Drums in the Deep:

Maintaining two blogs might prove to be a bit... much.  Writing in relative depth about the Camino over at Quo Vadis eats up most of my keyboard time (although quality-wise, you wouldn't know it), but I'm determined to also faithfully keep up with GTv2.0 this year.  In brief, here's where we stand:

The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien (544 pages):  Rereading 'Return' with new eyes after reading Humphrey Carter's biographies of The Inklings and Tolkien brought real joy to the characters.  I'd assumed I was done with them, but maybe there's more there to explore and appreciate.

Sourcery, Terry Pratchett (260 pages):  As always, good times and quick laughs.  Not my favorite so far, but I'm committed to Discworld, for what it's worth.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs (352 pages):  Surprisingly good find on the Kindle Daily Deal, I'm always a sucker for well done creepiness, stories of physical isolation, and mixed media widgets.  Riggs pulls it off quite well, and I'm excited for the next.  Supposedly a YA novel, although it's violent and dark enough to make me wonder.

The Description of Wales, Girauldius Cambrensis (41 pages):  Brief anthropological and geographical synopsis of Wales from a medieval author, interesting though short.

Ilium, Dan Simmons (730 pages):  KT': "You should read Ilium, it's one of my favorites." Me: "I'm not sure if I'm in the mood for hard science fiction, giant space robots or discussions of quantum teleportation."  KT': "There's almost none of that, it's about the Trojan War."  Cut to Chapter Three: Giant Space Robots Talk About Quantum Teleportation At Length.  But it's really, really good.  

Saint Francis of Assisi, G.K. Chesterton (134 pages):  Rediscovering my love of Chesterton by actually giving him some real attention.  I am still confused by Chesterton's method of biography - he skips factual accounting and heads straight for a kind of meditation on character.  It's a book that requires time to unfold, and demands a rereading in the future.

The Cosmic Puppets, Philip K. Dick (145 pages):  It's been a long time since I read any Dick, and I was halfway through this one before I checked the publication date to realize how early it was written.  Almost everything I've read by him was published in his middle or later years, and it was refreshing to read something both firmly in the vein of early science fiction and strongly PKD-like.  Short, but great.

A Million Little Pieces, James Frey (430 pages):  I didn't read it when it came out, and my intention on finding a copy at base was to read it as fiction.  I want to like stories of addiction and recovery, I really do, but I have yet to read one by an adult that didn't scan as trite or boring.  This one wasn't any different, and Frey's writing style annoyed me to no end - it seemed flat and choppy.

"It All Turns on Affection", Wendell E. Berry Lecture, 2012 (15 pages):  This was recommended by my Camino friend, Brother Sam, and it is amazing.  I've never read Berry before, only listened to him on NPR, and the framework he creates in this lecture on the two competing paradigms of American history - 'Boomers' and 'Stickers' (i.e., the conflict between forces of commercialization and cultures that practice sustainability and affection for the land) resonated strongly with me.


So... six weeks, 2651 pages down in 2013.  I'll take that as a strong start.

If Books Were a Drug...

THE GEEK THROWDOWN RETURNS!

Ok, so it's not as dramatic as all that.  However, last week at work someone asked me what my 'official' 2012 turned out to be, and I couldn't give her a straight answer.  I had to estimate.  The shame.  

If you recall, my Disgraced Opponent offered up her submission way back in June, and so the need for me to keep such meticulous records of reading ceased to exist.  I kept a rough tally, however, and when asked the best I could come up with was "Around 35,000 pages, total".  

Looking back, I think that was more or less accurate... but it's still a ballpark figure, and 'ballpark' is bullshit. Ballpark is for people who play sports-balls.  Ballpark is not for a Book Geek of any merit.  

So in lieu of any 2013 resolutions (how...pedestrian), I will take a vow.  An Oath of Geekdom.  

I profess, before Almighty God, all the Saints, and martyred Librarians everywhere, to record every single page I read in 2013.  

No competition, no races, no consequences, just the pride of a tame pathology this year.  Most importantly, no restrictions on rereads!  Here are the first four from January, a slow start, but there are others in media res.  

The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien, 544 pages.

Sourcery, Terry Pratchett, 260 pages.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs, 352 pages.

The Description of Wales, Girauldus Cambrensis, 41 pages.

Pilgrimage:

On Monday I leave for Spain to begin the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage through northern Spain that has seen pilgrims walk its’ paths for nearly a millennium.  

Let that one sink in for a minute.  I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it, to be honest.

