More Frightening

Apparently, for some people, a call for reasoned action is equivalent to a call for no action. I received the following e-mail in my mailbox this morning (no changes have been made to the original letter):

we must take action…do you suggest sitting here and doing nothing?   If we continue to do nothing we will be attacked again and again….no security precautions will prevent more attacks!   Letters like you wrote promote doing nothing….what a shame so many peole [sic] have your attitude, thats why we were attacked and have done nothing so far

Things like this terrify me, and I am glad that cooler, more rational heads seem to be prevailing against any calls for immediate action against Afghanistan.

So far, we have yet to find out with real certainty who committed the attack on the World Trade Center. The government claims to have strong evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the crime, and I don’t doubt that. But "strong evidence" is not the same as "proof".

So, given that… who do we strike against? Terrorists are like the ants that Jennifer and I have been struggling against in our new home for weeks now. They hide and emerge at random, you have to deal with them when you find them, you set out traps hoping to kill off the colony, but when you’ve done all you can, there are still more waiting to strike. I fear that a war against terrorism would be an ongoing war, bloody and violent and with no real end.

Which is why we cannot strike until we have absolute proof. We have to make absolutely sure that the people we strike against are the ones who are responsible. Or they’ll come back for more later on.

Beyond that, though, is the larger issue of what the terrorists were really trying to accomplish with their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Were they trying to destroy the United States? It would take a lot more than that to do so. Were they trying to disrupt our daily lives? Well, yes, they did, but a well-written Internet worm would have done the job just as well. Were they trying to frighten and demoralize us? Possibly, but anyone with an ounce of education in American history would know that when America is hit with violence, our sense of togetherness and resolve to stand together only grows. If decades of terrorism has not yet succeeded in destroying the resolve of Israel, a nation about the size of California, why would one strike against the United States, with several times the population of Isreal and a much stronger economy and military to boot, succeed?

These terrorists were intelligent enough to plan this sort of thing out; I have to credit them with enough intelligence to know that demoralizing or crushing the United States would take a hell of a lot more than one single strike, no matter how large. And I believe that they’re intelligent to know that succeeding attacks would be much more difficult because of the inevitable tightening of security that followed the first attack. With airports closing left and right whenever anyone whispers the word "bomb" in a closed toilet stall, further strikes of the same kind would take even more cunning and planning. I suppose it’s possible that other types of attacks could be in the works, but probably nothing with the sheer destructive power that was evidenced on September 11.

At this point, I have come to believe that perhaps the goal of the attack, assuming that there was a long term goal at all, was not so much to destroy as to provoke. bin Laden and others of his ilk have been calling for an Islamic Jyhad, in all defiance of the words of the Qur’ân, for years. If the United States, with or without the support of the rest of NATO, invades Afghanistan, we’d have to move through Pakistan; if we didn’t have Pakistani support (which it looks like we do at this moment, thank God), we’d have to march through Pakistan first, which would be costly and destructive — remember that Pakistan has nuclear capability, after all. An invasion of Pakistan would be destructive on both sides, but we would probably make it, destroying Pakistan in the process — and that would certainly unite the American-hating sectors of the Arab world against the West to unprecedented levels, and that would probably bring about the prolonged armed conflict that bin Laden and his cronies are hoping for.

I have no doubt that we would win such a conflict. I don’t believe that we have God on our side any more than I believe that bin Laden has Allâh on his side, but we certainly have superior military and intelligence forces, and we have proven that our military is excellent at learning from its errors.

So that’s why I find it frightening that warhawks like the one who wrote to me are talking the way they do. It means that the terrorists are coming close to succeeding in what they set out to do on September 11.

And finally, to stage a major conflict would be admitting that it’s all right to accept large numbers of civilian casualties in support of our goal — and whenever you believe that it’s okay to kill an innocent person in the pursuit of revenge or some other cause, you start down the same path of lunacy that led to the attacks in the first place.

I do believe that taking action against those responsible is appropriate; to leave this crime unpunished would be a different type of failure on our part. But I am opposed to stupid or unmeasured actions which would lead, in the long run, to the deaths of millions of people.


On a side note, just to clarify a couple of points. I do believe that there must be increased security, for a number of reasons: first, I believe that there may be more attacks in the making; and second, it’s just good for our comfort level. I would not even consider flying on an airplane right now if it weren’t for the near-paranoid security measures currently being taken (not that I’d be all that happy about it as it is).

Of course, I don’t believe that increased vigilance should come at the cost of our civil liberties; and it certainly should not come to any sort of racial profiling of Arab Americans or racist attacks against them. Now, more than ever, it is time for us Americans to demonstrate to the world that the values which we hold true and on which we are founded continue to inform us today: namely, the values of equality for all people and our willingness to accept as fellows even those who act, dress, and even think and believe differently than we do.

If we can’t hold on to our principles and values in a time of crisis, then what good are they at all?

