Transition Disposition

Goodbye 2023.  Looking forward to a better 2024.

Here's My Beard ... Ain't It Weird?

I grew my first beard at 17 or 18.  I told people that I did it to look old enough to buy beer, but the truth is, I just wanted to look older.  The combination of being a short kid—my “growth spurt” between 7th and 8th grade consisted of going from 4’1” to 4’6½”—and having an extreme babyface meant that I always felt like my outside wasn’t reflecting the maturity I felt on the inside.  Not that anyone is actually mature at that age, but it’s the age when you really want people to stop treating you like a “kid.”

By the time I turned 21, I’d been repeating the “it’s just so I can buy beer” line so much that I had managed to convince even myself, so I shaved it off on my 21st birthday: I didn’t need to look older any more, I said, because now I am older.  Except ... it really felt wrong somehow.  I didn’t really care for the way my face looked in the mirror, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Must be that babyface, I thought.  For a few months I tried just a moustache, but that was disastrous.  Soon I was back to the full beard.

Now, many people say that, the first time they try to grow a beard, it itches too much.  Some give up entirely at this phase; others just perservere and eventually the itching goes away.  But I’m a freak of nature, I guess, because my beard never itches when it starts coming in.

But, for some insane reason, once I’ve had it for about 10 years or so, then it starts to itch.

The first time this happened, I suffered for a couple of days, and then I knew that I just had to shave my chin and start over.  But I was still scared of the babyface.  So I decided to go for a “General Burnside” cut.  (This is the fellow for whom “sideburns” are named.)

And this was when I realized: I have no chin.  I come by this honest—it’s my mother’s chin.  To call it a “weak chin” is being overly generous: in order for a chin to be “weak,” it must first exist, and mine ... doesn’t.  Once I had the full sideburns but a clean-shaven chin, I could see it instantly.  The beard was defining my jawline, and, without it, I just looked like a complete goober.  But it is what it is: every 8 – 15 years, the itching starts, and the shaving must be borne, despite the visual horror it produces.  The second time I went with the Burnside again; the third time, I did more of a Ben-Stiller-in-Dodgeball sort of cut.  Now we’ve come to the fourth time around, and I’ve done that again (mostly due to lack of imagination); of course, being older now, my facial hair is mostly white, so it’s not nearly as cool as Ben’s was.  My youngest child had never even seen my chin before (or at least not that she’d remember), so it came as a bit of a shock.  And pretty much all my friends and coworkers have had the experience of being able to say to me, at least once in my lifetime, “oh, hey, you’re right ... you really don’t have a chin.”

So that’s why I look the way I do this week.  Luckily, my facial hair—unlike the head hair—grows very fast, so it won’t take long before I’m back to looking like an itinerant hobo riding the rails.  Until then, I remain a stubbled, chinless wonder.  But not an itchy one.

[Our title comes from an old George Carlin routine that I used to know by heart.  If you haven’t heard it, you really should.]

Third Party Blind

Less than two weeks ago, I was listening to Election Profit Makers, and they read a letter from a younger fan who said that they were not going to vote for Biden because of his approach toward Israel, and they wanted the hosts (David Rees and Jon Kimball) to weigh on in that situation.

At the time, I didn’t realize this was A Thing.  Sure, I’d heard that there’s a growing movement in the U.S. that thinks that the government of Israel shouldn’t be allowed—much less encouraged—to wipe the Palestinian people from the face of the Earth.  I’d even heard that this utterly radical stance was mostly held by younger people, and that they blamed Biden’s willingness to just go along with whatever Israel does (including offering them weapons to do even more of it) on his being a very old man.  After all, blind allegiance to Israel is sort of an American tradition.  Because otherwise you’re antisemitic ... right?

So, sure, I knew it was a thing, and that it was mostly a thing with younger people, but I didn’t know it was A Thing.  But apparently it is: ABC News says it is, The Guardian in the UK says it is, NPR says it is.  So I guess it is.  Apparently it’s quite popular for political experts to weigh in and say that Biden’s pro-Israel stance might seriously jeopardize his chances next year.

So what did the hosts of EPM have to say in response to their young interlocutor?

Rees: When it comes to young voters saying, “I’ll never vote for Joe Biden, this is a, this is a bridge too far (his support of Israel),” I’m like: all right.  I don’t even feel interested in trying to convince young people that they should vote for Biden because Trump would be worse.  ...  I used to totally be the third-party, protest-vote guy.  Now I am much older than I used to be, and I see electoral politics now as nothing more than harm reduction.  ...  One thing I have no interest in, and I will not support, is older voters scolding younger voters for deciding to vote with their principles, even if I happen to think, like “yeah, good luck, let’s see how that turns out, champ.” I’m not gonna ...

Kimball: Totally agree.

Rees: I’m not gonna get on a high horse and try to shame young people.  I think that’s tactically stupid, and also demeans what’s so exciting about politics when you’re younger, and, for some of us, even when you’re older.  It’s like, it is a mechanism by which you can express your idealism.  And that’s beautiful to have that.

(For the full discussion, check out Episode 237, starting at about 24:20; the quotes above kick in about 5 minutes into that discussion.)

And I identified with what David is saying there.  First of all because I have totally been the person voting for a third party, and second of all because I’m much older now than I used to be, and also when he says that trying to shame people into not voting for third parties demeans everyone’s idealism, young or old.  Beacuse, here’s my dirty secret: I still vote for third parties (sometimes), even now that I’m old.  Now, as I’ve pointed out, I live in California, so I have a luxury that many Americans do not: the Democratic candidate for President will win my state, regardless of how I vote.  Therefore, I’m free to vote for the person whose stated opinions and policies most align with my own.  Sometimes that’s the Democrat, it theoretically might be a Republican—while I have voted for Republicans before for other offices, there’s never been a Presidential candidate who’s impressed me sufficiently to get my vote—or it might be a different party entirely, and I don’t give a flying shit if that’s a Green party candidate, a Libertarian party candidate, or just a raw independent.  Your “party affiliation” is just a box next to your name.  It means nothing to me, especially these days, when people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema can claim to be Democrats, and the Republican party still (mostly) encompasses people like Liz Cheny and Adam Kinzinger (I could actually see myself voting for that guy for President, depending on the opponents).  What matters is what you (claim to) stand for, and how well your actions match your rhetoric.  If that stuff comes closer to what I want to see than any other candidate, then I don’t care if you’re a member of the Monster Raving Loony party: you get my vote.

But, as I say, I have the luxury of living in California where I actually can vote my conscience and still know that it won’t end up screwing the country.  I used to live in Virginia, where the margin of victory for the Republicans was frequently less than 10 points; I did (sometimes) vote third-party there, but then again I was younger.  If I still lived there today, would I still be so bold as to vote for whoever is the best candidate?  Or would I succumb to the “truth” that you may only vote for the better candidate?

What amuses me most about David Rees’ statement (which so strongly resonated with me and which I found most eminently reasonable), was that I was watching an episode of Democracy Docket with Brian Tyler Cohen and Marc Elias less than a week later, and Elias said this in response to a question from BTC about third parties:

So I, I just got to speak directly to your audience, because I imagine your audience is a lot of good Democrats, but also people who have very high standards for their elected officials.  And let me just tell you something: if you think voting for Jill Stein is doing anything other than electing Donald Trump, you are wrong.  If you vote for Jill Stein you’re voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for Bobby Kennedy you are voting for Donald Trump.  If you vote for the No Labels candidate, whoever he or she is ... if you vote for the No Labels candidate you are voting for Donald Trump.  And I’ll tell you one more thing: if you sit at home, because you’re disappointed, or you sit at home because you think your vote doesn’t matter, or you sit at home for whatever reason, and you don’t vote, you’re helping elect Donald Trump.  So you know I’m tired of the people who are saying ... you know, “I’m gonna have a protest, or I’m gonna sit out ...”.  If you don’t participate in this election, and enthusiastically drag your friends, your neighbors, your family, drag ’em to the polls, make sure they’re registered, drag ’em to the polls and make sure they vote, then you are you are feeding into what Donald Trump wants for this country, which is a dictatorship.

