VIRTUAL ESCAPE ROOM

 We signed up with virtualescaping.com for a game called Artifact Isle.

We could be a team of 6 but ended up with only 5, for a reasonable price of $35.

We were recommended to sign on a few minutes before, on a desktop, laptop, or newer ipad (2019), with 90 minutes to escape. We meet in a lobby, where we can strategize before pressing the start button. The team leader is the first person on the platform. We communicated within the ingame video chat.

If we get stuck, we can have up to 3 hints during the game. Another hint we were given was that not all clues will solve a problem at the same location as you find the clue, so I plan to take notes! Apparently, we may also have to split up to be in different locations around the island to solve the clues.

I am excited!

What I know:

I was given a diary from my late grandfather, and the information in it leads me to a forbidden cave and its treasures. My grandfather, and others, have been at this island, but no one seems to have survived. There are many clues to find, but the island is sinking!

From the pictures, there is a tropical beach with a 3 digit code, there are totems that are built in different sequences, there is cave with wooden crates and a movie projector, and a manmade entrance with totems on either side.

Things we had to do:

notice colours, groups of things, maps

CODES: coloured shape directions, codes, scramble words

Things I learned - if I have the key, I am fast! "Put me in coach. I'm ready to play, today!"

Even virtual escape rooms are fun!

Not everything means anything!

I like cooperation. People who just play around and don't explain themselves don't contribute much to the team. I

TIPS from The Escape Game

1. Communication is the key. Clearly and continually communicate. There are no bad ideas. Speak up if you think something is worth exploring. Close the loops.

2. Your game guide is an invaluable tool. Have them search the entire space after entering the room. 

3. When in doubt, ask for a clue. Don't get stuck too long on any one puzzles. There will be a lot to solve!

4. Make sure you are online in advance, and that you have everything you need downloaded before your start time!

5. Split your screen if you can.

6. Computers and laptops are better than ipads, so that you can see both your teamates and your game dashboard at the same time.

7. If you can, get a 360 degree scan of the room on entering.

8. Keep a pen and paper handy, to decipher or rearrange numbers, letters or words. 

9. Give clear instructions to your game guide.

10. Stay organized! Keep track of clues items and kinds of locks and codes you need to escape, and where you found them!

Have fun!

CLEANING UP MY RAM

I am almost not even able to use my computer. It am no longer able to open anything without delay, and when I use the "sweeping" app EaseUS CleanGenius, I have no memory freed, even though I have 3 GB in inactive memory, and the free memory is 110 MB of 8 GB!

So I am going to restart my computer (I tend to leave it on because the startup takes too long), and follow this advice.

These are the steps will try and update:

1. Restart your computer. Done

2. Update software. Done

3. Change browser. Still using safari.(chrome/firefox are better for RAM)

4. Clear my cache. This helped.

Finder-- Go tab--Go to folder dropdown--~/Library/Caches--Go to folder--Edit tab--Select All--File tab--Move to trash

5. Disable extensions

Recommended to follow:

Spotlight (command+space)

Finder -- Preferences -- right click -- clear (chose open folders in tabs --instead of new window)

Activity -- memory - i (information) -- quit (i didn't highlight and didn't recognize ANYTHING!)

              -- CPU 

Lastly, recommended to advanced user (so for me, to be used with caution as a last resort!)

Open TERMINAL

Write "sudo purge"

This should clear inactive

BOOK REVIEW: GARCIA'S HEART

Liam Durcan may have written his Opus Magnum, and if I were him, I would incredibly proud to have peaked with this novel. It is complex, beautifully written, and required me to google definitions, geography, history and art!   

I have not read his short stories, which was the first thing he published, but I did read The Measure of Darkness, which was well-done and a fascinating idea (an architect that loses both a portion of his vision and the ability to understand its loss i. e. neglect), but the character is not very sympathetic. 
In contrast, the protagonist in this story (one of only a few characters that is NOT a Garcia) is complex while still being sympathetic.

