The formula for humor-substitute

"Meme" used to mean a self-replicating idea, but it seems to have been diluted so much that all it means now is something that you repeat by rote as a substitute for wit or humor. The Internet is so choked with these meaningless, unamusing endless repetitions that one despairs of finding real humor anymore. Why be witty when you can just plug something into a formula instead? After all, everything is funny if you print it over a picture of a cat, or insert it between "1)" and "2) ??? 3) Profit". Did we learn nothing from "all your base are belong to us"?

Don't get me wrong: there is such a thing as a running joke. But to be a running joke, first of all, it has to be a joke.

Lorecon post-con report

As I had worried in my previous post, Dead of Winter turned out to be not a great choice for a con. If I had run it before I could probably fix the timing better, but as it is, we ran out of time without a solution to the mystery. Characters had an idea who was responsible but did not have any proof or any ideas where to find proof; it didn't occur to them to interview the people of the abbey more to find out about them. However, so far as I could tell, a good time was had by all, and people did get into their characters and the setting.

As a whole the con was as expected, exhilirating, fun, and exhausting. The games I played were as good as or better than the ones I played last year. Joe's horror game Mud Season was a standout, mostly because the plan we came up with was so fun to see through. Had some fun playing a board game called Pirate's Cove, though in the end, the game has lots of interesting strategic issues that all get undermined by a heavy luck influence that can easily undo everything your carefully crafted tactics have accomplished in a moment. Siobhan's Paranoia game didn't go off, too few people. Towards the end, a wearing game of Munchkin: Impossible (due to a bunch of irrepressible ten-year-old boys with no sense of personal space or of quiet) had a few good moments, notably when I turned someone's sex-change card against them by forcing them to help me defeat a super-spy that boosted me from level 2 to level 7 in a single turn.

By the time we arrived home through an abysmally icky mid-April blizzard (that hit a few hours early, or we would have avoided it) I was exhausted and sore and very glad to be home. Even in spite of the storm threatening to take out the power (which it finally did first thing this morning), knock out my Internet (which it did last night), interrupt cell phone service (some time during the night), knock down trees on my property (while I was watching this morning), and block the roads with more fallen trees (took an hour to get to work after several attempts were blocked). What a day! What a weekend! Can I go back to bed now?

Prepping for Lorecon

Tomorrow is Lorecon's first day. My slot GMing is Saturday morning, but once the con starts, it'll be too late to do any prep for it. I decided not to start the prep until this week, and I've found the adventure needs a bit more prep than I expected, so I'm a little hurried, but not too bad.

First, there's a lot of people and it's hard to keep them straight. The adventure could be better organized with more reference materials; I have to make the same cheat-sheet of NPCs that probably everyone who's ever run it has had to make, so why not include it in the adventure?

Also, its very non-linear plotline makes it hard to time to fit the slot. The trick of running a game at a con successfully is timing. You've got four hours and, of all the factors in your control, the single factor that will make the most impact on whether the players come away satisfied is whether the adventure concludes at 3 hours and 50 minutes in, or not. An adventure that ends too early is all right, but non-optimal; but an adventure that simply runs out of time (very, very common at cons) always comes off a lot worse for it.

To make your adventure fit a slot, use these two tricks.

1. Figure out where in the adventure's story you should be at the quarter, halfway, and three-quarters points. Figure out what time that will be. When the game is running, if you're running behind, hurry the plot by dropping clues on the characters, or leaving out encounters or complications. If you're running ahead, make things take longer or throw in extra encounters.
   
   
2. Write an adventure with several endings. That is, write it with one ending in mind, then figure out how some twist could make that not quite the ending, and put a few clues in pointing at that, and then write a second ending. Then if you're running behind, the earlier ending can be a satisfying conclusion and the remaining dangling threads will just be forgotten.

This adventure doesn't really lend itself to that. That's what I get for using a prefab, and at someone else's recommendation, but I am sure I can make it work. It'll just take a little more time, for me to work out a few extra complications I can throw in or take out as needed. Which is where I get stuck; I'm not sure if I'll have that time.

Now the good news. Columbia Games, having forgotten about me, decided to make it up to me by sending quite a generous packet. In addition to $5-off coupons and catalogs for everyone, I got two copies of HârnPlayer, second edition, which they're probably trying to get rid of since they have a third edition out now, but they're still great handouts and will be useful at the game. Plus a copy of Kanday, which will not only be useful for me in GMing but will be a nice perk for me. Plus a copy of the adventure, which I plan to also give out at the con. Very likely everyone who isn't already in my group will get a free book for attending, plus the coupon. Pretty nice haul.

One year later

Unnoticed, my blog's one-year anniversary just passed. Happy birthday to my blog! Still haven't quite run out of things to talk about; but the more serious and deep subjects of philosophy and transhumanism and such, I haven't found enough time to resume digging into. It's always easier to write a rant about something.

Extra-potent selfishness

This is something I've thought about writing in my blog many times, but I can never figure out how to say it so it doesn't seem petty. Part of it is being annoyed by selfish people, but part of it reflects my natural ability and propensity for looking at things systemically -- stepping out of my own perspective and thinking about what makes sense for the community as a whole.

The thing that always reminds me of it is when I go to get a glass of water from my office's bottled water dispenser. The office follows the obvious and unspoken rule: if you're the one who takes the last of a bottle, it's your job to switch to a new bottle. And this is a remarkably equitable rule. The odds of you being the one to change a bottle are exactly proportional to how much you use the bottled water compared to everyone else. If Bob uses twice as much water as Jane, today Jane might happen to be the one to hit the bottom of a bottle, but over the long term, Bob should be the one to hit that point exactly twice as much as Jane, and that's perfectly fair.

But suppose that Jane happens to be a selfish moron. In that case, when she hits the bottom of the bottle, she just walks away. Bob gets there to find an empty bottle, and now he has to do Jane's share. He grumbles about the selfish people who won't do their share and force him to do it. So far, what we have is a zero-sum game: for every bit of bad Jane avoids, exactly that same amount of bad gets dumped on Bob.

But now consider the fact that the bottled water dispenser includes a system to heat or cool the water so you don't get lukewarm room temperature water. This only works if there's water in the system, though. Not only does Bob have to suffer doing Jane's share of the bottle swapping, his reward for this is to get stuck with lukewarm water.

For some reason the systemic inefficiency of this offends me almost as much as Jane's root selfishness. Jane isn't just making things worse for Bob, she's also making things worse for the entire system. This is what I find myself thinking: "If Jane is going to be a selfish [word omitted], at least she could do so honestly. She should tell Bob, 'Because I'm selfish I left you to change the bottle. You might as well do it now so you'll at least have cold water later.'"

There are plenty of situations like this. A similar office-related one: I have a few cans of soda in the fridge and a 12-pack of soda next to it; when I take one can I replace it so I always have some cold. When people steal my soda it irks me, but it's less than 25¢. However, finding I don't have a cold soda when I want one makes me fume. Why can't they at least put another can in after stealing one of mine?

If someone steals your wallet, they don't really want the wallet itself, or your library cards. Probably they don't even want your driver's license and social security card. They might even have no interest in your credit cards; many muggers are just out for cash. But are they going to give that stuff back? Unlikely, even in situations where it adds no significant risk for them. So you're out the cash they gained (zero-sum), but you're also out a bunch of time and money to replace all those things. You may well find yourself thinking, who cares about the $50 I was carrying, compared to the day off I'm going to have to spend at the DMV office!

It would be nice if things could be arranged in such a way that the selfish people only stole what they took from us, not something extra robbed from everyone, too.

You'd like this.

Consider these two scenarios, similar in intent, representing opposite points in a spectrum.

1. Hey, I was thinking about movies I like, and based on what I know about your tastes and preferences, I picked out these few that I think you would also like. Let me tell you a little about them so you can decide if you would, since of course you know your own tastes better than I do. If you want, ask me questions about them to help you decide if you'd like them. If you don't think you'd like them, no problem.
   
   
2. http://www.youtube.com/v/MrYYWI9JDLM - lol!

I always hate when I get the latter kind. Generally speaking if someone gives me a link with no further information at all, I won't even consider following it, unless I already know that they're thinking of my tastes and they know me pretty well. The rest of the time, the fact that they like something is really only a very tiny factor in deciding if I would, most likely.

What's even worse is when I'm then grilled for a reaction. There's no tactful way to say "I didn't watch it -- why should I? I know nothing about it." Worse yet, there's no tactful way to say "I watched it, and I want those five minutes back, preferably extracted painfully from the still-beating heart of whoever is responsible for that." People tend to react badly to things like that said about something they enjoyed and "recommended".