(Again, if you want to follow along, this was the 12/11 episode, and the question and answer happens at about 8:10.)

And, if you don’t know who Marc Elias is, he’s sort of the epitome of what David Rees was talking about when he said “older voters scolding younger voters for deciding to vote with their principles”: he’s a balding, old white guy (not quite as old as I am, according to Wikipedia, but damned close), he’s a lawyer, and just listen to what he’s saying there.  “If you don’t vote for my political party, your vote worse than doesn’t count: it counts for the bad guy.” If a salesman was telling you, if you don’t buy their product, it’s the same as giving your money to burglars so they can come take your stuff, you’d roll your eyes at them.  If a realtor told you that, if you didn’t buy this house, you’re just giving permission to people to come knock your current house down, you’d probably look for another realtor.  But, when it comes to politics, we not only don’t think twice about this sort of rhetoric, we expect it.  Worse, we believe it.  And, regardless of whether it’s true or not, our belief makes it true.

Here’s a simple example: two Democrat groups (Third Way and MoveOn) have issued a statement about the potential new “No Labels” party.  An article says:

Third Way and MoveOn followed up Tuesday by asking the staffers to convince their bosses to publicly denounce the effort.

“We, the undersigned elected officials, recognizing the urgent and unique threat to democracy in the form of right-wing extremism on the ballot in 2024, call on No Labels to halt their irresponsible efforts to launch a third-party candidacy,” reads the statement for the lawmakers’ signatures.

“Their candidate cannot win, but they can and would serve as a spoiler that could return someone like Donald Trump to office. I therefore commit to opposing a No Labels third-party ticket in 2024 for the good of the country.”

Now, I’m not saying voting for the (potential) No Labels candidate is a good idea—I’ll have to make that determination when we’re closer to the actual election, but I will say that so far I’m unimpressed with any of the names being floated—but just look at this statement.  This is what oligopolies do: a small handful of companies in a space very aggressively lobby their customers against considering any possible competition.  You may think the Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on anything these days, but they absolutely agree that they don’t want any more players on the field.  You get to pick one of these two, and yes they’re both shitty, but that’s just the way it is and no one can change it so you might as well get used to it.

Definitely don’t look over there.  Yes, the UK has nearly a dozen major parties, 5 of which have 10 or more representatives in Parliament; Japan has the same, only with six parties holding 10 or more members of the National Diet; Germany has 8 parties with 10 more members in the Bundestag and closer to two dozen in total; France has only 5 major parties, but every single one has more than 60 members in their Parliament.  But pay no attention to those countries.  Just pick one of these two shitty options.  It’s your duty to do that.  And also not to question it.

Look, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to do the electoral calculus and come to the conclusion that, if you don’t vote for Biden, you’re throwing your vote away (or, worse, that you’re effectively voting for Trump).  That’s a lovely thing for any individual “you” to do.  But don’t think it’s okay to try to shove that down everyone else’s throat.  And maybe also think about whether it’s okay to just accept that blindly and not believe it can ever change.

While researching this blog post, I came across this article from The Nation.  Now, The Nation is, admittedly, a pretty liberal news outlet, and it should be read with the understanding of that bias going in.  But this article (which you really should read in its entirety) makes some pretty compelling points, which I will quote here.

The astute reader will note that I’ve been comparing Trump to Biden as if this will be the choice facing American voters next fall. But this is a false choice—a false binary that I subscribe to, but that many young voters do not.  ...

...  Many young people felt pressured into voting for him in 2020 because of the unique threat to democratic self-government posed by Trump. That threat is no less real in 2024, but this time around, Biden’s foreign policy is giving young voters a moral stance to pin their dissatisfaction to. And many voters of color who already viewed voting for Biden as merely a harm-mitigation strategy are wondering how the guy who ran against white supremacy now lets his team smear protesters who call for peace as equivalent to the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Responding to these valid moral criticisms with “Well, I hope you like it when Trump deports your family and takes away your voting rights” might feel like a cutting retort, but it’s actually a schoolyard bully’s threat masquerading as a political position.  ...

...  But just know that your use of Trump as a threat is not convincing them. The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse. They’re saying Biden should be better.

Perhaps the primary difference between Marc Elias and the author of this piece, Elie Mystal, is that Mystal is not an old white man.  He’s not necessarily a young man either, but being a person of color perhaps gives him a much better perspective to see how this “strategy” is becoming tiresome.  The Democrats tell us that democracy is at stake ... just like they told us the last time, and the time before that.  Even if they’re right—and I’m certainly not saying they’re wrong—they need new material.  And they need to stop using it as an excuse to muscle out any other party that tries to horn in on their territory.

Call and response

Have you ever been listening to a podcast (or watching a show, or reading a book), and someone in the podcast/show/book says something so crazy, so outrageous, that you just respond out loud?  You know they can’t hear you, but it doesn’t matter: you just feel the need to correct, or clarify, or just answer.

This happens to me all the time.  And I often really do respond out loud.  This week, since it’s an off-week, I thought I’d just a quick rundown of my responses-to-the-air for this week.

There’s probably somebody in your life who you, you feel maybe you’re disconnected from.  ...  Maybe ... send them a letter, write ’em a handwritten letter and send it to ’em. They would really appreciate it.

— Cody Johnston on Even More News, “Santos’ Little Cameos, New House Resolutions, And EVEN MORE GTA VI Reactions”

No, they wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t be able to read it.

[Context: Even More News is the “in between weeks” podcast that goes along with Some More News, and every week they start with some wacky holidays that are listed on the various wacky-holiday-calendars around the Internet and comment on them.  This helps inject a bit of levity before they have to descend into the actual news, which is often hard to be humorous about.  In this case, it was National Letter Writing Day, and this was an easy response: my handwriting is terrible.]

And for Prosperity to be built, there is only one way only, Prosperity can be built.  Prosperity is built by entrepreneurs.

— Magatte Wade on Drilled, “Messy Conversations: Magatte Wade, Atlas Network’s Center for African Prosperity”

To quote Wikipedia, according to whom?

[Context: The Atlas Network is a web of “think tank” organizations with one goal: funded by the oil and gas industry (as well as the coal industry, lumber industry, mining industry, etc), they produce intellectual-sounding opinion pieces and “studies” that they then pass off to media outlets in order to spread the word that fighting climate change is bad.  Magatte Wade is an African native (she was born in Senegal) and she pushes the idea that it’s unfair to try to curtail oil and gas production in Africa, because that just keeps Africans locked into poverty.  Obviously what they need is for people to come in and help them exploit their natural resources, and that way they’ll develop their economies.  As you can imagine, this makes her a darling of right-wing talking heads (the first time Drilled used a clip of her rhetoric, it was from an appearance on Jordan Peterson’s show).  The sad part is, she actually has some valid points buried in there.  But, in this episode, where she challenges climate journalist Amy Westervelt to a “debaite,” you can see that she’s far more focussed on running roughshod over the arguments of the other side and “winning” the debate than in any sort of honest exchange of ideas.  She certainly isn’t afraid to play the “I’m from Africa and you’re not, therefore I know what I’m talking about and you don’t” card, nor is she (as you can see from the quote above) afraid to just state very shaky premises as “facts” upon which she then builds entirely unsound arguments.  What I found the most infuriating, though, was her tendency to just talk faster and more forcefully and just ... more ... than Amy.  This quote is from the first ten minutes, during which Amy lets her go on until she finally winds down; at the end of that, she lets Amy talk for about two minutes before trying to interrupt her.  She’s clearly from the “whoever talks the most wins” school of debate.)

