OGL Doomscrolling

I’ve never been particularly susceptible to doomscrolling.  I didn’t do it during the height of the pandemic, nor on January 6th, nor even during the run up to (and aftermath of) Trump’s election.  I didn’t do it during the most intense times of the Black Lives Matter protests, nor during the most heinous parts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The closest I ever really got was an obsession with TV news shortly after 9/11, but that was technically before doomscrolling was a thing (although really it was the same impulse).  But, overall, I was starting to think I was immune to the syndrome.

And then Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast (or WotC)—the company that makes D&D—started fucking with my game.

Now, on the one hand I suppose it makes sense that this thing, which is more likely to affect me personally than any of that other stuff (maybe even more so than COVID), was the thing that finally caught me in its web.  But that’s sort of a shallow assessment, and I would at least hope that there’s a better explanation than that.  After some introspection, I think I’ve put my finger on it: none of that other stuff really surprised me.  Anyone who was surprised that Putin would invade a country just hasn’t been paying attention, and anyone who was surprised that cops were killing black people is beyond clueless.  The US government wasn’t prepared to deal with a major health crisis? yeah, some “breaking news” there.  Corporations are using the pandemic to gouge us for more money? well, duh: it’s what they do.  As for Trump, I can’t say which is less surprising: that a politician would be a compulsive liar, or that a rich white guy would be self-absorbed and unscrupulous.

But this ... this actually caught me off guard.  I never thought that this could happen.

And that’s primarily because it already happened once before. See, what Hasbro is doing is trying to screw with the Open Gaming License (OGL), which was invented for the third edition of the game (3e), and tries to do for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) what open source licenses did for the software industry.  Both 3e and 5e use the OGL, but 4e did not.  What happened?  Well, presumably, some dick executives at Hasbro decided that it sucked that other people were making money off D&D and decided to create a new version that wouldn’t use the OGL (I actually cover this is some detail in my discussion of what Pathfinder is).  And it bombed.  See, 3e made D&D the biggest TTRPG in the market—by a huge factor.  Other TTRPGs were, in those days, like browsers other than Chrome: sure, they exist, but the only people you know who use them are hardcore nerds.  4e killed all that, and other TTRPGs began to equal—or even overtake—D&D.  And it’s obviously an oversimplification to claim that moving away from the OGL was responsible for that ... but it’s hard to ignore it as a factor as well.

Especially when you factor in that 5e brought it back.  Basically, WotC said, “hey, guys, we know we screwed up, but now there’s a new version of the game, and it will use the OGL again ... please come back to us.” And it worked.  Oh, sure: once again it’s too neat and tidy to lay the massive success of D&D in recent years at the feet of re-embracing the OGL.  But, also once again, it’s hard to ignore that factor.  So it seems like the company learned their lesson, and now everything is good ... right?

Except corporate executives come and go, and often institutional memories are amnesiac.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, warns George Santayana, and that’s exactly what’s happened now.  Thus, doomscrolling.

Well, today is my last allotted day to obsessively hit the refresh button to get the latest news on this topic, so perhaps I can declare it not a complete waste of effort by giving you, dear reader, a few links which can hopefully tell the story in a cogent, coherent manner.  I tried to focus on shorter articles and videos to make it quicker to get through, but there’s no getting around that this is a big topic, so don’t dive in unless you’re willing to spend some time on it.  But, for all that, I think it’s a really fascinating topic, with business aspects, legal aspects, issues of creative vs capitalist, and feats of journalism.  If you do have the time, it might just be worth it to take a look at this particular controversy.  And, even if you’re not into TTRPGs, considering the fact that the blockbuster D&D movie is scheduled for March, and a new D&D TV show was just announced, it’s possible that the fallout could impact a lot more folks than that, if only tangentially.

