Thoughs on the Holiday Special

“But Grandpa Itchy, you're a Wookie! Why, when given the option to visualize any fantasy you want, are you dreaming about a human female?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, what's up with your ridiculous underbite?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why do we have to dress up in red robes and walk into the sun? And why is our most sacred Wookie Life Day ceremony hijacked by a bunch of humans, including a singing Princess Leia? And why are our names so stupid? And why do we have five image projectors in our living room? And why is my attention span so short that I can watch a cartoon and be happy when there are Storm Troopers invading my house and I don't know if my father is alive or dead? And why do we grunt and growl at each other for minutes a stretch with no subtitles? And why does an 'unedited' video from Tatooine have cuts and changes in camera angles, and why would the Empire broadcast some lame-ass cabaret song that rhymes 'rhyme' with 'time' and that is critical of the Empire in an attempt to boost morale? And why would anybody think that Harvey Korman's physical comedy is funny?"
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. You'll understand when you're older. Or maybe you won't.”
“But Grandpa Itchy, why does participating in our wookie lifeday ceremony make me want to kill myself?”
“Hush, Grandson Lumpy. Just hush. Eat your Wookie-Ookies.”

Duerminatrix

She slept in a nest of loaded guns: sawed-down shotguns with sanded-down triggers. The walnut stocks were stacked and threaded thickly together. Each night she would insinuate herself, at the rate of one inch of flesh per minute, into the tangle of wood and high-speed steel, cobalt steel, Parkerized steel, and bluing finish. And, after an hour of careful contortion, she would sleep naked among the a-wake triggers, neither shifting nor tossing nor deeply breathing nor dreaming for fear that she would jostle the guns in the slightest.
I questioned her, asked why she did not sleep in a bed of synthetics and feathers or at the very least on the naked floor. She stared at me quizzically, jaw agape and teeth naked. She slept in a bed of loaded guns; it had never occurred to her to do other.

A Fire on One End and a Fool on T'other

It's been twenty-one days since I last smoked a cigarette. This is less of an accomplishment than it might sound; it's relatively easy for me to go a month or more without smoking. I was up to five or six weeks back in February before I un-quit again. I'm sure there have been spaces of six months or a year since that I have gone without smoking. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself; I quit smoking, and then I quit quitting.

It's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-smoker. When I smoke, I tend to be more nervous. Smoking raises my blood pressure, which is already too high as it is. When I smoke, there is this feathery feeling in my lungs that comes whenever I breathe hard, and while I know it's not lung cancer, it's always difficult to convince myself that it's not. Concordant with this is my even-more reduced capacity for exercise such that I am incapable of walking up a single hill without wheezing. And I swear, although I've never heard of this being a normal side-effect of smoking, that smoking contributes to my migraine headaches. I bet I could accept all the other consequences, aside from this one, because if smoking does cause me to have headaches--and it definitely seems to me that I get a lot more migraines when I smoke than when I don't--it would be downright idiotic for me to voluntarily inflict that kind of torment on myself.

But it's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-non-smoker, either. I don't get pronounced withdrawal symptoms when I don't smoke. Even when I do smoke, I rarely have more than three to five cigarettes a day, which doesn't seem to be enough to cause me to physically addicted to nicotine. No; the withdrawal is mental more than anything else. When I smoke, I have a need that must be satisfied every few hours. I can satisfy that need, and then I'm good for a while again. I think it's the regularity and ease of satisfaction of this need that attracts me most to smoking--I should wish that all of my needs should be so scheduled and so simply met. And when meeting this one need, it's possible to ignore other needs--like my needs for companionship, comfort, reassurance, and touch. Those things, in my experience, are very hard to get. A pack of my preferred brand of cigarettes, on the other hand, is available at most gas stations and grocery stores for about five dollars.

Given my very moderate tobacco use, and given that brief, dizzying rush of stimulants to the brain that allows me to forget, for thirty seconds, whatever else might be bothering me, it's been difficult for me to convince myself that smoking is really harmful to me. I *know* that it is, but it's difficult to do the assessment and find that smoking is more of a drawback than a benefit.

Do you know, gentle reader, what the best part of quitting smoking is? It is, most assuredly, that first cigarette after you unquit again. True, the experience is tainted by guilt, but the physiological sensation of those pathways in the brain that have gone extinct coming crackling back to life in a minute of intense sensation not unlike orgasm--it almost makes it worth it. Repetition deadens the sensation as the brain becomes accustomed to nicotene, but if one can leave off the chase for the dragon for a few days or a week or a month or a year and then resume the chase, it's as if you've got the dragon by the tail all over again. After a day or three of repeated exposure, though, the experience becomes mere mechanics--no real rush, just a feeling of irritability and dullness without the drug.

And that small, stupid, completely legal high is only a single smoke away. And it's sad that'd I'd throw away three weeks of sobriety--or better to call it three weeks of relative calm, with clothes that did not stink and a tongue that did not taste of tar and stale ash--for a minute of craving satisfied. But I would.

I guess I'm waiting for some definitive, conclusive experience to forever purge me of the desire to smoke--because that desire still persists, even if I do my best to deny it satiety. I don't know if it's possible to hit that fabled "rock bottom" with respect to cigarettes, though. In faith, there have been moments when I felt the muscles in my neck constrict and red pain seared through my skull like some breed of contained organic lightning, and in these moments I swore "Never again." There have been a number of such moments. And, with the possible exception of the most recent iteration, I have broken that vow every time. I am apparently very bad at being operantly conditioned. (It should be noted, though, that it only required three or four such comparable incidents to forever purge me of the desire for being very drunk). Will this time be the last time I need to quit? Hell if I know. I think maybe keeping track of the individual days as they pass by might be helpful; it's harder to throw away twenty-one days of progress than it is to throw away some while of progress, and it's easier to congratulate oneself on resisting that temptation that comes multiple times a day if one reminds oneself that one has been clean for twenty-one days, rather than clean for a good while now. Ticking off that calendar in my head does seem to have both a positive and negative reinforcing effect.

Nietzsche says something about resisting temptation that I wish I could find now, but I can't. But I remember the essence of the quote being something like "There are two ways to conquer temtpation: the first is through regular indulgence, and the second is through surfeit." Oh, Hell, I don't know if Neitzsche said that, but it sounds like him. Anyway. I wonder if the means for conquering my addiction to smoking would not be to smoke so much as to make myself so absolutely sick that I can never ever want to smoke again, or to accept that occasional indulgences are less costly than the stress of spending a significant portion of my day thinking about not smoking. Or else, if there is some switch I switch I can find and then flick that will make me want to smoke no more forever. Until then, instead of enjoying the satiety of a cigarette, I content myself with the much colder comfort that it's been twenty-one days since I last lit up.

Tomorrow will be twenty-two.

The Dungeon Master's Manifesto

I've been playing role-playing games for a number of years now. I think it's safe to say that a majority of the difficulties I've encountered in the course of my RPG career have not been with the game systems themselves, but with the other people playing them. That pen and paper RPGs are a social activity is one of their primary draws, insofar as I am concerned, but it's also one of their primary drawbacks, because it's hard to deal with other people sometimes.

It is sufficiently difficult to gather a group of people to want the same thing--like, say, participation in a D&D campaign. It can be nearly impossible to get a group of people who all want the same thing at the same time and for the same reasons. One person wants to be the center of an elaborate interpersonal drama, another person wants to have the most powerful character he can possibly have, another person wants to crack jokes and pull pranks, another person wants the freedom to do whatever he wants, another person wants to feel important and responsible within the structures of the game world, and so on. It is possible to accommodate all of these desires within the medium of a D&D game. It's possible, but it's not always easy, and it's certainly not possible to accommodate all of the differing desires of each of the players at all times.

