The Parakeet — one of several polychrome woodblock copies made in ca. 1900 from works by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), a Japanese painter of the mid-Edo period notable for his striking modern aesthetic. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/polychrome-woodblocks-of-ito-jakuchu-birds
Wizard’s Challenge (1992) serves the same basic function as Fighter’s Challenge: a duet scenario (that is, one-on-one) that gives a wizard character a chance to gain some experience and history before joining a larger campaign. Unlike a fighter, who primarily hits things, the wizard requires challenges that won’t threaten his fragile physical form so much. So, investigation and problem-solving abound! There is so little combat that the book encourages experience rewards for other outcomes, which, I am not sure that had ever appeared in a D&D adventure module before this point.
There’s a town which is both a base and the venue for some event-based encounters that involve the assassination of local mages. Eventually there is the exploration of a cave and a tower, and a confrontation with the villain. A number of well-developed side adventures fills things out. It’s a nice little package that does what it sets out to do and then offers a little more besides. With barely any combat!
Unlike Fighter’s Challenge, this scenario doesn’t use much from the Wizard’s Handbook, which makes sense as that book has a good deal less utility. It does take its Erik Olsen cover from a color plate from the Wizard’s Handbook IIRC. Karl Waller interiors. These are a bit less exciting (no monsters, mostly) but they are printed darker…I am not sure if there is a correlation there.
OSR enthusiasts still debate the best way to map wilderness areas with hex grids, but 1/4"=5 miles was good enough for author Dave Hargrave and mapper Carolyn Schultz in Death Heart: Arduin Dungeon 4 & Overland Adventure (Grimoire Games, 1980).
This adventure takes place in the Mountains of Madness, a name borrowed from Lovecraft. This map also shows the three previous Arduin Dungeons: The Howling Tower, The Citadel of Thunder, and Caliban's Seat, the latter taking a name from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Other references within include a rough stone shrine to "Pukel" by the path (from Tolkien) and a +3 sword named "Black Raiser" (a nod to Blackrazor from White Plume Mountain, published the previous year, another adventure with a non-gridded map).
Thanks to Public Domain Review for hepping me to Gautier Dagoty's Essai d'Anatomie (1745). The plates are 2500px wide scans and are gonna make for GREAT collage elements. What a draftsman!
Raymond Biesinger’s “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off”
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Miami, Burbank, Lisbon! Full schedule here (New dates just added in San Diego and Denver!).
Raymond Biesinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound:
Biesinger is an iconic designer and illustrator whose instantly recognizable style and entrepreneurial hustle have allowed him to achieve the coveted and elusive status of full-time, economically secure(ish) artist. But over the years – and even in recent times – Beisigner has found himself in the all-too-common and endlessly frustrating circumstance of being owed money by people who refuse to pay it. The sums involved are typically small by the standards of corporate budgets, but it's what Biesinger calls "needed money" – money that makes a huge difference to the life of the artist to whom it is owed.
Speaking from personal experience, getting stiffed is one of the most embittering things that can happen to a creative worker – or any worker (as the tradespeople who've had their wages stolen by Trump can attest). I remember every time I got shafted by a client and often find my mind returning to those humiliating, frustrating moments.
There was the "friend" who hired me to do some work and then just decided never to pay me the $150 we agreed on. There was the university prof who asked me to speak to his class and promised me reimbursement for the taxi and then stiffed me for 20 quid. There was the international magazine who commissioned a short story from me, accepted it, then tried to cram a bullshit contract down my throat and refused to discuss any modifications to its terrible terms, finally stiffing me for the $500 they owed me.
There was the largest publisher in the world, who commissioned a novella from me for an anthology, promising me tens of thousands of dollars, who accepted the novella, and then "discovered" they hadn't ever finalized the contract for the anthology and canceled it, stiffing me in the process. The fact that I went on to sell that novella several times over, both in book form and as a graphic novel, and for film rights (twice!), making far more money in the process, doesn't make me any less angry about these fuckers who just screwed me without a second thought.
Objectively speaking, there is no reason for me to dwell on these little humiliations. It doesn't do me any good. It doesn't make the dickheads who screwed me feel bad. It is, as the proverb goes, "drinking poison and hoping your enemy dies." But I can't help it.
Neither, it seems, can Biesinger. But unlike me, Biesinger has found an incredibly productive – and inspiring – way to deal with that otherwise pointless seething. In 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Biesinger reflects on the nine titular ripoffs, telling the story of how he got ripped off, what he did to get his own back, how he felt about it at the time, and how he feels about it in retrospect.