Slight Comfort

For the past couple of days I have been listening almost non-stop to NPR’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on my computer through streaming audio from the KQED website. I’ve listened as people have poured out their pain, as denials were proferred by various groups, as politicians have postured, as nations and peoples around the world have condemned the attack and offered their support to the United States and its peoples. I have kept a separate browser window at all times to follow the news on CNN and MSNBC. Finally, at about 2:00 this afternoon, I shut down Real Player and launched Spinner to listen to some Celtic music. Enough was enough. I didn’t want anymore. I wanted to shut out the world and focus on my work and not think about it anymore.

Of course, that isn’t possible. For the past two days at work, things have been quiet and subdued. At the meetings I’ve been to yesterday and today, the other developers and the managers have been subdued and quiet. Almost everyone has kept a window open to CNN or MSNBC or ABCNews. Of course we get work done. The software gets written, the pages get built, the servers get upgraded, the sales team gets their sales. My co-workers are almost always fairly light-hearted, and even sarcastic to the point of obnoxiousness, but that has changed this week.

Last night, Jennifer and I watched Chicken Run, an inane little movie which we both enjoyed. I was grateful when Jennifer suggested renting it, because I’d been needing to get my mind off of the news. But immediately after the movie was over, we both went upstairs to the office to check our e-mail and see what was new in the world.

This afternoon, after spending twenty minutes on a minor graphics project, I went back to CNN and loaded again the video of the second plane being flown right into the second World Trade Center tower. Big mistake; the horror and the surrealism of the entire situation came flooding back in a huge wave.

I think we’re all still getting used to the idea that this is real. It’s not a movie. It’s not a scene from a television show. It’s not fiction, God help us, it’s real. The screams in the background of that video are more haunting and frightening because of that.

Did any of us in our worst imaginings think that something like this would happen? Well, okay, of course novelists like Stephen King and Tom Clancy have imagined stories of the Apocalypse, the world ending in nuclear war or plague, and maybe there have been political or science fiction thrillers which have started with lines like, "It all began on the day of the bombings."

But who knows if any of that ever really prepared us for the reality of what has happened? We’ve been told time and again that there were no contingency plans for an attack of this magnitude, that none of the scenarios imagined by our defense department included such despicably inhuman acts as were demonstrated on Tuesday morning.

I’ve seen some terrible things said and heard of terrible things done over the past few days. People attacking Arab Americans because of their race. Hate mails strewn about the web. Calls for immediate nuclear attacks on Afghanistan. I’m disturbed by e-mails claiming that all Arab Americans are culpable, and frighened by talk of war against an indeterminate enemy.

And what I can’t help but think about every time I see those videos is those telephone calls. The unthinkable calls made at the last minute to husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters. I can’t imagine having to make such a call, and I can’t imagine ever receiving such a call from Jennifer; or, worse, stepping away from my desk one morning which seems like any other morning, and coming back to my desk to find my voice mail light flashing. What must it be like, to know you are going to die soon, to be given the opportunity to say goodbye to those you love and finding that they aren’t available? Or to come back and find that you’ve missed that last opportunity to hear the voice of someone that you cherish and know that you will never see them or hear from them again? I don’t want to think about how the people who had to make those calls must have felt, and I don’t want to think about how it must have felt to take such a call.

The grief we all feel is profound; the grief of those who have lost loved ones, in the planes or in the towers, is beyond imagining.

There have been calls for international unity, there have been offers of aid and support from nations normally hostile to us, there have been thousands upon thousands of people lined up for hours to give blood to help those injured in the attacks, thousands of volunteers helping out, millions of dollars donated to the Red Cross, the United Way, the Salvation Army and other organizations. And there have been the spontaneous expressions of grief and unity and sympathy from all over the world. While they are encouraging and helpful, those who are lost will never return. A destructive war against those who we think might be responsible won’t bring back the lives that have been lost.

So I listen to the beautiful Celtic songs, I read about scientific discoveries being made and about how humanity goes on and about how we struggle to make sense of this tragedy, and express to those directly affected that we share their grief.

And I think about the words spoken by an alien intelligence to Ellie Arroway in the movie Contact, about how puzzling humanity is: "You’re capable of such beautiful dreams… and such terrible nightmares."

This Day

I am having such a hard time finding words tonight. From the first moment when I saw the hints in my mailbox that something was wrong to watching end of the day footage on Fox, I’ve been numb. Jennifer and I have been trying to make sense of all of this, and I can only imagine what must be going through the minds of the families of the victims and those who were there to witness the devastation. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be aboard one of those planes in the last moments. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be trapped underneath the rubble of one of the collapsed buildings, not knowing whether you’ll be rescued, not even knowing what has really happened.

I’ve never had sympathy for terrorists. I’ve had sympathy for their causes, for the innocents harmed by the stupid political games that nations play (I honestly believe that politics have killed more people than any other natural disaster), but terrorists have always struck me as one of the lower forms of life, lower even than Congressional bureaucrats. What point can possibly be worth killing more people than have died in any peace-time man-made activity?

We’re going to be coming to grips with this for a long time. We may never know exactly how many people died in this mindless attack. We may never know why one jet crashed in Pennsylvania instead of reaching its true target. We may never even know who’s responsible for this amazingly well-coordinated attack. Government officials are pointing the blame at Osama Bin Laden, but there’s no real evidence of his involvement right now. No one has claimed responsibility, and I find that more frightening than anything else for some reason.