Let me take it out of the RPG ghetto. Gentle reader, have you ever seen a creative writing workshop? In one of these things, you'd think that all of the persons involved would have a similar frame of reference. Here are people who are spending time and money in the pursuit of an activity that the vast majority of humanity doesn't give half a shit about. Here are people who have taken time away from reality television and Twitter and Internet porn to write stories--how bizarre is that! You'd think, then, that these people would be very supportive and understanding, and would be in agreement as often as not. You'd think that, gentle reader, but then you'd be mistaken. Because creative writing workshops are fractious things. I won't say that friendliness and supportiveness and solidarity and encouragement are impossible in such a setting. Certainly not. But equally possible are rivalries, insoluble debates over subjective points of style, and competing and conflicting notions as to what "reality" or "realistic human behavior" are or are not. Ask twenty writers what "literature" is, and you're likely to get twenty different answers.

Okay, creative writing workshops are kind of a ghetto, too. So let's put this in an even better and broader context. You have a group of friends, right? These are people you like and with whom you get along, and you have already made the effort to befriend them out of all the other people in the world whom you could potentially befriend. How many of those friends are going to want to go and see a particular movie with you? And if you do find some other friends to see that movie, is it likely that you're all going to be in agreement as to whether the movie was good or not? And even if you do all like the movie, do you think that everybody is going to like the movie for the same reasons? Or is it more likely that one friend will focus on character and dialogue, while another concentrates on the hotness of the lead actress, and another friend comments on the special effects, and so on? The disparity of opinions doesn't mean that people can't enjoy the movie for different reasons, but I think it's unrealistic to expect a group of adults with distinct personalities and backgrounds to all want the same things in the same way, even if that group does share a core set of values.

All this is to say that coordinating a group effort towards the acheivement of a common goal isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world. Especially if the group is composed of those persons possessed of legendarily poor social skills known as "gamers." Lord knows I don't prove the exception to that particular stereotype. I think gamers are often people who have difficulty expressing their desires and finding positive channels for fulfilling those desires--I think a goodly portion of the attractiveness of games is that they can provide these things. If the gentle reader has spent any time at all engaged in online gaming, though, he will know that even the best-intentioned and most friendly game can degrade into verbal abuse and acts of virtual corpse rape.

I think, in some ways, the nature of RPGs complicates this problem. RPGs offer empowerment and wish fulfillment. RPGs offer a person a chance to feel significant, to go above and beyond the normal restrictions of reality, to express his will upon the world in a meaningful way. RPGs can make people feel like heroes, or main characters, when all too often in life we feel like supporting cast or expendable extras. This encourages a mode of thinking that is very different from the kind of approach one would take to day-to-day tedium, bound up as it is by the presence of tradition and custom and law and expectation and very real and very serious consequences for violating these things in order to act in ways that would be consistent with our imagined fantasies. This freedom to pursue one's own desires in spite of consequences lends itself to a feeling of entitlement that can then conflict with the interests of the rest of the group. If everybody wants to pursue the same form of empowerment, or to find his own particular motivation for pursuing that collective goal of empowerment, all is well and good. But let me assure you, gentle reader, such synchronicity is not always the case.

I think, in some ways, the nature of RPGs as a fun activity complicates the problem, too. In the course of one's occupation, one most likely accepts that there are certain things one has to do and certain people one has to deal with, not all of which or whom are pleasant, and one puts one's head down and accepts the unpleasant necessities for the sake of the greater goal (personal fulfillment, a paycheck, whatever). If the unpleasantries become excessive, some people will leave their jobs and look for a better one; others never will. An activity for pleasure, on the other hand, comes with an attendantly lower threshhold for compromise or temporary unpleasantness in the pursuit of a long-term happiness. Assuming you didn't like that movie that you wound up going to with your friends, is it possible that you and your friends would walk out before the movie was finished? Would you do the same in a boring business meeting?
In a meeting room full of your co-workers, it's unlikely that a disagreement is going to make you so inflamed that you feel inclined to stand up and start shouting at people. It's a lot easier to get more dramatic when you're around friends and loved ones and the defenses are down and the discipline is off and you expect to have a good time be validated and will feel cheated if you don't.

Thinking about all of these things, I felt compelled to write out my feelings about my upcoming position as the DM of a newly-formed D&D group. The breakdown of my previous group and my relationship with Bonny have taught me that there are some things that are necessary for the health of any relationship, whether that relationship be between friends and activity partners or lovers. At the present time, I think these are the most essential elements of a successful relationship:

1. That the persons involved take responsibility for their own wants, and that they express their expectations as clearly as possible.
2. That the persons involved take responsibility for their own actions, and for the consequences of those actions.
3. That the persons involved be reasonably forgiving of mistakes, lapses in judgment, or moments of strong emotion.
4. That the persons involved make some compromises and small sacrifices for the sake of the continuation of the relationship, and also that these compromises be spread among the persons involved as equitably as possible. In tandem with this is that one person understand that other persons can't meet all of his wants at all times.
5. That the persons involved agree to handle disagreements in a productive manner, owning their own ideas and feelings rather than blaming others for not thinking or feeling the same way, and accepting that disagreements are inevitable in any relationship and that they don't necessarily need to devolve into rage and personal attacks. That the persons involved agree that there is rarely only one feasible approach to a problem, and that multiple methods might have merit, and that even absolute notions such as "right" and "wrong" or "realistic" and "unrealistic" vary from one person to the next and should not be closed to discussion.
6. That the persons involved agree that such behaviors as are manipulative, deceitful, obsessive, controlling, or physically or emotionally hostile are undesirable and unacceptable.
8. That while one of the persons involved is responsible for his own actions and wants and feelings, he is not responsible for the actions and wants and feelings of anybody else. That mature adults will desire neither to control others nor be controlled by them.
9. That no one person, even a person in a leadership position, is completely responsible for the the success or failure of a collaborative effort, such as a relationship.

I think that about sums it up. I wrote these expressions out in a document in the hope that I can clearly communicate my own expectations for my new group and to let them know what they can expect from me. My hope is to avoid the problem that occurred with the last group when, after being dissatisfied with the course of events for over a year, the players all decided to express all their dissatisfaction at once, and a group that had been cohesive for years fell to pieces. Do I think they should have expressed their likes and dislikes sooner and in less critical fashion? Yes, I do. Do I think I should have made a greater effort to be approachable and to be more clear about my own expectations and to be open to their ideas before things reached critical mass? Yes, I do. Do I think anybody is really at fault in this situation? No, I don't. But I would like to avoid, if at all possible, the kinds of communication failures that rent my last group with this new one, and I was hoping by being clear and explicit in the expression of my expectations that I might manage to do so.

Then again, it might seem weird to have a relative stranger hand you a seven page document at the game session, detailing all this stuff about relationships and communication, the discussion of which holds very little appeal for most men.

Then again, a lot of what I'm saying in this document is fairly close to the advice given by the Dungeon Master's guide with respect to group management. And I've already seen the potential for cohesion-sabotaging arguments just in our initial emails and forum posts, and I think it would be a good idea to provide some channels for argument resolution from the get-go. And I might save myself a lot of time and stress if I can identify my dealbreakers from the start, so that anybody who knows he can't accept my conditions for friendship and for collaboration in an interactive fiction project will move along presently.

Is this the right thing to do? Hell, I don't know. I know it's a bit extra-ordinary. But then, what I'm trying to do is deal with the problems that have ordinarily prevented me from deriving full enjoyment from a D&D group.

So, gentle reader, if you've been patient enough to read this far, I encourage you to read on to the end, and tell me what you think. D&D nerd or no, I expect that you will have some experience with human relationships, and will be able to give me some feedback as to whether it would be smart or suicidally stupid to give this list out next Monday. A lot of this might seem repetitive, given that the gentle reader has already read the condensed list, but perhaps not.

