Conversation of the Lord Divine
with folks who doubt, and doubt, though shine
through darkness that descends from doubt
wondering what Life is all about
when Hope and Trust and Daring are Thine:
"There surely is a loud voice from God
that is Mine and I am Laud
and Lord Divine, yet if you must ask,
or if not ... then will take a pass,
but know that you must choose, or ... Nod.
I Am that I Am, Be Still and Know that I Am God.
not even lord jesus incarnate
could spruce up this dead land to farm it
the whole parcel features
just four little creatures
five if you count the dead marmot
Thank you America! Thank you very much! I'll be here all night, folks.
The cretinous imbecile who said this...
"The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan--he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes."
...is gone from the Texas Board of Education. Let's hope this development portends sanity in our grotesque textbook industry. (I know, I know...)
Although it might seem unlikely that anyone would wonder whether the author of The Lord of the Rings was Jewish, the Nazis took no chances. When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”--Michael Weingrad, 'Why There Is No Jewish Narnia'
Today, I took my curling obsession to the next level and actually tried out the sport at the Broomstones open house. Accompanying me was a rag tag bunch including Johnston, my coworker Callie, Jeff Roberts, Adam, my roommate Karly, and her friends Matt and Johnny. After making the drive to Wayland and parking in a nearby church, we got on a shuttle bus that drove us to the club and gave us flashbacks to elementary school. Once there, we watched a brief movie about the science of curling before splitting into two groups of four to take the ice: me, Scott, Callie, and Adam vs. Karly, Jeff, Matt, and Johnny. As Michael Scott from the office described it there were no winners or losers, only poetry.
After trying the sport, I made the following conclusions:
I took more pictures here.
This comic from Tom Toles nicely skewers feckless Democrats and nihilist Republicans - ho hum - but it also unexpectedly reminded me of my childhood:
I was never a Congressman, mercifully, but in high school I had an eerily similar experience involving misguided legislative proposals and collapsing legal frameworks. We'll come back to the Congress in a minute.
For a year or two in my teens I played email Nomic - first in a large, silly, long-running game called Ackanomic (at the time it was the second-longest-running Nomic instance, if memory serves) and later in a small-scale offshoot called Rishonomic. I wasn't allowed to play D&D as a kid and my town didn't really have the personnel for a local game, nor were there local tech types to administer such an online endeavour, so Nomic was for a while my main extracurricular passion. I think I kept playing during my freshman year at college, but then I got interested in making RL friends and having sex with girls, so Nomic fell by the wayside.
What's Nomic? Its creator Peter Suber explains:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
In practice, Nomic is a highly abstract semisocial game for programmers, writers, hardcore rules-lawyers, actual lawyers, and other heady types. Suber's rules specify in-person play, but that's immensely complicated and slow-moving in most cases; email variants make provisions for simultaneity, communication lag, and so forth. Nomic play typically involves a lot of niggling discussions about the legality of rule changes. Win conditions vary from game to game - by definition! - but it's generally agreed that the most stylish way to win is by exploiting a loophole in the rules or identifying a logical paradox. (Bonus style points if you deliberately planted the paradox in the first place.)
It's terrific fun of an unrepentantly nerdy, intellectual sort. The best bits, for me, were the parallel discussion-streams, kicking around proposals and in-game declarations in a dozen highly formal domain-specific languages, discourses multiplying and variegating at the edge of the complex machine of the rules themselves. You couldn't help getting into the weird philosophy of the game - is an object in our physical world necessarily a 'game object?' - which was part of the philosophy professor Suber's original point. Those questions are the hidden purpose of the game.
If memory serves, I left Ackanomic because its large complex ruleset didn't seem very mutable anymore: the rules were written such that they remained unchanged after each 'win cycle,' slowly building up institutional inertia and ironing out the legal kinks. Frankly, I was nowhere near skilled/hardcore/bored enough to seek out hidden paradoxes and the like. So I joined the Acka spinoff being started by another player, Uri Bruck (a/k/a Niccolo Flychuck, designer of Party Chess - I still remember after all these years...), a new ruleset which proved all too easy to muck about with. In 1997 or '98, after declaring war on another Nomic and generally behaving like the prolonged-adolescent males we presumably all were, the Rishonomic body passed the following rule:
Upon the adoption of this proposal, the ruleset is amended by replacing all numbers with the phrase "A Suffusion of Yellow".
In retrospect this seems like such an obviously terrible idea that I'm dying to know how we convinced ourselves to just do it. Consider the immediate fallout: all rules are now numbered the same, tossing out the implicit precedence scheme; all player scores are reset to the same 'number'; the rules specify no method for determining the ordinal number equal to "A Suffusion of Yellow + 1," making later rule-numbering impossible; selecting a judge now takes an indeterminate amount of time (you've got a suffusion of yellow days to do it), etc. Indeed it's not even possible to determine with finality whether the rule numbering itself first, changed all numbers simultaneously, worked sequentially through all rules, was assumed to alter play perceptions of all numbers outside the game...
The chaos in the wake of the SofY rule - which led directly to the collapse of Rishonomic - came back to me when I read the Toles comic.
Man, what a great time I had in those days.
