Students of Magic

A passage upon my Authentic Wiki related to schools for magic:


Students are usually accepted into thaumaturgical schools at the age of ten or eleven, when they are introduced to magic as a problem of apprehension, consisting of a language-like structure of meanings, forms and relations, like a thought-puzzle, that must be grasped first by the mind before training begins on actually manifesting a physical representation of magic. Most students are able to manage the difficulty of being able to read magic within a period of 3 to 4 years.

The next stage of instruction is the manifestation of magic itself, which must be achieved before the student can hope to reproduce it in the ordered and controlled form of a spell. At this point, the object of teaching is not yet the successful casting of a known enchantment, but the first outward evidence that the student is able to apprehend magical structures strongly enough for their presence to take effect upon the world. This proves exceedingly difficult, for the student must do more than perceive magic dimly or respond to it with instinct. The mind must first be brought to recognise in magical expression a coherence which does not resemble ordinary speech, ordinary memory or ordinary reason, and having recognised it, must then learn to hold that coherence long enough for it to impress itself upon the world in some outward sign. Many students need considerable time to grasp this ability not because they are dull, nor because they lack discipline, but because the structure they are trying to apprehend will not remain still in the mind, seeming one moment nearly understood and the next to have broken apart into fragments too subtle, too numerous or too strangely related to be gathered again. Instructors therefore compare the effort to hearing a language spoken all at once by a hundred voices, then being expected to answer in it without being unsettled.

Elves seem to have an extraordinarily natural affinity for this difficulty, an apprehension that also extends to half-elves but slightly less so. Every elf destined to become a mage is able to produce a resonance or momentary flash of light by the age of 25; some are able to do it when as young as 19. The youngest half-elves can manage it at 20, but more often succeed between the ages of 26 to 30. Humans have been known to manage this at age 21... but by far, most do not manage until 28 or older. It is slightly unusual to find a human of age 34 or 35 that is still struggling, but even then, such persons do manage to become magic users. Other races than these, with the exception of the gnome, cannot, in fact, apprehend this magical coherence, presumably because of their biological structure. Would-be gnomish illusionists manage the feat between the ages of 23 and 25, but may be of age 28 before doing so.

Following the first manifestation, learning of cantrips becomes a rapid and exciting period for the student; quickly, they discover they are able to master at up to a dozen, maybe more, all in the space of 18 months, regardless of race. During this time, too, the character studies hard to learn the precepts of spells stretching up in to the fifth level or higher, at least in theory, if not in practice. When the individual student proves they have succeeded in learning and using three first-level spells, they are ready to leave the school and seek a more practical, in-world education, at a speed that suits them. In nearly every case, the span between being able to manifest a magical effect and mastering three spells, as well as cantrips, requires the space of five years.

Apprentices for Wiki Work

Of late, I have been thinking about my Authentic wiki. It has recently passed the 1,500 page mark; wanted pages have stretched out past 4,000.  The wiki itself is unlike anything that exists anywhere on the internet, as it addresses D&D without being a "fan wiki," as there's no compendium of WOTC lore, products, celebrities, or any such thing that isn't in fact applicable to the game itself. The content is meant to provide substance and support for dungeon masters and players during play, rather than as something to read. As such, quite a lot of the content is either dry and procedural, or simply so unfamiliar to the usual palate as to be, well, different.

Naturally, because of this, I think it's an achievement.

My earlier attempts to bring others on board, however, have been troublesome. Not to sound ungrateful, but some who dove in did so with very much experience in wiki building while assuming that I did too — while, in fact, I'd spent about one month with the program. They rushed in to build formatting that I was not trained on and did not understand, "to save me time," while creating changes I could not adjust on my own without literally deleting their work and mine. The issue arose, I think, because while a format like wikipedia can be casually messed with, because (a) the actual information is not structurally applicable to another usage other than pure interest; and (b) because there will always be someone else that's informed to come along and make repairs — my wiki is very much structural to a specific purpose and no, there's no one who can fix it like I can, because I'm the only person who clearly sees how the structure has to function without breaking the game. That was not made clear at the outset and it made for bad feelings and an abandonment of the project to entirely my hands.

Yet people have asked to help. And I am, unquestionably, wallowing in the size of this thing.

The easiest useful contributions are those that don't change content, but rather sharpen it in the most obvious ways: adding links, correcting bad links, fixing spelling, making passages clearer without changing the substance.  This is what I spend a lot of my time doing, especially with content like spells. It is easy enough for me to take a spell that was added to the system 4 years ago without any formatting whatsoever, like this one, and simply plug it into with chatGPT with the specific instructions: "rewrite for clarity."  I use this exact phrase because it gets good results. Chat will then tidy up the order of the words, not change their meaning, and churn out a fairly good copy that will serve fine as game rules, which it only needs to be. I usually then remove the Oxford comma (a stupid fucking unnecessary writing convention), straighten the curly quotes (which chat will not stop using), correct the American spelling to Canadian (because I am Canadian), add links where I see then, then add an image by saying to chat, "Make an image that fits this spell."

Images are an issue.  Because it's D&D, Chat wants to make every image something underground or in a cellar, in smeary "painterly brushstroke", with forty shades of brown for contrast, usually replacing 16th century clothing with 19th century. If the picture is outdoors, chat wants gray clouds against a gray sky, with dull brown-green plants, grey-brown buildings and grey-brown people, pushing things around on grey-brown scenery. And, again, as though its painted by someone whose learning to paint for therapy purposes.

To create a better picture, I usually have to tell chat to make the sky blue, the grass and plants green, the people occasionally in a piece of clothing that's yellow or red (but not yellow-brown or red-brown, which chat will always default to), and often use the following instruction: "imagine that I got into a time machine, went back in time, took a picture of the scene, came forward and am now using that picture; give me that kind of high fidelity realistic imagery." This generally helps with the smeary brown, but not always. Sometimes, chat has to be sworn at several times before the system realises that I'm "serious" about my request.