How I Roll: Some Things You Might Want to Understand About My Interpretation of What It Means to Be a DM

I do not design or run encounters out of malice. I don't punish characters in order to punish players. I will never design an encounter with the desire for or expectation of the failure of the party. I design encounters and challenges in the hopes that each will be overcome, and that the characters will show their worth in the overcoming of the challenge. Contrary to what you might believe about Dungeon Masters, I take little delight from frustrating, humiliating, or punishing PCs.

I do not see myself as being in a competition with the PCs, and I hope that the PCs don't see themselves as being in competition with me. If anything, I want to see your character succeed as much as you do. That's not to say that there won't be times that I won't be at least a little pleased if the monsters that I have selected are doing well in a combat. I might also be pleased if a villain should get away with some form of evil, if only to make the final reckoning between that villain and the party that much more satisfying. If the PCs should out-and-out lose an encounter, though, I don't count this as any kind of victory. If anything, I'll have wished that I toned down the difficulty. I enjoy giving the PCs a worthy challenge; I don't enjoy seeing them defeated. If I wanted to get involved in an arms race with the players, I'd just have four Demogorgons port in from out of nowhere and kick everybody's ass. But that'd be a stupid abuse of my authority and my responsibility, don't you think?

I believe that the challenge rating of D&D encounters isn't always 100% reliable. Some above-level encounters will end up being a breeze, while the goblin minions that were supposed to be easy can wind up wiping the party. Even the best-balanced encounter can get screwy based on a few rolls of the dice. I hope that we can all take this variability in stride.

While some of the characters in the game world might have telepathic powers, I do not. If you want something from me, you need to ask me. More likely than not, I'll be happy to give it to you, whatever it is. If you do not ask me for something, then I hope you won't be surprised or resentful if I don't anticipate your wishes.

I believe that people play RPGs for a number of different reasons. Even within such a outside-the-curve and self-selected group of people as D&D players, most likely there will be some individuals who prioritize combat mechanics, who prioritize the social experience of gaming, who prioritize roleplaying, who prefer to be passive participants, who prefer to be leaders, and so on. I don't feel that any one approach is necessarily superior to another. I will try to offer experiences that appeal to the variety of players in the group. This does not mean I can appeal to all of these varied interests at all times.

I will do my best to give each character a chance to shine. I will appreciate the patience of the other players when it is not their particular moment.

Charm spells aside (and those rarely used for this very reason), I will not force a character (or a player) to do something he does not want to do. I will respect your right to decide your own character's actions within reasonable limits.

While I respect your ability to choose your characters' actions, I hope you can respect my ability to decide the consequences of how those actions affect the game world. That is to say, if Jimmee the Halfling Rogue decides to cut the throat of a sleeping townsperson, then I hope that Jimmee's player won't be shocked or hold it against me if the town guards come after Jimmee. This also means that rolling a 20 doesn't automatically mean that a character gets what he wants; Gruumsh is not going to be persuaded to change his alignment to lawful good no matter what result you get on your diplomacy check.

I do want to give players what they want, so long as what a player wants doesn't conflict with my own wants or the wants of another player or the integrity of the game. I'd much rather empower than disempower a character or a player. I see my role as DM as being to help people have a good time, not to prevent them from doing so.

I will never inflict a permanent, incurable, disabling condition on your character (unless, for some weird reason, you want me to). I will never say that your fighter's sword arm has been disintegrated, or that your wizard has taken a blow to the head that has rendered him incapable of ever casting spells again. I won't cripple your character's capability to perform his primary function in the group.

I don't believe that rules discussions should derail a play session. If there is a rules dispute that can be resolved in a minute or less, we can resolve it on the spot. If there is a rules dispute that's going to take any longer than that to resolve, we can note it and come back to it later, preferably in email.

I don't feel that “griefing” (e.g., stealing from or killing another PC) can be justified by any assertion of the rules or role-playing or humorousness. If that's what your character would do, then you need to make a different character. Acts of comic mischief are fine. Disagreements and rivalries between characters are fine, and are even beneficial for the game on occasion, so long as the tone does not become hurtful to the players. Characters causing serious harm to one another is never good for anyone involved.

I will do my best to be approachable, and to give due consideration to any arguments you might have. I will do my best to be adaptable. This being said, I reserve the right to adhere to the rules as written (or, at least, my interpretation of them) if I feel that such an adherence is in everybody's best interests.

I view D&D as a cooperative and collaborative effort. I truly value players' input, and I do my best to give players what they want so that we can all pitch in to tell the most exciting, most entertaining, and most satisfying group story we can. I strive to be democratic and reasonable in my leadership of the group rather than dictatorial and arbitrary. The reverse of this is that if something goes wrong in the game, I will not very much enjoy if people go out of their way to dump blame on me. I view the relationship between the DM and the players as reciprocal. I very much believe that the players need to take responsibility for the fun of the game, too. I think that players need to take responsibility for improving a situation rather than resorting to bitterness, anger, or resentment. We're all adults here; let's try to work things out.

I believe there will be points in the campaign—in any campaign—where I will not be able to reach a mutually desirable agreement with one of the players. In such cases, if we cannot achieve a compromise, I hope that we will be able to accept the disagreement and move on for the sake of the flow of the game.

My first priority in being a DM is to be respectful and considerate, in language and in action, of the players. My second priority is to be fair and to maintain game balance. My third priority is the general good and cohesion of the group. My fourth priority is satisfying the requests of individual players. My fifth priority is adherence to notions of realism. All of these priorities descend from the first priority. If you come to me with a claim from a lower priority, don't be surprised if I reject it in favor of a higher priority. You say you want your level 1 character to have a level 30 magic item (#4), I'll most likely disagree on the bases of game integrity and unfairness to the other players (#2 and #3).

Claims about the “realisticness” of certain rules aren't going to carry a lot of weight with me; we are playing a fantasy role-playing game, not engaging in scientifically-accurate modeling of sociology, psychology, geology, biology, physics, or history. I believe that people's notions of what is realistic and unrealistic are highly variable.

I try to give considerations of realism credence within the game, but I'd rather not have the game overtaken by them.

I'm not going to accept disrespect or rudeness to or from another player under any circumstances, and I wouldn't expect you to accept it from me, either.

I view adventuring as a hazardous occupation. I think that a lot of the excitement in D&D comes from overcoming danger and peril (without ever actually being endangered or imperiled). While I bust my ass to ensure that the dangers and perils that the party has to face are appropriate for the party's abilities, there might be times when the party has to retreat. There might be times when a particular objective lies outside of the party's abilities. There might very well be times when the party is captured. There will be times when a character dies, maybe even the whole party (but hopefully not). I am not inclined to make the monsters pull their punches in order to ensure that nobody ever dies, and I don't think, in the long run, that such patronizing behavior would be very satisfying for anybody. I am more inclined to make monsters act in a way that makes good use of their abilities, and is consistent with their intelligence, their attitudes, and their desire for self-preservation. I will avoid last-second miraculous interventions in combat if I can help it; I respect the players enough that I'd rather have them solve their own problems than see them coddled by dei ex machinae. That being said, if a character does die, it is not necessarily the end for that character. Unless there are very obvious reasons otherwise, resurrection should always be an option, and if there are obvious reasons otherwise it's usually not anything that a little side-quest can't cure. Coming back from the dead in 4th Edition involves the payment of a relatively small amount of gold and a -1 penalty to a character's rolls for three milestones (which probably equates to six combats). This is a pretty mild penalty, and is significant without really being crippling (as opposed to, say, the old skool method of permanent level loss). I don't see it as unfair or cruel or even all that unusual that a PC should die from time to time. Consequently, I don't want to make character death unduly punishing. If the player decides that his old character is all-the-way dead and won't be returning—and the player should always be the one who has final say over this—the new replacement character will enter the group at the first possible convenience with gear and experience that are equivalent to that possessed by the rest of the group. I know character death can be stressful; people get attached to their characters, and character deaths can cause some anger or sadness. Character death shouldn't be deeply traumatic, causing rage or serious depression, and if it is traumatizing for you then maybe there are other, better games for you than D&D. I'd like to cultivate an attitude where death in the face of fantastic peril is a heroic thing to be admired rather than begrudged.