This is credited to being a "neurologic narrative" (Barbara Sibbald CMAJ), although I saw an interview where Dr. Durcan minimizes his role as neurologist in writing. Certainly, both novels I read do not overdo it, but have been certainly well-informed by his medical knowledge. I also learned in an interview that he doesn't do research, but his character Patrick refers to those who do as "narcissistic". 

I loved his imagery, and there were so many perfect phrases and sentences that, at first, I started writing them down, but had to stop, because I would have needed pages to note them all!

Here are a few gems:

"A boat. Affluence squared. The confluence of money and stretches of leisure time."

"The trumpet of Josh's raised righteous voice ushering them out."

"The allegations against Hernan outlined in the book were like anti-matter, altering the rules of the universe as he knew it."

"...causing his heart to make that thin-air no ropes climb into his throat."

When his heart started beating fast with emotion: "He knew the circuitry: pathways converging on his amygdala that, in response, fired like an automatic weapon, a heartbeat pattering after, spent shell casings bouncing off the floor."

And my favourite: "For all of the mighty tasks a brain was capable of doing, nothing was underrated as the ability to forget."

Here are some vocabulary words:

prosopagnosis - loss of ability to recognize faces
beatific - blissful
Shibboleth - the motto or catchphrase identifying yourself with a group (something that distinguishes outsiders from the group, as in Judges with the pronounciation of the Ephraimites of the word enough to betray them and have them killed

autodidact - a self-taught person
scion - descendent of a notable family
parse - analyze for underlying structure or meaning
redolent - fragrant

Some ideas:
Crying baby dilemma thought experiment and fMRI (solved by a mother in the novel) 
Classically utilitarianism says killing the child to save the village is worth it (John Stuart Mill) vs Deontology says that killing the child is wrong (Kant)

Declaration of Tokyo (hadn't read it!)

A physician shall not "countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture" (boarding in ER with no lights being able to be switched off, etc.

Always the ornery editor, I thought the spelling "en-passant" strange coming from a Montrealer, and would have spelled it in French italics "en passant". I wondered if it was blooper on the beach at Scheveningen that the sand was between them and Germany, when I think it would have more like England. Lastly, he refers to something gravely important not to "bear repeating". I think it does bear repeating, but she doesn't. That should be described some other way. 

Still, nitpicking aside, this is a monumental work crafted sentence by sentence like Lin Manuel Miranda wrote the raps for Hamilton. It's worth the read, and a real credit to the writer.

I have two things I have to ask next time I see him on consult service: When is Flash Forward coming out (I look forward to a female protagonist), and what's the deal with the cover art? The brain is oriented upside down, where does Mercury and the letters K and S fit in, and is that a sea anemone?!

And if you need a reader for your next novel, I am happy to give my feedback! I am looking to transition to another career, and proof-reader would be one place I can see myself!

Read it! 4/5

BOOK REVIEW: MADNESS OF CROWDS

 A book a year is an incredible feat, and Louise Penny continues to deliver. Sometimes, though, I wonder if the editing was really finished, and whether or not extending the deadline wouldn't improve some of her last works. This was one of them.

One of things that kept repeating in my head while listening to the audiobook, was the warning from Stephen King (or was it George Lucas, or was it Stephen King to George Lucas in reference to Jar Jar Binks) to "Kill your darlings".

If Ruth's duck never said "Fuck Fuck Fuck" again, I would be forever grateful. How long do ducks live, anyways? It feels like Rosa is getting far fetched in her survival, even if Ruth is somehow providing her optimal care, which I wouldn't think is being carried around everywhere. 

How many times did she refer to "The Asshole Saint", and sometimes still needed to repeat who he was. We know! Your readers are not idiots!

I got tired of hearing about specters, even though I spent advent reading Dickens and watching different versions of The Christmas Carol. Referring to specters in the Victorian era is okay. More than once is too much in 2021!

That being said, Ms. Penny tells a nice story while making social commentary appropriate for the times. 

The most annoying conclusion, but who could know how little omicron would be affected by the vaccine, was that the pandemic was over with herd immunity from vaccinations, and life returned to normal, but she gets to write fiction, so I can accept this and move on.

