Saturday, December 31, 2022

The conservative slide

 I think this is an interesting chart. It shows how people in general become more conservative as they age.


I don't think this is a function of people changing, I think this is a function of society changing. I know I am painting with a broad brush here, but most people get locked into their worldview in their mid to late 20's and change very little throughout the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, as each generation passes, society changes, things that use to be okay, become not okay and things that use to be not okay, become okay. The side effect of this is, a person can move from being fairly liberal at 20 to being fairly conservative at 50 without changing a single idea.

I seem to be an exception to this general trend. I was very conservative in my youth, in the first election I could vote in I voted for Ronald Reagan. I remember very clearly when my leftward slide began, it was while watching Oliver North and John Poindexter testifying before Congress, then later Reagan's speech address the scandal. I realized during this time that these people do not have the best interests of the nation in their hearts or their minds. I woke up and realized that tradition is peer pressure from dead people, religion is holding humanity back and conservative politics is about conserving the power of the wealthy. Each passing year since then I have become more and more liberal in my thinking. These days I am so liberal, I make Gandhi look like a war mongering fascist.

Happy New Years!

 2022 was a good year, not great but good. I got some writing done and I built out some self hosting infrastructure. On the other hand, I did not do nearly as much reading this year, clocking in at only 32 books this year. Of course work was just work, it was what it was. I am going to call it a win.

Happy New Years Everyone!

Thursday, December 15, 2022

Playing the Sandbox Part II

 In January of 2020 I wrote a post about starting a sandbox game. This was in reaction to some posts I saw in a Facebook group I was a member of at the time. Recently, this came back to the foreground for me when I was watching a Youtube video about the shortage of DM's in 5th Edition D&D. The point the video made was, that in modern times, DMing is a difficult task, virtually all of the responsibility for having a good fun game is on the DM, players have no responsibilities beyond making it to the game. Added to that is the various Twitch and Youtube streams of people playing D&D. Many of these streams are high production value shows featuring professional actors as players and DMs whose sole job is producing interesting content for viewers. This sets the bar very high for other DMs the games they are trying to run.

If I just started playing D&D in the last couple of years and my first exposure to the game was the Critical Roll game run by Matt Mercer, I would be terrified of DMing a game, because there is no way I could run a game of that quality. This is prevalent throughout the D&D community, I see Reddit posts written by players who are mad because they cannot find a DM of Matt Mercers quality and all the groups they join suck.

In this day and age you have to run a session zero for your campaign, even if everyone has been playing together for years, so the players can do all their prep work and the DM can layout expectations for the game. Back in the day, you know how our campaigns started? We sat down, rolled 3d6 in order, spent 5 minutes equipping them, then I would start randomizing a dungeon straight out of the Dungeon Masters Guide. If your character died, you rolled up another one and the game continued.  It became a running gag that players did not even name their characters until 3rd level. In case you think all we did was play one shots, this was certainly not the case, once the core set of characters was established, we would move on to modules or whatever crazy idea I had for a dungeon.

I am not saying everyone needs to stop watching Critical Roll, all I am saying is, lower your fucking standards, chill out and just play the game. If you want to DM but you are afraid, relax, I am here to tell you, if you run a game, players will come. Some will not like what your do, but others will. Even if you start with just one player, run the game. Even if you get six people to start a group and five of them drop out, keep playing. Find five more players and yes, four of them will probably drop out, but then you will have two players. Find 4 more players and continue on until you have four or five good players who show up to the game. Before you know it, you will have been playing with this group for three or four years and you will have a lot of cool stories that will put Matt Mercer to shame. Run the game, players will come.

When running your first game, throw out all the damn books, don't start with everything. Download the basic rules PDF, and limit your players to just the races and classes in that book. I would also download the 5E SRD, this contains more monsters and such, which will be helpful later on. Now get a sheet of hex paper, preferably 1/4 inch per hex, put a dot in the middle, that is your starting town, name it something stupid like Moosebreath. Each of those hexes is five miles, your first dungeon is going to be five miles (one hex) to the north of town. Now get a piece of standard graph paper, each square is ten feet, in the center, draw a cross road, 10 feet wide is plenty big enough. Now on one corner is a tavern, where the adventure will start. On the second corner will be a temple, make it a pantheon temple that covers several deities, don't make it hard on anyone, just make it the Greek or Norse Pantheon, most everyone is familiar with those deities and you will not need to explain Thor or Zeus to anyone. On the next corner is a general store, where the characters can buy and sell stuff. On the final corner is the Constables office, the local sheriff, if you will. You will add new buildings later, but this is all you need to start with.

Each of these buildings will need two NPC's each. Each NPC will have four 10's, one 8 and one 12 for attributes, assigned as you please. Give them names and assign them 4 Hit Points each. Assume each of these NPC's have the skills needed to do the jobs they have with a +2 proficiency and possibly the attribute modifier for the 12 they have. Give each one an appropriate simple weapon, which they also have a proficiency in. Yes, a group of four 1st level characters will be able to kill everyone in town, don't worry about it, they probably won't.

Draw more roads behind these four buildings and add several more buildings. I would not bother deciding what is in each of these buildings just yet. I would wait for the players to ask "Is there a blacksmith in town?" and then reply why yes there is, its this building. "Is there a wizard in town?", why yes, there is a hedge wizard, he is in this building. If they never ask for it, it is probably not important.

Next go to Donjon 5E Random Dungeon Generator, make the following changes;

  • Party Size: Set to party size
  • Motif: Undead
  • Dungeon Size: Small
  • Polymorph Rooms?:  No
  • Corridors: Straight
  • Remove Deadends?: All
  • Stairs?: No

Leave everything else alone. This should give you a random dungeon with 30-35 rooms designed for 1st level characters, already stocked with monsters and treasure from the SRD. This is the dungeon that is five miles north of town. Download the PDF of your newly minted random dungeon. Now you are ready to play, begin your campaign with "You are all sitting in a tavern in Moosebreath, you are having a quiet ale, when the priest and the constable walk in and say we have a problem, a golden chalice was stolen from the temple and the culprit was spotted headed north to the old ruins, we will pay you 100 GP each to recover the chalice.". 99% of the time the players will go for it and off you go. 1% of the time they will be dicks about it and not take the job, in which case ask them what they want to do and roll with it, if they want to flirt with the waitress, fine she will let them buy her expensive drinks until closing time. If they want to find another town, fine send them down the road and give them some random encounters, have them get lost and end up at the old ruins anyway.

Your total prep time for this game should be less than an hour. However, you now have the bare bones of your own home brew setting. You can add buildings and NPC's as needed to the town, you can place new adventure locations on your regional map, maybe add another town with different NPC's. Each 5 mile hex can be an adventure all in and of itself. You could probably play all the way to 20th level with the characters never leaving this area.

