the bone conductor

because if you do you are almost certainly dead fucking wrong, and quite possibly an idiot besides. there are as many examples as there are relationships, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on from the inside is usually impossible. from the outside? forget about it. who knows why people do things? and, of vastly more importance, what the hell business is it of random hypocritical strangers eager to indulge in some easy self-righteous condemnation, to pass judgement? and yes, hypocrites. anyone who castigates anyone else’s reasoning or motivations or whatever as far as their relationships are involved is a hypocrite, period. (of course we’re talking about situations where everyone involved is a consenting adult, which in this case specifically i think we can all agree is certainly the case; the absurd rush to an ignorant judgement seems to mostly involve WHY one or another of the parties is consenting to be a party to the relationship at all.) the louder and more indignant the castigations, the more assured the hypocrisy. there are so many examples of this dynamic, so many instances of someone publically decrying the lack of moral fortitude and/or personal dignity required to be as fine an example of a human being as the person doing the judging, that finding any number of examples to illustrate this dynamic presents zero challenge to anyone actually interested in things like honesty and dignity and the importance of conducting one’s self in an appropriate manner. which, of course, almost no one is, if the typical inane, brutally stupid reaction of the nattering classes and the bloggy clowns is any indication.

it’s none of your fucking business, so keep your nose out of it, moron. if you want to attack the governor’s own blatantly self-serving hypocrisy in going after “sex-rings” in the first place and then indulging himself, fine. in my opinion the mistake was the first move and not the second - again, we’re not talking about women being forced into slavery because they chose the wrong people to smuggle them across the border, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or any number of real, horrific, indefensible crimes of a similar nature that should be stomped right off the face of the earth - we’re talking about consenting adults. if the governor or your neighbor or your high school civics teacher wants to pay another consenting adult - man, woman, in between, whatever, for sex, so what?

you know, here’s a newsflash: puritanism sucks. it’s a dead end, culturally, civically, legally, period. it’s like continually insisting that the sun will rise in the west tomorrow because YOU really REALLY think it should. and you almost certainly think that because someone told you to think that. and that someone either a) has a vested interest in making you believe it, b) is clinically insane, or the most likely scenario: c) all of the above. then - and i really think this is the attractive part for the kind of people we’re discussing here - it’s time to punish punish punish! time to punish people for noticing that lunatic wishing in the face of vast amounts of undeniable evidence to the contrary, still did not come to pass. again. but hey, check back tomorrow. just don’t talk about it or mention it to the wrong people, because then it’s stake burning season. again.

this is pretty cool too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

really, i just liked that line. (obviously my whole “use caps and actual punctuation” thing has gone by the board here. good riddance.) it’s from a new yorker review of the macbeth production that is apparently kicking everyone’s ass in the most positive manner imaginable. and, you know, yay patrick stewart. that much talent should mandate constant, deafening applause in pretty much any context. back in the mid-90’s, living in north beach with the girlfriend (now the wife, oddly enough), said sigoth/gf/spousal unit to be had to endure TNG being broadcast twice a day in syndication; each time slot was showing episodes in their original braodcast order, but about 2 years apart. she became thoroughly smitten with the dashing captain and his “tea, earl gray, hot” sexiness. and i couldn’t even begin to wonder why.

I think I spend too much time yelling at invisible people.

I don’t really have anything to add to that. Although maybe it would be wiser to wait until someone actually hires me before advertising that particular, uh… non-clinically-crazy-type, harmless and quirky in an amusing kind of way, thing… that I kind of, you know, got goin’… there.

Anyway, I just checked, any my wisdom is 8, so I might as well run with it.

Which reminds me, of course, of how surprisingly sad I am that it took his dying to make me realize how much I really owe to Gary Gygax. That Tycho kid at Penny-Arcade said it better (naturally, although I comfort myself with the knowledge that he has been practicing a bit more regularly than I have for a good long while now. That, and whiskey, is what I comfort myself with, technically), although he’s all young and stuff. I was 12 or 13, already a compulsive reader of sci-fi and Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and most anything in the middle, having recently read TLTR for the first time - man, I was ripe for the plucking. My brother brought home the original rules set booklets (pretty sure there were three of them) from the hobby shop at the mall, Eldritch Wizardy (Baba Yaga’s Hut!) and the like, and some dice and some character sheets… and plucked I was, like a god damn E-string on Les Claypool’s bass. Or, more accurately for the time, Geddy Lee’s bass. I’d use some of the hardware from my first drum kit to help set up the play area, using the snare stand to hold the DM’s Guide for instance. That was really part of the awesomeness, setting up to play the game, building the perfect play area that 3 or 4 friends could sit around until 5 am, eating Ding Dongs and Cheetos and listening to Moving Pictures, and rocking the fire giant king’s face, getting all Vorpal on some dark elf’s ass.

