There are so many literate, thoughtful, well-written music blogs out there that I don’t even have to look for good ones to follow, I just have to pick a few that align with my own interests and enjoy those. Then, one day, I saw an offer I couldn’t refuse.

There are a lot of music blogs operating in a grey area of legality. To be honest, it’s a pretty dark grey. While I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those now-consolidated major labels that comprise the bulk of popular music distribution in the US and international markets, the copyright laws are written with those in mind who can most afford to purchase the governance and legislation they desire, and they’re all members of the Recording Industry Association of America.

The most unfortunate aspect of these blogs is not that they’re operating with a wink-and-nod toward copyright law enforcement; to me, what’s truly unfortunate is that many of them don’t need to be. What they tend to do is to reference a few of the best private music trackers for content, then upload albums to file repository websites—none of which I care to name, but you probably know them and their shady practices to trick people into paying for memberships to get “free” files—and provide links to YouTube videos. The videos are usually one or two that are simple shots of the album cover with a standout track or two from the album. Many of the best provide good, useful links to sites with detailed band or album information (last.fm, discogs.com, myspace, allmusic.com, and others) as well as links where the album can be purchased, such as Amazon and a band’s site, or their label’s site.

Since many of these blogs are on blogspot.com or wordpress.com, all of them are just waiting for the other shoe to drop, whether they know it or not. The day any of the major free blogging sites decide that these blogs are too big a legal liability, or the day they get Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices, that’s the end of the road for them. Many of them specialize in labels not affiliated with the RIAA, but frankly, figuring out who is and isn’t represented by the RIAA’s bluster is difficult at best, since there are some labels which have fought the RIAA itself, but have distribution agreements with other labels that support or are members of the RIAA. There hasn’t been any legal action that I’m aware of against these, but that may merely mean I’m not aware of it, not that it hasn’t happened.

The shame of the matter isn’t merely that our copyright laws are hopelessly pitted against their original intent; when the fastest culture could travel was on horseback rather than on fiber optic cables, a 14-year copyright on content was considered a good compromise by fair-minded people between the content creator’s need to make a living off creative endeavours, and the public’s need to have access to its own culture. Today, copyright is an ever-extended right that keeps growing and growing in length faster than real time. Very little of our culture is in our own hands, legally speaking. The print, audio, and visual cartels control cultural discourse, and unlike anyone with the public interest at heart, they can use their fat coffers to fund lobbying firms until they get the legislation they feel best suits them.

No, the real shame is that some of these blogs are, as I said, so well-written that that alone should drive traffic to their site and ensure readership, without having to provide the content they’re writing about and putting their existence in jeopardy, and that they don’t even recognize this fact. Now, more than ever, the typical internet user doesn’t need to be provided links where to download music in violation of copyright legislation. Today, people are seeking taste makers and filters: websites and magazines and friends who they can trust to point them in the direction of new music they might be interested in. The active music listener is no longer well-served by radio, slick magazines whose interests may not align with that of their readers, and least of all major music labels, who in particular have fallen spectacularly from the days when a label needed to decide which artist to try to “break”. Today’s better music blogs are extremely well-positioned to take on that role of trusted trendsetter and taste-filter.

One of the best-written that has a large overlap with my musical tastes made a pitch for more writers, and I couldn’t pass it up. It wasn’t trying to be Pitchfork, which constantly hammers on the new new new to appease jaded hipsters who want to look good (and by good I mean foolish) pretending that the latest album from Animal Collective is the end-all, be-all of music. The blog in question was a great mix of new sounds, old favorites, and forgotten gems. I hammered out a review of a favorite album, Front Line Assembly’s classic Tactical Neural Implant, with an eye to increasing the voice of the blog’s industrial coverage. This review is provided at the end of this article, and I’m very happy with it.

What I wanted to do was write about music with an engaged group of music enthusiasts for an engaged audience of music enthusiasts on a site that someone else could worry about the administration of. But, as I thought more and more about the “value added” portion of the website (posting albums to file repository websites with the nod to civility that we would take down anything at a label or band’s request and creating and uploading audio-centric YouTube videos), I decided that that portion was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I’d rather not paint a target on my chest, thanks. Others offered to do this portion of the work, but really, the problem for me was that the writing of the site stood on its own, and we didn’t need to peddle free downloads with a gauze-thin veneer of legitimacy.

I encouraged the administrators of the blog to focus on what we did best, the writing, and drop all the legal fictions about piracy that wouldn’t hold up in court or to a DCMA action anyway. The administrators, however, felt that their gauze was all the armor they needed, and that I was unnecessarily paranoid since they focused on “non-RIAA artists”. In my view, they missed the point entirely. I stepped away from the project until the issue was resolved, and since it wasn’t resolved to my satisfaction, I left altogether. The blog’s lead decided to stop the project for other reasons shortly thereafter, which is disappointing to me, as I still enjoyed reading it greatly.

One of the examples of the problem with the legal fictions regarding who is and isn’t represented with the RIAA has very much to do with Front Line Assembly itself. This album was released on a defunt label that had no association with the RIAA, but whose catalog was purchased by an indie which originally had no RIAA connections, but later entered a distribution agreement with an RIAA member, and eventually another RIAA member bought a majority stake in it. So even today’s artists which are clear of RIAA connections may not be so in the future, through no deliberate action of their own.

Not that the world has a pressing need of a review of an eighteen year old record, but again, pushing the new was not the site’s main function; it is, however, music I am passionate about, and if I can convince anyone to listen to this album with a review, that’s something I’m very interested in doing.

Front Line Assembly - Tactical Neural Implant
April 28, 1992 - Third Mind Records
industrial, industrial dance, ebm, electronic

In 1992, Trent Reznor observed in an interview with Spin Magazine: “For every band that I think has something to say, like Ministry, or Meat Beat Manifesto, there’s twice as many that have realized the formula for industrial music: repetitive 16th-note bass lines, snarling vocals–usually unintelligible screaming about the horrible condition of the planet or some kind of doomsday message about how shitty things are. Front Line Assembly is a textbook case of a band that—I can’t listen to a fucking song, let alone an album. Just monotonous, boring uninspired bullshit. And they’re far more traditional and far more exemplary of ‘industrial’ than NIN is.”

Tactical Neural Impact is exactly the sort of album Reznor was panning; it’s a cold album that lacks any of the uncomfortably plaintive frustration that makes Reznor’s own Pretty Hate Machine sound so dated. If this is music for machines, so be it. To be fair to Reznor, both bands arrived at the center of the industrial dance movement from different vectors. If Pretty Hate Machine shows its glam, funk, and “alternative” roots, it’s no accident. Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber arrived by another route altogether, and had plenty of outlets for their disparate influences—the most obvious example being the heavily Future Sound of London-influenced Delerium. Their influences weren’t Reznor’s: Kraftwerk, DAF, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire.

TNI came out at a very good time; the record labels were trying to anticipate the dominant trends that would replace the already-old-in-the-tooth 80s party metal sound. Many of them had engaged in bidding wars for new talent, and some of them had really pushed the new face of industrial dance and industrial metal. Of course, David Geffen would be the ultimate winner, and the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind ushered in a popular audience for Seattle grunge rock, and it was going to be very difficult to escape the underground nature of the genre of industrial dance. To do that, you had to add riffing guitars, and Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Skinny Puppy and KMFDM did exactly that, along with Front Line Assembly with their next albums. Even so, the flirtation with mainstream appeal didn’t last much beyond 1995. For me, TNI represents the first steps of the road ultimately not taken.

The opening ambience that leads into “Final Impact” stresses that this is going to be an album that meanaces with a whisper rather than threatens with a scream. Some almost-trancey sounds enter the mix, as if they were curious neighbors visiting from a Delerium album. Unlike a lot of the early Front Line Assembly releases, the vocals are restrained and focused; instead of textural ambience, actual songs are allowed to develop. This is music for the dance floor.

Though they would predominate in a major way in 1994’s Millennium, there are guitars here. Many fans balked at their overpowering presence in that album, but in TNI they’re not there to drive a song but to add a layer to it, such as in “The Blade”, one of the singles, along with “Mindphaser” which is an EBM-influenced juggernaut. The closest to an emotional ballad is probably “Remorse”, but it’s extremely restrained—anyone expecting a synthpop ballad along the lines of Assemblage 23 or Syrian isn’t going to be well-served. I find the synthpop sound to be very unappealing when taken too far, but this track exists in that middle area, along with some of Haujobb’s better work. “Outcast” is an engaging mix of sampling, restrained guitar work, and a beat that’s a little heavier than the rest of the album. The album is one of those short albums that feels short; on Tactical Neural Implant, not a moment is wasted.

mindphaser.com

Front Line Assembly on:
last.fm
Discogs
MySpace.com

Buy Tactical Neural Imlpant on Amazon

A lot of us are familiar with software companies leveraging the BitTorrent protocol. World of Warcraft comes to mind; every update is, if possible, sent to you via the torrent protocol. This is fine, because once you close the updater, the torrenting ceases. You are aware and informed.

