Isolation Report, Week #65

This week we had a new roof put on.  You know, when they tell you that contractors will be arriving at your house at the crack of dawn and making a lot of noise over your head, you say yourself “duh.” Of course there’s going to be a lot of noise.  But knowing it and experiencing it are entirely different things.  For 3 days, everyone in the house was woken up far before they were used to being conscious—even our middle child, who is the only true morning person in our family.  Lack of sleep was just the beginning though: the loud noise and massive amounts of dust coming in his window made our middle child (who was recently confirmed to be on the spectrum) fairly discombobulated,^* the indoor cats hid under the bed for 3 days, and the outdoor was scared to go out but not scared enough to be coerced into using the litterbox like a normal feline being.  We couldn’t let the dogs out in the yard because they think they’re vicious and want to “attack” the workmen.  We couldn’t run the air conditioner, because the roofers covered it in plastic to keep the dust from getting sucked into the vents, but we also couldn’t get in the pool, because stray pieces of shingle and once even a tool were raining down on it.  And the constant doorbell ringing: there are rotten beams, you should probably replace the gutters, we had to add new “fascia boards,”^** can you move your truck out of the driveway so we can park a porta potty there instead?  (It’s still there, by the way.)  It was a lot.

Next week they’re coming to turn the power off for up to 6 hours so they can replace our electrical panels (so that should be a load of fun), then the actual solar panels get installed.  As I say, it’s a lot, but at the end of the day we’ll have enough solar power to never have to pay the power company again, and a battery backup which should last indefinitely the next time said power company turns off our electricity for specious reasons.  Assuming the solar company isn’t full of shit.  We shall see, I suppose.

On the pandemic front, our humans are now 60% vaccinated, which is to say 2 of us have had 2 shots, 2 of us have had 1, and one of us hasn’t had any (but only because she’s too young).  Moving forward to a better future, hopefully.  Again, we shall see.

__________

* The technical term is “emotional dysregulation.”

** No, we didn’t know what that meant either.

Isolation Report, Week #33

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Another two weeks gone in this seemingly endless pandemic, but of course it still doesn’t feel like we’re any closer to ... anything.  Honestly, even though the election will be done in another two weeks, it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.  In the first place, two weeks these days can easily last two years, and, in the second place, the chances that we actually know who’s won on Election Night are so fucking slim that it doesn’t matter anyway.  I don’t give a shit: I’ve already voted.  It’s all waiting to see how it comes out in the wash for me at this point.

Today, I’ll give you thoughts on two things, one political, and one personal.  First, the political.

I’ve mostly been trying to ignore the whole Amy Coney Barrett thing: she’s going to get on the court no matter what happens in the hearings, so what’s the point in following them?  But I couldn’t help but hear about the moment where (Republican) John Cornyn asked her what she had been referring to during the hearing and she held up a blank notepad (to which Cornyn replied “impressive” ... because, you know, it takes a lot of effort to write nothing on a piece of paper).  This has been a source of many jokes, from both political camps: an unknown conservative described the blank page as a “list of Joe Biden’s accomplishments,” while comedian Kathy Griffin said it represented a “picture of his [Trump’s] brain scan.” What I haven’t heard anyone point out, though, is that a blank page is actually the perfect inspiration for Barrett’s “testimony”: it reminded her to keep her experssion entirely blank, her voice entirely neutral, and her statements entirely devoid of content.

And, honestly, it’s not even fair to pick on Barrett: any liberal judge in her position would do (as has done) the same.  Judges are full of opinions—it’s their fucking job description, for fuck’s sake—until you put them in front of Congress, and then all of a sudden they have no viewpoints on anything whatsoever.  There’s a metric shit-ton of “it wouldn’t be fair of me to talk about a case I might adjudicate one day” and “I have to keep an open mind until I hear the facts of such a case” and many other such empty platitudes.  So, if the point of Senate confirmation hearings is not to hear a judge’s opinions on the law, what the hell is the fucking point, anyway?

And we don’t have to stop there.  Over the past 4 years, we’ve seen and heard a whole fuck-ton of people “testifying” before Congress, and magically none of them remember any details about the stuff they’re supposed to be experts on, or the stuff they actually did themselves.  Sessions has appeared before Congress, and Dejoy has appeared before Congress, and Barr has appeared before Congress, and DeVos has appeared before Congress, and Mueller has appeared before Congress, and Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress, and can anyone name one single thing that has changed because of it?  It’s all pure theater at this point.

And then of course we have the debates ... it’s a fun little time where two people refuse to answer the questions they were actually asked or follow any of the “rules” set forth at the beginning.  At the end of the allotted time, you know absolutely nothing that you didn’t know going in, and all the “analysis” is centered around who flubbed a word or had a fucking fly on their head.  Let me be clear: the Democrats are not any better than the Republicans here.  I’ve often said that all answers in a debate—or even your average press conference—can be classified as one of 3 animals: a duck, a weasel, or a dead horse.  West Wing often gets accused of being “liberal porn,” but part of the reason it was so good was that even the Republicans on that show were better than the Democrats we have in real life.  Remember the episode in season 7 where Alan Alda’s character got his (Republican) campaign back on track by holding a press conference with the radical idea of just fucking answering all the reporters’ questions until they couldn’t think of any more?  When have you ever seen that done in real life?  Yeah, me neither.  And they wonder why we’d rather live in televsion land than in real life.

For the personal thing, I’ll let you know that this week I had my first, and quite possibly my only, colonoscopy.  I’ve told everyone I can think of that, if a doctor ever comes to me and says “you have to get another colonoscopy or you might die” I’m going to reply “let me think about it.” (And so I apologize if you’re one of the folks that had to hear that bon mot more than once.)  Now, if you don’t know what a colonoscopy is, it’s where they jam a camera on a tube up your ass and see how far they can get it up there, taking pictures and whatnot as they go.  Now that sounds horrifying, but the truth is that they knock you out completely for this whole thing, so you don’t actually feel anything.  You just go to sleep, and then you wake up, and you’re a bit bloated because you’ve had some extra air injected into your guts, but basically it’s like nothing happened.

So why do I say I’ll never do it again?  Well, those of you who’ve had this procedure before already know the answer: it’s the prep.  See, the day before, you can’t have any solid food.  Which is not great, but not terrible either.  I mean, you can still have water, and coffee or tea, and fruit juice.  I mean, no milk or cream in your coffee or tea, and no pulpy fruit juice, just clear stuff like apple or white grape, but that’s not bad.  And you can have chicken broth, which is not super filling, but better than nothing.  And you can have Jello and popsicles and sports drinks like Gatorade or VitaminWater, but certain colors are out (presumably because of the dyes): no red, no blue, no green, no purple.  Now, one of the (many) medical people I talked to in preparation for this preparation described this as “only leaving the crappy flavors.” But, as it happens, I love orange, as a flavor at least, so drinking orange Vitaminwater and “eating” orange Jello all day was just fine by me (orange popsicles, as it turns out, were not as yummy as my nostalgia had portrayed them).  So, still: not great, but not awful either.  Then there’s the medicine.

The first problem with the medicine is that someone decided that it was so disgusting that they needed to make it taste like fruit.  Unfortunately, this just makes it taste like disgusting fruit, which is still not great.  You have to mix it yourself, and then you have to drink it, slowly, but finish all 16 ounces within 30 minutes.  Slightly oxymoronic, but okay.  And you do this 3 times over the course of the day.  And the function of this medicine is to make you shit your guts out.  Because, you know: they don’t want any yucky stuff on their nice camera that they’re going to jam up your ass.  So they want you to get it all out.  All of it.  So, fine: spending more time on the toilet than not for roughly 7 hours is not my idea of a fun time, but, you know what?  We have technology for that now.  My kids spend 7 hours on the toilet all the time: you just need a phone or a tablet or what-have-you and you’re set.  But here’s the problem: after a while, you’re done.  There is literally nothing more to expel.  Except you’re still drinking this nasty-tasting shit, which somehow manages to come out exaclty as fast as it went in, and it’s all so violent and ... I dunno, repetitive.  And you know how you get when you have diarrhea for even just an hour and you start trying to raid your kids’ diaper ointment?  Yeah, multiply that by 7.  A fun time, it was not.

