Brian York's Life

Ramblings

Written on June 19, 2008

The main thrust of this posting is going to be the question of what I’m actually doing with this journal, but before that I’m going to talk about two important things. The second is related to my last entry, and the first is, well, something very recent.

That is to say, we have a new bed now. The bed that we ordered the morning after the wedding (during the drive back to Victoria from French Beach) is finally finished, and arrived today. And it’s now assembled in our bedroom, with mattress and sheets and everything. I’m so excited. It’ll be really nice to have somewhere to sleep that doesn’t creak when the cat walks across it.

So we have a double bed (with our existing futon mattress), complete with canopy, and made entirely of cedar. The headboard and footboard have a neat “branching” effect (they look sort-of wild), and the bed itself is finished but unstained, so it has the natural cedar colour. It’s a beautiful bed, and looks great in the room (and will be even better after a trip to Vancouver to get fabric to hang off of it).

Speaking of which, Amanda was very funny last night. Since today was going to be busy, we moved everything (including the old bed, but not the mattress) out of our room last night, and slept on the mattress on the floor. And Amanda came along, and tried to jump up to our window (as she often does). Except that, without the bed there, she can’t get that far up. So she’d fall onto us, and sit there looking very offended. Earlier, she was trying to walk under the mattress (she got in under the bed before), and couldn’t seem to understand that there wasn’t an “under” to the mattress anymore. She was also acting very confused all day — I think she thought we were moving or something. In any case, it was rather amusing.

And now, for a quick update. According to the neurologist the nerves aren’t dead, and the damage isn’t permanent, but it could be six months (or more, or less) until things get back to normal. So qualified good news — or, at least, it could have been worse.

Onwards to my main point. While those of you who read this won’t have noticed any difference, the journal has been re-organized in a fundamental way — I’ve created multiple categories, and I’m starting to use them. Most of the entries (not including this one) are tagged as “life” entries (the actual journal), while some are tagged as “philosophy” (the original reason I started writing this thing. There’s a third category, “games”, which I haven’t started using yet but will soon (for my “Triremes revised” game, which actually has an in-game reason for people to be using slide rules in space ships). That was another of my original reasons for having this thing, and I haven’t actually done any game-related writing yet.

So why the categories? Well, eventually I’ll offer category-based archives, and category-based RSS feeds (although the “everything” feed will remain active, and if you’re coming here via my livejournal account here, you’ll be notified of every entry. I may eventually even implement searching (and possibly comments), but that’ll have to wait until I have the time (eventually, I hope). This is intended so that people can choose what they want to get from the journal. Those who simply want to read it all can do so. Those who are interested in my outlook on life, and nothing else, can get that. And those who want to know about my game design, but could care less about anything else I’m doing here, can get that as well. Unless I make a lot of posts like this, which I’ll try to avoid doing.

So, finally, what am I doing here? There are a number of reasons I created this journal, and I think that they’re related enough that I can keep using the same journal, even when I have different things to talk about. The first reason, and the most visible so far, has been writing about my life. Whether a private journal or a public forum, such as this one, writing about what’s going on is a nice thing to be able to do. It helps me to figure out what I think about things, and it lets me, when necessary, put my emotions into the journal rather than carrying them all myself, and that’s also something that I value. Finally, it lets me keep my friends (those, at least, who read this journal) apprised as to what I’m doing with myself.

As necessary as the above reasons are for my own well-being, I’m not quite arrogant enough to believe that there’s a very widespread interest in my life. If that were all that this was, there would probably be somewhere between five and ten people who would bother to follow this for any length of time. Perhaps as many as fifteen. But certainly, a journal of my life would be of interest to few beyond my closest friends. There are things, however, that I’d like to write about, which I think could really appeal to a larger audience. Not that I believe that a larger audience will be looking here. Simply that I think that some of what I write might be worth using, or repeating in other contexts, or just mentioning to people who really wouldn’t care about what’s been happening to me in the context of a journal. And it’s for those thoughts that the “philosophy” topic exists.