The book's subtitle ("An informal self-defense guide for independent creatives") sets up this book as a kind of manual for navigating these situations in your own life, and there's plenty of that in here – successes and failures for the rest of us to learn from. These stories are often very satisfying, as the little guy gets the justice he deserves. But the most interesting part of this book is Biesinger's reflections on the meaning of the different ripoffs he confronted, and how they relate to his own work.
Because – as Biesinger will tell you – he rips stuff off, too. All artists do. "Good artists copy; great artists steal." (said Picasso (who was ripping off Faulkner) (or Stravinsky) (or Eliot) (or Trilling). He carefully parses through the muddied ethics of lifting elements for collage, for inspiration, and just because you forgot that you weren't supposed to. Much of Biesinger's early work was collage, and (as a collagist myself), and you can't do that work without developing complicated feelings about creative ownership.
Biesinger also straddles a line between commercial illustrator, producing commissioned pieces to order for magazine and advertising art directors; and fine artist, making "artistic" pieces for his own satisfaction, and selling these as prints. While he's proud of all this work, it's clear that how he relates to his own work depends a great deal on whether it falls into the former category or the latter. Part of that difference is a blanket prohibition on licensing his "artistic" pieces for commercial work.
This just adds to the moral complexity of Biesinger's deliberations: when an extremely well-funded charity misappropriates an "artistic" piece to accompany an exemplary article on women's health advocacy, he wrestles with a whole suite of concerns and mitigations – the "charity"'s reputation as a money-laundry for a wealthy plutocrat, his support for the article, his principle about not licensing his "artistic" work. It's typical of the kind of nuance that Biesinger brings to these chapters.
Also fascinating is Biesinger's chapter about a fan who solicited artistic advice from him, but went on to produce a portfolio of uncredited knock-offs of Biesinger's own signature style. Biesinger describes how he blasted this young artist for abusing his goodwill and unjustly profiting from Biesinger's own work developing his style, and then, in later years, repented of his angry outburst. In a delightful coda, Biesinger recounts how he looked up this artist years later, only to discover that he had matured into a talented, original, successful and ambitious creator. When Biesinger emailed the artist to apologize for his furious letter, the other artist replied that Biesinger's blast had been the kick in the pants he'd needed to finally figure out his own style, and he credits his later success to Biesinger's fury.
At the root of all nine tales of ripoffs is the inadequacy and/or inappropriateness of the legal system as a tool for redress when an independent creator is ripped off. In the case of commercial ripoffs – by agencies large and small, by fly-by-night concert promoters, by gallerists peddling unauthorized reproductions – the sums involved are usually far too small to involve lawyers or the courts. In the case of disputes with other artists – like the copyist who bit Biesinger's style – the law is (rightly) silent, because styles are not copyrightable.
In telling these nine tales, Biesinger beautifully illustrates the limitations of copyright as the sole regulator of creative activity. Copyright law (and its cousin, contract law) might be suitable for mediating commercial transactions between creative workers and businesses, but it's utterly unsuitable for other kinds of interactions, including interactions between artistic peers, or between artists and creators working in related disciplines. The most important thing that Biesinger is doing in this book is setting out a continuum of relationships and detailing many of the different tools available to creators to resolve disputes arising at different points on that continuum.
Given Biesinger's justly deserved fame as an illustrator, this is also a beautiful book, published in pocket-sized trim by Drawn & Quarterly, one of the world's great indie comics presses. The many, many illustrations in this small volume don't just bring the subject matter to life – they're artistic delights in their own right. It's a reminder of how wonderful the "art" part of all this stuff is, and how that complicates the all too familiar labor issues at the book's core.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Raymond Biesinger’s “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off”
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Miami, Burbank, Lisbon! Full schedule here (New dates just added in San Diego and Denver!).
Raymond Biesinger's new book 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off is a masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound:
Biesinger is an iconic designer and illustrator whose instantly recognizable style and entrepreneurial hustle have allowed him to achieve the coveted and elusive status of full-time, economically secure(ish) artist. But over the years – and even in recent times – Beisigner has found himself in the all-too-common and endlessly frustrating circumstance of being owed money by people who refuse to pay it. The sums involved are typically small by the standards of corporate budgets, but it's what Biesinger calls "needed money" – money that makes a huge difference to the life of the artist to whom it is owed.
Speaking from personal experience, getting stiffed is one of the most embittering things that can happen to a creative worker – or any worker (as the tradespeople who've had their wages stolen by Trump can attest). I remember every time I got shafted by a client and often find my mind returning to those humiliating, frustrating moments.
