Mi Biblioteca Personal

The other day, I unpacked and set up my bookshelves. This was an unexpectedly emotional process for me. I hadn’t seen my precious, precious books in months during our move from the Lump to Bangkok, and I suppose I was subconsciously worried that I’d never see them again. Or that they’d all be moldy and damp and wrinkled. In fact, some of them are a tad discolored from some sort of mold, but overall they’re in tiptop shape, and since I actually took the precaution of wrapping my most expensive and treasured books (the Gothic Bible, for example), those came through just fine.

Adding to my verklemmt response to putting my books out was the fact that I’ve had these bookshelves for the past two years, but I never really got to face them in their fully-stocked glory, because they were in a closet. Seeing all my books finally on shelves out in the open, and marshalling them up and down a bit, I realized how much they mean to me. I also realized with a surge of pride that I shouldn’t have been worried at all, because since I’ve read almost every page of these books (aside from, obviously, a few bricks like “Increasing your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary” and “Orlando Furioso Part Two”), it wouldn’t really matter if something happened to these books, because they are now, in some way, inside my head and make up who I am. I’ve been lucky enough to have money and time to read for pleasure for most of my life, which many people throughout history might not have had.

I’d ideally like to spend months and months describing to the world each book on these shelves and why I love them, in the style of Borges’ Biblioteca Personal - but at some point, reading someone else’s favorite books becomes like listening to the story of someone else’s dream. The intense personal associations that make dreams or lists of favorite things so vivid also make them dull reading. I mean, how could I possibly convey what I feel about Calvert Watkins’ How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics? Words fail me.

So I’ll content myself for now with posting this picture of a couple of the best shelves. It doesn’t do them justice. Most of the pictures I took were too blurry to read the titles well. Maybe I’ll take some with a tripod or something later. Anyway, I’ll stop going on about how happy I am to see my books. And yes, you’ll notice that I sometimes arrange my books by color and size, like Pepys. I know it’s not the best filing system, but dammit if it’s good enough for Pepys it’s good enough for me.

Text Wins

Unexpectedly and to my utter delight, a recent New York Times editorial by Daniel Radosh - in the course of a critical look at the new, super-modern game Halo 3 - claims that text games from the 1980s were the pinnacle of video games’ artistic achievement:

The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
...
There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can’t play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these “interactive fictions” gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story.... Today’s game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

This is precisely how I feel, and it’s why I haven’t been that excited about the last few generations of extremely popular console games: first-person shooters, car racing games, and sports games. I don’t care how realistic a shooting or racing game looks. I could run through hallways and shoot people, or drive a car quickly, or play football, in the real world. I look to video games for something different.

I recently read an entire Wired cover story on Halo 3, about the psychotic lengths of ultra-monitored playtesting that Microsoft was going to to ensure that players wouldn’t be challenged too much by the game, and would be funneled through the levels one after another, never spending more than five seconds in any room.

Reading this article, it seemed to me that the designers had missed the point entirely. They weren’t making a game, they were making an interactive movie or digitized theme park ride. What’s fun about playing a game that’s had all the moments of confusion or perplexity streamlined by hundreds of hours of group-focus testing sessions? I want a person with some interesting ideas to invite me to explore an interesting world, not a group-tested simulation of what stimulates the average teenage boy. I’d much rather play Pikmin than Halo.

This is why I feel that a lot of the most exciting games of the last five years were purposefully developed for the “limitations” of handheld systems. I find that an excellent Gameboy Advance or Nintendo DS game, Advance Wars for example, is usually ten times as fun as the latest Doom-type game where you run around dark hallways in circles emptying shotgun blasts into peoples’ heads. (Not that that isn’t fun, mind you, but I got tired of it in, oh, 1995 or so.) And this is why I still return again and again to play Infocom games from the ’80s, and to their excellent successors by passionate amateur writers such as Nelson or Plotkin.