It's fun to kick over a house of cards. Piercing pleasures (the muscle strain of lifting a heavy weight, the shock of an unexpected narrative turn) are necessarily short lived - impulses, infinitely narrow in time - but they stay with you in another form, as memory. Or as the scatter of broken rules and foreclosed possibilities: Rishonomic collapsed after all. I don't remember whether I voted for the proposal that made further gameplay impossible, and I don't even know what I'd like to remember. It was a pure gesture. Since the boundaries between Nomic groups and the world are so important to the game's identity, there can be no extrinsic prizes or motivations for playing; the rules say what matters in the game is all of what matters. Logic has neither good nor ill intentions; once you give yourself up to it, it starts to generate its own meanings and associations.
For some reason it seemed like destroying the game from within would be fun. (How many points was the SofY proposal worth to its author? Difficult to say, which is sort of the problem.) I imagine there was some social motivation: boredom, being dicks, mob curiosity, restlessness. But it's hard to look in at an institution and understand what it feels like to be in the grip of insane inner logic. Reading political news is a lot like deciphering play reports from long-running Nomics; it's easy to fall into despair because you don't understand the language, but the point is that you were never meant to. The thing exists for itself.
Why would the Senate Democrats even consider not passing comprehensive health care reform, given how close they've come? It seems insane, stupid, incomprehensible; only cowardice and treason are adequate explanations by the look of it. But this is to mistake their purpose. The ~59 Democrats in the Senate don't want to pass comprehensive health care reform; I'm guessing most of them don't particularly care one way or the other. For the most part they want to get reelected, want to be given opportunities to do so, the intoxication of being able to change the world with a pen stroke. They desire power and, having attained it, they take pleasure in its exercise. We are not here to control their actions, only to affirm them.
The people of the United States of America don't exist in the same world as our Senators and Representatives. We're not part of the game. We get to watch them play, make suggestions; if we're very wealthy or very angry we can sometimes manage to remove a player or two. But the machine operates under its own power, generates its own logics, provides its own incentives. Most of the rules aren't known to us. The first rule, though, should be obvious: Keep control.
Toles no doubt believes his cartoon depicts the Democrats' nightmare and the Republicans' dream ('starve the beast'), but I don't know about that. I wonder whether the job of the Senate is really to make laws. I think maybe it's nothing more than to never let go.
Maybe the Rishonomic folks weren't so immature after all.
From now until Tax Day, NO MORE ROLEPLAYING GAME BLOGS and (still) NO MORE PHISH BLOGS.
Simple as that. I'm tired of arguing about trivial things and I very definitely do not need to let my 'fandom' damage my 'actual human life.'
That is all.
Happy birthday T.S.B.B.!
Is it OK? I have no eye for these things. I know the image is weird, the colour mix, but no matter. Is the front page alright?
Much progressed in the novel at hand (Islands, Dan Sleigh, as referenced in "No Man Is An Island" Below), I am much progressed in my reading of this fine book.
For a number of reasons, it is deep, intriguing, compelling, and dark - I mean to say black! The human suffering of the age at hand is indwelling-ly oppressive but far beyond hope of being put aside, even for a moment. I pick up the book between the end of one small task and rush back to it for yet another page before the next task requires attention: e.g, I am making a delicious dinner from scratch, caring for another person, and attempting to keep up with the evening tv news so that dinner might be ready when the news pretends to go back to sleep for another 24 hours, but with each pulse beat I rush back to the bookmarked page at hand in order to not break the spell of the mid to late 1600s on the Cape of Good Hope, the valley behind Table Mountain, both of which I know from the late 1960s, and the transvaal.
Look it up at your local library or bookstore: Islands. Dan Sleigh. And transport.
The greatest thing about Monsters and Other Childish Things - Benjamin Baugh's roleplaying game of plucky schoolchildren and the irritating bug-eyed squamous horrors that live in their backpacks, emerging at moments of stress to eat the neighbours and (worse) the neighbours' pets - is its absolute consistency of theme and style. Everything about the core rulebook contributes to the game's smart-alecky Buffythulhu vibe: the minimalist cartoony artwork and notebook-inspired design, Greg Stolze's insightful how-to essays, and especially Baugh's inspired writing, which maintains a tone of creepy-comical melodrama even when presenting dry rules material. It's a thrilling piece of work, and crucially, it makes gameplay sound easy and fun.
One of the hardest tasks facing RPG writers is illustrating how the rules enable interesting play in the spirit of the gameworld; Baugh manages to make each play sequence and action seem like another tool for the players, a way in and out of trouble rather than an arbitrary mechanical device. The first seven pages of Monsters lay out its thematic concerns and basic player activities with astonishing elegance and concision; Stolze's One Roll Engine is a huge help in this regard. The ORE requires no player arithmetic after each dice roll - only counting - and this seemingly insignificant formal feature immediately distances dice-pool games from D&D-style roll+bonus≥target systems. Because the ORE is so simple and the gameworld so evocative, Baugh can sail through the game's basic technicalities at the outset and simply treat dice rolls and other mechanics as pure storytelling elements.
And what stories you'll tell! The game handles government conspiracies, superhero antics, heavy domestic melodrama, grade-school murder mysteries, dark-comic childhood-horror fantasy, and John Hughes-style teen dramedy with equal aplomb; it's not a 'generic' RPG so much as a tonally agnostic one. It's the devil spawn of Calvin and Hobbes and Men in Black. Monsters combines the genre-promiscuity of shows like Veronica Mars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both namechecked in the text among several other TV series) with an incredibly fertile and flexible central metaphor - some kids have monsters - and Baugh insists right up front (on page 10 in fact) that the game is supposed to mean something:
Since this is a game about childhood, monsters represent lots of things. On the surface, they’re big, scaly, scary bundles of superpowers. Monsters can do just about anything. Kids can do the usual things, like play video games or send text messages or punch or pick their nose. But a monster with vast fuming nostrils can smell the thing you hate most about yourself, or blow caustic snotballs big enough to stick a Volvo to the wall. And if you dealt it, then he smelt it, and knows just who you are.Monsters are all about power.
