The Twilight Report

In the dollar store some times ago I got a cheap book titled Great Battles. It is a funny book for me to own being a pacifist. But I find that sort of thing interesting. It starts with the Battle of Marathon and finishes off with the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which they refer to as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”). Each night I read a chapter which covers a different battle, and then I read about the same said battle on Wikipedia. Lately I have been making the rounds through the Napoleonic Wars: Trafalgar, Waterloo etc. Then I read into other subjects like the Napoleon's Continental System, in which he tried to cut the British out of trading in Europe, but this ended up hurting France more than Britain in practice. Also led to invasions into Spain and Russia which resulted into the downfall of the French Empire. I wonder if their are any lessons for us in The Future for that.

Lena has been watching through Star Trek The Next Generation, and we've been watching key episodes together. In The Best of Both Worlds, Picard tours the Enterprise the night before a tough battle with the Borg. He makes his way to Ten Forward and has a conversation with Guinan which is supposed to remind us that, this being the season finale, Anyone Can Die. (Riker is also mulling over a promotion to another ship, and guest Shelby is vying for his job). (Oh noes any cast change could happen)!

Picard: It's something of a tradition, Guinan - Captain touring the ship before a battle.
Guinan: Hmm. Before a hopeless battle, if I remember the tradition correctly.
Picard: Not necessarily. Nelson toured the HMS Victory before Trafalgar.
Guinan: Yes, but Nelson never returned from Trafalgar, did he?
Picard: No, but the battle was won.

Absent a stale spoiler alert, lets just say at the end of part two, all the regulars are back where they started and Shelby is on to other things never to be seen again.

Anyway, reading about Trafalgar, the thing that strikes me about this interaction now is that it seems like Picard is on “our side”. “Our side” being the presumed Anglo-Saxon-American audience which relates more with Nelson than his opponent Pierre-Charles Villeneuve (who by the way, unlike Nelson, lost the battle, but survived). The only problem is that from Picard's perspective Trafalgar wasn't won, but lost. He is after all, nominally French. We even later find out in another story that he had a relative fighting at Trafalgar on the French side.

Today Tristan was asking me about Transformers again. This pleases me because this is the list of the things that I am somewhat expert in (no particular order):

• Transformers
• C/C++
• Star Trek
• Perl
• Doctor Who
• Photography
• Thursday Next
• Never Being Confused

Anyway, he was asking me about where the Transformers came from and I told him about Primus and Unicron, the gods of the Transformers. This is sort of how it went:

me: Primus and Unicron are the gods of the Transformers. Primus created the transformers to battle the evil Unicron.
Tristnan: Did Unicron create the Decepticons to fight the Autobots?
me: No, Primus created both the Autobots and the Decepticons
Tristan: Why did he create them just to fight each other?

I really love the questions that Tristan asks. Now, granted we are talking about a mythology that nobody believes in, but you could easily recreate this exact same conversation using a number of “real” religions that I can think of, and this is exactly the sort of abstract thinking that should be applied to the subject.

I was reading the other day about how they (the giant ants^[1]) were going to make a game featuring both Sonic and Mario. Not only that, but they were both going to be featured in the title of the game. Growing up with the Nintendo vs. Sega rivalry, this would have once seemed like the moral equivalent to having Darth Vader command the USS Enterprise-K in the Next Next Generation, or having Captain Kirk pilot an X-wing. Times they are a-changing I guess, and where there is a business case anything can happen. Just today I was reading that Dell was going to start selling PC desktop systems with Linux pre-installed, which further confused me: this can’t be the same reality that I’ve lived in for the last 30 years. All of this is way too early for April Fools, so they must be ice skating in hell for sure.

Speaking space opera, I always had this fantasy of quitting my job in corporate America/Australia by declaring “I am a programmer. Like my father before me.” (Tyler can correct me on the inaccuracy of that quote) All this with the Visigoths about to storm Rome in 410, and bring an end to the Empire^[2]. The trouble is, my dad is actually a chemist. A pretty damn good one, but although he knows Fortran I wouldn’t really describe him as a programmer. I hope that if it ever does come to that, fate will forgive the necessity of a nice dramatic statement in place of a factually correct one.

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1. Damn you Tyler, I can’t use the word “they” or “them” without thinking about giant ants!
2. so my fantasies are historically schizophrenic

Merry Christmas everyone who celebrates thus, and for those of you who do not, Happy New Year. Happy Hanukkah; I see that it starts sundown on Christmas day this year.

I fly back to New York tomorrow. Nothing really happened while I was on vacation. I didn't even go skiing. This is in part because Don was feeling quite ill, although if I had been up to it myself I would have gone on my own.

