Fall 2024 hiatus

I was hoping to be able to keep my weekly updates until the end of the year. Unfortunately, I've run out of what to say, at least in this format. Last week was the first week since the start of the year where I wasn't even able to put out a late update. I guess almost 9 months isn't too terrible of a run, all things considered.

I might add more pages to make it easier to navigate some of the subjects I returned to, but otherwise, I will have to see if and when I get back to it.

Until then, the blog is on indefinite hiatus.

Trying something different for 2024

Greetings, faithful readers! It's been a while!

The purpose of this blog was to be an informal creative outlet. Sometimes it's worked out. Mostly I've been overthinking posts to the point of not publishing them at all. I have way too many drafts and half-baked ideas, and they're not getting to you. So I'm going to try something different this year.

I will try to set myself a schedule of posting once a week, starting today, but usually on Sunday nights. Instead of requiring myself to have a great piece of writing ready, I'll just treat this as a log, a journal, a commonplace book - somewhere to write down my thoughts with a bit of editing, then share them with the world.

In the past, I have been more prolific when I forced myself to spend October on some daily project. That is a bit much, especially with a day job, but once a week, just getting those thoughts out there, whether or not I have something fancy to share, should be doable.

So, what is up with me? For a while I was reading too many books at once, which was good in that I was making some progress, slowly, but bad in that I was having a hard time getting a clear sense of any individual book, to the point where I feel like I'd have to reread some of them to get anything meaningful out. Once I started committing myself to reading fewer and finishing them, I've felt a lot more accomplished.

I haven't read anything really folklore-related recently, hopefully I'll get back to that, but I've been trying to get at my other interests. For example, I recently finished reading Dungeons and Desktops - The History of Computer Role-Playing Games, 2nd Ed, by Matt Barton and Shane Stacks. Some of the games I've played, but a lot of them I didn't - either way, it was great to get a deep and broad sense of what this part of gaming has going for it. This is a field that was dying when the first edition came out, but has been getting more popular in time for the second, so it was interesting to get a slightly removed analysis of this revival.

I finished reading the second book in my Ervingiad, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Unfortunately, it's another victim in my being spread too thin problem, so I'm now rereading it and summarizing it to myself. So far I've been finding it most illuminating - in particular, the book hinges on the distinction between analyzing certain activities that involve a set of people, and the structure of small groups, with obvious applications to, say, role-playing games.

Speaking of role-playing games, I haven't run a game myself in more than two years, although I have been playing Call of Cthulhu pretty consistently, with occasional dips into other systems. I hope to run games again this year, starting with attempting to do Apocalypse World one-shots. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully better than my one attempt at doing so for Sorcerer.

I've also been working on my French again. And in that context, I've gotten back to attempting to read René Daumal's Le Mont Analogue, which I got years ago. I now sit down with it, go to the dictionaries when needed, resort to Google Translate when all else fails, and climb through. I'm almost two chapters in. It's fascinating.

Aside from these I have a bunch of few-sentence book, film, and TV reviews from the past few years that currently exist as messages on Discord, and which I should collate some time. Incidentally, I've watched a few good movies this year, including Promising Young Woman and In the Mouth of Madness, and read pretty much all the literature recommended for Sorcerer. I might try to collect the reviews and my thoughts and share them in future posts.

Here's to more of me in 2024!

Current and recent reading (June 2022)

I've been suffering from blogger's block for the past few months. To try and break it, I figured I'd go over some books I've read recently, or am in the process of reading:

