Posts from September 2014

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing a remake of/homage to a game I last played somewhere around 1990: Gravity Wars.  I gave this personal project a few hours here and there each day, or more usually each evening, slowly resurrecting a little piece of my past and putting my own spin on it.  You can check it out for yourself, if you like: Gravity Wars Redux.

There are a few things I changed from the version I played all those years ago, besides the change of colors.  First of all, instead of taking turns, in my version the ships fire simultaneously, meaning a no-survivors tie is possible.  Second, the shot preview paths weren’t part of the original game.  Third, the “Gravimetric display” wasn’t a thing in the original game either.  That and the shot previews are leftovers from my development testing that I decided to keep around, either because I thought they added something to the game or because I just liked them too much to dump.

In fact, most of the code in there is accreted leftovers from the experimentation and development process.  Looking at it now, I can see all the things I should have done.  It just got to a point, as with most coding projects, where I could add another scoop or two of spaghetti to the existing mound and ship it, or I could start over and try to make the lasagna properly this time.  I decided to ship it.

I have to admit the point of all this wasn’t actually to recreate Gravity Wars, as much as I like the game and am glad to have a working copy of it.  It was instead to teach myself about the canvas API, and also to try to get a handle on some JS features that have never quite made sense to me.  I think I did okay on the both fronts, in my own idiosyncratic way.

At this point in a JS-related post, I usually throw in a disclaimer about being a JS newb whose code should never be inspected by anybody.  That’s probably still true, but I know I’ve advanced quite a bit from where I was, which pleases me.  I can see that not just in that the code I’m publishing today, which is convoluted and clumsy but still better than what I’ve written in the past.  I can also tell I’ve gotten better simply because I can see better approaches, as a result of what I learned along the way.

This may be where I end the project, or I may go back and take another crack at making lasagna.  We’ll see.  The carrot for me in doing that is it would let me add some other fun features and useful improvements pretty cheaply, not to mention I could fix some things that aren’t quite what they should be (like the placement of planets and ships, which should be a little less random).  The stick is of course having to rewrite code I already wrote.  I mean, lasagna is nice and all, but I like spaghetti too.

Anyway, I enjoyed writing it and learning as I coded, so if slinging missiles around planetary limbs sounds like your idea of a good time, please enjoy.

I’m indebted to Sohrab Ismail-Beigi, whose 1989 PASCAL source code I studied and in some cases directly ported; and to pascal-source.ru, for making that code available for download.  My thanks to both.

• Gravity Wars Redux was published on Thursday, September 25th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the JavaScript and Projects categories.
• There have been seven replies.

There are two aspects of my parenting that have really helped me cope with the illness and death of my daughter.  One was there long before she became ill, was in place before we had any kids; and the other I learned in the months since the first tumor emerged.

What I’ve had all along is a strong determination to appreciate each stage of our kids’ lives for themselves.  I’ve heard or read any number of parents saying they wish the next stage of development would hurry up, or that a past stage had lasted longer.  You know: “Oh, I can’t wait for Johnny to start talking, all this grunting and wailing is so difficult!”  Then, months later: “I really miss the quiet days, before Johnny talked non-stop all day every day!”

Sure, the current stage is difficult.  They’re all difficult.  They’re also amazing, unique to each child, and they’ll never happen again.

So I went into parenthood determined not to push them forward, and equally not to hold them back.  Of course we teach and encourage them.  We taught them sign language so they could talk before they spoke.  But we also didn’t push it, drilling them and punishing every mistake and rewarding every success.  It was the same with speech: we spoke and signed with them, and they picked up each at their pace.  The same with solid foods, and potty training, and learning to read and write.

Of course this isn’t a 100% deal.  I don’t always manage to maintain a Zen tranquility about every last thing.  I’m really ready for diapers to be done, for example; it’s been a decade now, and I’m pretty much over it.  But we’re not pushing it, and I don’t make a big deal out of it — or even a small deal.  This phase will be done when it’s done.

That focus on appreciating the kids for who they are every day has long made it easier for me to navigate the regular shoals of parenting.  And believe it or not, it’s made dealing with illness and death easier.  I didn’t fidget impatiently for the end of the treatments, or try to block out what was happening.  I didn’t spend my time looking over the horizon, dreaming of future days and missing what was happening in front of me.  I was focused on what was happening, good and bad.  Every day, as much as I could stand.

Given how little time we had, I am incredibly glad that I was present for it.  That I cherished everything good in it, and accepted everything bad.  I shudder to think how I’d be doing now if I hadn’t.

That was the first thing that helped.  The second thing, the one I learned in the past year, is to treat all my kids as if they might die in the next year.  That probably sounds like a prescription for massive spoilage and neuroses galore, but hear me out.

Try to imagine this: you learn that your child has a small but noticeable chance of dying a year from now.  Say, 5%, or something like that.  There’s nothing you can do to change that, it’s just how it is: a small chance they have a year left, and a much much larger chance they don’t.  How would that change how you treat them and interact with them?

For me, it created a new blend of short-term and long-term parenting.  I’ve always been a long-term parent, thinking ahead years or decades.  That sometimes led me to be stern or unyielding, and to not always express an appropriate amount of patience and care when it came time to discipline.