First, the logistics: I’ll be walking from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostella, to the tomb of St. James the Great, some 450 miles (give or take), by myself, staying primarily in pilgrim hostels, attending masses as often as possible in the ancient churches along the route – culminating in a pilgrim’s mass at the cathedral at Santiago on or around October 21^st.  

So that’s all well and good, but it’s the reasons that are important.  I’m going to Spain to reflect on the changes in my life since January – this year I’ve faced some challenging questions about what role faith needs to play in my life, I’ve seen the sudden end of my long-term relationship which I believed would lead to marriage, I’ve returned to living a simple, nomadic lifestyle after believing that part of my life was finished, I’ve stepped into new and exciting roles and responsibilities at work and seen my relationships and commitment there deepen in ways I never expected.  

I’m also going to Spain to ask some difficult questions of myself and God: to enter a time of discernment.  I want to pray and think deeply on a couple of things – how to live my life under the values I feel are so important to the community we create at work; how to continue to escape my old patterns in unhealthy relationships and grow the ones that are valuable, deep, and meaningful; how to take the passion and faith I have toward God into whatever future directions my life will take. 

How to let go, listen to my heart, and follow God’s guidance toward a joyful existence. 

This summer I’ve experienced all the best that work has had to offer, I’ve seen how the community we create in our program mirrors the communities I want to live in and be a part of in my faith and personal life, and how valuable relationships with colleagues can become when you trust and are trusted.

This summer I’ve experienced what it means to be on my own and trust my abilities, energy, and instincts toward health and wellness without having a finite ‘end point’ in mind.

This summer I’ve focused on practicing gratitude toward what I do have rather than what I don’t, and I’ve begun to learn that I work best when I have so little that there is ample room for joy to fill the space. 

I pray that on pilgrimage I will have the time and space to listen closely to whatever messages God wants me to hear, to find Christ in all the people I meet, to lean into the discomfort and take joy from overcoming the difficult moments, to allow myself space to laugh and love unconditionally.  I pray that I will be ‘ruined for life’ in my relationship with God and come to understand how to bring that more fully into the world. 

Square Hell: Rage-Quitting Deus Ex 3.

This is a post about a video game.  Do not be afraid. 

So in the post-throwdown era, I've been catching up on video games I've missed.  After I brought myself forward into this century, I picked up the third in the Deus Ex series. 

I expected great things.  If I still had a LiveJournal, I could actually link you to long essays about how much I loved the original game: great writing, a deep sense of openness for the time, excellent environment and setting, and a real sense that I could choose a faction with whom to ally and completely shift the game's narrative.  It was a great example of why I play video games - the narrative was interesting, engaging, and I felt as if I were part of a unique story.

Deus Ex Number 3 (or, the Great Turd +1) had none of these things. 

Let me elaborate.  DE3/TGT+1 is a trite, frivolous game of no consequence.  Here are my chief complaints, ordered by subject matter. 

GAMEPLAY:

If you are making a technology-centric game in 2011, you probably shouldn't use Starfox-era 'popups' in the HUD whenever someone radios you.  Every time Sarif sent me an IM, I tried to do a barrel roll.

The AI is either a) severely mentally handicapped or b) precognitive.  I can shoot the baddies, with impunity, from 2 feet inside a vent and they can't figure out how to fire back... or I can be in plain sight, blast away, then run into a room and shut the door behind me (OH MY GOD HE SHUT THE DOOR HE'S A WIZARD WE'RE FUCKED) without any of the 'Elite Spec Ops' bots learning how to turn a handle.  On the other hand, literally the moment I peek over a crate into a room, as long as I'm in line of sight, every bot in the room has me in their sight picture.  I call shenanigans. 

No matter how much havoc one causes, running through rooms tossing grenades like confetti and blasting away like Scarface, it takes less than two minutes of hiding for the guards to return to calm.  It's like they were all trained by the United States Air Force.  "Haven't seen him in a couple of mikes, boss... coffee break!  Let's read US Weekly!"

The conversation trees are literally pointless.  There are no lasting consequences for playing Jenson as a nice, cold, or harsh guy over the course of the game... which means each conversation is a mini-game where I'm trained to press the right button to get the tidbit of info I need (which is probably sitting on a desk two rooms over anyway). 

In the entire game, I found hundreds of ventilation shafts that led me exactly where I needed to go (because at CIA HQ, vents often provide the most direct means of travel from the maintenance closet to the Room of Infinitely Sensitive Information)... and I only found two (2, dos, etc) false leads.  For the duration of the game, my problem solving skills were reduced to FIND THE VENT TAKE THE VENT GET THE XP JUMP OUT OF THE VENT LEVEL COMPLETE. 