On the other hand, I now know that I do not have any polyps, cancerous or otherwise, that I do have diverticula, which are the breeding ground for diverticulitis, and I have some lovely pictures of the inside of my guts.  I thought about sharing them with you, but my family discouraged me.  They seemed to think you wouldn’t find them as fascinating as I do.  Ah, well: your loss.

In any event, my next virus isolation report will be from the far side of the election, so perhaps things will look better then.  But, given 2020 thus far, I shall not be holding my breath.

Isolation Report, Week #10

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


This week ... well, honestly, it’s been pretty much exactly like last week.  Which is sort of the problem, I suppose.  I would appreciate it if time would move forward.  But I don’t think that time is predisposed to accede to my idle wishes.

The never-changing sameness we seem to be stuck in doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of news, and I’ve already philosophized as much as I care to.  I may even stop doing these reports weekly; perhaps I can go back to my previous habits of long post / short post, with the short posts being these “isolation reports.”  But I can’t make any promises: these are uncertain times, and who knows what tomorrow may bring?

In a vague attempt to make this post not entirely worthless, I’ll let you know some of the things I’ve been watching to try to keep my mind off the fact that our country is in the midst of a crisis without anyone even remotely competent in charge:

• The Mother and I finished up Altered Carbon season 2 [Netflix] this week.  She said it was perhaps even better than S1.
• I started on the final season of Blindspot [Hulu].  Honestly, these last few seasons haven’t lived up to the promise of the first two (or even one), but I’m a fan of Ashley Johnson (and her character), and it’s only half a season to find out the ending of the whole saga.  So I’m sticking with it.
• I watched the entirety of McMillion$ [HBO] this week.  When I first saw a commercial for it, I was intrigued, and then I saw that it was 6 one-hour episodes.  And I was like, interesting story, maybe, but does it really need 6 hours?  But it actually turned out to be pretty good.  Documentaries are normally not my bag, but I enjoyed this one.
• The kids and I started on season 2 of The Hollow [Netflix].  If you dig animation that’s kid-friendly without being dumbed down, this is not too shoddy.
• If you’re looking for more of a “here’s what we’ve been doing during the quarantine” type thing, the first episode of McElroy and McVarney came out this week.  Being two folks who I find entertaining anyway, it was a no-brainer for me.
• There was a new “Narrative Telephone” this week.  (See virus isolation week 8 for a bit more on what that is.)
• If you happen to like actual play D&D (or maybe just want to give it a try), there’s a new series of D&D parents and their kids all playing together which I’m finding pretty entertaining.  It’s called Roll in the Family, and there are five episodes so far [1 2 3 4 5].  I think there will be one more next week and that will wrap up the storyline.  The DM is top-notch, and all the younger players (and almost all the older players) are damned entertaining.  Plus, it’s for charity.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week.  Perhaps next week, I’ll take a break from all this virus talk.  Maybe.

Only the Finest Baby Frogs

I would guess that I was somewhere between 8 and 10 when I first saw Monty Python.

I was at my grandmother’s house.  Back in those days, most people had color TVs, but only the “big” TV in the family room.  If there were any other TVs throughout the house (and, in many houses, there weren’t), they were still black-and-white.  They all had real, honest-to-god antennae, because no one had invented cable yet (and wouldn’t for another decade or so).  We had two “bands” on the TV just like we had two on the radio, except instead of FM and AM, it was VHF and UHF.¹  The “normal” channels—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were on VHF and came in crystal clear, barring gale-force weather conditions.  In our small-ish town, we could get 2 channels on UHF, both hopelessly staticy unless the sky was completely cloudless and you managed to tweak the antenna just so.  One played religious programming like The 700 Club during the night, black-and-white comedies like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best during the day, and, weirdly, cool anime cartoons like Star Blazers and G-Force in the afternoons after school.  The other was the local PBS station, and its daytime and afternoons were filled with the typical fare: Sesame Street and The Electric Company and the occasional Romper Room rerun.  At a certain point gool ol’ channel 15² started playing boring crap like news and I would tune it out.  But, for some reason—undoubtedly desperation, meaning there must have been absolute shit on all the other channels—this one night, I decided to see what channel 15 had on at 8 or 9 at night.

And, what it was, was ... well, honestly, I had no idea what it was.  In those days, proper comedies had laugh tracks, so I knew they were funny.  This didn’t have that.  So maybe it wasn’t supposed to be funny?  But it certainly wasn’t meant to be taken seriously either.  Most of the sophisticated wordplay was over my head, none of the English class humor was landing, obviously,³ and surrealist comdey wasn’t something I’d ever been exposed to.  For that matter, was there surrealist comedy before Python?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  The point is, I was utterly unprepared to process what I saw that night.  I remember not “getting” it, not particularly liking it, and thinking I would probably never watch that crap again.  But of course I was wrong.

Throughout my life, there have been many comedies that I couldn’t appreciate upon first viewing, but which have since become central to my concept of humor: Beavis and Butthead springs to mind, as does The Mighy Boosh.  Oh, sure, sometimes it clicks right way: South Park, or the Young Ones, or Arrested Development ... all odd, but I felt right at home with them immediately.  But Ren & Stimpy took a few tries before I could fully appreciate it, and The State was certainly more confusing than amusing until I started to feel the rhythm of it.  Monty Python was my first, though, and they say you never forget your first.  It was the first time that my first viewing produced “this is crap” and my second produced “well, there a couple of good parts” and the third was perhaps “you know, it’s not half-bad” and by the time I hit four or five I was finding it utterly hilarious.⁴

The pinnacle, though, was my senior year in high school.  I distinctly remember getting together with my friends in the late summer before the school year: we had a picnic in one of the public parks in my hometown.  I had been an outcast all throughout my school career, until I switched schools in the middle of the 10th grade and had the good fortune to fall in with a fairly hip crowd.  But I still remembered what it was like to be on the other side of the Great High School Divide, and I was bemoaning all the cliques and all that.  “I wish there were parties where just anyone could come, and it didn’t matter who you were or who you hung out with or any of that,” I said.⁵  And someone said, why don’t you just throw a party like that?  And at first this didn’t make any sense to me, because, you know, I was hanging with the cool kids, but I wasn’t necessarily a cool kid myself—certainly not in my own mind, anyway.  So I was thinking, who would want to come to a party at my house, and also why the hell would my parents let me have a party at my house, also how would I pay for party supplies and whatnot ... it didn’t really seem rational.  But we started fleshing out a plan: they would be movie parties, so people would come because they wanted to check out the movies, and we had one of those fancy new “VCR” thingies so we could actually show the movies, and most other people didn’t have one of those so they’d have to come to my house because they couldn’t just sit at home and watch movies themselves, and we’d collect money at the door as contributions and that would pay for soda and popcorn and the actual movie rental and all that, and my parents ... well, honestly I can’t even remember how the hell I talked them into this, but I did.  And we came up with a manifesto, about how everyone was welcome and no one would ever be turned away (unless you didn’t bring your money for the cover charge) and, if you didn’t like it that you might bump into literally anyone from high school there, you just shouldn’t come.  And there were never invitations, just ... word of mouth.  Everyone knew that everyone could come, and most of ’em did, at least once.  We ended up doing this movie party thing maybe 3 times? maybe 4?  I can’t recall.  But I can absolutely tell you, for sure, what the movies were for the absolute first everyone-is-welcome movie-party at my house: we closed with Poltergeist, and we opened with Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Now, I wish I could take credit for having the idea to show this, Monty Python’s first “proper” movie,⁶ but I honestly think it was my best friend Mackey who suggested it.  If you are not familiar with it, the credits are all at the beginning of the movie—and interspersed with classic goofs in the middle of them, such as “A Møøse once bit my sister” and “The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.”—and, at the end of the movie, there is nothing.  Just a song which repeats ad infinitum over a blank screen.  I mean, it was a videotape, so it couldn’t have literally gone on forever, but I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you how long we let it sit there and play before someone finally said, “shit! the credits were all at the beginning, rememeber!” and we all laughed at ourselves and initiated the bathroom break while we rewound the tape and set up for the next movie.

