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.

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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.

SoCal 'Scapers Summer Gameday, 2019

This weekend we had a Heroscape gameday.  Now, you probably remember that every year we do a Heroscape tournament, and this year will no doubt be no exception.  But, at the end of the tourney, when we’re saying our farewells, we always promise that we’ll get together more than once a year, and maybe have just a casual gameday or two some other time during the year.  We always say that ... but we (almost) never do.  In fact, I would say that, in the decade or so that I’ve been going to SoCal Heroscape tournaments, we’ve managed to get together for a non-tourney event about twice.  We just suck at getting organized.

But we finally managed it, yesterday at a local game store called Paper Hero’s Games.  I and all three of my children, plus the middle one’s best friend, made the (moderately short) trek down and met up with 2 other regular tourney-goers, and we just happened to run into a new person who used to play but hadn’t in a long time.  Brave soul that he was, he came up to us and asked if he could join, so we set him up with an army (I have a tendency to overdo when it comes to bringing ready-to-play armies, so I had 25 or so) and threw him into the mix.  It was a great time, and I personally loved the venue more than other places we’ve tried, although I do admit that it was a tad crowded.  Squeezing into your seat was tricky, and finding a place to put all our stuff was a logistical puzzle, and it certainly was loud.  But the tables were free, the store management was friendly, they didn’t care that we brought outside food and drinks, didn’t give me crap when I finally ditched my shoes, and even asked if it was okay if they took back the table we had unceremoniously absconded with to put our overflow crap on—he asked us if it was okay to use his table that we weren’t even supposed to be using!  I was super-impressed with the friendly staff and hope to go back sometime.

The games were good too.  We only got in about 3 games a piece, but it was a lot of fun, and I think the kids had a good time.  We bought some stuff we really didn’t need (more to support the store than anything else), palled around with our fellow ‘Scapers, and one of our oldest Heroscape friends agreed to trade me a beautifully painted Gothlok for an unpainted one and few bucks.  I wish I’d had a chance to try out even more of my weird army ideas, but my littlest one and I did get to play a bizarre army consisting of Harley Quinn (because that’s her favorite comic book character), Scarecrow and Creeper (who, with their insane personalities, bond with Harley), a passel of Nottingham Brigands for range, and good ol’ Marcu Esenwein to fill out the last 20 points.  (This army, by the way, is not a particularly good one, but it was super-fun to play.)  All in all, a great time, and I hope we get to do it more often.

Next week, something more substantial.

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 reasons 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.

Have a lovely Independence Day

Nothing exciting this week.  Just getting ready for a short work week then maybe go see some fireworks on Thursday.  Longer post coming next weekend.

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.

__________

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.

Another Father's Day rolls around

You know, when I wrote last week that a longer post this week should be “achievable,” I totally forgot that it was Father’s Day.  Today my lovely children (and The Mother, of course) are taking me to see Avengers: Endgame, which is, what? 6 hours long?  So I think my day is pretty full already, and I’m only setting myself up for failure (as The Mother would say) if I try to work in a long blog post too.  So let’s skate one last time and I’ll just wish everyone a happy and brilliant Father’s Day, even if they’re not fathers—doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate the general concept of fatherhood, which I can tell you from personal experience is pretty great.  Love to all my minions from their Gru.

Until next week.

This damned knee ...

I really tried to get a proper post for you this week, as the regular schedule would indicate, but some medical issues caused me to fall behind on my work a bit, so I need to concentrate on that, unfortunately.  Next week should be achievable.

Some fun Game of Thrones videos

As you noticed, I didn’t post the final installment in my Game of Thrones reaction posts last week.  It’s coming, I promise, but I still need more time to polish it.

In the meantime, I’ll give you something else to do.  I’ve been watching a lot of Game of Thrones related videos online lately, and many of them have expressed my thoughts on the final season rather succinctly.  If you haven’t yet watched these, you may want to check them out.

I shouldn’t have to mention this, but ... MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASON 8 IN THE BELOW VIDEOS.


First, the inimitable Scooter Magruder.  Apparently he does a lot of sports-related videos, which probably explains why I’d never heard of him before.  But he also does a few other things, such as videogame reaction videos, and, of course, Game of Thrones reaction videos.  Here’s the complete set of his videos for this latest season.

