jus gladii

Ko, Part 1

“If you don’t like ko, don’t play go” is one of the first proverbs a beginning go player is likely to hear. Like a lot of go proverbs, its meaning isn’t necessarily clear when you first hear it. “Play forcing moves before living,” for example, makes no sense when you’re a beginner with no idea what either term means. Ko is a little different. In its most basic form it’s one of the fundamental rules, but its strategic implications remain obscure for a long while.

Dia. 1: A basic ko

This is the most basic ko position. If it’s White’s turn, she can capture at the marked point. Black cannot recapture due to the rule of ko, which states that you cannot immediately repeat the previous board position. This is the aspect of ko that you learn when you first begin playing. The importance of the rule takes much longer to learn.

Dia. 2: 4-4 point enclosure

This is a small knight’s move enclosure from a 4-4 point. This is one of the first enclosures beginners play, because the 4-4 point is relatively “easy.” Unfortunately, it shows an inconsistent strategy in the play of most low- and mid-level kyu players. The 4-4 point is aimed at the outside. It strikes a balance between the top and left, and it is expected to have long-range implications. It is not territorial. The knight’s move enclosure, though it has a long history in professional play, has a different purpose than most beginners understand. They think that playing this move protects the corner and guarantees fifteen points.

The problem with this strategy is the 3-3 point, which is marked in the diagram.

Dia. 3: The classic invasion

After a 3-3 point invasion, it’s impossible for Black to kill the invasion cleanly without ko. This is one of the easiest and clearest ko positions. White needs to capture 6 at ‘A;’ if Black backs down from the ko and plays at ‘A’ himself, white can often live unconditionally in the corner and has other options for forcing a ko.

One mistake I’ve found myself making in situations like this is considering the ko in isolation, so that I never make the attempt to form a ko as in Diagram 3. Rather than being a misunderstanding of ko itself, I think this stems primarily from a misunderstanding of ko threats—the other important part of ko strategy.

Dia. 4: Kong Jie 7-dan vs. Hu Yaoyu 8-dan

This position is from a game between two Chinese professional players. Kong Jie 7-dan is Black, while Hu Yaoyu 8-dan is White. White is attempting to reduce Black’s territory on the bottom side. The seven stones on the bottom side have very poor prospects by themselves, so White plays the marked stone at the 2-3 point. If Black responds submissively, white can merely connect and his group will live. This would amount, roughly, to a 40-point reduction in Black’s territory. Impermissible!

Dia. 5: Finding the ko

With moves 1–7, Black initiates a ko. First he cuts; White connects. Black plays 3. If Black played 5 first, White would simply play at 3 and he would be guaranteed an eye in the corner, which is enough to live. White 4 ensures that if he gets the chance he can play at ‘B’ in order to live. Black 5 puts White in atari, White 6 accepts the challenge to a ko, and Black’s capture at 7 begins the ko. Since Black captures first, White must find the first threat.

Dia. 6: The fight

, , , , and take ko.

White’s first threat, at 1, threatens to connect three dead white stones with the center group, and in so doing cut off twelve black stones. Black responds at 2, so White takes the ko. Black threatens white locally at 4. Local threats are usually a very good option if possible, so Black has the upper hand in this fight. I’m not sure that it’s quite one-sided enough to be a “flower-viewing ko,” but it’s certainly good for Black. White responds at 5, and Black takes the ko. White’s 7 and 13 threaten the integrity of the lower left; Black’s 10 and 16 are two more local threats. At 23, it seems that white can’t find any threats large enough; he ignores Black’s threat and ends the ko. He has lived in the corner, but at a huge cost—the entire marked central group has died, cut off after Black follows through on his threat with 24.

This is devastating to White’s chances. White resigns after a desultory effort in the upper right. (If you’re curious, you can view the game at Go4Go.net.)

It’s unclear to me why White plays the ko, to be honest. Although Black seems ahead prior to White’s attempted reduction, it seems odd that Hu Yaoyu would miscount the number of threats. Is it possible that he overlooked the internal threats?

