As I continue my leisurely stroll through the fallow, yet fertile fields of chess variants, I’m finding a few fascinating oddities. For one thing, the field seems to be a lot less active than it was ten years ago. The Chess Variant Pages is still on the Web, but if you click through to their “Variant of the Month” page, you discover that nobody has even bothered to nominate a variant of the month since 2006.

My guess: smartphones. The kind of geeky guys who think chess variants are cool are mostly the kind of geeky guys who like downloading apps to their smartphones. I guess I’m the exception. The only app I’ve ever downloaded was Pandora, and that’s so I can listen to music while I’m at the gym.

But then, I lost interest in chess variants ten years ago too. Here’s another theory: Inventing variants is easy. Playing them well is a lot harder. And the more variants there are, the less likely you are to master any of them.

Even so, the possibilities are endlessly intriguing. Using a standard chess board — or maybe one that’s 8×10 or 10×10 at most — you can staff the players’ armies with a huge variety of dynamic and mind-boggling pieces. And if you want to try out these pieces in actual game-play, it’s easy — at least if you use Windows. Zillions of Games is only $25. It hasn’t been updated in a decade, but it works fine in Windows 7. (I haven’t tested it in Windows 8.) Zillions scripts for the pieces mentioned below are all free for download.

The elk I mentioned above. When it’s sitting on a white square, it’s a knight. When it’s sitting on a black square, it’s a rook. The script lets you choose whether to replace your knights or your rooks with elks. Either choice will have a major effect on the opening and development. If your elks replace the rooks, white has an elk on the king-side, but black’s elk is on the queen-side. This asymmetry affects everything. If you replace the knights with elks, white can’t play N-f3, because the piece on g1 is, at the moment, a rook.

A scorpion is a pawn with a little extra juice. In addition to its normal moves, it can make a non-capturing move forward at a wide angle, for instance from e4 to c5 or g5. This simple change lets you open a file for a rook or fix a doubled pawn.

The marshall and the archbishop were proposed a hundred years ago. They’ve been given various names by various game designers. Just as the queen combines the moves of rook and bishop, the marshall combines the moves of rook and knight, and the archbishop combines the moves of bishop and knight. They’re highly maneuverable and deadly.

On a large board the knights are at a disadvantage, because they’re short-range pieces. So how about using knightriders instead? This piece can continue making knight leaps in the same direction, all in a single move, as long as the squares it lands on are empty.

Many variants use cannons, a piece adapted from Asian versions of chess. A cannon leaps over one or more pieces and continues its move (in a rook-like sliding manner) on the far side. A cannon can hide behind a pawn and still threaten an enemy piece — nasty.

One of the more interesting pieces I’ve run into is the trebuchet. It’s a catapult. It moves one or two squares in any direction, like a short-range queen, but when it moves, the nearest piece behind it is thrown forward to the next square past it.

The trebuchet can’t actually capture enemy pieces itself, not in the usual way. Neither can the coordinator. The coordinator moves like a queen, and captures enemy pieces that share an orthogonal or diagonal with both the coordinator’s destination square and the coordinator’s king. It can capture two or more pieces in a single move, but to use it effectively you’ll have to get your king out into the action.

And so on. The hard part is figuring out which game you’d like to focus on so as to learn how one or two of these pieces actually affect the tactics. I’m a lousy chess player, so it’s kind of dispiriting when Zillions uses its trebuchet to catapult a pawn down to my end of the board so it promotes to a queen.

In a couple of months I’m scheduled to go into the Medicare system. Kaiser Permanente offers supplemental Medicare coverage that pays for a dentist. (At present, I’m paying cash, because I only need the routine cleanings.) The supplemental coverage is through an HMO plan called DeltaCare Dental. DeltaCare has three dentists in Livermore, so this morning I drove around to check them out.

I was not impressed.

The first office I stopped at was closed, although the sign in the window alleged that it’s open on Wednesdays. The third office was also closed, and the sign in the window indicated this was normal. (Closed on a Wednesday?) The third office was in a strip mall, tucked between a hair salon and a donut shop. Not a promising location in which to find a great dentist.

The second office was open. I didn’t have a lot of questions on my agenda, but I asked how long the two dentists practicing there had been in that location. “Since February,” the young woman said. (It’s now June.) “Before that they were down in the South Bay.” I’m thinking, why would they relocate? No patients? But I didn’t ask that.

The office looked and sounded, frankly, deserted except for the woman behind the counter. “How many hygienists do you have working here?” I asked.

“No hygienists,” she replied. “Just the two dentists.”

