overgeeked
B/X Known World
Sorry for the mild spoilers if anyone reads Mushoku Tensei, but one of the male characters has resting bitch face as a superpower. It’s kinda hilarious.
What are you reading in 2024?
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
Tangentially related (it's about board/wargames more than anything else) Steve Jackson's Game Design: Theory & Practice is an interesting (and very quick) read. As something that came out in 1981 and was based on Space Gamer articles from even earlier, the book's pretty dated by today's standards but offers a fascinating look into design approaches of an era that was still dominated by two-player hex-and-counter games. Also a pretty solid overview of earlier trends in design from a vantage point much closer to the 70s than any modern history can be. Plus, the most dated stuff is kind of hilarious.
If you still have a collection of early Space Gamers you could just read the articles one by one, but the book does add and revise some material that probably make $8 in pdf a reasonable buy. My own physical copy disintegrated ages ago, but I was nostalgic enough to grab the pdf and reread it recently. Held up well overall, and for anyone who didn't live through the heyday of 70s and 80s wargaming it's an excellent window into the past that shows how far modern board games have come in the last 50+ years.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
It's not quite the same tone, but I recommend Re: Monster (the anime for which premieres next month). It's also an isekai, but is notable for being written in an epistolary format, which is unusual for a light novel series.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I just finished reading the Basilikon Doron, by King James VI of Scotland (later King James I of England). While most of his ideas for what a good king should and should not do were fairly obvious (e.g. "act for the good of the people," "don't be too harsh, nor too lenient," "don't mix business with pleasure," etc.") there were several amusing idiosyncrasies in there as well.
For instance, he advised his son not to play chess, because the game was so intricate that it might lead to wasting time thinking about playing it that should be spent thinking about being a better ruler. Likewise, hunting (with "running hounds," but not greyhounds) is a sport worthy of a king, but he's far less approving of falconry, which isn't enough like war to be useful as a learning exercise, and is "subject to mischance" that "inflames passion."
Oh, and meat should be eaten (albeit in moderation) as it helps to fortify the constitution. But it should not be flavored with sauces, as that serves to do nothing but please the palate, and so leads a king into "the sin of delicacy." No A.1. for you, son!
For instance, he advised his son not to play chess, because the game was so intricate that it might lead to wasting time thinking about playing it that should be spent thinking about being a better ruler. Likewise, hunting (with "running hounds," but not greyhounds) is a sport worthy of a king, but he's far less approving of falconry, which isn't enough like war to be useful as a learning exercise, and is "subject to mischance" that "inflames passion."
Oh, and meat should be eaten (albeit in moderation) as it helps to fortify the constitution. But it should not be flavored with sauces, as that serves to do nothing but please the palate, and so leads a king into "the sin of delicacy." No A.1. for you, son!
Eyes of Nine
Everything's Fine
Sad SF author news over in the In Remembrance thread. Won't post here, since there's enough bad news in the world, totally get it if people don't want to engage. But here's a link to the top of the thread in case folks aren't watching it. Posted the news today
Old Fezziwig
What this book presupposes is -- maybe he didn't?
So I finished William White's Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012: Designs and Discussions last night (technically, this morning, as I was having trouble sleeping and wrapped it up at 3 am or so). With the caveats that (1) I was not present or involved at the Forge when it was active, though I'm familiar with many of the games and some of the theory that came out of it, (2) I have no background in White's academic discipline and don't know if it's insightful or engaging with texts within his field intelligently or interestingly, and (3) my conclusions are probably not novel, here's the TLDR — It's half a good book and half a weird book.
The oral history pieces (interviews with and writings from people who participated in or were in the orbit of the Forge) are very interesting and do a great job of both contextualizing the Forge and its aims and critiquing them. My sense is that former Forge members have some complicated feelings about the Forge (in part and in whole) and also that, although they were aligned on the broad project, the idea of the Forge members as a monolith is incorrect. It seems like participation was a lot more fluid in real-time than it seems to have been when looking at the archives and website. There was an extended discussion of the Forge's moderation policies that was eye-opening to me as a different way to handle online discussions. And finally the summary of the Big Model was helpful to me as a bit of a primer on the theory, as it's hard to play catch up, even reading all of Edwards's essays that are posted on the Forge.