I am very willing to make aesthetical changes to the game for the sake of flavor. I reserve the right to say that the giant scorpion isn't a giant scorpion at all but is instead a giant cockroach with a nasty rancid bite instead of a poisonous sting. If you want to say that your scale armor is composed of the overlapping shoulder blades of werewolves instead of metal scales, that's fine, too, although it would be rather silly. I regard appearances as mutable. I regard actual game mechanics as far less so, and not really things to be modified or forsaken for the sake of flavor, but again I will try to be adaptable.

I reserve the right to say yes or no to any material that lies outside of the core books. You can make a case for including something found in a third-party supplement or an obscure splat book, but let's please be reasonable about this. Just because some fly-by-night publisher or fan-run website publishes a feat that gives a character +5 to hit and damage with all swords doesn't mean that including such a feat in the game is a good idea. If the new material is so awesome that every single character would want it, then chances are, it's over-powered and broken.

I think that rules exist in a game for a reason. I think that the rules provide a consistent mechanism by which imaginary characters can interact with impossible things and have it all make sense. However, if there's a good reason for changing or eliminating a rule, then I think that the rule should be changed or eliminated.

I come to a D&D session in order to play D&D, not to watch other people use their laptops to play World of Warcraft all night except for those few seconds when they are called upon to toss a d20. Laptops can be fine for finding a rule now and again. I don't think they belong at the game table for extended periods. D&D is a team effort, and I believe that the effort will be more successful if everyone involved makes the attempt to be as engaged as possible.

I am only human, and I will make mistakes. I will misremember rules. I may get impatient or irritable from time to time. I hope you will be able to forgive me when these things happen, even as I should forgive you.

As much as I think there are different playing styles, I think there are different DMing styles, too. I acknowledge that I am not the right DM for all possible players. If you acknowledge that I'm not the right DM for you, then I'll wish you luck in finding a new game and we'll both move on.

Post-Religious Ethics

I don't believe in a God that intervenes in human affairs. To me, the massacres of the last hundred years pretty much prove the non-existence of such a God. Where was God when six million of his chosen people were massacred in the Holocaust? Where was God when 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed in Turkey? Where was God when 1.75 million people were killed in Cambodia under Pol Pot? When tens of millions starved to death or were executed in China under Mao Zedong, or in the U.S.S.R. under Josef Stalin? Where was God on 9/11, with both American Christians and Arab Muslims believing that He had justified their faith and way of life, and entitled them to kill the other? I can't imagine that a loving God would hold human life so cheap. If He takes the time to invest each person with a soul, and He believes that killing is wrong, why doesn't He bother to stop it when it happens?

So God does not intervene in atrocities. If an all-powerful and loving God existed, He would. Even if not on an individual scale, surely He would care about the deaths of millions of people. So if He does exist, then He chooses not to intervene on account of wanting people to play out their own particular realities, even if this freedom leads to tremendous evil. In which case, God is essentially irrelevant with respect to day-to-day earthly human affairs, as irrelevant as the light that comes from a distant star. You can note that starlight, study it, and ascribe to it all kinds of influences on human affairs, but really, is it somehow affecting life here on Earth? No. Peoples' *belief* in the power of that influence might affect the course of human events, but the influence itself is nearly nonexistent, and then it is the human capacity for belief that's really influencing events, not the thing which is believed. And that capacity for belief lends itself as readily to perpetrating culturally narcissistic genocide (My God can beat up your God! You are all infidels/pagans/heretics/a social virus!, etc.) as it does to preventing such horrors from occurring. Belief itself is neither good nor evil--like technology, it only serves to enable the good or evil that already exists within men. Alternately, you might think that the God is too weak to stop these events. I have been led to believe that the Christian God can do whatever he wants, so capability is not the issue. A third option might be that God allows these evils to happen with the intention of preventing greater evils down the road. In this scenario, God is like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, staving off catastrophe with stop-gap measures. All is a part of God's plan, and all is part of the greater good--even environmental devastation, the extinction of His species, and the murder of millions of people. And what kind of a God is that, then? A god who *could* stop these evils, but allows them to happen so...what? People learn to be good from evil? People swear to never again allow such things to afflict the Earth? As if. As if the Holocaust has put an end to all subsequent racial genocide. Hell, it hasn't even kept the Jews themselves from inflicting genocidal atrocities on their Palestinian neighbors. Maybe, on account of being the victims of genocide and repression, they have more entitlement to now perpetrate it on others. I don't think they do.

I encounter people who believe that it is not possible to be moral outside of faith. Maybe it's not--if you take morality as being the received values particular to a certain cultural group. If homosexuality is a sin, and I am a sinner if I see no real purpose in being intolerant of homosexuality, well then, I guess I'm not a moral person. However, I think it is entirely possible to be *ethical* outside of a faith tradition. Because, you see, here's the kicker: morality is specific to a group, passed down through tradition. Ethics are a rational attempt to create a code of conduct independent of any one tradition's say-so. Sometimes the two coincide; God says it's bad to lie (morality), and we can see the destructive power of lying in such things as the Enron or AIG scandals, so we know if we want society to function properly we shouldn't be lying to people all the time (ethics). Often times, these things do not coincide. The Bible tells me that I should not suffer a witch to live; I've got no personal investment in killing people who practice witchcraft, and I don't believe that killing them is of a benefit to society, and I think killing anybody for any reason is a bad fucking idea, because then who's to say that I don't deserve to be killed on somebody else's say-so, divinely inspired or politically justified or otherwise?

I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's entirely possible to be moral--or at least responsible, and conscientious, and compassionate--independent of any religion. Indeed, I have a harder time seeing how people can be moral--or responsible, or conscientious, or compassionate--*within* religion than without it. Because religious beliefs inhibit the individual from using his conscience to decide the rightness or wrongness of any particular course of action. Certainly there are religious people who have worked for great peace and charity in this world, and I'd never disavow that. But how easy is it to fall into the trap of thinking "Well, this is justified in the Bible, so it *must* be what God wants," even if the action is morally objectionable. Certainly the Bible is not a consistent guide for moral behavior. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac, for instance. It's one that's always given me trouble. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham takes Isaac up to the mountain; Abraham ties Isaac up and puts him on a pile of kindling wood, and has his knife out to cut his son's throat when at the last second God intervenes and tells Abraham not to do it. God is pleased that Abraham has passed this test of faith, withholding nothing from Him, not even his own son. Elsewhere, of course, the Bible tells us "Thou shalt not kill." Some people take this to mean "Thou shalt not murder," whatever finicky little distinctions that people make between killing and murdering that somehow let good Christian soldiers off the hook, which seems like a lot of bollocks to me. But, at any rate, God says killing is wrong. And, certainly, any sane person would feel a very strong revulsion at the prospect of having to cut the throat of his son. A person's conscience, which we might otherwise assume is God's way of guiding us through life, would revolt at such an act. And yet God asks Abraham to do the wrongest thing that he possibly could, even though God Himself would be abhorred by this act in any other context and would expressly forbid it, except on this one occasion when he decides to contradict Himself? What kind of a guide for living is *that*?

