People give Gerald Gardner too much credit. While he was seminal in what became Wicca, many of us place too much emphasis on his views, rites and writings, to the point where one's degree of Wiccaness can become about agreeing with Gardner, and one's lack of Wiccanness can be dictated by the uninvolved by divergence from Gardner. You will literally find people who are willing to argue that any fool thing Gardner came up with is a dictate of Wicca, from the age of our priestesses to the energy-blocking power of a bikini.
I am not Gardner.
Like Gardner, however, I am a flawed human being, capable of making mistakes, who should not ever be viewed as anything else.
Because of that, I pledge to you, that any attempts to make my writings more or less than they are by drawing real, imagined or wished for lineages, or real, imagined or wished-for relationships, or real, imagined or wished for histories will be met by me with physical, mental, emotional and maybe even magical warfare.
Take my words and my writings as they are. I never say "I learned to do this from so-and-so, so do things my way," so therefore who I learned from and how are not relevant to discussions of my writings. WHERE THE THINGS I DO HAVE NOT BEEN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED, by other authors, I either leave them out of my works altogether (most often) or say they are of my creation (if they are) or say who I learned them from in that context. Saying I learned X from source Y does not make source Y my mentor, life partner, coach, or even friend.
I will not stand for poisoning, or even pleasantly flavoring, the well. My writings stand or fall by their quality, by the research relevant to them, not my lineages, degrees (college or Wiccan,) friends, acquaintances, enemies, family, favorite color, current affiliations, etc., etc., etc. If you've read my writings, you should know how I feel about "private sphere." I don't care who the actor is @#%ing, only that their acting is good. I don't care who the quarterback idolizes, only that he can throw the damn ball... and I don't care who the Pagan author went to High School with, only that his or her work is internally consistent.
IF YOU PUBLISH A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE ABOUT ME, I will vandalize it. I will have my friends vandalize it, I will have my family vandalize it. I will give interviews in the Pagan press where I say the opposite of whatever you've written, even if it is true.
I will intentionally plant so much dissent and discourse that, in the end, even I won't know who I am anymore... just to be left the fuck alone.
Hail Eris, if that's the way you want to see it....
I do not claim to be the result of my teachers, and I do not claim my students are the result of my teaching.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Female Halfling Virtue Names
The idea of halfling virtue names in gaming has been buzzing around in my head for a few months. Those who've gamed with me in the past are familiar with my preference for using virtue names for my human characters, in part because every journey, especially for those terribly religious characters like paladins, resembles the subtext in so many Greek Dramas-the real meaning of one's name.
The last one I named with a virtue name was sort of a joke... When going over my out-of-use characters, I found a preponderance of Doctor Who related names, Zoe, Jamie, Tegan and a Rose. Now, these were actually unrelated to Doctor Who on my part (indeed, my Tegan is a Teagan, given the patronymic of Teague the Harper, the NPC bard who was her dad) and my Rose was last played in 1995 or so, but since I've been watching Who from the beginning this past year it became a joke that all my characters shall names relating to Doctor Who, even if the writers of Doctor Who will have to write in my characters AFTER they go to the dead pile... Anyways, so when making a character who was deeply religious (albeit not in a Paladin way!) it was inevitable that she'd be Verity...
Virtue names for human characters are pretty easy, especially for female characters, because in most cultures in our history males are often named for heros or famous figures (in English, for example, Biblical names like James and Simon, and historic names like Alexander and Julian) and females are often named either after their fathers or after virtues, generally the virtues that make them a good wife. That's why virtue names often seem old fashioned to us: Hope and Faith aren't that out there, but Patience, Chastity and Fidelity sound like some women out of The Crucible.
If we look at Tolkien's names for Hobbits, most of them lovingly included on this list, you'll find that most of the masculine names are nonsense in English, but that there are a great many female names that have simple meanings in English: Flowers, Plants and objects of value.
