Daily Check-in – Lunar Obverse

Star Trek Discovery S5E04 “Face The Strange”

This week’s Star Trek Discovery Season 5 Episode 04, “Face The Strange” was SO MUCH FUN. The show has finally found its footing. The writers know the characters well, they put them together in interesting ways, and they play to their strengths, which is emotional connections amid bonkers Star Trek science. Minor plot spoilers ahead for this episode.

This week, the ship gets sabotaged by the crime couple that are the big bads for the season in the form of time bugs, literaly spiders that somehow tap into EPS conduits and force the ship to jump backward and forward in time. For Reasons(tm) Captain Burnham (played by the delightful Sonequa Martin-Green) and grumpy new First Officer Rayner (played to perfection by Callum Keith Rennie) are immune to the time loops so they keep getting reset and have to figure out a solution. They do get some help from Chief Engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp) because, of course, he’s got mushroom in his DNA. If you aren’t following this show you will probably think I am making this up but I assure you, I am not.

By having the leads jumping through time, but being tied to the ship, the writers get to have them interact with the history of the ship, and all the crazy shenanigans that have happened over five seasons of off-the-wall Star Trek nonsense (I say nonsense with love; I love this show, flaws and all) and even get to finally tie up a loose end that was introduced in a Short Trek a few years ago (“Calypso” if you’re curious) to my satisfaction, at least. Even Captain Burnham gets to see just how far she’s come from her origin as Star Fleet’s first and only mutineer, to sitting in the center seat.

Just really well done, y’all. I am sad that this is the final season because it feels like the show runners, cast, and crew are firing on all warp cores. Just this episode has so much payoff, it was a joy to watch.

The thing about Star Trek, for me at least, is it was my first fandom. I was too young to see it when it originally aired, or at least too young to remember that (I was born in late 1964, the first episode aired in September 1966) but I was old enough to watch it when it ran every afternoon on KPTV-12, Monday through Friday. I watched it and I loved it; it showed a bright (literally colorful) and hopeful utopian future, a future of adventure and science.

It remains the one major science-fiction franchise that says we can be better, that life can be more than war and hate and strife. Everyone gets second chances in Star Trek. Everyone tries to know themselves, and improve the universe they live in. Everyone tries to find solutions to problems by talking it through and appealing to our better selves. Even steadfast enemies become allies, in time. I love it so much, and am happy that for all my life, I’ve had stories that point the way to the good world I know is possible.

Interloper

Daily Story Project, Gaming, reviews

Been playing a lot of The Long Dark lately. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a computer game that’s a survival challenge that I’ve written about before. Your character is lost in the eerily abandoned Canadian winter on an island in the vague northwest. You have to struggle to stay warm, find food and water, and manage your strength. Meanwhile you have to watch out for predators that are far more agressive than found in nature, like wolves and bears. Infrastructure like running water and electricity is down, although sometimes there is an aurora that causes electrical devices to be temporarily usable; unfortunately this also increases the agression of predators making it very dangerous to be out and about under the glowing lights in the sky.

There’s a story mode, too, where you can play as Will MacKenzie or Dr. Astrid Greenwood (voiced by the incredibly talented Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, respectively), estranged spouses who are trying to find each other and get to a town on the island with a mysterious briefcase. Four of the five chapters have been released for story mode and at least one more is coming. It’s interesting and goes into the weird Quiet Apocalypse that’s befallen Great Bear Island.

That’s not the mode I’m playing right now.

For as long as I’ve had the game I’ve enjoyed the lower levels of difficulty; in those modes the game is much less tense, you start with basic gear like decent clothing and matches (important for getting and staying warm, as well as boiling water and cooking food), and you have better loot scattered around to help you survive, like knives, hatchets, pistols and guns.