Given this huge thumbs-up for text games from no less than the Gray Lady herself, this seems as good a time as any to complete my earlier story about how I put Zork and a bunch of other old games on my new cell phone.

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I had no earthly reason to believe that my new cell phone would play Zork, aside from a vague idea that I’d seen something somewhere online about old text games being playable on Palm Pilots. But I didn’t have a Palm Pilot, I just had a phone. This idea was a complete shot in the dark. But what’s Zork? let me back up briefly.

Zork is a text game that I first played on my friend Michael’s computer when I was about 8 or 9, so in 1983 or so. It looked more or less like this.


I played it for several hours, and all I did was read somebody’s mail, find a bird’s nest and fruitlessly yank at a grating hidden beneath a pile of leaves in a forest. Most of the things I typed were met with responses like “You can’t see that here” or “You can’t do that”. But I was hooked.

A year or two later I somehow got (I can’t remember how exactly I acquired things back then... birthday present? saved up allowance? spontaneous gift from easily hornswoggled grandparent?) my own copy of Zork I for our Mac Plus, along with, later, Hitchhiker’s, Spellbreaker, a copy of The Lurking Horror, and a couple others. These games were incredible, but they were extremely difficult to beat without carefully scanning the packaging inserts, paying for hints and/or hearing solutions from other kids, and they scarred me for life. In a good way. But around this very same time, we got our first Nintendo system, and I started to see text games as somewhat old-fashioned. The golden age of the text adventure was drawing to a close.

Several spasmic waves of roughly biennial nostalgia have since prompted me to play through these old games on every computer I’ve owned, and I have even attempted to program a couple things myself in a modern, freeware text adventure creation language called Inform. I currently play this sort of thing on my MacBook using this program, where games look like this:

So, having been playing Zork since 1983 or so, I grasped my spanking new Razr, plugged its USB cable into my computer, and set out to force it to play Zork with me. This rite of passage would take several days of arduous work, eventually shaving years off both the phone’s and my life, but it was a success. I figured out that the phone could play small Java games, and that somebody had made this program, a scaled-down version of this program, for playing old Infocom games on cell phones in Java.

Only trouble is, the only game that the scaled-down program could play was a demo version of Zork 1, in the now-beyond-extremely-obsolete Z3 story file format. It took me a couple of days’ tinkering to figure out how to get multiple copies of the mini Java application uploaded onto my phone, each loading a different story file. But I did it. This is what Zork looks like on my mobile phone.

Being able to carry around in my palm a childhood treasure which, at the time I first played it, required a humming beige box and monitor which together were larger than I was, almost reduced me to tears, and I began playing it immediately. I just beat it a few hours ago.

Never mind that the applet only has one save slot, and that I have to type everything in thumb-punishing SMS style. I now love my new phone, not only because it plays Zork - but that’s a big part of it. Anything that can play Zork is my friend. Is not dirty. Is not fighting me. Is very nice.

(Those last remarks were in the Bengali-Thai-English pigin I’ve been using to communicate with one of my students this week. But that’s an whole other story.)

The Loch Nichada Monster

I live in Bangkok, but I don’t really LIVE in Bangkok. I live in a pleasant, Epcot-Center-like community of the future, where cheerful Swedes and Koreans zip around on electric golf carts, jackbooted yet oddly childlike Thai guards pick flowers, nap and tickle each other at every corner, and everything - from Baskin-Robbins ice cream to the legendary “Strong and Bitey” Australian cheddar to my personal favorite grocery store item of any kind, ever (for the story behind it, not the taste), Weihenstephaner Korbinian - is available at the local store. Our apartment is near a pleasant artificial lake, ringed with tropical trees and a few apartment buildings, with the school looming in the background.

However, there’s a dark side. I’ve already mentioned the strange plague of albino geckos. There are also an awful lot of bats, and centipedes as big as a man’s finger. There are snails nearly the size of my fist that often get stepped on or run over, leaving a tragic, omelette-sized smear of invertebrate gore. There are glistening things that rustle in the undergrowth as you hurry down the slimy, uneven lakeside path.