For each link below, I’ve indicated what format the media is in, and what expertise the author is bringing to the table.  I’ve tried to arrange things into an order that makes the story easier to follow (which is decidedly not chronological order of these things being published), and add a brief bit of commentary as to what I think the value of each is.  This list is highly curated, based on my own opinions; I tried to save you from going through a lot of the dreck that I did during my doomscrolling spree, but that inherently means that my bias about what to include and what to omit is on full display, so take with as many grains of salt as you feel appropriate.  Some of these I’ve marked “informative,” if they’re primarily to get raw data; some I’ve marked “entertaining,” if the authors have added a bit of flair to make the new go down more easily; and some I’ve marked “emotional,” if the authors are letting their feelings show as to how much this is impacting their lives and livelihoods.

I’ve explained most of the acronyms above; “3PP” means third-party publisher (i.e. someone who is not WotC or the consumer who is publishing D&D-related material).  The fate of the 3PPs are the main thing that’s in doubt with this move from Hasbro / WotC.  It’s also fair to note (as some of the folks below do) that, when we demonize the “company,” we need to be careful to disinguish the sleazy executives from the rank-and-file employees of WotC (and its subsidiaries, like D&D Beyond), who are really just trying to get along, and many of whom don’t agree with the policies of the “company” at all (and several of whom are, apparently, responsible for many of the leaks that are fueling the fire, precisely because they can’t stand idly by).

What the hell is all this about anyway?

• Best overall summary: (video) Mark “Sherlock” Hulmes (D&D streamer); emotional.  The first 13 minutes here are the best breakdown of almost every salient event that I’ve heard so far.

• Best summary of the situation pre-leak: (video) Profesor Dungeon Master (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); informative.  The first 4 minutes here are a very concise window on the situation up to the point where the leak happened (the leak was just a rumour at this point; it became official upon publication of the Gizmodo article—see below).  After that, the Prof goes on to make some fairly cogent commentary and predictions, but a lot of it was invalidated by later events.

Was the original OGL useful?

• Negative: (text) Cory Doctorow (author); informative.  Some people say the original OGL was useless or even harmful.
• Positive: (video) Roll of Law (lawyer); informative.  Others counter that this is too simplistic a view.

The business issues driving this

• Early predictions: Flute’s Loot (D&D streamer); informative.  Really, Flute is just collecting words of wisdom here from Matt Colville (founder of MCDM), but, since he’s done us the kindness of picking out just the good bits, we may as well take advantage.  (And he does add some useful commentary.)

• Assessment of the factors leading up to this situation: (video) Ryan Dancey (former VP at WotC and co-author of the original OGL); informative.  Nice short clip from a much longer discussion with the Roll for Combat folks (who were one of the third-party publishers involved in the leak) which explains very cogently the business side of things from someone with inside knowledge.

• What WotC should have done to address “undermonetization”: (video) Tulok the Barbarian (D&D streamer); entertaining.  This is probably about as pro-Hasbro as it gets (spoiler: still not very pro-Hasbro).  While this came out before the ORC license annoucement (below) and way before WotC’s response (even further below), it is still the absolute best (and funniest) assessment of what WotC / Hasbro could have done—still could do, for that matter—to address their concerns that D&D is “undermonetized” without pissing off their customer base.

What’s bad about the (proposed) new license?

• The original leak: (text) Linda Codega for Gizmodo (journalist); informative.  This is what kicked off the controversy.

• Why it’s legally bad: (video) The Rules Lawyer (lawyer and D&D streamer); informative.  A good summary of the issues from a legal standpoint.

• Why fans are outraged: (video) DnD Shorts (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); entertaining.  Anti-Hasbro biased, obviously, but really encapsulates why people are freaking out.

Reactions from the community

• A typical 3PP reaction: (video) The Dungeon Coach (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); emotional.  I could list literally dozens of videos just like this one, but I think DC is honest and raw and lays it out straight.

• The #OpenDND movement: (video) The ArchCast (D&D streamer); informative.  A decent summary of the situation post-OpenDND but pre Paizo.

