THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAM FORTUNE

Sam Fortune, the protagonist of my latest novel, has led a pretty colorful life. I managed to get across most of his life story in the book, but here's a rather more detailed time line, for anyone who's interested (this includes some very minor spoilers).

1889. Sam is born in New York City.

1895. Sam's parents die of typhoid. Having no other family to take him in, he winds up living on the streets for two years, mostly around Mulberry Bend, and usually in the company of juvenile gangsters.

1897. Sam is caught by the police and eventually shipped out to northern California, as part of the Orphan Train Movement. The farmer who was supposed to have adopted him fails to show up at the train station, however, so he makes his way down to San Francisco, and later stows away on the Black Whale. He spends the next five years on the ship, after her captain, Julius Jaffery, decides to take him in (he becomes a cabin boy). The Black Whale sails all around the Pacific.

1902. Captain Jaffery sends thirteen-year-old Sam to a boarding school in Boston. He runs away two weeks later.

1902-1907. Sam works a variety of odd jobs in California, Nevada, and Utah, including stints as a ranch hand and as a roustabout in the circus. He begins boxing in 1906, at age seventeen (after starting out as a circus boxer), and fights Stanley Ketchel in early 1907 (Ketchel, shortly to become the world middleweight champion, cuts him a break).

1907. A few months after the Ketchel fight, Sam is knocked out by Red McClane. That evening, feeling rather despondent, he encounters Dr. James Blue, a British archaeologist. James, seeing something in him, decides to hire the eighteen-year-old Sam as a sort of bodyguard.

1907-1917. Sam works with James for ten years; they travel the world together and have dozens of adventures.

1917. Sam is drafted (aged twenty-eight) and fights in World War I, with the (predominantly Irish) 69th Infantry Regiment. James, who had received a deferment of some kind (Sam was never sure about the exact details), decides to volunteer at this point, becoming an artillery officer.

1918. James is killed, age forty-one, at the Battle of St Quentin Canal.

1919. Sam returns to the United States (with James's now-orphaned daughter Eleanor, who is eight years old) and joins his old war buddy Boswell's private investigation business (Boswell's a former Pinkerton). He trains a few boxers as well during this period.

1921. Sam quits the private investigation business for unspecified reasons.

1921-1925. Sam works for Diamond Shipping, once again traveling widely. Diamond specializes in shipping rare antiquities.

1925. Diamond Shipping folds early in the year. Sam, somewhat desperate, takes a job as a trainer for Jenks, a boxing manager, but quits in June after the best boxer in his stable, "Big" Joe Barlowe, blows an important fight. This is where the novel begins; Sam is thirty-six years old at this point.

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E3

Kind of a disappointing E3, at least for me. I'd heard the rumors about it being a multiplayer PvP kind of game, but I was still holding out hope that Fallout 76 might turn out to be a single-player RPG, or that it would at least have some kind of offline mode. Alack. The game is entirely online, and the focus seems to be solely on the base-building and the combat. I love Fallout, but I hate online games (people are jerks), so I'm afraid I'm going to have to skip this one.

It makes me worried for the future of the series, too. The most common response to complainers like me -- the #SavePlayer1 supporters who would rather play a story-driven, single-player Fallout title -- is that Fallout 76 is just a spin-off game, and that the inevitable Fallout 5 will surely return the series to its single-player roots. To these people I ask: Do you work for Bethesda? Can you see the future? Fallout 5 is likely to be a single-player experience, yes, but if Fallout 76 does well it's very possible the series might swerve off in this new direction permanently. And that would suck.

I was also disappointed by The Last of Us 2. I don't like that this game even exists. The first game was fantastic; it had an excellent story and an excellent conclusion. It simply didn't need a sequel.

I did like the look of the Resident Evil 2 remake, though (Resident Evil 2 is my favorite game in the series), and Cyberpunk 2077 looks interesting. And of course Fire Emblem: Three Houses has me intrigued, too; I'm a huge fan of the Fire Emblem series.