So what if these are virtue names after all? What if we assume the halfling tongue to be symbolic, so symbolic, in fact, that few Bigguns speak it because they don't share the entire mythic history of halfling kind and don't know what they 'really mean'? [scroll way down for Table]
oh, and this name generator is the best: http://www.slacknhash.net/halfling_name_generator.php
*From Tolkien
**Might be one of the most important Halfling Virtues of all!
The last one I named with a virtue name was sort of a joke... When going over my out-of-use characters, I found a preponderance of Doctor Who related names, Zoe, Jamie, Tegan and a Rose. Now, these were actually unrelated to Doctor Who on my part (indeed, my Tegan is a Teagan, given the patronymic of Teague the Harper, the NPC bard who was her dad) and my Rose was last played in 1995 or so, but since I've been watching Who from the beginning this past year it became a joke that all my characters shall names relating to Doctor Who, even if the writers of Doctor Who will have to write in my characters AFTER they go to the dead pile... Anyways, so when making a character who was deeply religious (albeit not in a Paladin way!) it was inevitable that she'd be Verity...
Virtue names for human characters are pretty easy, especially for female characters, because in most cultures in our history males are often named for heros or famous figures (in English, for example, Biblical names like James and Simon, and historic names like Alexander and Julian) and females are often named either after their fathers or after virtues, generally the virtues that make them a good wife. That's why virtue names often seem old fashioned to us: Hope and Faith aren't that out there, but Patience, Chastity and Fidelity sound like some women out of The Crucible.
If we look at Tolkien's names for Hobbits, most of them lovingly included on this list, you'll find that most of the masculine names are nonsense in English, but that there are a great many female names that have simple meanings in English: Flowers, Plants and objects of value.
So what if these are virtue names after all? What if we assume the halfling tongue to be symbolic, so symbolic, in fact, that few Bigguns speak it because they don't share the entire mythic history of halfling kind and don't know what they 'really mean'? [scroll way down for Table]
| Name*: | Real World Meaning/Derivation: | Halfling Virtue: |
| Amaranth | A category of plants, some weeds with many uses | Adaptability |
| Angelica | Group of plants used in medicine & flavoring | Flavorfulness** |
| Asphodel | Plants, let's assume the British Bog Asphodel | Hard to Kill |
| Belladonna | Plants, poisonous, useful as anesthetic... | Pretty & Deadly |
| Berylla | From Beryl, a gem w/many colors, Mohs 8 | Changeable & Strong |
| Camellia | Camilla, Genus of plants that includes Tea | Vital for EVERYTHING |
| Daisy | Flowers that close at night and open in day | Dependable |
| Diamond | Hardest gemstone | Hardy. |
| Lily | Perennial flowers that grow from bulbs | Always Returning |
| Lobelia | Plants that induce vomiting. | Remover of Poisons |
| Malva | Edible Plants w/weedlike growth | Comforter |
| Marigold | Plant that has insecticide properties | Wyrm (Dragon)Slayer |
| Mentha | The Mints, impossible to kill in the garden | immortal |
| Mimosa | A variety of plants including plants that react to touch | Speedy |
| Myrtle | Hard to kill plant used in making liquors | Giver of Health |
| Peony | Flowering Shrub, often up to 5-6ft tall | Tall |
| Poppy | Flowers, source of opium | Ender of Pain |
| Rosa/Rose | The Rose family, brambles | Sneaky and protective |
| Rowan | Tree with astringent berries | Preserver |
oh, and this name generator is the best: http://www.slacknhash.net/halfling_name_generator.php
*From Tolkien
**Might be one of the most important Halfling Virtues of all!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
How I got to my thirties, with a degree in psychology, with a focus on Neuroscience, without knowing *this* was synesthesia.
Synesthesia is a condition where when one sense is activated another sense is triggered along with it. When I studied psychology and neuro (as a dual major in Biology and Psychology,) I learned all about it, without ever realizing I was a synesthete.
My first real experience that something was different for me was in drama camp as a kid. Some new age hippy dippy people came in for a lecture, and one of the exercises was to close your eyes as one of them struck a chime, and describe what you 'felt,' or 'saw,' and for how long.
I closed my eyes, and put my head down, and put my cupped hands over my eyes, because the lights through my eyelids made everything sort of pink, until I got to a deep reddish-black. They struck the chime, and the sound of the wood on the chime made a white flash, followed by a deep blue that started as a small circle in the center of my field of vision and grew, to the point where it was a blue so very deep and intense that it was slightly painful. When the blue reached the edges of my field of vision it broke into white stars, sort of like when the Enterprise is moving through space. They all faded, slowly, towards the bottom of my field of vision, dripping to the bottom and slowly fading to black.
People started "describing" their feelings before the blue was gone. I've been tested by a buttload of hearing and sensitivity experts, and we know I hear high and low pitches at the far end of normal human hearing, and I'd already had enough hearing tests to understand why the kids thought the thing was completed, and when the guest speaker put her hand on the chime and stopped it I figured it was for she and I, who could still hear it.
