Stupornova

I tried to watch the movie Supernova today. Really. I tried. I didn't have any illusions going in, in part because I've never been particularly enamored of James Spader. He just seems creepy to me, in the same way Christopher Walken always seems creepy. But James Spader seems creepy in a different and less interesting way.

But I'm not an ideologue, and I thought "Oh, who knows, he might be good. After all, he was pretty good in Stargate, creepiness aside."

I'll never know, because I had to stop watching the movie long before I could decide if I liked James Spader. The movie itself seemed like a combination of Event Horizon, Alien and Firefly, which is all good. Unfortunately, it's also like Battlestar Galactica. Maybe even worse.

My main beef with Battlestar Galactica was the Unsteady Cam. Whatever the director may or may not be trying to tell me by wobbling the camera around like that, my reaction was to see it as someone's badly-done home movie and I lost interest in it very quickly. But Supernova takes the Unsteady Cam to new and altogether infuriating lengths. I found the Unsteady Cam in Battlestar merely annoying. But in Supernova, it was actually frustrating. It made me angry. I'm sure director and cinematographer and all sat around the screening room high-fiving one another over the artistry of the wobbling, but me, the consumer, got angry and turned the TV off because I couldn't bear any more.

The Unsteady Cam in Supernova has an all-new mode of unsteadiness. It rolls back and forth, incessantly, obnoxiously, to the point that most of the time I felt like I was watching the movie from a rowboat in the open ocean. Why? What possible idea does this rolling camera convey? That we're in space? That we're in a rowboat? That the Unsteady Cam has become such a trope in science fiction that one has to have an Uber-Unsteady Cam to be noticed? That we've drunk half a dozen bottles of cough syrup and can't hold our heads steady?

The movie also had the annoying habit of having wildly out-of-focus things in the foreground. I guess it's supposed to make us think we're actually on the ship, but most of the time it made me feel like a Peeping Tom, like I wasn't just on the ship, but hiding on the ship and viewing people in a furtive and somehow shameful way.

I turned it off. I have no idea if the story is worth anything, because the camera work alienated and frustrated me to the point that I turned it off and did other things instead.

I think what really gets to me is that someone had to design and build a special camera mount to produce that sickening rolling. It's probably some amazing construction of motors, joints, feedback devices, computers, and thousands of lines of code. It probably cost a pretty penny to develop. It's probably an amazing technical achievement. And all so I could feel like I was in a rowboat in the open ocean.

Come on, people. This is getting ridiculous. When your audience starts to shout "Hold still, for crying out loud," you may have taken artistic pretension just a little too far.

Bad Game Art

Two contestants in the "Cheesiest Game Cover of All Time" contest, at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't know which is really worse, the guy with the six-foot-wide helmet gripping the green-clad hostage one-handed and firing at the aquarium-head mantises with the other hand, or the dreadful strutting adventurer on the cover of Universe. Is he wearing a shirt? I can't tell. It looks like he's shirtless and wearing corduroy trousers, which I think would tend to give his position away, what with all that zip-zip-zip when he runs. And what are those amorphous greyish bipeds in the lower right? Rejects from the Tron animation team?

But one shouldn't judge a game by its cover. Rescue from the Hive is simple and kind of dorky, but reasonably fun - it's better than Worldkiller, which isn't saying much, and better than The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat, which now that I think about it isn't saying much either. Let me put it this way, if someone gave me a choice between eating asparagus or playing Rescue from the Hive, I'd go with the latter. And Universe is simply way better than its cover art would suggest.

I think the worst game cover art I've ever seen is Panzer Command by Victory Games. Just glancing askance at that jut-jawed, steely-eyed Nazi caricature unsettles me. I'd post it here, but it's so atrocious I don't want to look at it. It's horrid, but even worse, it's predictable, which makes it even more horrid.

Gunslinger

GUNSLINGER qualifies as a role-playing game only by the most slender of margins, that being that the rules mention the words “role playing” somewhere. The role playing rules are extremely abbreviated – essentially, everything that happens outside of a gunfight is abstracted out, and player-characters are expected to have about one gunfight a month for two years or so, at which point the role-playing game ends.

So what I’m really saying is that GUNSLINGER is actually a tactical game of gunfights in the Old West with a thin, skimpy veneer of role-playing tacked on just so they could mention it on the back of the box. But as a tactical game, it’s actually not bad. It’s a “sequenced” system were you lay out five action points’ worth of activities per turn using cards, and the cards tell you up front how long each action takes. Each turn lasts about five seconds, so each “sub-turn” lasts about a second, which is plenty detailed enough for the purposes of shootouts in the Old West. Instead of rolling dice, players draw from a shuffled deck of about 110 “event cards” every time a dice would normally be rolled. It’s mostly a gimmick, but a harmless one (and one borrowed from the Avalon Hill “Strat-O-Matic” sports games, I think).

