The Ascent: Part 1

An Excerpt from [Untitled Work of Fiction]

Rael woke before dawn to a strong hand gripping his shoulder. He opened his eyes and squinted, barely making out the stony face of Durran in the gloom. Durran motioned for him to rise, then turned and left the room without a word. Rael sat up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes. It had been a short night, but he slept soundly, more comfortable in a proper bed than he had been for weeks of travel. Now, after only a day in Camlin, he faced more traveling.

He quickly dressed and gathered up his small pack, pausing only to splash some water on his face from a bowl that had been left by the door. Before leaving he placed his unstrung bow and quiver into the long drawer beneath the mattress, but strapped his hunting knife to his belt and pocketed his sling. Both were small enough to carry without any burden, and it was better to have them on hand. Durran's insistence that they must slip out of the city before dawn had put Rael on edge, though he did not understand why.

Just as Rael made his way out of the room and into the dimly lit hallway, old Thanis appeared with the plump innkeeper in tow. Master Veer carried a candlestick in one hand and gestured with the other, halfway through an apology for breakfast not being ready at such an hour. Thanis cut him off, stating that the trio would eat on the road. As if to illustrate his point, he tossed an apple to the bleary-eyed Rael, who nearly dropped it. Rael fumbled with the fruit and tucked it into his shirt pocket. Thanis had turned back to the fussy innkeeper, assuring him that all was well and sending him off to attend to more demanding guests. Master Veer, seeing that his customers were content, nodded a quick farewell to both men and shuffled off in the direction of the kitchens.

Thanis motioned for Rael to follow as he turned down a side corridor and stepped outside into the pale pre-dawn. They stood in a narrow alleyway behind the inn, where Durran was waiting for them. The dirt-floored passage separated the back of the inn from another stout building, running from a road to the inn's storehouse where goods could be brought in out of the way of guests. The air was crisp and cool, and the ground was covered in dew. A slight sea breeze carried the smell of hay from the stables and the bustling sounds of morning preparations from the kitchens. The first sliver of sunlight already colored the eastern sky, providing enough light for them to find their way. The city would soon be coming to life as a new day dawned, and Durran had made it clear that they should be on their way without drawing attention to themselves.

The Sentinel was clad in his usual garb, but wore his cloak rolled into a small pack on his shoulder. None of the three men carried much with them, only what they would need for a day's march; additionally Durran carried his sword on his back, mostly concealed by the bundled cloak. Rael considered again their plan. They would spend the day hiking to the top of Mount Gibbeth, avoiding notice, and presumably come back down before nightfall if their sparse supplies were any indication. After a moment's thought he spoke up softly. "I don't understand, why are we going to such trouble just to climb this mountain? I'm eager to see the countryside, but what does it matter if anyone knows we're out for a walk?"

Durran and Thanis exchanged an impassive glance. Thanis grunted, then murmured, "Mind yourself, lad. All will be told in time. We'll talk on the trail, once we're clear of uninvited company." Without further explanation the eccentric Freelander gave Rael a gentle slap on the back and turned down the alleyway.

Durran had already set off toward the road, where he paused momentarily as the others caught up. His cold gray eyes swept briefly up and down the stone-paved street, watching for any who might notice their departure. Without another word they set off, moving quickly towards the northern city gate as the Sentinel led the way. They kept to side streets whenever possible, winding around major thoroughfares and squares where already early risers would be gathering, but never stopping to avoid detection. Their quick footsteps echoed down the cobblestone streets in the still quiet of the early morning, but Durran was more interested in haste than stealth. None of the few strangers they passed afforded them more than a passing glance. He seemed more wary of his surroundings than usual, but content that they would soon be forgotten by anyone who might have noticed them.

Dawn had fully broken when they turned onto the main road leading out of the city, just short of the north gateway. The gates were open and a cart or two were already making their way into Camlin. Pedestrians strode through the street, going about their early morning business. Without a pause, Durran led the small company out through the thick arched gateway. The two guards leaning on their spears at each side of the great wooden doors barely paid them any notice.

The Sentinel glanced cautiously back over his shoulder several times as the men departed from Camlin, checking for anyone who might be following. It was not until they were more than a league outside of the walls, and out of sight of any watchers, that Durran relaxed and slowed their pace. As if to indicate that they were now safe, he spoke for the first time since leaving the inn. "This road will take us north, along the foot of the mountain. From there we will turn to the west, and skirt the southern slope to the High Road. We should begin the ascent by midday."

