Wax Banks

Easy pieces.

the day.

that day i will tend to things.
you will not take the sheet rolling over in bed.
that day i will skip breakfast i think.
i will walk only away.
that day i will eat an unhealthy dinner.
i will try to read a book and fail.
i will lose my place.
that day i will hate sunshine.
i will not want to be touched.
i will watch children sit.
you will not be singing along as you walk in from work.
that day i will be tired.
i will fear to sleep.
you will not make up funny words over dinner.
i will have my way on the issue of the television.
that day i will not know what sentences should look like.
you will not turn from the unwashed laundry rolling your eyes.
that day i will forget obvious things.
i will catch myself not breathing.
you will not again gather into a human shape
what remains of me
that day.

L,
W.

Holy guacamole - Palin resigns.

From her statement to the press today:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE... I'll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won't deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska.

But I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more "freedom" to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.

"...so I better run!"

Y'know what? All in all I think it's kind of a great little speech. Political suicide, presumably, and given her history I'd bet you ten bucks (following Josh Marshall here) that this is about cutting her reputation losses and getting out of the public spotlight before additional ethics investigations snow her under. (Plus that MacArthur quote is craaaaaazy.) But today I finally began to understand how people could go for this woman. She just doesn't sound anything like a politician.

Which is to say on one hand her aggressive willful parochialism and grotesque bigotry ensure that she's not actually qualified to run anything bigger than Wasilla, by the looks of it, and I wish those poor bastards something better than Sarah Palin's stewardship.

But on the other hand: well, she's one of a kind, huh? Weird to get so far and be so wholly without shame. Admirable, kind of.

(I'm being sarcastic, but not just that. I really do think it's all kinda neat! Scary but neat! Like an episode of Buffy but with much less coherent dialogue.)

The financial crisis described slightly differently.

The financial crisis is the one thing that could have turned Obama's election - which was about young people's energy, new ideas, the blurring of standard GOP/Dem party lines - into nothing more than a middle chapter in a litany of grownup problems. It's the one situation in which Obama is no longer the bold (comparatively) young reformer but just another guy trying to fill the Big Political Moment.

I wrote this back in the day:

What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

Back then I really thought the election was about a sea change in American governance. I was excited about the election as such, the symbolism of it, the pragmatic power-sharing and -shifting of it. (Yes we did! and so forth.) The financial crisis - and the hyper-partisan mudslinging that's followed, much of it nonsensically 'socialism'-themed - hasn't suddenly turned Obama mortal and fallible. It's shown that as far as our nation's ruling class of venal middle-aged assholes was concerned, the election was never going to be allowed to change anything.

And that, ladies and germzzz, is my cup of fresh-brewed morning cynicism for today!

Louie.

Louie from Brian Moore on Vimeo. (h/t Danielle!)

You enjoy (my/your)self.

The phrase 'I'm enjoying myself' certainly sounds different from 'I'm having a good time' - listen closely and the latter is about circumstance, while the former has something to do with addressing oneself to it. What's great about 'enjoying oneself' is that the key to doing more of it lies in the very phrase: lasting pleasure and deep fulfillment seem to spring from acting at the limits of your abilities, in a state of total commitment-to-circumstance that rests far below conscious 'awareness.' To truly enjoy yourself you must become unself-conscious, taking pleasure in what you do without dwelling on your self-image, which after all pertains to nothing but your own perceived inadequacies, fantasies, personal myth-history, etc.

Your self-image isn't a positive part of you, as I see it; it opposes action. Why? Because the last thing you want to do is lose your image of your self, find that you've been living out of step with your actual relationship to the world.

So you try to remake the world as what you think it's supposed to be in relation to your fantasy self-image.

Which sometimes fucks everyone up, starting with you but by no means ending there. Maybe you discover electricity along the way, or paint a chapel, or marry the right person (or just someone else), or send your kids to a school where they happen to be happy/sad/lucky/coddled/alone. Most likely you find that the world in your head isn't the world, and you begin to tear things up.

Sounds hopeless. OK, so modify it a little. (I'm carried away anyway.) What keeps us sane is: differentials. Change. As long as we think we're changing the right way we can settle down, live at peace, enjoy ourselves. Which is to say we can love what we are only if we see it as the result of doing right. You have to trust the process that is your self before you can quiet down and notice the world.

'Having a good time' is just about time. 'Enjoying yourself' is about action - getting out of your own way and letting yourself adapt naturally to your circumstances, which is what all the other animals do since they don't have to abstract everything around them to keep from getting [fired/abandoned/ridiculed/sued/shot/etc.].

I believe in the pleasures of incoherence and of fluid form, and I'm able to love things more honestly when I can move with them. I don't always more skillfully or beautifully but I find a line eventually, and can curve with it as the time demands. It's bedtime, doctor's appointment in the morning, work to be done, I'm behind schedule maybe already, the phone needs charging, there are so many ideas to get rid of. How swell is that gonna be.

From a biggish thing about (among other things) Hamlet, proof-by-induction, fanfiction, the meaning of love, and the Eiffel Tower upside-down.