But I always admired the streamers and let’s players who played on the highest difficulty level: Interloper. Streamers like Tomasina, Zaknafein, Archimedes, among others. On Interloper, there are no guns, and you start with no matches at all. In that mode, knowing where you are and where to find matches and other good loot is paramount. The maps themselves don’t change, but the possible locations of gear is somewhat randomized. And you have to craft your own knife, hatchet, and bow — there are no guns in this mode. And without a knife or hatchet, you can’t harvest animals well, you can’t craft the best clothing in the game, and you can’t make a bow and arrows. You can’t even defend yourself from hungry wolves when they attack.

To give you a little idea of how the developers see this mode, there is a Steam achievement for surviving a single day in Interloper. It took me several tries, after doing my best to learn the maps on lower levels, before I achieved even this. When I wrote my earlier post I hadn’t even attempted Interloper. It felt too brutal.

I forgot to mention: this is permadeath. Dying in the game means your current save is deleted. Go back to Day 1, you have to start over. Make a single mistake and it can cost your whole run. And nearly every death in this game can be traced back to a mistake the player made. Get overconfident, go out into the cold without proper precautions, or just misjudge how much food and water you’ll need, and it’s over. You’ve faded into the long dark.

But I have finally strung together enough luck and skill that I am past Day 200 on a single run. Other players I’ve talked to have said the game gets boring at this point but not for me. I’m enjoying having a better chance (not a guarantee by any means) of surviving after the brutal first 20-30 days getting set up.

It’s far more than a walking simulator. It’s beautiful, meditative, and challenging. I love it.

Computer Origin Story, Part 1

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech

I was listening to a member special from the Accidental Tech Podcast folks, and they were sharing their Computer Origin Stories; remembering their first time using a computer, and their journey from there to their later computer programming jobby-jobs (as Casey always calls their regular jobs) before they all eventually quit to do the podcast full-time, some faster than others.

It’s fun to reminisce! It was all so very long ago, because I am old.

I should probably make this a much longer post, with links and images, but I wanted to kind of sketch out the outline of my own personal Computer Origin Story first. Try to get it down in words. It’s hard and I may be leaving out things and it might not all be in the right order, but here’s my first notes on the topic.

I am unsure if arcade games count for the purposes of “computers” but they were absolutely computers, so I’ll begin the chain of events by my encounter with a Lunar Lander arcade game in what must have been early summer 1979. It was the end of my 8th grade year in Junior High and our class got to celebrate by taking a day trip to the Kah-nee-ta Resort in central Oregon. While the rest of my schoolmates were riding on horseback, or relaxing in the hot springs, or sunbathing, I was in the dark resort lobby feeding quarters into this game trying to land a vector-graphics spaceship on a 2D planet surface, guiding it in by using a knob to control the rotation and a button to feather the rocket to speed up or slow down.

The first personal computer I remember using was a Tandy TRS-80, at a computer store in a suburban shopping mall. I must have been a teenager in my middle years. There was a grocery store in that mall, and when mom would go get groceries, I’d wait for her at the bookstore in that mall, and then, eventually, I’d wait for her in the computer store. This must have been in the early 1980s. I was in high school but I don’t remember what grade. I suppose I can try to find the name of that store, but for the life of me I can’t.

At some point the store ran a contest where the prize was a TRS-80, which would have been prohibitively expensive for my family to buy. To win the contest I had to play a Star Trek game and have the highest score. I got one chance to do it, and I don’t think I lasted longer than a minute or two. My parents, particularly my mom, thought I was going to beat it. I did not, but I had a lot of fun.

That store sold other computers. I would regularly buy issues of Byte Magazine and read up about computers. That’s where my interest began. But it didn’t stop there. More to come soon; there are a few more stops along the way.

Tired and whatnot

Daily Story Project

I’ve made a note of some ideas about things I can write about but for some reason, that reason probably being my dumb brain that hates doing boring things that aren’t novel or urgent, I can’t bring myself to write about them. So this entry will become another stream-of-consciousness flow of random stuff until I reach around five hundred words, as have they all been for the most part. Sure, some of the past entries have been coherent but that is not what I’m feeling today.