So, being typical method actors to be, the kids described the feelings the chime put in them. It got around to me, and I described the images I had, whereupon everyone looked at me like a freak...they were purely visual, and I assumed everyone saw them.
As a kid I also would bury my head in the side of a stuffed chair and look at the images the ambient noise made. I used to say these were cartoons, but while they weren't cartoons, the colors were bright, vibrant and cartoonish. When I was older and alone I'd do the same thing trying to recreate the experience, but it wasn't until recently I realized the hit and miss quality of it had everything to do with the noise in the room.
What finally started on the realization that this was not normal was discovering that the rest of you don't see lightning when your eyes are closed, your head under a pillow and the lightning hasn't arrived yet....
When I hear thunder, I see flashes of light, which is normal, except that since the speed of light and the speed of sound are different, I usually see the lightning twice, once when I hear the thunder, and a second time when I see the lightning...and the lightning is pink, blue or off white the second time, and a preternatural white the rest of the time.
Since discovering that not everyone else has this, we've explored the limit of it. I see colors for sound, and the colors are brighter the louder the noise is. Normal ambient noise, in a well-lit room usually goes unnoticed, but loud sharp noises, or noises in a dimly lit or largely white room start to annoy me.
Perhaps strangely enough, we're not convinced it's really *sound* that causes this, as the effect seems to have a direct correlation to physical sensations of vibration. Touching a subwoofer, for example, causes the colors to become so bright, and so prevalent, that it's pretty much all I can see, while headphones induce only mild colors, unless turned way up.
But if I, trained and knowledgeable about this stuff, thought my experiences were normal, I believe that synesthesia is much more prevalent than we assume.
Not sure where I was going with this, except to say that I wish I had it in one of those dramatic forms, rather than thin clouds of color that a colorful room can eliminate.
My first real experience that something was different for me was in drama camp as a kid. Some new age hippy dippy people came in for a lecture, and one of the exercises was to close your eyes as one of them struck a chime, and describe what you 'felt,' or 'saw,' and for how long.
I closed my eyes, and put my head down, and put my cupped hands over my eyes, because the lights through my eyelids made everything sort of pink, until I got to a deep reddish-black. They struck the chime, and the sound of the wood on the chime made a white flash, followed by a deep blue that started as a small circle in the center of my field of vision and grew, to the point where it was a blue so very deep and intense that it was slightly painful. When the blue reached the edges of my field of vision it broke into white stars, sort of like when the Enterprise is moving through space. They all faded, slowly, towards the bottom of my field of vision, dripping to the bottom and slowly fading to black.
People started "describing" their feelings before the blue was gone. I've been tested by a buttload of hearing and sensitivity experts, and we know I hear high and low pitches at the far end of normal human hearing, and I'd already had enough hearing tests to understand why the kids thought the thing was completed, and when the guest speaker put her hand on the chime and stopped it I figured it was for she and I, who could still hear it.
So, being typical method actors to be, the kids described the feelings the chime put in them. It got around to me, and I described the images I had, whereupon everyone looked at me like a freak...they were purely visual, and I assumed everyone saw them.
As a kid I also would bury my head in the side of a stuffed chair and look at the images the ambient noise made. I used to say these were cartoons, but while they weren't cartoons, the colors were bright, vibrant and cartoonish. When I was older and alone I'd do the same thing trying to recreate the experience, but it wasn't until recently I realized the hit and miss quality of it had everything to do with the noise in the room.
What finally started on the realization that this was not normal was discovering that the rest of you don't see lightning when your eyes are closed, your head under a pillow and the lightning hasn't arrived yet....
When I hear thunder, I see flashes of light, which is normal, except that since the speed of light and the speed of sound are different, I usually see the lightning twice, once when I hear the thunder, and a second time when I see the lightning...and the lightning is pink, blue or off white the second time, and a preternatural white the rest of the time.
Since discovering that not everyone else has this, we've explored the limit of it. I see colors for sound, and the colors are brighter the louder the noise is. Normal ambient noise, in a well-lit room usually goes unnoticed, but loud sharp noises, or noises in a dimly lit or largely white room start to annoy me.
Perhaps strangely enough, we're not convinced it's really *sound* that causes this, as the effect seems to have a direct correlation to physical sensations of vibration. Touching a subwoofer, for example, causes the colors to become so bright, and so prevalent, that it's pretty much all I can see, while headphones induce only mild colors, unless turned way up.