Thanis nodded in approval and produced an apple from his pack, which he polished on his shirt and bit into. Rael counted the hours in his head. If they would not begin to climb the mountain until midday, it must be much farther away than it appeared- which meant, in turn, that it must be truly enormous. It dominated the skyline from Camlin, already seeming to dwarf any mountain that Rael had climbed back home in the borderland. He shook his head. Whatever secrets Mount Gibbeth held, he would just have to wait and see for himself. In the meantime, he had a long walk ahead of him.

Repost: On the Virtues of Civilization, Part I

Reposted from WildWeazel

Yeah, it sounds like a lofty essay compilation on world history and anthropology. Don't worry, it's about the games.

I know I've casually mentioned "Civ" quite a few times, and even posted a few previews of stuff I'd been working on for mods. I even have a tag for the subject. But the whole obsession preoccupation with the game(s) has never been directly addressed. I shall fill this void in installments.

For the, ahem... uncivilized, I should at this point explain what exactly it is that I speak of. Civilization is a series of "4X" (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) turn-based strategy games that follow the course of recorded human history, from the stone age to the space age. The player assumes high-level control of a civilization and develops it through building cities, improving terrain, raising a military, researching technologies, and interacting with other civilizations. The original Civilization ("Civ1") was designed by the legendary Sid Meier and published in 1991 for MS-DOS. Sid's company Firaxis Games has since created 3 additional incarnations, expansions of each, and a number of spin-off titles. The franchise has sold over 8 million copies and is now one of the most popular names in strategy gaming.

My first encounter with Civ was an accident.

Continued in Part 2

An Ill-Fated Voyage

The US Government is like the sinking Titanic. Republicans are compulsively rearranging deck chairs while Democrats want to take another pass at that iceberg. Ron Paul and a few friends are standing off to the side with some life boats trying to get people's attention, but nobody is listening because they're all threatening to kill each other over whether the captain should have hit the iceberg head-on.

I posted that little quip to Google+ yesterday and got several approvals, so I broke my recent taboo and posted it to Facebook and got several more. Those who liked it varied across the political spectrum. I think that shows that it's a fitting analogy, and that people are aware of just how bad the situation is.

To anyone who is paying attention, it should be mostly self-explanatory. The iceberg is the massive economic disaster that we've been flirting with for several years now. The proverbial deck chairs represent the few billion dollars here and there that the populist Republicans have fought so hard for while the Democrats want to dump more money into the hole. Only an ideological few, mostly libertarian leaning leaders are willing to call out the political games for what they are and demand fundamental changes to our way of doing things.

That last part about fighting over past decisions seems like a silly hyperbole, but it's actually the part of the analogy that I find most true. You see, Titanic was built with a compartmental design to withstand a collision with an iceberg. But when the captain saw the ice at the last moment, either out of panic and lack of trust in the ship's cunning design, or for confidence in his own skill and wanting to minimize the impact, he chose to divert, resulting in more damage. It is likely that this maneuver actually doomed the ship.

Likewise, when facing a mounting economic disaster likely spurred on by decades of political maneuvering, our government chose to take drastic and short-sighted action rather than let the free market take its course, meet the crisis head on, and come out leaner and healthier on the other side. By pushing our already enormous national debt to completely unsustainable levels (now outweighing our GPD and putting us into the same category as the heavily indebted European nations that are now facing economic collapse) they have likely doomed our economy in the long run.

Unfortunately, what's done is done. Whether it was tax cuts, multiple wars, bailouts, stimulus funding, massive healthcare overhaul, or a fundamentally broken system, the money was spent and now it is owed. They have borrowed over $14.5 trillion from both American and foreign creditors, while piling spending on top of irresponsible spending. But much of the political rhetoric being tossed around is about how bad those decisions were, how it should have been done differently, how things might have ended up if only, how many puppies Obamacare has kicked. The fact is, those things did happen, we do have a national debt greater than our GDP, we are borrowing and spending at unsustainable rates, and the US Dollar is in decline. Nothing we say now, and little that we try to undo, is going to change that.

