel, no matter how you search for them. Of course, if she opened the product page for one, she would see the link to a current printing under the ‘different binding’ options (hardcover, mass market paperback, library binding). To ease her frustration, I planned to link directly to each item as I updated the price. It isn’t an amazing change, but I had never thought of it before.

Here is a snippet from my book buying list. It is toward the upper middle because my favorite authors dominate the top with little variety (just science fiction and some fantasy). [Amazon; Barnes & Noble; library]

Ubersleep           15lulu

Alphabet of manliness   10am/12.8bn/-lib

Getting Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks               11.7am/-lib

Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar            <am/-lib

Watching the Watchmen              26.4am

Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: Guerrilla Girls Guide to Female Stereotypes  18.3am/-lib

The Encyclopedia Of Tarot           22.8am 1-4 105.4am/  II  26.6am  III  34.2am  IV  45bn

Revelations of the Dark Mother                <am/-lib

The hero with a thousand faces                t lib/10.7am/13.5

Will to Power 11.6am/17bn/5bkmn

In the end, I didn’t submit a list to either and ate the consequence. Not directing my father held more significance. He bought me a shirt and a Barnes & Nobel gift card. In light of amazon, that retailer is neigh worthless. Sure, I liked to visit when a minor without a credit card. It was sort of like a browsing the library with more variety and the spice of a potential impulse buy. Now, I know – absolutely – that retailer prices everything five dollars higher (or more) than amazon does.

They offer only one saving grace: sparkcharts only sells through Barnes & Nobel. I consider them worthless, in principle, for any class I am studying. Without writing and relying on personal notes, I would do abysmally. However, the breadth of their offering suggested I could use them as a tiny introduction into a subject I don’t plan to study. For example, I bought Music Theory and Marketing to this end. They are as superficial as I expected, but good enough to quiet my interest. Further, I can return to ignoring the retailer in perpetuity.

I made sure to direct my mother’s gift more, despite dithering. In the end, I decided that she could buy me a pair of everyday shoes. Mine are scuffed, but have no holes. However, she had made a little fuss about them earlier in the year and during year 8, so I knew it would please her to buy me them (rather than committing to a block of cash). I had counted on the good will to reduce her input. When my father bought me a new pair of work shoes, I used the newbalance (one of the few major brands that sells 4Es) website and chose velcro straps. These are much faster. Yes, the time is small but not trivial. Consider the comparison between pants with a zipper and pants with buttons. I happen to have one pair and know that it is an annoying extra effort.

Unfortunately, nobody buys shoes with Velcro straps and manufacturers severely limit their color selection. During my dedicated research to find one dashing pair my mother could agree to, I saw the same colors over and over: white, boring American; black, work shoes; and ‘bone,’ a light brown/grey. The most daring was a white shoe with silver streaks. In the end, my mother sidestepped color and declared Velcro straps are for old people. (I admit all diabetic’s variants have straps.) I dropped the issue (it’s her money after all) and agreed to typical navy running shoes. I toyed with ankle boots, but she reminded me they will look silly since I wear shorts all the time. I know my leg hair presents a brusque and unkempt front, but these months (and even a third of every California winter) are too hot for pants.

But the best came from aggregated money (mainly my grandparent’s). I am using it right now and had considered it for a long while. I bought a corner desk.

Prior to yesterday, I kept that red chair in the corner for storing my backpack and (occasionally) clothes. I used my laptop in the communal bonus room with the television to my back. I have typed for an hour and one half and not been interrupted in any way. If this were a weekday afternoon, my sister would be watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey or something similar. In that case, I often resorted to putting on headphones and listening to a series of white noise clips I recorded for the purpose. Music could cover it, but that is just as bad as prose English dialog calling out to me. So, I lifted the sound from four youtube clips of waves, rain, a river, and someone driving a stick shift car on the freeway. It throws a blanket over the ambient voices but grates and dilutes my concentration anyway. Now, I have near total privacy even with my door open.