Monsters also represent unconditional friendship. Monsters don’t judge. They’re monsters. No matter how mad, bad or smelly you get, your monster will still love you. Your parents say that a lot, but sometimes...well, when they look at you that certain way when you screw up bad, you have some doubts. With your monster, there’s no doubt at all.
Monsters also have a tendency to get you into trouble. It’s sort of inevitable.
They don’t exactly have great moral compasses. Monsters just ain’t people. They don’t get it sometimes. If your best friend Typhon is a fallen Titan able to forge stars into javelins and chew titanium like bubblegum, and the gym teacher says, “Take a lap, Nancy-Sue! Time for the real men to shoot some hoops!”, it’s pretty darned hard not to let Typhon drag the gym teacher screaming through seventeen lower dimensional manifolds until his sanity curdles like lunchroom
beef Stroganoff . Because Typhon really wants to do that.People without monsters think its weird or something, and sometimes they get really angry or scared and they tell you to take your monster outside and to make it spit out the end table. Sometimes people show up in big vans with antennae and stuff on top, and guys get out with guns and helmets and they yell a lot, and then your monster has to eat some of them before they go away again.
Mostly though, you go to school (and it sucks). And your parents try and tell you what to do all the time (and it sucks). And then some other kid at school shoves you, and so your monster bites him a little, and then his monster bites your monster, and then the school is on fire (again) and the police get called (again) and you get detention (again).
That’s life with a monster. Sometimes it sucks, but it’s never boring.
It's good that Baugh is so candid about the metaphorical content of the game; this is no narcissistic White Wolf power fantasy dressed up as cutting-edge horror, but a serious game about frivolous things. It's also a goofy time playing make-believe, and Baugh's presentation ably captures that feeling of heavy lightness:
Relationships drive the action. Look at the relationships of every player character in the game. It’s the GM’s job to tangle up all those threads of human connection and see what happens. If you have a relationship with your Dad who happens to be town sheriff, and another player has a relationship with her Dad who happens to run the town’s drug gang, and your character totally has a crush on her character...Well, there’s your story, right there. Now I wonder how your monsters are going to handle all that?
The classic elegance of the setup is undeniable: take a painful emotional conflict or situation (powerlessness, boo!); amplify some pleasurable element (monsters, yay!) such that the stakes and unpleasantness of the conflict are also amplified (death, boo!); invite the players to do fun things (fighting, yay!) with scary consequences (getting eaten, boo!), and make sure the scary parts invite more fun (avoiding getting eaten, yay!); make sure the mechanical actions of the game strengthen the drama and keep players interacting. (For a 'fun' exercise, try describing any version of D&D in the same terms.)
However rich the game's thematic material, though, it will live or die on the strength and playability of its actual play mechanics. Fortunately, Monsters and Other Childish Things is a streamlined game with a great central mechanic. Stats/skills are typical: stat value adds dice to a pool, subskills increase pool if applicable. In the ORE, matching dice denote success, so a result of {3, 3, 4, 4, 6, 8, 8, 8} on a roll of 8d10 is called a 3x8, with 'width' (max matches, in this case a trio of 8's) broadly indicating speed/power and 'height' (8, the highest matched number) indicating quality/finesse. As the above-quoted text mentions, the game revolves around character relationships; the stronger a relationship, the more it can help an action roll, i.e. if you punch a guy who just insulted your sister then your roll benefits from your 'sister' relationship rating. True to its name, the ORE also determines damage and even hit location in a single combat roll.
The central conceit of the game is its most elegant mechanical feature: the children's titular monsters are powerful beings to whom the PCs can 'loan' relationships - but if a monster-augmented roll fails, the relationship suffers (and monsters can lower the relationship stats of children they defeat). The monsters want their children to be happy, see, but they can't help feeding on their relationships - friendly and bloodthirsty all at once. And how do relationships get repaired? Quality Time rolls, of course, which get harder as relationship ratings dip further. It's such an evocative mechanic that it leaves me a little embarrassed for e.g. D20 players (which I'm definitely one of!).
Crucially, the game isn't about combat; or rather it treats 'combat' as metaphorical conflict with claws instead of words. (The section on equipment begins What do you do if you find a gun? DON’T TOUCH! LEAVE IT ALONE! TELL AN ADULT!, then grudgingly provides basic weapon rules.) The worked-out combat tutorial is even titled 'A Conflict Example' - a deliberate and smart choice. The mechanical treatment of child/adult/monster relationships is equally evocative:
Monsters form emotional bonds with kids, not with grownups. The bond between a monster and a kid fades as the kid enters adulthood.The reason for this is pretty simple. Kids are emotionally exposed in ways that adults have outgrown. Remember how adults are mostly immune to emotional damage (page 28)? That’s because adults have learned to guard their feelings. They’re not as exposed. An adult has outgrown the vulnerability that made him or her open to a connection with a monster.
If you do run into an adult who still has a monster friend, it’s because that’s one vulnerable, needy grownup — one who still takes damage from emotional attacks from anyone — with one protective, desperate monster. Watch your step.
