GaryCon 2008: Mr. Gygax, we salute you

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gygaxMany, many people have in the last few days written eloquent tributes to Gary Gygax, so I won’t try and compete with them—I’ll just say that if Gary Gygax had not created a little game called Dungeons & Dragons, my life would be radically different than it is.

How many hours did I spent in my youth poring over game rulebooks, plotting out adventures in my mind, rolling up dozens and dozens of characters just for the sheer imaginative thrill of it? My first roleplaying experience was Tomb of the Lizard King—not one of Gary’s modules, but it wasn’t long before I was soaking up every piece of Gygax writing I could find. My cousins and I had so much fun with Tomb of the Lizard King that we proceeded to hole up for three straight days doing nothing but playing D&D (much to the consternation of our parents, who didn’t know what the heck to make of our excited babbling about clerics and hit points and gelatinous cubes). None of us had even the slightest idea what we were doing (my cousins made me GM even though I had never before laid eyes on a rulebook), but we knew we had stumbled upon something incredible. I have vivid memories of hours spent intensely reading through my cousin’s copy of the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide. After that it was Top Secret, Middle Earth Role Playing, Mechwarrior and many others… games written by others but which owed their existence to Gygax’s pioneering. Thank you, Gary Gygax, for sharing your creation with the rest of us, and for giving this awkward teenager an outlet for his imagination.

garyconTonight we participated in what some are calling “GaryCon”—a game of dungeon-crawling, kobold-killing, treasure-looting D&D in memory of Gary. I ran the players through a mostly improvised dungeon populated by skeletons, giant rats, and an owlbear, and remembering Gary’s DMG advice not to coddle players, I even managed to kill one of them with said owlbear. It was not the best game I’ve ever run, nor was it the worst: it was just a good game, and that seemed perfectly appropriate.

At the end of the game we each rolled a d20 in honor of Gary. I rolled a 19.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gygax.

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Once you start down the Crazy path, forever will it dominate your destiny

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Came across an interesting essay tracing the rise and fall of Samuel Francis. Francis was a conservative thinker and writer whose early writing was marked by a certain abrasive insight. But as time went on, he drifted out toward the fringe and sailed right over the border into Crazytown. The article describes a highly intelligent but… odd man who had a tendency to take good political points and taint them with bizarre, sometimes racist ideas.

When the conservative establishment started distancing itself from him, he just took his alienation as confirmation that his theories (and his sense of victimhood) were correct. By the time he died, the weirdness and racism of his waning years understandably clouded out any positive contributions his writings might have made:

Sam Francis came to Washington as one of the bright young minds of the New Right in the late 1970s….

But Francis was not a good soldier in the conservative movement. His personality and evolving ideological interests led him into direct conflict with the very movement that had nurtured his early career. He became the house intellectual of the Buchanan breakaway campaigns and the theoretician of the anti-Bob Dole, anti-George Bush paleoconservative movement. And, as he became estranged from mainstream conservatism, he veered into the “racial creepiness” racialism of journals like The Occidental Quarterly.

This was my first exposure to Francis’ story; perhaps some of you are more familiar with him. Francis’ life story is a reminder that even smart people can get obsessed with crazy ideas—and furthermore, a smart person’s belief in crazy ideas doesn’t make him or her less smart; it just means that his or her good ideas are now hopelessly bound up with the crazy ones. And it illustrates some of the weird appeal of the fringe right, which for all its creepiness seems to attract some genuinely smart people.

I stumbled across this via a Ross Douthat post about the Ron Paul racist newsletter controversy. Douthat observes that once you’ve waded out into the political fringe and taken up common cause—willingly or not—with the crazies you find out there, it’s awfully hard to ever return to the mainstream again.

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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled

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Geez. Talk about raining on the parade:

We have examined the science behind three of the most popular pseudoscientific beliefs encountered in Hollywood movies. For two of them — the idea of ghosts and vampires — we have shown that they are inconsistent and contradictory to simple facts. For one of them — the idea of zombies — we have made no attempt to deny that it relies on real cases. However, we have reviewed evidence showing that the concept is a misrepresentation of simple criminal acts.

