My daughter is crying again.

I say ‘again’ without any sort of malice. Tiny Sweat Pea is less than ten weeks old and crying is to be expected. It’s what she does. Well, along with feeding and that other thing.

My spouse has been home with her all day, and it is definitely my turn to soothe, but something else has my attention: My shiny new Dell XPS gaming rig and a little toon who is diligently staring at a war fork, unblinking, trying to decipher its construction.

This is Ultima Online and I am busy Grandmastering a skill called ‘Arms Lore.’

There hasn’t been much call for this skill in my 10+ year history with the game. With a recent update, however, the gods of Sosaria altered the laws of reality and transformed Arms Lore from a “Misc” pursuit to one required for dedicated armor- and weapons-crafters. To produce the highest-quality wares, one must master this discipline.

Words mean stuff, and I chose ‘discipline’ with care. It’s almost a form of punishment to train Arms Lore to its highest level. In the past – before the Sosarian laws of physics changed – it wasn’t enough to study a single weapon or body covering endlessly. Instead, it was generally considered prudent to craft a large number of daggers at the local smithy, then study them – one after the other, never repeating – until your knowledge increased a tiny fraction. At that point, you started the process again with dagger number one. If you ran out of daggers before your ability improved, you either crafted another batch or waited until dawn (server maintenance) for the chance to learn some more.

Today, however, I benefit from two things that did not exist when the World Gem shattered in 1998. First, the gods have relented and relaxed their punishment of repetitive actions. Players no longer need to take extended sea voyages to nowhere or use infinitely large numbers of items to reach their learning goal. Second, and infinitely more important, the Kingdom has been Reborn.

Ultima Online is home to a vastly conservative player base, wedded to their beloved two-dimensional client. I am not one of those. In fact, my toon is staring back at me from behind a 17.1 inch rendering of that world as I have never seen it before.

It looks terrible – or, rather, it did until I chose the ‘Legacy Art’ display option. Now, it’s fan-banging-tastic. But familiar graphics and house decorating are not what we’re discussing today. We’re discussing punishment in the form of endless, mindless, pointless mouse-clicking.

Other lands in other dimensions, even Sosaria to some extent, know ‘the grind:’ repetitive quests to kill the same foul beast, usually in the same geographic area. Crafters don’t even get the benefit of an occasional adrenaline pulse; we sew and stitch, pound and fold, sand and polish until our fingers are numb. Not so in the new Kingdom.

I carefully shift Tiny Sweet Pea to my shield arm and begin wielding the mouse with great efficiency. First – create a new macro. The hieroglyphs are intuitive and fall neatly into place, four of them in total to complete one session of weapons-study. I inscribe a new rune on my notepad and assign it the arcane symbol ‘=’ as a reminder. A test run fails – I’ve transposed the middle two glyphs. Not a problem. A moment’s effort and the new method proves successful. Now, the less-fun part: I arrange the same four pictographs in a repeating pattern.

My eyes begin to blur. My hand twitches. Tiny Sweet Pea drools enthusiastically. Somewhere around iteration 24, I lose count. Surely this will be enough.

Thanks to a new feature, those 24 action sequences become 240 in the blink of an eye. And not a moment too soon, for Tiny Sweet Pea has grown bored with the whole affair.

Have you ever been close to an angry infant? I mean really close, not two-seats-in-front-of-one-on-Southwest close. There is no describing the sensation, and when she’s yours you just want to make this pretty little person happy again so you can go back to giggles and experimentation with those crazy things called ‘toes.’

So I bounce around the room singing “Devil Went Down to Georgia.” My apologies to Mr. Daniels, but I’ll never understand why I started singing this ridiculous song one sleepless night when T.S.P. was first born. I’m even more at a loss to explain why it works.

About the same time the devil opens up his case, my toon gets a gain. Then another. By the time Johnny’s chicken is pickin’ out dough, I’ve gained a full point.

The macro ends. I invoke my mystic ‘=’ another time. We move on to “The Gambler.”

Fast forward two days. From my starting point in New Haven, I’ve learned 575 tricks involving Arms Lore. Instinct tells me there are only 92 new facts to learn before I attain the rank of Grandmaster. I’d be there already, except the gods foresaw my ill-intentioned use of folded paper and an antique measuring weight and disabled the ability to learn while I sleep. Natch.

Instead, I’ve helped my daughter learn to eat her fist and read a few chapters in my new book, all the while tapping ‘=’ every 5-7 minutes. I could extend that by repeating a few more sigils, but 7 minutes is enough to read 10 pages or talk to my spouse without undue interruption.

A vast improvement over the way the world used to be. Satyrs help.

~M

Great story I'm right there with you re: KR - and congrats on the arrival of your Tiny Sweet Pea!