I wish people would take a few steps towards Option #1. At very least give some nominal description of the book, movie, webcomic, YouTube clip, etc. you're recommending. Better yet, remember to think of the other person's tastes, not solely your own. Above all don't be offended if they don't choose to watch, or don't like, something that you liked.

Have you (been) saved?

There's a hardware store on a major road near me which has one of those signs out front where they can put letters up to spell out messages, you know the kind. Probably 95% of the time, rather than having something about whatever sale they're currently running, they have a Bible quote or something exceedingly preachy. Even more likely so when a religious holiday is approaching.

This week, with Easter coming up, the sign only says that they're having a sale on nails. (Nothing about crosses though.)

What's worse: that that's intentional, or that it isn't?

Why be stressed?

Events like those in the last post tend to get me feeling stressed, and I always feel dumb when I realize this. Why should a mere game stress me? Doubly so, why should I let myself get stressed just because someone else is acting inappropriately? And finally, even if these things should cause stress, shouldn't this conclusion and closure resolve it?

Indeed, it does, just not immediately. For a while after, the "it's done" has to slowly soak in, and during this time, other matters are more likely to crank up my stress than they would be at other times.

Fortunately, I have some good destressors coming up. First, our roleplaying group is roleplaying again, and that's always a good step. Plus, and I wasn't expecting this when we started up again, it's good to be GMing after a while away from it. I usually do a tiny bit more of the group's GMing than I would in an ideal world, and after a while of GMing the ache to play is palpable. But the reverse, when I've been away from GMing a while, sneaks up on me unnoticed. It wasn't until a few hours into the game that I found myself thinking, "ah, I missed this".

Weekend after next is Lorecon, which should be an exhausting rush of games, including one I'm GMing which (to my surprise) a few people have actually signed up for. (Unfortunately, Columbia Games, which is supposed to support me with handouts and coupons and stuff since I'm pushing their product line, let me slip through the cracks and is now ignoring me.) Cons are always a good destressor; it doesn't just take you out of life for a weekend, it takes you out of your life about eight different ways in a single weekend. Half of them will probably be duds, but that's still four more escapes than you usually get in a weekend.

To round things out, next month we're planning a little seaside getaway in Salisbury, Massachusetts. The smell and sound of the sea have a literally legendary power to destress. We're still figuring out what we're going to be doing there, and it might be not much more than lying around doing nothing -- some vacations are busy ones where we bustle from museum to activity, and some much slower-paced, and both are good.

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." - Isak Dinesen

And they all lived happily ever after.

I've logged off from Harshlands for the last time, at least under the current administration.

This "shutting down" process was taking way too long. But what set me off today was not that.

The admins run the forums in a very severely "locked down" state where they delete posts quite readily. They leave no sign behind that a post was deleted, too. In fact, the person whose post got deleted doesn't usually even get told their post was deleted.

Virtually everyone who reads the forums has the sense of a lot more consensus than there really is, because opinions that counter what the admins believe are ruthlessly and silently suppressed.

Those who are well-treated by the admins invariably conclude that any unhappy people are just natural troublemakers and malcontents; after all, there's nothing real to complain about, and they get treated wonderfully. "Some people just can't be happy," they must think.

Of course how would they know? They don't see how miserably unfairly some people who've gotten on the bad side of the admins are treated. And they never will, if every complaint and every contrary viewpoint is deleted to "avoid flame wars". (People can be as inflammatory and offensive as they like, as long as they only do it on one side -- their side.)

Why is it like this now and not before? That I'm not so sure. The most obvious answer is that I used to be on their good side so I, too, was blissfully unaware of how bad things can be, and then one day I got on their bad side.

But I think there's more to it. When I started, Revus was the head admin, but he was largely inactive, and Blackhorde and Millie were the de facto admins. While this didn't have any real impact on their authority or impact, I think it might have tempered their worst abuses of power. Revus eventually retired, and handed them the keys to the castle. Nothing really changed; Revus was around just as much as ever, and Blackhorde and Millie still did the same things they did. But I wonder if they didn't gradually get more and more comfortable with their position, and check themselves less and less.

I have little hope that anything could dislodge them. Their control over the viewpoints that people can present and complaints they can raise is almost entirely complete. No one is ever going to call for them to step down anywhere that anyone else can hear.

I flirted with the idea of crusading, trying to get word out to people about what they don't realize is going on. "If I don't do it, who will?" But that didn't last very long. First, it's just infeasible. It would take a remarkably strong group outcry to get Blackhorde and Millie to really take a hard look at themselves and how they run things. They're absolutely convinced, I'm sure, that they're being reasonable and fair, and that's why it's impossible to get them to give themselves a hard appraising look and realize what they're really doing. Anything less than a rousing consensus would be brushed off, but it'd be a miracle just to get people to be willing to listen, let alone to that level of outrage, after they've been couched in cozy sameness-of-opinions and preferential treatment for so long. Even if it were possible, though, it's just a lot of stress and aggravation I don't need. Far better for me to just close the door and move on.

So Reb and Merewyn have set out on their pilgrimage. Maybe someday if the Gentle Lady blesses them with new admins that still remember how to look at their own behavior, they'll return. But I really doubt that'll happen, even by accident. I've been down this road before: a corrupt administration may be removed, or retire of their own will, but the corruption usually remains.

MGB vs. RNY vs. Cigna

As we find more about the various gastric bypass surgeries, and the varying and often draconian requirements various surgeons and facilities require, we keep shifting which are our greatest concerns.

The most recent one was that there was a 350-pound limit on all the laparoscopic versions; having to go to an open surgery increases the risk considerably (as well as the recovery time), and it seemed likely I wouldn't go ahead with it if it had to be open, though it's too early to make that decision. Nor was I very positive about the idea of finding a way to lose 130 pounds without any help just to get to the point where I could get the surgery; maybe I could do it, maybe not, but at best it'd mean being miserable for a very long time just to get to the surgery.

However, we've learned that High Point Regional Health System in North Carolina does MGBs (which are always laparoscopic) up to 450 pounds, which is well within reach for me.

The question of finances still looms. While our doctor is confident that we can get this kind of surgery covered, it's quite likely High Point is an "out of plan" facility. There's some very, very, very small chance that we could get it covered anyway if it's only available for us there, but more than likely we'd have to treat it as an out-of-plan facility. That would mean a $2,500 cost to us for each surgery, plus figuring out how to cover the whole $17,000 cost in between the surgery and getting it paid, since the doctors wouldn't bill directly. Financial problems are a factor but not a showstopper; our credit rating ensures that we can deal with these kinds of concerns, even if it's hard, costly, and stressful.

On a more positive front, I'm feeling very strong that I meet the selection criteria for these procedures, and won't have too much trouble convincing the doctors to let me do it. MGB is continuing to look like the best option, as I read more about it and its results, but I'm still keeping an ear out for someone trash-talking it with actual results, not just vague dislike and anecdotal considerations. I'm sure there are facts to be had out there, but it's troubling how much conjecture and bias there is. This is medicine, folks, and medicine is a science.

Gastric Bypass, Step 2

Yesterday we visited our doctor -- or as close as possible, since our previous doctor moved away and no new one has been hired for her patients yet, so a physician's assistant is handling us until a new doctor is brought on. The PA was very encouraging about the possibility of a gastric bypass. She didn't think there'd be any trouble getting insurance to consider it a medical necessity (at least, no more trouble than anything involving insurance), and she seemed little worried about the dieting requirements, considering we have 4½ years on record already. Maybe she's being a little excessively positive on that last point; I suspect the surgeons will make us jump through pointless hoops, but nothing we can't do.

Step 3 will be talking to surgeons. We got a referral for a consultation at Fletcher Allen, where we will talk to someone, probably a surgeon, about the options and what comes next, and assuming we decide to proceed (which seems likely at this point), how it'll go.

The big question still hanging in the air is whether to go for laparoscopic Roux-en-Y (of the various bariatric surgeries that are shown to reverse diabetes, this is the most common and well-known) or the Mini-Gastric Bypass (MGB). A lot of our research has showed lower complication rates and lower risk from MGB, so we've been leaning towards that, despite far greater difficulty arranging it (due to it being available only far away, the probability of far greater difficulty with insurance covering it, and the question of how to finance it).

However, we're starting to uncover some evidence contradicting that, and speculating that some complications are not being accurately recorded, because of the unusual nature of how MGBs are done (only by a few "licensed" surgeons) means some complications might be handled at different hospitals and not connected back up to the original surgeries in reviews of post-operative results.