So, given the inscrutability, cultural bias, the inaction of God with respect to mortal affairs, and the general ineffectuality of religious morality when it comes to preventing evil in the world (or, indeed, the collusion of religious morality in the perpetration of such evils), I don't see how I could possibly live my life in accordance with religious tenets. God might be the ultimate judge of the living and the dead, but I guess that's something I'll have to worry about after I'm dead, because I sure as Hell don't have any proof that His will is done here on Earth. I don't see that it's somehow better to listen to received dictates--which, again, are dependent on a person's cultural inheritance, much as every religion claims to have the ultimate truth about the universe--than it is to listen to my own conscience. That's not to say that my own conscience might not be wrong about things--it often is--but, frankly, I don't see how I'd be a better person if I were to spend my time scanning through the Bible, trying to find one consistent answer about how I should go about any given task. This is especially true when it comes to contemporary problems that were not issues in Biblical times. What does the Bible have to say about global warming? That we are the custodians of the Earth, after Adam and Eve, or that Earth is the Devil's portion and the End Times are just around the corner and we shouldn't give a crap about worldly things when we could be storing up treasures in Heaven? I go with the former rather than the latter, but you see there's no way of prioritizing this information and coming up with a solid solution.

I don't see that God strikes down sinners. I don't see that he really helps people to be good. I don't see that God operates in this world in any way that our own consciences and our own experiences, fallible and limited as they are, do not.

When you think about it, you really are free to do whatever you want. Either God doesn't care, or he's not going to stop you. You can murder all you like. Go ahead. You can have sex all you like, and it's extremely unlikely that He'll strike you down with lightning (or AIDS, which was seen as God's judgment against gays in the 80s; now AIDS is largely confined to the poorest countries in Africa and Southeast Asia while people in the developed world, gay or otherwise, are able to prevent or live with the disease--is that saying that AIDS is now God's judgment against poor people?). Go on, eat a double cheeseburger--God's not likely to strike you dead for gluttony. Of course, there are consequences for any of these actions. You eat cheeseburgers, you will have a heart attack and die. You have a lot of disaffected casual sex, even with a condom, and maybe you won't get an STD or end up unwanted pregnancies, but I'm pretty sure you'll develop all sorts of emotional problems in the long run (at least, I tell myself that when I get envious of men who seem to bag a lot of hot chicks). You kill people, the police will get you--or maybe they won't. What I'm saying is that the repercussions for these actions are human or biological in origin, not divine. Maybe there's some kind of divine judgment down the road after death, but we can't know it, ad there are certainly no end of different and mutually exclusive interpretations of just what that judgment (or non-judgment) will be, such that adhering to any one interpretation is a crapshoot. But until such point as that, not all evils will be punished, and not all good acts will be rewarded.

There is no effective or actual guiding principle to human action, aside from that which we create for ourselves, and that which is instinctual in us. We can say that "This is good" because it brings pleasure to people and benefits the individual or the group, and "This is bad" because it harms the individual or the group. And there will necessarily always be conflicts in the prioritization of how the interests of the individual interact with the interests of the group; the majority is not always right, and uninhibited freedom for the individual can result in some awful things, too. I think the sooner we realize this, and realize that God or the gods or whatever are content to let us fuck ourselves over good and proper without the need for any divine or demonic intervention, the better off we, as a species, will be.

I think we need to understand that there is nothing stopping you from pulling the trigger, save for your own conscience. Just as important, there's nothing putting your finger on the trigger in the first place, save for your own conscience.

We are truly and awfully free, much as we try to convince ourselves we're not. Much as we want to believe that we are relieved from the terrible responsibility of having to make our own decisions, insofar as I can tell, it's all a cheat and self-deceit. If anybody could convince me otherwise, I'd be glad of it.

The Will is Weak

I've been faltering quite a bit on my vegetarianism of late.

Outwardly, I've been a vegetarian for about two years. Inwardly, it is as if those two years haven't been but a second, in that my taste for meat has never gone extinct. If anything, after going for weeks without eating meat, I get this keen hunger for flesh and blood. I lust after meat, much as I might lust after a woman. It's ghoulish, I know, but most Americans are getting their fix for flesh on a daily basis. Mine gets temporarily beaten into submission, only to come back stronger than ever.

Some vegetarians develop an aversion to meat, or else they become vegetarians because of that aversion. Why can't I have this aversion? I want it. I really, really do. But no matter how much I tell myself that I don't want to eat meat, the smell of chicken or steak on the grill drives me a little crazy.

It's not like I'm not getting enough protein. I eat almonds and beans and peanut butter and cheese and meat substitutes. A lot of meat substitutes. Too many meat substitutes; they're laden with sodium, and I hear bad things about excessive consumption of soy. But my point is that this isn't a need thing (I don't think), it's a taste thing.

My inhibitions against vegetables break down. I experiment more with the leafy stuff in the produce section that used to scare me. I eat more greens. I accept the necessity of eating avocados, even though they still don't taste like much to me unless they're in guacamole with excessive amounts of salt and garlic, and then it's not really the avocados I'm tasting, is it? I eat exotic mushrooms--mushrooms are great because they *aren't really vegetables*. Fungi aren't plants; they're more like animals that don't move, and you can taste it in their flesh. Thank god for mushrooms. I go to the farmer's market and buy all kinds of Asian vegetables like giant radishes and purple carrots. But this variety of new foods to which I am now amenable is not sufficient replacement for meat.

Being a vegetarian would be a lot easier if it were not for polish sausage. And bratwurst. And pepperoni. And mutton chops. And fried chicken. And chicken strips. And teriyaki chicken. And teriyaki beef. And Korean ribs. And ham. And bacon. And bacon cheeseburgers. And roast duck. And smoked salmon. And beef jerky. And calamari fritti. And carnitas. There are not replacements for these things in a vegetarian diet. It's possible to find vegetarian versions of a few of these foods, but the pretend meat is never convincing. It might be alright in its own right, but it would never fool anybody who had any experience with the genuine article. If I have a jones on for fried chicken, let me tell you, Morningstar Chik'n Tenders are better than nothing, but they certainly don't ever quite satisfy. Sometimes I can find vegetarian specialty restaurants or markets that sell usually overpriced but often quite excellent pretend meat. I don't feel like I'm cheating myself or punishing myself when I eat the teriyaki chicken kabobs from Mother's Market; but I can't have them every day, and I don't know where a good vegetarian market is around here in S.D., anywho.

The real essence of the problem is this: I love the taste of meat. I am quite confident that I always will. This taste was strongly inculcated in me as a child--my parents rarely, if ever, served more than a garnish of non-potato vegetables with any meal, and most of the time left me to scrounge for myself in the kitchen with few, if any, available vegetables. My mother had a thing for canned vegetables--canned peas, canned corn, canned beets, canned potatoes, canned mushrooms--but I found such fare disgusting, and do to this day. Meat or pastries or very unhealthy dairy products were usually the default foods in my home. I'm still struggling to uninculcate the overstrong tendencies towards these foods in myself.

I love the taste of meat, but I don't allow myself to have it. Some small part of this self-denial is a concession to health--lord knows I don't need to be consuming large quantities of cholesterol and saturated fat. Nobody does. Some small part of this self-denial is on account of animal cruelty. This isn't a major issue for me. I don't think animals have any special right to life. I don't think of animals as friends, or as having a human-like intelligence. I acknowledge that animals can feel pain, but insofar as I know that pain and fear involved in industrial-scale slaughtering techniques is relatively brief. Whether the animals suffer in as a result of confinement and overcrowding or the mutilations they incur as part and parcel of contemporary industrial meat-raising techniques, I cannot know. It's hard enough for humans to gauge pain in other humans; I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a chicken, and I don't think that Peta does, either.