The text in a page like the one linked above can also be made better by asking chat to "expand" the text. Not some other word, which will produce a different result from the one I want, since the last thing I need is more adverbs and adjectives and meaningless redundant sentences if chat is asked to "make it longer."  Expand suggests, apparently, "use some things you know about the spell here and roll those into the text. These things then need to be carefully looked at, to make sure chat didn't change the meaning of the original, because chat WILL do that. But if the original is kept for comparison, then it's easy enough to cut sentences out of chat's expansion and reimpose the original wording if need be.

Additionally, if the content is a trifle dull, I find asking it to "enrich" the text is best. Otherwise, chat will load the text up with metaphors and similes, which is most enjoying. "Enrich" seems to produce small side reflections that are useful and almost always practical in some manner, so that chat isn't fucking with the language, but actually addressing the content of the sentence. This is very helpful. Words like "expand" and "enrich" can be used together, as it, "Rewrite for clarity, enrich, expand," and chat will do this without drastically slaughtering the work in a decorative, purple manner. I have arrived at these specific words after A LOT of effort.

Helpers willing to do this with the wiki would not need to invent game rules or understand the entire system to contribute meaningfully. They can take old text, preserve the original, run one of these specific operations, compare results, strip out drift, and return something clearer or fuller without altering the rule’s intent. That is a concrete category of labour. But that would mean trusting that I'm not giving prompts randomly. I'm being extremely particular about details, not just what I'm asking chat to create, but also what part of what chat creates that I'm willing to put on the wiki that retains the trust of the original while improving the presentation.

If someone wants to help with that, and show they're capable, THEN we can talk about the creating of base level sage abilities and writing spells from scratch, which I believe are learnable things for those who are willing to let themselves be taught. I don't want anyone who wants to come in and "fix" things to "help" me. I would like apprentices who can follow basic instructions and do ordinary work.

If you want to consider yourself for the task, you can use me for your resume and I'll make arrangements to give you access. Please be adaptable.

What is It, Anyway?

What is it I get from being a dungeon master?

That is, within the game itself. Obviously, outside the game there is the satisfaction of worldbuilding with a purpose, of redesigning game imaginatively, of concocting some justification for a thing to exist... and in my case, the hands-on experience of constructing maps that secures me a better knowledge of the real world, which fascinates me, while enjoying the artistic endeavour itself.  So far as I know, chatGPT can't meaningfully construct one of my maps yet, no matter how I prompt it, because apparently it can't organise the aspects that make my maps what they are.

Actually, that's a bit of a pity. I'd rather have the maps made worldwide than the effort to make them. Reasons for other effort into other things can always be found.

I have a game coming up tomorrow, and right now, as far as the game goes, I don't know what's going to happen next. I have some potential plans for what the party might encounter, and I have some potentials for what the party might decide to do with those encounters, but I don't have a set plan that A and B and C and D are going to happen. So basically, I don't know what is actually going to come about tomorrow night. As a DM, I have a setting that I can function in because the setting gives me ideas as people move through parts of the setting, and I trust my imagination and my improvisational skills to "come up with things" — not with invented plans, but with inspired ideas from the game world as the players actively go and confront them. But as far as what actually happens, that is outside my ken. I really don't know.

Understand: I am not improvising because I've failed to "prepare" — but because preparation automatically boxes in what the players are free to do, for all the reasons that a lot of writers have named: because if you spend hours making a session, and the players don't want to do it, then you have to railroad them or throw that work away, or ultimately repurpose that work somewhere else... all of which feels like manipulation and gaslighting.

Further, I have prepared. I've spent so many hours building the map and studying the land — because I run the real world with my game — so that I know Hungary, I know Hungarian history, I know the land that the players are in, I know what the hills look like, I know what the rivers look like, I know where they go, I know the people, I know the climate, I know as much as I possibly can know about that part of the world. That's the preparation that I'm doing. Knowing what's made there, knowing what trades there, knowing where the trade patterns are, knowing what the people care about, knowing what the historical character of the time period was... having all of those things. That's my preparation: not to build this particular dungeon that the players have to go in because it's a box, or if you prefer a metaphor that I've used in the past, my game world is not a Midway ride.

This all means I don't need to assemble the "ride" in advance, with painted scenery and a concealed track, waiting for the players to be loaded into the correct car. The Midway ride is more than artificial, it's predetermined under the guise of motion. It gives the appearance of travel while ensuring that every turn has already been decided.

Doing things this way would scare the living shit out of most who wanted to DM. I know this because they've told me so. Not knowing what the game is going to be when they sit down, that is absurdly frightening because they don't trust themselves to come up with something on the spur of the moment. And likewise, they don't think they'll be able to flesh out that thought in the time provided for the game's presentation. And perhaps they're right. I have never DM'd any other way. I did not go through a period in my early game where I used modules every session; at most, I tried a module now and then to fill in a gap, but from the start I just like "DMing by the seat of my pants..." except, in reality, that is not what I'm doing at all.

I am also writing this blog post by the seat of my pants; I write all my posts this way. Which means in essence that I am inventing ideas at the speed of about 60 words a minute, which is more than fast enough for a D&D campaign. The reason I can be creative at this speed isn't just because I've practiced — I can remember when my typing speed did not keep up with my thinking, and worse, when my handwriting did not. It's also because creativity as a writer is a double-sided process made up of what am I writing now and what logically follows from what I'm writing now. There's always the next sentence waiting upon the last one, because logic dictates that the next thing to say is this: if you know what the subject is, you know how to talk about it.

Running D&D is also a chain... and it's not a chain that we build by ourselves. The DM does not build that chain. The players say this, the DM responds to that. The players say that, the DM responds to it. The players are building the chain along with the DM. So long as the DM says things that are more or less open-ended for the players to respond to, the players are going to say things that are more or less open-ended for the DM to respond to. And thus the players slowly and steadily decide that they're going to go up into these hills, and the DM thinks, these hills would logically contain these things, and so I'm going to put these things on this hill, though I don't know when, or where, or perhaps not even if, I'll decide if the moment seems right. After all, I don't want to make that encounter appear like it's instantaneous the moment that the players start to climb the hill.