Okay, so these two dentists have so little business they’re doing the routine cleanings themselves? And the other two offices are closed on a Wednesday morning. I think I need to talk to somebody at Kaiser about this. It smells a little fishy.

I’d like to have a stable computer system for making music. Boy, wouldn’t that be swell? But achieving that goal is about on a par with gazing upon a tantalizing mirage in the desert and then actually reaching the mirage by trekking across the sand dunes.

Once in a while I start thinking I might like to put together an electronic music set for live performance. Of course I’d need to have a stable computer system in order to do that. I have lots of options, but none of them comes close to being ideal.

Probably the most stable music performance software around is Propellerhead Reason. I like Reason a lot, and not only is it rock-solid, it’s cross-platform. I could use it on either a PC or a Mac laptop — a big plus. But there are minuses too. Reason won’t host third-party VST plug-ins, which means that I would have to do without some of my favorite software instruments. Among them are the instruments I use to play microtonal music. Reason flat-out won’t do microtonal music, and that’s one of my major areas of interest.

As a side note, however, adding VST instrument tracks to Reason is not terribly difficult. Reason can run as a ReWire client within another recording app (take your pick). Just load the VSTi into the host, develop the track, and export it as audio. Then quit both programs, re-launch Reason by itself, and load the audio file(s). If you have to jump through this hoop over and over while working on the music, doing so would get tiresome. But once the other instruments have been converted to audio, you no longer need the host app. Reason becomes a stable, self-contained program again.

But is that the best solution? For one thing, it’s not the right way to do microtonal music. Reason would become a pointless encumbrance in that scenario.

I like Image-Line FL Studio a lot too. It hosts VST plug-ins, no problems there. It’s Windows-only, which means that if I decide I’d like to do a live set, I’d need to buy a new Windows laptop … and I really don’t want to mess with Windows 8. From the reports I’ve read, Windows 8 is a stinker. How much longer I’ll be able to find a new laptop that comes with Windows 7 is anybody’s guess.

FL Studio doesn’t like doing multiple time signatures. It will grudgingly allow you to create music in multiple time signatures, but FL itself will insist on pretending that your piece has only one time signature from beginning to end. I often need to use multiple time signatures, and it’s annoying when FL thinks the bar lines are 3/8 off from where they actually are. Mental arithmetic, anyone?

FL doesn’t export MIDI files properly — it refuses to include controller data in the exported file. Last year I needed to export a bunch of tracks and finish a piece in Cubase, because FL became very unhappy when trying to play the piece. This was most likely because the piece had multiple tempo changes. I use tempo changes less often, but I don’t want to have to go through that hassle again. Also, I’ve noticed that tech support at Image-Line tends to be a bit defensive. At times, they seem to take the attitude that there must be something wrong with your system, rather than considering the possibility that their software might be at fault.

So how about Steinberg Cubase 7? It’s cross-platform, it hosts VSTs, and it’s happy to do multiple time signatures. I like Cubase a lot too — been using it for 20 years, very nice program. But just now I tried launching Cubase and loading a sketch that I recorded last fall (using version 6.5). Cubase crashed. I tried twice, and it couldn’t load that sketch. I have no idea why.

If your creative activity involves working on one studio project at a time, finishing it, and then moving on to the next project, this type of malfunction won’t happen often, and it won’t sabotage you too deeply (unless it happens on a project for a paying client). At worst, you lose one project, and you can usually avoid that disaster by not upgrading your system while you’re in the middle of a project. Upgrade between projects, make sure the new system is stable, and only start a new project after you’re satisfied that everything is working.

But my creative work is not nearly that bolted down. I have lots of sketches lying around. Sometimes I open up a year-old sketch, notice that it has some potential, and decide to finish it. Sometimes I think I’ve finished a piece, but a year later I realize it has a few flaws that I want to fix. At that point I need to load it again and do some more work.

Oh, and in case it’s not obvious, I seldom use audio tracks. Most of the creative work is in the form of MIDI arrangements. Creating audio stems of MIDI tracks is a really good idea when a project is finished, but doing it every day while working on a project would be insane, so I have to be able to load older work and also load the VST plug-ins that play the tracks.

The back-and-forth creative process, reloading old material and reworking it, would be essential if I were serious about doing a live performance set. I have some older pieces that might be very suitable for a concert set. Re-recording them from scratch would be possible, but labor-intensive, so loading the existing files (if I can) would save a lot of time.

If I can’t reload and edit older work, putting together a set (whether it’s for performance or for a CD) is a prospect to be dreaded. Unless, of course, I decide to use Reason and forget all about microtonal tunings. (Grumble, grumble, grumble.)

What’s the solution? I have no idea.

