A Short Sojourn of My Own

Today was busy with in-laws.

Oh, and I got to meet Mooch.

The box behind her is the "if I fits, I sits" box" that she has claimed. I find it kind of funny how cats (and children) will enjoy the box something came in far more than what was inside the box.

Case in point: Calvin and Hobbes.

Amazingly enough, I didn't sneeze or have any other sort of allergic reaction to her. So either I'm getting better at dealing with my feline allergies, or I just got lucky. I'm thinking the latter, but you never know.

#Blaugust2026

Gen Con 2026 - Emptying the Backpack

When I mentioned in the previous video that there were things to unpack, I wasn't kidding.

I typically bring the backpack I use for work when I go to Gen Con.* It prevents me from going crazy and buying all sorts of stuff at Gen Con because it had all better fit in that backpack. I realize I could just carry around an extra bag, but come on. Have you SEEN the crowds at Gen Con? We're talking about ~74,000 attendees over four days, and the place was already crowded enough without me lugging around an extra bag. I also held some things for my son, so my parts of my backpack were already spoken for.

That means I didn't end up buying board games at Gen Con, but that's okay. If I wanted to buy a board game, I'd rather support my local game store.

Funny thing, that...

My Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) held an "RPG Celebration Sale" on July 18th, where all RPGs and both Reaper and WizKids Minis were 20% off. Oh, and if you spent enough ($50) they had a bunch of goodie bags full of freebies to give away. 

So...

Yeah, I indulged there, knowing full well that it was coming out of my Gen Con budget. Therefore, I'm counting what I purchased there as part of my Gen Con haul. My blog, my rules.

...and that's it.

Yes, I bought a RuneQuest splatbook that fills in the gaps of some of the RuneQuest mythology, and what's ostensibly the Pendragon Gamemaster Screen but with several extras...

Yeah, just a few.

The map actually won awards at Gen Con last year, so I was happy to have that included in the bundle, but there was also a Gamemaster Gazetteer and some Gamemaster Resources tucked away in separate booklets.

(Hmm... I ought to do an RPG From the Past on Pendragon in general.)

Both of these items were printed by Chaosium, who were well represented at Gen Con, but I thought it better to purchase these at my local store so not only would Chaosium get paid but so would my local store.

***

Now, about Gen Con itself...

I gave serious consideration to picking up another Traveller book, and my oldest espied me perusing the volumes there in the Exhibit Hall and teased me a bit about that. However, in the end I decided to not purchase my typical annual Traveller book because I had other things in mind.

One item was a pure impulse buy:

Published by Goodman Games.

Yes, it doesn't look like much --more like a notebook that someone had doctored with stickers-- but I was quite surprised to find this at Goodman Games' booth because I hadn't heard anything about it. You see, several years ago I'd purchased this book from my FLGS:

I'm always up for a book of short pieces from experienced game designers and game masters to help me understand the process behind adventure design, and this proved to not only be a great read but full of great tips as well. So when I saw its sequel at Gen Con, I immediately snapped it up. The listing of authors on the back of the new volume didn't exactly hurt, either:

Even my wife, who looked over my purchases when I got back home, recognized some of the names: Luke Gygax (one of Gary's sons), Steve Jackson ("THE Steve Jackson??" she asked), and Sean K. Reynolds. I knew a lot more of the authors than she did, and that alone made it worthwhile to pick up.

A bit later I wandered by the MIT Press booth, and I pretty much geeked out a bit. Yes, I am a real geek if I get excited about a university press being represented at a con such as Gen Con, and unlike last year they brought enough books that they still had products to sell on Sunday. And being the history nerd that I am, I bought two books about the history of Role Playing Games:

Both of these books are THICK, each at least an inch thick, and I've listened to Jon's podcasts off and on over the course of the past year so I knew what I was getting when I bought these: well researched and well written. I mean, MIT wouldn't have published them if that wasn't the case.

I did pick up a short and sweet game about cat cuddles for my youngest --no, she's not going to play it with Mooch-- and I stopped by Many Worlds Tavern because I saw something that spoke to me: coffee. I remembered that Many Worlds sells coffee and tea, and while the only ground or whole bean coffee they had left on Sunday afternoon was decaf, I picked up some loose leaf black tea to drink when I'm not in a coffee mood:

Morning Mists Breakfast Black Tea

It'll go well with a present my oldest gave me at Gen Con which she'd gotten from a local coffee shop in Milwaukee:

From Stone Creek Coffee. I've discovered that
Milwaukee has quite a few good coffee shops.

Oh, I guess I ought to mention a few freebies I got as part of attending Gen Con:

The little die in the pouch came from Many Worlds Tavern for purchasing the tea, the poster of the Daggerheart expansion that came out was being just handed out at the end of the con, and I figured "why not" and picked it up. That last one, the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, came from Kenzer and Co., and for me was a blast from the past. I have several KotD comics around (somewhere) that I'd picked up a couple of decades ago, so seeing a freebie just being handed out like that made me happy. I got to see an old friend again.

***

So, that's it. Not all that much, but enough for me. The books alone will keep me busy when I'm not working on radio or writing or gaming.

The crowds aside, I'm looking forward to next year's Gen Con!

*Minus my laptop, of course.

#Blaugust2026

Something I Can't Unsee

This... feels weird.

Yes, it's a short of the most recent Superman movie (2025), but what's so weird about it is that the interior is that of Cincinnati Museum Center.

My wife used to work there in both the Natural History Museum and the Cincinnati Historical Society, and we used to take the kids there on a regular basis when they were growing up. 

So yeah, I know nothing else of the movie or the scene, but looking at the interior of the rotunda like that is... Well, it's a bit much.

In case you're wondering whether they touched up the rotunda very much, here's a video of a performance of Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 on the Wurlitzer organ at the Museum Center. The pipes are hidden from view, but the main portion of the Wurlitzer is right on the border from the rotunda to the walkway that leads towards the Omnimax Theater and the Amtrak station.

As you can tell, the Winhold Weiss murals were changed from this:

From WVXU's 2023 article.

From the same WVXU 2023 article as above.

To this:

From Reddit. Here's a better set of pics from
James Gunn on Facebook. Not sure how long it'll last.

Layers Upon Layers

Fantasy RPGs and MMOs have a problem with clothing.

No, I don't mean overtly sexy clothing, although there's plenty of arguments around for armor that makes you wonder what the artists were thinking, but rather the design aesthetic itself.

I look at clothing found in games and I wonder how to properly describe them. Part of that is trying to properly describe them in writing, but also just trying to understand what the inspiration was and what time period was the clothing designed to evoke.

For example, LOTRO zooms in on what I'd call your standard Fantasy aesthetic, shooting for a Medieval look in spots and a Renaissance look in others. Think of the differences in clothing in the Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy with the Rohirrim and Gondor, never mind the differences in The Shire and Bree-land.* Even The Elder Scrolls kind of subscribes to a traditional Fantasy look.

It's in games such as WoW, with heavy Steampunk and SF influences mixed in with Fantasy, where I have issues trying to understand the aesthetic.

(I'm not going to throw in mounts and whatnot here, because this is about clothing. Just sayin'.)

Video games often tend to hew to what Blizzard has defined as the "Rule of Cool": cool people doing cool things. As a corollary, you have to look cool while doing those cool things. So, if there was a design decision on gear/clothing, Blizzard would go with what looked coolest. 

But.

How the hell do you describe the clothing? How would it work? 

To be honest, I never really considered such things until I realized just how many layers people wore in prior centuries. A modern person would consider "layers" as throwing on a sweater before adding a jacket when going outside, but to someone from, say, the 1700s, that's just a start.

Thanks a lot, Shrek; onions and people are the same.
From Yarn (and the movie Shrek).

Part of my interest in Renaissance Fairs, living history locales, and Medieval re-enactment organizations (such as the SCA) are how people lived back then. Any student of history could tell you that a lot of literature and art depicts how the upper classes (nobility, religious, and even rich merchants) lived; by comparison, there's scant space devoted to how the vast majority of people in any given time period lived. 

Still, I get it. People who play MMOs end up playing characters that rise to the ranks of the great and powerful. At the same time, very rarely do people who begin a tabletop RPG or an MMO start at such lofty heights. Your gear changes as you rise in the ranks, but not always. The leader of a Thieves' Guild, for instance, would not want to attract attention to themselves by living it up and wearing extravagant clothing. The same would go for a spy; their job is to inhabit the role they've been chosen for, whether servant or concubine, courtier or merchant. If there's one thing that RPGs and MMOs kind of miss out on, it's that you're not going to be wearing the same clothing all the time. For ease of plot (and to be honest, the ease of the Art and Graphics Departments) you just tend to keep the gear you're wearing all the time. But if you're entering into hostile territory, odds are good that unless you've got an army at your back you're not going to be wearing a uniform or gear that screams "Hey, kill me first!"**

Anyway, back to clothing in general.

When you delve into clothing as, say, a member of the SCA, when you have about 1000 years of history to choose from to make your character and then clothe them, there's going to be a bit of chaos involved. The similar thing happens in RPGs and MMOs, where artists draw what looks cool but isn't typically confined to a specific period or aesthetic. Even then, you have to make design choices. 

For example, in some of the fiction I've played with I decided that it was a good idea for Squires among the Knights of the Silver Hand to embrace a monastic look, evoking the inspiration for the Paladin, the Military Religious Orders...

If you stop at the 14th century version of the kirtle --and potentially the surcoat as if it were a tabard-- you have a suitably monastic look which is quite distinct from others you might encounter around a city such as Stormwind or even Silvermoon City. It is also quite practical and essentially a unisex look, so it would work for all Squires.

From the Etsy store for SPESMedievalMarket
as a Wool Cotte for Men - 13th and 14th Century
Woolen Kirtle. Uh, don't look at the price, but if it
is hand-made, that explains a lot.

Once you start getting later than the 14th century, the unisex look gave way toward tailored clothing toward both sexes, so sticking with the version above makes sense for your average RPG or MMO.

Leaping forward several WoW expansions, you have the Neo-Victorian look of Gilneas, where Victorians and late-Medieval to Early Modern looks are found in Stormwind and elsewhere.*** Trying to make sense of a world where the Victorian and the Late Middle Ages' clothing coexisted would make your head hurt --I know it does mine-- but I think the reason why I have issues with this is because I look the two styles as points in time from the same culture. In a fantasy world, there can be no assumptions that the two styles are part of the same culture, because they can co-exist without much of an issue. After all, just look at the clothing styles for various cultures even today; there's absolutely no requirement that all cultures maintain the same clothing designs, and to assume such is to be pretty myopic.

I guess with the mish-mash of clothing aesthetics I ought to just give up trying to define everything and just learn to enjoy the ride. Still, I know my desire to define everything will just annoy me to no end. 

Besides, there's an opening to create a story point for your character that just fits. Like this from Dungeons & Doodles: Tales From the Tables...

Here's the Patreon link. Seriously, the
webseries is really well written.

*I'm leaving Dwarves and Elves out of this because they're purely fantasy races. Since Tolkien modeled Hobbits off of the country folk he knew, I'm lumping them in with Men for this exercise. If I were using David Eddings' Belgariad, for example, things would be a wee bit different as the various nations have distinct dress and stereotypical attitudes. Nobody ever confused Eddings' works with deep philosophical and historical themes, however.

**Mages know all about that; even Nefarian can be heard yelling to his underlings in a fight in Blackrock Spire: "Foolsss...Kill the one in the dress!"

***And you thought David Eddings' nations from The Belgariad were a hodge-podge of various tropes. Chereks were Vikings, Tolnedrans were Romans, Asturians were Robin Hood and the Merry Men, while Mandorians were Arthur and his Knights, etc.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Okay, the reference to both Queen and the movie Highlander aside, nobody lives for that long. Even with today's medicine, the oldest verified* living person was (according to Wikipedia) a touch over 122 years old. Life and death are a natural cycle, and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality. (Or at least a much longer lifespan.)

I'm not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that --whether here or in an afterlife-- but instead I want to look at how we write about species/races with vastly different lifespans than ours.

Let's get the big one out of the way, shall we?

This was the version I had as a kid.
I have no idea whatever became of it.
From Ebay.

We write what we know, so we project our lives, our understanding, and our emotions onto anything we create. Frequently that includes animals that don't live as long as us. Anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species --101 Dalmatians, anyone?-- and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it's a direct 1:1 correspondence.** 

Of course, that's not exactly the case. Other animals are not us, and while they may have individual personalities, they don't have the sense of impending death that we have. That means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn't impact what other animals experience; while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things, it's pretty likely that they don't have any real thoughts of the Rainbow Bridge like we do.***

***

Okay, that's us looking at the lifespan of animals, but what about our examination of other races/species that are much older than us?

There's a quote by the Science Fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell****  about approaching alien intelligence that applies here: “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”

The "other" big one that we might as well talk about are the Elves and Dwarves of Middle-earth.

Alan Lee's cover of The Tale of Beren
and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien. Star-crossed
lovers from two separate races, Beren
and Lúthien represented Tolkien and his wife, Edith,
as they came from two separate worlds.

Elves are immortal, assuming they don't die due to violence or merely wasting away,***** and while Dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans. Even the Númenóreans, descendants of Men who fought alongside Elves in the Elder Days, have a much longer lifespan than that of the "regular" folk. 

Our experiences of Elves in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters. They provide the world's exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead; think of Dumbledore's "here's what happened" part at the end of the first few Harry Potter books and you get the idea. 

I've mentioned this before --unfortunately since Google doesn't have this blog indexed I can't easily find it-- but when Fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it's not a big deal, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Think of it this way: the entirety of Middle-earth's Third Age was over 3000 years, which puts the equivalent in our time to be ~975 BCE. The Zhou Dynasty in China, divided rulership in Egypt, splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two, the gradual rise of the Assyrian Empire and decline in the old Babylonian Empire, and the rise of the Olmecs. So, looking at all the upheaval that's happened from that time to today, the timeline presented by Tolkien in the LotR appendices is incredibly simplistic. No country/nation has lasted 3000 years in our world (the current nation of Egypt bears no resemblance to the Medieval Mamluks, much less the Hellenistic Ptolemaic or the New Kingdom), yet Gondor and the Elven kingdoms remained (relatively) intact and with a similar political structure over that time. Sure, some empires have come and gone, but nothing even close to what we've seen in the real world.

However, as time in Middle-earth has progressed, the Elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Even the threat of Sauron didn't mean armies of Elves marching against him in the War of the Ring --Peter Jackson's movies notwithstanding-- and the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit was the Largest military action the Elder Race performed in the latter half of the Third Age.

In one sense, the gradual retreat of the Elves from view, leaving the world to the mortal races, is rather natural. If you're an Elf you don't change, but everything else around you does. Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and woodland creatures all grow old and die, and you don't. In the Elves, that manifests in terms of grief and weariness#, which is why they're drawn to the Undying Lands where they'll find a respite from the world's mortality. 

"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."

--From The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, The Return of the King, Appendix A

Tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the Elves on a racial and personal level, particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality (and the rejection thereof) brings to a person and their family. However, I think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality. In the end, the Elves' society didn't really grow or change over time, but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification. 

***

Now that I think about it, if there's one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long-lived people in fiction or gaming, it's that we really don't know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around. Or even a couple of people, for that matter. Would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness, such as Tolkien's Elves? Would they dominate society like the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k? Would they become more rigid and black/white in their worldview?

Would they lose what makes us human: the ability to connect on a personal level to someone, to feel intense emotion, to love and grieve, to emphasize, to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others?

While there's a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal, in pop culture there's frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story, but I think this is something that can't be avoided forever. Merely hand-waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like, well, a regular person is missing the boat. 

Yes, I pulled this out from my Meme Monday
on Age Disparity Memes. From Imgflip.

Obviously, the physical part of being immortal is one thing, and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games. 

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. At sight of her, Caramon's mouth sagged open. Riverwind's eyes widened. Even Raistlin stared, his eyes seeing true beauty at last, for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden.

--From Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, pg. 323.

That impression by Raistlin, where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things, really hit home the concept that Elves had such a long lifespan in AD&D 1e that Laurana appeared to have no decay at all. Back in those days, the lifespan of AD&D 1e Elves were about 4000 years, so yea, point taken.

"The more you know...." From 9GAG.

And given that the average video game player doesn't really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character, I guess it's not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most. 

If you're one of those in the back raising their hand and saying "Yeah, but I do!! I care!!" I'm right there with you. After all, I played tabletop RPGs, and I've read a metric ton of SF&F, so yeah, I've got opinions about excessively long life or immortality.

Another way of looking at intra-species
romances. From the Pathfinder comic Hollow
Mountain, posted on Reddit.

The problem is, we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who, but a larger question is how does the longer-lived person behave toward others? Do they look at their short-lived brethren as merely cattle? As playthings? As children to be parented (either strictly or gently)? As the Great Unwashed, who need religious and social purity imposed upon them? As agents of chaos, to be destroyed? Or an annoyance, to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim?

For me, one thing is certain: people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else. 

Garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun. "What's it like to live forever, Grandfather?" he asked.

"I don't know," Wolf said. "I haven't lived forever."

"You know what I mean."

"The quality of life isn't much different," Wolf said. "We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that's taken a very long time." He stood up abruptly. "This conversation's taken a gloomy turn," he said.

--From Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, pg. 258.

As you could probably figure out, I disagree with David Eddings' presentation of Belgarath in The Belgariad. From a story standpoint it works fine, but I'm under no illusions that The Belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story. If a person is 7000 years old, I have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human. If we are the sum of our experiences, hundreds or thousands of years are a LOT of extra experiences that literally nobody living (or dead) could possibly comprehend. Plus, memory is a bitch and that's when people live our current lifespan. Can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago, or 1000? We don't even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago, much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive. 

There's also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people, and if we've done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens. That's just for those of us with a normal lifespan, so extend that out several centuries and what have you got? Someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else. If you think it's hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view, just try to do that if you're 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview. 

At least he admits it. From Reddit.

***

I was thinking about this when I realized that the freakiest thing that any NPC ever said to me in WoW was this:

Yeek.

Think about the implications of power and vision that statement had. In the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst. But only someone with the age and prestige and power of the Dragon Queen could pull that off. Even then, becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of Alexstrasza is concerned. In terms of age and power imbalance, it's a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog.

Which reminds me...

From Reddit.

Yeah, sounds about right.

*There's plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history, but given what we know about physiology that's likely inaccurate, to put it politely.

**Stick a pin in that; we'll see that again later.

***Given that the so-called cognitive revolution (roughly 50k-60k years ago) gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts, we'd have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that. I realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times, but Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book. 

****Most well known for his decades of running Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction during the Golden Era of SF, Campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure. I was first introduced to him throughout the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction. If you can find a used copy around, it's very much worth a read.

*****It feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about "wasting sickness" and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer.

#I've read a ton of Tolkien over the years, and so the only book I can definitively point to for some of this is The Silmarillion, although Unfinished Tales might have parts of it.

Who's Training Who?

If you're like me, you've recently had to have some "training" at work concerning AI.

I'm not talking about the training my son had when he first arrived at grad school, where he learned how to spot AI generated work that students would pass off as their own, but the basics of using AI to "improve workflows" and to "increase productivity".

Oh yes. I believe it's a sign of the apocalypse that when your employer wants you to learn something, said something is about to implode.*

Anyhoo, I was thinking about all of that training over the weekend when this YouTube video dropped in my lap:

Now, I'll be up front is that I find Brandon Sanderson likeable and engaging as a person, or at least how he presents himself online, but I'm not the biggest fan of his work. I liked Mistborn and The Well of Ascension well enough, but the concepts that he'd put forth in The Stormlight Archive really don't appeal to me. We also disagree on the genius behind Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, because he really thought those middle books --where I and a bunch of other readers finally had enough-- were much better than we gave it credit for.**

I'm not personally acquainted with Brandon either, but I have enjoyed his class on writing SF&F. There's actually two versions of the class on YouTube, last years and one about 3-4 years ago. To be honest, both are worth watching if you want to get a feel for the nuts and bolts (and the business) of writing in my favorite genre.

All that being said, I really found his keynote address from the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025*** quite interesting, and I found I did agree with it on a lot of points. I'm more of a Original Series Star Trek fan myself, but I do appreciate his comparisons of Data and his ongoing desire to become human in the series as a reference point to what separates current levels of pseudo AI from what most people would consider art. But more than anything else, what resonated with me was that art is a transformational process: the creation of art also changes us, and the more we remove ourselves from that process by the insertion of AI into the mix the less we are transformed as well. 

That doesn't mean that we can't be transformed by creating AI art, but our isolation from the creative process makes it harder for us to be transformed. After my "training", I've compared what's known as vibe coding as basically what a non-technical boss thinks that coders do when they provide a design document. Instead of taking a framework created by your prompt and then coding in all of the details, vibe coder instructions are to instead "refine your prompts so that you get what you want that way". To me, that's equivalent of the old Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert trying to tell the engineers how to do their job.

Holy crap. This was in 1995? Yikes.

It also gives new engineers and coders a false impression of how to write code. You need to learn to fail before you can succeed, and vibe coding bypasses all of that knowledge by eliminating the skill development process. It's great if you're an experienced coder, you're in a rush, and you already know what you want, but to do regular work on an ongoing basis? You're reducing the code writing process to "just give it a few words and let it do the job". 

I suppose I could boil down a lot of the "promise" of AI to this: it lets MBAs think they can be engineers or scientists, without them realizing that the their own job could be replaced as well.

*Back in 2000, my then employer's CEO called all of the development staff together for an all-hands meeting. The late 90s, if you'll recall, were the high-flying days of the OG Dot Com boom, and it was all "internet this" and "internet that". So, when we were brought together despite the push to get the current version of our software out the door, we joked half-heartedly that the CEO was going to announce we were going to be an internet company.

Lo and behold, he actually did just that. We were going to put our mid-range CAD/CAM/CAE software, which was so hefty that it could barely run on the best Windows XT servers at the time, on the internet as a browser-based product.

We were all stunned. The network throughput on the internet wasn't up to the task, and more importantly neither were the browsers themselves. It was an idea 20 years ahead of its time, perhaps, but it was also a harbinger that within the year the Dot Com bubble burst and the stock market imploded.

**I also thought that Robert Jordan could have used an editor who reined some of his worst impulses in, such as his tendency to overdo it on the language and description. I mean, I'm not the greatest writer of description in the world, but I really do think that RJ was really just padding his page count at times.

***In case you wondered where the Keynote part of the title is about; I know I sure did. Here's a blog post of the speech itself from Brandon's website.

Fading Away

This week, a significant portion of my youth passed away.

First, the news broke a couple of days ago that Ozzy Osbourne passed away, a few weeks after the Black Sabbath Farewell Concert. While it wouldn't shock me if he decided euthanasia was the best answer to his struggles, it could also have been due to complications from Parkinson's Disease. Ozzy's death reminds me a bit of Freddie Mercury's passing, who died a day after he publicly announced he had HIV. In both cases, I suspect they both knew it was time.

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I began listening to Ozzy midway through high school. Given that my parents were very strict about what music I could and couldn't listen to, I had to get around that by copying acquaintances' cassettes of heavy metal bands. That way, my parents couldn't really see what I was listening to, and once I got a car --and a cassette deck in said car-- I did most of my listening while driving or on my boom box while working after school or over the summer as a janitor. Bands such as Twisted Sister, Motley Crue, Scorpions, and Autograph found space on my Maxell and TDK blanks, but the second heavy metal album I copied* was Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz. It may have been a copy of a copy, since the sound quality wasn't very good, but at least I had it.

I couldn't find the cassette with Blizzard of Oz on it,
but I could find these.

It took my going away to college --and away from the prying eyes of my parents-- for me to more fully embrace music found on "Satanic" lists by Evangelical preachers.

The funny thing is that since I began listening to heavy metal midway through the 1980s, I came to Ozzy first through his solo career. To me, Black Sabbath was this band from the past that wasn't really relevant today. This was hammered home by my encounter with graffiti I had to clean off of a chair in my high school (I was a janitor, remember?) that said "Black Sabbath Rules The World". A couple of coworkers happened to wander by, snorted, and one of them said derisively, "They need to put an album out first!"

"First an album, next the world!" the other quipped.

It was only much later, in the 1990s, when I began listening to Black Sabbath and realizing that hey, they weren't half bad after all.

Still, Ozzy had penetrated into the national consciousness through the Satanic Panic. I didn't put any credence in all of the claims --I played RPGs and wasn't about to sacrifice small animals to Satan, after all-- but plenty of people did.** 

Ozzy even found himself in the then popular comic strip Bloom County:

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 80, by Berke Breathed.

From the 1987 compilation book "Billy and the
Boingers Bootleg", Page 81, by Berke Breathed.

Yes, I was a Bloom County fan, and yes, I had all of the compilation books.

Here's the proof. I still have the floppy
record that came with the book.

In case you wondered what the songs sound like, here's one of them (courtesy of YouTube):

Over the years, my interest in heavy metal waned, but I still have a soft spot for heavy metal from the 70s and 80s and what it meant to my own personal declaration of independence as an adult. While the Bloom County cartoons played up for amusement the concept that Ozzy was just a "regular guy" playing around with heavy metal, the reality that came out decades later was that he pretty much was just a regular guy after all and his Ozzy persona was just an act. 

***

Yesterday, the news broke that Hulk Hogan had also passed away, and with that another chunk of my youth vanished. 

I wasn't that much of a World Wrestling Federation fan, as I used to watch the rival organization World Championship Wrestling (the home of Dusty Rhodes and "Nature Boy" Ric Flair), but you couldn't not be aware of WWF and it's biggest star, Hulk Hogan. Among the WWF pantheon, I cheered more for Andre the Giant than Hulk, but Hulk was the face of the WWF. There's no denying that.

This was at the end of Andre's career,
when he "turned bad" and wrestled against
Hulk in 1987. From The Detroit News.

To be clear, I wasn't one of the pro wrestling fans around school who were so far down the rabbit hole that they subscribed to one of several wrestling magazines, but I was enough of a fan that I could at least hold my own with those hardcore fans. The fans fell into two camps: those who loved Hulk and those who hated him. Most people loved him, but there were a few contrarians who preferred Hulk's enemies (such as Rowdy Roddy Piper) instead. 

But that Golden Era of wrestling is fading from memory. Hulk is just the latest to pass away, as Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant, Randy Savage, Rowdy Roddy Piper, George "The Animal" Steele, and The Iron Sheik are all gone.

***

Finally, overshadowed by Hulk Hogan's passing, was also the passing of Chuck Mangione. You know, the "Feels So Good" guy.

This is the full version. The radio edit/singles

version can be found here.

If you're of the right age, you couldn't avoid Feels So Good. It was all over the radio, and it helped to drive the Soft Rock radio format to greater heights. The irony was that while I heard it on radio all the time --my parents listened to Soft Rock, after all-- my biggest memory of Feels So Good tied into our first color television set. 

That first Saturday we had the Sears color television around the house, I woke up and went downstairs to turn on the TV. It was pretty early in the day and before the Saturday Morning Cartoons came on, so I flipped to one of the independent or PBS stations (I can't remember which) and suddenly there was a video of the sun rising on my screen with Feels So Good playing as an accompaniment. Being one of the first color TV images I ever saw at home, that moment was etched indelibly in my mind. 

Over the years I grew to appreciate Chuck's jazz output and his loyalty to his hometown of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, of whom he was an alum and an instructor. I learned much later that Chuck was also an alum of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, of whom he played alongside Keith Jarrett. 

***

All three of them had left an indelible imprint on my youth. Maybe it wasn't the three themselves that I remember most, but what they represented: rebellion, guilty pleasures, and the music my parents listened to. Still, it feels weird to be reminded of my past only when that past is permanently lost to us. 

In an ironic twist, at times like these I'm reminded of this little segment from George Carlin. George's stand-up comedy hasn't always aged very well, but in this case it actually has. The entire video is worth watching, but I highlighted this one specific bit at the 4:55 mark:

Note to self: Google doesn't like it if I try to embed

YouTube videos at a specific time marker.

*The first was Twisted Sister's Stay Hungry. Yes, really.

**And still do today, just to be clear about it. If people give them half a chance, these devout folks would attempt to eradicate "satanic" music and books once more. After all, look at all the attempts to ban books and media today. Cancel Culture is not simply a thing on the political left.

An RPG From the Past: Traveller

This is Free Trader Beowulf,
calling anyone . . .
Mayday, Mayday . . .  we are under
attack . . .  main drive is gone . . .
turret number one not responding . . .
Mayday . . .  losing cabin pressure
fast . . .  calling anyone . . .  please help . . .
This is Free Trader Beowulf . . .
                                        Mayday . . .

--The iconic distress call gracing the cover of various editions of Traveller

Back in the late 90s when I worked as a Software QA Engineer, one of my friends there* and I would spend about a half hour after 5 PM chatting about whatever was on our minds. He wasn't interested in "traditional" sports, but he was an absolute racing nut. He preferred the CART series** back then, so we frequently talked open wheel racing. One day, however, we geeked out over RPGs, mainly because of the upcoming D&D 3rd Edition.

"I never really played D&D," he confessed. "I played Traveller."

"What's that?" I thought I knew of most of the RPGs at the time, but this one was new to me.

"It's a Sci-Fi RPG."

"Like Gamma World?" Gamma World was put out by TSR, the publisher of D&D, and was essentially D&D in a post apocalyptic setting.

Be warned, the prices for the
Gamma World 1e rulebook can
spike. A LOT. From eBay.

"No, although it was closer to Star Frontiers." Another TSR game, this time set in space.

Yikes. This is the $90 copy on eBay.

"I'd never heard of it before."

"Oh yeah, it was really cool. It came out right around the time Star Wars was released in theaters, so it got kind of a boost from that."

A few days later when I stopped by his cubicle, he handed me a small booklet. 

"The Travellers' Digest?"

"Yeah! It was a periodical that was put out to support Traveller. It had premade adventures, like early Dragon magazines, but in a scientific journal format."

I flipped through it. "Looks pretty cool."

"Hey, you can have it. I don't play any more, and I happened to stumble on it the other day while I was moving boxes."

"Thanks!"

It's digest sized too, much like the
original Traveller rulebooks were.

That was the extent of my knowledge of Traveller until several years later, when I was perusing the RPG section at a (now deceased) local game store and came across a few Traveller books under the GURPS license.*** As it turned out, the employee at the store was in a long running campaign of GURPS Traveller, and over the course of a half hour he filled me in on the history of the game.

I found this pic from
talestoastound.wordpress.com.
No, I've never acquired a copy of
the original version.

Traveller was published by Games Designers' Workshop, a wargaming company, in 1977. Marc Miller was the primary designer, with Loren K. Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, and John Harshman assisting. The original intent for Traveller was to be a generic space RPG system, but what ended up happening was that the Charted Space setting, released by GDW over the years, became so associated with Traveller more people think of Charted Space when they think of Traveller. (Kind of like how D&D and Forgotten Realms are so intimately intertwined.) GDW also kept up with an "official" timeline of what is going on in the Third Imperium****, in much the same way that White Wolf did with Vampire: the Masquerade, so that further integrated Charted Space into the Traveller RPG.

Traveller has seen many iterations over the years. There was the original Traveller, then Megatraveller in the late 80s, then Traveller: The New Era, and Marc Miller's Traveller (4th Edition). There is also a 5th Edition of Traveller put out by Marc Miller, but that version has returned to its roots as a "generic" space RPG system and is mostly comprised of tables upon tables of stuff. Hey, if you like tables to generate things for a space RPG game, there you go.

But for me, Traveller took on new life when it escaped the confines of GDW after GDW closed up shop in 1996.

Among the first of the "non-GDW" Traveller games was GURPS Traveller, supposedly a deal made with a handshake between Loren K. Wiseman and Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, the publisher of GURPS. GURPS Traveller followed an alternate timeline than the "official GDW timeline", and Steve Jackson Games put out quite a few high quality settings books for Traveller.*****

The starship on the cover of Behind the Claw
is the Beowulf Class Free Trader.
The Spinward Marches is a contested sector
in Charted Space that is the starting
point for many Traveller campaigns.