So I trust that as I tell the players they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, I'm not actually "being boring." The tendency is to think that's what we're being, because we grow self-conscious if nothing happens, but in reality we're not alone and the players are thinking continously, filling in the gaps as they climb the hill with a sort of tension... because they're perfectly aware that at any moment something could jump out from behind that rock or that tree, even if, as the DM, I have no intention of having a creature do so. 

And so, after a while, you tell the players they're at the top of the hill. The players start to realise that if nothing has happened yet as they climb this hill, they begin to talk between themselves because obviously there's nothing here. That motivates the players to say something else or do something else, which again builds more of that chain, which the I then respond to and the players respond to. And then in the middle of that, something hits me as a DM, "Oh, I know, I'll put a village, a very strange and unexpected village at the bottom of this hill that the players won't know what it is at first glance." But once I put the village there, then the chain begins and we can discuss what's in the village and all the answers and the questions related to the village. And there, we're running D&D. We are not running a railroad. We're not deciding ahead of time what's in the village. Hell, we didn't even know there was going to be a village there five minutes ago, but now there's a village because we've established it. It doesn't matter if I did it on the spur of the moment or if I invented that village three weeks ago on a piece of paper that I now have on the desk in front of me. What matters is that once it's invented, I'm responsible for defining how the players relate to the village. I am answerable. I must know why it is there, what sort of people live in it, what relation it has to the hill, to the road, to the surrounding country, and to the players now that they have seen it. These are things I can know because I know the region in which this village is located.

And so the chain continues into the future of the campaign.

I truly like this process.

I enjoy instantaneously coming up with a rationale for the village, for what they do there, what it's organised around... and most of the time, these questions are answered within a few seconds of the player's querries. Certainly, there are some who would see this as cheating, or even "faking" the world... but again, it does not matter when the village comes into existence... what matters is that, once it's here, not only does it remain consistent as to itself, it must affect every other thing surrounding the village. Because, after all, a village is not limited to its own environs. Those in the next hex are influenced also, because they know perfectly well the village is here. That it has always been here. Only the players and the DM did not know it.

Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind because of the way the aliens in it, the Tralfamadorians, talk about time. Time to a Tralfamadorian isn't a sequence of disappearing moments, but a field of fixed landmarks that only happen to be "sequenced" because of the way that humans conceive time. To a human, the village I've invented came about five minutes ago. To a Tralfamadorian, it's always been there, waiting in the future, for me to stumble across it when the time came.

Moving to a different author, if you will, I'll pull Tolstoy now, who after the body of War and Peace talks at length, for more than a hundred pages, about fate. Tolstoy relates time or events as we perceive them as the bow wave of a boat moving through water. In his conception, all the events of the present are affected and "pushed forward" just as the boat pushes the wave... but because in time we only perceive the edge of the wave, we imagine that we can choose to go this way or that, that our consciousness allows a choice to be made, as though we are in control of our consciousness. To put it as Tolstoy does, we look at the bow wave as though it is pulling the boat — that the wave "turns" left and that the boat follows, or the wave turns right, and so on... whereas, in fact, the bow wave has no control at all, and neither do we, as we are required to make the decisions that are forced upon us by all the decisions that have been made prior to the moment we experience as the instantaneous present.

Taken at it's word, this view dictates that when I think, "Oh, I know, a village..." in fact, I was never in a position to force that thought to arise in my brain at all. That was not a moment of my making a decision, that was a moment of my brain spontaneously, and apparently randomly, impressing upon me, without my compliance, that a village ought to be at the bottom of the hill. That is a very difficult thought for a lot of people, but I'm quite comfortable with it — since, quite right, it would be impossible for me to decide to invent a village before actually inventing the village, or thinking its a good idea before spontaneously thinking its a good idea. 

I have no idea why my brain would impose a village on me, of all the random things it might impose at that moment. I'm comfortable with not caring about that. I trust it will happen, because this is the manner I seem to think. But it isn't really in my power to decide whether or not I shall trust it, either, because that too is the bow wave... and at this point, I shall stop hurting the heads of my readers, who must by now realise that this post was not considered in advance before I decided to write it, either.

The logical end of this post is to describe "time" as a ride that we're on, that we don't control, that for whatever reason I've decided (without deciding or even being asked) to enjoy some of that ride in the process of D&D, and then to bow out looking all clever and shit because I've read Vonnegut and Tolstoy. Whom, really, the reader ought to read. All that matters here is that I enjoy D&D because it makes me think at a scramble in a way that no other activity does, which is why I find myself returning to running it every now and then, instead of just designing it.

Let's Fix Wish

Wish is a spell that enables the character to literally alter reality within the boundaries of their mental conception, allowing them to create, destroy, or change anything that they can fully visualise and understand. The power of the Wish spell, however, is limited in critical ways that have been outlined here as precisely as possible, with the caveat that it may be necessary, in game play, to further refine the language necessary to define this very difficult and badly mishandled form of magic.

| range = 360 ft.; see text
| duration = permanent
| area of effect = see text
| casting time = 5 rounds
| save = none
| level = mage (9th)

This said, the magic is not subject to linguistic interpretation by the dungeon master of the player's intentions, regardless of the player's language. When casting the spell, the player makes clear what is being wished for, without presenting a "phrase of wishing" for interpretation, and then the DM permits that result. The DM does not re-interpret, or create invented consequences that are in no way part of the spell or this description here of it, nor does the DM impose any "monkey's paw" thinking in the DM's interpretation. The only effect of the wish spell is what the player wished for on behalf of the player's character, period.

Limitations

When employing the spell, the caster is first and foremost limited by the range of the spell, in terms of what can be affected. Because of this, the wish spell cannot choose to wish away the planet, or a country, or any entity that is larger than the area of effected. The spell cannot be used to cause a country to cease its existence, since some part of that country will continue to exist outside the spell range. With regards to the limitations on "concepts," this point must be clearly understood.