Among other things, the authors of this study use their “science” to show that vampires and other undead menaces cannot exist. More commentary here.

A fun read, but one gets the impression that the authors are probably the sort of people who turn to everybody else during the Star Wars trench run scene and loudly remark (with an irritating smirk on their faces) that there’s no way you’d be able to hear the explosions in the vacuum of space. You know, the sort of people who are pretty smart but who need to be slapped every now and then.

On the other hand: if I were a vampire interested in throwing potential Van Helsings off of my trail, this is exactly the sort of report I would stealthily author and then publicize. I don’t see an “Al U. Card” listed as one of the authors, which hurts that theory a bit, but one can always hope.

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All these worlds are yours except Europa

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Wow, is mankind ever playing with fire. First there was the Skynet thing. Now we’re messing around with Europa despite explicit instructions from omnipotent aliens to the contrary. At this point the natural next step is to create a race of slave robots (that are stronger and smarter than us) to serve humanity; or possibly start designing really creepy-looking warp drives for the space shuttles.

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Always be careful when destroying the Enterprise

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The Enterprise blows up.You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I yammer about a board game for a few minutes. It’s been a while since I’ve subjected you to such trivia.

As I have no doubt mentioned, I am a fan of the Star Fleet Battles board/wargame. Now, this is a game with a lot of rules. The “master rulebook” runs over 400 pages, and a second master rulebook covering a different quadrant of the galaxy recently came out at an additional 340 pages. While it’s a very fun game, those rules do not make for a riveting read-through (not that that’s stopped me, of course). But every now and then you hit something quirky in the midst of all the rules legalese that makes you grin.

For example, here’s one of my favorite little rules in the entire game. It’s something that will probably never happen in a typical game. It describes what happens when a starship captained by a “legendary captain” (think Kirk or Picard) is destroyed:

[G22.223] If his ship is destroyed, he has a 1% chance of doing something that results in his being aboard and in control of the nearest enemy ship of the same or smaller size class…. All legendary officers and remaining crew arrive with him. (Don’t ask how he did it; that’s what legends are made of!)

I assume that rule is inspired by Star Trek III, which features Kirk self-destructing the Enterprise yet shortly thereafter taking control of the Klingon Bird-of-prey through various bits of trickery. Who could forget this classic scene (thank you imdb):

Torg: [the Klingons have boarded the Enterprise only to find it is deserted] My Lord, the ship appears to be deserted.
Kruge: How can that be? They’re hiding.
Torg: Yes, sir. The ship appears to be run by computer. It is the only thing that is speaking.
Kruge: Speaking? Let me hear it.
Enterprise computer: [Torg walks over to a console, placing his communicator towards it] 9-8-7-6-5…
Kruge: [shouts] Get out! Get out of there! Get out!
Enterprise computer: 2-1…
[the Enterprise bridge explodes]

Other fun rules cover similarly rare but cool game events, like crew mutiny on Klingon ships whose security officers have been killed (in the game universe, Klingon ships are crewed largely by slaves) and what happens when you tractor an enemy ship and then drag it at high speed into a planet. They’re situations that rarely if ever come up in your average game—but you know that when they do, they fuel Gamer Stories for years to come.

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In nomine

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Thessaly is upset about her bath.One of the most fun parts of pregnancy—from my perspective as a dad, at least—was brainstorming names for our little Bundle of Joy. For years (well before the pregnancy happened), Michele and I have noted cool, amusing, and interesting names that might be appropriate for a hypothetical child. Most of them were probably not appropriate, being ancient Mesopotamian and Byzantine in origin, but when we learned last year that a baby was on the way, we were nevertheless faced with the challenge of distilling a monstrous list of potential names down to our very favorites.

I won’t list out the various names we considered (hey, if another baby ever comes along, we might put one of them to use). But as you know, an important part of choosing a baby name is trying to think of any possible embarassing nicknames that might be derived from the name by angsty junior-high classmates. We were unable to come up with anything too awful for Thessaly (what’s that—you thought of a dirty-sounding nickname? Get your mind out of the gutter!), but since her birth we have nevertheless seen the emergence of many nicknames that we never anticipated.