I have one more week this year that I have to show up at work. I'd tell my boss that I am quitting, but since he won't be in next week it will have to wait until next year. Many people will be predictably absent. I get to be the sole developer on call for EinsTimer next week. Isn't that dandy.

Incidentally, how does one tell one's boss that one is quitting?

I don't know what I am doing for New Years Eve.

I looked at Sydney city maps and Australian rental sites to gage how much it will cost to live in Australia: So far I estimate more than Beacon, but not horribly so.

I am looking forward to going to the MoMA on Thursday with e.

I guess what I am saying is that I don't have anything to say.

I'm thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, which of course brings up the whole low carb thing. It's a serious inconvenience that pasta is now worse than slathering your blood red cow stake with the thickest bacon grease imaginable, because when cooking for people you have to think up something more complicated to make. So I send Tyler an IM asking: "are you on any of those funky low carb diets?" in hopes that if he comes out to visit me in New York I can make something simple like pasta. But he doesn't answer me right away.

I decided I really needed a paper clip. I riffled through my desk drawer, but come up with nothing. I decide to go buy some and tell Tyler: "i need to go get paper clips. i'll be back in a bit."

To which he responds: "no; they don't work. my dad actually wrote a book which describes why"

I was about to walk out of the room, but I stop with a feeling of dread in my heart. Suddenly I had been thrust into some strange universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee and for some reasons all paper clips have become non functional. I wonder what else is different about this parallel universe? And why did Tyler's father write an entire book on why paper clips don't work? I've been so wrapped up in the future and being an optimist and all that B.S. that I have made myself susceptible to believing it just may be true when somebody tells me something like "paper clips don't work."

"huh? what?" I type.

Then I remember the question before that. "oh. heh. cool. got confused there."

Tyler responds with: "the diets"

"i thought you were saying PAPER CLIPS didn't work."

Relieved that I wouldn't have to double check my Star Trek DVDs to insure that Spock didn't have any extra whiskers (except of course for that one episode that he did), I went off to get some paper clips.

On the way back I'm listening to a CD I burned with just music that I like to listen to and none of the extra chaff which is on those CDs that those musical corporations expect us to buy. It struck me recently that with the exception of the first ("reptile") and last song ("suicide notes") it is all "happy" music, and that I haven't been much interested in listening to the "unhappy" tracks. Guthrie used to imply that the fact that I used to listen to depressing music made me unhappy. I contend (as I did then) that I listened to depressing music because I was depressed, and now that I prefer to listen to "happy" music because I am optimistic.

For a second there it didn't even bother me that I still don't have plans for New Years Eve. It occurs to me that New Years Eve is really Old Years Night... and is so about the past, not The Future.

I was having Raw Fish for lunch today (yes, some call it Sushi) and decided to have desert, which means Green Tea Ice Cream. I dunno if this is a widely accepted practice among all Sushi restaurants, but the place I was at today has these really vicious looking spoons for eating ice cream. I remember thinking that they looked a little like the sort of spoons Klingon's would use... if Klingon's used utensils.

Note: Yes... I am an X-Star Trek Geek. No... I'm not anymore.

Anyway, later in the super market today I was revisiting this thought in my mind and it occurred to me that the spoons are really too small to be entire spoons, but they are about the right size to be tea spoons. So I was eating with Klingon Teaspoons in the Sushi House Today.

On leaving the super market I started thinking about this Chatbot I have been half heartedly developing. I have two best friends from College. One of them has or had an acquaintance that spent all of his time developing a Quakebot. I think maybe he dropped out of school because of it. It made conversing with him pretty unplesant because he pretty much couldn't talk about anything else. So naturally this made me think about my friend, and social drawbacks to being obsessed with writing a bot. So I think I will cancel the bot project before it gets any further.

On the drive home, I decided to call my mother to tell her that I had eaten Ice Cream with a Klingon Teaspoon today. Then we talked about the olympics... and how well Australia is doing. Neither of us ever fails to take the opportunity to point out that Australia is always ahead in the per capita medal tally... even if it is only to each other. I am not quite sure why this is.

When I get home I chat on-line with my other best friend from college who is now working for a video game company in LA designing sound for a first person shooter. In a way, I am incredibly jealous. When I was younger I wanted nothing more than to work for a company designing computer games. Of course I was more interested in the more cerebral interactive fiction games of Sierra "[fill in the blank] Quest" fame. There is no money in that anymore, and I won't scoff at the Quake-esq games my buddy is working on. I estimate the sound on his games will be stunning. I'm really happy for him.