But if I, trained and knowledgeable about this stuff, thought my experiences were normal, I believe that synesthesia is much more prevalent than we assume.
Not sure where I was going with this, except to say that I wish I had it in one of those dramatic forms, rather than thin clouds of color that a colorful room can eliminate.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Where to get your Who, Part 6
Once more, for those playing at home, here is Wikipedia's list of Doctor Who episodes, which is also linked below:
Doctor #5:
Season 19 (1982)
Serial 116: Castrovalva, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 117: Four to Doomsday, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 118:Kinda, available from Daily Motion, and maybe nowhere else.
Serial 119:The Visitation, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 120: Black Orchid, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 121: Earthshock, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 122: Time-Flight, available on DVD from Netflix.
Season 20 (1983)
Serial 123: Arc of Infinity,available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 124:Snakedance, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 125: Mawdryn Undead, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 126: Terminus, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 127: Enlightenment, available on DVD from Netflix, online from Daily Motion.
Serial 128: The King's Demons, I have not yet found this available except as a used VHS.
Special (1983)
Serial 129: The Five Doctors, available on DVD from Netflix and online from Daily Motion.
Season 21 (1984)
Serial 130: Warriors of the Deep, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 131: The Awakening, available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 132: Frontios, available online from Daily Motion
Serial 133: Resurrection of the Daleks, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 134:Planet of Fire , available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 135:The Caves of Androzani , available on Instant Play and DVD from Netflix.
Doctor #5:
Season 19 (1982)
Serial 116: Castrovalva, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 117: Four to Doomsday, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 118:Kinda, available from Daily Motion, and maybe nowhere else.
Serial 119:The Visitation, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 120: Black Orchid, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 121: Earthshock, available on DVD and instant play from Netflix.
Serial 122: Time-Flight, available on DVD from Netflix.
Season 20 (1983)
Serial 123: Arc of Infinity,available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 124:Snakedance, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 125: Mawdryn Undead, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 126: Terminus, available on DVD from Netflix, or online from Daily Motion.
Serial 127: Enlightenment, available on DVD from Netflix, online from Daily Motion.
Serial 128: The King's Demons, I have not yet found this available except as a used VHS.
Special (1983)
Serial 129: The Five Doctors, available on DVD from Netflix and online from Daily Motion.
Season 21 (1984)
Serial 130: Warriors of the Deep, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 131: The Awakening, available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 132: Frontios, available online from Daily Motion
Serial 133: Resurrection of the Daleks, available on DVD from Netflix, and online from Daily Motion.
Serial 134:Planet of Fire , available online from Daily Motion.
Serial 135:The Caves of Androzani , available on Instant Play and DVD from Netflix.
Friday, January 29, 2010
When Tabletop Gaming became Unaffordable
I am a second generation D&Der. My son is a second generation edition AD&Der, and a third generation Dungeons and Dragons player. My gaming experience resume is several pages long, running through the D&D boxes (which we own, from a garage sale) from the blue-cover first edition of AD&D, to second edition, which we didn't really see as a new "edition," as we'd been using the optional proficiencies, etc., for a while, and the switch from combat tables to THAC0 is really easy to understand. Every so often when I'm cleaning, I come upon my first character from my High School gaming group...the one who rolled two 18s on her stats and 00 for psionics the first time I rolled a character...the first time I rolled percentiles... I'm not sure how she gets out there...she gets put away, but she reappears...
I still own the second edition AD&D Players Handbook and DMG I bought after I stepped on four stray $20 bills on my way to the mall, just after the books came out. I own about $1000 in gaming books, at cover value, probably several times that in collector's value...about 1/3 of them are AD&D. As a teen, I lived briefly in a homeless shelter, and in my trashbag of stuff I owned was a PHB and my dice. I wrote three high school papers and a college statistics paper on gaming...suffice it to say I am a big, fat D&D nerd.
Since I'm Wiccan, I've been told it's because I'm a gamer. Forget for a moment that I was Wiccan before I was a gamer, and I've taken years off gaming, but I've been Wiccan the whole time. Of the hundreds of people I've gamed with, three were Pagan, and about 30 were atheists. (Two were Mormons, a third a fundie Christian, 10 or so were 'cake-or death' or 'comfy-chair' Christians, but that's just an aside.) If there is a correlation between being Wiccan and being a gamer, I bet it has more to do with the correlation between Wicca and high IQ and the correlation between gaming and high IQ.