But when I realized Rebecca would likely be dead within a year, I realized I had to change how I acted toward her.  I had to soften how I disciplined.  By soften, I don’t mean letting her do whatever she wanted, or reducing the scope of discipline.  It meant working extra hard to meet outbursts of five-year-old rage with calm and measured words.  It meant being clear about the causes and reasons for punishment while working extra hard to be matter-of-fact and neutral about it.

These were things I’d always tried to do, but in the chaos and tumult of day-to-day life, I hadn’t always pushed myself.  Now, with a limited time frame, I had to make every day count.

And, once I realized that, I realized I had to do it for all three kids.  Because who knows what will happen?  We all have a limited time frame, easy though that can be to forget.  Carolyn might have died in an accident before Rebecca’s tumor came back.  How would I feel if that happened, and the last thing I had said to her was angry in words and tone?

I had been falling short with all of them.  Rebecca falling ill made me realize that, and showed me how to step up.  And so I have.

As I said, that doesn’t mean their discipline has lessened.  Because, to go back to the 5% chance of death in a year scenario, that’s a 95% chance that they’ll grow up to be adults.  So you can’t let them run wild; if you do that and they grow up, you’ll just as surely have failed them, not to mention everyone who comes into contact with them.  The boundaries are still the same.  I just try my best to communicate them in a different way.

Even with the odds of death much higher than 5%, that’s how we treated Rebecca.  Partly it was because she might survive, and partly it was because she wasn’t an only child.  We had to treat her consistently with our other children for their sake, as well as for hers.  Even more for her siblings, perhaps, given the outcome.

But when I did put her in time out, or took away a privilege, I always did my utmost to do so quietly and with care, not in anger.  Not with a smile, which would have mocked her frustration; nor with raised voice, which would have escalated it.  Just calmly, implacably, maybe a little sadly.  I did my best every time, and not just with her.  With all three kids.  I continue to do it with our surviving children.

I don’t always succeed, but I always try.  And when I find myself losing control, a quick internal reminder of the stakes is usually sufficient to regain my course.  Usually.  I’m not perfect.  But I’ll keep trying.  That’s all anyone can do, is keep trying.

• Presence and the Gift was published on Wednesday, September 24th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Cancer and Parenting categories.
• There have been eleven replies.

A thing they don’t tell you before your child dies, because nobody who knows this would go around proclaiming it unprompted (except, apparently, me) and nobody who doesn’t face this situation would ever think to ask and probably nobody who does face this situation has the meta-awareness to go asking after the truth that they will all too soon have to inhabit, is that the pain of it does not consume you like nuclear fire and leave you a hollow, broken, still-burning shell of ash.

Not continuously, anyway.

It does do that sometimes, much more often in the beginning after the end, but that begins after a while to subside and the moments of overwhelming anguish slowly grow farther and farther apart.

After a while, you don’t even hurt continuously, let alone feel what seems like an endless torment.  There are periods of waking time, seconds or minutes or maybe even an hour or two, where you don’t actively remember your child is gone forever, when you aren’t focused on that ungraspable fact.  The intervals grow slowly, over time.  Because humans can get used to pretty much anything.

The grief remains indescribable, but the nature of its indescribability changes.  At first, it is so vast and deep and overwhelming that trying to grasp it is like trying to understand the true size of a galaxy.  Those are the moments of fire and ash, when an unexpected, vivid memory or sharp regret brings you to a sudden, blinded stop.

You try not to have them while driving.

Between those moments, the grief is still there, but different.  It’s not there in strength every microsecond of every day; it comes and goes.  There are times you can put it aside for a while, to concentrate on a demanding task or play with your surviving children or watch a brainless movie.  When you become aware of the grief again, it’s surreal and confusing.  It’s like trying to understand the true shape and texture of a six-dimensional whale.  Even if you could, there’s no way to describe it in words so that someone else can understand.

In those moments of greater awareness, the surreal nature of the grief makes the entire world, your entire being, feel wrong.  It warps you and everything you perceive.  A previously energetic and focused person can become listless and disoriented, or a fidgety, easily-distracted person can become still and quiet.  Anger comes flaring out in strange directions, over stranger reasons.

Recognizing this is difficult, and counteracting it is doubly so.  Recovering from it is a long process, the end of which I have not even glimpsed.  I can imagine it in some detail, I know which general direction to go to get there, but I cannot yet see it.  It is either too far away, or too obscured by the warping effects of the grief.  I don’t know which.  It could well be both.

But this is why I seem to check out, from time to time.  I’m not actually going through an internal hell of pain and torment when I do, which is what I suspect other people suspect.  Instead, I’m trying to come to some understanding of the extradimensional horror that always hovers nearby, sometimes right in front of me and other times just out of sight, hoping that if I can somehow comprehend it in its entirety, it will finally go away and allow me to be happy that she lived instead of sad that she died.

• Indescribable was published on Monday, September 8th, 2014.
• It was assigned to the Cancer, Observations, Personal, and Rebecca categories.
• There have been eleven replies.