Original Content and Observations from Your Obedient Serpent, Athelind Llewellyn Long.
For the account I use to follow, like and reblog things, see http://athelind.tumblr.com
I've said it before, but as a [tumblr] Old, it is our task to bear witness to history for the younger generations.
With this in mind, I need to make clear that, as shoddy and half-assed as the "America 250" debacle may look to Millennials and Zoomers, this cheap-ass parking lot carnival is vastly more pathetic for those of us who remember the Bicentennial.
The Bicentennial, for context, happened in an election year, just a year after the end of the Vietnam War, and only a few years after President Nixon resigned after being impeached in a corruption scandal. And we STILL had three years of lead-up hype and preparation for it.
An entirely unofficial lead-off to the festivities in 1973 was a recreation of the Boston Tea Party that included hanging Nixon in effigy.
On some level, you could say that, in 1976, we were celebrating that The System Worked As Designed: a sitting President was deemed accountable for crimes committed in his name and under his orders, with Congress and the Supreme Court enforcing the checks and balances engineered into the Constitution, and the press uncovering the secrets and lies and laying them bare for all to see.
And in response, the Republican Party proceeded to spend the next half-century doing everything in their power to ensure that such a thing wouldn't happen again.
Let's try something out. Post a movie (trailer and/or poster is enough) that exemplifies the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons to you, and make sure to include what your favourite edition of the game is. No actual D&D-branded movies, please, that's too easy. Other than that this is a judgement-free zone of genuine curiosity, don't mock other people's picks. I'll start.
3.5 player here
I feel like I can't think of any which are absolutely, 100% bang-on (Though I haven't seen Fire and Ice yet which seems like the most D&D movie ever) but a few which may come to mind are like
Wiiiizarrds?
...With the notable addition of nazis to the whole vibe
Wizardry's 1991 adaptation, which I can't seem to find a decent cover of
And this is technically an OVA about the length of a movie, but Ruin Explorers is close to my heart as an anime I watched a lot as a kid. This one might be cheating, though, as I'm pretty sure it's based on someone's TTRPG campaign.
If we go for animated series and manga, suddenly the pool gets a whole lot bigger - Overlord, Goblin Slayer (Skip the anime on that one - it misses the point,) Samurai Jack, and pretty much any Dungeon series like Dungeon Meshi, Tower Dungeon, or the first half of I'm A Spider, So What?
I kinda feel like the pattern I'm noticing out of those is they tend to focus on either disconnected shorter adventures, or very long quests through a dungeon and focusing on whatever random encounters are along the way. That particular experience tends to not be found in a lot movies.
There's also the curious case of the Adventures of Puss in Boots animated series, which is structured essentially like a long-running D&D campaign (Concepts show up for little one-off adventures and then start to come back and be iterated upon for further adventures, eventually leading to exploration of the Underdark and alternate planes such as Hell as things escalate to apocalyptic themes and the characters get more experienced.)
(...Like, no, really. That's what that series is actually about. At one point they parody Griffith from Berserk.)
Okay, [tumblr] ate my first run at this, so let's try again.
I started gaming in the late 1970s, but because I spent most of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s playing other systems entirely, I sort of skipped directly from AD&D1 to Pathfinder 2e.¹ Oh, I had brief flirtations with AD&D2 and D&D3.X, but I skipped 4e and 5e entirely.
¹ Yes, I am counting Pathfinder 1e, 2e, and Remastered as "Editions of D&D". The Paizo pedigree is as valid as any WotC release. Fight me.
I don't know if AD&D1 is my favorite edition (I would certainly rather play Pathfinder, whose mechanics have benefitted from half a century of playtesting and refinement), but I'll always have an affection for it -- especially for those early days, when everyone was playing a mishmash of AD&D1, "Three Little Books" D&D, third-party supplements like The Arduin Grimoire, and whatever house rules they came up with.
For me, the movie that best captures The Spirit of Dungeons & Dragons is 1981's Clash of the Titans.
I'd been playing D&D for three whole years when Clash came out. It's from that strange post-Jaws, post-Star Wars era, where all the studios were pivoting toward the new paradigm of the Summer Blockbuster. They all knew that Star Wars had finally broken Fantastic Adventure free of the B-Movie Genre Ghetto, and were trying to figure out just how to jump on that bandwagon.
