The January issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line for your reading pleasure. Craig Clarke’s back, so there’s new content even if you’ve been following the blog for the last month.

This post concerns serious low-level software geekery; if you’re interested in how Ramble develops as a game, but not in the underlying software, you can safely skip it.

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As I indicated yesterday, I’ve been working on a simple computer game for my son David. As I progress, two things happen: the game gets more interesting, and the infrastructure I’m using to produce it gets cleaner and more powerful. I thought it might be interesting to some if I were to talk about the design of the game and also of the underlying software. Consequently, I’ll be making a series of posts over the next few days, weeks, and months about the issues involved.

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It’s been five days since I last posted. I hadn’t really intended to take such a long break, but somehow blogging just hasn’t been a priority over the last few days, and I haven’t had much to talk about. In fact, I still don’t have much to talk about.

Christmas was a joy and a delight, of course. We started with our church’s Christmas pageant on the 23rd (both boys remembered their lines and delivered them appropriately). Christmas eve was a quiet, peaceful day; usually we have Jane’s mom over for dinner, but as she’s on a cruise to Antarctica we had nothing special to do and could take it easy. Christmas morning my dad came over to help the kids open their presents, and in the afternoon we went to the park (new scooters). Sunday we went to church, and then over to my dad’s in the late afternoon for the family Christmas. Since then we’ve mostly been lolling about, reading and playing video games. Plus, I’ve done some work on a few projects.

The big deal for this Christmas season is that David and James didn’t catch chicken pox from the boy across the street. This is a big deal for two reasons. The first is, Dave came down with a bad case of hives after the Christmas pageant, and for a couple of days we weren’t sure that hives were his only problem. Red spots have an uncanny way of looking like red spots. The second is, I’ve never had chicken pox so far as I can recall. I do not wish to contract it. But God is good, and the dreaded pox hasn’t come under my roof.

Projects…I’ve finished proofing the PDF for Through Darkest Zymurgia; it’s just about time to get my CafePress store on-line (so I’ll know what the URL is, so that I can put it on the “lawyer’s page” of the book). My brother’s come up with some good designs for the cover, though nothing’s finished yet. So it will be at least a couple of weeks before the printed book sees the light of day.

In addition, I’m working on the beginnings of a computer game for the boys to play, mostly because it’s a fun little project. It’s intended to be your basic dungeon crawl; if you’ve played or heard of Ultima, Final Fantasy, Angband, Rogue, Nethack, or Wizardry you’ll have a vague idea of what I’m after. What I’ve been working on so far, mostly, is creating and displaying nice mazes. Here’s a partial screen shot:

There’s been a lot of web traffic about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer of late, and I’m here to tell you that it’s all wide of the mark. You’ve all heard the story of the poor little reindeer who got teased for his unusual physical characteristics and who finally got happy after he was able to show how useful he could be. You probably felt sorry for him. You shouldn’t have. Rudolph is a proud reindeer, and he doesn’t need your pity.

It’s true enough that Rudolph was on the outs with the other reindeer, but it had nothing to do with Rudolph’s nose; the young fellow’s just naturally a bit of a loner. On top of that, he was frequently disgusted by the behavior of the other reindeer. What am I saying? Well, it’s like this.

Santa’s all about fairness, right? Every year, he travels (at great expense and personal hazard) all over the world, and distributes toys to children in strict accordance with their naughtiness or niceness. He doesn’t play favorites. So just how is it that Rudolph wasn’t allowed to help pull the sleigh until that foggy Christmas eve? Rudolph’s a decent reindeer; you’d think that Santa’s innate fairness would require a strict rotation of eligible reindeer, so that over time everyone would get to help out on the big day. Not so. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but our Santa has a blind spot, and that blind spot is his reindeer. He loves his reindeer, and he loves to call them by name. And so every year, when Christmas Eve rolls around, he naturally picks the reindeer whose names he knows best.

And the reindeer know it, see. They take advantage of it. “Good morning, Mr. Claus, sir. Can I get you a cup of coffee?” “How about another donut, Mr. C?” “You want I should polish the sleigh again, boss?” “Gee, boss, have you lost weight? Your red suit’s getting a little baggy. Here, let me take it in an inch or so.” It’s a disgusting sight, watching a whole herd of reindeer dancing attendance on Santa in the hopes of getting noticed. Like I said, Rudolph’s a proud reindeer, and he wants no part of it.