• The ORC license: (text) Charlie Hall for Polygon (journalist); informative.  Paizo are the makers of Pathfinder, you may recall, and are severely impacted by all this since Pathfinder (or at least the first version of it) is completely dependent on the original OGL.  This article is a nice summary of Paizo’s annoucement of the new Open RPG Creative (or “ORC”) license, and it includes a link to the full announcement if you want to read that.

• Community reaction to the ORC license: (video) No Nat 1s (D&D streamer); entertaining.  I don’t love this guy in general, but his joy at the Paizo annoucement (just above) is kind of infectious.

The campaign to send WotC a financial message

• A typical plea on Twitter: (tweet) Ginny Di (D&D stremer); interesting.  Ginny Di is a major influencer in the D&D space.  Note that she’s retweeting something from DnD Shorts (see above), but most people feel it was her signing on that really made this go viral.

• A typical plea on YouTube: (video) Indestructoboy (third-party publisher); interesting.  Reasoned and rational.

• The end result: (video) Tenkar’s Tavern (D&D streamer); informative.  Not necessarly the best on this topic, but probably the most compact.

WotC’s response

• What it is and why it’s bad: (video) DnD Shorts (D&D streamer and third-party publisher); entertaining.  The only person I’m linking to more than once, Will from DnD Shorts is definitely very anti-Hasbro, but he’s just so damned articulate and simultaneously so damned entertaining that I can’t not point you at his videos.  This video contains the entire text of WotC’s response.

• Why people find it offensive: (video) Dungeons & Discourse (UK legal professional^* and wargaming streamer); entertaining.  Originally an anti-corporate voice in the wargaming hobby space,^** this creator originally published videos under Discourse Miniatures.  She actually just started this new channel focussing on TTRPGs specifically because of this OGL debacle.  She’s informed, articulate, funny, and I adore her accent.^***  (I actually just signed up for her Patreon.)

So that’s it; pretty much the whole story.  There are more details out there, but don’t get sucked in like I did.  It’s not worth it.

And maybe now I’ve learned that even something this massively stupid shouldn’t surprise me.  Hopefully that’s armor against the next crazy-ass thing that might tempt me into wasting my life reading about shit that’s just going to depress me anyway.  One can always hope.

__________

* The UK has a few different professions which are licensed to practice law, and I don’t know exactly which one she is.

** Remember that D&D actually grew out of wargaming, so it’s definitely related.

*** Northern Ireland, perhaps?

Paradoxically Sized World VI

"I Can Dream the Rest Away"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

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.]

My opening line for the the last installment of this mix was this:

Can you believe it’s been just over 3 years since we last saw an installment in my LittleBigPlanet-inspired mix?

And that was, ironically ... almost three years ago.  So I guess we can believe it, eh?  Look for PSW VII sometime in early 2026, I suppose.

This is just one of those mixes that started strong and has slowly petered out.  My middle child, for whom this was always their favorite of my mixes, has moved on to other music, and, honestly, my tastes in mostly wordless electronica run way more towards downtempo: basically, this music, entirely designed to make you feel like you’re in a happy little videogame like its inspiration LittleBigPlanet, is often just way too upbeat for me.

Still, there’s a time and place (and mood) for nearly all types of music, and I still reach for this mix every now and again.  You might think I’d be running out of actual music from LBP to seed the volumes with by this point, but the truth is that there’s 3 main games, plus the two portable versions (PSP and PS Vita), and, the one that I lean most heaviy on this time around, LBP Kart.  Kart gives us a whopping 4 tracks this time out, so let’s start there.