I did find that a Nobel Peace Prize winner was an unlikely guest in Three Pines, and was disappointed that she was played as the simpleton at first. I was honestly aggrieved by Gamache's decision to ignore his son-in-law's breech of protocol, and not upholding the morals that he dug in with in the past with much more at stake. 

Unless this is going somewhere, if Gamache is no longer Gamache, I think it's time to develop other character and go somewhere other than Three Pines.

It's worth a read, but not a recommendation. 3/5

BOOK REVIEW: VIRAL BY ROBIN COOK

 I picked up this (audio)book while waiting for the one I really wanted to read, Pandemic. It has not been easy. I thought that this was a departure for Robin Cook, and read reviews that agreed with me, but when I reviewed the 35 odd books that Robin Cook has written, I realized that I haven't read that many, and what I read was a very long time ago.

Coma was old paperback copies when I read it, but that was still back in the 1990s when Kevin Bacon played a medical resident in Flatliners. I would have to look at the stories of Fever, Outbreak, and Vital Signs to be sure I actually read them. For me, Robin Cook was a master of medical thrillers, but maybe I didn't read that many of them!

Fast forward to this week, and I found myself reacting badly to the unsympathetic character that leads the story. His idyllic life falls apart when his wife contracts "EEE" on the beach at Cape Cod, and his low budget insurance plan becomes a looming debt that he cannot pay. It should be a tragedy, but his egocentric brain carries on without feeling any human emotions of grief and loss, he outsources his sick daughter to a variety of women, including strangers that are all more than eager to serve his needs for free, and he gets angry at every turn of events, bordering on entitled rage with every emergency encounter. 

It drove me nuts!

The reader of the audiobook made a few mistakes, calling Ver-sed "Versed", and the French patient was called the male french version Jean  when it was supposed to be Jeanne. (True, Jean in English as a female sounds like denim, but you still have to say the -n at the end when you say it in French!) The accent varied too much for me, and I would expect that any French speaker who repeatedly used the colloquial word "shannanigans" may not be speaking with an accent. Similarly, he assumed the American ER doc who has a Sikh name had an East Indian (?Irish) accent, when it was more likely he talked like an American, because he was! 

I kept waiting for the husband to find out that his wife's cardiac arrest was a medical error, with Versed 5 then 10 mg more in keeping with Valium doses, and possibly the reason she died, and not the seizure. Alas, that was not the plot twist.

I have great sympathy for the writing of a bad book. Even that takes a monumental effort. I wondered if at age 80, we are seeing the cognitive decline expected of the age or if a ghost writer was writing their first attempt at a copy cat (the name Robin Cook, like Robert Ludlum, is a brand unto itself). The prose was tediously repetitive, and the story read like a report, with no plot, no tension (except for the toxicity that emanated from the un-woke immature man that unfortunately talked the entire time), and no complexity of emotion or normal life. Characters were one dimensional, and the ideas were pat (no charge, everyone perfectly followed the covid precautions, a woman hired for her business savvy and another who was a total stranger were used as caregivers with the father oscillating between overreaction to neglect of his daughter, and in total denial of the needs of his family, colleagues and himself. If this was the tragedy, I could accept it as a character flaw, but it seemed that the author was unaware that a father could feel emotion, and make decisions that would acknowledge the feelings and needs of others, and not only himself.

What is the worst, SPOILER ALERT, this is a story of an angry shallow man who rages his way through the health care system, and repeatedly assaults health care workers verbally and then physically. His behaviour, while understandable to be inappropriate given the circumstances, is unchecked and totally inappropriate. The doctor's response of ambivalence is unlikely, given assault is uncommon, and would not be tolerated. Brian's misguided rage has no insight into what the real issue was, and his - this grief is terrible because it is no one's fault.  This reality never even comes up. 

The coming reality of mosquito borne disease in the ongoing climate changes, and the inequity of for-profit health care are real issues that bear discussing. Vigilante justice and the unlikely escape of the law is unacceptable, and unchecked misguided rage and  assault are serious issues, and not to be romanticized and oversimplified, as in this book.

I don't recommend this book, and give it a 1/5.