Robin Hood & Maid Marian, poster from 1880

Oh Marian maid, queen of May, born a shepherd girl!
What have they done? Your flock is gone,
Your ballad’s of a different world.
Once you stood alone, you know – you were not just a foil,
But instead you played the central maid
As Yorkshire festivals you toiled.

And then dependency came in, for propriety’s sake,
For maids alone cannot be shown
Lest women proper place mistake.
French, then Saxon, poor and back to Norman blood,
You stood apart and pined your heart
For loves you never needed much.

Your love, your boy, your shepherd boy, now lord made rough outlaw.
Your good French name Leaford became,
And you an archery prize for all?
From play to film and back again, your shape a-shift and formless raw,
And now you’re dead as roles are shed
And actors move through dialogue.

Do you wander alleys now, and shop at big box stores?
Do you worry mortgages, or giving to the poor?
Your ballad flows and we all know that stories grow and change and more;
You may have spent some time with bad boy Robin Hood
But given time we’ll see the shepherdess back home in her own wood.
Marian is always there in thought, be she queen of May or not.

Nowhere, that I know of. Occasionally you see it on half.com or from third-party sellers; sometimes, for over $200. (Of which I get nothing, of course).

This comes up particularly now because Penny Arcade linked to the book today. But I probably get a couple of inquiries a week about it (thanks for your interest, Karl, Brady, John…).

The good news is that I hope to have news on its renewed availability in the next few weeks.

This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia Mathematica, based on the news this week that some genes for violent antisocial behavior have been identified.

It turns out that up to one percent of the population may have these genes. But they do not always express, because nurture and life circumstances are just as important in whether or not the person’s  actually going to turn out antisocial, or dare I say it, evil. And yet, we have so often ascribed these behaviors, throughout history, to the Devil, or to other supernatural causes.

I ended up linking this to the notion that religion exists in our mental space in a position analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in its broadest layman interpretation states that a system cannot prove its own consistency; wasn’t there something religious, in the end, in Russell and Whitehead’s belief in complete systems, in the ability of logic to put everything into order?

OK, so either you come to this blog because it sometimes leaps from game design to poems linking genetics, theology, and mathematics in rhyming hexameter — or you are wondering what the hell (no pun intended) I am on about. Shrug. Here’s the poem either way, annotated for your (in)convenience. Read the rest of this entry »

A Cherufe Tale

Ay, Pedro de Valdivia, of Extremadura,
Do you miss your granite home?
The Bío Bío shores are flat and muddy waters
And Mapuches lurk in bushes and in loam.

Last night the cry of the Chonchon, tue tue tue,
Called out bad luck for you and Spain.
Do you fear for your fresh-made town of Concepción?
It will survive, as you survived the Atacama plain.

Tomorrow you will drink your gold, molten hot,
And writhe your guts out on a stake.
Your foster son Lautaro is now the native general
And you will die, hidalgo, one betrayed.

The Pillan spirits of this land have anointed you,
Pedro de Valdivia, rude conquistador.
Your small town will one day speak the word
“independence” in the Plaza Mayor.

You were the last of knights, you loved the last of queens,
Your European tale is Spanish no more.
It matters not if once you were of Extremadura,
Cherufe sacrifice; you die a myth Chilean born.

There are so many annotations to this one, that I am just going to link ‘em all to Wikipedia. This one resulted from reading Isabel Allende’s Ines of My Soul, which brought back many memories of hours reading into the stories of the conquistadors. Truly amazing stories, full of gore and ridiculous heroism and unspeakable exploitation and rank stupidity. I had forgotten the story of the conquest of Chile, which didn’t really even end until the 1800’s. Read on for the summary…

Read the rest of this entry »

We spent some time today at the park at a Cub Scout event, and I fell asleep on our blanket on the grass, staring up at the maze of intersecting branches, and at the smooth-trunked trees that vaulted to the blue. I was struck by how alike the grasses were, the same shapes and forks and blind reaching for the sun, the way that the water grasses arching over the little stream were hiding tadpoles from my glance, and the way the bigger boughs made the sun dart in and out like flashing flickers on a fish - was something watching us?

