NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft was successfully launched into space today, and yours truly was there to watch…sort of. I wasn’t at Kennedy Space Center; instead, I was at the “ROC”, which is where the project “NOPE” (Network Operations Project Engineer) keeps tabs on all the things that have to go right for JPL to track the spacecraft, receive its telemetry, and send it commands. Among those things are the various subsystems of JPL’s Deep Space Network. For critical events (such as launch and first acquisition) the flight projects like to have subsystem engineers on-tap in case anything should go wrong. And since I work on the Uplink subsystem, that meant me, or one of my co-workers. This time it was me.

The experience was both exciting, as I’d not supported a launch before, and terribly, terribly boring, as nothing went wrong that I had to deal with. Please note: I’m not complaining. Boring is what I was hoping for.

But a full day of boring leaves me tolerably brain-dead and in no mood for blogging, so I will leave you with a link to the Deep Impact home page. Don’t miss it!

This is not a Blandings novel. There are no pigs. There is no Earl
of Emsworth. There is no Beech the Butler. There is no Lady Constance…
well, then again, there’s sort of a Lady Constance, though she’s the
Earl’s daughter rather than his sister. And there are imposters,
and heaven knows Blandings just isn’t Blandings without imposters.
And though it’s a stamp rather than a pig, heaven knows there’s a
McGuffin that’s just ripe for being stolen, if only one of the guests
was a former safecracker. But the Earl’s not an idiot; he’s merely
impoverished. And his offspring aren’t idiots either; the only idiot
isn’t even a member of the family.

In fact, Wodehouse has taken the established conventions for Blandings
novels and turned most of them on their heads, and produced a really quite
delightful confection that satisfies the same craving as do Lord Emsworth,
the Empress of Blandings, and so forth, and yet in a delightfully
different way.

I’m just itching to go into great detail about all the things Wodehouse
does differently than usual in this book, but that would mean giving
them away, and we can’t have that. So if you’re a Wodehouse fan, you’ll
just have to go out and find a copy.

And if you’ve never read Wodehouse, why on earth are you wasting your
time with me when you could be discovering Wodehouse?

It’s a game. You get together with a group of people, and make up encyclopedia entries. Each entry cites other entries, some already written, some not yet written. They need not be factual; in fact, it’s probably best if they aren’t factual. This is not an exercise in erudition, it’s an exercise in imagination. At the end, you’ve got a web of 26*(number of players) entries, and presumably have had a good time.

As Michael says, it could be a lot of fun with the right group of people–rather like Balderdash on steroids, I’m thinking. But I’m having difficulty imagining how you’d pick such a group, though.

OK, this has got to the be the geekiest entry in this series to date, as well as the most specific, as it involves an obscure point of Tk programming that will be of interest to almost no one; on the other hand, there are some reflections on player controls that might be of interest to a broader audience.

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Just for fun, I’ve made my latest version of Ramble available for download at the new Ramble Home Page. It’s available as a Mac OS X application, a Windows executable, and for the die-hard Tclers in the audience, a starkit. If you decide to take a look at it, be aware that it’s still in its infancy, and isn’t much of a game yet; it’s more a preview of coming attractions. The game begins immediately when you start the application; it ends when you die or win the game. In either case, you’ll need to quit the game and start over in order to play again.

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I spent the evening working on Ramble instead of writing about Ramble, and now I find I’m out of time. But I’m hoping to put the initial (very, very simple) version on-line sometime in the next couple of days. Hold your breath!

Via Lynn Sislo I find this truly bizarre gallery of images–one artist’s conception of the skeletal structure of a variety of well-known cartoon characters. Charlie Brown is here, as is Marvin the Martian, Tweety Bird, Fred Flintstone, and a number of others; but the real eye-openers are the Powerpuff Girls. This must be seen to be believed; you simply can’t imagine it on your own.

On our Peter Lovesey page, I give him the tagline “diamonds,
not so rough”; I sometimes wonder if “red herring monger” would be more
precise. But be that as it may.

I first encountered Lovesey’s books shortly before this book came out,
and I confess it stopped me in my tracks; it’s only recently that I’ve
begun reading his Peter Diamond novels again. And all this without my
even reading it, mind you; just reading the flyleaf was enough to put me
off. Why? In this book, Peter Diamond loses his beloved wife Steph.
Although she hasn’t had a major part in any of the books, she’s had a
persistent and important role in all of them–she’s Diamond’s anchor, his
prop and stay, the thing that keeps him from going nuts, his island of
peace. And in this book, she dies…and Diamond has to deal with it.

I hate that.

Having read the flyleaf I put the book back on the shelf
and said, “Well, I think I’ll wait for the paperback of this one…and
maybe even longer than that.” I hadn’t even read enough of the flyleaf
to find out how Steph dies; just the bare fact was sufficient.

And for quite a while, the only Peter Diamond books I saw on the shelves
were this one and some I already had. About a month ago, though, I found
two others nestled on the bookstore shelf next to this one, and decided
that it was time to bite the bullet and get on with it, especially since I
could begin with the other two books. I didn’t know at the time whether
they were written before or after Diamond Dust, and it didn’t
matter; it was all insulation.

You’ve perhaps noticed that I haven’t said much about what’s in the book,
or how Steph dies, and I’m not going to. I’ll just say that parts of it
were indeed painful to read; Steph’s death is a bad thing, bad for
Diamond, and bad for us, and knowing that, I’d guess, Lovesey doesn’t rub
our noses in it. He portrays Diamond’s grief simply and poignantly
without wallowing in it.

The mystery that follows is as intricate and surprising as anything else
of Lovesey’s I’ve read, with red herrings galore, and I found the ending
perfectly satisfying–which was yet another surprise.

But I rather suspect that if I’d tried to read it when it first came out,
I’d have had more trouble. Living with the fact of Steph’s death for a
couple of years lent me some needed distance.

It might seem odd that I’d get so worked up over a mystery series, and
indeed I’ve probably overstated my dismay. It wasn’t heartbreak that
caused me to put this book back on the shelf a couple of years ago, it
was the wish to spare myself an unpleasant read. But either way, it’s
a tribute to Lovesey’s skill.

The Summons, by Peter Lovesey

In the first Peter Diamond mystery, The Last Detective,
Diamond ends the book in grand style by resigning from the Bath CID. He
spends a fair amount of time unemployed and underemployed until this book,
when the Bath CID needs him again. It seems that a guy Diamond put away for
murder has escaped from prison and kidnapped the Chief Constable’s
daughter, and the only one he’ll talk to is Diamond himself. He claims
to be innocent of the murder, and he wants Diamond to prove it. The CID
is interested only in capturing the guy before the Chief Constable’s
daughter is hurt, and they want Diamond to sweet-talk him; they have no
intention of re-opening the case.

But Diamond’s an honest man; that’s why the escapee is willing to work
with him. And though it seemed like an open-and-shut case at the time,
and still seems like one now, if Diamond says he’ll look into it, look
into it he will, whatever the top brass say. And as he’s still a
civilian, they can’t stop him….

The average Lovesey novel has some delightful twists, turns, and
surprises, and this one is no exception; though, honestly, I’d kind of
like to see a novel in which Peter Diamond isn’t going it mostly
alone.

Visibility: What can the player see, and when can he see it?

The simplest answer is everything, all the time–what I’ll call complete visibility. The entire world (or, at least, the entire level) is visible all at once. You can see your character, all terrain features, traps, treasures, monsters, etc., et al. This is dead simple to implement (provided the world is small enough to fit on the screen all at once), but generally speaking it’s boring. A big part of the fun of playing a tile-based game is exploring the game world, and that requires limiting visiblity.

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