Edit:

Here is a link to a quick and dirty sandbox I setup using this method, total prep time for this was 45 minutes.

Download Sandbox.zip

Sunday, December 11, 2022

More D&D Magic Items

 The Gauntlets of Zordon:

When worn, these gauntlets give a +3 to hit and +3 to damage to any attack (melee, ranged or spell). Additionally, on a critical hit, in addition to the normal critical hit damage, the attack does an additional 2d6 damage of the type listed. The target of the attack must also make a DC 16 saving throw of the type listed, a failed save gives the target of the attack the condition listed for 1 minute

  • Red - Fire - Frightened (Save vs Wisdom)
  • Orange - Thunder - Deafened (Save vs Constitution)
  • Yellow - Radiant - Blinded (Save vs Constitution)
  • Green - Poison - Poisoned (Save vs Constitution)
  • Blue - lightning - Stunned (Save vs Dexterity)
  • Indigo - Psychic - Paralyzed (Save vs Intelligence)
  • Violet - Force - Charmed (Save vs Wisdom)


Monday, November 21, 2022

New magic Items for D&D

A couple of weeks ago I ran "Don't say Vecna" for my player. When I was reading through the adventure in preparation for the game, I could not help but notice the keys to access the portal to Vecna's lair were the hand and eye of one of the inhabitants of the tower. Of course these were not magic items and the persons name was not Kevin, but I thought it would be hilarious if these items were watered down versions of the real thing. This is what I came up with;

The Eye of Kevin

  • You have Darkvision for 120 feet, if you already have Darkvision, the Eye doubles the distance of your Darkvision.
  • Any spell requiring an attack roll you make deals an extra 2d8 cold damage on a hit.

The Hand of Kevin

  • Your Strength score becomes 16, unless it is already 16 or higher, then you receive a +2 to your Strength score up to a maximum of 20.
  • Any melee weapon attack made with a weapon held by it, deals an extra 2d8 cold damage on a hit.

Both the Hand and Eye of Kevin

  • You gain proficiency in Intimidation, if you already have Intimidation, you gain Expertise in Intimidation.
  •  If you start your turn with at least 1 hit point, you may roll 1 Hit Die to regain hit points.
Attunement
  The Hand and Eye of Kevin requires separate attunment. Attunment takes place upon touching the item and causes 2d6 psychic damage and 2d6 necrotic damage. The items integrate themselves into the characters body and retain the look of the item, which will disturb most people unless effort is made to cover them up with an eye patch, glove or illusion. The character can remove attunment at any time, in which case they once again take 2d6 psychic damage and 2d6 necrotic damage, but otherwise return to the state they were in prior to attunement.



Sunday, November 20, 2022

Review: They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears by Johannes Anyuru

They Will Drown in Their Mothers' TearsThey Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears by Johannes Anyuru
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This was a rough read. It might be an artifact of the translation process, but transition between scenes was nothing less than horrifying. It felt like at times the author would move from one scene to another halfway through a paragraph. I get the author was telling two different stories, and they were attempting to give the reader a sense of confusion about the reality being created, however it did not work for me at all, it ended up feeling like bad writing compounded by bad translation work.

It did not help that this book was depressing and not just slightly depressing, the kind of depressing that makes you loose your will to live. The first of the two main characters Annika/Nour, is supposed to be a time traveler sent back in time to prevent a terrorist attack, she is supposed to be a sympathetic character. The problem is, she comes off as a terrorist who had a last minute change of heart and is now trying to get off on an insanity plea. I found her story to be completely unbelievable and about as compelling as your average Bruce Willis movie. I was not even slightly convinced she was a time traveler.

The second main character, an unnamed writer she asks to come visit her at the asylum she is locked up in. He gets caught up in her story and ends up visiting her several times. This casts a shadow over his own life and his relationship with his wife and daughter. No journalist outside of Info Wars would touch this story, let alone actually entertaining a person like Annika/Nour, who is either batshit crazy or a con artist.

Bad writing, bad story, bad characters. I highly recommend avoiding this one.

View all my reviews

Saturday, November 19, 2022

Setting up a Mastodon Server

I spent the better part of today setting up a Mastodon Server. For those who don't know what Mastodon is, it is a Twitter replacement. Getting an account on Mastodon is not quit as intuitive as Twitter, the hardest part being finding a server. Over the last week, I have been considering this move because of the Elon Musk/Twitter train wreck currently going on. I am not a huge Twitter user, but I know a few people who are and I was thinking they might need a place to land eventually and once you have a server it is very easy to sign in and start using.

For the last year or so, I have been getting into self hosting. I have my own ESXi server for virtual machines, I also have a machine dedicated to hosting Docker containers and I have gotten pretty good at building internet facing services. I am not going to go into any details about what I did to get everything running, there are plenty of good documents on the internet to help you do this, all I am going to do is provide an overview for those who are interested and think they might want to do this themselves.

My instance of Mastodon is hosted on a virtual machine on my ESXi server. I looked into doing it on Docker, which is my preference, but Docker seemed to make the process harder rather than easier. Besides that, backing up VM's is much easier than backing up Docker containers. I gave the VM 4 GB of RAM, 128 GB of hard drive space and 4 CPU cores. I suspect that will be more than enough to handle a small user base, assuming I decide to keep it going. Looking at the monitoring tools I use, the install is taking up about 5 GB of storage, it is using 1.25 GB of memory and CPU usage is staying comfortably under 10%. Please keep in mind this is with basically 1 user, ME! I am certain if I had say 10 regular users, this would change.

I really only ended up with 2 major issues. The first was I had trouble getting HTTPS working properly, solving this issue was mostly about getting all the tricky little settings between the VM, my proxy server and Cloudflare talking properly, honestly I have no idea what I did that finally made it work. The second big issue I have is email verification does not work. I tried to follow the instructions for getting smtp working, but no matter what I did, it failed to send out emails correctly. Fortunately I can manually confirm users and since I do not really plan to have more than a handful of accounts, if any at all, this will not be a problem. All the other issues I had were with things like out dated documentation and variations with Linux commands, nothing that was not easily solved with a few minutes of thought.

I really have no intention at this point of actually allowing others to use this beyond myself and the wife. I doubt the twitter thing is going to result in Twitters implosion and in a couple of weeks it will all be over. I am going to leave it up and running for a while though just in case. Besides, who knows, I might actually decide I like Mastodon and use the server as my own beautiful virtual world.

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Edition

 Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has announced it will be releasing the Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Edition. I am not going into specific detail about what it is, you can go read the announcement for yourself.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/celebrate-30-years-magic-gathering-30th-anniversary-edition-2022-10-04

This announcement has become the latest Internet shit storm. Usually with Internet shit storms, I sit back and eat popcorn, these things never fail to entertain. Unfortunately for me, with this one, there seems to be very few people attempting to defend this product. 99.99% of what I seeing is against this product, even WotC has not spent anytime commenting on it or defending the decision to publish this product.