Nothing we've found so far is truly conclusive. The most damning criticism of MGB seems to be that there have not been any truly comprehensive comparative studies contrasting it with Roux-en-Y; Dr. Rutledge, the inventory of MGB, claims that this is true only because Roux-en-Y practitioners refuse to cooperate in such a study.

And this is typical of what we've found so far; generally when you hear physicians talking about these surgeries, you get the feeling that you're hearing their personal preferences and prejudices at least as much as you're hearing the science. Personal preference and prejudice is supposed to be the patient's job in the doctor-patient relationship; the doctor is supposed to be the one dragging the patient away from spurious reasoning to scientifically-backed results.

Hopefully when we sit down with a surgeon up at Fletcher Allen we'll be able to dig through all of this. We're trying to keep open-minded about the procedures, willing to listen to the surgeon's input while at the same time insisting it be substantiated and scientific, rather than being focused on how what they happen to do at that hospital is inevitably the best treatment. ("As far as this case is concerned I have now had time to think it over and I can strongly recommend a course of leeches.")

The final death knell of Harshlands

Today I did my weekly login to Harshlands. I don't go in to roleplay or participate anymore; all I do is keep my cart stocked for the benefit of those players who use it as part of the Tashal economy, while slowly accruing silver I will need if they ever make caravanning possible.

But I don't really play. No, I stopped that a couple of months ago, as I wrote about in the blog. There were a number of reasons. A lot of them were flaws in the game, in what it was trying to do versus what the admins were willing to let it do. Some were based on the simple unprofessionalism of the admins, my exposure to which all ran back to one act of twinkery that went unpunished and almost ruined my character last year -- that act wasn't the real issue, though, it was the hostility that it engendered in the admins towards me. I continued to pour my soul into the game, doing lots of in-character development, plus serving as a volunteer coder, hoping that one day they'd make good on their promises to make caravanning work, and hoping that the other problems could be worked around or lived with. But instead, caravanning got less viable as time went on. Most of the people I enjoyed playing with left, or had their characters die and recreated in other places, or went dormant, or simply got themselves involved in things that prevented my character from running into them. Playing got to be no fun. But I stuck it out for months until I finally stepped away... announcing I would keep my cart stocked and be ready to caravan if it ever got viable.

So today I went to stock my cart to find that it had been robbed. Again. Now, this might not seem too odd, but you have to understand the situation. It's a two-wheeled peddler's cart; there's not really room to be on it, let alone hidden inside it, and it only has "interior" rooms because of OOC code limitations -- that's how the stockroom is handled. Here's a similar cart, only much larger because it's four-wheeled:



Bolted to the cart is a sturdy wooden strongbox with a hefty lock. Inside that is a sturdy chest with a lock. There's another locked area where the goods are kept (and where revenue is stored).

The cart is smack dab in the middle of the busiest square in the entire island. The room description specifically says that the square is crowded shoulder-to-shoulder even in the middle of the night, and that the whole square is brightly illuminated with lanterns. There are several guards posted there, in addition to the peddler who works the cart.

Months ago, while my character was a struggling journeyman trying to close the gap between the incredibly poor income rate of a peddler (mostly caused by game limitations) and the huge startup costs of a caravanner, his life savings was robbed from that chest. The admins explained away this impossible act by claiming that it was done at a time when the square was emptied due to an unprecedent invasion of undead. Fair enough, except that I read about that invasion hours before it happened. Trouble is I can't prove that. The admins never admitted, and still do not admit, that there was twinkery involved -- which is funny because the players involved have admitted it was twinkish. And based on that it was handled IC, including my character paying 3000 silver (a large fortune) for lifelong protection against further robbery.

Today, he was robbed again. This time, all three locks were picked, and it's probable merchandise was also taken (no way to tell -- either it sold and the silver from the sale was taken, or it was taken, or some of both).

Now, the important thing which will escape most people's attention is that this isn't about the robbery or the silver. As I write this, the issue of whether this is a twink remains to be decided, and if it is, I might get the silver back. I can't say I'm terribly optimistic given how badly this was handled last time. And yet, the last time might force them to handle it better this time, since they got caught screwing up last time and then refusing to admit their mistake and digging themselves in deeper, so they're extra defensive now. But it doesn't matter.

See, it turns out that the responses I got to my petitions were insulting in a way that defies even my low expectations. It's so far into childish it might be intentionally playful in a way that went very wrong, but even if you grant every possible benefit of the doubt, it still ends up painfully insulting. Amongst the more infuriating insults concerns my use of OOC rather than IC methods to deal with this and everything else -- a clear suggestion that I don't count since I no longer roleplay:

And if not well that is sort of something not
to handle in character.
No, would probably be something out of character.
Best to come in and not play really.
Just use the mechanics.
And stuff like that.
And when stuff does not work fix it.
And go on using the mechanics.
Would really be better that way.
No tension of roleplay and stuff.
And no in character out of character seperation needs.
For all would be out of character.
Another good idea.
Thanks.

Of all the people to be snarky to about handling things IC and contributing to the game, they are so completely off-base to pick me. Plus they deleted the post I made on the forum about it. So what do you think the odds are that they're ever going to feel like treating me fairly, live up to their promises, and make me welcome in the game again?

A tiny part of me wants to note that I still have coder access to their box and could cause an essentially unlimited amount of harm to the game if I wanted. Luckily for them I'm very much not the vindictive sort; this post is about the meanest thing it's in me to do, and that's mostly wanting things to be aired. Besides, I would never punish the other players; they're suffering enough as it is, and if anything I want to find ways to make things better for them on the way out. (The tiny part wonders if crashing the game might not make things better for them, though; maybe being forced out of the game is the best thing for them.)

I am currently "closing up shop" in the game so that my character's departure is explained, and his assets are used to at least benefit those who remain behind, continuing what little I was able to do to add to the game for the benefit of other players. It's frustrating and angering, and yet at the same time, it's almost a relief to close the door on this chapter finally.

Though when I say "finally" I must admit that I have made provisions to undo this departure in the extremely remote possibility that things change. In the short term, that'd mean them changing their tune and coming back with a very convincing apology. If that happened (and just after monkeys flew out of my butt) I'd be able to undo my departure with minimal IC explanation needed. In the longer term, if they stepped down as admins, in favor of someone with more professionalism, I could probably explain my character's return and start afresh.

But these are both very remote possibilities. They don't feel like not closing the door, just like the chance a new door could maybe be opened someday, but not likely. I still get the sense of closure.

The subject is not the first line

I was tempted to make the title of this blog post be "Did you ever notice how..." After all, how often have you seen an email, forum or newsgroup post, blog post, etc. where the subject was something like that?

There's a reason we have a subject field separate from the body of the message. The subject or title should summarize what the body is about. Having it in a separate place enables the reader to find the items of interest to him. It allows focused searches, effective threading, and indexing of entries. Imagine what a visit to your library's card catalog would be if every book's title was just the first five words of the book!

When you simply dump the first few words of the body into the subject, you're defeating the purpose of both. You're making it harder for me to read whatever collection of messages or items your entry is in: a forum, my email inbox, a blog, whatever. And that means you're making it less likely that I'll read yours.

So use the subject or title to record the subject or title of your post, okay?

But I want to want those things!

The ideal outcome of a hypothetical weight reduction regimen would be this: I would still want and enjoy and eat all the same foods I do now, but I would be satisfied -- genuinely satisfied -- with smaller amounts, and those amounts would allow me to lose weight and end up healthier.

But what about something where the net result of the procedure was that I no longer even wanted or liked some things I now like?

Obviously, after the procedure I wouldn't miss those things, any more than right now I miss brussel sprouts or pickles. I would be perfectly content. And people who have had gastric bypass and found that formerly-loved foods are no longer desirable tend to insist that they're glad they did it; they have no regrets.

Yet the me now can't help rebel at the idea. I get so much pleasure from, say, a good New York bagel slathered with cream cheese. A surgery that made me like only a small portion of that, that'd be fine; I'd still have the same enjoyment followed by the same satisfaction. But a surgery that left me no longer desiring it in the first place... I can't help feel like I'd be losing something. The pleasure I get now from that bagel would be simply gone, with nothing to replace it.

Any argument that a post-op person gives to defuse this "concern" feels hollow: it has the ring of someone who has lost something and lost the ability to know he lost it. I don't mean to sound overdramatic, but it sounds like someone who's been brainwashed. One can't help imagining that if a later surgical development restored to them the ability to enjoy those dishes they've said goodbye to, they'd be the first to say "thank heavens, I had forgotten what I was missing!"