Objects that exist at the time of the spell's casting must be within line-of-sight of the caster at the time they are acted upon. "All the creatures inside a building" that cannot be seen cannot be wished out of existence. All creatures within the character's line-of-sight, however, can be wished away in exactly that fashion. This applies to any other effect that is intended, contained within the vast number of possibilities present in the spell list and the compendium of the game setting's possibilities. Persons seen can be killed, brought alive, their ability stats improved, their wealth improved — they can be demon possessed or the reverse if so wished. But persons who are not in line of sight cannot be summoned to the caster, because they cannot be seen. The caster cannot have the King of England suddenly brought before him or her, because that individual is not in the caster's line-of-sight, unless that king is already in the caster's presence. For similar reasons, the caster cannot teleport to a distant land by wish, because that would be out of the spell's range.

Conception

The caster is limited by what can be conceived. The caster can improve another character's strength to make them "as strong as possible," but the caster cannot conceive of what an "18 strength" is. Further, the caster cannot conceive of "giant strength" — and therefore, while the caster can say the words, "as strong as a frost giant," the caster doesn't really understand what that strength would be like in the body of a character, or themself. Therefore, the wish would be fulfilled, by making the character the strongest possible that they could be, which in my game world is a 19 strength, which can conceivably occur through existing game modifiers. This change would be permanent.

In like manner, while the caster might wish to produce an enormous number of gold pieces, or merely an enormous amount of treasure, again, this defies conception. The player knows the number "one billion" but the human cannot literally conceive of this number; the player cannot, in fact, conceive of the number 351. Were I to pile that many apples in front of the player, their number would have to be physically counted, or my assertion trusted: one could not simply look at the pile and know. Thus, for things that are wished for (which are not brought from elsewhere, but literally appear of their own accord within range and line-of-sight), the idea counts, not the number. For a really large amount of wealth, the character could reasonably say, "As much as the largest horde in the world." But since the player does not know how large that actually is, the amount itself would have to depend on the character's actual experience. More or less, take all the wealth already controlled by the whole party, then double that and have it appear. Job done.

This line of thinking must apply to anything that is asked for, that does not already exist.

Single-use Realism

Once a thing has been wished for, it can never be wished for again. The caster cannot wish for another treasure the next day, or for any treasure, of any kind, ever again. If a character is made to be strong, no other character can ever be likewise affected, even to the tune of one ability point. This is a severe limit on the spell. It says that the caster must consider the use of the spell in any circumstance, since if one frost giant is obliterated out of existence, not only may no other frost giant ever be gotten rid of again with the spell, nor may any other kind of "giant" — because, and this needs to be very clear, "distinctiveness between objects affected only goes so far." Except for colour, one dragon is close enough to every other dragon as to consider the entire species as the same. The same goes for every demon, every snake, every spider and so on. A distinction can be made reasonable for a weretiger vs. a werewolf... those cannot be mistaken for each other. But a weretiger vs. a tiger? It would depend on what shape the lycanthrope took.

And yes, this applies to races also. The caster gets one wish obliterating a human or humans, one wish obliterating an elf or elves, one wish obliterating a troll or trolls. An argument cannot be made that the wish was to heal only humans named "Dave." No, not distinctive enough. The individual DM can choose where to draw the line, but there must be a line. If, therefore, one is going to use the spell to obliterate an enemy, it would be best not to obliterate a large number of mixed raced creatures at a single blow. Best to take out all the frost giants and then use other means to get rid of the rest. And the caster, yes, should consider, is this really as many frost giants as I might have to get rid of someday in one blow?

Uses

Possible uses for the wish spell include, and are by no means limited to, Restore hit points, resurrect a dead creature, cure disease, cure poison, remove curses, repair damaged magic items, create non-magical or magical objects or items, duplicate the effects of any spell except those not possible by the limitations above, make a given spell's effect permanent, grant immunity to a condition, enhance ability scores, grant proficiency in a skill, create buildings, dismiss a spell, push an enemy outside the range of the spell, dispel magic, create a protective barrier, grant the ability flight, take away or restore a memory, alter terrain within range, make a weather-type permanent. And many other things a player can think of.

Kicking the Can

This is a very frank conversation about aging. Do not read if your age says you're not old enough to get on this ride.

As someone in my early 60s, I'm supposed to be concerned about the future and the changes that it's going to bring. Just as I was supposed to be confused about the internet, and confused about the youtube, and then streaming, I'm likewise expected to be frightened of A.I. and whatever else might follow, because I'm an old man.

Of necessity, I found myself stumbling over the use of Discord, which I've had to engage with in order to make the online D&D campaign work. And no, I'm not especially good at it, or experienced with it, or anxious to become experienced with it... and it's a bit of a joke with the experienced players, which I don't mind. Where technology is concerned, I've always been a step or two behind the curve.

That does not make me afraid of the curve.

A few days ago my partner and I fell into one of those conversations that people in their 60s have... what is going to happen to us when we can no longer do the dishes, drive to the store for groceries, keep up with the bare minimum of housecleaning and so on. We're not so wealthy that we can hire someone, our younger family are very busy being a young family and obviously, there's a desire not to burden people we care about. I know from experience that there are people our age who have the attitude, "Well, the young will take care of us, that's what they're good for."  This, of course, is evidence of these people having totally forgotten what it was like to be young. It wasn't just that they didn't care, it's that when they were in their 30s, they were telling their friends, "No, I can't go to the bar, I really need this done because we desperately need me to keep this job."

Yet now, these same people assume other 30 year olds will drop the bar and the job to go vacuum their carpets. It's a little funny.

All this is to confirm that, for the most part, people aren't prepared to be in their late 60s, should they live so long. This despite having thirty or even forty years to prepare for it. There's too much resistance, too deep a desire to just argue that no, we're not getting old, or that when they do it can't be that bad, or whatever, to actually sit down and think, this body has a best-before date. Maybe that's something I should consider.

This hits a wall when we find ourselves having a combined ten visits to the hospital, doctor and lab all in the space of a month, ending in nothing actually being "fixed." Because this is the reality of hitting this particular stretch... the stuff that starts to break down does it in a way that can't be corrected. It can only be managed. That is very sobering.

