Arden House, Book Two is done.
It is BEAUTIFUL, and just in time for holiday gift-giving.

We're going to have two Open Houses: 
Saturday, 20 December and
Sunday, 21 December
Both days 2 to 4 PM at our house.
(IM me if you need directions)

We'll have crates of books, $15 each, and
I'll be able to accept credit cards.

I'm off today. Rain does that. Don't have the car, because the coworker is using it. Didn't want to let that keep me locked up in the hotel room, so I went for a walk anyway. What the hell - it's just rain - it won't hurt me.

That means that by the time I got to Perkins for my brunch, I was pretty thoroughly soaked. I'm ok with that, but it might have shifted my mood slightly. (Full disclosure.)

The annoyingly ubiquitous X-Mas music was being piped through the dining room. Many songs played. One stuck in my head, and I found myself analyzing the lyrics in a different way than before:

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, 
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen., 
But do you recall?
The most famous reindeer of all?

I'm sure you're about to tell me.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (reindeer)
Had a very shiny nose

Dude has a drink every now and then. No big.

And if you ever saw it (saw it)
You would even say it glows (like a light bulb)

Actually, I wouldn't. At least (if I'm honest) not to his face. Come on - that's just rude!

And all of the other reindeer (reindeer)
Used to laugh and call him names (like Pinocchio)

The other reindeer sound like jerks. They're not even creative jerks.

They never let poor Rudolph (Rudolph)
Join in any reindeer games( like monopoly)

What exactly makes a game a 'reindeer game'? Sounds to me like the other reindeer are not only uncreative jerks, they're also biggoted douche bags.

Then one foggy Christmas Eve, 
Santa came to say, (ho ho ho)
Rudolph with your nose so bright, 
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?

Oh, so you wouldn't lift a finger to help Rudolph with the uncreative biggoted jerks before, but now that you NEED something from him...

Then all the reindeer loved him, (loved him)
And they shouted out with glee, (yippie)

What shallow pricks these reindeer are! They're all about tearing good ol' Rudy down until Santa gives him the thumbs up and now he's better than sliced bread? This is starting to sound like an after school special about cheerleaders. Seriously Rudolph? Get a better class of 'friends'.

Rudolph the red-nose Reindeer (reindeer)
You'll go down in history (like George Washington)

Because being a slave and towing the line (literally) to the fat white dude is all it takes huh?

What? I'm not grumpy. Just disillusioned.

When I hear that scientific studies are untrustworthy, I ask "well... in comparison to what?"

I understand skepticism born of awful things like evidence being cherrypicked to support a study sponsor, at the expense of, you know, actual sick people. Ugh. But I also understand that while science doesn't resist these biases every time, other ways of learning about the world are usually even more subjective and biased.

I see other people make very binary decisions about this. "Science is always right!" Well, no, it's an iterative process, carried out by flawed human beings.

"Science is always wrong and changes its mind all the time!" Well, no, iPhones work as well as they did yesterday and they're chock full of bits that wouldn't work for beans unless gobs and gobs of science was correct to a tremendous degree. If you disagree, may I please have all your electronics and your car?

Science has the toughest time making accurate statements about big, complex, chaotic systems (like bodies) with lots of emergent behavior, with a lot of money on the line. It's challenging to eliminate both the "confounding factors" (everybody in the study was a bottle-fed white male) and the biases (the study was sponsored by Megafoodco). But nothing else is perfect under those circumstances either.

Having a bit of crisis with this beast lately, I must admit. Nowhere near giving up, just a combination of Depression Dumb* along with the mountain of crap necessary to meet the Minimum Viable level and it seems like I've been staring at the same code forever and having nothing happen, which isn't even true at all.

But let's talk about what's working even though it won't even compile right now. I just wrote an inventory handler, which I needed to write in order to handle equipping/removing wearable gear, which also needed to be able to send events to notify the gear logic that it's been put on/taken off, in case there are special things that need to happen**, and it also needed to be able to ask gear logic whether or not it was okay for the player to put the gear on because maybe there are stat requirements, or take it off because maybe it's cursed, which all led to a whole other level of cascading shit to support those changes, like figuring out repeating interval timers, and smoothing off the rough edges in the language or adding new features or refactoring code to make things cleaner and simpler to understand.

I mean, shrug, yeah, that's what it's like when you're creating a new complex system from scratch, you want to do something you can conceptualize very simply "hey let's dress the simulated dudes up so they can fight in armour and with real weapons so I can test the assumptions I made about character design and feel like I haven't been wasting my time with this idea" and then it's two weeks later and you still haven't done it because basically you said, "hey let's get in the elevator and ride to the first floor and see how it looks" and then woah fucko before you can do that you need to smelt some iron ore and invent electricity.

I'm really hopeful that it will be a good environment to tell great stories in. That's why I'm making it. I want to be able to tell interactive stories, and to allow other people to tell stories too, in the same universe. And all of the work I'm doing right now is basically to establish the rules of the universe and make sure they're consistent and fair, and it's really just feeling rather tiresome right now. There's probably some comparison to be drawn with a major world religion, but enh. 

​* For those just tuning in, I have some pretty severe depressive episodes at times and during them, my brain feels like molasses. I could probably, should probably, write about depression sometime, but it still feels like pointless whining, even though I know that isn't true. So we'll see.

** From my debugging console: owner['event_equip']=function(parm) { if (parm["on"]) { console.log('The spirit of the dead cow thanks you for wearing its skin.'); }

I got up at 4, wrote until 5:30, went to work. Worked until 15:30, then went to Pendle Hill. It's 18:00 now. I just noticed this poem by Marge Piercy written on poster board over the door to the Kiln Room.

"The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest 
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Had to share this here for my bookworm friends:

I've heard it said that if you don't throw up after a run, you're not training hard enough.
Today, I almost trained hard enough.
Also, the fitness center at my apartment complex is alarmingly popular at 2:30am.

Yesterday was a nice, easy 5 mile run in 58 minutes. I decided to try watching a movie while I ran. Running outside is more fun than watching a movie on a treadmill. For the future, I definitely need to use a different pair of earbuds - my ear still stings from where my sweat shorted the ones I was wearing.

It's been more than a month since the last time I ran a mile as fast as I could, so I tried it again, but this time on the treadmill. Last time, I averaged 6.8mph; this time it was 6.5mph. The amount of misery I'm experiencing right now suggests that I should probably make this a bigger part of my routine. It's really amazing how it takes longer to recover from running one mile at ~6mph than it does to actually run 5 miles at 5mph.