I know that my own shock and horror are miniscule. I’m still alive and I know no one who was killed or even injured in the blasts. I can only hope and pray that those who have lost loved ones will find comfort, that we as a nation can find the strength to heal, and that we can all avoid allowing our own anger and hatred to overwhelm us and spread the horror even further with racist attacks on Arab Americans or worse.

Amazon.com has set up a PayPal link to the American Red Cross, which needs both money and blood. Please contribute as much of both as you can.

Majestic

A couple of years ago, before Y2K failed to dim so much as a single light bulb at midnight, studying bizarre and wacky conspiracy theories was quite a hobby of mine. I used to spend hours reading through the more bizarre conspiracy sites, looking up black helicopters, Men In Black, the Majestic-12 group, and so on. I enjoyed reading the rants of William F. Cooper, and a couple of others whose name I’ve completely forgotten at this point. And while I never believed that JFK was killed by anything more complicated than a single gunman with very good luck, I always found it intriguing to learn what people thought about the idea that the US Government had signed a treaty with alien visitors to exchange technology for human experimental subjets, or whether the United Nations is set to invade the United States and turn the world into a single government police state.

Personally, I think that believing such tripe is giving way too much credit to the ability of the US Government to keep secrets. Yes, small secrets can be kept for a good amount of time — there are people I know who performed secret operations in the Armed Forces decades ago and who still won’t talk about it — but massive conspiracies just won’t work for long periods of time. It would involve the willingness of everyone involved, from the highest to the lowest, to keep their mouths shut forever about massively important issues, and people just aren’t capable of doing that. And the government, after all, is composed of people who are capable of the same mistakes and screw-ups that you and I are capable of.

On the other hand, it is fun to speculate. Does the government really engage in mind control experiments under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA? Does Majestic-12 really exist? Are there really aliens that maintain regular contact with the US government? And so on. I especially enjoyed making up my own wacky conspiracy theories using the same evidence that many of the other conspiracy theorists out there used (the best ones always claimed that the official denial of the existence of a conspiracy was outright proof that a conspiracy exists — which is sort of like saying that my denail that I own luxury yacht harbored in Boston is absolute proof that I do own such a yacht).

And so now there’s this game, Majestic, an on-line role-playing game which incorporates all of these elements and throws you deep into a storyline involving the conspiracy. But Majestic doesn’t just keep itself confined to the computer screen; oh, no. You get telephone calls, you get e-mails, you get instant messages, you get faxes… It’s an immersive sort of experience. I’d first heard about Majestic at DunDraCon 2001, and I checked it out briefly one night while I was in Portland last March, but I avoided getting involved. I just didn’t have time for it.

But the other day my friend PurplKat sent me an instant message telling me that I just had to check out this game. So I went, I signed up for the free preview and played it through, and found myself getting caught up. I finished off the free preview in a couple of days, and decided to splurge and go for the full experience. The game is meant, really, for people like me, who don’t really have the time to get fully involved in a long term game, so the puzzles are relatively simple and can be solved in a few minutes with the clues that the game gives you. Sometimes you have to go back and look up some things that you hadn’t considered important before, and some times it’s possible to miss something completely.

But my main interest is in the unfolding storyline, which is what I always get intrigued by (I’m the kind of guy who, when playing a game on my computer, almost always turns off the "battle" features, or sets the battle difficulty at minimum so that I can concentrate on the mysteries and plots at hand). Seeing the names of secret groups like Majestic come up, or MK-ULTRA, or HAARP, or even Pale Horse is like re-encountering old friends… delusional friends, of course, but it’s still fun to get wrapped up in a story like this which involves some of the same elements I played around with just for fun a few years ago.

Of course, if you’re the type of person who believed that The Blair Witch Project was real, then, obviously, Majestic isn’t for you. Nevertheless, though, I’ve encountered a couple of people playing the game who believe that "it’s more than a game". One fellow I chatted with joked about "they" tapping our IM conversations, but I did encounter someone who really does believe that the government is keeping an eye on the people who play this game.

I always worry about people like this. When I ran a Live Action Vampire game in Davis a couple of years ago, I included on our website a link with the words "So you think you’re a real vampire?" which led to Bellevue Mental Hospital. There really are people out there who think that they’re vampires, and some of them play in LARP’s. There really are people who think that their Dungeons and Dragons characters have some sort of life outside of the game. There really are people who believe in these "shadow governments" and the aliens and that the United Nations is going to take over at any minute and confiscate all of our guns.

It’s the people like these who give fodder to the anti-gaming nuts, the ones who go on daytime talk shows with stories about how Dungeons and Dragons caused their kid to commit suicide. The truth is that the kid was probably already troubled to begin with, and the game gave the kid an outlet for their troubles. In such cases, I blame the parents for not seeing the signs before hand, and for essentially neglecting the kid’s emotional needs.

But I guess that’s all beside the point. The real point is that I’m getting more deeply involved in this game, and I’m enjoying it immensely. For the small price that it costs and the fact that it requires very little time commitment, it’s worth it.

