Martin Luther King Jr. will never mean the same thing to me that he means to my brother-in-law Reggie, nor will he have the same impact on me as on my nieces and nephew.
Close as we are, I can’t even claim Reverend King’s impact to the same degree as my sister.
I’m just a liberal white boy, full of liberal white-boy guilt, who tries real hard to do the right thing and tries too hard to say the right thing (and who ends saying too much of the right thing, and trying too hard, and just… embarrassing himself). I’m the one who thinks, deep down, no matter what I do, I’m somehow part of the problem.
But if nothing else, I can see the dinosaurs of our past dying out, year by year; replaced by children who are better than the generations past. Better than me. It is a glacially slow change, but likewise inexorable, and it gives me hope.
And when I read too much of today’s news, and hear too many quotes from too many stupid, scared, old white men, and my faith in the glacier starts to fade, I look at pictures like this… 'I have a dream that one day that little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.'
… and I think that maybe I can see the change happening. Maybe I even do a (very) small amount to help.
And I am very, very lucky that this is so.
“I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
After a holiday hiatus (and… ahem… an extra week off), we’re back.
With a couple new character to voice, once of which is giving me some heartache. Suffice it to say that Mak (the human, not the squirrel) sounds a lot more like Badger in my head than he does in my mouth. Ahh well.
I create best in public. For good or bad, that’s how I roll; it’s never worked as well for me to write a whole story and present it for the first time as a finished thing. I loose my sense of urgency, the need to produce regularly or face public failure and, yes, the chance to enjoy the feedback from the people who liked it (or didn’t). That’s how I work, that’s what I need.
Kate and I are a lot alike in many ways, and while I try not to assign my own interpretation to her actions (I was warned early and often not to), I’d suspect that she’s wired somewhat the same way when it comes to creative efforts.
So, I’d like to point out a project she just started: one picture, posted, every day, for a year. To be sure, she’s actually taking a lot more pictures than one per day, but the end result is the best of the daily bunch, and frankly I think they’re pretty good. I think you should check it out; I certainly think a couple comments would be welcomed.
She lasted almost four days without taking a picture of Jake.
In the meantime, I’ve got a project to work on, and I need to get to it. Cheers.
Short post today; I love you (I do, really. Put this mask on.), but I have other writing to do.
So last night, I spoke to Twitter and said:
I love my new bowling ball. My new bowling ball hates me and is filing for a restraining order. I think I’ll name her ‘Carla’.
Yeah. I’m going to talk about bowling again.
As I’ve mentioned previously, my bowling game has improved quite a bit in the year since I got started in a league with some other gamer nerds in the area. Good times and steady improvement led to a pretty surprising second-place finish for the fall season. Our team was edged out of 1st place in a nail-biter of a final game, our salty tears diluted somewhat by the fact that Kate and I were first in the Most Improved categories for our respective genders and we both got second place in our “High Handicap Series” categories.
Oh, and the prize money. That helped too.
I decided to farm the filthy lucre back into the habit that spawned it and get myself a new bowling ball.
See, for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been using a ball generously given to me by Chris (the guy who got us into the league in the first place). It’s an old ball of his, drilled for both his hand measurements and for a ‘beginner’s’ grip. It’s a little beat up, and I have to kind of crook my thumb a bit to wedge it into its hole well enough, but… well, it works. It doesn’t do anything too fancy, but clearly I can make it hit the pins.
So why get a new ball? Well, I can turn in a very nice score with the Old Ball, but it doesn’t really let me do those fancy curving shots that you see the pro guys put out, and those fancy curving shots actually help the ball hit the pins in a way that makes it more likely they’ll fall down and go cracka-boom.
So I dug around a bit, and took some suggestions from Chris, and ordered up a nice new ball. It’s pretty. It does lovely curvy things. I named it Carla. You know, just in my head. As a joke. Totally a joke. Say hello, Carla.
Before the new season started last night, I went in and got the ball drilled. Oh, shush: quit snickering.
Okay, fine: “I got new finger grips added to the ball.” Happy now?
The guy at the shop told me that he would allow no stinking beginner’s grip on a ball like that, so I drilled me up a ‘fingertip’ grip.
Which is fine; that’s kind of what I was expecting. When he was done, the ball was finally ‘finished’. Ready.
And damn she was pretty.
But there’s a saying in bowling: “Pretty balls don’t throw strikes.”
The ball curves, yeah. WAY more than I’m used to, but that hardly matters, cuz I can’t get the damn thing to come off my hand; that fancy fingertip grip basically means that everything I’ve trained myself to do with Old Ball is wrong wrong wrong. So wrong that I damn near hurt myself last night. I’m going to have to completely relearn how to play, pretty much from the ground up.
So after an abysmal first game (95 pins! Woo!) during which I threw more gutter balls than I think I ever have in a game, and air-balled a fifteen-pound hunk of stone more than I’d like to admit (encouraging many nearby bowlers to look around for the moron noob who didn’t know how to play), I put Carla back in my bag, mumbling something like “It puts the lotion on its skin…” and pulled out Old Ball. My security blanket. Security ball. Whatever. Shut up.
Old Ball didn’t fail me. The approach I used was simpler. Crude. Basic.
But the pins fell down and went cracka-boom.
Frustrating, to have the New Pretty Thing and to have to actually WORK before it produces… well, forget about ‘something better than the old ball’; I’ll be happy with ‘something comparable to the old ball’.