To be continued…

Consequentiality

Recently I had a discussion with one of my online friends about Go. I told him that despite my tendency to “abandon” the game for months at a time, I always seem to come back to it. I had difficulty articulating why that’s the case, but it led me to thinking about what makes a good game. In general, I think a good game should create an environment in which the player possesses the ability to affect that environment as a player, not as a character. This can include metagame elements such as completion times and scores, as in classic arcade games, or it can be based on an individual’s command of the playing environment, as in the perfect information abstract games. This concept can be called “consequentiality,” the idea that the player’s actions have a real effect on the outcome of the game. I think Go epitomizes the concept. Beyond the turn-based structure of the game, it makes few assumptions about the players or the flow of the game. For a counter-example, let’s look at online RPGs…

Anyone who’s talked to me about games will realize that I hate MMORPGs. With the exception, perhaps, of the socipathy simulator EVE Online, these are the exemplars of games based around being time sinks. That’s their business model; a player pays $14.95 per month, so it is against the company’s interests to make it possible to “finish” the game. The games are structured around loot, and there is no functional difference between a “good” player and a “bad” player. This may seem nonsensical if you’ve never played one of these games, but allow me to illustrate with two imaginary items.

Item:	a silver sword
Type:	weapon
Damage:	3d4
Bonus:	2
Crit. %:	10%

Item:	a runed greatsword
Type:	weapon
Damage:	4d5
Bonus:	5
Crit. %:	15%

To someone who plays a MMORPG, these item tables will look immediately familiar. They will tell you that the first weapon produces 5–14 damage, for an average of 9.5. 9.975 over many hits if the game uses a 1.5x critical modifier. The second weapon produces 9–25 damage, for an average of 17, or 18.275 over many hits. The second weapon is obviously better: if you give a “good” player the first item and “bad” player the second, the bad player will win every fight. The “balancing factor” in most MMORPGs is the loot model. Obviously the second item is better, but it’s “rarer.” The first sword might be available from a standard weapon shop in a safe town; the second drops 1% of the time from the Mad Mushroom of the Fungus Hills, which spawns only once an hour.

Now, randomness isn’t necessarily bad. Roguelikes like Crawl and Nethack rely on similar damage, combat, and loot models, and I consider them very successful and well-executed games. The difference is in constraint. In Crawl, for example, the amount of loot is limited because levels can be cleared and repopulate only very slowly. The food supply is a limiting factor, a de facto time pressure forcing you to explore and requiring decisions about balancing resource use with “farming” for loot. MMORPGs have no such constraints. The world is static, support structures tend to be extensive, and the outcome of your game—such as it is, given that MMORPGs have no failure states—is determined by the time you have to spend on it. This is why they’re so repetitive; the game design is not based on concepts of success and failure, but upon chance. With no time constraints, the chance becomes dreary inevitability.

So. My favorite games remain games of strategy and tactics (Go), of reflex and aim (Team Fortress 2 and other action games), and of limited resource management (Crawl, Spelunky). All are consequential: a player’s action determines his success or failure, and his skill at the game can mostly mitigate random effects. There are critical hits in TF2, while Crawl and Spelunky are heavily randomized, but all rely more heavily upon the player’s understanding of the playing environment than upon inconsequential elements such as luck-based damage or repetition.

Netflix

Since I signed up for Netflix, I’ve been watching movies constantly. Previously, my movie-viewing habits were relatively simple: I went to the movie theater with my friends when there was a palatable movie to watch and sometimes watched a rented movie with someone. I seldom rented movies on my own, with a few exceptions, so the choices had to be somewhat moderated to the taste of the group rather than the individual. Well, with the addition of Netflix’s thousands of discs, that’s changed a bit.

In the month or so since I signed up for the service, I’ve watched:

Seven Samurai
Taxi Driver
Chungking Express
Touch of Evil
Yojimbo
Fanny and Alexander
Reservoir Dogs
Sanjuro
Le Doulos
Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters

Now, I didn’t like all of these movies. Reservoir Dogs was little more than Quentin Tarantino experimenting with violence, while Touch of Evil was hopelessly dated and Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander bored me to tears. What’s interesting, though, is that I don’t think I would have been able to find any of these movies in one of my local video rental stores except Sanjuro and perhaps Taxi Driver. It’s certainly affected my viewing patterns!

Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that due to the easy availability of his films I’ve become a Kurosawa fan. The one piece I had watched before, Rashōmon, felt badly paced and a little dull. Within the last month, however, I’ve watched and enjoyed Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, and Ran. I checked the last out from a local library, but the point stands. I intend to make a longer post about his movies in the future, if I can find something to say that hasn’t already been said.

I’m also venturing further back into movie “history” than I previously have. Movies are a young medium—barely a century old—and yet many of its works are considered antiquated and unwatchable by people who call novels from the same era “modern.” More and more, I’m discovering that it’s the dismissal of the older movies that’s the problem here, rather than some deficiency of the movies themselves. Touch of Evil was a rare exception, but I blame this on the censorship of the period and some truly bizarre casting decisions rather than merely its age. It’s hard to make a convincing movie about crime when there is essentially no violence and the antagonists are “comic” racist caricatures. It’s also hard to make a convincing Mexican when he’s played by Charlton Heston. I much preferred Le Doulos—a roughly contemporaneous French film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville—to Welles’s noir.

The Candy and Steak Model

One of my friends posted a comment on my post about Stalker, and I feel it necessary to respond. Since I’ve been making it a point to watch a few movies the last couple of weeks—I’ve just subscribed to Netflix—I decided to make it a post of its own. It may help to explain my “odd” taste in movies.

It may be cliché that I prefer a movie closely resembling the two that you mention (I, Robot and I Am Legend), but I don’t care. I like a movie that keeps me on the edge of my seat, a suspense. Save the world movies, Good verses evil, casting of spells, the use of heavy artillery, you catch my drift.

I do catch your drift. I don’t particularly like your drift, but I catch it. The thing is, that’s pretty much the normal mode of watching film. It’s based on the standard Hollywood “focus group commercialism” model of film-making: make it exciting, suspenseful, and easy to digest. Don’t make it too interesting—if it’s too interesting, people will complain when you shoehorn in an unnecessary, cookie cutter sequel. I enjoy films like that as much as anyone, I guess, but I don’t consider them good or significant.

The thing is, film and other art forms can be much more than just a three-hour entertainment in the middle of July. Summer blockbusters are popular, yes, which is why they make money, but they’re not necessarily the only or the best type of film. Stalker, for example, is an extremely slow and meditative film. It’s also vastly superior to any film I’ve seen in the theater since at least No Country for Old Men, and of the two I’m not sure which is the better. The film exhibits a feeling of strong authorial control on the part of the director. Tarkovsky has a voice, whereas a director like Francis Lawrence (I am Legend) seems more like a cypher, a manager presiding over a product already drafted and detailed in limitless committee meetings. Stalker lingers in the mind. I Am Legend and I, Robot do not. It’s like comparing candy and steak: both are enjoyable to eat, but one is more satisfying, despite the investment required.

Stalker

Anyone who’s allowed me to pick out a movie to watch (or who has talked about movies in general, really) will be aware that my tastes tend toward the “odd.”’ David Lynch? He’s a genius. The Coen brothers? Amazing. Terry Gilliam? Pretty dang good. None of the films from these directors are weird in quite the way that Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is weird, though, and I think I may be adding a director to my list.

Stalker is the story of the “Zone,” an anomalous location in an industrial region of an unnamed country. It seems that some years ago, an event took place there causing the region to become depopulated and dangerous. There are rumors of prizes worth the risk of braving the police cordons and the unknown dangers of the Zone itself, and so people brave them. This is the central (and only) conceit of the movie.

Some of my readers may immediately make the connection to Chernobyl. This is the definitive ruined landscape of the modern world: poisoned irrevocably and invisibly, with access strictly controlled. The movie was made in 1979, but the resemblance to the real event is obvious.