I just wanted to get those points aside before I made many of the following observations, because I imagine it will be something seen as terribly socialist, evil, or what have you.
I won't lie when I say that everything after the Tome of Magic and Forgotten Realms Adventures (AD&D 2e) is pretty much dreck to me. I own the "Player's Options" books, and the hardcover ones are such awful abortions that I'm glad they only exist with the red label that looks exactly like 3rd edition... I threw 4e down in disgust after I saw preview copies. The entire reason for 3, 3.5, 4, and however many more, is to make money, not to play the game, and they bog down the game so much as to become unusable... I sincerely believe this is because the game is now managed by a company that makes its money on the need of children to collect things.
I grew up pretty damn poor. If AD&D had required me to collect books to get full functionality out of the game I would have been prohibited from playing. If I had been prohibited from playing AD&D I would not have gotten an S on the writing sample of the MCAT and aced all those standardized tests as a teen. I know for a fact that professor who wrote in a review of my work that I had an "intuitive understanding of statistics and randomness" that made my experimental designs "airtight, and at a level beyond what [he saw] on grant proposals," would not have written that if I had not gamed. AD&D improved my math, reading, writing and even handwriting abilities. It taught me logic, spatial reasoning and more. It got me reading Machiavelli when my character ended up running a town. When I started DMing, it taught me how to think on the fly.
When I later was tested for "problem solving ability," I broke the test. Honey, ain't nobody in Buffalo a better Problem Solver than me, and although they think I'm a prick, you can take those words to our local "Creative Problem Solving" merchants and bank on it. To them, I'm an enigma, wrapped up in a burrito, covered in Salsa Verde. Honey, I've generated so many ways to use a ton of peanuts in 3 minutes that I've run out of post-its and given myself writer's cramp... I have never had more cognitive dissonance than going to school to learn to use a problem solving method that is a thousand times slower and less effective than my own....but this is very much stream of consciousness here, as all good blog rants should be...
AD&D benefited me in hundreds of thousands of ways. It benefited my life, my career and my emotional health. I have never been as physically and mentally ill as when I was working too many hours to game. It keeps my brain fit in ways I only barely understand. It provides social structure I only barely understand...and that bare understanding is with a degree in anthropology and another in psychology.
AD&D encouraged a subgeneration of young adults to create map-making software, art, new spell ideas, new random generators and more when the internet was new. It created a vast wealth of resources and trained a huge group of people in seeing the real world, the one we live in, as something that can be broken into parts and explored. It is a game of scientists and engineers, a game about using all those "products of your imagination." Most of those generators, at least the ones Wizards of the Coast hasn't tracked down and destroyed yet, are still out there on the net, or in the Wayback Machine. AD&D handbooks are the first thing to appear on file sharing services-they were the first things to appear on usenet, or gopher.
Think of an entertainer, author or English-speaking scientist under the age of 50 that you see as witty or clever. Delve into their history...you'll find D&D, and often AD&D specifically. It was something that helped to make the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK, great... well, those of us who were allowed to play.
[This tangent calls for its own rant, but I'll just state the following fact: Between AD&D and "Second Edition AD&D," demons and devils were removed and then restored as deballed figures with silly names. I'm playing a character right now who is a proper summoner, using imps, demons, devils and the rest, and I'm having to look stuff up in books just a little less old than me. During the time from when the demons were removed to now there was an upswing in teen violence, and virtually none of those engaging in teen violence were gamers. You took our demons to punish us, didn't you? End Rant.]
I sincerely feel that allowing kids access to gaming at low cost is as important as providing public access basketball courts and parks. I think a generation of stupid kids-or more importantly, a generation without as many exceptional kids-has much to do with a lack of low-cost gaming resources as a generation of fat kids has to do with a lack of safe public parks and gym classes.
I believe that every gaming manual that is over 20 years old and is currently not supported by a current publication of said system should be considered 100% copyright free and open source, and I don't mean the stupid d20 license. Hell, if I had my way, every time a new edition came out the previous edition of the game would become free...give gamers a reason to support your edition.
I mean that everyone who is interested in gaming should have access to user-generated books, even customizable books of their own creation, as long as the currently published system is no longer supported. You guys know we're already doing this stuff, right? How many people playing mages have a print-out of every spell they use instead of needing to open the PHB? Since most, maybe even all, of said books are 'work for hire' books, the decision to release the books from copyright in toto would be a corporate one.
