Looking Forward to Pathfinder's Next Iteration

The second edition of Pathfinder has just been announced.

Now, I have an opinion on this, and I’d like to believe it’s an informed opinion, but (like pretty much all my topics), I feel like there’s quite a bit of background to cover before my thoughts make sense.  Happily, I’ve already talked about most of it before: for full details of my opinions, you could read my post on post-apocalyptic RPGs (where I cover a bit about the different versions of D&D, up through 3e), and my two-part series on Pathfinder (link to part 2 at the bottom of part 1; this one covers open gaming and the rise of Pathfinder’s first edition).  If reading all that seems like too much trouble, I’ll give you the short version:

• What we call D&D today was originally called “Advanced” Dungeons & Dragons.  In retrospect, we refer to this as first edition (even though there was a version before it: sort of a proto-D&D), or 1e.  It was ... a game.  It came out in 1978(ish).
• The second edition of “advanced” D&D came out in 1989, and we call that (again, in retrospect) 2e.  I have never heard anyone say that 2e wasn’t better than 1e.  1e was a hot mess of confusing and contradictory rules.  2e cleaned up a huge amount of that (but admittedly not all of it) and added long-demanded subsytems (e.g. “non-weapon proficiencies,” which would become skills in 3e).
• Third edition D&D (no longer “advanced”) came out in 2000, and was called 3e pretty much from the get-go.  What we retrespectively rename it is “3.0,” because of what followed.  Unlike the 1e to 2e transition, 3e pretty much radically rewrote nearly all the rules.  However, the basic shape of the game didn’t change.¹  Most significantly, 3e was the version of D&D that introduced us to the OGL (or “Open Gaming License”), a concept based on the open-source software (OSS) movement.  Whether 3e is better than 2e or not is more debatable, but I would say a majority (although maybe not a huge one) would say it is.
• In 2003, just 3½ years after 3.0, 3.5e was released (and here’s where people started using the software-style version numbers).  There were a number of good reasons to do this, primarily because the lack of public playtesting meant that there were some things in 3e that were just plain broken and really needed to be addressed—and, if you have to force people to buy all new books anyway, may as well fix as much as possible, right?—but it did force people to buy all new books (if they wanted to keep getting cool new stuff that was compatible with the game they were playing, at least), and therefore this is the first instance I can remember of anyone referring to a new edition as a “cash grab.”  3½ years really is a fairly short amount of time to ask people to reinvest in core rulebooks all over again, but at least most people agree that 3.5 was better than 3.0.  Oh, sure: a lot of people hated it and refused to upgrade on principle, but very few tried to argue that it wasn’t better.
• In 2008, 4e was released, and it was a radical departure.  Now, you may have noted that, in my Pathfinder posts, I described 4e by saying it “sucks.”  That was probably too harsh: I plead youth and a certain amount of bitterness.²  Today let’s just say that, while 3e seemed radically different at the time, because it was a complete redesign, 4e was a departure on a whole different scale.  It just wasn’t the same game any more (and consequently launched the so-called “edition wars”).  And, while some people like the game it was better than actual D&D, I preferred (and still prefer) the original.  I’m okay with rewriting and redesiging and throwing out whole chunks and replacing with crazy new ideas, but I still want it to be the same game.  Call me anti-progress if you must, but that’s my line and I’m sticking to it.  But, regardless of how you feel about whether 4e was better or worse than 3e (and probably they’re so different that “better” and “worse” aren’t even terms that could apply any more), the most significant point is that it wasn’t released under the OGL.  They took the open-gaming game and closed it.
• In 2009, the inevitable happened, and the open-gaming game was forked: Pathfinder appeared, keeping the same general engine as 3e (3.5e, really) and just fixing some of the more egregious warty bits.  Being disappointed with 4e, I switched to Pathfinder immediately and played it nearly exclusively.  Again, I’ve heard few people claim that Pathfinder isn’t better than 3.5e, and comparison to 4e is just as silly as comparing 3e to 4e.
• In 2014, 5e arrived amidst claims that it brought together the best bits of the previous 4 versions ... and, surprisingly, it pretty much delivered.  The most common criticism of 5e is that it’s “everybody’s second favorite version of D&D,” but it’s easily my favorite.  It’s back to being the same game that 3e was, in my opinion, but once again redesigned from the ground up, and streamlined and simplified to a degree I had previously thought impossible.  Not immediately, but gradually, I’ve switched away from Pathfinder over to 5e.³

Yes, this is actually the short version, and I’ve still glossed over quite a few details that I didn’t feel were entirely relevant.  Last bit of relevant info: who am I to offer an opinion, and what perspective do I come at it from?  Well, I’ve played every edition mentioned above, except for 4e, and I’ve been playing for about three-quarters of my life.  I’m a software developer who’s been programming nearly as long as he’s been playing D&D, and whose first serious computer program (at perhaps age 15) was a D&D character generator.  While I’m quite literally a graybeard, I do not consider myself a grognard: I love change, and I love updates to my favorite games, and I love it when things get easier to do and I love having more options.  And my perspective as a programmer leads me to think about new editions of the game like new versions of a software program: new features aren’t always good just because they’re new, but never upgrading means you’re stuck with outdated features while everyone around you gets the good stuff, and complete rewrites are tricky to get right, but pay big dividends when you do.  Also, I believe in open-source.  A lot.

Now, all that having been said, what do I think of a new version of Pathfinder, given what little info they’ve released so far?  Well, there are a few common (negative) reactions that I’ve seen a lot of that I want to address:

• Many people are referring to it as a “cash grab.”  This is so far past ridiculous as to be practically moronic.  Every version of D&D—nay, every version of any tabletop RPG—released after 3.5e has been called a “cash grab” by somebody, and usually a large/loud contingent of somebodies.  But look at the timelines up above: 1e to 2e was 11 years, and then 11 more to 3e.  No one ever said “cash grab” for any of those.  3.5e came along a mere 3½ years later, though, and the cries of “cash grab” at that point weren’t entirely unjustified.  4e was 4 years after 3.5, but 8 years after 3e, which is still pretty respectable.  5e was 6 years after that, which is getting short again, but I would argue that being sensitive to the fact that many fans were unhappy with 4e—and sensitive to the business argument that Pathfinder was actually beating D&D in sales at that point—makes it okay.  On the Pathfinder side, second edition Pathfinder (P2e? 2P?) will arrive next year, a full 10 years after the original, which was, you remember, based on the 3e ruleset, which is another 9 years old on top of that.  Updating a 19-year-old ruleset is a “cash grab”?  Please.
• Some people are saying that Pathfinder built its business model on customers who were afraid of change, and therefore updating the rules is doomed to fail.  But this is silly: if we were afraid of change, we’d have stuck with 3e altogether (many did), instead of embracing Pathfinder, which had more than a few radical new concepts.  Pathfinder gave us more options and kept play exciting while still simplifying a lot of complex bits—that’s why we bought it.  If they can do that again, we’ll buy it again.
• Some people are pointing out that several of the details released so far sound a lot like the changes that D&D introduced in 5e, so therefore Pathfinder 2e is a 5e rip-off, so therefore why not just stick with 5e?  The answer to this is two-fold.  First, those innovations didn’t actually originate in 5e—D&D stole some good ideas from other games with a lower profile.  If Pathfinder thinks they’re good ideas too (and, why wouldn’t they?), then they too should steal them.  To return to my software analogy, two competing pieces of software are often going to end up looking remarkably similar, because they’re both catering to the same customer base.  The similarities are irrelevant; we need to focus on the differentiators.  Secondly, speaking as someone who more-or-less abandoned Patfhinder for 5e in the first place, I’m hoping they steal as much from 5e as possible ... I actually want it to be more like 5e than what we’ve heard so far.  Include all the features that tempted me away and I’m likely to jump right back on board.

So, overall, none of the criticisms are striking home, and I’m pretty damned excited about the possibilities here.  Now, whether those possibilities will come to fruition or not is still an open question.  I’m not blindly saying that Pathfinder second edition will be great.  But I think it could be great.

What will determine whether it succeeds or fails is pretty simple, in my book.  It all has to do with why I (eventually) chose 5e over Pathfinder.  See, the reason that Pathfinder is better than 3e is that it adds choice.  As I’ve mentioned before, I believe that roleplaying is storytelling.  More choices for building a character, and more choices when advancing that character, means more flexibility in the kinds of stories I can tell.  When I read people saying that you never need more than 4 classes,⁴ my mind boggles.  Are there only 4 kinds of people in the world?  What kind of sad, impoverished stories are these people telling?  Every character in every story needs to be different from every other character, even if only by a little.  Every character needs multiple ways to be unique, to be memorable, to be heroic.  We need choices.