And there are... things... in the lake. Large things. I don’t know what they are, but they thrash periodically. The sound is exactly like the sound of Shamu leaping ten feet into the air, through a hoop and slapping back down into the water. When this happens as I’m strolling around the lake, I always look, but a moment too late, and all I can see is a giant welling circle of disturbed water, as if someone had just dropped a boulder into the lake. I have no idea what sort of sea beastie could possibly be making splashes like that in a peaceful little pond. I am picturing something roughly dolphin-sized. With needle-sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. I tried to take a picture of one of the splash blast zones earlier, but it didn’t come out. You can’t see it, but half of the lake in the picture below is rippling from the aftereffects of a creature’s vigorous, whalloping aquathrash. I’ll try to capture this phenomenon on film later today. If I don’t post after this, you’ll know what happened.

Under the Bathrobe of Gandalf

Problem: I live in Thailand. I need to learn Thai. Yet I am too shy to talk Thai on the fly.

Proposed Solution: Read a Thai translation of a book I’ve already read. This has worked for me in the past, during such successful projects as “Read Heart of Darkness in German” and “Read somewhat less than half of Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian before giving up.”

New Problem: After some research which consists of walking into the bookstore and judging books entirely by their covers, I conclude that when Thais turn to fiction they apparently prefer to read nothing but Harry Potter, cheesy romance novels with amorous Conté-crayoned Hindu gods on the cover, some strange comic book series about a boy with a watermelon for a head, which might or might not be Japanese, and, for some reason, the Wizard of Oz books. I can’t find any familiar, easy books to start with. Except a few neglected shrinkwrapped Tolkien bricks on the top shelf.

Insane but Somehow Perfect Solution: Buy Tolkien’s The Return of the King in Thai and attempt to read it.

I’m pretty excited about this grand project. The book has a really cool green cover, with some pretty badass Thai fonts. The Thai version of the series title is, oddly, the same as the English one; it actually says, more or less, LORD AAF DAA RINGS in Thai letters. You’d think they could have come up with their own version, but whatever.

The book also came with a removable map. Thai pretty much looks like some kind of mutant Elvish already, so seeing Tolkien’s map actually in Thai letters (again, in an extra cool font with extra curlicues) is more or less mind-blowing. Those big letters say GONDOR. This map is quite possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen in my entire life.

Let the great experiment begin! I just spent about an hour translating the first sentence. Thai has no freaking spaces between words, and the vowel notations are a bit obscure to me at this point, so to my untrained eye, after figuring out what I thought the letters were in English, the first sentence in the book looked like this:

PPPNMNGLDAAKMAJIJTSAKLMKANGKNDLF

Not very promising. But wait! PPPN? KNDLF? I know those rascals! Things snowballed from there, if snowball is the right verb to describe an hour of agonizing dictionary research. Soon I had produced the following translation:

“Pippin watch pass through out come from under dressing gown of Gandalf.”

Not exactly a masterpiece of lucid prose, right? I must have screwed up somewhere, right? Nope! It’s pretty much on target. The English version is:

“Pippin looked out from the shelter of Gandalf's cloak.”

I was close! Apparently, I can translate Tolkien from Thai. One sentence down, many, many thousand to go. Huzzah!

And by the way I just found out it’s Rosh Hashanah this evening, so to my triumphant huzzah may I add Shanah Tovah! I’ve got a good feeling about the year 5768.

Unfrozen Newhandythal Man

I am notoriously (if one can be notorious among a circle of acquaintances which totals eight or so people) crotchety about getting new personal accessories. I have purchased probably five pairs of shoes in my adult life, one watch, one wallet - which is now gradually disintegrating from the punishing condition known as chronic tropical swampass - and most of my electronic equipment has been battered hand-me-downs from my much earliery-adoptery wife.