And who knows? Perhaps there is a grand world conspiracy to let the Illuminati control the United Nations through the extraterrestrials who are breeding hybrids with human beings and using top secret mind control devices developed by the US Government during the Vietnam War to turn us all into slaves of the New World Order. And perhaps Kennedy was killed because he knew all this and was about to tell the truth.

Nah. That’s preposterous. And besides, if I knew, would I really tell you?

But now I’ve got to go. Jennifer and I are headed out to Boston to take a cruise.

In Which Richard Ponders World Conquest, and Jennifer has a Revelation

It was the second day of Dragon*Con 2001, one of the largest science fiction gatherings in the United States. Jennifer and I were taking a break from the panels and the dealer room and the art show and were sitting in the eating area of the hotel’s restaurant, people watching. Past us strolled Klingons, angels, fairies, goths, Imperial Stormtroopers, Blue Meanies… in short, a wide variety of the best and the brightest that the galaxy has to offer. We were seated facing outwards, pointing out costumes and making comments to each other. Most of these comments were nice, of course — Jennifer and I are both, on the whole, nice people — but some were, I admit, downright catty (one in particular that I made to Jennifer: "I love coming to these conventions; I can feel positively slender here!").

I watched carefully and observed how a lot of the people interacted with each other. It’s true that a lot of them have less than perfectly developed social interaction skills, so a lot of them are very shy and don’t interact well with other people who don’t share their interests — with the Mundanes. But even with those folks who had shown up at the Hyatt in downtown Atlanta on Real Business (that probably involved Lots of Money), the conventioneers were polite and civil, which is a lot more than I can say for most of the other people I usually meet in large crowded settings. And it occurred to me that most of these people just want to be liked, somewhere near to the surface; they just don’t know how to express it or act on it. Hence, they are often shy and introverted, but very polite and very courteous.

I mentioned this to Jennifer, who agreed with me. I went on to say, "You know, almost all of these folks are very intelligent and creative. Good problem solvers."

"Mm hmmm," said Jennifer.

"And," I added, "very capable problem-solvers. The ones who have played lots of Dungeons and Dragons are even used to solving problems in teams." Which is true; and, in fact, there are studies which show that teenagers who play role-playing games actually have a lower suicide rate than most other teenagers; and this is usually attributed to the fact that they have learned well how to confront and solve problems as groups.

"You’re right," said Jennifer.

"I know I’m right," I said. "And," I went on, "there is a lot of untapped talent for good here. I bet someone with just the right level of charisma and know-how could mobilize these folks and leverage all of that talent and intelligence into world domination. I bet I could do it."

"Yes, dear," said Jennifer. This is the code phrase she uses which means, "That’s very nice, dear, you go ahead and do that and I’ll just sit here and eat my salad."

So I know that if I do go out and leverage the power of the fan community into world conquest, I’ll do it with Jennifer’s blessing. But I probably won’t. I can’t figure out what the heck I want to do with my own life, so God only knows what I’d do if I had to cope with figuring out to do with an entire planet. So I’ll leave it to someone else to work out the logistics of conquering the world with legions of science fiction fans, fantasy fans, and goths.

On the whole, it was a great convention. I’ve already mentioned how much fun it was to sit and people watch and take in the costumes. The panels I attended — ranging in topic from "The Prospects for Artificial Intelligence" to "Horror in the New Millenium" to "Game Designing in the Twenty-First Century" — were fascinating, and I got to meet at least one of my favorite writers, and have some interesting conversations about whether ant hills could think and how to incorporate horror elements into science fiction games. My good friend Evilpheemy had wanted me to run a playtest of the science fiction/horror role-playing game that he and I have been developing for about four years now, but I honestly didn’t have a chance. There was too much else going on. Next year, when we go back, I’ll try to get in a playtest of the (hopefully) completed game, as well as do some more socializing, and perhaps even attend some of the live music events that they have going on late at night.

On Saturday, both Jennifer and I attended a panel which was entitled, "Science Fiction for the New Millenium," which was supposed to address the topic of what social problems and innovations science fiction would be addressing now that the year 2001 is almost over and cloning, AI, space stations, and cybernetic implants all seem to be becoming realities. In reality, the topic wasn’t very well addressed, because when the topic of ethics in the new century came up, the specific issue of copyright violations on the Internet emerged. One of the panelists — a shortish fellow, well-respected in the science fiction field, and with a reputation for being a bit outspoken (if you know who I’m talking about, you know that I don’t need to name him; and if you don’t, naming him won’t do you any good anyway) — went on a long rant on the topic and confronted one of the audience members face to face; I thought he was going to hit the poor guy. I felt sorry for him — the audience member, that is — but I also realize that it’s practically an honor to be berated in public by this particular writer.

Jennifer became annoyed at the entire situation. We had come to see the topic of "Science Fiction in the New Millenium" addressed, and instead the panel became a forum for addressing one author’s particular hot button. As we left the auditorium, Jennifer looked at me and said, "He may be a respected writer, but he’s a real jerk."

