"The truth of the matter is I am not much like Holmes, and thus not much like House. I am not thin, I am not addicted to anything of a chemical nature (books being vegetable), I am not at all misanthropic (my friend Nick misses the point that House expects the worst of, and thus is nasty to, all people -- a category that includes women only incidentally), I have no hidden musical talent, my life is rarely interrupted at a critical juncture by a commercial break or a chapter heading, nobody important has ever asked me for anything (since nobody really believes I am a genius or even particularly useful), and my observational talents (such as they are) are mostly squandered in the pursuit of witty repartee."

Yesterday evening, while eating, Guinevere asked me if I'd heard anything interesting in the news. She works very hard in a very demanding career, while I tend to find myself with long stretches of unclaimed time, which I then tend to fill with research into politics, economics, and the history of science. The irony is that we each envy the other.

As it happened, the recent Japanese election was very interesting, so I told her about it. When I got done she asked me if I'd thought about starting a video blog where I talked about politics and current events, because she thought my way of explaining and describing things was both clearer and more interesting than that of traditional journalism or even of bloggers generally. You see perhaps a sliver of why I like Guinevere so well.

But, it is worth noting that my typical mode is also far less impartial and respectful than that of traditional journalism, while being far less personally invested than your normal blogger. I will call Taro Aso a big jerk, and I will call Hatoyama a clueless dork, and I will describe how they're the two faces of a life of privilege (callousness on the one hand, and pity on the other). At the same time, I don't really care, because neither one of them is as horrible as any of a hundred political leaders I could name from history.

I hold similarly disrespectful and detached views concerning most of American politics. Lately, though, the "right wing" has given itself over to true demagoguery and unthinking wrath. I have to confess that it is difficult for me to remain light-hearted and cheerful in the face of these things.

Even so, I do like talking about these things, and I especially enjoy seeing the light of knowledge spread about. (I may be a stumbling drunk of a torchbearer, but I am proud of the flame I carry nonetheless.) So, I thought I'd throw it out there, and ask… you.

What do you think?

Okay, so I got my copy of the Pathfinder RPG core rulebook on Monday, a little earlier than most people can. Here is your before-the-rush "GenCon starts tomorrow" review. The executive summary is that if you liked D&D v3.5, get this. It's the same, but better.

 

( Read more... )

So, I set up a separate blog to do the Genji thing in, but plan to cross-post to here. The Genji-only blog is here.

It is likely that link will break sometime within the next year, but we'll deal with that announcement when we get to it. Also, there is no reason to visit that link as of 24 July, because I haven't actually posted anything yet.

Wish me luck!

It has been a thousand years or so since “Murasaki Shikibu” wrote the Tale of Genji. She wrote three centuries before Chaucer made English a respectable language for those with literary aspirations. Much of what she wrote borders on the incomprehensible today. And yet, the story of Genji consistently moves me in a way few modern authors can achieve. What the mysterious Lady Murasaki created was beautiful; an excellent work of literature. Its continued endurance is fortunate.

I will not argue that the Tale is the best work of literature ever written. Truth be told, it is not even my favorite piece of Heian-era Japanese literature. I feel a much closer spiritual kinship with the often maladroit Sei Shōnagon and her Pillow Book than with the eminently courtly and refined Murasaki. However, what Sei Shōnagon wrote was confessional nonfiction, and directly expressing oneself is easy. We are endlessly obsessed with ourselves. To be “raw” and “natural” and “authentic” is the easiest thing in the world. We love to talk about ourselves, our opinions, our circumstances. Good esteem or bad, we can barely shut up about how exceptional we are. The very cheapness and ubiquity of reality television highlights the superabundance of our narcissism. Why pay for something we can get for free? Culturally we have forgotten that “Art” is cognate with “artifice”.

The Tale is pointedly artificial, coolly embracing the dichotomy of human nature and human culture. It is not terribly difficult to extract from the Tale an idea of what Lady Murasaki was like, but that is not the point of the exercise. The obvious point is to entertain, and moreover to entertain a fabulously self-regarding and easily jaded audience. It is very clear that Murasaki Shikibu wrote for an audience, and was aware of their demands; she mentions them occasionally. One of the more distressing sections ends with an aside that amounts to, basically, “the audience made me do it”. Eight centuries later, Doyle would resurrect Holmes from his death at Reichenbach Falls for similar reasons.

