Vendredi V

The Friday Five this week actually interest me, so I might as well answer it:

1. What is the first book you remember reading?

I trust this memory less and less as time goes on, but for a long time I've been convinced that it is Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I don't remember a lot of real kids' books.

2. What is your favorite book?

Only one? Well, The Sun, The Moon & The Stars by Steven Brust is certainly in the top five/ten, and I was thinking about it recently, so we'll go with that one. It's certainly the one I am mostly likely to reread in whole or in part if I happen to pick it up "to check something". I think I posted a top N list on the NaNoWriMo forums somewhere.

3. Who is your favorite author?

Umm...C.J. Cherryh, I guess. I have a top N list for this one, too, I imagine.

4. Pick up the nearest book (magazine or any available printed material will do). Turn to page 24 (or the closest to it). Go to the 7th line. What is it?

Hmmm, the numbers have changed since the last time I saw this meme. "Line", though? It used to be sentence, which makes more sense. Oh, well, to be excessively literal:

Cazaril."

Intangible points for those who can identify the book! No fair Googling.

5. If you could be any character in literature, who would you be?

Tricky one. I mean, most of the interesting characters in books I read have horrible lives where they have to fight evil and stuff. And, let's face it, I wouldn't actually like that kind of life. Something in my head, though, is encouraging me to say Matrim Cauthon from the Wheel of Time. At least he's got a sense of humour about the whole thing.

Thunder Rolled

For some reason, recently, I was thinking of whether theism could be compatible with evolution, despite my continuing lack of theistic tendencies myself.

See, the thing is that evolution is entirely contingent. Living beings reproduce, sharing their genetic code to create variations on themselves, or getting mutated. The reason that natural selection seems to produce "progress" is based on statistical tendencies. It's conceivable for every carrier of a beneficial mutation to die before producing any offspring. It's conceivable, if history were rerun, for eukaryotic life to never arise before the planet gets engulfed by the sun. It's also conceivable for every human born for the next hundred years to have no Y chromosomes, entirely through random chance. But enough of that.

Let's say that an omnipotent deity didn't just want to populate the earth from spare parts over seven days. Let's say it saw some potential in genetic inheritance, and decided to build everything that way. Being omnipotent(and I've always presumed that omniscience was part of omnipotence), it could conceivably manipulate every single genetic interaction that ever took place on the planet, picking which genes combine with which genes, which random mutations happen, which strategically-placed carbon-14 atoms decay to nitrogen right in the middle of a strand of DNA. It could manipulate every step of the process until it arrived at the precise bipedal sentient form it was looking for. At which point the thorny issue of free will enters the picture.

I'm not saying this is going to convince any of the "intelligent design" people...but it could be that all God does is play dice. Except that he always knows where they're going to land.

No Next Sibling

I've been playing a lot of abandonware games recently.

There were two impeti for that--one, the Chapters employee who accosted me while I was peering at Pratchett titles and told me about the Discworld computer games at the-underdogs.org. And two, the Jazz Jackrabbit demo on the shareware game CD. Simon was really enamoured of that demo, playing it over and over again, so I thought I might get him the full registered version for his birthday or Christmas. Except that the web pages were defunct. I found it on Abandonia, and now we're thoroughly tired of it.

The Discworld game is pretty cool, though. It's your basic puzzle game, having to pick up items and use them on other items and give them to people until you've collected all the plot coupons. This may be the first one I've played which is entirely graphical, no window for typing in text commands at all. And it works quite well. It's faithful to the Pratchett spirit, too. It takes bits and pieces from a number of books, up to at least Moving Pictures. You're Rincewind, in Ankh-Morpork, and you have the Luggage. Death keeps popping up, you run into Nobby and Carrot, Windle Poons, Nanny Ogg, Lady Ramkin, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, and the agoraphobic bogeyman.

Best of all, though, is the voices--there's a lot of dialogue. Eric Idle does Rincewind's lines(except for half a dozen or so that they probably had to put in at the last minute); Tony Robinson, a.k.a. Baldrick from "Blackadder", does a whole slew of voices, too. I also saw Jon Pertwee listed in the credits, but I'm not as sure I can tell which characters he does. This means that Simon and Luke like it a lot better than the other games where I have to read everything to them. It's quite an elaborate puzzle, though, and I confess to being a wussie when it comes to these games--I go straight for the walkthroughs. I get frustrated very quickly when I don't know what I'm supposed to do next. By the fourth time through, though, I have it down, and I'm getting a little sick of it, but it's still Luke's first choice when we sit down at the computer.

Unfortunately, my attempt to install "Discworld 2" wasn't successful. It keeps asking for a CD, or has trouble initializing the sound drivers or something.

I also downloaded the "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" game. I remember Spider Robinson talking about it at Worldcon. It's also fairly true to the spirit of the books. It doesn't have much for animated graphics, but you have 360° pan, and you can manipulate any object with your mouse. (It gets a little silly, sometimes, when you click on the floor and then on the table, and up pops the option "Put The Floor On The Table", and it's hard to get out of that mode sometimes.) I haven't gotten too far in it yet, but I'll get back to it sometime. It doesn't seem to have voices, but then I couldn't get the Discworld ones to work until I rebooted, so maybe they'll show up next time I play it.

I tried "King's Quest", which I don't believe I'd ever played before, though I might have seen it. I keep getting lost wandering around, or falling off the bridge into the water, and Simon doesn't like it that much either. Maybe he finds the witch and the troll a bit scary.

"Dune" was more successful. It's an interesting game, with you as Paul Atreides(looking a lot like Kyle McLachlan), helping your family recruit Fremen to work for you shortly after your arrival on Arrakis. You start out just getting them to harvest spice, but more and more events happen, until you're at war with the Harkonnens. I don't know if there's the whole treachery thing from the book, since I haven't seen the appropriate character, but...well, it makes me want to reread the book again. One of my coworkers has been reading the series, so we've been talking about it at lunch from time to time, which has also repiqued my interest. I can't remember the last time I reread those books, though I have been through all six books at least twice, and the earlier ones probably more than that. Anyway, the game is interesting, a bit less puzzle-oriented and more wargame-oriented, but as soon as the Harkonnens attack I start floundering. Simon liked it at first, but then his interest waned.

I also tried one called "Elite Plus", an interstellar trading game, but I got bogged down and didn't know what the hell I was doing, and even with the PDF manual I couldn't figure out how to bloody exit the game, so I might give up on that one. Then there's "Rampage", a real oldie which I've downloaded but haven't tried yet. The boys are young enough to be scared of monsters, so maybe playing one as a main character won't go over too well. We'll see.

I remember when they used to be content for me to play the same game over and over again, and I kept wanting to switch games. But now they don't want me to go back and play the old ones, so I have to keep finding new ones. Is this a normal progression, or have I warped their personalities into neophiliacs who will never be contented with a routine? Ah, they'll be okay.