a blow struck against venezuelan hegemony...,
2008-03-03 21:31:09
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a buddy helps some random fuckwit on the internets...,
2008-03-04 20:41:33
the anti-christ fails saving throw v. death:
Gary Gygax is dead. It's hard to think of any single individual that did more to change modern soul sucking entertainment for the better, really. What would modernity be without millions of individuals wasting cumulative years of their imaginary lives away on Everquest or World of Warcraft or doing whatever the hell it is people do on Second Life? All of us would still be rotting in front of some shitty sitcom together, being blown dry by the boob tube when we could be hacking orcs or creating whole ecosystems.
Not without his detractors, bored fundamentalists took a look at all that dice rolling and magic talk and concluded, of course, that it must be Satanism. It was worse than the modern novel, even the rock and or roll. A gateway to drugs and homosexuality, straight into the arms of the Dark Prince.
It so happens that when I was a misdirected, bored youth dungeon mastering my weekends away, one of the kids in my merry band of nerds was enjoying the fruits of a rough family life and a broken home. With his divorced mother off on a drunken binge one weekend, the county social workers came to his home and discovered a copy of Gary Gygax's satanic masterpiece with my name on it. This they promptly confiscated, calling my mother to inform her that her son was in mortal danger. We had to go down and sit in for an hour and a half long private lecture against the dangers inherent in combining imaginative narrative construction with probability contests before they gave it back. I hope I was more amused than angry trying to reason with these people. As best I can remember it ended something literally like this:
ME: By that argument, Monopoly is a danger to public health and should be outlawed before it kills again.
SOCIAL WORKER: Yes! You see what I'm saying!
MRS. BUERMANN: I think you should return the books now.
Ah well. I haven't calculated a THAC0 in over a decade and wish I still had my original DMG - there was some great advice buried in that thing for people who create their own realities, particularly Gary's warnings against the hidden dangers of monty hall campaigns.