[affecting nasal voice] And I would sing like this, which I never sang like before.

— Fred Schneider on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, “Fred Schneider”

Give it up Fred: we have ears.

[Context: Fred, talk-singer of the B-52’s and utterer of such iconic lines as “it wasn’t a rock ... it was a rock lobster!” and “love shack, baby!!”, was responding to a description of the improv game “Hey Fred Schneider, what are you doing?” He apparently doesn’t think he sounds like that.  This is reminiscent of Kurt Cobain adamantly insisting that Nirvana wasn’t a grunge band, or George Bush Sr’s response to Dana Carvey’s spot-on impression of him, wherein he claimed he’d never said anything like that in his life.  The problem with such denials is, you’ve been recorded.  We can hear you.  Yes, Nirvana, you are grunge (in no small part because the word was coined to mean “music that sounds like Nirvana”), and, yes, Mr. Bush, when you try to say “not gonna do it,” it quite often sounds like Carvey’s “na ga da,” and, yes, Fred Schneider, when you call out “hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail!” ... you sound kinda nasally.  You just do.  Own it, man.]

And that’s all for this week.  I thought you might enjoy hearing my (normally solitary) mini-rants.  If you didn’t, you can just wait around till next week, I suppose.

We All Need a Little Guidance Sometimes

The D&D community rarely shows concensus about anything.  Give them pretty much any topic and you’re nearly guaranteed to find an equal number of rabid fans both lauding and decrying it.  And yet, there are a few topics that tend to unite D&D gamers, and one of them is that the guidance cantrip is overpowered.

I probably don’t need to tell you, but guidance is a simple little cantrip that grants you or an ally a 1d4 bonus to one ability check within the next minute.  It’s a nifty bonus, for sure, and it’s nearly always going to be useful, but the main thing that the Internet objects to is that, as a cantrip, you can cast it over and over again, without limit.  In general, cantrips are minor spells where it’s okay for someone to cast it over and over.  Sure, a wizard with fire bolt can cause 1d10 of damage every round (or as many times as they can hit their enemy’s AC, at any rate), but then so can any twit with a pike.  A bard with mending can cast it over and over to fix a completely destroyed chain, or clothing which has been ripped to shreds, but since it takes a minute for every casting, it’s often possible that a skilled craftsperson could do the same job in less time.  This guidance though ... the Internet seems pretty convinced that being able to grant this bonus over and over is appalling, if not apocalyptic.

There is quite a lot of discussion out there that supports this claim.  It’s regularly found on lists of the most powerful cantrips: in the middle of the list, mentioned second, listed at #5 out of 10, all the way to #1 of 15 or even #1 of 20.  A Redditor asks “5e Guidance Cantrip is OP?” One EN World poster laments What, +1d4 to every check ever? And the Alexandrian simply says “Guidance is a terrible spell.”

Well, I don’t agree.  I think that what the Internet overlooks (or sometimes deliberately ignores) is that guidance has a number of important limiting factors.  And it further frustrates me that you can quite often see these limits being steamrolled over in popular streaming games, played by professional TTRPG gamers.  And I hate to pick on Critical Role, but it is the OG streaming D&D game, and almost certainly the most popular, and I find it fascinating that Matt Mercer, its very brilliant DM, is sometimes very obviously frustrated by his players’ over-reliance on guidance, and yet he often doesn’t seem to adhere to the simple limitations I outline below.

Now, I’m a firm believer that an article that tells you that a thing isn’t as bad as you think it is isn’t all that likely to be useful: it’s hard to dislodge strong opinions.  So I’d rather you consider this a list of advice, especially if you’re a GM whose players are overly fond of shouting out “Guidance!” at the drop of a wizard’s hat, but even if you’re a player who is starting to feel like you’re breaking the system somehow by casting this useful cantrip at every opportunity.  Remember these limitations, and maybe police yourself so your GM doesn’t have to.

Without further ado then ...

The reasons why guidance isn’t overpowered:

Guidance requires touch

You have to be able to touch the person you want to guide.  How many times have I watched someone on screen call out “Guidance!” when their fellow party member tries to do something, and watched the GM struggle to figure out a reason why it doesn’t apply?  “Um, I’m going to say you can’t use guidance in this case because ... um, you didn’t know they were about to do that, so you didn’t have time to cast it.” So silly.  How about, there are 3 people between you and them, so you just can’t reach them?  How about, you’re holding your spell focus in one hand and your weapon in the other; what are you going to touch them with?  No touch, no guidance ... it’s just that simple.

This is most applicable in combat situations where maneuvering to get to an ally comes with its own risks.  Definitely not applicable if the character is guiding themselves (which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do).

Guidance requires concentration

Absolutely no one seems to remember this.  If the caster is already concentrating on another spell, guidance would instantly end it, and guidance is hardly ever worth that cost.  I’m not saying that you as the GM should use that to engineer a “gotcha” moment: “haha! since you cast guidance, you lose your other spell!!” No, I’m just saying that it’s perfectly reasonable for you to remind your player of the consequences of their actions—perhaps “you know that if you use guidance you’ll drop concentration on your other spell, right? are you sure you want to do that?”

Most applicable in combat, but surprisingly pertinent even out of combat.  “Sure, you can do guidance if you want, but everyone will lose their pass without trace bonus ...”

Also rare, but if the caster throws out guidance in those situations where they’re worried that their party member might need help on an ability check, they’re then concentrating on a spell.  They either can’t cast another concentration spell at that point, or the ally will lose the guidance.

A more commonly encoutered limitation: having to maintain concentration means you can’t cast guidance on multiple allies.  That means that grandiose statements like “a spellcaster with Guidance can make their entire party better at anything they set their mind to” necessarily comes with a pretty big caveat: as long as they only set their minds to things one at a time.

Guidance requires an action

For some reason, it’s very common for people to use guidance on themselves during combat, to give themselves a little juice on whatever cool thing they’re trying to do.  And I have never seen a single GM object to that, despite the fact that it can almost never work.  Trying to use guidance on that Athletics check to escape the monster’s grapple?  Well, too bad: the Athletics check is an action, and the guidance is an action, and you don’t have two actions.  I suppose you could use guidance this turn and apply it to the Athletics check next turn, but do you really want to do that? for a measly 1d4 bonus?  Even when the thing you’re doing is not action, it’s rarely worthwhile to actually use guidance on it.  Let’s say you want to maneuver through the crowded battlefield to get to an enemy, and your GM says you can only do that if you can make a decent Acrobatics check.  Since the Acrobatics is part of your movement, you could use guidance to help out ... but then, when you succeed and get to the enemy, you don’t have an action left to attack or cast another spell.  So you’re probably worse off than if you’d just taken the straight roll.

Guidance requires it to be your turn

This is another thing that I often see GMs letting people get away with in streaming games.  Player A: “Okay, I’m going to spend this round trying to figure out the puzzle.” GM: “Okay, give me an Investigation check.” Player B: “Guidance!” Except: no.  Even if player B is close enough to touch player A (see first bullet), it’s not player B’s turn.  And they can’t cast a spell—not even a dinky cantrip like guidance—when it’s not their turn, unless the spell is a reaction (which guidance isn’t) and the situation fulfills the requirements of the trigger (e.g. you can’t cast feather fall unless someone is falling).  And there’s isn’t any trigger for guidance, because it isn’t a reaction spell.  So, you know ... no.  You can’t cast guidance on the player doing the Investigation check.  It isn’t your turn.