I found something a lot more underhanded the other day while investigating some issues. A program called PMB.exe wanted to access the internet. PMB is another torrent client (Pando Media Booster) used by some other pieces of software to share data (in my case, it was from trying Dungeons & Dragons Online for free for a few weeks).

The key difference is that, unlike the WoW patcher, PMB was operating without my being aware, and was not making any attempt to keep me informed. As I have quite enough torrents that I deliberately seed, the last thing I need is another client fighting for bandwith, sharing files that I’m not interested in sharing. It was only sharing game data files, nothing of mine, but it’s still an extremely unethical thing to do without my knowledge.

I don’t have any expectations for Pando to live up to; they make stealthware and sell it to other companies. I do, however, have expectations for DDO’s publisher Turbine to live up to. When Asheron’s Call was popular, one of their practices which set them apart was their approach to their customers. At the time, the big massively multiplayer online games were Ultima Online and Everquest. Ultima Online’s developer, Origin (now Electronic Arts) were best known for a rather brain-dead approach; problems with the game were often hand-waved as something the players should sort out, and there was insufficient attention to detail to the ramifications of software changes and how they would be exploited. Everquest’s developer, Verant (now Sony Online Entertainment) was better known for being downright hostile to its users; you were playing their game, according to their vision, and if you had a problem with that, well, you didn’t know what you were talking about and frankly you could go toss off if they didn’t ban you first.

Turbine was the first of the more popular MMOGs to treat its customers like customers. They were neither ignored nor actively treated like the enemy. Their customers weren’t always right (and anyone who ever played an MMOG is going to cringe at the notion that the customer is always right), but they weren’t talked down, patronized, or insulted.

This respect for the customer is precisely why this inclusion of Pando Media Booster feels like a betrayal of Turbine’s values. This is my bandwidth. The use of users’ bandwidth without informing them is theft. If a game developer wants to use it to distribute your content in a more efficient fashion, go ahead and ask the user. In my case, I’ll probably let you, assuming your client isn’t running in the background when I’m not actively involved in the game loader or the game itself.

Turbine, this is shameful and unethical.

Update, 16 Feb: Peter from Pando’s Network Support Team commented below and addressed some of the issues I brought up. Specifically, he does address the initial notification issue, so there is an initial screen which informs the user about the presence of the PMB client. If the PMB client was running only when DDO was updating, and running as an application showing up either in the task bar or the system tray, I’d feel a little differently about this whole situation. As it is, it’s the fact that this client has been running silently on startup and that I had to find out about it via firewall software and the process explorer that bugs me. I didn’t sign up for that.

Faust, one of the seminal bands in the so-called Krautrock movement played a show at the MOCAD in Detroit. There was a workshop on the previous night which I did not recall early enough in the evening to attend. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m familiar enough with Faust to adequately describe them to anyone not familiar with them, nor to describe the concert in enough detail to satisfy fans more familiar with them than I am. For the former, there’s Wikipedia, and for the latter, there are recent live albums. The show was extremely entertaining, and I did get a few shots I like of some power tool moments. This may be a bit misleading, lest one assume an aural similarity to Einstürzende Neubauten. The power tools showed up during a few ballad-style performances, in fact.

Faust was preceded by Indian Jewelry, a Houston band that played a heady combination of droning electronic noise, pounding rhythms, and chanting vocals. There were definite pop sensibilities in their mix, and the fluidity with which the members swapped roles between songs was notable. If Faust are an important band that everyone should already know, Indian Jewelry are a new band I would recommend getting to know. I only have a few shots of Indian Jewelry, and most didn’t go the way I wanted, as I was not using my own camera, but one with a better low-light lens than I have. The photo of their performance is one that I find attractive, but is almost impressionistic. The more straightforward shots I tried weren’t satisfying.

Without further adieu, photos of Indian Jewelry and Faust.

…all different.

When I was in the sixth grade, about 1983, I was given a board game; whether it was for my birthday, or Christmas, or some other occasion, I can’t recall. To be fair, it wasn’t actually a board game, but I didn’t quite understand that at the time. In fact, I didn’t understand much about the game at the time. This game was the mighty Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rules box set, the 1981 edition with the wonderfully strange, stylized artwork of Erol Otus.

It came with two books, a crayon, and easily the strangest dice I ever saw, known to geeks everywhere as d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. Reading through the books, particularly the Basic Set rules, this was clearly not going to be a game of the sort I was used to. This seemed like a deceptively hard game, even though the rules were a lot less intimidating than some others. Freedom in the Galaxy was a classic example of having bitten off more than we could chew, so there was precedent for a few new games which quickly made it into the difficult to open hall closet, rarely if ever to escape. Not every game could be Avalon Hill’s classic, Feudal, after all. Incidentally, we never did figure out how to play Freedom in the Galaxy. The rules were dense, complicated, and poorly written. The several attempts we made to get through it usually ended up in an argument between me and my father, with anyone else involved generally walking away from the table. It was, frankly, a disaster of a game. I did take one thing from it, however. One of the characters was a humanoid bipedal saurian named Ly Mantok. A few years later, after entering the world of the Commodore 64 and the modem, it was my BBS handle on the local rural system for a brief time, until about five minutes after someone decided that they would call me “Mylanta” instead. (I later used Lacerta or Lacerta Skala, which was some broken Latin hodgepodge for “Lizard Scale” from the etymology section of the dictionary definitions of those words, clearly referencing the old character from a game I never even played. Later still, Delphi replaced this, and references the Temple to Apollo and not the database nor the car part supplier. Finally, upon getting back into the BBS scene after returning from England (more on this later), for the DC area boards, I picked a new handle for each board with the connection to the past being simply the first three letters. Delirium, Deletion, Deliberate, Delusion. “Delusion” happened to be the handle I picked for what became my favorite local DC BBS, before the Online Service Providers made it all irrelevant, so “Delusion” is what I kept. Ironically, the service provider I used in the brief period between direct-dial BBSes and an actual ISP? Delphi.)

So back to the hall closet in 1983: that’s where the story ended. For a while, at least.

After sitting in storage, under-appreciated for maybe a year, I took the game out and saw more in it the second time than I saw in it the first time. Sometime during this reading, I thought I “got” the game. I was ready to play it, and I brought it to a neighbor’s house to try to play. We were two people strong, so we decided I should be the Dungeon Master and play a character, and that my friend should play a character. I chose the magic-user—possibly the worst name ever for a wizard-style character ever conceived—and my friend played a fighter, probably influenced as much by the Conan the Barbarian movie as anything else.

Tank and DPS in place… Wait, wrong era.

The rest of this post is going to assume some basic familiarity with role-playing game (particularly D&D/AD&D/d20) terminology and slang. These first characters weren’t “characters” in the sense that the word usually implies. They were, quite literally, a group of six ability scores, hit points, experience points, level, armor class, a race, a class, an alignment we didn’t understand—lawful, we were the good guys, of course—and a list of armor, weapons, and loot. All of this was scrawled on 3.5 inch index cards in the barely legible scratchings common to all boys our age condemned to a world of post-cursive, post-D’Nelian print. There was no “character” in the sense of any motivation, a past, or a context. Later, constant erasing and re-writing would eat through the cards and require a character transfer to bigger cards.

We really had no guidance. We had no access to anyone else who knew what the game was, let alone anyone who had experience in actually being Dungeon Master. Eventually we would get a few more people playing, though it never occurred to me to limit myself strictly to the role of Dungeon Master. To point out that we were not playing the game correctly would be a gross understatement. The map was laid out before us, though anyone familiar with the game is probably aware that there’s all sorts of information on the Dungeon Master’s map that the players shouldn’t have. An alternative never even suggested itself to us. Playing the game was more fun than losing, so as we progressed through the Keep on the Borderlands adventure (the other book in the D&D box set), a lot of potentially game-ending die rolls were overlooked. Over the course of a few summer days, we killed the kobolds and orcs as we taught ourselves this new type of game. With the map, there wasn’t a lot of mystery, and with constant fudging of die rolls, there was really no jeopardy, either. Experienced aficionados of role-playing games can probably guess the result. With two key aspects of the game effectively removed, all there was to do was bigger, badder monsters, and more and more treasure. We were knee-deep in the classic Monty Haul powergaming mode.