It made me think, if trees are just huge grass, then what grows huger still?

If Trees Did Not Stop Growing

The trees are dense with cellulose,
are grasses overgrown. They fork
the sky, they prize the stratosphere

And if they got there, what?
Read the rest of this entry »

In Latin, the words for “apple” and for “evil” are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala).

- Wikipedia

This apple from Tajikistan gave birth to all the fruit:
The red ones, gold ones, tart ones, green and russet hues.

Each branch was mated to a branch carried over miles
And honeybees deployed in ranks to stoke the woody fires.

The names themselves are everywheres: from Fuji to Orléans,
Grannies, Coxes, McIntoshes and countless other brands,

Which carry in each half-cut star and in their very style
The memory of Kazakh slopes where first they grew in wild.

The blossoms spread, pink and pale verging on the blue,
Until we had the legends: the gold ones Hera grew;

The one that Eris tossed to Paris, causing wars in Troy;
Immortal orchards grown in eddas, Idun’s deathless joy;

A snow white princess poisoned; Atalanta’s race;
Johnny and all those orchards over which he traipsed;

The tree of knowledge, good and evil, our original sin.
This is quite a burden for fruit to bear within.

We have made the apple ours, and on it grafted history,
And yet the breed runs on, profusions to a tree,

This fruit humanity resents, but loves and needs.
Every apple carries still inside those bitter seeds.

I got an email about this recently, but haven’t seen it myself. Apparently Game Informer picked the top ten books on gaming, and A Theory of Fun is on the list at #9. Perfect timing of course, given that it’s out of print and I get three inquiries a week on how to get ahold of a copy. Working on it…

David Kushner, author of the excellent Masters of Doom (which I have the galleys of somewhere around here, and which came in at #1) managed to type in the full list. I’ll have to see if I can find a copy of the article.

Edit: here’s the article.

We heft the oak beams, one two three, each count
A sturdy truss; smooth hewn and splintered, blunt
And heavy, painted gaily marbled, dun
And costumeless. By numbers shall we know
Their place, when Southwark greets our lumber load;
The Theatre is no more, and soon we’ll have a Globe.
In Shoreditch now there stands a hole, on lease-
Land Burbage didn’t own. And past the trees,
By open fields, his Men will have a Streete-
Built O, wherein proud Oberon will prance
And Lear cry out his woe; where faery dance
For groundlings’ sake, and Puck plays out his pranks.
We’ll sift the straw and lay it straight on top,
And paint anew the spangled sky aloft
Above proscenium’s boards. We’ll stop
The crowd with good stout rails, so high-pitch boys
Can stain their lips and flounce their tails, and raise
A ruckus to the skies, the center of our noise.
But first, we must dismantle, first we take
Apart. If all the world’s a stage and planks
Are how it’s made, then for our Good Lord’s sake
I hope he spent his seven days as well,
Assembling worlds in beams of thirty ells,
A Shakespere for his script, Queen Bess, and all
A-toiling midst the sound of London’s bells.

Annotations: Read the rest of this entry »

Peace shouldn’t be quiet, clouds soft and pliant,
A mellow sky scene in blue.
Peace should be blaring, a jazz band past caring,
A squabble of children and you.
The clangor of pots, your eyes full of spots,
Buttercups growing in dew.
Peace is invention, it’s sustained attention,
It’s chemistry going kaboom.
It’s racing of go karts and artichoke hearts
And farming in Kalamazoo.

It’s silence as well, but the silence of bells
The moment they still for a few;
An aftershock sound that echoes around
And gives way to rush and to hue.
It’s not smug inertia, safe from what hurts ya;
Pain is what gives us the glue.
It’s temperate intemperance, all quantum events,
Mosquitoes buzzing canoes.
A whole raucous party, that’s peace’s priority:
Space to be scattered and true.

Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.

Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.

So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all.