Wax Banks

Too long; didn't read.

In 2001 (02? 03?) Zhan suggested I take a look at two community (i.e. 'Web 2.0,' i.e. 'social networking') websites: MetaFilter and Plastic. He was killing a lot of would-be thesis-researching time on those sites at the time, as I recall.

Plastic was the smartest, funniest Slashdot-like site back then.

MetaFilter was the deepest.

I sent my $5 for a MeFi membership, joined Plastic for free, and pissed away many many hours reading and occasionally ranting over the next mumblemumble years.

Plastic's gone and MeFi celebrates ten years of dilettantism, inanity, dogmatism, and genuine love this weekend. Here's to Matt Haughey, the most successful community architect on the Internet, and to the blue, green, and grey.

My life just got much worse in a hurry.

I just spent eight minutes reading the blog of a gossip-blogger with the stage name 'Perez Hilton.'

Everyone who supports this imbecile: go fuck yourself, hard, 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.

How not to structure a sentence, part one million and four.

Easy, comprehension-crippling mistake:

Musically referencing the monsoon with the opening “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” this time we knew it was for real.

No!

We did not reference anything, god damn it! The band references the monsoon; we know it's for real. The two clauses should correspond and agree. 'Musically referencing the monsoon...the band let us know it was for real. And we did know. Know, we did. They rocked our balls and minds. Who did rock balls/minds? The band. The professional American rock band.'

See?

I never learned this shit in English class - never knew what a 'clause' was until college or grad school and still don't know what a 'mood' or 'participle' is - but it's not too hard to pick up if you read middling-tough prose with any attentiveness. Keep your ears open and the clarity of your writing will improve.

...a good way to hear God laugh.

I had difficulty going a few days without reading the Internet. I kept relaxing my standards: first nothing but CNN and email, then a quick look at political blogs I don't comment on, then glances at community sites (MeFi, Whedonesque), then over to blogs that irritate me without reading comment threads, then look-don't-comment in those same threads. I'm currently at the odd stage where I read comment threads, write responses, then don't post them.

What do the prolonged-adolescents say?

"SELF-DISCIPLINE: UR DOIN IT WRONG"

??

Keeping busy though. Writing short stories, revising things. What I posted the other day, about All-County Jazz Band, wastohavebeen an early section in an essay about the Grateful Dead. Here's a footnote from that essay, which I abandoned in tears:

[**] One important point of comparison between the Dead and Phish is that Phish's songs have way, way, way better arrangements than the Dead's. The Dead had mastered a form of back-porch Americana that Phish don't really attempt - indeed they often sounded like an unusually sympathetic group of musicians at a thrown-together jam session - but the Dead never did have an in-house composer of Trey Anastasio's technical competence and fearlessness. For many Phish fans the great feel-good tune is 'Fluffhead' - which is thirteen minutes of full-band written composition with a brief guitar outro, and invariably a concert highlight. There are longish Dead songs but none of them can approach the tightness of Anastasio's compositions.

Tears because my mindbrain broke a little and I wrote the following instead. Note that the original text uses italics, like all my shit, but they're lost in blockquoting. All of the mere world to learn to live with:

And then break. Right there. I'm home now. I was going to ride the Minuteman Trail with sunblock on my bald spot but once I took my shoes off at home there was no hope of going out. I was also going to be a great American novelist but once I took my shoes off...

There.

See? And now we're out of it and hurry across the lawn so as not to burn and into the other one.

Outside it sounds like an arboretum, or the Aviary at the local zoo (wherever your local zoo is, where are you from?). I hear, like, a million birds singing. It's quiet in the apartment but there's no silence, the birds never stop making those extraordinarily varied noises. I'm supposed to _____ this week. Two weekends before I _____. We have a _____ in Chicago. Pulling threads, slackening. The wine bottle we didn't finish on _____. My jaw is always tight, it aches all the time. When I manage to loosen it I yawn instantly. I didn't bring my glasses to the futon along with my laptop, so I can't look at the screen for too long without getting the first echoey drumbeats of a headache. My posture is so terrible! I'll surely grow up looking like _____. Or worse, a _____. How long the mood can carry over and seep into the weekend or early week when on a _____ evening you unexpectedly _____ and then can't sleep.

No music. No music.

The thing about the Grateful Dead is I don't care about the Grateful Dead. The thing about the future is I don't care about the future. Everything through a tissuey paper layer that resists when I push at it, a horror movie effect. Reading without my glasses gives me migraines. Well, but it doesn't - it used to. In high school physics class I got a pain behind my eye so piercing and unbearable I thought I was dying. I worried I had a tumor. (Have you noticed this affectation of mine where I used British spellings for words like 'colour' and 'favour'? I wrote 'tumor' and in my brain the disk skipped and I wasn't sure whether it was spelled right or what kind of person I was.)

The thing about me isn't that I don't care about me. Ha ha, but no, but thanks for saying it. I'm absolutely obsessed with me. Could I meditate for five hours straight? I think it's possible. Find a comfortable sitting position, close your eyes, hands flat on your thighs or knees, legs shoulder-width apart on the floor. Hee hee, I thought it was such a big deal when I mentioned to my psychotherapist that I never ever sit with both feet on the floor. I had no idea what it meant. Well, but if it means anything at all, I mean. (I don't have a writing style. I think I do but there's no coherence and my habits don't add up to anything.) My therapist had me meditate during the session. This was a year ago. I told him it felt great to sit with my feet flat on the floor, which is halfway true; it gave me a sore back but it felt good to think about. Like i was directly experiencing the metaphor and not, you know, the ground.

Or I just say that to play on the metaphor-about-metaphor? Well, you know how that goes. You, you, you! Charming. How I pretend you exist. (Sometimes I see Shervin's face when i write, sometimes my wife's, sometimes my dad's or brother's. Or an ex-girlfriend's. Depends on what I'm writing about. Journal entries I see my friend Krevice. Or Scott Kaufman, whom I've never actually seen. They always, all of them, look disappointed.)

It's 86 goddamn degrees outside.

The whole point here is: there's no music on. Just the birds. Me and listening and the very very small probability of an outbreak of peace.

Al Swearengen says 'Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh,' and capitalizing the word 'god' I feel like I'm playacting. Trying to still be a little boy, but I feel the same way doing the other thing, so maybe the problem isn't with words.

It really was 86 degrees and I really didn't go out in it.

Withdrawing from the Internet.

Hello y'all.

I'm not going to read the Internet again until next week, maybe the week after that. (I'll look at articles my wife recommends. BHITW and all.) I can't seem to comment on other people's posts without venting disgust at their ineptitude or turning it into a referendum on my own mindbrain; hell, most of what I read I only look at to irritate myself. And as you'd expect, it's bringing me down.

Maybe not just me.

Here's a helpful infographic to carry you through in the meantime:

Why, despite the near-constant fury he provokes in me and others, I still read Andrew Sullivan.

From Johann Hari's profile:

With the scenery of conservatism collapsing all around, Sullivan was one of the first major [umm... --wa.] champions of Barack Obama as a future president. He found his temperament—empirical, doubtful, discursive—immediately congenial. This brought yet more howls of betrayal from the right. But now Obama has won, will Sullivan’s Obamaphilia clash with his small-state conservatism, as Obama embarks on a programme of big-government Keynesian reflation?

This question cuts to an unacknowledged tension in Sullivan’s thought that has lain dormant since his Oxford days. Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”

When I ask Sullivan about this, he says: “It’s very hard to be a consistent Oakeshottian, to not let dogmas creep in. Perhaps my belief in markets has become like that. Over the next few years, in my blog and writing, I’m going to be thinking this through.” It seems he can imagine reasoning himself to a more Obama-friendly pro-intervention viewpoint—surely provoking yet more cries of betrayal from conservatives.

He believes his greatest future conflicts will centre on religion—the topic of his next book. He learned his Catholicism as an altar boy in East Grinstead. For him it is a sacramental religion, all about smell and sight and touch. Ritual is at its core, because “ritual has no point beyond itself. Only ritual can approximate the ineffability of the divine, enact its truth while not purporting to explain or capture it.”

Read the (cleverly titled) whole thing.

Reviewed: a Blood Bowl/D&D mashup of sorts, courtesy of The Chatty DM.

[Heavy nerdery follows! As does a little sentimentality and longish discussion of the encounter-design system in Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition. Can't say you haven't been warned.]

As a kid I ran a couple of games of Top Secret/S.I., the Niles/Spector espionage roleplaying game from TSR. Had no idea what I was doing. I loved it.

There wasn't really anyone to play such games with in high school, so I left RPGs aside until last year. Wish I hadn't. Owned plenty of books - D&D 3e, GURPS, MERP, etc. - but settled for reading, not playing. Not anymore, baby: been playing in a fantasy campaign for nine months or so.

This afternoon I served as Dungeon Master for the first time, in a game of D&D 4e with five of the fellas. As a warmup to running H3, Pyramid of Shadows, I decided to give Philippe's 4e/Blood Bowl mashup a try. Philippe, a/k/a the ChattyDM, seems like an earnest and straightforward fellow and a careful but vibrant writer, and the scenario's got a lot of (his) personality. Fun premise, simple (loose) structure, plenty of potential: the PCs are the halftime entertainment at a game of Blood Bowl in the Astral Plane (Skill Challenge); they get sucked into the game itself (ad hoc Blood Bowl subgame rules, combat); they end up fighting a gigantic necromantic cleanup device and a horde of undead. Phil conceived of it as a low-level testbed for the new 4e classes (Invoker, Shaman, et al.); it's probably going to lead into our campaign's next adventure, so I converted it to a 7th level delve.

How'd it go? Lemme tell you.

Catching, throwing, juicing, hoping, waiting, listening.

Over the last couple weeks I've been part of a baseball-n-literature roundtable at Quiet Bubble, overseen by Mr Walter 'The Other Walter' Biggins, a/k/a Q. Bubble himself. It happily ranged all over the map:

Baseball's a little different. It encourages hardscrabble kids to try their hands at it but slumming rich kids have always been drawn to it, too. And, because it's a team sport, it forces people from different class and ethnic backgrounds to get along and coalesce into a working unit. Different teams fight against each other but baseball also forced—earlier than most American sports—people within a team to make conflict and resolve tension, too. There's at least two sorts of conflict happening in baseball. When you add managers and owners to the mix, there's even more class conflict and tensions between workers (players) and corporations (owners).

[...]

Man, it’s hard to be a baseball fan right now. And, pardon the narcissism, it’s particularly hard for me. The team of my childhood, the Texas Rangers, is not only the worst franchise in professional sports (even the Tampa Bay Somethings have been to a Series now), but we have recently discovered that the players during the Rangers’ only era of semi-competence—the AL West champions of 1996, ‘98 and ‘99—were the preeminent juicers of their time. I picture Juan Gonzalez, the (strangely moody!) two-time MVP who symbolized those years, sitting in a darkened room right now, rocking back and forth, clutching his shriveled, aching testicles and neighing softly to himself.

[...]

