Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
Michael Chabon has an essay in the New Yorker about superhero costumes. And there’s a related audio interview here.
I still haven’t gotten around to reading any of Chabon’s books, despite hearing many good things about them, but, judging by this essay, he’s definitely an interesting thinker and talented writer.
“An adventure in which your 7th-level columnist honors the passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax by exploring the depths of his own early teen D&D years. Featuring hypotheses of attempted profundity and confessions of adolescent dorkery. Enter, brave adventurer, if you dare!”
Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has a nice column on Gary Gygax. It sounds like Mr. Fry is about the same age I am, and started playing D&D at about the same time. And he too was a DM more often than a player. It sounds like we have a lot in common, in the area of D&D experiences. (I never colored the pictures in my Monster Manual though. Yikes!) He’s got a lot of good observations in this piece that I heartily agree with, particularly his note on Gygax’s vocabulary, and how it had “taught me two very interesting ideas at once: first, that a single thing could be described by many names; and second, that each of those names meant something subtly different.”
My Dad has very serious vision problems, but he’s not completely blind. This means that he can use a normal computer, but he has a lot of problems doing so. We’ve got his machine set up so that he’s using very large fonts, and a high-contrast color scheme. The problem we frequently run into, though, is that most software developers don’t take these kind of things into account. We’ve found that developers are really haphazard about when and where they respect the default font size and color scheme in Windows.
We recently switched him from a dial-up ISP (Wal-Mart Connect) to Verizon DSL. The Wal-Mart Connect service used a proprietary client for e-mail and web browsing (basically, the old CompuServe 2000 client), and that actually worked pretty well for him.
When we switched to Verizon, I switched him over to using Outlook 2000, largely because it was already installed on his machine, and I was familiar with it. That turns out to have been a pretty bad idea. Outlook does a pretty poor job of respecting large font sizes and still leaving you with a usable interface. My Dad just hasn’t been able to get used to it, and there are a number of hurdles that make it hard for him to use.
I’ve been researching alternative e-mail clients for him. Basically, I’m looking for something with a fairly simple interface that’ll work well with a high-contrast, large font environment. I tried Scribe first, but that had a few interface quirks that made it unusable. I then tried Sylpheed, and that actually looked like it might be usable. I didn’t get too far with that though, since my Dad couldn’t remember where he’d written down his e-mail password, so I couldn’t actually get all the way through the setup. We’ve also been talking about just switching him over to Outlook Express, but I’m not sure that’ll be much better than Outlook. Hopefully, the next time I visit my parents, he’ll have found that password and we can play around some more.
Steven Levitt has a short bit up on the Freakonomics blog mentioning that he’s just finished the last Harry Potter book, and now has been “left aimless in Harry’s absence” and would like to know what he can read to “restore meaning to his life.” There are a lot of great suggestions in the comments, including not just books, but some comics too.
It’s interesting to see what people think of when they’re asked to suggest new material to a Harry Potter fan. The Potter books have a certain ineffable quality to them that has made them popular far beyond the audience that would usually be attracted to a “young adult” fantasy series. Mr. Levitt certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who reads a lot of Piers Anthony, for instance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Piers Anthony.) I do think that any open-minded, intelligent reader could find some great underrated stuff in the SF & Fantasy aisle in Borders, given a little direction, though.
Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is mentioned by several commenters. That’s certainly a work that has some superficial similarities to the Potter books — it’s a fantasy series featuring a couple of young kids as protagonists. And it’s a great work. I think somebody could probably get a great term paper out of comparing and contrasting the themes in Potter vs HDM. (And, come to think of it, I’d bet a good number of high school students probably already *have* written that paper.)
There are several recommendations for the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Also great books, but different in tone from Harry Potter. Come to think of it, I’ve only read one Discworld book (Mort). I think I have another one around here somewhere waiting to be read. I should really dig that out and read it.
On the comics front, there are a few recommendations for Fables, which I blogged about recently. (I now have the first six volumes waiting to be read.) And Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and some other Gaiman stuff) gets mentioned. (I’ve read all of Sandman, and I’d certainly second the recommendation on that.)
Stephen King’s Dark Tower series gets a couple of mentions. I haven’t read any of that, but I’m getting curious about it. Maybe after I get through some of the other stuff in my pile, I’ll pick up a couple of Dark Tower books and give them a try.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell gets a couple of nods. I read that a couple of years ago, and it’s great. Definitely a good book to read after the Potter series, if you’re interested in seeing how another great author handles magic.
There are a couple of recommendations for Orson Scott Card’s Ender books. I’ve read the first, Ender’s Game, and have the next few in a pile waiting to be read. Good stuff, but I don’t really see any relation to Potter, other than (again) a young protagonist.
And Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels get mentioned too. I’ve now read through all but the most recent Thursday Next book, and I’m definitely worried about withdrawal after I finally finish that one! (Hopefully, Fforde hasn’t finished with Thursday books yet, though.)
So, in a nutshell, there’s lots of great stuff to read out there, both books and comics! I’m curious as to whether Mr. Levitt would consider picking up any of the comics work mentioned in the comments. Would a serious economist like him consider picking up a Sandman or Fables graphic novel? Would your average businessman want to be seen reading a comic in public? I don’t know. It’s never been a concern for me, but then again, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.
I saw in the news today that Gary Gygax has passed away. I haven’t played D&D in years, but I have very fond memories of some great D&D games with my friends back when I was a kid. I remember bugging my mom to buy the Basic D&D box when I saw it in a store, back around 1979. Bless her, she did buy it for me, though she was a little leery about it. I had no idea what the game was about, mind you, I just thought the box art was cool. When I opened the box, and figured out that it wasn’t just a board game, I got sucked in. I remember being really excited about it. At some point, I transitioned to AD&D, and of course bought the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. Those books sure saw a lot of use.
Though I haven’t really thought much lately about D&D, it did have a big effect on my youth. At one time, role-playing games were pretty much the center of my (geeky) social life. I was usually the DM, so I’d say that RPGs had a lot to do with my development of a lot of key skills, including leadership, organizational skills, creativity, consensus-building, and all that good stuff.
Thanks, Gary, for making the teenage years of many a geek just a bit more bearable, and maybe even a bit exciting now and again!
We implemented a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) at work last week. I was afraid it would be overly complicated, but it wasn’t that bad, and we seem to have it running smoothly now. We’re running it on top of Lotus Domino. I’ve found that the documentation for BES is OK, but if you hit a snag, you’re going to need to head out on the internet and do some searching. The best place to find BES information seems to be the BES Admin Corner at BlackBerryForums.com.
CrackBerry.com has some useful stuff in their forums, too. For Domino-specific information, I’ve found besdomino.blogspot.com and notesberry.org useful.
I’ve been almost completely ignorant of the BlackBerry platform until now. I’ve got plenty of experience with Windows Mobile and Palm, going back several years, but I just never had occasion to pick up a BlackBerry. It turns out that they work pretty well! We won’t get to keep one in the IT department, unfortunately. We’ve just got one to use for testing that we’ll have to give back at some point. I looked into picking one up myself, but I don’t see any way to do that (and hook it up to the BES) for less that $50 per month, and that’s a bit much. I guess I should be glad that the company’s not making me carry around a BlackBerry 24×7, but it does seem like it would be a useful thing to have.
For now, I can still check my e-mail on my Moto SLVR via RemoMail, which I’ve blogged about before. And when I’m near a wifi access point, I can always use my iPod Touch.