Guidance requires somatic components

Now, this one doesn’t apply as often, but it definitely is yet another case where I see people getting away with it on streams when the GM really should know better.  The party goes up to talk to a group of suspicious NPCs, and the party’s face starts to spin a tale to keep things from escalating.  Simple enough: the GM calls for a Deception (or Persuasion) check.  Inevitably, someone in the party will yell “Guidance!” Except ... guidance is a spell.  You’re a group of oddly-dressed, dangerous-looking, often only vaguely humanoid people, talking to a bunch of nervous, twitchy folk who are already a bit suspicious of you, and someone in the back starts casting magic?  Yeah, that ain’t gonna go down how you hope.  Again, I’m not recommending you as the GM use this as a “gotcha” moment; just gently remind the guidance-happy caster that there will be consequences if they start breaking out the funky hand gestures and mystic words in the middle of the tense negotiations.

To be fair, this is one I do hear GMs (particularly Matt Mercer) call out on occasion, as well they should.  I just don’t hear it enough.

Guidance requires verbal components

This is a lesser requirement, but the caster does need to be able to speak to cast guidance.  No guiding if you’re gagged, no guiding inside the radius of a silence spell, and I would at least call for another Stealth check if someone tried to cast guidance while they were hiding or otherwise trying to avoid discovery.

Guidance only lasts for a minute

Don’t forget that guidance only lasts for a short time, so any ally you cast it on has to use it or lose it within the next minute.  This doesn’t come up that often, but I have seen players try to cast it on an ally who was about to head off on a scouting mission (to help with their Perception checks), or one about to sneak into an enemy encampment (to help with Stealth).  But that only works if they can achieve the objective in under a minute.  Also consider that if the task takes longer than a minute to complete—say, an Investigation check to search a room, or a Sleight of Hand or Thieves’ Tools check to disarm a trap—the GM is well within their rights to say that the guidance doesn’t last long enough to grant the bonus.

Guidance only benefits ability checks

I mean, it’s pretty clearly laid out in the spell description, and I don’t really notice people trying to use it on attacks or saves, but I do think this is a pretty obvious limitation that should be more thoughtfully considered when people are trying to talk about how “overpowered” guidance is.  Guidance is hardly ever going to turn the tide in combat, and, even outside combat, saving throws are way more imporant than ability checks in terms of influencing game outcomes.

Guidance requires the caster to know about the ability check

This is a subtle one.  But, to take a simple example, I have difficulty imagining any situation where guidance could be used on an Insight check.  How could the caster possibly know that the ally was trying to figure out whether or not someone was lying?  Unless the caster is the one doing the insight-ing, but then you have the problem described under the somatic components bullet: your target is bound to suspicious if you start waving your hands around mystically while you’re talking to them.

At the end of the day, guidance only gives you a d4 bonus

Seriously.  It’s just a d4.  Sure, you can do it for every single ability check because it’s a cantrip—well, every single ability check made by a person you can reach, when it’s your turn and you have an action and you’re not concentrating on anything else and you have at least one hand free and you can talk—but ... so what?  As a GM (or, even worse: as an armchair game designer), why would you get all hot and bothered to an average improvement of 2.5 points on a bunch of ability checks?  Let the characters have this one.  They get so few pleasures in life, and those 2 or 3 points are not going to make your story any less challenging.  Trust me.

And this works in the opposite direction as well.  The Alexandrian, as much as I admire him, is going a bit overboard when he says you’re just making your party worse when you don’t cast it.  It’s just a d4.  Your party will be fine if you forget once or twice, or if your GM points out one of the reasons above and shuts down your last-minute casting.  Use it when appropriate, skip it when inapplicable ... it’s just a fun little bonus, no biggie either way.

And that’s why guidance is not overpowered, and it’s just fine to allow in your games.  Keep your players honest, but let them have fun.  At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, right?

Thanks were given

We’ve survived another Thanksgiving, and we’re all pretty much still thankful for the same things: family, friends, job, health, fuzzy children and videogames and having enough disposable income to spend on the things we enjoy doing.  If you happen to celebrate this holiday, we hope you had a lovely one, and, if you live in a country that doesn’t celebrate it, or celebrates it on a different day, or if you just believe that people shouldn’t celebrate taking advantage of our indigenous population, we hope you had a lovely week in any event.  Till next time.

The Salesman's Tale

As far as stories about one’s life go, everyone has a few that all their friends and acquaintances have heard ad nauseum, and a few that they love to tell and may or may not be a hit, and, if they’re very lucky, a few that they only tell occasionally, but are always entertaining when they do.  This is one of those for me.

Now, I’ve alluded to this story before, most particularly in my discussion of fate (or whatever you wish to call it).  In that story, I talked about how it was I came to work in a restaurant, even though I had been a professional programmer for several years at that point.  That restaurant was a small joint about a mile off the campus of George Mason University called the Mason Jar Pub.  We served sodas in Mason jars (get it?), but also beers and pizza and all the stuff that college students require.  This place was run by a snotty punk named Brian whose dad was in “construction” (air quotes used very advisedly) and had obviously been gifted the pub as baby’s first business.  He ran it with his girlfriend and a friend of theirs named Dana.  They ran it very poorly, and eventually the business ran out of money and Brian and friends ran out of town and none of us got to cash our final paychecks, which led to a number of uncomfortable days in court as we tried to get paid by the father.  Lessons were learned all around.  But, in the run-up to this inevitable debacle, the following thing happened which ended up changing the course of my life far more than my one missed paycheck.

Now, because I had gone to college previously, then dropped out (during which time I did the aforementioned professional programming), and was now back for a second tour, I was a bit older than most of my peers.  I was, in fact, just a wee bit older than Brian himself, and this was the point in my life when I learned that most people really can’t handle managing employees who have more age and experience than they themselves do.  The prime example of this was the reaction I got when I pointed out to Brian that I had some experience with computers, and I could give him a hand if he ever needed any help.  Said reaction was basically just a sneer.  I was one of the dumb college kids he had hired; obviously I was not to be allowed in the club with him and his girlfriend and Dana, who was the only one trusted with “the books.” I shrugged and went back to making calzones: no skin off my nose if he wanted to struggle with his new computer.

You see, there was this fellow named Tom Cooney was working for Sharp and had sold the Mason Jar Pub its first cash register.  He then sold them a computer to which you could download all the data from the cash register and then load that all into QuickBooks.  Provided you knew what you were doing, of course—this type of process was still a bit fiddly back in the early 90s.  And Brian and company most certainly did not know what they were doing.  They struggled with that damn computer constantly, and Dana was constantly calling Tom asking for help.¹  So I knew they could use my expertise.  But, if they were too proud to accept it, it was none of my concern.  I had been hired to sling pizzas and clean up the joint, and I was perfectly willing to do just that.

Now, the three twitbags couldn’t be around all the time.  Especially on the night shifts, there were often times when none of the three of them were available (or just didn’t want to be bothered).  For these occasions, there were two “assistant managers,” who happened to be senior ROTC students, as well as roommates and very good friends.  One was a pale, freckled redhead whose name I think was Lou; the other was a confident black man with glasses named Wayne.²  These were both big, burly men who were training to be Marines, older than most of my coworkers (still a bit younger than I was, of course).  I think that Brian thought that they were going to be “on his side” in the imaginary divide in his mind that existed between “management” and the rank-and-file.  But, the thing about middle managers is, if you treat them (and pay them) as badly as you do the low-level employees, they tend to side with the majority rather than the upper echelon.