Now imagine (3,3) and (4,4) on the plane. Ya dig? OK: What's the next point?

Most people, I'm guessing, speculate that the 'next point' is (5,5). Linear progression. You don't even have to think of it as function input and output; you could just have a weird way of making two lists of integers that happen to proceed at equal pace from the same starting point. 'Sliding friction' is the force that resists you when you're sliding; 'static friction' is what fights against you starting. The latter is the greater force; as wacky Wernher von Braun said, 'Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.' The world has tendencies: in motion, stay in motion; at rest, stay at rest. Reality is opinionated. So are we.

We're made to extrapolate, which is how we invented God; we need order to make sense of infinity, which is why we invented God; we tend to value and enshrine straight-line thinking, which is why God looks like a bearded white man (and there's no such thing as a 'liberal media').

Proof by induction works like this: if you can show that a proposition is true for one baseline element, and that if it's true for one element then it must be true for the next one in line, then the proposition must be true for all elements. Inductive reasoning frees you to run - once you've settled on your baseline, your (literal) starting point, then all you need is a logic of association to allow you to make a universal statement. Which feels, let me tell you, absolutely wonderful. That wind-in-your-hair feeling of encompassing all of what you see in a single expression or conception. A formula.

But.

That joy (of understanding) doesn't come from a point. Think of singular aesthetic (i.e. learning) experiences that have 'changed your life,' or just your mind: I remember for instance my first rock show, being dumped for the first time, 'losing' my virginity, realizing I was falling in love with my future wife. You go back later on and fill in relationships to what you know, or to later examples of the same general phenomenon, but in each instant what prevails is confusion, loss of center, prior understandings (a/k/a 'priorities,' right?) falling away. The word for this feeling is freedom. The feeling changes you, but you can't possibly understand or articulate each moment within itself. The limited relationship between your reptilian, emotional, and analytical minds precludes such understanding.

And from that point, where do you go?

What would Hamlet say if he were here with us right now?

D&D nerdery: Varied roles, empty rooms.

Over at Eleven Foot Pole, Greg writes about an unexpectedly empty room in Thunderspire Labyrinth, the 'Crypts,' described as follows in the written adventure (H2):

Crypts: The remains of about two dozen minotaur warriors lie here in burial niches along the walls. In the southern hallway stands a statue of a grim-looking skeletal minotaur with a greataxe—a minotaur version of the Grim Reaper. An iron door leading to the south is locked. It can be unlocked with a DC 20 Thievery check or broken open with a DC 25 Strength check.

Greg seems irritated not by the emptiness as such, but by inconsistency:

The skeletal reaper is a classic archetype, and here we have a new bull-headed twist on the idea. It's a great way to build on the undead from the last encounter and really tie the Horned Hold into the ongoing minotaur-themed history.

Unfortunately, yet again, it's not to be. The statue doesn't come to life; the dead don't rise from their graves. There is, in fact, no tactical encounter for this room whatsoever, making it the only part of the Hold not covered in this way. Players will be completely baffled as to why nothing in this room is animating and trying to kill them. It does, after all, run contrary to their entire previous experience.

I tend to insist that games should 'play fair,' not penalizing players for reasonable assumptions based on precedent. But that insistence doesn't extend to situations like the one. A roleplaying game's primary feature is the playing of roles; a strong role (in drama, at work, in school, in sports, etc.) offers its player interesting choices, compelling challenges, and - this is crucial - more than one note to play. Dogberry in Twelfth Night is a fool, sure, and he gets laughs aplenty - as does Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice - but for an actor neither holds a candle to Lear's Fool, who gets to do sly wit, big physical comedy, teary pathos, and that wild Merlin monologue, all in a relatively small written part. Lt. Daniels on The Wire got to be the angry careerist hardass in the first season, but the part came right to life as Lance Reddick revealed the long game Daniels was playing - and that smile of his 2/3 of the way through the season opened up the role, changing its relationship to the world around it. Great dramatic roles offer both subtle nuance and stark contrast - they vary in various ways.

(The wildest screen performance I've seen is Michael Gambon's in The Singing Detective, in a role as technically demanding and fine-grained as Hamlet but with an even broader range. See it if you haven't. Now.)

In combat-driven roleplaying it's important to emphasize for players that the combat has a purpose; violence in the real world is an extreme interaction, the end of communication, not (for most people) a basic mode of coexisting as depicted in shallow sword-and-sorcery gaming. D&D 4e is combat-heavy; indeed it's assumed that the primary mode of character development is through combat itself. But that gets a little monochromatic after a while. How do you know something's Big and Important if there's nothing mundane to compare it to, no baseline of experience, no mere life? How can the revelation of a secret be meaningful without it being withheld for a while? Who fights with nothing to fight over?

Why are your characters doing what they're doing? What is the world, to them?

Questions like these can be answered in well-designed combat, but your campaign's story - the emerging Tale of Years that includes but hopefully isn't limited to your party's great (and other) deeds - will be unreadable if it consists solely of one kind of action. A list of fights may as well be the bathroom-cleaning time card at the Burger King, a schedule of obligations.