Sounds like the kind of metaphor that hardcore roleplayers can readily identify with, but whose full reflexive/ironic metaphorical significance might be lost on some readers...or maybe that's just my monster Mr Snidely X. Criticthulhu talking?
As for campaign material, Monsters includes a starter adventure, What Did You Get for Christmas?, which emphasizes the game's TV-series parallels by presenting a 'pilot' episode and three scales/vibes for continuation (one-shot blowout, somewhat broad episodic series, and season-long metaplot-heavy serial). The 'pilot' exhausts several of the NPC/plot resources given in the preceding chapters, and it's somewhat programmatic and linear in approach - in more or less every way this is as far from The Village of Hommlet as you can get - but it does an excellent job setting up a weird comedic horror vibe for the game: a kind of Breakfast (of souls) Club guest-starring the Men in Black. And the game's wide-open premise gives GM and players many, many options for the next chapter of the campaign.
It's not perfect, nothing is, but the Monsters rulebook balances mechanical and (for lack of a better word) literary matters with such delicacy that you won't notice the occasional tonal bump, bit of awkward phrasing, or dunderheaded editorial oversight (all five stats are listed on page 10, exactly one line below the words 'There are six stats'!!!!). Luckily, the really funny bits ('GUTS: How tough and dogged you are. Also, the most likely place someone's going to punch you') far outnumber the moments of puerility or awkwardness - like the dumb, unfunny 'Drunken Clown' NPC entry, or the unpleasant racial dynamics in the 'Gang Banger' entry on the next page. Still, there's something not-quite-endearing about the teen boys' adventure tone after a while; after 100+ pages the dorky faux-masculinity of the text starts to feel a little too lived-in, the 'Girls are icky!' rhetoric stops seeming entirely guileless, and the inevitable comparisons with Buffy the Vampire Slayer get less and less favorable (in psychological and particularly in gender-dynamics terms) for Baugh's book. Indeed, the 'Antagonists' and 'Everybody Else' sections are in some ways the weakest part of the book, even if the starter adventure that follows is a fine piece of work.
But this criticism doesn't drastically diminish the achievement of Monsters and Other Childish Things - and Baugh's followup, the marvelous Gaimanesque campaign setting/expansion game Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, addresses every one of these concerns while providing a genuinely novel twist on Monsters's gameplay (PCs have no backstories; chargen is part of gameplay itself). Candlewick turns the genre and theme of Monsters around a bit, and reading it I do find myself missing the rambunctious 'come back here ya little punks!' feeling of the original game, but together they constitute a big bold mainstream RPG with indie twists and of-the-moment Goth Babies aesthetics. I gotta tell you, I love reading these books, and I really really want to run a game with my friends.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go do something else for a while; my other monster, who looks an awful lot like a monthly budget and eats freelance-editor paychecks, is eyeing me hungrily.
A chat with The Deb this evening led me to discover that it's been nearly a year since my last book review on here. This floored me. I knew it had been some time, but...this is simply disgraceful. My book reviews were probably my favorite blog posts, and I received some nice feedback on a few of them.
And there was plenty of good material over the past year, my last couple illiterate months notwithstanding.
Ah, well. There are other things afoot!
Like helping engaged couples find the perfect wedding photographer, for example.
Islands is a novel by Dan Leigh, a researcher in the National Archives, [Capetown/Cape Town], South Africa, and just 'by the way' looks like a close cross between two friends of mine, one now dead and gone but not forgotten (Thaddeus Januskiewicz) and the other recently retired outside of Sante Fe, NM (Walter Kirkland Wait): I met the first as a pre-teen child of about 8 years, the latter in the fall of 1963 when he showed up as a member of his freshman class at college. Both men lived the internal-crossing-into-the-external lives of artists, the former with both brush and as a toolmaker and the latter with pen and ink cartoon creations of the most fantastical Hieronymousillian playfulness and as a paleo-historian and archeologist, now a mechanic who owns perhaps 26 cats in various stages of kittenhood to feral, several horses, two or three barns that stand beside he and his wife's home, and three to five Volvo P-1800s he is simultaneously taking apart and salvaging in the creation of one perfect P-1800 -- a car that I consider born perfect coming off the Volvo factory line. Lord only knows how many computers Walt owns, or the parts to build several more, but I am sure at least one of his barns is chock full of other items, large and small, that he has picked up touring flea markets since migrating to NM about 1978, where they soon after had their first child who did me honor by being named after me: that boy is now a man, recently married to a Hong Kong citizen -- a Brit-educated lawyer, is the major English language voiceover artist for the Japanese cartoon industry, and runs his own commercial studio, in Hong Kong, producing higher end commercials (for Mercedes and the like): Red Angel Studios.
That digression into the personal -- a place that I, like you, tend to inhabit and be intimately informed about -- is merely to say what I cannot yet say specifically about Islands, because I am so little progressed into the text, the story: that all life is story, which explains why we have language and music, perhaps in the reverse order [?], and the artifacts of folk and classic forms, from folk songs and dancing to major etudes, sonatas, symphonies, and at the last, but not nearly the least, we have literature and the generic subdivisions into which particularists like to categorize the forms...apparently because 'order' is not enough unless is is militarized into ranks and files down to the squad level.