The strongest evidence of the Tale’s excellence is its simple survival. The most recent English translation, and the one on my shelf, was published in 2001. This is not guarantee of literary worth, of course. The pay records of the English army during the 100 Years’ War were recently published with some fanfare. Still, no one has ever pretended to have read a book of accounts in order to gain cultural credit at a cocktail party.

To be fair, reading the Tale is not an easy task. I am quite certain there are parts of the Tale that I’ve only read in the technical sense; my eyes slid over the page as my brain disengaged and went to knock back a few brews with Morpheus, god of sleep. The thing is mammoth, and the fact that no one ever speaks anyone else’s name gets very confusing very quickly. It is much worse than the Victorian trick of replacing someone’s usual moniker with a single initial and a handful of discreet dashes.

It is probably best to view the Tale as a series of novels. Some are better than others. It helps that the Tale is broken up into a series of novella-length chapters, some of which follow along in neat close-order chronology, and some of which do not. Further evidence of the Tale’s excellence is how many of those novella-chapters reward both facile skimming and deep scrutiny. The individual stories are often interesting in and of themselves, but there is also considerable hidden meaning to be found.

There is symbolism to be uncovered, but symbolism is the literary equivalent of a parlor trick, or possibly hamburger cut with cornmeal. Symbolism usually just offers the illusion of substance. Once you actually work out the hidden meaning, you’re just drinking more Ovaltine. Finnegans Wake, by my estimation, is more a practical joke on Joyce’s part than it was a real work of any literary merit.

In the Tale symbolism is usually used by the characters themselves to allude to something they do not wish to explicitly say. Once you puzzle out who is being referred to, you’re done. Instead of building up semiotic matrices of elaborate self-reference, you instead realize in a sudden flash that a particular action or phrase carries far more emotional freight than you had noticed on first encounter. A glimpse of sleeve will have all the excitement of an unexpectedly illuminated clue in a cozy Christie-style murder mystery, with no need for a corpse to make it matter.

This excitement is the final hallmark of the Tale’s excellence. For heft and subtlety I can turn to Mann’s Magic Mountain, but despite being practically made of pure liquid irony, I never had much fun with that text. For misunderstanding and emotionally complex characters I can read pretty much anything ever written by Dostoevsky, but any shocks delivered will be cold, like winter rain falling unexpectedly on your neck. For a uniquely feminine take on biting satire I can always rely on Austen, but she didn’t write a thousand years ago. So, while I would hesitate to place Murasaki Shikibu above these literary worthies, mostly because I am a dilettante and dislike being told off by my academic superiors, I have no qualms whatever placing her among them.

And what an epic tea party that would be!

So, what happened?

Early Tuesday morning I received catastrophically bad news, of a highly personal nature. Upon returning home, I deleted the majority of my social networking accounts, and made other preparations to cope as best I could. At around noon it turned out that I had been misinformed, or had misunderstood.

But why did you delete all of your social accounts?

I did not wish to make my grief a matter of public record. I was, in effect, removing the temptation to blub.

So you’re back now? This whole embarrassing incident is behind you?

In a manner of speaking, yes. Alternatively, no. I am not expecting to reactivate Twitter anytime soon, and the blog hasn’t seen much activity in ages anyway; “paid” status on LJ lapsed a week or two ago. I only reactivated this LJ account so I can lurk if I feel the need. After all, Ken Hite occasionally posts some interesting recipes.

While catastrophe was averted, my overall life status remains both unpleasant and boring. That means I don’t have much to talk about. Especially in the current global milieu, life is unpleasant and boring for a great many people, including many of the people who care enough to take an interest in my existence. My current circumstances in no way make me special. Further, while I consider myself a competent wordsmith, there is a vast surplus of meditation on ennui. Adding to it would benefit no one. At the moment, I lack the mental fortitude to write anything else. The old saying is, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” In this instance, swap “nice” for “useful” or “entertaining”.

So, I am "officially" packing my kit in for awhile.

But, what was that –30– thing, anyway?