In game studies—'ludology' or the critical study of the form and content of games and play, as opposed to 'game theory'—you get the concept of the 'magic circle,' the operating fiction of the gameworld. It's the contract that binds gameplayers into the crazy belief that this leather thing belongs in something called an 'end zone,' or that there's a substantive difference between one side of the 'foul line' and the other (talk about a Manichean goddamn universe—in baseball, 'in' and 'out' are called fair and foul!). Within the 'magic circle,' our morals are reset: coworkers become enemies, the fifty-yard line marks the border of the homeland, and 'traveling' gets you yelled at...

[...]

In this postmodern time where the existence of a stable, coherent self (and therefore Reason, Truth and Knowledge) is made problematic and the individual subject position is decentered for a more social conception that is almost Sophist, how surprising is it that baseball is waning in the popular imagination? Another reason to hate postmodernity.

It's a good read if I do say so myself, but don't take my word for it. Many thanks to Walter, Dan, and Brian. Let's play two.

Nobel Prizes explained!

To be clear: winning the Nobel Prize does not mark you as an important figure in your field, nor does it indicate that you are currently doing vital research. It does not mean that people should now listen to you.

The Prize means: you have been important in your field, you have done vital research, and people should've been listening to you for years. It might indicate that your best, most innovative stuff is behind you. (In terms of pathbreaking original research, it does generally seem to mean this.) It does not change your level of expertise, nor does it indicate heightened trustworthiness.

You'd think people understood that.

The repeated invocation of Krugman's Nobel by journalists and bloggers and everybody, as evidence that Krugman is now (suddenly) an important economic critic and columnist, is charming and laughable. Krugman is no more (and certainly no less) worth listening to now than he was a year ago or two. His main (indeed only) credential is his economic expertise, not any sort of Prize. Not the goddamn NYTimes columnist spot.

This is why the dream of the gatekeeperless blogosphere, the meritocracy built on pure ideas and unfettered intellectual/emotional exchange, is total bullshit. People aren't built that way, maybe, but they sure aren't raised that way. We want to be told how to feel because feeling is scary. Plus none of us know anything at all about anything so that's bad too.

The total vacuity of Nikki Finke. Well, so what?

If you're the sort to care about Hollywood gossip then you probably read Nikki Finke's blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily. Finke loudly covered the recent WGA strike with a clear pro-union bias. No big deal. She's a gossip columnist, mostly, only she covers gossip like 'How will this $400,000,000 be spent by Hollywood philistines?' Which makes her 'important' in a soulless secondhand way, much the way it makes her a 'journalist.' Hollywood wannabes, starfuckers, and navel-gazers love her blog.

Unfortunately, Kim Masters of the Daily Beast, this is not a good defense of Finke:

The former debutante is much discussed but rarely seen; only a couple of photos of her are floating around the Internet, the most recent of which, Finke claims, is from 2006. She is accused of being many unpleasant things: shrill, vindictive, self-promoting, and more. But what can’t be disputed is that she has broken some important news, notably NBC-Universal’s hiring of Ben Silverman to run the network and more recently, the fact that Peter Chernin was leaving his job as Rupert Murdoch’s No. 2 man at News Corp.

(My emphasis.) Neither of these items is news: major executive turnover is accompanied by press releases; 'breaking' this 'news' just means repeating gossip a day or two in advance of the press releases. So what? I read Finke's strike coverage, lacking any other source of information. What I learned was: being caught up in a publicity stunt is exciting, particularly when it's in some way writing-themed, but one form of resentful whispered gossip is the same as another. The strike should've been a transformation, ended up being (by the looks of it) a minor corporate payoff to mildly disgruntled corporate employees (the WGA), and Finke fit right into the disappointing tone of the affair. An onscreen tabloid differs from a printed tabloid only in the number of trees it fails to kill off. ('Tabloid'? Oh, be fair! Oh, feast your eyes. A cold void where a brain should be. C'est la blogue.)

And you don't care, Reader(s); well good for you. It's 5am, I couldn't close my eyes in bed without the usual nightmare visions, and this is what's left to us when hope flees:

No, not the feet. The whole idea of the feet. You see? You see.

Etiquette concerns: blogroll?

If you're spectacularly attentive to detail and have no real happiness in your life, you may have noticed that my blogroll is missing. Went out with the old design. I wanted a cleaner look, hadn't updated it in a long time, and so there you are. The question is, does one owe it to the blogfolks of whom one is a fan/admirer/ally/nemesis to keep that blogroll thing up there? Isn't it unsightly and likely not in heavy use? I get next to no links from other people's blogrolls - maybe one a day. Is it a slight? Do I hate?

I don't actually need answers, I just wanted an excuse to share something very personal with you, baby:

Are we going steady now?

Going, going, Galt.

If you're friends with any of the idiots talking about 'going Galt' out of fear of the 'socialist' stimulus bill and budget, etc., point them this way. There are sensible reactions to the government's responses to the financial crisis - negative and positive - and then there's the other thing. This 'going Galt' shit is the other thing.

'Zero-to-hero' gaming?

Part of the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons is its narrative sweep: the promise of following a character from 'That skeleton is moving, run!' to 'Hey, could you quickly marshal an army of skeletons to distract that god while I deal with this dimensional rift?' or thereabouts. But this literary sense of the game necessarily exists in parallel to the main action of the game, just as the 'meaning' of a play can't intrude on the performance of an individual scene. (The play's meaning isn't the actor's responsibility, it's [primarily] the writer's, secondarily the director's - another lesson for gamers, never mind actors.) When you're in the middle of an adventure or a section of a campaign your narrative consciousness foreshortens. Same thing when you're reading a well-written book or watching a skillfully crafted film - as long as it's not (sigh) self-conscious high literary metafiction, your consciousness of the form should dim, should (let's say) 'adverbize' (ha), your intellectual defenses dropping to heighten your emotional experience.

Which is why 'zero to hero' gaming isn't particularly well-suited to tabletop roleplaying: if you were to actually play Nodberg the Peasant on his very first adventure into the Nastywilde Forest in a 'realistic' way, Nodberg would be toast. You don't want realism, dear Gamers, you want to be fooled like any other reader/viewer/voter. You want permission to believe, to trust the storyteller enough to suspend your disbelief (defense mechanisms) and give in to the structure of the drama. You think you want the frustration of being a zero, but really you want (I betcha) a dramatization of your character's transformation to a somebody. A nonzero.

Let's say Nodberg heads out to the Chamomile Caves to pick some mushrooms for one of the members of his poly threesome, Daniellsworth. He runs across a troll. Hides in the cave, gets trapped when the troll comes in after him - can't get around the thing - so he comes up with a plan: he knows trolls track by scent in the dark, so he rubs the mushroom under his arms to make it musky, spits on it to make it sticky, and heaves it against the wall. The troll goes to track what it thinks is a drooling sweaty manburger; Nodberg slips by on cat feet, and is so suave in this moment of daring that he remembers to get another mushroom as he goes! (Daniellsworth and Vajitszil will be so proud that he kept his head.)

Now, dear Gamer, you're committed to 'realism,' or in any case think you are. If Nodberg is gonna make that kind of escape on a regular basis, he's gonna need a little more systematic knowledge, more practice, more drudgery (or - again - more luck, and if that's all you care about go play goddamn roulette). To actually evolve from Skinny Poly Nerdberg to Swarthy Nightblade Trapspringer Poly Smoothberg is going to take lots and lots of practice, which the rules of D&D don't cover, because this practice isn't mechanical (or rather the other way 'round: its in-game representation can't be mechanical - you really wanna roll the dice to determine how much educational benefit you derive from e.g. hitting 5,000 crosscourt backhands after school?). It's roleplaying, gotta be, and not the fun kind; the transition from 14th to 15th level is pretty easy to justify in game terms and you surely know how to roleplay it at the table, but the fine-grained character development from less-than-zero to almost-a-hero doesn't translate into fun dice-rolling experiences. The 'leveling up' mechanic doesn't scale to scared villagers. If that's the experience you want, forget your d20, grab a shovel and a shotgun, and leave your house; there are plenty of experiences awaiting you and if you play D&D you're (sorry folks) near-certainly just a scared villager yourself.

So here's an (I think) better idea, which has the added advantage of being blazingly obvious and indeed the default choice: if you wanna get the feel of zero-to-hero but don't want to cripple your character in the game's early stages to the point where he can't regularly do anything interesting (because he's got e.g. the proportional strength of a doily), make the challenges harder. Duh. A level 1 rogue trying to pick the pocket of the rare mountain-dwelling Midichlorian Familyfucker (it's got sharp teeth) is gonna need just as much ingenuity and crafty roleplaying as Nodberg in the cave - 'Your weapons: you will not need them' - but the game already has a well-defined system of rules for adjudicating your lvl1 rogue's actions without relying too much on handwaving and protean table compacts.

Old-school nostalgist/revivalists insist that 'fairness' and game balance are for little teenage bitches, but that's just revanchist carping of the 'Get off my lawn!' variety, the self failing to recognize itself. Your DM doesn't have to build 'fair' encounters - D&D 4e doesn't forbid anyone from putting a lvl15 trap in a roughly lvl2 dungeon - but it's nice for the system to be consistent (spanking a pre-linguistic baby that doesn't understand what it's done is sometimes necessary; spanking an older child that doesn't understand what it's done is child abuse. The contract is, 'You can trust that I have our interests at heart'). From the player's standpoint a little of the overarching paranoia and sense of malice is gone from 4e, that roller-coaster feeling that the world's against you, but the illusion-shattering feeling that the rules system is against you or 'mistaken' is gone too. Which might not make as much of a difference to the stereotypical Asperger's-spectrum troglodyte at whom D&D used to be aimed (I know a few of these guys; not all stereotypes are essentially wrong, though none are 'fair' - heh), who after all took some or much of his gaming pleasure from engaging with the rules themselves rather than primarily the storyworld; but in terms of bringing new people into the hobby, especially those raised on the emergent architectures and algorithmic procedures of computer/video games, this is a big necessary step forward.

Those girls and guys want the same zero-to-hero feeling you do, Gamer. The way to achieve it is to replicate not ineptitude but necessity, desperation, possibility. The 'Short Cut to Mushrooms' isn't thrilling because Frodo's useless or because he's statistically unlikely to be able to do anything about danger; it's thrilling because that Black Rider is terrifying and new and Other, and it reminds reader and hobbit(s) just how small we all are. (Hobbit readers get both barrels, alas.)

That holy emotion, that shift in perspective, the acknowledgment of smallness, comes not from size but from contrast. We're not essence-seers like the Buddha, we're edge-finders, pattern-matchers. (Personal nerd pride sidebar: Did I ever tell you I was very briefly a steganography researcher at a lab at MIT, in my capacity as level 1 computer programming acolyte? I would write GIMP plugins in Perl (TMTOWTDI) to detect 'random' scatters of encoded data in scanned images of dollar bills, to prevent counterfeiting. Did you know, further, that half the counterfeit money in Boston is printed on home inkjet printers?)