There was the "friend" who hired me to do some work and then just decided never to pay me the $150 we agreed on. There was the university prof who asked me to speak to his class and promised me reimbursement for the taxi and then stiffed me for 20 quid. There was the international magazine who commissioned a short story from me, accepted it, then tried to cram a bullshit contract down my throat and refused to discuss any modifications to its terrible terms, finally stiffing me for the $500 they owed me.
There was the largest publisher in the world, who commissioned a novella from me for an anthology, promising me tens of thousands of dollars, who accepted the novella, and then "discovered" they hadn't ever finalized the contract for the anthology and canceled it, stiffing me in the process. The fact that I went on to sell that novella several times over, both in book form and as a graphic novel, and for film rights (twice!), making far more money in the process, doesn't make me any less angry about these fuckers who just screwed me without a second thought.
Objectively speaking, there is no reason for me to dwell on these little humiliations. It doesn't do me any good. It doesn't make the dickheads who screwed me feel bad. It is, as the proverb goes, "drinking poison and hoping your enemy dies." But I can't help it.
Neither, it seems, can Biesinger. But unlike me, Biesinger has found an incredibly productive – and inspiring – way to deal with that otherwise pointless seething. In 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Biesinger reflects on the nine titular ripoffs, telling the story of how he got ripped off, what he did to get his own back, how he felt about it at the time, and how he feels about it in retrospect.
The book's subtitle ("An informal self-defense guide for independent creatives") sets up this book as a kind of manual for navigating these situations in your own life, and there's plenty of that in here – successes and failures for the rest of us to learn from. These stories are often very satisfying, as the little guy gets the justice he deserves. But the most interesting part of this book is Biesinger's reflections on the meaning of the different ripoffs he confronted, and how they relate to his own work.
Because – as Biesinger will tell you – he rips stuff off, too. All artists do. "Good artists copy; great artists steal." (said Picasso (who was ripping off Faulkner) (or Stravinsky) (or Eliot) (or Trilling). He carefully parses through the muddied ethics of lifting elements for collage, for inspiration, and just because you forgot that you weren't supposed to. Much of Biesinger's early work was collage, and (as a collagist myself), and you can't do that work without developing complicated feelings about creative ownership.
Biesinger also straddles a line between commercial illustrator, producing commissioned pieces to order for magazine and advertising art directors; and fine artist, making "artistic" pieces for his own satisfaction, and selling these as prints. While he's proud of all this work, it's clear that how he relates to his own work depends a great deal on whether it falls into the former category or the latter. Part of that difference is a blanket prohibition on licensing his "artistic" pieces for commercial work.
This just adds to the moral complexity of Biesinger's deliberations: when an extremely well-funded charity misappropriates an "artistic" piece to accompany an exemplary article on women's health advocacy, he wrestles with a whole suite of concerns and mitigations – the "charity"'s reputation as a money-laundry for a wealthy plutocrat, his support for the article, his principle about not licensing his "artistic" work. It's typical of the kind of nuance that Biesinger brings to these chapters.
Also fascinating is Biesinger's chapter about a fan who solicited artistic advice from him, but went on to produce a portfolio of uncredited knock-offs of Biesinger's own signature style. Biesinger describes how he blasted this young artist for abusing his goodwill and unjustly profiting from Biesinger's own work developing his style, and then, in later years, repented of his angry outburst. In a delightful coda, Biesinger recounts how he looked up this artist years later, only to discover that he had matured into a talented, original, successful and ambitious creator. When Biesinger emailed the artist to apologize for his furious letter, the other artist replied that Biesinger's blast had been the kick in the pants he'd needed to finally figure out his own style, and he credits his later success to Biesinger's fury.
At the root of all nine tales of ripoffs is the inadequacy and/or inappropriateness of the legal system as a tool for redress when an independent creator is ripped off. In the case of commercial ripoffs – by agencies large and small, by fly-by-night concert promoters, by gallerists peddling unauthorized reproductions – the sums involved are usually far too small to involve lawyers or the courts. In the case of disputes with other artists – like the copyist who bit Biesinger's style – the law is (rightly) silent, because styles are not copyrightable.
In telling these nine tales, Biesinger beautifully illustrates the limitations of copyright as the sole regulator of creative activity. Copyright law (and its cousin, contract law) might be suitable for mediating commercial transactions between creative workers and businesses, but it's utterly unsuitable for other kinds of interactions, including interactions between artistic peers, or between artists and creators working in related disciplines. The most important thing that Biesinger is doing in this book is setting out a continuum of relationships and detailing many of the different tools available to creators to resolve disputes arising at different points on that continuum.
