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Craig Clarke reviewed this book in Ex Libris Reviews last month, causing me to
reflect. I reflected that although I’d heard of Nick and Nora Charles,
I’d never read a book or seen a movie in which they appeared. I
reflected that although I’d heard of Dashiell Hammett, I’d never read
anything by him. And I reflected that I’d been completely unaware that
Hammett was responsible for Nick and Nora Charles, having associated him with
mean streets and gumshoes and Humphrey Bogart. Clearly this was
something to look into, and so I procured a copy of The Thin Man
forthwith. And I read it.

And I enjoyed it.

But good grief, fish don’t drink as much as these folks.
It’s like some witty, urbane game of quarters. You get home from the
theater: take a drink. Some one comes to your hotel room: Take a drink.
Your visitor takes a drink: take a drink. You get up in the morning:
take a drink. Someone gets murdered: take a drink. Go out to a
speakeasy patronized by underworld types: take a drink for each one. But
sip them slowly, because the speakeasy’s liquor is lousy.
You’re feeling a little tight: take a drink. You’re not feeling tight
enough: take a drink. Make a witty non-answer to an impertinent question:
take a drink. Hear yet another all-too-plausible tale from Mimi
Jorgenson that you don’t believe: take two drinks.

It’s all well-written, mind you; and it’s fascinating to watch Nick’s
behavior change as he gets drunk. He doesn’t get loud angry drunk; he
doesn’t slur his words or get sentimental, or any of the other cliched
drunken behaviors; but there’s a definite sense that the inhibitions
are lifting, that he’s not watching himself so carefully, that he might
be saying a little more, saying it just a little louder, that he might
not care quite as much about consequences.

The other characterizations are good, too. I especially enjoyed disliking
Mimi Jorgenson, one of the most poisonous, duplicitous female characters
I’ve ever come across. The only character I can compare her too is the
lady in the movie The Maltese Falcon. Go figure.

Some time I’m going to have to re-read this to figure out just how Hammett did
it.

I saw the doctor yesterday, and got some antibiotics, and I’m feeling better in that the symptoms are less severe, but I’m also completely wiped out, which I wasn’t before today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

But there’s been some sporadic progress in the world of Ramble. My development version now includes:

• A simplified version of Angband combat
• You can now buy a variety of hand and missile weapons, with appropriate ammunition for each.
• Giant garden slugs
• Line-of-sight visibility

That last feature came as quite a surprise to me, as I hadn’t planned to do it yet; and even more surprising, it’s fast enough. I’m rather shocked. Though, I’m not entirely happy with the function I’m using to compute the tiles on a line-of-sight between two other tiles.

Anyway, “I aten’t dead”, as Granny Weatherwax would say, and I hope to have energy for writing prose Real Soon Now.

Sorry for the lack of posts; I’ve been down with a nasty sore throat for a couple of days. Things should pick up soon.

Driving home today, I made a number of decisions about the future
evolution of Ramble. So far, I’ve been patterning it after games
where it’s easy to die…and when you die you have to start over from
the beginning. That’s OK for me, after all; I have a longer attention
span, and I know how the game works. But Dave, I think, finds it
annoying. So I’m going to change things so that if you die
in the dungeon you wake up back in town, ready to go–but having been
penalized seriously enough to give death some sting.

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Here’s another remarkably funny book. It’s a mystery novel, and a
remarkably odd one at that.

Fair disclosure: the author sent me a free copy of this book, otherwise
I’d never have picked it up in a million years. I accepted his offer
with some apprehension, because this is a book that comes from the
Christian Ghetto. There’s quite a lot of fiction written from an
explicitly Christian world view, published by explicitly Christian
publishers for sale by explicitly Christian bookstores. I don’t tend
to read it, even though I’m a Christian; the little that has come to
my attention (I’m thinking of the Left Behind series) hasn’t been
to my taste, and being a bit of a snob I’ve always felt that it was any
good it would be sold in regular bookstores anyway (as Lewis and Tolkien
and Walker are (Hi, Lars!)).

So I accepted this book rather against my better judgement, and rather
put off reading it after it arrived in the mail. I was terribly afraid
that it would be incompetently written, or so terribly, terribly earnest
about the Christian faith that I’d find it uncomfortable reading.
Please note: the Christian faith is indeed worth being terribly, terribly
earnest about. But I find that fiction needs a lighter touch.