I don’t tend to think that I have unique insights, but I am in a somewhat unusual position (there aren’t that many astronomers in the world or, for that matter, that many scientists of any time), and some of what goes on in astronomy, or science in general, might be of interest. While science is an important enough discipline that it affects nearly everyone who’s likely to be reading this (science -> photonics -> fibre optics -> broadband internet, or even science -> telephones -> modems -> internet, or science -> quantum theory -> solid state physics -> semiconductors -> transistors -> computers -> internet), schools don’t do a very good job of teaching what science is, and how scientists work. Neither does the media. Neither do most scientists, especially those who are very visible to the public, with the exception of a few excellent science popularizers, many of whom are also good scientists. While I don’t think I’m at their level, I do think that I write well enough, and have enough experience both with science and other disciplines, to be able to explain a bit of how science works, what areas it claims to be able to explain (or potentially explain), and why it is that those areas are part of science (and others aren’t). Finally, I can talk (or write) pretty much forever about the “risks” and “benefits” that result from applying the scientific method to a discipline, and that’s a useful bit of information as well.

True, that isn’t really philosophy. It’s a combination of interesting things I hear about, interesting (and not really autobiographical) things I’ve done, and interesting things I’ve thought about a bit, mostly related to my chosen area of work. But I think it might be interesting, and maybe it even has a chance of being informative. And that’s a goal worth aiming at.

Then, finally, there’s the “game design” topic, which is (really) as bad a name as the “philosophy” topic. This is a topic that exists solely because I’m interested in it, and want a forum to inflict my opinions and experiments on whoever may want to read them. It is, however, likely to be the most popular topic here, with the understanding that in this context “popular” means “the number of people reading it may be 30-50 instead of 5-10”. I pick that number because the area of game design I’m interested in is science fiction wargaming (“science fiction conflict simulation” to make it sound technical) and science fiction roleplaying, and the major mailing list devoted to these, at least in the way I go about them (sfconsim-l), has a core of about 10-15 most active members, and a halo of another 20-30 members who are at least somewhat involved (I include myself as a very infrequent member of the latter group). The things I’m going to be writing about here are similar to the things I’d likely be posting to that mailing list, except that it’ll be much easier to keep them here permanently (I’ll probably post to both places, but I hope that at least some members of the group will start looking here for my thoughts, even if they respond to them there).

While I haven’t actually posted any game design articles yet, I hope to soon. In particular, I’d like to post a long, fairly rambling article about the thoughts behind a universe I’m currently in the process of working out. Granted that I’m not really intending to use it as a serious arena for game design (although it might be interesting to put together an RPG background for it), but even if I’m only going to be using a universe for my own purposes (such as writing fiction or semi-fiction set in it), I like to see if I can put together a few basic things. And if I’m going to be writing about space battles, I like to put together strategic and tactical wargames which model that universe, however uninteresting these games may be to play (thanks to Rick Robinson for suggesting the wargame as a tool for writing fiction — that’s at least the first place I heard about it). That way, whatever happens on paper (or in an RPG background) will at least be consistent with the background I’m trying to create. And what would be incredibly dull to play out on hexmaps can be very exciting to read about (assuming, of course, that my writing ability is up to the challenge, but that’s another topic entirely).

Not to mention that some of the ideas I use in any particular universe might be useful to other people. Even my inspirations might be useful. I’ve certainly stolen ideas from other people and re-worked them (for example, I’ve taken a space drive idea by Chris Weuve and worked it up as an explanation for how the Alliance/Independent war in the excellent (but sadly cancelled) TV series “Firefly” went the way it did (and, incidentally, to explain how faster-than-light travel worked the way it did in the show). Actually, I’ve cobbled that on to an idea from modern astronomical research to explain why so many of the “worlds” in Firefly are called “moons” (see this paper for details, and see if you can figure out what I’m getting at). In any case, I think that this, too, might be interesting enough to be worth writing about. And I can certainly see that people who are interested in any one of these topics may have no interest at all in the others. So, eventually, I hope to be able to allow people to pick and choose. Now, of course, this won’t happen until I get the time to make it happen, and that could be awhile, but I still hope to make it work eventually, and I think that it will let me do what I’m hoping to do with this web site, which is all I can really ask for.

And yes, for the small minority who care, things will still (eventually) end up in the files section of the web site. I just tend to use it for more finished designs and writing, whereas most of what I’m going to be doing here is general philosophy or random thoughts about specific problems. When I’ve worked these random observations down into a more coherent structure, I’ll put them up as files (and I’m thinking about putting up the files in both LaTeX and PDF, in case people want to play around with my settings to make them easier to read, or just save time on the download). Of course, I’m not sure how quickly any of this will happen, since the combination of graduate school and marriage seems to be leaving me with no free time at all (except for the time I’m using writing this journal entry, but then I really should be working instead so I suppose it doesn’t count). And that’s about it for this subject.

« An Update | Main | Well, here I am again »

Entry last updated October 17, 2004