It’s an interesting system. It’s different from the system in BOOT HILL, but about as much fun to play. Not quite as deadly, though. BOOT HILL was rightly infamous for its profusion of one-hit, one-kill gunfights. Such things aren’t as common in GUNSLINGER; people seem a bit more resistant having their heads shot off, I guess. It’s more likely that you’ll be wounded and bleed until you pass out than be completely killed with one shot. Chances are you’ll die anyway – you take “supplemental damage” during the dealing process, presumably the result of cod liver oil and bloodletting and trepanning and tuberculosis and whatnot, and that’s usually enough to do you in. The point is that though characters don’t croak quite as often during the shootouts, their lifespans still aren’t terribly long and you still shouldn’t make wedding plans for them more than about two weeks in advance. (Actually, it's entirely possible to have a major exchange of gunfire in GUNSLINGER and never hit anything. More than once I've seen players unload all their weapons at one another without hitting anyone. The smoke clears and the posse and the gang are still standing there, wide-eyed and completely unhurt, and the drama then revolves around who can reload the fastest.)

Where GUNSLINGER really shines compared to BOOT HILL is graphical sophistication. GUNSLINGER has eight or ten full-color geomorphic maps, usually with some kind of rural terrain on one side and a town building on the other. No end of interesting map configurations are possible, and the game had nice round counters for the characters, weapon counters, a stagecoach/buckboard, horses (both alive and “lying down”, as we don’t want to tell my wife that horses can be shot), and counters for things like bales of hay, whiskey bottles, pitchforks and the like. There are even floor plans of four additional buildings printed on the backs of the player aid cards, a nice touch and a nice use of otherwise blank paper. GUNSLINGER also has quite a brace of nice optional rules for things like sun dazzle and ladders and whatnot.

In other words, BOOT HILL offers a good character generation system, better role-playing rules, an area or strategic map, and ideas for things to do when one isn’t right in the middle of a gunfight (and it has that masterstroke of Old West RPG design, "Greased Lightning" speed). GUNSLINGER has pleasing, colorful and useful components and nice special and optional rules. Combine the two and you might really have something.

Favorite RPG

I sometimes wonder what my favorite role-playing game is. It's sort of like wondering what my favorite meat dish is - the answer doesn't matter, and it's never the same answer twice in a row. But it's an amusing and harmless way to spend an evening when you don't feel good enough to do anything, but not quite bad enough to justify going to bed early.

The game I played the most was without a doubt Dungeons & Dragons. I started playing it back around 1977 or so, when the game consisted of three flimsy tan booklets and the Greyhawk and Blackmoor business (remember them?). Though there were things about D&D that I heartily disliked, it was still fun to play, to the point that it was almost impossible to talk my hearties into playing any other RPG.

Is it just me, or the backwards armor class drive anyone else crazy too? How much sense does it make that armor class -3 is better than armor class +17? And the profusion of dice bugged me - woe betide the player who lost his 12-sided dice, or who stepped on that ridiculous 4-sided dice in the middle of the night while scrounging around for uneaten Fiddle Faddle in the dark.

But I played a lot of D&D. I knew people who were quite monogamous with D&D. They played only D&D, and they bought only D&D. But I was considerably more promiscuous. I could even be called an RPG slut, because I could never survive the temptation of a new RPG on the shelves at the game stores I haunted. I bought Tunnels & Trolls, Bushido, Chivalry & Sorcery, Arduin, three versions of Traveller, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest, Star Trek, Universe, The Morrow Project, Shadowrun, D&D, Twilight 2000, Boot Hill... I bought games that were only loosely role-playing, like Deathmaze, Citadel of Blood, Car Wars, and Gunslinger. For crying out loud, I even played Squad Leader/Cross of Iron as though it were a role-playing game, and managed to convince myself that when I played NATO Division Commander, I was indeed the Division Commander in question. (One of the few major gaps in my RPG collection in those days was a lack of Runequest. I don't know anything about Runequest as a game or a system, but I eventually got kind of tired of those elite RQ people constantly harping about how Runequest was the "thinking man's RPG" as opposed to the schlocky crap that was D&D. I don't normally spend much of my time defending D&D, but gee whiz, guys, give it a rest already.)

