The Idea Oubliette

I’m feeling a little agitated and jittery today. My internet access is down due to some nasty snow and wind. Are the two related? They might be. I know I’m certainly missing my twitter friends and feeling less in touch with the world. How long is this weather going to hold? I can’t look that up. Sure, I could pull out a radio and listen in, if I had one. I might somewhere, but I’m at the mercy of the broadcaster to decide when to report the weather and how much of it to report. Some argue that internet access should be a basic human right. Does this point of view hold water? I suppose it could be argued that since the internet allows us to draw together into a larger community that it is an essential part of improving the human condition. Its use in political organizing and to connect dissidents in repressive regimes can certainly help make the case for it as a basic human right. Is the jitteriness really from not having the internet? My doctor did just increase my dose of modafi...

Empathy is the ability to look at another person, see their emotions and experience a sympathetic emotional response. It’s an ability present in humans and chimps, and perhaps some of the other equally intelligent animals out there. It’s what helps us care for and about those in need around us and rejoice in their success. It’s generally considered to be a female trait, but I think it helps to define us as human beings. An uncaring perspective, relegated to simply reacting to the emotions of others without understanding them, can lead to a worldview unable to take that dimension of the human condition into consideration. It’s easy to see how empathy could have helped our distant ancestors. With the ability to care about the suffering of others they were able to see a need for compassion. This mutual support would have allowed for closer knit communities and more caring for those most in need. Some studies have found that people with conservative viewpoints are less likely to have...

I have never had the pleasure of traveling to Europe before. In fact, I’ve never left the borders of North America, having only visited parts of Canada and the US. In June 2010, it seems that this is going to change; my father will be taking me to Belgium both to visit relatives and see the sights. Realizing how easy it would be to simply take some of that time to visit the United Kingdom gave me the idea to have a few tweetups with my UK tweeples, and of course, see the sights. My basic idea is to take a week of my European trip to travel through the UK. I’m planning to have stays in London, Liverpool and Edinburgh. There’ll be a plane trip from Halifax to London, then a train trip to Liverpool, followed by another train trip to Edinburgh, and finally a plane to Brussels to join my father in Belgium. I’m planning to get to London between the 10th and 12th of June, with a departure from Edinburgh between the 18th and 20th of the same month. How much time I spend in each city will d...

140 characters is just not enough to do justice to the people I follow that make my Twitter experience so great. Either that, or I’d have to flood people’s timelines with many, many tweets. That’s just wrong... But if I forgot you, and you feel wronged by it, feel free to chew me out publicly in tweets. If I mess up the links to your twitter pages, I'm sorry. Beatings are encouraged. First and foremost: @ JardinDeSophie because she is my wife and the bestest. I don’t know where I’d be without her. @betagoddess One very special tweep who will be silent forever. I miss my mother. Good people: People who have engaged me in conversation, some of them have helped me through the hardest time of my life. @ ladyloki @ botticellirejct @ mergyeugnau @ bird42 @ ram327 @ WongoWoman @ CS999 @ doodledawne @ KingBobulousIII @ sundaeg1rl @ M20Mermaid @ damarisens @ mr_craig @ JulesHardy @ Noadi @ Angry_Atheist @ happy_atheist @ TheMadderHat @ kpibca @ Smithengarde @ Scr...

I’ve figured out what I want to be if I grow up: a writer. In fact, by writing this I’m living the dream, aren’t I? I guess things have been building up to this my whole life; I’ve been reading since I could, and writing even when I didn’t have to. Whatever my mood has been, as long as it wasn’t too severe, I’ve always written. When I was down, I wrote depressing poetry or prose. When I was up, I wrote whatever popped into my head. Now that I’m stable, I can take the time to write coherent, sensible articles. What are you going to write? It’s a good question, and I like it quite a bit. I’m going to write articles here, like the ones I’ve written so far. I’m going to write for HandmadeNews.org , with my first article there out just recently. I’ll always be writing emails. Sometimes I’ll write things down in my notebooks. If I feel like my writing is worthy of it, I might write a screenplay Josh Olson would enjoy reading. I wont bring it to him to read, though. If it’s good enough ...

I started programming when I was young, with the hopes of writing video games. I think a lot of kids start that way. When you like something, or someone, you try to emulate what you’re seeing. But how has that early dream turned out? They tell writers to write what they know. It’s good advice. How can you write about life in the Serengeti without have someone to give you a first hand account or having been there yourself? You can always use your imagination, and that’s all you can really do when writing fantasy or science fiction. It works for writing video games. How can you expect to write a genre you don’t immerse yourself in? These days I spend most of my gaming time playing casual games. I’m busy doing other things, and don’t want to spend long stretches just sitting at the console or computer. Recently I read an article about the kind of video games the most people tend to flock to. Typically they’re games that are relatively simple and involve sorting things in some way. It...

Here's a quicky I wrote trying to mix science fiction and horror a little. It was always a bit cold in space stations, Terry thought. Sometimes it made it hard to sleep on the metal deck plating, but then again, beggars can't be choosers. He'd been waiting for a transport for weeks, so he could hitch a ride out of Titan Station, but strangely, none had come. In his experience, even remote research stations like this one tended to get weekly supply shipments. There was no trouble keeping out of sight from the scientists on board, they were too consumed with whatever research they were conducting. Just as well, he thought, it gave him an easier time when dipping into the food stores. Not fantastic fare, certainly not 'an epicure's delight,' as the last transport's in-flight magazine had described his previous home's cooking. But then again, there was no beating Mars colony's Advanced Flavour Enhancer 3000; it made even stale bread taste delicious. He h...

