Spinning Yarns

Today, I gave one of the worst lectures of my life. And no, I’m not exaggerating — it was terrible, truly embarrassingly bad. Even though it’s Friday, and I’ve been looking forward to the weekend, I wish I could rewind the whole damned day back to about a half hour before my first class, and do the whole thing over again. What a mess! As it is, I should probably think about spending some of Monday’s lecture on cleaning up after myself. I’m not sure that would succeed short of starting the whole topic over again, although maybe a second time around I could make it clear that I am, in fact, actually fluent in my native language. It wasn’t exactly obvious the first time.

I realize, of course, that everybody has an “off day” now and then, but that is not a great comfort to me in this situation. I hate making mistakes that affect other people’s lives. If I ran the water too hot, and killed off all the yeast so that my bread doesn’t rise, I might be displeased, but I certainly wouldn’t worry about it. In this case, however, my stumbles cost my students some clarity, interest, and understanding they might otherwise have gotten, as well as making me look as if I’m a scatterbrain who doesn’t know his subject. In an academic setting where a complicated course of study is supposed to fit neatly into 27 lectures, it’s counterproductive when your teacher’s explanations are even more confusing than the textbook’s.

I’m finished beating myself up about this now, but I felt pretty down about how it went for the rest of the day. Fortunately, I felt a lot better about how my second lecture went. Ordinarily, the second lecture is more difficult, because it’s a larger class, and my voice is usually starting to give out by the end of 130 minutes of full voice talking. But today, probably a third of the class was absent due to some combination of boredom, sickness, and Fridayitis, and it is always a little easier to connect with a smaller group. After that I felt somewhat better.*

* The fact that it was Friday afternoon certainly didn’t hurt my attitude any, either.

On a more positive note, the days are getting perceptibly longer, and although the past few days have been freezing cold outside, the clear blue winter sky is quite beautiful after a long grey December. Maybe if we’re lucky, it will warm up just enough to snow, and then we can go outside and go sledding or snow-shoeing. Hey, there’s no harm in daydreaming.

Filed by Michael at 21:07 under Personal
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I had a strange dream last night. I was the main character in it, but I’ll tell it narratively, because it’s just that kind of a tale.

He was the Prince of the Realm, chosen son of his father the King. His father had been king for many long years, and made many ruthless enemies — but had nevertheless preserved the strength and prosperity of the nation. The Prince and his father had never been particularly close; yet there was a kind of distant love between them. As the years wore on, the King grew old, and the scheming of his enemies wore away at him, until he was grown sick and weary and could no longer rule effectively. Everyone knew the Prince was next in line for the throne, but the King’s Privy Counsellor had other ideas: He contrived to send the Prince on an errand across the rough wastes along the border of a neighboring province, and arranged it so that the Prince would meet with a fatal accident during the prosecution of this errand.

The Prince knew the whole scheme, but he went along with it anyway. He set out on horseback with a retinue of dandied courtiers and men-at-arms, plodding slowly as if for a diplomatic envoy, through the narrow passes and stony paths across the wastelands. A few days out, he rode alone out ahead of the group, and came into a rocky cauldron of a valley in which a sleek and evil black dragon lived. The dragon leapt forth from his cave, and swallowed the Prince at a single gulp! Drawing his stout knife, he slew the dragon from within by piercing its heart, and when it collapsed dead on the stones, he wriggled out to its mouth, and looked out from between the beast’s teeth. Above, he heard the sounds of rapid hoofbeats and shouting voices, a group of men who had been sent to follow him and insure his demise. From their talk, he could tell they had seen the body of the dragon lying in the valley, but they had not yet realized it was dead, for smokes and steams still rose from its nostrils after its dying gasp.

Thinking quickly, the Prince tried to speak in the voice of the dragon, to frighten the men away. He was too small to make the surly roar of an angry black dragon, and it came out too softly for the men around the cauldron-valley to hear. But, to his good fortune, he had been given a small pouch of a special powder — if you ate this powder, it would temporarily give you the voice of any other creature you wished. He pulled out the pouch, swallowed the bitter powder inside, and suddenly he was able to speak with the dreadful voice of the fallen dragon whose mouth he was hiding in.

