Author: VD

I never met Gary Gygax, although I once did a book signing with Dave Arneson, who was the other creator of Dungeons and Dragons. I wasn’t much of a D&D player, although my best friend was, and D&D was the inspiration behind two of the games I loved most, the SF role-playing game Traveller and the computer game Akalabeth. D&D also served as the basis for the fiction of the fantasy writer that I imitated in learning how to write my own fiction, Joel Rosenberg.

Gygax and Arneson unlocked a world of imagination for tens of thousands of bored teenage boys. The computer game industry owes as much to them as it owes to Tolkein, Wozniak, and Jobs. Even today, the basic mechanisms they created are still operative in games like The World of Warcraft, indeed, they are so dominant that it is difficult for game designers to even conceive of mechanisms to replace them.

Too often we lionize those who come later, those who cash in, and we forget the conceptual giants upon whose shoulders they stand, who many times are bypassed and ignored by the very industries they created. Every role-playing gamer, every fantasy reader, every computer game player, owes a genuine debt to Gary Gygax. Roll your favorite D20 today in his honor.

Hillary Rodham Clinton scored comeback primary wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island Tuesday night, denting Barack Obama’s delegate lead in a riveting Democratic presidential race.

I tell you what’s going to happen, you tell me I’m crazy. I tell you it’s still happening, you begin to see I might have a point. I tell you what’s still happening, you tell me I’m crazy. I tell you it’s still happening, you see again that I might have a point.

Are you beginning to recognize the pattern yet? Don’t you recognize the comeback theme from the last time a Team Clinton member was making his first run for office? This riveting race should end in a dramatic climax of unity, with Obama saying “yes he can” to the vice-presidency. What other choice is there for her? A squatty Hispanic toad?

No, this story needs its happy ending for the fainting masses.

UPDATE – yes, it really is that predictable:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton hinted at the possibility of a Democratic “dream ticket” with Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking on “The Early Show” on CBS, Clinton said “that may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of the ticket.”

I also dislike people who like New York City on principle. Especially if they’re not from New York City:

Often times if you ask a white person about where to travel, you will get a lot of responses. But if you ask them about New York, white people will go nuts. They love the city universally and all either live there, have lived there, will live there or want to live there.

White people like New York because it has artists, restaurants, a subway, history, diversity, plays, and other white people. It literally has everything white people need to thrive! The only thing it’s missing is nature, but Central Park is right there, and since you are walking all the time, you are outside!

If you are from New York, tell this to a white person. They will instantly be interested in you “what part of New York? and you are really from there?” When they inevitably tell you about your home town (”I know this great italian place…”) you should respond by saying “man, I thought place was only known to New Yorkers.”

I’ve only ever had one good friend from New York City. She absolutely loathed the cult of NYC, I think I may have picked up a bit of that from her. Living in Europe, I can understand the annoyance; I can’t tell you how many people have attempted to tell me all about their two-days experience of Florence or Venice.

One of the more amusing things that happens while travelling is the way tourists compliment me on my English. Pretty much all of my old American clothes have worn out now, so I am usually taken for an Italian even though no Italian would make that mistake for a second. (They usually think I’m English, sometimes Swiss.) Needless to say, I seldom bother to disabuse them of the notion, it’s more fun to make up something about the wonderful four years I spent learning English and studying the art of mime in Iowa or whatever.

But Europeans are positively the most annoying members of the NYC cult. Seven times out of ten, if a European under the age of 30 finds out you’re an American, he will tell you that he feels a special connection with NYC and it is his heart’s desire to visit it someday. That’s bad enough, but what makes it incredibly irritating is that it is invariably conveyed in a manner that indicates they actually believe that this feeling is unique to them. The other three all want to go to Los Angeles.

Brett Favre has decided to retire from the NFL after 17 seasons.

I will always appreciate Brett Favre for his competitive spirit, his love of the game, and the many passes he threw directly into the chests of Vikings defenders. He was unique, he was a thrower nonpareil, he was the only quarterback whose interceptions you could see coming even before the ball was snapped. He’d narrow his eyes, hunch his shoulders, and hurl the ball at an incredible velocity directly into triple coverage as if he hoped to throw it right through the covering cornerback.