As out of control this was, from a D&D purist perspective, it was compounded by the fact that the Basic Rules box set went to level 3. Having nowhere to go but up, it made sense to hand out levels at the same rate one needed to increase from level 2 to level 3. The plusses on the magic swords got higher and higher, The hit points and treasure and amount of the monsters increased, but rarely the always-fudged-anyway risk. I also played the game with some cousins from time to time. They were no different than my neighborhood games as far as player experience. Of course, I used the same character in both games and just made the assumption that, well, the dungeon filled back up. Needless to say, the constant goal of more treasure, more levels and more power is extremely interesting at first. It’s also the kiss of death for long-term game-play, and not surprisingly, both groups drifted away from playing after a while, once even the veneer of non-existing jeopardy was gone. A +17 sword will only motivate the flagging interests of players so far.

I eventually became bored, too; I realized something was wrong, but other than fudging dice rolls to keep players in the game, I didn’t really understand what we were all doing wrong. I chalked it up to the limitation of the fact that I didn’t have access to the Expert Rules, and there would surely be better stuff to do once I had that. Instead of the Expert Rules, I came across a book called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook. Well now, clearly all that had been wrong is that we were playing the training wheels version of the game, and now I could play the Real Thing.

The neighborhood group gave it a chance. Armed only with the Players Handbook, character creation offered an extravagant menu of choices, particularly if one wanted to be a spell-caster. Even so, there was a lot of rule-lookups, a lot of cross referencing, and a lot of confusion. Adding the formidable Dungeon Masters Guide to the mix at a later date compounded this issue to an incredible degree. Eventually, this group again lost patience, and that was probably about the time we started playing epic games of Axis & Allies, and eventually spending more and more time appreciating my friend’s father’s extensive collection of adult magazines. I was still interested in playing, but I didn’t have anyone to play it with. Much like the way I would play Risk by myself from time to time, six-handed, I developed ways to play AD&D solo. When you’re playing the game solo, it’s effectively a dungeon crawl powergaming session, but clearly that was pretty close to what we were doing before in the group anyway.

In junior high (which in our school district was limited to the seventh and eighth grades), I met other players. Very often, these were kids who, like me, were in band, were geeks to varying degrees, read a lot of the same (shitty) fantasy novels I read, but didn’t live close enough for sessions that could be regular or convenient. My two friends who were the most into AD&D were probably Matt and Dusty. However, they also had Commodore 64s, lived on lakes, and there were usually a lot of better, more immediate distractions when we’d be at each others’ houses for time periods that weren’t really conducive to AD&D gaming sessions (which is to say, for less than most of a day). Since they were neighbors, however, they could play frequently. During school, we would “talk shop” about AD&D and while I was primarily a hack ‘n slash powergamer number cruncher, they were more of the “Bastard Dungeon Master from Hell” types whose primary goal was to kill the player as quickly and in as fool-proof a way as possible. I became more of a collector than anything else; while I would play from time to time with other people, that long-term convenient session-style play never panned out. So I would collect, and play modified streamlined rules for solo-play. As the powergamer and the BDMfH bounced ideas off each other, the end result was that both campaigns headed off the cliff into the Chasm of Ridiculousness. My character would gain levels. Their dungeons would get more physics-defying. My character would add classes. Their dungeons would be in a castle suspended from a chain of the Strongest Metal We Could Invent a Name For. My character became multi-classed in every class I could find, in the original books, in the Unearthed Arcana (chock full of new classes), and in Dragon Magazines. Their dungeons would contain herds of Tarrasques. My character would kill evil devils, demons, daemons and gods (and my Monster Manuals and related references would be filled with crossed out stat boxes overwritten with “Irrevocably Dead”, “irrevocably” being a very important adjective in the high-end AD&D lexicon. Their dungeons would eventually require extra dimensions to hold all the evil, diabolism, and mind-numbing complexity within. My character would gain levels to such a ridiculous degree that I was effectively forced to use my Casio VL-Tone calculator/synthesizer to calculate them since it had a ten digit display rather than the eight digit display common to most inexpensive calculators available. Their dungeons filled with gods so powerful that they made the most powerful “official” adversaries and gods pale in comparison. My character would kill all gods, good or evil, and assume control of dimensions. Both their campaign and mine would be tossed aside for a brief moment of sanity, and I think each of us played a purist hack ‘n slash session or two of regular low-level (but not first-level) characters to whom rules were strictly applied, and if they died, well, it was time to create a new character.

One day, during junior high, a few gamers were discussing some gameplay mechanic or campaign issue or another. The conversation went to hell, literally. With the sort of pseudo-philosophical hair-splitting common to issues concerning the Outer Planes (non-AD&D types, think various versions of heaven, hell, and everything in between), the matter of the differing motivations of infernal denizens came up. There were three important types: demons (an unorganized and destructive form of evil), devils (who represented a hierarchical, orderly approach to infernal damnation), and daemons (which were represented by inscrutable, powerful creatures of pure evil, without any regard to personal independence for their followers, nor regimentalized armies of destruction).

In front of us was a pleasant, popular girl. She wasn’t a snobbish sort, but she wasn’t a close friend of any of us, either. She turned around, having half-heard enough of our conversation, and asked “which ones are real?”

“Which ones of what are real?”, I asked.

“You know, demons or devils, or … the other ones, day-mons.”

“None of them,” I stated, deadpan. I was hoping this was some sort of misunderstanding.

“Oh, I know you’re playing a game and that it’s all pretend, but what I mean is which one of those groups are based on the real thing. You know, like in real Hell,” she clarified, admittedly more open-mindedly than a lot of conservative Christian types ever would have.

At this point in my life, I wasn’t an atheist, but at that time I was moving down that continuum from liberal Protestant to Deist. I wasn’t ready to reject the idea of a deity, but I was pretty sure that Satan was a boogie-man whose primary purpose was to be a tool used by sleazy charismatic preachers to scare the unholy shit out of me (perhaps, eventually, literally) when I was in eight and woke up too early on a Sunday morning.

“Right. None of them. It really is just a game, and it really is just all made up. There are no demons, devils, or daemons in real life” was my confident reply. She made a dissatisfied (but not angry) noise and went back to what she had been doing. I had had my share of exposure to the “D&D is a tool of the devil” sorts. This was the occasional aunt, parent of a not-too-close friend, and very conservative parent of the girl who was brought up in a house so weird and repressed that she would never even be able to fake normal. It was often also the occasional adult who was more open-minded, but had really only been exposed to one side of the story. The irony was never lost on me, particularly when exposed to the most lunatic fringe of this already-lunatic group: the Jack Chick types would have you believe that those of us playing Dungeons & Dragons (goddammit, it’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, you Neanderthals!) were either really casting spells, or at best, thought that we were; that we were playing with forces beyond our control; that we were involved in bizarre rituals. Well, yes, 14 year old boys can turn anything into a bizarre ritual, but it always involved pizza, silliness, and fart jokes, not occult summoning rituals, unless girls were around. Then it was strictly pizza and silliness. This sort of inability to distinguish fantasy from reality—often a key accusation in the media (but less prevalent in the Christian circles, for reasons that will be obvious)—was always limited to the fundamentalist critics of fantasy gaming, never to the players. For us, it was a game. Not “just a game”, but definitely a game. Many years later, I would have my own fun with Jack Chick’s amazingly loose connection with reality.

Back to the game table: the period of campaign normalization and the general society’s misunderstanding of role-playing games bled into high school days (class of 1990). Computers were part of the mix as soon as we had them. My hoarding instincts led to early databases of AD&D class sources, spells, and weapons on the Commodore 64. I’m pretty sure that these were Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheets for the most part. Computer RPGs started out as basic exercises in BASIC, appropriately enough, and moved on to classics such as Telengard and the Apshai series. More advanced offerings followed, such as Questron and the early Ultima series, whose 8-bit gem was easily Ultima IV. Official AD&D CRPGs started with 1988’s Pool of Radiance.

AD&D was the source of frustration that, one day during the 11th grade, resulted in my first and last shoplifting experience. By this time, TSR had moved on from major books every now and then to a constant stream of small paperback modules, adventures, and campaign setting books. I was at a Waldenbooks store with a friend, Greg. To me, it seemed that the Forgotten Realms campaign setting books were getting smaller and smaller, and the prices were getting more and more expensive. We had already been to the B. Dalton store, from which I had bought two FR campaign settings and a Dragon Magazine. At Waldenbooks, I saw about four more brand-new FR campaign settings that I had never seen before, and feeling that I was paying more and more for less and less, I asked Greg to go look to see if they had a particular magazine up front. I then slipped in four of the AD&D accessories into my B. Dalton bag, met Greg up by the magazines, then walked out.