There seem to be two camps opposed to this product. First there are the common players who make up 90% of the people who play and collect Magic cards. These people range from the casual player who buys a couple hundred dollars of cards a year to to serious tournament players who spend a significant portion of their yearly income on cards. These folks want cards they can play the game with and the $999.99 price tag is too high, it effectively prices them out of the product. The second group is the top tier collectors, the people with a lot of money and invest some portion of that money into cards hoping that $15,000 Black Lotus will someday sell for $25,000. This group does not want this product because it will drive the prices of the cards they have down. The second group does not want the reserved list cards reprinted at all. The first group would love to see those cards reprinted, but they want them reprinted at an affordable price.

There is no doubt in my mind this will be a successful product and it will sell out. Anyone with any knowledge of Magic: The Gathering as a game will understand that this product will be selling on the secondary market for $3,000 this time next year and in five years it will be selling for $10,000, this is as close to easy money as you will ever get. If I have enough money come November to buy one or even two, I will do it, I would be crazy not to. I put it in a box and on a shelf and forget about it for a couple of years, it is a no brainer. Worst case scenario is ten years from now you sell it for $1200. This product is never going to be worth less than what you paid for it, assuming you paid the original $1,000 for it.

While I am probably not going to buy this product, just based on the price alone, I really don't think this is a bad idea, I just really wish it was cheaper. I don't care about the reserved list, I don't care about the secondary market, I don't care about collectors. All I really care about is playing the game, so I am in the first category of players. I really don't see why WotC doesn't reignite the Legacy and Vintage formats the same way they lit up Modern by providing support for it. If they reprinted the Unlimited set with the modern frame, for a reasonable price and said they could only be played in Commander, Legacy and Vintage, they would sell hundreds of millions of dollars of these packs. On top of that, I don't think it would affect the long term value of the old cards. Anyway, that is my opinion on this.

Monday, October 3, 2022

$100 Computer

Best Buy is selling Lenovo Ideapad 1 for $99.99. This is not a beefy system as you would expect, it has a Celeron processor, 4GB of Ram and a 64 GB solid state hard drive. In spite of the tepid specifications of this machine, I thought, just how bad can this be. The worst case scenario is it becomes a $100 paper weight or I give it away to someone child. For the sake of transparency, I also purchased a 512 GB M.2 card as well for around $80. This is not strictly necessary, but keep in mind Windows 11 is 30 GB by itself, so that 64 GB drive it comes with will not allow for many extra programs to be install or much in the way of music and videos, especially since a chunk of that 64 GB is taken up by a recovery partition.

Oddly enough, I was actually surprised by how well this system actually performed. I was expecting to have to install Linux on it to make it actually usable, but that was not the case. Windows 11 performed well enough that I left it on the system. I am not going to pretend this system will replace anyone's desktop or even a laptop used for anything serious. Programs like GIMP ran extremely slow and choked quickly on the anemic 4 GB of RAM. However the Edge browser worked fine and played YouTube videos fairly well. I also did not have any trouble running VLC, Libre Office or Visual Studio Code. Compiling small programs with GCC went okay, I am sure though I would not be happy if I tried to compile a 10,000 line project.

Some things to note, uninstall Microsoft 365 unless you actually plan to use it. It is also worth while to disable all of the Lenovo software that runs in the background, this frees up some hard drive space and some memory that can be used for more productive things. You will also do well to switch Windows out of S mode so you can install software outside of the Microsoft Store. You should also try to avoid big software packages that are known to be hogs, GIMP and Photoshop being the common ones, as well as almost all virus scanners, just be careful about what you are doing and you should be fine.

So what is this thing good for? Well I think if you have a kid who needs something slightly more useful than a Chromebook, but don't want to drop $500 on a machine for a child, this is a good choice. This is also good as a throw away computer to take traveling. Even if you buy the M.2 like I did, with tax, you are still under $200, so if you loose it, it is stolen or it gets damaged, you are really not out that much, as long as you make sure to back up your data in the cloud like a good and responsible computer user. For light use, this system boots reasonably fast and works just fine. I bought it thinking I might live to regret it, but instead came out thinking that it did not entirely suck.

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

My Early Computer Experiences

My interest in computers started when I was in grade school, or more likely started when I was watching Star Trek in the late 60's and early 70's. The first time I actually got to use a computer was in High School, when i took a computer programming class. At the time a bank in town had a DECSYSTEM-2020, basically a PDP-10, which they did not not come even close to using all of its resources and so allowed Billings Senior High to access it and teach computer classes. It was on this system that I learned to program Basic for the first time. At this point I did not really get into computers, the instructor was pretty uninspiring, plus he and I disagreed on the utility of flow charting.

When I started college at Eastern Montana College (EMC), they actually had their own Dec system. It ran the same operating system as the one used by my High School, but I cannot tell you what model it was. Here is a picture of it in the early 80's, maybe someone can tell me what it is..





It was at EMC where I really took my first steps into learning how computers really worked. I learned not just how to program, but how the actual operating system, TOPS-10 or TOPS-20, worked. This was also where I learned how to hack, the security, or lack there of really makes me cringe today. I did get caught once, fortunately the Professor who caught me was the Father of a High School friend who knew me pretty well, he let me skate, but also let me know he was very unhappy with me. He also reminded me of the incident 12 years later when I was the best man at my friends wedding.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been building a Serial Terminal, not really for any real functional reason, but mostly because I could. Those early computer experiences I had were through serial terminals, so it kind of gave me a bit of a nostalgia rush. Like all good nerds, I started wondering if I could actually recreate those early experiences. Obviously buying an actual DECSYSTEM-2020 would not be an option, I doubt there are many left in existence, let alone in a functional state and even if there were, they would cost a fortune to ship and require me to dedicate a room in my house to it. However, after five minutes on Google, I discovered there is a very good emulator out there by the name of SIMH. I also discovered that copies of TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 are pretty widely available and a few very nice people have even made rebuilt packages like TOPS-10 in a Box and the TOPS-20 Panda Build. Both of these worked out of box on my Debian 11 machine with no messing around at all.

TOPS-10 in a Box was the easier of the two, however keep in mind it is a bit limited, the person who built its only goal was the play Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” as it was intended to be played, so while it does contain both FORTRAN and BASIC compilers, it does not have all the bells and whistles. The TOPS-20 Panda Build is far more complete and includes a bunch of extras like Emacs and has networking built in as well. Over the next couple of days I am going to marry these two packages to a Raspberry Pi 4, use my Serial Terminal to access it and see if I can get some of those old feeling I had back in the late 70's and early 80's of my early exploration of those systems.