I didn't play most of them. At least not with other people. The only ones I played with other people were a lot of D&D, a little bit of Traveller, and a dab of Boot Hill. But I spent unholy amounts of time on Twilight 2000, Traveller, and Boot Hill, and maintained very long campaigns in all three played solitaire. And how sad is that? Who ever heard of playing an RPG solitaire? It's like playing poker solitaire! It's unseemly and kind of disturbing. Traveller in particular soaked up an awful lot of my time back in those days. I still have all my Traveller notes in a plastic bin - more subsector maps than Carter had pills, hundreds of characters (including several that I strongly believe were lifted more or less intact from the game Freedom In The Galaxy, including Sidir Ganang). I wrote several very substantial programs on my Commodore 64 to automate the character generation systems in High Guard and Mercenary, and to design starships using the "little black book" rules.

So if "favorite RPG" means the one I played the most, it's D&D. If it means the one I spent the most time on, it's Traveller. If it means the one that I found most amusing to tinker with, it's Boot Hill.

I never designed a world in D&D - I was content to merely play, and never really did any of the creative work. But I did design several new subsectors in Traveller, and created a whole fictional part of Arizona in Boot Hill (I note with some amusement that many of the planets in my Traveller subsectors had names drawn from Gordon Dickson's "Three to Dorsai" set, courtesy of the Science Fiction Book Club, and many of my Boot Hill characters had "X-eye" names, like Deadeye, Pig's Eye, Eagle Eye, and, sadly, someone named "Numbnuts").

I also spent a lot of time on Twilight 2000, but I developed a love-hate relationship with that game. I loved aspects of it, such as the two-card draw to determine NPC personalities, a system I freely adapted to Boot Hill and even Traveller, but the game itself wasn't terribly rewarding to play. Firefights took so long to resolve (especially if they involved more than a handful of characters) that I ended up writing a computer program (in Pascal, aieee) based on Dupuy's Quantified Judgment Model to resolve them. Of course, the QJM is highly statistical and generates bizarre results when there are only 11 people in the fight ("What do you mean, an advance rate of 177 kilometers per day??"), but at least it allowed me to resolve the fights between the "good guys" and the "evil Spetsnaz colonel's army" in less than six calendar months.

Eventually my RPG pilot light went out and I stopped fiddling with them. One milepost on the highway to ruin was the release of Traveller: The New Era, which I heartily disliked. Another milepost was the realization that D&D, by now AD&D or ADHD&D or whatever it was, had become less a game than a lifestyle choice (in the same way that Advanced Squad Leader or full-house Starfleet Battles could only be grokked if you lived them to the exclusion of everything else for about eight months). And RPGs started coming out faster than I could buy them, let alone learn them, and indeed Shadowrun was the last one I ever bought (and, perhaps not coincidentally, I found it entirely unworkable).

This is not to say that I have no interest in RPGs. I still tinker with a new set of Boot Hill rules from time to time, and I occasionally find myself flipping through Universe and thinking "This actually seems pretty interesting." (Not to digress too far, but one of the things I liked about Universe was that it took place in roughly the 23rd century, in a tiny part of the galaxy. This was in direct contrast to Traveller, which was in the 35th century and spanned pretty much the whole galaxy. I could wrap my mind around the society that existed in Universe, but Traveller was sometimes hard to visualize. What's a trip to a Tech Level 15 convenience store like? In the 35th century, what are money, infotainment, sex, and restaurants like? Beats me!)

Will I ever play an RPG again? I can't say I never will. But if I do, you can probably bet it'll be either Universe, Boot Hill, or some vintage variant of D&D.

Is That A Stetson?

BOOT HILL was an attempt by TSR to do for the Old West what D&D did for the fantasy novel. It was first published in 1975 as a set of miniatures-based combat rules with no particular role-playing accessories, and again in 1979 as a “full” RPG. It was the first role-playing game to be set in the Old West, and remains one of the most spectacular flops in all of gaming. Most RPGs manage to scrape out a niche of committed (if perhaps slightly deranged) players that cling to it through thick and thin. There are, even today, small communities of die-hards who still play DRAGONQUEST, for crying out loud, and there’s even an on-line community of THE MORROW PROJECT players! And THE MORROW PROJECT sucked! BOOT HILL never managed even that much; the number of fans was so small that they never managed to find one another and link up the way the somewhat more numerous DRAGONQUEST or THE FANTASY TRIP fans managed to do, like survivors of the Titanic clinging to one another for warmth.