Sometimes, they got it right, and gave us other classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Alien (1979).
Sometimes, they weren't quite sure what they were doing, and we'd get odd artifacts like The Black Hole (1979) ... and Clash of the Titans.
I mean, I'm sure the idea sounded good in the meetings. Ray Harryhausen was one of the Big Names in special effects. He was the genius of stop-motion animation, and had been cranking out well-regarded Saturday Matinee fare since the late 1950s. "Let's give this B-Movie icon an A-List budget and an A-List cast and see what happens!"
What happened looked and felt like a very expensive B movie, full of distinguished actors who never quite seemed in sync with the material.
The plot beats are very D&D, as young Perseus levels up (very very quickly), obtains the various magic items and companions that he needs for his quest (that sword is unquestionably +3 and Vorpal), and wins the day by Clever Use of This Thing He Picked Up rather than whittling away at the kaiju's Hit Points.
Harryhausen's other sword & sorcery excursions -- Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad movies -- are hugely influential on the hobby, but they're B-Movies, and they know exactly what they are. Clash, on the other claw, the Very Expensive B Movie, has an awkwardness that really captures that spirit of early D&D, a sense of "we're breaking new ground, we're not sure what we're doing, and the dice may screw us at any point, but whatever this is, it's gonna be BIG."
I've also got to give a nod to 1984's Conan the Destroyer. Yeah, that's right, Arnold Schwarzenegger's second turn in the role. It's not a very good movie, and it's certainly not a better movie than Conan the Barbarian. However, it feels very D&D, in part because it backs away from the Biblical Epic pretensions of Milius' film, in part because it has that B Movie Charm, but most of all, it's because, unlike the first film, it has a full party of D&D archetypes: Barbarian, Wizard, Thief, and, um ... I'm gonna go with "Monk" for Grace Jones.
And if we're allowing TV shows as well as movies, well, then, I've got to include Thundarr the Barbarian.
My economics professor just talked about hypothetical relationships between supply and demand and then played YouTube videos and skipped half his lectures
The real reason that Economics has earned the name "The Dismal Science" is not because of its dismal conclusions or even its dismal premises: it's because of its dismal grasp on the scientific method itself.
In the dominant schools of economics, if the empirical data doesn't match the predictions of theory, then the usual conclusion is that the data is at fault: the participants in the studies aren't the "rational actors" of the theory, or there are outside factors that have "corrupted" the experiment, and these should be eliminated rather than incorporated into a revised model.
When I took economics in college, I was taught about "The Tragedy of the Commons" as if it were an historical fact, an enshrined inevitability that had emerged time and again throughout the historical record. I was astonished and aghast to discover, years later, that it was actually the title of an essay written within my lifetime, and almost completely contradicted by the actual institution of the commons, which endured for centuries without the apocalyptic consequences predicted by economic theory.
(The same professor also said, on the first day of class, that "the stock market isn't economics, it's psychology." Now, that is an hypothesis amply supported by the data; if only more economists understood just how much every other part of their field is also psychology.)
Last Friday, 17 April 2026, my sister, brother-in-law, and I were driving up to West Coast Falconry in Marysville, California, to participate in one of their classes. On the way there, we got a phone call from them: in the early hours of the morning, someone had broken into the Falconry, coaxed the birds out of their enclosures, removed their bands and jesses, and destroyed and vandalized much of the falconry equipment. At the time of the call, all of the birds were still missing, and the sheriff had yet to arrive on the scene.
West Coast Falconry is owned and operated by a master falconer, with a small staff of dedicated people who are devoted to these birds. They run on a tight budget, so this has been devastating both emotionally and financially.
The Falconry's birds include falcons, hawks, owls, and one eagle. These birds are captive-bred or rescued and depend on their handlers for survival.
As of yesterday, four of the birds are still missing.
Local news reports:
A GoFundMe page has been launched, and includes regular updates on the status of the missing birds.
Some notes, based on the comments I have seen on other sites:
At this time, there are no reported suspects in the case. I understand the impulse to immediately blame PETA or other "animal rights" groups, but this is also rural California, and there are plenty of bored teenagers and Trumpinistas out there as well. Please do not turn the comments into a morass of unfounded accusations about whatever perpetrators you might find most likely.