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
• Episode 5
• Episode 6

I don’t think I have ever watched a video where everything the person said was exactly what I was thinking on the topic too, but I can’t find a single point of disagreement with Mr. Magruder on the topic of Game of Thrones season 8.  It’s like the guy lives inside my head or something.  Episodes 3, 5, and 8 are probably the best, but they’re all great.  Highly recommended.


Next, this fellow Ryan George does “pitch meetings” for different shows and movies where he plays both sides: that is, he’s both the person with the crazy (generally stupid) idea and also the executive who has doubts but is willing to play along.  You know what? it’s easier to just watch them than listen to me try to explain the concept:

• Game of Thrones in general
• season 8 specifically

I don’t agree with Mr. George on everything, but his take on season 8 is pretty damned spot-on, and also hilarious.


Finally, just for fun ... this is nothing to do with season 8, but just something I stumbled across and had to share: “Ice Ice Baby” by the Game of Thrones characters.  You’re welcome.


Next week, something more substantial, although I have no idea what.

D&D and Me: Part 1 (The Time Beforetimes)

[This is the first post in a new series.  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.]

[This series is about my discovery of and (occasionally stormy) love affair with D&D.  You may wish to think of it as an alternative to 23andMe, since D&D is embedded far deeper in my DNA than any silly “chromosomes.” Or think of it as a complement to my series on the Other Blog “Perl and Me.” This will probably be a bit shorter than most of my series.  Probably.]

I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with Dungeons & Dragons—or “D&D” for those in the know—for most of my life.  For a long time, I took a detour into Heroscape, and I still love (and play) that game too.  But I’m entering a more “on-again” phase, mainly in that I’ve (finally!) discovered the joy of watching people play online.¹  As I’m always interested to find out more about the people behind the art I enjoy—whether that’s musicians, authors, filmmakers, or what-have-you—I’ve also spent a little bit of time listening to some of these people I’m watching talk about how they got into D&D.  And that made me want to tell someone how I got into D&D.  So here I am, telling you.

Because I never met a tangent I didn’t like, I have to start with the pre-D&D stuff.  There were lots of interests that came before I even heard about D&D, and lots of intersecting interests and interests that grew out of it.  Any story about a thing is always about more than just that thing.  For me, as a very young child, the two most important pieces were no doubt fantasy and horror.  And for that we need to talk about books.

I was an only child for the first 11 years of my life, and, while I loved games, I rarely had anyone to play with.  I didn’t make friends very easily, and I was a very short kid, and quite sensitive about it.  So I spent a lot of time by myself, and most of that time I spent reading books.  In my house, movies were awesome, and we went to see quite a few, and television was awesome, and we watched quite a lot of it, and music was intensely important—I may have mentioned before that my father was a record collector—and we listened to a shit-ton of that, but books were king.  No one ever discouraged me from reading comic books, or watching cartoons, or any of that stuff (my dad, in fact, had been fond of comics himself as a kid, so I think he was secretly a bit happy when I started to get into comics), but it was just always clear that books were the ultimate medium.  Everything else was second tier ... at best.  We had entire walls of our house devoted to books, as well as books in cabinets, books in boxes, bookcases stashed into odd corners ... books everywhere.  I had a bookcase in my room as well, of course, and the very first book I can remember reading, after all the Dr. Suess and P. D. Eastman and Berenstain Bears, was a book on Norse mythology.  It was a book aimed at younger readers, so it was a bit watered down, but I learned a lot about Odin and Thor and Loki before I ever saw them in the pages of a Marvel comic.  From there I gave up on the kids’ versions and starting reading Bulfinch’s and Larousse.  It was a short hop from there to The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Probably around the same time, I started getting into comics.  However, I always had a very weird approach to buying comic books: if the cover featured anyone even remotely recognizable—your Supermans, your Batmans, your Spider-Mans, your Fours of the Fantastic variety—I didn’t care much about them.  I wanted comics with pictures of heroes I had never seen before, never even heard of before.  The first comic I can ever remember buying was Atlas #1: that Jack Kirby artwork is always an eye-catcher, I was of course familiar with the name from my studies in mythology, and I had inherited enough of the collector gene to know that a #1 issue could become a valuable commodity ... even at 8 years old, which is how old I must’ve been, according to Wikipdedia’s publication date.  From then on, I would buy anything that had a superhero or two—or, even better, a whole bunch!—that I had absolutely no idea who they were.  It’s why I bought the “origin” issue of Black Orchid, and Ragman #1, and Moon Knight #1, and absolutely why I got into the Legion of Super-Heroes and the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  Teams of misfits with weird powers appealed to me, and really the only truly popular characters I ever liked were the X-Men, and that was only because they rebooted the group with a a whole new batch of crazy unknown heroes—mostly non-American, even!²  Not my fault they got all popular after that.