In short, I have not by far finished Islands
, and indeed have little progressed at all; yet already I know this is a fine book worthy of your notice, having taken up the challenge of recreating the opening of the Cape of Good Hope to European settlement, beginning as a layover from longer sea voyages to the Eastern ports stretched out below the Indochina subcontinent, which was the new state of things in exploration and exploitation in the mid-seventeenth century when the story opens and speaks of the scourge of scurvey among the crews of those far flung vessels before humankind understood how to prevent or heal the afflicted other than by providing a land-based layover, for new able bodied crew could not at that time be impressed from brothels in Africa the way they might in Marseiles or Shanghai: the numbers that sailed from the point of departure had to be saved where saving was possible in order to make the voyages out and coming back. The Cape of Good Hope was well-found and provided promise of fresh meat and vegetables IF a foothold might be purchased by the toil of those willing to trade chance of new life and lands for service to their home merchant marine -- soon enough their navies.Well written and intriguing, a story that takes time as needed for the revelation of character and motive among the various main figures and their supporting characters, while abiding by the rules of historical reality, Dan Sleigh's Islands promises to be a very good read and informative about matters too little investigated or unfolded before the eyes of an eager readership. It may remind you, too, of the many stories that intermingle with your own life, the woof and the warp, between the divine and human that make you and your memory what they are in that roiling stew that is you. I recommend it to your most promptus reading list.
From Diablo Cody's script to Juno, which I reread yesterday in a weak moment:
INT. LORING HOUSE - MARK’S SPECIAL ROOM - DAYMark is seated at the computer, surfing a horror movie
website. He has the blank expression of a bored obsessive.
The doorbell rings.
'The blank expression of a bored obsessive.' That hurt, even more than remembering Cody won the Oscar for Juno.
I'm that way with blogs and RPG rulebooks. They don't give me nearly as much pleasure as you'd think, given the amount of time I pay in. Why do I bother? Why do I read The Valve, for instance, when I'm irritated by nine out of every ten posts? Why read Grognardia when the subject line and illustration alone are almost invariably enough to tell me what the guy's gonna say? (Most politics blogs fail for the same reason.) If I know I don't want anything in particular from Pandemonium Books & Games, why walk in and allow my buying compulsion free reign? (For that matter, what difference does my conscious desire make?)
I know I'm a slave to very strong desires, the satisfaction of which gives me no pleasure. I know I'm precisely the 'bored obsessive' mentioned in the scene. Man, I didn't care one way or the other about Juno screenplay, I just happened upon it in my ~/Downloads folder; the description of Mark's expression hit me so hard precisely because I was wearing it as I read!
Why are my healthy habits so much harder to keep up than my destructive ones?
OK, so let's indulge my defense mechanisms and talk about what's wrong with Juno, because why else would I have a blog? Why would anyone?
The problem with Juno is precisely that it's a clever bit of writing. The dialogue's stagey and self-conscious in an adolescent way, the characters are largely one-dimensional, Cody substitutes cutesy affectation for real individuality (e.g. specifying Juno's brand of lip balm - 'Dr. Pepper Lip Smacker' - instead of, say, exploring what in the world she and her insufferable one-dimensional best friend actually have in common or what could possibly motivate their relationship), etc., etc. But those problems do seem to share DNA with the film's writerly success, which is that its whisper-thin pregnancy narrative is primarily a smokescreen for the film's double-headed story about (1) Juno and Bleeker's obviously-perfect-for-eachother romantic wish fulfillment, and (2) how being a grownup is more complicated than the smug, self-satisfied, ignorant Mary Sue Juno can possibly understand, even though in the end her naïve fantasies are encouraged by the people around her who know better.
So Juno's pregnancy acts as metaphorical misdirection; its main function is gonna be to pull her closer to her Miraculous Boyfriend, Cody's Y-chromosomal take on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl beloved of indie film jerks everywhere. (Hello Garden State. Hello Amelie. Hello, ironically, Fight Club.) But the relationship between the two is more suggested than depicted, in strokes so broad they start to look like handwaving. In fact the film's dual climax begins with Juno's realization that she loves Paulie, an epiphany so dramatically unmotivated that she must explain her feelings at excruciating length and cuteness in the scene at track practice (page 102 in the shooting script, for those reading along at home).
The actors in Juno also do incredible work, turning delicious lines into something like human communication. Jennifer Garner is so heartbreaking as Vanessa that you forget that her job in the film is to be a perfect angel for Juno to Recognize Afresh, in Dramatic Fashion. The role of Mark is a nice little turnabout - he's a jerk who's arguably doing the right thing by leaving Vanessa, maybe, and Cody's nonjudgmental style works well in his scenes. But there's not much of a story there, and it veers out of believability. (The first guitar-nerd scene is wholly out of place and wrong - a farcical intrusion into a realistically-scaled sequence and story.) And Michael Cera is obviously skilled at playing, in essence, the only part he's played as an adult - so skilled that you forget to be annoyed at how thin and artificial the role is. The adults around Juno are fantastic, Ellen Page is spectacular, and Jason Reitman helps everyone do a convincing imitation of life in the midst of this maddening, hermetic plot.
But it all feels like an achievement - or rather, like we're obligated to call it one, like a script and a film begging for attention. The character of Rollo the store clerk (page 2!) is the script's most obvious misstep:
This is your third test today, Mama Bear. Your eggo is preggo, no doubt about it!...
You’re not a lion in a pride! (to himself:) These kids, acting like lions with their unplanned pregnancies and their Sunny Delights.
...
That ain't no Etch-a-Sketch. This is one doodle that can't be undid, homeskillet.