I’m tired, is what I’m feeling. Like sleepy tired, but also mentally tired of the dumb job hunting and the endless capitalism and the grind of having Things that Need Doing. Life hasn’t had a lot of joy lately for me. Brief moments of happiness or enjoyment but actual full-on joy? Not present, man.

Physically tired because yesterday I ramped up my exercise routine. Been walking at least once a day every day for several weeks now, thanks to inspiration and a challenge from my friend Christi through our Apple Watches. Walking is great but I miss running, so because I’ve been nailin’ it in the walking thing I pushed myself to try adding little jogging segements. Nothing crazy, just a block or two, and then I let my heart rate ramp back down before going again. It felt good to do it; I’ve always said that running makes me feel human, by which I mean feeling myself in my body, and not living in my head. And even though I returned home sweaty and tired I wasn’t injured or hurt; no pain just discomfort from having worked my muscles harder than normal. I went out and did another, slower walk later in the day, after dinner, to keep my body in motion, and maybe that helped prevent soreness and pain.

And today, my legs and back feel a bit stiff but mostly what I feel is sleepy. I don’t want to move much. I just want to sit, or lay down ideally. I want to be still, close my eyes, and drift into a nap.

Can I do that? After this post. I promise, Me. You can rest soon. Just another 132 words after that last sentence. Keep going.

The mental tired is also a problem. Is this brain fog? Am I a victim of Long Covid? How could I tell? That’s not a diagnosis that doctors are handing out these days. I’m sure I’m just worried about All of This. It’s nice having my dad here, though. It gives me a bit of comfort knowing someone else is around. Dad and I didn’t always have the best relationship but it’s pretty solid now.

How did I get to my dad from exercise? Oh, probably because he can’t exercise. Well, walking around, slowly, is the most exercise he gets these days, being in his late 80s, and having had surgery to repair his broken spine and ribs less than a year ago. That puts exercise into perspective. Right?

Red Barn Kids are not in a barn

Daily Story Project

One of my earliest memories is using a typewriter to write “stories”. I wish I still had some of those. I remember being inspired by a Scholastic book called “The Boxcar Children” about some orphaned kids who lived in an abandoned train boxcar. I wonder if that book actually exists or if I confabulated it somewhere along the line? Memory is a strange country, folks.

The kids in my apartment building and general neighborhood broke in to a locked up standalone garage down the street once, where an old car was parked. It might have been my dad’s Triumph race car? I can’t tell if these are real memories or if I’m inventing them out of whole cloth. The events would be, if real, over 50 years old at this point. I can see some of the other kids’ faces, but others are just generic fuzzy images. I know my sister was there, if it’s something I actually know or not. We did not get caught but then I went and tried to type it up as a story using the family typewriter, a mechanical and not at all easy to use device that often locked up, all the type arms jamming together and requiring delicate untangling before it could be used again.

Maybe the typewriter jammed because I did not know what I was doing? Surely not. OK, yes, that is almost certainly the issue.

I loved the sound that thing made, sharp crisp metallic spring-loaded typefaces smacking into the paper. The little “ding” of the bell when it reached the end of a line, the ratchet sound of hitting the arm, rotating the cylinder to move the paper down, and slamming the whole thing back to start another line.

The title “Red Barn Kids” emerges from the memory pool. The garage was red, but I do not believe it was a barn. But “Red Garage Kids” doesn’t sound as good, does it?

I can see myself sitting in our living room, the tiny TV in one corner, me on the couch with a laminated TV tray unfolded in front of me, the heavy mechanism of the typewriter holding down the shaky metal legs of the tray, and me pounding those keys with my fingers, one finger on each hand since I was, what, 7 or 8 years old and had not learned nor even knew about ten-finger typing yet? That wouldn’t be for another 10 years at least when I took typewriting class in high school, a skill I use daily thanks to computers being, y’know, a thing now.

Kids breaking in to a barn to look at an old car isn’t much of a story. That’s my thought now. More of a scene, or a vignette. It needs conflict, tension, resolution. Why are they breaking in? Just bored? To retrieve something? Does anyone get hurt, or scared, or refuse to enter? Clearly this story is not ready yet to be published.

