perldiver

It's been a tough two weeks.

• As everyone reading this probably knows, on March 4th the Good Egg himself (E.Gary Gygax) passed away.
• Today we lost Arthur C. Clarke.

These two men, neither of whom I have ever met, have profoundly shaped my life.  Despite the fact that I haven't actually played RPGs in about two decades (beyond one or two one-shots), I still identify as a gamer, and I can still recite the history of most of the artifacts from the First Edition DMG--including, of course, the Ring of Gaxx.  And I know the story of the gazebo, and the one about the head of Vecna.  And these stories and experiences have given me lifelong friends and endless hours of pleasure.

Likewise, it seems that I had my nose stuck in an SF book for most of my childhood and teenage years...and I still do now, whenever I have time.  And, although I was never a voracious Clarke reader the way I was for Asimov, I read a bunch of his work with great enjoyment, and read a whole lot more by other authors who were influenced by him.

Finally, over the last ten years I've started to believe that space is actually an achievable goal, that perhaps I too can go for a space-float in my lifetime, or mine an asteroid, or see the rings of Saturn from upclose and personal.  And that, in so doing, humanity as a whole can spread out from the tiny little island of our birth and explore the great wide oceans and continents that surround us.  That we can harness  the energy and material resources of the solar system in order to make the world a better, happier place...and that this could happen in my lifetime.  This is a view that Sir Clarke advocated throughout his life--he was the one who invented the concept of geostationary communication satellites and predicted, back in the 1940s, that men would walk on the Moon by 2000.

It seems altogether fitting that, as I look out my window, the city is cloaked in grey fog.