To which one of the people who were passing us at the time and who had overheard us replied, "Yes, but that’s just the way he is."

And then Jennifer said, "Well, I guess you don’t have to be nice to be popular."

Well, okay, it probably wasn’t much of a revelation; I’m sure that Jennifer already knew that, after all. But I had already come up with the title for this entry and I needed a story to fit it.

Dragon*Con was, over all, brilliant. I enjoyed everything, from the AI panel to the 2001 Miss Klingon Empire Beauty Pageant (I can’t even pronounce the name of the woman who took the title, and spelling it would be hopeless — suffice to say that she earned the title). I came away wishing I could have seen more, and that I had had time to do more, including running the playtest. I came away with questions: questions like, "How can I make the setting for our role-playing game truly horrifying?" and "Where can I find more of that guy’s books?" and — most importantly — "Since when was a Jedi lightsaber part of a Klingon armoury?"

Some questions, I guess, will never be answered.

I can’t wait until next year’s Dragon*Con. I’m sure it will be as much of a blast as this year’s.

'Cause You Can Never Have Too Few Linux Boxes

Because I was so darn excited about my computer at home and feeling cocky about having fixed up my Linux box so well, I started feeling cocky. "You know what would be cool," I told myself, "is to have a shared partition on my computer at work that both Windows and Linux could see. That way, I could work on a file in Windows, save it, reboot into Linux, and work on it again without having to e-mail it to myself. ‘Cause that’s just silly."

So I broke out the copy of Partition Magic which our IT guy had given to me many months ago when I first started messing around with Linux at work, and began merrily partitioning left and right. Whee! A 500 MB partition to share happily between Linux and Windows! Is life grand, or what?

But then, of course, came the errors. "Error 302: Cannot write file." "Fatal error in partition: 302".

Um.

Partition Magic told me that it had finished the partitioning, and so I tentatively clicked "Reboot". The computer whirred and buzzed, with very little smoke, and then happily launched Windows.

It took me a few minutes, though, to realize that something really had gone wrong. Normally, when I boot up my computer, I get a LILO boot screen, which lets me decide at boot time whether I want to run Linux or Windows. This time, I got no such screen.

A little bit of digging confirmed my worst fear: in my zest to improve life at work for my Linux computer, I went and zarked Linux.

"Zark" is a technical term, by the way. It means just what you think it means.

Okay, so I got a little over-confident. This won’t be too hard to fix. No, really. I just need to reinstall Linux. And LILO. And hope to God that I don’t fry the Master Boot Record and destroy any chance I might ever have of logging into any operating system at all on my computer. Because the neatest thing in the world is turning on your computer and finding a nice little screen that says, "Operating System Not Found."

Ugh. Can I go home now?

Munchkin' Away

Over the past five years or so, my parents have built up a fairly respectable little theater company at their church, the Shoestring Theater Company. They’ve put on a number of productions, including Oliver Twist, Annie, and Godspell, in addition to smaller productions that are usually part of a church service or some such thing. This year, their production was The Wizard of Oz, which I think my father has been wanting to be a part of for years. Jennifer and her parents and I drove the 120 miles or so down to Los Gatos on Saturday to see the play, and we all had a grand time. My sister was fun to watch as the Scarecrow, my aunt was perfectly cast as the Wicked Witch of the West (no offense to my aunt, of course — so please don’t turn me into a toad!), and my dad, in my opinion, pretty much stole the show with his portrayal of the Cowardly Lion. On the whole, though, I really do think I enjoyed watching my little sister portray the Scarecrow the most. I am inordinantly proud of her; she’s recently graduated high school and has started attending a local junior college to take classes in art. I don’t think she knows what she wants do Do With Her Life yet, but that’s quite all right; at 18, you don’t have to know. I, personally, think that she ought to pursue the arts; she’s quite a talented artist, in my opinion, and I hope that she does something with that in the future. Whatever she does, though, I’m sure that she’ll do it well.

Jennifer’s mother was really impressed with the show, as she was with the Shoestring Theater Company’s production of Godspell last year. What really impressed her was the way the production company had included everyone who wanted to be included. "Everyone has a place at God’s table," she said. And it’s true that my parents have made a special effort to get as many people involved in their productions as possible. For the munchkins, of course, my parents cast dozens of the church’s children; and who, really, would be better for the part? The children very obviously had a great time in the show, even the one young boy who was either sick or too shy to take part in most of the dancing and sat on the step in front of Dorothy’s house, next to the withered feet of the Wicked Witch of the East.

Segue here. But I promise that I’ll bring some of these upcoming disparate elements together somewhere in here, somehow. Keep the faith.

My friend Evilpheemy and I are in the middle of designing a role-playing game system; we’ve only been gaming together for a few years, not even five years, so I don’t have quite the gaming history with him that other people do; but our minds work enough alike that we can work together on a large creative project without ripping each others’ throats out yet still have enough differences of opinions so that things can still get interesting. Evilpheemy’s concentrating on the development of the actual mechanics of the system, with some input from me, while I’ve been busily developing the overall milieu of the game setting, with some input from him. All in all, though, The Outer Darkness is primarily his baby.