Given Biesinger's justly deserved fame as an illustrator, this is also a beautiful book, published in pocket-sized trim by Drawn & Quarterly, one of the world's great indie comics presses. The many, many illustrations in this small volume don't just bring the subject matter to life – they're artistic delights in their own right. It's a reminder of how wonderful the "art" part of all this stuff is, and how that complicates the all too familiar labor issues at the book's core.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
Making up words is a perfectly cromulent passtime, and while most of the words we coin disappear as soon as they fall from our lips, every now and again, you find a word that fits so nice and kentucky in the public discourse that it acquires a life of its own:
I've been trying to increase the salience of digital human rights in the public imagination for a quarter of a century, starting with the campaign to get people to appreciate that the internet matters, and that tech policy isn't just the delusion that the governance of spaces where sad nerds argue about Star Trek is somehow relevant to human thriving:
Now, eventually people figured out that a) the internet mattered and, b) it was going dreadfully wrong. So my job changed again, from "how the internet is governed matters" to "you can't fix the internet with wishful thinking," for example, when people said we could solve its problems by banning general purpose computers:
Along the way, many of us have coined words in a bid to encapsulate the abstract, technical ideas at the core of these arguments. This isn't a vanity project! Creating a common vocabulary is a necessary precondition for having the substantive, vital debates we'll need to tackle the real, thorny issues raised by digital systems. So there's "free software," "open source," "filternet," "chat control," "back doors," and my own contributions, like "adversarial interoperability":
These have all found their own niches, but nearly all of them are just that: niche. Some don't even rise to "niche": they're shibboleths, insider terms that confuse and intimidate normies and distract from the real fights with semantic ones, like whether it's "FOSS" or "FLOSS" or something else entirely:
"Enshittification" took root in my hindbrain, rolling around and around, agglomerating lots of different thoughts and critiques I'd been making for years, crystallizing them into a coherent thesis:
This kind of spontaneous crystallization is the dividend of doing lots of work in public, trying to take every half-formed thought and pin it down in public writing, something I've been doing for decades:
After those first couple articles, "enshittification" raced around the internet. There's two reasons for this: first, "enshittification" is a naughty word that's fun to say. Journalists love getting to put "shit" in their copy:
And nothing enlivens an academic's day like getting to use a word like "enshittification" in a journal article (doubtless this also amuses the editors, peer-reviewers, copyeditors, typesetters, etc):
That was where I started, too! The first time I used "enshittification" was in a throwaway bad-tempered rant about the decay of Tripadvisor into utter uselessness, which drew a small chorus of appreciative chuckles about the word:
The word rattled around my mind for five months before attaching itself to my detailed theory of platform decay. But it was that detailed critique, coupled with a minor license to swear, that gave "enshittification" a life of its own. How do I know that the theory was as important as the swearing? Because the small wave of amusement that followed my first use of "enshittification" petered out in less than a day. It was only when I added the theory that the word took hold.
Likewise: how do I know that the theory needed to be blended with swearing to break out of the esoteric realm of tech policy debates (which the public had roundly ignored for more than two decades)? Well, because I spent two decades writing about this stuff without making anything like the dents that appeared once I added an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable to that critique.
Adding "enshittification" to the critique got me more column inches, a longer hearing, a more vibrant debate, than anything else I'd tried. First, Wired availed itself of the Creative Commons license on my second long-form article on the subject and reprinted it as a 4,200-word feature. I've been writing for Wired for more than thirty years and this is by far the longest thing I've published with them – a big, roomy, discursive piece that was run verbatim, with every one of my cherished darlings unmurdered.
That gave the word – and the whole critique, with all its spiky corners – a global airing, leading to more pickup and discussion. Eventually, the American Dialect Society named it their "Word of the Year" (and their "Tech Word of the Year"):
I've been dragged into (good natured) fights over the German, Spanish, French and Italian translations for the term. When I taped an NPR show before a live audience with ASL interpretation, I got to watch a Deaf fan politely inform the interpreter that she didn't need to finger-spell "enshittification," because it had already been given an ASL sign by the US Deaf community:
Which prompted the rock-ribbed Financial Times to get in touch with me and publish the speech – again, nearly verbatim – as a whopping 6,400 word feature in their weekend magazine:
This was the start of the rise of enshittification. The word is spreading farther than ever, in ways that I have nothing to do with, along with the critique I hung on it. In other words, the bit of string that tech policy wonks have been pushing on for a quarter of a century is actually starting to move, and it's actually accelerating.
