Tropical Disease

Three or four days into my busy Hawai'i trip I picked up a dry, unproductive cough that interfered tremendously with my singing voice. The low notes disappeared like water poured out on desert ground, and the high notes cut out unexpectedly, like AT&T's cell phone service. When I returned to the High Desert, I found that taking Hall's mentholyptus cough drops made the coughs MUCH more productive, but my voice is still under the weather. When you've been singing in a proto-professional setting like a college or university for more than two years it can be very depressing when you don't have control of the voice the way you used to. Last year in October I had a very bad sore throat during the college's production of HMS Pinafore, but managed to pull through our performances anyways (as Dick Deadeye). My voice has improved tremendously since then, and my mood sinks terribly when I fall ill with a respiratory disease of some kind. It seems as though singers get illnesses with negative vocal consequences more often than the average person, but perhaps the singers just notice it more?

Here's an MP3 recording of me singing "Vagabond" by Ralph Vaughan Williams in the fall recital.

I found out later that I probably acquired the coughing and chest congestion from my sister's boyfriend, Matt, who plays Warhammer 40,000. A while ago I picked up the game Dawn of War, a derivative of the previously-mentioned tabletop game, and really enjoyed it. I hadn't played a new RTS since Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun came out in August 1999. I had played others such as Homeworld but not until years after they were released, so DoW was quite a refreshing experience. Something even more interesting happened yesterday, when our nearest neighbour had a problem with his computers, and I was called over in the typical "help us computer man" fashion. The grandson in the family (they're traditional Hispanic) had purchased Command & Conquer: Generals but had not a prayer of running it on any of the five(!) computer towers in the house. I took three of them home to work on (not one over 300MHz!) and borrowed the C&C game to check it out. It was a real revelation to see how homogenous the RTS world has been getting lately. It went, of course, without saying that this is definitely a good thing. The unit-specific build and upgrade interface, in-field unit augmentation, mini-map location, and many other details were precisely the same. I much preferred DoW's left- and right-mouse button functions, as well as the impressive skirmish AI. You know how, in most RTS games, you beat back the enemy's puny attacks and slowly build a 'critical mass'? Well, the AI builds a 'critical mass' in Dawn of War quite handily, even on Hard or Harder.