• The World of Fanzines - A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham, most famous for his Seduction of the Innocent, which lead to the Comics Code, and made him in many ways an enemy of comics, weird fiction, and the like. And yet, he became a big fan of fanzines as a medium, and writes about them insightfully and appreciatively, even when they satirize him. Cites from a variety of sources, and dedicates the first half of the book to reproductions of fanzine art.
• Sailing - an Informal Primer, by Richard Ulian, is an acquisition from back when I gathered up quite a few books about maritime subjects, preparing for it being a bigger focus of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I'm glad I got this one - it helps me make sense of description of sailing in fiction, and gives some ideas of the kinds of problems you might run into. Possible seeds for challenges and hazards in games that are focused there.
• The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes - this collection is a treasure trove of classics in the field. It's grouped by subject, and is wide-ranging - which is good, because folklore is very wide-ranging itself.
• Contested Culture - The Image, the Voice, and the Law, by Jane M. Gaines - a difficult read, encompassing two fields I'm not very acquainted with: legal and culture studies. But I'm enjoying my slog through it. This critical look at copyright law and how it relates to the creation of culture, and who gets to be termed a creator thereof, is a nice complement to all my reading about folklore.
• Subterranea - Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces, by Chris Fitch - each one of the vivid studies in this book could inspire a dungeon delve or other underground adventure, from terrifying natural phenomena that either themselves or taken to a slightly larger extreme could become a significant adventuring challenge, to depictions of human habitation below the surface.
• The Complete Wargames Handbook, by James F. Dunnigan - I am starting to feel that I could at least get something out of a hex-and-chit wargame. Also interesting to get some perspective on how an out-and-out board wargamer saw role-playing games in a book published in 1980. A third edition is available online (pdf), although I'm reading a copy of the first edition.
• Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper's Rulebook - the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was a huge disappointment when it came to helping me do my work as a dungeon master. This, so far, seems to be much better at providing guidance as to how to actually run a game of CoC, although I haven't done this myself yet.
• Apocalypse World 2nd Edition - this edition is supposedly less edgy than the first one. It still has a bit of that left left, but having persevered in reading through a few chapters, I'm already seeing why it's become a classic, as well as a template for a whole genre of RPGs.
• Welcome to Mars - Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America, by Ken Hollings - a book based on a limited radio series (found here; out of order, unfortunately). Made me revisit the start of the Atomic Age, and realize how fascinating it is, in itself, in its effects on our culture and society, and in its fictional and gaming potential. Also full of horror stories resulting from Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, and many human experiments.
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman - I went all in on Goffman after encountering his frame analysis in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and reading this is already rewarding.
• Night's Black Agents, by Fritz Leiber - More well-known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, this shows Leiber as a very good modern weird/horror fiction writer, as well. An easily available, Lovecraftian sample is The Dreams of Albert Moreland, originally published in a now scanned fanzine (The Acolyte 10, pdf).
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Sep/Oct 2020 - I used to manage to keep up with Analog so that I would finish one before the other came around. Towards the middle of 2020, as I started accumulating RPG and other books, this fell by the wayside. I was also not very happy with the early 2020 issues, which made it easier to decide to cancel. I still have a backlog, and I finally finished this one. Mixed bag. Two stories that should express the gamut of the magazine pretty well are available from the publisher online: The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (pdf) is a weird tale with Arthur Machen vibes, while The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (pdf) is a more typical hard science fiction story, with animalistic aliens that would make fine inspiration for your next science fiction or fantasy game.

We no longer live in a pre-COVID19 world

I have tried keeping politics and current events away from this blog, but since Twitter is no longer an outlet for me, I find myself wanting to express certain things here.

Let's start with a film. Late December I watched a political thriller, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. I strongly recommend it, although the reason I watched it then was that it was leaving Amazon Prime, so you'll have to find it elsewhere.

I won't spoil the film for you, but I have been repeating one episode in it to people when I try to explain my exasperation at the discourse about COVID19 and "going back to normal". In the film, Beatty's character chases someone onto an airplane. He runs from a cab, through the terminal, up the stairs, into the airplane, and only then, after takeoff, does a flight attendant come over to ask him for his name and whether he'd be doing a round-trip or taking them one way. See, back then you didn't need to have pre-paid for a ticket, checked your luggage with your ticket, gone through security, then have your boarding pass checked before you were let on a plane. Planes were a lot more like buses.

Now imagine the following pitch for a new airport design: once we're done with terrorism and airborne smuggling, surely we'll go back to those good old days as expressed in the film above, so let's use the latest in soundproofing technology to allow the gates to be a dozen feet away from departure drop-off, so people can very easily get on the plane. TSA is just a temporary measure, right? Airliner hijackings are a thing of the past, right? We'll go back to normal, and then we can just make things so much smoother.

This may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how policymakers and business leaders sound when they discuss COVID19. It's all about "going back to normal", "getting people back in the office", dozens of op eds concern trolling about the ills of working from home, the psychological effect of physical separation of children from their classmates - all potentially legitimate concerns, but not comparable to the horrors of suffering from a serious disease or watching classmates, siblings, parents, colleagues, teachers, suffer or perish.

We can't just pretend things are going back to normal. Nothing says that we won't still be dealing with it five years from now. And we'll still only have solutions designed for a world that pretends that this plague doesn't exist.