LBP Kart is exactly what you think it is: the LBP version of Mario Kart.  It’s a driving/racing game, so it’s quite different from the cute little platformers that comprise all the other installments in the franchise.  And the music is different as well—could Fishbone’s “Skankin’ to the Beat,” for instance, ever have made it into a “normal” LBP game?  Doesn’t seem that likely.  Actually, even “Fresh” by Devo is (unusually for them) a bit frenetic and punky.  Driving games require a whole ’nother vibe when it comes to music: you want fast-paced music that inspires speed and those daring feats of roadwork that are best left to videogames because you’d die in a fiery crash if you tried them in real life.  Crashes in driving games are more funny than scary, so that frenzied beat that you find in the punky reggae of Fishbone or the punky synthpop of Devo is perfect.  You know what else has that crazy energy?  Dubstep.  In this case, “Odessa Dubstep,” by Liverpool house/D&B group Apollo 440.  All 3 of these tracks have a beat which is driving (pun only half intended) and intense; the game itself uses instrumental versions, but I’ve gone with the original vocal version in all cases (as I typically do in this mix).  All these factors combine to mean that this is perhaps the most head bangin’, almost danceable, volume of this mix so far.  Its character diverges sharply from previous installments, at the same time that it’s still noticeably upbeat videogame-inspired electronica.

One of the consequences of that is it’s given me a chance to include a few tracks that I had had slotted for this mix but just never seemed to work on any of the other volumes.  Probably the best example of that is Finland’s Nightwish, whose metal tune “Whoever Brings the Night” was used in LBP2.  As boss battle music, it was okay for it to be a bit more intense than the other tracks in that game, but it meant that it really stood out in my other volumes (which, you know, don’t really have boss battles embedded in them).  Now, Nightwish is often described as “symphonic metal”—and I think that pretty well describes “Whoever Brings the Night,” with its operatic-adjacent choral background vocals, barely noticeable woodwinds, and interesting orchestral percussion.  Add back in Anette Olzon’s excellent vocals and it becomes a heavy metal anthem which still fits right in with the rest of the mix, amazingly.

Another track which fit nicely here was “Toccata” by Canadian electronica artist OVERWERK (the stage name for Edmond Huszar).  OVERWERK was introduced to me by another coworker, who is more into the EDM and techno side of electronica.  A lot of OVERWERK’s stuff isn’t my bag, but this take on Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is pretty awesome.  As is “Best Fish Tacos in Ensenada,” another track from LBP Kart, this time by British DJ Freeland.  It’s a hard driving EDM tune that makes a nice lead-in to “Odessa Dubstep.” Finally, Chicago’s Tortoise is usually described as “post-rock,” but to me it mostly sounds like a 2000’s update of prog rock—“Prepare Your Coffin” (used in LBP PSV), for instance, sounds like it’d be right at home alongside early Yes, or perhaps Emerson Lake & Palmer.  Hard to fit that vibe into other volumes, but it seemed perfectly comfortable here.

There’s also a fair amount of music from other LBP bands that we’ve seen on this mix before.  You may remember Ochre from their track “Sosacharo,” which was the opener for volume V; well, I actually discovered them after hearing their song used in LBP2, “Infotain Me,” which I planted right in the opening third this time ‘round.  I followed that up with Ratatat, a band who I now can’t remember how I discovered, but it surely must have somehow been related to LBP, because their music is so perfect for this mix.  We heard “Flynn” last volume; this volume’s track is “Dura,” which starts out with a sort of synth harpsichord riff, then explodes into happy electronic tones.  Likewise, we’ve seen Plaid twice before on this mix,¹ but the first time I ever heard them was LBP2’s use of “New Family,” a mellow yet still upbeat piece of electronica that I felt worked nicely into our closing third.  Röyksopp I also discovered via LBP;² “In Space” is a very mellow, almost spacey, track which leads us nicely into our closer.  Ugress is appearing here for the fourth time; after discovering the Norweigian wonder via his track for the PSV,³ I’ve sort of fallen in love with him.  “Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” is exactly the sort of non-bridge bridge track that he’s so good at: with a slow build for a nearly a minute, it then bursts into a percussion-heavy thrash-adjacent groove that’s the perfect lead-in to Nightwish.