No, the real reason I deny myself meat is because I want to protect the planet. I don't give a rat's ass about cows and chickens, but I do care about biodiversity and the wild species that are compromised as a result of industrial agriculture. I like wild animals; I think of them as "real" in a way that domesticated animals are not. I want civilization to last out my lifetime and the lifetimes of my hypothetical grandchildren. And I don't see that happening unless there are major changes to the way we get our protein in this country.

I was writing this entry last week and got lazy about finishing it; my renewed interest comes with a special article in this month's NatGeo. It reminds me how it takes five pounds of corn to produce one pound of pork or ten pounds of corn to make one pound of beef, not to mention the exorbitant amounts of water and fossil fuels used to produce meat and then there are the tons of pig or cow shit to deal with afterwards which often end up getting dumped into rivers and causing lethal algae blooms or leaching into groundwater or causing some other nasty pollution problem. And, see, this is why I don't let myself eat meat anymore. Because with populations continuing to increase around the world but resources already being stretched to their limits, there's no way we can continue on with our current lifestyle into perpetuity. Scientists have been busting their asses to increase the efficiency of food production with things like growth hormones and factory-style mass production of animals to be slaughtered, and there may be breakthroughs yet to be found that will solve some of these problems, but in the end there is no possible way that the American diet can be sustained beyond the next generation, any more than can the current American consumption and combustion of gasoline. And if we can't increase efficiency, then the only other alternative is to put new land into production, which causes habitat loss, which is then the greatest threat to biodiversity on our planet. You see how it's all connected? And you see why, much as I really really want that ham and cheese sandwich, I ask for the Veggie Heaven instead. Veggie Heaven. As if.

It's not that the production of plant foods isn't fraught with problems in itself. You've got your dependence of petro-chemical based fertilizers, your use of carcinogenic pesticides that love to leach into groundwater or remain as residue on food, your problems with mono-cultural single crop farms that only necessitate the use of more fertilizers and pesticides, your soil degradation issues that come with exhaustive and super-intensive farming techniques. You know when they slash and burn down the rainforest in Brazil? They plant soybeans in the ashes. Yeah. But, of course, all of these problems are intensified by the consumption of meat. Maybe farming practices are pretty sucky at present, but if you recall that something like...damn, I can't find the actual percentage right now, but it's about 75%...something like 75% of the grain produced in this country goes for animal feed rather than human food, you realize how it is that the consumption of meat exponentially aggravates all those other extant problems with produce farming practices, because a large majority (whatever the exact number) of what we make is not going directly to meet human needs, but is instead being given to animals who are then killed to satisfy human wants. Meat is a luxury that our country, and our planet, cannot afford.

None of these issues apply to fish, of course. Fish are just out there in the ocean; nobody's spending fossil fuels and grain to make them grow. Instead, we are just overharvesting our seas such that world fish stocks have fallen about 80% in the past fifty years, turning the once-abundant ocean into a vast wet desert. And that's no good, either. A large amount of the fish that get caught turn into chicken feed, besides, and so that introduces layers of inefficiency again.

I know I'm not doing an extensive analysis here. That's not the point. The point is that others have done the research and the analysis, and I can find no reason to dispute these facts. I really believe it's important to take this information into account; I believe it's important to live a responsible lifestyle that doesn't threaten the continued survival of the last remaining wild places on earth, and potentially human civilization as we know it. The way we are living now will not abide. The disasters of climate change, hovering over our current fragile and over-extended food production system like vultures. Either we will change before we encounter the imminent catastrophes that come with overconsumption, or those catastrophes will come and force us to change, or those catastrophes will wipe us out. I'm just trying to get a head start on the future.

But it all seems so abstract sometimes. Knowing that these problems are global in scale and endemic in our culture seems so damn impersonal. If my resolve does crumble and I order a cheeseburger, does some polar bear drift past on a shrinking ice floe, howling its pain and starvation as a result of my own poor choices? No. No such polar bear appears. I can't see the results of my own successes in reducing my carbon footprint, or my own failures. The impact of my actions on the environment remain terribly far away, and terribly small. It's only when millions of people convince themselves that their actions are insignificant and choose not to pay attention to the repercussions of their lifestyle choices that there is a serious problem. And, at best, I can just say that I am one person who is opting to be conscious and conscientious when there are many millions more who do not care. Those catastrophes aren't depending on my own personal collusion or resistance to occur.

But just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right. And just because everybody else is doing something wrong doesn't mean that I am excused from doing right as I see it. And right for me means minimizing the damage I do to the planet. And so that means salivating at the smell of my neighbors grilling sausage on the grill and then going to eat my sauteed greens. And probably accepting that I am fallible, and not feeling guilty when my resolve does fail, and so get discouraged from doing anything at all.

I just wish the wanting would go away. But it never does, does it? Perhaps this whole life thing isn't actually about getting what you want, but learning how to accept that your wants will always outstrip your capacity to satisfy them, justifiably or otherwise, and to keep those wants in submission. A rather unhappy thing to contemplate, but I wonder if it isn't true.

Loneliness is Such A Drag

One of the many songs I have floating around in my head half-formed and never really written is entitled "Long Cold Summer." The chorus goes like this:

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
As cold as I've ever known
I could not feel any number
Chills me to the bone
These things I've not outgrown
History has shown
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

A lot of the songs that come to me never get farther than the composition of a refrain or an initial melody, which I suppose is why I'm not much of a songwriter these days. And maybe that's for the best if I'm going to be producing such forced rhymes in my songs as "summer" and "number" or invoking the grand cause of history to describe something that would be strictly personal.

At any rate, these coming months promise to be a long, cold summer like the one years back that inspired me to come up with the fragment of song. I've known a lot of long, cold summers in my time. That's not to say that the cold is external. Growing up in the desert (even if we try to paint it green with borrowed water), I've known weeks of waking up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, of having a sheen of sweat burst forth from my forehead the moment I take a step outside with no consideration for the fact that I have miles yet to walk, of having the blood run so hot beneath the skin that it feels like fever even when it isn't, of breathing air that burns the lungs and scorches the throat and seems evacuated of oxygen. And, physically, I expect this summer to be like those other summers.

Internally, though--internally, it will be cold. So cold that I'll be able to sit and sweat and think for hours on loneliness, for want of anything better to do or anywhere else to go.

I've been on a school schedule for most of the years of my life now, and that brings with it a boom-and-bust cycle of socialization. I meet people during the school year, and that's good. I even form something like friendships with those people after many weeks of forced proximity and sometimes forced cooperation on obnoxious group projects and the unforced but still automatic bitching about instructors and their methods after class. But then summer (or the change of a semester) comes around, and before I've managed to build those friendships into ones that would warrant socialization outside of the class (or, alternately, the office), those nascent friendships are lost to me. There's a big difference between being tossed together by chance and unified in the amicable dissing of a common enemy (be he boss or professor) and achieving that point where I could comfortably ask a person "Hey, you want to come over to my place some time and hang out?" By which I also mean to say "We could watch a movie or maybe play a board or card game, if you didn't think that was too socially deviant, but I don't know you well enough as yet to know whether you'd consider that deviant or not. Or maybe we could just talk, because you know, there are times when I need to hear another human voice. I'm trying to minimize the amount of pressure I'm exerting on you here, knowing full well that you'll probably say no, or maybe say yes just to be polite and even feign enthusiasm but that doesn't imply any kind of follow-through. Please? I could really use a friend right now."

I've got a girlfriend now to act as a buffer against these boom-and-bust cycles. Call her social insurance, if you will, though I know that sounds callous and overly-mechanical. She keeps me away from the worst of the loneliness. But when I am otherwise lonely outside of my relationship with her, it shows, and then she gets impatient with my feelings of alienation. Not that I blame her, really. But if I am otherwise lonely, then my relationship with her becomes lonely, too. And anyway, she's going to be gone in Europe for much of this summer. So going to her for some small amount of human contact won't really be an option.