The sense of narrative sweep that pulls us into tabletop adventuring in the first place is best honoured and evoked not by the home fantasist's pretense to 'realism' but through the storyteller's craft of dramatic contrast and staging. 'Zero to hero' isn't an algorithm, it's an emotional experience, and Dungeons & Dragons (Fourth or any other Edition) is well-enough-suited to providing it. That the game has never been particularly good at simulating the travails of peasants-carrying-swords isn't a weakness of the game system, it's its nature: the attractive fantasies include enhanced abilities, an adopted past, great knowable defeatable enemies, danger that can be named, a call that can be understood, permission to ignore the mundane, the freedom to believe again that the dark cobwebbed passageway under the stairs runs at right angles to this world and emerges into another world entirely. That setup leaves so much narrative overhead, so much space for growth and exploration, that niggling about the difference between a hypothetical level -2 peasant and your underpowered-but-with-potential level 1 wizard seems silly or petty.

Well that's enough of that, I guess. Dangling possibility for next time: one reason 'old school' revivalists are so adamant about rulings-not-rules and save-against-death rolls and all those other forms of arbitrary ludic caprice is that

1) they're all middle-aged men and

2) they've played this shit a long time, have high-paying jobs, families, bills they pay responsibly every month; and

3) they miss being able - encouraged - to admit they don't know everything. They get their feeling of mastery elsewhere; they want danger, and ideally they want it in the form of dice rolls that go bad more often than the little teenage bitches' dice rolls go bad. What this obsession with tyrannical small differences says about the psychology of both potbellied-revanchists and teen-bitches I leave for the moment to the Reader(s). (Just so you know where I stand, I'm some sort of immensely sexy/wise potbellied bitch, rapidly balding to boot and not particularly good at paying bills, and I think the members of Tribes A and B should spend more time on ecstatic ritual and a good deal less time justifying themselves to their fellow tribesmen while slagging off [respectively] the poor deluded bitches and revanchists of Tribes B and A. Didacticism and outreach aren't the same thing - yet another lesson by the way for both actors and RPG-bloggers, boom! Not that my opinion matters much.)

[Plenty of new eyes on this post, thanks to ENworld. Hello fellow nerds: more here, here, here(!!), here, and nostalgically here. Enjoy.]

Digital devolution.

Suddenly I remember that the people who created the tools that make today's digi-pop lifestyle possible do not, in fact, have anything in common with the people now trading on those tools to get semifamous. I rediscover my capacity for pity; for how miserable must this young tribe of social-media-bloggers, hipster-foodie-photographers, indie-folktronica-hypers, organization-fetishists, corporate-shills-in-fashion-sneakers, graphic-designer-wannabes, and other assorted largely coastal organisms be, ten years out from their useless liberal arts degrees with nothing to do but talk to one another about how Ira Glass is really awesome and the new living room chair was totally worth the $400 because it's, like, really a work of art?

The generation that used its engineering skills to escape Mom's basement is not the generation that uses its graphic design skills to get into slightly smaller lofts with lots more natural light. That the latter fetishizes the former is a joke - but not on the former.

Here's how you'll know 'fourth-generation media' have arrived, idiots:

When a new technological storytelling medium has 'arrived,' or the 'game has changed,' a female audience will give a fucking shit.

Well, Warren Ellis is a breathless earnest-conspiracy wannabe-tech-punk type and he's pitiably prone to overstating shit like this, so what. But plotless fan-made FX reels made on borrowed Hollywood equipment using preexisting models from multimillion-dollar digital productions aren't interesting - historically, aesthetically, technologically.

The Guild is aesthetically kind of meh but it's a vastly bigger deal than this silliness in every imaginable way.

This way to the exit.

Arthur Silber is apparently dying.

By choice.

I don't know him, nor am I certain I'd want to know him more closely as he is now; he's angry and disappointed all the time, hates America with remarkable consistency, and his interests seem not to be my own. He apparently sang or did theatre in a past life. He has several cats. He quite likes Angels in America. He used to be a Randroid but has moved into a more interesting political/economic philosophy in the last several years.

And.

My sincere thanks to all who have made donations. I have just enough to pay February rent, with a little bit left over. Since it's just a little bit more than the rent, once I'm able to function even slightly better, I'll be selling my books, CDs and DVDs to a secondhand dealer I've dealt with in the past. I won't get much money for them, since I don't have much of anything now, but it's better than nothing. And I'll need it. I'm sorry that people have recently purchased some items from my [Amazon] Wishlist. I'll try to listen to and/or watch the items people have so kindly sent me before they're all sold. I've deleted the link to the Wishlist, and I don't expect to restore it.

Silber doesn't get proper medical attention or welfare money, by his own account, because he's a 'conscientious objector' to the American political/economic system. (The precise meaning there shouldn't be difficult to figure out.) So if his hints of autobiography are to be believed, he's dying, poor and alone save for his goddamn pets, without even a properly-working computer with which to beg.

I don't want to keep typing things like 'by his own account' and 'if you believe him.' I hate the too-sensitive defenses I've built up over the years, which lead me to second-guess the man's accounts of his problems. But I've emailed Silber a few times, trying however ham-fistedly to be helpful (e.g. talking about work-from-home possibilities), and he's never gotten back to me. He's not obligated to do so, of course, nor to care how I feel. But the motherfucker lives off charity and is at the end of his rope - why not write back? He certainly has time to write long goddamn blog posts consisting mainly of quotes of older long goddamn blog posts - why not take advantage of a correspondent? Why would anyone want to die? If he's on his way out, why not straightforwardly talk about his health problems? Is that 'undignified'? What's less dignified than dying when you don't have to, for Christ's sake?

I want to beat the man silly for hating so many things, for being such a condescending prick, for refusing to live in this world while complaining about it. But I also want him to get healthier and happier. I don't want to extend his life - I want to improve it.

If you have any suggestions (other than 'Get over yourself' - I know, I know), or know anything about the guy, or know someone who knows him personally, could you let me know? And if you have ten dollars to spare, consider sending them his way. I'm not saying you necessarily should - but you should think about it, should have thought about it, come through it.

I wish I knew what to do, I wish knowing and caring were a little more lined up.

From something else.

The ne plus ultra of wisdomless data in hipster tech culture may be the ascendant 'lifehacking' fetish, whose enthusiasts labour under the charming misapprehension that downloading neat-o Macintosh utilities amounts to meaningfully improving not the trappings of one's work environment but the very substance of one's life itself. These 'lifehacker' types write blog posts back and forth in a genially subliterary language full of debased tech terminology, pimping single-function shareware apps and Sweet! Sweet! Deals! on startlingly expensive yuppie lifestyle items to - remember - improve the 'quality' of readers' lives. Self-described 'customization freaks,' these bloggers and their readers pass off (and ingest) linkwhoring and free publicity as enlightened self-improvement - as if someone watched the seminal, widely-misunderstood film Fight Club, heard Edward Norton's self-satisfied/disgusted monologue about 'single-serving food, single-serving friends,' decided WOW, THE WORLD DEFINITELY NEEDS MORE OF THOSE, and went off and invented the absolute antithesis of all that the film stands for, times several million pageviews a year.

The single most important criticism of 'Internet culture' ever delivered consists of the next five lines of that very scene:

'That's clever.'

'Thank you.'

'How's that working out for you?'

'What.'

'Being clever.'

Which (cleverness) brings us back to Merlin Mann...

Hire editor; kill self.

Professional writers who write like this should be fired:

Tank Artillery [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

That's exactly what the National Review Institute is aiming to do: Highlighted and advancing the best of the ideas on the Right. At their conference last week, Mike Franc, Yuval Levin, and Heather Mac Donald were among the originial conservative thinkers on display. Mona Charen wrote about the conference here.

WFB would be ashamed, of course, for a variety of reasons. But why isn't everyone else?

Heh.

Via Sullivan, we have some idiot at National Review Online summarizing this...

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

...like this:

There's no civil war on the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru, Time

I know, I'm trying to stop reading this stuff. But the level of self-parody here is delicious. NRO is a travesty of the once-vital National Review, and it occupies too central a space in conservative 'intellectual' circles to ignore. Alas, the politicians and the 'intellectuals' spend a lot of time jerking one another off down in D.C. True on the left and the right, but I can't stomach the 'liberal' version of this nonsense long enough even to laugh at it. Tyranny of small differences and so forth, I guess. Plus Rick Perlstein didn't, y'know, lead us laughing into a war that's killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and will cost maybe a trillion bucks.

Oh did I tell you we saw Bill Kristol at Zoe's the other day? No, I couldn't bring myself to make the obvious 'I loved you in City Slickers' joke. My wife was so disappointed.

Progressives in the Cabinet?

Ezra Klein says Obama is pursuing ideology-agnostic competence. Christopher Hayes says he's fucking the progressives who helped him into office. The Corner kidz joke that 'change you can believe in' looks a lot like the mid-90's. HOW CAN THEY ALL BE RIGHT?!

What the hell?

A nation of deeply distrustful temperamentally-conservative xenophobes just elected a half-African black man President by less than 10% in the popular vote, and you expect him to start throwing shit around before he's even taken office?

There's a war to prosecute and a massive global financial bailout to oversee, a half-Republican electorate to sell on universal health care, and an international investor class to massage into semiconsciousness before beating it to death with the Happy Communism Stick. The man knows what he's doing.

Please. Fools. Relax.

I think I'm about to kick off a no-blogs-until-2009 policy. There's writing to be done, and (y'know) actual 'living.' A few of these cats could undertake the same mission.

Pro-life views hurt the Republicans as much as bad foreign policy.

This, from the intelligent but really-really-imperfect Daniel Larison, is simply false:

Doesn’t it seem obvious that foreign and economic policies, in which the GOP is widely viewed as having failed, have much more to do with the woes of the party than pro-life views? These would be the policies that the administration put into action, as opposed to its pro-life rhetoric, which has more or less changed nothing.

The answer's no.

It's possible that Larison doesn't actually live in the world and interact with people, but not likely. So how does he manage to misunderstand this simple point? 'Pro-life' fundamentalism, like institutional and individual 'homophobia' (i.e. 'hatred of faggotry and distrust/hatred of those who practice it'), colours all discussions of domestic cultural policy, just as ridiculous anti-tax/'small-government' rhetoric (read: calls to cut social services for the poor, nonwhites, et al.) colours economic policy. The policies we get from Washington might not be 'conservative' in any pure sense, but they reflect the disproportionate influence of those politically active right-wingers who hold these views. The window of acceptable conversation is narrow, and that narrowness is one important measure of the influence of various political organizations.

Which leads us back to Kathleen Parker. Larison's criticism of Parker amounts to, 'It's the war that fucked the Republicans up, and our policies don't actually reflect evangelical beliefs.' Half of which is half-true (the war is a rallying point but this wasn't ultimately an election about the war, nor about George Bush, as polls overwhelmingly show), and half of which is totally irrelevant. Christianists (to borrow an increasingly-popular term) might not determine the final outcomes of social debates, but they dictate their terms to a remarkable degree. The idea that 'life' begins at conception, that a 3-day-old fetus has the same rights as a 3-day-old neonate, is absolute insane bullshit. Yet we have to take into account the feelings - purely religious beliefs, in other words - of the people who hold onto such notions, when setting domestic cultural policy. That's a direct result (and not the only one) of the disproportionate power Christianists have over domestic policy debates.