It’s worth asking why I was only interested in the weird, unknown heroes, and I’m not entirely sure I have a good answer.  But I have a theory.  See, as a kid, I was a little OCD—had I been born 25 years or so later, I might have been diagnosed as being on the spectrum, at least a little.  ADHD at the very least.  But, anyway, one of the ways in which my particular brand of OCD manifested was in my obsession with lists.  My mother would indulge me in this (or maybe she was indulging her own predilection for having children able to recite things back to her, who knows) by teaching me various lists of things.  First she taught me how to count to 10 in Spanish.  Then in French.  Then in German.  Then in Malaysian.³  Then she taught me the Greek alphabet.  Then the books of the Bible.  Then all the US Presidents.  Then she sort of ran out of things to teach me and I started chasing lists on my own.

I always loved animals, so I started reading this set of wildlife encyclopedias we had lying around.  But trying to come up with a list of all the animals in the world isn’t like coming up with a list of all the presidents: we don’t even know all the species of animals at any given time—a fact which was already blowing my young mind—not to mention the fact that the list is constantly changing as new species spring into existence or go extinct.⁴  And when it comes to classification, the classic Linnaean taxonomy (phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) held strong appeal for my orderly brain, but it turns out that people were always fighting over what went where.⁵  The main controversy I recall was that rabbits were put into the “new” order of lagomorpha, although the books made it clear that some taxonomists might still be hanging on to the “outdated” idea that they were rodents.  This pretty much blew my mind, since of course my mother had taught me that rabbits were rodents, and common sense told me they were rodents: I mean, come on, they’re small furry creatures with big buck teeth—of course they’re rodents!  But apparently scientists not only knew otherwise ... they had once believed it and then changed their minds.  Insanity.

I fared no better trying to learn the countries of the world.  Surely this was an area where one could come up with a clear list.  And yet ... was Estonia a country?  They had an embassy in the US, but the UN didn’t recognize them.  What about the Bantustans of South Africa?  The opinion of my brand-spanking-new World Book Encyclopedias was that two of them (Lesotho and Swaziland⁶) were countries, but the remainder (such as Bophuthatswana and Transkei) weren’t.  Plus South Africa had two capital cities: how was that supposed to fit into my nice listing of countries and their capitals?  And it continued to get worse: every year they would send us “year books” with updated and entirely new articles, and they actually came with little sheets of stickers you were supposed to stick in the margins of the main encyclopedias, alerting you to an updated section for this article or a whole new article between these other two articles.  I very diligently applied all these stickers for many years, and I distincly remember when the update for 1979 came in and there was a whole new article for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which was apparently an entirely new country ... one year, no country; next year: country.  Mind.  Blown.

Somehow I didn’t melt down and throw a tantrum when I discovered this.  I just began to chase the lists even harder.  I think I somehow (probably subconsciously) believed I could eventually find all the members and learn all the classification controversies and make my own decisions and then I—alone in the world!—would be the knower of the complete list of X.  Where “X” might be animals, or countries, or perhaps superheroes.  Thus my theory that the lists were responsible for my comic-book-purchasing habits.  No point in buying a “regular” issue of Spider-Man—I already knew who that guy was—but an issue with these new guys Cloak and Dagger ... now there was something adding to my quest to know the complete list of superheroes.

Surely even you, dear reader—used to my tangents are you no doubt by now are—are wondering how on earth this relates to D&D.  For that, we need to look at the other half of my interest: horror.