And I have other friends. I have friendships that I have cultivated for years, which is the normal course of things for me. It takes me probably one or two years to feel fully comfortable around another person, and to reach that aforementioned level where it's okay to ask for some kind of intimacy beyond the casual interactions that occur when disparate persons are placed essentially haphazardly into close physical proximity (maybe the sorting is guided with respect to intellect and social class, whether at work or in an academic setting, but the factors of emotional compatibility and personality are still essentially random). I form friendships but slowly and carefully, and I can only maintain a few at a time. And when those carefully-laid friendships begin to crumble, as they are for me now, I have no immediate other recourse.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer

Previous summers such as these have given me ample opportunity--no, more like need--to write, and to read. In the silence that comes from a dearth of human voices and the stillness that comes from a dearth of human interaction, I am clacking away at my keyboard, trying to populate my barren universe with fictional characters. Or I am glutting myself on books or films or video games, trying to invite those characters into my desolate life, allowing their stories to take over my own, which is sad and boring. But it doesn't really work. The characters I create are all fragments of me, and I know it, and they can't provide me with real company any more than I can pretend that the person in the mirror is a friend rather than my own reflection. And while other peoples' works can be a balm for a time (see the entry on WoW), I can't allow hide my mind behind other peoples' fictions indefinitely, any more than I could ask another person to dream for me. None of it, really, is a replacement for real human contact. The history of literature has shown that lonely men like me have tried, throughout the ages, to replace the volatility of relationships with the constancy and predictability of books, and it's never really worked. We've got exponentially more media now to distract us from that loneliness than Dante did when he wrote verse for dead Beatrice or Catullus did when he said love is like being crucified. But media can only mask loneliness, it can't really take it away. It's a change in appearance, not in essence.

So maybe I should be grateful for a summer that will demand that I write even if only to keep emptiness from crashing in on me, but it's hard to feel grateful for that.

Another fragment gestated into a full song:

I'm going nowhere
And no-one's waiting there for me

Oh, I will have time this summer. I will have time in abundance. And when I am socially-integrated, I am always regretting the loss of that time I have when I am going nowhere and no-one's waiting there for me. Time to think, and reinforce the same dark tracks of my thinking until they are so deep that I do not know how to extricate myself from them.

The therapist tells me that a painting shut away in a dark cellar where no-one can see it still has value. He tells me that a flower blooming on a distant and desolate mountainside where no-one will ever find it and where it has no chance of producing seed still has value. That these things are not to be disparaged for their lack of connectivity and value to others, but still cherished in and of themselves. He tells me that even if a man should alienate his friends and his love, he still has value. Maybe he's right, but what he says seems damn alien to me a lot of the time.

I know I hate feeling like I can go anywhere or do anything, because nobody really cares what I do, and nobody is waiting for me or wanting me to come back.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

On The Eating of Vermin, etc.

This past weekend was Easter Weekend, and for the past three years that has meant that I go on up to Julian in the eastern part of San Diego county for the O.C. Friends' Easter Retreat. I could go on about the kindly company of my fellow Quakers or the merits of Camp Stevens, but I will limit myself to one of the highlights of this years' excursion; namely, the eating of worms and scorpions.

There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.

One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.

I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.

I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).

When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.

John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.

The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.

I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.

I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.

Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.

Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.

Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.

So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.

Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.

The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.

I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.

And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."

There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.

The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.

Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.

Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.

My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.

The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.

The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.

I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.

Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.

I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf

And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226

The Path in the Jungle

Imagine you are cutting a path through a jungle. Your tool is a machete, and with it you begin to hack your way through the vines and bushes and branches of trees.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And yet you press on.

You can see your progress behind you. It seems very minute in the vastness of the jungle. It seems pathetic. It seems like nothing at all.

But it is something, isn't it?

After days or weeks or years of cutting and carving and hacking and slashing your way through the jungle, your path intersects with another path. This path is well-used; you can see the impressions of many feet in the mud. Or perhaps it is red sand, or gravel. Or even concrete or tarmac. This new path--not your path, but the path you have found--leads off into the distance. There you can see, rising above the treetops, the flashing lights of a city. You can see the columns of the city's smoke, and you can hear the honking and the shouting and maybe music or gunshots from its streets.

The city is not so far. And you have been such a long time in the jungle alone. Surely you must go there and see its squalors and its delights and its squalid delights and its delightful squalors for yourself.

And you go to the city, and you stay in the city for a while. Maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years. Maybe you never leave. Maybe you find what you are looking for in the squalid delights and delights and squalors and delightful squalors and you never feel the need to leave again.

Or maybe you do.

Maybe one day you go back out on that well-established road that leads up to the city. Maybe you don't think anything of it at the time; maybe you're just going on a walk or out to get some air. Or maybe you do remember, thinking back on what it was like to swing that machete over and over and over and over again, leaving mangled plants and the thinnest of trails behind you.

Either way, you happen upon a scar in the jungle. A place where someone has been clearing a path, and where the ever-regenerating vegetation has yet to completely erase the evidence of passage. And you realize that this is the way you have come to the city. You look to the jungle on the opposite side of the road--not your road, not the one you had made but the one that leads to the city you had come to think of as yours, but is not now your city, in this instant--and see that the jungle is whole and unwounded. The jungle is vast, fast, and oblivious.

And maybe that's all you think. Or maybe you become dour at the meaninglessness of your former efforts, and return to your pretty, dirty city a little bit bitter, and that's the end of it. Or maybe you go back to the city and purchase a new machete--your old one having been so rusted and notched and pitted that it would be of no use now, even if you hadn't thrown it away--and you go back to that place opposite your old path and plunge into the jungle again.

Very soon, your machete is dulled by cutting through the tough wood and fibrous stalks. Very soon, your hands are covered in thick, sticky, bitter-stinking sap. Centipedes run races up and down your arms. Mites gnaw on the tender webbing between your thumb and first finger. Leeches feast on your legs; you only notice them when they grow as thick around as sausages, gorged on your blood. Your body itches and aches and exudes more sweat than you had imagined possible, until your face and armpits and groin are slick with sweat, or maybe that is the blood from the feasting leeches or the many gouges and scratches you have incurred from errant branches.

And you ask yourself why you are doing this, and there is no good answer.

You do not know where your trail is headed; maybe it goes nowhere. You do not know if anyone will ever follow you on this trail. There are perfectly good paths that lead to the pretty, dirty city; why not follow them? Why make your own?

And yet you press on.

You sometimes see trails that parallel your own. Trails that near yours, but never quite touch. Or perhaps they do intersect. Sometimes you even see the trail-cutters who are making them. Sometimes you speak to them. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes these parallel trails are covered over in old vegetation, only barely visible as trails at all. Sometimes the sap is still stinking-bitter and the severed leaves have yet to turn brown. There are trails that come close to yours, but your trail is never quite exactly like any of the others.

Is that sufficient?

There are other cities, other well-worn roads. You pass them. And maybe you enter into the second city, or the fifth. And maybe you don't come back out again.

Or maybe you do. And you take up a new machete that will grow just as quickly dull.

And you continue to cut a trail that might be of no use to anyone, not even to you. It might be redundant, or it might lead to nowhere worth going. Your trail ultimately leads away from the light and life of the city, into dangerous wilderness.

And yet you press on.

Or maybe you don't.

Once An Addict, Always An Addict

Facing the imminent possibility of the break-up of my D&D group, or the necessity of my leaving it on account of my having made everybody feel too bad about things too often, I've been feeling intensely the desire to return to World of Warcraft--or World of Warcrack, as my boss is given to calling it.

I hate WoW. But I love WoW.