The designers of BOOT HILL made certain design choices (or lack of design choices, which amounts to the same thing) that tended to inhibit true role-playing and made the game seem more like a long-running TV show and a role-playing game. In most successful role-playing games, role-playing is the whole dang point. The point of the game is to blur as much as possible the line between the me sitting here and the me striding through this imaginary glen. Among the things these games tend to do is honor the characters with a certain durability – it’s hard to evolve a deep role-playing connection with a character if his life expectancy is measured in minutes. This means that combat systems in particular are tweaked in such a way that they are rarely immediately mortal. There’s almost always a way out, even if it involves pell-mell retreat or godly intervention. Your character can die, and often will especially at low levels, but if you survive “game infancy” and get a few levels under your belt, you can look forward to a certain longevity.

But not in BOOT HILL. It started out as a wargame of gunfights in the Old West, and as it evolved into a role-playing game in its second edition, it never lost its detailed and accurate combat system. And an unfortunate fact of life is that to accurately model gunfights, you have to accurately model the fact that a single gunshot wound can kill dang near any cotton-picker. Once you’ve made the decision to throw down, anyone can be killed, from the lowliest minor character to the most veteran player character in the game. All it takes is one shot, and there’s no option to retreat and no divine intervention. Wounds in BOOT HILL are divided into three categories – light, serious, and mortal. Head wounds are mortal 60% of the time, which is realistic, but it’s kind of a bummer all the same.

In other words, you learn not to develop deep role-playing connections with characters because they have a habit of not sticking around. Instead, you tend to view them as actors in a long-running TV show. You may like them, you may have a strong emotional attachment to them, but they aren’t you and you know that in the long run they’ll be replaced by someone else.

BOOT HILL had a lot of strange quirks. It had no alignment rules, for example, and in a genre that was almost obsessed with alignment, the sheer amorality of the system could be alarming. You could shuttle seamlessly between black evil and upright decency without the slightest penalty, and some players didn’t like that. The swift and sudden lethality of the combat system was very unusual for an RPG, as we’ve already discussed. Characters never really grew or evolved. There were no levels and no skills, and really no way for a character to benefit from experience. You were who you started out as, and that was that. And these were all deliberate design choices.

TSR didn’t help its cause by its strange management of the game. The rules were always heavy on combat, especially gunfights, and fairly weak on everything else. There was a decided lack of supplemental material, and the “campaign game” (as TSR called the role-playing element of the game) rules were distressingly brief. Everything, it seemed, except the rules for gunfights was up to the players to work out, and not everyone liked having to finish the game design. Every new edition of the game was so unlike the earlier editions that it was like getting a whole new game, which tended to make rubbish of all the work you’d done for the earlier editions (a problem it shared with other TSR games like GAMMA WORLD).

Personally, I like the mythical Old West of gunslingers and outlaws, and I liked BOOT HILL. I liked it a lot. I generated hundreds of characters to populate the town, and hundreds more to populate the ranches, mines and settlements that I scattered across the countryside. I evolved a region that was locked in perpetual struggle between miners and ranchers, between open-range and closed-range ranchers, between an increasingly urbanized town population and an essentially feudal rural population, between high-born Mexican nobles and hardscrabble campesinos… Oh, you get the idea. But it was never really role-playing; it was more like writing a movie or a TV show and I never really identified with any of the characters. I think the failure of BOOT HILL was a tragedy, and to this day I harbor dreams of writing a “fourth edition” of the rules to correct its quirks and deficiencies, but that’ll have to wait.

Those Sorts of Games

Behold Starforce, a game originally published back in the Pleistocene by Simulations Publications Inc. Okay, 1977 or thereabouts. Kids today would probably look at this and say "This is a game? Where's the controller? Does it run on an X-box or what?" No, boys and girls, it ran in your brain and it consisted of nothing but paper. Well, paper, a little bit of cardboard, and occasionally some dice, though SPI stopped shipping dice with its games as a cost-saving measure, and a good thing too because it got to the point I had so many of those characteristic SPI dice in my bedroom it looked like I was developing some kind of fetish for them.

The elite stance on Starforce was that it had interesting mechanics and a reasonably thoughtful premise, but that in the end it boiled down to a guessing contest. You might as well throw dice and the high roller wins. Maybe so, but I thought it was reasonably educational, and I still think it's a pretty elegant solution to the problem of simulating three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional map. (Other solutions have not been quite so successful, in my opinion. Vector 3 and games of its ilk were difficult for me to visualize, and I often found that despite my incessant bitching about how science fiction games didn't have good 3D systems, when they gave me one, I bitched about them too. Sometimes the best solution is to a Traveler - just pretend there are three dimensions and get over yourself.)