My parents loved horror.  They enjoyed fantasy, and sci-fi probably even more so, but horror was their true calling.  I started reading Stephen King and Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz⁷ at a very young age, and we would go see horror movies like crazy.  I saw The Exorcist in the theater, at a time when I must have just barely turned 7, and The Legend of Hell House, and Jaws, and Burnt Offerings, and Prophecy, and Grizzly, and Day of the Animals, and It’s Alive (in roughly decreasing order of quality) ... all in the theater.  At home on the small screen, we watched even more: I remember Twilight Zone reruns, and I remember Night Gallery, and most of all I remember Kolchak: The Night Stalker, in which a Chicago reporter for a tiny newspaper managed to encounter a different supernatural threat every single week.  His editor (who was properly grumpy and talked primarily out of the side of his mouth, as all good Chicago news editors should) would yell at him about his “cockamamie stories”⁸ and how “ya got no proof!” The problem with a monster-of-the-week show that you’re supposed to be taking seriously, though, is that unless your protagonist is actually some sort of professional monster hunter (see also: Buffy), or perhaps even is one of the monsters themselves (see also: Dark Shadows⁹), it starts to strain credulity after a while.  Of course, as a kid, that was not an issue for me.  The bigger problem was that you eventually start to run out of monsters ... or at least out of monsters anyone’s ever heard of.  Partially they solved this problem by occasionally making up monsters—my favorite was the updated take on the Headless Horseman, who was now a headless motorcycle rider with a big sword, zooming around decapitating people—but also they went scouring the cultures of the world for more obscure monsters.  Manitou, rakshasa, succubus ... all these I first became familiar with as a result of avidly watching The Night Stalker.  It was only on for one season, but it was a pivotal moment in my personal history.

Because now, you see, I had a new list to make: a list of all possible monsters.

Next week, we’ll see how that pretty inexorably leads to my discovery of Dungeons and Dragons.

__________

1 Most likely we’ll get into why it took me so long—I mean, Critical Role has been a thing for 4 years already—in a later entry in the series.

2 I can’t remember whether Thunderbird considered himself American or not, but at most 2 out of 8.  Still nearly 90% male, of course, but it was still the seventies: “progressive” hadn’t yet progressed all that far.

3 My grandfather was stationed in Malaysia during WWII and taught her when she was little.  It’s the only one of the four languages I can’t remember today, as it happens: I don’t remember much, but I do remember that the words for numbers were multisyllabic, and that always seemed really weird to me.

4 Honestly, there were similar problems with some of my other lists—Ancient Greek had some letters that didn’t survive to the modern Greek alphabet, so do we count those letters or not? and don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha—but I was never aware of those at the time.

5 Nowadays, biologists have all but abandoned this amount of orderliness for a much more flexible system: clades.  While it’s a much better system for trying to organize the multiplicity of life, which is by its nature chaotic, it would have been anathema to my OCD mind at that age.  Luckily, while the book that would eventuallyt inspire cladistics had apparently already been written, it didn’t start to gain traction until I was out of college and could no longer be offended by its conceptually infinite branchings.

6 Note that modern-day Wikipedia tells us that these two countries were never Bantustans; perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall the World Book making this fine distinction.

7 A.k.a. the first 3 of what would ultimately become my pentagram of literary idols.

8 Note: not necessarily an actual quote.  My memory does not really extend back that far, although I have rewatched a few episodes for nostalgia’s sake.

9 Which I also remember watching, at least a bit.

The End of an Era

Well, tonight was the final episode of Game of Thrones: after 7 years, 73 episodes, and countless character deaths, it’s all over.  Hopefully next week I can present my summary on the final season, but right now it’s just too fresh ... too raw.  Plus it’s an off week anyway.  So, next week.

By the way, I totally spaced on the post two weeks ago; sorry about that.  It happens rarely, but it happens.  The Mother and the kids were gone for a few days, and I was treating myself to a bit of a staycation, and I guess my laziness just sort of kept right on trucking.  But we’re back on track now.  See you next week.

Push Poetry (a history)

It started with one word.

At my last job, there was this computer process that would go rogue and the team would get an email and someone would have to go manually kill the job.  It was considered good form to reply to the email, letting the other team members know that you’d killed it, and that way none of them had to worry about doing it themselves.  After a while it became a weird competition as to who could kill the job and report back the fastest, so naturally these reply emails were inevitably brief.  Just the single word: “Killed.”