Saturday, August 13, 2022

Dell XPS 8940 Failures

 A couple of months ago I bought a new computer, my old one was 5+ years old and getting long in the tooth. My last couple of machines have been Alienware systems and I have been very happy with them. This time around I went with a Dell XPS 8940, it was a good deal with an Intel i7-11700 and an Nvidia 1660. Initially I was pretty happy with it, performance was good, it was noticeably faster than my previous system and was considerably quieter as well.

Then the freezes began. It did not happen often, maybe once a week. Unfortunately it was a hard lock, so the BIOS error logs showed nothing and neither did the Linux logs. I ran diagnostics on the machine multiple times and everything checked out fine every single time. My tech intuition started to buzz that this was not a typical hardware failure. So I did what every good Tech does, I went out on the internet and Googled it. Sure enough, this was a known issue with these machines. The issue started with BIOS version 2.4 when Dell implemented vulnerability patches to the BIOS, since then they have released 4 BIOS updates and none of them fixed the issue.

I implemented every suggested fix and then waited to see if the system locked up again and sure enough, it did. By this time I was outside of 30 days, so no money back guarantee for me. Other owners had went through the process of having hardware replaced with no good results, so I figured this was a non starter. The lockups happen rarely enough that it did not bother me too much, it was more of an annoyance than anything else, so I lived with it. However eventually I decided I had paid good money for this system and I should have something that works, so I decided to replace the motherboard so I could get on with my life.

I needed to replace the motherboard, but along with that comes a new case and power supply. for the motherboard I choose the ASUS TUF Gaming B560M-Plus, this supported the CPU and had some nice BIOS options and reviewed on Amazon pretty well. For my case I picked the Zalman T6 ATX Mid Tower, frankly the case is the least important part of a computer, so at less than $50, I was in. It is not a great case, but it has good air flow with nice fan placement and plenty of room on the cable side to hide all my bad cable management. I decided to replace the memory as well, the Dell stock memory was running at  an anemic 2333 Mhz and I figured I might as well bump that up to 3200. So I grabbed a Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (2X16GB) DDR4 3200 memory kit. Finally, for the power supply, I went with a Thermaltake Smart 500W 80+ White Certified PSU, again, not the greatest PSU ever made, but Thernaltake makes a decent product, and it was a massive upgrade from the Dell 360 Watt PSU I had. I took the free shipping on all of these item, in spite of that, I had everything within a week of ordering.

On Thursday night after work, I gutted the 8940 and transferred all of its hardware to the new case and motherboard. The process took me about 2 hours and the system booted on the first try. The only mistake I made was I connected the hard drive LED backwards, fortunately I had not put on the side panel yet, so that was a quick fix. Otherwise this was a pretty nearly flawless process. I am a bit unhappy that I had to spend another $320 to get this thing going the way I wanted, but I expect over the next 5 years this new and improved system will serve me well. When it comes time to replace it, someone please remind me to just buy the fucking Alienware.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Trash Talking Generations

I see a lot of trash talking between generations online. Listening to these conversations, it amazes me that we forget who is responsible for what. Boomers who are complaining about entitled Millennial's need to remember that it was Boomer's who raised the Millennial's. likewise Generation X complaining about the work ethics of Millennial's, need to remember it was Generation X who were supposed to be mentoring them early in their careers. In case you are not sure how this works, here is a breakdown for you.


At any given time, there is a generation that is both raising children and mentoring young adults. Yes, those very same Boomer's who hurl the participation trophy insults at Millennial's, were the one who actually gave them all those participation trophies. So, before anyone goes off complaining about the younger generations, consider who it was that was responsible for influencing these young people during their formative years. 

Sunday, July 24, 2022

The Ages of RPG’s: The Bronze Age, Maybe II

 The previous five posts, were originally posted in an earlier iteration of this blog. I believe I wrote them over a 6 month period around 2010-2011. I have reposted them here with no editing at all for context. A lot has changed in the last 12 years, these were written when we were 2 years into 4th Edition D&D and 4 years prior to 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons (D&D5E). At that point D&D5E was not even being considered let alone talked about anywhere. D&D5E hit the game industry like a cement truck. After the tepid failure of 4th Edition, I don;t think anyone was expecting much from D&D5E . Boy, were we wrong.

D&D5E went through a very long public playtest process, where Wizard of the Coast (WotC) made the draft versions of the game available to anyone who wanted them and actively asked for feedback and they got it. The end product was really really good, it was streamlined and the learning curve was very shallow at its beginning staged and became more complicated only as the individual groups needed it to be. The game lent itself well to scale and allowed for interesting customization. The game also gave plenty of choices for both role players and power gamers. You can easily play a combat monster of a fighter that does massive amounts of damage every turn or you can play the Cheese Makers Son turned Artificer, both can exist in the same game and neither be overshadowed by the other.

On top of this we saw the advent of game groups streaming their games on YouTube and Twitch. Critical Role, Acquisitions inc, D&D NPC Man and a host of others have become extremely popular. These streaming groups have brought in hundreds of thousands of new players. For many of these players, this is their first real exposure to the game. Throw in the websites like Roll20 that allow groups to play online and the COVID epidemic, that kept everyone at home for 2 years, you get a critical mass of players. D&D5E  is without a doubt the most popular iteration of the game. WotC has sold millions of copies and has become the primary profit center for HasBro games, the owners of WotC and D&D.

So where does that leave us now? Are we now in the Iron Age of RPG's or are we in a 2nd Golden Age? As I said in a previous post, the problem with setting “Ages” is you really rarely know where you are until long after its over. So I guess the answer is, we don't know and probably won't for a few more years. The next Edition of D&D has been announced, it is being worked on and will be released in 2024, 10 years after D&D5E  was introduced. WotC has said it will be mostly a revision of current edition, more of a 5.5E than anything else, I am pretty okay with that. I like D&D5E  and I can see us playing it for many years to come.

The Ages of RPG’s: The Bronze Age, Maybe

 I have written about the Golden Age (1974-1989) and the Silver Age (1991-2000), this begs the question of where are we now. The problem with setting “Ages” is you really rarely know where you are until long after its over and it is not unusual for the genre you are speaking about to go in to a long decline before the new emergence occurs. It is definitely possible we moved from the Silver Age directly into the Bronze Age. Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition (D&D3E ) certainly caused a large influx of new players and brought a large number of players back to the table who had not gamed in a decade or more. It is also very true the history of the RPG hobby is the history of D&D. Even the Silver Age was characterized by D&D’s decline as much as by the rise of the World of Darkness.