Is this about writing? It might be. I’m a pretty basic guy when it comes to putting words down. As Papa said “I know the 10 dollar words, but there are older words; better, simpler, and those are the ones I use.” Could be that the thing I’m working on right now also includes some fancy-schmancy tricks that I’ve seen used by writers I admire, and I thought “I can do that. How hard can it be? It’s just writing.”
Yeah. Gutterball.
So what happens to Carla now? Do I stick with Old Ball and my respectable-but-maybe-not-as-good-as-it-could-be game?
No. This weekend, I go to the lanes and I practice. A lot. First I figure out how to simply deliver the damn thing, then I’ll figure out how much that changes the roll, until finally, maybe, I’ll get the results I want. Practice practice practice. Lots of people throw tricky balls like mine; they do just fine, and dammit, they aren’t any better than me.
But last night I bought a bowling bag that holds two balls. Old Ball will never be very far away.
Sometimes you need old and simple and crude and ugly. I see no reason to give up the simple things that work, just because I’m working on a fancy new thing.
Once upon a time, I was a pretty hard core MMO raider.
Now, I’ve been playing MMOs since long before they were called that (or had graphics) and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent on such pastimes, but I’m not talking about the play of MMOs in general — just about a very specific activity: raiding.
For the uninitiated, ‘raiding’ is a term for an activity in a multiuser game like World of Warcraft. In this activity, you and a largish group of other like-minded people assemble at a set time online and in somewhat organized fashion attempt to defeat some boss in the game who is designed to be too tough for a single person or even several people to beat. These fights are usually quite challenging, with multiple phases and ‘tricks’ that you need to figure out and learn how to deal with before you can finally put all the pieces together, do all the dance steps in the right order, avoid the specter of Plain Ol’ Bad Luck, and beat the guy.
All MMOs with which I am familiar have this mechanic, though some (CoH) have it to a much smaller degree, which others (LotRO, WoW, many others) use the idea of ‘added complexity’ to bring interest to boss fights that would otherwise be “the big guy gets the guy’s attention, and we all beat on him with relative impunity.”
Because of those little tricks and features, it’s a situation where you go into each new fight pretty much assuming that you won’t win the first time. You’re not really even trying to win — you’re gathering information. What kinds of attacks is he using? Fire? Okay. Do his special attacks have any visual or audio clues that provide warning? Do we have to stay moving or fight in a particular location, or both, depending on what’s going on? How hard is he hitting? How hard are WE hitting? Is he resisting our attacks too much? Can we fix that?
And, ultimately: “How can we avoid the thing that just killed us, the next time?”
Victory does not come easily, and it rarely comes quickly — when I played World of Warcraft, I participated in a raid a couple nights a week, for two to three hours each night, and it would often take us several weeks of attempts to learn how to reliably down a new boss. During those weeks, there were no rewards — nothing but the ongoing drain of repair bills, consumables consumed, and the ever present specter of Time Spent Without Victory.
In terms of gaming, I don’t think there is anything else like this try-fail-try-fail-try-again experience in other games. Certainly not tabletop rpgs.
Sounds pretty depressing, but I’ll tell you a secret: The Win Made it Worth It. There was nothing at all like finally putting it all together and making it work.
And I still enjoy it. I certainly don’t raid like I used to (or play WoW, come to that), but probably my second favorite thing to do in Lord of the Rings Online is to get in a group with Kate and a few other good players, chat about our day, and figure out how to beat a new fight.
Sometimes, we don’t figure it out.
There’s this new fight we tried this weekend that looked like it would be pretty easy to beat. I mean, tricky, yes, but even during the first attempt we pretty much had it figured out: when he says THIS, you run away; when he says THAT, we all bunch up; don’t stand on the open grates with the fire underneath; stay behind him.
And then, suddenly, we were dead.
“What happened? Oh. Fire. Fire bad. Stay out of the fire. Okay. Good tip. Let’s try again.”
Almost beat him… and boom. Fire. Weird.
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Finally, we called it for the night, said we’d ponder it, and come back to it later — maybe ask around on the forums to see What The Hell?
So we ask around, and everyone says we’re idiots. No one knows what we’re talking about. No one’s having that problem.
Well, dammit, what do we do now?
Easy.
We go back and try it again.
Like I said, there is no real corollary (that occurs to me) between this experience and any other kind of gaming.
That’s not to say it doesn’t remind me of something; it reminds of several things, one of which is writing.[1]
In November, I blasted through writing Adrift. I didn’t finish it, because it’s considerably longer than 50k — probably twice that — but I knew that would happen, and I was prepared to continue on in December.
Which, to be clear, I have done. But man has it been painful.
How painful?
I’ve been working on the same scene — not editing it, mind you, just writing it — pretty much for the whole of December. Nothing is working right. Everything is coming along hard; every sentence is like pulling out my own front teeth with a pair of pliers.
Just when I think I’ve got it, boom. Fire. Dead. The looming specter of Time Spent Without Victory. Right now, I’m not even trying to win; I’m just trying to gather as much information as I can, so I can improve my performance in the next attempt.
Then, I stare at my screen, and I think “well what do I do now?”
And sometimes, there’s no poetic answer. There’s no author’s quote that shines a light ahead. There’s no technique or skill or talent to get you out of it.
There’s just the answer I learned from Boss Fights in MMOs.
“Go back in. Try again.”
Maybe, eventually, succeed.
1 – The other thing it reminds me of is submitting your work and trying to get published, but that’s a whole different post.