But one thing Starforce did was get me interested in these sorts of games. Here are some of my thoughts on various science fiction games of that era:

Starfire: Loads of fun to play and offers a lot of simulated complexity without really hurting your brain, but it bears as much resemblance to actual interstellar flight as Justin Bieber does to a death metal singer. It's really Jutland in deep space, but it's still fun.

Battlefleet Mars: The map is a brilliant learning exercise, and you really wish it was good, but in the end, tedium sets in.

Mayday: Hot diggity dog! Vector movement, computer programs, sandcasters, what more can you ask for? Ships with hulls larger than 50 tons, for one thing.

Starfleet Battles: It was fun in its early incarnations, but as the game grew more complex, my brain couldn't keep pace and I found myself muttering "Am I doing this right?" way more often than I should have.

Vector 3: Novel 3-dimensional vector movement, and proof that you should be careful what you ask for. I asked for a novel 3-dimensional vector movement system, and they gave it to me. Boy, did they ever give it to me. Still, I liked the "pod" idea.

Warpwar: Another gem from Metagaming that packed a whole lot of game into a tiny package (you could easily carry the entire game in your shirt pocket). The technology levels and the diceless combat system were interesting wrinkles, but the game lacked chrome (yes, I know, and I have the gall to bitch when they give me too much chrome).

Voyage of the BSM Pandora: A classic highly deserving of whatever praise it gets these days. It cheeses me mightily that I put a gallon can of paint on the booklet of paragraphs and melded them into a monolithic block of off-white paint.

Rescue from the Hive: Cheesy science fiction of the stringiest and gooiest sort, but I sort of liked it even though it really was pretty bad. And I was pleased to see the old Starsoldier counter art come back for an encore.

Starsoldier: How many linear equations can you solve in an hour? Not enough! The game had interesting ideas and mechanics, and I always liked the future history it was drawn from, but you end up having to do an awful lot of math and the map is probably the most unattractive piece of printed paper since Tank! And that's bad, me buckos. Still, who could resist tinkering with the constants for gravity and atmospheric attenuation and fighting it out on a cylindrical asteroid?

Invasion Earth: There are more Traveler-related game products than there are kinds of light bulbs, and keeping them straight is tricky. But don't waste much effort on this one. Other than a novel (and ugly) attempt to render a map of a globe with equal-area hexes, there isn't much going on here.

Dark Nebula: It's sort of based on Imperium with a dash of Warpwar, but it's quick and easy and doesn't assault you with much in the way of math or mind-bending complexity. The trick, really, is remembering that whatever it is, it isn't Traveler, even though it feels like it.

Starship Troopers: This game amounts to Panzerblitz in spacesuits, and that isn't for everyone. I generally enjoy it only if the Mobile Infantry player lands his boat right on top of my nuclear demolition charge. If not, I lose interest because there are only so many bug beams to go around.

Car Wars: Not really a science fiction game, and surprisingly akin to Starfleet Battles in mechanics. It's a game that is more fun to think about than to actually play, but it isn't bad to play either, especially if you keep the chrome quotient low and refight Mad Max encounters. It also helps if you can do a good impersonation of Wez from The Road Warrior: "Toady! The gassssss!"

Traveler: A science fiction role playing game, sort of like D&D with lasers and computers instead of swords and orcs. As such, it's a hoot. Or was, anyway. I liked the first version, the "little black books" as they are known, along with the twelve or so supplements. But after that, the pain began to mount. Mega-Traveler had many tasteful ideas but no discipline. Traveler: The New Era was just too much. The mere technical supplement, Fire, Fusion & Steel, was weighty enough to beat a home invader to death with. I'm still very fondly disposed toward this game, but only in its early pre-Mega incarnation.

Universe: SPI's answer to Traveler, and in many respects a strikingly effective role playing game. It was generally much more restricted (geographically and technologically) than Traveler and I personally found that pleasing, as I almost suffered whiplash when some kid told me he was a tech level 27 Transformer in the Traveler universe. But alas, Universe went down with the ship when SPI folded, though I still have all the stuff, including two or three copies of the Delta Vee starship game.

Manly Tears of Regret

I haven't had all that many jobs in my life. I had the pleasure, dubious or otherwise, of getting started in my present career at a fairly young age, and before long was making more money in it than I could make elsewhere. Since bills tend to expand to consume available income, I couldn't just back out and do something else without suffering some loss in my standard of living. Thus I am what Karl Marx used to call a "wage slave." It’s not that I dislike what I do for a living. It’s just that my favorite job, without a doubt, was working at the landfill, and it didn't pay as well as other things.