Rollo's not a person, of course, he's a Push Button To Enjoy One Line of Diablo Cody Dialogue! machine. Cody might well know someone who speaks like this, but it doesn't matter; 'believability' is not strictly a function of concordance-with-reality, it's a measure of dramatic coherence and contiguity. Rollo isn't believable even if his dialogue was dictated by Cody's local 7-11 worker. His function in the drama is actually impaired by his relentless zing! and zip! and yuk-yuk-yuk! Casting (the spectacularly funny) Rainn Wilson in the role was a misstep, I think; he's so weird-looking, and the design and art direction in his scene are so obsessively quirky, that their ironic function (contrast w/the seriousness of Juno's task, i.e. pregnancy testing) gets lost. Cody is so busy tap-dancing across the surface of her Big Indie Topic that she manages to deflate it into one more element of the script's all-consuming Cody-ness.
Well, there's your problem. The cost of Juno's neat tricks, particularly its coming-of-age misdirection, is that its powerful human moments (the note on the wall! Vanessa and her bassinet!) can only float along in parallel with its endless quippery and twee-teen self-satisfaction. They don't seem to come from a unified human impulse. Juno's empathy is schematic but its condescension feels absolutely lived-in and real; it's a hostile film (and script), dripping with contempt that its let's-get-together message can't obliterate or outbalance. I wish I could say this was surprising, but mainly it's deflating and familiar. After all, it's the sad loners (like Juno herself) who harbor the darkest anger, and the contemptuous 'norms' who feel the deepest sadness. The script again, page 94:
Bleeker and Juno KISS, oblivious to the gawking track team guys in the background.In the distance, near the school entrance, we see STEVE RENDAZO (the kid who always TORMENTS Juno) regarding the makeout session with a sad, envious expression.
I think Cody really believed she was just paying off a joke here (the setup is on page 11: 'The funny thing is that Steve Rendazo secretly wants me. Jocks like him always want freaky girls'), but this is dumb revenge, and no less contemptuous or pathetic for being visited on the dumb spiteful jock. Bleeker is a figure of fantasy in the story as surely as Juno is for Steve Rendazo, and this reads like a bit of 'punk' acting-out. But Heathers would already've knocked that shit out of the park if The Breakfast Club hadn't done it first. Must the jock's main function in the story be to settle authorial scores?
But then that's exactly the sort of thing Hollywood writer types go for, hahaha, and so the Oscar goes to...
I wrote an email to myself almost 6 years ago listing out my life goals. I was stuck in a job I hated, living with mom and dad, and it was my first step to codifying what I actually wanted to do with my life. This was before The Bucket List (movie), so I'm proud that it was also somewhat original, even though I probably found the idea on some career website. I found that email today thanks to a random gmail search, and I found it entertaining and a reminder. So I added all the things I've accomplished since then to the bottom and added some more things to top, and emailed it to myself again. Here's hoping I'll find this in another 5 years.
---
Have spent at least a month (in total) on every significant land-mass in the world.
Extra points for Antartica.
Fill out a county map.
Learn how to play the electric bass, saxaphone, and trumpet.
Extra points for playing every instrument ever imagined.
Speak Mandarin fluently. If time, Japanese as well.
Become a black belt.
Go spelunking once.
Learn how to kiteboard and wakeboard.
Windsurf the Gorge.
Hike the Grand Canyon.
See lava flow in Hawaii.
Scuba the Great Barrier Reef.
Swim with dolphins.
Hike in New Zealand.
Eat my way through India.
Eat my way through Italy.
Go on a furniture buying spree in China.
Name my Greater Swiss Mountain dog Cocoa.
Name my daughter Mia.
Still play soccer at age 80.
Things I've accomplished. (that I can always do again)
Ice Climbing.
College Diploma.
Survived.
Skinny dipped w/ glaciers.
Lost myself in music.
Fallen in Love.
Spent a month in Malaysia.
Three weeks in Japan.
Visited Thailand.
Visited Singapore.
Visited Hong Kong.
Eaten chicken feet.
Learned how to lead climb/rappel.
Hugged trees in the Redwoods.
Learned how to surf.
Hiked among the Bristlecone Pines. (One piece was older than Jesus)
Hiked the Subway in Zion.
Ran a Marathon.
Led a Trad climb.
Climbed in Joshua Tree.
Free climbed in Yosemite.
Unlike the rest of the world, it is snowing here (after a long day of rain coming down as slush that eventually built up to form a foundation under the snow). Nothing like it -- when you are on an ATV in darkness, attempting to effectively plow a not-too-small driveway, being forced away along the angled setting of the plow blade by "snow" that is turning into solid ice under the pressure while four-wheel-drive wheels are losing grip on the slush-ed asphalt of that same driveway.
Cool.
The "maybe-snowflakes" of the morning 'stuck' around all day here, though it eventually, like popcorn, did find the right temperature by which to expand into snowflakes the size of front hare's feet, quickly laying down a first full coverage of the household footprint, and then rapidly added inch upon inch, until the six or seven inches of a predicted 4 to 5 was laid down like the perennial blanket we all so love That was almost accomplished by 6:15 p.m. but I stalled and didn't go out until the dark was thoroughly established about 7:30 p.m.
And you were just thinking about or beginning to digest your dinner choice of the evening.
