Bloggobad

For ages, I've felt a linger urge to return to blogtown, a vague sense of loss when I think about the ridiculous acres of Livejournal webspace I once flooded with emotional fumbling and rants about nonsense. However, when slouching back into the ever-crowded Blog Arena, the first question one must ask oneself is this: Why?

If you've come into this situation equipped with anything resembling a sense of perspective, you'll quickly realize that there are approximately ten billion blogs of an equally unimportant nature floating about. Soon after, you will recall all those blogs at which you have glanced at, rolled your eyes and bypassed. What do you, a thirty year old man with a sedate job, have to offer?

TRUTH BOMBS.

As I've aged, my capacity to feel shame and fear of regret have both atrophied to withered husks. They barely exist! And so, like Daredevil, I shall leverage my disability into a position where I can help the common man with my particular insight. Why wait? LET THE BOMBS FALL:

Twenty one years later, the prostitute from Total Recall with the three breasts is still the most profound idea communicated by sci-fi movies.

Apocalyptic Froth

I love me some roleplaying, but I have to admit that after many years of loving roleplaying, I am just about sick of swords. Rather, I am just about sick of roleplaying with fantasy tropes. Which is not saying I don't want to PLAY games brimming with fantasy tropes, just that they aren't very exciting to think about any more. Frankly, at the cusp of my third decade on the planet, I think I've been exposed to every possible description of "I hit him with my longsword" or "I do magic at him".

So, where to go? Well, the first reach is towards science fiction, because I am a nerd of towering nerdosity and have spent a fair amount of my lifetime imagining spaceships lobbing things at each other both cunning and terrible. It seems a place which would fit me well, and give me a nice place to think fun things and write up fun adventures and generally have a grand time of it.

Sadly, however, it is not so simple. To get a game going that doesn't require too much math, rethinking of paradigms, mapping and describing confusing combats in three dimensions, etc, you need to hand-wave a bunch of the realities of science fiction and end up smack dab in the lap of science FANTASY instead. Which is a fine genre! I love it! But it's basically Dungeons and Dragons where your sword goes "ZAP' when it hits things.

So, onto Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Time. So, the players will be fighting over the one canteen and arguing over if they should cook their fallen companions to avoid starving! GREAT!

Now, what do have them do?

Medieval 2 is a pretty cool game

Prince Henry was known by the people, including People of Quality, as The Good. Among the more cynical circles it was said with derision, to highlight the boy’s seeming innocence and light heart. Yet in private even these persons would concede that the boy’s eyes gleamed; not with the mundane light of any earth-born gem but with the properly capitalized Light. In short, Good Henry was a saint in mail, a husk filled to ripping with holy radiance which was plain to any and all to see.

It should be immediately obvious that this is a most dangerous trait, and for the worldly denizens of court (including the King, who was not possessed of the Light but merely a lifetime of hard-won lessons on the mundane facts of ruling) the only truly safe action was to send him very far away indeed. Happily, there was a Crusade called not a year after the boy reached his year of majority. Duly prepared with a modest sum of men (the indebted, the repentant and the bloody-minded), a seemly purse of coin for supplies and a flotilla of ships deserving of the name only in jest, did Prince Henry the Good go to war.

The court at home was happy to let him go and forget him. There were, after all, Scots of dubious ancestry and copious heaps of sharpened steel right here near home to worry about. Wistful and melancholy at the prince’s presumed glorious death, wise King Rufus set his frustrations firmly on the shoulders of his hill-born neighbor foes and several years passed in the usual way in the north of England: everything north of York soaked in blood with precious to show for it but crows and widows.

Until, that is, the Glorious Summer of 1360, when Edinburgh fell to English swords in a great glut of butchery and smoke which surprised no one more than the good servants of Rufus himself. Shocked to find themselves inside the gates against all expectation, the Scots were treated to a momentary pause akin to a man awaking from a deep sleep to find himself aseat in the privy. This was, naturally, followed by gleeful pillaging all round the town.

The Glorious Summer gave way to a hard winter indeed; the troops of Robert the Steward fought in a frenzy, the love of their homesteads and hearths pushing them beyond the endurance of the English who, after all, had hardly expected to be garrisoning the walls of this foreign city in the first place. Cut off from reinforcement from the barracks of Nottingham, Duke Richard Williams watched men starve and die who had just months before been the heroes of all God-fearing enemies of the Scots (this is to say, most men and women of whom were aware of them).

As King Rufus watched his whimsical dream of Scottish dominance fade, as his fantasies of being hailed as the ruler who had dared conquer where Great Rome had found only the bitter tang of defeat, he received news.