Why do I hang on to stuff for so long? While most people seem to be thrust into effervescent spasms of ecstasy by the act of buying a new car or cell phone every other year, for some reason, there’s something about buying new stuff that actually disturbs me.

I think it’s partly because no matter what you buy, they keep making better, cheaper ones every six months, and partly because I hate to admit that my old whatever-it-was is not good enough any more. If I have to get a new whatever-it-is every couple of years, then doesn’t that make me an idiot for buying the old one? Shouldn’t I have chosen better in the first place? Agh.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I am the polar opposite of an early adopter. Late adopter doesn’t begin to cover it. I am such a late adopter that by the time I adopt something, it’s old enough to be cool again in a retro kind of way. I am a T-800 grappling my way clumsily through a world of T-1000s, still rocking the same clothes, boots and bike I took off the first guy I met. So imagine my pleasure (mixed with vague uneasiness) upon my wife’s getting me a brand-spanking-new cell phone for my birthday. A gleaming, sleek metal phone with a camera and a sort of Tricordery flippy part and God knows what else.

Actually, my new phone was purchased slightly used, and the model has been out for a couple of years, but compared to most of my possessions it was if this thing was an example of some unimaginably refined future technology that had just been beamed down from an alien spacecraft. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of it, but excitement definitely had the upper hand over technophobia. For, within minutes of being presented with the phone, I had an idea for personalizing it, alien gadget that it was.

I decided I would force it to play Zork.
More later.

Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon

The New York Times has posted a series of summaries and excerpts from bootleg Chinese Harry Potter books. I can only assume that this is the sort of insane story we’re going to see more and more of over the next year as random reporters head to Beijing for the Olympics and have to find material for their daily reports. I could make all sorts of jokes on the topic, but I think nothing could do this subject justice aside from letting one of these remarkable books speak for itself:


Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon

Summary: Harry becomes a fat, hairy dwarf after being caught in a “sour and sweet rain”; he loses all his magic and can get it back only by obtaining the magic ring. After he does, Harry becomes a dragon that fights evil. Voldemort has an even more powerful brother who makes trouble for Harry.

Excerpt: “Harry doesn’t know how long it will take to wash the sticky cake off his face. For a civilized young man, it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the elegant bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dudley’s face, which is as fat as Aunt Petunia’s bottom.”

Al Talk Thai Real Good

I only moved to Thailand last week, and the last thing I want to be is one of those asinine Westerners who blither on about the uniqueness and beauty of Thai culture. Yes, it does seem like an endlessly fascinating country, but who cares what some random white guy has to say about it? Especially when so many of the white guys in Thailand seem to be mullet-haired German bricklayers on disability leave, with khaki shorts, nicotine-stained teeth and lonely, lonely hearts. I’m not sure the world is dying to hear their - or my - deep thoughts on Thai culture.

BE THAT AS IT MAY, I, a random white guy, did just see something interesting while leafing through the Thai dictionary.

You can get some insight into a culture by noticing the words that it borrows from other languages. Loan-words are often borrowed because the concept originally didn’t exist in the one country and spread from somewhere else.

For example, we borrowed the words for “ninja”, “glasnost”, “smørgasbord” and “ménage à trois” into English, presumably because those things were very rarely encountered in Merrie Olde England. Some stealthy Japanese person or filthy-minded Frenchman had to import them.

So, while perusing the English-Thai dictionary yesteree’n, what do I see but the following entries:

Lock: láwk
Lock: mâe kuncae
Key: kuncae

It seems pretty probable that the Thai word “láwk” is a loan word from English. And “kunci” (pronounced koon-chee) is frickin’ Malaysian for “key”. By the way, the expression “mâe kuncae” for “lock” is a typically adorable Asian way of defining a lock by saying that it’s... a key’s mother. Why not? As the box my desk lamp came in puts it, “Give happiness to all families”.

Results of study: Thai people had no word for “lock” or “key” until some English and Malaysian guys came over and sold them some.