Generally, my sense of right and wrong made a huge distinction between Commodore 64 copy parties in which I would trade software with a bunch of other teenagers who could also not afford the $30 that each piece of software cost (about $60 in 2009 dollars), and shoplifting. With piracy, I was getting something I couldn’t afford and therefore would not otherwise be buying, yet not depriving anyone else of it. I had friends who would steal albums on cassette from K-Mart and that wasn’t just risky, it was wrong, and I didn’t want any part of it.

So when I had that bag full of AD&D loot—some purchased, some purloined—a cavalier attitude toward theft had not fueled my poor decision to shoplift. It was pure blind rage and a sense that I as member of the fanbase which made these games so profitable in the first place, was being taken advantage of, and taken for granted. I regretted it immediately, but fury was still a stronger force than regret until I got everything home. When everything was open and I started reading through, it was yet another case of TSR taking a random country in its Forgotten Realms campaign, and fleshing them out with 48 page booklets of information I would get very little use out of, either playing solo, playing the occasional group game, or even as source material for my own ideas. I kind of fell off the AD&D nipple then, and was happier to get the solo-play experience from CRPGs than from a floor filled with books, anyway. Just as importantly, BBSes and telecommunications (and, let’s be honest, phreaking to real BBSes since I was from a sleepy one-Board town whose local BBS scene rarely generated more than five messages a week) were taking more of my time.

When I went to England in January 1991 for my first assignment in the Air Force, I connected with a more “genuine” AD&D game, this time the less haphazard, more streamlined 2nd Edition. Here I got to experience a lot of the stereotypes of RPG society. There were the Casual Gamers, who often brought their girlfriends who could have cared less. There was the Role-Player, with a good separation between player and character knowledge. I was there as the DPS Mage… Wait, still the wrong era for that terminology. There was the Social Gamer, generally driven to bring out the best in others. There was the Rules Lawyer, who of course we let be DM rather than risk him on the other side of the table. There was the Guy Who Games In A Robe (and you just hoped you never caught a glimpse of how much or how little else). And there was Evil Rogue Character Motivation Guy: my friend, Franklin Sevier Harris, or Sev, whose full name I give only because I’ve been trying to find him off and on for a while now with little success beyond a Pandora account he hasn’t touched in about 22 months and if a quick aside accomplishes that, then so much the better.

Evil Rogue Guy is the player who is there to make sure everything revolves around him. Despite the fact that it makes absolutely no sense for an evil Drow assassin to be hanging around a paladin, a good cleric, and a group of other characters who ride the alignment funnel to its point, Good-ish pure Neutral, to the ends of Lawful Good and Chaotic Good, he’s there. Not only is he there, and playing a race whose alignment is pretty much assumed, that’s not good enough: he wants to role-play the party-creation encounter. As ham-handed as it is, when you have casual gamers, a lot of times it’s best just to dive in and start the session doing something instead of figuring out what to do. But not with Evil Rogue Guy. Calling his character evil is a misnomer, he’s merely Chaotic Selfish. And, perfectly within character, he trusts no one. What good assassin would? So instead of spending the first ten minutes after character creation having fun, the Chaotic Selfish character requires all the rest of the players’ characters to convince him, in character, that he should tag along with the party. What’s more, since we all know he’s a Drow assassin, it’s only reasonable to assume that his character is not to be trusted, and will be serving us a double cross at the most inopportune moment, but will be trouble leading up to that point, as well. Halfway through the session, we’ve got to tell Sev as players either he needs to get his character on board, or play a more compatible character, because the whole session is going nowhere.

Several sessions are like this. Due to the transient nature of military life, with people coming and going, people changing work shifts, and people getting dishonorably discharged for possession (and not the demonic sort), temporary and permanent turnover is legion. Most sessions involve coaching at least one person through the dreaded Character Creation Gauntlet. Unfortunately, its’ not actually dreaded. It’s fairly fun. It just goes on for so long that the amount of time devoted to it ends up being twice as long as the time left for actual gameplay. Even with access to a regular group, it still ends up being more fun to collect rather than play. By then, more than ever, the CRPGs are improving, so at least there’s that.

When I left England in January, 1993 to go to an assignment in Maryland, I had an interesting roommate.

He was a real character. We had a lot that separated us. He was old for his rank (I think because he joined older rather than because of slow promotion), I was younger. By then (as now), I was very much an atheist, but he was the member of a conservative Christian sect which observed a lot of the Jewish holidays and dietary laws (I don’t remember perfectly, but I’m pretty sure he was a member of the United Church of God). I was married, I believe he was a virgin (my then-wife Cindy was attending college at Western Michigan University, which is why we weren’t living together yet and why I had a roommate). I liked powerful industrial metal, thrash, industrial dance, British dance, a lot of what meaninglessly got lumped into the so-called genre “alternative”, and my tastes were growing more eclectic, while he was a fan of Disney movie soundtracks. I liked a wide variety of kinds of movies, he was a fan of, well, Disney movies. I was a gun-control (but not elimination) liberal with an ACLU card, he had an NRA card. It sounds like this is going to be a disaster, right? Actually, we got along very well, and he liked AD&D, too. He had friends, Garret and Lisa, who were also big fans of AD&D. The four of us, plus occasional spare players, would get together every now and then and play, but there were usually other distractions, and we never got that heavily into a campaign.

There was a store called Gamer’s Depot that had a lot of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D products for prices which lead me to believe they had no idea what they were doing as far as running a retail store for profit, and they had no idea what they had. I would find early prints of Dieties and Demigods which included the Cthulhu and Melnibonean sections deleted from later versions, and which I could have bought there for $10 and easily sold for $50 at a convention. These days, it’s easier for buyers and sellers to find each other on eBay, so that same book goes for about $20 today (or less if you’re patient). Vintage issues of Dragon Magainzes, including issues below #50, would often be sold below cover price, despite the fact that some were also worth about $50. Unfortunately, I only bought what I wanted. After the store closed, I often kicked myself for not just buying them out with a paycheck, including what I didn’t want for myself, and taking it all to Gen Con and making a killing; the prices were ridiculously lower than resale value. This of course meant that when I did find the store closed, I couldn’t have been less shocked.

Eventually Cindy finished school and moved down to Maryland, and I no longer had a dorm roommate. Garret and Lisa were good friends of Cindy’s and mine, but the four of us had a lot more use for poker together than convincing the girls to roll up characters and play AD&D.

[A brief aside: Eventually Garret got stationed out west, and that was the last connection I had to actually playing AD&D. Interestingly, they came back to Maryland, and we all picked back up with hanging out regularly, but somewhere along the way, they were lured into the multi-level marketing experience, Amway, and briefly got me involved in it, too. I got as far as being sent out to Anaheim for a convention. Unlike a lot of people who learn the hard way, I actually got into and out of it quickly, and the trip to the convention didn't cost me any money. Their singular devotion to "living the dream", always a big part of the Amway brainwashing process, precluded them from having friends who didn't share it with them.

At Anaheim, I had the most uncomfortable mass-public experience of my life. This was not a "business meeting" in any real sense of the term. This was a cult rally, and the cult was a two-pronged attack of conservative Christianity and greedy, manipulative business-as-secular-religion vapidity. I chalk it up to a positive experience though, because I did get to go to an excellent record store in Los Angeles while I was there.

One of the other major moral regrets of my life stems from this portion of my life. In MLM-speak, your "upline" is the person who invited you, and your "downlines" are the people you invite into the cult. During some local meeting, my upline's upline's upline was there with us, at breakfast. In the Amway cult, one is supposed to talk glowingly at all times about "business", despite the fact that it is almost invariably losing you money rather than making you money unless you're selling worthless monthly "motivational" tapes and worthless pop-psychology self-help books that are either amateur publications, or mainstream titles at significant markup: your upline is always "a great, great guy", and it is a constant that "business is great"; "business is booming" further cements your goals and inspiration into place. So my upline's upline's upline (a really great, great guy) was a Diamond Distributor in cult-speak. This is a Really Big Deal™, pretty much akin to cult royalty, and you certainly didn't want to embarrass your upline by being anything less than awed and obsequious. My upline's upline's upline (a really great, great guy) sat down with me, Cindy, Garret, and Lisa, and introduced his wife, an unreadably serious-looking Japanese lady. By this time, I already had the experience at Anaheim, and by now I was busily fooling myself that this was going to go anywhere, it being increasingly obvious that the cult's goals and mine were not mutually compatible. At some time during bland breakfast conversation in which it would, upon later reflection, be obvious to me how much a tedious fake chore everything in this man's life was, someone mentioned something either about being stationed in Korea, or Korean food. At this, my upline's upline's upline (a really great, great guy) became much more visibly interested and animated in the conversation.