And that only goes to cover the very beginning and very end of this classic movie, which has since become one of my favorites.  In fact, I’m pretty cagey about picking an absolute favorite out of my top 10 or 20 favorite movies,⁷ but, realistically, Holy Grail is almost certainly at the top of that list.  It is, above all else, inifinitely quotable, and practically every line in it is classic: “I got better ...” and “your father smelt of elderberries!” and “what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?” and “strange women lyin’ in ponds is no basis for a system of government” and “three, sir” and “let me go back in there and face the peril” and “I’ll just stay here, then, shall I?” and “brave Sir Robin bravely ran away” and “I think I’ll go for a walk” and “help! help! I’m being repressed!” and “of course it’s a good idea!” and “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” and “go away or I shall taunt you a second time!” and “get on with it!”  This paragraph could easily have been twice as long and I still would not have exhausted all the great lines in this movie.

When my eldest child was young we watched the entirety of the original series, including a couple of episodes I had somehow missed, and we watched Holy Grail often enough that we could recite the Black Knight scene by heart.  We would act it out with toy swords upon occasion: “It’s just a flesh wound”  “You’re a loony.”

Throughout all my life I have hated musicals.  With a great and unabiding passion.  And yet I know all the words to “The Lumberjack Song” and “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” and “Every Sperm is Sacred”:

Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I am a connoisseur of the Ministry of Silly Walks, and Teddy Salad, CIA man, and the music of Johann Gambolputty &c of Ulm, and The Bishop, and the Spanish Inquisition, and pet ants, and how not to be seen, and Norwegian Blue parrots, and argument clinics, and mouse organs, and sharp, pointy sticks, and Confuse-a-Cat Limited, and the Piranha Brothers, and most especially that time of the evening when it’s just gone eight o’clock and time for the penguin on top of your television set to explode.  I have watched, several times, A Fish Called Wanda and Time Bandits and Brazil and The Fisher King and, at least once, Clockwise and The Rutles and Yellowbeard and Fierce Creatures and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Jabberwocky.  It’s certainly possible that there is a group of six to ten people unrelated to me who have had a bigger influence on my cultural development than the members and contributors of Monty Python, but, if so, I can’t imagine who they are.

Graham Chapman died in late 1989, as I was preparing to make a major move in my life: from the small town where I had lived all but a single year of my life to the environs of my nation’s capital, where I would, after a 3-year absence, finally return to college.  I was too caught up in my own life to notice his passing, I fear, and I only mourned later, but not too much: so many of the members remained.  When Ian MacNaughton, director of all but 4 of the episodes of the Flying Circus and one of the several people to be referred to as “the seventh Python,” died in 2002, it wasn’t major news, sadly, and I never even noticed at all.  But, in the past month, we’ve lost two more: Neil Innes, who sang about brave, brave Sir Robin in Holy Grail and “I Must Be in Love” for the Rutles, and who was perhaps most credited with being the “seventh Python,” died only 3 days shy of seeing in the new decade, and Terry Jones—the Bishop, Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson, Sir Bedevere, Mr. Creosote (he of the “wafer-thin” mint fame), last surviving undertaker, purveyor of strange stains and mysterious smells, and Cardinal Biggles, poker of innocent women with soft cushions—has, as I write this, been gone for less than a week.  I myself am now at that age where I’m really starting to notice the deaths of my heroes, and even moreso at that age where such deaths start to happen with somewhat depressing regularity.

At 76, Michael Palin is the youngest of the survivors, and the mighty John Cleese is already 80.  Eric Idle is just a few months older than Palin; Terry Gilliam just a year younger than Cleese; Carol Cleveland (wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!) is right in the center of them at 78.  So I suspect that I’ll be receiving 5 more of these little missives of obituarial melancholia, unless one or more of them manages to outlive me, which would not really be better, if I may be so selfish.  Still, I hope I may be forgiven my whinging just a bit.  These are the people who had the profoundest impact on shaping my concept of what “funny” means, who initiated my Anglophilia, thus leading me to Fry & Laurie and the Young Ones and French and Saunders and Blackadder and Red Dwarf and The IT Crowd.  These are the people who, in a small but significant way, made me who I am today.  I’ll miss them one by one as they move on, and I’ll especially miss them once they’re all gone for good.  The Pythons themselves seem prone to making jokes upon the occasion of each other’s deaths—Cleese supposedly said of Jones’ passing “two down and four to go”—and that’s appropriate.  I’m sure that once you’ve spent that many decades trying to make people laugh, you’ve got to be a bit irked if people can’t laugh after you’re gone.  But, still ... my laughter this month is tinged with a patina of sorrow.  These were giants to me ... if nothing else, a giant foot which squashed my boredom and had a policeman’s head on top of it saying “wot’s all this then?”

Or perhaps just ... “Dinsdale!”

__________

1 The highly-underrated “Weird Al” movie of the same name immortalizes those times.
2 The VHF channels went from 2 to 13 (there was no channel 1, although I never really knew why); anything 14 or up was UHF.  Those channels went up to some large-ish number—78, maybe?—but the reception got crappier the higher they went, so mostly the channels would stay at the lower end of the band as much as possible.
3 As I was a stupid American who doesn’t “get” that sort of thing.
4 And perhaps we shouldn’t limit ourselves to television: the aforementioned “Weird Al” Yankovic was an acquired taste for me, as was This Is Spinal Tap.
5 Or, you know, words to that effect.  It was 35 years ago; don’t take “I distinctly remember” as meaning that I’m offering you a verbatim account of that day.
6 Python’s technically first movie is just a glorified clip show of the series, which I always found very disappointing, as by that time I knew all those sketches.
7 I often refer to them as my “Top X Movies,” because the number only ever gets bigger.

Grandiloquence of Otiosity

This week I completed another week of laptop recovery (because the computer gods hate me), and I finally started on the Smaller Animal‘s solo adventure for the family campaign.  It was also my first week back at $work, which went pretty well, I released several CPAN updates for my Perl modules, and the smallies are easing back into their school routine.  Overall not too exciting a week, but I’m fairly happy with the progress.

Tune in next week for a (hopefully) longer post.

D&D and Me: Part 4 (If I Could Talk to the Animals)

[This is the fourth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about playing a lot of different games, including a lot of D&D.  More importantly, playing a lot of very different characters.]


One of the most awesome things about D&D—all tabletop roleplaying games, really—is that it’s open to a lot of different playstyles.  Different people can get different things out of it, and that’s great.  I’ve talked before about my personal goals: chiefly, that I believe that roleplaying is storytelling and, in any story, character is king.  So I’m one of those folks who puts a lot of effort in my character when I’m a player, and wants my players to do the same when I’m the GM.  D&D can feed a lot of needs for people: a need for tactical combat simulation with more flexibility than any computer game can provide, a need for an improv space where you’re not limited by even a rough story outline but can do (or at least attempt) literally anything that pops into your head ... or, for many, it’s even simpler than any of that.  It’s a chance to play make believe, like you used to do when you were a kid.  A chance to return to a time when you could be anything ... be anyone.  Don’t like your name? fine, pick a new one.  Frustrated by your family situation? no worries: recast yourself as the long-lost heir to a vast fortune, or an orphan who discovers their parents were superspies who had to give them up for their own safety.  Don’t like your age? poof! you’re a little kid, an old man, a middle-aged matron with a huge family, an aging oil baron, an alien intelligence trapped in the mind of an infant, a faerie changeling in a pre-adolescent body, a girl who falls down a rabbithole, an orphan boy who finds out he’s a wizard, a girl whose house is carried away by a tornado, one of a family of orphans whose parents were involved in a secret international organization.  Anything.