I met this wall when I was 30, when my daughter was aged six, and when my first wife's multiple schlerosis reduced her to a quadrapelegic. This is where I did my training in "no-solution medicine." It was more than sobering, it was catastrophic. Comparatively, every horror I've faced since has the edges smoothed off. That's a part of what makes me me.

Life, if you'll pardon the expression, is essentially kicking a can down the road. When you're young, can-kicking is fun. As you age and start to work, that can-kicking feels awful at first, then you're so busy you've forgotten that it's what you're doing. But then, steadily, as things fall away, as your children move away from home, as your parents die and leave you the pater or mater familias, as friends go, as the places you hung out go, as the things you liked to do once and can't any more, or have simply ceased to be, go, there you are, still kicking that same can, wondering how long this part is going to go on. After all, realistically, I could live to be a hundred. A hundred is the same distance from me now that 24 is. This gives me an awful lot of time to kick a can with not that much else to do.

A different game that my generation likes to play, that my parents generation did without much hope, is this: "How far will technology progress before I'm really old?" That matters, particularly with medicine. My mother had a heart valve installed in 1977, when she was told that it might give her "two or three years, perhaps more."  The valve did not in fact fail until 1995, when she was still alive... and long enough to get a better heart valve installed in another operation, and this time with the adjoiner, "We don't know how long this is going to work."  My mother lived until 2012. She did not die of heart failure. Which is what makes this game, "Will technology keep me alive?" so much fun to play at this age.

I understand that at present, the fastest growing job market — where the numbers of actual workers are increasing at the fastest rate — is aged care. Looking after the old and dying is, right now, a big growth industry. I brought this up with my partner, which inspired the usual discussion called, "Why the fuck we don't want to end up in an old age home," an old favourite, complimented by this technology thing. Usually, as soon as a lot of people start working in a particular growth industry occurs, there follows a desire to automate that thing because there's more money to be made there. I'm sure the gentle reader has noticed there's quite a lot of discussion about robots right now.

Let me walk you through that thinking again. When a sector swells, it attracts capital. When capital arrives, it looks for ways to reduce dependence on labour. The needs of the ailing and the dying are minimal. An 90-year-old does not need a robot to help her prepare for a big party, or anything complex like that. She needs something that can move a spoon to her lips. And change things. And be able to lift her, so the bed can be made. The needs of a 90-year-old makes a very limited yet practical number of things that a robot can be taught to do.

None of those being commit euthanasia, but I know you young people. That's where you all went.

Tamara and I have agreed. We would rather have a robot take care of us in our later years than a person. A robot doesn't make assumptions such as, "You're old, of course you want to watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News with the other old people here."  A robot doesn't care if you don't conform. A robot can be programmed to just adapt to the patient, unlike a human who recognises, "Hey, the patient is helpless, they can adapt to me."  These are things, trust me, that you'll think about one day.

Oh yes, of course I know that most people my age would cringe in horror at this idea. They live in this fantasy land where "care" means warmth, company, presence, concern... but we're under no such delusions. People suck. Having a person in your home, making decisions for you, about what you need, and what you have to accept now, I did that in my early 30s with my first wife's nurses. And it SUCKS. They are not reasonable, they are not human, they are "educated" with a set of precepts that say, in essence, "my life is really fucking hard, and you're sick, so shut up and make my really hard life easier."

I still bounce against this in hospitals. I did just 6 days ago. I don't mean to disparage nurses, we all depend on them. But they aren't reasonable as people. What they do for a living precludes any possibility of them being that.

On the other hand, a robot is like a toaster. It doesn't work without effort, but when it works, it does not tell you what to think, or what tone to speak in, or what expression you ought to have on your face. You are never judged by your toaster. You don't stuff bread into it at 1 AM to have it carp, "How come you're not in bed yet? I can't be expected to make toast at this hour? Why don't you behave like a responsible person?"

I'm at a point in this post where I want to tell as story about something I said to a nurse before the surgery I had in 2008 for when I snapped my quadraceps tendon on a diving board. She asked me a personal question about my sex life, the question being on her clipboard, and I gave her a wholly blase answer that offended the ever royal shit out of her. She immediately turned to me and SCOLDED me for answering in an inappropriate, albeit joking manner. I won't write the line here. I'm not ashamed of it, its only that in all my trafficking around the internet, I still haven't heard this phrase yet. So I guess, yeah, I'm kinda still out there.

To give a fairly parallel example, George Carlin once did a sketch back in the 70s based on answers you don't give to your parents, though you think of them at the time. It consisted of the parent saying cliche things and then him giving the answer he said he did not give when he was a boy.

One I remember had the parent saying, "How many times do I have to tell you?" and Carlin smugly answering, "Seven."

Oh, how I wish I could have said that to my father. He'd have beaten the shit out of me, quite literally. Anyway, that's about the level of my answer to the nurse.

All this is to say that locking me up in a care centre where the same people feed me, change my diapers and help wheel me into a room where I have to watch a news feed that's obviously tainted with the other old people isn't going to go well. I'm not going to shut up and that means I'm going to lay there in filthy diapers a lot of the time, subject to some nurse's passive aggressiveness. Not looking forward to that.

See? I'm already talking about things in an ordinary blog post than we're all supposed to pretend doesn't exist on the internet.

Yet if I say the words to a robot, one assigned to my actual home, not a care facility, because the government finds it cheaper to house me in my own home than in a grand whatever, well damn, bring that future on, I'll love it. The robot can carry me to my keyboard and I'll spend them morning hitting a key when I can, taking weeks to finish a blog post this long. Sounds like heaven.

The robot might even be programmed to answer, "Oh Alexis, you're so funny."

Images that Were Impossible when Covid Started

These are all images I've added to my wiki in the last few days. This is what comes of having access to a tool that replaces a skill a given human being does not have. To have someone generate this content by hand would have cost me in the neighbourhood of $2500, at least. For something that I view as an incidental convenience, that adds life to a minor, insignificant wiki page. In short, something I'm not going to spend money for.

The problem with opposing a useful tool is that, whatever your moral stance, if it is this bloody useful, it's going to get used. And you're literally not in control of your faculties if you think this is a tide that can be stemmed.