I’ve told this story before, but it seems an apt time to repeat it. When Favre reached his first Pro Bowl, he entered the game when the NFC had the ball in the AFC’s red zone. I have no idea why we were watching the game, but we were, and as soon as he came in, I said “and here comes the INT”. Sure enough, Favre didn’t hesitate for a second, but took a five-step drop and then hurled a ball at about 500 MPH directly into an end zone blanket-covered by the AFC’s very best secondary.

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence for Peter King and the OC, two men who are suffering today.

I’ll actually miss watching Brett play. I will not, however, miss the obsequious behavior of the commentators so smitten by him for lo, these many years.

Lisa Schiffren offers support for Charlotte Allen’s thesis:

Does a certain type of man swoon and faint in the same way? I don’t know. But over a lifetime in and around politics I have seen the equally awful spectacle of the drippy, excrutiatingly earnest young man, defending his views and his candidate at painful and tedious length. All campaigns are stocked with these young men. They approach the candidate with extreme reverence, citing little known and generally irrelevant details about his or her life as if they were kabbalistic invocations. They trade received opinions about floor fights at political conventions held in their infancy as if those had been the high points of their own, personal lives. They have no sense of humor or distance whatsoever. Is this better than swooning?

So, this woman deems the male ability to focus – an aspect of male behavior that is indubitably connected to such things as technological advancement, entrepeneurialism and great guitar solos – is somehow equivalent to women fainting in sexual excitement over a politician? This is nothing more than the typical woman’s equalitarian response to criticism and conflict.

John Hawkins talks to five women who are successful bloggers in large part because they are attractive women about the hardships that come with obtaining your success through being attractive and female:

Michelle on how to be a success at blogging.

There are a couple of factors. The first is not to try to be somebody else. If you want to be a success…don’t be another Michelle Malkin or Glenn Reynolds or a Drudge wannabe. The marketplace of ideas rewards original ideas and original thinkers and I think having a niche is very important….

This is more than just a bit ironic coming from the world’s most dedicated Ann Coulter impersonator. I’m only surprised Me So hasn’t dyed her hair blonde. Malkin, like Dawkins and Harris, is an intellectual charlatan who is unable to defend her own positions and she knows it. On the plus side, she is an extremely hard worker and she should be given credit for being one of the earliest campaigners against the Mexican migration, but this is balanced by the fact that she’s the quintessential media whore. That people like John Hawkins should “respect and admire” her simply astounds me. And “courageous”? Please, John, the woman won’t even stand up to defend her own book.

The latest publishing scandal is hardly a surprise. I’d bet that the majority of the non-fiction personal triumph tearjerkers out there are substantially fictional:

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed….

The revelations of Ms. Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.

One would think that the first sign that a chubby, literate white girl claiming that she had run drugs for the Bloods was telling tale tales would be it’s a chubby white girl claiming to have run drugs for the Bloods! In addition to the completely obvious, such as the names “Terrell” (Owens) and “Taye” (Diggs) for her non-existent black foster brothers and the aforementioned fact of the author’s chubby white girlness, it’s worth noting that there is no gang per se called “Bloods”, it’s a broad criminal affiliation to which many location-based gangs belong, not that the chick lit editor who was listening to Ms Seltzer’s melodramatic stories with her heart in her mouth would have known that.

This sort of thing was old when it was Vanilla Ice and Rigoberta Menchu doing it more than a decade ago; I’d guess that most of the successful black gangster rappers are the college-educated sons of doctors and lawyers. This happens because most people like fantasy, but many of them don’t like to admit it.

The foreign press is much more open about the horrid state of the U.S. economy:

The verdict is in. The Fed’s emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed. Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter. The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into the safest pockets of the US credit universe.

The desperate emergency rate-cutting was a foolish idea anyhow. More of the venom that’s poisoning you isn’t going to help, Americans would have been a lot better off if they’d taken their medicine back in 2001. Instead, more money was pumped in and no amount of hiding the statistics can conceal the fact that running the printing presses until they melt isn’t going to fix anything.

The Fed is like a guy with a hammer trying to steer a car. The car is headed for a cliff, so he frantically pounds on the steering wheel until it breaks. Now, there’s nothing it can do. A friend of mine was cursing the fact that he’s tied into dollars because of his stock options. “They’re so screwed”, he said, in unconscious imitation of what two other executives had concluded just last week.

Don’t plan on moving anytime soon, and if you’re thinking of selling your house, better do it now. Prices are going to continue to go lower, and they’ll do so for longer than anyone thinks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’re into cash, or better yet, if you’ve been into gold for the last five years. But it is problematic given the size of the debt edifice that has been constructed upon the housing market.

