A Dang Shame

Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child.  Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm.  They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans.  One of them had a floppy-eared dog.  Sometimes there was a pretty lady there.  When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down.  If I remember all that right.

I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility.  They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.

Well, around pandemic time, they actually did.  Muscle cars exist again, happy day!  But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.

And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well.  It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history.  Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag.  The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.

General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children.  Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.”  Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.

Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills.  Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers.  May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.

Shame shame shame, a little song of shame.  Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way.  A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.

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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.

anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see.  but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.

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Spoil Me This, but Ne’er That

I really don’t care about being spoiled on most narrative media.  I might have felt very different about it when The 6th Sense came out, but I don’t even remember.  Anyway, spoil anything you want in the comments.

If something is good, it’ll still have some interest in the execution.  I knew Gregor Samsa turned into a bug and whatever happened after that was sad, absurd, and unpleasant.  The specifics still matter, still animate the reading experience.

But there is one story where I know the setup but do not know how it ends, and I would like to preserve the surprise.  Maybe it’s because the hook is more compelling than most, with no obvious solution.  Anyway, the story is centuries old; I’m a little overdue to find out.

But still, don’t spoil it!

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How to Play Right

I may have given the idea, by way of some cheek, that I am an inflexible taskmaster as a GM.  I think it’s possible to have standards in player behavior while also adapting to what the players want to do.  Observe the comments on this old post, where I GM’d a little adventure, wordpress style…

RP by Comment

If the whole thing is too much to read, the teal deer:  In the end I had one player left.  He wanted to cut jeezis some slack, which is not what I’d originally set out to do at all.  But he was being a good player, writing a story that worked, so I let it happen.

Maybe consistency isn’t the thing I’m desiring the most.  Maybe I just want to see players write characters that I would ever want to see in media.  Hero, antihero, villain, joker – just be entertaining.  Not to yourself alone; consider the audience of people you are playing with.

That includes the GM.

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TTRPGs as Writing

On my previous post, I suggested an alignment system – a declaration of a character’s moral inclinations – could be a useful tool to avoid some of the annoyances I’ve had in players having wildly inconsistent characters.  But why does that bother me?

On one level, the obvious.  Hard to plan the overarching path of a story if you have no idea how a character will respond to it.  But there’s something more.

I can’t help but see TTRPGs as an act of creative writing.  I’m bothered by shit characters because they are shit writing.  If I could just get with players on their level I’d be ok, right?

I can’t.  I can’t see it as disposable fluff time, a meaningless jackoff session.  Why not?  If it is, I’m just the fool distributing handjobs for free.

I would literally rather hold the unhygienic penii of strangers in both hands and tease them to climax on my t-shirt than GM for bad players.

Does that make sense of where I’m coming from?  heh.  coming.

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Alignment Systems or No?

I don’t have a computer right now (composing this on cellphone) so I can’t type well enough to really write.  But I’d like to start a little discussion.  Alignment systems in TTRPGs:  yea or nay?

For the longest I wasn’t going to include one in my home brew RPG, but as I reflected on my annoyance with inconsistent player morals, I think, yeah, I want that.  I want to be able to point at that entry on a character sheet and say, what are you doing now?

Wanna change that “nice” to “naughty”?  Again?  Why don’t you just start your next guy as naughty and save yourself the trouble?  Why do you keep doing this to me mothafuckas?  This was supposed to be a fun game, not a morality play, not a psychodrama.

I don’t want to make that alignment have metaphysical reality / game effect to it, just want a guardrail for player behavior.  Assuming it would even work, I dunno…

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Chronic Pain Tetris Game

Remember that news story about how a reporter randomly found out his wife had berserk record-breaking ultra Tetris skills?  I know a lot of AFAB people have chronic pain, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, shit like that.  And I know video games like Tetris can engage the mind in a way that helps distract from pain.  I wonder out my ass like an evopsych bro, are wimmenfolk better at Tetris because of chronic pain?  Could I have a career in pop science fluff pieces?

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Manoposting III: An Unfortunate Self-Immolation

I’m sure we’ve all been following the really important things happening in US culture at the moment, but it’s nice to see our humorists put them in perspective, cut through the haze of this whirlwind we’re all experiencing.  I present for you D’Angelo Wallace’s thoughts on ostensible feminist Katy Perry’s newest album, made with the help of notorious alleged rapist Dr. Luke.

Well worth watching.

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Manoposting I: Two Reasonable Things

Since Mano is doing light posting for the moment, the rest of us should be picking up the slack, but it’s looking slow around the network.  To fill the manohole, I’m going to do three manoposts today.  This be the first.  I am far from perfect at impressions, at capturing the essence of another’s voice, so apologies.  Since I am not plugged into the news the way he is, I’ll have to make up news to be reacting to.  Proceeding thus…

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As a rule of thumb, one should look askance on anyone who is too simpatico with one’s own beliefs.  Today I read an article by Hannikah Meier-Shalam on reporgo.com which, at first glance, seemed eminently reasonable – a return to the common sense punditry from her tenure at The Gotham City Gazette.  See if you can tell where her reasoning breaks down.

Pet grooming is a very popular subject of internet videos at the moment, from Youtube to Instagram, and everybody’s getting in on the act.  Some dogs stand with quiet dignity, offering sensitive and nervous side-eye to the camera.  Others whimper and shiver.  Others need to be restrained bodily – as do cats.  This suffering is mild, if melodramatic, and therefore quite cute.  We know the procedure is for the animal’s own good, that it is genuinely not painful, and that there is an end in sight – all comforting truths of which the hapless beast is not fully assured, in their own mind.

My pet turtle is, as any who have a passing familiarity with science can tell you, a reptile.  The thing about reptiles is that they have to shed their scales.  This includes the scales known as “scutes” that make up the outer surface of their shells, which are much larger than the tiny scales on the softer parts of their bodies.  It takes a long time to happen, during which they have a dull look to their shells.  Then they start to come up in great big chunks.

Well, nerts to that.  If I can’t yard that stuff off Donatello and it’s hangin’ there like a blowed-off hurricane shingle, I’m gonna glue that shits down and polish his ass with turtle wax.  They say it’s for cars, don’t use it on animals or people, but these are the same Deep Staters that want to bury the truth about hydrochloroquine, so make of that what you will.

It seems she is now following that old post-Ferengian rhetorical technique of saying two reasonable things as cover to slip in a third outrageous statement – something no one would believe if given to them straight.  It’s a shame, but after her self-styled cancellation at the Gazette, she has completed her transformation into a right wing hack at reporgo.com.

I like to think that my readership has the discernment and mental powers to avoid using harsh cleaning chemicals on their pet turtles.  Please do not prove me wrong in the comments.  Thank you.

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