Autobiography (Lud the Gamer)

I was born and raised in New Minneapolis, Canada. Went away, came back, continue to spend most of my time here. Hope to die here, and not someplace else.

Egg Tooth visited the city once, when I was young. Vivid memory. He was quite a monster, back then.

Later I lived in the Egg Tooth neighborhood, went to college, had some adventures. I always hoped to meet Egg Tooth, or at least Bob Dylan (nonfiction), but neither happened.

Jack the Reader was a long-time resident of the neighborhood. He was a few years older than me. I wouldn't say that we struck up a friendship, but we both spent a lot of idle time at The Nested Radical, so I did get to know him somewhat. He was always going on about spies, conspiracies, ENIAC -- all that stuff.

I was young and easily impressed, and I still respect Jack -- he's a great guy, and a hell of a reader -- but he as a way of believing what he wants to believe, and then getting you to believe it, too. Which is fine when Jack has a grip on reality, but problematic when he goes off on a tangent.

I was young, attending college, living in a Bohemian neighborhood. You will want to know if I tried Extract of Radium.

You know the slogan, Humans Love It!?

I can personally attest: they do, they do!

During this time, I was invited to appear on Who Wants to Be a Chronometer?, the reality TV show. Damned appealing offer, almost impossible to say no. But I somehow I managed to say No, I do not want to be chronometer.

Some other guy, one of my classmates by the name of Cranshackle, agreed to be on the show. I remember we talked about it. He was devoted to the idea of becoming a high-end wristwatch with precision jewelled bearing -- real old-school, no modern electronics. Later I saw that he was bumped from the show early in the season and got converted into a metronome, which is technically a chronometer, I suppose, but totally a burn for that guy.

A lot of Extract of Radium users got that invitation. It was a thing, an ephemeral fad-profit-nexus.

Speaking of ephemeral fad-profit-nexi, Euphoriolanus played a gig at The Nested Radical once. He was a big-time spokesman for Extract of Radium in those days, and he deployed his trademark rudeness with equal excesses of gusto and pride. But I spotted the telltale ivory shavings in his shirt cuffs -- it was obvious that scrimshaw abuse was taking its toll.

When I wasn't busy reprogramming myself with Extract of Radium, or waking up long enough to attend class, I watched a lot movies. The student union organized a showing of Johnny Got His Gun (movie), with a guest appearance by Dalton Trumbo. I got to meet him, briefly, after the movie. Nice guy. Year later, he would introduce me to John Brunner.

I happened to get free tickets to he first showing of Ridley Scott (nonfiction)'s new documentary film Alien. The critics hated it, hardly anybody went to see it, but I thought it was a masterpiece.

Around this time, the Antikythera Team approached me with a job offer. This was totally unexpected, and since the Chronometer business, I was wary about all things clock-related.

But it seemed like the coolest job in the world, so I dropped out of school and did some reverse-engineering work on the Antikythera mechanism.

Later it would turn out that my work had side-effects which annoyed Anarchimedes, making us enemies for life.

I knew nothing of this at the time, although I did find evidence that Anarchimedes and Daddy Warbucks were involved in the Spirograph weaponization program.

Working with the Antikythera Team was okay, but a majority of the team members were pushing a new project, the Shakespeare-Magellan Expedition, and of those team members, several were fanatics on the subject of A Clockwork Bard for Liebowitz.

I didn't think the Shakespeare-Magellan Expedition stood any chance of success, and as for the Clockwork Bard business, I was feeling nervous about all things clock-related -- flashbacks to the Chronometer? days.

Canterbury scrying engine computing simple display of the Mandelbrot set (nonfiction) using the statue of Lanfranc (nonfiction)

So I gave notice with the team, intending to go back to school and major in scrying engines. I put my stuff in storage, sub-let the apartment, and headed to England, where I visited the Canterbury scrying engine.

It's not the oldest, nor the largest, nor the most powerful of scrying engines. But it runs simple calculations flawless, and the cathedral-size monitor makes an impressive display.

It certainly made a hell of an impression on me -- from that point on, I devoted my life to programming. I was going to write my own scripts, run my own calculations, change the world. Not starting with the Canterbury engine, of course. It's among the most expensive engines in the world, and I was still a novice programmer. But someday. Someday!

I spent a lot of time teaching myself how to assemble analytical engines into scrying engines, and over time I started to attract attention from talent scouts.

Babbage simulators were just coming into vogue, and I wrote several plug-ins which became temporary fads, if not cult classics, with Babbage (nonfiction) fans.

I enjoyed life in England. They have the word "bloody" over there, for one thing, and it's a bloody useful word.

On the premise that taking up a quintessentially English hobby would me go native, or at least stiffen my upper lip, I took up sunspotting, and so met, and befriended Edward Lear.

I became -- not exactly Boswell (nonfiction) to his Johnson (nonfiction), but and certainly not a sidekick (nonfiction) in his crime-fighting career.

His honesty was disarming, and his self-analysis was a study in computational complexity theory (nonfiction).

Lear worked with Barragán, the celebrated architectural criminologist, on several cases. These two men had very different temperaments, but when they collaborated as crime-fighters, they seemed to function as a single entity.

Together, they captured The Eel, who was a slippery character indeed, and imprisoned him in the Nacreum.

Their success made enemies. Some of these could be disregarded. But not Daddy Warbucks.

Daddy Warbucks declared war on Lear and Barragán, and he had the means to back up his threats. But as usual, Warbucks was stingy with his fortune, and his lateness in paying troops and contractors triggered work slowdowns and a wave of petty theft.

Fiction cross-reference

• Lud the Gamer

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Game (nonfiction)