I can't help imagine someday a better version of the surgery coming along that is like what I originally described: you like the same things, just less of them. And those people who have already had today's surgeries will not be able to "upgrade" (and may be so "brainwashed" that they don't think they want to).

And yet, the people who've had the surgeries almost all agree that they don't regret giving up those things. And so too would I not regret them if I had the surgery. Is it foolish, petty, and self-defeating to be even concerned about it now?

Gastric bypass surgery

This weekend I had a small job I picked up through RentACoder to record a TV show and do a transcript of the show, which entailed watching it several times. The show is called Action Hero Makeover, and it turns out it's about a relatively new variation on gastric bypass ("stomach stapling") surgery, as it was performed on Gil Gerard.

If you don't know me, you should know that I'm extremely obese, with a BMI in the 75 range. Most of the typical complications and correlated illnesses, however, have not been a problem for me. I've never had high blood pressure, and my cholesterol has generally ranged from acceptable to very good (with the exception of HDL which I just can't get to go up). I've shown no signs of heart disease.

In recent years I've been diagnosed with type II diabetes. However, I've also shown that it's possible for me to control it, even without meds. I've also shown that I can fail to stay in control. This progressive failure is mostly because of my own failures of willpower, but it's certainly true that my weight contributes: it's hard to be active and exercise when my weight itself is an obstacle so often, in the form of knee pain and general soreness at even modest activity, the difficulty of getting started, the cost of equipment that can hold up to me, and the general low level of energy I have.

Generally speaking I believe that it's possible to be "fit and fat", and that the medical community has assisted in perpetrating a number of fallacious ideas about overweight, the most pernicious being that if there are poor health conditions associated with overweight, that losing weight is invariably a means to solve them.

• First, correlation in the public at large doesn't mean correlation in any individual; for instance, my lack of blood pressure problems at my size is unusual, but it doesn't hint at a hidden problem.
  
• Second, correlation isn't causation; many of the ill effects associated with overweight are effects of a common cause, not effects of overweight itself, and trying to prevent them by eliminating overweight can be like trying to avoid sickle-cell anemia by bleaching your skin.
  
• Third, even when a health problem can be reduced or eliminated by losing weight, that doesn't always mean the health effects of attempting to do so aren't worse. Though rarely publicized, the ill effects of almost all forms of dieting are well-proven, and it's clear that dieting is not only rarely effective but usually counterproductive.

That said, I wouldn't mind not being fat one bit. There are lifestyle reasons; one feels petty talking about the thousand discomforts of being in a world that refuses to fit me, and one feels like arguing with the world and insisting it accomodate me rather than "giving up" and adjusting to fit it, but despite that, it'd sure be nice to be able to fit on planes and in cars, not have to apologize every time I try to pass someone in a restaurant, and be able to buy clothes cheap and easy. And there are health reasons like back and knee pains I wouldn't mind missing.

But the best reason is to be rid of diabetes. Yes, rid of diabetes. This is something I've really thought of as impossible, and that's what really struck me about that show I was transcribing from. Before the surgery, Gil was a very out-of-control diabetic, with fasting blood glucose numbers in the 300 range; we weren't told if he was doing anything to treat it, and it's possible he wasn't because other, more serious health concerns he was dealing with would preclude most forms of treatment. After the surgery, his fasting blood glucose was in the 100 range -- entirely normal, with no diabetes treatment at all. It's commonly said that once you're diagnosed diabetic you can only be "in control" or "out of control" but you can't ever not be diabetic, but even the doctors described Gil unequivocally as no longer diabetic.

I've known about variations on "stomach stapling" for years, but they were very dangerous and not terribly effective. Before I was diagnosed diabetic, I didn't give them much thought; clearly they were a lot of risk to solve not very much. (It didn't help that my father died on the table in exactly this kind of procedure; though it probably didn't hurt as much as you might think, given that my father was never very close to me, and that I am not the kind to obsess and worry and get wrapped up in fear because of something like that.)

Even after my diagnosis, I still didn't think much about them because they still seemed too risky, and I didn't think they'd make that big a difference: maybe they'd cure the discomfort of airplane seats, but not diabetes. I always had a general sense that one day the risk would be reduced to near nil, the efficacy improved to highly reliable, and the option would become far more accessible; and then I'd have to re-evaluate. But I didn't think that day was anywhere near yet.

The show made me wonder if maybe the time is nearing after all. Dr. Rutledge's technique, Mini-Gastic Bypass (MGB), offers some very compelling advantages even over the "state of the art" techniques now being done all over the country. The risk of dying on the table is now comparable to everyday surgeries like appendectomies. Other complications are very rare for the most common procedures, but for MGB they're far lower still, almost negligible. MGB also costs a good deal less, since it's a laparoscopic technique with a recovery time measured in hours, not weeks. I'm not just reciting the TV show's points; most of these comparisions between MGB and other bariatric procedures weren't mentioned in the show. But I've been doing a bunch of reading, and MGB simply becomes a more compelling option the more I read. Not merely by comparison to other bariatric surgery options, but more generally, as something that maybe I should seriously considering doing.

However, there are two big snags.

• Requirements: All forms of bariatric surgery require you to demonstrate extensively to the surgeons that you have spent years and years sincerely trying other methods of losing weight, and failing. While I have done "diet and exercise" for years, and it's easy to show I haven't lost weight and kept it off, I would have to lie to suggest I was trying to lose weight. Apart from the discomforts like back pain and difficulty finding clothes that fit, I haven't minded my weight; it's my diabetes I have minded, and I found that my control over that and my weight were barely correlated, if they were correlated at all. I did lose weight during my "in control" years even though I wasn't really trying to; but sometimes I gained it back, and my control didn't track my weight really at all. Would my attitude towards my weight be considered by the surgeons and therapists to be "unhealthy"? Would they refuse to consider me because I hadn't tortured myself enough with diets and done enough damage to myself before coming to them? Maybe I could parley my struggle with diabetes into something, but I'm doubting that could really live up to the kind of onerous requirements I'm seeing.
  
  
• Insurance: It'd be easy to prove to an insurance company that, if someone's going to be on their insurance for a long time, it'll make far, far more sense in the long run to let them get surgery like this than to wait for insurance to have to pay for the ongoing treatment of a chronic problem like diabetes, then deal with the complications. It's a no-brainer: $17,000 now versus tens, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions over the course of a life. But what's this, logic, in a paragraph that started with the word "Insurance"? What was I thinking? No doubt the insurance company is hoping that my employer will change insurance companies before then, or failing that, that I'll be hit by a bus. Or perhaps they still think that everyone who is overweight is so because they're evil. Either way, they don't cover procedures like this. Could one wangle an exception based on "medical necessity"? Uncertain. But given how it took months of stress-inducing, health-eroding arguing with them just to cover a better blood sugar meter, one can't help wonder if the cost they'd exact in sheer agony wouldn't make surgery seem like recreation by comparison. This is a doubly interesting question to ask right now since our long-time primary care physician is moving away, so we don't even know who our new doctor is yet. Who knows how sie will feel about us? Or how good sie will be at dealing with the insurance company, even if sie decides this is worth fighting for?

Yet through all of this haze, the image keeps haunting me of the idea of not being diabetic anymore. If this is going to happen, there's a lot of thinking, research, planning, struggle, and perhaps outright fighting, and a lot of time, in between me and it. I guess maybe it's time to start preparing to start prepare to decide whether I'm going to start preparing to do it. Maybe.

Poor Odysseus

After several years of wandering aimlessly around my house getting into messes, Odysseus, our Roomba Discovery, has found his way back to his charging base for the last time. iRobot made me wait two weeks for a firmware upgrade that didn't help, as I knew it wouldn't -- you can't fix hardware problems by updating software. Now they are willing to do an out-of-warranty exchange for $95 which gets me a fresh new (or at least refurbished) Roomba Discovery, while Odysseus probably gets refurbished too.

Meanwhile, Telemachus, our Roomba Dirt Dog, is filling in best he can for his dad. Telemachus is made primarily for basements, workshops, garages, and decks, and has no vacuum, only sweeping. He's not nearly as good as his dad is at doing the floors. But he does well enough that Penelope, the Scooba, can mop them effectively. It gets the job done, but I am really looking forward to having a proper Roomba again.

If Odysseus is gone, what should his successor be named? It's tempting to keep the name, since it's so appropriate, and since the replacement will be identical and a refurb besides, so is it really different from if he were sent off to be fixed? Besides, using the name of one of his suitors (probably Antinous) just seems too bleak.

