Electric Book +2 To Wisdom (-1 to Charisma)

I played D&D when I was a teenager, or tried to. The trouble with D&D is it appeals to kids with poor social skills, but requires well organized kids with sufficient social skills to get other kids with the same interests together, often enough, to play a game like Dungeons and Dragons. Honestly, video games like Fable and Dungeon Siege were a huge relief, because they did the math for you, and let you play alone rather than deal with kids with severe personality disorders that liked D&D in the first place. Its heaven for kids with Autism, but only for them. Sigh.

Really, the badness of D&D is what got me writing fiction in the first place. Rather than trying to convince a bunchy of autistic kids to follow a story I'd prepared for them, I just wrote the damn story. Strangely enough, this is sufficient motivation. By the time I'd graduated high school and gone to college, I was able to write full novels, which is a lot easier than you'd think. If you simmered a story in your noggin for a month or two, it could erupt out of you like a pot boiling over. I'd write it down, and thanks to computers, you can add lines wherever you need to. Keep expanding ideas while the rightness of something told you this was the correct solution. Artists believe what they are creating is right, that it needs to exist. That it is creating itself and they are just the medium imposing the rightness back into the universe where it belongs, defined as they know it should be. Creation is very obsessive. Strangely, when technology took all the irritating table calculations from D&D and put them into a computer, which did those on the fly so combat could actually move in real time, it was so much better. But it wasn't a story so much. Only the very best RPG video games are stories, like Fable, and the rest are more of a slog like most video games, of jumping and smashing and the same stuff popping out of the same damned barrel. I hate ROM games. This is why Diablo 2 was one of the best ever. The maps changed every time you played, and the barrels got a random item each time. Sometimes just money or junk, but sometimes something you'd actually use. That was more like life, the randomness. Life isn't so predictable.

I got my Kindle Paperwhite (+2) today. I've been charging it. I loaded a Terry Pratchett book on it, "Guards! Guards!" which like all Terry Pratchett novels are a joke every paragraph. I am impressed with this level of dedication. That's a lot of work, writing prose that funny, that consistently. I uploaded some of the freeware archive stuff from Gutenberg onto it. Works. The bookmarks, in particular, work. You gotta like that. They also transfer from one device to another, like my PC. So you can shift back and forth and the device you're using knows. The size is perfect. It actually DOES fit into a shirt pocket. Amazing, right? And you can easily adjust brightness and font size and turn pages. Its really well thought out, and very light weight and 8 weeks of battery life. This is good technology. And its an electric book, a library of books with a screen of optopixels I learned about back in 1992. Very low power consumption, mushrooms of silicon with a very precise shape to work. Its neat. And I understand how it works at the quantum level, because that's how I learned about it first. People like to think that Quantum Mechanics is mystical and nobody understands it, but we use it every day. That's how cellphones and computers work. Don't confuse your OWN ignorance with the engineers use of advanced physics. Quantum mechanics is everywhere. It won't make a good fresh baked scone taste better because you included a pinch of allspice in it, but it will find your recipe quicker. And show it to you.

The electric book makes me somewhat more geeky, but I'm almost certified to shelve books at the library and I've got another job interview. And this time probably isn't hiring for mammary glands so I may even be hired. You never can tell.

I continue to listen to Unbeaten Tracks of Japan and I think my mother would have really liked this book. She might have wanted to go and hike through the mountains and the river valleys of Japan today. No malaria now, and people wear clothes, and there are convenience stores and actual hospitals and pharmacies and such so folks are healthy, even if they are very few away from Tokyo. I am starting to think that times are so terrible in the boonies, for so long, that going to Tokyo is a Sure Thing(tm) in Japan, which is why people put up with the overcrowding and the high costs there. Still, the mountains sound really neat to me. Wish I spoke Japanese. I think a mountain bike and panniers would be a fair way to see the place, at the same pace as Isabella Bird, but perhaps a scooter would be less destructive to the body and give you more energy to look around. Only thing better would be a citycar with the windows down, ones you could put up when it rained. From the sound of the story, it rained all the time, and the sweaty summers must be very much like The South here. Complete with thunderstorms. The downside of the electric book is it doesn't support audio. The upside is that it is thinner than the pictures show it. And I'm pretty happy about that. I can't think that road houses are still around after all the kids who could have been maintaining them, have long since moved to Tokyo, and everybody drives cars or takes the train or a bus. What will this place be like when its as poor as Japan was 140 years ago? Will we be covered in flea bites, mosquitos, and suffer a 30% death rate from malaria? I wonder.