Unfortunately, choice brings complexity.  And complexity is not always bad, but it certainly can be.  If it makes the game harder to play, or harder for new people to learn, or makes it take longer to resolve what seem like simple actions ... all that complexity is no good.  When people say a new version is “streamlined,” what they mean is that a lot of that type of complexity has been removed.  Pathfinder has a lot of that kind of complexity.  Especially as the person who’s most often the GM in my games, I eventually just got burned out on how much effort and math and just plain work it was to manage all the complexity.

D&D 5e is definitely streamlined.  Combat is faster, and easier, putting together encounters is easier (and faster), there’s less math all around ... a lot of the complexity has been removed, and (again, especially from the GM perspective) that’s a welcome relief after the vast collection of fiddly bits that make up Pathfinder.  5e has a sort of elegance that’s very compelling.

And yet ...

And yet there’s a reason I liked Pathfinder in the first place.  It gave me more choices, and that was good.  Unfortunately the choices came with increased complexity, and that was bad.  5e gave me simplicity, and that was good, but it also reduced my choices, and that was bad.  I found that I missed all the options for building characters, or building monsters and encounters, or building NPCs such as main villains.  All of a sudden it was harder to tell the stories I wanted to tell.

One last digression:  I started my (professional) programming career in C.  C is what’s known as a “strongly-typed” language: every time you create a new variable, you’re required to say what type it is (integer, floating-point number, string, array, etc).  But that can be a giant pain in the ass, especially if you’re pulling in data from outside sources (such as databases⁵) and you don’t know what the type is.  For the last few decades, though, I’ve been programming in Perl, which is called a “weakly-typed” language—that is, when I declare a variable in Perl, I have to distinguish between singular values and plural values, but that’s it.  Strings, integers, floating-point: they’re all just “scalars.”  This was amazingly liberating for a long time.  But it turns out there’s a price to be paid for freedom: slower performance in some cases, potential errors from not being able to assume types, or from having the wrong type accidentally jammed into a variable, and so forth.  What I really want is to be able to choose between “strongly-typed” or “weakly-typed,” but within the same language.  When I declare a variable, I’ll choose whether to specify the type or not.  Interestingly, some of the newer languages (like Perl6) do allow this (they call it “progressively-typed”).  You get the best of both worlds.

Likewise, in my RPGs, while it may seem like I want both complexity and simplicity, and that those are diametrically opposed, in reality that’s a false choice.  I can have both in a single game, as long as each one is in the right area.  When I first started to think about it, I thought I wanted simplicity as a GM and complexity as a player.  But that’s not it, exactly.  What I actually want is simplicity at the table, and complexity away from the table.  Building a new character, or advancing my character to the next level ... those are activities that take place away from the table.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes (well, not to me, anyway), because it’s not holding up the game.  On the other hand, resolving actions such as skill challenges and especially combat needs to be simple, because they are happening in real time, during the game itself.  Now, there may be times when it’s desireable to simplify even the complex parts—for instance, if a new player wants to create a character quickly, or if a GM needs to put together an encounter on the fly—but those types of situations can be handled with judicious application of templates or a playbook-style set of examples.  In general, I think the at-the-table/away-from-the-table dichotomy makes the best split.

Will the second edition of Pathfinder provide this perfect split between complexity and simplicity?  I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either, yet.  But Pathfinder’s differentiator from D&D has always been more options, and more complexity in those good places, and I don’t see that about to change any time soon.  And the tidbits they’ve released about the new version seem to indicate that they’re going to be stealing some of the features from 5e, in particular those that provide 5e’s simplicity in those good places.  So it’s at least possible that Pathfinder 2e could end up with the perfect balance.  And that would be pretty freaking awesome.

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1 Obviously that’s my opinion.  Some folks disagreed, and there has been a movement ever since to “get back to” 2e-style play which is commonly referred to as OSR (for “Old School Revival”).  The fact that the many OSR D&D clones don’t just use 2e rules straight up lets us know that even they believe 2e had lots of room for improvement; they just didn’t agree with the direction 3e chose.  But, honestly, that’s a bit too much background info even for me, and not really necessary for the story.  Primarily this footnote exists so nitpickier readers know that I’m aware of OSR and don’t feel a burning need to “correct” me in the comments.

2 The “youth” part, obviously, is a bit tongue-in-cheek: 6½ years ago I was still pretty old.  Certainly my kids would tell you I was.

3 The full story of why I like 5e so much will have to wait for its own blog post, I think.

4 Meaning the 4 original classes: fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric.

5 If you know anything about programming and databases and typing, you might wonder why databases—which are themselves strongly-typed—have issues interfacing with a strongly-typed language.  If you’re really interested, you could check out my discussion of strong vs weak typing on my Other Blog.

Birthday Weekend: Middle 12

This weekend is the Smaller Animal’s birthday weekend, so there’s not much time for blogging pursuits.  The only movie out right now that he wants to see is Early Man, which is the latest Aardman effort.  Unfortunately, it seems that the big splash of A Wrinkle in Time has pushed the smaller movie out into the fringes, and almost every place still playing the film in our area is a) not really in our area, meaning it’s a half-an-hour drive or more away, and b) at remarkably silly times, like 9AM.  Who is really getting up at 7AM to go watch a movie?  Literally the only place playing Early Man in the Los Angeles area any time after noon is the theater in the tourist-trap shopping cluster outside Universal Studios, and we simply didn’t have the time to take out the second mortgage necessary to be able to afford that.  So we just ended up renting Coco from Amazon.  I actually didn’t want to like that movie—I’m quite sensitive to the argument that Coco is just The Book of Life redone by a bunch of white people, and that even aside from questions of cultural appropriation, Pixar is 3 years too late to the party and is just using its massive reputation to club a bigger audience into the seats, whereas Book of Life was almost criminally underrated (it really was a great little flick).  But, despite all that, Pixar just doesn’t make a bad movie.^*  Highly recommended.

Food-wise, we’ve done Panda Express and Subway so far (specifically, lots of orange chicken and meatball subs).  Oh, and birthday donuts.  Still KFC to come for dinner tonight.  Gift-wise, there’s a number of videogames, of course, and some Pokémon crystal things to go on some wristband thingy.  I don’t know; I’m old.

Anyway, that’s all you get from me this week.  Tune in next week for a longer discussion about ... well, whatever I find to meander on about, I suppose.

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* Okay, maybe Planes.

Gaming the Grey

A recent article on EN World got me pondering the contrast of black-and-white vs gray in modern fantasy.  Because the author (Lew Pulsipher) seems to me to be spot on in many ways ... but also slightly off in some ways.

Now, obviously my position is going to be highly influenced by my philosophy of balance and paradox: surely here is a custom-tailored debate for my outlook.  Obviously I must be on the side of gray, right?

But not so fast.  Recall what I said quite early in my inaugural Baladocian post:

But what I mean when I speak about “the Baladox” is that I believe in balance and paradox.  Not just that I believe that they exist, but that I believe everything in life is ruled by those two principles.  That the world is not black and white, but that sometimes it is gray, and sometimes it is both black and white and the same time.  And, recursively, sometimes it’s sort of halfway between gray and both black and white at the same time, and then sometimes it’s black and white and gray, all at once.

Now, that may sound sort of hand-wave-y, but it actually applies quite nicely in this situation.  What the author (and nearly all the commenters, for that matter) are trying to do is divide the world of fantasy (and/or fantasy roleplaying) up into either black-and-white—where the bad guys are inarguably evil and the good guys are purely good—or gray—where everyone is a little bit good and a little bit evil, and the “bad” guys are just those who lean more to one side than the other, or perhaps it’s even up for debate whether anyone is a bad guy at all.  But the problem with this is that entire argument is a stark dichotomy which doesn’t track with the actual reality.  Look at the simple examples that everyone there is using: the Lord of the Rings vs Game of Thrones.  Lord of the Rings is obviously black-and-white, with Sauron representing ultimate evil and the only good orc being a dead orc.  Whereas Game of Thrones is obviously gray, with the Kingslayer being both a oathbreaker and murderer, and also the savior of an entire city, and where it’s easy to root for “bad” people like Tyrion or the Hound, and far more difficult to get behind “good” people like Stannis or Robert Baratheon.  Except that there’s a big problem with this analysis: it completely ignores the Night King, who is no less purely evil than Sauron, and the political situations of Gondor (including the madness of Denethor) and Rohan (with the machinations of Wormtongue).  Hell, even Saruman, who does some pretty awful things in the Lord of the Rings, is not completely evil.  There is plenty of gray in the Lord of the Rings, and plenty of black-and-white in Game of Thrones.

