The Packbats' Weblog

So, we learned today that D&D's default setting has, instead of an entire meaningful afterlife for atheist^[1] characters the way worshippers of gods have, those characters' souls get used as bricks in moldy wall somewhere-or-other off in some Astral Plane sub-plane or something: The Wall of the Faithless.

That's boring. I think there's way better ways to acknowledge the presence of players with characters who don't want to worship any of the gods in the setting - ways which grant the faithless dead afterlives as thematic and as good a source of plot hooks as any of the others. Honestly, there's a lot of better ways. Here's one for y'all's amusement, though.

Those who die without connection to any gods are sent instead to the Ancient Sands, a plane of trackless desert whose sun circles the horizon endlessly, offering no means of navigation. Those alive or dead that choose to wander the plane, however, find themselves coming upon first landmarks, then people, with those they encounter being connected to their own alignment. In this way, these souls find fates in keeping with their choices - the cruel surrounded by the cruel and the kind by the kind - with those who wish for stability seeking out a resting place and those who wish for novelty forever exploring the place and its people.

[1] In this case, worshipping no gods rather than thinking none exist.

occasionally we are overwhelmed by the realization of how much weirder we are than we had any idea we were allowed to be.

- 🦊 (January 12)

Thinking about this b/c 👋🏽 🐰 - new system member fronting.

Like, god, the goalposts on our brain's bullshit just don't stop moving. We grew up taught to be proper and obedient, and we grew up knowing on a gut level that stepping outside the bounds of what's allowed could mean being punished and being told you deserve it ... so we have a really strong sense of when we're in a zone that we feel confident of social safety - of society's authorization - and when we don't.

And we can sense the gradations, because being a plural system with two members is already breaking from what society licenses, but being a plural system with a bunch of members, and adding more month after month, just ... we know we're not safe from What Everyone Knows out here.

...

Thank goodness for friends who are excited to meet new friends instead.

- 🐰

(Maybe with help from others - 🦗? 🐦? or maybe when I'm driving my fingers, their signatures feel close to hand. We don't know. We're still learning.)

---

we can't speak to anyone else's weird

weird, for us, was not lying to ourselves nor sabotaging ourselves in the name of compliance to the expectations placed on us

it has been scary because it has meant putting ourselves outside the bounds of what power structures defend as normal

but it has also made us real

made us self-aware, self-affirming, and self-actualizing

we get to exist and avoid pain and harm and seek out joy and accomplishment

this is the part in the script where we say it is worth it, but it honestly wasn't a decision for us - or if it was, it was the decision we made as a child, that we were not okay lying to ourselves

but we can say that not lying to ourselves seems to work out

A quick message (via iPhone, because the DSL modem at home is on the fritz): I will probably be visiting Austin, TX for a week starting on the 14th!

Does anyone have advice on things to do and see there? I heard great things about the Congress Avenue Bridge bats, but I can't say I recall much else.

A testimonial from a dissatisfied customer.

Via circuit_four.

60% of one day's wordcount, and I've kicked things off with a literal bang. Unfortunately, I've a headache, $2.50 of iced coffee I don't want, 1/3 of a brownie I don't want, and a bit of a block.

I guess I just need to remind myself, as the Bard once said, to "lay on - and curst be he who first cries, 'Halt, enough!'"

I've generally tended to take the position that while the people running Iran are a bunch of reactionary thugs, they're at least a fairly intelligent bunch of reactionary thugs.

After this revelation on Iranian Press TV, however, I'm not so certain.

FiveThirtyEight: Worst. Damage Control. Ever.

(As I mentioned in the Google Reader repost, NY Times noted that Iranians are allowed to vote in districts they aren't registered in. This in no way suffices to explain what we're seeing here.)

Blame luve on DeviantArt for this, the Weirdest Music Video I've Seen This Year:

...are a toxic mix, for unknown reasons - the third causes the second to crash the first. Forum thread here - the short version is, "go into Mail's Preferences, and in the GrowlMail pane set Notifications to 'Show a summary of received emails'. Or uninstall Safari 4."

Edit: Courtesy of codeman38 at macintosh, a third way: go into the GrowlMail pane and delete the line in the "Description:" box which says %body.

coppervale, yesterday, wrote a bit On Becoming a Writer where he approvingly quotes a rule Harlan Ellison said to him: "You're not a writer until a writer tells you you're a writer."

gregvaneekhout begged to differ, and suggests that "the designation 'writer' can only come from the act of doing it".

The question I am inclined to ask is: whence* comes the divide?

First: I claim that it truly is a divide, not merely a quibble of the sort which may be casually dismissed in a footnote. It tears along the same line dividing elitism and egalitarianism, distinction and description - either the former elevates Writer to a title or the latter reduces it to trivia, depending on which side of the line the reader falls, and there is a real sense of investment in the side. "How dare you claim we are not writers?" one might ask; or, inversely, one might ask, "If you are writers, where are your publications? Where are your awards? Where are your membership cards?"

Second: that's where it comes from. It comes from the split between the prototype of the writer and the etymology of the term - from the difference between definition by similarity and definition by function. Further, it gains its power from the conflict in the definition. To use an elitist frame, because we ascribe merit to the title, we wish to gain it (this drives the meaning towards the more general functional form), but because the merit of the title comes from the prototype, we wish to restrict the title to the deserving (this drives the meaning towards the prototypical). To use an egalitarian frame, because we pay attention to this behavior, we wish to employ our language to match the behavior as logically as possible (this drives the meaning towards the functional), but because we pay attention to this behavior, we want to make sure to be thrifty, to only pay to the truly exemplary examples (this drives the meaning towards the prototypical).

Third: These very tensions make the divide impossible to resolve by any maneuvers. Nevertheless, I have an opinion.

My opinion is thus: the best strategy is to employ the word in the functional sense. This does tarnish the trademark, if you think of "writer" as a trademark, but to try to apply the elitist standard raises too many ridiculous confusions. (Check it out: Is Anne Frank a writer, by the elitist definiton? Samuel Pepys? William Topaz McGonagall?) But on the other hand, we should recognize that adjectives apply - professional versus amateur, good versus bad, original versus derivative - and we should recognize that people may (or may not!) take "Writer" as a part of their identity, and not to deny them their identity or ascribe too much moral or social value to their identity.

The same goes for a lot of other titles - "artist", "dancer", "fisher", "poet". These words are not states of being, they are states of doing. Best to recognize it and go from there.

* Linguistic aside: "from whence" is an equally valid form. I simply prefer the shorter version.

Saw this "genre fiction" (how I hate that term!) book list on hmmm_tea's journal - made a few inconsequential alterations to the rules myself...

1) Look at the list, copy and paste it into your own journal.
2) Marks: read one or all of, intend to read (or reread, or finish), loved, hated.
3) Feel free to elaborate wherever you like, whether on the books, the rules, or the list itself.

In no particular order:

( 100 items long, for whatever reason. Be warned. )

Obvious lacunae - Richard Adams (at least "Watership Down", and I'd add "Shardik"), Hal Clement ("Needle", "Mission of Gravity", but probably not "Still River", however much I love that book), Vernor freakin' Vinge ("A Fire Upon the Deep", I haven't read "A Deepness in the Sky", "True Names"), Edgar Allan Poe (anything, for cripe's sake), Bruce Sterling ("Islands in the Net", for one), Bram Stoker ("Dracula")...