"Well, the world would be better off without Korea. They're barely human." Sadly, he didn't quit there. He went on on a eugenic bent for a few seconds before someone tried to tactfully change the subject.

Did I mention that he was a really great, great guy? I'm not naïve, I know the history between Korea and Japan is ugly, filled with a lot of atrocity, and not easily forgotten by people with a personal connection to it, such as his wife. The comment, however, was wildly inappropriate and blatantly offensive.

I stood up, and told him loudly enough for everyone else at the restaurant to hear "No offense, but go fuck yourself. Your wife may have had a difficult history, I don't know, she's said about two words. You're a racist asshole, a worthless human being, and she probably is, too. The world would be better off without either of you two." Then saying goodbye to Garret and Lisa, Cindy and I walked away before I slowed and turned. "And kimchee is delicious," I loudly added, before walking out of the restaurant without another word, everyone looking directly at our table.

The problem, however, is that isn't what I did. Instead, I was so genuinely surprised at the conversation turning so petty and ugly so quickly (or more to the point, the monologue by that really great, great guy), that I was literally speechless. It felt like a bludgeon to my forehead to be confronted in person with such blind, unthinking racism without any warning beforehand. Historically, it didn't make any sense. If either the Japanese or Korean people had inflicted grievous harm on one another, certainly the Koreans had a lot more reason to hold a grudge against Japan than vice versa, after a wholesale annexation of their country under force to the Japanese empire before World War I. Of course, looking at history, the former dominant race rarely forgives and forgets once subjugation is over. A lot of white people in this country who should know better are still waiting for someone to "give them their country back" (from the black president).

So in a move I've regretted since, I didn't embarrass this stupid schmuck in front of his smug, priggish peers, his loyal legion of asslickers, the rest of the pious cult of the Gospel of Prosperity, and more importantly, my former friends. The relationship between Cindy and I and Garret and Lisa didn't recover after Anaheim, after Korea, and after they focused on living the "dream" to the exclusion of friends who are only in your company because they enjoy it. Like almost everyone in multi-level marketing, the secret hope is that the one person you can convince tomorrow is so ridiculously successful that his success will change your life, and that you will become the person you're trying to trick yourself into being. I say this with no malice whatsoever: having made one of my other friendships extremely awkward by pushing the sales pitch too hard, I hope that we were the last friends that Garret and Lisa ever lost because of Scamway, whether they were the infinitesimally small number who beat the odds and make a profit, or whether they came to their sense like I did, if not as quickly.

Right, I think I was talking about gaming. The result, when I look back, is that I never really had a real, regular game. The “campaign” experience common to most veterans of pen & paper role-playing games is one I’ve never had. I was merely a collector, a bit of an AD&D dilettante, one who had the brief taste of powergaming and number-crunching, but fortunately very little of the more free-form sort of RPG characterized by theater-aficionados and acting-centric role-playing, which I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed anyway. Nevertheless, the experience did inform a lot of later interactions I had with characters and players in games such as Ultima Online (where I was a role-playing purist, and missed a lot because of it), Asheron’s Call (where I was a casual gamer with a role-playing veneer,which I enjoyed greatly), and World of Warcraft (where I never saw a moment of actual role-playing, either on casual PvE servers, adversarial PvP servers, nor even on PvPRP servers, and didn’t miss it a bit). I’m currently “between online games”, having walked away from WoW after an unrelated project took me away from it for a month, and I realized I kind of liked having more time available for other projects. I think the next one for me is probably going to be Diablo III, which is more of a dungeon crawl than anything else. I look forward to it. It’s the sort of gameplay I’m familiar with, one I’ve got roots with.

My sister and I have discussed buying a starter kit for someone about the age I was when I first played the game so incorrectly. I have very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the videogames that compete with pen & paper RPGs are much, much more immersive and socially connected, and on the other hand, that sense of the company milking the customers (now Wizards of the Coast rather than TSR) seems no less focused on constantly hitting the cash cow than it ever was, now coming out with a fourth edition after eight years of third and so-called 3.5th edition. For reference, each edition has lasted about eight years, but honestly, the second and third editions were so much better-written, and so much more consistent, that each edition after the second seems less and less necessary.

At the end of the day, though, I still enjoy the memories of the experiences, save for that one moment of weakness at a bookstore in Flint during a particularly hot-headed day.

The original crayon in the Basic Set was to color the numbers on the dice. After having a few sets of extremely good dice in my collecting, I can say without reservation that the original dice are some of my favorite items in my collection. They are also some of the worst made; molded resin blobs with rounded, ill-defined edges.

I think a nerdy life would be less without them.

Spleenshine is a high-quality, high-test product hailing from the deepest bowels of the internet. While it is stealthily packaged in a Voss spring water bottle, I personally assure you that what is inside bears little resemblance to its former inhabitant. The one common thread between what was in this bottle and what is now in this bottle is purity.

At 185-190 proof, Spleenshine is for all intents a pure slice of alcohol. Whether that makes it homemade gin, homemade vodka, or homemade rum is really more about the process rather than the product.

The scene of the crime.

The icy vessel.

I took the time to prepare a frosty shot glass. I’m very fond of these glasses, which are thin, tall, and reminiscent of test tubes. They are standard two ounce shots.

The players gathered.

The same time only accomplished a slight cooling of the Spleenshine.

The breaking of the seventh seal.

The ... sniffing of the seventh seal?

The nose is immediate and bright, with notes of flinty stone, citrus oils, and rocket fuel.

The water of life.

I have made one decision about further use of this product; from now on, it will be poured using a glass apothecary funnel for precise, accurate application. Fortunately, I have a few of those.

Nature's wrath.

I don’t think his name has ever been officially written down, but the cat’s name is Q. Think “q.q”, and not Star Trek, because he makes a funny crying sound. Clearly, the cat also lacks much common sense, as shown here.

The reckoning.

This is what the end of the world smells like, with a full, clean bouquet.

The drinkening.

Spleenshine has an effervescent sparkle to it. It has a flinty, mineral start, and a cleanly austere mouthfeel with a hint of camphor. It continues with an explosively spicey pepper note that has traces of lemon oil, sea water, and gasoline, and a lingering finish with hints of apple and a strong alcoholic heat that one would justifiably expect. The intensity of the finish continues on the breath itself, not unlike a particularly strong ouzo.

Apocalypse.

Next: Round 2, the … Spleentini!

I listen to a fair amount of noise music every now and then. I like “isolationist” (Lull, JK Broadrick), some of the early noise-based industrial (Throbbing Gristle), minimalist textural music (Pan Sonic being the best example), and of course, so-called power electronics of Merzbow and Whitehouse.

Having said that, Sunn O))) was new to me. I was aware of them, their legendary status and their very vocal fanbase, but after seeing that they were coming to Pontiac at the Crowfoot, I decided to listen to a couple of the better clips on YouTube of their live performances. What I heard, even considering YouTube limitations, was amazing ambient drone metal at a devastatingly slow tempo and crushing volume.

This was clearly a concert I would regret missing. I arrived a little after the opening time, but the club was not yet open, and was still finishing their setup. I looked around at the rest of the people waiting, and it’s largely an extreme metal crowd with lots of tattoos and piercings, and concert t-shirts that tend toward Norweigan black metal, death metal, noise, and grindcore. The first thought that I had was “holy fucking shit, it’s going to be a melee”. I’d been to some rough concerts before. KMFDM’s Beat by Beat tour earned me a boot in the face. Black Dice, a noise band, toured a year or two ago, and the crowd was so geared up and brutal it felt like I left with an asskicking and actually had to retreat from the front halfway through; they didn’t even have a barrier between the band and the audience, or a stage, or anything preventing the crowd from pushing itself right into the instruments. I’m amazed that it didn’t actually come to that. Pretty much any show I’ve been to that’s involved industrial dance or industrial metal has had a mosh pit.