Now, obviously we should have just fixed the damn problem and then no one would have had to do anything manually at all.  But we were not allowed to fix things at that job without having a properly prioritized ticket (which, as you can probably guess, is a big reason I no longer work there), and besides: we were having fun.  It was always a big race to see who could kill it first, and report back.  “Killed.” “Killed.” “Killed.”

Of course, eventually we got bored with just saying “killed” over and over, so some bright soul replied one day with something like “Squashed.” And then someone else went with “Crushed,” and there was “Executed,” and “Exploded,” and so on.  Finally I was interested.  Here was a competition I could really get into.  Here were some of my entries:

Hunted down while shambling along, sloughing off rotten pieces of itself and moaning “Braaaaiinsss!”, and decapitated with a chainsaw.

In the parlor, with a candlestick, by Colonel Mustard.

Shrunk down to bug size by an experiment gone wrong perpetrated by a bespectacled, absent-minded scientist who looks suspiciously like Bob McKenzie, accidentally taken out with the trash and dumped out in the yard, chased by the cat, and finally gruesomely decapitated and eaten by a praying mantis.

Those are just a few I saved.  There were many many others: I remember one where I actually looked up the model number of a sniper rifle so I could write a long paragraph about tracking it down through the woods and putting a bullet through its left eye.  When I wrote this one:

Taken to the vet, told it was too late, loved and petted and comforted while the injection took effect, and ... dammit, I’m going to miss that little guy! <sniff>

a friend of mine told me he actually thought my dog had died for a minute.  Obviously I had to write these ahead of time so that I could manage to be the first to kill-and-reply, so I always had a few in the chamber and ready to fire.  I always thought it was super-fun, and considered it a personal challenge.

So, fast-forward to new (and still current) job, and there was no such weird runaway job to worry about killing, and no chance to write insanely weird missives to my coworkers.  It was a bit of a bummer, but I figured I’d survive.

Not right away, but eventually, I became the person who pushed our code to production, affectionately (I think) called the “pushmaster.” To do this, I utilized a creaky old collection of ancient scripts, command snippets, and glue-and-duct-tape bits, which I began to refer to collectively as “the push machine.” When initiating the push process, it was necessary to let everyone know what was going on by posting in our local tech channel, because there were things you really shouldn’t be doing during our push: probably if the whole process was a bit smoother and/or more idempotent that wouldn’t be an issue, but it ain’t, so it is.  The very first message I can find in the old logs is this one, from November of 2014:

okay, firing up the push machine ...

From there, it gradually got more descriptive, and began to reflect my growing suspicion that our push process needed some serious work that nobody on the team had the time to concentrate on.

push machinery winding down.

the great push machinery is waking back up ...

push machinery shutting down.  sounds of settling mettle and trailing steam.

and the great grey-green grinding gears of the push machine slowly settle into the sludge.

the strain of the mighty push machinery lowers in pitch as the metal grinds back into motion after being held in place by its backstops and giant rubber bands ...

and the push machinery settles down, its plaintive whine gradually decreasing in pitch, until one final burp of steam and electronic squeal puffs into the air.

and, with that, the foul, fetid fog of the push machinery and the choking, charnel chaff charcoal from its charcoal chimneys, located on the banks of the great, grey-green greasy limpopo river, slips sluggishly into slothful slumber once again.

You can see where this is going.  I no longer had the competitive angle, but I was now engaged in an bizarre attempt to one-up myself by getting weirder and more surreal as I went along.  (You may also recognize my theft of some of the imagery from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child.”)  Here’s a few of my favorites plucked at random from the logs:

the push machine stops its ceaseless, frantic dashing around and slowly starts to melt, greasy black smoke and the horrific stench of burning plastic oozing from its slowly disintegrating form.

the push machinery lets off a final blast of its steam whistle.  it’s quitting time, and all its robotic parasites scurry back to their flap-enclosed maintenance bays.

the push machinery carefully folds its aluminum aprons and puts away its tin pots.  some steam still spouts slowly from a few scattered pressure vents, but the humidity is dissipating, and the whining and grinding of cogs and gears is fading in the soft summer breeze.

