Ted the Caver

Happy Halloween!

I was recently directed to Ted the Caver, a re-envisioning of Thomas Lera's "Fear of Darkness" (PDF Link). While I was unimpressed with Fear of Darkness in its entirety (it attempts to tell too much of the story, and resolves around ideas stretched for me too far beyond my willing suspension of disbelief [probably based on the quality of writing] for its conclusion).

Ted the Caver shares some similar short-comings. Purporting to be the annotated caving-journal entries of a hobbiest spelunker, much of the presentation is weak - critical elements to the story are built into the same way one would do when writing prose fiction, not the way personal experiences are typically conveyed. In my own journal writing, and what I've seen in limited reading of those of others, elements from experience deemed important are granted priority and emphasis: brought up early in the entry, with associated events or ideas splayed out conceptually from that one center and expressed in terms of their relationship to it. The chronological prose and persistent use of limited perspective, when such is limitation is purely artificial, comes across as disingenuous and interfered with my ability to fully immerse in the story.

But only with the full immersion: I was still able to get into it, and at times became frustrated at the pace - I was impatient with the process of reading itself as I wanted to move ahead in the story without having to bother with the intervening language, but knowing it would diminish the delivery to skip ahead and stuck with it anyway.

That's partially where I want to give props to how the story is being presented on the web. The forced pacing lends a certain degree of realism, and helps make the characters more believable. The limited coincidence with factual events (which I'm sure acted as the story's genesis) also helps lend a degree of credibility. The choice to omit the (far-fetched) ending leaves an unresolved suspense and contemplation with the reader, a mental itch in need of resolution not forthcoming (very 1950's-horror-flick).

The other part I wanted to commend was that, in editing out fingerprints of the incredible conclusion, the remaining content becomes almost completely plausible. Gravity, geothermal vents, sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide, and post-traumatic-stress disorder (based on the stress and fear during oxygen deprivation and attendant effects of volcanic gas inhalation) are sufficient to explain away the mysterious events. None of this diminishes the humanity of fear in the described reactions, and in fact made me that much more sympathetic.

All in all it's a fun read, and for Halloween is definitely recommended.

Best Noise Ever

First: an apology. I have several articles in the works, but none that I've had the time and concentration to bring to fruition and post. So this is a simple non-sequitor.

Back in the day when Mike and I shared an office, we tried to lighten the effects of stressful duties by taking time now and then for chess (taking a break from thinking to do other thinking - a lot of people didn't get this). Mike is good, and well read on the subject - he'll deny this, but only because the volume of works he's digested on the subject is < 1% of works available on the subject; but this still puts him ahead of 99.025% of the population. And he practices.

It was his interest to cultivate a worthy opponent, someone capable of presenting a challenge for him as he sought to master the various principles he studied. This means he also distilled the theory behind those principles and gave me some excellent tutoring as I tried like mad to keep up. Eventually I learned the subtleties of the playing field beyond the simple list of moves I'd always been aware of prior. Having a patient and skilled opponent was an excellent experience for myself, and I eagerly soaked it up.

So it was that we had a chess table in the office. At first this was a simple pedestal supporting a shallow box with a "3-1" style game board and sundry pieces within to support the same. The set was glass Staunton, attractive and simple. Being on a pedestal, however, and in a fairly small room, it frequently met with casual impact and predictable results. Most if it was inconsequential, a game aborted and pieces scattered. Finally, the shallow tray broke from its column (it was sat on, as someone adopted a squatting stance during conversation unaware of it behind them) and a pawn was decapitated.

It was replaced with a slightly larger de-coupled version - same clear/frosted motif of glass Staunton, but now free-standing. We assembled some decommissioned servers to hold it up, but it wasn't a terribly good fit (it needed to be on its own as we couldn't sacrifice the desk space). Eventually we happened upon the perfect item: a Foundry BigIron 8000 Switch (fully populated). This $250,000 (at the time) chunk of hardware was intended to be used by the company after moving to a larger building across the parking lot. While said building was still under construction, the switch was stored in the NOC general office. It was with their blessing that I purloined it for my own use, promising to turn the sensitive bits toward the wall and be very nice to it generally.

And it really was perfect - just the right size for the board and captured pieces on either side, black and somewhat imposing with an overtly technical aire about it. It was also solid enough to be unaffected by a casual bump, and obviously important enough not to receive a hard one.

Times were good, and the chess continued.

Then one day, in walks the CTO. He had apparently not been aware of the storage arrangements I'd made with the NOC, and stopped mid-sentence when he noticed what was serving as our table.

"Is that a...!"

This man is capable of firing off a pretty hefty blue-streak, and did so with such frequency that he liked to make sure incoming candidates in IT could take it. He would burst in during interviews, let something colorful about the current state of operations fly, and violate many an HR clause in the process; solely to ensure that they'd survive there if offered the position later.

In this case, he was speechless. I guess there was a "G" sound from somewhere in his throat near the beginning, and most of the vowels were a derivative of the letter "A", but that doesn't adequately describe what came out of him. And it wasn't just what was said, either - he took an involuntary step backward, eyes widening, face contorting into mortification and grief, and arms raising defensively.

He strode quickly out of the office and utterly refused to set foot in it again while we remained in that building (another six months).

I miss that chess table.