But then the perfect solution occurred to me: Aethon, the name Odysseus affected while he was disguised as a beggar. So it won't be him, but maybe it still will...

24 Season 5

Did another marathon session of 24, though this time even more interrupted by other things and spread out over a slightly longer period of time. (Spoilers follow for Season 5.)

I noticed something amusing: we spent Super Bowl weekend watching a season where a big chunk of plot centered around attempts to get and hold the nuclear football, then we waited for the President's Day weekend to watch a season that revolved around the contrast between two presidents, one of which was assassinated. Maybe we should watch a season over Valentine's Day so Jack can finally get some lovin'.

Season 5 is very bleak compared to earlier seasons. It starts off with a "holy " moment and then throws a few more at you for good measure. But it's not just how many people die, or even how many named characters die. We also see a lot of Jack's wild behavior in the past catching up with him, long-deferred consequences hitting him hard, both in his personal life and his work. We see even fewer people we can trust, as the most cherished institutions fall one by one to treason, forcing Jack to actions even farther beyond the pale than usual.

But most of all, we go a long long time with no victories, even small ones. Season 4's plot was a string of separate crises that were actually tightly knitted together into an overall arc of threat, which meant we kept having minor victories mixed with our new threats. But a huge section of season 5 went by without a single victory to ease the tension, and when one finally came (Jack finally got the recording), it was taken away again almost immediately, and this time irrevocably.

Speaking of the recording, I kept being annoyed that no one would just make a copy. Jack could have played it through his cell phone the first time he had it. Maybe that copy wouldn't constitute absolute proof, but it would certainly ease some of the pressure of CTU not believing or backing him, and it would have been an unlosable backup. And who could believe that Chloe's first action wouldn't be to make a digital copy and then store encrypted copies of it in a thousand different sites on the Internet? But I can't really complain, because if you allow that, then you have to ask why Henderson didn't just step on the recorder, or put a bullet in it. So I guess the McGuffin absurdities cancel each other out.

I'd say I enjoyed season 4 more than season 5 on the whole. I'm not averse to bleakness or to seeing cared-for characters dying or to having to wait for my payoff. I don't think those are why it wasn't quite as engaging. I'm not saying 5 was bad, just not quite as good.

Incidentally, is this the first season without an appearance of Naked Mandy?

My 15 minutes of fame

You may have heard about how Congress changed when Daylight Savings Time takes effect this year, and a lot of people are scrambling to get computers to handle this properly. This is a real trivial thing -- the worst that'd happen is computers may show the wrong time for a few weeks, but it wouldn't even mess up their calculations. Calling it "Y2K lite" (as I've seen in the news) is just the media trying to hype a story out of nothing.

So in a completely humdrum bit of my work one day, I have a slightly older version of Unix for which no official patch has been issued, but that's no big deal. It's not a bunch of coding, just a configuration file, and that is in a common format for many versions of many releases of Unix. I tried to get one from a later version of my flavor of Unix, but couldn't get the archive to unpack, so I found one in a patch for a version of Sun's Solaris Unix which I could get to, and that worked fine.

The whole process probably took me two hours, though not straight through -- it was two hours of doing this and several other things. It was maybe 15 minutes of actual work. And it would have been maybe a minute if I spent more time doing Unix things; it was only unfamiliarity (my Unix system takes such good care of itself that by the time I have to do something on it, I have to remind myself of basics) that made it take that long.

It was a trivial thing of no import. It would be like if an auto mechanic couldn't find the right size wiper blades, so took ones a little too large and cut them to fit.

I happened to mention this in a post somewhere on a forum, I don't even know where, and on a very slow news day, a reporter for ComputerWorld named Patrick Thibodeau happened to see my post and contacted me. He was writing an article about the DST change, one which makes too much of a big deal out of the "threat" (because, of course, big threats sell news), and wanted some information. We talked a few times briefly and my sense was that he was looking to round out an article with "real life" examples from a few people. And furthermore that my story turned out way too uninteresting to be worth even a brief quote.

Skip ahead several weeks to today. At work, out of the blue, I got a call from the secretary of the technology editor of the Boston Globe who wanted to talk to me about the article I was featured in, and the incident behind it. When I agreed, somewhat dumbfounded, I was asked to hold for the editor, and then another person was talking to me. This is someone who is too important to dial his own phone, and he was talking to me about this.

Well, I restated that this was no big deal at all, and then once the call was done, went to look through ComputerWorld. Sure enough, I found this article in which I am prominently featured. I'm glad I come off looking good, not like an idiot, though I'm a little uneasy about being featured as having to administer an "outdated" version of Unix -- it's only one version behind a supported version!

So now my co-workers are making fun about how I'm famous, and I didn't even find out I was in this article until a week after it was printed, and it's about the most trivial thing ever. I hope all the geeks out there are rolling their eyes at the reporter, not at me, for making such a big deal out of nothing. And I'm just a little freaked about being featured in a prominent computer magazine and not even knowing about it. I just don't know how to react. I guess I kind of hope it's all just going to be forgotten tomorrow. But if I get another call from someone who is too important to dial his own phone, I don't know how I am going to react.

I guess it's good to get national exposure for being clever. I just wish it was over something where I actually had been clever. I'm not sure why this is freaking me out at all, but it is.

Snow final tally

We got just over 3' of snow at my house. The railings in this photo are 4' above the deck.



Okay, skiiers and snowmobilers, you got what you wanted. Now be quiet. That was the deal.

Snowed in

Like millions of other people in the States, I'm snowed in today. We've gotten two feet here already, I think, or near to it, and this is due to go on through the night. The woodstove is warm and the house is comfy, and I needed to take time off from work anyway as I was nearing my leave cap.

If only I had a good Internet connection that didn't go from bad (on normal days) to worse (in heavy weather), it'd be a great day.

The necessity of sunglasses

When I was a kid I played outside in the full sunlight all the time and never had sunglasses, but nowadays if I go outside and it's full sunny I need sunglasses. What happened?

Is it my eyes aging? (My acuity of vision is still as good as it ever was, though I realize that might not be measuring the same thing.) Is it that I live in a more northerly attitude so the sun is lower in the sky? Is it the thinning of the ozone layer and other environmental depredations making sunlight more intense? Did I always need sunglasses and just didn't know it, or got used to it?

A delightfully counterintuitive bit of math

Let c be 0.9999~. The ~ means "extending infinitely"; just as 1/3 equals 0.3333~.

Then 10c = 9.9999~.

10c - c = 9.9999~ - 0.9999~.

Solving the right side of this equation is easier if you line the numbers up like so:

9.9999~
0.9999~
---------
9.0000~

So 10c - c = 9.

So 9c = 9.

So c = 1.

Therefore, 0.9999~ = 1.

It doesn't "approximate" 1, it's not just "really close to" 1, it's exactly equal. They are two different expressions in numeral form of the same number, the same way 1/2 = 2/4.

It's remarkably simple and can be understood by anyone who's taken 7th grade algebra, and yet it's so counterintuitive that at least half of people, having seen the proof, refuse to believe it.

Here's another approach.

1/3 = 0.3333~ (nearly everyone believes that one)
Multiply both sides by 3, and you get...
1 = 0.9999~

I love explaining this to people and watching them get upset at how they can't disprove it, but they want to so badly. It's a mind-bending and hopefully mind-broadening experience for them.

Damn furriners

A recent episode of House let me learn a new word, gadje, which is the word used by the Romani people (sometimes called "gypsies") to refer to outsiders. Like many other peoples who have been persecuted (or even some who haven't), the Romani have a strict "us and them" separation complete with a special word to use to refer to the "them" side.

Here are some similar words I know:

• Gadje (Romani)
  
• Gaijin (Japanese)
  
• Goyim (Hebrew)
  
• Gweilo (Chinese)
  
• Guizi (also Chinese)
  
• Gringo (Mexican)

I can't imagine any good linguistic reason why these should all start with the same letter, and more significantly, the same phoneme. But I can't think of a single counterexample. Just a freak meaningless coincidence? Do you know a counterexample (or any more to add to the list)?

Turning in circles

You're sitting in your room and decide to get up, walk across the room, do something (check the thermostat, get some more drink, etc.) and then return to where you started. Depending on tiny details of the arrangement of furniture, your own personal habits, etc. you might find that your return trip completely reverses every movement you made, but it might not. Instead, you might have gone through a rotation before your return.

To picture what I mean, imagine this. An empty room, a chair facing a wall. You stand up from the chair and walk to the wall, then turn to your left to turn around. You walk back to the chair, then turn to your right to sit in it. Your movements have completely reversed themselves.