Which is not to say that these two examples don’t lean pretty hard toward one extreme or the other.  There’s no denying that the the gray is pretty much background material in the Lord of the Rings, and the black-and-white is just there to shake up the gray and keep it interesting in Game of Thrones.  So on the one hand you could claim that I’m merely quibbling over matters of degree.  But I think it goes deeper than that.  I think that humans, with their inherent need to simplify things, wish that they were faced with a stark, either/or choice in this area.  But the fact is, we’re not.  Like everything else in life, the choice between black-and-white or gray is not between two poles, but rather a spectrum.  You can hew close to one end or the other, or you can stick closer to the middle.  It’s entirely up to you.

But I think this debate is oversimplified in another dimension.  Because we’re very specifically talking about fantasy here.  There are other types of literature out there, and we needn’t make the same choice for every genre.  Sometime I feel like people want fantasy (including some offshoots, such as horror or superhero stories) to conform to the level of gray shading that we’re seeing in modern dramas such as House of Cards or Breaking Bad or Sons of Anarchy.  There’s been a tendency in this area to take antiheroes to new heights.  And, personally, I like it—I’ve enjoyed all three of the examples I just gave.  But a drama set in modern times is very different from a fantasy.  For me, there’s nothing wrong with choosing shades of gray for one genre, but preferring a bit more black-and-white for others.

And fantasy (in addition to horror and superhero literature) is one area where there’s a distinct advantage to black-and-white.  A story in which good and evil are clearly delineated leaves no ambiguity about who to root for, and no question about whether the protagonists have “won” at the end.  If the evil was defeated, that’s a victory.  If not, then hopefully there’s a sequel in the works, because otherwise it’s a bit of a bummer.  And, again, there’s nothing wrong with a good tragedy, especially in a modern setting.  I shan’t give any direct spoilers for Breaking Bad, but let’s just say that the conclusion of that story was positively Shakespearean.  And I loved it.  But that’s just not what I want out of fantasy.  I want the good guys to win in the end: I’m willing to wait a while for that to happen—three movies or so is about right, but I’ll settle in for the long haul of seven books, if the story’s compelling enough—but, in the end, dammit, the good guys need to win.  Is that realistic?  No, of course it isn’t.  It’s FANTASY.  It’s not supposed to be realistic.  When I want realism, I’ll watch something realistic.  Or science fiction, perhaps: I’m way more tolerant for shades of gray and tragedic outcomes in sci-fi.  But fantasy needs to feed my need for a world where the bad guys are easy to identify and the good guys are destined to win.  Otherwise I could just stay in the real world.

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy Game of Thrones, because I do.  I like the show more than the books (blasphemy, I know), because the books are even more tediously, drearily gray, but even the show can get on my nerves sometimes.  “Stop freaking fighting each other, you idiots,” I will often say to the screen.  “Listen to Jon Snow.  He’s the only one with any brains.  White walkers are coming to munch on your brains.  Morons.” I have a similar love/hate relationship with The Magicians (I’ve watched the first two seasons of the show, and am about three-quarters of the way through the first book).  It’s obvious that somebody read Harry Potter and said, man, these kids have way too little sex to be teenagers, and then promptly went off to write their own version.  And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all: by being a direct contrast to Rowling, Grossman not only provides a completely different take on the vagaries of a magical eduction, but is able to pose many really interesting and profound questions.  For instance, in the book especially (and to a lesser extent in the series), the characters wrestle quite often with boredom: if you can provide all your basic needs with the flick of a wand, then what do you actually do all day?  It is, in many ways, a meditation on the contrast between those who have to work hard just to feed themselves and those who are wealthy enough to afford leisure time, and then what happens if you have nothing but leisure time.  So there are definitely intriguing aspects.  But sometimes I find my mind wandering, or I simply throw up my hands, because there’s never any clear concept of who the real enemy is (or, rather, it’s more that, whenever you think you know who the enemy is, you later find out you were wrong ... mostly).  To me, this stumbling around, never able to figure out exactly who the bad guys are, is just not that entertaining in a fantasy setting.  In other settings, okay.  But, to me, fantasy is different.

So, whether we’re talking about books, or movies and television, or roleplaying games, I think the question of black-and-white vs gray is a false choice.  In reality, you will end up with both; it’s just a question of which one you will choose to emphasize more than the others.  Now, in a roleplaying context, I’ve already done an entire post on choosing a playstyle and, not surprisingly, two of the options were Lord-of-the-Rings-style and Game-of-Thrones-style.  (The third choice was Conan-style, which is sort of a variation on black-and-white, where the “good guys” are defined as “you,” and the “bad guys” are defined as “anyone who gets in your way.”)  As a GM, I pointed out that it’s important to get your players on the same page; personally, I prefer to let everyone vote on what style they prefer, preferably with lots of discussion.  But, as a player, I’m always going to vote for Lord-of-the-Rings-style.  I love the epic quest, with clear goals and crystal clarity on who the ultimate bad guys are.  A little bit of murkiness on the lower-level baddies can be fun—I love a chance to figure out how to turn the #2 “bad” guy and make them a good guy double-agent—but up at the top, I want Sauron, I want Voldemort, I want the White Witch, I want the Dark One, I want the Night King, I want Lord Foul, I want the Wicked Witch of the West and the Red Queen and Captain Hook.  You can tell me about the tortured childhoods of these fiends all you want, but I will only be listening with half an ear.  These are the Big Bads, the faces of ultimate evil, the pullers of strings and wielders of dark energies.  These are the people whose defeat is worthy of an epic quest, and that’s what I’m in it for.

So, whether as participant (as in fantasy roleplaying) or merely audience (as in fantasy literature or cinema), I like to see my good and evil clearly accentuated in a fantasy context.  Throw me a little gray here and there, but mostly black-and-white.  Fantasy is one of the few genres that can support that sort of dichotomy, divorced as it is from what we see in the real world, so I say: take advantage of that.  Keep the heroes valiant and the villains despicable and we’ll all get along just fine.

Tick Take Three

I just blasted through the entire second half of the first season of the new Amazon series The Tick—6 half-hour episodes—in a single night.  It really is that good.

While the Tick is ostensibly a superhero (based on a comic created in 1986 by Ben Edlund), it’s really quite different from other superhero properties.  Sure, a lot of superheroes, such as Batman and Spider-Man, have shown up in various movies and televsion shows, with radically different takes on the characters.  But in the Tick’s case, it’s less like, say, Conan, where many different authors and filmmakers have different visions for the iconic character.  It’s more like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where every version is a manifestation of the weird brain of its creator, and yet they’re all different.  And, somehow, all lovable.

The first series based on The Tick (1994 – 1997) was an animated one, and it had a lot to recommend it.  It was insanely surreal (for instance, their version of Aquaman was Sewer Urchin, who lived in the sewers, had a sea urchin helmet, and talked like Rain Man), had wonderfully consistent continuity (e.g. when evil villain Chairface attempts to carve his name into the moon with a giant laser, he is stopped by the Tick and Arthur, but forever after that episode, every time you see the moon on-screen, it has “CHA” on it), and was just plain fun ... if you were into superheroes.  It was true to its roots in that it was primarily a spoof of standard superhero stories, and it was excellent at being that, but admittedly was not much beyond it.

The second series (2001) was live-action, and its primary claim to fame was the casting of Patrick Warburton, who is an actual actor who looks like he was drawn by Ben Edlund and brought to life in a mad scientist’s lab.  You may have seen Warburton on screen now and then (most receently as the titular Lemony Snicket in the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events), but mostly you will know him from the many thousands of cartoons and videogames he has done voice work for (e.g. Family Guy, The Emperor’s New Groove, Tak and the Power of Juju, Skylanders, etc ad infinitum), because his voice is large and booming and perfect for the Tick.  There will never be any actor better suited to play this character, both visually and aurally.  But, aside from that, the 2001 series did just about everything else wrong.  The comedy was too broad and campy: it almost seemed like the writers thought they were Eric Idle, elbowing me in the side and saying the words “wink wink” to me through the TV screen.  Simple example: the 1994 series’ version of Batman was Die Fledermaus, which is the name of a famous German opera and is German for “the bat.”  In the 2001 series, he’s a Latino gentleman named “Batmanuel.”  And that should tell you everything you need to know about the level of humor right there.