In any case, the movie follows the adventure of a guide to the Zone—a “stalker”, which is used in English even within the spoken Russian dialogue—and his clients, a washed-up writer and a scientist. Unlike many reviews, I am going to try to avoid spoilers; I know that most of the people reading this haven’t seen the movie, and I think being spoiled beforehand about the events of the plot is particularly dangerous here. In light of that, I’m going to skip the “meat” of the movie with two words: it’s good. The cinematography and directing bear further examination, though.

This is not a realistic movie. The acting is good but often feels artificial, and much of the movie is dedicated to symbolism of action and visuals. The world outside the Zone is filmed in sepia-tinted monochrome, with many details lost in shadow and with a disconcerting unreality of texture. The Zone itself, on the other hand, is presented in color, emphasizing the lush green of the vegetation and the rich, eerie coloration of the overgrown industrial wasteland which comprises most of its landscape. Many of the shots in the film are long, almost uncomfortably so; from comments elsewhere I gather that this is a common trait of Tarkovsky’s films. One shot I found particularly memorable was a simple tracking shot across several submerged objects in an apocalyptically polluted river. The sequence is almost poetic in its simplicity.

You may have gathered that this isn’t an action-filled movie. If you begin watching Stalker expecting to see something akin to Hollywood’s I, Robot and I Am Legend, you will be disappointed. This is a slow-paced, meditative film concerned primarily with psychology and spirituality. It’s excellent.

The Savage Detectives

Like most other artists, writers are self-obsessed. The art becomes the art, so to speak. Rock musicians sing a lot of songs about rock, blues musicians often sing about the blues, Captain Beefheart exists, and “serious writers” write about writing and writers. Seriously. To varying degrees.

The Savage Detectives is that sort of story. It’s either the transparently autobiographical story of its author, Roberto Bolaño (who becomes Arturo Belano within the narrative) or the story of the futility of the art of poetry personified by the semi-mythical Cesarea Tinajero. Either way, it’s an odd one. Arturo Belano and his friend Ulises Lima are the only narrative constants, but neither is a narrator; instead, the novel is narrated by a large number of characters who are mostly writers or who are involved in the world of the literary avant garde in Latin America and Spain.

Like I said, it’s an odd one.

Bolaño’s novel was named one of the ten best books of 2007 by The New York Times Book Review, and I don’t disagree—I just don’t think I can recommend it to most people. It presumes a great deal of interest in writing (as an art), poetry, and Latin America. When you’re marketing that to an English-speaking audience, you’re approaching sub-niche status… no matter how sublime the translation.

The Joker and the Madman

I’ve done a lot of movie-watching recently, including the movie that seemingly everyone else has seen: The Dark Knight. It’s a good film with something extra: an unforgettable performance. Ledger’s Joker is going to remain in the cultural lexicon for a long time, longer certainly than his predecessors in the role. He managed to bring something uncanny to the screen, a sort of Loki-esque chaos which appeals to the id and is deeply unsettling because of that.

If Nolan’s second Batman film has a message, it is that anyone can be corrupted. The best “need a little push;” the rest are already there. The Joker’s last, failed gambit feels tacked-on, as if the studios said: “This is too dark. It needs to leave the audience feeling that good will win.” It didn’t work. One of my friends, who isn’t the most analytical when it comes to films, said it was “too depressing,” and when you’ve gone right past all of us intestine-gnawing English majors to hit the pragmatists in the gut, well, your attempt at lightening the film has failed.

That said, The Dark Knight may as well be a Judd Apatow comedy when compared to Werner Herzog’s classic Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), which I finally finished watching today.

Aguirre is the story of a mad explorer with delusions of grandeur and a mean streak which appears to have enveloped his entire being. It’s a minimalist film—a “tight” film, in my own personal lexicon of film analysis—whose dialog would fit in a twenty page book and whose cinematography is breathtaking. The strength of the movie is Aguirre himself, played by Klaus Kinski, whose one-sided gait, thousand-yard glare and tortured grimace give the entire movie an atmosphere of dread.