Rudolph might have a red nose, he tells me; but at least it isn’t brown.

If you’re familiar with Tom Lehrer’s song of the Elements, and even if you’re not, you’ll most certainly enjoy this animation which makes the full drama of the song manifestly visible. Or something. (Via Dustbury.)

This is the third Recluce novel in series order; it takes place a couple
of hundred years after The Towers of Sunset and (I think)
something longer than that before The Magic of Recluce.

When the book begins, Recluce is a reasonably prosperous nation;
order-masters are good with plants, and consequently Recluce has become a
major exporter of spices. It is still fundamentally rural, and the
population is concentrated at the north end of the island, just as it was
in Creslin’s day.

Enter Dorrin. Dorrin’s a nerd. Instead of learning to send his mind out
on the winds like his storm-wizard father, he wants to build steam
engines. And steam boats. And all manner of other dangerous objects.
Such things are forbidden on Recluce; because they depend on the
containment of fire, which is naturally chaotic, steam engines are
thought to be works of chaos. Dorrin’s sure this is mistaken; but you’d
have to build them out of ordered materials. In short, they need to be
built by an order-master.

Recluce hasn’t survived for 200 reasonably peaceful years by ignoring
possible sources of chaos, and it’s clear that Dorrin’s going to have to
take a hike. Fortunately, his family is reasonably well-off, so they can
afford to send him to the Institute for training. The Institute was
founded by members of the cadre of Westwind guards who came to Recluce at
the time of the founding; most citizens call it the Institute of Useless
Knowledge and Unnecessary Violence, but it’s a useful place to study if
you’re about to be kicked out: Candar and Hamor are violent places, and
weapons training can be extremely useful.

The training segment is at once the most interesting and least satisfying
part of the book. Least
satisfying, because Modesitt cribbed a little too much of it from
The Magic of Recluce. There’s one scene on the ship from
Recluce to Candar that’s almost identical, for example. I suspect Modesitt was
trying to be clever, because although the words and actions are similar
the people are markedly different; but it doesn’t come off right. Most
interesting, because here we see the seeds of the dangergeld of Lerris’
day. The folks who exile Dorrin really don’t want to do it; they just
want him to give up his engines. They tell him, though not in so many
words, that he can come back when he’s done that. They have no idea what
they are about to unleash; it’s an interesting contrast to Lerris’ story,
in which his needs and the needs of the country are equally balanced, and
his dangergeld is designed to serve both.

Anyway, Dorrin goes off to the country of Spidlar in Candar, and begins
building things. Relationships; business; engines; his reputation; he’s
a quiet man, a focussed man, an unselfconscious man, and everything he
does is constructive. He can’t help it; he’s an order-master of the
highest degree, and the first person to really work out the details of the
order/chaos balance.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a novel without some
conflict, and it so happens that Spidlar is next on the list to be
conquered by the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Dorrin rises to the
occasion; and amazingly, unlike Creslin and numerous other Modesitt
heroes, he doesn’t do it solely by thinking of bigger and better ways to
kill lots of people.

I’ve never like The Magic Engineer as well as some of the
other books in the series; but it has its own flavor and atmosphere, and
it’s better than I remembered.

New Year’s Day is more-or-less a known quantity here in Southern California. Without looking at the Weather Channel or checking the newspaper forecast, you can pretty well assume that it’s going to be a gorgeous sunny day with a bright blue sky. The temperature is likely in the 40s or 50s, but it’s going to be a sunny day. It might rain steadily for days beforehand, but on the first of the year in Pasadena it’s going to be a sunny day. In all the years that they’ve been holding the Rose Parade, you can count on one hand the number of times it has been rained. I once spent the night with two other people in a Chevy Chevette because it was pouring down rain and we couldn’t sleep on the sidewalk along the parade route as we’d intended. It was a four-door Chevette, granted, but it still took some doing. By eight o’clock, when the parade started, the rain was over, the clouds were gone, and the sun was shining to beat the band.

Christmas Day is considerably more variable. It’s often cold and gloomy (by Southern Californian standards) but it’s just as like warm and clear, and some years it’s been in the 80s. I can recall one year, shortly after my parents first got central air and heating installed, when my mom turned the thermostat down low so that she could light a Christmas fire in the fireplace; it would have been far too warm otherwise.