Over the past 200 years, many fine chess players have explored just about every conceivable series of opening moves to great depth. The real game-play begins only after eight or ten moves by each player, when you’ve plodded out past the end of the dock and dropped into the water. Assuming you know where the dock is; if you don’t, you may find yourself plunged into the water early on — not a good thing.

Another reason chess is less than captivating for me is because the computer can always beat me. The computer can beat almost everybody, a fact that’s bound to be at least mildly discouraging if you’re looking for an absorbing pastime.

Chess is not a single game; it’s a huge family of games. Chinese and Japanese chess have long traditions of their own. The original game seems to have been invented in India, from where it spread both eastward and westward. In addition, dozens of modern versions have achieved some degree of popularity. (Thousands more have been invented but have attracted no interest at all.) A signal advantage of playing one of the modern chess variants is that there is no book of established openings. From the very first move, you’re on your own.

Designing new chess variants is an amusing pastime in its own right. Lots of people have done it. I’ve designed a few myself. You can play chess on a board of hexagons, in a three-dimensional matrix, or with bizarre rules. The tricky bit is finding an opponent to play your new chess variant and help you refine your new rules so as to make a playable game.

Chess variants can be arbitrarily complex. You can toss in new kinds of pieces and new board topologies until the cows come home. The most likely result is that your game will be unplayable. Nobody will be able to remember all of the rules, much less master their tactical implications. I’ve come to feel that the best variants are probably those that are as similar as possible to the familiar version of chess, with only a few changes. Such games are more likely to be playable.

Berolina Chess, for instance, uses the familiar board and pieces. The only change is that the pawns move diagonally and capture by moving forward, instead of the other way around. (Seems to me they ought to be able to capture by moving one square to the left or right as well; that would be an interesting Berolina variant.) Berolina pawns change the whole game in a way that would require detailed study to comprehend.

One of the best variants, I’m guessing, is Embassy Chess. Played on a 10×8 board, Embassy gives each player two new pieces — a marshall and a cardinal. In the same way that the queen combines the moves of the rook and bishop, the marshall combines the moves of the rook and knight and the cardinal combines the moves of bishop and knight. This set of pieces has been known since the 19th century, and was recommended by Capablanca as an alternative to conventional chess. Embassy differs from Capablanca’s version in the placement of the pieces at the start of the game, and is, it seems to me, an improvement. In the Embassy layout, all of the pawns are protected by pieces in the starting position; in Capablanca’s layout, the king-side knight’s pawn is unprotected.

Embassy with Berolina pawns? See, I just invented a whole new game.

If you’re curious about chess variants, you can find lots of information on the Chess Variant Pages. This site seems to be less active than it was a few years ago, but stuff is still happening. Also worth checking out: M. Winther’s variants, which can be reached via http://hem.passagen.se/melki9/.

If you can’t find an opponent for a variant that you’d like to play, a good option is Zillions of Games. This $25 Windows software will play just about any chess variant. Dozens of Zillions .zrf files are available for free download, and if you can’t find a few that you like, you can write your own using the Zillions scripting language. The reference docs on this language are rather abstract, but studying other people’s code is a good way to learn.

Ten years ago I wrote a fantasy novel called The Leafstone Shield. It was much too long, and not serious enough. When my agent finally got around to reading it, he said he didn’t see a market for it. I’m sure he was right.

Later on, I created a PDF of the book and made it available as a free download. I’ve since withdrawn it, but at least one person downloaded it. Recently he read it and sent me an email. He agreed with me about the weaknesses of the story. But along the way he suggested that I might want to consider self-publishing it as an Amazon e-book, specifically in the YA (young adult) category.

My story features three strong female characters, and they get into some pretty hair-raising difficulties. By making them just a few years younger, I could conceivably transform the story into a viable YA novel.

Intrigued by this concept, I decided to do a little research into the YA genre. I wandered over to the Teen shelves in the local library, checked out three YA fantasy novels, and read the first few chapters of all three. They’re all pretty good. I might even finish reading them.

What they have in common, which my story conspicuously lacks, is the substance of the tip I’d like to share. I understood this concept when I was writing my first couple of novels (which were both published by real New York publishers), but somewhere along the way I got distracted. I got interested in other stuff and lost track of how to do strong plots.

If you want to be successful writing plotted fiction, here’s what you have to do: Put the lead character’s ass in a meat grinder, preferably on the very first page, and then keep turning the crank. It’s that simple, and that difficult.

In my too-long unpublished fantasy epic, the lead character does indeed have a goal that propels her into action. But the goal unfolds over the course of the first 250 pages or so — the first 1/3 of the book — and during that time she encounters no profound or agonizing obstacles. To be sure, there are some hurdles she has to leap over, but they’re just hurdles, not brick walls she has to bulldoze her way through. Really, the first 1/3 of the book is a vastly bloated prologue. What’s worse, if I skip or skimp on the prologue, the rest of the story doesn’t make much sense.

