Lev Lafayette's journal

A couple of weeks ago, I made initial preparations for an upcoming trip to South America and Antarctica with my friendly neighbour Kate R., and last week, payments were made for said voyage. In addition to the tour's planned route to Lima, Cusco, Machu Picchu, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the Antarctic Peninsula, the Falkland Islands, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires (again), we've added a couple of nights in Santiago. To say the least, the trip isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a great deal of ruggedness involved on the itinerary, and volume makes a difference as well. There are many practical tasks to be undertaken between now and December, including improving my questionable competence in the Spanish language. I have smashed my way through the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile introductory course in Spanish over the past fortnight, at least in part helped by an existing "fairly good" B1 level on Duolingo.

Eschewing the numerous optional activities offered by the tour company that are not really to my taste, I am scanning attractions that suit my inclinations toward museums, art galleries, archaeology, natural beauty, and, in the South American style, anything relating to their surrealist and magical realist literary traditions. I already have firmly marked out "La Chascona", built by Pablo Neruda, who, apart from winning the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature for his surrealist love poems, was also a career diplomat and politician. Another site of this ilk to visit will be the "Centro Cultural Borges" in Buenos Aires, dedicated to the mythologist, writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges. This said, the pair of them come with certain controversies, as if often the case, the art and the artist make a troublesome union.

It seems fitting that so much of the trip will be an exploration of wondrous landscapes in reality, history, archeology, and the literary tradition of surrealism and magical realism, and, I readily admit, I will be drawing a great deal of this travel experience in writing my "Call of Cthulhu" project "Fragments of Time, Slices of Mind". As that is being written, I have decided to run a short campaign using "ElfQuest", based on the comic series by Wendy and Richard Pini with their palaeolithic and telepathic characters. In the most recent months, I have been quite involved in a game run by Andrew D., "Night's Dark Agents", which is a story involving modern European special operations teams versus vampires. Finally, on this trajectory and of marginal interest to anyone not deeply into the lore, I have picked up (at an incredibly cheap price) an unpunched copy of Chaosium's "Dragon Pass", close to fifty years old and in "almost new" condition.

I've spent a good portion of my free time in the past week doing an extensive literature review for my MSc dissertation in information systems. As literature reviews should do, it addresses a core concern of my inquiry: a major conflict between business and economics, as both academic disciplines and professional practice; in former, there is an attempt to reduce competition to gain a monopolistic advantage (even if theorists like Porter call "competitive advantage"), whereas the latter argues that such behaviour harmful to productivity and economic welfare as a whole. Even after reviewing various business models for free-and-open-source software, the solution is not yet clear. Capitalist investors are less interested in innovation or even a general increase in economic welfare than they are in the acquisition of economic rents, "information landlordism" if I may coin a phrase. Schumpeterian rents might be an alternative theoretical model in non-general software products (e.g., proprietary bespoke extensions) but any sort of copyright regime does set up an institutional perverse incentive for extensions. In any case, it provided for some appropriate background thoughts as I smashed by way through the GNU Octave dependency tree, before getting tripped up at the end with an MPI build of Gnuplot; a little annoying.

Making use of a generous gift voucher from Damien and Jack B for my birthday last year, caseopaya and I went to Whiskey and Alement. I have to be in a particular mood for whiskey, and this was not the time (it rarely is, I have litres of the stuff at home). The bar was crowded and noisy, just what I don't want in such an establishment, but they did have a good variety of whiskeys and non-whiskeys and quite reasonably priced, as long as one doesn't account for the somewhat bland and pricey wines that we started with. I ended up having delved into Delord Armagnac ('83, if that makes much of a difference) and a Grout Calvados, both of which were absolutely superb, whilst caseopaya stuck to her favourite gin. It certainly did remind me that I need to get some Calvados into my otherwise pretty well-stocked home bar. Delicious stuff, and only further strengthens my affection towards the Breton people.

Apart from that, I am continuing my new year's objective in publication writing, which was not an easy target. As the days progress, I am increasingly aware that any sort of reasonably staggered publication schedule requires temporal concentration on particular works, which is not something that I am particularly fond of, and I suspect most other people on the planet are the same. When one's brain is overflowing on one subject, it is a release to concentrate on something else for a while (or eat, or do housecleaning, etc). Worse still, one gets into their head crazy ideas about additional publications, which may have aesthetic value, but would be require something else being delayed in its stead. On that note, I am considering a contemporary-cum-cyberpunk supplement for Papers & Paychecks, based on my own tangental pub, Emails & Direct Deposits. This is, after all, the most appropriate year for such things to come out.