Ever read The Da Vinci Code? It's not a good novel by any standard other than one: it's absolutely impossible to stop reading once you've started. (By that standard it's pure goddamn heroin, a near-perfect example of a bad idea embodied.) People remember it as a breathless ride in which the action never stops, a chase across Europe to confront conspiracy/history or blah blah blah. It's a chase book, an action book. Right?

Actually no.

Most of The Da Vinci Code is talk.

The constant chatter - blunt exposition, inept one-liners, endless portentous crypticisms about 'the universal feminine' or what have you - occurs in the midst of ongoing hustle and bustle, but it's still chatter. The puzzle-solving is just part of it - ultimately The Da Vinci Code is a fast-moving detective story about a guy solving pseudointellectual puzzles about the history of a religion. It's not a shooter (though perhaps you remember the shootings), but it's not even really a sneaker. It's a talkie. Dan Brown's vile genius is to situate the talk carefully, punctuating it with deaths and escapes and travel and the like.

And yet the story moves like the devil's chasing it. The story isn't 'good,' but it sure works.

An empty room - what looks like downtime, wasted space, a fidgety longueur for ADD-afflicted players - is an opportunity to move the story in another direction: backward into history, down into the secret tale of the world, in to the characters' motivations and fears, out beyond the story the players think they're living to even more complex threats, possibilities, ramifications. This is true in straight storytelling as well as in games, and for teachers guiding students as well: If you treat a scene as a challenge, the players who trust you will rise to that challenge. That's true in and out of combat, of course. It's a historical accident that American roleplaying games evolved from wargames (and everything stupid and retrograde about the industry and culture of RPGs in America stems from that basic fact); we owe it to ourselves to think of roleplaying as an activity that can include simulation (e.g. of combat), but that's really about - surprise - playing a role. Structured make-believe. Storytelling with dice. It could really be so.

The strength of a role is this: the variety of strong actions it allows for.

* * *

All of this is to leave aside the technical question, 'How do you make an empty room interesting?' Which is a storytelling challenge dating back millennia, of course. Here's a simple solution: let the players stock the room. Describe it, set the scene, lay on some creepy atmosphere, and when a player describes searching the room, hand over control: 'OK. You find something in the statue's shadow, embedded in the floor. What is it?' Or maybe just: 'You hear a keening sound, distant, worrisome. What does it sound like?' And let the player(s) tell you.

It's their story after all.

Gone.

Michael Jackson, genius, now departed. RIP.

Phish2point0: an overview mixtape.

[This is a very long Phish post. It's aimed at people who aren't necessarily fans, but it's still...a very long Phish post. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.]

The period known to fans as 'Phish 2.0' stretched from the first day of 2003 (the worrisome comeback show at Madison Square Garden) to mid-August 2004 (the catastrophic farewell festival in Vermont). In that time Phish played 63 shows over four relatively short tours and a trio of multi-night stands (Hampton '03, the 20th anniversary run, Vegas '04).

It was a weird, fascinating time for the band, as I've talked about elsewhere. In the mid-90's it was a big event for a Phish tune (other than the long composed suites) to stretch beyond 20 minutes; by summer 2003 one could reasonably expect one or two such monster jams per show. Yet something was a little off; the energy couldn't be sustained, or the music ran its course, and personal problems certainly obtruded; within 18 months of their shaky-but-thrilling reunion and very successful winter 2003 tour, Phish were broken up, this time (it seemed) for good.

They're back together now, more focused and energetic than any time in the last decade, and it makes sense to consider what went on during that wild interregnum, to get a better handle on what they're doing now.

In that spirit, I'd like to present a mix of 2003-04 Phish, with notes on what to listen for, even how to listen, where this music fits in the band's history, what it says about their unique improvisatory methods.

programmers: capsule history of the internet.

[Additional Fixing You magique. Forgive me.]

prior to the advent of the digital american online there wasn't all that much to do; you'd watch a tv show on your actual tv, for instance, and the absence of spoiler websites meant you didn't know what was going to happen until you saw the actual show, which is stupid - how do you know you want to see the show without knowing how it ends, what the online encyclopedia 2.0 says it means, what kind of numbers the tv-industry professional webblogger/marketers think this "skein" will garner? in the holy name of american christ what is a "skein"? also newspapers were hand-delivered to the doors of hardworking organization men and their nuclear families by pauper children, selfish malnourished little jerks who'd come around every couple of weeks begging for money. "please sir, i have nothing to eat!" "leave me alone, {charming ethnic slur}, my atlantic-salmon-and-liquid-gold smoothie is getting cold." you remember what it was like: it was like we were on top of the world where we belonged. there was little to do, nothing to say (except, sternly, to the paperboy), and you didn't have an audience of several dozen strangers from the web-based online community webblogs to share your well-formed important opinions with. so you kept them entirely to yourself; it's not like you can talk to your family about that shit.

(do you remember the time little beauregard chased the paperboy all the way back to his "home" under I-45? we thought we'd die laughing! apparently the paperboy, too, was afraid he would perish.)