Don’t do it this way, kids. Learn from my horrible mistake. Put the lead character’s ass in a meat grinder on page one, and don’t stop turning the crank!

After tonight’s concert, I think I may be done.

Not because it was a bad concert. It was a pretty darn good concert, actually. Elgar’s Enigma Variations, the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, and a solid piece by a local composer. The orchestra did a very respectable job. The audience obviously appreciated what they heard, and that’s one of the wonderful aspects: For a mere $20, people can hear a symphony concert close to their home.

Most of the musicians in community orchestras are unpaid amateurs. We do it because we enjoy it.

The biggest drawback of playing in an orchestra — any orchestra, no matter how good — is that it’s not a creative activity. You’re a foot soldier. Somebody else decides what you’ll play. You’re told how fast to play, and how loud. Somebody puts a page full of dots in front of you (more like 30 pages, actually), and your job is to execute the dots.

In a community orchestra, there are other issues. There’s never enough rehearsal time, and the quality of the players is somewhat variable. As a result, the orchestra never sounds as good as I wish it did.

On top of which, those darn composers take it for granted their work will be played by conservatory-trained professionals who can do absolutely anything. Typically, there are a few passages in any concert that are simply too tough for me. (The fact that the conductor generally insists on taking the difficult movements at a breakneck tempo does not help.) I don’t like getting up on stage in front of a bunch of people who are paying money for their tickets, and failing to play some of the notes. It bothers me. Usually the tricky passages are at the most dramatic moments, so the fumbling in the strings is covered by fortissimo brass. But not always.

Yes, I’ve had some pleasant musical experiences along the way. I’ve played Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh, the Brahms Fourth, Sibelius Second, double concertos by Bach and Brahms, and various other rewarding pieces. Also, there’s something satisfying about doing your best with a challenging part.

On the other hand, it’s time-consuming, it’s never entirely satisfying, I come home exhausted, and I have nothing to show for it. Also, they make you wear a black suit and a bow tie, and what’s up with that?

The working title is “Floogle.” The main instruments are u-he Zebra (main melody), AAS Lounge Lizard 4 (electric piano), Spectrasonics Trilian (fretless bass), and Spectrasonics Stylus RMX (beats). NI Reaktor does a cameo in the introduction, and there’s a bit of Camel Audio Alchemy later on.

I’m trying to learn more about mixing. I tried something new (for me, anyway) in this mix. After comparing my track to those on a few CDs, I decided that the up-close synthesizer sound (which I rather like) isn’t quite what the pros seem to prefer, so I added a touch of global reverb (u-he Uhbik-A).

Granted, my points of reference are perhaps terra incognita to your average 20-something ambitious pop musician. I’m coming from the far side of eclectic. I play in a symphony orchestra. At home, for recreation, I play Bach and Haydn on the piano. On my iPhone I have albums by Weather Report, Jon Hassell, Paul Simon, Bill Nelson, Frank Zappa, National Health, and the Residents.

More than anything else, I respond to music that’s intelligent. If a piece simply wallows in an emotion for four minutes without any evidence that the composer expects listeners to engage in mental activity, I find the music not just boring but offensive.

But that’s what I’m finding online. I don’t think I could ever write music this stupid. It would drive me nuts. I keep wanting to use, you know, melodies. Chord progressions. Bass lines. Syncopations. Phrases. Maybe even key changes or meter changes. When I listen, I listen for those things.

An endlessly repeated drum loop is bad enough. When there’s no discernible melody, when the bass line plods endlessly along the roots of a single four-bar progression without so much as a passing tone to break the monotony, I find myself wanting to shake the composer until his teeth rattle.

Has none of these alleged composers ever heard of any of these fundamental techniques? Or are they just afraid to alienate their brain-dead listeners by using any of them? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t single out any of the artists on bandcamp or soundcloud, because they’re mostly amateurs. But when I flip open this month’s Electronic Musician and find record reviews of new CDs by Olafur Arnalds, William Tyler, and Tricky (no, I’ve never heard of any of them), I figure, hey, these people are professionals. They must have something to say.

But no. I seek them out on the Web. I listen to tracks. I recoil. I cringe. Has it come to this? Evidently it has. The pod people have won.