So, one slow night I was working with Wayne and a couple of other people, and Wayne was bitching about how badly all us employees were being treated and how little we got paid compared to Brian and his coterie, who seemed to be pocketing all the money.  At some point, the discussion turned to sneaking a peek at the books.  After all, it was all on the computer, and the computer was right there in the office.  The office was locked from us paeons, of course, but Wayne, as the manager-in-charge, had the keys.  For emergency use only, theoretically, but ... perhaps finding out what was going on was an emergency, dammit!  (Had we known what was coming, we would have felt even more justified.)  The problem was, only Dana had the password to QuickBooks.  So Wayne turned to me.  “You know computers, right?” he asked me.  “You could hack in!”

I was not surprised at this misconception: that all us programmers know how to hack things.  I was a bit surprised to hear this future Marine lieutenant suggest something so morally ambiguous.  But, then again, Wayne himself often told us that his Marine instructors taught them to make a decision and stand by it: making a poor decision in the heat of battle can be bad, but hesitating and making no decisiono at all is often disastrous.³  So, after my initial shock, I set about explaining that I was never much of a hacker—in fact, the only thing I had ever successfully hacked was a copy-protected videogame on my Commodore 64, which tried to tell me it couldn’t run after X times because my trial period had ended.  I did in fact show that snarky videogame message who was the boss, but breaking a QuickBooks password was a whole different animal.  Computer security had advanced by about a decade at that point and I had spent zero of that intervening time keeping up with it.  “Well, take a look,” Wayne encouraged.  So I said I would.

And, perhaps 15 minutes later, I was ready to admit that there was literally no chance that I was smart enough to break into a password-protected QuickBooks account.  “Sorry,” I said, not all that sorry.  But Wayne was not deterred.

“Okay, but there’s got to be something you can do to fuck with them, right?” he suggested.  Well, okay, I was not bothered by being unable to hack, but this now felt like a challenge.  Surely any programmer worth their salt could do something to fuck with people, given free access to the physical machine.  I had certainly engaged in a few juvenile pranks with coworkers—both as the fucker and the fuckee—but a lot of those things were only effective against other programmers.  What I needed was something that would get under the skin of a normie.  So I started poking around to see what tools I had available to me.

And what I found was a hex editor.  Now, if you’re not a technogeek like myself, you might not know what this is.  It’s a program that will let you edit anything on the computer: data, commands, even the operating system itself.  It was exactly the thing I had used in my one and only successful hack.  You see, a videogame that keeps track of how many times it’s been played and then refuses to run necessarily has to store that count somewhere, and that means you can find that place and edit it, and change it to zero.  But there are two problems with this approach: first of all, you’d have to constantly change it back to zero every time the count got too high again, and secondly the people who programmed the videogame have obviously thought of this.  They don’t store the count as a raw value; it’s encoded somehow, so that even if you could find it and change the value to zero, that wouldn’t be read as “zero” by the program itself.  So I quickly realized that my “brilliant” plan could never work.  But I realized that, in my attempt to find where the data for the count was stored, I had stumbled across something even better: the place where the code to compare the count and show the snarky message was stored.

You see, on the one hand, figuring out exactly how a given piece of software works should be easy: it’s all just numbers, and the software authors can’t keep you from being able to read those numbers without also making it impossible for the computer to read them.  So, theoretically, you can just look at all the numbers in the software and see what it’s doing.  But, the tricky part is, the same number can be interpreted differently depending on context.  For instance, say you look at one byte in a piece of software and it happens to be hex 49.  Now, that might represent the number 73, which is just the hexadecimal number converted to decimal.  Then again, it might be a capital “I,” because that’s what hex 49 is on the ASCII chart.  Or it might be the lower byte of a two-byte number, or the upper byte, or the middle byte of a four-byte number.  Or it might actually represent an instruction: say, an immediate exclusive-or of the next byte with the “accumulator,” which is assembly-speak for “the current number we’re working with.”⁴  Which of those many things it actually is depends entirely on context: the only number that you’re 100% sure of is the very first one, and, after that, you have to deciper every number, in order, to figure out what the next one means.  If you lose your place, or if you miscount how long something is, then all of a sudden you’re interpeting number as letters and letters as instructions and instructions as numbers and you’re just fucked.  So, while it should be simple, in practice it’s very much not.

In the case of my videogame, the code which checked how many times it had been run and then conditionally displayed the annoying message was not near the beginning of the code, but it was jumped to near the beginning of the code, because that check was one of the very first things it did.  So I was able to find it and trace through it and eventually I found the “branch” instruction: the part that said, if the value is no good, jump to the code which displays the message and terminates the program.  And I replaced the “branch” instruction with hex EA, which is what we technogeeks call a “NOP”: a no-op.  So then, instead of branching when the number was too big, it just ... did nothing.  And, after the nothing, it proceeded with the regular videogame code.

And I could do all that because I had a hex editor, and that allowed me to search for certain byte sequences, identify them, and replace them with different sequences.  And then save the file, overwriting the old program with a new version which was almost identical to the old, but with one slight tweak.  Once you know how to do this type of thing, it’s pretty easy to extend that to other changes.  And one of the simplest edits of all is to replace one string with another.

See, your hex editor knows perfectly well that sometimes numbers represent letters, so you can tell it to search for a string, and it can do that fairly easily.  The longer the string, the more likely it is that a given set of sequential numbers will represent those letters and not just be a stunning coincidence.  And, once you find the string, you can easily overwrite it with a different string, as long as the new string is exactly the same length as the old one.  Now, if you happen to know something about the way the program was written, you can pretty easily replace a longer string with a shorter one: anything written in C, or a language that derives from C, will use a zero byte as a marker to mean “the string ends here.” So a 10-character string will actually be eleven bytes long: one byte per character and the zero byte at the end.  You could easily replace that with a 5-character string and just fill in the last 5 bytes with zeroes and Bob’s yer uncle.  What you can’t do (or can’t do safely at any rate) is replace a 10-character string with a 20-character one, because those last 10 bytes are going to overwrite something entirely different: if it’s another string, the program will end up displaying the latter half of your replacement string intead, which is maybe not too bad, but if it’s code, then the program will likely do very bad things as it starts interpreting your characters as instructions.  But, as long as the string is equal or shorter, you’re golden.

And, the thing is, it’s very rare to find a hex editor on a random computer.  The vast majority of users have no need for one.  Finding a hex editor on the accounting PC for a small college-town restaurant was just weird ... surreal, even.  I would eventually discover that our salesman friend Tom needed the services of an engineer-type, and the one he was using at that point was a bit sloppy.  He had been using the hex editor when he set up the computer, and just never bothered to delete it.  But, at the time, it felt almost like destiny: there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to this computer, but the presence of a hex editor opened up my possibilities quite a bit.

Now, back in those days, we didn’t have Windows.  Well, technically speaking we did, but its use wasn’t prevalent yet.  Most programs, including QuickBooks, just ran on the primitive system underlying Windows: DOS.  When you booted up a DOS computer, you were faced with what we called a “C prompt”: C:\> .  And you just typed the name of whatever program you wanted to run—perhaps qb for QuickBooks—and it ran.  Now, if you mistyped something (say, you accidentally fat-fingered a key and typed wb or qv instead of qb) you would get an error message.  Specifically, it would say “Bad command or filename.” Not that you’d be likely to mistype a two-letter command, but something longer, you might.  And the thing is, “Bad command or filename” is a really excellent string to search for in a piece of software, if you happen to know which piece of software is responsible for printing that “C prompt” and running whatever commands you enter.  Which I did.  So it was fairly trivial, given the hex editor, to find “Bad command or filename” and just replace it with a shorter string.  Like, say, “What the fuck?!?” Which is exactly what I did.