“YOU!” he said imperiously, “I SHALL DESTROY YOU UTTERLY, AND EAT THE HORSES YOU RODE IN ON!”*

* Apparently, the person in charge of dialogue in my dreams could use a pay raise, or perhaps he should simply be replaced. Nevertheless, this is what I said.

With shouts of terror, the men wheeled around and fled as quickly as their horses could carry them. The Prince heaved open the dragon’s mouth with his feet, and slipped out onto the stones, a little worse for the wear, but happy to be alive. He climbed up out of the cauldron-valley, and went back to find a group of his loyal followers who had also been following along on his so-called “errand.”

When he arrived, he was dismayed to learn that the King had died overnight, and he was therefore to be crowned as the new King immediately, so as to insure a proper succession. His followers did not have the proper royal Crown, for that was still with his father’s corpse, but they had procured a substitute crown, which was a broad, flat white disc with its edges turned down, and a round hole in the middle to fit over his head and around his brow. They placed it on his head, and thus he was made King.

I think I ought to speak to somebody about improving the quality of plot and character development in my dreams.

Filed by Michael at 22:18 under Dream, Personal, Story
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My cousin Christopher introduced me to the idea of adventure games by teaching me how to play Dungeons & Dragons when I was about seven or eight years old. I’ve been hooked ever since. At that time, D&D was the ur-game of its class, the system that started it all, and TSR, Inc. was on top of the world. My father hated the fact that Christopher had taught me how to play it, and on at least one occasion, took away all my gaming-books and dice and locked them in a cupboard. I have never really understood why. It’s true that D&D got a pretty bad reputation among a certain queer species of uptight Midwestern parents, who somehow bought into the cart-before-horse argument that role-playing adventure games lead children into Satanism, teenage rebellion, criminal deviancy, virgin sacrifice, and morally degenerate behaviour — but my father has never been particularly uptight or Midwestern, so I must confess I can only surmise about his reasons. In any case, parental disapproval gave D&D exactly the edge of additional allure required to completely suck me in, and I’ve been a gamer ever since. Sorry, Dad.

I’ve always had a soft spot for adventure games, both the pencil-and-paper variety like Dungeons & Dragons, and their computerized counterparts, ranging from simple text adventures like Crowther & Woods’ original Colossal Cave Adventure, INFOCOM’s Zork and HHGTTG; to text-graphical dungeon crawlers like NetHack, Rogue, and Moria; to graphical fantasy adventure series like Ultima and Bard’s Tale, to 3D action games like Tomb Raider and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. You can debate about whether all of these truly qualify as “adventure” games, but for me, the important ingredients of an adventure game are exploration and puzzle-solving, regardless of what else the game might involve. I tend to prefer games that are less directly combat-oriented, although games completely without fighting tend to wind up boring (e.g., Oregon Trail or Taipan, two games I used to play on the Apple //e, and which were boring as hell).

My latest addiction is Baldur’s Gate, which is already a fairly “old” game by modern standards, as it was published in 1999. The interface is similar in spirit to that of WarCraft or Myth, which is to say that it’s a step up from the Ultima games in terms of attractive graphics and game mechanics — but, interface aside, it’s just the sort of game I like to play, and I very quickly got caught up in it the first time I played this past Saturday. To avoid losing my entire life to this game, I have made myself a rule that I’m only allowed to play it on Sara’s computer, which limits me to the times when I’m at her place and she’s not using her computer. This rule is comparatively easy to enforce since I do not have a copy of the game that will run on my laptop anyway. Nevertheless, I played for four hours straight on Saturday, and another hour or so Monday night: It’s a sickness, I tell you — a sickness! But it’s also a lot of fun, so, what the hell.

Filed by Michael at 19:33 under Miscellaneous, Personal
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