This may not be as interesting to some as another terrific book you've stumbled onto or might be reading about in this space OR the politics de jour, but it is about the weather. And one other thing: that because we haven't had much real snowpack in our area this winter, after the first grandiose displays back before Christmas and some one to two inch subtleties since then, I've been thinking about the local reservoirs and my longstanding, long term predictions about fresh water. We need this down- and outpouring of heavenly goodwill. It's not a forty days and forty nights downfall after all,
The US Men's curling team lost their final game to China just now, finishing 2-7 in the round robin tournament, well out of medal contention. As skip John Shuster missed yet another shot in the 8th end, he was overheard to say "I'm sick of this stupid game." Oh, Mr. Shuster... such good taste in baseball teams*, not such good luck on the curling sheet. The word "shustered" was even coined for his style of play. (That style would be missing the big shot in key situations, it seems. Although hey, he's got a bronze medal from 2006 and you don't.)
On the plus side for the sport of curling, everyone I've talked to who has paid the slightest bit of attention (and, okay, all but one of those people were people I introduced curling to) has joked that they're going to learn to curl so that they too can go to the Olympics and screw it all up. After all, it can't be that hard to beat Shuster's team, can it? (Um, yeah, it probably can.) Even if most of those people never actually pick up a stone, some will (I will!), some of those will stick with it, and maybe even some of those will compete for the US in future Olympics and actually do well.
And so, John Shuster, while you might be sick of this game, the rest of the country is just starting to pay attention.
* If you don't want to install silverlight, it's a video of John Shuster talking about how he's inspired by the Minnesota Twins. Given how the Twins of late have a habit of working hard to make it to the playoffs only to fail miserably once they get there, it's kind of an apt inspiration.
I don't know who I'm posting this for. But if there is any chance that you want to know how the US started torturing people against the Geneva Convention, there are 289 pages in a declassified PDF here.
With a hat tip to the NBC announcer, from the country who brought us ABBA and Ace of Base, the Swedish band Hammerfall featured the Swedish women's curling team in their music video "Hearts On Fire." It's... bizarre.
100221 So this is Hell!
Last time I wrote here I expressed an intention to keep the blog more current. Uh-huh. As it turns out, I have been no more current than in the incarnations preceding that moment, and perhaps less.
Anyhow, it has been a busy time for us in several ways, ranging from maniacally driven reading (me) to beekeeping labors and choral practices, pleasure, and obligaitons; and we've been addressing rife lymphoma in the family (my mother) that has kept me to-ing and fro-ing from Slingerlands to Brant Lake to Glens Falls Hospital to Brant Lake (on consecutive days, often enough all day), and back home again, week upon week, three or four days at a time. Quite an exercise in recalling where you are upon awakening of a morning, quite a lazy memory slump on attempting to recall "I was doing..." before leaving home -- uh...,oh well.
In December, SWMBO, The Girl, and I joined up in California to visit SWMBO's West Coast root family for the holidays, moving from her brother's home in Orange (in company of his wife and children, and SWMBOs and his sister) and driving down to the Baja in Mexico for five days, where we had a rollicking good time driving sand rails up and down the beach and into the only too rough nearby backcountry. And within a week we were back at Albany County Airport and soon home in Slingerlands and The Girl back in Wisconsin. It was quite an adventure, only too brief, but that brevity kept us available to meet church and family obligations both up close (and in the distance, which I have been addressing weekly ever since).
If anyone out there is interested in a reading series that moves like consecutive prairie fires, check out the Steve Berry 'Cotton Malone Novels' ... I did not read them in order, which I found to be no problem, but I can well imagine that reading them in order might well be more fulfilling. They aren't particularly deep, though they are not shallow: they are highly detailed with adequate characters to keep the reader at a level of high pitch keeping up with the complications, and these novels drive from page to page, not merely chapter to chapter. Suspense is high throughout. Hey, not Great Literature, as I usually conceive of it, but good, sound books, terrific stories. These are not all I have been reading but only the latest batch over a few weeks and first to mind.
Whether this blog entry can be considered the first of a renewal of good intentions...that's anyone's guess at this point: we have been playing it by ear and deed over the past three months and I see no immediate likelihood of alteration, although of late it has appeared that my mother's cancer, which she is riddled with -- neck, armpits, breasts, groin, and bones -- is being beaten down. Not bad for age 88!
"May you, too, be so blessed!"
And what obscure sport am I reporting the scores for? Why, the only one in which you get to throw rocks at houses -- curling!
For some bizarre reason, curling has become my new favorite sport. I first got into it during the 2006 Torino games, mostly because I loved listening to the announcers' Canadian accents and because the women's team was from Minnesota. Fast forward to last summer when I bought a Wii and brought it home. Deciding to buy me a new game, my dad selected a sports game which included curling and family fun at the cabin was had. (That game is actually not so good and I've since bought a better curling-included game.) So while I've yet to throw a real stone (I'll get to that), I know the rules and the strategy.
Now that the 2010 games are under way in Vancouver, I've been streaming the curling matches at work and watching coverage on CNBC. (In fact, I am currently watch the Canada-Denmark women's match.) For those who don't know the difference between a peel and a tick, the summary of the first few days goes like this: team Canada is generally awesome and unbeatable (particularly the men) and team USA can't win a game, usually due missing a clutch shot in the 10th end. (End ~ inning in baseball... kind of.)