Needless to say, Wayne was tickled pink at the thought of poor Dana mistyping something and getting cursed out by her own computer.  I was a bit proud of myself: it was basically trivial for me, but it could seem like magic to the uninitiated.  And I thought nothing more about it.

Until ...

You see, what happened was that, sometime in the next few days, Dana was having some troubles with getting data downloaded from the cash register system and, naturally, she called Tom for tech support.  Not that tech support was really Tom’s thing—he was the salesman, recall—but the whole computer thing was, strictly speaking, on the side from his job at Sharp.  So he was tech support that day.  And, when you do tech support over the phone, you get into a sort of rhythm: “Okay, type this.  And what does it say?  Okay, then, type this next.  Now what does it say?” And so on and so forth, back and forth, until eventually poor Dana flubbed whatever she was supposed to have typed.

“Okay, type this command; now what does it say?”

“Ummm ...”

“Just tell me what it says on the screen.”

“Well ... it says ...”

“Yes? what does it say?”

“Well, it says ... ‘what the fuck’.”

Without missing a beat, Tom responded: “Somebody there knows computers.”

Or at least that’s the way he recounted the story when he told me about it later.  Because he started dropping by the Mason Jar Pub quite regularly after that, hoping to ferret out which employee had the secret computer knowledge.  And, eventually, he stumbled onto me.  And that’s how Tom Cooney became my first business partner: I became his new, not so sloppy, engineer, and I was introduced into the weird world of running your own business.  It’s part accountant, part movie producer, part one-man-band (even when you have partners or employees), part having the weight of the world on your shoulders, and part ultimate freedom from being told what to do by idiots with no vision.  I owe Tom a lot, but I think maybe I owe Wayne even more.  Without that juvenile prank, my life would have turned out very differently.  And maybe not better.

__________

1 This led to Tom and Dana actually dating briefly, if I recall correctly.

2 I mentioned Wayne—and this very story—in passing when discussing how much I owe to Bernice Pierce.

3 I stress this is all second-hand information from a single source, diluted by decades of intervening time and degrading memory.  I apologize to any of my readers with military experience if I’m misrepresenting the advice.

4 Note: I’m not stating categorically that 0x49 is an immediate XOR for a 6502 CPU; I’m about 4 decades out from even being able to follow the reference docs for that particular flavor of assembly, much less actually remembering it.  But I did look it up, and I’m pretty sure that’s right.

Another trip around the sun ...

I really thought I was going to be able to do a full blog post this time, despite it being my birthday weekend.  But, apparently, I’ve relaxed too hard, and the time has just slipped away.  I would love to tell you I’m sorry, but ... I too relaxed to feel all that sorry about it.  Sorry for not being sorry.  Sort of.

Next week: the thing you should have gotten this week.  See how it all works out?

Post-Halloween recap

Another Halloween put to bed, another birthday weekend upcoming.  Nothing overly exciting to report so far: the smallies went out for what is likely their last trick-or-treating ever, while I stayed home to pass out candy to any children who knocked on our door, of which, it turns out, there were exactly zero.  Then we all met back at the television for our annual viewing of Trick ‘r Treat, which is surely the greatest Halloween movie of all time (even counting the actual Halloween).  Our youngest managed to stay awake until the last 5 minutes of the movie, then we all went to bed and, presumably, had lovely dreams.

Until next year!

Plutonian Velvet I

"Ministers of Night"

[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.]

As we approach the pinnacle of spooky season, I thought it appropriate to present one of my spooky mixes.  And I have several of those, many of which we’ve already encountered.  As a connoisseur of all things creepy and crawly—as an aspiring author whose pentagram of literary idols include Stephen King and Clive Barker—I distinguish among many different flavors of spooky.  We’ve seen Phantasma Chorale, for instance, which is lightly creepy, with a bit of child-like thrown in for good measure.  We’ve seen Darkling Embrace, which is creepy but pretty, and Dreamscape Perturbation, which is creepy and dream-like.  Darktime was all about dark music, and Penumbral Phosphorescence was full on goth.  But how about some music which is downright spooky?  Well, you’ve finally come to the right place.

For this mix, we’ll be concentrating on music which sounds a bit scary or unsettling.  If it has some creepy lyrics, that’s a bonus, but it’s not the focus.  Mainly these are songs from artists which usually are perfectly normal-sounding bands, putting out perfectly normal-sounding albums, except for that one track that makes the fine hairs on your arm stand on end.  The name of the mix is drawn from a few lines from The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, the patron saint of Hallowe’en if there ever was one.  The ends of two different stanzas of that excellent poem are:

“Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

So, as we sit here, on the violet-velvet cushion of Night’s Plutonian shore, let’s see what dark and festering cobwebby corners of alternative music we can find to chill our bones.

When I first discovered Falling You, back in the early days of the Internet,¹ I immediately fell in love with them² and started trying to download every single thing I could find by them.  Which is how I stumbled on this “remix” of “Hush” by Abney Park.  The original is pretty good—listen to it if you like—but it’s not significantly creepy.  What Falling You did was to entirely mute Robert Brown’s lead vocals, kick up Abney Park keyboardist Kristina Erickson’s almost whispered backing vocals, cut out nearly all the instruments except for the synths (which are perhaps even enhanced a bit), and add some creepy sound effects.  The result is something entirely different from the original ... and insanely dark and excellent.  For years I had it paired with “Mad Alice Lane” as the opening to Darktime, but honestly it transcends just being about darkness.  It’s a wonderfully creepy tune that serves as a wondeful intro.

And it’s followed by my other great find from those early Internet days: “Mad Alice Lane” by Peter Lawlor, founder of the Scottish band Stiltskin.  It took me forever, but I finally tracked down the CD single of this excellent (and excellently spooky) song; the version I’m using here is the slightly longer “A Spooker Ghost Story” one.³  The story of the song is just as creepy as the song itself, so defnitely give that a look-see.

Once I divorced these two excellent tracks from Darktime, I decided they should form the core of their own spooky mix.  And instantly I knew the first two companion tracks that had to be added: both are by Siouxsie and the Banshees and both are off Peepshow.  “Scarecrow” is one of my favorite tunes to play at this time of year, and, while the choruses are a bit rockin’ (as much of the Siouxsie œuvre is wont to be), the verses are super eerie.  As for “Rawhead and Bloodybones” ... well, based on a disturbing British tale of child-snatching boogeymen (or a single boogeyman with a compound name; versions conflict), the song has a lot of discordancy and notes that just jangle your nerves.  It made for the perfect closer.

After that, “The Lights are Going Out,” the closer for OMD’s 1985 masterpiece Crush, was so unlike anything else on that album that I’d always had it in the back of my mind as a candidate for a spooky mix, and the Cure’s short “Subway Song” is a little two-minute gem with a little jump scare built right in.  I follow up the latter here with “Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi.  The Bolshoi were contemporaries of OMD, though not nearly so well-remembered these days.  They had a similar sort of new-wave/synthpop sound, and “Barrowlands,” the penultimate track on Lindy’s Party, is similarly conspicuous in its dissimilarity to everything else on that album.  It’s got a great graveyard feel to it, and also provides our volume title.

Rounding out the 80s contributions (though I embarrassingly didn’t think of it until quite recently) is “Sanctum Sanctorum” by the Damned.  I was looking for a replacement for another track that just didn’t seem to fit, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have anything by the Damned.  And, while the Damned may not be a proper goth band, lead singer Dave Vanian is the gothiest motherfucker on the planet: black leather and huge white streak in his jet-black hair (at least during the Phantasmagoria era), married to Patricia Morrison of the Sisters of Mercy (which is a proper goth band)—hell, he even used to be a gravedigger before becoming a rock star.  And Phantasmagoria has some goth gems on it, of which “Sanctum Sanctorum,” with its Phantom-of-the-Opera-style opening organ chords and backing thunder-and-lightning effects, is easily the spookiest.