The level design is boring on almost every level.  Coming out of the sewers to the Chinese skyline was pretty neat. 

It makes no sense to put things where they are and not other places.  Why are there sniper rifle rounds in a TV station closet?  Why do I need TO EAT A CANDY BAR TO POWER MY MILITARY-GRADE CHEST EXPLOSIVES and I can't buy one from a vending machine?  WHY ARE THERE VENDING MACHINES IN EVERY BUILDING?

The story is linear.  Make no mistake, this is a game-writing crime that offends me more than anything else.  I'll put up with all manner of shenanigans if the story is good, and it feels like I can affect it in a meaningful way, but other than side quests, the main narrative travels from Point A to Point Bullshit.

By the time I'd sunk 2 hours into the game, I'd become a sociopath.  Linear story line?  No consequences for my moral choices throughout the game?  Ammunition hiding out in trash cans?  I literally executed every major character I was able to, just to prove it didn't matter.  I felt a mild remorse when I ran out of 10mm ammo. 

DESIGN:

Apparently, some time in the next 30 or 40 years, EVERYTHING IN THE FUTURE BECOMES SQUARE.  Maybe Apple effectively copyrights everything rounded.  Maybe the level designers loved Square Enix so much it's a joke.  But shit gets old, quick.  Ever seen a round trash can?  Well, rejoice, because no one at the Montreal studio has. 

I am typically a stealth-based player in games like this... and, typically, skill trees play to my play style.  By the end of the game I had nearly every skill maxed, and I used... um... three of them.  Not for lack of trying.  But seriously?  There's no incentive to try different things, so the ENTIRE HOOK OF YOUR GAME DESIGN IS BROKEN.  Time to reboot, jackass. 

Everything cool that happens in the game is done in a cinematic.  All the neat stuff that you saw in the trailers?  Cinematics.  Your job to make that cinematic happen is to run up to something and hold a button, then sit back and watch the carnage.  Oh, and ANY meaningful interaction with a plot-dependent character happens in cinematic.  Spend 45 minutes sneaking your robot-ass through a level like a ninja?  Yep, you're going to walk straight through the door like Clint Eastwood the moment you get within ten feet of a plot point.  Except you don't shoot like Clint.  You shoot like Napoleon Dynamite. 

AND FINALLY:

This game is racist.  Deeply, deeply racist.  Remember what Asian people and Black people sounded like in movies from the 60s?  Yep, that's what they sound like in DE3/TGT+1.  BUT!  BUT!  I learned a very valuable lesson from the random street people in this game:

If there are two black men wearing hoodies standing in a corner ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, they will sell me guns and explosives. 

Everyday Fuel:

GEEK THROWDOWN VOL 2:

            To blatantly steal from Fukuyama, the Geek Throwdown is now in the End of History.  The zero-sum game has ended; we are beyond competition for supreme hegemony.  

            It’s good at the top.  

            Call it hubris, or the sweet flush of victory, or overwhelming relief, but I did forget to mention the final books I read in my race to the top.  And since I know you all wait with great trepidation, here they are.  Pay attention, they’re some good ones. 

1.    The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides:  It is easy to forget how amazing this book is, to remember only the movie and the soundtrack and to lose sight of how the prose wraps itself up into your bones and takes root there, blooming in strange and unexpected ways when you see a field of grass or the summer scabs on a young girl’s knee.  It’s a primer for being a sentimental boy, for trying, and failing, to know a girl, for the consequences of binding our souls to something lost long ago.  In another life, Lux and I could’ve been sweethearts. 

2.    Ready Player One, Ernest Cline:  So I’ll admit that the premise, and how it was originally described to me (“It’s like someone crammed every geek culture reference into ONE BOOK and MADE IT AWESOME”) didn’t sell me at all.  There are too many books out there that try to be self- and geek-aware, and fail miserably, like your mom using LOLZ in her awkward texts.  It doesn’t work far more than it does.  RP1… worked.  I think it worked because the world was fully realized and consistent, which is where many science fiction novels fall down.  I think it worked because it made sense.  I think it worked because I cared about the characters.  Ultimately I’m not really sure what the secret was… because I was way too busy getting all ehmehgerd!!! over the Dungeons  & Dragons references.  