As for other artists who don’t derive specifically from LBP but that we’ve seen on this mix before, probably the most obvious is Bonobo.  I honestly can’t believe this brilliant British DJ and purveryor of amazing downtempo has never been featured in an LBP game: so much of his music seems perfectly suited for it that I’ve already used him twice so far,⁴ and here he takes the honor of closer.  “Nothing Owed” is a sax-driven, meditative but not sad, mellow track, puncutated by an acoustic guitar riff which is just a perfect way to close out this volume.  And the only other band to appear on this mix 3 or more times (including this one) without ever appearing in an actual LBP game is Combustible Edison, the lounge-exotica-electronica band who we’ve heard multiple times on other mixes⁵ as well as twice before here.⁶  “Solid State” (like much of CE’s output) sounds like it’s from a 50s sci-fi show.  It makes a nice transition from the center stretch of more intense songs into the gentler closing third.

For artists just appearing for the second time, you may recall my speaking of Monster Rally before; I discovered them via my old cable company’s “Zen” music channel, and had had “Panther” down for this mix forever before I finally managed to work it in last volume.⁷  This volume’s pick is a short but happy little bridge called “Paradise”: it makes a nice lead-in to the Ochre/Ratatat pairing.  And finally Smokey Bandits have appeared all over these mixes⁸ before they finally showed up last volume.  I squeezed “Revolucion Valiente” in between Apollo 440 and Fishbone because its strong, brassy, spaghetti Western feel could take it.

Paradoxically Sized World VI
[ I Can Dream the Rest Away ]

“Carefree” by Kevin MacLeod, off Calming
“Egg Nog” by Luna [Single]⁹
“Neopolitan Dreams” by Lisa Mitchell, off Wonder

PSV

“Paradise” by Monster Rally, off Return to Paradise
“Infotain Me” by Ochre, off Lemodie

2

“Dura” by Ratatat, off LP3
“Fresh” by DEVO [Single]

Kart

“Toccata” by OVERWERK [Single]
“Apocalypse Please Wait Buffering” by Ugress, off Reminiscience
“Whoever Brings the Night” by Nightwish [Single]

2

“Main Title” by Xcyril, off StarGate Odyssea
“Best Fish Tacos in Ensenda” by Freeland [Single]

Kart

“Odessa Dubstep” by Apollo 440 [Single]

Kart

“Revolucion Valiente” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“Skankin' to the Beat” by Fishbone [Single]

Kart

“Solid State” by Combustible Edison, off Schizophonic!
“New Family” by Plaid, off Double Figure

2

“Prepare Your Coffin” by Tortoise [Single]

PSV

“In Space” by Röyksopp, off Melody A.M.
“Nothing Owed” by Bonobo, off Dial 'M' for Monkey

Total:  20 tracks,  77:23

I wouldn’t want to imply that there’s anything too surprising here, but I will note that hearing Australian Idol contestant Lisa Mitchell show up in an LBP game was surprising to me; I mean, generally speaking, her music is more suited to, say, Sirenexiv Cola.¹⁰  But “Neopolitan Dreams” is a jaunty 3 minutes that, once stripped of vocals, you could imagine popping up behind Sackboy’s adventures (which it did, in the PSP version).  The use of a celesta (or similar toy-piano-adjacent instrument) just gives it that extra layer that makes it fit in so well here.  (Plus it handily provides our volume title.)