There are other things which point to the serious probability we have already seen the Bronze Age. For instance the Old School Renaissance, which is a niche within the RPG hobby of players and publishers returning to the old games. This renaissance started with the publication of HackMaster in 2001 and was followed by Castles & Crusades, New Editions of Traveller, RuneQuest and Tunnels & Trolls. It also gave birth to the Simulacrum Games which are games that attempt to emulate the old games without treading on copyrights and allow for the publication of new material for the old games. Simulacrum Games include, but not limited to, Labyrinth Lords, Spells and Wizardry, OSRIC, Lamentation of the Flame Princess to name just a few. This movement is characterized mostly by people who have fond memories playing the game back in the early 80′s, have now reached middle age and want to recapture that feeling of wonder and exploration we all felt when our first characters took their first tentative steps into the Caves of Chaos.

The Open Game License opened up the possibility of 3rd party game companies to write material for D&D3E and they did. In the years following the release of D&D3E there was a huge expansion in the number of companies writing game material. The Internet also gave rise to electronic distribution, companies no longer had to print actual books, but instead release their work as a PDF. The majority of this content was crap, but there was some really good stuff put out as well, material that would have never seen the light of day in previous decades.

If in fact the Bronze Age started in 2000/2001, it is also a good possibility it ended in 2008. In that year two things occurred, first the U.S. had entered into recession in late 2007 (known among my conservative friends as the Carter/Clinton recession) and recessions are never good for business, but also tends to hit niche hobbies harder than other business types. The second thing which occurred was the release of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition (D&D4E). First, when D&D3E was released, I think the hobby was ready for a serious change to the game, second players had no where else to go, Wizards of the Coast simply stopped selling Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (AD&D2E) and if you wanted support, you transitioned to D&D3E. When D&D4E came out, people were not ready for a complete over haul of the game and Paizo Publishing took advantage of the Open Game License and published the PathFinder RPG, which is 99% compatible with D&D3E, so players had a place to go for new material, they did not even have to buy new books if they didn’t want to. Although D&D4E was not a failure, it also did not live up to expectations, initial sales were far below what D&D3E produced and players who did adopt the new game, did so very slowly. In effect, the hobby has been in contraction for at least 2 years and it looks like this trend will continue.

At this point, I am not sure I want to say with any authority that the Bronze Age has come and went, but it does appear as though it has. However, it is just as likely it was the Silver Age getting its second wind. Most Comic Book historians place the end of the Silver Age at 1970, however between 1970 and 1975 there was a mini resurgence marked by the Death of Gwen Stacy, the Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories and Mike Grell’s work on the Warlord and the Legion of Superheroes. It is well within the realm of possibility that the Bronze Age is yet to come. Either way, I can’t wait to see what happens next.



The Ages of RPG’s: The Silver Age Part II

 I have received some feed back on my estimation of when the Silver Age occurred. There are those who feel the 1990′s were not the Silver Age and if not a dark age, then definitely a time of shadows. The 1990′s were marked most heavily by the decline of Dungeons & Dragons and TSR generally being in self destruct mode. While there were other RPG’s that were popular, by in large the 1990′s were bereft of innovation and nothing of significance occurred. While I see this point of view, I am not certain I agree with it. There a lot of action going on in the RPG hobby, with TSR and D&D on the decline, it opened the market to other possibilities and allowed Vampire: The Masquerade to out sell D&D for a short time. The idea the 1990′s were completely without merit is only valid if you make the assumption that RPG’s and D&D are hard linked together and I am not convinced this is the truth. You may be able to convince me the Silver Age did not start until 2000 when D&D3E was released, I refuse to acknowledge that the 1990′s were a cultural wasteland for our hobby.

I am actually hoping the decline of D&D in the last couple of years sparks a new era similar to the 1990′s where D&D isn’t dominate and other game systems are allowed their time in spot light. As I have said in previous posts, I can easily see a future where D&D is nothing more than a gateway game published as some sort of evergreen game similar to Monopoly. In this future, D&D still extremely popular and is the game most people start with, but is not the best selling game or even the most popular game. In this near future we may see Pathfinder become the front runner, but replaced within a few years by GURPS 5th edition or something entirely new. This would not be a bad thing at all.



The Ages of RPG’s: The Silver Age

 I am eventually going to write again about the Golden Age of RPG’s, but frankly the research kind of depressed me. It heavily reminded me of times long gone, when I didn’t have to work for a living. So for the time being, I am going move on to the second great age of RPG’s. As I said in the first installment, the Golden Age either ended in 1981/1982 time frame or by my reckoning, around 1988/1989.  So then the question becomes, when did the Silver Age begin and what prompted it. The answer to those questions is very easy, the dawn of the Silver Age was 1991 when Vampire: The Masquerade came out and started its ascendancy.  There are those who will argue Vampire had nothing to do with the Silver Age, that it was AD&D2E which powered the Silver Age during the 90′s. I argue differently, because it was Vampire that was the first RPG to ever out sell AD&D and it did so at the peak of the Silver Age.

The Silver Age is marked heavily by TSR’s fall, the decline of AD&D and eventual acquisition of both by Wizards of the Coast. TSR’s decline occurred for couple of reasons. RPG’s in general were in decline primarily because a new genre of games emerged lead by Magic: The Gathering (MtG). With limited gamer dollars out there and with AD&D largely considered to be passe, gamers switched in mass to MtG. Those who stuck with RPG’s started playing Vampire, which was considered new, hip and cool. Seeing its money flow decline, TSR quickly jumped on the trading card game band wagon with SpellFire and then tried to grab market with Dragon Dice. Both games failed miserably and make matters worse, they made several poor marketing decisions concerning AD&D. Instead of concentrating on a few very popular game world settings, they diluted their market by introducing Dark Sun, Mystaria, Dragon Council and Birthright on top of GreyHawk, Forgotten Realms and DragonLance. Add in the general move towards splat books, instead of generating more money, they simply spread the money they were making across more products and continued to do so until none of the products were profitable. By 1997 when Wizard of the Coast acquired TSR, it was a shell of its former self and all but decimated, all the while White Wolf was building the power house World of Darkness product line. The Silver Age was a little bit about the fall of D&D, but more about the rise of Vampire: The Masquerade. I however have spoken more to TSR’s fall than White Wolf’s climb in popularity only because I know more about TSR than White Wolf.

There are some who make the claim that the Silver Age was also a time of enlightenment in RPG’s. That gamers were moving away from old paradigms like the classic Dungeon Crawl and PC’s killing monsters and stealing their stuff. Gamers were at the time moving towards more theatrical Role Playing where character development is more important that cool new powerz. The claim is these new games were more sophisticated not on the mechanical level, but rather on the intellectual level. This is of course a crock of shit, but I am not going to get into that right now, because I want to dedicate a whole post to Role Playing vs Roll Playing.