Other obvious, if more modern, choices were “Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl (with Elysabeth Grant breathily telling us how she “met a stranger on a train” and Sam Rosenthal’s goth-soaked arrangement), “Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star (more organ, sludgy percussion, and echoey vocals by Hope Sandoval), and “Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers (a taste of New Orleans creepy accompanying a song of tragedy sung by Katharine Whalen).  Those fell naturally into a little block, starting with “Diamond” and ending with “Mary,” that closes out the first third and sets us up for the middle stretch.

A few more self-evident choices: modern goth masters Faith and the Muse, who here give us the breathy, bassy track “Kodama,” and dark ambient, strings-heavy Amber Asylum, who provide “Cupid.” The lyrics of “Kodama” are actually about the commodification of Hollywood,⁴ but the song still retains enough sinister to secure its position here.  As for “Cupid,” it’s a rare vocal outing for band founder Kris Force, and those vocals soar and swoop; it’s not always clear exactly what the words are, but the arrangement is a bit menacing and a bit tortured, so it works well here.

Tossing in a bit of early-to-mid-’aughts trip-hop, the Belgian band Hooverphonic can go dark with the best of ’em, and I always thought “L’Odeur Animale” was one of their darkest.  The whole song just feels ... off, and that creepy little tag at the end just seals the deal.  When Geike Arnaert sings “deep inside,” it makes you shiver, even if you don’t know quite why.  My other choice was Germany’s Trost, whose Trust Me is normally fairly uptempo, if a bit surreal.⁵  But the last track,⁶ “Filled with Tears,” has more of that bass-driven, echoey and breathy vocals that have popularized so many of the other tracks I chose.  Plus the one-two punch of Hooverphonic and Trost makes a fantastic wind-down to our closer from Siouxsie.

Plutonian Velvet I
[ Ministers of Night ]

“Hush [Flashback Mix]” by Abney Park [remix by Falling You] [Single]⁷
“Mad Alice Lane (A Spookier Ghost Story)” by Lawlor, off Mad Alice Lane (A Ghost Story) [CD Single]
“Cupid” by Amber Asylum, off The Natural Philosophy of Love
“Scarecrow” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow
“Kodama” by Faith and the Muse, off :ankoku butoh:
“The Lights Are Going Out” by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, off Crush
“Danny Diamond” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off The Inevitable
“Shadow of a Doubt” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The Scavenger Bride
“Mary of Silence” by Mazzy Star, off So Tonight That I Might See
“Now, When I'm This” by the Black Queen, off Fever Daydream
“Ghost Children” by Bruno Coulais, off Coraline [Soundtrack]
“Toccata” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Waltz of the Damned” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off Swing Is Dead
“Subway Song” by the Cure, off Boys Don't Cry
“Barrowlands” by the Bolshoi, off Lindy's Party
“Sanctum Sanctorum” by Damned, off Phantasmagoria
“L'Odeur Animale” by Hooverphonic, off The Magnificent Tree
“Filled with Tears” by Trost, off Trust Me
“Rawhead and Bloodybones” by Siouxsie and the Banshees, off Peepshow

Total:  19 tracks,  79:13

And that just leaves us with the centerpiece of the volume.  We start with 3 instrumentals: a rare double-bridge leading into a hardcore synth-driven update of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” First up, the Black Queen, a dark synthwave band composed of former members of Trent Reznor’s touring band for Nine Inch Nails.  I discovered these guys while checking out the veritable cornucopia of dark synthwave that’s springing up these days (such as Urban Heat and Light Asylum), and while dark synthwave doesn’t necessarily mean creepy, there’s certainly something ominous about “Now, When I’m This,” which is the short intro to the Black Queen’s debut album, Fever Daydream.  And the transition from “Mary of Silence” straight into “Ghost Children” wasn’t working for me, so this little track made a nice bridge to the bridge, if you see what I mean.  And “Ghost Children” itself was picked to be a little bridge into “Toccata”: it’s a nice (but creepy) little track off of Bruno Coulais’ excellent soundtrack to Coraline.  I mean, all of Coraline is pretty creepy—it’s the entire raison d’être for Phantasma Chorale after all—but I tend to think that “Ghost Children” is one of the few actually spooky ones.  And it tees up the Nox Arcana take on Bach’s classic, given its uncanny bona fides by association with early silent horror films such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931 (it didn’t become associated with The Phantom of the Opera until 1962, by which point it was already cliché horror film music).  Nox Arcana does some excellent work here, keeping it lively while also providing the appropriate amount of darkness for being the anchorpoint of an album named Legion of Shadows.

And all that takes us to perhaps the only surprising choice of the volume: Lee Press-On and the Nails.  Retroswing auteurs LPON are often silly, but also occasionally gothy, and their album Swing Is Dead contains a few tracks that aren’t out of place in the Halloween season.  But only one is truly spooky: “Waltz of the Damned” sounds almost exactly like what you would hear while waiting in line to see the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  The amusement-park-style sound effects fade into some New-Orleans-style dirge before leaping into LPON’s more typical big-band sound, with Lee’s vocals heavily processed through a voice-distortion unit spewing lines like “and when the leader waves his fiery baton, the band begins to scream in three-quarter time!” It’s eerie, spooky fun.

Next time, we’ll sneak up on some sonic explosions.

__________

1 Which is when I also discovered a bunch of other crazy things I’ve shared with you, like Ensemble of the Dreamings and Zoolophone.

2 Well, him: Falling You is almost entirely composed of John Michael Zorko.

3 That single also contains the nearly-ambient “Dogs of Breakfast,” which we heard on Shadowfall Equinox III.

4 Or at least that’s my interpretation.

5 We’ve heard from Trost once before: her weird little ditty “Even Sparrows Don’t Like to Stay” was featured on Gramophonic Skullduggery.

6 These sorts of weird, creepy songs are often used as closers for their native albums.

7 This one is so damned hard to find that I just gave up and uploaded it myself.  You’re welcome.

Rumble in the Jungle

After a break of a little over a year, we’re finally back to the Family Campaign (which is what I call the D&D campaign that I’ve built around my children’s characters, who happen to be all animal-based).  Why so long?  Well, a big reason was the return of my eldest child and their partner.  You’d think that would make it easier to do a thing called “the Family Campaign,” but not so much, as it turned out.  But another reason was that this was the first really big battle that I’d planned for the campaign.  Now, if you watch actual play games like Dimension 20 or Critical Role, you might recognize that this is very light in terms of combat: D20 typically has a major (as in, episode-long) combat every other episode; CR is usually a bit less often, but not by much.  However, I’m a much more combat-light (and therefore story-heavy) GM.  While I pepper in short combats, done using theater of the mind, I save big set-piece combats utilizing fancy battle maps for special occasions that come along maybe once a level.

So, with the arrival of the party in Maztica (a jungle-dominated continent with cultures influenced by Aztec, Incan, and other Mesoamerican cultures), I figured it was time to pull out all the stops.  You can see the array of enemies I put up (with apologies for my limited Phtoshop skills); there’s a few evil cultists (always fun to battle, with no pesky moral quandaries to worry about) and then a number of creatures taken straight from Legendary Games’ Latin American Monsters, which I purchased specifically for this purpose.  There’s a jaguar in the right foreground, with a werejaguar right behind it, a couple of pumas, and a werecaiman.  That red furry thing with the horns is a timbo; the scary horse-headed woman is a sihuanaba, and the big snake with antlers is a mazacoatl.