That's where the lifeboats come in. A few prescient leaders have been warning us about the reality of the situation for a while now, but most of us have been too caught up in mudslinging to take notice. The "spending cut" that supposedly solved the debt crisis merely says that the government will spend a few trillion less than it had otherwise planned to over the next ten years, much of which will be borrowed. This ~$2.4 trillion, a number unfathomable to most people, is still only pocket change to the $15 trillion debt that is still rising- and, per the same legislation, authorized to rise- bounded only by the continued wrangling of Congress. This massive number is in turn dwarfed by the $114.5 trillion unfunded liabilities, the money which the government is already planning to spend but can't afford. Yes, that is one hundred trillion dollars greater than what we already owe.

Ron Paul, who has been warning of this for years, and his son Rand are two who have been pushing hard for a balanced budget amendment that would ban deficit spending altogether. A requirement for a vote on such an amendment made its way into the law, which may prove to be its greatest victory. Ron has also long been a vocal advocate of returning to the gold standard, which would effectively prevent the government from monetizing debt by simply printing more fiat currency and devaluing the money supply. At this point even such revolutionary actions may not be enough. We may be in for an economic collapse, and abandoning a doomed ship may be our only recourse. We're already past the oft-quoted 200 year average lifespan of great civilizations, and it looks like the "American Century" may be cut short.

It's time for a paradigm shift. The federal government got us into this mess, but left to its own devices it's not going to get us out. Our lifeboats are state and local governments committed to financial responsibility and personal freedom; election of leaders who will take courageous and unpopular action to bring our debt and spending under control and reign in the unconstitutional expansion of the federal government; and a firm reliance on God, not the State, as our provider and protector. Are you going to climb in, or will you listen to the band play until the ship goes down?

Hello World!

Here we are, at the birth of a new blog. I'm not quite sure what to say at this point, besides welcome.

This isn't the first time I've started a new blog. It likely won't be the last. I've been more or less "blogging" for several years now, at different sites under different titles. A majority of this time was spent on my previous blog, the now deprecated WildWeazel.net, which itself underwent many transitions along the way.

Over time I've struggled to pin down exactly what I wanted out of an online presence. I'd like to think that it is because I feel that I have something to say, which other people will find interesting. Much of it has simply been driven by a desire, almost an obligation, to be a part of the interactive, self-publishing community that has sprung up around web technologies.

I've found myself at times falling into the bad habit of making it more about the blog itself than about blogging. I'm a software developer with an interest in usability, so the temptation to mess with code and try new designs and features has sometimes taken precedence over writing interesting posts. I let myself forget that the first "feature" of a good website is content. Sometimes I feel like I need a blog to play with, and another blog to, well, blog with.

Again, I feel the need to step back and reconsider what I'm doing here. This is not just a continuation of my previous blog. Were that the case, I would have just redesigned the theme, written up another self-motivating post, and allowed the domain to renew for another year. But in reflection I felt that I had reached a point where WildWeazel was no longer in line with what I wanted to put into and get out of a personal blog. It was too cluttered, too distracted.

So this is another one of those transitions. The timing was mostly arbitrary- it just so happened that my old domain was expiring just as I felt the itch to start something fresh- but there is an element of symbolism to it. I've recently graduated from college with my master's degree and started working as a professional, so I am in fact leaving one stage of my life behind and entering another. You could say that WildWeazel symbolizes my college years, as the use of that name nicely coincided with them, and that I am now putting that name aside and starting fresh (though I continue to use it as my nickname in gaming contexts, as anyone coming from CivFanatics will recognize).

And so, in brief, that is why I have started this blog. I chose the name Debugging Life because it has a nice double meaning. In one sense, it describes what I do. I'm a software engineer, and a lot of my work involves debugging- finding and removing problems in the software. Thus, this is the life of a debugger. In a larger sense, it describes my motivation for blogging in the first place: to explore the issues that I face in my life, and hopefully provide some insight along the way. I suppose then that this blog will tend to be split between two general topics: observations on software engineering, and thoughts on life in general, with a dose of nerdy perspective spilling into the latter.

My motivations for this blog are not ambitious. I have no aspirations of being the talk of the software community. Nor do I feel that I am particularly insightful on other topics. I doubt that I have much to say that can't be found in countless other tech blogs and/or personal pages. My posts are mostly a creative outlet for my own amusement, and occasionally I find that there are others out there who share my interests and enjoy my writing. If you are one of those people, welcome.