I say this not because I don't think authors should be paid for their work, but because I don't see value in punishing creativity when the soft-core gamers are still going to buy your big collection... the kids will always want the latest equivalent of Pokemon cards.
Dear Wizards of the Coast-
Free AD&D. Seriously Free it completely. I'm sick of trying to turn the shades of my childhood idols, as I'm clearly not high enough level. Seriously, free it completely. Set it free. Tell us all we have to do is say that we grabbed this from a book from 1989 and let us rip books and publish them via cafepress without fear of persecution. People are doing it already, so make it right.
And, as an aside: When you're ready to make mad money off of it, I mean serious money by creating a world environment game where people interact with human DMs, give me a call, or drop me a line. Give me a decent programming team, let me hire some of the kids I see DMing at tournaments and cons, and I'll give you a MMORPG that will be addictive. Better than life. You'll make a few billion dollars, and probably be sued, unsuccessfully, for providing a game that is as addictive as crack for some people....the first MMORPG where learning to role play is a more important currency than gold...
It will have higher overhead than WOW or SWG, but you'll have people who are willing to pay more by far....
You know how to find me.
I still own the second edition AD&D Players Handbook and DMG I bought after I stepped on four stray $20 bills on my way to the mall, just after the books came out. I own about $1000 in gaming books, at cover value, probably several times that in collector's value...about 1/3 of them are AD&D. As a teen, I lived briefly in a homeless shelter, and in my trashbag of stuff I owned was a PHB and my dice. I wrote three high school papers and a college statistics paper on gaming...suffice it to say I am a big, fat D&D nerd.
Since I'm Wiccan, I've been told it's because I'm a gamer. Forget for a moment that I was Wiccan before I was a gamer, and I've taken years off gaming, but I've been Wiccan the whole time. Of the hundreds of people I've gamed with, three were Pagan, and about 30 were atheists. (Two were Mormons, a third a fundie Christian, 10 or so were 'cake-or death' or 'comfy-chair' Christians, but that's just an aside.) If there is a correlation between being Wiccan and being a gamer, I bet it has more to do with the correlation between Wicca and high IQ and the correlation between gaming and high IQ.
I just wanted to get those points aside before I made many of the following observations, because I imagine it will be something seen as terribly socialist, evil, or what have you.
I won't lie when I say that everything after the Tome of Magic and Forgotten Realms Adventures (AD&D 2e) is pretty much dreck to me. I own the "Player's Options" books, and the hardcover ones are such awful abortions that I'm glad they only exist with the red label that looks exactly like 3rd edition... I threw 4e down in disgust after I saw preview copies. The entire reason for 3, 3.5, 4, and however many more, is to make money, not to play the game, and they bog down the game so much as to become unusable... I sincerely believe this is because the game is now managed by a company that makes its money on the need of children to collect things.
I grew up pretty damn poor. If AD&D had required me to collect books to get full functionality out of the game I would have been prohibited from playing. If I had been prohibited from playing AD&D I would not have gotten an S on the writing sample of the MCAT and aced all those standardized tests as a teen. I know for a fact that professor who wrote in a review of my work that I had an "intuitive understanding of statistics and randomness" that made my experimental designs "airtight, and at a level beyond what [he saw] on grant proposals," would not have written that if I had not gamed. AD&D improved my math, reading, writing and even handwriting abilities. It taught me logic, spatial reasoning and more. It got me reading Machiavelli when my character ended up running a town. When I started DMing, it taught me how to think on the fly.
When I later was tested for "problem solving ability," I broke the test. Honey, ain't nobody in Buffalo a better Problem Solver than me, and although they think I'm a prick, you can take those words to our local "Creative Problem Solving" merchants and bank on it. To them, I'm an enigma, wrapped up in a burrito, covered in Salsa Verde. Honey, I've generated so many ways to use a ton of peanuts in 3 minutes that I've run out of post-its and given myself writer's cramp... I have never had more cognitive dissonance than going to school to learn to use a problem solving method that is a thousand times slower and less effective than my own....but this is very much stream of consciousness here, as all good blog rants should be...
AD&D benefited me in hundreds of thousands of ways. It benefited my life, my career and my emotional health. I have never been as physically and mentally ill as when I was working too many hours to game. It keeps my brain fit in ways I only barely understand. It provides social structure I only barely understand...and that bare understanding is with a degree in anthropology and another in psychology.