I’m not yet prepared to guess what Christmas will be like this year, as our weather has been changing from cold to warm and back again every few days, but if I had to make a choice I’d guess that it will be warm. We’ve been having frequent Santa Ana winds recently, warm dry winds that are shaking the last leaves from all the trees that drop them, and once the Santa Anas set in they often hang around for awhile. Why they are called Santa Anas I’m not sure, as they come from the north and the city of Santa Ana is an hour’s drive southeast of here. I’ve seen a number of theories; the most popular is that “Santa Ana” is a local corruption of “santana,” which means a hot dry wind. The trouble with that theory is that you’d expect the corruption to go the other way–it’s far more likely for “Santa Ana” to be shortened to “santana” than the other way around. More to the point, Southern Californians have been calling them Santa Ana winds for generations; the only people I’ve ever heard refer to them as “santana” winds are those who once called them “Santa Ana” winds like the rest of us, and then decided that that wasn’t right. The late lamented Jack Smith, an L.A. Times columnist from the days when the Times really was a Los Angeles newspaper investigated the topic in detail and concluded that “santana” was purely bogus, and that the winds had their name (if I recall correctly) because they blew from Santa Ana Canyon.

I have no idea where Santa Ana Canyon might be, or why anyone would choose to name a wind after it, but there you go.

Anyway, it’s been a warm lovely weekend, and we’ve finally begun our Christmas preparations. I don’t mean shopping for gifts; we started that ages ago, though mostly on-line. But after Thanksgiving comes the season of Advent, a penitential season similar to Lent, and I don’t like to get out the tree or the decorations or the Christmas music until Lent is pretty much over. Today was the fourth and last Sunday of Advent, so first thing yesterday morning we got the tree out of the back shed (yes, it’s artificial) and set it up in the living room. We had a bit of a milestone this year–the tree was decorated almost entirely (with more enthusiasm than skill) by our three older kids. Jane held the baby (who has taken to screaming like a banshee if Jane puts her down) and handed out ornaments, and I played Christmas carols on my recorder, and a good time was had by all.

Then this afternoon, after church, we got out the Christmas Train–an LGB train with an oval track, a locomotive, a flat car, a freight car with low sides, and a caboose. You’ll notice we got it out the day after the tree got decorated; last year we set it up before the tree got decorated, and on January 1st, while we were watching the Rose Parade on TV, my eldest son asked, “Mom, can we decorate the tree today?” Jane was just beginning her third trimester as Christmas approached, and neither of us were sleeping well in consequence, and what with the kids napping at various times and overall fatigue, we somehow never found a time to get the whole family together to decorate the tree. And after the kids were in bed, we were either too tired or occupied with other needful things. So we’re doing better this year–let’s hope it continues.

Update: I’ve just done a Google on “santana wind” and found a whole bunch of people who claim that they are named that because the Mexican inhabitants of Southern California call these hot dry winds the “devil winds”, “santana” being the Spanish word for Satan. Except that it isn’t; that would be “satana”. Quite a few of these folks talk about how when they first came to Southern California in the ’50’s or when they were growing up in the ’70’s everyone knew they were the “santana” winds, but then the network newscasters, idiots that they are, screwed it up by calling them the “Santa Ana” winds. The trouble with that argument is that my father, who was born here in Southern California in 1926, grew up calling them the Santa Ana winds. On another site I see this:

The origin and even the original spelling of the terms for these winds are unclear, and during the past century both Santa Ana and Santana winds have been used. The term “Santana winds” is said to have originated in Spanish California when the hot dry winds were called “devil winds.” Other sources credit the persistence and ferocity of these winds through the Santa Ana Canyon in Orange County as the reason for their being called Santa Anas. A third reasoning has an Associated Press correspondent mistakenly identifying Santana winds as Santa Ana winds in a 1901 dispatch.

Whatever the origin, native Angelenos have been calling them Santa Ana winds for at least a century; that’s good enough for me. 

This is the first in Modesitt’s long running Recluce series, and to my
mind it’s still the best. All of the others at best serve to either elaborate
themes or fill in details sketched in here.

The story takes place when the island nation of Recluce is at the height
of its power, and has most fully become itself. The country is peaceful,
productive, and stable; the master of Recluce have not only learned what
works to keep it so, but why it works. Where earlier generations of
leaders were simply doing their best, the current generation has it more
or less down to a science.