And that’s all D&D is, really.  It’s make-believe for grown-ups.  Well, and still for kids too, but for kids who are ready to stop fighting about whether your invincible forcefield actually stops my laser sword or if it’s really true that MY LASER SWORD CAN CUT THROUGH ANYTHING!!  It’s just a way to roll some funny dice and figure out who wins: unstoppable force, or immovable object.  And what you use that for is to relive those childhood fantasies about being anything you could imagine.  Or anything you could steal from popular culture.

When I was a kid, I was really into animals.¹  So a lot of who I wanted to be was wrapped up in Tarzan, and Mowgli, and Dr. Dolittle.  This is one of the very few concepts that D&D struggles with, actually ... the closest I ever came was playing a “beastmaster” bard (technically, the “meistersinger” kit from The Complete Bard’s Handbook).  You might ask: what do bards have to do with animals?  But apparently the theme was sort of a “pied piper” character.²  I really loved this character, although his name and stats haven’t survived, unfortunately.  But he was problematic in a fundamental way, because a beastmaster-style character “breaks the action economy.”  This is a phrase us D&D nerds use when we talk about characters who can do too much in a single turn.  How much you can do in a turn is limited in different ways for different versions and editions of D&D, but it’s always limited.  My beastmaster character had a weasel, a leopard, and a jaguar, which meant that when my fellow party members were taking one turn, I was taking four, because I was essentially four characters.  Sure, the weasel couldn’t do much, but even being three characters can monopolize a combat.  Eventually the GM put his foot down and I had to retire that character, and I’ve never seen anything approaching it ever since.³  But, you know, there are plenty of other ways to do animals in fantasy settings.

There are druids, for instance.  As a druid, you get to hang around with animals, talk to them, and even turn into them.  I played a druid for many months, possibly even years.  I have a vague recollection of doing so twice, although I may be misremembering ... certainly Sillarin is the only one whose name and character sheet has survived.  He was, according to the latest sheet I still have, an 8th level half-elven druid, with +1 leather armor, a ring of protection, a ring of invisibility, and a staff of the woodlands,⁴ who favored spells like entangle, faerie fire, dust devil, and spike growth.  He was left-handed, and the “flaw” he took was “tongue-tied.”  Back in those days, you could accept roleplaying disadvantages in exchange for mechanical advantages, which is overall a terrible system if your goal is to have roughly balanced characters.⁵  On the other hand, there are many cases in my own experience where those flavorful disadvantages are the main things I remember about the character.  And that’s never more true than in Sillarin’s case, where I decided that interpreting “tongue-tied” as “having a stutter” was just a cop-out.  Sillarin’s issue wasn’t with stuttering; in fact he spoke rather eloquently, and often at great length, and sometimes, if you got him started, he couldn’t really stop, and it was just that, sometimes, or even often, you might say, if you knew him, sometimes when he began a sentence, usually with the best of intentions, he would somehow get lost in the middle of it—through no fault of his own, mind you!—and you might never see him emerge from the other end, which could make conversational gambits with him somewhat ... tiring.  I loved playing Sillarin, who was endearingly annoying (as opposed to annoyingly annoying), and not exactly heroic, but not exactly not heroic either, and who believed that good could not exist without evil, which meant that, in the end, evil wasn’t all that bad, and that the preservation of nature was really the most important thing.

The next time I returned to the concept of a nature-loving (and, this being D&D, pretty much nature worshipping) character was with my first female character: Ellspeth, cleric of the nature domain.  My party wanted me to play a cleric for a change (druids can provide some healing, but not as much as a proper cleric can dish out), so I was doing something I’ve often done over the years: building a character to fill a gap, but trying to find a way to make it interesting for me.⁶  I’ve always thought of this as being somewhat akin to writing poetry using meter and rhyme: sure, free verse is fun and all, and you get to break the “rules,” but sometimes giving yourself constraints—even artificial constraints—will force you to get more creative than you otherwise would.  So how could I take the concept of “cleric” (which many, many people view as equivalent to “walking first-aid kit”) and make it actually fun?  My min-max-ing friend (who may well have been my GM at the time too) suggested I find a race with a bonus to wisdom, which is the primary ability score for clerics.  But racial wisdom bonuses are hard to come by; one of the few races that get it is the swanmay, which is just a refluffed human who can turn into a swan.  They make excellent rangers and druids, and, yes, clerics, but the one catch is: only women are inducted into the swanmay order.  No men allowed.  I wasn’t looking to play a female character, but I didn’t dismiss it out of hand either.  Could I take on that challenge?  Playing against type is one thing, but playing against gender is quite another, and I think it may be harder for heterosexual cisgendered males (especially younger ones) to do so than their female counterparts.  Intellectually, we all knew that playing a female character didn’t indicate any tendency towards being gay, but societal messaging can be insidious and doesn’t always respond to logic.  So playing that first woman was a bit daunting, I won’t lie.  But there were a lot of things to make up for it.  A swanmay is essentially a lycanthrope—a wereswan, in a weird way.  Where Sillarin worshipped Silvanus, Ellspeth worshipped Artemis, the huntress, and took the bow as her signature weapon.  Her flaw (still taking those to get the corresponding benefits, of course) was a phobia of the undead, which she acquired at a very young age when her family was wiped out by zombies or somesuch, leaving her as the sole survivor.  Raised by elves and then inducted into the swanmay order, she hated undead and vowed to kill them where she could find them, but she was also terrified of them, leaving her with difficult choices when confronted with them.  Since I had dumped charisma for her stats (most of us dumped charisma back in those days), she was blunt and plain-looking, totally unremarkable personality-wise.  But she was fiercely loyal to her friends, had a love for her horse Fiona, animal empathy, omen reading, and in addition to her bow could throw a mean chatkcha (which was just the closest D&D equivalent I could find to a glaive) and favored the hatchet for close-up work.  Unlike druids, when a swanmay transformed, her clothes and equipment just dropped to the ground and had to be retrieved later, which meant that, just as would an involuntarily transformed lycanthrope such as a werewolf, Ellspeth would come back to human form naked and vulnerable.⁷  This never bothered her; I decided that someone who had to go through that process with this much regularity had probably abandoned the quaint concept of modesty long ago.  She achieved 9th level, as near as I can tell from my old character sheets, and had an even more impressive array of magic items than Sillarin had amassed, including a staff of curing, a cloak of elvenkind, and a bow of accuracy.  She was often gruff and perhaps she sometimes complained about having to heal everyone all the time, but she was yet another character that I developed a sort of closeness to, and one which stretched my concept of what sort of character I could be if I pushed myself to explore parts of myself I hadn’t yet discovered.



Next time: even more characters that I played, and what they meant to me.

__________

1 As I’ve already mentioned a couple of times in this series.
2 That explains the German name, I guess?
3 Although I’m currently working on a way to import the concept into fifth edition.  If I can figure out a way to do it without breaking the action economy again, I’ll really have something.
4 For those who are familiar with newer versions of D&D but not the older ones, this was a pretty standard amount of magical loot for a 2e character of that level, although I agree it seems excessive by today’s standards.
5 Whether D&D characters of different classes—particularly when pitting fighters against wizards—are even remotely balanced in any edition of the game is an ongoing debate that will probably never die.
6 For a more recent example of me doing this, you could go back and review my character concept for Arkan.
7 It is probably worth wondering why the designers intentionally assigned this particular disadvantage to a race composed only of women.  The early days of D&D are not particularly enlightened in terms of feminism (or any other ism, for that matter).