Books are People Too

In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.

But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story.  Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.

I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.

It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."

More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication."  More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.

Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher.  Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?

Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.

To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.

Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.

Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.

Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.

Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.

This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.

With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school.  School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.

For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."

When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not.  This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.

Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:

"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."

These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.

Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"

These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.

If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.

Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?

Well... fuck the reader.

Session 5: Fight!

Most of the session consisted of setting up for this fight, having the fight, then sharing out the treasure and experience after. The battle consisted of 9 goblins with 7 to 10 hit points each (goblin soldiers-at-arms, hardened, selected for unusual constitutions) and one "cavewight," which is the equivalent of the AD&D ogre... though augmented through the cult he'd organised around himself, and a total of 44 hit points. In addition, two ochre jellies, whose presence was inexplicable... even more so since they did not attack the goblins but rather ignored them, while freely attacking the party. So, in all, 12 opponents against six party members, levelled 5, 4, 2, 2, 2 and 1.

The battle was close. I am sorry that I did not take screen shots throughout, I simply didn't think of it, trying to manage combat rules that I've forgotten, which the players knew and had to keep calling me out on. It's a trifle embarrassing, but I felt it proved the wiki's value, since the players were using the wiki's rules to correct me. That's how a rule system is supposed to work.

Mikael the mage, 2nd level, suffered most, after likewise probably landing the most successful hit of the game. The black border around the shrine is a five-foot wide pit, which the cavewight was pressed against when Mikael hit him with an attack, knocking him back across the gap and taking him out of the fight at a critical moment. That gave a chance for Pandred to deal with the second jelly (the first had been killed early) while the others managed goblins for a time before the cavewight could get back into it. That breather, I believed, was much needed. Unfortunately, Mikael was knocked down to -3 by an attack by a goblin... then got in the way of the jelly, the average damage of which would have killed him. The jelly did five damage, leaving the mage with -8... whereupon a miraculous 2 in 20 roll was made that allowed the mage to retain consciousness. Left with only the ability to move one hex per round, without the ability to fight, and with his intelligence being essentially between 3 and 4, the character just tried to keep from being hit. Unfortunately, the cavewight had gotten back in the fight by then, had remembered Mikael, and came forward to crush him — only to miss the mage by 1 point. Mikael lived, while Pandred finished off the cavewight; two of the goblins broke ranks by failing morale and the players were able to mop up.

Ti, going into the battle weak, kept to the outskirts and struggled through the fight. Xoltan missed and missed and was missed and was missed. By round eight or nine, he had still not done a point of damage or suffered one. But both characters kept opponents busy and off the backs of Lexent and Pandred, the highest levelled characters. Pandred was wounded early and bled steadily for at least six or seven rounds; Lexent was also wounded, but neither could do anything about it, since they were needed to keep fighting. It's an awesome image... the combatants bleeding from open wounds, still fighting, keeping the rest of the party alive under difficult conditions.

And a call-out to Arduin, Pandred's hench; the faerie fire spell, plus Lexent's dust devil, were unquestionably both effective; Mikael's telling hit would not have landed without the former, and it would not have stunned if the latter had not bled the cavewight's hit points. Well played, all around.

Treasure offered an average of a thousand experience to everyone in the party; I had to be reminded of my proposed rule, that silver give 1 x.p. for every three coins, regardless of silver's value compared to gold, and 1 x.p. for every four coins of copper. I think that rule works well, as it means I don't have to pile up 55,000 copper to make it worthwhile. A few thousand were enough. The total weight of treasure was 170 lb. — though I'm not certain if that includes the gem or not:

This monster common opal, size shown by the 8 in. tall bullseye lantern (not counting handle), weighs 61 lb., 1 oz., and is worth a thousand gold pieces in Ozd/Miskolc, where the party is. If they can get it out of the Sanjak, the political province where they are, it will be worth more. Broken into pieces and polished, it's probably worth ten times as much. The party chose to split the experience for it. An opal of this size is extremely rare; an opal mine might find a head-sized opal once in a lifetime. The above is liable to be found once in a century. The party checked it for magic and it has none. They managed to heft it out, but the risk of moving it is that if found by a random guard, either an Ottoman in the empire they're in, or a customs' patrol should they try to smuggle it into Hungary, they'll either get dinged so hard for the tariff that it won't be profitable, or it'll be simply grabbed. I don't know how much the party understands about this yet, but I'm sure these smart guys have thought about it.

Anyway, that was the running on Friday, pretty much. Next game is the 17th.

P.S.,

Two things I forgot.

The above is the experience for combat only, experienced by the participants.

The other is that the whole combat, using my "complex" system, took about 2 hours and 45 minutes to play. And that's online; it would have been faster in person. I understand this is fast, compared to how normal D&D, and especially 5e, would do with a total of 18 combatants. I know there are some who have trouble with "tactical" combat, but one thing: it isn't boring.

Truth

In 1999, my life had fallen apart. My wife had been taken from me by multiple schlerosis and I'd had something of a breakdown. The year before I'd tried to wrest myself out of a tailspin by starting a zine, that had begun to get some attention from actual mainstream media in the city... but then my business partner had a collision just before Christmas and emptied the joint bank account to cover his loss, at the same time that I'd had an accident and broken my left ulna. All that spring I'd tried to put myself together again emotionally, fought to get enough coverage for my arm to cover at least a part of my rent; finally I'd had to abandon the apartment I was living in so I could sleep on the living room floor of a fellow I barely knew through a coffee-shop bookstore where I used to go to play chess and engage in discussions about politics, art, philosophy and the like. I was just 34.

I got work as a cook and got a new room to live-in with a roommate who seemed steady at first but eventually bailed on me. The apartment got switched to my name and I got another roommate who turned out to be easier to live with though a bit of a slob. Around the same time the bookstore, which was run by an ex-hippie who was not a businessman and did not care about business, or the law really, needed someone to run it five days a week and I jumped at it. I moved behind the counter and started making and serving the coffee as well as drinking it.

