Ntuple Indemnity

Huh?

Eoin Colfer is a witty, tech-savvy guy, and based on author’s credentials alone, when his continuation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy” arrives on shelves I’ll be sure to take a look. I’m guilty of being party to this kind of brand-driven exploitation, and I know it. Setting aside for a minute my serious qualms about the brand-name licensing trend in fiction publishing, two reservations spring to mind:

• Didn’t we already see, with Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (I have yet to read The Time Paradox), that Eoin Colfer is a cautionary case study in wells drying up?
• Didn’t we already see, with Mostly Harmless (and to a lesser extent, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish), that Douglas Adams is also a cautionary case study in wells drying up?

Hitchhiker’s is finished. Let’s move on.

I’ve spent the better portion of the week playing Spore. Strictly speaking, one doesn’t finish the game—once your species has developed as far as it can as a spacefaring civilization, you can keep on playing for as long as you like—but sometime on Wednesday night, I completed the “42” achievement for discovering the secret at the centre of the galaxy, which is the closest thing the game has to an ultimate goal. In the true spirit of Battlestar Galactica I have yet to find Earth, though I am assured that it exists, and that you can destroy it.

In case you couldn’t tell, Spore is rather fantastic. Will Wright couldn’t have been more correct when he said (to paraphrase) that there’s a great unexplored gulf between the massive multiplayer online game à la World of Warcraft and the joy of the classic single-player experience where you, you get to be the star of the show without any interference from the addicts, cheaters, and generally rude malcontents who dominate computer game culture on the Internet. So here you have a game of a scope that could only be satisfactorily populated by the freshness, diversity, and sheer staggering quantity of user-generated content in the shared online space—but the territory of the playground itself is yours and yours alone. It’s like Animal Crossing, but more so.

There are some design flaws, many of which are fertile ground for future bloodletting sessions at the hands of Electronic Arts (aka expansion packs), but I want to get the elementary what-works-what-doesn’t criticism out of the way quickly so I can talk about more stimulating topics like user-driven storytelling and everyone’s favourite weasel word(s), intelligent design.

Continued »

This week’s selection: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) by Vladimir Nabokov.

In brief: There are many things I wish I’d known before I started reading this alternate-universe family saga of phenomenology and incest, and Russian is one of them.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Ada, or Ardor, keep reading below.)

Continued »

4-2 (+475), second place; time management denied me a finish in first. I did this at the first Edmonton local tournament I’ve attended since the establishment of the Edmonton Scrabble Club. Outside our game room, there was a convention of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Edmonton, you silly place.

The tournament scene here is fairly new, so the competition was light, and as the top seed I needed to win all six rounds to keep my rating. 4-2 is disappointing, but not catastrophic; I needed to stay above 1200 to play in Division 2 at the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship as I’ve been doing for the past few years, and I think I’ll be okay.

I lost my last game because my opponent drew tiles like a magician pulls rabbits from transdimensional hats. That happens, and I can live with it. I can’t live with Round 2, where I lost to the same opponent by 6 points with one second left on the clock, a defeat that epitomized everything that went wrong in Orlando.

The scenario: I’m holding CO with 0:03 on the clock. As far as I can see, I have a sure win as long as I play my tiles and announce my score before the clock runneth over. My opponent surprises me and plays YEG*—a word I instantly know to be a phony—but without thinking, or really looking at it, I dump my play on the board and finish with the clock reading 0:01. I lose by 6 points.

As it turns out, even if I’d taken the 10-point penalty for going overtime, and took the time to look at his play and challenge it off the board, I still would have won the game. This made all the difference between first and second place.

It’s time to admit it (and to be frank, I already have): there is something systematically rotten about my time management, and it’s killing my endgame. This has deteriorated from embarrassment to utter lunacy.

On the upside, my resumption of serious word study over the past few weeks is beginning to pay off. A month ago, I would never have seen HETAErAS. You would think that somebody as interested in ancient Greece as I am would know what the Greeks called their courtesans. Well, I do now, and I’m all the richer for it.

Bingos: RUINABLE, INDITES, ENTrIES, AMNIOtES, CINEAST, REMINTED, ENDEARED, HETAErAS, DIPOLES, kINDLES, MARLInE.

This week’s selection: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) by Truman Capote.

In brief: Short, simple, and sweet, Capote’s novella is one of those stories that packs every postwar anxiety about the American Dream into one very enigmatic character. There is something mature about fiction that reflects on the idealism of the individual spirit, and asks us to do the same, through immersing us in a deep sense of wistfulness rather than outright disillusionment.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, keep reading below.)

Continued »