My wife has been working hard in the garden all summer long, and now…
She’s just piling them up on the kitchen counter because I’m the cook, so I’m expected to do something with the fruits of her labor. All at once. Now.
We’re getting there!
Wait, what? Games can make you rethink how you look at the world? I never thought about this before, but the structure of Dungeons & Dragons implies a fallen world, in which people are picking through the debris of a collapsed civilization. It suggests that gangs of murder hobos looting the wreckage is a perfectly normal, ordinary way to see your culture.
In a nutshell, the argument is that—independent of campaign setting—the rules of AD&D imply the game takes place in the wake of some unspecified, civilization-ending cataclysm.
For what it’s worth, classic sword and sorcery fiction tends to make this same assumption. Conan’s Hyborian Age is perhaps the most famous, taking place thousands of years after “the oceans drank Atlantis.” Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique tales are more properly classified as Dying Earth stories, but the effect is the same: the last vestiges of humanity cling to superstition and sorcery on the Earth’s last remaining continent. Not to mention The Dying Earth itself, where technology and magic are both remnants of long dead empires, and are completely indistinguishable from one another.
Simply put, without the collapse of some ancient civilization (or several), the landscape wouldn’t be littered with ruins for the characters to go dungeon-diving in. But that assumption can hardly be called unique to AD&D. Later editions still feature plenty of ruined temples, lost cities, and dungeon delves, even if they are significantly less lethal than the old school variety.
I never noticed! I wonder if this might be a relic of a medieval way of thinking, where Europeans saw themselves living in the ruins of fallen Rome, and it was normal to live surrounded by bridges and aqueducts and statuary built in the past.
We Americans don’t have that — instead we have a history of belittling the constructions of our predecessors. Cahokia must have been built by wandering Hebrews, don’t you know, because Indians couldn’t possibly have accomplished anything. We have our own biases, though, and another game reveals that.
Would you believe Minecraft mechanics encourage colonialism? Also it’s another game where your ‘wilderness’ is sprinkled with dungeons and temples and lootable structures. This video explains the perfidious possibilities in a sandbox game.
I’ve played a bit of Minecraft, and I hadn’t thought of exploiting the villagers before, but I knew of the mechanics. The latest edition has some other curious additions: there are pillagers who will raid you or nearby villages, which lets you play the role of protector and patron, killing the bad NPCs and saving the good NPCs. It’s an interesting evolution of a game that once was kind of the digital equivalent of building ships in a bottle, or cultivating bonsai. It’s not a game unless there’s an opportunity for violence!
(Note: I am not saying D&D and Minecraft need to be policed for their violence, but only that it might be a good idea to be conscious of how the rules can create a bias towards certain behaviors.)
Classes start next week, but the administrative burdens began today: a two hour division meeting, followed by a one hour discipline meeting, with paperwork to do this afternoon. But first, I’m going to go assess spiders. Fortunately, my diligent student came in while I was locked in a room with a seething mass of academics, and he fed everyone, so I just have to measure mortality for a while. Spider mortality, that is…all of the academics emerged alive, with only a few scars.
Then…keyboard pounding for a while. Then…university-wide social at the horticulture gardens, although I’m bringing my camera and might do more socializing with the spiders while I’m there. Then…last night with my granddaughter, before I have to take her to the airport tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I can arrange a swap with our cat (don’t tell Skatje).
She’s been learning about finger-painting! She can’t leave now!
Her mama put baby Iliana in my lap this morning. She looked at me, her little chin crinkled up, her lip trembled, and in moments she was howling with tears running down her cheeks. So that’s how my week is going.
It could get worse. Today begins my week of meetings and appointments and duties in the run-up to the first day of classes, next Wednesday. I’m expecting to walk into classes and see the Iliana Reaction on the faces of all of my students now.
Scene of the crime
I know, you think Scandinavians are staid, boring, normal white people, but I can tell you that deep in their bosoms beat the hearts of the weird. Witness the events in Insjön a few years ago.
It was Friday night in the village of 2,000 souls when two teenage siblings wandered out with their smartphones to play Pokémon Go.
But instead of finding Pikachu or Squirtle they soon came face to face in the park with a couple who must have seemed scarcely more real.
The teenagers’ mother, who reported the incident to the police, told newspaper Dalarnas Tidningar:
“They wore rubber masks depicting pigs’ heads and they started screaming and waving a green laser.”
A laser beam hit one of the teens in the face and the children rushed back home, shaken but luckily unharmed.
The masked shooters, who also wore T-shirts labeled ‘King’ and ‘Queen’, were next spotted by incredulous motorists as they had sex beside the hamlet’s waterwheel.
As one does. It wasn’t even midwinter yet, when brains turn into a hamster wheel of desperate crazy seeking release.
Because Wellington, NZ has just surged into the lead. They had to snatch this statue from Christchurch to do it, though, so this battle might be getting fierce.
I find this whole idea disturbing and alien. Daniel Kelly, an MD who worked at USC and UCLA, is currently under investigation for sexual abuse of a large number of gay and bisexual men who received ‘care’ from him — he seems to have been fond of overlong, invasive rectal examinations, and of prolonged fondling of patients’ genitals. He would, for instance, give a rectal exam if a young man had symptoms of a cold.
But that’s not what bugs me — if found guilty, he’s just another sick abusive man, and we’ve got evidence of plenty of those. No, the bothersome bit is how the university handles these situations.
Kelly joined UCLA in 1980. In 2002, he stopped working there, signing a confidential settlement that paid him $68,320 and barred him from seeking employment at any University of California campus. In a statement, UCLA said the settlement was “unrelated to allegations of sexual misconduct.”
He did something that got him banned from any UC campus, but it was all wrapped up under a confidentiality agreement, and he got paid? I don’t get it. I keep my nose clean my whole life, I do my job, and my university never takes me aside and hands me a big check while telling me I can’t talk about it. I’d happily not talk about it for that much money!
Especially when that much money is just about exactly what I need to pay our lawyer.
But no, it always seems to get paid to creeps who objectify and abuse students, and nope, I’m not willing to do that. Why is it always corruption and crime that are so lucrative?
We got all these shiny noisy fancy toys for Iliana’s visit, and what’s her favorite thing? We picked up an empty refrigerator box from the local appliance store and cut windows in it.
We’ll be able to save a lot of money next time a grandchild visits!
We fetched our granddaughter Iliana from the airport today, and now we’re exhausted, and so is she. That might be understandable since we were up at 5:30am to drive to Minneapolis, and we just got home now at 7:30pm.
We have her for a week. May die.
But she’s so cute!