What made the book strange for me? The big thing was the absence of Edwards as a current-day person in the oral history (and to a lesser extent Vincent Baker, too). I don't blame either of them for not wanting to participate, as I imagine that they might feel (not unreasonably) they've said everything they want to say about the Forge, with much of it available online, to boot. But there was some weirdness to have people talking about the Forge and Edwards retrospectively while Edwards's presence in the book is historical. It's just a noticeable tension in the project. But I also found these things jarring — (1) the use of first names for Forge members in the book, (2) the long discussion of Edwards's "brain damage" comments was gossipy and tiresome (and a little funny, albeit unintentionally — there was a chart!), and (3) the exegeses of a couple of Forge threads for the purposes of showing how the Forge worked were interesting but mostly showed how dominant (domineering?) a presence Edwards could be in the conversations. And I skipped the last chapter entirely — I thought it was weird when he mentioned it in the introduction, and I could not have had less interest in an RPG about indie game designers in the Oughts as a capstone by the time I got to it.
Anyhow, after I finished, I picked up The Longest Minute by Mike Davenport about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. I'm still trying to learn about my new home's history.
The oral history pieces (interviews with and writings from people who participated in or were in the orbit of the Forge) are very interesting and do a great job of both contextualizing the Forge and its aims and critiquing them. My sense is that former Forge members have some complicated feelings about the Forge (in part and in whole) and also that, although they were aligned on the broad project, the idea of the Forge members as a monolith is incorrect. It seems like participation was a lot more fluid in real-time than it seems to have been when looking at the archives and website. There was an extended discussion of the Forge's moderation policies that was eye-opening to me as a different way to handle online discussions. And finally the summary of the Big Model was helpful to me as a bit of a primer on the theory, as it's hard to play catch up, even reading all of Edwards's essays that are posted on the Forge.
What made the book strange for me? The big thing was the absence of Edwards as a current-day person in the oral history (and to a lesser extent Vincent Baker, too). I don't blame either of them for not wanting to participate, as I imagine that they might feel (not unreasonably) they've said everything they want to say about the Forge, with much of it available online, to boot. But there was some weirdness to have people talking about the Forge and Edwards retrospectively while Edwards's presence in the book is historical. It's just a noticeable tension in the project. But I also found these things jarring — (1) the use of first names for Forge members in the book, (2) the long discussion of Edwards's "brain damage" comments was gossipy and tiresome (and a little funny, albeit unintentionally — there was a chart!), and (3) the exegeses of a couple of Forge threads for the purposes of showing how the Forge worked were interesting but mostly showed how dominant (domineering?) a presence Edwards could be in the conversations. And I skipped the last chapter entirely — I thought it was weird when he mentioned it in the introduction, and I could not have had less interest in an RPG about indie game designers in the Oughts as a capstone by the time I got to it.
Anyhow, after I finished, I picked up The Longest Minute by Mike Davenport about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. I'm still trying to learn about my new home's history.
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Alzrius
The EN World kitten
After having been reading it off and on since December, I finally finished my copy of Giovanni Boccaccio's 1361-62 work De Claris Mulieribus ("On Famous Women").
Presenting short biographies of over one hundred women from antiquity right up until Boccaccio's own time, there were quite a few entries which I'd never heard of, and many more whom I knew only in passing, making this quite informative. Though since Boccaccio also makes quite a few errors over the course of these entries, I'm equally glad that my copy had footnotes where subsequent historians and translators point out things which he got wrong.
That said, for all that he's shining a spotlight on women of history who might have otherwise been overlooked, this book is really, really a product of its time. While not all of the women he writes about were virtuous figures (since he's writing about famous women, whose fame might have been for good deeds or ill), the virtue that he praises them for is often chastity, where the reason he finds them worthy of remembrance is because they never got married, never got remarried, killed themselves after being raped, killed their rapist, etc. Between that and the overt praising of chastity as a Christian virtue, it's celebration of womanhood seems extraordinarily backhanded by today's standards. Doubly so for the fact that he characterizes some of the most impressive deeds performed by the women therein as being indicative of them having a "manly spirit" that overcomes the "inherent weakness of their sex."
Where the book was more fun was in the entries for mythological figures, since Boccaccio flat-out rejects that they were mythological, being a staunch euhemerist, believing that all mythology is derived from real people and events. Thus, he confidently tells us that (for example) that Medusa was a real woman, whose beauty was so great that men would stop and stare at her whenever they saw her, so captivated it was like they'd turned to stone. Many of these are hilarious.
That said, it's notable that Boccaccio goes out of his way to avoid rationalizing any Biblical figures in this way. In fact, not withstanding Eve herself, he doesn't talk about anyone from the Bible at all, probably to avoid being brought up on charges of heresy.
Presenting short biographies of over one hundred women from antiquity right up until Boccaccio's own time, there were quite a few entries which I'd never heard of, and many more whom I knew only in passing, making this quite informative. Though since Boccaccio also makes quite a few errors over the course of these entries, I'm equally glad that my copy had footnotes where subsequent historians and translators point out things which he got wrong.
That said, for all that he's shining a spotlight on women of history who might have otherwise been overlooked, this book is really, really a product of its time. While not all of the women he writes about were virtuous figures (since he's writing about famous women, whose fame might have been for good deeds or ill), the virtue that he praises them for is often chastity, where the reason he finds them worthy of remembrance is because they never got married, never got remarried, killed themselves after being raped, killed their rapist, etc. Between that and the overt praising of chastity as a Christian virtue, it's celebration of womanhood seems extraordinarily backhanded by today's standards. Doubly so for the fact that he characterizes some of the most impressive deeds performed by the women therein as being indicative of them having a "manly spirit" that overcomes the "inherent weakness of their sex."
Where the book was more fun was in the entries for mythological figures, since Boccaccio flat-out rejects that they were mythological, being a staunch euhemerist, believing that all mythology is derived from real people and events. Thus, he confidently tells us that (for example) that Medusa was a real woman, whose beauty was so great that men would stop and stare at her whenever they saw her, so captivated it was like they'd turned to stone. Many of these are hilarious.
That said, it's notable that Boccaccio goes out of his way to avoid rationalizing any Biblical figures in this way. In fact, not withstanding Eve herself, he doesn't talk about anyone from the Bible at all, probably to avoid being brought up on charges of heresy.
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Alzrius
The EN World kitten
So, my copy of the Instructions of Shuruppak arrived in the mail today, and since I needed a palate-cleanser after Boccaccio (see above), and this was quite short, I sat down to read through it.
As it turns out, it was much shorter than I expected. While the book I purchased has just over forty pages, the actual instructions (i.e. the contents of the tablets) only take up about a quarter of that. The rest of it was an introduction by the translators, their notes on the fragmentary nature of the tablets themselves, and then (after the instructions themselves) a listing of transliterations and some notes on the translations.
Insofar as the instructions themselves goes, enough of the original tablets have been lost that it seemed like every other line had a break in the text and/or a notation that some terms were uncertain. Still, there was some practical advice in there, such as not buying a donkey that brays too much, that being alone in a room with a married (to someone else) young woman for too long will invite suspicion, and that getting lost among the mountains is dangerous because the gods who live there eat humans. All good things to keep in mind even today.
As it turns out, it was much shorter than I expected. While the book I purchased has just over forty pages, the actual instructions (i.e. the contents of the tablets) only take up about a quarter of that. The rest of it was an introduction by the translators, their notes on the fragmentary nature of the tablets themselves, and then (after the instructions themselves) a listing of transliterations and some notes on the translations.