Imagine a different path. Imagine if, six months into the pandemic, world and local leaders had actually sat down and thought how a functioning society could work while taking this disease into account. We have all these tools that allow us to work and study remotely. We have the constraints that are very acute for parents with children. What could we do with this? Maybe the government could incentivize households to pair up so that work and childcare can be shared. Maybe the office buildings which will no longer consistently hold in-person businesses can instead be used to significantly reduce class counts to make in-person schooling actually safe. Maybe some effort could've gone into modernizing ventilation systems and adding air filtering to classrooms and businesses, and training more healthcare workers to deal with expected surges. Maybe there are better solutions for these and other problems that have come up that I can't even imagine, because I'm a software engineer and RPG crank whose highest academic training was in theoretical physics. But we'll never get there if we keep pretending that this is just a temporary speedbump.

We are beginning Year 3 of the Plague. Let's not pretend it's going to just dissipate. It'll even be economically more sensible long-term to actually adapt instead of constantly pushing off the inevitable by insisting on normalcy and then disrupting this normalcy as case counts make it untenable again.

2021 in review - folklore

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on in 2021 was folklore. It started with an exasperation at repeatedly running into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a blueprint for all compelling stories - and how this affects writing and the expectations from role-playing game plots - but became something more.

I started with Stith Thompson's classic, The Folktale. It is an extensive study of folktales from around the world, using what's now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, and the Thompson motif index of folk literature, including descriptions of the folktales and their variations, as well as the methodology of collecting and cataloguing them. While a bit outdated, and occasionally offensive - to give an example, it separates the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, and when presenting folktale collection methodologies, has no problem having members of the former do their own collecting, while the latter's work is to be collected by more civilized folklorists working with local agents - it made it clear that there are a variety of story types, most of which have nothing resembling a hero's journey, that have been so engaging to various cultures, that they have been continually reproduced and adapted, often without the use of mechanical reproduction or even writing. It also presented evidence of an extent of inter-cultural permeability that isn't often taken into consideration when people discuss culture. It was also interesting to read the various categories of supernatural elements that appear in folktales, and that now live in modern fantasy in a much more restricted manner, due to their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons and in Disney movies. Jon Peterson's treatment of the medieval fantasy genre in his Playing at the World goes into the former in detail. The latter you can reflect on when you consider what first comes to mind when you hear of Snow White or The Little Mermaid.

Having finished with Thompson for now, I went on to read Barre Toelken's The Dynamics of Folklore, which tries to provide a starting point for analyzing folk life and folk creation as something living, as opposed to a pervasive attitude of relegating it to a less educated past. Toelken makes it quite clear that folklore is happening all the time, and that the actual performance of the piece of folklore is paramount - which, to me, connects very closely to how I'm starting to view role-playing games, an activity whose focus is in its performance to and for its participants, rather than something that should be compared to fiction, or cinema, or other forms of culture that involve separate stages of generation, reproduction, and consumption. There's something bigger to discuss here about the relation of canon to fan works and vice versa, and the attempts to control folklore, a creative, autonomous process, when it develops around reproducible media, with all the intellectual property consequences that entails. I will hopefully find more learned studies of this topic.

In Dynamics, Toelken pointed several times to the works of Edward T. Hall, specifically to his The Hidden Dimension, where he introduced the concept of proxemics, the study of personal and cultural perceptions of space. I took a detour to read that work, which is why I will probably only be done with Dynamics next year. While it is also a bit outdated, and has an unfortunate tendency to present animal models for human behavior uncritically, as well as to indulge in cultural stereotyping, the very fact that human perception of space is multi-sensory, can be broken up into reasonable ranges, and that people's comfort and interest in what happens when thus separated from each other can depend on their cultural context, context, as well as personal preference, was pretty insightful. Specifically, for tabletop role-playing games, this is something I will be keeping in mind as I am trying to communicate position and its emotional effect, and will contribute to my thoughts about combat systems, exploration, and other spatially-significant aspects of an imagined world. I have some more reading material in that direction - here's hoping it can bear fruit sometime next year.

2021 in review - role-playing games

We're getting towards the end of 2021, so it's a good time for me to look back on this year, also the first full year of my blog. Since role-playing games have always been my focus, this post is dedicated to them. I only intend to mention games I have played - reading is all well and good, actual plays can be useful, but the play's the thing.

After winding down my own first role-playing campaign, I decided that I will no longer run Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, I've continued to learn and play other games, although remain a player in a 5E campaign with my existing local group.