The two of us represent two different styles of gaming. We’re not really opposite ends of the spectrum; Evilpheemy enjoys rules and systems and gaming engines much more than I do; whereas I think I’m a bit more prone to worrying about whether my storylines are clichéd or truly original, and making sure that my games are some sort of High Art, and I rarely know all of the rules as thoroughly as I should (in fact, when I spent three years of my life running a Vampire oriented Live Action Role-Playing Game, I had a number of assistant Storytellers whose role was to focus on the mechanics of the rules and rule interpretations while I built up the huge plots that really excited me). Naturally, neither style of play is better than the other. It’s kind of like the difference between the UI of Macintosh or Windows 9x; both are essentially the same, but both have fanatical adherents.

In gaming, though, there is a phenomenon which is often referred to as "Munchkin Gaming". The term "munchkin" is applied to those players who insist on a certain sort of high-powered gaming. These are the players in a Dungeons and Dragons game who really want characters that are half-dragon 28th level mages that can polymorph at will into an Elven fighter mage, or something like that. In Vampire: The Masquerade, they want to be the 6th Generation Brujah with Disciplines to rival any Antediluvian, plus several Master-level out-of-clan Disciplines besides.

If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then you probably know the type anyway; Munchkins come in all forms and sizes and live everywhere. Outside of gaming, Munchkins are the ones who insist that they know more than the teacher, who refuse to believe it when the teacher is right; they’re the ones who always know more than you, who always want more than you, and who believe with all of their soul that they deserve it. And what’s more, they whine about it when they don’t get it.

I’ve been running role-playing games in one form or another for close to twenty years, and it’s quite a fair estimate when I say that I’ve probably run close to a thousand game sessions. In all that time, I’ve never met a player who didn’t exhibit some sort of munchkinism at one point or another. I’ve done it myself, even; when I play a character in someone else’s game, I frequently want to be the Really Powerful Mage or the Mega Fighter. I try to keep my whining down when my stats don’t quite make it to all eighteens, at least.

I can think of many ways that you can be a munchkin outside of gaming. The most obvious that springs to mind is to insist that you deserve a special set of privileges from life, and to whine about it when you don’t get it. Do you believe that you’re entitled to a particular job, a particular lifestyle, a particular income level, a particular set of circumstances in life? Well, okay, that’s fine. But how are you going to choose to respond to the fact that you probably don’t haven’t got that job, that income, that set of circumstances — are you going to whine about it, take your dice and your character sheet and go home, so to speak? Or are you going to stick in it for the long haul and see where you can take your low-level character over the next few months of the campaign? Personally, I think that the second is the more desireable option; if for no other reason than because you’ll probably have a lot more fun along the way.

The Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz are a fairly innocuous folk, happy and beaming and organizing themselves into groups with auspicious names like "The Lullabye League" and "The Lollipop Guild". I’m not sure how the term Munchkin came to be associated with the obnoxious practices in gaming that I’ve outlined above. Who knows, except that the term "munchkin" came to be associated with contemptuous behavior in general.

How do I continue to "munchkinate" in my own life? Well, there is certainly a part of me which would like to believe that I can have a career which I enjoy, in which I’m successful, and in which I can earn the respect of my colleagues for my skill and talent in that career; heck, I have this dream of being invited to lend my expertise in places all over the world. I don’t know if I’m ever going to achieve that, and at the age of 33 it seems unlikely that I’ll ever find such a career… and I’m not entirely sure that being another code jock in another cubicle will lead me there. I can respond to that situation by either whining about it, or taking the relatively low stats that I’ve rolled for myself, setting out at the beginning, and seeing where I can go.

The old adage says that a man’s reach should never exceed his grasp. However, there is a line from William Blake of which I’m very fond, which goes something like this: "A man’s reach MUST exceed his grasp; otherwise, what is heaven for?" And even Data, the "artificial life form" from Star Trek: The Next Generation had wisdom regarding this sort of thing; he knew that his quest to become truly human would never succeed, but he understood that sometimes reaching for such a goal is in and of itself important, because the journey itself provides its own rewards.

Meanwhile, here I sit, typing away on my computer, close to midnight. I promised Evilpheemy that I would have a completed campaign setting for The Outer Darkness finished up by the end of the month, which will be upon us on Saturday, and I’m not finished with it yet. So I guess I’d better get working.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of some of the cast from my parents’ production of The Wizard of Oz. You can see my sister dressed up as the Scarecrow, and my dad dressed up as the Cowardly Lion. It was a great play, and if you happen to be in the neighborhood of the Presbyterian Church of Los Gatos in the next week, I strongly recommend that you check it out.


In other news: after over two weeks of messing around and struggling, I’ve finally gotten my Linux box working again. The solution involved re-installing the proper kernel from the installation CD-ROM and updating my network configuration. There are still a few minor kinks to work out, but now I can boot my Linux box again and even get on-line without booting the other computers in our network off-line. I am so proud of myself that I could just spit.