This is not some roadside petting zoo or a "Tiger King" situation. West Coast Falconry is dedicated to conservation, education, and the rehabilitation of injured animals. Please do not turn the comments into a place to spew venom about either the practice of falconry or West Coast Falconry itself.
It is the task of older generations to bear witness to the younger, to recount the events of their lives, so that they are remembered. These personal, first-hand accounts are as important to history as any formal documentation … and because those official accounts often play to an agenda, they are often more important.
In these troubled times, those who have borne witness to the atrocities of the past continue this vital task, standing firm against those who would deny their role in repeating the worst and darkest moments of the last century.
Their words must be heard. There are some things that we must always remember, some things that we must never forget.
But not all of these are hard, dark things. History is more than bleak cruelty. There are moments of light, of hope, of triumph, and it is our duty to remember and share these, as well, to keep that light of hope alive.
I am, as I write, listening to one of those moments, courtesy of https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/, a real-time replay of the Apollo 11 flight. A few minutes ago, I heard Neil Armstrong announce those immortal words: “The Eagle Has Landed.”
I heard them when they were first uttered.
My memories of the Apollo program are entwined with my memories of my mother, who left us not long ago. We watched every one of the Apollo flights, and she kept us home from school to do so on at least one of them. (Of course, one of her Good Republican Cloth Coat acquaintances asked her, “aren’t you worried that they’ll miss something important in school?” I can only image the LOOK Mom must have given them when she responded, “What could be more important than THIS?”) *
I have always suspected that the midsummer scheduling of Apollo 11 was no accident: only the most ardent space flight devotees (like my family) were glued to the television for the dry runs of 8, 9, and 10, but NASA knew that when it was time for the actual landing, the whole world would just stop.
I am aware that much of the manned space program of my childhood was political. The “Space Race” was as much for prestige as for science, a grandiose game of Capture the Flag played to one-up our Soviet counterparts. That’s the official account, these days. That’s the excuse for canceling the last three Apollo missions, the justification for half a century of shoestring budgets. We “won the race,” so why should we still keep running?
I suppose that in the adult world of 1969, this was common knowledge, the enthusiasm leavened with the world-weary cynicism of the times.
But I was five. All I knew about the Soviet Union was that they called their astronauts “cosmonauts.” I didn’t have politics: I had WONDER. I BELIEVED.
I know that I will always see the events of that day through that five-year-old’s eyes … but I have to think that, when the Eagle landed, and a few hours later, when Armstrong took that One Small Step … for just a day, even just an hour … three and a half billion human beings let themselves believe, too. For all the cynical rhetoric then and now about the Apollo program being a nationalistic publicity stunt … for a brief, fragile moment, this was a victory not just for the United States, but for humanity as a whole.
The truth of Apollo 11 isn’t in the flag they raised, which toppled in the exhaust of their departure and has almost certainly faded in half a century of the hard and unrelenting lunar sunlight. It’s etched in the plaque on the leg of the lunar module, in gleaming stainless steel:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
For all mankind.
Look into the night sky tonight, at the the waning gibbous Moon.
And remember:
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, we reached for the Moon, and had it in our grasp.
That we let it go all too soon doesn’t matter: we have touched the sky.
All of us.
In the face of tyranny and cruelty, in the face of catastrophe, remember what we have done, and dare to believe in what we yet can do.
I normally save this one for Moon Landing Day on July 20th, but withy yesterday's launch of Artemis II, I thought it appropriate to bring it back early.
Certainly, all of the emotional resonance still holds true for me. I am certainly of the political and propaganda aspects of this flight, but in this midst of all this hellish turmoil, I am setting those aside to let my inner child embrace that sense of joy and wonder and unity.
We're going back to the moon.
And, yes, "we." Much of the lead-in to yesterday's launch on NASA's streaming service was full of idealistic rhetoric about "discovery and exploration for all", and certainly, there is an element of propaganda there. But I think that for the astronauts and the support staff behind them, those ideals are sincere. The mission patch encapsulates it, with the "AII" deliberately depicted in such a way that it spells "All":
[source]
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen. You carry our hopes and dreams with you. Clear skies.
Growing up on the internet it was drilled into us to not give our real name, age, etc. only for all these social platforms to turn around and be like 😦☝️ um actually, we really need your social security number, credit card, and full government ID.