Back in the 1970s the local county government operated a number of landfills, mostly intended to serve county residents. Most of them were very small and rather crude affairs that weren’t even staffed on a daily basis, but some of them accepted commercial trash hauling and were quite busy indeed. Over my two years of employment with the county I worked at all of them, though most of my time was spent at the Avondale landfill near Avondale, Arizona. I worked at pretty much every facet of landfill operation, or at least those facets of landfill operation that the county cared about.

Let's settle something now, at the outset. There is a difference between a landfill and a dump. Actually, there isn't such a thing as a landfill per se. The proper term is sanitary landfill, but it's hard to say the word sanitary when you work at the dump. For one thing, it's obviously unsanitary, and for another thing, sun-bronzed sweaty guys on bulldozers don't say words like "sanitary." Ever. Yes, it's hard to believe, but I was once a sun-bronzed sweaty guy on a bulldozer who refused to utter words like "sanitary" or "esteem-building" or "Baluchistan." But I digress.

Mostly I liked crushing things. The D6C dozer we used wasn't particularly large by dozer standards. It weighed about fifteen tons and produced about 150 horsepower, but you'd be amazed what you can crush with a fifteen-ton machine. I've seen them crush cars and pull buildings down, and I personally crushed many a TV set with one. My Inner Hooligan never tired of hearing the muffled whoomp of TV sets imploding under the tracks.

The only thing that I couldn't break with the D6 (and by that I mean I couldn't break it even after I set out to break it) was the canopy from a US Air Force RF-4B reconnaissance plane that Goodyear Aerospace threw out one day. I drove the dozer up one side and down the other of that canopy for quite some time, and all it did was push itself down into the ground.

People sometimes ask me "Didn't it stink?" Well, sure. It's a dump, for crying out loud. Dumps have a characteristic smell that's hard to really describe. It's somewhere between dirty socks and old potato peelings, but the truth is that after you've been at the dump for a half an hour, your nose goes numb to the stench and it simply no longer registers. The only time you notice a smell is when you pick up a whiff of something well out of the ordinary.

For instance, one day I was sitting on the dozer waiting for it to cool off. This was summer in Arizona, and our D6s tended to overheat. You could dig pretty hard for a half an hour or so, but the temperature would creep up the whole time, and eventually you'd have to stop and let the thing sit and blow off heat at fast idle for a while. So I was sitting on the dozer while it cooled off, and I kept getting a whiff of something good. Good as in tasty.

And then I saw it: a catering company had thrown away about four big aluminum pans of lasagna. There they were, sitting on top of the trash, four glittering pans of rich, cheesy, aromatic lasagna. Probably still piping hot. Bubbling. Full of ooey gooey cheese.

Dear God.

You see, lunch at the landfill was always a nightmare. I brought my own lunch, usually some variant of a sandwich and Twinkies. And the lunch sat in a lunch box all morning, getting good and hot. By lunchtime the the top slice of bread had already started to curl up into a shape akin to a horse saddle. The lunch meat was turning a greyish color that I imagine Sherwin-Williams would have called Gangrene. It wasn't uncommon for one's Twinkies to get so hot that they actually excreted their cream filling. (Veteran landfill employees never put lettuce or tomatoes on their sandwiches. Ever. Lettuce simply evaporated by lunchtime, as though it had never been there at all. Tomatoes almost evaporated, but they usually left behind a stringy rind and a vague smear of goo, which had by then heat-melded to the saddle-shaped piece of bread. Modern foodies would pay through the nose for such a thing, "dried tomato and crispy bread slabs", but back in those days, such things were about as welcome as skunks.)

And there was that lasagna. Sigh. I argued with myself for quite some time. "I'm sure it's still good! It doesn't look contaminated, and damn it smells good, and all I have to look forward to for lunch is gangrene-colored lunch meat and bread that's curled up like Seabiscuit's saddle. I could hop down off the dozer, rescue that lasagna, and I'd eat like a king!" Hell, if I rescued all the lasagna, I'd eat like a king for days!

In the end, common sense prevailed and I dozed the lasagna into the hole along with the rest of the trash, but not without the need to dash away the occasional manly tear of regret.

Plastic Pail List

The other day I was talking to a friend about "Bucket Lists", the things one intends to accomplish before one kicks the bucket. I don't intend to publish my Bucket List, at least not in this venue, because I'm not of a mind to put up with the ensuing hoots of laughter.

But we discovered that beneath the weight and solemnity of the official Bucket List is the Plastic Pail List - stuff that would be nice to accomplish, but since it's all pretty corny to start with, it doesn't really matter if you accomplish it or not. The world won't change much either way.

So here's a sample of my Plastic Pail List.