Now do the same thing but at the very end, turn left, not right, before sitting down. You're in the same end position, but now, you've done a complete 360° turn to the left (counter-clockwise, as seen from above) in the process.

On a trip around the house to do a few things before returning to your seat, you might do several turns in both directions. Over the course of a day, do you end up exactly cancelling out your turns? Probably not. I bet most of us turn more one direction than the other, and so gradually over our lives, we end up gradually accumulating rotations in one direction (probably clockwise).

Imagine if every time you did a full rotation, you shifted yourself into an adjacent universe, different only by one tiny slice of probability. Maybe most people rotate back and forth in a small set of adjacent, almost identical universes. But some people favor one foot or the other, so they tend to rotate gradually away from their original probability, and as a result, end up in a universe that differs from their own by too little for them to become consciously aware of it, but by enough that the dissonance makes them seem out of place. Maybe they end up geniuses or madmen or both.

Maybe you could learn how to do this on purpose, rotating the right number of turns to select the alternate probability curve on which you didn't just drop your cellphone on the floor, or the one where the fourth number on the lottery was 18 instead of 19. Though the more you did this, the greater the risk you'd end up too far from your original dimension.

What do other people think about while they're heading back from the fridge with a fresh cup of soda?

24 Season 4

Since the Super Bowl cancelled roleplaying and we had nothing particular to do this past weekend, we decided to do something I've always wanted to try: watching a whole season of 24 straight through. Well, not completely straight through -- we didn't do it in one sitting! I'm not strong enough for that, though I really wonder what it'd be like. But we started Friday evening and finished Sunday afternoon, without watching anything else in between.

Because of the crush of stuff to do we have fallen several seasons behind on 24, which we allowed ourselves to do because it's more fun to watch on DVD anyway. So we watched season 4. If you haven't seen that, spoilers may follow. Season 4, in case you don't recall, introduces Secretary of Defense Heller and his daughter Audrey.

I definitely enjoyed this season and I felt like watching it back to back enhances it more than the suspense of having to wait a week does. I liked it better than season 2 (which was nicely plotted, but veered too far into unbelievability at times) and season 3 (which felt scattered to me, though that might be my fault, I was a little scattered watching it; never figured out if it was unfocused and that's why my interest faded, or if my scattered attention is what made it seem unfocused).

Season 1 of course had that "first season" freshness and it didn't pull any punches or pander to its audience. On the other hand, its plot was a little uneven. For good reason: they only got a greenlight for 13 episodes with a hope to renew for the other 11, and in a decision that every science fiction fan can get behind, decided to set the story up so it would have a satisfactory ending after 13 episodes. Naturally they put hooks in for the other half, but of course the priority was on the episodes they had approved, to make sure they were good enough to get the renewal. Plus they couldn't get actor contracts through the whole season for all the incidental characters so they couldn't count on actors remaining available, and killed off some of the characters earlier than might have ultimately been ideal. So there was a bit of a lull in the middle of the season, then a few dumb plot twists (don't remind me about the amnesia bit!) before it wrapped up for a great ending. One can't help wonder how great season 1 could have been if they'd had the greenlight for all 24, but you can't blame the creators for the flaws.

Season 4 had tight plotting that knitted together a lot of stuff into a single story with a lot of twists but nothing (well, almost) that didn't follow from earlier stuff. There's hints in the early episodes about things that don't become clear until much later, and it's fun trying to figure out where it's going. It was also enjoyable to start with only a few characters from previous seasons (Jack, Chloe, Erin Driscoll, and President Keeler) and then start seeing others appear, but with each one being a plot twist of its own. And I loved the dynamic between Chloe and Edgar -- the scene near the end where they talk about Chloe's lack of emotional fallout from her activities in the field was precious.

One thing I can fault this season with, though, was a decidedly conservative slant on a few things. I should not be, and am not, really surprised that Fox would nudge the show in that direction, but it was still a bit jarring when it happened, especially given how liberal-leaning earlier seasons were (particularly in the person of Senator and then President Palmer). We saw a fair amount of it in Secretary Heller, who was definitely a conservative and who often got to depict his views in clear, strong words against others (most notably his son) who depicted their side extremely poorly. Heller also had the advantage of being put into fictional circumstances which justified all his attitudes and gave him a chance to be noble and heroic as he espoused them.

But where they got really heavy-handed was later in the season when they brought in an Amnesty Global (a very thin disguise for Amnesty International) lawyer working (unwittingly, at least) for the terrorists by demanding due process for a captive in CTU's custody. Our heroes needed to torture this suspect since he was their only lead on the terrorists (and we can set aside for the moment how torture gets good intel on TV shows like 24 but not in real life, since that's true no matter what the show's political leanings are). Eventually Jack had to go renegade just to torture the guy. The story didn't really follow what happened to him after that.

The show depicted this suspect as being able to almost but not quite get off entirely because he claimed that he had no connections to the terrorists. But CTU agents (quite a few of them) plainly saw him having cordial relations with the one he later claimed he did not know, and who attacked him and tried to steal his boat. Inexplicably, no one called him on this issue, nor on the fact that he was lying to law enforcement agencies.

Nothing in this would have forced him to tell them what they needed to know, of course. But the show depicted it as if CTU barely even had grounds to hold him. Realistically, even the Amnesty "Global" lawyer, on learning that the suspect had been seen by multiple credible witnesses doing business with a known terrorist responsible for attacks on US citizens on US soil, and then lied about it to law enforcement in his presence, would have advised his client to come clean and divulge whatever information he had in order to substantially reduce his sentence. (Brenda Lee from The Closer would have had him singing in five seconds without even looking cross at him.)

It didn't really ruin my enjoyment of the show; bigger plot holes get dodged like flying bullets in every act. But I hope that it doesn't continue to escalate in later seasons.

Weasel words

The canonical example of "weasel words" is this line you've been hearing in toothpaste commercials all your life: "Nothing gets your teeth cleaner!" Sometimes they even say that clinical studies show this.

Of course the true results of the studies, done decades ago and never repudiated, is that all the toothpastes were equal in effectiveness. Of course the advertisers don't want to say "exactly as good as all the other brands, even the cheaper ones", so instead they say something that sounds like it means their brand is the best, but doesn't really mean that.

My father liked to make fun of this by saying "Hmm, if nothing gets your teeth cleaner, that's what we should use, nothing!" As it turns out, the joke's on him, as well as on the toothpaste manufacturers. Dry brushing (without toothpaste or even water) turns out to be more effective than toothpaste for your dental health. (Though most people still use toothpaste for that clean feeling.) So by trying to deceive us, the toothpaste manufacturers accidentally have been telling us the literal truth all these years.

Spoilers vs. the storytelling art

I'm sure there are some people who genuinely love spoilers for their favorite TV shows, but it's my pet theory that a lot of the people who say they do, and think they do, only feel that way because they don't realize what they're missing.

Spoilers are an instant-gratification for the impatient. The story makes you want to know what's going to happen and spoilers are a cheap solution. But that suspense is part of what you were watching the show for in the first place! It's not something to be solved, any more than you should solve a rollercoaster's scariness by making it flat.

Making a TV show, movie, play, etc. is a very complicated art. There are hundreds of tiny decisions that go into every moment. A delicate balance of subtle, almost subliminal factors, ranging from the intricacies of facial expressions of a good actor to the precise timing of camera movements to the details of color in a costume, cumulatively (and holistically) have an impact on the mind of the observer. The producer isn't just tossing plot revelations at you; he's not even only telling you a story. He's crafting, from a thousand tiny brushstrokes, an experience.

Start tinkering with any part of that experience and you may end up diminishing the enjoyment you get from it, possibly even in ways you wouldn't consciously notice. For instance, watch it on a TV whose color calibration is way off, and you might miss subtle cues or have some aspects of the psychological impact of the scene diminished or removed, which can throw the whole balance. You may well come away thinking not "that seemed good but I didn't appreciate it as much as I could", but rather, thinking "that sucked! Why did other people say so much good stuff about it?"

It's my considered opinion that a lot of people are eroding their enjoyment of TV shows by embracing spoilers, without even necessarily realizing it. Inevitably they end up complaining about how the show has really gone downhill, and maybe it has, but I bet some of the time, it's at least in part because they've been changing how they watch the show.

Let the storytellers practice their art. That's what they're (hopefully) good at. They chose when that plot twist would be revealed for good reasons, to maximize its impact on you, to crank up suspense, to build up a payoff, to improve your enjoyment of the show. They went to school for this, they got picked out of a large number of contenders based on their talent, they spend all day every day thinking about how it can best be done. Let's do them the honor of trusting them to do their craft. Or at least have the decency not to bitch at them about how badly they do it, if we aren't even going to let them do it their way.