Would be nice, though, to see what 7 year old me committed to paper. Actual paper, I mean. That kid had goals and the tools with which to achieve them.

The reason

Daily Story Project, General, meta, Uncategorized

I forgot to write a 500 word post yesterday. I guess 10 is the number to beat going forward. Like many of my similarly-brained cohort, I’m a perfectionist and stickler for detail, so missing a day when I was aiming for a long unbroken streak is like a pebble in my shoe, a ringing in my ear, a mote in my eye. Irritating, nagging, infernal. I felt a flood of emotion when I realized a day had passed without me meeting the goal I had set for myself.

The streak is broken. I failed. It’s over. Might as well stop trying. I’m no good. I can’t do this. Why bother?

Why bother? Why am I doing this in the first place? What was my reason, and does missing a day invalidate that reason?

OK, then. The reasons I started this new daily streak. Let’s dig in.

I’ve done this before. There’s a tag on this post that I’ve used before, “Daily Story Project“. It’s been a thing on this blog going back a long way. I keep trying to do this. I read about streaks, I live for streaks. Keeping a streak going is sometimes all the motivation I need to keep doing a thing. There are folks out there like Jonathan Mann who has written a song every day for (as I type this) for 16 years and 103 days; 5,581 days in a row. That’s impressive! On one level it’s a challenge to see if I could create something new using my preferred method of creating (writing) for even a tenth as long, even 1% as long.

The only thing I’ve done daily is… I was going to say “wake up and get out of bed” but then I remember days, bad brain days, where I did not get out of bed. I couldn’t tell you my longest streak, though; that’s not something I keep track of. For the better, of course.

If I weren’t just trying to hit 500 words right now I’d go look up the longest once-a-day streak I’ve ever maintained on this blog. But I don’t really care. A reason I’m doing this is to add to this blog, to see who will come if I build it, to turn the Field of Dreams tagline around a bit. But that’s writing for others. I write for myself. If having an audience was important to my creativity this would be a very different place. Here, I write whatever I want. I write for me.

The primary reason I’m doing this is to build up a habit. Just keep going. Give myself permission to do it without friction. No obstacle, only flow. So failing to hit that daily goal is the only obstacle that matters to me. I hate it. It means I took my mind off the target. It means I got distracted. It means that whatever was happening in my brain that day did not get recorded, and you can’t change or grow unless you pay attention. At least, you can’t notice change or growth without keeping track, monitoring, observing, measuring.

I write in order to measure. That’s why. If I miss a day, I missed a measure. But I can keep going.

Day 10 – 502 words about frustration

Daily Story Project

What on Earth can I type 500 words about tonight? I’m feeling discouraged and frustrated about job hunting. Found out I didn’t get a job I wanted after three rounds of interviews, but considering how they reacted to my tough questions, maybe I dodged a bullet. But unemployment checks don’t come forever, so I have to get something going. I do have the advantage of a dad who’s got a little money who can help for a bit, that’s always nice. I just don’t want to lean on him too much, y’know? I’d like to pull my own weight. I know I can be a great employee for the right organization. I can fix things. People tend to like me. I can jump in and be useful almost immediately and have a short learning curve.

Where is the boss that wants someone like that? You’re out there, I can feel it. I’m right here. Come find me.

I had a dream last night about being gaslit by the organization I mentioned above, the one that went a different direction after three interview rounds. I’m a practical person, don’t believe in metaphysics, so I won’t say it was a psychic revelation. I just knew that since I hadn’t heard back from them when they said they’d know either way by earlier this week that no news was bad news, and it permeated my subconscious.

Still working on this website and working on another one I will focus my technical skills and stories about working the Help Desk, and getting the rest of my digital infrastructure in place. Was messing around with OBS Studio last night and maybe I’ll start streaming on a regular basis again. Had fun doing that for Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and now that the Fallout TV show is out it’s making me yearn for the wasteland once again. Would streaming older Fallout games be interesting to people? I’m willing to try.