The end of the Silver age probably occurred around 2000 or 2001 when Wizards of the Coast released D&D third edition and started the second ascendancy of  D&D. On a personal note, unlike the Golden Age, I was AWOL from gaming during the Silver Age. I played MtG, and was very obsessed with it for a couple of years. But as far as RPG’s go, I played next to none. When I returned to the States after Desert Storm, I played a little GURPS and AD&D at Fort Gordon and while I was in Germany, I put together a game group which lasted about six months and broke up because we were deployed to Bosnia. So I pretty much slept through the Silver Age and sadly, I have no real emotional attachment to the age at all.



The Ages of RPG’s: The Golden Age II

 I was going to speak more about the Golden Age of our hobby, but I decided not to. I went to the trouble of having a couple of fairly extensive email conversations with a couple of old friends about that time period. We had a great lot of fun reminiscing about the good old days and wallowing in nostalgia. The problem is, I came away from it somewhat depressed about the whole thing. You see, I am a middle aged man, my youth is gone and it is never coming back. I am a different person and the world is a different place. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing really, because time moves on and our lives progress, but this does not keep us from looking back on our youth with some fondness.

So what does this have to do with gaming ? Well, my talking extensively about the Golden Age with friends got me to thinking about the current retro clone revolution, or the old school renaissance if that is what you want to call it. The question I have is, is this movement really a long term shift in the hobby or is this just a case of a group of middle aged men trying to recapture their lost youth, which will fade as these people start becoming grandparents and wonder away from gaming again. There is some credence to both theories.

This movement does not seem to be centered around a single person or company. Several retro clones have been released, both as commercial products and as free products done out of love. HackMaster 4th edition was the first of these products, followed shortly by Castles and Crusades. Not to mention the resurgence of Traveller, RuneQuest and Paranoia by Mongoose games. All of which were/are successful product lines. The there is the free products, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lords, BFRPG, Dark Dungeons and a few others, which have also shown to be popular. For the first time in more than a decade, there are adventures and supplements on the market that are compatible with D&D and AD&D. In short, people are making money and if people are making money, that is a good sign for the future and the long term viability of this movement.

On the other hand, who are buying these products ? Is this movement bringing in new players or just stroking ego’s of old players ? As close as I can tell by surfing the various forums, the answer is, the latter rather than the former. I see no sign of a new generation of gamers coming up in significant numbers, playing any of these games. None of the publishers or developers of these games even seem to be targeting the younger players. The future of this movement depends not on the 40 somethings, but rather on the 12-16 year olds who will be playing these games for the next 10-15 years and who will be the future game designers and adventure writers. Without new blood, this movement is doomed and the movement does not seem interested in new blood.

I think in the long run, this renaissance will more or less be a bump in the road. Right now there is a small demand for old school AD&D/OD&D modules and such, but it is primarily in demand from a small demographic of older players and this demographic, as far as I can tell, is not a growing one. These companies are making no effort to get their products into game stores or even into Amazon, they are sticking to Print on Demand through Lulu and or PDF downloads with DriveThruRPG. So while this is an interesting spike, in another few years these companies will probably move on to other revenue streams. In another 10 years, the kids who grew up playing D&D 3E will be entering thier 30′s/40′s and start looking back fondly on their misspent youth, only this time Paizo with their 3E clone Pathfinder, will be there to catch them.



The Ages of RolePlaying Games: The Golden Age

 Something I am probably going to speak of more than once is the various ages of RolePlaying Games. During the course of virtually all mediums, they go through times of resurgence and times of ebb. Usually the first  surge of any medium is called the Golden Age. Mostly, we have no idea when an age is passed or when a new one begins until years after the fact. In comic books, no one in 1940 was referring to the time as the Golden Age of Comic, and no one stood up in 1950 and said “Well that was fun, too bad its over.”.  No one even realized there had been a Golden Age of Comic until the Silver age was well under way. It was the same way with the Golden Age of RPG’s, I don’t think anyone really knew it was over until the mid 90′s.

Defining the beginning of the Golden Age is easy, it occurred in 1974 when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson publish the Original Dungeons and Dragons and the ascendancy of D&D began. The ending is more difficult to nail down, some would place it as early as 1979 when the final core Advanced D&D book was published and D&D as a whole started to move into popular culture. Others put it as late as 1982 or 1983 when Gary Gygax gave up editorial control of TSR and the gaming industry started in a new direction. I personally place the end of the Golden age much later in 1989 when AD&D 2nd Edition came out.

The reason I place it so much later is first, I do not consider Lorraine Williams to be the viscous and evil bitch she is made out to be by the larger game community. She was a business woman who saw the potential of the industry, yes she openly disdained gamers and what she did to Gary Gygax is inexcusable, but she did take the debt ridden TSR and make it profitable, like it or not, TSR would have went down much earlier without Williams. The other thing I point out when discussing the period between 1982 and 1989 is, a lot of now classic books and modules were published like Unearthed Arcana, the Desert of Desolation series, Ravenloft and the Temple of Elemental Evil to name a few. The mid and late 80′s also saw the other publishers come into prominence, Hero Games, with Champions, Chaosium with Call of Cthulhu and Steve Jackson Games with GURPS.

Perhaps it is m own misguided perceptions of the time period which caused me to extend the Golden Age past 1982 or 83. When I went to GenCon in 1988, I knew things were changing, I remember standing in the hall where all the company booths were setup looking around me and thinking “Things are different now.”, I just didn’t understand how. Perhaps it was not the gaming industry which was changing perhaps it was my life. Maybe I was witnessing the beginning of the end of my own game group and probably end of my 20 somethings as well. At GenCon, four of us got in the car and drove there, three of us came back. One of us had graduated College and had gotten a job, this was his last hurrah, he went straight from GenCon 88 into his adult life, I never saw or heard from him again. After that slowly, one by one my friends started leaving our hometown, they were starting college, finishing college, getting jobs, getting married and getting the hell out. By early 1990 the game group I had been playing with since 1985 was virtually gone and by late 1990 so was I. I would not seriously play RPG’s again for more than a decade.



Sunday, June 26, 2022

Thoughts on Roe v. Wade

 I think there is a gross misunderstanding of what happened last Friday when SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade by Republicans. This was not a small government move to take the Federal government out of the decision making process when a woman is deciding if she wants to carry a child to term or not. What actually happened was SCOTUS unilaterally removed the rights of women to make those choices and placed in the hands of State governments.

This is not a move to give women more freedom, it is a move to give State government more control over women's rights. When Republicans talk about "States Rights", they are not talking about moving power from the Federal government and placing it in the hands of State governments, what they really mean is they want to take rights and power away from individual people and give those rights to the State governments. It is no surprise that Clarence Thomas stated that next on the chopping block is birth control, gay sex and gay marriage. It should also be no surprise that Republicans in the House and Senate are saying that if they take control of Congress next year, they will bring forth bills to ban abortion nationally.