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WHAT I'M PLAYING

Working my way through Persona 5 at the moment. I'm liking the game, but not as much as I liked Persona 4 or even Persona 3. The game has great music, great gameplay, and a great aesthetic, and the characters are all decently interesting, but compared to the earlier games it just seems...soulless. Maybe it's the story; the Phantom Thieves stuff just isn't as compelling as Persona 4's Scooby-Doo murder-mystery. And something else: Persona 5's characters are just too cool for school. Persona 4's cast felt more real, more human. They were kids; they had weird quirks; they had real insecurities; they got themselves into funky misadventures (the guys having to escape the hot spring before the girls spotted them, for example); etc. One of the best moments in Persona 4 was when the kids discovered the TV world; Yosuke was so excited that he had to pee, and he started jumping around doing the pee-dance. There's none of that wackiness in Persona 5; the cast is comparatively bland and humorless, for the most part. The game takes itself very seriously, which is a real misstep, I think, because the overall story/concept isn't anywhere near as dark or as heavy as the two previous Persona games.

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WHAT I'M READING

Finished Jane Austen's Persuasion a few weeks ago; I burned through the whole thing in about two days. I always devour Jane Austen's books; I just can't get enough of that elevated prose. Thomas Babington Macaulay was absolutely right: Austen is a prose Shakespeare.

Right now I'm working on the original Tarzan of the Apes and Kurt Busiek's Astro City: Ordinary Heroes, and looking forward to Greg Keyes's The Reign of the Departed, the first novel in his new The High and Faraway series. Greg Keyes is one of my favorite authors, but he tends to spend a lot of time writing movie novelizations and tie-in's that I'm not terribly interested in, so I was really excited to see this new original series appear on Amazon.

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THE HORRORS OF THE SEPARATOR BUILDING

I work for a rural electrical cooperative in western Minnesota, installing and maintaining equipment for their load management program (this equipment turns off water heaters, air conditioners, and electric heaters during periods of heavy usage; in return for having this equipment installed, customers receive a lower rate on their bill). The cooperative also sells, installs, and maintains water heaters, so we're always having to work on these damn things.

So last week my dad and I (we work together) had to go to one of the big, corporate dairy farms and remove a water heater that they were no longer using. I wasn't looking forward to it, partly because I just don't like going to these big factory farms (for a variety of reasons), but mainly because this water heater was in their separator building. The separator building is where they dump the cow manure; the manure passes through a series of machines, which separate out the liquids and the solids. The liquid waste is used as fertilizer, while the solid waste is used as bedding for the cows (it turns into a brown, powdery substance, which doesn't smell, the moisture having been baked out of it).

These buildings smell like nightmares. I've been in several of these, but the one I visited last week was the worst, probably because it didn't have any real ventilation. Opening the door to the building was like getting punched in the face. It's an absolutely vile, almost overpowering odor.

It's hard to describe the smell of baking cow manure. It's a sweet, pungent, rotten sort of smell, and it's extremely aggressive; pinching your nose shut against it won't do you any good, because you can smell it through your mouth (don't ask me how). Worse, it clings to everything; you pretty much have to burn your clothes after you visit these places.

But the work needed doing, so we done it. After working in the building for about five minutes, my nostrils started burning; five minutes after that my nose started running, and my eyes started watering. I had to step outside several times for (comparatively) fresh air. (We'd received a warning before we went in there: if everything starts to look blue, it means you're not getting enough oxygen and you should get the hell out of there. Fortunately it didn't take more than a few minutes for us to cut this water heater out of the line.)

Good times. Here's some pictures.



Some warnings outside the entrance.



The curtains are to keep the cow manure from splattering all over everything.



The separation machinery.



Last picture is of the water heater; after a few years in that environment it was practically rotting away.

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BH

Thinking about making this a monthly feature.