We weren't supposed to give our info online right up until the corporations figured out that the only way they could make money using the internet was not to sell US the product, but that WE were the product to be sold--to other corporations.
Back in 2011, when the "Web 2.0" social media companies first started pushing this transition, I posted some thoughts I had on the subject on LiveJournal:
Life in these Untidy States: They've Given You A Number, and Made You Think It's a Name
Nov. 13th, 2011 10:19 am
It is a classic trope of science fiction that In the Future, We Will Have Numbers Instead Of Names.
In almost every instance of this trope more recent than Ralph 124C 41+, this is a sure sign that you live in a dystopia. It suggests a world in which human concerns are devalued, and society itself is engineered to make it easier for a large, impersonal bureaucracy to track and monitor its citizens subjects.
Over the last few centuries, as Nation-States have arisen and consolidated their power, there has emerged a doctrine that everyone should have one and only one name, used in any and every context; that this is your only "real" name; and that the only possible reasons to use nicknames, pseudonyms, or any alternative to the name recorded in your governmental and financial records are to conceal unsavory practices, or perpetrate outright fraud.
A name that falls outside a limited range of acceptance criteria may not be accepted as a "real" name, and will certainly engender harsh feelings from governmental and corporate bureaucrats inconvenienced by the nonconformity.
As so many things have, this memetic push has accelerated across the close of the 20th Century and the dawn of the 21st.
Be advised, and be aware:
The only difference between this doctrine of "real" names and the dystopian trope of numbers that replace names is the number of bits in your designation.
The intent is to make you easier to track. The intent is to make you a product.
Vernor Vinge warned us, thirty years ago: when someone knows your True Name, they have power over you.
Government watchlists aside, Google and Facebook aren't making money providing you with free email and search and "social networking". They're making money by selling your easily-monitored habits and interests to other corporations. If you operate under more than one name, if you compartmentalize your life and your purchasing power amongst multiple identities, you are diluting their product by making it more difficult to thoroughly profile you—and they consider that intolerable.
Enlightening References:
EFF: Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online
BoingBoing: Google Plus's "Real Name" policy is abusive; Facebook is not a "Real Name" success story
BoingBoing: Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before?
xkcd: Password Strength
Addendum:Lauren Weinstein: The Coming Fascist Internet
(I have noticed, and not without irony, that the same kind of people who once ranted about Social Security Numbers as "the Mark of the Beast" tend to automatically and reflexively agree with the idea that people only have one "real name".)
Postscript: True Names and True Selves
Nov. 16th, 2011 05:44 am
In a response to my post about the Doctrine of "Real" Names, araquan provided the following insight from a Charlie Rose interview [2026 note: Dead Link] with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg:
Facebook COO Sandberg talked about the power of relationship-based networks, contrasting "the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends."
"So that's Google versus Facebook right there," Rose replied.
Sandberg didn't agree. She thinks the entire first phase of the Web's development -- which led to "a lot of wonderful things" -- was largely based on "anonymity and links between crowds."
The next stage of development, the one Facebook has spearheaded, is built around identity. "The social Web can't exist until you are your real self online," Sandberg said. "I have to be me, you have to be Charlie Rose."
The logical fallacy, of course, is the conflation of "real self" with "legal name". You can't be your "real self" if you're always wondering, "what would my family think of this? What if my boss Googles me?"
I am my "real self" online, and my "social Web" is woven among those who know me as "Athelind" and "Your Obedient Serpent".
That other name?
That's not my "real self", Ms. Sandberg.
That's my banking information, and I know why you want it.
[notes under cut]
I have changed all links that originally pointed to LiveJournal to their corresponding links on Dreamwidth.
I have removed a link that now points to an Alex Jones website. Rest assured that this was not its original destination.
I have added emphasis to the last line of the second journal entry that was not there in the original.
I have included the original LJ tags below and as Tumblr tags.
bohica, boingboing, economics, general semantics, heresy, magick, nothing to lose but our chains, roleplaying myself, secret id, security, semiotics, the revolution will be digitized, the terrorists have already won, true names, untidy states, warning
Ramadan starts tonight (Feb 17) as well, AND the Winter Olympics are going on. Technically, Ramadan starts tomorrow, but since Islamic days start at sunset, it effectively begins at sunset tonight. So:
I ran the numbers on every year from 1924 to 2200 — 276 years — to find when Fat Tuesday, Lunar New Year, the start of Ramadan, AND the Winter Olympics all overlap.