In old-school journalism, –30– signifies the end of a story.

Had an idea for a recipe this morning. Made if for dinner. While doing so, noticed very similar recipe on can of ingredient used. Appended to bottom of recipe, in a grating attempt to be "hip" or whatever it's called these day, was the question: "Now, why didn't you think of that?"

Rude words ensued.

Like that of Nam Sang-guk, Roh's suicide is very saddening.

So, I tried out the Architect "content creator" for City of Punchings (i.e. City of Heroes/Villains). I found myself enamoured of the potential for fiendish subtlety. Those who have played the game and departed? Time to come back.

I'm running a game on Sunday afternoons. The second actual play session was this week (we had a session devoted to character generation). It's a mix of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, a couple ideas from Pathfinder, and some stuff I made up on my own.

So far? Diagnosis: Really fun.

Players, pat yourselves on the back.

You know how, when Gygax shuffled off behind the great DM Screen in the Sky, I said some mean things?

None of those apply to Dave Arneson.

"I know the name of his first love and his last love, and I know why he doesn’t like dragons and why he has scars on his shoulders and his taste in women and why he sleeps alone and which star he looks at as he prays to a Creator he doesn’t trust."

Still rereading some of my old stuff. I've come across a lot of wince-worthy pontification. This bit jumped out and whacked me, though, because i suddenly remembered the character in question vividly… my outlook was bleak back then.

Years ago now, I ran a game set in the Forgotten Realms. Recently, I started a new one. I thought I was done with the Realms (and I was glad to be so), but I kept my binders and notes in storage, just in case. Today I was going through those records, and I found a speech I'd written for the wizardly mentor of the old campaign, Moratha Kane. I really liked it when I wrote it then, and I really liked it today when I came across it again. Moratha always had style – acerbic, pessimistic, generous, sad, without artificial sincerity or false bonhommie, he was always a pleasure to play and to write lines for. Here is the speech, which introduced the adventure. It was delivered on the last hill overlooking the city of Waterdeep, riding north from the Way Inn:

It was gaudy, ridiculous, and very moving.

The cemetery was less gaudy, far less ridiculous, and even more moving… even if the New York monument was overly flamboyant, and the civic boosterism of the memorial managed to get the location of the Lincoln address wrong, the address itself still cuts through the noise of history.

There's a lot of thought left to think. At least I understand why Ken Burns won't shut up about the place.

"Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone."
-- Walter Bagehot

To those who believe Shakespeare was, as a man of limited means, perforce too ill-educated to write those works attributed to his name:

Shut your pie-holes, you worthless piles of fat and drool.

Sincerely,

Wolf

For introducing Jeepform to me. There are some things there that I've no interest in, but when they say things like: "We shall try not to take ourselves too seriously or become pompous asses, which is an easy thing to do in the sub-culture setting." Well…

I've been playing Two Worlds on the weekends. It's not very good, although the PC version is playable. It's basically Morrowind, but with really frustrating mounted combat (your mount has a tendency to change speeds and direction for no apparent reason, and you can only use one-handed weapons… which means lances and spears are for on-foot combat only). Also, the "build your own spells" system is, compared to Morrowind or Oblivion, weak. Very weak. Once I figured that out, I ignored the magic system altogether, which is usually the opposite of how I play…

The writing and voice acting are often itch inducing ("Ye Olde Englishe" words like "mayhap" and "prithee" show up way too often, especially since they're smack in the middle of otherwise Modern paragraphs containing words like "teleport"). The main character also has this irksome habit of launching into monologues where he basically serves as your narrator, describing the world and even going so far as to explain his motives, which may or may not match the actual reason you did something. Underneath that, though, I was shocked to discover that both the good guys and the bad guys had believable motives… and I WAS WORKING FOR THE BAD GUYS! Not because the script had been written that way from the outset. Nope. I'd just signed up with, and been playing for, the wrong team.