This new series (technically 2016, since that’s when the pilot came out) is quite a different take.  Peter Serafinowicz is still no Patrick Warburton, but he is a remarkably talented fellow, and manages to capture the essential weirdness of the Tick quite nicely.  But perhaps the greatest twist in this version is that, in many ways, the Tick is a secondary character in the show that bears his name.  This, for the first time, is really Arthur’s story.  The mild-mannered accountant who becomes an accidental superhero but refuses to adopt a nom de guerre now has a dark (and terribly interesting) backstory, and a sister, who is neither a superhero, nor a prop to be captured by villains and thus require rescuing.  (I think part of the success of superhero stories in the modern age is that they’re finally discovering that the non-superhero “support” characters are far more important to the stories than they’re usually given credit for.)  Oh, it’s still wonderfully silly and surreal—it couldn’t be The Tick otherwise—but there is real pain and loss here.  Like Bruce Wayne, Arthur has to witness the death of a parent at a very young age at the hands of a criminal, but he responds not by becoming Batman, but rather by entering a world of therapy, nervous breakdowns, and paranoid conspiracy theories.  Which, if you think about it, is a much more likely reaction to that sort of trauma than growing up to put on a costume and fight crime.

Anyway, this new version of The Tick is wonderful, and weird, and well worth watching.  You’ll appreciate it even more if you dig superheroes, as I do, but even outside of that demographic I think it has something to offer.  Check it out.

Adventures in Spirituality, Part I: The Nature of Agnosticism

[This is the first post in a long 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.]


The other day I was pondering what it means to be agnostic.  I often think of myself as having that outlook, although of course it’s a slippery word that means different things to different people.  Dictionary.com says:¹

a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

And that’s sort of what I mean when I use the term, but not exactly.  I absolutely feel that there’s an aspect of “unknowable” to the universe.  As evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane once said:²

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine.  Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

and I certainly agree with that sentiment.  The certainty of religion has always struck me as being a bit naive; to trot out a few more quotes:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.  — Bertrand Russell

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.  — William Shakespeare

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.  — Confucius

To imagine that we fully grasp the nature of the universe because we’ve read a book or two that some other (equally fallible) human has designated as “holy” strikes me as the very height of human hubris.  Surely the universe really is stranger than we can imagine.

On the other hand, “agnostic” is often taken to mean “indecisive.”  That, rather than choosing religion or atheism, I just can’t make up my mind and am constantly dithering between the two.  Interestingly enough, in my experience it is only those truly dedicated to one side or the other that seem to hold this opinion.³  Well, speaking as a confirmed agnostic, I can assure you that I’m not having any trouble making up my mind.  It’s already made up: I believe there is some sort of force running the universe, but I don’t know what it is, and I probably never will.  And I’m okay with that.

That’s what “agnostic” means to me: that, while the concept that we can understand everything there is to understand about whatever Higher Power runs the universe, and can influence Its decisions by means of arcane chants and rituals, is certainly absurd, the concept that there is no Higher Power at all and everything just happens by sheer chance is equally absurd.  My experience of the world has taught me that neither of those concepts meshes with reality particularly well.  So I prefer to live in the middle.

The amusing thing about being an agnostic is that you get to see both sides in an unflattering light.  The devoutly religious are often dismissed by atheists as believers in fairy tales, which honestly has a grain of truth to it, but is far too haughty.  Contrariwise, the entrenched atheist may be disdained by religious types as being amoral: obviously, without a Higher Power telling them right from wrong, they would have no moral compass whatsoever.  And, while there may be a tiny bit of truth lurking there too, it’s an almost perversely obtuse attitude to take.  What both sides seem to want to conveniently ignore is that the other side has millions (if not billions) of devotees, many of which are remarkably intelligent and learned individuals.  So any explanation that involves the other side being “not too bright” or “not too principled” is severely lacking.

I admire people of faith, and I also admire atheists with strong science-based convictions.  But they can go to extremes, and then it’s not as much fun being in the middle.  When it’s more like being a spectator at a tennis match, watching the logical arguments fly back and forth, one can afford a wry amusement.  When it’s more like cowering behind a rock while the bullets are flying, then it starts to be a bit scary.  My pet name for Christian extremists is “CCFs,” which stands for “crazy Christian fucks.”  This might make it sound like I have something against Christians, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The majority of them are wonderful people—just as are the majority of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth.  But there will always be bad apples.  Did you know that Genghis Khan was a Buddhist?⁴  When I first learned that, it kind of broke my brain.  On the one hand you have a religion which holds all life as sacred—a religion in which some monks will not even kill an insect.  And, on the other, you have a conqueror who started out by killing his own half-brother and ended by killing (by some estimates) 1.2 million people in a single massacre, after he had already won the battle.  He was known to build pyramids of human heads as a symbol of a victory.  Also, he was a practicing Buddhist.  Now, of course, any Buddhist will no doubt point out that he wasn’t a “real” Buddhist, that he wasn’t actually practicing the “true” tenets of Buddhism.  Which is exactly what the average Muslim would say about a suicide bomber, or what the average Christian would say about people who bomb abortion clinics.

So it can get tricky.  When I see someone on television holding up signs saying that gay people are going to go to Hell, I can’t help but feel like that’s explicitly contrary to the message that Jesus was trying to get across when he said things like “love your enemy.”  Even worse, it really undermines the whole argument that religion provides a moral code to live by and atheists are therefore amoral.  If my choice is hang out with a bunch of people who have to hate entire swaths of the population because “God told them so,” suddenly the atheists are not looking so bad.

But of course the atheists have their extremists too.  In 2010 the government of France outlawed burqas (among other things); this was on top of the 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools.  Measures like this seem (to me) to stem from a misguided attempt to stem overt religion, on the grounds that religion breeds intolerance.  Which is of course true: historically Christians in particular have been remarkably efficient in exterminating people whose religion they disagreed with, even other Christians (see e.g. the Anabaptists).  If I may offer up one more quote:

To know a person’s religion we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.  — Eric Hoffer

And yet, is forbidding Christian children from wearing crosses in school the way to solve that problem?  This now undermines the other side: the atheists are supposed to be the calm ones, the logical ones, the rational ones, but this starts to smack of hysteria ... and on top of everything else, it’s pointless and ineffective, as history should have taught us by now.  The Romans forbade the Christians from displaying their symbols and meeting in their churches, but it doesn’t seem to have done much to stem the tide of Christianity.  And then the Christians took over and tried to forbid—or, even worse: co-opt—the symbols of Druidism and paganism, and yet we still have Wiccans and many other flavors of neopaganism.  It just plain doesn’t work, so why are we still trying to do it?

So my position as a self-confessed agnostic often puts me firmly in the middle, or perhaps in a sort of no-man’s land, not really able to identify with either side.  I’m often put in the position of sending out emails (or blog posts) that try to straddle this line; for instance, when writing about my son’s heart surgery, I included this line:

For those of you who know us personally—and/or who just feel so inclined—we will gratefully accept your positive energies, be they in the form of prayers, rituals, spells, or just good vibes, should any of those be a thing you believe in.

This was a very carefully crafted sentence, one that I put a lot of thought into as regards how to best appeal to those of my friends who might be so inclined to want to pray for us—and I will gladly take all the prayers you care to give, regardless of whether I subscribe to your brand of “God” or not—as well as to those of my friends who might be inclined to roll their eyes at the concept of begging an invisible man in the sky for favors.  But, you know, there is now ample scientific evidence to support the idea that positive thinking can impact your health.  Oh, sure: they call it “dispositional optimism,” because that sounds fancier and more science-y, but it all comes down to the same thing.  So I’m happy to receive positive energy from any and all who are willing to send it my way.  And, if you don’t believe in that sort of crap no matter what the scientific studies say (or you’d just like to point out that extrapolating the power of positive energy from studies on one being optimistic for oneself to beneficial outcomes for being positive on behal of others is not really supported by the extant evidence), that’s fine too.  I’m okay either way.