I can’t help but think that Heath Ledger and Christopher Nolan watched the performance at some point. Although the Joker and Aguirre are drastically different characters, watching them in proximity makes them seem almost like two sides of the same coin. The Joker is outward-directed chaos, breaking order down around him and acting on whims; Aguirre crushes people and their plans because they don’t happen to conform to his will. Neither is someone you’d want to invite to dinner, and both characters have particularly dark exits, for different reasons.

I have more to say about both films, as well as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but it’ll have to wait until later—Aguirre is still swimming around in my head at the moment.

Oh, and D.K.—watch Amélie. You won’t regret it.

Beguilement

Well, that was a disappointment. I’m not sure what’s going on with Bujold, but her recent books have been well off her peak. Beguilement is essentially a romance novel disguised as a fantasy, and nothing happens for three-quarters of the book. It’s front-loaded: at the beginning, we get a lot of fantasy-adventure, and the rest of it (all three hundred pages) consists of the protagonists falling in love and having sexual escapades. I wonder why this wasn’t a standalone novel; it’s plain that Bujold wrote most of this book as filler, and given its modest length (360 pages) it seems unlikely that the book would have been “too long” if it were printed as one volume. It’s a shame. The characters are likeable and the world is interesting, but I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the the second volume.

Adam Bede

At one point in my life, I felt it a sort of Solemn Duty to finish every book I began, no matter how dismal I found it. Oddly enough, I think going to college and majoring in English cured me of that; good luck getting through that degree if you insist on reading everything you’re assigned. That said, there’s always a little bit of a guilty feeling when I decide to put a book to the side.

I began reading Adam Bede because The Valve had a summer reading project and decided to read it. Generally I enjoy collective reading projects, and when my own suggestion of Green Grass, Running Water wasn’t selected, I went along. I should have known better.

I have history with Nineteenth Century novelists. We don’t get along. Short stories, fine; poetry, fine; essays, fine; but the novel of the period seems turgid and, perhaps, lacking in scope. Adam Bede, for example, is a casualty of pacing. I read twenty-five chapters, and so far have learned:

Adam Bede is honest, handsome, and skilled.
Seth Bede is honest, but not as awesome as his brother.
Arthur Donnithorne is a friendly sort, but a bit of a lightweight.
Hetty Sorrel is pretty, but vapid and vain.
Dinah Morris is pretty, but cold and holier-than-thou.

After three hundred pages, nothing of interest has happened. That’s a problem.

It’s interesting to me that a great number of people seem to think that the novel in English never rose to a higher level than it attained in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are still people who will say Dickens is the greatest novelist, with perhaps Austen a close second. I don’t understand this attitude, and I wonder whether these are the same sorts of people who feel that Shakespeare is the greatest English playwright and that Leonardo da Vinci was the greatest painter in history. All arts progress, and it seems an injustice that writers nearer our time get less credit than century-old pastorals and thinly-veiled morality plays.

Oh well; I think I will take a break from heavy reading and take a detour into escapism with Lois McMaster Bujold.

Stories of Attachment

Okay, I’m not a fan of romance novels. In fact, I’m going to take the risk of offending a few people who will read this by saying that romance novels are basically pornography for women. Considering that my grandmother owned hundreds of the damnable things, this is a little bit horrifying. She liked the cheap ones, where all the coverart is of a pirate, cowboy, or gangster with a woman whose breasts are barely concealed by her blouse. The implications for the psychology of this are probably damning. (Why do books by and for women feature breasts as a prominent point on the cover, anyway?) There is a style of novel, however, whose treatment of love is more interesting. I can’t call it a “genre,” because it doesn’t seem particularly internally consistent, so let’s call them “stories of attachment.” Most people have read or encountered these in some form. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a particularly good example of the type.