The bookstore was nominally open from 11 a.m. to 9, which made a ten-hour shift. The owner couldn't afford to pay minimum wage for that, so he made a deal to pay me a quarter of the day's take, which I'd take home each night, with the other three quarters put in an envelope and dropped through the slot of the place next door, which he also owned. Since it didn't matter to me how long I worked, I began opening at 7 a.m., then staying until midnight. I lived a 7 minute walk from the place, so I would get up about 6:40, scrub my body, do the basic things and then walk over and open the place. At night, I'd close, mop up for half an hour and then go home to crash. I got about 28-30 hours of sleep total between Sunday and Thursday; then I'd sleep on the weekends.

Meanwhile, I got neighbourhood regulars who made it practical for me to be up that early; I'd usually make a hundred and fifty by the bookstore's actual opening time, when the place would fill up with all familiar faces. There were about twenty diehards who came in every day, another twenty who might come in once every three days and hardly any strangers. The place was loaded with couches and tables with chessboard surfaces, while behind the bar were a dozen chess-sets. The chessplayers would roll in around six and stay 'til eleven; the university students appeared around four; the musicians around six. Most would hang for four or five hours. We treated the shop like a living room.

As I said, my workday ran about 16-17 hours. If I felt up to it, I closed later. I drank buckets of coffee. I began talking with professionals in the early hours and various forms of people, from those a foot from the street to those working through their PhDs, steadily and without a break for hour after hour, day after day. I brought in a crock pot and made soup that I sold to make a little extra money, since we were selling squares and bakery goods already. I brought my own music, an eclectic collection of mixed casette tapes with music that ranged from 1955 to the present of that time. Technically, playing the tapes in a public business was illegal. No one noticed. No cop ever set foot in the door, because no one drank, no one fought, no one was loud enough to be heard. The store was in a little strip mall with the nearest apartment building about a hundred yards away. I was never robbed. The customers were all "friends" of mine. Over the next ten years, I'd go to their birthday parties, their weddings (where sometimes I'd be the M.C.). I still know some of these people.

A lot of that talking involved what I called "list conversations." There was an internet, but it in November of 1999 it was in its infancy... which is to say that these talks were a sort of in-person social media. Somebody would mention a movie they liked, then someone would mention another movie, then that would remind someone of another, and another, and another, and for half an hour or more the whole conversation would just be making these group lists of movies that people had seen, and what ought to be seen, and what was all right, and what never should have been made and so on. Another day it would be music, say jazz Monday, then metal on Wednesday. Or politicians. Or places people visited. Or languages people had tried to learn, had learned, had learned and had now forgotten. Basically, anything could be a list conversation.

Another kind of group conversation was certainly what would later develop as the "flame war," but such terms didn't exist yet. Between five and nine just about every day, there'd be at least thirty people, counting the chessplayers; and like I say, we all knew each other. And we didn't think alike, so we'd argue. Mostly, people would argue with me. Not because I'm argumentative in and of itself, please understand, but because an argument would start in front of me about something, and two people would have opinions, and say this and that, and I'd be right there, playing chess with someone across the bar, or cleaning dishes in the sink, or working on D&D, which I could do while I worked, because I didn't have a boss to tell me to "get to work" or anything, so long as the place was clean at night and the till managed. And being right there, I'd have something to say when someone said something I didn't agree with. Moreover, in any room, especially one that I'm managing, I'm better at arguing than anyone else. It's not like I'm going to stand there and have someone say that Robert Borden built the railway across Canada, am I?  I'm certainly not going to listen quietly while someone fails to recall that Louis Riel was a Metis. And if someone says that the Federal government tried to "take away Alberta's oil" in 1980 because they were greedy, well no, I'm not going to listen and accept that garbage either. I'm going to weigh in. I'm going to correct. I'm going to walk over to the shelf in the bookshop I'm in and get out the book there and prove my bloody point. Right?

Because, see, there's a few very interesting things about having a bookstore at your disposal, depending on the person you are. One behind the counter might stand among all those books and be vaguely aware of what they are or what's in them. Another might resent having to dust them, since this really was more of a coffee shop than a bookstore; I think I actually sold about a book a month for the eight months I was there... though of course people would pick a book and read it while drinking their coffee.  But I am, or was, before the internet, a lover of books. I am a writer, after all. And I had many, many hours to just hang and wait for money to come in the door, with the time to take note of where all the books were. Too, I was 35 by then, and about 8 to 10 years older than the main body of the regulars who hung out there. I had a university degree in Classical History and Archeology, I'd been a professional student between 1986 and 1992 and I already knew a lot of books that were there. Plus I had a mind that kept track of book shelf geography, because I'd spent 20 years haunting libraries for fun at that point. So when I say, I walked "over to the shelf," I mean straight to it, knowing where the book was, like a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat, while flipping to page 85 to read the second paragraph from the top of that page. For a lot of people, that's fucking scary. It's not the way someone who is schlepping coffee is supposed to be.  After all, people who work pouring coffee for a living are losers.

All this is to give an impression of what confidence looks like to people who don't possess it. Confidence is not caring where one works; or caring what one looks like in a given moment, or the state of one's present circumstance. Confidence is not a suit and a tie or a job and money and a big house. It isn't an education or a fat list of books read or talents had or how well one can speak or even the stupidity not to care what others think. Confidence is holding a standard in one's mind that is bigger than the presence of every person in the room and then insisting that everyone it going to be held to that standard, come hell or hurt feelings or embarrassment or a friendship potentially lost. My world at that time, and now, was made of facts. Not in the sense that we have a perfect knowledge of truth or can accurately state that anything is a "fact," really, not if one has read Plato, Kant or Nietzsche, certainly.  But a fact in the sense that what just came out of your mouth is total bullshit, while what came out of this book is at least agreed upon by someone outside this room we're in. This is a very important measure to weigh in these things, and despite those who feel it doesn't have to be, especially now in this wild west of the internet, it remains as true today as it was then. Nothing is a fact. But an opinion that has been vouchsafed by someone with enough skin in the game to make it public has more validity that whatever half-baked thing that came out of your brain ten seconds ago.