You may recall ever so long ago that I said that I believe most fervently in balance and paradox.  And that’s no less true of my approach towards spirituality than anything else ... in fact, it’s probably more true.  After all, I sometimes (somewhat flippantly, granted) claim that “baladocianism” is my religion.  So, as a baladocian, I certainly believe that the truth lies somewhere in between religion and atheism ... and also that they’re both true.  My approach to spirituality is somewhat complex, and it’s been shaped by my experience (naturally), and, as I pondered what it meant to be agnostic, I also thought about what brought me here, and I thought that maybe it might be interesting to share that journey with you.


Next time, I explore the flavor(s) of Christianity I inherited from my parents, and where I left them along the way.

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1 Dictionary.com, if you’ve ever wondered, is based primarily on the Random House Unabridged, although it includes content from other sources as well.

2 In 1927, in Possible Worlds and Other Papers.  Thank you Wikiquote.

3 Just as, in my experience, only the most staunchly heterosexual or homosexual adherents will condemn bisexuals as fence-sitters.  But I suppose that’s a sentiment belonging to a very different blog post.

4 This is a mild exaggeration—he was raised a tengrist, which is a form of animism.  But he often practiced Buddhism, and consulted Buddhist monks, and so forth.

R.I.P. John Perry Barlow

A long time ago—in 1994, the Internet tells me—I read an article by one John Perry Barlow, who my subsequent reearch infomed me was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF.  At that time, I didn’t really know who Barlow was, or what the EFF was, even.  But the article (which you can still read online) piqued my interest, as did the entire concept of the EFF, which is a non-profit organization devoted to Internet civil liberties—that is, they fight to keep the Internet free, for everyone.  I’ve never forgotten that article, or the EFF, whose name has popped up more and more often in the intervening years.  And I’ve never forgotten about John Perry Barlow, from whom I read many more articles and statements, and who is an articulate, passionate, ardent freedom fighter for a thankless cause for which he will never receive proper recognition.

Or, at least, he was.  John Perry Barlow died this week, at age 70.  I never had the pleasure of meeting him, although I have met a few folks who knew him personally, and by all accounts he was exactly what he projected in his writings.  In the EFF’s obituary, executive director Cindy Cohn wrote:

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more.  As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth.  Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good.  He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it.  So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”

So the man was not only articulate, passionate, and ardent, but also crazy optimistic.  I’m not even entirely sure I realized how much I admired this guy until I found out he had passed away.  So tonight I say, rest in peace, John Perry Barlow.  The world will miss you, even though it will probably never quite figure out why.

Cantosphere Eversion I

"Where Time Becomes a Loop"

[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.

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.]


There are people who like music that pushes the boundary of what “music” means.  Some of these people like experimental jazz, and some of these people like no wave, and some of these people like proto-industrial, such as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle and the ever-inventive (and ever-impenetrable) Einstürzende Neubauten.  I am not one of those people.  If you’re interested in playing “wrong” notes (by which I mean playing simultaneous notes that deliberately diverge from what most people understand as a chord, particularly when the result is discordant to the ears), or perhaps just combining various noises with no notes at all, then you’ve lost me.  I understand, intellectually, that there are artists who are extremely talented and produce such work.  But, emotionally, I just can’t respond to it.  I’m sure it’s a personal failing.

But, strangely, I am okay if what you want to mess with is the structure of the song.  Perhaps you want to take notes and play them “out of order,” or you want to combine random noises along with the notes, or you want to throw random samples and loops into the mix, or perhaps you just want to throw several completely different songs together and see what happens.  You can get some interesting (and very weird) music this way, and of course there will still be people who see it as not-quite-music, but for me it’s very different than the types of music I enumerated in the first paragraph.  It’s pushing borders, but pushing completely different borders ... perhaps we could even say it’s more rearranging internal borders than truly breaking through external ones.

When you take a sphere and turn it inside out, that’s called sphere eversion.¹  Well, to me, the music I’m talking about today involves turning a song inside out.  It’s a cantosphere eversion.

Now, the absolute masters of this form, in my book, are the Art of Noise.  While they have produced some perfectly “normal” songs (like their version of “Peter Gunn”) and some songs which contained some outré elements (like the inimitable “Paranoimia”), their best work, in my book, is that which pushes a bit beyond the conventional structure.  I’ve included 3 tracks from AoN (although 2 of them are quite short), all off of their briliant album In Visible Silence.  “Opus 4” is our opener, just as it is on IVS.  It very much sets the mood for what is to come.  “Beatback” is just over a minute, serving as a bridge into the volume’s middle section.  And “Eye of a Needle” is a wonderful, longer piece, that anchors the volume’s final third.

But really I would never have been able to properly appreciate Art of Noise when I finally discovered them if it hadn’t been for Yazoo.  I’ve talked about my love for this 80s synthpop miracle before,² but all those times I was going with their more traditional fare.  But as soon as I knew this mix was going to become a reality, the very first song I reached for was “I Before E Except After C,” which has always fascinated me.  It’s weird and nonsensical, and many people absolutely hate it, even when they love the remainder of Yazoo’s output.  But I was always entranced by it, and I’m so glad I finally found a happy home for it here in my mixes.

Now, as much as I love “I Before E Except After C,” it’s not actually the mix starter.  What really kicked this mix off was learning of the existence of Animal Collective, who played the absolutely magnificent “FloriDada” on Steven Colbert’s show one night back in May of 2016.  As soon as I heard it, sounding as it does like 3 entirely different songs being played by the Collective’s 3 front-men, I was enthralled, and also instantly reminded of the Art of Noise, which I hadn’t listened to in quite a while.  It’s no surprise that the first 3 tracks on this volume are AoN, Animal Collective, and Yazoo.  By the time you get to end of that triplet, you know exactly where this mix is going.

Probably the next most obvious choice for this mix was “Revolution 9” by the Beatles.  A great deal has been written about this track and what it could possibly mean.  Personally, I’ve always just thought it was the lads having a bit of fun.  There are quite a lot of strange noises and brief snippets of dialogue that fade in and out, as if you were traveling very fast and just hearing snatches of conversation as you passed by.  This is the same basic model used in “Let’s Talk About Cars” by the Butthole Surfers, although the latter at least has some semblance of a melody running through it.  The Surfers, of course, offer quite a lot of choices when it comes to experimental songs, but I’ve always been partial to Electriclarryland, which is certainly their most accessible album.  This track, though, proves that “accessible” is always a specturm for the Buttholes.

Of course, there are quite a few tracks on this album that are experimental primarily in the sense that they consist of just a few phrases repeated over and over.  First and foremost is Orbital’s classic “The Moebius,” which is, as Lieutenant Worf tells us repeatedly in the song, where time becomes a loop (and that also handily provides our volume title this time out).  But we also have John Standing giving us a list of “Elements,” with backing by Lemon Jelly (who are also sampling some of the music on that track), and German downtempo artist Naomi reading us a list of cities interspersed with the repeated word “Rainfall.”  In fact, I like Naomi so much that I let them do essentially the same thing twice: they show up on the back half of the volume repeating some nonsense about a “Butter Worker.”  These are the tracks that almost didn’t make the cut ... well, except for the Orbital tune, which I was always eyeing, for the perfect title drop if nothing else.  They’re not really in the same ballpark of “inside-out-ness” as most of the remaining tracks here.  They have real melodies and everything.  But, in the end, I decided to let them stay.  In some sense, they provide a little break from the weirdness of the rest of the volume.

A step above these tracks are those which are musically not so strange, but lyrically just consist of screeching or grunting.  My favorite of these is probably “Cry of the Vatos” by Oingo Boingo, in which Danny Elfman and the boys sound like they’re doing imitations of caged animals, but “Cthulhu’s Night Out,” by favorite of my Paradoxically Sized World mix³ Ugress, with its odd cross between wordless crooning and creepy chanting, is fun too.  “Christianity” by Skinny Puppy gives us what might be demonic chanting.⁴  And let’s not ignore Odyssey, by Canadian electro-house artisan OVERWERK, which somehow manages to sound like a Wagnerian opera as performed by cartoon characters.  Normally this latter style—similar to popular fare by Daft Punk and deadmau5—doesn’t really appeal to me.  But something about this track really pumps me up.

There are also a few more songs here that seem, like “FloriDada,” to be a couple of different songs going on at once.  “Pirhana One Chord Boots” by Transglobal Underground is a good example.  It’s not really too far off of normal, but the background music and samples never quite match up with the foreground vocals, giving the tune a mildly shizophrenic quality.  Which is also a great description of my choice from Devo.  I sort of assumed that Devo would be rich fodder for this mix, but they actually don’t mess with a good pop song structure nearly as much as you might think.  “Too Much Paranoias” is the obvious exception, and it somehow serves as a musical expression of its subject matter.  And there’s certainly a lot of weirdness going on in “The Voice & the Snake,” even for Enigma.  While most of their output is more suited to mellower mixes,⁵ this one is just ... strange.