I am very glad I chose this type. Officemax had tempted me intitially with cheap ‘L desks’ (two shoved together with a little round connector. As you can see, I need a deep desk because I use a separate, ergonomic keyboard with my laptop on a homemade stand. I put the towel on the lip to protect my elbows. I could go on about the trivial details, but it isn’t anything you can’t guess. The white sheet is a map of the world I drew (Winkel Tripel projection) but discarded. During writing, I hung it up. It serves nicely as a dust cover, but I have better and my work is nicer than a bare wall.

I have finally progressed to a point I am ready to reveal another entertainment: Cortex Command. PCGamer’s demo disc for “May” included the latest version. I know I can invoke the next comparison for my concurrent readers, but few others. The Nineties saw two similarly themed games: Worms and Liero. Both involved destroying the opponent’s team and terrain; but, Liero ran in real time and hosted a dedicated modding community. Data Realms, CC’s development company, has managed to combine the best elements of each with much better art to make a strong game.

In its most abstract, Cortex Command is a team-based strategy game of point capture. The story hides this well. In the future, humans have managed to sustain disembodied brains in jars and wirelessly control clone bodies. The action focuses on the gold mining arm of a larger faction called The Coalition and the player is tasked with coring this new planet for all it is worth. The game promises many factions with the same goal and the firepower to enforce each claim. Reinforcements can be bought against the ore extracted, and are brought down via rocket or drop ship (a jet-engined Osprey). The default store includes a great variety of arms: bazookas, gatling guns, auto shotguns, and pistols. In the face of such danger, we reasonably bury our brain in thick-walled concrete bases. Inevitably, mining tools are pressed into service against doors and other barriers. All these conspire to create a delicate balance of sending shock troops to besiege without abandoning our own bastion.

I must admit Cortex Command lacks a satisfying single player campaign, but only temporarily. Data Realms chose to employ a transparent game engine that has undergone much improvement. They released the newest version ‘build 23′ a few days ago, but people have played since build 13. (A few youtube videos depict obsolete missions and designs.) This marks a penultimate milestone in engine development, and they can finally focus on creating a proper campaign. They have provided four missions and a tutorial. Instead, I devote more energy toward its skirmish mode. Here we can play against the AI or up to three human opponents.

The AI presents an acceptable challenge. The AI spawns dropships and rockets all across the map that release opposing clones that dig and fight their way to my brain. I can spend hours using a single actor to destroy their transports before they land. When they kill him, though, I must scramble to bring down another before they make annoying tunnels. I could use more; they can defend themselves somewhat, but not really.

What I would really like is to encourage my sister or my friends to join me so we can battle each other. Most of the maps are designed for multiple players anyway. I had to cut one myself so as to not waste time hopping around the map to kill stragglers. Luckily, Data Realms made Cortex Command gamepad compatible. I have two playstation controllers, so I bought an usb adapter. It came in that sealed plastic, so I used our glass shears to open the package as I always do. Unsurprisingly, I cut too low and ruined the driver CD. This forced a two day hunt for a replacement driver. As Xboxes and usb gamepads have become more common, the site that most forum posts pointed to – psxpad – closed.  I eventually found mayflash_com, which hosts many varieties of drivers for its adapters. Any multiplayer bout will require a similar set up. Cortex Command will not support lan or internet multiplayer.

As I mentioned above, the game has inspired a dedicated modding community just like Liero did. I often visit its forums to download mods for new actors, weapons, and scenes (maps). Have you played the flash game ‘Body Ladder?’ Some one remade it for Cortex Command. Others have added black hole bombs, stylized robots, and a Portal gun. Obviously, you may appreciate the variety better in experiencing it.

The game has already been used to make a machinama homage to MS Paint Adventures.

The untold story and beautiful concept art inspired me to yet another project. I have a vision for a comic depicting the awakening of a cryogenically frozen contemporary who must learn about the strange culture the setting must incentivize. I have made promises like this before. This time, I abstained from mentioning my goal until I had reached a physical milestone. First, I made a tiny version of the entire ‘first chapter’ wordlessly.

I then made a script to explain all the implicit dialog in the sketches. I have just finished the next stage of sketching so all the panels mostly reflect the blocking, but not the quality of future drawings. Because I worked with the script, I didn’t try to fit in the whole dialog in each panel. Each is only a reference point with the first and last words. Here is a page: