Less Brooding and More Examining

My wife and I took advantage of being near to our closest Barnes and Nobles bookstore on Saturday that we decided to drop in for a little while. The last time I was at this Barnes and Nobles was several months ago, and after putting up my post at the end of last week, I thought it a good idea to follow up on whether or not I could find some of those authors I mentioned on the SF&F bookshelves.

At least this particular Barnes and Noble separates Science Fiction and Fantasy into two separate sections --they did this about 3-4 years ago I believe-- and as Bhagpuss observed Fantasy outstrips Science Fiction in shelf space. But you know what outstrips both combined? Manga. 

Here's a crude representation of the SF&F / Comics section at our B&N:

This is as of November 1, 2025.

It's an approximate design, as I was using Paint and it isn't exactly a precise tool. However, as you can see, Fantasy and Science Fiction took up about 5/6 of the interior section of three bookcases, with Fantasy getting 3/6 and SF getting 2/6, with the last 1/6 a depository for SFF-related oversized books as well as some RPGs. The RPGs shared space with other Western-style comics in the smaller shelf in the center, whereas Manga had the entire outer portion of the bookshelf to themselves. And to be honest, I might not be quite representing this accurately, as there might be even more manga shelves that I missed.

Anyway, all that's past is prologue, so let's get to the interesting part: the books.

For starters on the Fantasy side of things, no David Eddings. There was plenty of Terry Brooks, which I'd seen numerous times before, but Terry is still actively writing so that gives him a boost over the deceased Eddings. There was also no Katherine Kurtz, Katherine Kerr, or Janny Wurtz, which again tracks with what I'd seen before. There was also no Fritz Leiber, but guess where I did find a book of his? In the Science Fiction section:

As of November 1, 2025.

That was surprising, given that his arguably most well-known works are the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser collections. 

I'll use that as an excuse to flip over to the SF section, which when I was last at B&N was indeed very thin. However, in the intervening months, it seems that either the corporate leadership or the local ownership* decided to beef up the SF section quite a bit. There was always quite a few Isaac Asimov books around, although they apparently have yet another cover design, but given that Foundation was (relatively) recently loosely adapted into a television series, I guess that's no surprise.

Ray Bradbury, however, is having a bit of a moment.

As of November 1, 2025.

Because of the video adaptation, classroom requirements, and the political climate, Fahrenheit 451 is present in large numbers. However, it was rather nice to see The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes as well.

Arthur C. Clarke, while not being given even close to the amount of shelf space as Asimov or Bradbury, still has at least a few books present:

As of November 1, 2025.

If you were going to pick 3-4 books of Clarke's to be there, I'd expect Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001, all of which are present. There's also 2010: Odyssey Two, which is an okay sequel, but I guess it's there because 2001 is there. 

And yeah, I suppose I ought to mention Bob Heinlein:

As of November 1, 2025.

At least the back of Starship Troopers mentions that it is a controversial novel, something which my old Berkley Books edition never did. Speaking of which, it's interesting that Heinlein's novels are being reprinted by Ace, as opposed to Berkley and Baen**, which were you'd find his novels back in the 80s. Given that Ace is now a subsidiary of Berkley, I guess that makes sense, but while investigating who owns what imprint for this post holy crap is the publishing industry consolidated these days. I can easily see why some people go and self-publish if the consolidation of the publishing industry is any clue.

So there you have it. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself incorrect with regards to the SF authors, and maybe that's an indicator that some other novels I read back in the day may have a chance in the sun as well.

*I'm betting on the local ownership, because while the corporate overlords have some say in the overall layout and the big displays around the store, the composition of individual areas will reflect local tastes and what sells.

*Given Baen's current publishing focus in Military SF, it's no surprise that Heinlein's old 40s-60 short stories ended up being published by them in the 80s/90s. As I'd mentioned before, Heinlein's works --particularly his older short stories, have aged really badly, and I suppose you could see his imprint on Baen's authorial focus, particularly some of the right wing aspects of Baen's output.

Wherever I Go, There's a Bookstore

I think it says something about me and my family that my wife and I visited out oldest up in Milwaukee this past weekend* and we spent part of our time in the bookstore that is below her and her partner's apartment.

Oh, we did go to a museum --The Milwaukee Public Museum, and yes, it's totally worth the trip-- and we also attended a concert by one of the local community orchestras that my oldest's partner plays bassoon in, but we can't have a trip anywhere without visiting a bookstore. 

Here's the proof. I sat down on a bench
in the store, looked to my right, and there
it was. I'd been thinking about buying this
classic, and I took this serendipity as a sign.

Some of my fondest vacation memories as a kid involved bookstores. Such as the time when we went down to Jekyll Island, Georgia (my parents rented a house for the week). I wasn't interested in hanging around the beach**, so I read the books I brought. We managed to find a small bookstore in a strip mall nearby when we made an excursion to check out the area, and I found these books:

Yes, I was on an Isaac Asimov kick at the time.
Then again, he wrote a metric ton of books of all types,
so it was kind of hard to avoid his works back in the day.

Asimov on Physics was right up my alley because that's what I eventually majored in at university, but I'd argue that Asimov on Science Fiction fueled my interest in writing far more than any other book at that time.

To be clear, both books were compilations of articles that Isaac had written for various magazines, from his own Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine to Galaxy Science Fiction to Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction.***

I devoured that book (from Isaac's perspective) on the history and writing of Science Fiction, and it inspired me to try my hand at writing. 'Try' being the operative word here, because if you thought some of the stuff I put here on the blog is pretty bad, my first attempts at writing articles and fiction in high school were abjectly terrible. I still don't know how I got good grades in English back then, because I occasionally come across an old piece I wrote for class and shudder.

Still, I can also see Asimov's influence on my writer's voice when I occasionally return to this and other essay compilations of his. Unlike Stephen King, whose book On Writing I used as a springboard to learn how to edit better, Asimov provided me positive reinforcement that yes, I could write and I really ought to try my hand at it. The book also taught me that short story magazines were still alive and well (okay, at least 'alive'**** these days) and were worthwhile to read. If it weren't for that, I'd never have gotten to enjoy some really good stories. 

***

There is something oddly comforting about visiting a bookstore, especially for the first time. Sure, with the big stores (such as Barnes and Noble) there's likely to be a bunch of people there who are not readers but are with someone who is*****, but the independent bookstores tend to be packed with readers who genuinely love books. If you ask them and given them a blank slate, they are happy to provide a pile of books to read.

That actually happened to me over a decade ago, when I went to our local bookstore and when someone there asked if I needed any assistance, I admitted that I'd fallen off the wagon as far as reading SF&F goes, and I asked what books I ought to try out. The employee was almost giddy in that he instantly provided me with six books to read and pointed out about another half dozen or more to pick up after I was finished with those. Not all of his recommendations stuck with me --the John Ringo book I only got about 30 pages in before I decided he was far too overtly political for my tastes-- but I did find subgenres I'd have never tried were it not for his encouragement. 

Maybe I need to get out of my comfort zone again and try some specialist independent bookstores, such as Mystery or Romance bookstores. 

*Yes, the Meme Monday was written and scheduled beforehand.

**It stunk of dead fish. And before you say "Hey, what about that endless teen boy pastime of checking out girls?" yes, I can say that I did check out girls. I just made a point of doing that when my parents weren't around, and if I'd have walked over to the beach they would have been there. All. The. Time.

***Galaxy may --may-- have had a relaunch in 2024, but I haven't seen it at a bookstore yet. IASFM is now currently known as Asimov's Science Fiction as you'll see on the website, and Astounding became Analog and is now formally known as Analog Science Fiction Science Fact. Analog and Asimov's are published by Must Read Magazines, the same imprint that also publishes Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Where's The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, you may ask? Well, they began having printing issues, and I've only seen an issue or two since 2023. I did see this thread on Reddit indicating that a fan purchased the magazine with the attempt to save it, but I have no idea if that'll come to fruition. F&SF had a long history in print, and it was one of the last Fantasy fiction magazines out there. If I won the lottery, this would have been one of the things I would try to save from oblivion.

****Aaaand the deeper I've delved into this, the Must Read Magazines imprint also includes F&SF magazine, and the so-called fan (plus the intentionally vague 'group of investors') have been putting out contracts with 'morals clauses' and some pretty onerous ceding of rights in them. This does not bode well for the future of all five magazines, because I've this feeling that there's a private investment firm trying to squeeze every last dollar behind the magazines' intellectual property for their personal benefit. I'll keep an eye on Writer Beware articles for this going forward.

*****Or are buying a book for someone who is a reader.

Time Marches On

My wife and I met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore, and afterward we wandered the stacks. I espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale, and I immediately felt a bit wistful. It reminded me that the first boardgame store I visited here, Boardwalk Hobby Shop, had closed during the pandemic. The owners had decided to retire, and like I said in a previous post, I couldn't begrudge them that. 

The day before I was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop, as her current one is far too old and slow to handle Windows 11, and I needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled.* Naturally, I went to Microcenter, and afterward I stopped by my nearby Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), YottaQuest.

I wasn't there to buy anything --because laptop, you know-- but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place. Those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents, and they weren't there just because their grandkids wanted to visit,** but to actually buy something themselves. 

I took this pic last Fall, when there were
leaves everywhere. Even on a nose or two.

Time marches on, but I hope that some things continue. Such as good bookstores and game stores.

*Having spent the last 12+ years buying laptops for the kids, I've seen a lot of trends. Such as the decline of HP in terms of quality --holy hell are those laptops flimsy-- and the rise of Acer as a viable brand. I remember when Acer's Aspire line used to be nicknamed "Expire" because of how poorly powered and built they were, but HP has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff. I still refuse to touch Dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it's fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat. Tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working. And I won't get into the overheating problems with that laptop, either.

**That was my experience as a kid when I'd drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore.

#Blaugust2025

Time for a Bit of Scrabble

If you ever wondered if you could just go off script and do your own thing in Retail WoW, yes you can.

However, it's not easy.

If you do what I did and deleted the Dragon expansion seed quest because I decided I was going to ignore what Blizzard threw at me and just go my own way...

Guess what happens when you log back in?

Note the lack of a "Close" button or an X in the top right corner.

Yep. You're forced into accepting the quest again. Even if you hit the Escape key, you get this:

I'm really starting to dislike the sound of his voice.

So you have to either accept the quest and then simply ignore it, or you are in a constant state of having to abandon the quest only to have it automatically reappear. Apparently this has been a thing for quite a while, judging by the Blizzard forums:

As of June 2, 2025, although this was posted in 2023.

The best I can do is accept the quest and then untrack it, and that's that. 

When you think about it, simply going off script appears to be an option that Retail WoW doesn't know how to handle. Player driven fun, such as what I described at the end of this post here, is something that Retail WoW isn't really built for. And I'll be honest, I doubt it's very much on Blizzard's mind at all.*

It certainly seems that there's a dual problem in Retail at this juncture with regards to unscripted play: the player base is simply not interested in that, and Blizzard takes the lead in providing things for players to do. There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here as to which came first, but it certainly seems that players are fine with following whatever tasks or events that Blizzard sets out. This puts the onus on Blizzard to provide "fun" for the players, rather than the players taking the initiative to work out fun for themselves. 

I get it: that pendulum toward player directed fun can swing so far that it could be a disaster. Just look at Fallout 76 and how Bethesda was so sure that players would come up with their own content that it simply fell flat on its face when that didn't happen. You need to provide some structure to a game world, and I think Bethesda finally realized much too late that they'd better get some NPCs and traditional quests in there right pronto. Still I wonder if the pendulum has swung so far toward doing whatever Blizzard hands out without questioning whether we, the players, could make up something better to do.

But judging by all the hoops I have to jump through to just go off in my own direction, I don't think Blizzard really wants me to do that either. It's almost as if people who decide to go investigate what's over the next hill are relegated to the Classic side of the fence, where all the malcontents who won't do as their told reside.**

***

As for Livona, I did take a flightpath through Kalimdor just to see another place that no longer exists in the current state of Retail:

Yeah, I think I'm going to not do any more recent expansions. I might be living in the past, but at least there's a damn World Tree here. I can guarantee that Cardwyn would have said "fuck it" years ago and given the middle finger to any starter quests, echoing a certain parody novel...

Just then a soft knocking came at the door.

"Dammit," muttered Frito, roused from his reveries. "Who's there?"

There was no reply save another, more insistent knock.

"Okay, okay, I'm coming," Frito went to the door and opened it.

There on the stoop were twenty-three lyre-strumming nymphs in gauzy pant-suits couched in a golden canoe borne on the cool mists of a hundred fire extinguishers and crewed by a dozen tipsy leprechauns uniformed in shimmering middy-blouses and fringed toreador pants. Facing Frito was a twelve-foot specter shrouded in red sateen, shod in bejeweled riding boots, and mounted on an obese, pale-blue unicorn. Around him fluttered winged frogs, miniature Valkyries, and an airborne caduceus. The tall figure offered Frito a six-fingered hand which held a curiously inscribed identification bracelet simply crawling with mysterious portents.

"I understand," said the stranger solemnly, "that you undertake quests."

Frito banged the door shut in the specter's surprised face, bolted, barred, and locked it, swallowing the key for good measure. Then he walked directly to his cozy fire and slumped in the chair. He began to muse upon the years of delicious boredom that lay ahead. Perhaps he would take up Scrabble.

--From Bored of the Rings by The Harvard Lampoon, page 149.

*I actually do know something about what's on Blizzard's mind, but I'm not allowed to divulge that information right now.

**That's not necessarily a surprise, as were it not for the malcontents there wouldn't be a WoW Classic in the first place. And to be perfectly blunt, if WoW Classic didn't exist, there wouldn't likely be a Dragonflight or War Within, because Retail WoW would have died when BfA and then Shadowlands' poor design and execution caused subscriptions to plummet. It was Classic WoW that kept Retail afloat during those days.

Putting Words to Passion

One of the nice things about going to a bookstore is that you might walk in on an event and be instantly enthralled.

That happened on Tuesday, as my wife went down to Louisville to visit with her aged parents* and to watch a concert our youngest played in. If I left after work I might have been able to make it if I didn't have traffic and I didn't get pulled over for speeding, but I figured I'd better not risk it.** Since my wife was spending the night down there I decided to visit the bookstore. 

The moment I walked through the doors I knew something was up; a huge crowd had assembled to my right with a speaker at the podium.

"What's going on?" I asked one of the booksellers.

"It's an author signing."

Then I noticed the big poster next to the author:

From Joseph-Beth's Facebook page (and Hanif Abdurraqib).

I'd heard about that book before, but I couldn't exactly remember where. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The basketball guy."

"Yeah, the basketball guy," the bookseller confirmed. "Go over and listen!"

If on the surface the book was about basketball, considering it was broken into sections about pre-game, the various quarters, time outs, and whatnot, the book was not strictly about basketball itself. It was more a set of essays about life and family and friendship, mixed in with poetry.

But hearing Hanif speak, and listening to him read sections of the book... Holy crap, can that man write. 

It was an otherworldly experience when Hanif read, whether it was opining on when he thought Michael Jordan was at his coolest --the 1985 slam dunk contest-- or relating the story when a friend of his asked him to cut her hair off. However, what charmed me the most was when he was simply discussing things with the audience, about how the first line of this book came to him in a "Boogie Nights"-esque way, or how he'd read Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron in his youth.

"Wow, he's amazing," I said to another bookseller, who was standing nearby, also listening.

"Yeah, he's good," he replied.

"Yeah, if I had only a quarter of his talent... Just, wow."

The bookseller told me they were really pleased with the turnout, and given that Hanif's book tour was only to a handful of locations --Ann Arbor, Michigan, was next-- I think that Hanif knew his audience. 

Hanif also had high praise for his editor, and he hammered home how vital he believed editors were to the creative process. I can't remember the last time I heard an author at a signing give so much praise to their editor in an unprompted manner, and it felt so refreshing for Hanif to give some love to that often overlooked person in publishing.

It was a ticketed event, so I'd have had to have bought a ticket --which included a copy of the book-- for him to sign, but that's fine. I can go back another time and grab a copy of the book. In the meantime, I picked up another one of his books, a collection of essays on music and pop culture, to tide me over.

***

Speaking of things to tide me over...

I asked my questing buddy, a voracious reader in her own right, what I ought to be looking out for. 

"'When the Moon Hatched,' by Sarah Parker," she replied. She'd apparently had her eye on it for quite a while.

Although part of the store was taken up by the event with Hanif, I managed to find it in the SF&F section.

There were quite a few copies there,
which is a pretty good sign.

"It's pretty thick," I told her later.

"How many pages is it?" she asked.

I thumbed through the book to the end. "690 pages."

"OOOO...."

*They're both in their 90s and are still kicking.

**I much prefer the weekend concerts, which I can make more easily. That being said, my time away from home the past couple of weeks kept me from taking the afternoon off to go on down as well. Even then, I would have had to come back that evening because my wife was intent on staying the night anyway. Luckily, my wife informed me that I'd already heard the music they played at a previous concert I attended.

A Short Interlude

I was at our local independent bookstore the other day, perusing the YA stacks, when a teenaged couple stopped by.* The girl marched right up to the staff picks on the left, grabbed a book, and presented it to the boy. 

"That was fast," the boy said. 

"I know this place like the back of my hand," the girl announced confidently. 

I gave them some privacy and moved away with a little smile on my face. In the 1980s I would have said that about our local bookstore just a 5 minute bike ride away.

You know, I don't think reading is dead just yet. 

I've experienced this same feeling lately, watching teenage gamers at my local game store, or even watching YouTube videos put out by younger people so obviously invested in reading or tabletop gaming. When you need every bit of positivity a lot of these days, I take some comfort in that the next generation of geeks is ready to shoulder the load and teach the generation after them to love these pastimes. 

*I only got a cursory glance at them, so I couldn't tell if they were high school or college age for certain, but my guess was they were about 16 years old. Maybe 17.

Vacation's Over

Well, after a week off, I bought 60 days of WoW game time from Microsoft.

That week away felt good, actually. After a good 48 hours of FOMO, I guess I detoxed enough that it wasn't a big issue any more.

Relaxing while killing things works in my book.
And yes, the guild advertisement and the commentary
amused me to no end.

Playing some other games for a while, such as SWTOR, LOTRO, Rome: Total War, and Stardew Valley were good for the soul as well. I didn't have to read about any raid drama, PvP issues, boosts, or any other shenanigans, so I simply got a chance to relax and do whatever.

Oh, and I read a bit too. 

Here's some proof of that.

But one thing I continued reading was this:

Nowadays, there are three levels:
Technician, General, and Extra.
This is the study manual for the Technician exam.

Yes, after 30+ years of being a shortwave radio listener, I'm studying for my amateur radio license. It's something to do, and to be honest I've forgotten more in the study guide than I care to admit. Until this past year I've never had any desire to get on the air, but some of the more recent natural disasters have gotten me to thinking that I can do some good in a small way by providing communications in this age of extreme climate-change driven weather. Plus, tinkering around with electronics is one of my hobbies. And it gives me an excuse to go about 60 miles north to the annual Dayton Hamvention, the largest amateur radio convention in the US. Whether I'll actually have a ham license before I visit is an open question, but you don't need one to attend anyway. I've gone several times over the past few decades, and I always find something interesting there.

Keeping that Sense of Mystery

I make a point to watch long standing developer Tim Cain's Cain on Games YouTube channel. He has decades of experience creating video games, and as a long time player/coder myself*, I really enjoy his insight into designing and creating games. Today, his post was a quick world building tip:

For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation. 

This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling. 

Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.

You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away. 

That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.

Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well. 

One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.

And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)

*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.

Fighting the Demons

The other week, my son asked me how Baldur's Gate 3 was going. 

"I haven't really touched it since we last talked about it a month ago," I replied. He is quite aware that I try not to go bananas when playing a video game, and for me that means playing a game in fits and starts.

Yes, I'm aware that I play MMOs --and WoW Classic Era-- very regularly. The thing is, in those games I'm not very goal oriented these days, so it's more to play just so I can hang out with other people. Or people watch wherever I'm at.

There's always something going on in Vivec City.
Even at the bank.

Still, I worry about my ability to control myself, as I have the tendency is to go "all-in" on playing a game I like that I'm progressing through. So I play a bit, then I force myself to back off. Once I create a bit of separation, that magical pull that a game or a book or a piece of music has on me lessens, and I feel better able to balance my desires with my needs. 

BG3 is definitely a game that I enjoy playing. It has some moments that make me go WTF, such as your companions' backstories*, but overall I enjoy it a lot. It scratches that RPG itch that I don't get often enough these days, just as Age of Wonders 4 scratches that Fantasy building game itch that Master of Magic first gave me.**

Hey Sundren, how are you doing?
I remember you from Age of Wonders III.

So when I told my son that I hadn't played in what was effectively a month, he wasn't surprised. One of his friends had begun playing BG3 recently, and he was having to balance the video game with all of his grad school work that needed to be finished before the end of the semester. I didn't envy that friend of his one damn bit.

***

I suppose I've always known to a certain extent that I am prone to addiction. 

If I find something I like, I tend to do it over and over to an almost unhealthy extent. Even before the Satanic Panic derailed my D&D youth, I used to read and re-read The Lord of the Rings. And before that, The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.

This was the version of the books that I had.
From Amazon.

I clearly remember my dad coming into my room when I was in 8th Grade and sick with a cold, and he informed me I had better start reading something else than "those darn Tolkien books". Of course, that made me want to re-read them even more often just to spite him, but I instead turned my mind toward other Fantasy and Science Fiction***.

During my freshman year at college, I had problems transitioning to college level work because I got distracted by Star Trek, of all things.**** That Fall of 1987 was when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted, and the friends at college and I would watch the show religiously and talk about it after. The internet was still in its protracted infancy and email access was restricted at UD, so those of us who liked geeky pastimes could only rely upon face-to-face contact for such discussion. So there I was, struggling to keep up with my studies, but all I could think about was Star Trek. 

Yes, I was a nerd. You had to ask?

When my grades began slipping to the point where my scholarship was in danger --and my dad made sure I knew about it-- I had to take drastic action. So I began dialing it back on Captain Picard and crew.

I wasn't as self-destructive as some people I knew in college, such as the person who lived in the dorm next to me. He didn't last a semester at college, as about 6-8 weeks in he discovered the pleasures of partying and simply stopped caring about his classes.***** His girlfriend (who was attending Notre Dame) contacted us because he had even gone silent with her, and she was worried. My roommate and a couple of other people on our dorm floor, including our Resident Assistant, basically held an intervention and convinced him it was smarter to drop out to get his life back together before he ruined it completely.#

Still, watching that happen was a sobering experience. There were several instances of people on my dorm floor imploding and getting themselves on academic probation, enough so that the joke was that our floor had the lowest GPA in the entire building, and that was despite several people with excellent grades calling our floor home.

***

Even today I have to be careful lest I get sucked into some distraction to the point where I haven't gotten any of the normal activities of home life completed. This goes for work as well, because I've had to be told more than once over the course of my career to basically "stay in my lane" and not do other work I found interesting but wasn't part of my job description. 

So while I'd love to be farther along in playing some of these video games, I know that I have to be on my guard. Writing down lists of things to do, much like how you'd write out a grocery list, help to keep me on track from being distracted too much, but even then my sense of time can get all thrown off when I'm absorbed in something. Maybe I ought to set a timer.

You and me both, Jodi.

*I have a post I'm working on about that.

**I should clarify that the original Sim City, Sim Earth, and hell, even Santa Paravia for those old farts like me were the video games that inspired my love of building and development games. 

I actually have a printout of the source code
of the game in TRS-80 BASIC. I'd meant to convert
it to TI-99 4/A BASIC, but I never got around to
it. Something something hormones something something.
From datadrivengamer.blogspot.com.

***Likely to his displeasure. He never read fiction, much less F&SF.

****Given that I went to an all-boys high school, you'd think that I'd have said "girls" instead of Star Trek. And you're not wrong in that having girls in classes were a distraction after years of not having them around, but you have to understand I dealt with that already in high school. My junior year of high school I took Spanish III, and since only two of us signed up for the class they sent us over to the "sister" all-girls high school next door. I should have known that something was up when my classmate and I discovered we were in two separate classes, but even I was surprised on that first day of school I walked to the classroom and knocked, only to see thirty pairs of eyes turn and look at me. 

"Spanish III?" I asked.

The teacher smiled. "Sí sí," she replied. "Red?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, my face likely showing my mind turning to mush, as a wave of laughter swept the the class. It wasn't enough that I was outnumbered 30:1, but that they were all really attractive as well meant that I was in for a very long year.

"Do you want to sit somewhere up here?" the teacher asked, motioning to a desk in front. 

"No, I'll take this one right. back. here." I replied, sliding into the desk in the back by the door to another round of light laughter.

TL;DR: I survived the year, but that's because I made myself as invisible as possible. I'd say about 5-6 of the girls knew me from grade school, so most of them were a total unknown to me. My biggest takeaway from that year was that if you kept quiet you got to hear all sorts of interesting things about people's lives, particularly their love life. I also (now) realized that I missed a few obvious hints that some of the girls dropped that they were interested in me. This period of my life will come back from time to time, so don't be surprised if this reappears in a subsequent post.

*****I was there when it happened; we'd gone out on a Saturday night to the university village, nicknamed The Ghetto at the time, and we came across a student house that had kegs there but very few people in attendance. At the time I didn't drink so I passed (they got me a Mt. Dew, I think), but about halfway through his first beer our floormate decided he really really liked that stuff and he just started plowing through the beer like there was no tomorrow. He and another guy we were with got totally plastered and it took us the better part of an hour to walk them back to the dorm.

#As far as I know, it didn't help. Someone who was a mutual acquaintance ran into him at a concert back in their hometown a year or two later, and he was well down the "throwing your life away" path.

EtA: I corrected the time from 3-4 weeks to 6-8 weeks, as it was late October when this began.

Keeping the Fire Going

Sometimes the inspiration for a post comes from out of left field*, and this certainly fits.

Zinn over in Jinxed Thoughts --yes, Zinn's back!-- had a post this evening about a Choose Your Own Adventure book series, called Dice Man:

From Jinxed Thoughts.

Zinn is a fan of Judge Dredd, and so that cover caught her eye. Only one of the stories covers ol' Dredd, but that's fine. That post she wrote jogged my memories about the Choose Your Own... style books that I'd bought back in the 80s while I was forbidden from playing RPGs, and I have no idea where they are now: Tolkien Quest/Middle Earth Quest series and the Lone Wolf series.

***

I had the top three books, but this is
a sampling of what was put out.
From u/aelphia on this Reddit thread.

Let's talk Tolkien first, shall we?

This was my gateway drug into the Middle-earth Roleplaying System by Iron Crown Enterprises, but I'd almost completely forgot that little factoid. Back in the 80s when I was banned from RPGs, the first book appeared at one of our local bookstores,** so I naturally snapped it up. 

Inside the book looked a lot like the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, only there were fights and skill checks involved, and for those checks you could either close your eyes and point a pencil at a page in the back with random numbers on it or you could get out some dice and ...you know... roll for it. There was even a miniature character sheet in the back, as I recall, and the story itself was well done.

I know now that the book, being produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, meant that the quality was bound to be high, but I had no idea what to expect. I mean, the old Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves suffered from uneven quality from book to book, so I had kind of steeled myself for a potential let-down.

But the best part? It looked like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so it passed whatever invisible inspection my parents' had, and besides it was the size of a paperback***, so I could easily toss it in a book bag or in the middle of some other books and nobody was the wiser.  After the third book I didn't see any more being published, but that was okay by me; by then I'd moved on to hiding the MERP RPG books themselves in my room.

Having done some short research, it appears that the series was restarted when I was away at college, which is why the actual number of Middle-earth Quest books is much larger than the three I remember.

***

There was also another reason why I was okay with the Middle-earth Quest series ending, and it was this series that I stumbled upon at that same bookstore:

From the Lone Wolf Fandom Wiki.

I knew from the moment I saw it that I was too old for the target audience, but I quickly snapped it up and skimmed the inside anyway. There was a similar system in place to that of the Middle-earth Quest books, so I acknowledged that it was more for elementary and middle-school kids and swallowed my pride and bought it. 

Looking back on those Lone Wolf books now, I can see the obvious kid-oriented plots, but I was still happy to feed my RPG habit with these supercharged Choose Your Own Adventure style books. The funny thing is, I tired of these more quickly than the Middle-earth Quest books, mainly because after the first story arc finished, the author Joe Dever went back and started another story arc with your character essentially starting all over again. In an echo of complaints about every MMO expac ever, I wasn't so thrilled to essentially toss out all of my old abilities and weapons just because. Still, I have some very fond memories of these books that kept the RPG flame alive for me in the 80s when things looked bleak for me.

#Blaugust2023

*A slang term referencing baseball. The outfield in baseball is the farthest away from home plate, so "out of left field" is slang for "from out of nowhere".

**It feels so weird saying 'bookstores' these days, but when I look back on it, the 70s and 80s were 38-48 years ago. We even had a bookstore at the local strip mall a short bike ride away from my home, and that's something my own kids would never ever comprehend. To them, going to a bookstore is a "pile into the car and drive for 20 minutes" event, especially since the Borders 10 minutes away closed back in 2011. And that was the summer before our oldest mini-Red began Seventh Grade; she'll be 25 this Fall. (!)

***And cost as little as one, too!

What on Earth is Red Reading This Time: The Lost Family

What if something potentially fun and lighthearted, or just a personal curiosity, takes a sharp turn off the highway and deposits you in the middle of nowhere, adrift without any cell signal nearby?

This isn't the plot of a novel, but metaphorically speaking this is what happened to Alice Collins Plebuch when her work on her family tree took a decidedly unexpected direction. All she had to do was spit into a vial and send it off to a DNA testing site, such as 23andMe or AncestryDNA, and await the results. What she got back, however, wasn't the Irish ancestry she expected. Alice experienced what genealogists call a NPE, a Non-Paternity Event, where your parent isn't the one you thought they were. Sometimes it's an adoption that was hushed up, it's the usage of donor sperm for insemination, or the byproduct of an affair. Or sometimes the NPE was something darker. The result of experiencing an NPE, however is that it can turn the recipient into what is known as a "Seeker", trying to find out the answers behind the NPE no matter where the path leads.

Uh, yeah. Basil Rathbone I ain't.
From Pinterest.

This story, and a study into the practice of what can be classified as recreational genomics, is the focus of The Lost Family by Libby Copeland. The book evolved from what was originally an article for the Washington Post*, and Libby interwove Alice's search with an investigation into how genomics has evolved in the past decade to where it is today, including both the positive and negative aspects of this opening frontier into what our genes say about us. 

I'm surprised the photo turned
out as good as it did. It's a wee
bit cloudy outside today.

Sometimes the positive and negative are part of the same story, such as the usage of DNA genealogy databases in the apprehension of the long elusive Golden State Killer. That Joseph James DeAngelo was caught was one thing, but that DNA genealogy databases could be exploited by law enforcement without people's knowledge was quite another.

Remember those fingerprints we all provided 
when we were kids back in the 70s and 80s
so that law enforcement could find us if we
were abducted? Yeah, like that only much more so.
From imgflip.

But this book, while it makes for an engaging read**, has a personal angle to it that goes far afield from anything that this blog typically covers. 

***

Over the past decade I've seriously considered having my DNA tested numerous times, and even within the past month I've gotten to within a few clicks of signing up for AncestryDNA's DNA test. (Luckily for me I didn't, because a couple of days later that money --and some Father's Day cash-- was sucked up by car repairs. Yay, car repairs.) Some of it is curiosity, as I've always considered myself a bit of a mutt as far as my ancestry is concerned, and my mother insisted we have some Native American ancestors on her side***, and putting the question of where my ancestors came from to bed would solve these two items. But there's there's more to it than just that. 

We know absolutely nothing about my father's father.

("Oh, a puzzle!" my questing buddy exclaimed when I mentioned this to her.)

My dad was always told that his mom and dad met, moved out to Colorado, got married, and his dad died when he was an infant. As you might be able to read between the lines, that was simply a fabrication by my grandmother and my great-aunt, her sister. One of my dad's cousins finally spilled the beans to him about 25 years ago before my grandmother passed away: apparently my grandmother got pregnant, she and my great-aunt went out west, had my dad, and then came back home with him. My dad, being the sort who would apologize if he ever cursed with a word stronger than "darn it", was incensed and demanded an explanation from his mom. 

"Who told you that?!" she responded.

"I want to know the truth!"

I don't know all the details, but what I do know is that in addition to the above story my grandmother had "doctored" my dad's birth certificate, which made it difficult for him to receive Social Security benefits because his name didn't match that on the certificate.****

So... Who was my grandfather? Outside of a name that may or may not be real, I don't have a clue.

I also don't know if there are any genetic risks for cancer or heart disease or whatnot that I don't know about either.

As for relatives I don't know about, well... I'm of two minds on that one. Unlike my wife, who calls her parents multiple times a week and chats with her sister and her other relatives on social media all the time, I tend to keep my distance from my family. They all tend to be far more religious than I am, and far more prudish as well, so I'm happy to keep them at greater than arm's length. 

And, oh look, here's this little DNA test that has the ability to upend entire families' understanding of who they are if I were to spit into a vial and send it off to get studied.

That's the thing that keeps me from pulling the trigger: I already know that something will likely come up, and that I won't be interested in reaching out to these people, but will those people then find me? Or if I don't get test but another relative does, and suddenly I'm the one getting the metaphorical knock on the door by someone claiming to be a cousin I never knew existed? 

In a post pandemic world, where I saw the worst of humanity broadcast for everyone to see, do I really want to know these people? I can select my friends, but I can't do the same to family. Unlike many Seekers I don't feel adrift because I'm missing part of my life, but I am curious. But am I curious enough to find out answers I might not like? 

***

Finally, there's a question about my genealogy that has nothing whatsoever to do with my non-existent grandfather, and that has to do with my family's search into their own family tree. 

One of my mom's sisters has been conducting research into my mom's family, and supposedly she's found all of this interesting stuff about where the family came from, yadda yadda yadda. However, my aunt isn't exactly known for her academic rigor, so without me reviewing her research I look at her claims with a skeptical eye. So for my edification if nothing else, I'm interested enough into my own verification of these claims that I've begun collecting a database on the family history. Yes, I use Ancestry's database, but no, it's not public. DNA testing might help to solidify some of this genealogical research, but then again, it might open up a can of worms. 

Jeez, Rowan, the least you could have
done is gotten me into the Opening
Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics...
From memegenerator.net.

***

Some reviewers think of this usage of recreational genomics --and the book itself-- as basically First World Problems. "I don't think that the world really cares who your great grandpa bonked," is what one reviewer on Goodreads said. The world may not, but this isn't really about what the world thinks. The book isn't really written for Genealogists either, as they likely already know everything in the book and would look at it as rather simplistic.

From Cafepress, where you can get this
on a coffee mug.

I don't get to say how your ethics and morality play into what you might find in your family tree, and to be fair what people think of genealogy in the US and Canada --where a lot of people's ancestors came from somewhere else-- is going to be different than the viewpoint of someone from Europe or Asia. 

If I were to look at it as purely an academic exercise, I'd most likely pass on a DNA test. From that perspective, the potential downsides outnumber any upsides. Still, I'd be a fool to not acknowledge an emotional component to this: the desire to know as much as possible. While I may keep my family at a distance, knowing a bit about their collective history --my history-- is a very strong pull. Plus, I want to set any records straight: I'd be going in ready to accept things such as hidden names or even different family names than what is commonly accepted today, because history is messy like that.

What? Oh, the book! Right.

About the book...

Yes, I liked it. For people worried about there being too much Biology in the book, don't worry; if you lack detailed knowledge about genetics you won't have any issues following the book. You had better expect to think critically about the subject, however, and for people who thought that getting your DNA tested on a lark or as a present to a family member the book is a bucket of cold water dumped on you. If you want to go ahead, do so, but go into it with your eyes wide open as to any consequences you might encounter. And to be fair, you don't even need to have been tested to personally feel the effects; Big Data is seeing to that.

*In much the same way as Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer was originally written as an article for Outside Magazine. Alas that the original article appears to go to a follow-up article about people who are obsessed with Chris McCandless.

**Not everything in the book is as annotated as some people might like, but I was comfortable with it given that NPEs and other genealogical surprises are kind of a touchy subject, and genealogists weren't always so keen to put their names and faces down on these discussions.

***Which I no longer believe, I might add. Apparently, that is a fairly common family backstory that people have, and it frequently turns out to not be the case.

****It took months, but eventually things got sorted out.

EtA: Changed a couple of words for clarity's sake.

A Big Problem of Epic Proportions

There are only so many times the characters can save the world before it becomes old hat.

--AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide (1989), page 123.

That little quote from the 2E DMG highlights a big problem in a lot of consumable media today. Every conflict has to have bigger and bigger stakes, and each movie or book or game's conflict has to be earth shattering to draw your attention and give the protagonists something to do. While I realize that some might blame this on the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe --or Star Wars, for that matter-- this issue of constantly raising the stakes has been a staple of SF&F for decades. 

Works such as Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories have all had epic consequences that result in a heightened form of dramatic tension. Even Michael Moorcock's Elric short stories, while typically not so epic in scope, over the course of the cycle build toward a world shattering conclusion in the sixth collection, Stormbringer. You could even make the argument that stories that may not have such dire circumstances, such as Isaac Asimov's original Nightfall or The Martian Way, still present a conflict epic in scope.

Yes, yes, I know, it's right there in the name "Epic Fantasy". Duh.

The thing is, the SF&F genre and the media industry as a whole (movies, television, video games) has a big epic problem: everything needs to be epic in scope or in conflict.

And to borrow that oft used term from The Incredibles, if everything is epic, nothing is.

Yes, this one is back again...

I didn't realize just how pervasive this was until I started rummaging around the SF&F section of bookstores, looking for something new to read after being away from the fiction section of bookstores for several years. The shelves were full of massive tomes with taglines such as "Every age must come to an end" or "The greatest sagas are written in blood" and... I couldn't get excited about any of them.

That lack of interest has nothing to do with who is writing, and neither does it have to do with the setting. I'm sure that some people would tell me that it's because of "woke" culture or a "politically correct" setting or some other bullshit answer, but the thing is, I don't have issues with any of that. Yes, I read a lot of "Classic" SF&F back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s* so I have my street cred, and I have absolutely no issues with new voices or settings for Science Fiction or Fantasy. It's just that I'm tired of the same old "the world/universe/nation needs saving" Epic story trope, because in the end the stakes are of the same variety that I've seen countless times by now. 

And video games aren't exactly helping.

I've said it before about World of Warcraft and it bears repeating now: I prefer the original, vanilla version of WoW because of the overall lack of an Epic plot to the extent the expansions put into place. Sure, there are storylines riddled throughout the leveling areas, but nothing so laser focused on an epic conflict to the extent that you see in the latter expansions. You've got Nefarian, C'thun, and Kel'Thuzad, but you didn't have two continents' worth of quests focused on the storylines behind those three. That lack of an overall epic narrative meant you could forge your own story, picking and choosing what to do and where to go, without having an overarching epic story to direct you.

Let's be honest here: video games and novels are one thing, and movies are quite another. I mean, look at the tons of movies and shows that are churned out year after year in the MCU alone, not to mention the DC Universe or Star Wars. Everything is epic in nature where the MCU is involved, and even a movie such as Captain America: The First Avenger Goes Fishing would somehow turn Steve Rodgers' catch of the day into an epic worthy of Ernest Hemingway. 

I had no idea this existed... I SWEAR!!!
From a YouTube video by Reel Hazardous.

But therein lies the blandness of it all: you've seen this story a few times, and it all starts to blend together. And trust me, given the amount of books, video games, and movies I've consumed over the decades, I've seen far more than just a few versions of the same trope. 

I need to be perfectly clear: I'm not saying that "[insert content here] sucks", I'm saying that I'm tired of these stories. These books could be incredibly well written, the video games programmed and designed to an exquisite degree, or the movies insanely well crafted, it's just that I've seen it all before. And to get my attention something else needs to be done. 

What doesn't need to be done is do what's been done to death in video games: the moving goalposts problem. You play a video game with an epic story, finally defeat the big bad, and then either in the final cutscene or a lead-in to the next expansion/installment in the series there's a revelation that "it wasn't this Big Bad who was behind everything, it's this NEW Big Bad!" 

Or the "Princess is in another castle!" meme.
From knowyourmeme.com.

Or you saved your town in this video game? Now you get to save an entire province! Then the next expac is "Now you have to save your country!" Then "the world!" Then "You now have to save the Afterlife!" (Oh wait, that's Shadowlands...)

That's a huge trap that authors and developers alike fall into, where the stakes have to ratcheted up more and more to keep people's attention. (After Infinity War, what then, Marvel? Multiverse Mayhem? Well crap, that's exactly what they're doing now...)

***

What's the solution? Hell if I know.

And besides, if I did know the way out of this, do you think that publishers and developers and producers would be beating a path to my door? Oh HELL no. Right now, the sound of dollars from the people who consume their content is louder than anything I can say or do. If I've learned anything in this world, content creators want a sure bet on where to put their money, and it's a lot easier betting on the same old same old than trying something new. Of course, game companies discovered that breaking their games up into pieces got them a lot more money than release it all at once...

Dorkly, don't ever change.

That doesn't mean that I've turned into a costume drama loving highbrow (or lowbrow, or midbrow-or-whatever the Hallmark Channel fits into) consumer, it's just that I want something more than what we've got right now. 

It also doesn't mean I want to eschew standard novel formats and instead go with modern novel constructs; I had to read Virginia Woolf in an English class at university and that experience alone put me off of reading any novels designed to be "modern" for a couple of decades. The English professor who taught the class I read Mrs. Dalloway in warned us away from taking his Modern Novel class, because non-English majors sign up expecting to get to read modern popular novels, but that isn't anything at all what they actually read.

Probably the best way to put it is that maybe the sentiment "go big or go home" is missing the point: perhaps not going all out will result in a better story. 

*And part of the end of the 00s/beginning of the 10s.