His son, Prince Henry the Good, had lived. Jerusalem had been taken, lost, retaken and finally purged of the Muslim, and stood as a beacon to all of Christendom. In the process, his shining and dangerous son had been reformed, taken into the crucible of holy war and recast as something else entirely. The people called him aloud “The Great” (and the People of Quality did so quietly). A mish-mash of crusaders from all nations which knew the true color of Christ’s love had been reforged with him, an iron-hard army of men who had fought, died and ultimately conquered for the Pope and the Son of God . They had stood in the hellish fire of that Moorish sun and witnessed, as his son had witnessed, the naked power of the Divine Grace and been lifted above all earthly concerns.

Most disconcertingly, the great city of Jerusalem, the Hub of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, was no longer their charge.

This boatload of zealous maniacs was coming home.

Revelation

There are no words to describe how bad Alex is at the movie title game, EXCEPT: better than me.

Speckled

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. " - Carl Sagan

The other night I watched a program about dark matter. You've all probably heard about dark matter, I'm sure. It comes up now and again, gets bandied around like any other household term and then rightfully relegated to page 5E and only seen again by really persistent nerds and your grandpa, who scans every word of every paper just in case. "Dark matter" is not a good term, or at least it's an ill-used term. It is a sexy and vacant term for a really exciting astronomical thing which thousands of geeks are wrestling with every day, a concept that is breeding ulcers and midnight inspirations all over the place. It is really heady stuff, and you can sum it up pretty directly with a short phrase:

"We don't know what the fuck."

The term "dark matter" comes from a man with a suitably fantastical name: Fritz Zwicky. And just to be clear, it isn't called dark matter because of it's raven hue - we have no idea what this stuff looks like - but because it is obscured, unobservable. We are In The Dark about it. The central reasoning postulating the mere existence of the stuff is this: It has to exist, or else the universe isn't behaving correctly. If dark matter does exist, then all of the observable rules we have come to understand governing physics are off. To put it in perspective, if we are NOT wrong in our calculations, normal matter (that is to say, atoms as you or I understand them) makes up a whopping 4.6% of the stuff in the universe.

Every insanely, incomprehensibly titanic monster of a star, every Jupiter-sized hulk of a gas giant, every single particle of hydrogen drifting in the untold vastness between solar systems, added in total, make up 1/20th of what should be there. Every single observable thing, e.g. the universe as any person without clinical insanity or an astrophysics degree, is a tiny fraction of everything. The vast majority of the universe is made up of Who The Fuck Knows, mixed with We Have No Idea. Whatever it is, it is completely transparent to any method of observation we've thought of and can only be inferred by the fact that it's mass alters how planets, stars, etc dance. Whatever dark matter is made of, it's not made of regular-issue atoms.

So. To sum up: the entirety of everything is a vast gulf of unknowable Whoknowsium upon which our quaint little raft of baryonic matter floats, getting shoved around by vast tides of dark matter. Our entire universe is like a swimmer on a floating sedan in a sizable swimming pool filled with invisible, untouchable water which we only assume exists because otherwise, how would the chair float? This bizarre and borderline insane state of affairs has been the high drama of astronomy for seventy years, because the other option is that we're wrong about everything else. Either the universe is crazy, or we are.

What a wonderful, inspiring, beautiful state of affairs.

Diversion

So recently I find myself reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, whom I may never forgive for failing to write a sequel to The Diamond Age, even if he has done pretty well for himself. In any case, the Cycle is all about 1600's Europe, the birth of modern science & finance and fun things to do in the Mediterranean when you're half-mad with syphilis. I am nerdy enough where I find the bits where characters argue about Newtonian physics nearly as exciting as the scenes where people make bold escapes through Paris on horseback, BUT NOT QUITE. But don't feel bad, Newton, nobody can compete with a character referred to as The Vagabond King. I digress.

The real point here is I caught myself thinking "Oh these Royal Society fellows, I could drop such science bombs on them as would make their heads spin!", which is most likely a lie. When you come down to it, these people were working directly with sciences they barely had names for, but they were elbow-deep and involved with them in ways I can hardly fathom. I, meanwhile, have a lot of vague understandings of advanced theories that I can't claim to understand.

So basically, before I go back in time to impress English gentlemen-philosophers, I better brush up on my physics. And chemistry. And biology. And oh crap, I'm doomed.

Summatime and the Bloggin's Easy

In a bygone era, back when the world was young and the boundaries of possibility had only been sketched in the broadest strokes, Atlantis knew a spring which seemed never to end. Its people prospered and cast themselves wide across the world, enduring only the hardships they chose to inflict upon themselves in the pursuit of understanding, living bright lives of color and splendor. Then one of them pushed too far, sought the unspeakable and brought the whole system shuddering to a halt and sent their paradise beneath the waves. The Atlanteans, a mild and sympathetic race, inflicted the worst punishment they knew: For ten thousand generations, the bloodline of those who had brought the Golden Age to an end and damned humanity to grunting murder in mud-spackled huts would be mildly uncomfortable in any sort of humidity.

My ancestry makes itself known every summer, chiming in to remind me that Minnesota would be a swamp if it was ten degrees hotter on average. Ick.