D&D and Me: Part 3 (Playing the Roles)

[This is the third post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[When we left off last time, I had sort of kind of played D&D, but not really knowing what the hell I was doing.  Still, many characteristics of those early games still hold true today (or perhaps are true again): I was the GM, I homebrewed a lot of stuff, I made sure my PC didn’t die, and I played a GMPC.]


To understand my D&D experience in college, we first have to understand a bit about my overall college experience.  I went to college right out of high school, as many folks do nowadays, but back then I was the first person in my family to do so.¹  I went somewhat aimlessly for two years: I did well in a bunch of classes, did horribly in others, and dropped more than a few.  After two years, I had neither a major nor enough credits to technically qualify as a junior.  I decided that college was too hard and dropped out to go work in the Real World™.  Well, after 3 years of that, I decided that working in the Real World was even harder (most of my readers no doubt just said “duh” under their breaths) so I decided to go back to get my degree.  Long story short, I ended up spending my last 3 years of college about 3 years older than everyone else.  Being in most cases the only person around old enough to buy beer certainly has its uses in terms of popularity, and I found myself with a much larger friend pool in this second college stint.

I was also attending college with one of my best friends from late high school and the period just afterwards.  He was 4 years younger than I, not even a freshman when I was a senior, but his mom had been my Spanish teacher, so I’d known him forever.  And he was always much more gregarious than I was, so I inherited this large group of people who were predisposed to think kindly of me because we had this great friend in common.  And, at some point, my friend says to me, “hey, you used to play that Dungeons & Dragons thing, right?”  D&D was never his thing, but some of those other folks were into it, so maybe I could hook up with them?  I was a bit hesitant, because remember: I still didn’t really have a clue what I was doing when it came to playing the game.  But at least I had played before, and that counted for something, and soon I was inducted into my first real gaming group.

I first joined that group in about 1990, and played in it very regularly until I moved to Maryland in 2004.  (And my very last game with the group was on the occasion of my going away party when I moved to California in 2007.)  Of course, people came and went continuously throughout that 14 years, and, much like the paradox of Theseus’ ship, it could be argued that it wasn’t really the same group at all by the time we got to the end of that period, with only 2 of us original members remaining.²  By the time it was over, we had not only played every version of D&D up to that point (1e, 2e, 2e + Skills and Powers, 3e, and 3.5e), but dozens of other games besides: Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (two different versions), Traveller, GURPS, Wheel of Time, Mage, Trinity, and In Nomine.  We further rolled up characters for but never played (or only played an introductory session of) Shadowrun, Hero, and BESM.  Games which I bought but never played included Palladium, 7th Sea, Earthdawn, EverQuest, and Jorune.  I don’t reel off this long list to impress you, but rather to impress on you what a huge part of my life this was.  It didn’t consume all my spare time, of course—there were videogames, and books, and TV and movies, and beaches and skiing, and a little bit of dancing and a lot of drinking—but I doubt there was a single month in that 10-to-14-year period when I didn’t play at least once, and, outside of Novemeber and December when the holidays would invariably bork our schedules, not even that many weeks where we didn’t play.

At first, it was all one insane, connected campaign.  If we got bored with one setting or plotline, we just planehopped somewhere else: from Ravenloft to Athas to Sigil, from White Plume Mountain to Castle Amber to a strange land laid out like a chessboard.  Some of us would keep the same characters, some of us would roll up new ones, and I have a lot of difficulty remembering which characters adventured with which and where one adventure ended and the next began.  I remember we decided to play an “evil campaign” once and, instead of rolling up new characters, we just turned all our old characters evil.  It had rather dire consequences for the ranger and the cleric, but I was a druid at the time (and therefore true neutral, whether I liked it or not), so I just sort of shrugged and said “whatever.”³  Occasionally our characters would die, but more often we’d just get bored with them and “retire” them ... you know, just in case we ever needed them again.⁴  Later, we adopted a rotation system, where we would take turns being the GM so that each person had more time to prepare for their campaign, and we would play a different game—often a whole different game system—every week.  Thus, even when we were playing Vampire or Star Wars or Call of Cthulhu, we were still playing D&D concurrently.

My history as a player was both weird and predictable.  Just like with comic book characters, I liked the oddballs.  Fighters were boring: all they could really do (at least pre-third-edition) was swing their swords and repeat.  Wizards were both diametrically opposed and exactly the same: they had this huge plethora of spells (which came with a massive amount of bookkeeping work), but, at the end of the day, all they could really do was cast their spells and repeat.  I was drawn to the classes that nobody else wanted to play because they were strange or “underpowered,” classes that couldn’t do any one thing better than anyone else but could do a little bit of everything.  I favored druids and bards,⁵ once a nature cleric (who was almost a druid, really), and later on a psionicist and then a monk (who also had a few psionic levels).  I also experimented with hybrid characters, using the Skills & Powers system, trying to create the perfect blend of thief and wizard.  The two times I was reluctantly talked into playing a straight fighter, I chose a half-ogre the first time and an alaghi (pseudo-yeti) the second time.  For yet another evil campaign, I played a wannabe necromancer who was so low-level that he could only reanimate zombie chickens.⁶  Basically, any excuse to do something different.

Again, it’s an interesting exercise to analyze my behavior in hindsight.  Could I say I was embracing diversity, even back so far as when I was trying to “collect” all the monsters and let them all have an equal place in my fantasy world?  Well, somewhat ... but I don’t want to hyperidealize my younger self.  Absolutely I was always happy to go around slaughtering orcs and goblins just because that’s what you were “supposed” to do in the game, and I will admit it never really occurred to me to question that until I started hearing about other people doing it first.  So please don’t imagine that I’m claiming more social consciousness than I deserve.  But I do want to give credit to D&D for a little of that type of thing.  For instance, the first time I ever imagined myself as a woman was because I wanted to play a swanmay, and there are no male swanmays.  At that time, I wasn’t yet comfortable enough in my identity and sexuality that this was a no-brainer for me: I struggled with that decision for quite a while before I took the plunge.  And I no doubt didn’t do a very good job portraying a woman—just putting on someone else’s shoes doesn’t automatically make you understand their journey.  But it’s a start, and, as they say, every journey starts with a single step.  Since that first female character (Ellspeth, my nature priest), I’ve played straight women on at least two other occasions, and once a shapeshifter character who was very gender fluid.⁷  And while I might not be ready to give roleplaying credit for broadening anyone’s horizons to the point of epiphany, I can certainly say that it helped me avoid the trap of having all my imagined characters default to white / male / cis / etc—in other words, exactly like me.  And that’s definitely a good thing.



Next time: I’ll take a little closer look at what playing all these different roles meant to me.

__________

1 Except for possibly my grandfather on my mother’s side, who was the only other person before me to even attend.  But I think even then there was some delay between high school graduation and college matriculation.
2 Actually, technically speaking, I wasn’t an original member myself, so there was really only one.
3 What I actually said had more to do with maintaining balance in the universe and how we’d probably done enough good in the world that we could afford to do a little evil for a while without tipping the scales too much.  But it certainly meant “whatever.”
4 My absolute favorite was my friend Tim’s dwarf (fighter? cleric?), who took his helm of underwater breathing (or somesuch; I’m probably misremembering the exact name of the item) and retired to the ocean floor to become a kelp farmer.
5 Prior to second edtion, bards were notoriously impossible to play; my first bard character was drawn from the Dragon magazine article “Singing a new tune: A different bard, not quite so hard”.
6 I mean, theoretically, he would have been able to raise proper zombies at some point.  But we didn’t stick with that campaign very long.
7 That would be in the Trinity game.  For some reason, I was very attracted to the biokinetics in the game, who could change their body shapes and facial features pretty much at will, and I decided I was actually 3 or 4 different people living in one body, with different races and genders.