Books such as Unbearable Lightness are concerned primarily with how people relate to each other in a romantic and sexual context. They are not usually concerned with courtship: they are stories of attachment rather than stories of pursuit. Furthermore–oddly, perhaps–most of these books seem to be written by men, from the male perspective. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera’s protagonist, Tomas, is a womanizer who is nevertheless attached psychologically to his wife and to one principle lover. This can be interpreted in the customary way, with a vague allusion to the “virgin-whore” dichotomy, but I think that does a disservice to Kundera. Sabina is not a whore, and Teresa is not a virgin. Instead, I think the two women are examples of success–self-actualization–and failure. Sabina lives “lightly,” accepting herself and doing as she will. Teresa lives “heavily,” and is a burden and a duty to Tomas. Both are beloved of him, but ultimately Teresa leads him to suffering and death.

I recently read two Japanese stories of attachment: South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami (as previously discussed) and Snow Country, by Kawabata Yasunari. I intended to review both, but upon reflection discovered that they share many similiarities with Kundera’s novel.

Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun is unlike any of the other novels that he has written and that I have read. Unlike the others, it lacks fantastic elements beyond omitted background details. Hajime is not drawn into a shadowy Limbo (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle); fish don’t rain from the sky (Kafka on the Shore); there is no “sleeping beauty” (After Dark); and there’s no psychological city representing decay and the loss of memory (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). What replaces these fantastic elements?

As a young boy, Hajime knows a girl named Shimamoto. She isn’t physically beautiful, but the memory of their brief friendship stays with Hajime through a catastrophic high school relationship, a dreary period of working at “a company,” and his marriage. Predictably, perhaps, she reappears, and the novel becomes a question: will Hajime’s attachment to Shimamoto overwhelm his accustomedness to Yukiko? This has obvious parallels with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that Murakami had read it.

Snow Country, like the others, is this sort of novel of attachment. Shimamura, Kawabata’s main character, is a dilettante. He writes about Western dance and considers it a bonus that he’s never actually seen a ballet; his writing, Kawabata says, is a satisfying sort of self-mockery. It’s more subtle than the Murakami. Shimamura is torn between a geisha and a young village girl; his wife is an afterthought, and his love for both girls is doomed from the start. The arc of the story, needless to say, is very different from the Murakami, and Komako—the geisha—is more central than either Sabina or Shimamoto, and her competition less visible.

I would argue that none of these stories are stories of romance as such. Romanticism, after all, doesn’t last very long for most of us outside of a desire for wish-fulfillment stories, and none of these books are wish-fulfillment stories. Instead, the women represent a key philosophical decision: should I be “responsible” and attached, whatever that might entail, or should I seek idealized sexual freedom and romance? Lightness seems positive about the “freedom” answer and South of the Border about the “responsible” answer, but Snow Country is the most unambiguous. Komako and Yoko enact a doomed parody of the decision, but the choice was made long before either came onstage: Shimamura chose freedom and, in doing so, doomed himself to inconsequentiality and flitting from obsession to obsession. The plot of the novel is just the ugly ruination of the three.

Isn’t that uplifting? This is a theme that reverberates through all three novels: weightiness versus lightness; duty versus inspiration; consequentiality versus ephemerality.

I highly recommend all three novels. Lightness may be the best, overall, but the Seidensticker translation of Kawabata is subtle and skillful, and Murakami is probably the most entertaining. Just don’t come in expecting a typical Hollywood- or television-style love triangle. Or happy endings.

Summer Reading

My Summer will involve a lot of reading. This can partially be blamed on the Southern heat. Although I fully expect to take several medals in the “complaining about the heat” and “sprinting from the air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned building” events this summer, the most satisfying method of coping may be reading a book in front of an air conditioner vent while drinking ice-water. In light of this ambitious vacation planning, I’ve begun to line up my reading schedule, and thought it might be a fun way to inaugurate the “real” posts on the new blog.

In Progress

The Collected Short Stories of Isaac Babel.
The Overcoat and Other Tale of Good and Evil, by Nikolai Gogol.
Starwater Strains, an anthology by Gene Wolfe.

What can I say? I’ve been on a short story kick lately. Of these three, Babel’s collection is probably the best. It’s a surprising book, full of stories with decidedly mixed tones that Babel pulls off perfectly. It’s difficult to tell a sad story in a funny way and get by with it, but he manages well enough.