Fat Tuesday and Lunar New Year land on the same day 27 times in that window. That's roughly once a decade, but the gaps are uneven - there was a 24-year drought from 2002 to 2026, then it happens again just 3 years later in 2029.
Of those 27, only 8 fall in a Winter Olympics year: 1958, 1978, 2002, 2026, 2046, 2070, 2154, and 2198.
Of those 8, how many also have Ramadan starting that same day? One. Just 2026. And even that's technically off by a calendar day (Ramadan begins at sunset on the 17th, with the 18th as the first full day).
The next-closest Winter Olympics match is 2154, where Ramadan is still 32 days away. If you drop the Olympics requirement entirely, the three-way overlap (Fat Tuesday + Lunar New Year + Ramadan) only happens 4 times in 276 years: 1931, 2029, 2124, and 2127. None of those are Olympics years.
Today is a once-in-centuries alignment. There is nothing else like it in the entire 1924-2200 window.
The thing that continues to upset me about Neil Gaiman is that so many of his works involve predators taking advantage of vulnerable people, assaulting and abusing them in a clear reflection of all of the accusations and evidence that have come out against him. "Calliope" is the most overt, but it's a common thread through his entire body of work.
Please spare me the "oh, we should have known what he was from what he wrote" bullshit. That's patently absurd, and it's not the upsetting part.
It's that those stories that he wrote make it very, very clear who the Bad Person was. That's why he can't take refuge in "oh, I'm autistic, I couldn't read the social cues to realize I was in the wrong."
He sure as hell could WRITE the social cues to show who was in the wrong.
He KNEW. He knew how to be a good person, and how to be a bad person.
A couple of years ago, as I was taking advantage of my Paramount+ subscription to rewatch All The Star Trek Ever, I had an epiphany:
The Star Trek universe has been experiencing timeline alterations since the very first time-travel episode in TOS Season 1.
The Doylist explanation, of course, is that they were still working out the vague details of their Generic Space Opera Setting, but from a Watsonian perspective, the now-familiar elements of what we now think of as "the Star Trek Universe" don't really start settling in until after "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (Season 1, Episode 19). Immediately after, in fact: I think that the very next episode, "Court Martial" (S1 E20), is the first time we hear the term "Starfleet" used to describe the uniformed service under which Kirk's Enterprise operated. Previous episodes bandied about terms like "Star Service", "Spacefleet Command", "Space Central", and everyone's favorite, the "United Earth Space Probe Agency". The first mention of the "Prime Directive" comes in "The Return of the Archons" (S1 E21), and I don't think we hear about the "Federation" until "A Taste of Armageddon" (S1 E23).
Even with all these key pieces on the table, though, there are still some peculiarities. Starfleet is sometimes referred to with the definite article, and isn't quite a compound noun yet: "The Star Fleet". There are a few other odd quirks that I noted at the time but don't quite recall right now, but ultimately, it's not until after "The City on the Edge of Forever" (S1 E28) -- another time travel episode, and one that definitely left some butterfly effects on the timeline -- that things start to feel like the Star Trek setting that we all know and love -- making it a milestone in more ways than one.
Doylisticly, of course, a big part of that is that there was only one more S1 episode after "City", and then they had a production break of several months to finally pull all of these ad hoc script elements into a coherent, largely consistent setting.
The fact that so many of these defining elements show up shortly after time travel episodes is just a bonus for the Watsons out there.
Basically, the point of Oscar the Grouch is so that kids know it’s okay to have fucking emotions and moods that aren’t all cheery. That’s the fucking point. And that’s even more important to the kids who are living in harsh realities. Realities where their families are falling apart or they’re not getting food every day or they’re getting abused. Telling them it’s okay to express that they are NOT HAPPY because they are HURTING is so fucking important I cannot even say it.
Big Bird is nice, but goddamn, when you’re a kid who’s hungry and you just got beat by your caretaker and all you wanna do is hole up somewhere and tell everyone else to go away because you don’t even have words for how bad things feel? Big Bird is not your dude. Cheery happy, “well, let’s play a happy game!” Big Bird ain’t cutting it for you. Oscar the Grouch is your dude. Oscar the Grouch is the dude who tells you it’s okay to put the lid on your garbage can and be alone and be upset.
