Hanger On

Part of my job is to do quarterly surveys of 450 seaweed plots, from the Boston area up to Northern Maine. The fall survey has taken a long time, because my usual grad student helpers have been very busy with other things, like TA'ing, studying, and working on their own labor intensive projects. As it gets later in the season it gets harder and harder to work, with shorter day lengths less likely to coincide with the low tides we need for the seaweed plots to be exposed. By some miracle, though, the cold of winter has been holding off. Last week near Pemaquid, Maine, we saw a wild rose still with green leaves and a bloom.

There are only 50 more plots to survey, but they're all on a very low-lying ledge at our Northermost site in Lubec, Maine, and it looks like the only tide that will be low enough for us to get to them will be on Christmas. Fortunately, I'm not very religious, my folks are amenable to a rescheduled holiday, and we have a Jewish lab technician who may be able to help. It will be a weird Christmas.

Does this look like anything to you?

Apparently I have inherited my father's gift for finding messages from supernatural beings in my cast-off undergarments. Dad was recently blessed with an image of The Virgin Mary in his briefs, and this morning I encountered the sinister visage of Satan in my undershirt. Evil is afoot!

View From the Office

Some days it's pretty nice to be a marine biologist, especially mild sunny fall days spent working in the rocky intertidal zone.

Uncloseted Video Game Geekiness

I’ve had an off-again on-again romance with video games. As a little kid I was scared of them, so I missed the classic ‘80s era. But as an adolescent in the early ‘90s I followed my friends Erik and Erik to the dark side. My first “system” was a Super Nintendo. I remember playing all sorts of different games on it, from Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country to Super Metroid and SimCity, but the games I got most hooked on were RPGs (role-playing games) like The Legend of Zelda, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI. I played some games on my folks’ computer, too, the most notable being a 3D first-person perspective shooter called “Doom,” which my parents and sister hated.

I can't imagine why they hated it.

I didn’t play a whole lot of video games after Doom, because highschool homework and stuff kept me too busy, and because the rapid advance of game technology had outpaced our old family computer. (It was a 33 Mhz 486.) In college I hardly played at all, except for one major relapse for the RPG “Final Fantasy 7.” (I had recently broken up with a long-distance sweetheart, and obsessing over the immersive quest of the game was a much-needed distraction from obsessing over the breakup.) Grad school was mostly gameless for me, other than a few goofy social games like Guitar Hero. The exception was a cheesy vintage RPG called “Phantasy Star IV” that I discovered on a disk of old Sega games that came with my then-girlfriend’s console system. I got instantly addicted to that one, and could concentrate on little else until I finished it, much to then-girlfriend’s chagrin. When I lived in Florida after grad school I played zero video games because I couldn’t fit them in with my busy windsurfing schedule.

The upshot is that, despite a promising start, my video gaming career has floundered. I’ve basically missed the last 15 years of video game evolution. It’s a bummer, because during those years video games have become much more sophisticated and “gaming” has earned more widespread respect and inclusion in popular culture. On the spectrum of coolness, gamers are now closer to rock and roll heroes than they are to stamp collectors. Though I’ve never succeeded at coolness, and I care about it less now than ever, I’ve secretly wanted to try some of the new games to see what all the fuss is about. So I was delighted to find out that my girlfriend is, in addition to being gorgeous, intelligent and athletic, a video game expert. And she has been willing to hold my hand as I attempt to apply my primitive and rusty 1990s skills to her overwhelming and complex 2010s games.

The first new game that I tried at her house was “Borderlands” on the Xbox 360 console system. It’s a first-person shooter like Doom, combined with addictive role-playing game elements like quests and experience points that “Level Up” your character. (Leveling Up increases your digital persona’s strength and abilities in the same way that working out, studying, or practicing a sport increases your real-life abilities, except that Leveling Up occurs faster with less effort and the gains that your character makes will never atrophy [although your body and social life may atrophy if you do too much virtual Leveling Up and not enough real life Leveling Up].) I had a hard time figuring out Borderlands initially because the controls are much more complicated than in Doom. You have to aim your gun with one toggle button while moving your body with another toggle button, and there are a bunch of other buttons that you need to duck, jump, strafe, open boxes, pick up items, reload your gun, switch guns, talk to swarthy merchants, etc. I have a tendency to panic when attacked and shoot my feet while stumbling in circle, but I’m slowly figuring things out. The most fun I’ve had so far in Borderlands has been playing the game in two-person mode, teaming up with my sweetheart. She saves my life a lot, and every once in a while I return the favor by blasting an alien beast that’s sneaking up behind her.

Soloing Borderlands

The other modern game I’ve been messing with is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called World of Warcraft. That’s the one that I think I would get dangerously addicted to if I had a computer powerful enough to play it at my own house. (Thank goodness I don’t.) Like the name implies, W.O.W. is a whole 3D virtual world of castles, magic and dragons, and it’s populated by thousands of internet-connected players as well as computer-controlled monsters and NPCs (“Non Player Characters” like townspeople and guards). Actually, since there are millions of people who play the game, there are numerous copies of the virtual world on different servers so that no one world gets overpopulated. The players on one server won’t meet those on another server, so if you want to play with your friends you have to make sure you create your characters on the same server, or pay real money to the video game company to move your existing characters.

Whew. Ok. To start playing W.O.W. you have to design and name your player character, picking from eight cool “races” like human, elf, goblin, troll, etc., and several “classes” like warrior or shaman that dictate what kind of abilities you will have. You also pick the character’s sex, skin and eye color, hairdo, and various other physical features that you may or may not be able to pick for yourself in real life. You can’t pick your character’s body type, though. You have to be either big and buff if you’re a male, or slim and busty if you’re a female. My character, Jimbonereus, is from the “Tauren” race of buffalo people who live in teepees and have totem poles. His class is “hunter,” which means that he can shoot bad guys from a distance and sic his vicious pet on them, but he’s not so good in a close-up fight and he can’t cast good spells or use beefy shields and armor.