There was also a d20 version of Traveller, called Traveller20, Traveller Hero (using the HERO System), and what is commonly known as "Mongoose Traveller" (a version of Traveller put out by Mongoose Publishing). Of all of those various versions of Traveller out there, the most popular one that's currently being supported and published is Mongoose Traveller, which is presently on its Second Edition.

Over the years I acquired several GURPS Traveller splatbooks, but I could never get into the GURPS system enough to warrant running the gauntlet of configuring GURPS for a campaign of my own. But Mongoose Traveller...

Now, that's a system I can get behind.

The late Andrew Boulton created several short videos
based on Traveller and the Charted Space setting
about 15 or so years ago. This is the best of the bunch,

using "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean:
Curse of the Black Pearl for the music.

***

Mongoose Traveller is a bit of a throwback to the original Traveller system in as much the same way as D&D 5th Edition borrowed from Old School D&D. If you want to play a game of Traveller today, most people will be expecting a game of Mongoose Traveller, so if you say "Let's play Traveller!" this is what people expect you to pull out:

It is functionally the same as the
Traveller Second Edition Core
Rulebook, just tweaked for clarity.

Traveller is one of those games whose character creation was a mini-game of its own. You start out as a fresh faced 18 year old, then you go through some (or many) iterations of "professions". You could be a student. Or join the military. Or be an assistant on a trading crew. Or... you get the idea. After that iteration is over, you make a few rolls to see how that period of your life came out, you gain skills, potentially gain "defects", and either join the campaign or spend more time in another iteration.

If somewhere in the back of your mind you're thinking, "That's nice and all, but it's not like your character is ever in any real danger during this character creation process, right?" Well, it's a good thing you're not playing the original version of Traveller.

Why? Because in the original release of Traveller back in 1977, your character could actually DIE during the character creation process.

You read that right.

It was one of the quirks that Traveller was (in)famous for.

Thank you, John Kovalic.
Dork Tower April 4, 2019.

The modern game, starting with GURPS Traveller and Mongoose Traveller, does not allow for character death during the creation process; it's merely "optional" in Mongoose Traveller. I suppose you could use that rule if you really wanted an "old school" feel to your game, but why bother? The point is to create a character that you can play, not realism to the point of having a useless or dead character.#

Another quirk that is not so unusual these days is that character creation in Traveller is a shared experience. Instead of creating a character --in consultation with the GM-- and then showing up with the completed character on the first group session, Traveller expects that character creation for the entire group is what happens in your first session. Along with other RPGs, such as FATE and Burning Wheel, characters in Traveller are created with character hooks, so that each character has a connection with the others. (Or some of the others.)

This is one of the big editing changes
in the 2022 Update version of the rules.
If only other RPGs did this!
(I'm looking at you, Ars Magica...)

***

One thing that distinguishes Traveller from, say, Paizo's Starfinder or the various iterations of the Star Wars RPGs is that Traveller skews much more toward hard SF. Elements of Fantasy --Magic, Force wielders, etc.-- are not found in Traveller. There's SF handwaving in terms of how faster than light (FTL) travel is achieved via the Jump Drive, and there's Psionics among some species --such as the Zhodani, a sub-species of Humans-- but aside from that, Traveller is very much a hard SF setting. Even The Ancients, a mystery species (well, not to the GM) who planted human ancestors across Charted Space and tinkered with and/or uplifted others, are less Fantasy and more SF. I mean, CRISPR-Cas9 exists already.

Unlike Star Trek, where players typically are members of the crew of a Starfleet or Klingon starship, the Traveller crews can fill any number of potential roles:

• Independent Trader
• Naval
• Mercenary
• Pirate
• Espionage
• Smuggling
• Warzone/Rebellion
• Exploration
• Diplomacy
• Etc.

All that's limited is your imagination.

Yeah, Smeghead.
From zhodani.space.

• Want to play a campaign inspired by Firefly? Traveller can do that. 
• Want to play a rebellion campaign without Fantasy elements, such as Star Wars Andor or Blake's Seven? Traveller can do that.
• Want to play a bounty hunter space campaign inspired by Cowboy Bebop? Traveller can do that too.
• Want to play James Bond in Space? Or an Ocean's Eleven in space? Traveller again.
• Want to play a space exploration/horror campaign where your crew encounter aliens based off of Alien or The Thing? Or even Men in Black? Yeah, Traveller has you covered.
• Want to play a military oriented campaign in the same vein as John Scalzi's Old Man's War? Hey, if you want to homebrew the setting a bit, Traveller can do it. After all, there's a Traveller setting called 2300 A.D.
• Want to play a space opera where Duchies encompassing different star systems vie for power and prestige in a galactic empire? Let me introduce you to Traveller's Third Imperium, set in the Charted Space universe.
• Want to play a game with a lot of starship oriented combat and maneuvers? Traveller was built with starships in mind at the beginning, not bolted on at the end (Starfinder) or added in an expansion (Star Frontiers).

In fact, Traveller's Charted Space setting can handle all of these campaign ideas and more, while providing a familiar framework to fall back upon. Even Charted Space itself may feel familiar to SWTOR fans in an unexpected manner, as the Third Imperium's modus operandi is that the Imperial Space doesn't mean that the Imperium centrally controls worlds or systems, but the space between the systems.

***

Mongoose Traveller uses the six-sided die as its main mechanic --typically 2 six-sided dice rolled, with the nomenclature of 2D instead of 2d6-- but aside from that the basics of RPGs are still intact. There are skill checks, combat checks, etc., all things you'd expect in an RPG. While Traveller is definitely a hard SF game, don't mistake the game as being entirely centered around combat. 