I can hardly express how little use I have for mosh pit idiocy. My general opinion is that when I pay to see a performance, any time I have to take my eyes off the stage to brace myself against a charge by a sweaty, shirtless 300 pound guy, it’s a waste of my time and money. The same applies to crowd surfing; I’ve helped people up when asked, but I’d prefer it not happen. While we were waiting for the Crowfooot to open, I was just trying to mentally prepare myself for the fact that it was probably going to be one of the roughest shows I’ve ever been to, and that I was probably going to last about ten minutes up front before I had to retreat to the back so I didn’t have to spend any time defending the compact camera I borrowed from my sister. Babysitting an SLR all night with a high f-stop lens—a lot more trouble for worse pictures—wasn’t even thinkable.

I had already been forewarned that this band plays live at about 128 decibels and wearing ear protection would be pretty important.

The first band, Eagle Twin, were a two-person doom metal band. This isn’t really the sort of thing usually I listen to, but for what it is, they were very good, and don’t use the sort of histrionics I associate with the subgenres of metal I actively dislike, black metal and death metal.

After a wait that probably felt a lot longer than it actually was, Sunn O))) took the stage. It has been said that Black Sabbath is what happens when you play Zeppelin albums at half the speed. And that early Swans albums are what happen when you play Black Sabbath albums at half the speed. This made Swans sound like speed metal in comparison. Forget 120 BPM. Forget beats. Bring on 1 minute notes, and longer. At an excruciating volume, 128 decibels is like trying to have a conversation with a jet engine 25 feet away. It was so loud that the vibration it made my jeans feel like they were going to tear themselves off. This is music meant to be experienced and felt as much as heard.

All four musicians were dressed in black robes, with enough fog on the stage that there a third of the time, I couldn’t even see them, despite being the second person from the front. The stage remained lit in green light throughout all but the last few minutes of the show. The vocals, deep, slow and indecipherable, were delivered with the seriousness that the rest of the performance required. This was an absolutely hypnotic, vital experience. With the robes, from head to toe, it was fairly cultish feeling, and probably the most sinister musical performance I’ve ever experienced. It was difficult taking pictures, as often as soon as I had the shot I wanted, the fog machines would kick in, and they were placed in front of the musicians for an effect not unlike a wet winter morning. I managed to get a few shots I wanted, and I was close enough that the vocalist was near enough to the camera to have touched it.

Despite the intensely somber delivery, it was, ironically, an absolute exultation. One of the best aspects of enjoying this performance was the melee I was expecting, and was sure was imminent, never happened. In fact it was easily the most civil concert I’ve been to in a crowded venue. There was a complete lack of mosh pit stupidity. The fist-pumping audience affectation typical of harder music was absent, in no small part due to a lack of a beat structure, and had been replaced by the outstretched hand, palms out, the better to feel what can only be described as a sonic onslaught. Finally, one of my least favorite aspects of musical performance was also absent: the encore that the audience is expected to ask for and the band is expected to pretend to give in to, even though it’s a set piece. In place of that, we instead were given a performance that was about two hours long and never held back.

The audience was a lot different than I expected. Usually at a concert, I like to buy a few CDs, and typically I’m very well-informed about the band. This was the exception, for me. Talking to other people at the merchandise table about which albums were representative and which were only of interest to completists, I was very glad that the dozen or so people I spoke with were well-informed and willing to steer me in the right direction. Finally, even the t-shirt designs for sale took me by surprise. Rather than the distressed blackletter typefaces and scraggly spidery logos typical to a lot of extreme music, Sunn O))) had the good judgment to ignore those pretensions. Say it with me: Helvetica.

Yes. Helvetica.

This was an excellent night out.

While in IRC, our friend Grogan linked a site I’d read a little of in the past, but a video I hadn’t seen or at least hadn’t remembered. God is imaginary is one of a few sites devoted to atheism and rational thought that rejects metaphysics, but also concentrates on talking to Christians rather than at or about them. It spends most of its energy making intelligent, rational arguments about the logical inconsistencies of faith generally, and Christianity specifically.

The technique the site uses is to take some basic precepts and to see where they lead if rationally and logically applied in the form of thought experiments. This reminded me of a thought experiment I’ve thought about for a long time. It’s original to me in the sense that I didn’t read it anywhere, but I have absolute certainty that other people have independently come up with it, and have probably written it down better than I have.

The subject is not religion, but rather, a different area of metaphysics.

I have a friend, whom I will refer to as Steve, who is very “open-minded” to concepts such as ghost hauntings, alien visitations, government coverups of alien crashes, and other issues which can fairly be described as pseudoscience. We’ve discussed government conspiracies since he’s aware that, while in the military, I served almost four years in an interesting assignment at the NSA, and had a high security clearance on the merits of the fact that when you’re troubleshooting network connectivity and message delivery systems, you have to be cleared at the highest level those systems are used for. I don’t claim to have any interesting secrets, because the fact is that most documents which are classified are overclassified, and usually classified not because of the information within them so much as the fact that the means of the information gathering is more sensitive than the result. When interesting secrets do come up in a job like that, most of them—particularly the best ones—tend to become public knowledge, and the value of a government keeping a document secret often has more to do with when something is known rather than whether it is ever known. Be that as it may, Steve is sure that I know something regarding the popular conspiracy theory regarding aliens crashing a spaceship in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the biological and technological evidence that is purported to be held in Area 51.

He’s wrong about the facts and about what I would have been in a position to know, but I do know something about conspiracies generally. Successful conspiracies are not about the big lie of massive proportions, they’re about personal gain. Here is an example of a conspiracy that isn’t plausible: the government was responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the Bush White House masterminded this with the goal of passing legislation to give the government extraordinary powers over peoples’ daily lives. Here is an example of a conspiracy theory that is plausible: industry leaders in a market sector met in a private meeting in Hawaii to artificially inflate the price of a commodity, succeeded, and managed to raise prices by 70% within 9 months. Not only is it plausible, it’s documented fact. It’s not a documented fact because it’s on Wikipedia, it’s on Wikipedia because it’s a documented fact. It’s not as sexy as a transportation failure billions of light years from home, stranding exotic visitors on a remote backwater of the galaxy, but it’s still a pretty interesting story with a very human element.

Those are the sorts of conspiracies that are real. They almost always involve profit, not being held accountable for one’s actions, and ego. They never involve space aliens, bigfoot, or the fulfillment of the Revelation of St. John.

If Nixon and seven other men couldn’t keep a third rate robbery under wraps, one needs to think seriously about the government’s ability to keep a shocking secret like evidence of alien visitation a secret when that sort of conspiracy would require hundreds, or possibly thousands of responsible, rational people diligently keeping their mouths shut and not slipping up all the way to their very death beds, being willing participants in the most sensational conspiracy in human history, and nobody but the tinfoil hat gallery being any the wiser for it. NASA faking the moon landing or the White House masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001 (or at best quickly reacting to them to hide the truth, if it wasn’t their doing) requires, to my mind, an even greater army of professional secret-keepers and government bureaucrats doing their very best to prevent the public from knowing information vital to the nation’s interests. Put briefly, all of these ideas are absurd.

Steve had a typically interesting thought experiment involving the “infinite universes” theory. I admit, I forget the details, because I was shocked that someone had stumbled so closely to a thought experiment of my own that I couldn’t wait to flesh it out. The concept of the “infinite universes” theory goes something like this:

The math behind string theory and quantum theory leave open the possibility of infinite universes. Infinite universes are created in every non-deterministic action (and to a quantum physicist, it’s probably accurate to say every action is non-deterministic, since it is posited that a quark’s location or speed can be known, but to know one makes it impossible to know the other). Every time a quark dodges left instead of right, every time a piece of dust wiggles north instead of south, every time a photon is reflected instead of absorbed, it is because every possible action has occurred, and we only live in a specific universe which that event which could have happened in any number of ways happened in only one specific way.

In the mundane realm of things, there’s a universe where you didn’t just deliberately blink. There’s a universe where your faucet sprung a leak tomorrow instead of today. There’s a universe where you went to bed five minutes earlier last night.

More interestingly, there are non-mundane consequences of random events. There’s a universe in which you have a much better job. There’s a universe where you died ten years ago. There’s a universe where Marilyn Monroe lived. There’s a universe where Adolf Hitler won the war for Germany and ruled on for decades.

Go a step further. There’s a universe where any statistically reasonable thing has happened. There’s a universe in which you are president of a world government. There’s a universe where medical science is far in advance of our own and that you will live on for 500 more years. There’s a universe where Marilyn Monroe lived to become the best fighter pilot in the world, and proved herself in a decisive war between the forces of Southern California and the army the allied Eastern US, European, and Canadian powers, and killed an enemy soldier with every tiger claw bullet her sonic slingshot ever launched. There’s a universe where Mahatma Gandhi won the war for Germany and continues to rule into his 140th year.