AD&D encouraged a subgeneration of young adults to create map-making software, art, new spell ideas, new random generators and more when the internet was new. It created a vast wealth of resources and trained a huge group of people in seeing the real world, the one we live in, as something that can be broken into parts and explored. It is a game of scientists and engineers, a game about using all those "products of your imagination." Most of those generators, at least the ones Wizards of the Coast hasn't tracked down and destroyed yet, are still out there on the net, or in the Wayback Machine. AD&D handbooks are the first thing to appear on file sharing services-they were the first things to appear on usenet, or gopher.
Think of an entertainer, author or English-speaking scientist under the age of 50 that you see as witty or clever. Delve into their history...you'll find D&D, and often AD&D specifically. It was something that helped to make the US, and to a lesser extent, the UK, great... well, those of us who were allowed to play.
[This tangent calls for its own rant, but I'll just state the following fact: Between AD&D and "Second Edition AD&D," demons and devils were removed and then restored as deballed figures with silly names. I'm playing a character right now who is a proper summoner, using imps, demons, devils and the rest, and I'm having to look stuff up in books just a little less old than me. During the time from when the demons were removed to now there was an upswing in teen violence, and virtually none of those engaging in teen violence were gamers. You took our demons to punish us, didn't you? End Rant.]
I sincerely feel that allowing kids access to gaming at low cost is as important as providing public access basketball courts and parks. I think a generation of stupid kids-or more importantly, a generation without as many exceptional kids-has much to do with a lack of low-cost gaming resources as a generation of fat kids has to do with a lack of safe public parks and gym classes.
I believe that every gaming manual that is over 20 years old and is currently not supported by a current publication of said system should be considered 100% copyright free and open source, and I don't mean the stupid d20 license. Hell, if I had my way, every time a new edition came out the previous edition of the game would become free...give gamers a reason to support your edition.
I mean that everyone who is interested in gaming should have access to user-generated books, even customizable books of their own creation, as long as the currently published system is no longer supported. You guys know we're already doing this stuff, right? How many people playing mages have a print-out of every spell they use instead of needing to open the PHB? Since most, maybe even all, of said books are 'work for hire' books, the decision to release the books from copyright in toto would be a corporate one.
I say this not because I don't think authors should be paid for their work, but because I don't see value in punishing creativity when the soft-core gamers are still going to buy your big collection... the kids will always want the latest equivalent of Pokemon cards.
Dear Wizards of the Coast-
Free AD&D. Seriously Free it completely. I'm sick of trying to turn the shades of my childhood idols, as I'm clearly not high enough level. Seriously, free it completely. Set it free. Tell us all we have to do is say that we grabbed this from a book from 1989 and let us rip books and publish them via cafepress without fear of persecution. People are doing it already, so make it right.
And, as an aside: When you're ready to make mad money off of it, I mean serious money by creating a world environment game where people interact with human DMs, give me a call, or drop me a line. Give me a decent programming team, let me hire some of the kids I see DMing at tournaments and cons, and I'll give you a MMORPG that will be addictive. Better than life. You'll make a few billion dollars, and probably be sued, unsuccessfully, for providing a game that is as addictive as crack for some people....the first MMORPG where learning to role play is a more important currency than gold...
It will have higher overhead than WOW or SWG, but you'll have people who are willing to pay more by far....
You know how to find me.
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Boogieman of "duotheism": An invention of ignorant reconstructionists
There is a reoccurring silly movement in some reconstructionists, to exclude Wiccans from their rites at all costs by prohibiting or limiting the practice of "duotheism" in their presence or making other such goofy statements. Often, this is simple prejudice, and more often than not when one seeks the source of it, it's the result of hearsay, or blatant lies. I could even relate the story of the ignorant "reconstructionist," who went on to post a giant rant on his blog when some Wiccans "hiding" (his word) on a reconstructionist list had the AUDACITY to correct him when he posted a screed comparing reconstructionism to Wicca in which every line of "what Wiccans believe" was wrong...oh, teh nose! teh Wiccans is lurking! Teh Wiccans! Teh Wiccans who was invited to join when teh organization was just starting and were here from the beginning! teh Wiccans are in-full-tratin us! oh, teh nose!