It's not.

Traveller was designed from the beginning to handle a lot of campaigns, and while the "free form trader" type of campaign is the most ubiquitous type of Traveller campaign, that doesn't mean that you spend all of your time examining spreadsheets and figuring out optimal profit margins as if you were playing a pencil-and-paper version of EVE Online.## 

Heh. If you really want to, I guess both.
From imgflip.com.

But campaigns aside, let's talk about another elephant in the room: advancement.

Traveller may not be so unusual today, but the concept of a game where there is little if any skill advancement once character creation is complete very much went against the grain back in the 1970s. Think about it this way: what would WoW be like if there were no levels or power ups or skill progression such as is currently found in the game? If the point of the game wasn't to become powerful but the telling of the story and your character's progression through the story? While you may potentially learn more skills (and/or spells, attack moves, etc.) and you might find better arms/armor/weapons, the concept of raid bosses with explicit and/or implicit affiliated gear checks would take on a different meaning. 

If you were a crewmember on the Firefly (or the Bebop), your focus isn't on progression, it's where your next meal is coming from. If you were Fezzik, Inigo, or Westley, your "character progression" in The Princess Bride happened before the real story began, when Princess Buttercup was captured. The entire adventure didn't end with someone "leveling up", but rather their escape from Prince Humperdinck's clutches. Their adventures certainly didn't end there, but they weren't running around looking for loot and better magic items to use. 

My point is that the mindset we have with a lot of our RPGs is very much advancement/loot oriented or maybe min/max oriented, and Traveller is not built for that. Sure, you might end up with a better ship than the Beowulf Class Free Trader --hey, that Empress Marava Far Trader would work-- but how you got that ship in place of your old one is worth an extended campaign all by itself.### In fact, there's a starter adventure hook out there that is exactly this: your crew purchased the rights to a starship that's sitting out in the wilderness, having landed there a while back and the owner wasn't able to get back and take off. It's all yours, but it's out there, somewhere. Surely that's not a big deal, is it? Is it?

***

In the end, Traveller is one of those RPGs whose Charted Space setting is so amazingly deep that if the game mechanics don't suit you, I could easily see Traveller's Charted Space being used as the setting for another RPG, such as FATE or Savage Worlds. Still, Traveller itself has its share of devotees even today.  Not too long ago, my oldest was hanging with a couple of friends from her high school days. The boyfriend of an acquaintance was there, and talk eventually turned to RPGs. "Oh, I play this Sci-Fi RPG that hardly anybody has ever heard of," the boyfriend piped up. "But we like it."

"Oh," my oldest replied. "You play Traveller?"

"Holy crap! You've heard of it?"

"Yeah, my dad has a lot of splatbooks for it."

Score one for the Sci-Fi devotees!

Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Come in, Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Can you hear me?

Come in, Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Hang in there, Beowulf. . .

                . . . help is on the way!

--From Steve Jackson Games' GURPS Traveller website

*Before anybody asks, yes he was one of the people from this story. I still keep in touch with him, even after he left our company and moved to Houston to take a job with NASA. Yes, he works at NASA as a third party programmer, and presently is coding various systems for Artemis. The lucky dog.

**It's morphed into the IndyCar Series of today. It's a very long story as to how CART led to a rival league, the IndyCar Racing League (IRL), and how after several years one league folded and the resultant fallout created the IndyCar Series.

***GURPS is one of many generic role playing systems out there, but also one of the more complicated ones to set up. It is so detailed that it is difficult to configure the way you like it, but once you've decided on a system and customized a set of abilities it is easy to implement. That being said, I frequently like to quip that GURPS is a game where the system tends to get in the way of a good time.

****The Third Imperium is the largest star empire in Charted Space, and so you frequently see Charted Space and Third Imperium used interchangeably. If you're like me and see a space game with a name like "Imperium" in it and immediately think of "Evil Galactic Empire", don't worry. The Third Imperium is definitely NOT that. The closest way I can describe the Imperium --and Charted Space in general-- is that it is the Age of Sail in space. Distances still have to be crossed for communication, and while the Jump Drive does connect star systems, it does take time for a starship to cross the vastness of space. Subspace communications --ala Star Trek and Star Wars-- simply don't exist. 

*****If you ignore the GURPS stat blocks and/or tweak them to your own version of Traveller you're using, the writeups for these GURPS splatbooks are fantastic to mine for ideas and setting materials. I think the only drawback now is that they might be hard to find in print. Not as hard to find as MERP, for example, but definitely not something that'll just show up in the cheap bin in a random game store. However, Steve Jackson Games has PDFs of the splatbooks for sale at their Warehouse 23 website.

#This is a pale echo of the same argument about "realism" by modifying a PC's character stats in AD&D 1e due to aging or gender. I understand the desire to make a PC "realistic" by modifying character stats if you want to play an aged Cleric, for instance, but you don't need to modify stats for that. Any DM worth their salt would accommodate this without resorting to changing a character's stats at all. Same with playing a male vs. female Human PC: just because the average male Human is stronger than the average female Human doesn't mean that female PCs should have a lower ceiling on their Strength stat: after all, you're playing an outlier to the "average" Human, so artificial limitations to the stats for the sake of realism make no sense.

##I know NOW that EVE Online isn't like that, it just seems like it at times. So that little quip here was to just tweak the EVE fans out there.

###After all, we can't all be so lucky as to win a freighter in a game of Sabacc. And if you did, can you imagine that the crew of said ship would be happy about that?