Proposition 8 was a blow to the civil rights of all Americans. At a moment when the state could be altering the legal definition of marriage to remove religious considerations, we remain shackled to a conception of marriage that no longer has procreation as its main goal, no matter what lies the pro-Prop 8 types spread around. That's a function of the influence of largely right-wing (culturally/socially conservative) religious organizations - though not of 'religious beliefs' or even 'Christian beliefs,' obviously, as those are up for very public debate and e.g. Barack Obama's 'heterodox' Christianity has the same claim as the laughable James Dobson's on the public's attention. Again: Larison wants us to believe that Christianists have no power because they always vote Republican. He's choosing to misunderstand this point (he's far from stupid). The Republican Party doesn't ever deliver the cultural counterrevolution the Christianists want - but it's doing its best to arrest any social progressivism that rears its head. Which is in part - to whatever degree - a function of Christianist (politicized Christian) loyalty to the GOP.

Which is why they won't have a place in the Republican Party forever. Political parties are compromises; soon the Christianists may well realize they needn't compromise with the likes of Cheney, Gingrich, and Rove any longer.

'Wellllll...that'll be an interesting day.'

[Doc - I'll get to your comment tomorrow, probably.]

See? Idiot.

I don't understand.

Yes, there is rot on both sides. But social conservatives are not rotten and it's rotten to suggest they (we, in my case) are.

And, dear God, it's not God who is the problem.

'Yes, everyone has to share the blame, including us. But we don't! See, I got you there! Also I'm high as a kite right now.'

I know, old joke. But how else do you explain her?

I think someone's gone off-message!

Doesn't this idiot know the President-Elect is one of them?

In the video, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, castigated Obama's foreign policy stances on Afghanistan and Israel and ridiculed the president-elect's worldview. Al-Zawahiri compared Obama unfavorably to the late Malcolm X, an African-American militant who adopted Islam.

On the other hand, does this mean it's OK for these idiots to like Obama now?

Funky 16 Corners.

It's the fourth anniversary of the naaaastiest podcast on the web. Maybe you've heard of 'Rubber Souled'? Go now, go.

[All links save the last are to mp3 DJ mixes guaranteed to spice up your music collection, your dinner, and your goddamn sex life. Hat tip to Walter for reminding me about the Corners - along with a stern reminder, in turn, that Obama's electoral victory doesn't mean he gets to go around stealing all our fine white women! Happy belated birthday, W.]

Will someone please send Arthur Silber a goddamn laptop...

...so he can go back to whining about how Barack Obama is the devil?

Vindictive, juvenile assholes.

Ezra Klein: 'THE END OF NADER: The man who did more, arguably, than any other to condemn us to the Bush era comes out swinging against the Obama era, wondering if Obama will be "Uncle Sam or Uncle Tom?" [...] I'd just add that Nader's political opinions have long since ceased being relevant to his role in American politics.'

Andrew Golis: 'At a certain level, this strikes me as a nice punctuation to end the era of Bush. The man who helped start it finishes it by racially smearing the man who has now ended it. On another level, it's just so fucking sad.'

Matthew Yglesias (sarcastically): 'I, for one, am completely indifferent to the fact that George W. Bush rather than Al Gore has been president for the past eight years — they’re just tweedledee and tweedledum.'

Some fool at TPM: 'I thought I'd lost every ounce of respect for Ralph Nader. The 2000 nonsense cost him most of his capital with me, and in 2004, he lost even more for running so plainly not for the people he claims to represent, but for his own glorification.

But now, it's all gone.'

Sigh.

Please go read this instead. The complaints in the liberal blogosphere about Ralph Nader have basically nothing to do with race - it's an expression of guilt from pious white fools, sure, but mostly it's resentment from people with short historical memories who're working hard to keep their finally-the-Democrats-are-in-charge-of-everything buzz going for a few more days before they're reminded that politicians are, in fact, fucking politicians.

Hey, wasn't that the point Ralph Nader was making?

DEAR EZRA KLEIN: Ralph Nader did not even arguably do more than anyone else to 'condemn us to the Bush era.' Saying so makes you sound a DAMN FOOL. (Better candidates: George Bush. Karl Rove. Whatever imbecile ran Al Gore's campaign. Everyone who had anything to do with John Kerry shitboxing himself and the entire Democratic Party in 2004. Bill fucking Clinton and Monica fucking Lewinsky. Everyone who voted for George Bush in good faith having been lulled into a false sense of security by the stock market's spectacular success. Osama Bin Laden, for God's sake.

Grow up you schmuck.

Ezra Klein, sigh.

Bored now:

Spencer Ackerman asks, "Remember in 2003 and 2004, when there was all this talk about how the Democrats were in danger of no longer being a national party?" I do remember that. I also remember how Democrats had to get religion if they ever wanted to be competitive again. I also remember how they had to appeal to the white heartland by nominating candidates more culturally recognizable to rural voters. Instead, they went in the opposite direction, running a candidate who was recognizable to the majority coalition Democrats hoped to have in 10 years. It seems to have worked out pretty well. It's almost as if pundits don't really know what they're talking about.

No, Ezra. Don't be fucking stupid. The Democrats nominated a young, very Christian Midwestern senator with centrist capitalist/cultural views and a plan to cut taxes for most Americans during a major economic downturn, affiliated with a flame-spitting Christian church and willing to forcefully repudiate the Democrats' laughable identity-politics brand. He's exactly as cultural-elite as the majority of Senators, Republican and Democrat, but - in spite of his tech-heavy campaign machinery and academic credentials - Obama is more or less the ideal Safe Black Male to pitch to moderate Republicans. And the fact that he brought so many new voters into the race is a function, primarily, of

1) his age,

2) his race, and

3) George Bush and Dick Cheney's disastrous presidency, the most media-saturated presidency in history at a time when 'progressive' media outlets are just being born in the USA.

The man will ride into the White House on the back of a tax cut proposal. Think about that for a minute.

Obama is not the radical liberal the politically wishy-washy national media makes him out to be. And much as young left-leaning pundits like Klein and Ackerman would like to believe he vindicates both their politics and their attitudes about Republicans and Democrats, Obama's appeal remains as it's always been: he can reach out to Republicans and build a liberal coalition using conservative language.

My hope is that Obama is able to show disaffected post-Palin Republicans (the ones who don't see the GOP primarily as a white Christian cultural army) how much common ground there is between his views and theirs. His command of the Christian cultural language so important to American politicians is what's gotten him in through the door.

Self-satisfied liberals ignore that fact at their peril.

Wow, wow.

It's always nice to discover a truly great writer tucked away in some corner online - someone with an ear for language, the sense of literary shape, a thirst for...well, anything really. You remember that this benighted medium has its moments, few and far between or whatever but real.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 'Velociman.'

There's just one catch. There's always a catch! See if you can guess what it is:

I am not a reactionary person by nature, but trust me when I say the first 100 days of a Barack Obama presidency will bring holy hell upon those who adhere to a classical liberal philosophy. This man is a radical of the first stripe, and he has left no stone unturned in his quest. He has not committed voter fraud in the good old fashioned way. He has a vast network of ACORN operatives stealing votes through fraudulent means by the hundreds of thousands. This man has not committed campaign finance fraud in the good old fashioned way, squirrelling away Chinese monies like Bill Clinton. This cocksucker actually disabled his credit card verification system to allow tens of millions of illegal dollars to flow into his coffers from any number of enemies of the state. The droid army of the legacy press is aware of this, of course, but who wants to be the whistleblower once this man assumes power? No one. No fucking body. Wouldn't be prudent at this fucking juncture, as 41 might say.

Did I mention this man hates me? You and me? Yes he does. Why? Because he can. Yes He Can. Beneath that cool persona is a megalomaniac. Cool? Like Stalin after a purge, emotionally and sexually spent. Like Saddam after a torture session, dozing in his chair with someone's genitals curled in his fist. Like Pol Pot after a petit mal seizure, mumbling a litany of the dead. Cool that way.

There are four kinds of people in this world.

1) Crazy people who do not write well.

2) Crazy people who write well.

3) Noncrazy people who do not write well.

4) Noncrazy people who write well.

You want to steer your web browser away from groups 1, 2, and 3. Velociman is apparently a banner-waving card-carrying member of group 2, but god damn there are some honey sentences in there.

I am threatened by Barack Obama's brownness.

And here is a visually-appealing explanation of why you should be too!

(Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com has in the last few weeks become one of the three or four indispensable election-news sites. Go there.)

Michelle Malkin is a great entertainer and a riveting screen presence.

Whores' Guild, blogosphere chapter (a/k/a 'Some excellent gaming blogs you should be reading').

[I know, it's not as perfect a name as '"Concerned Ladies of America West (C.L.A.W.)" East Coast Chapter,' but it'll have to do.]

I should note that the long D&D-n-sex post below was inspired by some recent nerdly blog-reading. If you're at all interested in roleplaying games from a player's, gamemaster's, writer's, or more abstract/theoretical point of view, you should definitely be looking at the following blogs, among others:

• The Chatty DM. Linked here, if memory serves, to read about Chatty's 'Kobold Love' project (housed at Chatty Studios): an open-source D&D adventure written for 4th edition, with an open call for other authors to develop analogous adventures for other systems. The charming hook: the PC's play kobolds, out to avenge the adventurers who keep wrecking their lives for no good reason. What inspired me about it was that he'd made his writerly pastime into something he could share with other gamers; Chatty recently parlayed that webgoing notoriety into a paying RPG-writing gig. And I was all like 'fuck that, I'm as good an unemployed writer as I know, I should...' and then I typed various things which at some point I'll share with you, Reader(s), whom I love but do not, ultimately, trust as far as I can throw you. Anyhow: have a look.
• Jonathan Drain. Heady writing about RPGs; start here if you have writerly predispositions (or preoccupations or, I suppose, fucked up self-image). His best post, to my eye, may be this one, 'The Invisible Dungeon' - a smart, bootstrappy way to think about system-agnostic adventure construction.
• Mike Mearls (also here). One of the lead designers on D&D 4e, and more or less a straight shooter re: the gaming industry (near as I can tell). Alas, his audio interviews reveal that he is a native speaker of Geek English with a Geek accent, which drives me up the wall - but then I am judgmental and my mom was an English-language snob and what can you do.
• Critical Hits. A series of podcast interviews and live-play recordings. (Oh I hate myself.) Plus reviews and such, but frankly you can take or leave those.
• Dungeon Mastering. Interesting collection of articles, with a helpful assortment of documents to get campaigns and such started - plus the biggest collections of free adventures and maps I've seen.
• Kobold Quarterly. The new Dragon magazine, by all accounts. Home of Wolfgang Baur of Open Design microfame. Open Design is a project to watch - spiritual successor to Dave Sim's self-publishing, among other things. Question: how big does your built-in audience have to be in order for you to make money writing as Baur now does, under a patronage model?
• Treasure Tables. Lovely.
• Gnome Stew. Even lovelier - system-agnostic GMing advice with a design-y bent.

