Tiny Planet

The people at Hubble say it has to do with the sun melting ice at Pluto’s northern hemisphere as its orbit changes; it does, after all, have a 248-Earth-year orbit.

Personally, I think it’s annoyed that we downgraded it from being a planet. You’ll always be a planet as far as I’m concerned, Pluto (and at least 1.8m other people agree).

This week marks id Software’s 19th birthday, and what a long, magnificent trip it’s been. I’m not going to attempt a history of the makers of Doom and Quake: you can see that here. What I’m going to do is talk about my own fondness for the company.

My first experience of id (that’s id as in part of the psyche, not short for identification) was Commander Keen, a series of platform games that saw the player take control of Billy Blaze, whose football helmet doubled as a space helmet and who had a spaceship in his garden. It was just fun and colourful, and a little bit barmy (although I hated Keen Dreams), and for me it marks a ‘golden’ era in games, partly because of the series’ association with Apogee (the now troubled 3D Realms), which produced games like Xenon 2 and others that formulated my childhood (I was seven when the first Commander Keen game was released, although it was a couple of years later before I played them).

And how could we forget Wolfenstein 3D, the game whose model went on to spawn the Doom series? This was my first first-person-shooter and I don’t even remember thinking of it as particularly violent, although I can see why people might think so. It was too cartoony violence to make an impact, I suppose, or at least one detrimental to my well-being. And at the end of the day, you got to battle Hitler (albeit Hitler in a robot suit).

DOOM. It’s easily one of my top five games of all time, a game that was at turns adrenaline pumping and fascinating. The mixture of science fiction and occultism caught my imagination, particularly the idea that you got to actually battle the forces of Hell itself. Of course, half of the fun was making sure you got the enemy soldiers near barrels so you could reduce them all to puddles of gore thanks to one well-placed rocket. Born in the days of episodic games, it spawned a sequel series of episodes and was rebooted a few years back with glorious updated graphics and a fairly similar storyline (although you’re no longer connected to the Martian moons). But for all the charm of the latest graphics and character movement, it still doesn’t have the je ne sais quoi of seeing your sprite grin evilly at picking up the shotgun or chainsaw.

Somewhat eclipsed and jumbled with Doom in my mind is Quake. I don’t really remember the first Quake game, which had more to do with an occult invasion of the Earth, but I know I played it. I preferred Quake 2 though. It was gripping and compelling, and I’ve gone back to play it time after time. Quake IV is the only game I’ve ever upgrade my computer to play, and the visual effect was worth it, although as it’s built on the Doom 3 engine it looks quite similar. I did like the grand size of the narrative and how it placed itself within a longer sequence of events, most of which are only hinted at.

As far as I’m concerned, id Software is one of the great gaming companies. Its products have been with me for as long as I’ve been using computers, and it will take something special to eclipse games like Doom in my internal ‘best ever’ lists. As for their upcoming projects, Doom 4 and Rage, we shall have to wait and see. Here’s a trailer from a few months back for Rage:

I’m heading to Italy in a couple of weeks, but somehow I don’t think my other half would be too keen on a detour here, to the Museum of Criminal Anthropology. What’s that, you agree with her? I suspected as much. Fair enough, we’re going to Rome and the museum is in Turin.

Click the link above for a nice write up at Morbid Anatomy. Image taken via there from here.

I was asked a perplexing question recently. I had just spoken at a postgraduate seminar in Trinity College Dublin, delivering a paper called ‘”The allegory of so lamentable history”: The Old Testament influence on Bede’s understanding of apocalypse’ (see last abstract here for a similar, earlier paper). In it, I basically argued that Bede, an Anglo-Saxon historian in the eighth century, used the Bible to understand how the end would come for his people, and particularly that he used the book of Amos as a model for criticising corrupt elites.

Many medieval writers used the Bible in some sense to comment on or understand their own day, but some, like Gildas and to an extent Bede, saw in it actual prophecies of what was to come in their people’s history. All of which is pretty heavy going, I admit, but that is the world I am trying to decipher and analyse for my doctorate. The paper went well and there were good questions (and people had paid attention to our papers, which is a bonus). At the end the chairperson, a theology graduate, asked about the difference between theology and ideology in Bede’s work. In all honesty, I said that Bede would not necessarily have drawn a distinction: as far as he was concerned, a perfectly Christian kingdom was the ideal that the Anglo-Saxons should aspire to, and his work was partially designed to encourage the development of such a kingdom.

The chairperson felt that the use of the Bible to advocate national agendas was a travesty, a view I can fully understand although it does not apply to early medieval writing. As far as Bede was concerned, what he was doing was using the Bible to show how the English were part of a united Christianity: if the Bible and its messages could be shown to apply to the English, then that meant they were definitively part of the wider Christian world and were as important a part of it as somewhere like Rome. I appreciate that this is difficult to get across; I have spent more than a year working on this so it seems second nature to me. However, the chairperson came from a theological perspective, and a modern one at that, so it seemed like a travesty to use the Bible in this way. As I said, I understood where he was coming from.

After the meeting had broken up, he asked my colleague and I about our faith convictions. I wasn’t enormously pleased about this, as I believe such things are personal and you shouldn’t be put on the spot about them, although I know he did not mean anything by it really. But I had to think quickly to try and sum up some ambivalent and unarticulated thoughts that have bubbled away in my brain. It reminded me of the immigration forms for Abu Dhabi, which ask you to specify religion and sect: these signifiers of identity can mean a great deal while also meaning one must step outside old familiar zones. I gave a probably wholly unsatisfying answer referring to nominality, acceptance, etc, summed up with “I’m neutral but friendly”.