Big Bird tries to talk you out of being upset (and maybe sometimes that’s okay). But Oscar the Grouch teaches you that, no, it’s okay to be upset and you have every right to stay upset and grouchy and unhappy until you’re at a point where that can change. Oscar the Grouch teaches you that you have a right to your emotions, whatever they are.
On a more advanced level, the point of Oscar is to start teaching kids that it’s okay to have boundaries, it’s okay to want to just go into your trash can (home/safe place) and not be bothered, it’s okay to defend those boundaries and say “go away!” when you want people to go the fuck away and that you can still have a place on Sesame Street. That not everyone has to be shiny, happy Big Bird.
#i also think it’s really important that oscar is#a beloved member of the sesame street community#kids often internalize the lesson that No One Loves You When You Misbehave#and seeing all the nice people of the Street consistently be like#aw yeah that’s oscar he’s a little difficult sometimes#but he’s part of the neighborhood and we always include him#yeah i think that matters a lot
for the record. IF i was trapped by the devil and forced to make a tangled live-action. first of all i would kill everyone in disney corporate and then myself. but assuming that's not an option i would cut down maximus's screentime and give like half his role to cassandra from the tv series. would that suck bc the javert horse is funny as hell? yeah! would it save on money AND would it cut down on the amount of time we have to watch a shitty cgi horse do shitty cgi slapstick that looks like fuck in live-action? fuck yeah it would!! bring the lesbian in early let's see what happens
Do you think that actors and crew members are not, also, unionised? literally everyone is unionised. Bring that lesbian in early. Eliminate the horse. Eliminate Flynn. Make it all lesbians.
Unfortunately, CGI Visual Effects Workers are largely NOT unionized. There is a VFX Union, but it's fairly new, and unionization is only happening slowly -- which means that yes, making your VFX crew make a shitty CGI horse might indeed be cheaper than hiring a real horse and the animal trainer and handling staff to go with it.
This came up during the big strikes of 2022-2023, though I don't recall the details. It's a big reason why traditional 2D animation has fallen by the wayside, and it's a HUGE reason why so many big-screen movies are effects-bloated blockbusters.
A few weeks back, I found myself reminiscing about the Old School concept of the Campaign on one of @vixensdungeon's threads.
After mulling this over in the back my mind for a few days, I had an epiphany:
My Early Gaming Experience was Not Standard, even for the era, and that has shaped my approach to role-playing and my expectations for campaigns ever since.
Back In the Day, the Platonic Ideal was the Campaign, as Vix described: the persistent world in which characters adventures. Players might come and go, characters might level up and retire, grand epics might be told -- but the Campaign was always there. The idea of "the same game" running for years or decades was always the unspoken goal -- bold indeed, when the very concept of an RPG had been around for less than a decade.
My gaming in high school was largely tied up in a couple of intertwining campaigns -- as I think I've mentioned recently, characters weren't as locked into their "home games" as they tend to be nowadays, and it wasn't uncommon for a single player to have more than one character in a campaign, or even to play more than one character in the same session.
There was my own campaign, which I ran during lunch hours at high school, and there was the Big Campaign run by my friend K, who was in college. K's Campaign really did seem to be working toward that Platonic Ideal: a persistent setting with multiple and constantly-changing groups of players and PCs.
I only got to play in K's games at conventions -- I lived in the Middle of Nowhere in North San Diego County, and he lived smack in the middle of Orange County (Anaheim, I think). Mind you, I went to a LOT of conventions in my high school years, so I was hitting one every couple of months.
Between those games, however, K, our other friend J, and I kept things going via the United States Postal Service. We'd churn out thick, multi-page missives detailing what our characters were doing between adventures.
Remember the Stronghold Rules in AD&D1, where all the different classes got to establish different kinds of forts or castles or temples after they reached a certain level? They were one of those things that nobody ever paid attention to, and got dropped by the time 3rd Edition rolled around.
Well, we used them. A lot. And tweaked them, of course, because that's how we rolled in those days. The cleric built her Temple; the ranger built a great Hall where rangers and druids gathered and trained; the wizard bought the Tavern That You All Meet In almost before it became a cliché.