3.    The Magician King, Lev Grossman:  So… hm.  I felt tricked by the first in this series (It’s like Harry Potter if Harry were Holden Caulfield and Brett Easton Ellis wrote all the characters to be like his terrible friends!)… and I couldn’t put it down.  I feel exactly the same way about the sequel.  It feels cheap to make such self-aware jabs at Harry Potter and Tolkien and then to lift, wholesale, entire plot devices from Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling.  I imagine Mr. Grossman explaining how clever and post-modern the whole premise was using Power Point to some room of jackasses at the NYT Book Review and then getting high-fives (Ironic Pro-Plebe High Fives, at that) from Michiko Kakutani.  But I bought it, and read it, so I guess Grossman wins. 

Necessary Noxious Navel Gazing:

      Last week I booked my ticket to fly to Spain and hike the Camino de Santiago.  Seven short weeks from now I’ll start that trip and it feels both very shockingly real and impossibly far away.  I originally started thinking about it from the pilgrimage perspective, and then, as things went suddenly sideways in Boone last spring, as a time to find some peace and let go of the expectations I’d had, and lost, for the future.

      Right now I’m mostly curious about what will happen.  I feel confident in my ability to do the physical work and to navigate the process.  I feel confident in my commitment and ability to pick up enough Spanish between now and then to stumble through the basic interactions.  I feel comfortable in just committing to it, letting the process happen, and being grateful for the opportunity to reflect and examine my faith and myself.  

      I think I’m less confident in the kind of support I’ll get from my family – it seems like all of the major decisions I’ve made as an adult, they immediately fall into questioning and focusing on the potential problems or disadvantages.  Or, to be honest, seeming distant or uninterested when I try to talk to them about why it feels important to do, what it could mean.  

      Part of being an adult means standing on your own – I understand that.  But I’m often jealous of people who have parents who get excited about the great things they are able to do ahead of time.  I only really get that excitement after the fact, so when it comes time to take the plunge, I nearly always feel alone.

Endgame:

The time has come, faithful readers: Kate has conceded the Geek Throwdown.

I thought I would be eager to gloat.  I thought I would run triumphantly through the streets at dawn, half-naked and giddy, proclaiming my victory to any open window... but, much like finishing the last of the ice cream, waking up next to the sorority girl, arm-wrestling your 15 year old cousin, or polishing off the bottle of Aftershock, all I feel is disappointment and shame.

Don't act like you haven't been there. 

So instead of my crowning as King of All Book Geeks and subsequent benevolent reign of Geek Glory, let's do a video recap in the style of a posthumous lifetime achievement award:

In 7 months of competitive reading:
I read over 40 books totaling nearly 18,000 pages...
While working 60+ hours per week without a vacation...
Getting booted out of a 3 year relationship...
'Trending ascetic' aka Living Out of My Jeep For 2 Months...
Moving to a new state...
Significantly changing job responsibilities...
Training for a marathon...
Writing increasingly inane and obnoxious blog entries...
Finishing Alan Wake, Mass Effect 3, and Dragon Age: Origins...
Learning how to operate a 'smart phone'...
Playing Dungeons & Dragons...
and NOT LOSING MY SHIT. 

Ok.  Maybe I did win a little bit.

"We are always sixteen / I am a thousand Julys":

Summer broke on the backs of children... wait.  Right man, wrong book (and if you can snap up that dangling allusion, kiddos, I'll buy you a stiff drink). 

I realize the Throwdown is morphing more into a regular old blog as my distinguished opponent is increasingly absent, work has gotten busy enough to keep me from reading as much, and the fact that summer is here.
Summer. Is. Here.

Since it's actually gotten warm, I've sat up late among fireflies and stars drinking cold beers with multiple sets of good friends, gotten tasty food at the farmer's market, run through swarms of bugs on gorgeous trails next to the Ocoee, rekindled my love for Lux Lisbon, spent quality time with coworkers at the Universal Joint every dang week, fallen asleep on the back porch while the bright sun warmed my skin, stumbled post-workout through the doors of Jittery Joe's in search of a 7AM coffee fix, gone on an amazing bike ride through farmland and the 90-degree heat on the promise of pizza, imagined honeysuckle everywhere, found delight in the tartness of pineapples, driven with the windows down, driven with the music up.  Sung loudly.  Fallen asleep happy.

Before the leaves start to kamikaze down onto our heads, I want to crash a hostel near a beach (any beach, really), pretend like I know how to navigate a boat down a large body of water, swim in a lake, load the Jeep out with gear and friends and find a place to camp, put a few hundred rounds down range, laugh until I hurt. 

I am grateful and joyful.  Winter is coming, but summer is now.