The co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Dave Arneson, died today.

D+D is one of those things that I can't say I do much anymore. It's too restrctive in its time consumption and its difficult ro find people to play with (or with whom to play, however you like your grammar served.) [or ).] But I will say that D+D took up a great deal of my time in high school. Time that I should have been doing homework or calling girls or doing other things that are typical to a sixteen year old boy, as opposed to sending a 24HD frost worm to kill my friend Paul's half-Elf fighter/thief.

Parents have always had a problem with D+D. The notable instance is when a Harvard undergrad student killed himself while apparently re-enacting actions his character took during the game campaign. Even in the 80s, before the unchecked rash of blaming popular media for kids acting violently (Doom and Marilyn Manson for Columbine, for example), D+D and what is now known as "geek culture" came under fire. Later, of course, it turned out that the student (whose name escapes me at the moment) was dealing with some pretty serious drug issues, was diagnosed by the school counseler as severely depressed and also dealing with very repressed homsexuality - not something you want to be open about at Harvard. In the 80s. So he was prime suicide fodder to begin with for reason much less exciting than going off to be a Paladin and lead the armies of Ravenloft against the grimlocks.

And then of course there's Everquest kid. Everybody remembers Everquest kid. He lived in his mom's basement and played the online RPG, and essentially became the most powerful character in the world. Eventually someone came along and dethroned him, and the guy was so dismayed that he offed himself. Once again, all the blame fell on the game, and the media decided not to report that he also had a drug problem, had some mental issues, and the very mother that was campaigning so ardently to avenge her beloved son's tragic demise was the same mother who routinely abused him from a young age and probably had a good deal to do with turning him into a social recluse to begin with.

Thankfully my own parents were a little more open-minded about these things, though they were probably thinking, "Where did we go wrong!?"

The only friend I had who really had whacko parents was Keith, whose mom burned all of his D+D books (about $100 worth) because "(quote, as in, I'm not making this shit up) demons would jump out of them while he slept at night and dance around his bed," (end quote). Thankfully Keith got the hell out of there and, the last I heard, is doing graphic design.

As someone who believes that gaming is generally a benign activity, I really don't see much weight to these arguments. Sure, people get obsessive with games, particularly nowadays, but I somehow doubt all of the people who have ruined their lives or others because of a game pales in comparison to the number of obssessive weirdos who've ruined their lives or others in the name of Christianity. And playing pen-and-paper games like D+D has a number of benefits. They re-enforce basic math, teach both logical and dynamic thinking, improve memory (those rulebooks are fucking thick), and generally encourage the use of imagination and improv. Also, since game design is such a sought-after skill in serious game markets, D+D also teaches many of those fundamentals. I for one never thought the little maps of caves and sprawling icescapes in 8th grade would ever come in handy, but they apparently do.

Anyway, a big shoutout to Dave Arneson. Thanks for wasting so much of my childhood and keeping my imagination alive.

For the more concise version, you needn't do more than look to your right.

What I had hoped for this site to become has offically gone on hold. My current legal and financial situation(s), well, more like situation since they're basically intertwined, has gotten worse and between my lack of funds and new need to focus on job hunting, I can't make working on this my priority anymore. The code for the sites namesake, and my child of a pet-project, is coming along nicely, but for now I need to focus on more urgent needs.

In other news, I added a writing page, where I'll be putting my little blibs and blurbs for all of you to see.

I recently updated myself on the Hans Reiser trial. Turns out he did kill his wife, and worse yet, he pulled what wired.com has dubbed the "geek defense." As I understand it, his entire defense was that he had been staring at a computer too long, though from the over 100 articles that have been written about this trial (no, I have not read all of them), the jury and judge were a little more than amused by it. He's now appealing the decision based on the fact that his lawyer was a pill head and betrayed him.