the push machine gradually slows its motion and begins poking out its sensors aimlessly in random directions for a while, but is soon reduced to accosting various woodland creatures.  they hurry away, avoiding eye contact.

the push machine sits in its rocking chair, looking longingly out over the water in the fading light.  condensing steam forms on its metal flanks, rolling down the sloping planes underneath its dimming visual sensors.

la machina del empujón cerra sus ojos metálicos y piensa de la pérdida.  la noche está tranquila ahora, pero la soledad tiene un filo plañido que casi se escucha.  agotada, la machina gira y roda despaciamente de regreso a su caverna.

the push machine stutters gradually to a halt, its jittering metal pincers still intermittently drumming on the soft banks of the misty river.  the soft susurrus of a large body sliding surreptitiously into the water is barely noticeable amidst the fading whine of gears and pistons winding down.

the push machinery freezes.  for several microseconds that seem to stretch on for eternity, there is absolute stillness.  then it explodes in a burst of sound and fire, sending out a hail of clattering metal fragments which rain down incessantly, making soft plopping noises as they land in the mud.  as the sonic echoes fade away, a small beeping begins, and each tiny piece of metal begins laboriously converging on the blast epicenter.

the push machine walks along the shore of the limpid river for one quiet moment at the end of its labors.  hearing a sudden sound, it freezes, straining to keep its metal limbs from scraping against its rusted chassis and giving away its location.  then, startled by its own reflection in the water, it suddenly bounds off, clanking and squealing, to seek refuge in its muddy den.

the push machine begins to hum and spark.  soon, bright fizzles of light are shooting from its metallic body accompanied by long, sizzling splashes of sound.  with a long, whistling scream, a jet of smoke shoots straight up into the gathering gloom, and, then, with an ear-shattering bang, the twilight is turned back into day as the green fire of an enormous catherine wheel spirals across the sky over the riverbank.

the push machine color-shifts slightly; were there any eyes here to see it, it would seem to be viewed through a broken prism.  slowly its edges grow fuzzier and its center becomes more translucent.  after some amount of time which seems to stretch forever but is probably very brief, punctuated by whistles and hisses which are simultaneously lowering in both tone and volume, it has vanished completely.

the push machine begins to jerk and stutter.  there is a loud whine, sharply ascending in pitch, then a sound of large metal gears grinding against each other in a disturbing fashion.  as its echoes die away, all that remains is the soft hum of a servomotor rhtymically interuppted by the quiet click of the push machine’s many limbs resetting to start positions.  tick ... tick ... tick ...

the push machine aims its ocular sensors at the disappearing visual indication of the nearest plasma spheroid.  a single drop of cooling fluid rolls down its front-facing planar surface.

the push machine slowly begins to crumple, drawing inward upon itself until nothing remains but an ever shrinking metal ball, which gradually becomes a brief, glinting period before winking out of existence entirely.

the push machine suddenly begins belching thick, purple smoke.  an alarm which has the exact pitch and tone of a whooping gibbon begins to sound.  chartreuse lights blink in morse-like patterns, and the intertwined smells of sandalwood and stinkbug slowly drive all the surrounding fauna back into their hidey-holes.

the noises from the push machine start to fade, as if coming in from a distant radio station as the tuner moves farther and farther away from the source.  its metal body gets smaller and smaller, its colors fading out to a grainy sepia tone, until eventually it can neither be seen nor heard at all.

the push machine ends its wash cycle and goes into the spin cycle.  shortly, scraps of metal are being flung in all directions.

the push machine thumbs its olfactory sensor at the overseer unit, which re-emphasizes its electronic call that, while the push machine does not necessarily have to return to its den, it may not remain in its current position.

the flames bursting forth from the push machine are quickly extinguished by the foaming chemicals sprayed by its attentive minders.  clouds of thick, oily smoke roll away on the evening breeze, accompanied by the smell of burning plastic and the popping sounds of cooling metal.

the push machine slowly sinks into the bubbling tar.  lonely electronic beeps and whistles grow fainter as the lights dim and more and more of the rust-flecked surface is consumed by the grasping pitch.

the push machine begins to liquefy, shedding bits of its metal hull in great, shining globular beads of teardrop contour and plasmic consistency.  after a long period of squelching noises and oily black smoke which drifts away on the breeze, there is nothing left but a large puddle of goop in the muddy riverbank.