UPDATE – Unsurprisingly, the reaction of state and local governments to this decline in availability and concomitant increase in the price of credit is to try to change the rules in their favor:

A complex system of credit ratings and insurance policies that Wall Street uses to set prices for municipal bonds makes borrowing needlessly expensive for many localities, some officials say. States and cities have begun to fight back, saying they can no longer afford the status quo given the slackening economy and recent market turmoil.

Gunny JMC testifies:

I found the school system substantially flawed and only those students with the burning desire to educate themselves, getting an actual education, in my day, graduating high school in 1975. At the time, the teachers were mostly good teachers, and well educated, but fighting a bureaucratic system. It occupied too much of their time, but had not destroyed them yet.

I watched my son and daughter get a horrible education, ameliorated only by my demands of their reading skills, and the constant discussions on everything, each day and evening at home. Neither of my two children graduated high school, but they fit right in with the statistical failure of their school. I’m not sure how one would graduate from the school they went to, it was over-run with gangs and drugs, and only a few male teachers were able to control the mob scenes. I went there on a regular basis, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not, but I always saw kids in the halls, and on many occasion, reached out and grabbed a firm hold and stopped a kid from doing something.

You are absolutely right in calling for the end of these schools.

It’s easy for the college-educated class to forget that while they can afford to have terrible schools tearing away at the values that sustain the social fabric, the less-educated have no such margin of error. It doesn’t actually matter much what is learned or not learned by the suburban girl whose parents pay for a quiet abortion, by the suburban boy whose parents hire lawyers to plea-bargain a felony distribution charge down to a possession misdemeanor and 100 hours of community service, or by the adult-children of either sex who take eight years to complete their sociology degrees on Mommy and Daddy’s dime. They can afford to mess around for 12 years, then settle down into a functional role as an office drone or hausfrau without their lack of an actual education having any significant effect on their lives. They possess the economic ticket, which is all that a college degree represents nowadays.

As I have written previously, the schools are now so bad that they actually maleducate, the net effect is negative and a child would learn more and receive a better education by doing nothing but playing XBox and PS/3 for 12 years. At least he’d learn reading, math and geography, you’d be amazed at the level of geographical knowledge possessed by the average 12-year old wargamer.

Publisher’s Weekly comes up with a description of TIA that actually manages to be less accurate than that of the most hostile atheist non-reading reviewer:

The atheists write with what Matt Baugher, v-p and publisher for spiritual growth and Christian thought at Thomas Nelson, calls “venom,” stridently stating that religious belief is delusional and dangerous and the world would be better off without it. Becky Garrison (InProfile, this issue), senior contributing editor for the smart Christian humor magazine the Wittenburg Door, offers a snarky, satiric response in The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail (Thomas Nelson, Jan.). Baugher said orders from mainstream retailers for Garrison’s book have been double what they expected.

Blogger and political columnist Vox Day comes at the issues from a nontheological perspective in The Irrational Atheist (BenBella, Feb.), relying on factual evidence to counter atheist claims that religion causes war, that religious people are more apt to commit crime and that the Bible and other sacred texts are unreliable and fictitious…. All of these books aim to move the discussion in a less vitriolic direction, and none more so than Zondervan’s A Friendly Dialogue Between an Atheist and a Christian (Feb.).

Less vitriolic. That’s just… astounding, considering that I did nearly everything but question Richard Dawkin’s parentage and tear out Sam Harris’s liver with my bare hands. PW is known throughout the publishing industry for its oft-peculiar take on books, but this may take the cake. Of course, it’s possible that they had the insight to see through the aggressive gamer’s pose and realized that at heart I’m all about the kumbaya and mutual hair-braiding.

On a tangential note, I was helping some guild mates on a quest at the Hellfire Citadel last night when a L70 Blood Elf priest and an L61 Tauren warrior happened to show up at the instance gate where we were waiting for the last member of our party to arrive. I immediately hit the priest with a Viper Sting and set my wolf on the warrior, leading to a violent free-for-all that left five dead, two of ours and three of theirs. The two that got killed were understandably annoyed, which amused the last member of our party when he showed up, saw all the skeletons and asked what happened.

After being informed, he took one look at my Field-Marshal’s Pursuit and said “Never invite a battleground guy anywhere you’re likely to run into Horde.”