And while we're at it, Reader(s), you may or may not know that among the occasional commenters at this site is a gentleman named Adam Roberts, who is British and therefore suspect in most ways but who is - had I only known this the day I jumped on him at The Valve for some silly thing I've now forgotten! - apparently one of the more highly-regarded writers of hard-SF of these, the Latter Days. Jesus Christ, one newspaper reviewer has said he possesses "perhaps the most untrammelled imagination in British fiction," which again - British, hence suspect - but honestly if someone said I had even 'perhaps the nicest hairshirt among pseudonymous Cambridge bloggers' I'd just keel over and die from an overdose of autoplotzing. ('Plotzing re: oneself' --wgh coinage)

I mention gentleman Roberts because you should read his stuff, critical and fictional (irritatingly, he's also a fine critic), and because...whenever he leaves a comment that can be interpreted as nice, I become uneasy, thinking that perhaps I'm being dissed in a dogwhistle sort of way audible only to other people who actually collected their grad school diplomas. Such is the depth of my feeling of inadequacy that I've closed comments on this post to keep you, whoever you is/are/would-have-your-friends-believe-you-to-be-in-the-plural-or-singular, to keep you from coddling me in any way. That's boldness. I'm a barbarian and I'm bold.

The financial crisis explained twice.

1) At length, by five MIT economists. [This panel happened last night in 10-250 and was superb.]

2) Succinctly, using Pokémon. [This blog post happened last week and is a blog post.]

'Unrepentant'? The new talking point has four syllables?!

I gotta say, I'm impressed. With the exception of the whip-smart[*] Derbyshire and (sure) Ponnuru, the Cornerites are a dimwitted bunch. But they've mastered at least one Real Big Word this week: 'unrepentant.' Followed by 'terrorist,' it appears a cool dozen times on the front page of The Corner at the moment.

What does this mean? On the one hand, that these clowns have difficulty writing anything other than catchphrases. More importantly, it means the final phase of the campaign is on. The latent racism, xenophobia, and post-60's conservative revanchism bubbling heretofore beneath the campaign's surface now comes on full-force. And unsurprisingly, the key figures in the Right's propaganda war at the moment were...Vietnam-era revolutionaries.

C'mon, chuckleheads! Can't we pretty please fight a war other than goddamn Vietnam? Isn't that part of the point of Obama's candidacy?

[*] The Derb has some despicable traits but if I had to assemble a team of smart conservative media pundits he'd be on it.

Rationalizing 'bros before hos.'

I ought to know better than to read Pandagon; the best writer on the site by a wide margin is Amanda Marcotte, but she's also in some ways the most disturbing member of that cohort - a thoughtful person who works hard, and knows she's working hard, to rationalize and aestheticize her overpowering hate and disgust. She says some absolutely stupid things, but then so does everyone; the problem with Amanda's writing is that the stupid or hateful or (to be more precise) blandly misandrist ('man-hating') things she says (when she says them) are couched in bog-standard 'progressive' rhetoric of a particular young white bourgeois feminist variety, shot through with just enough co-opted punk style to appeal to the cool kids.

The rest of the writers are histrionic and boring (and old hand Jesse Taylor has unexpectedly supplanted Pam Spaulding as the site's resident screeching harpy). Well what can you do. [Update: Well yes, some qualities I hold as dealbreakers w/r/t Pandagon I tolerate in writers like Andrew Sullivan. And I should note that the Pandagonians are in most issues 'allies' of mine, at least in theory (or Theory, if you like), so why carry on like this? I plead insanity on the former case and shrug at the latter. Sullivan, for his part, seems good-hearted for the most part - though to be frank I think he's a racist misogynist asshole and a world-class hypocrite. I'm not sure why I continue to read his site, nor those of his fellow poli-bloggers like Yglesias and Klein, with whom I've got so many problems. My hate is complex, today isn't the day to think it through. Someday will be, I promise.]

In any case:

People like Laura Sessions Stepp who scold young women and tell them to manipulate the guys with their sexuality in order to make everyone more mature are doing young women a great disservice. Young women have enough on their plates---Kimmel does take time to mention how young women feel this intense pressure to be effortlessly perfect, just for starters. They have to grow themselves up, and people like Stepp would have them take on the responsibility to grow young men up, too. Which is fucked up on 14 different levels. To name a few: Good luck even getting a guy to submit to being your maturation project. Love, especially early love, shouldn’t be this horrible and thankless job. He’ll resist you, which means endless amounts of tears for you and hostility from his male friends about how he’s pussy-whipped. He’ll probably cheat on you and dump you. It’s unfair to have to take care of your own development and a man’s, especially when he’s not going to give much back in return.

Now, Amanda's talking about young men in particular here; on the other hand, she's a young woman (just a couple years older than me if I remember correctly), so let's call a spade a spade: this is how she sees men. This is what she thinks is the basic nature of male/female relationships. And to be clear, this is not merely her description of a free-floating patriarchy that keeps all people down, nor a diagnosis of the unfortunate abuse of most men by emotionally closeted misogynist alpha males desperate to pathologize all non-macho masculinities: this is everyone, in Amanda's world. She uses the language of victimization to talk about men who don't fit the frat boy stereotype, but she happily slides into general condemnation when she gets going (and she gets going fast). And notice that she criticizes Sessions Stepp's tactics but not her feeling, which is that young men women's help to grow into reasonable human beings, while (it is implied) that relation does not go the other way. Plus Amanda seems happy to do what Sessions Stepp is describing, if only it didn't take so much work. Which is a gross fucking attitude even outside of this dubious argumentative context, even outside of this specific instance.

That said, it's worth reading her whole post, which is about 'hookup' culture (which should be pluralized). It's these sentences that stopped me short:

I suspect a lot of young women also know that they're basically biding their time until guys their age grow up a little and lose some of their allegiance to the "bros before hos" mentality and become acceptable boyfriends who can exhibit care about you as a human being. Until then, why waste your time? And hell, even after guys start growing up, there’s often plenty of times when you’re single and it seems every guy you meet has "issues" with grown women, and it's self-punishing to hold out for the good one to come along when that could means months or years of waiting.

Again, this is a perverse way of seeing the world, though not a surprising one: it basically removes from women's shoulders every scrap of responsibility for the state of dating relationships, implying that because women allegedly 'mature faster' than men that men are inferior beings, certainly inadequate.[*] But that's common perversity. So what. I'm interested, rather, in the classic line, 'bros before hos.'

When I was in college, my housemates used to use this line all the time. I lived at a fraternity, of sorts; culturally, the only thing it had in common with typical fraternities was its all-male membership, and even that was negotiable.[**] Still, you'd hear 'bros before hos' all the time. 98% of the time it was said in jest, or as half-ironic affirmation of the worth of a brother ('Don't worry boss, you might be single but you've got us'), in which case 'bros after hos' might have been a more precise formulation. It was also a way of needling one another: 'What, you don't want to hang out with us? Because you're gonna go have sex or something?' Which was both a reasonable claim (c'mon, you can have sex any goddamn time) and a misrepresentation. While my housemates did tend to display some resentment toward the women who 'stole' their brothers away - I was quite often guilty of this, shamefully - ours was a committed, consciously welcoming community; our aspiration was equality of treatment in all things, one of the few rules actually enforced in the house, and extending our love and affection to everyone who entered the community was the one task we all worked hard at for four straight years.

In other words, the phrase was never spoken nor taken at face value. (How many such slogans are?)

But the one positive meaning 'bros before hos' had, its mock-dismissive language aside ('bro,' like the later 'dudebro,' was as much a slander in our house as 'ho,' though 'ho' was never ever used in isolation that I can recall), was that it reaffirmed our commitment to one another. Unless you're wearing a ring of some kind - of the wedding or (argh) promise varieties - you likely have only informal commitments to reassure you of your place in your Special Somebody's life. But we had actually taken oaths to one another (regarding trust and friendship and acceptance rather than loyalty, though our national organization's oaths contained some of that stuff), and crazy as that sort of thing sounds to many people, the oaths (like wedding vows) served as markers of faith, rituals with the power not only to mark time and space but to transform relationships.

My first college girlfriend split with me during sophomore year; we'd dated since between semesters as freshmen. I couldn't understand why we were breaking up - or rather, I wouldn't let myself believe what I perceived were her reasons for splitting (boredom, frustration, etc.). The fact is, I'd come home to my crazy housemates and they'd take care of me, which granted me the security, the 'safe space'(!) I needed to deal with my confusion and sadness (and anger). It took me a long time to accept that it was for the best. And in the intervening nearly-a-decade (Christicles!) I've learned a lot about relationships, much of it from my housemates themselves.

But that's fanciful. The imaginative material is this: our words of stylized, ritual affirmation had power. And in a country and a culture where men are for various reasons constrained in their ability to express their thoughts and emotions verbally - indeed, in any form but the physical - we found ourselves co-opting the language of the frat boys we despised (our biggest common bigotry) in order to express a complex truth about ourselves and our shared life.

I know Amanda's using 'bros before hos' as a synecdoche here for the genuinely misogynist culture(s) found in many 'first-world' fraternities and macho-male organizations, but as usual she's eliding certain crucial differences between such groups, and as usual she's ignoring the fact that (like religious beliefs that are ridiculous on face - the Ascension, the Annunciation, reincarnation - but symbolize emotional truths) the language of men's cultures is always shot through with the same complexity as the (sure, let's grant this) women's cultures formed in reaction to male aggression or control or circumscription. It's a common move in academia and its popular bastard discourses to valorize woundedness or defensiveness while criticizing identical behaviour in allegedly dominant groups, but we shouldn't roll over for it, even when the people perpetrating such double standards do so for 'progressive' reasons, or (orthogonally) with a good heart.

So to sum up: 'bros before hos' doesn't actually mean 'it's better to hang out with the guys than with bitches,' nor does it simply reduce to 'women don't understand us, dude.' Nor is the 'attitude' it purportedly signifies as simple as immature dismissiveness and avoidance. And while it's nice to have a simple explanation for or response to everything in pocket - for instance that old chestnut, 'I blame the patriarchy' - the cultural prejudices of both men and women are twinned with biological predilections of both men and women which in complex, unpredictable, and sometimes mutually beneficial (and often mutually disastrous) ways determine the roles of men and women as they grow, adapt, intertwine, and slowly devour one another. Which is maybe only to say that we can hate or even love features of the world without hating or loving the people who seem to embody or display them, and we'd be well-served asking how the people who display them feel about the whole thing - and whether the allowances you make for people shaped and coloured like you, you should consider extending to the Other Half.

Though maybe I was saying something else, or more. Honestly, I'm better at maintaining speed than depth. You may know that by now. If you're disinclined to be charitable toward the above, I hope you'll take it with a grain of salt. Amanda's readers have got the shaker and they're using it up at a goodly clip. Ask politely.

* * *

[*] I should note that, as Amanda has literally made it her job to let people know how she feels about male/female relationships, at extraordinary length, it's possible that her sense of 'every guy [having] "issues" with grown women' might have less to do with spirit-crushing patriarchy and the emotional crippling of the American male than with Amanda Marcotte. And believe me, this isn't the bog-standard misogynist 'Oh another uppity feminist bitch' reaction so commonly seen among reactionaries; I'm guessing Amanda would be a more effective advocate for her political views and (broadly) her sex were she less self-involved, less resentful. And a more effective advocate would a wonderful thing. Alas.