This is not now and never has been about "States Rights" or "Small Government", this is and always has been about removing the fundamental right to privacy and control of the population. Think about this, if women do not have the basic right of bodily autonomy, then neither do men. If women do not have the basic right to privacy, then neither do men. If gays do not have the right to choose their life partners, then neither do straights. If the State government can regulate gay sex, then the State government can also also regulate straight sex.

I know this sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope argument, however in the case of Clarence Thomas and these various Congressmen, they are telling us in in plain straight understandable language who they are and what they are planning to do and I think we should believe them. Ask yourself this, how many States have laws on the books making sex outside of marriage illegal? The answer is 7 States. How many States have laws making adultery illegal? The answer is 18 States. Now please by all means, tell me again how this is a slippery slope and it will never happen.

Sunday, June 12, 2022

r/selfhosted

 Yeah, it has been a good long time since the last time I posted anything here. It is a wonder I even still bother to maintain this site. The fact of the matter is, I really just want to retain the domain name, so I pretend to blog every now and again to justify the $12 a year it costs me to keep it. To make even weirder, I have been offered money for this domain name, $2000 to be exact, but I turned it down. The exact reason I turned it down is a bit vague, but I am sure subconsciously I have a good reason.

I have been working on this blog post now for at least a month. I originally was just going to talk about setting up an ESXi virtual machine server, but since then the project has grown to the point where I am self hosting a small pile of services. Below is a screen shot of Homer, one of the services I setup. Homer's only job is to serve up a nice webpage with links to things I use. It is really just an overly complex landing page, but it works well and makes things look pretty. I am not going to get into the links or the streaming services, these are just external links to websites I go to reasonable often. The Applications and Servers is where the more interesting stuff is happening.



Meh!, between taking a screen cap and uploading the above image, I changed my mind, I am not all that interested in talking about setting up my own cloud services. While I enjoyed learning how to use Ubuntu Snaps and Docker Containers, it is honestly not a particularly interesting subject and there are tons of websites and Youtube videos on how to set this stuff up. While I set this up on a machine with 16 GB of RAM and 5 TB of storage, you could easily do the same thing on a Raspberry Pi, minus the ESXi server of course. If you really are interested in what I did, I got started with this Youtube Playlist.

pi-hosted on the Novaspirit Tech channel

The process he is following will work perfectly fine on any old Intel/AMD based system you have laying around that was built in the last 10 years. I think you could get by pretty well with 4 GB of RAM, I have seven Docker Containers running and it is consuming less than 1.6 GB of RAM. The amount of storage you need depends entirely on how much room you need for NextCloud and Emby.

Saturday, March 5, 2022

The least popular Dell PC ever

 My latest retro computer acquisition is a Dell Web-PC. This models sales were abysmal, Dell only sold a few thousand for the 9 months it was available. Really, this was too bad because it was ahead of its time for 1999. It was the first legacy free PC on the market. By legacy free, I mean it has no floppy drive, no serial port, no printer port, no PS2 mouse and keyboard ports. The system sported three USB ports for peripherals, integrated modem, audio and video. The CPU is a Celeron running a 466Mhz, 64 MB of RAM and a whooping 5GB hard drive. The most interesting thing about this machine was the coffee maker design of the case.



When I received this one, I had three major issues. First I noticed the power supply was not screwed down and was loose in the case. Some one had opened it for one reason or another and when they put it back together, they did not screw in the power supply properly. This was an easy 10 minute fix for me to open it and screw everything in proper. When I booted it up, the first thing it told me was the memory size had changed, now I knew why they opened it up.

The second issue was it would not boot into Windows 98, it would get to a screen where it was identifying my monitor and it would freeze. I had no problem getting into Safe Mode, so I cleaned things up as best I could, cleared out the Startup folder, uninstalled the old ass version of McAfee and cleaned up the registry. It still would not boot into Windows 98. So I booted to command prompt only, went into C:\Windows\Options\Cabs  and ran setup.exe. I know some of you are cringing right now, a dirty reinstall of Windows 98 was very much a no-no back in the day. In my defense, this was a last ditch effort to save this install, if it did not work I was going to have to do a clean install anyway, so I went for it. Fortunately it worked for me and I was able to get into Windows 98. I then went ahead and did some maintenance on it, I ran disk cleanup, made a complete run of chkdsk and defraged the drive. There is nothing more fascinating than watching Windows 98 defrag 1.5 GB of data on a 23 year hard drive.

The final problem was once inside Windows I found the CDROM did not work. I tried re-seating the cables to no avail. This does not really bother me much, I suspect I can probably get a replacement easily enough, but at the moment I have no particular need for it.

While this is not the fault of the machine itself, but rather the time frame in which it was designed, it does not have any network ports, nor does it have any PCI ports to add one. I can't say I really need to get this machine on the internet and in fact it would probably be a bad idea. However if I ever beed to, I expect I can find an USB Ethernet dongle that will do the job, but for now, I will leave it be.

Edit:

I realized I had an old TrendNet wireless USB dongle that had Windows 98 support. I used my USB floppy to install the Windows 98 Mass Storage drivers, which allows me to plug in USB drives. I then used a 32 MB USB drive to install the TrendNet drivers. Worked perfectly, the system is now online, although I still don't think having a Windows 98 machine on the internet is a good idea.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Review: Arthur Rex by Thomas Berger

Arthur Rex: A Legendary NovelArthur Rex: A Legendary Novel by Thomas Berger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this book in High School, I had a fond memory of it being a new and interesting take on Arthurian legend. Well, this book did not age well at all. While the story loosely followed the well known adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, the characterizations were terrible. Virtually every major character was made out to be not just flawed but so terribly flawed that their flaws out shined their good attributes, the things that made them heroes. The character who took the worst hit was Guinevere.

The representation of Guinevere was terrible. She was represented as a complete bitch, she was shallow and cared for no one except for herself. She did not love either Arthur or Lancelot and made both of their lives miserable. I much prefer the older versions of her, where she loved both men and was eternally torn between them. Lancelot did not fair much better, being characterized as a bitter, miserable man being held hostage by Guinevere. This was not a beautiful if doomed romance, but rather an abusive relationship between two broken people. Arthur himself was nothing more than a buffoon where most all of the events of the books happen in spite of him, rather than because of anything he did or said. The author probably could have made him a minor side character and it would have made no difference to the story.

If you are looking for a good modern retelling of this tale, Arthur Rex is not it. I wish I had left this on the shelf as a memory from my teenage years.