But the US's luck turned around today -- both the men and women's teams finally won! The men's victory is not without drama as it came after they benched their skip (skip ~ last shooter/team captain) John Shuster and replaced him with 22 year old alternate Chris Plys. Oh, the tension in the curling world! Unfortunately for the men, they're still ranked last while the women fare only slightly better. (They're ahead of Switzerland, who remain the last unvictorious team on the rink for either gender.) I'm cheering for Canada all the way at this point.
Today's Olympic victories aside, I've decided that curling is my best shot at ever being a world class athlete, given that hockey didn't really work out for me. And so, on March 7, I'm going to the Broomstones open house with anyone who wants to join me. (Seriously, if you're reading this, are in Massachusetts, and want to go, a bunch of us have registered for the 3:40 slot.) I'm bringing a camera and I'm sure I will discover that hurling a 44 pound piece of granite into a precise spot on the ice is not a easy as Cheryl Bernard makes it look... but I'm also betting that it will be a ton of fun!
Commenting on this thread, which overflows with the kind of silly bullshit you'd expect from argumentative nerds. The topic is the bundle of seeming contradictions and weirdly dismissive/negative/myopic claims in Gary Gygax's public statements about the hobby that he and Dave Arneson founded in the mid-70's.
Unless you are a very, very serious goddamn RPG geek, do not read the rest of this post. Its narrowness of vision and concern embarrasses me, though I'm glad that after thousands of pages of insufferable RPG reading I can now talk about the shit with at least minimal familiarity. Yes, I did paying work earlier today, why do you ask?
JRT wins the thread here:
The problem is "Gamer Gary" and "TSR Gary" are not really separate people. You have to take his history whole and total.
Oh well. Several comments down, James sez:
Yes, the chess analogy is one that Gygax sometimes used, most famously in "Poker, Chess, and the AD&D System," in which he compared AD&D to Poker according to Hoyle or tournament rules chess. This is likely one of the most famous appearances of "TSR Gary," as he denigrates the introduction of "extraneous material tinkered onto" AD&D as apt to "bring it down to a lower level, at best, ruin it at worst."
Meanwhile, Mr. Romero refers to...
...the AD&D we remember, an insane mess of inspirations and cranky pronouncements not at heart different from OD&D.
While Delta adds:
AD&D caused far more ongoing rules debates than OD&D ever did. I almost feel like there's a case for temporary insanity when this passage got written.
Instead of concocting this unlikely tale of warring personalities - or supposing that Gygax was temporarily or permanently 'insane' - in order to justify ignoring some of Gygax's edicts and simplify the TSR Saga from history to myth, let's try something easier, Occam-style:
1) Gygax didn't particularly know what he was doing when he cooked up OD&D, but he had enough verbal facility and nerd charisma to slide by as 'pope of the (actual) old school.' The sacred aporias in the old books can be adequately explained by inadequacy and experimentation rather than too-cleverness; its leaps forward (e.g. 'one player, one character') are important, but they require less genius than Gygax's fans like to believe, and in any case the relatively silent partner Arneson was responsible for many of them...
2) Gygax's AD&D project was seriously hampered(!!!!) by his conflicting business/nerd interests, failure to understand what roleplaying had become or the audience it might reach, and obvious fixation on pseudohistorical simulation and numerical precision. (The note about 'simulation' in the 1e DMG is a giant blinking sign reading 'protests too much.') He had a swell idea - game-group-portable one-stop FRPG rules - but he didn't actually have the skill to pull it off. This partly explains the incompetent organization, abstruse prose, and obsessive detail of the AD&D 1e books, the myopia of items like the original 'Deities & Demigods,' etc. Indeed, it explains why OD&D functions now as a 'toolkit' rather than a fully-operational game: Gygax never actually wrote a unified, fully-operational game. Looking for one in his ludography is a recipe for frustration - or worse, religion.
3) The explosion in AD&D's popularity had a lot to do with distribution channels (prestige hardcovers on mainstream bookstore shelves!) rather than any ludic leap forward (as folks here can attest).
4) Gygax really believed both the 'TSR Gary' things he said AND his 'Gamer Gary' comments. The reason his public pronouncements are self-contradictory and unclear is the same reason the AD&D 1e books are such a bloody mess: he was neither a clear writer nor a particularly linear thinker, he had plenty of ideas and trouble communicating them (not the only gamer so afflicted), and he was as happy to fulfill his corporate obligations as ANY NERD WOULD BE given a bundle of cash and a bully pulpit for talking loftily at a devoted audience of thousands. He sold out, in other words, but didn't lose his conscience, so you'd get regular reminders of both in his public writing.
5) Remember that Gygax was famously a DM rather than a player. He wanted to make rules and worlds - to set the standards. Do you really expect such a man to play well with others, to admire the work of others in dramatically changing his precious game design, his business livelihood, his sole legacy? I suspect he felt threatened both personally and in business terms by changes in the RPG landscape, and acted out in response. Some people undergo pretty stark changes of voice and style under stress. That'd explain his fractured writerly output and inability to adapt to his conflicting designer/PR/eminence-grise roles.
To summarize #1-5: the inadequacies of OD&D, AD&D, and Gygax's proclamations are merely inadequacies requiring no explanation, only suggesting that Gary-worship is always going to be complicated. The 'old ways' need not be a perfect expression of anything at all, nor do we need to consider Gygax the final authority on any question about the evolution of RPGs beyond TSR just because he was around in the early days. He might've caught lightning in a bottle but that doesn't make him goddamn Zeus, ya dig?
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March 11, 2010 10:00 PM
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