And, yes, I built a full map for it.  Here’s some pics we took to mark our place when we had to pause this mega-combat:

As you can see, I had to use a number of proxy figures: my jaguar is here represented by the tiger (and the werejaguar is a weretiger figure), the timbo is the wrong color (but otherwise surprisingly accurate), the werecaiman is really just a lizardfolk, that “wolf” is actually supposed to be a black panther (one of the good guys), etc etc.  But the overall scene—a bar on a beach with a jungle right behind it—is actually pretty accurate for what I had in my mind.  The kids seemed to have a good time with it anyhow.  (Fun fact: the legs you can see in one of the pictures belong to my middle child, who was taking their own pictures of the battle.)

Oh, and you might wonder: what the heck is up with the Bazooka Joe wrapper?  Well, I asked my youngest to find a way to mark that space, and that’s what she came up with.  We had to mark the space because one of the powers of the timbo is called “Gravedigger”: in a single turn, it digs a grave, pushes you into it, and covers you up so you start suffocating.  So that bubble gum wrapper is actually a grave marker, and there’s someone in there buried alive.  So that’s fun.

We’ll pick it up here next week, if we can wait that long.  It’s a tough battle, but I provided a few allies to help them out, and I think they’ll prevail in the end.  I’m anxious to find out how it all comes out!

I thought Jared Kushner was going to fix this ...

When the WGA went on strike earlier this year, I was miffed for an entirely selfish reason: I get almost all of my news from places that employ writers, like The Daily Show and Steven Colbert on The Late Show.  Just as when the coronavirus first hit, I was abruptly plunged into a news-free zone.  As I noted back then:

Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

During this year’s stoppage, I found some new outlets, mostly on YouTube, where creators are not writing for the AMPTP, so the strike allowed them to continue.  Most of them, however, were not nearly amusing enough.  I’ve grown somewhat fond of Brian Tyler Cohen, for instance, but there’s no denying that he’s not only a radical liberal (which I don’t mind so much), but also a staunch Democrat (which I’m far less tolerant of).  Generally speaking, the Democrats are not nearly as liberal/progressive as I’d like, and they fuck up just as badly as the Republicans (case in point: Bob Menendez).  Then there are the “dirtbag left” and their less extreme offshoots, who will happily—even gleefully—attack Democrats, but traffic more in manufactured outrage than incisive and funny commentary.  About the only truly postive find during this long dry spell was Some More News, who are not so much current news like Colbert and whoever ends up being the next Trevor Noah, but more like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight: deep dives into an single problematic situation, trying to use humor to explore the nuances of the story that traditional news outlets (even the “fake” news ones) just don’t have time to cover.

But now the strike is over, and Colbert is back, Meyers is back, Oliver is back, and The Daily Show will be back tomorrow night.  And just in time for the most violent flare-up between Israel and Palestine in decades; by the time it’s over—and I’m being optimistic just in assuming it will eventually be over—it will almost certainly jettison the “almost” from that description.  This is the type of thing that it is very difficult to inject even a modicum of humor into, but one of the reasons I truly respect these folks is that they always find a way: you can’t make jokes about the tragedy itself, of course, but you can make jokes about the idiots talking about the tragedy, or trying to “manage” it.  You can point out hypocrisies and people being greedy and foolish.  They figured out a way to do it about 9/11 (eventually), and they figured out a way to do it about the pandemic.  And, I have to say: I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of even trying that I’m seeing from my usual outlets.  That probably sounds a bit crass, like I’m complaining that this humanitarian crisis, where thousands are being killed, isn’t funny enough for me.  But that’s not what I mean to imply.  I’m more disappointed in how this is the line that my comedic news idols are afraid to cross.  A world-wide pandemic that killed 7 million people?  Sure, we can find a way to make jokes about that.  The Middle East?  Fuck that, man: I’m not touching that.

I think the main source of the problem is, perhaps more than any other hot-button issue in the United States—perhaps more even than abortion, or gun rights—there are reflexive reactions to stating a position on either side.  If you refuse to say you stand with Israel, well then of course you’re supporting terrorists.  And, if you do say you stand with Israel, then you’re supporting apartheid at the best and genocide at the worst.  Best just not to take a side.  Except ...

Except I reject this false dichotomy.  I do not stand with Israel, nor do I stand with Hamas (or any of the other Paletinian terrorist groups-du-jour).  I stand with the innocent civilians.

Numbers are hard to pin down, but the United Nations says that “More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians, were reportedly killed ...” and that ”... at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, including older persons and 290 children ...” ABC News reports that “In Israel, at least 1,300 people have been killed ...” and that “Palestinian authorities said at least 2,329 people have been killed ...” Would it really be so controversial to posit that killing innocent civilians is bad, regardless of which side is doing it?

This conflict has been going on so long that people don’t even bother going back to its beginning in their lists any more: the United Nations lists casualties only going back as far as 2008; Wikpedia’s list of military operations headed “Gaza-Israel conflict” only goes back to 2006 (and has 21 entries in those 18 years).  But, trying to extrapolate from Wikipedia’s timeline, I think there have been more than 50 incidents just in my lifetime—the first of which started when I was 7 months old—ranging from plane hijackings to full-on wars.  And I was only trying to count incidents in which multiple innocent bystanders were killed: I skipped all the assasinations of military and political figures by both sides.  Also, once it became clear I was going to hit 50 (easily), I actually quit counting, because it was just so goddamned depressing.  The Israelis and the Palestinians have bcome the Hatfields and McCoys of our lifetimes, except if the Hatfields and McCoys were wiping out huge swaths of the West Virginia population.

And I understand the issues of conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people, but I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel.  If it were, there would quite a few antisemitc Jews these days: Jon Stewart has done some of this, not to mention there’s an entire organization of Jews for whom it is the raison d’être.  But it’s harder for non-Jewish people (such as myself) to do so.  In fact, there are, bizarrely, actual laws in 35 states (including my own) saying that you’re not allowed to boycott Israel in protest of its policies.  You know where it’s not illegal to protest Israel?  Israel.  Many Israeli newspapers have been extremely critical of Netanyahu in particular, which is only sensible: in a democracy, people are supposed to be critical of their governments.  They are supposed to hold them accountable.  There are no laws in the US about not being able to protest the US government (probably), but it’s okay to make it illegal to protest other countries’ governments?  It’s just surreal.

Meanwhile the Palestinians have the opposite problem: too often the face of their people is a group like Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Fatah, or the PLO, or ...), which everybody condemns, and rightfully so.  But condemning a terrorist group that operates in a country is not the same as condemning the people of that country, and expressing support for the people is not the same as expressing support for the terrorist group.  Netanyahu has said that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price”; does that mean that Hamas will pay this price?  Because it sure seems like it’s the Palestinian people paying it right now.  If the Israelis wanted to hunt down every single Hamas soldier who participated in this henious attack on their country, who would speak out against them?  But bombing innocent civilians back to the stone age because of the actions of some madmen who claim to speak for them?  Does that really seem “justified”?

So I would like to take the (hopefully!) uncontroversial stance that people in both Israel and Palestine have the right to live their lives without fear of being shot, kidnapped, or bombed.  I dunno ... that just seems like common sense—and common decency—to me.

Even More News, the current news discussion podcast from the Some More News folks that I mentioned way back at the beginning of this post, had an almost entirely humor-free discussion of the current situation in Israel and Palestine that you could check out for more in depth discussion.  The episode of Some More News that they reference is actually two years old at this point, but (as Cody says) it’s eerily relevant to today’s news, so you should probably watch that.  The older video does lean more towards the Palestine side, but the recent podcast is more balanced.  And all the information is good regardless.