By the time we were 16 or 17 and driving and stuff, we’d started making our own games, combining the overall depth and feel of AD&D with the combat system from DragonQuest and some stuff stolen from Champions, plus whatever comic book stuff we were reading then. But, you know, at a certain point when you’re 17 and have a license and, even better, another license with a somewhat different, more advantageous birthday on it (*cough*) there’s only so many nights you can devote to that. Plus we realized we were having more fun designing the rule sets and campaigns and characters than we were actually playing the game, which had already delivered a grievous injury to our enthusiasm by the time college, and everyone splitting up all over the place, killed it altogether. And, you know, since I’m ancient and stuff, I probably don’t need to mention that this was about a millenia before anything like Baldur’s Gate or NWN or any of that stuff was available (although conan on the apple ][ ruled so hard).

I still have my dice, and a few figurines, although I think I left my original set of the AD&D books at jorm’s place when we tried (with a remarkable lack of success, although the fried chicken was tasty) to play a module a few years ago. I can see the newer set of books on the shelf from here though; I picked them up when they came out a few years ago, even though I haven’t played since (outside of pc games, I mean). I guess it means that much to me, it was that important to me. How thoroughly goofy. Anyway, thanks, Mr. Gygax. Thanks for all of it.

I’ll deal with you invisible bitches later.

Roger Angell of the New Yorker wrote this a while ago. It explains something that I’ve given a lot of thought to, especially since, in my group of nerd friends in particular, I’m very well acquainted with the “amused superiority and icy scorn” phenomena and just how exceedingly fucking annoying it is to be condescended to about this.

Anyway.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Of course, my nerd friends do care, as ardently as the most lunatic sports fan… about computer games. Which, apparently, aren’t “sports,” which I think is “bullshit.”

This doesn’t explain the phenomena of why most Raiders fans are unbearable assholes, or why most Boston fans period, of any sport, should have thier faces sewn to the underside of an elephant for a week or two.

(btw, I got that quote from the sports guy on espn.com.)

If my recollection serves, he started off on the sports page. Which, I suppose, is a good place to hone one’s sense of misplaced outrage and self-righteous blatherings about things you are only faintly acquianted with at all, and chronicling (literally, in this case) experiences that other people have had with a knowing, assured attitude, despite never having done any of those things. You have to love the level of clueless condescension that goes into this kind of treatment of a civic question - it’s like someone turned the city pages over to Jackie Harvey (”Newsflash! Apparently some of the Muni buslines are savagely overcrowded! No wonder there’s been talk about a “subway” through the Chinesetown! Mayor Agnos really needs to look into this…”) Although, lord knows I’d love a Washinton Square terminus to that line. San Francisco appraoching the 20th century! SO cuuute…

Anyway, then he goes for what can only be called The Gusto, parroting the moronic and thoroughly unscientific line that somehow the number of liquor stores in a certain area contribute to alcoholism, as well as city waste on ambulances and hospitalization for the miscreants and etc. etc. Because an alcoholic certainly wouldn’t walk an extra 3 blocks for some St. Ides. And if you want to “solve” the problem of alcoholism, I don’t think adopting even more hardline bullshit about what kind of booze a liquor store can sell is going to work. What almost certainly would work would be affordable (free) treatment for alcohol abuse for anyone who wants it, as well as affordable (free) and effective job training and placement programs. Trying to outlaw alcoholism, especially in an area that because of it’s relative affordability tends to attract people with problems of one kind of another in the first place, by changing the liquor store regulations is just self-righteous and asinine, as well as ignoring the fact that for many of the people around there, those corner stores are where they do most of their shopping, period. It’s called “urban.” Everyone doesn’t get in the 4wd Volvo wagon and head to Safeway. After living in the Tenderloin on a couple of different occasions during the early and mid-nineties, I think I can, unlike idiots like Nevious, speak to this with some actual experience and knowledge of both the hood and the folks in it. Better yet, Nevious completely ignores a story in his own paper that goes a long way towards proving how stupid the “city wasting money on ambulances for fuckups” argument is. It’s not that it isn’t necessarily true, so much as that it’s the city’s (and the community’s) fault for not addressing the problem intelligently in the first place.

Also, most of those recidivist ambluance users, as it were, are homeless, not necessarily residents of the Tenderloin in particular. As a visit to where the Haight hits the park, or Washington Square, or the Wharf, or any other part of town where homeless tend to congregate, would surely indicate, if one was paying attention…

no word on whether or not there is a correlation between the invisible man in the sky fixation and some other prevalent belief, uh, systems. although there is also evidence that people don’t know what the fuck they believe.