Insofar as the instructions themselves goes, enough of the original tablets have been lost that it seemed like every other line had a break in the text and/or a notation that some terms were uncertain. Still, there was some practical advice in there, such as not buying a donkey that brays too much, that being alone in a room with a married (to someone else) young woman for too long will invite suspicion, and that getting lost among the mountains is dangerous because the gods who live there eat humans. All good things to keep in mind even today.
Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
The First Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor. This was a fun read, looking at what Greeks and Romans made of various kinds of fossils in various kinds of contexts. Some was familiar to me, a lot was new, and there’s a delightful vein of personal experiences about contacting this or thst expert, going to some museum, and finding fossil pieces in, in one instances, that hadn’t been opened since getting delivered from a 1928 expedition. Reminding us that the giant heroes as well as the giant monsters of myth often had strange or multiple heads, multiple limbs, and other features thdt aren’t just regular people scaled up, she illustrates things you can do with sets of mammoth bones when you don’t know how they’re supposed to go together and they’ve been disjointed and all mixed up. Voila, Titans and/or things they fight.
Attachments
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Trying to make room on my shelves for the last two books I read, I came across a small monograph of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, which I couldn't recall having read before. Resolving to fix that oversight, I polished it off earlier today.
While I hesitate to characterize Thoreau's moral opposition to government as libertarianism per se, his moral calling to (nonviolently) resist participation or cooperation with a government that he finds to be acting immorally is quite stark. Voting and democratic institutions do not solve this, in his view, and lack of resistance makes us complicit insofar as our participation (e.g. by paying taxes) in government goes. That we are by measures intimidated (by the threat of monetary sanctions and jail time) and seduced (by participating in the commercial spheres that government asserts dominion over) is how our voluntary submission to an unjust government is achieved.
Personally, I found myself unable to help but contrast this to Plato's dialogue Crito (which I've only read in part, and need to go back and finish), where Socrates refuses his friend's plan to break him out of prison, despite agreeing that the death sentence he's received (set to be carried out the next morning) is unjust. To Socrates, there is no virtue to reaping the benefits of living in society, and only to turn around and reject that same society when it becomes onerous. Better instead to work to do what you can to improve it, even if that means accepting the imperfections of the present.
Both men advocate living for virtue, but how they proclaim that with regard to the larger society in which someone lives – one by removing yourself entirely from an unjust society, and the other by working to improve that society even if it means countenancing injustice in the meantime – are stark in how they contrast.
This is what a Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Good debate would sound like, I'd wager.
While I hesitate to characterize Thoreau's moral opposition to government as libertarianism per se, his moral calling to (nonviolently) resist participation or cooperation with a government that he finds to be acting immorally is quite stark. Voting and democratic institutions do not solve this, in his view, and lack of resistance makes us complicit insofar as our participation (e.g. by paying taxes) in government goes. That we are by measures intimidated (by the threat of monetary sanctions and jail time) and seduced (by participating in the commercial spheres that government asserts dominion over) is how our voluntary submission to an unjust government is achieved.
Personally, I found myself unable to help but contrast this to Plato's dialogue Crito (which I've only read in part, and need to go back and finish), where Socrates refuses his friend's plan to break him out of prison, despite agreeing that the death sentence he's received (set to be carried out the next morning) is unjust. To Socrates, there is no virtue to reaping the benefits of living in society, and only to turn around and reject that same society when it becomes onerous. Better instead to work to do what you can to improve it, even if that means accepting the imperfections of the present.
Both men advocate living for virtue, but how they proclaim that with regard to the larger society in which someone lives – one by removing yourself entirely from an unjust society, and the other by working to improve that society even if it means countenancing injustice in the meantime – are stark in how they contrast.
This is what a Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Good debate would sound like, I'd wager.
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