[**] There are a handful of progressive-minded living groups at MIT, to go with the usual assortment of alpha jocks, midlist jocks, overcompensatory subjocks, whitebread nerds, and the batch of nice Jewish boys at AEPi. My fraternity was doggedly nerdy, somewhere in the middle of the MIT pack in terms of social skills but near the top in terms of open-hearted extroversion; we were zealous about our house culture, which was built (I kid you not) on four rules: 'No hazing. No homophobia. No misogyny. No one shall force his or her lifestyle on anyone else in the house.' 35 people on top of one another can be frustrating and tiring, and my brothers' lives were more densely interconnected than is typical for college kids, in part because of the absence of freshman/upperclassmen competition or alienation (because of the no-hazing rule). But when the house worked, when we acted in concert and allowed love and trust to guide us - in other words, when we lived in faith with one another - I believe we had something truly unique among living groups anywhere. In particular, the aggressive and even abrasive boys-at-play, nothing-is-sacred quality of house culture balanced out the retiring awkward-touchy-feely tendencies many of us had: for instance, at house meetings we'd end with 'Gossip and Slander,' in which we went around the room gleefully outing one another's secrets and peccadilloes, especially the shameful or tawdrily sexual ones, under the belief that almost nothing is worth keeping from family. (In truth we would respect serious secrets and blood-family concerns, of course.) This only sounds invasive; truth be told, it was the best part of house meetings, other than the drinking game, which had only one rule ('Every time someone says something stupid you take a shot'). It was a short game.

Dig it, baby: talkin' criticality formality banality blues.

The advent of frictionless digital communications has had a big impact on cult cultures of all kinds. The basic change is encoded in this question: is it better (for whatever value(s) of 'better' you choose) to develop a theory, or to share an opinion? Put another way, are ideas for sharing, or is their primary purpose to provoke and sustain other, higher-order ideas? Should we be worried, in other words, about the privileging of 'wit' and 'intelligence' (or their like-a-looks) over 'wisdom' in our modern writing corps that comes with instant-response online culture?

OK for instance: Have you considered the possibility that as good as The Empire Strikes Back obviously is, as much of an improvement as it is over the first Star Wars film, that much of our enjoyment of the film has nothing to do with the writing, that it's the special effects and above all the music that made the improvement? Consider the difference between the Ben/Vader duel in the first film and that astonishing silhouetted opening to the Luke/Vader duel in the sequel, pictured here:

Think too of the first moment of the TIE fighter chase in Empire, the first moment in the trilogy (to my memory) to absolutely break the implicit X-Y plane in space travel. Lemme see here: 'Well we can always outfly 'em,' Han says, and the Millennium Falcon plunges straight down like a Nilla wafer falling from a child's hand, TIE fighters chasing, that looming Star Destroyer in the background like dark God. And then the chase through the asteroid field - here comes the music - that scherzo with its glockenspiels and interposing snatches of Vader's theme, loping in 6/8 at first before a woozy string section ushers in the lightning-quick 2/2 like something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon, climaxing with two recurrences of the most memorable incidental music in the trilogy, that soaring horn chorus, flutes and piccolos going basically insane around the edges of the 'Oh we're fucked now but wait, wait...' fanfare. What else can you call it? And while this is happening in the score, yet another crazed action cue from composer John Williams in a film that's already seen the most complex action cue he'd ever written ('The Battle of Hoth'), meanwhile onscreen the Millennium Falcon tips onto its side to fly through a narrow canyon, and the TIE fighters actually make it through the first gap before exploding...

And yeah, Han and C3P0 have their 'the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field' conversation that every geek on earth can quote, and Han and Leia share one of their Bogey-n-Bacall moments (remember who cowrote the screenplay):

LEIA: You don't have to do this to impress me.

HAN: You said you wanted to be around when I made a mistake; well, this could be it, sweetheart.

LEIA: I take it back.

[...]

LEIA: You do have your moments. Not many, but you have them.

...but their every moment together is helped by the fact that the Han/Leia love theme (with its snazzy 'here comes everybody' modulation before the final go-round) is as strong as the famed Imperial March, and the ensuing floating-garbage scene is pure visual poetry, an unexpected moment of grace after the frenzied Falcon/Star Destroyer chase. (Lucas's idea?) Snappy as the dialogue is (and the structure - think of how creepy it is when Threepio 'reveals' that stormtroopers are in Cloud City, after the audience already knows), the music and visuals are so strong, so tightly-conceived, that maybe it's time we reconsidered how 'little' Lucas contributed to his great work's second volume. Critics smile at Empire while scoffing at Return of the Jedi, but the things that stick with you - Luke leaping through a dank bog wreathed with choking mist, or Han plunging into the freezing machine, or an opening battle sequence on a frozen tundra, or that final awful scream from Mark Hamill on hearing who's really his daddy - come straight from Lucas himself. And none of those images would have half their power without John Williams's most iconic compositions - a 6/8 theme (felt in 2) for the crypto-space-fascists[*], a wild percussion-and-piano to score a war film, gentle strings for the aging monk Yoda, that gorgeous pizzicato-strings-and-french-horn arrangement of Yoda's theme for the training montage (with loopy clarinet fill to round out the verse), and a heart-on-sleeve Big Movie Theme for the best-developed relationship in the series (Han and Leia).

In other words: say what you want about the immeasurably improved writing and direction, the fact is that the film builds on portions of Lucas's original story, and it's golden, and at the level of pure image and sound the film stands tall with or without dialogue.

* * *

Now, this is just a notion. It wasn't until I wrote the boldfaced line that I stumbled upon the hidden thesis of this silly post, which is that it's time to reconsider Empire as a work that's primarily George Lucas's - to restore credit to the 'visionary' who first dreamed this stuff up in 1973 or '74 - and to take a beat to celebrate John Williams, without question the best orchestral-score writer in Hollywood.

But!

My question is, would one be better off going off with this post and working up a more general take on the series? Would it have more impact as an aside or interpolation in a larger argument about the Star Wars trilogies (like the one I was working up last spring, along the lines of 'Star Wars and The Dark Tower are Tolkien-homage cycles (OK, clearly), the prequels are Lucas's Silmarillion (and all the more personal and important as a result), and specifically the two newer cycles are lamentations for the passing of the generation that was itself the 'new arrival' in Tolkien's own lamentation - i.e. King's and Lucas's stories are post-Sixties responses, not entirely complimentary, to the legacy left by the men and women of Tolkien's generation, who were after all the Empire, however well-intentioned, of the 60's)? In that context these observations might go to support a broader argument. I can't even tell whether they're interesting on their own, but if I were talking about the trilogy instead, I could cite them as evidence rather than conclusions (tricksy, no?)...

Well but I started out talking about instant-feedback culture. The point being: if I didn't have this outlet, I might never have written any of this shit, and so what. But what if I had been moved to write it anyhow? Would I be stopping after this paragraph? Would I have to be someone other than myself to take up such a task? Where do I sign up to become that guy? And could this version of Wally Holland III take this line of thinking and weave it into some other, and if not, can I blame my decline and fall on the Internet of which you are a part?! Reader(s), it's been one day since my last confession, and I am a goddamn sinner.

* * *

[*] One of my fondest musical memories is getting to play those maddening incessant triple-tongued repeating figures on my clarinet at All-County Band, for a medley of Williams's marches. It's a lot to ask of a kid who can't be bothered even to practice even his Solo Fest performances, never mind sight-readable ensemble pieces. Well I never said I was perfect, Reader(s).

The shark looks so small from way up here on my bike, thought Andrew.

Idiot:

The press doesn't matter so much any more. We all have Google.

Links to a crazy person.

Brad Hicks combines unsupported assertion, motivations-imputing, historical analysis, and clean effective prose into a tasty daily stew of cultural criticism. He keeps things largely reined-in tonally, but because he lacks sympathy (and apparently empathy), he's largely unconcerned about offense. And he's apparently a bit unhinged. Go read these things, they're worth it:

A marvelous post on oil speculation, the Seventies, cycles of history, and our current president:

What's so magical about that $50 (in 1976 dollars) price point? That was what it would cost to pump more oil out of Texas. So with $50 to $75 oil in the present, and every expert assuring them that the price of oil would never drop below $50 and might well be on the far side of $100 in a couple of years, everybody in America sank their money, all at once, into Texas oil exploration. Houston office real estate became more precious than gold, as company after company was funded to buy up mineral rights, or to scientifically survey for good places to drill, or to drill exploratory wells, or to build oil well machinery, or to service oil well machinery in place. Among those companies was a tiny little firm named Arbusto Energy Services. Its founder and CEO was the son of a US Senator and largely unsuccessful Republican Presidential candidate, happy to take his father's campaign contributors' money and eager to take advantage of the fact that oil would never be priced less than $50/bbl to earn his own "independent" fortune, to prove that he was more of a man than his father. That man was, of course, George Walker Bush, and when oil hit $15/bbl, he went completely bankrupt.

How does a guy forget his own multi-million-dollar bankruptcy?

But here's why this is weighing on me right now: for the last couple of weeks of the presidential campaign, every politician in America has been eager to take a stand on the subject of off-shore oil exploration and mining...

On McCain, the Keating Five, and the constituencies who want to believe he's a 'maverick':

All five of the Keating Five swore up and down that they thought Keating's money was perfectly legal campaign contributions with no quid pro quo, and the only one who was believed was John McCain, because when prosecutors and the ethics committee looked into it, it became clear that it really never occurred to McCain that those were bribes. And coming under investigation for bribery shook John McCain to the very core of his being, because there's only one thing that's as important to John McCain as his constant need to have a super-model on his arm, gazing adoringly up at him, and that's his reputation. If you know the full history of McCain's military service, you can see clearly that he is far, far more concerned about his reputation than he is even about his country. And thus, it brought his whole world crashing down to realize that to people who didn't know him well enough to know that he really was too dumb to recognize a bribe when he was handed one, it would look like John McCain put his office up for sale.

And it's what John McCain did about that that cemented his place in history, to date. He put himself way, way out in front on every ethics issue to pass through Congress from then on: budget reform, campaign finance reform, ethics reform, lobbying reform, you name it. Ironically, he didn't change his own behavior so very much...

On McCain's predilection for beauty queens:

Seriously, what in the fuck is it with John McCain and beauty queens? His first wife, Carol Shepp McCain, was a swimwear model. But she got into an automobile accident and became only normally attractive, so he cheated on her with a 17 years younger beauty pageant winner named Cindy Hensley, whom he ended up divorcing Carol for and marrying. Then she got to be middle aged and a little plastic looking, and what do you know, McCain starts being seen everywhere he goes with, and doing some potentially lucrative favors for, a cheerleader turned bribe lobbyist, named Vicki Iseman, who's 13 years younger than Cindy. He gets outed on that, cuts off ties with her, and then a couple of months later (after viciously humiliating his wife in front of a group of bikers, to her face) he picks as his "running mate" yet another beauty pageant winner who's almost half his age.