And I decided that the Mitchell tune should be the culmination of a very happy opening triad, sort of the bridge to past volumes.  I absolutely had to start with “Carefree” by Kevn MacLeod; because of MacLeod’s habit of releasing his music royalty-free, it gets used in an amazingly large number of YouTube videos, and “Carefree” is so close in sound to Lullatone’s iconic “Race Against the Sunset” (which was used in LBP3 and was the opener for volume IV), “Carefree” is used in a metric shit-ton of fan videos about LBP, because creators know they won’t get demonetized for using LBP’s actual (copyrighted) music.  So it’s an obvious choice for opener here.  That flows nicely into “Egg Nog,” by Luna, also known as “what the founder of Galaxie 500 got up to in the 90s.” “Egg Nog” is theoretically a Christmas tune, but it’s not overtly seasonal (aside from starting with the shaking of some sleigh bells), and is probably not particularly typical of Luna’s output.  But it’s a happy little tune that slots beautifully between “Carefree” and “Neapolitan Dreams.”

And that just leaves us with Xcyril, a French composer who does the occasional soundtrack and otherwise releases neoclassical works that feel like they ought to be soundtracks to something.  So far we’ve only heard from him on Phantasma Chorale, but his “Main Title” for what appears to be a Stargate fan-film series is short, sweet, and very videogame-y.  I’m not entirely sure why I thought it would fit between the Finnish goth-metal and the British EDM, but I actually think it works.

Next time, let’s dip our toes back into that pool that is the 80s.

⇐ Paradoxically Sized World V

Paradoxically Sized World VII ⇒

__________

1 Once on volume II and once last volume.

2 “Vision One,” their track from last volume, was used in LBP2.

3 “Ghost Von Frost,” which we heard on volume IV.

4 Once on volume I and once on volume II.

5 So far: Salsatic Vibrato V, Phantasma Chorale I (twice), Phantasma Chorale II, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

6 Specifically, volumes III and IV.

7 Besides “Panther,” Monster Rally has also showed up so far on Gramophonic Skullduggery I and Apparently World I.

8 Specifically, Salsatic Vibrato VI, Shadowfall Equinox II and IV, Gramophonic Skullduggery I, and Snaptone Glimmerbeam I.

9 As usual, I hate to link only to YouTube, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to get this track.

10 In point of fact, “Clean White Love” does appear there.

Prolly not all it's cracked up to be

Welcome to 2023.  Please keep your hands and arms inside the new year at all times.  Side effects may include drowsiness and upset stomach.  Not recommended for children under 5 years old.  Risk of electrical shock: only qualified personnel should service this year.  Max load capacity 300 pounds.  If ingested, do not induce vomiting.  Read and understand operator’s manual and all safety instructions before using this year.  Authorized personnel only beyond this point.  Avoid direct exposure to year.  In case of damage or leakage, please notify the CDC.  Please mind the gap, and supervise children at all times.  Not intended for highway use.  Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your stay here in 2023.

Season's Greetings

After over a decade of researching the various holidays that exist at this time of year, I feel uniquely qualified to offer you the most diverse set of season’s greetings you’re likely to receive this year.  Here they are, in roughly chronological order of the establishment of the holiday.  Please believe that I sincerely extend unto you each sentiment, as serious or silly as each might be.  To you and yours, I wish you all:

Merry meet! (more about Solstice)

Shalom Aleichem! (more about Hanukkah)

Yazdaan Panaah Baad (more about Zartosht No-Diso)

Merry Christmas! (more about Christmas)

Greetings on Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (more about Sol Invictus)

Habari gani? (more about Kwanzaa)

Enjoy the Mystery Days

Jai Ganapati! (more about Pancha Ganapati)

Happy Festivus! (more on Festivus)

Merry Christmahannukwanzaakah!

Happy Candlenights! (more about Candlenights)

May you all know joy in all that comes your way.

Impending Merriment

Beginning that long slide into the holiday season, so somewhat consumed with family matters this week.  And next week it’ll be Christmas Day, so you might not get anything substantial then either.  But we’ll just have to wait and see.

Only He Who Attempts the Absurd Is Capable of Achieving the Impossible

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post about quotes.  I sort of imagined it would end up being a thing I’d come back to again and again over the years, but, suprisingly (at least to me), that post is now over 12 years past.  Oh, sure, I’ve used quotes in many posts since then, but only a few have been really solid “quote posts”: there’s one on individuality, and two focussed on particular human quote generators—one on MLK, and one on H. L. Mencken.