I wish I knew the constellations better. I can identify a few by sight, but most of them might as well be graffiti. Consequently, I can't find most stars to save my life. I can find a few. Polaris, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Sirius. But Vega? Hmm. Procyon? Hmmmmm. Antares? I thought I saw Antares once, but maybe it was the red light on the microwave tower down by the pottery outlet place.

I'd like to memorize the entire Periodic Table of Elements. I've memorized the first three rows, but that's as far as I ever got. (My mnemonic for this is assembling the elements into Russian-sounding names. The first two rows are H. He. Libebcnofne. The next row is Namag Alsipsclar. But I ran out of enthusiasm for the project after three rows.)

I want to plug an accordion into a metal distortion pedal designed for a guitar and try to imagine a world of norteno music in a really bad mood. (Though every time I think about it, Finntroll is what comes to my mind. Humppa, anyone?)

I'd like to open for Insomnium with my new accordion death metal band. Have I mentioned how much I like Insomnium lately? They don't get an inordinate amount of respect from the metal underground, but they work for me.

That'll do, for starters.

Went Viral

I spent a good chunk of my week off from work being ill. And I didn't just feel ill either - I had an actual fever of 103, which isn't THAT serious, but it's still somewhat unpleasant. It's a good thing I wasn't trying to climb Mount Everest last week - I don't think I would have made it to the summit.

But it's kind of ironic. I went through about a year of chemotherapy, and one of the consequences of chemo is that your white blood cell count varies between low and zero (normal chemo gives you low white cell counts, while the lethal-dose chemo gives you zero white cells). So there I was, little more than a large walking agar dish, and I never got sick. No fevers, no infections, nuthin.

And now, with a full complement of white blood cells and all, I couldn't take a few days off from work without some stupid virus having Spring Break somewhere in my innards.

Still, there's sick and then there's sick. This was just annoying and inconvenient. It wasn't like I was planning on climbing Mount Everest, after all.

Would I? Climb Mount Everest, I mean? I've always had an odd interest in high-altitude mountaineering. I don't think I really want to go forth and actually do it, but I find it fascinating at least as long as I'm lying comfortably in bed reading about it.

One reason it appeals to me is that I'm a jargon junkie, and mountaineering is crammed full of interesting jargon. The Hinterstosser Traverse, the Black Pyramid, the First Step, the Second Step, the Yellow Band, the Western Buttress, the Ruta Normale, the South Col. And those are just geological features, to say nothing of things like seracs, couloirs, laybacks, descendeurs, jumars, and Advanced Base Camp. It's fascinating. The only field of human endeavor that has better jargon, in my opinion, is aerospace, where the mere idea of a convergent-divergent supersonic de Laval nozzle gives me chills.

But I'm not particularly fond of heights, and I'm not sure that halfway up the Lhotse Face is the right place to discover that heights make me barf. I once saw a poster of two climbers traversing an ice field high on K2, and the exposure was absolutely breathtaking. Could I stand it? I mean, assuming I could get to that altitude without imploding like the core of a Type-II supernova, could I hold it together psychologically or would I gibber and walk right off the edge?

Sick As A Dog

I've been sick as a dog the last day or two.

I actually wonder about the origins of that phrase. Sick as a dog? Really? My dog eats really horrible things and never gets sick. My parents used to have a miniature dachshund that was famous for pilfering Cadbury chocolate bars from my grandmother's purse, and he never really got sick either. It's like saying someone has the constitution of a dinosaur - how do we really know what their constitutions were like?

But sick, yes. I woke up last night with intense nausea, and it hasn't really gotten much better since. Please understand that when I say "intense nausea", I know of what I speak, because I went through cisplatin, and that's the mother of all intense nausea.

In a way it's sort of nostalgic to wake up at 2 AM with hair-trigger nausea and fumble for the Ativan and compazine. Wow! Just like the good old days!

One might wonder why I'm so sick. I either ate something that didn't agree with me, or I'm just damaged from all that chemo and prone to occasional upsets, sort of like Frodo getting sick on every anniversary of being stabbed with the Morgul-blade on Amon Sul. The only difference is that Circan doesn't wait for me at the Grey Havens. At least as far as I know.

And can I tell you how impressed I am with myself for working a couple of Tolkien references into a post on nausea??

Week Off

I'm in the midst of a week off from work. Unpaid, mind you, but still, a week off. And what have I accomplished? Nothing. But I have come to terms with the fact that I haven't accomplished anything.