I hate how these media circuses paint geeks and nerds to be these total freakos when there are plenty of non-geeky, non-nerdy freakos out there who cause a hell of a lot more damage. For example, the NY guy who shot 13 people, or the PA guy who was afraid Obama was going to steal his guns, and ended up shooting three cops. Gamers and computer programmers might be a little socially awkward, but that doesn't mean they're all killers. I'm sure Reiser had his own demons, and cases like this should be taken one at a time, and not be used to paint an entire demographic as monsters.

Speaking of geeks, I was watching Star Trek today. I suppose that sentence speaks for itself. I can't really help liking it: I was raised on that thanks to my parents. What really made that series stick out for me was the fact that it was the polar oppisite of, say, Dune. Dune might be celebrated as one of the best sci-fi books ever, but it's so facsism practually oozes out of the pages the way the yellow sugary stuff oozes out of warm lemon merange pie. It was the kind of thing Heinlien's Starship Troopers parodied, and even though I didn't really care for either the book or the film, it's a good comparison. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry really showed his genius when he didn't really show much of future Earth, and all the viewer knew was that shit was pretty cool and humans didn't need money anymore. It sounds vaguely like the evil S word: socialism, though, that was never directly stated. I dunno, something about that notion that sci-fi can exist without being post-apocolyptic fictional nazi bullshit always stuck with me, and I thought I'd mention it.

Until later.

Yep. I finally made enough money in one year to partake in the government's big offering of pie to the American people. I get a whole three-hundred big ones included with my tax refund. Hold on, I think I've heard this one before. You know, the story where a nation was going bankrupt and the president needed to shut everyone up so he gave them a chuck of change with their tax refunds? If this sounds at all familiar, either you can't form new memories like that guy in Memento and everything sounds familiar (in that case, get back to looking for John G, lasy asshole), or you remember the same story from a couple years ago. Point being that Obama's latest placaction of the American people is the exact same thing his predecessor did. You know, The One Who Must Not Be Named, the guy who all of us pretentious, enlightened types are suppposed to joke about while we blog on our Macs in Starbucks drinking a shitty, overpriced Iced Coffee? (DISCLAIMER: I do not own a Mac, blog in public, or pay four dollars for coffee.)

It sounds mean but I find the irony quite delicious. And not delicious in that prepared tofu way, more delicious in that lemon merange pie way. I can already feel the well-oiled gears of Obamamania starting to sqeak with the rust of dismay, and while it does not mean things are looking particularly good for me, at least I have the pleasure of being one of the few who can say, "I told you so" when your grandma loses her pension and has to live in a hotel.

No, I will not apologize for that.

Throwing money at things is a solution, and sadly in the current state of things it's the only solution. However, the concession that saving the companies will screw over all of the people who got Obama elected in the first place must be made, and while the documents have been signed for a while, nobody is admitting it. It's like a family not dealing with their drug addict cousin, and when he dies of an overdose, everyone says, "Oh, he was so strong and healthy," at the funeral.

Instead of feeding the junkie, the more intelligent solution is to throw his ass in rehab. Instead of telling companies that they need to stop outsourcing factories and bringing industry back to the 'States, the Obama solution is to create a thousand jobs here and a thousand jobs there, and at the same time let GM can ten thousand folks so they can "show enough fiscal responsibility" to get their slice of the pie. And we good American citizens are expected to take our measly three hundred and quietly look away.

It might sound like I'm being overly critical of Obama, but come right the fuck on. How is General Motors going to help me: a 26 year old college grad who has no interest in working in the auto industry and can't afford one of their crappy cars anyway. Why should a company that's been sinking its country into debt and embarresment (look up Ford factories in Dresden, Germany around 1939 - interesting stuff) for years get anything they want, while an educated citizen who could potentally have a long life of paying taxes and producing for his country get smacked in the face with a meat mallet?

In other news, Pandora is cool.

Yeah, I know I'm using a Weezer song as an entry title. The way I figure it, I get one emo moment every couple months, and this is.

And as far as things to be emo about go, holy fucking shit Weezer sucks anymore. So much for the band that got me through high school.