If you didn’t already click on all those, let me just sum up by reminding you that I have a “quote file,” which I curate with any interesting quotes I find, and my computers spit them back out at me randomly.  Recently, I got this quote:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

And I immediately got excited about the possibility of bringing in several other quotes which talk about contradictory thoughts, such as one by Whitman, one by Emerson, and one by Stephen Fry ... and then I realized that I’d already written that post.  Which was a bit deflating.  Reminds me of another quote:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.  It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

— Mark Twain

Of course, I was somewhat heartened by the fact that the quote that provided the inspiration was not, in fact, used in that post.  Why not, I wonder?  Well, that post was from a while back as well—over 8 years now—so maybe I just hadn’t found the quote yet at the time I scoured my quote file for that topic.

So, were I to rewrite the post without sufficient research, not realizing that I’d already written it, it wouldn’t be the same.  It would have different quotes (at least one more, and probably one or two less as well), but, more interestingly, it would have a completely different point.  That post was about consistency and self-contradiction; the one I was going to write today was going to use the cognitive dissonance of apparent self-contradiction as a back door into the topic of paradox, which is one of my favorite concepts to write about, but which I haven’t done in a while, so it would be a refreshing return to form.  Reminds me of this quote:

You can not step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.

— Heraclitus

Because the quote file is continuously evolving, you see ... as are my thoughts on the meanings of the quotes, and my outlook on life, and all manner of things.  The universe is in constant flux, as this quote reminds us:

With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules—and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.

— Ransom K. Ferm (an imaginary person invented by Kurt Vonnegut)
opening epigram of The Sirens of Titan (1959)

So I not only get older and therefore more likely to repeat myself, but also I, and the entirety of the world around me, are constantly changing and evolving, meaning that, even when I repeat myself, I’m unlikely to say the same things in the same way.  It puts me in mind of this song:

I remember when the world was a little girl,
Every corner turned leading back to her,
Flowing like a stream on a rolling stone,
Certain there was nothing changing ...

— Alison Moyet, “Changeling” (The Minutes, 2013)

That one’s a bit more abstract, but I think it captures both concepts, and the inherent paradox, quite nicely.

This quote business can become a bit recursive, actually.  How about this one?

If you don’t know where you’re sailing, no wind is favorable.

Here I’m quoting B. Dave Walters, from episode 50 of Writing about Dragons and Shit, from July 6th of this very year.  But, then again, B. Dave is actually quoting Seneca the Younger’s “Letter LXXI: On the supreme good,” from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, and what he actually wrote was:

errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo derigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est.

which translates more directly as “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim; when a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind” (at least according to Wikiquote).  And that of course put me in mind of another of my favorite quotes:

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.

Probably just the similarity in nautical themes.  But I can’t take those two and build a blog post around them either: I’ve already written a post centered around the whole ship in a harbor thing too.  Which I of course had also forgotten, that one being about 10 years ago ... I would lament that “I’m getting too old for this shit,” but apparently I already wrote that post too—including another quote, even.  Did I start out this post by saying I hadn’t really written a lot of quote posts?  Man, I really am getting old ...

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Then again, I haven’t really stopped playing.  But perhaps Shaw wasn’t really talking about growing old so much as “growing up,” which is truly a fate worse than death.  If you’ll allow me the indulgence of a self-quote:

”... but then I grew up.” — The good face one puts on when confronted with the tragedy of having irretrievably lost some essential facet of one’s childhood.

Of course, others have put it better.  Here’s one from one of the special features on the Finding Neverland DVD:

Don’t grow up.  Never be a grown-up.  Be an adult; be mature ... but don’t be a grown-up.