Have to re-write my Hire Me page; it’s a mess right now, not very good from a marketing perspective and I’ve been trying to learn more about marketing and sales since that’s a huge weakness for my liberal arts ass. My sister is great at that, and so is my friend Christi, so I’m trying to apply the lessons they have to teach me. I can learn. Is our Brian learning? Time will tell.

Just a hundred more words and tonight’s diary entry is done. I don’t know what else to write. I’m doing daily walks; that’s a good thing. Gotta stay active. Dad is still here and will be for another couple of weeks while they rebuild his apartment space. Was supposed to play D&D last night but it got postponed another two weeks from now, which is frustrating but that’s the status quo of D&D games. Finding time for that is hard for adults with busy lives. It’s not like back in the day when we could play all weekend every weekend.

Two more words. Done.

Day 9 – Old Home Week

Daily Story Project

Dammit I had an idea to write about today but I forgot what it was by the time I had a chance to sit down at my computer.

Dad needed his tax forms printed out and I hate printers. Also I don’t have a working one currently. So I drove him over to my sister’s house to get that all taken care of. It took him a while to do it, so I messed around on my laptop and chatted with my sister and my brother-in-law, took a look at the damage from the ice storm and pipe bursting, and petting the Very Good Boy Archer. Tried to figure out why my remote login to my home server worked on one subdomain but not the primary domain (still don’t know why but since I can get in one way, it’s not a huge urgent deal.)

Then dad had to go poke around and look for some things that got packed away when he had to start his controlled-homelessness run. By the time we left, it was after 5 PM and rush hour was in full bloom, making the estimated Google time to get home, across town, nearly an hour due to traffic.

Dad, navigating, sent us near his home bar, and I laughed and suggested that he’d done that on purpose; since he’s been living with me, he hasn’t gone, and it’d been a few weeks. “Your friends probably miss you,” I said. And he thought about it, and said, “well why don’t we swing in for a drink and wait out the traffic?”

You will notice, dear reader, that was not a denial.

Dad knew the bartender, several people sitting at the bar, as well as nearly everyone out on the covered patio around the fire pit. And he introduced me to every single one of them. Almost everyone there knew who I was, told me how much they loved my dad, and said that he only told them good things about me. “Your dad says very often that he’s been blessed with good kids and grandkids,” they said.

It was wild. A little intimidating, even. But it was fun to see dad hanging out with people he knew. I ate greasy bar food, and drank semi-fancy beer (Rogue Dead Guy Ale, for the record) which made me feel only slightly out of place) and listened to dad tell his stories and to other people telling him stories about their lives. Dad remembered everyone’s names. He knew what they did for a living. He knew who was married to whom. It was nice.

And every time someone new walked in, he yelled the same damned joke: “It’s about fuckin’ time you showed up! We can get this meeting started now.” Well, sometimes he started the joke and someone else finished it for him.

Everyone there said they were happy to meet me, and they all seemed sincere. I should go back sometime. I wonder what kind of reception I’d get if I walked in alone? I’m more of a loner than a charmer like my dad. It’s too bad I take more after my mom that way.

Day 8 – Here I am

Daily Story Project, fear

This whole 500 words a day writing exercise is supposed to be about just giving myself the chance every day to sit down and write something. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be about something. I just need to put 500 words down on the screen and post them to the blog.

That being so, why did I just complain to my bestie, Tracy, that I didn’t know what today’s post was going to be about? I know it doesn’t have to be about anything. I’m the one who set the rules up. I know this in the cockles of the soul I don’t have.

Tracy, being helpful, suggested a few things, asked me some questions about what I’ve been doing all day, even suggested I could ask ChatGPT for a prompt. Not gonna do that last one. I don’t really trust ChatGPT or the other LLMs for anything creative because every time I’ve used them they’ve lied, made things up, or gotten factual things wrong and been very certain about them when questioned. They’re not ready for general purpose use yet. But that’s not on Tracy. She was trying to help.