Cantosphere Eversion I
    [Where Time Becomes a Loop]

        “Opus 4” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
        “FloriDada” by Animal Collective, off Painting With
        “I Before E Except After C” by Yazoo, off Upstairs at Eric's
        “Rainfall” by Naomi, off Pappelallee
        “Revolution 9” by The Beatles, off The White Album
        “All Mink & No Manners” by Big Audio Dynamite, off Megatop Phoenix
        “The Moebius” by Orbital, off Orbital
        “Odyssey” by OVERWERK [Single]
        “Beatback” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
        “Pirhana One Chord Boots” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
        “Cthulhu's Night Out” by Ugress, off Reminiscience
        “Christianity” by Skinny Puppy [Single]
        “Elements” by Lemon Jelly, off Lost Horizons
        “The Voice & the Snake” by Enigma, off MCMXC a.D.
        “Cry of the Vatos” by Oingo Boingo, off Good for Your Soul
        “Let's Talk about Cars” by Butthole Surfers, off Electriclarryland
        “Eye of a Needle” by Art of Noise, off In Visible Silence
        “Butter Worker” by Naomi, off Everyone Loves You
        “Too Much Paranoias” by Devo, off Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
        “Is Yours Working Yet?” by Big Audio Dynamite, off Megatop Phoenix
        “Gin and Tonic Blues” by Reverend Horton Heat, off The Full-Custom Gospel Sounds of the Reverend Horton Heat
   

Total:  21 tracks,  79:18

For bridges, I was inspired by the interstitials from Big Audio Dynamite’s Megatop Phoenix.  These are strange little snippets of samples and bits of stray music stitched together and jammed in between BAD’s poppy, reggae-influenced tracks, where they sound a bit out-of-place.  Here, on the other hand, they fit perfectly, sounding like just shorter versions of some of the Art of Noise tracks (especially “Eye of a Needle”).  “All Mink & No Manners,” which bridges our opening third with the center stretch, is probably my favorite.  But “Is Yours Working Yet?” (which bridges into the utter insanity of the final track) is also pretty fun.  As Alfred Hitchcock says at the beginning of the latter, “I trust that everyone is enjoying the music.”

Finally, in the category of “songs that sound like they’re being slowly dissolved in an acid bath,” we close the volume out with “Gin and Tonic Blues” by the Reverend Horton Heat.  I originally tried to slot this track in Bleeding Salvador, but it’s just too much even there.  It’s not just lyrically surreal—it’s musically strange, and perhaps even a bit disturbing.  But here it works well, and the way it ends up sort of consuming itself until it abruptly falls off a clifff makes it a perfect closer.


Next time, we’ll look at yet another volume of contemplative, autumnal fare.

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1 Click that link and then watch the video on the Wikipedia page; it’s a bit mind-blowing.

2 Specifically, on Darkling Embrace I and Totally Different Head I.

3 In fact, we’ve seen him on volumes II, III, and IV,

4 And, if you know anything about Skinny Puppy, that’s pretty much exactly what you expected from them.

5 Such as Numeric Driftwood III, which is where we’ve seen pop up before in this series.

Contemplation of Disinterment

Today I dug a hole for our guinea pig, mainly because I thought it might finally be time to reclaim that shoebox-sized space in our freezer.  I would say it took me a good half an hour to dig a hole which is perhaps a foot square and maybe half a foot deep.  If I’m being generous.  The whole time I was performing this arduous task, all I could think about was all those people on TV who discover they have to dig up a body, because there’s some vital clue that was buried with it, or there’s some lost artifact in the coffin, or because the body itself is a necessary component in the spell that’s needed to save the world, and, several minutes later, there’s one or two characters at the bottom of a hole they have to jump up to get out of.  And, as I was thinking about that, one word kept recurring to me: bullshit.

Also, why do these people always have shovels handy?  Before I spent half an hour digging the hole, I had to spend half an hour locating the shovel, which I guess I didn’t put back in the garden shed from the last time we had a pet die.  If you had come to me last night at this time and told me I needed to help you dig up a body, I’m pretty sure we’d have still been digging when the sun came up this morning, and probably not in any danger of getting that nice satisfying “thunk” of shovel-on-coffin any time soon.

But perhaps I’ve spent too much time thinking about this topic ...

Whole30(ish)

This month, I’ve decided to do another Whole30.  Now, I’ve talked about my take on Whole30 before, and I don’t really want this post to be a regurgitation of that one (although some repetition will be inevitable).  But I think it’s worth delving into some more detail about what I’m talking about when I say I’m “doing” a Whole30.

To briefly recap, the concept behind Whole30 is that you spend 30 days eating a very narrow variety of things—partially to reset your taste buds and digestive tract, and partially to remind you of what real food tastes like—and then you add things back in, slowly, maybe never getting around to adding back in the really bad things at all, like donuts or McDonald’s food.  This works well, but, as time goes on, you will unavoidably start slipping more and more, so it’s a good idea every now and again—perhaps no more than every year or two, even—to start over.  For me, the last six months or so have included three food-centric holidays,¹ a pretty stressful family medical procedure, and an atypically intense project for work.  So I’ve not so much fallen off the wagon as been run over by it.  My weight has crept back up, and my digestive system was gradually starting to revolt.  So another reset seemed like a good idea.  Plus, The Mother wanted to do it as well, and, as I’ve mentioned, it’s always easier to coordinate my diet with hers.

But I’m not that interested in being as strict this time around as I’ve been in the past.  I think that’s it’s okay to make small exceptions—or even big exceptions—as long as you’re clear with yourself exactly what the limits are up front.  Where you get into trouble is when you try to leave it “flexible” ... which is code for “I’ll just cheat whenever I feel like it.”  The problem with cheating—even tiny, insignificant cheating—is that it feeds itself.  You cheat a little here, and the world doesn’t end, so you cheat a little there, and, next thing you know, you’re less cheating and more abandoning.  If you set up the modified rules beforehand, and you stick to them, then you’re not cheating at all: you’re just playing a slightly modified game from everyone else.

Before I lay out my guidelines, let me be clear that I don’t recommend something like this for your first Whole30.  The first time around, you should stick to the rules more closely.  Only once you’ve been doing this for a while should you consider deviations such as the ones below.  And of course many will say even then it’s not acceptable.  But I’m a little more open to variations in the core plan.

So let’s look at the broad categories of banned foods for a standard Whole30 and what exceptions I’m personally allowing for this particular reset.  Note also that every exception must have a frequency as well: just because I’m willing to allow something doesn’t mean I think it’s okay to eat it every day.

No grains.  In general, I’m all in favor of this restriction.  I personally find that cutting out grains makes my body much happier.  That may not be true for you—one of the things that makes nutrition such a devilishly tricky thing to advise people on is that everyone is different.  But I definitely do better when avoiding grains of all types, so I’m sticking to that, broadly.  The only exception I’ve made so far is that we cooked one meal which included whole kernel corn, which I thought was okay as long as it wasn’t an everyday thing.  I think it’s worth staying away from the myriad forms that corn is tortured into, in general, and just eating corn straight off the cob does not do my digestion any favors, but a bit of actual corn as part of a larger meal seems okay.  As long as it’s infrequent—I probably wouldn’t want to do this more than one a week, say.

Oh, and I’m still okay with corn starch used to keep my shredded cheese from clumping.  But not for anything else.

No legumes.  So, first of all, it’s fair to note that even rigorous Whole30 allows one exception to this rule: green beans (a.k.a. “string beans”).  This is because, while there’s technically some bean in there somewhere, the vast majority of what you eat when you eat a green bean is the pod around the relatively tiny beans.  The actual legumes you manage to consume are minimal.  But the truth for me personally is that, outside of peanuts, there aren’t really too many legumes I’m even tempted by.  I don’t actually care for string beans, really, and I’ve always been decidedly “meh” on peas.  I like kidney beans, but I don’t miss them in chili, and what’s the point of red beans and rice if you can’t have rice?  I used to enjoy pork-and-beans / baked beans, but that involves sugar.  And I dig refried beans, but you can’t really eat Mexican without corn, so there’s another dead end.  Soy sauce is a bit of a blow, but it turns out that coconut aminos are a reasonable substitute.  And there are other nut butters besides peanut butter, and you can make hummus out of cashews instead of chickpeas, if you’re particularly dedicated to it.  So far I don’t think I’ve consumed any legumes or legume products at all, and I don’t plan to.