Click Jimbonereus to see his "profile" on the WOW website. It will change occasionally as he goes on new quests and finds cute new outfits and stuff.

My sweetheart recommended that I be a hunter because it’s an easy class for casual “P.V.E.” playing. PVE stands for player-versus-environment, which is where you’re tromping around the wilderness going on little quests and killing the computer-controlled monsters. The other kind of play is PVP, where you battle other human-controlled characters, and you get your butt kicked if you’re not a serious gamer. I’ve never done any PVP, but I have done some five-person cooperative PVE adventures with other human-controlled characters. (The game has some repeatable dungeon adventures that are specially-designed for five people at a time, so you queue up to do a certain dungeon and are grouped with four strangers who have requested to do the same dungeon.) The first time I tried a tough dungeon, the four other people in my group voted to kick me out because I kept falling in the water and getting behind. But I practiced my jumping and made it through OK the next time around. I even got some special loot for my contributions that time. There are many little rewards like that in the game to keep you addicted. No matter what cool stuff your character does or gets, there’s always another quest or another power item that you NEED, so you keep playing.

As a scientist and an introspective-type person, I’m fascinated by how strongly these kinds of games can capture our focus. It’s like there’s some hard-wired circuitry in our brains that gives us a sense of excitement and fulfillment when we pursue a gratifying quest and amass some kind of wealth, experience, or power. And RPG videogames are designed to tickle that circuitry to the maximum extent. If only real life could instill the same desire for obsessive pursuit of advancement. Perhaps it can?

Cold Hands

The toughest things for me about windsurfing in cold weather are: 1) keeping my hands warm, which requires thick gloves, and 2) keeping my forearms from cramping, which requires thin or no gloves. Friday evening it was sunny and about 47 degrees in Nahant, so I decided to go with no gloves. My hands got quite cold and numb, but not past the point of working. The nasty part was after the session when I was walking my gear back to the van and the blood started returning to my hands. That part always hurts a lot. It was a mellow side-shore wavesailing session with buddies, though, so it was worth it. Here's the video.

John "Badass" Coelho

Shortly after I moved to Massachusetts last year I met a couple of really good wavesailors who were "dialed" at Nahant, my local launch. One of the dudes was named John Coelho. At first I didn't know his last name, so I just put him in my phone as "John Badass." Last weekend he proved that he deserved the name when he was one of only two windsurfers to successfully challenge the humongous waves and icy temperatures left in the wake of our freak October snowstorm. (The other victor was pro sailor Josh Angulo, though, truth be told, Angulo didn't get out there until the afternoon when things had mellowed out.) Here are some shots of Mr. Badass. I think they were taken by Jay Turcot, but I'm not sure.

Note the snow on the grass in the background.

Well done, John. Maybe next time I'll join you... Or maybe not. :)

Dishonorable Intentions: The Best Romance I've Ever Read

A while back I posted a poll to determine the extent to which readers of this blog were also readers of romance novels. Of those who answered the poll, 100% of the women and 24% of the men had read at least one romance. I was among the 76% of unenlightened men... until now.

Indeed, I just finished reading "Dishonorable Intentions," by Katherine Ivy, aka Lady Notorious, aka my charming, talented girlfriend, Rhonda. It wasn't the first time I had read her stuff- I had also seen her short story, "Love's Consequence" in the anthology "Modern Magic: Tales of Fantasy & Horror," and I had read the not-yet-published fantasy novel that she wrote for her master's thesis. Both of those blew me away, so I had high expectations for the romance novel. Rhonda tried to lower those expectations by explaining that "Dishonorable Intentions" was a different genre, and that it had been her first effort at writing, completed as a just-to-see-if-she-could-do-it "practice novel" while she was an undergraduate geology major. It turned out that Rhonda's warnings were unnecessary, because I found Dishonorable Intentions to have the same fast-pace, ingeniously-constructed plot, and badass-yet-realistically-characterized heroes that drew me into her other writings.

Dishonorable Intentions takes place in England during the "Regency" period of the early 19th century. The Regency was a rich and ritzy time for the nobility, and it was less uptight than the subsequent Victorian period, so it was the perfect setting for juicy romances. The romance of Dishonorable Intentions is made juicier still by intertwining with a crime mystery; the perilous hunt to recover a lost fortune in the form of a giant sapphire called "The Eye of the Storm." Intense drama develops as gorgeous, intelligent, great-spirited young Arabella battles to save her family and preserve her independence while winning the love and healing the heart of the handsome and virtuous but cynical and much-maligned noble Gabriel.

I must admit that before reading the book I doubted that I would be able to sympathize with characters from the upper crust of English society. I figured the nobles of "le bon ton" would just be tiptoeing around from mansion to carriage to ballroom, snootily obsessing over superficial concerns. In fact, some of the background characters in Dishonorable Intentions WERE a lot like my fluffy stereotypes, but the heroes Arabella and Gabriel had personal strengths and values that ripped right through the bullshit parts of their world. Those qualities made them very appealing, both to each other and to me as a 21st century reader.

I shouldn't give away too much of the story. If you want to read the book yourself you can download it from Amazon at this link. It's only like $5, so you really can't lose. If you don't have an e-reader device like a Kindle then you can do like I did and download Adobe Digital Editions (for free) so you can read it on your computer.

PS- Here's the novelist paddleboarding at Nahant last week. (Swoon!)