I’m flailing. I know I should just do this, ramble and harrumph and blather until I hit the word goal. Because last night’s post was good. It was real good. It was tight, it had an emotional basis, it took a natural event and made it personal and even profound. I loved it. Today, I wanted to try to top it.

That’s not how this works, though. I have to just do it, the writing bit, and see what happens. Inspiration is incredibly fickle; if I have to wait for inspiration I might be waiting a long long time. This project is about building a habit. About making space. About giving myself permission to be bad, or even clumsy and un-word-y-like. I don’t have to DO anything but put down at least 500 words today. Tomorrow is another chance to write, and the day after that, and the day after that. Maybe some of them will be beautiful. Maybe some of them will be hilarious. Maybe some of them will be sad. But, realistically, as Theodore Sturgeon once said, 90% of them will be crap. That’s how it works.

I need to be OK with that and I guess, today, I’m not, so it’s a snag and I’m having trouble getting past it. You can’t see this but I’m looking at the word count on screen and I’m just barely over 400 words. I have to go on, and on. I should stop using contractions just to eke out a few extra words here and there. You, dear reader, have probably stopped reading because you can tell I’m padding all this out. It is true, I very much am. I do not blame you for moving on at this point.

But you should at least know this: tomorrow I will be back, doing this again. I’m showing up. Imperfectly. Honestly. Just me.

Day 7 – Turn around, bright eyes

Daily Story Project, fear

Obviously the big thing that happened today was the solar eclipse. I don’t know if I have 500 words about it, though. For one thing, we only got about 22% coverage here in the Portland of Oregon, and for another, it was very cloudy so I couldn’t see much of the sun at all.

I did make a point to be outside during the event, though. Listen, I’m a practical person. I try not to give much attention to spiritualism or magic or the supernatural. But for days now I’ve been seeing people talk about Eclipse Energy and how it represents a break, a cleansing, a shift in perspective. And that all seems like unfounded disconnected thinking.

I say that, but I do also have a horoscope app on my phone, and I know my Big Three by heart (Capricorn Sun, Scorpio Moon, Sagitarius rising) and I share daily horoscopes with my friends. I think that those Big Three do somewhat circumscribe my personality in many ways. I do have a practical side that fits with the general Capricorn vibe; see the paragraph above, even though this paragraph may, to some, undermine my argument. But my practical side is also weighted by the sharpness and intense nature described by the whole Scorpio thing; I just mask it a bit. And backing all of that, the traits of a Sagitarius rising means I’m curious, novelty-seeking, and get bored easily.

In many ways this is also a description of the ADHD mind, at least my (technically not professionally diagnosed) ADHD mind.

And I’ve been on a run of bad luck lately. I’m unemployed, and beginning to doubt I’ll ever find a job that’s a good fit that I can ride out the rest of my professional life with. The pressures of modern late-21st-century capitalism are getting to me. I just want shelter from the elements, healthy food and drink, and medical care when necessary, and all of those things are becoming harder and harder to find. The idea of a cleansing, a break, a magical way to shift my focus and find something better… it appeals. It appeals strongly. Doesn’t it? You feel me on this, right?

Twenty minutes before the maximum coverage for my location, I headed outside, in comfy workout clothes and sturdy walking shoes, with Bonnie Tyler singing that every now and then she falls apart. Me, too, Bonnie. Me, too. I’d love to not fall apart. Can I soak up some Eclipse Energy and make it happen? Or maybe I just need to pull myself together and make it happen, eclipse or no eclipse.

I stopped on my walk at 11:25 AM Pacific, and pointed my phone at the sun behind the clouds (not looking directly at it, I’m not that gullible) and sang along with Bonnie. I don’t know what to do, and I’m always in the dark. We’re living in a powder-keg and giving off sparks.

To this atheist, this was as close to a prayer as I will allow myself to make.

And the only one who can respond is the person making it.

Forever’s going to start tonight.