No added sweeteners.  If you’re doing a strict Whole30, all your sugar has to come from fruit: whole fruit, dried fruit, or fruit juice.  99% of the time this is plenty for me.  However, I do allow just a few exceptions here:

• Honey is very natural and I don’t have anything against it.  Still, I hardly ever use any.  One exception is that, once a week, I make a big batch of smoothies, mainly for my kids.  But you can bet I’m having a big ol’ cup myself as well.  And sometimes (not every time), my taste testers inform me that whatever particular combination of fruits I’m using that week is too tart.  And the answer to that is honey.  And I’m not going to make them drink smoothies that they think are too sour, and I’m not going to skip a delicious smoothie just beacuse there were a couple of squirts of honey in 8 cups worth of the finished product.  So, while I try to use sweeter fruits to avoid needing honey at all (bananas and pineapple are the best options there, if you’re curious), if I have to, I have to, and I don’t beat myself up about it.  Also, I’ve been experimenting with making my own Whole30-safe granola, which I’m supposed to make with date syrup.  But, really: is honey any worse than date syrup?  I don’t think so.
• I make my own Thousand Island dressing, which has no explicit sugar and isn’t particularly sweet.  But it does have ketchup, and ketcup contains sugar.  You can’t have ketchup without sugar ... trust me, I’ve tried.  Again, this is more of a once-per-week type of thing rather than an everyday one, but, as long as I stick to that frequency, I think it’s okay.
• Did you know that even low-carb diets such as LCHF and Atkins will let you eat chocolate, as long as it has no less than 85% cocoa solids?  It’s like their only exception to the absolutely-no-carbs rule.  That’s good enough for me, man.  Most days the tiny amount of sugar in my preferred brand of 85% dark chocolate is often the only actual sugar I consume in a day.  And the taste is strong enough that I don’t want to eat too much of it at a time.
• As a super-special exception, I allow myself a small glass of eggnog no more than once a week.  I stocked up on the stuff at Christmas, but it ain’t gonna last forever, and it’ll probably all be useless right about the time I’m done with my 30 days.  And I love me some ‘nog.  So I cut myself some slack here.

Even with all those exceptions, though, it’s still a pretty radical reduction over the amount of sugar and other sweeteners I’ve been consuming lately.

No dairy.  Okay, so this one is right out the window.  The only benefit I ever got from this part of Whole30 was my introduction to ghee (ghee is the only official exception to the “no dairy” rule), which I now use almost exclusively instead of butter.  These days all our milk (for both drinking and cooking, although I rarely just drink it) is lactose-free, because our middle child is even more lactose-intolerant than I am, weirdly.²  But even that’s a small amount of my dairy intake.  Mainly, for me, it’s all about cheese and yogurt.  Cheese is excellent in salads,³ and it’s a decent late night snack instead of the usual chips or cookies or candy.  And yogurt is simply awesome, if you can find any without any added sweeteners.  Toss in some of your own fruit, or some of that homemade granola I was talking about, and it’s amazing (and filling).

No alcohol.  I’m really irked about this one.  Multiple studies suggest that avoiding alcohol entirely may actually increase your chance of heart disease, and I’ve yet to hear any cogent defense of the no-alochol rule from the Whole30 folks.  So I have a very simple rule: I will allow alcohol as long as whatever it was originally made of, before it was fermented, would be allowed under the plan.  So the number one thing that allows is wine; I’m not much of a wine drinker, personally,⁴ but it’s nice to be able to allow good wine sauces or good dijon mustard.  But if you can track down good vodka, that’s made from potatoes (cheap vodka is made from grain, so I stay away from that crap).  And good vodka is a pleasure to drink, so that’s nice too.  Gin works as well, although it’s defnitely a distant second in the liquor department as far as I’m concerned.  And I think tequila might be okay by my rule, but I don’t really like tequila, so I’ve never bothered to do enough research to verify that.

No chips or fries.  I’m pretty down with this rule.  The only real exception I allow is roasted plantain chips, which I think are significantly different from fried chips.  First of all, they’re not particularly good to just eat a handful of, so they’re no replacement for potato chips (or even fried plantain chips).  But they’re perfectly good to double as crackers with some cheese, or to crumble on a salad instead of tortilla chips.  So, since they enable me to avoid two things I really don’t want to make an exception for, I voted them in.

No sulfites or other preservatives.  The official exception to this is balsamic vinegar, and I extend that to wine, reasoning that, if it wasn’t already banned by reason of being alcohol, it should be allowed under the same logic as vinegar.  I also eat a braunschweiger which contains sodium nitrite, but A) that’s more of a curing agent than a preservative, and B) I don’t eat braunschweiger that often.  Other than that, I’m pretty religious in following this one.

So that’s my version of Whole30(ish), and I try to stick to it.  Anything outside these explicit exceptions I consider cheating, and I feel appropriately guilty about it, and vow to do better.  But I’ve only cheated a couple of times so far, and I expect to make it to the end with the total number of cheats enumerable on the fingers of one hand.  And I can live with that much.  Perfection is a nice goal to aim for, but it doesn’t make much sense to beat yourself up if you don’t achieve it, because you never will.  The most important thing is to see a big improvement in your diet, and this represents that for me.  And that’s good enough.

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1 Yes, I include Hallowe’en.  If you’re not binging on crappy candy as part of your Samhain tradition, you’re doing it wrong.

2 I say “weirdly” because lactose intolerance is commonly something that gets worse with age.  But if the Smaller Animal’s condition gets any worse he may not be able to look at a milk carton without having to run to the toilet.

3 I talked about my favorite cheeses for salads in my Saladosity series, specifically when I went shopping for meat and cheese.

4 My alcohol of choice is beer, but that’s just liquid bread.  So that’s out.

Gone But Never Forgotten

Tomorrow we celebrate the birth of a man who was instrumental in the development of modern America.  Unlike many years, this year Martin Luther King Day is actually on King’s birthday: Januray 15th.  Most years I celebrate very simply, by just reflecting on the words and the life of Dr. King, and typically listening to “Southern” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.  Obviously Dr. King’s life can’t really be reduced to 3½ minutes of a song by a synthpop band, but I always found OMD’s tribute moving nonetheless.

Toward the end of 2016, I did a blog post where I shared a few quotes from Jesus, and I noted that, regardless of whether you believed in his status as Messiah and Savior, his words were still powerful.  Dr. King holds a similar position in my mind: you may not agree with everything he stood for, but even if you agree with our current president that Nazis can be good people too, or you’re a little nostalgic for the “good old days” of separate-but-equal, it’s still hard to ignore powerful statements like the following.  Here are my favorite quotes from the man:

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?”  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

It’s wrong to hate.  It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong.  It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China.  It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it’s wrong in 1954 A.D.  It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So, tomorrow, I’ll reflect on these words, and be happy that my three little (and not so little) children can live in a nation where they are exposed to ideas like these, where words such as these are considered important enough that we set aside a day to contemplate them.  We’re all benefitting from Dr. King’s dream.  Obviously we still have a ways to go before we get to the promised land, but I do believe we’re on the path.  And we have one man, and his relentless dream to thank for it.

So, thank you, Dr. King.

The Expression of Tension

A few weeks back, in my capacity as D&D enthusiast, I was perusing the articles highlighted in EN World Weekly.¹  I found this article by Lew Pulsipher particularly interesting: “Tension, Threats And Progression In RPGs.”  The content of the article was very good, and I encourage you to read it.  It’s actually quite similar to one of my cornerstone GM philosophies: I don’t kill characters.  There are a lot of similiarites to what I wrote, but also some intriguing differences.  I like that the article is well-balanced: it asks both “How do we structure an RPG, or for that matter any adventure, so that players’ loss aversion is not activated?” and “Without the possibility of loss or failure, what tension can you put into a game?” ... which are fairly diametrically opposed questions.²

But the most interesting part of the article, to me, were the comments.  Now, I very often don’t read comments on the Internet.  In general, it’s a good way to get pissed off and lose faith that the human race can survive as a species.  One needs to constantly remind oneself that people who post, say, YouTube comments are not representative of anything other than jackasses who have nothing better to do with their lives than post YouTube comments.  But there are certain online communities where the comments can be more or less safe to peruse, and EN World is a place where the folks in charge maintain a certain level of civil discourse.  Sure, the banter can get a bit rowdy sometimes, especially for particularly contentious issues, but most of the time the comments are intelligent and thoughtful, or at the very least heartfelt and not just designed to provoke a negative response.