In fact, there’s a universe in which anything physically possible has happened, statistically reasonable or not.

This is a popular metaphysical belief. Some optimist scientists and philosophers adhere to it. There is a specific reference in Hindu holy texts which allow one to come to this belief. It’s been explored in science fiction. It’s a charming belief that, in short, a lot of people who ought to know better like to adhere to. I used to. My excuse is that I was about 15.

Here’s my thought experiment.

Take the idea to it’s mathematically obvious conclusion. If you have a number line that goes on into infinity, your whole numbers represent an infinite set. 1 2 3 4 5… If you take your even numbers, it’s an infinite set. 2 4 6 8 10… If you take your multiples of 2, still infinite. 2 4 8 16 32… Multiples of 95,381.28, infinite. 95,381.28 190762.56 286143.84 381525.12 476906.4… No matter how you describe a natural progression of numbers that has no end point, not only are all of those sets infinite, but it’s not even possible to suggest that one set is more infinite than another.

So in an infinite multiverse, not only is every universe that is at the very least consistent with the physical laws of our universe possible, but each and every one of them exists in an infinite number of instances, different from each other (if they even must be) in ways that are as inconsequential as a random quark in deep space interacting or not interacting with another random quark. On the other hand, an infinite number of universes exist which are as different our own as the physical laws will allow. Some people would even go so far as to suggest that in a multiverse, the physical laws it must follow are also up for grabs, making the situation defy even these lax confines of my thought experiment.

So yes, in an infinite multiverse, there’s a universe where you’re a happier, ridiculously more successful version of yourself, and you can fantasize about the very real likelihood that these different universes can communicate with one another. If communication between between two things are possible, it is possible to exchange matter, since communication is a form of energy transfer, and thanks to Einstein’s famous equation, we know that given energy, we can create matter, and vice versa. So while we can’t conceive of a technology which allows us to move information and matter between different universes, we don’t have to; out there, there are an infinite number of universes where an infinite number of beings, including an infinite number of humans, including an analogue of you, have figured out the secrets of this technology. On the other hand, if communication, and thus energy transfer aren’t possible between universes isn’t possible, this is the exact same thing as there being only one universe, and the whole thing is just a fantasy without any real-world application, and not even worth considering.

This leads to the fantastic conclusion that there’s an infinite number of universes where Earth exists without any human life, and that we can just move there using universe-transfer technology from our own (or more likely, another) universe, and start over. There’s an infinite number of universes where better, more enlightened versions of ourselves know information—scientific, historical, social—that we need and are willing and determined to spread it out to their less-enlightened multiverse analogues.

Which brings this multiverse theory to the brink. There are an infinite number of universes which have beings that have gone to war with other beings in their own universe, or beings in other multiverses. This has happened an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of super-weapons which have had the unintended effect of destroying every other universe that exists. This has happened an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of super-weapons which have had the very intended effect of destroying every other universe that exists, and an infinite number which target only our own universe. An infinite number of times.

Since we’re still here, this clearly hasn’t happened to our universe once, let alone an infinite number of times, that is the exact same thing as there being only one universe. As before, the whole thing is just a fantasy without any real-world application, and not even worth considering. There is no multiverse, and we have to deal with our own issues ourselves. There are an infinite number of things which will not solve them for you, including God, Brahma, and Super You from Alternate Earth. Any time otherwise responsible mathematicians and physicists start down the roads of unprovable—or worse yet, provably wrong—conclusions about the state of the universe, they should probably step away from metaphysics and ground themselves in testable theory.

There’s a difference between metaphysics and theoretical physics, and any theory which gives us this level of wish fulfillment should be suspect.

If internet memes are for anything, it’s for dragging them around the block until they’re bloody. While watching boxxybabee with a mixture of fascination and horror, I was reminded of an extremely interesting video technique I first saw applied a year or so ago. I can no longer find the original (which, by the way, used better source material than mine), so I can’t properly credit the person who came up with it. However, I remembered it well enough to re-create it.

A week or so ago, I was thinking about a particularly amusing XKCD strip about Google search results in relation to a rather silly story about the Vatican suggesting that people consider give up text messaging for Lent.  This made me curious as to what the best hit for the phrase “Gave up x for Lent” where x is some traditional Lenten sacrifice, or an ironic statement about Lent, or just some terribly random thing.  I aimed for the funny, but actually ended up surprising myself.  Just a note, I searched for “gave up x for Lent” rather than “give up x for Lent” because I figured out of the two phrasings, the former was more likely to be a real (if funny) circumstance, or at least an honest observation, where as the latter would be slightly more likely to be someone trying to make a funny suggestion.

We’ll skip the lecture on the scientific approach to irony here.

beer	1,340
liquor	76
alcohol	417

Starting with the classics here, without much surprise.

swearing	178
smoking	329
masturbation	512
music	155
candy	182
chocolate	617
beating my wife	2
murder	4

More classics, but from my amazingly scientific poll, murder is easier to give up for 40 days than beating one’s wife.

music	155
secular music	64

The notion of “secular music” has always bothered me.  It passively carries this idea that there are two kinds of music; the Christian kind God likes (which is presumably gospel music praising Jesus as if one is a dog humping the leg of the almighty, and so-called “Christian Rock”) and the secular kind the Devil likes (which is everything that isn’t about God and Jesus, or if it is about God and Jesus, was created by a band who didn’t mean it enough for it to be “real” devotional music).  When you get into Christian rock genres, it gets really funny, particularly when the desired genre the group is playing in is a very aggressive one (Christian death metal and Christian black metal come to mind); the lyrics that you can’t understand are about how Christ is a great guy.  You can’t understand them still, but at least you know they’re praising Jesus, so that makes it acceptable.

Enter Whitehouse and Blackhouse.  Whitehouse is an extreme industrial noise group, and if that isn’t familiar territory to you, and you’re having visions of a Nine Inch Nails video, you’re on the wrong track.  Whitehouse is industrial noise in the original Throbbing Gristle sense of the phrase, often more accurately described as power electronics, and definitely not dance music.  This is a cult group that has limited appeal, and is comfortable with that fact.  They probably sell 2,000 albums in a good year.

All of this presumably sounded really good to a certain Christian who decided to form his own band, and wear his noise flag proudly, calling himself Blackhouse.  This is the same idea as Whitehouse but presumably whose unintelligible vocals are less about violence and abuse, and instead are more about Jesus and Jesus.  And hope.  What do you get when you have a niche band band modeled after a niche band who sells a few thousand albums a year?  Ironically, what you get is extremely good.  I also would have accepted “sales figures in the dozens in a good year”.

Straightforward modern popular devotional music, however, has a specific audience in mind.  This isn’t like the days of the master composers of the Baroque period where their audience was so predominantly Christian that the question as to whether it was Christian music wasn’t just an intellectual diversion, it didn’t even make sense in the historical context to ask the question in the first place.  These are the days when Christian music means commercial music marketed to a Christian audience.  Like any other kind of music with a public following, it is a commercial, financial endeavor, as well as an artistic one.  It’s one thing, however, to have a Gospel band whose variety of music doesn’t really exist outside a devotional context—there aren’t any Gospel albums that aren’t about faith and spirituality, after all—and it is quite another to specifically brand your music as being just like {rock|heavy metal|boy bands|insert genre here} but different because you are talking about Jesus and are therefore more acceptable to your audience and more typically, your audience’s parents who might be concerned with the drugs and sex antics of secular rock stars.  After all, Christian rockers just don’t do that.  It’s crass market manipulation at best.

I’m going to borrow a few lines from the Flaming Lips when they were at their weirdest.  “This man came up to me just the other day / he asked me if I’d been born again / I told him I didn’t think I had / that I had been rejected / but I think hell’s got all the good bands anyway”

Back to the matter at hand…

coke	122
soda	400
pop	465
soft drinks	212
cola	2
water	8

Growing up in Michigan, the typical word for a non-specific cola was “pop”.  It’s one of those words that really marks your speech.  The next biggest speech markers for this area of Michigan (this is southern Michigan, not the Upper Peninsula, whose caricatured speech I have never heard natively, and I can only assume is gross exaggeration) is probably the unstressed vowel sound (phonetically marked by a schwa symbol, ə) in the word “to”, which ends up sounding like a quickly spoken “tuh” or “teh”.  To put it another way, “We went tə the store.”  It’s usually very subtle.