Shooting Zombies at Dusk: Or, Five Reasons Why My Wife Is Cooler than Yours

So the other evening, I went out into our back yard to hang my laundry out to dry. I came back inside to hear the sounds of gunfire, screaming, and high-speed industrial music emanating from our living room. This would probably have been alarming to some people, I suppose, but I wasn’t at all dismayed; I simply knew that Jennifer was in the living room, playing House of the Dead. When I approached, she smiled distractedly, not looking away from the dying zombies and monsters that were oozing green blood, and pointed at the other light pistol, which she had gotten out of the box but not plugged in. I sat down next to her, plugged in the light gun, clicked "Start" and began shooting.

Marrying Jennifer was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. There are many reasons why this is true, but here are the top five reasons why I’m convinced that this was a good idea:

  1. She Cooks. Jennifer actually seems to like cooking. And even though I tell her it isn’t necessary to prepare dinner every night, she does so anyway. And she’s a good cook, too.
  2. She’s Funny. Strange things just pop out of her mouth sometimes, like when she called the cats "fuzzy window beans". I have no idea what it means, and I don’t think she does either, but it made me laugh.
  3. She’s Brilliant. Apart from being smart enough to have the incredibly good judgement to marry me (either that, or someone slipped in a frontal lobotomy somewhere when she wasn’t looking), she’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and she’s not afraid to show it. And I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who reads as fast as she does.
  4. She Plays "House of the Dead". It goes without saying that a wife who plays shoot-em-up games with you which feature zombies oozing green gore is just cool. In fact, she was the one who insisted that we buy the game, as well as the DreamCast system to play it on (and who knows? maybe one day we’ll even buy another game for the DreamCast).
  5. She’s Just That Cool. There aren’t many guys in the world who are lucky enough to find someone like Jennifer, let alone be fortunate enought to marry them. I try to tell her often how I feel and how much I appreciate her, but sometimes I need to say these things in a public forum as well.

Thanks for everything, Jennifer. I love you more than anything.

At Square One. Still.

Back on March 7, I referred to a project I’d taken on at work: re-engineering a large piece of open-source software, Phorum, which is written in a hypertext processing language called PHP (a scripting language similar to ASP or Cold Fusion), to operate against our in-house database schema. Phorum typically comes with its own database and is designed to be run in conjunction with an open-source database program called MySQL, and although ports to other database programs are available, it really only works best when compiled with MySQL. Our company uses Oracle as our database backend, and our platform engineering manager decided that he wasn’t at all pleased with the way Phorum builds and creates new tables, willy-nilly — we don’t want a third-party application, he told us, to build new tables at will in our database. So our senior database programmer built us a new schema and one of the Portland developers and I spent two months re-engineering Phorum to work with a new database schema built in Oracle instead of its native schema built in MySQL.

The project was finished, more or less, shortly before I left for Ireland and the UK. I was never quite happy with the way it turned out; there were major bugs in the program, and certain elements of its functionality were never thoroughly implemented. But QA gave our re-engineered version of Phorum a formal write-off and we implemented it and it went live and our customers used it (more or less, though I don’t believe utilization was ever very high). The other developer and I created a long list of known issues that we intended to work on and fix when I returned from my trip.

Of course, while I was gone, the axe fell, and the other developer that I’d been working with was laid off. I was told by one of the managers in the Sacramento office that I would be inheriting the whole of the Phorum re-engineering project when I returned, and I looked forward to that. There was a lot left to do, and with a whole new piece of functionality being implemented on our customer website, there was going to be a need for an entirely new set of code. Phase II of the Phorum Re-engineering Project would be kicked off around about mid-August.

And here it is, mid-August. And the other day, B–, the other developer in the Sacramento office, sent me an instant message telling me that he had been assigned to this project. He knew that I’d been anticipating this project and looking forward to it, and he knew that I would be upset that I wasn’t assigned to it. He was right. I was upset. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that upset at work since my days working at Pizza Hut when I nearly got into a fight with an assistant manager who threatened to shove my glasses down my throat.

The reason B– was assigned and not me? Based on an IM conversation I glanced at over someone’s shoulder (not actually the way it happened, but I promised certain parties that I wouldn’t reveal how it actually happened), it was because the Production Manager wanted someone more competent to handle the project. "No offense [to Richard]", he said, "but we need someone to clean up the mess that he made."

Of course, when I asked the production manager directly why I wasn’t assigned to the project, he replied, "I’d forgotten that you’d worked on Phase I, and when [the other developer] left, all of his knowledge base was transferred to C–, and it was natural to assign this project to him." B–, to his credit, had declined to work on the project (which I told him was appreciated but really unnecessary — though B– told me that the Production Manager knew I’d be upset that B– was working on this and not me). So the project team for the project is composed entirely of developers up in Portland.

Of course, I knew that the Production Manager’s response to my own query was bullshit, but there’s no easy way to call a manager on that, so I let it drop. He told me that he’d assign me to technological projects in the future, but I honestly don’t believe him at this point. I’ve been hearing this sort of promise for nearly a year now and nothing, really, has come of it.