the push machine shudders, shimmers, then seems to drift slowly out of focus, its disintegrating image seeming to distort as if reflected in a funhose mirror.  with one final blinding flare of color, it winks out of existence.

the push machine slowly topples over onto its back; the motorized treads on its undercarriage rotate feebly, seeking purchase and finding none.  emitting a series of irritated electronic chitters, the maintenance bots surround it and drag it slowly back to its docking bay.

the push machine’s seams are venting steam at an alarming rate.  the fact that it no longer appears to be leaking oil may just mean that all its oil has now leaked out.  the squeal of its internal belts has almost reached a pitch only audible to canines.  it may be trying to stagger back to its maintenance bay, or perhaps it’s just shaking itself to pieces where it stands.

the push machine begins to pitch, then to yaw, then to roll.  its rotations and revolutions blur into a complex möbius strip while its minders look on, motionless, as if pondering what support mechanism allows this particular range of motion.

the treads of the push machine roll slowly through the mud as the drizzling rain continues to come down, and slowly, ever so slowly, it sinks deeper and deeper into the muck, the treads desperately trying and failing to gain purchase in the viscous mire, until, eventually, the highest points—the tips of the radio receiving antennae—are the only parts of the machine still visible.

the push machine fades to monochrome and rotates 90° in all dimensions, causing it to effectively disappear.  its confused maintenance bots scurry hither and fro aimlessly, beeping forlornly in a fruitless attempt to locate it.

the push machine moves so fast that its rust and faded chrome are only a blur.  at some point the oily smoke of its dirty engines and the stinking cloud produced by the friction of its metal parts rubbing together become indistinguishable, and the glow off its body is reminiscent of a rocket on re-entry.

the push machine settles into the sludge as the sun slowly sinks below the great, grey-green greasy horizon line of the limpid limpopo river.  as the flaming fiery sphere fills the darkening twilit sky, a single drop of oil leaks from the ocular sensor of the quiescent quasicontraption, then all is quiet, and quelled.

the push machine freezes for a fraction of a second, then immediately resumes its frantic movement.  this only lasts for a few more seconds, however; then it halts again, quivering slightly, then bursts into motion for perhaps a full minute, only to stall once again.  small scurrying robotic tenders hover on the outskirts, waiting for the frenzied motion to resume once again, but it never does ...

the push machine slowly grinds to a halt with various ear-grating creaks and groans.  various multicolored fungi begin to grow out of the cracks where its metal plates no longer fit together seamlessly.  rust spreads preternaturally quickly across its pitted surface, and what little paint has not already chipped away steadily fades to a sun-bleached gray.  in mere moments the accumulated aging of a hundred years appears complete on its frame.

the oily steam from the push machine begins to coalesce in the cool night air, its surface tension gradually forming a vesicle which surrounds the shuddering metal body.  slowly, ever so slowly, the heat of the atmosphere inside this utricle achieves sufficient differential to cause the whole to lift, and eventually the push machine floats gracefully away on the billowing breeze.

the push machine keels over dead.

Over the past 5 years or so, I’ve pushed to production, by my count of searching through the logs, 168 times.  I’m pretty sure every one of these was accompanied by some sort of message, although many of them of course were simpler than the ones above.  But, as the years went on, it became harder and harder to come up with clever messages.  I started to paraphrase bits and pieces of popular culture:

the push machinery downshifts to idle, and reflects:
from there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

the push machine keels over and clatters into a million tiny little pieces.  and each of those pieces bursts into a million tiny pieces.  and, although at that point i stopped counting, i shouldn’t at all be surprised ...

the push machine runs screaming into the murky woods.  the crying tires, the busting glass, the painful scream ...

the push machine rides slowly off into the sunset, slumped forward in its saddle, ignoring the slowly receding cries of “push machine! push machine! come back!”

here, at the end of all things, the push machine is glad just to be done.

the push machine slides the rounded chunk of metal the final foot, reaching the apex of the incline.  suddenly its forceps limbs slip on the mud-slickened surface, and its visual sensors track the downward progress as the large obstacle rolls back to its origin.  after a short, low blast of steam, it begins to caterpillar down the slope to begin again.

as the push machine becomes motionless and start its soft blinking, its maintenance bots slowly gather round it in a circle, stretching out robotic limbs to connect with each other.  is not the spirit of the holiday within their grasp, so long as they have pseudopods to grasp?