Anyway, I needn’t have worried, and I’m actually a little ashamed of
being such a snob, because I enjoyed Bye Bye Bertie immensely.
Subtitled “A Joe LaFlam Mystery”, it’s a well-done farce. Joe
LaFlam is a Christian private eye by day, a taxi driver by night, and a
complete nutcase almost all of the time. He suffers, if that’s the word
I’m after, from a nearly continuous hard-boiled internal monologue about
the state of his soul, his desire to be married, and his life as a
private eye in the rainy town of Seattle, Washington, and sometimes his
monologue spills over onto the people he meets. This generally causes
them some confusion, because he in fact lives in Vancouver, British
Columbia.

In the current tale (the first, and so far, I believe, the only one), Joe
is approached by a beautiful young Christian woman; her sister has been
kidnapped by a group of druids who are demanding $200,000 or they’ll
sacrifice her to their druidical divinity. Being, in his own mind, the
gallant Christian knight, he undertakes to deliver the ransom–and then
attempt to capture the kidnappers. Nothing goes as he plans, of course,
and he ends up getting arrested by the police for rummaging suspiciously
in trash cans; and the next day…

But I don’t want to tell you the whole story, because that would spoil it.

The only thing that prevents me from recommending this book
whole-heartedly is that it was written to be read by folks from a
very specific Christian subculture, and if you aren’t familiar
with that background the book might seem very alien indeed, and you
might have trouble telling when Dewhurst is being serious and when he’s
being over-the-top. The fact is, he’s being over-the-top silly most of
the time; like me, he’s a man who needs to handle serious things with
lightly.

And he does, indeed, speak of serious things. Joe’s internal narrative
reveals him to be a total nutcase, as I’ve said, Christian or not; but if
Joe’s capacity for self-delusion about the quality of his spiritual life
is funny, it’s also all-too familiar. My own internal monologues aren’t
nearly as purple as Joe’s, but I’ve wrestled with lots of the same issues,
and I’ve probably fooled myself just as often.

Well, maybe not that often. But often enough. At least–

Well, anyway, Dewhurst’s written a book that even the secular humanists
in my audience might enjoy. Just remember that it’s a comedy, that it’s
over-the-top and exaggerated, and that it’s not a life-portrait of those Red
State voters you’ve been hearing about, as tempting as it might be to
think otherwise. And even though your Borders or B&N might not have
it, Amazon does.

Howdy! If you tried to download the OS X version of Ramble 0.3 yesterday and got a 404 error, try again today; the problem’s been fixed.

I’ve just uploaded version 0.3 of Ramble to the Ramble Home Page. It’s got many enhancements and changes, which I’ll discuss below the fold. Here, I’d like to publicly thank Michael Cleverly, fellow Tcl’er and fellow father, who made speech synthesis work in Ramble (on Mac OS X only, alas). I first met Michael at the Tcl/Tk conference in Vancouver B.C. three and a half years ago, and I’m hoping to see him again in October at the Tcl/Tk conference in Portland. Speech synthesis isn’t perfect yet; we only use one voice, and some of the more complicated interactions aren’t spoken. But it’s still useful for Michael’s boy who isn’t old enough to read.

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My brother gave me this book for Christmas, and he’s probably been
wondering when I was going to get around to reading it and reviewing it.
I actually finished it over a week ago, but the reviews have been lagging.

The Soddit, subtitled “or, Let’s Cash In Again”, is a
remarkably funny parody of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit. I say “remarkably” because parody is a form that
backfires more often than not, and the likelihood of failure increases
with the length of the work. At 343 pages, The Soddit is considerably
longer than its nearest neighbor, Harvard Lampoon’s
Bored of the Rings, and it’s also considerably funnier.
Roberts somehow manages to stand every well-known scene on its head, and
still come up with a fairly coherent narrative. When you’re done, you’ve
actually read a complete story, one with great similarities to Tolkien’s
work, but a genuine story in its own right as well. And it’s funny, too,
which as I say is remarkable.

I won’t give any of the jokes away, much though I’d like to. I’ll just
say that Roberts appears to be aiming for something halfway between
Douglas Adams and
Terry Pratchett, and if he
doesn’t quite hit the bullseye he’s still to be commended for hitting
the target at all.

Read it yourself; or buy a copy for your favorite Tolkien fan. They’ll
like it, if their sense of humor is in working order; and if they
don’t at least you’ll have the fun of watching them fume.

I’m writing Ramble for my kids to play, but I’m also writing it for
myself. If a game is to be appealing to its author, then it has to
include a fair amount of unpredictability. In a game like Ramble,
that means generating interesting but unpredictable levels. The
problem has many aspects, but in this essay I’m going to focus on the
issue of random terrain in general, and random mazes in
particular.

Note: So happens, this is the 1,000th post on this blog; so you should click through to the rest of it, if only for the pretty pictures.

Continue reading →