When I was around 11 or 12, I started to question the received wisdom that there was a deity. I came to the conclusion that all signs pointed to no. Do I outright, unequivocally and without reservation deny the existence of such an entity? No. However, I don’t see it as a likely scenario, and until I’m presented with hard evidence, I have enough reason to say that there isn’t. Some people take comfort in their religious beliefs, especially their belief in an afterlife. I have no interest in an afterlife, either for myself of my loved ones. In the past five years I’ve lost both my grandmother and mother, both of whom I loved dearly. No amount of belief in an afterlife would soothe my pain. I mourn at the fact that they are lost from my life, right here, right now. I imagine it’s the same even for those who believe that the dead pass on to somewhere else. You can’t escape the fact that their tangible presence is forever gone from your life. Unless you believe in ghosts, but that’s a ...

Feeling down when something bad happens is normal. Feeling elated when something good happens is great. Bipolar disorder is neither. Previously referred to as manic depressive disorder, bipolar disorder consists of mood episodes ranging from deep, dark depression to the sense of invincibility and superiority that is characteristic of a manic phase. It disrupts the lives of those who suffer from it and all those around them. Luckily, however, with the right course of treatment it can be kept under control. Bipolar disorder has been found to be linked genetically and physiologically to schizophrenia. A person suffering from bipolar disorder can experience the same sort of hallucinations and delusions as someone with schizophrenia. Both have a genetic component, with a number of genes interacting to create a pre-disposition to these disorders. The families of those afflicted often include others with one of these disorders, mood disorders or alcoholism. Depression is a common symptom ...

Dear Mr. Hewlett, I’m writing to you in the hopes that you’ll read this and learn a bit about the great woman who was my mother and a big fan of yours. Helen died recently at the much-too-young age of 59. In April she found out she had pancreatic cancer; less than 5 months later, she passed away. If you don’t read this, that’s okay, I guess, because it’s also a part of my grieving process. I think you’ll be touched by it, but at the same time, it’s helping me deal with the loss. My mother as your fan Every movie you were in, she wanted to see. She didn’t get a chance to before she went. I had wanted to buy her A Dog’s Breakfast for Christmas; I think she would have really liked it. I think Cube would have given her a bit of claustrophobia, but didn’t it do that for everyone? She loved Atlantis. I think your performance was a big part of that. Joe Flanigan and Paul McGillion may also have had something to do with that. The episodes she watched of SG-1 were mostly the ones with...

My next few posts will be very personal. My mother passed away last week, and I need to write in order to properly grieve. I want to share my thoughts, and I hope they might inspire or touch some of you.

I know I've been publishing an article every Tuesday and Friday since I started this blog, but there's been a death in the family, so I've been a bit preoccupied. I'll try to get a new article out soon, probably related to that particular situation.

Almost entirely throughout my life, I’ve had access to computers. In most of that time I’ve wanted to write computer games. Most of my attempts have been aborted early on, before even getting code written. Stacks and stacks of paper have been used to sketch characters and scenery. One day in 2001 I decided to put together a small Space Invaders-like game named SpaceRat . SpaceRat began as a set of graphics I had created for a friend’s clone of Space Invaders. I had drawn a “hero” space ship and some enemy ships. There were a number of enemy sprites that I did not use in SpaceRat, simple because they did not fit the look I was going for. Starting off with pre-made graphics gave me the push I needed and gave me the opportunity to jump straight into programming the game. I was still in university, but was then employed in a co-operative education placement for discreet, a division of AutoDesk . Health problems prevented me from actually working at the time, and so to judge my ability ...

It seems comments weren't working, so I've fixed it. I think my template messes the embedded comment box.

When you’re far away from the city lights, the clear night sky is a beautiful thing. The constellations shine brightly, the Milky Way stands out clearly, and the Moon can provide all the light you need to see by. Living out here, I’ve had a chance to see wonderful things in the sky. Recently, the Perseid meteor shower provided my wife and I with a romantic bit of evening, with beautiful, astral accompaniment. We saw some spectacular meteors fall that night, and it was a welcome change from the cloudy night we had had previously. In the winter, on a snow-covered night, with the full Moon out, the snow sparkles beautifully and you can see almost as well as during the day. The silence is stirring and inspirational, and you can stand there in your winter gear, relaxed and at peace, almost losing track of time completely. To facilitate my Moon viewing, I wrote a small program called MoonPhase. You can find it where I keep many of my little projects at my main website . It shows the cu...

The art of knitting lace is an intricate process; it takes great skill with knitting and the ability to keep track of complex knitting instructions. One day, my wife Sophie was knitting a particularly complex pattern, and she complained about not being able to keep track of how many stitches she should have for a particular row or how many should be left in the next row. Enter the programmer! I’ve been throwing together little utilities for myself for ages. Sometimes I want to calculate some value that would take too long by hand; sometimes I want to sort a list in some particular way. Other times I have trouble deciding what to have for dinner, so I’ll write up a list of options and then pop in a random number to pick from it. I have one such script from ages ago that I used regularly when living in Montreal. It was clear to me that Sophie needed software to handle her problem. With instructions spanning up to a hundred stitches, it’s the sort of thing that’s hard to keep track of...

For as long as I’ve been using computers I’ve known of text adventures. Using your imagination and the words on the screen, you construct a world in your mind and then interact with it through the computer by typing in commands. The goal is usually to solve different puzzles in order to come to some sort of winning scenario. Nowadays text adventures have given way to interactive fiction, or IF. Much like text adventures, there is often a goal to reach. However, some can be entirely freeform and offer the reader a variety of scenery and possibilities to explore. They still stick to text as their means of communication and rely on the reader to imagine the scenery. There’s still usually some sort of puzzle to solve, and this can provide a lot of fun for some. The interactive fiction community is still going strong. There are plenty of archives out there for the curious reader to explore; the most prominent being the IF Archive . There’s a newsgroup at rec.arts.int-fiction (Google Groups...