What’s odd about these constants is that they seem almost have been fine-tuned so as to allow living beings such as ourselves to exist. If the force of gravity were just slightly smaller, for instance, stars and galaxies would never have formed. The entire universe would consist of a rapidly expanding cloud of gas. On the other hand, if gravity were just a little stronger, the stars and galaxies we see would all have collapsed into black holes. No planets, no sunlight, and perforce no scientists to look through telescopes and think about these things.

For those who believe in God, such a state of affairs is not difficult to explain. God created it that way, so that folks like us could come into being. Appeals to divine intervention are not, however, given much credence by scientists. Yet on the other side of the coin, it seems an awfully big coincidence that our universe should happen to have the characteristics that it is observed to have.

We do know that the universe we observe seems to have had a beginning, or something very like a beginning. About 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was extremely hot, extremely dense, and no bigger than the head of a pin. Since then, it has been expanding rapidly. Our most sophisticated observation and analysis suggests that it will continue to expand forever, and will indeed end (if that’s the right word) as a very thin, scattered cloud of cold gas.

Some cosmologists have proposed an explanation that would account for the seemingly custom-tailored nature of the universe we live in. It might be only one of an infinite number of universes, each of them with entirely random physical properties. Some of these universes would expand for a few minutes and then collapse again. Some of them would contain little or no matter. But if there are an infinite number of them, some would be rather like our own. In those, life as we know it could appear.

In fact, life could only appear in universes suitable for life, so all such universes would appear to be custom-tailored. What’s more, some universes (including, perhaps, our own) could be expected to have physics suitable for spawning new, baby universes. This process, of new universes budding off from older ones, may have been going on quite literally forever.

None of this is my own thinking, by the way. I’ve been reading The Book of Universes, by John D. Barrow.

It’s hard for the human mind to contemplate infinity. One of the odd consequences, if this multiverse of all universes has been going on forever, is that an infinite number of the other universes will look almost exactly like our own. So much like our own that you and I will be there — exactly as we are now, thinking exactly the same thoughts, or almost. Anything that can happen will have happened an infinite number of times. And in an infinite set of universes, anything can happen.

But wait — the concept is about to get a whole lot stranger.

In the past couple of decades, we have developed the ability to create sophisticated artificial models of complex systems, using computers. If we manage not to destroy all life on Earth, our ability to build complex models is bound to grow. In fact, if there is an infinite supply of universes, in some (a smaller but still infinite number) of which beings with complex intelligence can evolve, then it’s pretty much inevitable that some intelligent races will have developed the ability to create complex working models of entire living beings, entire planets full of life, or even entire universes.

The essence of such a complex model is that entities within the model would not know they were only virtual entities living within a model. Their experience — that is, the data that flows into them, and the behaviors they engage in as a result — would be of living in what to them is a real world.

This could be true of us. If we were actually virtual entities living in a simulated model world, we would have no way of knowing it. Welcome to the world of Philip K. Dick. What we think of as reality may be entirely constructed by vastly more intelligent beings. And their intentions might be benign, malevolent, or simply incomprehensible to us. In fact, given an infinite supply of universes, in some of them our creators’ intentions would be benign, while in others our creators would take delight in tormenting us.

What’s worse, they might have created our “real” world only last year, complete with “real” fossils, Roman ruins, galaxies that seem to be billions of years old, and everything else. Or they might have created only YOU. The rest of us might be amazingly realistic fakes — animations that disappear as soon as we’re out of your line of sight.

The word “might” in that paragraph is not adequate. If there are an infinite number of universes, some infinite number of which contain highly intelligent beings capable of constructing virtual models of intelligent beings, then in an infinite number of those universes you are an artificial construct who has been given the perhaps very temporary illusion that you’re real. In another infinite number of universes, however, you’re entirely real — made of real protons and neutrons exactly in the manner that you suppose.

And you have no way of knowing which of those two conditions you’re actually in.

In the course of the first few pages, we’re treated to: an old man with a bad hip who has painfully to climb many castle stairs; a young princess with a serious facial deformity; a half-witted fool who is just pathetic, not funny; a king who is churning with resentment over the actions of his brothers and obsessed with reclaiming his rightful throne, no matter how many thousands of men have to die along the way; an envoy whose left hand has been maimed, by the king, with a meat cleaver; a queen who is tall and thin and has “prominent ears, a sharp nose, and the faintest hint of a mustache,” and who is telling the king he should kill his remaining brother; offhand recollections of a siege in which people had to eat rats; and a blood-red comet providing a nasty omen of things to come.

Given that the story is about Serious Business, we can perhaps forgive George Martin for neglecting to include so much as a trace of humor, though such neglect is bound to make the story somewhat leaden. His failure to present a character we can admire or care about is, I think, a more serious defect.

Clearly he’s doing something right. People are eating this stuff up. To me, though, it reads like gravel.