That’s Dr. Suess, The Young Ones, “Last Kiss”, Shane, The Lord of the Rings, Sisyphus, and Dr. Suess again, respectively.

I’ve also experimented with drawing from several sources and combining them in unique ways.  Here’s one that combines references from Colossal Cave Adventure and the Zork series:

the push machine is lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  it’s pitch dark.  the shiny brass lamp is turned on, but flickering fitfully.  eventually, the push machine will be eaten by a grue.

This one begins with The Scarlet Letter and somehow ends up in “Shaft”:

the push machine knows not of what you speak.  do not talk lightly of a learned and pious conveyor of code like the push machine!  shut your mouth.  i’m just talkin bout the push machine.

Many of my coworkers refer to these messages as “push poetry,” although one of them has more correctly pegged it as “purple prose.” Still, there can be a certain poetry in it, and, more recently, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing some actual poetry for these push messages.  Now, as I’ve talked about before, I’m not much of a poet, really, but I dabble.  And I tend to like structured poems.  Here’s an attempt at a haiku:

grey drizzle on riverbank,
the push machine waits there forlornly—
a barren tree in winter

Note that I subscribe to the point of view that haiku is not defined by the number of syllables, but rather by its contrasting images, generally using nature imagery, separated by a full stop of some kind.

Then I tried rewriting existing bits of poems to recast them as push messages.  Here’s a bit of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll:

the push machine engages with snark, every night after dark,
in a dreamy delirious fight;
is served with greens in those shadowy scenes,
and is useful for striking a light.
but after meeting with boojums, by day,
for moments (of this be assured),
it softly and suddenly vanishes away—
and such a notion cannot be endured.

And continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme (he’s one of my favorite authors), here’s a longer piece drawn from several verses of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

the push machine and tender bots
were walking close at hand.
it sweated grease and fluids green
upon the slimy sand.
“fear not, machine!” the bots cried, “your
performance has been grand.”

“if seven suns with seven stars
shone for half a year,
do you suppose,” the tenders asked,
“that all this mist would clear?”
with forlorn beeps, the push machine
shed an oily tear.

“oh, push machine,” bemoaned the bots,
“you’ve had a pleasant run.
shall we be heading home again?”
but answer came there none.
and this was scarcely odd, because
the push machine can’t talk.

Tired of Carroll?  How about some E.E. Cummings?

push machine lived on a pretty how bank
(with up so greasy many miles dank)
mist cloudy rainy mud
it clanked its didn’t it dripped its did.

Maintenance bots(both spat and hissed)
cloudy rainy mud and mist
guided gently and back to den
rust slime grit grim

But here’s my absolute favorite, and the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

This is another combination of disparate sources, and it’s probably the closest to my previous attempt at a cento, although obviously much smaller.  Here’s where the lines come from:

• Line 1: Cheating a bit and reusing the same opening as my previous cento; this is from Peter Straub’s Shadowland (although he was merely codifying a much older meme).
• Line 2: This is paraphrase of a line from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
• Lines 3 and 4: This is a phrase by Clive Barker, describing the dream-sea Quiddity (probably from Everville, but I suppose it might be from The Great and Secret Show).
• Lines 5 and 6: This is a lift from Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman.
• Line 7: From the opening of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft.
• Line 8: This is a fun one.  Pretty much everyone has heard this, and thinks it comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But in fact, it isn’t in the book, and it also isn’t in the movie.  When Arthur C. Clarke did the original screenplay for the movie based on his book, so the story goes, he included this now infamous line (“My God! It’s full of stars!”), but it got cut in later drafts.  But somehow the line survived into popular culture despite never actually appearing in any publicly released medium.

I really loved how this one came out, and I felt it was a bit of a shame to consign it to the fleeting ephemera that is our #tech Slack channel.  So I wanted to move it somewhere more semi-permanent, and I also wanted to share it with you guys.  So now I have.

So there’s a sample of my so-called “work poetry.” Hopefully there will be several more years of push poetry to come, and perhaps I’ll do another post about it once I’ve accumulated some further examples.