R.I.P. ThinkGeek

As many of you may know, ThinkGeek disappeared from the web this week ... you can still put the address into your web browser, but you’ll end up on GameStop’s site instead.  For the most part, it went quietly, without huge fanfare.  Some of us former employees “celebrated” this event the way we’d always done when someone left the company: we drowned our sorrows in tacos.  If you’ve seen a hashtag #TacosForTimmy—well, you probably haven’t, as it wasn’t trending worldwide or anything, but you can check it out on Instagram or Facebook.  But saying goodbye to TG was what that was all about.

I’ve mentioned before that I worked there, albeit briefly.  In fact, I once did a blog post talking about my time doing the Ask Timmy column.  Now, on the occasion of ThinkGeek’s (metaphorical) passing, someone suggested that I might be inclined to do one final Ask Timmy as a sort of eulogy.  I considered this quite seriously.  But the problem there is, Timmy is wise and clever and, most of all, he’s always nice.  I’m not sure that my own feelings on what ThinkGeek meant can be that restrained.  Truth be told, I have a little bit of bitterness about the whole thing, so let me get that out of my system first.

First, a bit of history.¹  These 3 pals Willie, Jen, and Scott were running a small ISP, back in the days when there were such things as small ISPs, and they had an idea for a side business, selling geek T-shirts and electronic doodads from a separate website.  They enlisted one of their ISP empmloyees, Jon, to pitch in, and the original thinkgeek.com was born.  Shortly thereafter, it got slashdotted and the resulting traffic brought the servers down.  That’s when they knew that they had hit upon not just an idea that people would pay for: they were hungry for it.

It was the very late 90s, and the dot-com bubble had yet to burst ... although, even when it did, ThinkGeek survived.  Nowadays companies such as Nerdist and Geek & Sundry get a lot of (very deserved) credit for the proliferation of nerd culture ... but, don’t forget that ThinkGeek predated both by over a decade.  In fact, while we can always quibble over the details, I would contend that ThinkGeek was the original purveyor of “geek chic,” and that it was a really big part of why geek is now big business.  Which can only lead to the question: what happened?

So, here’s my theory, and you can take this with as much salt as you care to: I was sort of vaguely an insider, but only for a very brief period (about 3½ years out of ThinkGeek’s 20 year history).  So I’m speaking about 82.5% as an outsider, really.  Bear that in mind.

As part of one of my other series I’m working on, I’ve actually done a bit of historical research on TSR, the company that originally created D&D.  It’s a complex story, but I think I can sum it up pretty succinctly: it was started by a geek (Gary Gygax), then it started making money, then the business people came in and forced him out, then they nearly went bankrupt.  It was eventually bought, by the way, by Wizards of the Coast, which was started by a geek (Peter Adkison), then it started making money, then the business people came in and forced him out, and then they got bought by Hasbro.²  This is nothing new, of course: Netscape was also founded by a geek (Marc Andreesen), then it started to make money, then the business people (in this case AOL) came in and forced him out, and now it’s a dead browser.  Remember Slashdot, the catalyst of ThinkGeek’s early success?  Founded by a geek (Rob Malda), started making money, then the business people came in (the same corporate entities that would go on to buy ThinkGeek, coincidentally³) and forced him out and now I can’t name anyone who still goes to the site for their news.  Hell, this pattern goes all the way back to Nikola Tesla, if not further.⁴  And it’s still going on today: Chris Hardwick and Felicia Day seem to be gone from Nerdist and Geek & Sundry after their purchase by Legendary (and then repurchase by a Chinese conglomerate).  And, again, we can quibble over details—for instance, I’m sure some of those geeks would disagree with my characterization of them being “forced out.”  A number of them left pretty unwillingly, but several of them decided to move on all on their own ... and yet I find it hard to believe that any of them wouldn’t list “increasing corporatization” as a contributing factor to their exits.

And, amidst all of what seems to me to be a pattern so clear even a monkey could pick it out, there seems to be this meme that geeks are just terrible businesspeople.⁵  For instance, I just dug out an old podcast featuring two scholars who wrote books on Gygax, and they both agreed on his lack of business acumen.  And yet ... what was step two of that recipe?  Step 1 was the part where the geek starts a business because they have a product that they’re passionate about and they want to share it with the world.  Step 2 was the part where it started making money.  Because, let’s be crystal clear on this: the big corporations don’t want anything to do with you if you’re not making lots of money.  Oh, sure: they always think they can make more money than you could on your own ... and yet they always seem to be wrong, in the end.  Probably just coincidence.

Now, part of the reason the “good” businesspeople never take any of the blame for the eventual (entirely predictable) failure is that such failures inevitably take a long time.  And, in the meantime, there are still wonderful, creative people working really hard to produce good things despite the terrible ideas the people who are ostensibly good at business are forcing on them.  TSR, for instance, produced some of their most iconic products and settings after Gygax left.  And ThinkGeek was certainly no exception to this rule.  Some utterly fantastic products were produced well after ThinkGeek was bought, and some utterly fantastic people worked there, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting despite never having had the chance to call them my coworkers.  I would never want to diminish any of the contributions of these folks.  But I have to say the downward spiral always seemed inevitable to me, and it was one of the reaons I left when I did.

ThinkGeek was bought by Andover.net, and Andover was bought by VA Linux, which changed its name to VA Software, which changed its name to SourceForge, which changed its name to Geeknet, which was almost bought by Hot Topic, but then was bought instead by GameStop.  And now it is gone.  And geeks everywhere are sad.  Honestly, I feel like it’s not so much that geeks are bad businesspeople as it is that businesspeople are bad geeks.  See, geeks know what geeks want to buy—I can’t believe that I have to say this like it’s some sort of profound statement when in actuality it’s sort of self-obvious.  Businesspeople, apparently, do not know what geeks want to buy, or how to treat them well.  They always seem to have these grand plans, and of course they know better than everyone else how to make money ... except they kinda don’t.  Any entry-level course on business will tell you that one of the most important concepts in order to be successful is to understand your market segment.  And yet, corporate overlords, again and again, think they know better and push out the people who know what they’re doing—the people who made the companies successful in the first place.  Then they just sort of flounder around dopily until they realize they have no clue what they’re doing and they either shut it all down or sell it to some other corporate sucker and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Jon left first, and then Scott, and then Jen, and finally Willie, in 2013.  I wasn’t there for the last 3, so I can’t say for sure, but I deeply suspect that at least some of them didn’t go willingly.  I was there when Jon left, and so I can tell you for a fact that he was pushed out, in the sense that the corporate people running the place made it so miserable for him that he finally just gave up.  I know this because I was asked to participate in it.  I refused, and so I was next on the list of “how toxic do we have to make the environment before he leaves?”  The answer was, not too much more so.  I left ThinkGeek in 2007, after a really dumb argument with the manager who was the extension of our corporate rulers,⁶ and I moved here to California.  Where I am really really happy, and my family is very happy, and I have a pool with a jacuzzi and all that, so it’s not like I’m complaining.

Except ...

Except that, despite the fact that it comprises only around 10% of my career as a software guy, my short tenure at ThinkGeek was one of the best experiences of my life.  I had just come off 13 years of running my own business, which I only did because I was convinced that it was literally the only way to have a company that was a fun, respectful place to work.  I probably would have kept on doing that forever, except that the dot-com crash indirectly borked me by flooding the market with all those “programmers” who had gotten into the business during the bubble and now were willing to work for cheap.  They couldn’t match our quality, of course, but, at the point at which a company can afford to hire 3 or 4 such schmucks for what they used to pay us, they just figured they could make up the quality with quantity.  And I was forced to go work for someone else again, and I figured I would hate it.