Is there even one woman, even one woman anywhere in his office, career, or personal life that he's ever voluntarily associated with who hasn't been a bikini model, cheerleader, or beauty queen?

On Wall-E and complexity (a sharp post clarifying the most common misreading of the film):

And that's what drove untold thousands of people psycho: the portrayal of all Americans (because whether or not there are other space arks, we are shown that everybody on the Axiom is descended from Americans) as so morbidly obese that they're helpless. Because as everybody knows, human beings only come in one of two shapes: fat, or virtuous. Everybody knows that since everybody around you wants you not to be fat, and since everybody (mistakenly) "knows" that "all" it would take for you not to be fat is to exert minimal self-control and go to some minimal effort to please other people, that means that if you are fat, then you must have no regard for anybody else. And if you have no regard for anybody else, and don't care what other people think of you or want from you, then you obviously must not have any virtues at all. Right? And the fat-acceptance activists, who think that the movie they think they saw or that they heard about without seeing perpetuates these beliefs and mocks the lazy fat people to their faces on the screen, are just as histrionically angry at Pixar as the rest of the country is over the implication that 700 years from now, there won't be even one single American left in the whole human race who cares enough about other people to bother to be skinny.

[...]

If that's the movie you think you saw? You weren't paying attention.

(I'm not quoting the thesis of the Wall-E post because it deserves reading.)

Anyhow, I spent yesterday afternoon writing not-blog and hope to do the same today. I wish you well.

Sarah Palin.

Sullivan's usual histrionics notwithstanding, I think he's got the right take on McCain's VP choice:

If McCain's entire argument so far has been that Obama is too untested to be president, then how can he pick a 44-year-old first-term governor of a state with 600,000 people with no foreign policy experience whatsoever? [...] It's totally about electioneering (misguidedly, I'd hazard, but I don't know enough about her to know yet) and fundamentally unserious about governing.

Of course, Sullivan's usually-latent misogyny comes right to the surface today - who cares if Palin was Miss Alaska? - so try to look past that shit.

[Update: Josh Marshall says the same thing with less of whatever it is that Sullivan cakes all his posts with.]

Complaints that the press is too 'insider-y' and 'clubby'...

...are largely grammatically-questionable proxies for the real trouble, which is as ever: we have broken faith, and we lack understanding. The GF (well, the Wife, but that doesn't abbreviate as well - or do I start calling her 'Wi-Fi'?) points to this blog post:

Actually, who betrayed the public is you, the media, again, because you just couldn't stand not being insiders for ten minutes and waiting out the pick and maybe using those resources of staking out potential candidates' homes and working the phones on, I don't know, illegal wars and torture. The press only breaks out their investigative skills every four years so they can scoop their competition by 20 seconds. Would it have killed them to embargo the story and let the campaign play it out the way they wanted?

This secret was so tantalizing to them, making it necessary to marshal the full resources of the American media, while eight years of secret government and secret law received no such attention. The discovery of the pick was an end in itself, justifying their clubby, insider self-images as the coolest kids in the room. And then, after they've undermined the rollout, they blame the candidate.

This is incoherent and grotesque on a number of levels. 'Would it have killed them to embargo the story...' is a step away from 'Why don't we just take dictation from the White House Press Secretary?' and in any case bespeaks a pretty limited, almost (forgive me) 'faith-based' understanding of how newspapers make their living. 'Undermined the rollout' is histrionic nonsense: since the media is j-bombing all over Biden and Obama right now the whole thing doesn't seem undermined, eh? As for 'only breaks out their investigative skills every four years,' let us remember that

1) glass houses, while pretty, afford little privacy and no protection whatsoever from accidental stone-throws, and

2) comparing the print press's not-unexpected inability to out worldwide secret-government conspiracies (e.g. secret CIA prisons and superbases in Iraq) to its excited coverage of an easy-to-understand domestic-politics (i.e. media) story is comparing apples to giant rocks, or clouds, or unicorns. Oranges don't even enter the metaphorical picture.

(Let's also remember that the news media, national and local, are constantly displaying their investigative abilities to a rapidly vanishing audience that for the most part does not give a shit...)

I too wish the press had been more effective at reporting on George Bush's insane policies these last seven years. I wish, too, that the feckless imbecilic Democrats had been more effective at stopping those policies. And I wish our universities were cranking out students more invested in local politics and inclined to stick around and be part of local communities rather than chasing across the country the first job they're offered. And I wish the 'Left' in this country was qualified to take part in a grownup political discussion about electoral politics As She Is Practiced Today. Plus: ponies are nice.

But if you don't subscribe to a newspaper, you're not really in a position to tell that newspaper's editors how to do their jobs.

Lemme say that part again, using different letters and words in different order:

A state-funded press would be a goddamn nightmare; a privately-funded press obeys the dictates of money. And 'you're the bosses, you figure it out' isn't a business plan, it's a child's complaint. Bloggers love to complain about the news media's (lack of) focus, its inability to deliver the kind of coverage that bloggers want; but didn't we all just watch goddamn Season Five of The Wire? (Now on DVD, by the way.) There are reasons for these failures, economic and logistical and demographic, just as there are reasons for the government's inability to wave the Peace Wand in Iraq and make all the hullabaloo go away. (Just as there are reasons a senator from Delaware would support a monstrous bankruptcy bill.) And chalking it up to 'clubbiness' and 'insider self-image' may make pseudonymous diarists feel good, but it doesn't even begin to approach any useful level of analysis, description, or prescription.

Faith is not something you have, it's something you make, keep, and work for. It's satisfying to say that the American news media have broken faith with their readers, but we might make the same accusation in reverse, and without imputing personal motives or secret desires. If you are willing to generalize about the neuroses of an entire enormous field of laborers then you are living in bad faith with regard to them; you are in despair. News coverage are public goods but we can't protect them without acting in faith toward them - without investing at a deeper level than 'Why can't you satisfy me right now?'

Cynicism and ad hominem handwaving make for increased blog readership but they make us weaker and stupider.

And now for the 'Overuse of the word "pivot"' pundit-corps self-stabbing hour, brought to you by Burrell Cutlery...

Long title, short post: Dear web-pundits,

Saying 'pivot' and 'counterfactual' all the time makes you sound not like a scholar but like a goddamn poseur.

[I'm in the process of giving up blog-reading entirely and am leaching the poison from my body. Gimme a break.]

Kill me him, please.

If you read Ezra Klein's blog, you don't have to read Matt Yglesias's blog - and vice versa. Actually by some rule of Internet logic that means you don't have to read either blog, just mine. Further evidence to support this (I should think) trivially true statement:

1) Yglesias's latest post, as of now, starts:

This David Leonhardt article is long, important, and a bit difficult to digest so I’ll hold off commenting on the substance of the thing. This offhand choice of example on page four, however, raised a pet concern of mine...

...which translates to 'Because I have no area expertise at all, my job is to write about what I've read, which really means writing about my hobbyhorses, so I'll ignore what I claim is "important" and pick nits with the one thing I can comfortably, effortlessly generalize about.

2) The top ~twenty posts on both Klein's and Yglesias's sites include comments on Rachel Maddow's new TV show, Obama's new TV ad, Max Bergman's post on John McCain as TV pundit, and...well, and this, re: Obama's VP choice:

Klein: "Nobody knows anything. Repeat after me: Nobody knows anything. The New York Times breathlessly reports that Obama "all but reached his [VP] decision while on vacation in Hawaii." As Jack Shafer says, "The key phrase, used twice in the Times story, is 'all but,' and it provides Obama's advisers the vast wiggle room in which they can simultaneously assert that he has made up his mind and that he hasn't made up his mind. In other words, the Times has no news to report—only a higher octane of speculation it expects its readers to swallow until Obama does make his announcement." The New York Times does this because they don't know anything about who Obama's vice presidential pick will be, but they have to keep reporting the news and getting people to click on their stories."

Yglesias: "As everyone has now heard, Joe Biden has now said he’s not the VP pick. It seems, basically, that neither Biden nor Evan Bayh nor Tim Kaine nor Kathleen Sebelius is going to get the nod. Nor are candidates who’ve gotten grassroots support such as Hillary Clinton or Wesley Clark going to be chosen. Nor Bill Richardson nor Chris Dodd. And yet the VP will also be someone from that list of aforementioned not-choices. Which is puzzling. But by the same token, a month ago everyone knew that Barack Obama “had to” make his pick before the start of the Olympics. And yet he didn’t. So presumably everything we know is wrong."

...which is to say, knowing nothing causes them despair (as they're paid to write about something), and the easiest thing to write about is your recognition of your own despair in others, particularly those who have jobs and things you secretly wish you had (e.g. 'journalists').

3) Ezra Klein really writes like this:

"My colleague Ann Friedman has an interesting post on the history of the douchebag -- not just as an insult, or cleansing device, but as an early-20th century contraceptive. Apparently, the douchebag, paired with a sort of prototype diaphragm called a pessary, was the birth control of choice for women in committed relationships. Like the pill or the patch today, it let you escape from latex. It was only later that douchebags became a hygiene device and, later, a descriptor for Joe Francis. Her post also has a few interesting links for those committed to further douchebag studies.

"This is, incidentally, the most fun topic to write about ever."

...which isn't surprising, because like Yglesias he's a mid-20's dilettante (he differs from his fellow pundits in age and political predilections), but is nonetheless disappointing, because he's a well-paid dilettante.

4) Matt Yglesias really writes like...well, like Ezra Klein if Ezra Klein turned off his spell-checker and watched more televised sports.

5) You know that website, 'Stuff White People Like'? Let me tell you something: white people - no, let's generalize that to just people - like one another. And no one likes one another more than people who have a financial and publicity-minded interest in liking one another.

Side note:

Ta-Nehisi Coates replaced Yglesias at the Atlantic's website. He's a better writer than his predecessor, has a way, way better eye for art (not difficult), and differs in style from his fellow Atlantic bloggers - though half the time I suspect (perhaps ungenerously?!) that Coates was the 'let's hire someone who can use the word "ho" without getting fired' hire, a shake-us-up choice and (slightly less) young generalist in the vein of the imbecilic Megan McArdle, equally lacking in particular expertise beyond the primarily autobiographical. (Check his bibliography.) Still, he writes strongly and with more passion than any of his colleagues save the histrionic Sullivan - who could use maybe a little less most days - and I trust him and wish him luck. (His pieces on Obama are among the best I've read, and everyone's writing about that fella. So - no small thing.) Well this unlocks some of my own preoccupations, I suppose, but I'll come back to those when I'm not busy mourning the death of a short-lived but beloved Dungeons & Dragons character (Stuffis Otherspoon, halfling warlock - RIP).

PZ Myers: amateurish, juvenile, self-obsessed...bigot?

Myers - of Pharyngula - was indispensable when it came to anti-evolution textbooks and so forth. Now that he's got nothing to talk about he's...well, have a read.