Despite this (or more likely because of it), there's a growing chorus of "concerned" people who say they like the critique but fret that it is being held back because you can't use it "at church or when talking to K-12 students" (my favorite variant: "I couldn't say this at a NATO conference"). I leave it up to you whether you use the word with your K-12 students, NATO generals, or fellow parishoners (though I assure you that all three groups are conversant with the dirty little word at the root of my coinage). If you don't want to use "enshittification," you can coin your own word – or just use one of the dozens of words that failed to gain public attention over the past 25 years (might I suggest "platform decay").
What's so funny about all this pearl-clutching is that it comes from people who universally profess to have the intestinal fortitude to hear the word "enshittification" without experiencing psychological trauma, but worry that other people might not be so strong-minded. They continue to say this even as the most conservative officials in the most staid of exalted forums use the word without a hint of embarrassment, much less apology:
After spending half my life trying to get stuff like this into the discourse, I've developed some hard-won, informed views on how ideas succeed:
First: the minor obscenity is a feature, not a bug. The marriage of something long and serious to something short and funny is a happy one that makes both the word and the ideas better off than they'd be on their own. As Lenny Bruce wrote in his canonical work in the subject, the aptly named How to Talk Dirty and Influence People:
I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you.
Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here.
Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story. They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.
Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound. As I said in that Berlin speech:
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
Finally: "coinage" is both more – and less – than thinking of the word. After the American Dialect Society gave honors to "enshittification," a few people slid into my mentions with citations to "enshittification" that preceded my usage. I find this completely unsurprising, because English is such a slippery and playful tongue, because English speakers love to swear, and because infixing is such a fun way to swear (e.g. "unfuckingbelievable"). But of course, I hadn't encountered any of those other usages before I came up with the word independently, nor had any of those other usages spread appreciably beyond the speaker (it appears that each of the handful of predecessors to my usage represents an act of independent coinage).
If "coinage" was just a matter of thinking up the word, you could write a small python script that infixed the word "shit" into every syllable of every word in the OED, publish the resulting text file, and declare priority over all subsequent inventive swearers.
On the one hand, coinage takes place when the coiner a) independently invents a word; and b) creates the context for that word that causes it to escape from the coiner's immediate milieu and into the wider world.
But on the other hand – and far more importantly – the fact that a successful coinage requires popular uptake by people unknown to the coiner means that the coiner only ever plays a small role in the coinage. Yes, there would be no popularization without the coinage – but there would also be no coinage without the popularization. Words belong to groups of speakers, not individuals. Language is a cultural phenomenon, not an individual one.
Which is rather the point, isn't it? After a quarter of a century of being part of a community that fought tirelessly to get a serious and widespread consideration of tech policy underway, we're closer than ever, thanks, in part, to "enshittification." If someone else independently used that word before me, if some people use the word loosely, if the word makes some people uncomfortable, that's fine, provided that the word is doing what I want it to do, what I've devoted my life to doing.
The point of coining words isn't the pilkunnussija's obsession with precise usage, nor the petty glory of being known as a coiner, nor ensuring that NATO generals' virgin ears are protected from the word "shit" – a word that, incidentally, is also the root of "science":
Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Second: the fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners.
This is such an interesting take. I see people online all day talking about the watering down or semantic shifting, but I've never really seen the coiner of a term make this argument. As a linguist, it's kind of a refreshing take. I'm often sort of torn between defending the technical sense of a word and letting people understand that semantic drift is normal and expected, but this is a very interesting thought -- that broad colloquial usage will lead some people to the more technical meaning and the theoretical framework behind it.
As a native Spanish (from Spain) speaker, I wonder if the possible translation "enmierdamiento" produces the same reaction of pearl clutching because of the word "mierda", which we use often but it's not one of the strongest bad words we use on a daily basis. We could use it in front of children of any age and we do, and they use it too, as a matter of fact.
I also know that, at least the Wikipedia article does not translate the title as "enmierdamiento", and I also wonder why they went for translating it as an explanation and ignoring the "shit" part of it. I agree with this translation, partly because as I said, swear words and bad words are so commonplace in Spain that they are not nearly as fun as in English.
OD&D and AD&D 1e had special rules for subduing dragons in combat so they could be sold, making the dragon itself potentially more valuable than its hoard (Clyde Duensing III, Dragon 134, June 1988)
areudirty
origamiaround
theartofmadeline
dededos
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
blakekathryn