Instead, I met Jon and Andy (who, despite being inherited from Andover was not a corporate shill, but rather one of the best bosses I’ve ever had) in a restaurant / pub, where we had some dinner and drank some beer and talked about whether I’d be a good fit for ThinkGeek.  All the cultural stuff they talked about sounded awesome—too good to be true, if I’m honest—and it was just left for me to have a more technical 1-on-1 interview with Jon.  Should I come by early in the morning some time?  I asked this with some trepidation, as I kind of suck at mornings, but I knew that was what was expected in the corporate world.  There were chuckles.  A lot of the ThinkGeek crew aren’t morning people, I was told, and Jon certainly isn’t.  Come by in the evening after the work day is mostly done.  I breathed yet another sigh of relief.  When I pulled up to the front door (it was, in those days, a small office on the backside of an office park about the size of a strip mall), Jon happened to be outside smoking.  I put on my emergency flip-flops, got out of the car and smoked with him, mostly in silence.  Then he said, let’s go in and talk, and we walked through the door, and the first thing he did was take his shoes off, and I was pretty much in love.  In love with the company, in love with the philosophy, in love with the dogs at the office and the cool toys that were always lying around and the loud music that we played for “inspiration” and the company videogame consoles and what passed for “meetings” which was mostly us sitting around a table and acting goofy while coming up with cool ideas, but mostly in love with the people.  I’ve written plenty about my love for Willie, so I won’t repeat it here, but I loved all those guys.  Jen, who was the first person I ever met who called themselves a “web designer” that wasn’t a pretentious bastard but rather a smart, thoughtful person who had style and understood how the web really worked.  Scott, who was one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with and was just a joy to be around.  JenVon, who was one of those no-nonsense types who always knew exactly what was going on and how to do things more efficiently, and yet still was super-fun to hang out with.  And of course my fellow code monkeys: Jon, who knew how to put his head down and just get shit done, who was often quiet but had a sly wit, and absolutely magnificent taste in music;⁷ and his eventual replacement Jacob, who was so earnest and genuine and probably cared more about the people who ultimately benefitted from the website (a.k.a. our customers) than anyone else I’ve had the pleasure to work with.  And all the rest of my ThinkGeek peeps like Andrea and JennK and even the people who I never met until much later like Kate, and many more: I love you all, guys.  You changed my life for the better.

Which, you know, sounds ... well, to call it “hyperbolic” probably seems like an understatement.  It probably sounds like overblown bullshit to many of you.  But it really is difficult to convey how impactful this one job was for me, and (I’m pretty sure) for just about everyone who worked there.  Oh, sure: we all bitched about corporate this or that, and we fought sometimes (as all work siblings do), and we had some bad days.  But we all respected each other, and we not only tried to have fun, we mostly succeeded.  More than that: we believed it was part of our job to have fun.  Not just work hard all day and play hard all night, but actually play while we worked, so that just about every day you would wake up and go, yay! I get to go to work today!  Most jobs aren’t like that ... most jobs don’t even come close.  But I got to do that for 3½ years, and I will always be grateful to the people that made that happen, and just a touch bitter about the people who made it go away.

So perhaps one day I’ll readopt the calm, soothing, wise voice of Timmy the Monkey and do a more proper eulogy: you know, the kind where you only say nice things about the deceased and ignore any faults they might have had.  But this week I’m feeling too raw for that.  This week I’m feeling a lot of mixed emotions, and I wanted to let them all out, both good and bad.  Because ThinkGeek was a beautiful, shining thing, and an important cultural thing, and I feel like it was taken from us too soon, by people who were greedy and yet probably didn’t end up getting rich, people who thought they knew what we wanted more than we did, people who probably looked down on us a little bit but had no problem profiting off our talents.  Those were not good people.  But still they cannot sully the memory I have of what ThinkGeek meant to me, and I’m sure what it meant to all its former employees.  We got to do something we loved, every day, and we kicked ass at it, and they even gave us some money for it.  And you can’t say fairer than that.

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1 Remember, I wasn’t actually there for ThinkGeek’s birth, so you’re getting all this second-hand.  My memory is no doubt faulty in places, and the memories of those that told me the original stories may have been faulty in places, and anyway “what really happened” is a bit of an aspirational myth for all stories, if you think about it.
2 Many would say that Wizards also has gone downhill ever since, but it must be admitted that they’ve had a bit of a resurgence of late.  Hopefully they can end up being the exception to this pattern.
3 Or maybe it wasn’t coincidental at all; that’s a part of the story I was never privvy to.
4 By the way: July 10 is Nikola Tesla Day.  Be sure to celebrate.
5 To be clear, this pattern isn’t limited to just geeks: creative types of all sorts have experienced this exact pattern, and they’ve also been accused of being bad at business.  It just so happens that geeks are the ones I’m most familiar with.
6 I’ve actually told this story before, in my post on fate.  However, at that time, I was being a bit more coy about what company I was talking about.  At this point, I don’t really see much point in such subterfuge.
7 Okay, except for the K-pop.  Sorry, Jon: I still can’t get behind you on that one.

D&D and Me: Part 2 (Mapping Out the Territory)

[This is the second post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[When we left off last week, my love of lists and my love of horror had collided, and I had decided to come up with the ultimate list of monsters.]

I started learning about monsters from reading about mythology, of course.  There are lots of cool monsters and magical beasts in Greek and Norse mythology: Pegasus and Medusa and Fenrir and Ratatoskr and dryads and naiads and fire giants and dark elves and birds with bronze beaks and horses with eight legs and that’s only scratching the surface.  But this was not sufficient.  For some reason I had decided that I was going to write novels about this fantasy world where every possible monster or magical creature was a separate, sentient race.¹  Looking back on it now, we’re talking about the years between roughly seven and eleven, and it seems almost ridiculous when I tell you that I was attempting to write novels, or that I was imagining sophisticated concepts like the various races fighting over what counted as “sentient” and therefore determined whether this or that creature would be a recognized race, but I suppose I was a precocious child.²  And of course the line between “fantasy race” and “monster” is very fine indeed, so the vampires and rakshasas and kelpies and harpies and peri were welcomed into my fantasy milieu.  And I knew perfectly well that books on monsters were the best place to find new fantastic creatures.

Now, I’ve already written at least a little bit about my preoccupation with Monsters Who’s Who, but I don’t think I fully captured why it was special to me.  Remember that last time I talked about the great respect that my family always had for books.  I should also mention that my father was³ a bit of a cheapskate, so, when I would beg for toys, or comic books, or anything along those lines, I usually got a “no.” But begging for books was a much easier row to hoe.  You can deny a kid a Star Wars action figure on the grounds that it’s frivolous, but denying them a book?  Unthinkable.  At least I’m pretty sure this was my father’s position.  So we were window shopping at the mall (we did that a lot when I was younger), in a Border’s or somesuch, and I found this book, which was really more of a “coffee table” sort of volume—great pictures, light on the actual information—and it had all these cool monsters in it, and they were super liberal on what they counted as a “monster”—not only comic book villains like Annihilus and Ultron,⁴ but even superheroes⁵ and 50s monster movie antagonists like the Blob and Quartermass (which is possibly a worse sin than referring to Shelley’s monster as “Frankenstein”)—but I wanted it.  So I begged, and I got it.  And I read it over and over, and it was cool, but ... there should be more.