At this point, I won't get into how far from reconstructed a rite would be that had a belief litmus test for members. Most forms of reconstructionism are reconstructing civil religions that were practiced at the city (town, city-state) level, and welcome to anyone who believed in said gods, regardless of what individual cult movements they belonged to...
I'll also leave off here on the easy discussion of how lame it is to spend your whole time as a member of group A lying about what group B teaches. This is lame whether it's an ignorant reconstructionist lying about Wicca, an ignorant Wiccan lying about Christianity, whatever. Same stuff, just as lame...
The lie I'm going to discuss, and I don't care who is lying, whether it's the person coming up with it in the first place or his/her minions spreading it, is that there is a such thing as duotheism, and that it's what Wiccans believe, and that it's not polytheism...
Actually, let me back up for a minute, and say how this was at the start...
In the early days of (Non-Germanic*) Reconstructionism, the ignorant claim about Wiccans from those Recons who set themselves up as experts on how reconstructionism differs from Wicca claimed that we Wiccans believed that ALL GODS WERE ONE GOD.
The problem with this claim is that you can pretty much see immediately in the Wiccan liturgy, the published BOSs, the rites all around you, that we have, at the least, both a god and a goddess.
So, the "we're the real polytheists and Wiccans are not," thing went from "all gods are one," to "all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess."
Now, I am certain there are some Wiccans who believe that all gods are one god and all goddesses are one goddess. There are some people who believe just about anything. This view, however, is still polytheism (poly=multiple.)
But let's talk about the "proof" for duotheism versus the 'proof' of Wicca being polytheistic:
That's right. The sole proof that Wicca is not polytheistic, but "duotheistic" comes from a piece of liturgy that doesn't find its way into Wicca in the form it is being criticized for until fairly late in the game... and we don't all even use that form...and it only implies, sort of, one goddess....not one god.
"Duotheism," is a myth. It is a boogieman that only pops up when people want to criticize Wiccans.
Instead of sticking a (fake) label on a people, why not call them what they call themselves. Revolutionary idea, no?
*Asatru pre-dates all of us and is not involved here. There have been more than their fair share of Asatru screeds making claims about Wicca, but these come from a slightly different perspective I'm not going to discuss here.
At this point, I won't get into how far from reconstructed a rite would be that had a belief litmus test for members. Most forms of reconstructionism are reconstructing civil religions that were practiced at the city (town, city-state) level, and welcome to anyone who believed in said gods, regardless of what individual cult movements they belonged to...
I'll also leave off here on the easy discussion of how lame it is to spend your whole time as a member of group A lying about what group B teaches. This is lame whether it's an ignorant reconstructionist lying about Wicca, an ignorant Wiccan lying about Christianity, whatever. Same stuff, just as lame...
The lie I'm going to discuss, and I don't care who is lying, whether it's the person coming up with it in the first place or his/her minions spreading it, is that there is a such thing as duotheism, and that it's what Wiccans believe, and that it's not polytheism...
Actually, let me back up for a minute, and say how this was at the start...
In the early days of (Non-Germanic*) Reconstructionism, the ignorant claim about Wiccans from those Recons who set themselves up as experts on how reconstructionism differs from Wicca claimed that we Wiccans believed that ALL GODS WERE ONE GOD.
The problem with this claim is that you can pretty much see immediately in the Wiccan liturgy, the published BOSs, the rites all around you, that we have, at the least, both a god and a goddess.
So, the "we're the real polytheists and Wiccans are not," thing went from "all gods are one," to "all gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess."
Now, I am certain there are some Wiccans who believe that all gods are one god and all goddesses are one goddess. There are some people who believe just about anything. This view, however, is still polytheism (poly=multiple.)
But let's talk about the "proof" for duotheism versus the 'proof' of Wicca being polytheistic:
'Proof' of Wicca's duotheism
| Proof of Wicca's Polytheism
|
That's right. The sole proof that Wicca is not polytheistic, but "duotheistic" comes from a piece of liturgy that doesn't find its way into Wicca in the form it is being criticized for until fairly late in the game... and we don't all even use that form...and it only implies, sort of, one goddess....not one god.
"Duotheism," is a myth. It is a boogieman that only pops up when people want to criticize Wiccans.
Instead of sticking a (fake) label on a people, why not call them what they call themselves. Revolutionary idea, no?
*Asatru pre-dates all of us and is not involved here. There have been more than their fair share of Asatru screeds making claims about Wicca, but these come from a slightly different perspective I'm not going to discuss here.
Friday, January 15, 2010
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