WoW (and EQ before it) is wonderful in providing me with a sense of purpose. "Here's a quest, go do it!" says WoW. And, unlike in other MMORPGs, many of the quests are actually doable. And there are a lot of them. Many hundreds of hours' worth of quests. And in addition to the quests that I could ever actually do, there are a great many more that were contingent upon the assistance of other players, and these always hung just out of reach, like a fruit on Tantalus' tree, and they kept me interested even if I was barely ever able to satisfy them.

The so-called "real world" is very bad about providing me with a sense of purpose. Most times, when I complete a task, the reward is vague or long-term. If I motivate myself sufficiently to do my push-ups and sit-ups in the morning, do I get fanfare and a monetary reward and a sense that the world is right again and an observable increase in my capabilities? No, no, no, and no. If I write a piece, what is the reward? A brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by agonizing doubt, followed by nothing at all, as the piece lingers and dies on my hard drive. Or else goes to a workshop where my fellows pick it apart and show it to be the ugly and ungainly thing it is. That feels like more of a punishment than a reward.

But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of purpose. Even if I achieve maximum level--a feat which takes about a hundred hours of gametime, if not more, which equates to several weeks of real-world life spent doing nothing other than experience grinding--the finish line recedes away from me. "Oh, you're level 70," says WoW, "That's cute and all, but do you have a thousand gold for an epic flying mount? And you don't have any Tiered gear from the dungeons. So you need to start at the bottom of the level 70 instances and run each one between five to ten times (each run taking several hours to complete, and more hours to initiate and arrange, if it ever gets off the ground at all; most of them don't), and then work your way up until you have the gear you need to go see the biggest and baddest and most exciting dungeons." And all of this participation in the "uber" end-game is contingent upon other people to go into these dungeons with you. So that means that groups fall apart, or that if I am not up to an elite hardcore standard set by people who *only* play WoW in terms of gear or damage per second or knowledge of the intricacies of every little aspect of the dungeon, I am open to extreme and mean-spirited criticism at any time.

WoW is wonderful in providing me with a sense of discovery. Every new quest and new zone is an opportunity to see something new. And I like exploring. Not physically, so much, but intellectually, absolutely. There was so much to see in WoW--I don't know how many virtual miles of terrain actually exist in the game, but it's a lot. There are caves, and marsh channels, and purple-leafed forests, and cities built atop colossal mushrooms, and floating islands, and all kinds of interesting things to check out. And all of it filled with ore deposits and rare herbs and treasure chests and other exciting things to find, as well as strange beasts. And there are a number of classes to try, each with its own different playstyle.

But WoW is terrible in providing me with a sense of discovery. With all those pressures to get more gold and get better gear, now now now now now, many times it's difficult to actually appreciate exploring the virtual world. And with all of the pressure on being uber, the pressure is always on to copy somebody else's approach to playing one's class, or to be open to such comments as "You suck" or "You fail at life" or "Learn to play" if one does not. That, and it becomes abundantly clear after a while that the game rewards certain classes and builds (i.e., the ones that do a lot of damage) and punishes others that might have utility but that utility is too limited in solo play. But I know there are some people who always have groups and for whom this is not an issue; I've just never been one of them. You want to be a healer, or a warrior who uses a sword and shield? Tough shit, unless you're already level 80 with tier 8 gear (or whatever it is these days).

That, and over the course of leveling up many characters in both the Horde and the Alliance, I've been there and seen that. The world doesn't change--or if it does, the change is slow in coming. There are no seasons and no weather. The quality of light is constant. NPCs stand in the same place all day, every day--unless they walk a predictable and prescribed path. If I kill a monster, a few minutes later it will be standing in exactly the same place where it fell, sometimes even looking over its own corpse. If I complete a quest, that same crisis will still be unresolved if I take another character to the same place. The world is persistent--which means that there is nothing I can do that will have any lasting effect on the game world. How could it, if it were to mean that one character gets to do something and then it is closed off to all of the thousands of other players on the server? I guess some Chinese or Korean MMORPGs have such things, but that is a large part of why they are terrible.

I love WoW because it makes me feel like I'm not alone.

I hate WoW because it makes me realize how alone I really am. The other players in WoW--they don't tend to be people who appreciate quality fantasy literature, or epic poetry, or even tabletop RPGs. They approach WoW from the perspective of a FPS (i.e., a first person shooter). To them, WoW is like Halo. What matters is score, kill count, and superiority. If they meet you in battle, they will kill you and then humiliate your corpse by an act of virtual rape, and then they will probably hang around for ten or fifteen minutes just to prevent you from getting back up and playing again. If they are in your group, they will constantly be checking damage meters and bragging about their primacy and criticizing those on the bottom. I'm not like that. I care about story and feelings and setting. And when I take all kinds of criticism because I'm not hardcore enough, it only serves to hurt me. A lot.

Or when the other players do want to discuss things, it tends to be television shows, or abrasive and uninformed political commentary, or how work sucks, or such things. It's generic, uninteresting, unstimulating, impersonal.

Or when the other players do want to engage in the actual "role-playing" elements of an MMORPG, it's even worse. They manufacture crises for themselves, and play out such dramas as though they mattered. They play at being nobles, or vampires, or great heroes (greater than the other heroes who are all around them), or tragic scions of extinguished families, and other such insufferable narcissistic bullshit. They have feuds and duels and factional wars, for no other reason that to generate conflict and resentment and opportunities for irrelevant antics.

Compounding all this is the fact that people tend to be extremely unpleasant while playing WoW. Much of this unpleasantness is attributed to foreigners and teenage boys, but I don't think all of it can be attributed to them. There is the bragging and verbal abuse and humiliation mentioned above. Then there are those people who engage in price gouging by purchasing all the items at auction and re-selling them at higher prices. Then there are the people who incessantly beg for money. Then there are those people who slander Horde or Alliance players in terms that would be hatefully racist, if they weren't referring to virtual identities. Then there are those people who overreact with threats or profanity at even the slightest of mistakes (or non-mistakes). Then there are those people who abandon your group for no reason at all. Then there are those people who refuse to help out with even the smallest of tasks, even when such an alliance would clearly be of mutual benefit, and instead insist on working at cross-purposes.

Two of my books now have been about the failure of the virtual world to sustain interest and a sense of self-worth. My current novel, After Life, describes an MMORPG that is so immersive that the characters have forgotten that they are characters at all, and they play out all of the racism and greed and meaningless agonistics that choke the real world, believing all the while that these tendencies are "perfection" in their virtual utopia. But, of course, it's all crap, isn't it?

All this...and it draws me back. Like the need of a clean junkie for just one last needle, WoW tries to pull me back in. It gets worst whenever I experience a fit of depression; then it seems most soothing to submerge my consciousness in a virtual world for a while, and so afford my soul a chance to regenerate. Until, of course, the injuries I sustain in WoW hurl me back out again.

I don't want to go back to playing WoW. I don't want to get back to those days when I begrudged the 30 seconds it took to go to the kitchen to get a cereal bar or to go to the bathroom to urinate before plunging back into playing again. I don't want to feel that intense sense of inferiority to those cruel bastard braggarts who enjoy making others feel bad about themselves, and so often feeling as though I am failing at life.

But there's an entire continent I've yet to explore, and a class I've yet to try. And I have been very depressed lately.

Fuck.

WoW is haunting my thoughts right now; recurring every thirty to sixty seconds or so. It won't be much--just a slight sting, an ache, a pang; a screenshot, a memory, a "What if" moment.

We shall overcome.

I hope.

Reflections on Battlestar Galactica

The BSG era has come to a close. There might be subsequent spin-offs, but BSG in its essence has ended.

I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.

Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.

But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.

You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.

And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.

But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.

So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.

Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.

I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.

I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.

And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.

The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.

Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.

The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.

In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.

Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.

Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.

Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.

So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.

Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.