Gogol is not quite as good. He’s recognized as one of the masters of the short story. Dostoevsky said “We all came out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” and I can’t deny that story has a power and melancholy worth its reputation. The other stories, however, are uneven. “The Terrible Vengeance” is another excellent story, but the rest of the stories seem over-long and meandering. I’ll have more to say about these melancholy Russians in about a week, I think.

Starwater Strains is good, but it may be the weakest collection of Wolfe’s stories that I own. That’s not a severe indictment—after Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Storeys, most authors’ collections would look weak. Most genre writers would kill for a collection this good. That said, perhaps because I’ve read so much of Wolfe now, or perhaps because it’s being read concurrently with Babel and Gogol, this collection seems a little less effective than his others. The Sam Cooper, Ph.D. stories and “Mute” (also collected in Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse) make it worthwhile.

I’m overdue on a giant post about Wolfe…

Planned

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton.
Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy.
Peace, by Gene Wolfe.
There Are Doors, by Gene Wolfe.

Okay, so this is a weird list. I bought the Allende on a whim for a dollar, and it’s been lying there taunting me for months. It’s been recommended to me, but it honestly sounds like nothing I will like, so I’m not exactly enthused. Still, broadening the horizons and all that. The Hardy is in a similar boat. One of my coworkers recommended it to me, and I’ve decided to take her up on it. Of course, I hate Hardy as a result of a miserable assignment of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 12th Grade English, so this is his last chance to make a favorable impression.

I’ve long felt that Chesterton is a gaping hole in my reading experience, so I’ve made up my mind to fix that. Thursday is widely regarded as his best work, both funny and serious, and so that will be my beachhead. Of course, Chesterton is also Gene Wolfe’s favorite author, so this serves the purpose of tracing influences as well. As for Mr. Wolfe, I’ve mostly finished his serieses and am moving into his (strange) standalone novels. A lot of people dislike these two, so we’ll see how it goes.

Possible

Green Grass, Running Water, by Thomas King.

This is a result of summer reading posts at How the University Works and The Valve. I enjoy reading groups, but it seems that most of the interesting ones choose really miserable books. Green Grass, Running Water is a rarity: an interesting looking novel that actually has people interested in it. Of course, given my luck, they’ll pick something terrible. Like a re-reading of Frankenstein. Come on, people, it was terrible the first time.

Spring Cleaning

After years of looking at the same WordPress theme, I finally got off my tail and edited it. Well, demolished it, actually. I’ve left the land of WordPress behind, folks, and struck out on the strange road towards blosxom. If you were subscribed to me via RSS, well, you’re out of luck now. (And I guess I’ve probably lost a reader. Oops.)

The theme is still a little rough around the edges, but blosxom is much more flexible than WordPress. I feel that I can actually make the page look like I want it to look without wrestling a five hundred pound bear. By the way, if you’re using Internet Explorer—I am aware that the page looks like crap at the moment, and I will get around to doing the horrible sacrifices and voodoo necessary to make it look like a competently designed page. Maybe. Why don’t you guys just use a real browser, anyway? It’s a 5.7 meg download and I haven’t met a site I needed to use that wouldn’t work in over two years.

I’m looking at you, Tovi. I’m looking at you very emphatically.

You may notice as you look at the blog that some of the links at the top of the screen appear not to work. They do, actually, it’s just that I haven’t written anything in those categories yet. When you click on “books,” “movies,” “games,” or “meta,” you get a list of the posts that are contained within that category. If you’re interested only in one particular category, you can also get an RSS feed only of that category. Simply click on the category icon and then “RSS” at the bottom of the screen.

I’ve shopped out comments to Disqus, which is a nice web 2.0 comment and discussion system with pretensions. Ignore the pretensions and you should get along fine.

Also, since I’ve shopped out the comment system, they have to deal with the advertisements for Genuine Young Russian Lovers, WIN TONS AT BLACKJACK!, and FIFTY TYPES OF VIAGRA !!!@#@!. I would probably consider murder to avoid having to deal with those. Disqus, thankfully, is quite a bit short of murder.