Unfortunately for Myers, his Big Project - 'arguing' (roughly) that Religion Is Evil And Its Adherents Stupid - is a hell of a lot less interesting than he thinks it is; unfortunately for everyone, so is Myers himself. The big finish to his 'acquire and desecrate a (consecrated) Communion wafer': he put a rusty nail through it and dumped it in the garbage. How very angry-teenager of him. His rousing goodbye:

Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Since Myers doesn't seem to understand the concept of a 'provisional fiction,' since he doesn't seem interested in the psychology of fantasy (nor the transformative power of ritual [see below]), since he's high on his 15 minutes of low-grade Internet fame, there's little point in treating the stunt as anything more than it is - the acting-out of someone who's convinced he has nothing to learn about something, and loves attention. This seems to happen to professors who blog all the time: they taste a little online fame, they realize that blog comments are a lot more fun that seeing kids sleep through their college lectures, and out of enthusiasm (or more cynical fame-obsession) they get a little shrill (see also: John Quiggin, Ann Althouse).

Myers's 'history lesson' about Catholic anti-Semitism is typical of a certain contemporary intellectual set: he's obsessed with medieval Catholicism (though not learned) because it's a lot easier to snark about Dark Ages superstition than to empathetically discuss 21st-century religious ritual and culture.

Anyone who thinks that 'rituals...build only self-satisfied ignorance' is, I'm sorry to say, an imbecile: ignorant of history and basic psychology - or worse, a cynical liar happily misrepresenting his views to boost his hit count. Since the concept of 'sacred space' and the 'magic circle' informs everything from children's play to religious observance to the structure and function of narrative fiction and drama, if we take Myers's words at face value we can assume that he sees no value in human interaction or culture of any sort. Since he's asserted the opposite as well, we can conclude - again - that he's a fool or a liar. It's good to treat fools kindly; it's good to stamp liars out.

Myers is out of his depth; he's not arguing from a coherent worldview, he's going after something that bothers him. In my experience, the things that bother me most are the things I think I understand but turn out not to. My tech-school education taught me, in part, that everything can be broken down and analyzed and understood. Which is a limitation of tech school, sure, but also my own limitation: the need to believe such an obviously false notion, to cling to order - to hope. I've come to understand this limitation as the source of faith, and have come to understand my own (lapsed) faith, the Catholicism of my youth, as a way of integrating that coping mechanism productively into my social existence. I suspect Marx was right: the smallest unit of civilization is the pair, the electricity between two people, the contract, the shared interest and mutual recognition and trust. The word for this connection is 'covenant'; the means by which we remember it in one another's absence is called a 'sacrament.'

Right to be angry.

David Appell tears into Matt Yglesias and his ilk. Yglesias was asked by a pseudonymous reader what Yglesias had heard about water resource allocation during his time at some conference for liberal pundits/pols in Aspen, CO. Yglesias responds:

I didn't hear anything about that when I was in Colorado, but I did hear a lot about water last year when I was in Southern California and New Mexico. I'm far from an expert in this, but normally when you see shortages you're looking at an effort to allocate a valuable resource by regulatory fiat (and therefore special interest political clout) rather than price. Thus, I was strongly predisposed to favor this proposal for tradeable water rights from Michael Greenstone at Brookings when I read it months ago and reading it again it still seems right.

Appell glosses.

[T]his casual traveler, [Yglesias,] who has spent his entire life living in apartments on the eastern seaboard, actually thinks he has something valuable to say, because a year ago he spent a few days in a Best Western somewhere in the southwestern US.

Appell's anger is justified, though a few of his commenters rightly point out that Yglesias doesn't claim expertise. What's going on is something more complex than that, it's happening among his readers, and I worry that it's genuinely making them - us? - less wise. Where shall wisdom be found? Generally not on a weblog. Which is the real ceiling on this woeful medium. Information aplenty these fellas will give you, but that other thing, well...

Nerd!!

TBIO destroys minds: '4th Edition Elemental...or Powerade Flavor?'

Tsk, tsk. (Whoever it was, it was over Thai, and surely this power was meant to be used for loftier purposes than this.)

New term for the day.

RSS Aggravator: Your personal listing of all the blog posts you 'need' to read despite knowing exactly what every blogger has to say about everything, knowing exactly what the comment threads will be like, exactly what issues each blogger wants to talk about - your daily RSS feed of hobbyhorses, compulsions, preoccupations, and endless repetitions, courtesy of the blogosphere.

Rogers on maturity, preciousness, etc.

Magnificent post here from John Waters (yes, the standup comedian who wrote Catwoman). Hell of a writer in a lot of ways. Seen The Core lately? It's way, way better than you think.

Not the heart of the post, but the leadup to it:

n short, Senator Clinton had my respect, based on her accomplishments and independent of her gender -- then she spent it, tossed it away in fistfuls, in trade for dirty borrowed blades with which to cut her way to the nomination. She Liebermaned on us. And what is particularly galling to me, positively enraging, is that if she were not indeed a woman, with all that entails to feminist politics in America, Melissa and Digby would be the first in the trenches calling out those tactics for the bullshit they are. Although they, and many like-minded bloggers, did indeed call fouls on such behavior, Senator Clinton would be dead to them in any other context. If there is a "lack of respect" for Senator Clinton, I assure you that for many of us, she came by it honestly.

To the same degree Melissa and her fellow travellers are shocked and disappointed at our apparent indifference to Senator Clinton's treatment by a certain percentage of the population, people like me are shocked and disappointed at their apparent indifference to Senator Clinton's reprehensible campaign tactics and rhetoric.

As usual, Rogers cuts through a lot of bullshit with a certain fist-pumping panache. Go read the whole thing.

A grin without a cat.

Errol Morris, Cambridge resident:

"How can you say she's a good person?" I am sitting in an editing-room in Cambridge, Mass. arguing with one of my editors. I reply, "Well, exactly what is it that she did that is bad?" We are arguing about Sabrina Harman, one of the notorious "seven bad apples" convicted of abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal. My editor becomes increasingly irritable. (I have that effect on people.) He looks at me as you would a child. "What did she do that is bad? Are you joking?" And then he brings up the trump card, the photograph with the smile. "How do you get past that? The smile? Just look at it. Come on."

We barely know ourselves; we'd rather not.

[Hat tip to Foonyor Barzane of course!]

Why oh why can't we have better pundit-prodigies?

I've long thought Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein - part of a group of mini-celeb bloggers in D.C. - were rather badly overrated, the Interpol and Vampire Weekend of blog-punditry. (Klein is closer to Interpol than Yglesias, as his irritating pomposity is always closer to the surface, while Yglesias, for all his faults, like Vampire Weekend has a self-effacing and ironic streak that makes his liteness less disappointing.) They're 'wonks,' which is to say they like to talk about specific policy and are largely 'pragmatists' (read: young, unearned cynics) where transformation and vision are concerned,; Klein is less the cynic and lets himself get swept up in windy rhetoric sometimes, never more than when John Edwards is involved, but both bloggers write about politics they way Yglesias writes about basketball: with a remarkable ability to make exciting topics seem lifeless and small. They embody unfulfilled promise: there's nothing revolutionary about Ivy-educated Jewish nerds entering the world of political punditry, and the fact that they do it online mightn't have been irrelevant, but it is in their cases (they're also magazine writers, unsurprisingly). Do they write well? Well enough - like smart undergrads, or jaded grad students. Do they write beautifully? In my years of reading them, I've never known either to write something I would consider beautiful, or even particularly elegant - in prose, in structure, or in thought.

I bring these guys up because this election cycle has utterly captivated me - it's the first election in which I've given a damn about primary results and so forth - yet it seems to have had no emotional effect on them. The bloodlessness of their campaign coverage, the nonchalance with which they talk about the ascension of two remarkable politicians (and Hillary Clinton), is unbelievable to me. Yglesias in his most common refrain talks about McCain as if he were literally nothing more than a knockoff sequel to his Boomer contemporary, George Bush, disregarding the awesome, essential differences between them - not least McCain's repeated demonstrations of iconoclasm and bravery, starting (yes, this really matters) at the Hanoi Hilton; Klein (in the above-linked post) kneels to kiss John Edwards's feet while dismissing any notion of Obama as a transformational candidate on the very grounds of his greatest promise, i.e. as a practitioner of a politics of recognition and reconciliation, particularly in outreach to marginalized Americans.

As 'wonks,' maybe Yglesias and Klein feel they need to maintain distance from the aspirational, transhistorical moral questions animating our changing culture (e.g. 'How can we be great?') and stay closer to the earth ('How can this policy be better?'). But I read their stuff, then head over to read the riskier writing of someone like Christopher Hitchens (there aren't actually that many people 'like Christopher Hitchens'), and all I can think is that these two young guys have never ever in their entire lives been told 'No,' never actually fought for anything, never risked anything in writing. The closest they've gotten to war - or even to high-stakes cultural politicking - is name-calling in the comment threads of lefty blogs.

They remind me of the worst of me, and of my generation, and when I see Klein's biography blurb on his page ('He's a frequent guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews' - even as he calls Matthews an empty suit on his frontpage this week) I can't help but think that an incrementally better pundit corps isn't really what the country and world need. They encounter political questions as topics for debate - as fodder for blog posts. Where's the empathy, the imaginative outreach? Where's the sense of a shared story? I won't ask 'Where's the courage' but will ask instead: Where's the reverence for courage?

It's telling that neither writer has ever (ever) displayed anything like an aesthetic sense on his blog; their discussions of movies, TV, and music are invariably as gutless as their political writing, like book reports from high-school résumé-builders. (Their knowing post-MTV hipster informality has none of the naughty jazz of their more literary peers.) It's that lack of passion, that disconnection from the emotions that fuel most people's political aspirations, that marks them as cut-rate writers. They don't capture American energy in their writing; they don't reach for it; they amble at sufficiency instead of straining for greatness.

Say what you want about the overwrought disingenuous prolonged-adolescent careerist [and frankly misandrist] Amanda Marcotte, forever rebelling against primordial wrongs - she's got stones, and gives over to the fire sometimes, and is caught up in something that's bigger than her own total monthly pageviews. Klein and Yglesias could take a note or two from her (but one or two will do).

Taking down Fox News? Is everyone here very stoned?

Matt Stoller:

The Fox News situation, where Obama went on Fox News and mismanaged communications, drew criticism from Moveon because taking down Fox News has been a key strategic goal of that organization; nevertheless, the group supported him because of overwhelming adulation from their membership.

If anyone at MoveOn thinks that that organization can 'take down' Fox News, they're even more fucked up than I thought. And if Stoller takes this 'strategic goal' seriously, he's an idiot. Stoller describes his political activity as 'partisan hard edged combat,' which makes me think he should (1) ask Markos what actual combat is like, and (2) grow up. 'Mismanaged communications'? By which Stoller means we're supposed to give a damn that someone in Obama's campaign said he would 'take on' Fox News, and we're supposed to be disappointed that Obama didn't pour cayenne pepper on Chris Wallace's bare scrotum. Don't know about Stoller but I, for one, have already had this monologue, thanks.

Matt Stoller is resentful, and he's not stupid. Let's not mistake his posture for wisdom.