What this has all really made clear to me is the enormity of the error I made in taking this job, and how badly I’ve screwed my career up. I was eager to leave the University, but I can’t remember why at this point, if it was for anything besides the income. If I’d remained at my last position with the University, in Information Technology: Communications Resources, I’d have, by now, over a year of solid Cold Fusion programming experience under my belt, not to mention formal training in Oracle, XML, SQL, C++, and Java. And while my pay would not be as high as it is now, I would certainly be in a much better position to move forward in a career in programming than I am now.

And so I find myself taking stock of my situation. I know HTML — but that’s no major accomplishment any more. HTML is startlingly easy to pick up. I have a miniscule amount of experience with Cold Fusion. I pretend to know Java, but I really have very little experience with it, none of it paid; same with C, Perl, and Unix/Linux. I thought that I knew PHP and SQL.

It’s hard to accept that I am still far away from a decent career in the field, and I’m feeling overwhelmed and intimidated. I did major damage to my career by taking this job, and I have no idea how to go about fixing it. And I’m beginning to wonder if it’s really worth it.

Mind you, I’m not mad at the company, or the Production Manager, or anyone in particular, except for myself. This is rather typical of me. At the risk of sounding like someone who is deep in the throes of a typical midlife crisis, I’m looking back over my life and trying to find some accomplishment that I can really point to with pride and finding very little. I’ve never been very good at disciplined approaches to anything, nor at committing myself to anything. What I describe as "intellectual vagabondism", my tendency to expose myself to a wide array of fields, is not so much a broad range of knowledge as it is an inability to focus my efforts on one thing in particular. My degree in philosophy isn’t due to any noble commitment to learning as it is to laziness; I found that I could do well at philosophy with very little effort, but I could also do well at other fields, such as physiology or biology or chemistry, by applying myself. I just didn’t feel like it.

I hate feeling like I’m at square one, and I hate knowing that if I’d ever been able to approach anything with discipline I would not be at square one, that I might be able to point at something I’ve accomplished honestly, without having to fake or exaggerate its importance. I hate knowing that my college years were a waste and that I lack any sort of discipline or concentration that would allow me to move forward.

At least I have a job, which pays decently even if it is a dead-end job. And right now there are few projects that are pure HTML, and I’m simply not being assigned to other projects (and it’s not through a lack of my volunteering). So right now my workload is light, and my work load next week will be light as well. So I have plenty of time to crack open my books on C and Java and pretend that I have the discipline to learn something new.

I suppose that this might be a good thing.

No More Yielding than a Dream

And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream…

–"A Midsummer Night’s Dream", Act V Scene 1

I know that I really ought to be concentrating on one thing at a time, but there are far too many things that I want to do. A partial list:

  1. Learn Linux (so that I can get my Linux box working and browsing our local network successfully, not to mention getting it talking to our printer)
  2. Learn Java (heck, I’m even enrolled in an on-line class)
  3. Install and configure all kinds of neat things on my Linux box — Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Perl, python — and learn how to run them all
  4. Run a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign
  5. Create and run a full-length scenario in a role-playing game system that a friend of mine and I have been developing for about three years now
  6. Write a novel that takes place in that same milieu (loosely based on The Pilgrim’s Progress, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner"
  7. Learn C and C++
  8. Learn how to program for the PalmOS
  9. Get a new job
  10. Finish reading The Lord of the Rings
  11. Work out regularly
  12. Learn XML
  13. Read Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray
  14. Learn Unicode
  15. Finish writing a database application in PHP and MySQL for our family website
  16. And, oh yeah, sleep once in awhile.

In an ideal world, I’d find some way of combining several of those projects into one big project, making my life much more efficient. Of course, tools like my Palm Pilot make it much easier in some ways; for example, during a corporate update meeting last week I was able to write notes for my Dungeons and Dragons game right into my Palm Pilot and look like I was paying attention and, yes, even taking notes about what the COO was saying.

Actually, I suppose, in a truly ideal world, I’d find a way to get paid to do all of those things. Heck, if I could find a way to get paid what I’m earning now to create sophisticated on-line web/database applications with PalmOS components and which focused on my own creative little worlds of science fiction and fantasy — well, then I’d be very happy. The same friend with whom I’m developing the new role-playing game dreams of a day when we can travel to a science fiction convention or see a new science fiction film and write it off as a business expense.

Actually, that’s only half of what I’d like to do. The other half is exactly the same thing but with a focus on building similar applications for research professionals — specifically, field researchers involved in cultural, wildlife, and natual resource conservation.

Now that I think about it, though, perhaps those two things aren’t all that different after all. It’s all about me learning how to use the latest and greatest web-enabled technologies to enable people to work with each other to explore and learn about the world around them and tell meaningful stories to each other about what they’ve found and learned.

But that appears to be a weak and idle theme, no more yielding than a dream…


Addendum, a few minutes later. There are actually a couple of different organizations which do at least part of what I’m interested in: Skotos has been seriously developing new technologies to build up interactive storytelling on the web (even if the front end honestly doesn’t resemble anything more interesting than a pretty MUD interface); and Explorati has been building new software and tools to enable web based communities of all types, with a particular focus on interactive storytelling. Unfortunately, neither company is hiring. Ah, well.