Paper Trail

After many months of digging slowly and carefully through the accumulated debris of years, I finally came to a place of beginning and ending. There are only two short years in what some might call senior high and others might call junior college; for many of us, it's a period in which the child bows out to the uncertainty of adulthood.

I found the little archive in which I'd packed the notes and letters of old friends from that time. They are pre-adult, adolescent, post-childhood things. Having kept them over the years as mementos of my youth has ensured that I retain perspective. I've never laughed mockingly at teenage crushes and the other minor affairs of the heart that my students experience; I've been to that kind of place in life before.

I remember it all, and when I forget, I remember again, looking at the green ink one person used, the paper, the cards, the decorated envelopes and the innocent photographs. Which ones loved, and were loved? Which ones loved, and went away? The emotions are long buried, but like a summer in the south of France, can be evoked, ghostly, in the dim light or the deep red wine.

It's only paper. It ought to be discarded. But it is still there, and every time I return, I know what I have lost, and what I have gained.

Eighteen

She is eighteen, and that is not to diminish what went before. But the eighteen years just covered are minutes in the hour of the glass. We do not know how many minutes, though it is certain that the first eighteen years are almost all the shaping that this tempered and imperious metal will receive. For after the eighteenth bell, the eighteenth chapter and the eighteenth candle, there is little that can change the indwelling spirit – unless it be the indwelling Spirit.

She is eighteen, and greatness lies before her. Does it describe, does it destine, does it deceive or distract? We do not know; and neither does she. But eighteen is when, to our everlasting regret, one's powers are at the greatest gathering, the greatest possible density of confluence. The powers can yet increase, but they will never feel as intense, so close that the heat bleeds from nerve to nerve and it sometimes feels all too much. In time, the powers will fade a little and then a lot, but the learned control will make up for some of that.

But she is eighteen, and if she does not realise that she is a pawn become a queen (or at least a princess of the blood), she will not seize this moment at the full before it ebbs. And so this fleeting laser flash of words, this drop of painfully distilled blood, it is for you, and you, and you, and you, and on this day, particularly you. Where will and power are one, so let it be. Ask now no more.

Spare Time

Time is a spare thing, an old stickman, a skeletal reaper with a rusty scythe. And yet, as spare as time is, we waste it further. This was my somewhat morbid reflection today. I hear from many parents that their children spend time in a profligate and perhaps rather heedless manner. They seek my advice. Yet, in the background what I hear is my own past – a past filled with joyful memories of computer games and endless trashy novels, slowly being refined towards an education in computer science and the ability to distinguish good writing from bad.

But I didn't set out to make this a long post (pointless, pointed or disappointing). I set out merely to provide links to a series of articles which my filters somehow missed. Here they are. Welcome to The History of Computer Role-Playing Games:

The Early Years (1980-1983)
Yes, I actually played Akallabeth by Lord British. These were my secondary school years.

The Golden Age (1985-1993)
This was the heyday of piracy, and weird computer exploits and other lovely things.

The Platinum & Modern Age (1994-2004)
The age that most of my students grew up in – an age of heresy mixed with iron, blood and innocence.

...like every other age of humanity.

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And on quite another note, here is a brilliant story which deserves to win more than one award.

Reflection

I was 18 and it was a cold rainy night. It was the night of the senior prom, and for the sins of our predecessors, it was being held in the school auditorium instead of at the hotel which they had vandalised.

I spent a lot of time with her and her friends, in the gallery where we sat. My grandfather had introduced us. It was a time of hope; it was a time in which dark things were forever put behind. But I remember one specific thing - I liked her company, and our families were well-acquainted, but there was none of that feeling of... gravity.

Sometimes your heart weighs so much, feels so large with hope, fear, portent or despair. Sometimes it is full of blood, and at other times it is unbearably light with air. And sometimes, it is happy but it feels nothing beyond that. And that was how I passed the night.

It was the other one who greeted the new year with me a month later, when my head had been shorn in the service of my country.

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Years passed. I wrote many letters, something that feels somehow so archaic in this age of ubiquitous electrons. I kept their replies. I remembered them, even though my heart had gone on. She owns a restaurant. The other one is a teacher. And I look in that dark mirror of the past, and all I see is clean rain on an open road.