That standard, to count for everything, must be external. It must be. It cannot be what I think in my gut, or what my group of friends think, or what my professors happened to think or what some large NGO banging doors in a goverment house think we should all think — no. The only standard that matters, that can matter, is one that is so widespread that it is impossible to point to one person or one gang or one institution as its source. We do not know that Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa because he wrote a letter about it, or because the Louvre says so, or because someone made a movie about it or some group of experts took paint samples... but because everyone that counts has already, for the last five centuries, put this one to bed. It's not a question. And when it becomes a question, and people in authority allow it to become a question, that's not because it is one... it's because someone, somewhere, has lowered the standard so they can justify awarding themselves some importance as a fact-wrecker. It's not the pursuit of truth that's going on, it's the pursuit of bullshit.

We are being taught every day, and in a very narrow window of time when compared with human existence, a mere 25 years, since the arrival of a google sorting program, that every challenge to settled knowledge is a brave, truth-seeking phenomenon, in which the internet has "finally and at last allowed us to expose the lies that have led to our time," with the assumption that somehow everything we know, everything, is only known because some kind of cover-up has occurred. And because of the structure in which money whirls around between media and politics, there is more than enough impetus to throw sand in everyone's eyes and call it water, and shove it down their throats and call it water, and then expand this charade by crying out, "thank gawd we've found water at last! Click to pay for it."

We live in a system that can surface, rank and monetise contrarian claims at the speed of the electron, while actual verification still happens at a comparative snail's pace. On one level, it's scary terrifying, much moreso than the made-up panic about A.I. On another, we are mere days from technology from creating something so unimaginably immersive, like Larry Niven's wire, that I expect we're going to see a significant part of humanity just "tap out" to a place where nothing can be sold to them because whatever's coming is going to make the internet so boring no one's going to come round to the party any more. That's not truth. That's just how it looks to me. Eventually, someone's going to invent a product so enticing to stupid people that it will make it impossible to sell them sand any more. They'll have all they can gorge.

The people who came to my coffeeshop every day suffered from one simple disease: boredom. They were not looking for enlightenment, or company, or togetherness, or any of the crap that socio-scientists like to haul out and claim without offering a shred of proof beyond "we asked two hundred people and they said..."  No, they were bored. There was no internet, there was nothing on television, they didn't like to read, they did not do anything for themselves — except the chessplayers who were addicted to a game that could be played healthily with other addicts. The rest needed someone, or something, or some place to fill the void of endless pointless days without expectation of purpose or success with company as entertainment. Just as I was doing, since I didn't really think I was going to be a writer, I didn't have a group of D&D players, I wasn't in a relationship, I wasn't likely to meet anyone on my economic level that would serve in that capacity... and I had 85 hours a week to give to a place where I could drink coffee, sit, read, chat, argue and clean, to keep myself busy. And at that, because I had a purpose, I did better than most everyone there.

The exception were the small group of folks who dropped in between 7:00 and 7:30 to get coffee before work. The best of these was Tony.  Tony was a Major in the Canadian Armed Forces, who worked at Mewata base, starting at 9:00. His day mostly consisted of scaring the bloody blue bejeezus out of anyone who dared exist in the same space as he did, which they had to, because they answered to him, because he was a Major.

Tony invariably came in four days a week just after 7:30, once he learned I was always there. We'd play a game of chess, we were about evenly matched, talking while playing. He started off by talking about work; about the position he had; about the absurdity of it as he saw it. Not the absurdity of the military, or of the terror he left in his wake, because all that was necessary, which I understood despite not having ever been in the military because I read books. No, Tony found it all funny because he had ended up there; his success had all been utterly natural. He had simply been built as a human being in the womb, most likely, to eventually rise to his rank with his capability and his capacity to be an excellent Major. I talked to this man over many months, and we talked about everything he couldn't talk about with other people. That is why he came so consistently, and stayed until the last minute, because it took him ten minutes to drive to Mewata. Because, strangely, we were built to talk to each other.

Because Tony was used to being obeyed, deferred to, tiptoed around and distanced because of his rank, it mattered to him to have someone not subordinate to him, not dazzled by him, not trying to impress him and not frightened of him. My role was something like that of Ben from Next Generation's Lower Decks. It's an interesting place to be.

That relationship with Tony is memorable to me now because it wasn't a part of the "eddy" that the bookstore-coffeeshop made in my life. The drifters, the students, the regulars, they didn't come in that early. They never met Tony. He never met them. Which means my overall gestalt of learning as I pulled myself from circling the drain and chose instead to start living again hinges on a reward I got because I was willing to wake up very early in the morning and work as someone who, for the first three hours a day, ran a "coffeeshop" as well as a living room. The distinction may be lost on some. It isn't lost on me.

On the whole, I do better with people who aren't easily threatened by me. Who aren't impressed. Who don't need my approval. And yet, are perfectly free and easy with their own. Tony approved of me every time he came in, by coming in. Most customers who came to the shop would have no matter who worked there. Many would have preferred another barista... and, of course, those people got their wish. In not that much time, eight months I said, they got one.

A person who writes a post that is this long, that is this damning, this arrogant, this presumptive, is not looking for praise. He is not selling sand. I'll try to put this is plainly as I can. Water is everywhere, and it's free. But it can't be bought. It has to be earned. We earn it by ceasing to seek outside sources to soothe our boredom. We don't earn water by buying another video game, or looking for it on the internet, or watching a streaming service, or any of the things that rely on our going to someone else to get it. Water is earned by sitting down and finding a way to amuse oneself by arranging what we know into a shape that we made ourselves. It's very frustrating. It's largely unrewarding for a very long time. But this is the only way we get the sand out of our mouths and drink water instead.

There are two very funny things about this. The first is that it doesn't really cost anything. Oh, materials, maybe, or a single tool, plus a bit of upkeep. And a room to do it in, but heck, you already have to have a place to sleep. On the whole, it's not expensive to become self-entertaining. It's really just about making things with as little help as possible.

The other funny thing is that almost no one believes it works. Including an awful lot of people in the process of trying it.

That's the truth.