Now, Recluce as a society is based on order, in both the common sense of
orderliness and in the magical sense, order being the force that opposes
chaos. Chaos is rigidly excluded. Discontented folk breed chaos, so it
follows naturally that those who do not fit in cannot be suffered to
remain.

Enter our hero, Lerris. Lerris is a youth of good family, he’s been
given the best education available on Recluce, and he’s bored.
B-O-R-E-D, bored. Nothing ever changes in the small town in which he has
spent his entirely life, and he’s so incredibly bored he can hardly stand
it. Boredom is a form a discontent, so after a couple of years of
apprenticeship to his uncle, a master woodworker, he’s informed that he
has two choices: exile or the dangergeld.

The dangergeld is an interesting institution, and one that we see in
several stages of development in the later books in the series (as I’ve
noted in other reviews, the series order isn’t chronological, and tends to
go backwards as often as it goes forwards). It’s a form of limited
exile–after several months of intense survival training, dangergelders
are sent overseas to one of the planet’s several continents. Once away
from Recluce they may do as they like…but each dangergelder is given a
specific task to do. If they carry it out successfully, and they still
wish to do so, then they are allowed to return to Recluce. Invariably,
the task is one which will require them to deal with the root cause of
their discontent–and possibly one or two other matters.

In Lerris’ case, he’s commanded to travel by ship to the continent of
Candar. Once in Candar, he’s to travel past the Easthorns to the
Westhorns (two ranges of mountains). He’s to travel alone, i.e., apart
from the other dangergelders, and he’s not to return until he knows he’s
ready, whatever that means. Lerris leaves Recluce convinced that it’s
meant to be a one-way trip.

Now, it develops that Lerris isn’t your average rebellious teenager. At
least one of his parents is a powerful order-master (that is, a wizard).
Though he doesn’t know it, he has the potential to become a powerful
wizard himself, with the capacity to turn towards either order or chaos.
Should he choose the latter he’ll destroy himself in a short time, as he
hasn’t the temperament for chaos, but it will be exceedingly messy. As
for order, he needs to learn to value it in a more chaotic setting. And
thanks to the balance of order and chaos, Candar, the closest continent
to Recluce, is an extremely chaotic place. In short, Lerris is liable to
make mistakes, his mistakes are liable to be spectacular, and so the
masters of Recluce are sending him where he can make them without harm to
his countrymen.

But there’s more to it than that. The havoc a budding
order-master can leave in his wake is a potent force if it can be
channeled properly. Recluce has been sending young lads like Lerris out
into the world for centuries, and the masters of Recluce have a shrewd
notion of Lerris’ full potential. He’s not just a journeyman wizard,
seeking to find himself; he’s a guided missile, and a tool of Recluce’s
foreign policy. Just imagine how angry he’ll be when he finally figures
it all out….

I really do enjoy this book. There’s more than a hint of
wish-fulfillment in it, I’m sure; I’m not super-powerful myself, but it’s
fun to imagine. On top of that, parts of the book have the whole boot
camp dynamic working for them; I always like that. And then there’s the
emphasis on values, and on doing the right thing whether or not it’s
expedient (the proper use of power is a major theme in all of Modesitt’s
books). Finally, though, it’s an interesting tale well-told, and the
hero not only grows up, he also gets the girl–who, actually, is quite a
heroine in her own right. Her story is just as interesting as Lerris’
and would have made a fine novel, except there’d have been considerably
less magic in it.

If you like epic fantasy, and you haven’t read this book, you really
should, even if you never go on to read the rest of the series.

A few weeks ago I began to require TypeKey authentication from readers before they could leave comments here. The effect has been both good and bad. On the one hand, I’m no longer having to delete several hundred bogus (and occasionally obscene) comments every single day; instead, none are getting through. This is a big win. On the other hand, I’m getting many fewer real comments than I used to, which although unsurprising is a pity.

I’d been hoping that the problem would subside after a while, and that I could open up the comments section to everyone again; instead, some hosting services are receiving so many attempts to post comment spam that it’s slowing down their servers and causing serious problems. I got a notice from my own web hosting service a couple of days ago, asking all MovableType users to please disable comments or switch to full authentication ASAP–or they’d pull the plug on the site. And I can’t blame them.

So authentication won’t be going away any time soon, and it’s likely to become common on other blogs as well. It’s easy to use; if you’d like to comment, just click on the Sign-On link and create an identity for yourself at TypeKey.com. Thereafter you can use that username and password on any MovableType blog.