Conclusions: Thais are a charming and peaceful bunch who knew no thievery until recent times? Maybe. I’m pretty sure the truth is more complicated than that, so draw your own conclusions. I’m off to feather my mullet.

They Do Move in Herds

We lived in Malaysia for the past two years. In Malaysia, there were geckos. Many, many geckos. They were speedy little greenish lizards that like to sit out on rocks, or on walls in the evenings, and eat bugs. If you come near them, they either a) freeze and don’t move a muscle, b) scurry away, or c) leap straight off the wall or ceiling in complete terror, flip and flop around on the floor, and scurry away. They only do option C if you really surprise them. It happened to me about four times in two years. One landed on my shoulder. I shrieked like a girl scout.

Those were the days. I long for the days of option C.

In Bangkok, they have MUTANT ALBINO geckos that have GENETICALLY ADAPTED TO LIVING ON PEOPLE’S PAINTED WALLS. Just think about that for a second. THEY EVOLVED TO MATCH OUR PAINT SCHEME. These things are pale whitish yellow, they’re plump, wrinkly and impudent like old Finnish men in a sauna, and they are basically like having wriggling human fingers clustered hungrily around every light fixture. They’re smart, too. These translucent monstrosities stick much closer to the light than their dull-witted jungle-dwelling Malaysian cousins. In a few years they’ll have evolved heat shields which allow them to cling directly to the light bulbs. At this rate, there’s very little else for me to do but urge you to enjoy what little time you have left before the geckos become sentient and put us to work in their vast fluorescent bug zapping mines. I give us about five years.

You Had Me At “Makruk”

Just a short post to say: We’re in Bangkok and things are going great.

I’m looking forward to absorbing Thailand’s ancient and noble Buddhist culture and shedding my sinful attachments to the meaningless material things of this plane of existence, but in the meantime... hey look at the cool crap I just bought!

We’re still jet-lagged and we’ve only been to the store twice in this country, once to an expensive local grocery store full of European imports, and once to good old Carrefour, but somehow I’ve managed to buy three or four toys already. Two of them are mysterious Japanese Super Mario items promoting the recent DS game “New Super Mario Bros.”. In both cases I had no idea what to expect once I opened the package, which added to the fun.

One was a tin case about the size of a pack of cards, which contained some Mario stickers and about ten tiny pieces of tic-tac size candy. The second one was a box containing little Mario and Goomba figurines, as well as some more diminutive Japanese candy. I will probably get some more similar things as I come across them. For some reason we didn’t get quite this kind of random Japanese item in Malaysia. I guess I’ve moved slightly north.

My other main purchase so far has been a Thai chess (a.k.a. Makruk) set. I’ve already chronicled my feverish desire to possess one of these sets, and I’m still a bit in shock at the contrast between the difficulty I had finding one downtown, and the ready availability of the blasted thing in Carrefour, which, let’s face it, is French Wal*Mart. Anyway, I am pretty excited about finally having my hands on a set of these unique, elegant, vaguely Buddhist-temple-looking pieces, and I’m looking forward to playing against some Thais. Who am I kidding? I’m looking forward to playing against myself and pretending I know some Thai people when in reality I only know this oddly chubby horse, and I’m pretty sure that he hates me.

Gameboy Publishing

Well, I'm writing from my graduate school classroom. On my Nintendo DS. I'm not usually into handheld internet things, but my computer wasn't working, so I got this thing online. It's agonizingly slow. This is really just a test, and I can't picture doing it except as a novelty. But I'm amazed that what's basically a gameboy can go online. Web-ready toasters and soapdishes can't be far off.

Note: As originally published, this had weird line breaks and some stupid ad for MSN or something on the bottom, because I sent the post via e-mail. I cleaned it up a little. Web browsing on the DS is pretty crappy - it’s slow and seems to disconnect a lot - but it allowed me to get online for one entire day last week when my computer wasn’t working, so I think it was worth it.