The comments for this article (mostly) fall into two broad categories: the grumpy old grognards grousing “back in my day we had ten characters a day killed off, every game session, and, dammit, we liked it!” and the snot-nosed kids whining “if you take my character’s toys away, that’s not fair and I’m not playing!”  As a long-time advocate of balance and paradox, it wil not surprise you that I find both of these extremes incorrect ... and, at the same time, think they both have a valid point.

First, let’s look at the amusing way I characterized the two groups.  (At least I hope you found it amusing.  You didn’t take me seriously there, did you?)  The truth of the matter is, the concept that the old fogeys of the hobby are prone to being fine with having characters killed off willy-nilly is a complete stereotype, as is the idea that the younger players are going to be the ones most prone to loss aversion.  But stereotypes nearly always have some basis in fact, and actually the article even encourages a bit of this thinking, demonstrating reasons why the older players are more likely to be comfortable with character loss—because they were raised on wargaming³—and why the younger players are more likely to be holding on to loss aversion—because they were raised on videogames.  And it’s true that wargames have a tendency to teach you that everyone is expendable, while videogames have a tendency to teach you that you just need to learn to save before you try to fight the big boss, and that way you can do it over and over again until you not only win, but you do so without losing any significant resources.  But this is an oversimplification.  People are just wired differently, and I believe there are plenty of kids out there who are just fine with their characters dying, and plenty of graybeards out there who would be appalled at the concept that their 20-year 17th-level ranger might be permanently killed.  In the end, we hope that all the “expendable” folks find each other, and all the “indispensable” folks find each other, and everybody will just play the game they want to play.

But there’s a broader philosophical question here, and it’s what Pulsipher was digging around at, and it’s what the commenters were struggling towards as well.  Setting aside that this is not really a question with any one “right” answer ... what’s the right answer?

First let’s look at why both the answers offered up by the two main groups of commenters are wrong.  The concept that characters are expendable is clearly wrong, if we agree that roleplaying is storytelling.  To sum up that chain of logic, if roleplaying is storytelling, and if, in storytelling, character is king, then your character is obviously the most important part of the game, and therefore cannot be considered expendable.  Of course, perhaps I’m wrong that roleplaying is storytelling.  D&D was born out of wargaming, in fact, and Gygax—who is tellingly quoted by Pulsipher as saying that “death walks at the shoulder of all adventurers, and that is the true appeal of the game”—was inordinately fond of killing off his players’ characters.  And he invented the game, so he must be right ... right?  Short answer: no.  (I’ve already dealt with the “sanctity” of authorial intent in another post and won’t re-belabor it here.)  What D&D was when it was invented is not what it is today, and likewise the reasons people play it are not the same.  The game still aims to support those who want to play it as a sort of glorified wargame—the sort of “how long can I keep Joe Warrior alive before he’s smashed to a pulp and replaced by his cousin Moe Warrior?” style of game—but the game openly acknowledges that that’s just one style, and not even the most common one.  Other RPGs beyond D&D have made even stronger stances that that just ain’t how roleplaying works in the modern age.  If you’re interested in playing something closer to Gygax’s original intent, that’s fantastic ... but I’d argue that modern D&D is hardly the best choice for that.  Trying to play D&D today as a character-expendable wargame is just about the same as trying to roleplay a game of chess.

So the folks who say killing characters is perfectly acceptable are wrong.  What about those who say that their characters should never have to face any losses at all?  These are people who are not only saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to kill off their characters (and, remember: I agree with that part), but that you shouldn’t be allowed to kill their hirelings, their families back home, their pets, their mounts, the townspeople they met 3 sessions ago ... hell, Pulsipher even calls out “destroying the player’s favorite magic wand” as potentially going too far.  I shudder to think what the sensitive advocates of this position would say to my policy that, while I won’t kill your character, I’m perfectly happy to lop off an arm or take out an eye.  And gleefully tell you that it builds character afterwards.⁴

But it should be clear that this position—that of avoiding all loss whatsoever—can’t be right either.  Roleplaying is storytelling, and storytelling has to have conflict.  Reward without risk may make for a lovely videogame,⁵ but it’s a terrible story.  You know that famous story where everyone gets everything they ever wanted without having to do any work for it?  No, you don’t know that story, because no one’s ever told that story, because it’s boring.  In The Hobbit, Tolkien describes Bilbo and the dwarves’ stay in Rivendell thusly:

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.

Like it or not, it’s the danger, and the loss, that makes the story interesting.  What we love about a good fantasy (or a good sci-fi tale, or a good horror story, or a good spy novel or adventure tale or any of a dozen more types) is the perseverance in the face of adversity.  But there must be some adversity there to face.  Otherwise you’re not persevering ... you’re just trundling along.

In fact, I believe you can make a compelling case that outright death is necessary for a good tale—although not the death of everyone.  While there are some stories in which everyone (or nearly everyone) dies, they don’t make very good roleplaying models.  I don’t think anyone would consider it very fun to play Hamlet, or Macbeth, in a D&D game.  Inevitability can make for compelling drama, but roleplaying requires a bit more free will than that.  So you can’t just off everyone (despite what Gygax would recommend).  But the occasional character death just adds depth—it ups the game, raises the stakes for the remaining party members.  Think of all your favorite fantasy epics: the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Dresden Files, the Chronicles of Amber, many many more.  Does anyone die in any of those series?  More like in all of them.  Can you think of an epic fantasy series in which someone important does not die, in fact?  Death is often an excellent motivator, which is why I refuse to take it off the table for tangential characters, especially those you’ve specifically put into your backstory.  We may have never actually seen your wise old mentor in our campaign, but I still know that if I dump his body into your campsite one day, interesting events will be set in motion.  But, while the possibility of actual player character death is far more realistic (and, yes, perhaps even makes for a richer story), there are just too many logistical issues to make it feasible.  Because you put a lot of work into creating that character, so it’s now your bailiwick, and only you can make the decision as to when and if that character will die.⁶

So I think it’s reasonable to say that killing player characters is bad, but that’s not the same as saying all loss is bad.  Eliminating loss from the story altogether just doesn’t work, and to be fair most of the commenters (even those on the side of avoiding character death) realize it.  They talk about “story losses”—meaning loss of status, or failure to achieve goals—but those are still losses.  Only a few people talk about just having a goal of obtaining more items and achieving greater power, and therefore not advancing is the “penalty” for failure.  But I would argue that that model doesn’t work.  It makes an okay game—although I still might be a bit bored by it, personally—but, as a story, it’s awful.  Imagine talking about the Lord of the Rings in terms of “remember that time when Aragorn didn’t get any better at killing things for like 3 months? ... man, that was tough!”  It’s completely unworkable because it removes your ability to tell stories about your character’s achievements afterwards.  Without ever having faced any obstacles, your character’s victories are hollow, and not worth bragging about.  Your audience wants to hear how you stared death in the face.  How you cockily slaughtered everyone because you knew there was no chance you’d get seriously hurt ... it just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

We can’t eliminate tension and loss altogether from our roleplaying, and we shouldn’t try.  But that doesn’t mean we have to consider our characters expendable and “just get over it” if they’re permanently removed from the story.  The truth is we can have loss—real loss—without character death, and we should not only accept that, but actively seek it out.  The risk of loss is what makes our epic fantasy games epic.

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1 As I do every week.  If PnP RPGs are your thing, you should be checking them out too.

2 There was one idea which I found mildly problematic in the article, but I think I’ll save that for a separate blog post.

3 There’s certainly more than a grain of truth to this: as you may recall, my wargame of choice is Heroscape, and around our house we use a motto that I stole from one of my fellow dads on the Heroscapers forum: everyone dies in Heroscape.  If you want to teach your kids wargames—even chess—you have to teach them to be okay with losing pawns.

4 No pun intended.  Okay, maybe a little pun intended.

5 I would actually argue that it makes a fairly crappy videogame, but that’s a whole separate topic.

6 And, honestly, the wise old mentor is your character too, so realistically I’m not going to just kill him off without clearing it with you first.  But it’s definitely an option, is all I’m saying.