Jonesing for roleplaying

It's not a conspiracy, it just feels like one.

Of the last ten weekly roleplaying game sessions, we've managed to play on three. Between the holidays, illnesses, visiting girlfriends, and other causes, spread out over the entire group, we've flat-out cancelled seven out of ten. Next week is already pre-emptively cancelled due to the Stupid Bowl. And with another third of our group recently succumbed to the WoW zombie cult, my hopes for this turning around are dwindling.

When we do play, out of a seven-hour block of time, we usually get 3-4, tops. It takes minimum 2 hours, more often 3, for us to get through late arrivals, eating lunch, watching unnecessary TV, and assorted socializing. We often end an hour early too.

Where MUDs used to be a source for a cheap substitute, my terrible luck with them has rendered them unhelpful. I'm only playing one right now and that one is not really there for roleplaying. (And what little roleplaying I can get out of there is currently stymied by the eternal impossibility of getting a bunch of people to show up at the same time to do something.)

My efforts to set up an experimental conventional roleplaying game in SecondLife, as a means to fit roleplaying in when time and distance don't permit the old "gather in a room" approach, have completely come up dry. I could only get five people to even start on being interested, and I have not found a time that can get three of them, let alone all five. It's pulling teeth to even get anyone to say something as simple as "Saturdays are good but Sundays bad for me". I'm pretty near to giving up the ghost on it.

O roleplaying, why hast thou forsaken me?

Taking another stab at caravanning

I guess I wasn't too surprised when my almost departure from Harshlands did not lead to any renewed interest amongst the administrators in putting in the few hours of work necessary to make caravanning a possibility, and thus make my character playable again.

At some level I guess I was hoping they might say, "oops, I guess he wasn't bluffing" (since so often people "quit" MUDs "forever" on a regular basis) or even "oops, I guess more people were affected by him than we thought". Maybe I hoped they'd say "hey, some of these criticisms have some substance to them." I was even hoping they'd say "hey, the way we sometimes react to criticism by shutting down instead of addressing it needs to change". Most of all I hoped that they'd take my claim that they could have caravanning at a "good enough" stage in a few hours and just do it already, if only to set the stage for the improvements that'd make it better (and which I as a coder might facilitate).

Instead I think they mostly concluded, "good riddance, one less problem to worry about".

Independently, however, I had brought to my attention by another player a fan-written, but very professionally done, exhaustive, and complete, book on Mercantyling, a supplement I long thought was needed since there's very little about mercantyling in the existing materials. In addition to a plethora of other subjects, it covers the economics of mercantyling in detail, providing a step-by-step system to cover buying, selling, capacity, and profit, along with overhead costs, financial risks, and material risks.

I've posted a detailed analysis of this system's implications on the Harshlands forums. In addition to the wagon capacity being restored to earlier estimates, it corroborates a few things I had previously claimed should be the case: that profit margins should have a high enough average to justify all the investment and risk, and that profits should be very variable. It also helps calibrate precisely where those profits should be.

What I now hope most of all is that this, in addition to reminding them about the caravanning issue, convinces them that their fears that a level of profit sufficient to cover operating costs and justify the risk will not be game-imbalancing, inappropriate, or recommended solely based on selfishness, are unfounded. And maybe then they'll finally be willing to do those few hours of work necessary, no longer limited by the fear that this will break the game the minute some less-scrupulous mercantyler comes along.

I wonder if I'm being just as rosey-eyed as I was a few paragraphs ago?

If you could peer through time

Suppose it wasn't possible to travel through time, but you could instead pick a point in spacetime to observe and even record. Full sensory input as if you were there, but no chance to interact or affect. Where and when would you go?

This question got chatted idly about last night at Trivia (we won, by the way) and it soon became obvious the answers fitted neatly into two categories. First, we have the Tourism options: watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence, see an early Jimi Hendrix concert, witness the Battle of Thermopylae, get a look at the primordial form of the solar system.

Then there's the Mysteries, all those nagging things that we'll never know the true answer about. To make things interesting let's say you have to be able to specify a precise time and place; this means you can't find out whether the Beale cipher or Money Pit on Oak Island are hoaxes. Let's also say it has to be on Earth. What mysteries do you want to solve for once and for all?

The first two it seems everyone comes up with are the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the grassy knoll in Dallas 1963. Close behind is Jack the Ripper. After that we fall off into ones that are easy to think of, but that really, when I stop to think about them, I can't say I care that much. Where is Jimmy Hoffa? It was important then, but how much does it matter now? Amelia Earhart? The Lindberg baby? D.B. Cooper? Maybe Roswell would be worth looking at. How about the Princess Anastasia? What did Mozart really die of?

I'm mildly curious about all these things, but I have this sense that there's much bigger questions needing answers, things that somehow I can't bring to mind. Maybe that's just because the "you have to know the time" limitation I imposed on myself rules out a lot of good ones (like "what made the dinosaurs go extinct?"), but even with that, I feel like there's good ones just lurking outside my thoughts.

Earliest memories

The most irksome thing about childhood amnesia is that I can't even tell which is my earliest memory, or when it is, or whether any of the contenders are real memories or just memories of people telling me about things that happened.

The earliest memory I can clearly fix at a point in time happened just before my fifth birthday. (I read that the average age for a first memory is about 3½, as long as you talk to other people and confirm that the memory is real. If you just go on when people claim is their first memory, that's usually a year or so earlier. It's like how 80% of people consider themselves to be better-than-average drivers.) This memory is of when I was being babysat while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to my sister, which puts it in May 1972. I remember my babysitter taking me for a walk down the block, and stopping at the corner by the street sign to talk about what was going on.

I have a few flashes of images that may predate that, including one striking one of a horseshoe crab turned upside down on the beach. But there's one in particular which is striking in its clarity of detail but which I can't place in time, or even confirm if it's real. This is one of those situations where it might be nice if I hadn't been disowned by my mother, because maybe she could confirm it.

In this memory I am with my parents and we're visiting somewhere in an oldish building, maybe an apartment building. We're leaving and it's late. The stairwell we're going down to leave is one of those ones where the stairs go a half-flight from the building's hall to a landing against the wall, then turns to go another half-flight to the next level, and so on in a huge rectangular spiral, like the ones you see in any high school in the world. You can lean over the railing and look all the way down to the basement down that narrow column between the flights. And that's what I'm doing in the memory.

Apparently, to keep me entertained during this visit, I have been given a small collection of toys, I think some kind of building block toys, which were in a rectangular Tupperware container of a particular faint jelly-like green color which, thankfully, is no longer being made. The lid was milky white, not the same green. And while peering over the railing, I managed to drop this container and it fell to the basement, spilling its contents.

I was naturally very upset and insisted that we get the toys back. My father was reluctant, because it was the end of a long day and he was tired, and it was quite a few flights down, more than he would have otherwise had to go. My mother insisted it was worth retrieving them, with the ease that comes of not being the one who'll have to do the job.

I wish I had some way to confirm if this was even real, and if so, when it happened. I'd like to know where this place was and why we were there. Above all I'd like to know how old I was at the time.

Going back on metformin

My hemoglobin A1c is up to 7.9 -- which is no surprise. I know I've been out of control for a long while. There are a number of reasons, including my knee making exercising non-sustainable, major slippage on our carb control (which I find hard to keep up alone), higher stress levels, and not testing reliably enough.

Getting started again, as I've written before, is very problematic. I'll get myself a head of steam to start again and I'll pick a day and say "starting on that day I'm back to doing everything I should", and I do, and then a day comes when I'm too busy or too tired or I have a cold or something, and it'll be easier to blow it off and break my streak because... I've already stopped before and started again, so what's the big deal about stopping and starting again? The date of starting was arbitrary, after all. And of course I know how stupid and self-defeating that is, but it still happens.

So here's the new plan, step by step.

1. I'm going back onto metformin. This is a very easy drug to go on, as its only side effect is that some people have gas and diarrhea for a few weeks while they acclimate to it. I already went through that once, so I might not have to go through it again, but even if I do, no big deal. Metformin doesn't do bad things to your body even if taken forever -- in fact, it's been proven to help with heart conditions unrelated to diabetes so it's taken by people who aren't diabetic. I always figured, when I went off it, that I'd be back on it someday (and that one day I'd probably be on insulin, too, unless medical science advances quick enough), so it's no big deal to be back on it. The idea here is that, if my control is so bad, it's hard to get encouraged because the little things I do barely make a dent in how bad my numbers are. Metformin can give me a kickstart so my control gets going again without me having to do everything all at once on the first day.
   