— Dustin Hoffman

Finding Neverland, of course, being a movie about J.M. Barrie, who, as the author of Peter Pan, had quite a few interesting ideas himself about “growing up.” Here’s one of my faves:

If I were younger, I’d know more.

— James Barrie

But life goes on, and things keep changing.

The problem isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

— Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

One has to adapt to change.  Adaption is a learned skill; it only comes with age.  Sadly, age can also make it more difficult to be malleable in one’s thinking.  Youth has its advantages:

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

— Lyman Bryson

So I suppose age has its advantages as well.  Age nearly always brings experience; experience hopefully brings maturity; maturity typically brings wisdom.  The key, I think, is to keep on learning.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

— Confucius, Analects 2:15

Of course, the learning has a tendency to lead to paradoxical thinking (so there’s our backreference to paradoxes).

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

— Bertrand Russell

And doubt is ... troubling.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

— Voltaire

Voltaire, of course, was a famous philosopher, who is quite often quoted to help us understand our world.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

— Karl Marx

There’s that “change” word again.  This post is a bit circular, I suppose.  Ah, well, as another philospher once said:

You win a few, you lose a few.  Some get rained out.  But you got to dress for all of them.

— Satchel Paige

So, at the end of the day, when I wonder why I keep writing this blog, when I can barely remember what I’ve done already and what I haven’t, I come to the conclusion that I keep doing it because I love writing.  And, as the man who will soon be Maryland’s first black governor once said:

Every day you’re doing what you’re not passionate about, you become extraordinarily ordinary.

— Wes Moore, quoting a mentor of his

Pursuing your bliss is something I’ve striven to do, and striven to instill in my children.  When it comes to children, I’ve always been a bit inspired by Frank Zappa.  His youngest once said:

We were free to say whatever we wanted—there were no “bad words,” except if you used them intentionally to hurt somebody.  We could go to bed whenever we liked, and I would play in the rain for hours in my underwear—it didn’t matter, and it was fun.

— Diva Zappa, to The Guardian
on the occasion of her father’s 70th birthday

And I’ve tried to live by that.

Well, this post about quotes has rambled far and wide, and definitely didn’t end up where it started.  I don’t know if it has a particular message, but it does hit a lot of the important aspects of quotes I’ve touched on before: that they are distillations of wise words, regardless of who originally spoke them; that there are often multiple quotes that say the same thing, or come at the same topic from multiple angles; that they are repeated and transmogrified and requoted.  They come from disparate sources: in this post, I’ve quoted books, songs, interviews (both written and spoken), movies, podcasts, textbooks, and myself.  They often have uncertain attributions—the Vonnegut quote is to this day still often attributed to the entirely fictitious Ransom K. Ferm, while the title of this very post is often attributed to M.C. Escher (for obvious reasons), and occasionally to Einstein (for slightly more obscure motivations), but is actually Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (at least according to the ever-excellent Quote Investigator).  And I’m quite proud of the fact that, even though I once joked that “all quotes in the history of man were either spoken by Confucius, Voltaire, or Mark Twain, and which one your quote was spoken by only depends on how old you’d like to pretend it is,” this post quotes all three of the great luminaries of the quotiverse, and I’m fairly certain that all three are actually attributed correctly.

Still, the lack of an overall message sort of bugs me.  Perhaps I can fall back on a line I heard in an episode of a Japanese anime that I watched once with my eldest child when they were probably around 7 or 8.  One does not expect to find deep meaning when essentially watching cartoons with your kid, but occasionally serendipity and epiphany align.  So, if there is a message here, perhaps it’s this:

We’re all alive for a reason.  Find out why.

— Gojyo (Saiyuki: The Journey Begins, “Where the Gods Are”)

Progeny Rebound

This weekend, my eldest child has come back home to live with us again, along with their partner.  As you can imagine, it’s been a hectic week with all the preparations.  So there’s not much to say here.  Hopefully more interestingness next week.