In history, we always strive for (or at least are supposed to strive for) objectivity, removing ourselves from the subject and analysing it critically. Naturally, this can only ever be an aspiration: everybody has some interpretation or reading of the text that is affected by their experience to date. And there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, although it should be recognised at least.

I tend to approach things from a literary criticism point of view, although that is usually over-ruled by historical analysis. I think what the chairperson was really wondering was if our faith convictions had determined or influenced our papers, or our interpretation of how the writers used their sources (my colleague gave a paper on early modern uses of the Bible in apocalyptic scenarios). It did not: we merely examined how medieval historians had used the Bible as a source. But his question did make me think, and I am not sure I could ever give a proper answer.

[Cross-posted at Chronica Minora]

I have started a history blog here, where I will write about my research and other history-related things. Tiny Planet will be more news, current events, and personal commentary.

Dear all,

This blog theme looks to be becoming increasingly awkward, so I plan to move to a simpler, cleaner look in the near future. I am also in the process of setting up a blog more focussed on my research; I am taking a course in digital skills (hello Dr Murphy) and will try to put these to good use.

Le meas,
David

I emerge from the shadows of correcting a stack of undergraduate assignments to bring you this beautiful, oddly ethereal piece of electronica:

I’ve been working on the PhD for about six weeks now (it seems like much longer) and I’m trying to throw myself into as much as I can. I taught writing skills in October, and until the end of this month I’m teaching medieval history tutorials for first years. They’re a tough crowd.

But no sooner do I feel like I’m getting on top of things than something new and massive lumbers over the horizon. In this case, several somethings. Conferences and seminars. I’m attending one at the weekend, which I’m not delivering a paper at but which I’ll use as a chance to see what other PhD candidates are doing in the humanities. Meanwhile, I’ve submitted abstracts for two and been accepted for one, a postgrad series in Dublin. The other I’ve heard not a word about for sure. I have two conferences and another seminar series to submit ideas for, which is going to keep me busy. I was able to get the bulk of one paper written today but there’s a lot of finnicky detail to do yet. Plus it looks like going way over the allotted 15 minutes.

It’s a very strange experience going back to your MA thesis and referencing it in a conference paper. It’s almost like going back over ground that is far too familiar, while almost being like delving into a difficult past that you’d like to keep closed just a while longer. When the PhD loomed I was sure I’d have the momentum to just plough into it, but the day I submitted the MA I realised I wanted nothing more to do with the writer in question (Bede) or the era of history in general (early medieval Anglo-Saxons).

I knew there was no way out of it, but I promised myself that I’d spend some time writing about something else. Anything else, just not Bede. I needed to plug out of that mental world and recharge. And yet, slowly but surely, I found myself returning to Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the people it documents and the tales it tells.

One strength of the department I’m in is that there is a postgraduate seminar series where the student can pick the topic of their paper. And so, one day, almost without realising it, I started fleshing out the idea for a paper based around Dryhthelm, an Anglo-Saxon who lived around the year 700 and who Bede says was brought back to life to pass on a vision of heaven and hell. Dryhthelm came up in my MA thesis, but only as an example. This time around he will be the focus of a paper in his own right, and it’s quite likely he’ll end up a chapter or significant section in the PhD.

I’m not sure whether or not I should be annoyed with myself for breaking my internal promise to avoid Bede for a while, but the brain is in session and heading somewhere, at least. Perhaps it’s worth noting that, much like the people I’m writing about believed the world would end when it returned to the condition in which it began, I’ve come around in my own mental circle and am back where I started, only further on down the road. It’s surprisingly close to how the early medieval writers understood the nature of time.

It feeds in to the work I’m doing at the moment. The paper I’m writing has nothing to do with Drythelm but something else that’s cropped up in my reading, which lately has been how early medievalists (and indeed Bible writers) understood how the world would end. It’s a bit different to what I’ve done before, but is closely tied to the main themes of my PhD, so, even if the paper goes down like a lead balloon, I should have some substantial work done for it regardless.

Between the two parallel ideas that are running through my brain at the moment, I’ve written close to 4,000 words. Not all of it will be kept, but some of it will be fleshed out and expanded in significant detail. Which, six weeks in to a three-year PhD programme that requires me to write 80,000 words, is not a bad thing at all.

Sort of. Apparently at least two quick posts I wrote in the last month have vanished into the ether, but no matter. My thesis is finished and I have started on my PhD. I need to do some overhauling of the blog but that’ll take a while as I have a fair bit to do in the real world.

If you’ve come here and been greeted with some sort of Twitter authentification window, apologies. I only found out that was happening tonight. I have removed the Twitter feed from the site as I don’t like that sort of thing. I might re-embed it when I figure out something better.

Copy editors (AKA sub-editors) will sift through stories to ensure clarity, will check spellings to the best of their ability, and do their best to make headlines enticing. That’s our brief, although we do sometimes fall short. Even so, it’s good that some people recognise the important role that copy editors play in journalism, whether it be online or in print. Very few readers actually know what we do.

Copy editors are the unsung heroes of newsrooms. Unknown to the public, and often underappreciated by their colleagues, they’re the last line of defense against a correction or, worse, a libel suit.

They’re skeptics who revel in the arcane. They know the difference between median and mean, and can speak knowledgeably about topics from Methuselah to the Milky Way. They write headlines, design some pages, check facts and make sure assertions are supported. They spend entire careers working horrible night-shift hours.

This might sound like self-congratulatory waffle, but subs are losing jobs as quickly as reporters as newspapers seek to cut costs on production while maintaining a certain level of content. It’s also true that I’m an unemployed copy editor (although can you really be an “unemployed [insert job]“?) but that was by choice, even if I do miss the work, unsociable hours and all.

Meanwhile, my thesis is clipping along nicely and I have surpassed the 20,000 words needed for submission. Of course, now comes the editing and rewriting; the subbing, if you will.