   
2. Then I start testing and recording my glucose every day and before and after most meals. I'm just recording, not judging. I have to be very careful not to look at each reading as a condemnation, not wincing at them.
   
   
3. Next I start recording carbs on every meal. Again, trying not to judge myself too much, just trying to record things. Eventually this is meant to get me to be more conscious of it and get out of the habit of splurging so often that it's not splurging anymore. (Key element in this is avoiding all the tasty, cheap high-carb snacky things we buy at Big Lots, which is hard for me when everyone else around me is having them.) But not to be so discouraged immediately that I react by stopping the recording.
   
   
4. Then I start very slowly at exercising. I avoid the treadmill since the knee pain thing was a complete showstopper. Instead, I'm trying out using a stationary bike at work. If it works out as it has in past tests, giving me the exercise without straining my knee to the point of pain, and (more importantly, and not yet tested adequately) it brings my glucose down appropriately (in combination with metformin and diet changes), I will buy one for home. (And someday a non-stationary bike too, for summer! Yay!)
   
   
5. Then the diet changes work their way in, little by little, not all at once. There are already some systemic changes in terms of using substitutions I'm still doing from before -- low carb bread and pasta, for instance. A few other things I've cut out already -- the reduced, but still too high, carb apple juice, for instance. The big challenge here will be the overabundant plethora of inexpensive carby snacks and sweets. The substitutes for these are all things that take a lot of effort and time to make, and in some cases, skills I lack. If you could buy Splenda-sweetened panna cotta and cheescake at the supermarket, I'd be golden, but you can't, you have to make it yourself. Not that it's hard, but when you're in the middle of something and just want to snack, a trip to the pantry is one thing, stopping what you're doing to cook is another.

Not even penny-wise

"We have to do something about this photocopier." (or printer, or computer, or fax machine, etc.)

"Oh? What's wrong?"

"It's old and out of date. It keeps breaking down and it's getting harder and harder to get support and parts for it. Supplies like toner also cost more than they used to as they get harder to find. Compared to the cost of a modern, more efficient, fully supported one, we're spending more to maintain this for a year than it'd cost to replace it, especially after you add in man-hours spent dealing with it."

"We'd better replace it, then. Order us a new one."

---

"Here's that new copier we ordered. What do we do with the old one?"

"Seems a shame to throw it away."

"How about if we put it in Cathy's office so she doesn't have to walk ten steps every time she wants to make unnecessary and wasteful copies?"

"Good idea."

That's when I got out the axe, your honor. I move that the case be dismissed on the grounds of justifiable homicide.

I already had my cold for the year!

It's not fair, having to have a whole second cold in the same winter and it's not even February yet. This one started with two days of headache and has progressed into that miserable endless coughing stage already. I wonder if I picked it up at my blood draw last week at the hospital.

I can't really take any time off from work, which is doubly annoying since I'm right at my leave caps on both annual and sick leave. But there are specific things to be done each day that need me here -- a doctor's appointment today, shopping tomorrow, and yesterday, recovery from a whole bunch of major system changes in our network.

Of course I have to admit one reason I'm reluctant to stay home is because my crappy Internet connection at home is so limiting in what I can do. So many things get saved up until my time at work when I have the speed to do them. I even consider spending off time at the office just to tap into that network. If I had a good Internet connection at home I would be more inclined to use my leave time. Isn't that sad?

Player-driven events in MUDs -- a different approach

Not sure why I have been thinking of how I'd run a MUD so much lately, though my repeated failures at being content with MUDs must have something to do with it. In addition to my thoughts about how combat might work and some thoughts on a setting, I've been thinking about the question of player-driven plots.

Those of us used to pencil-and-paper roleplaying games take for granted the idea that player actions drive the story almost completely. In MUDs, the tiniest crumb of player-driven plot, which even the most railroaded face-to-face RPG would have hundreds of, is taken as a wondrous new innovation and accomplishment. It's partially because of the limitations of coding. A MUD by its nature is more asynchronous -- admins and players log on and off at varying times, which is one of its strengths, you can always go play when you want -- which means things have to be built and coded ahead of time. There's a lot less room for improvisation when the admin can't just say "sure, that might work" without having to stop everything and go recode something or build a bunch of new objects whose need wasn't anticipated. The admins can't spend the time to build things that might not be needed that much because of limited time and resources. And it's even more non-viable to have an event able to adapt to unexpected player actions if it has to keep happening when the admins aren't around!

Ultimately it's a question of resources. Imagine a MUD like Lusternia which has a very active set of admins, builders, and coders, who churn out new stuff at an unprecedented rate. Yet the players complain because events are handed down from on high, rather than bubbling up from player actions, and are essentially linear, with only one possible outcome. As well they should; you don't get a feeling that you can impact the world you're in if it's impossible to do so.

Now imagine if they came down one day and said, "From now on, you will get only about 1/4 as many events, and everything else will slow down too -- new areas, new skillsets, bug fixes, etc. But in exchange for that, we will have player-driven events every month." Would people be happy or not? Hard to say -- people are always willing to say "we need more of X" but have a remarkable capability to ignore that the only way to get it is to have less of Y and Z.

So imagine how this might work in a new MUD where this went in from day one. I imagine a monthly sweepstakes; anyone in the game could buy a single ticket per month for a very low cost (say 5 credits). Once a month, 10 people would "win" the lottery. The prize would be 50 credits plus a chance to submit an idea for an event, in the form of a writeup of no more than one page. Admins would review these ideas and choose the best one, considering implementation difficulties, the event's "neutrality" (events that take the form of "my city has an idea for how to beat up the other cities" would be less likely to win), how well it'd fit into the overall story, etc. The selected proposal would then be developed, possibly with the player who proposed it taking an active hand in helping make it happen, both by roleplaying the stuff related to it in-game, and maybe even by doing some of the building if that's possible (though I think that part wouldn't likely work -- getting someone else to write room descs is often more work than doing it yourself, for instance; not everyone has the talent). The winner would also get another credit prize, say 200 credits, plus get to see the event play out -- probably going in directions even he didn't anticipate!

And these events might well lead to changes in the world around them. In fact, after the initial setup, the events might be the primary method of introducing change into the world; admins wouldn't even make their own events except in the rare case where they needed to do so for some kind of coding or balance reasons.

Naturally I see all kinds of problems that could crop up with this, so consider it brainstorming. I think a lot of those problems might be addressable, at least assuming that the MUD was otherwise able to succeed so you'd have enough players and admins to do it. But I like the idea in broad strokes. Wonder if it could be made to work.

I guess that's why they call it the blues

When I first heard the title of this well-known Elton John song, I thought, that's an interesting question. Why do they call it the blues?

I was very disappointed to learn that, though the song keeps saying "I guess that's why they call it the blues," it never makes even the tinest attempt to answer the question. There's never even anything to be an antecedent for "that". Worse yet, no one else even seems to notice.

Then I chuckle at myself for being such a geek.

But... why do they call it the blues, anyway? Wikipedia says this:

The phrase the blues is a reference to having a fit of the blue devils, meaning 'down' spirits, depression and sadness. An early reference to "the blues" can be found in George Colman's farce Blue devils, a farce in one act (1798).

But that doesn't answer the question either. Why are the devils blue and not, say, yellow? For every image I can summon up in which blue is melancholy (a dark sunset, for instance) there's another where it's positively uplifting (a bright blue sky). The psychology of color is a fascinating subject I'd like to go into at more length one day.

Google as a knowledge multiplier

There is certainly a skill to finding pertinent information on the Internet, and it's something you can practice at, learn how to do better, improve at with practice. But there's a big factor often overlooked.

Someone who already knows some about a subject will always be better at researching that subject than someone who knows almost nothing about it. This is even true when the latter is better generally at searching than the former.

That's because knowing a little bit about a subject provides you with search terms, as well as enough understanding of the subject matter to quickly identify which of the search hits will be relevant and informative. The first 10% of knowledge in any field will make the biggest impact on search efficacy.

I might be reading too much into it, but isn't it interesting that this could be seen as encouraging a revival of the generalist, the "Renaissance man", a pattern of learning that went out a hundred years ago? Okay, so it's just Google, right? But computer-enhanced human intellect is not going to go away -- it'll become more pervasive. It may well turn out to again be a good idea to have a baseline knowledge in everything even if you have to also have a specialized knowledge in one thing, just to take advantage of that multiplier effect.