And that's one of the things that the letter-writing side of K's Campaign largely focused on: developing our strongholds, interacting with our henchmen and hirelings, tying new PCs into the existing narrative scaffold.
A few years later, Aaron Allston would introduce the concept of "Bluebooking" in the Champions supplement Strike Force, and it was basically the same idea: the game doesn't have to stop when you leave the table.
In any event, because of all this, and a few other games with their own between-session in-character interactions, I always assumed that blue-booking was the norm. I thought most people did this: dove into their backstories, had in-character interactions between formal game sessions, played side adventures and solo sessions when the opportunity arose. For forty-five years, I thought that was a mark of a successful game.
I ran an online game on Discord for several years, and because we frequently had scheduling issues and I am not the most reliable of GMs, I set up a specific channel for "Unmoderated RP", a place for the players to have in-character interactions and conversations between sessions.
It basically went unused. And I thought that reflected a general disinterest in the campaign itself, even though everyone mostly seemed to enjoy themselves during actual sessions.
And that's what I have finally figured out, after all these years: my unconscious expectations for TTRPGs have not been reasonable.
The game doesn't have to stop when you leave the table -- but it doesn't have to keep going, either. And for most people, it doesn't.
Most people walk away from the table and leave their characters there.
(Don't expect me to do that, though. I'm here to make blorbos, and I will hug them and squeeze them.)
Nothing frustrates me more than people who talk about whether a presidential candidate would be a “strong leader”. People who want to be led are and always have been the single greatest danger to freedom.
The role of the President is not to lead the country.
The role of the President is to serve the country.
If you think the United States is “choosing a leader” tomorrow, you do not understand American democracy.
The last year and a half has been a job interview.
A thread about the Johnny Cash cover of "Hurt" and Trent Reznor's reaction to it showed up on my dash this morning. There was one particular comment that reminded me of something, but I didn't want to derail that thread, and so, here we are.
@sophiamcdougall wrote:
... I think the fact that Cash did not write it is crucial to the power of his version. This is a young man's song about suffering, about addiction and self-destruction in youth. And Cash is, in the most majestic possible way, taking that and going "oh kid, you have no idea"...
When I read that, I was reminded of a similar situation, where an older artist brings new meaning to a younger artist's song -- but in this case, it's the same artist.
Joni Mitchell recorded her song "Both Sides, Now" in 1969, when she was 26:
And here's a version from 2000, when she was 57:
In 2015, Ms. Mitchell suffered a brain aneurism, and had to re-learn how to walk, speak, and play guitar.
Despite this, she still performs live on occasion. Here she is at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, at the age of 79:
She really has looked at life from both sides, now.
"Both Sides Now"
Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way
But now it's just another show
You leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away
I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all
Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way
But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day
I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
(For reference, Trent Reznor was 29 when he released "Hurt" in 1994, and Johnny Cash was 70 when he covered it in 2002.)
i think theres this idea in the general public that the "best" fanfic gets turned into real books like 50 shades of grey. but the truth is that the best fanfic can never be published as an actual book because its intricately woven into the canon material so its inseparable even if you change the names
Amusingly, I was just reminiscing with a friend about an exception that proves the rule. In this instance, the fanfic had to have the characters and setting altered, and the "real books" got to restore the original cast and canon:
In the 1970s, Don Rosa wrote and drew a comic called The Pertwillaby Papers, first for his college newspaper, then for a comic collector fanzine. Rosa had grown up on the epic Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge tales from comics legend Carl Barks, and The Pertwillaby Papers evolved soon into was a high adventure in the Barks style. One of the first story arcs was actually a stealth sequel/homage to one of Barks' classic Duck stories, with the human cast of the series standing in for the Duck cast.
In the '80s, Disney relaunched its US comics line, and Rosa got the opportunity to write and draw new Duck stories. His first story was an adaptation of that first Pertwillaby arc, with the Ducks taking back their roles from the Pertwillaby cast.
Rosa went on to write Duck stories for Disney for almost twenty years, and is now considered with the same high regard as Barks himself. Eventually, he mined all of the Pertwillaby story arcs for plots and ideas, completing one story left hanging in its original form.
As for canon, well, he paid more attention to the continuity Barks had established than Barks himself did (much to the master's dismay), and his magnum opus, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, is a glorious deep dive into the minutiae of McDuck trivia from the Barks years.