“Pop”, however, is the big one, which if you can get over it, you’ve pretty much got your neutral “newscaster English” delivery.  It’s compounded by the fact that there are a lot other regional speeches severely marked by their words for non-specific colas.  When I first left Michigan during my service with the Air Force, I went briefly to Texas and Mississippi, and then longer-term to England.  “Pop” immediately sounds like an affectation in that context, which is particularly funny because it’s not affectation, and the best way to get over it is to use “soda” or “cola” which is a very conscious affectation itself.  Best of all, one can just avoid the non-specific form and just refer specifically to a Coke…

…unless you’re in the American Deep South.  Then you’re using the non-specific form, which is ambiguous unless you’re particularly good at speaking with a capital letter.

meat	1,100
fast food	709
dairy	85
tofu	0
salad	0

One of the more common Lenten sacrifices is the eating of meat.  In modern times, this almost always means mutton and beef, often pork, and almost never includes fish and shellfish.  This is where things get very dicey for anyone looking for even a modicum of consistency.  During the turn of the 7th century, Pope Gregory I declared laurices to a marine species, and therefore acceptable for consumption during Lent.  Though it may come as a shock to modern anti-abortion Catholics, a laurice is a rabbit either removed from its mother’s body as a foetus, or a very-newly-born pup.  Like all human endeavors, religion is satisfyingly full of ironies.  In Scandinavia and Germany, beaver tails were also considered fish, possibly on the merits of the fact that they look a bit like a flatfish, but more likely as a compromise to keep Lenten observance a fast rather than an exercise in starvation.

atheism	52
religion	590
science	1

As superficially funny as the idea of giving up religion for Lent is, there’s really something to it.  Lenten observance is one of the most transparently extra-Biblical practices that still holds sway with many Protestants and most Catholics.  Unlike the problem of theodicy, it doesn’t take logic or even a familiarity with the norms of rhetoric to see through to how Lent isn’t a practice ordained by the New Testament Bible, but is a function of human tradition.  Sadly, however, when you give up science for Lent, you still have to pay your utility bills and put gas in your tank, because the physical world doesn’t run on faith.  Try using it to move a mountain all you want.

sex	196
gay sex	0
anal sex	3
my virginity	832

Seriously, Catholic schoolgirls?  Bravo, we salute your continued dedication to making the internet a little hotter.

x	2
the internet	117
shopping	99

X.  Do you see what I did there?

facebook	464
myspace	417
texting	71
google	8
yahoo	0

Until there’s yet another ridiculous news story about the latest buyout offer Yahoo’s founder has turned down, I resolve to forget Yahoo exists.  This is a very easy resolution, since it’s pretty much my default state; the only place I see Yahoo is in search engine results for Associated Press stories (which you can get anywhere), or on the default pages of some of my customers’ browsers at their offices.  They were once the leaders of the mediated search market, and now, they’re Google for those people who aren’t computer savvy enough to know that there is more than one search engine, or that you can change your browser’s start page.  Nobody has to “give up” Yahoo, because even people who use it don’t find it compelling.  And they’re certainly not using it as source material for any search engine related commentary.

lent	1,710
Christianity	94
Catholicism	303
Jesus	181
god	1,050
giving up things	547
lentils	6

That this is where I would end up is probably as obvious to most readers as it was to me.  What I found genuinely surprising is that so many other people ended up here, too.  It’s kind of sad that it takes something as patently ridiculous as Lent for people to realize that Christianity and the Catholic church are such fallible (and failed) institutions.  All this is right there for anyone to read, and they don’t need to take Richard Dawkins’ or Thomas Paine’s word for it.  They just have to read the document itself, and its flaws and its humanity are on display without mediation.  All it takes is the realization that you can’t justify the document with itself, which is to say, you can’t use the circular argument “The Bible is the word of God.  I know that God exists because it’s in the Bible”, as that is a meaningless statement.  Faith is always a distant kin to fact, and those people who actually do believe they have physically seen or heard God in their own life (and I mean literally, not in some pseudo Protestant hippy pantheist “he is everywhere and he loves you” pap) don’t hear God speaking from a burning bush or shouting out of their radio and then proclaim the strength of their faith as the source of their knowledge; they don’t need it when they have “real” evidence.  Be it the burning bush, the radio, the fossils of human footprints near dinosaur remains (however incorrectly interpreted), numerology (the Number of the Beast as applying to pretty much every US and Soviet and Russian leader since Richard Nixon) or the image of Christ on a piece of toast; faith is always trumped by evidence, except for those poor souls (read: the vast majority of believers) who only have their faith. Fortunately for the faithful, those who do have evidence are generally insane, and they should be grateful to lack first-hand “evidence” in particular.

Unfortunately for the faithful, once you play in the realm of evidence, religion is in a pitched battle:  and losing.

Give up your faith for Lent.

Sabrina, 2008

I’m not terribly fond of tacky, morose pet memorial websites, so I’ll keep this upbeat and relate a few funny moments.

When my (now ex-) wife Cindy and I first saw Sabrina, she was a tiny blur of a kitten living outdoors.  She was pretty skittish, and tended to retreat to a drainage ditch when approached.  One winter, the night the temperature was supposed to get to -10° F, which is very cold for Maryland, where I then lived.  Neither of us, nor the neighbor who had often seen her, thought she had much of a chance if things got that bad, so we increased our efforts to catch her.  We managed to lure her into the apartment entryway, where her escape routes were cut off.  Her ears were already wind burned, and would remain so for a few months, so I’m glad we got her when we did.  Her coloring was a tabby tortoiseshell, cats of which are female 99.67% of the time.

We had two cats at the time, so Cindy let our neighbor take her in.  This didn’t last more than a few days, since she was terrified of his ferrets, who seemed to enjoy cornering her, and the neighbor turned out to be fairly allergic to cats.  There was talk about finding her a new home, but honestly by this time I was very fond of her and only paying lip service to the notion.  She wasn’t yet very fond of anything.  One day, she took a flying leap off a second-story deck, hit the ground running, and retreated back to her drainage ditch.  Cindy went back to retrieve her, since she was making more progress with her at the time, probably because I was larger.  I failed completely at holding my laughter in when Cindy came back, both of them covered in mud, and Cindy holding Sabrina by the scruff of the neck.  “Take this.”

She was deathly afraid of us and our two cats for a while, before becoming very affectionate, particularly toward me.  It was pretty obvious that she had some neurological issues.  She’d have a little spasm every few months that I’d see, and her depth perception was sometimes dead on, and sometimes pretty iffy.  Her eyesight gradually degraded, though I remember early on she was fond of seeing hands.  One morning, the television was on but nobody was watching it, and for whatever reason, Robert Tilton’s televangelism schtick was on (yes, that Robert Tilton, of all people).  He had his hands spread wide, and within moments, she was at the TV, waiting for those hands to pick her up.  Cindy often said she’d forget how to walk as much as I held her.  I don’t think she ever went fully blind, but if she were judged in human terms, I’m pretty sure she’d have been described as “legally blind”.  She could eventually find the best-lit area to nap in, but that was about it.

She was kitten-sized her whole life, very affectionate, happy, good-natured and very sleepy.  She was not, however, the brightest crayon in the box.  During one recent winter which got really cold, before I’d fall asleep, I’d tuck her under the blanket at my back so she could stay warm.  After about a week of this, she learned that digging into the blankets was a good way to keep warm whenever she wanted, whether I was sleeping or not.  This was literally the first new learned behaviour I’d seen out of her in years.  She has always been extremely sweet, and easy to love, that much is certain.  At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to set up a punchline, she was also extremely oral; she would lick exposed flesh far longer than anyone could tolerate, and her tongue was a violent sandpaper attack.  The best approach for me was to put a pillow over my head, stick a hand out from under the blanket, and let her lick that so she wouldn’t try honing in on my breath.  I counted the number of licks before she gave up, a few times, and it occasionally went to 300, 400, and beyond.  I’m told this is characteristic of cats that are separated from their mothers too early, but nobody’s sure if she was an abandoned kitten of a pet cat, or born feral.

If the initial veterinarian we took her to was reasonably correct about her age—which is tricky given how small she stayed—then in 2009, she was about fifteen years old.  Other than her neurological issues, and a sneeze no veterinarian was ever able to successfully address, she’s been physically very healthy her whole life; I’ve never had to take her in for anything other than routine visits.

I’m writing this as she’s still alive.  Her health is failing fast and her weight is very low.   This is extremely unusual for her.  If she doesn’t recover, then with much regret, I will publish this post.