Usually I don't play the "Evil" side of a game with a "good or evil" storyline, because [1] the evil is cartoony "I eat kittens because my mother didn't love me" type stuff, and [2] I don't feel the need to get some kind of "evil catharsis" that way. And it's not like I'd made a conscious choice to play against type or anything, either. There were the Roman-looking dudes and the Scottish-Highlander-looking dudes, and I went with the Roman-looking dudes because I ran into them first. I figured both sides were basically rotten, and this was some sort of dystopic "shades of grey" thing. My character was ostensibly a mercenary sort of guy (and the game forces you to play a male bounty hunter, for "story" reasons), so I figured I'd pick up some cash from the other side. It was in the midst of this cash-gathering that I realised that for my original employers, and in the name of imperial security, I was wearing black armour decorated with skulls, burning people out of their homes, blackmailing a guy into betraying his friends by threatening his wife, and (the final insult) going on a fetch mission to cure the boss's VD! Basically, I was standing in a cave, ankle deep in blood, holding a jar for which I'd quested across half the province (labelled "The Cure"), and had a Road to Damascus moment. Meanwhile, the guys I was getting paid to murder were trying to gather the evidence necessary to bypass a corrupt judge and get heard in a higher court, and arguing amongst themselves whether or not it was preferable to seek justice or revenge when they had that evidence. I mean, there was actually a genuine moral conundrum! (If you're wondering, yes, I found what amounts to a third option. I publicly went the justice route, then stole the bad-guy-boss's VD cure while he wasn't looking and tossed it into the sea. The game engine didn't have the ability to do anything with that -- there was no "Evil Goon dies of general paresis while incarcerated!" message -- but I felt a sense of grim satisfaction anyway.)

So, hats off to an otherwise mostly mediocre game for playing the bad guys subtly enough that I actually fell for it… for awhile.

(There is also another, far more cartoony, bad guy side in Two Worlds. I discovered them later. By the time I was running into them on a regular basis, I'd lost interest in the larger story. I probably won't finish the game.)

I have been trying to find the translation from whence comes this quote: "Not at all similar are the race of the immortal gods and the race of men who walk upon the earth."

I do know that it's from Homer's Iliad, Book V. Diomedes is trying to kill Æneas (again), and Apollo is slapping him down.

The exact phrasing shown above comes from Civilization IV, as the "research quote" for Polytheism. It also shows up (with ellipsis) in Kenneth C. Davis' Don't Know Much about Mythology. Both the book and the game came out in 2005. Davis' bibliography lists the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Iliad, but the relevant line in that translation is: "Our kind, immortals of the open sky, will never be like yours, earth-faring men."

If you happen to know the origins for the Civ4/Davis version of the quote, or can find it easily, that'd be spiffy keen. I couldn't find it; I suspect it's either from a recent translation, or a paraphrase of a translation (Buckley's is closest). As a bonus, the same line as rendered by several translators is shown below. Pope, predictably, is the wordiest and takes the most liberties with the actual text. (To quote Richard Bentley: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.")

Buckley
"Consider, O son of Tydeus, and retire, nor wish to think things equal with the gods; for the race of the immortal gods and of men walking on the earth is in nowise similar."

Cowper
Think, and retire, Tydides! nor affect
Equality with Gods; for not the same
Our nature is and theirs who tread the ground.

Earl of Derby
"Be advis'd,
Tydides, and retire; nor as a God
Esteem thyself; since not alike the race
Of Gods immortal and of earth-born men."

Pope
"O son of Tydeus, cease! be wise and see
How vast the difference of the gods and thee;
Distance immense! between the powers that shine
Above, eternal, deathless, and divine,
And mortal man! a wretch of humble birth,
A short-lived reptile in the dust of earth."

Lang
"Think, Tydeides, and shrink, nor desire to match thy
spirit with gods; seeing there is no comparison of the race of immortal
gods and of men that walk upon the earth."

Got a help-wanted ad from MI-6 (yes that MI-6) served up with my personal version online pink sheets (i.e the Financial Times). Guess they didn't notice I'm not a British citizen. Apparently they're hiring operational officers for all three divisions.

Man, that'd be a Hell of a thing. Of course, I could never tell anyone.

Q: "Who do you work for?"

A: "Ninjas… I mean, Wernham Hogg. Yeah. Wernam Hogg. Not ninjas. The opposite of ninjas. No, not pirates! I mean… Look, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you now. But don't feel too bad. It's for national security. In a way you're kind of a hero."