The AQ test

Charming. Both FallenPegasus and Zoneryie posted their scores on the Autism Quotient Test. The test reads, "The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives."

I scored 37.

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I backed out of the 2.6.3 kernel for my home box. It was so nice, so fast and shiny and all, but the ATAPI cd-record doesn't work (it seems to hang badly probing SCSI psuedo-channel 1, which I don't have) and the SCSI cd-record needs a reboot after every burn. On 2.4.24, I can repeatedly burn CDs all night long without complaint. So that's okay. Also, the NVidia driver for 2.6.3 isn't quite up there yet, so I'll wait. On 2.4.24, I get full three-D.

After running through the Service Pack 1 upgrade of Windows 98SE, the sound stopped working an Warcraft 3 just hangs. Time to re-install.

Lain is still down so my access to the outside world is seriously hampered by having a major chunk of my thought processes hidden behind a black screen even I can't reach through. Fortunately, Lain networks fine so I can still get to the data, even work with it, but it's awkward.

Flashback Failure

When I was thirteen years old, the age when every young man's brain has been replaced with that of a rather stupid dog in heat, I was living in the Florida Keys. For six weeks that summer, I was on a sailboat with seven other people: two adults and five teenagers, all approximately my age. The teenagers were evenly split genderwise, the adults were both in their fifties. Don't ask how this happened; such an arrangement would probably never be allowed in our paranoiac decade. But there I was.

I had a terrible crush on a girl on board named Molly. I never said a thing to her. We used to keep watch, 3am-7am, and every few days it would be Molly and I together. She was a pretty girl, the least stuck-up of the crew, but very quiet. Frightened. I tried to be a gentleman; I hope I succeeded.

Those were a wonderful six weeks from which many of my stories have had their origins: the isolation from the mainland, the crystal blue waters, the dolphins and rays. The sunburn. The two storms we sailed through, losing our jib in the second one. Remembering Bill, who was probably 52 at the time, climb the mainmast in terrifying winds to free the jib before it caught the full storm and capsized us. Being alone and dependent upon others for my survival. The food, which was still good despite it being sailor's rations. The fishing for lobsters, and how every one of us kids failed to catch even one, but Bill brought twelve back to the boat for baking. Fishing off the fore-nets, where nobody caught anything except this one guy who seemed able to summon barracuda the way an old lady with a loaf of bred can rouse a flock of pigeons, one after another over the edge of the boat.

One of the things that I remember most clearly was that there were two (count 'em, TWO) eight-track tapes on board. For you youngsters, the eight-track was a primitive analog music storage device optimized to auto-reel as it played out, so you never needed to turn it over or reset it to play the music. It was huge and clunky, with no search or forward capability, and it was ugly and they're dead now and good riddance. The two tapes were Kraftwerk's Kraftwerk and Uriah Heep's Demons and Wizards.

I recently acquired a copy of Demons and Wizards, and my thought when I put the CD in was, "I wonder what this'll feel like." I haven't listened to this music since 1978, and it was the only thing I had to listen to during six of the more formative weeks of my life.

Oddly, I didn't feel much at all. My primary reaction was, "Eh, another one of those seventies bands." Not terribly good, a sort of mellow Deep Purple. This is supposed to be their most standout album. The production values are good (surprisingly so) for the era. But the flashback didn't happen.

Maybe it's because I have mined those memories so deeply for stuff to write about that the memories, such as they are, are set and aren't amenable to affect from such tokens of the past as the one album that was there at the time.

I suspect this is a Curse of the Writer. My past isn't a source of nostalgia so much as material. And once I've taken apart a time and place in my life and looked at it from every angle and applied the lessons learned to my beloved characters, there's not much left except the mere telling of it all.

I hope I do that reasonably well.