Douglas Rushkoff (the optimistic Gen-X intellectual angel on my right shoulder - on my left shoulder is pessimistic Gen-X intellectual devil Tom Frank) on the RNC last night:

I felt a bit nauseous watching the Republican convention last night. I’m very much a give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt kind of guy, so I try to listen to the arguments people make even when they’re made in over-the-top or patronizing ways. Sometimes it’s good to distinguish between the rhetorical devices and the underlying substance. Even people who use manipulative language sometimes have an important point beneath their persuasion techniques (ads against smoking, for example).

I usually don’t feel uneasy when I put those filters on, but last night - during the Guiliani speech - I realized I was no longer filtering a speechwriter’s intentional manipulation; I was trying to look beyond real hate. These folks were gritting their teeth, shaking their fists, and smiling the way gladiators do when going into combat against barbarians. And this is the incumbent party. The ones currently in power.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor - a bulldog with lipstick - than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

In their attack on community organizing - a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant - Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.

But it actually goes deeper than this. Consider how Republicans have so far justified their choice of candidate: he is a “great man.” That America needs a “hero” in the White House to lead us in continued preemptive strikes against Bin Laden in Iraq (I know Bin Laden is not in Iraq, but Giuliani clearly implied he was). Only a leader with McCain’s war record and paternal qualifications can help Americans muster and maintain the tenacity necessary to “drill baby drill,” (even though this will have no influence on oil price or supply) and generate the requisite hate to “kill baby, kill.” As I explained in Coercion, having a parent figure on whom to transfer authority allows people to regress to a more childlike state. This not only allows them to feel safe; if gives them the freedom to express their rage. Make no mistake - that’s what we’re witnessing. And this rage - not America - is the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term chances for survival.

Republican party representatives are proud today that their convention has finally produced the “same level of energy and enthusiasm” as the DNC’s last week. And while it may have produced the same level of excitement, the excitement was of a very different character. It’s much easier to get people riled up but inviting them to hate a man - particularly one who they haven’t been allowed to hate for traditional reasons. Giuliani’s job - much like his job as mayor of NYC - was to give the Republicans in attendance permission to hate Obama and the potentially intelligent society he represents. It’s not about city vs. country or educated vs. military. It’s about thought vs. violence.

Tags: not my other blog, politics

I don’t talk much politics here, but The Phil Nugent Experience is one political blog I can usually read without curling up into a ball crying.  Also: “Drill, Baby, Drill”? Really?

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

A biography of Jack Parsons, occultist and rocketeer, in comic book form.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Random idea I'm too busy/lazy to work up into a series of posts:

Anyone remember that "Just Imagine" series of comics where a wondering world "finally" got to see how Stan Lee would "re-imagine" the classic DC Heroes? So you had "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creating Superman," "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creates Batman," and so on. Insert Stan-bashing joke here, except it's just too easy, so instead I'll link to "Just Imagine... Stan Lee creating the Watchmen."

So I was thinking about how, in both good ways and bad, Gary Gygax was like the Stan Lee of gaming. And I started to amuse myself by "just imagining" Gary Gygax's Dogs in the Vineyard, or Gary Gygax's Unknown Armies, or any fairly non-Gygaxian game you have an affinity for, with all kinds of Gygaxian verbiage and random tables and anagrams of Gygax for all the place names.

And then jeffwik  and bryant  both posted postmortems on recent games they've run (and let me just say that you two may not be entirely happy with everything about them, but I'd have knifed a moderately-sized orangutan to play in either one) and that got me thinking about old games I've played in and old games I wish I'd played in, and that turned the Just Imagine idea into something where I'd mix and match the names of classic games from our circle onto the interests and obsessions of game masters from same.  In other words:

• Just Imagine... jeffwik's Orlando Trash! (you know, because of Jeff's Disney thing)
  
• Just Imagine... bryant's Airportation! (no idea what this would be - it's just a name with potential)
  
• Just Imagine... robotnik's Uncanny Valley! (no idea what that would be about either - robots, presumably - I've just always been jealous of that as a name for a game)
  
• Just Imagine... jeregenest's Through the Delbruek Gate! (dunno - the name just sounds like it could be Jeremiah's), that or else jeregenest's Unknown USA (that I'd dig).
• Just Imagine... mgrasso 's Pantellos! (faeries, natch)

(I'm missing lots of key people, I know, but I'm coming up with these games off the top of my head. And the names of most of the cool head58 games I can remember reading about take the form "[adjective] Star Wars.")

So anyway: just imagine... I finished and fleshed out this post!

Tags: boston, gaming, gilts

Mills Kelly is teaching a course this year that has me seething with jealousy awed respect: Lying About The Past, complete with a second term create-a-hoax practicum.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

There’s a great article by writer Joshuah Bearman in this month’s last month’s (what do you want from me: I’m a historian) Harper’s about Billy Mitchell and the world’s best Pac-Man players. Mitchell is the subject of the recent documentary King of Kong, and he is a total piece of work, but I won’t spoil that if you haven’t seen the movie. While focusing on Pac-Man rather than Donkey Kong, the Harper’s article necessarily covers some of the same ground as the film. But the parts I really like are about the zen of classic arcade games: the difference between Pac-Man’s complex but essentially predictable patterns and the randomized unknowability of Ms Pac-Man (ah, woman); Mitchell’s analytical schematic approach versus the dream-inspired chaos surfing of Abdner Ashman; and (shades of Lucky Wander Boy) the eternal mystery of the “kill screen” and What Lies Beyond.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Chef Julia Child, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., White Sox catcher Moe Berg, and the proverbial many more served in an “international spy ring” for the OSS during WWII.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Celestial Monochord goo-maps the Anthology of American Folk Music. What part of that sentence isn’t awesome? (See also.)

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Emo and goth to be made illegal in Russia? Don’t they know if we outlaw emo, only outlaws will be emo?

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Scott Kaufman reports (without, alas, documentation) that Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale based their Batman on Teddy Roosevelt.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

From the “We survived, didn’t we?” department: A paean to old, dangerous playground equipment. (But see Greg Downey’s astute response.)

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

"Whoa, sounds like somebody's living in the past. Contemporize, man!"

P.S. I'm aware there's something sorta kinda sad about posting pages of text on a five year old roleplay campaign. Of course, I do live in the past, in more ways than one. But in the spirit of living in the now, I should note that I am still playing in that ridonkulous 30-year OD&D campaign I mentioned before and I've also hooked up with a promising bunch of local gamers whose style might be closer to what we had in Boston. I'm hoping to run a 4-5 session Cold City or PTA game with them. The beast, as always, is scheduling.

Tags: gaming, london, not my other blog

A few months ago I mentioned the film student who was interested in trying to turn Unknown USA into a screenplay. He and I have bounced a couple of emails back and forth since then with him asking for clarifications and elaborations of various things on the wiki. All y'all who have GM'ed before know how fun and rare and self-indulgent that is, somebody actually asking you to yammer on at length about some old game of yours. So that's fun.

The first question he hit me with was "what's the deal with Danny Greer?" and my answer turned into a frickin novel, which, among other things explains what the hell I thought was going on in that session with the Hollow Earth and the Silver Age Knights of the Road and the Oneiros. Which you sure didn't ask to read, but ( that's what LJ-cuts and the vertical scroll bar are for. )

Tags: gaming, nostalgia, not my other blog, unknown usa