Ancient Logic

It has been, to say the least, a busy week. With the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the events seem to be heading towards the inevitable long epilogue of legal proceedings and analysis. I haven't really had time to process all of this, but obviously, for someone with simultaneous interest in history and technology, there was a lot to ponder about this week. I have been in shock for my city since hearing the news about the bombing on Monday. The images and suffering from the attack are hard to wrench from my mind. The deaths of a small boy and two young people so filled with promise and life is an enormous tragedy. The number of casualties  maimed, lives forever altered, is profoundly disturbing. This is terrorism. This was done to subvert our sense of meaningful lives and replace it with a crushing scene of senseless murder. But in the more than 10 years since 9/11, one gets the sense things have changed in America. While the media quickly started chasing its own tai...

After finishing Fallout New Vegas, it's back to Skyrim for a few months. I bought Dawnguard and I'm sure I'll plunk down a few bucks on the Hearthsim expansion at some point. Weighty sigh. So much unfinished business from my last play-through. I only got to maybe a third of the Daedric quests, I really only finished the Mage College faction quests and I didn't even bother with the Civil War story arc. This game is enormous. But it's also surprisingly compact. I remember in my first play through wandering through the tundra and coming across one astonishing ruin after the other and basically feeling depressed that I would never get to every site again. This time I've paid more attention to how the game achieves that sense of a vast untrammeled wilderness while still piling up all sorts of interesting places to go. One way it does this is by clever world design. As the crow flies, Riverwood is not far from Whiterun, certainly not as far as Helgen is from River...