Anyhow, progress on my site(s) has slowed to a crawl. They're designed and ready to go up, pending some last minute tweaks, but I'm now faced with two (expected) problems when it comes to running a state-wide site: 1) people have to know about it 2) people need to be into it. It's damn near impossible to sell anything web-based to anyone anymore because so much of the market is eaten up. Imagine making a new search engine and having to compete with Google. I mean, your average American probably doesn't even know what a search engine is anymore - but they know Google. They don't know what the fuck it does or how it works, but it's used. Or imagine making a social site to compete with Facebook.

It's pretty hard to believe that the general concensous is that this country has laws against monopoly. Wait, no it isn't.

I used to read the webcomic Penny Arcade, and one of the comments writer 'Tycho Brahe' made about web culture alwayss stuck with me (in paraphrase) "Want to make a successful webcomic? Start in 1997." It sounds pretentious as shit, and it is, but the guy's point is excellent. I feel like I've missed the boat of web life, and my feverent hatred of social sites and just about anyone who self-identifies themselves as a web geek doesn't help. I still live way back in 1995, before I even owned a computer or had ever seen a fucking website before, and believe that the Internet is a tool, not a way of life.

And speaking of the wonderful Internet, Myspace proudly (which I don't understand how you can be proud of this) announced that it removed 90,000 sex offenders from it's site. Let me say that again, for it sounds almost musical. Myspace removed nine-tee-thoow-sand sex offenders. That means that up until yesterday, there were almost one tenth of a million rapists and pedophiles pouring through the public profiles looking at YOUR twelve year old. And trust me, your little snowflake has a Myspace. And a Facebook. If s/he is artsy probably a Deviant art account, downloads porn on his/her PSP and has probably sent a nude photo to his/her boy/girlfriend. How do I know this? Because I fucking pay attention. Parents.

There'a a line of smiley faces above the text window for this blog software and they're really starting to creep me out. That information doesn't help you at all.

Well, another rant concluded. New topic.

I started playing Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion last week and I must say I'm really enjoying it - and even managed to hang on to a slim thread of maturity and named my character something other than Ugly-Ass Mofo or Balls. I don't get what's up with the contiunation of series nobody has heard of: I wasn't aware there was an Elder Scrolls 1, 2, or 3, even though I played Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind a few years back and hated it. It's the same with Fallout 3 - what happened to Fallout 1 and 2? Or does the three at the end just sound better?

Oblivion basically took everything that sucked about Morrowind and made it better. You actually have a fighting chance against a goblin with an iron knife at the beginning of the game, and don't need a full suit of plate mail and a magical hammer to win in single combat against a rat. The races are all basically the same, and I only say that because any character of any race can do any thing if you increase the right attributes and skills. For example, my Wood Elf can swordfight like an Imperial and sneak like a Kajieet. Kadidit? Kajet? Cat person.

The two biggest improvements over Morrowind are 1) rapid travel. No more looking for those giant fucking bettles to carry you all over the world. And secondly, there's an actual storyline. Morrowind suffered the problem of not having any direction and a dense storyline populated with generic overlong fantasy names that would make Tolkien himself want to punch the writers.

Of course Oblivion has lots of drawbacks. The system by which you interact with computer characters is impossible to understand (though quite amusing when you piss people off.) The difficulty is a bit unbalanced and the only reason the game is difficult at all is because the monsters you fight have eighty billion hit points and can tie your silver sword of frost into a silver ballon doggy and eat it. Plus, for a game that markets itself for giving the player freedom, there is almost none. You basically run from point A to point B and complete one or two objectives, then move on to point C. You can get just about anywhere on the map from square one, but what good is that if there's nothing to do there?

To round it out, that is what I see as the limitation of all technology: freedom. From games to websites, users are just limited. And I suppose what annoys me is that all of this is starting to become normal. Technology is like an insurgency - when the people embrace it, it wins, regardless of the opposition. Now that the majority of consumers accept that Facebook captures a personality and Oblivion or other sandbox games represent AI freedom, there will be less of a drive to improve on such technologies and more of a drive to maintain the status quo and keep the dollars flowing.

tell me who's this funky dude, staring back at me?