I'm not a fountain of deep wisdom about much of anything. Oh, I've learned a few things over the years, but they aren't really "wisdom" in the spiritual sense. To give you an example of what sorts of things I've learned, here's a brief list:

1. Don't set steel wool on fire. It burns way better than you think it does.

2. Don't thin Ceramcoat paint with rubbing alcohol unless phlegm is the desired outcome.

3. When making a model of the planet Mars, remember that pi is 3.1415, not "about 3".

But I actually have learned a few things that might be more useful.

One is that people are way too judgmental about things that don't matter, and way too prone to applying the word hate to the fruits of their judgment. It's gotten to the point you can't even have a conversation with someone about the relative merits of Macintosh or PC computers without it turning into a hateful grudge match, or politely disagree with someone about politics without it turning nasty.

I'm not arguing that we should all practice bland acceptance of everything. If someone commits a horrible violent crime, they deserve to be judged, and certain things, like the Nazi Party, are so heinous they really deserve to be hated.

But cancer did teach me that I have only so much spiritual energy to go around, and I can either expend it hating things that really don't deserve to be hated, or I can expend it in more amusing pursuits.

Not that I think I'm better than anyone else. If hating LeBron James or hating Justin Boober (neither of whom I like at all) gets you through the day, go for it. Part of being nonjudgmental is not judging people who are judgmental. But for me, personally, I'd rather spend my time and energy thinking about things that I enjoy, not endlessly prodding my Inner Wound and nursing a deep grudge against life.

The other thing I learned is that in the long run, it really doesn't matter very much if you accomplished everything on your to-do list or not. Will the universe really be any different if I wash out the pool filters today instead of tomorrow? I don't think so. And when you're in the hospital getting ready for the next round of lethal chemotherapy, the fact that you're a week overdue on washing the drapes won't even cross your mind.

Granted, there are things that have to be done on time. You have to pay the mortgage on time, or unpleasantness ensues. But other than that, what difference does it make?

There are certain personalities that enjoy crammed to-do lists, and it's possible for one to become too lax and never do anything. But consider this week. Does it matter if I replace the water filter in the refrigerator today, or tomorrow? Not really. And I'm not going to beat myself up because I haven't checked off a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

Here's what I have done this week: I found the long-lost instructions and decals for a Star Trek model. And that made me happy. Happier than replacing the water filter would have made me. So there.

Battlestar Vertigo

I tried watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica today. BBC-America was running a marathon of said show, and since I hadn't watched it before, it seemed like a good opportunity to catch up on it. I'm sorry I did. It isn't for me.

The main problem is that I didn't care for the "documentary style" it used. Maybe some people like it, and the producers clearly must have or they wouldn't have used it, but I found the endless weaving and wobbling of the camera to be annoying, distracting, and ultimately productive of a mild case of motion sickness. The bigwigs who developed the show will probably argue that the erratic, restless camera is somehow "realistic". But when I view the world through my own eyes, I don't see it wobbling and shaking; it seems very solid and stable no matter how my head moves. So I don't think it's realistic at all; I just think it's a distracting artistic fetish, and it made me want to reach for some of my leftover anti-nausea medications.

The second problem was that the one episode I managed to watch before I got kind of queasy and had to turn it off was dumb. You're on a ship fleeing an attack by the Cylons. You're in the middle of a war for your very survival against an implacable foe that will stop at nothing to see you dead. You're in a ship that's been around for a good long while. So when all the water tanks on your port side blow out and vent said water, what's your first supposition? Sabotage? Enemy action? No - you conclude that the tanks, which have been utterly reliable till now, were "structurally weak" (as opposed to "morally weak", I guess) and simply failed simultaneously.

And then there was some space battle, with Colonial Vipers and Cylon fighters zipping around doing heaven knows what. I couldn't tell, because the camera moves in the special effects shots were, if anything, even more wild than during the tepid staff meetings. Maybe the producers were trying to give us a sense of the confusion and chaos of battle. Or maybe their digital effects weren't great and by confusing and confounding us with wild and erratic camera moves, they didn't have to spend so much money on detailing and texturing the models (digital or practical).

And I hate the helmets the human fighter pilots wear. Yeah, I know that you have to light the actors so the audience can see their faces, but every time they showed a human fighter pilot's face, I had the strange feeling that said fighter pilot had just awakened and was staring, bleary and half-asleep, into the flat white zombie-glow of a refrigerator. Very unappealing.

The bottom line: the story wasn't good enough to make me want to put up with the irritatingly unstable camera.

Done and done.

This isn't to say that the premise is bad. I just didn't care for the execution, and got so tired of IRRITATING camera I felt absolutely no desire to stick around long enough to give a shit about any of the characters or what happened to the humans in the end.