I honestly cannot remember where I first heard of Dungeons & Dragons.  In addition to having a thing for monsters, I also had a thing for games, even though I never really had anyone to play with me (I was an only child until age eleven).  So here was a game, and it was also full of monsters!  You know what? I bet I saw an ad for it in a comic book somewhere.  Doesn’t really matter.  Point being, I had to have this creation.  I needed it badly.  And, eventually, I got it ... maybe for Christmas one year?  I can’t recall.  I remember it being the so-called “blue box,” and I remember it having cool (and bizarre) monsters, as expected, but probably the thing I remember best is the dungeon: it was laid out on a grid, beautiful straight-edged halls and rooms, with a little bit of more irregularly-shaped cavern in one corner.⁶  But screw those curvy walls: I was all about the straight lines.  There’s just something about all those perfect, 10-foot-wide dungeon corridors, with their 20x20 or 40x40 rooms to one side or another, that really strummed my OCD, and for a long time I became obsessed with drawing dungeons.⁷  I asked for graph paper, which my mother thought odd, so she got me some of that stuff with the little green squares.  No, that wasn’t right, I said: these squares are too small.  Ah, my mother says: you want quadrille paper.⁸  Blue squares, and bigger (according to Wikipedia, graph paper is 5 squares per inch, while quadrille paper is 4 squares per inch).  And my father worked at a paper mill, so he could get all sorts of paper for cheap or maybe even free; I don’t recall.  But I do remember going through several pads of quad paper making dungeon after dungeon.

Now, understand: in all this time, I never actually played the game.  In the first place, I had no one to play with.  Still not many friends, and my little brother would have just been born, assuming I got the game shortly after it was first published.  But, probably more importantly, the rules of these early versions of D&D were kind of insane, and often contradictory.  For instance, I’m pretty sure that there were at least some cases where it just wasn’t possible to resolve whether someone was surprised or not, because your opponent could succeed on a roll to surprise you and you could simultaneously succeed on a roll to not be surprised.  (Perhaps from this you can guess that I was obsessively reading and rereading the rules, despite having no real opportunity to apply them anywhere.)  So no real playing, just reading, and “collecting” all the monsters, and drawing dungeons just to draw them.  I bought the original Monster Manual (because: more monsters), but I never picked up any of the other books, because I had no need for them.  Until ...

So I mentioned earlier that my little brother (and only sibling) would have just barely been in existence at the time D&D came out: in fact, they share a birth year (1977).  There are 11 years between the two of us, and while there are certainly advantages in being the only child (and only grandchild for much of that time), I had decided that I really wanted a sibling.  So I was thrilled when my brother was born.  Finally! someone to play games with!  But, you know, babies don’t exit the womb able to play games.  The situation hadn’t improved much when I was 12 and he was 1, and 13 and 2 made little difference as well.  At 14 and 3, we could at least graduate from peekaboo to tic-tac-toe, and by 15 and 4 simple things like Candyland or Uncle Wiggily were feasible, but, still ... I was getting impatient.  This whole sibling thing took way more patience than I was (and still am, for that matter) prone to.  By 16 and 5 we could really start to get into some good games, but of course by that point I was in high school, and I actually had some friends (although not the sort that might be interested in D&D, as near as I could tell), and I had less and less time to play games with my little brother.  When was it that we first hit on the idea of me running a D&D game for him?  17 and 6? 18 and 7?  Probably closer to 19 and 8, but somewhere during those years.  By this point I had read the rules of D&D so often that I knew them very well, but I had still never played, so starting out as the putative DM (that’s “dungeon master” for the uninitiated) was just insane.  I had zero clues about what I was doing.  Also, running a game where you have only one player is tough, because D&D is really designed to be a game where players work together to solve challenges, and character classes (especially back in those days) had pretty narrow lanes for what they were good at.  I don’t remember much about this game, but I think my brother wanted to be a sort of classic knight, so obviously a fighter with heavy armor, and we went through one of the many dungeons I’d drawn, with random rooms full of random monsters and absolutely no rhyme or reason why any of them were there, just sitting in a room (with no food or anything else to do) waiting for someone to bust down the door.  A fighter, of course, is quite excellent at busting down doors, and pretty darned good at killing whatever’s on the other side, but has no magic at all, can’t heal himself, and (perhaps most importantly for a classic dungeon crawl) has no ability to identify and disarm traps.  So I dreamed up an NPC⁹ who would be a pixie rogue, thus providing a bit of magic and the requisite trapfinding—I can’t rememember what the hell we used for healing—and I made him a statue in the early part of the dungeon with a puzzle that my brother’s erstwhile knight could figure out to free the pixie from his stony prison.  Once freed, the pixie was so grateful that he agreed to accompany the knight deeper into the dungeon.  My brother, into animals nearly as much as I was,¹⁰ also brought in a fierce fighting dog to help out with the combats.

I can’t remember how long we played this ... well, I hesitate to glorify it with the title of “campaign,” and really it was only an “adventure” in the broadest sense, but these few sessions of D&D that were his introduction and, in a weird way, mine too.  More than once, certainly, but as many as five times?  I can’t recall, but it couldn’t have gone on too long.  I had other things to do, and typically when you play D&D you play it for quite a few hours at a time, so it was a pretty big time commitment.  Was it perhaps 10 hours of gaming, spread out over several sessions across perhaps weeks? could it have been 20?  Surely no more than that.  But it was influential in a number of ways.  Firstly it gave me a taste for the game as roleplaying, above and beyond the cool factor of the monsters and the gridded dungeons.  Secondly it instilled a lifelong love for the game in my brother, who continues to play even more than I do and most of whose online identities are named after his favorite D&D character.

But it also gave me what may be an atypical experience of the game.  There were no rules for “fighting dogs” or pixie rogues ... hell, there weren’t any rules for lots of things back then, but certainly not for esoteric things like that.  I had to make that shit up.  So my very first experience playing D&D was me homebrewing a bunch of shit and then running a dungeon crawl.  Maybe I’m wrong and that’s not that unusual, but I kinda feel like it was a weird way into the hobby.  Certainly it’s given me a base of understanding that, more so than any other game, the rules of D&D are ... malleable.  You can always add in your own touches to Parcheesi, or Monopoly—how many of us were adults before we realized that getting money for landing on Free Parking wasn’t actually a rule?—but customizing D&D is a whole ‘nother level of creativity.  I want to explore this more in a future installment, but for now, chronology demands that we back off from my career as a DM and see me finally become a player.

Next week: off to college.  Again.

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1 The age-old debate over whether e.g. “a pegasus” isn’t really a thing because “Pegasus” was the name of one unique individual was never an issue for me.  From my budding authorial perspective, any dilemma of this type was instantly solved by whichever answer increased the number of races in my fantasy world.

2 This is possibly a bit of an understatement.  But I have to tell you, from both my experience as a child and as a father: children suck at having the good sense to realize that they’re “too young” to accomplish something.  Or as Pearl S. Buck once (much more eloquently) said: “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and so they attempt the impossible—and achieve it, generation after generation.”

3 Okay: is.

4 Who I was mostly unfamiliar with because, as I mentioned last week, I wasn’t reading Avengers or Fantastic Four.

5 Really? Spider-Man as a “monster”?

6 One would think that, what with everything being on the Internet these days, I could find an image of that exact dungeon.  But, alas, I couldn’t, though I found several that were close.  The one that felt closest to what I remember is Blue Dungeon 013 by Tim Hartin.  Creative Commons share-alike license.

7 In retrospect, my lack of artistic ability may have fed into this.  I couldn’t draw a dragon to save my life, but, given graph paper, a pencil, and a ruler, I could draw the shit out of some dungeons.

8 I have to admit that, until I started writing this very series, I never knew how that was spelled; I always thought it was “quadrle” or somesuch.

9 I suppose this was technically my very first GMPC.

10 My favorite kid-quote from my brother: he once announced, quite seriously, at age 8 or so, that he was opposed to nuclear war, because it would kill all the pets.  Wasn’t worried about the people, you understand: just the pets.