After attempting to playtest it a bit last year, this year is when I had the most experience in Blades in the Dark. You can find an index to the posts I wrote about my experience here. To summarize: very interesting, intense experience, but lacking in constraints in places, and would require me to do a bit of thinking and some constraining of my own before I ran it again. Mostly good as my first real attempt to run a modern fiction-first game. I should try and see how it runs as a player, too. Maybe next year.

I also ran a Sorcerer one-shot. I still struggle to summarize the experience - I think at this point I just feel that it was premature as it stood - but thinking about it, combined with the seasonal connection to my main inspiration for the scenario, A Night in the Lonesome October, led me to my most prolific project of this year, constituting the majority of my posts: Through Sorcerer's Eyes. In some ways it connects to my speculation about system as theory, except applied to literature rather than role-playing.

In terms of games played, this year was a success. I'm surprised that I didn't write a post about Session Zero Online, a convention centered in Manila, the Philippines. In my defense, it was very intense, and came along just as I was starting a new job. I played three games there: a playtest for Basheer Ghouse's upcoming Ahadi, a narrative role-playing wargame focusing on high-ranking officers in the Mughal Empire, which I am really looking forward to seeing in a more complete stage, as even this early draft was delightful; Rajit Kalita's Ramayana Run (now published as Ramayana Tales: Search for the Sanjivni), a 5E adventure and supplement set in the world of the Indian epic, the Ramayana - fascinating, but the experience clarified to me just how much 5E's character sheet game overshadows any attempts at doing something different with the system; and Curious Chimeras` Mere Gods, a contemplative narrative game inspired by traditional Southeast Asian cultures, about people returning to their home-town after a long absence, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

After this, I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, which I had backed on Kickstarter. It was my first experience with a diceless TTRPG - this, in turn, led me to the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game-focused community, with which I participated in TirCon 2021. There I played two games using ADRPG itself, as well as the award winning Alice Is Missing, which is unfortunately not for me, and an ADRPG-Everway concoction called Amberway, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Other games I played were Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Troika!, MÖRK BORG, and Ultraviolet Grasslands (now situated as part of the Vastlands).

Aside from the platforms provided by the conventions I mentioned, I want to thank the CoC-focused Pinkerton One-Shots Agency Discord, especially for allowing me to run my Blades and Sorcerer games, as well as The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, a blog and podcast that I support on Patreon, which is also focused on CoC, but discusses horror and general gaming, and in whose Discord I have played and expect to play many games.

Short social media update

You may or may not have noticed that I've not posted on Twitter since last Friday, December 17. The reason is that I have been locked out, pending an appeal of their demand that I remove a tweet in which I implied that the US Constitution is a suicide pact. They claim that this constitutes promotion of suicide or self-harm, which is against their rules. I say "they claim", but the tweet was flagged mere minutes after it was posted, and my original appeal was rejected moments after I raised it, so I'm not sure whether any human was meaningfully involved in the decision. This has given me some time to reflect on my social media use.

Early this year I raised concerns about using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc, to hold thoughts and conversations about RPGs, or any topic, really, although I was being much less self-serving there. I figured that if I keep my long-form thoughts here, on this blog, which I am backing up so that I can preserve it, even if Blogspot decides to shut down or decides it no longer wants me here, that this information, at least, will remain less ephemeral.

However, I have to wonder whether letting Twitter guide my attention is a good idea at all. I do like the accounts I follow there, but I also find myself spending more and more time engaging in interactions that I'm not sure are healthy for me. Not to mention how many accounts I report as potentially fake, and how many tweets I genuinely think are harmful remain there despite my reports. For example, I reported an antisemitic "joke" a month ago, and it's still there at time of writing. I know I wasn't the only one outraged by it, either.

I am leaning towards deleting my "offending" tweet so that I can use my account again, then letting my followers know that I'm either leaving the platform or otherwise no longer going to engage with it, and urging them to follow me here or to email me. Facebook I keep mostly for friends and family overseas, and a few interest groups, so it's a bit more useful to me, although I've lowered my engagement with it, as well, in that I don't think I post there more than once every few weeks.

In case it hasn't been clear before, I do welcome feedback and comments on my posts. Unless I've made a very silly configuration mistake, you should be able to comment under the posts themselves, and there's a form for getting in touch if that's too public for you.

I have a few ideas for posts for the rest of the year during my break, but I also have to pack for my move, so I can't guarantee anything. If you've added me to your RSS reader, you'll know soon enough.