Here’s a partial list of names that we’ve used for Thessaly that are not her actual name:

  • Thesso
  • Fussaly
  • T-Bot
  • Thessie
  • Señorita Fussypants
  • Sweetie (awwww…)
  • Your Daughter (as in “Hey Michele, Your Daughter just spit up all over the chair again”)
  • FormuLass (her superhero identity)
  • That Baby
  • Little Miss Pee Pants (or “Poopy Pants,” depending on the situation)
  • Cuddles (awwww…)

We’ll have to get in the habit of using her actual name by the time she becomes sufficiently aware as to understand what we’re saying—I don’t think we really want her going through life as T-Bot. (OK, that would actually be kinda cool.) So what obvious nicknames for Thessaly are we missing?

Oh, and choice #2—narrowly beaten out by “Thessaly”—was the name of a Byzantine empress. Maybe next time.

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Yes Virginia, bloggers are still destroying civilization

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Ah, the sweet sound of another old-media journalist bemoaning the end of Culture at the hands of those pesky bloggers. Don’t those rank amateurs recognize the harm they’re doing by… sharing their thoughts and ideas with others online?

I exaggerate, but not by much. It’s a bit puzzling to see a book like this come out in 2007—it seems clear at this point that while the phenomenon is still evolving and changing, the blogging/social-internet/citizen-journalist cat is highly unlikely to crawl back into the bag whence it emerged, and so it seems a bit pointless to whine about it. There are plenty of serious questions and problems one could raise about this media shift (actually they have been raised, and discussed to death already), but what are these whiners seriously suggesting we do about them? Sit there and wish really hard that people would stop, uh, sharing their thoughts and ideas with others online? Good luck with that.

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Because you really want to know what I think about politics these days

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So today is the big Iowa caucus. I’ve been alternately interested and repulsed by this latest, interminable election cycle (and so many months to go yet!), but the caucus has managed to once again get me reading all those political blogs I periodically try to purge from my daily reading list.

One of the ways in which this election cycle is different is that it’s the first one in a long while where I’ve been genuinely interested in who the Other Party—the Democrats—will put forth as their candidate. I don’t remember ever feeling like I had a personal stake in the Democratic party’s choice of nominees, as I’m usually most concerned with who the Republicans will pick. But this year, there are worthy candidates in both parties, and the closeness of the races makes this all interesting in a way that it hasn’t been in… oh, about seven years. Small as it might be, the potential exists that I might, for the first time I can remember, have to choose between two candidates who each look pretty good, rather than settling for the least distasteful choice, and that’s exciting. We’re in a brief window here where politics is (sort of) fun and interesting again. By February or March, of course, the two main opposing candidates (almost certainly the least pleasant of all the possibilities) will have been effectively chosen, and we’ll have to wade through months of degrading political muck to get to the actual election.

But until that happens, I’m going to try and be positive about all this. Here’s hoping that the end-result of all these caucus shenanigans is a presidential race in which two respectable candidates face off against each other in an old-school Battle of Ideas (*cough*Obama and McCain*cough*). And while I’m at it, I would really like a pony for my birthday this year, and I wish my Warcraft character were level 70.

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Don’t be a nerd—listen to Officer Byrd

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I was pleasantly surprised after my last post (so very long ago, I’m afraid) to learn that so many of you remembered Cal Worthington, his dog Spot, and the ubiquitous television ads which made him a part of my childhood. But imagine my joy when I discovered this morning that, thanks to the internet, yet another memorable character from my TV-watching youth is still out there, teaching impressionable young children to wear bike helmets, avoid downed power lines, and never eat from the colorfully-packaged boxes of poison under their parents’ sink.

My friends, let me introduce you to… Officer Byrd.

That horribly catchy theme song has been stuck in my head for about 25 years now. I’ve sung it for my wife, but I suspect that until today, she didn’t believe Officer Byrd really existed. (Michele, I expect a full apology and a retraction of those things you said about my mental health.) But oh, how he existed. There are 14 Officer Byrd videos out there for you to watch (check out the sweet special effects in episode 4). No word on the controversial episode 15, in which Byrd’s cheerful partner Officer Mike is brutally killed by the Mob two days before retiring and Officer Byrd has to break all the rules and take justice into his own hands.

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