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Saturday, February 19, 2022

RE: My conversation with a Presuppositionist Part 1

 I was going to post the 2nd part of this discussion because I thought the first part went pretty well. Unfortunately the second session did not happen, his account was banned, so I can only assume his conversations with other people were not as polite as the one he had with me.

Friday, February 18, 2022

My conversation with a Presuppositionist Part 1

 The following is a conversation I recently had with an internet acquaintance. As a side note, this is how I remember the conversation and it may not be 100% accurate.

Presup: You are an atheist? You don't believe in God?

Me: Nope, I do not believe believe in God.

Presup: You don't believe in god or you deny the existence of god?

Me: Ah, you are trying to shift the burden of proof to me, I am cool with that. I'll make this easy for you, I deny the existence of god.

Presup: How did you come to that conclusion?

Me: I read the Bible, the Quran and various other religious texts and I have found none of them convincing. I have also had many many many conversations with theists over the years and none of them has ever produced a shred of evidence that any sort of god exists.

Presup: Yes but how have you proven that god does not exist?

Me: The same way you have proven fairies don't exist.

Presup: That does not answer the question, if you are going to make the claim that God does not exist you have to prove it.

Me: So you have to prove fairies don't exit before you can make the claim that fairies don't exist?

Presup: We are not talking about fairies, we are talking about God.

Me: Now who is not answering questions. Do you believe in fairies?

Presup: No of course not, but there have been no divine revelations about fairies, God has been revealed through divine revelation.

Me: Okay, provide me with evidence of this divine revelation.

Presup: I don't think you understand the position you are in, you have made a claim that you need to provide evidence for.

Me: This is what I call the "Nigerian Prince Fallacy", see I don't have to automatically believe everything anyone tells me, just because I have no evidence to the contrary, my default position is to not accept anything without evidence. If I receive an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian Prince, who says if I send them $10,000, he will give me $10,000,000, should I believe him and send him $10,000 or should my default position be disbelief?

Presup: Your analogy does not hold up, there is evidence for God, because he has revealed himself through divine revelation.

Me: You keep saying that, but so far I have seen no evidence of god or divine revelation.

Presup: But you have not provided any evidence that God does not exist.

Me: So what?

Presup: Your position is unreasonable, you can't deny the existence of god if you have no evidence that he does not exist.

Me: Sure I can watch "I deny the existence of god because I have seen no evidence to prove his existence.", there I just did it. If you think that requiring evidence before belief is unreasonable, then I have a Nigerian Prince I'd like to introduce you to.

Presup: I don't think you understand burden of proof, you are making a claim that God does not exist, now you have to prove your claim. Lack of evidence is not in and of itself evidence. Give me an example other than God where lack of evidence is evidence for something?

Me: Sure, fairies, unicorns, leprechauns, dragons, do you want me to go on? I have the D&D Monster Manual on my bookshelf, so I can go on. 

Presup: You don't understand what I am saying. You can't be 100% sure there is no God if you don't have any evidence that God doesn't exist, it is unreasonable to think otherwise.

Me: I understand you perfectly and I disagree, I think accepting any premise on face value without evidence is the unreasonable stance, not vice versa.

Presup: I don't think you are as smart as you think you are. You are not getting it, you have the burden of proof here, you have to provide evidence.

Me: My wife would certainly agree that I am not as smart as I think I am, but I do know one thing, I have never fallen for the Nigerian Prince scam, I have also never tithed 10% of my income to a church so they could build yet another church nor have I been required to sacrifice any animals.

Presup: I think your worldview leaves a lot to be desired and you still haven't proved God does not exist.

Me: I would also point out that you have done nothing to convince me that God or any god exists. I think this is where the problem is. See, I have no desire to prove anything to you, I am not trying to convert you to my viewpoint,  if you want to continue believing in your god, go for it, The only reason we are having this conversation is because you challenged my belief that no god exists, had you not brought it up, I would have never challenged your belief in god, because I simply don't care if you believe in god or not. I am not and I never have been an activist atheist.

Presup: When you told me you were an atheist, wasn't that a challenge to my belief?

Me: Only if you took it that way, you told me you were a Christian weeks ago, did I ever say a word about it? In fact you did not even know I was an atheist until you asked me if I went to church. I am happy to continue this conversation, but I really think if we do you should take a different approach with me, you will never convince me like this.

Presup: Well what I am trying to do is show you that your worldview is flawed and you should at least consider the possibility that God exists and you keep refusing to provide evidence for your claim that God does not exist and you keep saying lack of evidence is evidence and that is not true.

Me: Except you are trying to overcome my very reasonable default position of not accepting things at face value. I would suggest trying a different line of questioning, because you are getting nowhere with this one.

Presup: Only because you are not thinking this through logically. 

Me: Maybe that is because you have not given me anything to work with, you say god exists, but you have not defined god, the word god means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To me, the Christian God is no different that Zeus or Allah or Yahweh. Maybe next time we can pick up with you being more specific about god and what your worldview actually is and then I can be more specific about why that god does not exist.

Presup: Okay

Me: TTYL

Presup: Later!

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Review: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Round HouseThe Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a dark book, unfortunately being from Montana means I am aware of just how tragically accurate this book is. Native American women are horribly vulnerable to being raped and murdered, in my home town, growing up hardly a week went by where the police blotter report did not include an attack on a woman from the nearby reservation, mostly by white men, rarely were these men ever tried, let alone convicted, even if the evidence against them was rock solid.

This story is about one such incident and the dark affect it had on the family in the aftermath, no one, not even close friends get out of these events unscathed emotionally. The main character, Joe is just 13 when his mother is raped and nearly murdered, and he has to witness her dark spiral into depression and the struggle of his father to get justice for her. The story fluctuates between the antics of Joe and and his friends in the summer of 1988 and the truly terrible traumas suffered by his mother and by extension his family. The juxtaposition of these events between what his young life should have been and the stark reality of what is was, makes for an engaging and very sad story.

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Sunday, January 23, 2022

I think time reset today?

 The strangest thing happened today. I was doing my laundry and I remember looking at the clock, it was 2:38 PM, thinking, the dryer should be done at 3:20 PM. I continued to read my book, Round House by Louise Erdrich if you must know, and a few minutes later I felt a bit dizzy. I took a breath and closed my eyes for a moment, just resting, it was nothing bad, just a bit of light headedness. I then opened my eyes and started reading again, I then got a sense of deja vu, like I had read this chapter before. I looked at the clock, and it was 2:15 PM.

Don't get me wrong, I do not believe I actually traveled back in time. I am pretty sure I just misremembered the time when I looked at it the first time and we have feelings of deja vu all the time, it is not really that big of a deal. However for a few minutes, it did throw me off, the experience made me doubt reality, or at least my perception of reality for just just a few minutes. It was just weird, that's all.

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