Don't Read; Much Bitterness

No question.  Restarting the online campaign after a two-month hiatus is robbing energy going towards this blog.

I haven't anything left to say at present on the subject of NPCs.

I've thought about writing a post regarding the definition of "campaign," but I'm not feeling that would be fruitful.

A few days ago Keltoi posted a comment regarding emergent stories, with this link to an article arguing that emergent experiences just aren't as important as authored stories.  Essentially, this comes down to an argument that says an OUTSIDER gets more out of the latter than the former.  Why I, a gamer, should give a rat's crap about what an outsider feels about my game experiences, isn't really explained.  I suppose it's the perception that "PopMatters" thinks we should have ... and since PopMatters sells advertising to popculture companies, and said advertising pays the author of this garbage's fee, it probably matters to the game company advertiser that word-of-mouth advertising from game users turns out to be more effective if the stories being told are "more exciting" in the retelling.  Ugh.  Not writing a post about this.

JB started a pretty good post, the third in a series he's writing, providing a scathing critique in the first half ... but then he went to this place where he tried to explain away everything he'd just criticized with a cruddy old lampshade I couldn't sell at a flea market in shithole Oklahoma.  I thought about tearing into that and decided it wasn't worth it.  JB has a natural instinct that drives him to habitually defend every tiny piece of the original works of D&D, and since he's one of three D&D bloggers left in the known universe that I waste my time with, it's fair to argue that I'm just being an asshole about it.  Looking for the link just now showed he's written a 4th post today; I'll read it when I'm done here.

I have a slight notion of writing a post about how if we look at D&D as it was first conceived, OD&D as it were, there's really nothing there that needs to be "fixed."  On the level it was intended, it works.  My issues were that it didn't work well enough, or didn't cover enough ground, or that it could be done better ... but if I were to run dungeon encounters with B/X, exactly as written, the concept would work.  This goes against the idea that D&D needs to be drastically rebuilt from some massacre of fundamental rules, like getting rid of experience, combat, races, classes, all gaming that takes place in towns or what else ... which is a little big like saying we could make a better car if we got rid of the wheels, the transport capability, roads, affordability or fueling stations.  Alas, however, I tend to think this point of view is either obvious or hopelessly lost on people who DON'T have campaigns and yet nevertheless dream of starting one of this variety, that no player or designer is asking for.

As you can see, this is a post of posts I didn't write.  I have this vague hope that from sketching these out, something will click in my head and I'll suddenly go off on a tear about the game importance of food and shelter, why players should be occasionally and physically punched in the face (for their own good) or what snacks I will eat while watching the public execution of an ex-president and treasonous halfwit on television.  I admit that the events of the last eight days have convinced me that running on a platform that we should Build a Wall between Canada and the U.S., which the U.S. will pay for, is a credible political strategy just now.

I think this could get me elected as a member of the socialist party up here.  And gawddamned right, we have one in Canada.  Eff you, Oklahoma.

If the geographic center of the contiguous United States is 2.6 miles northwest of Lebanon Kansas, the pinpoint of the intellectual pit of despair in America is 337 ft. due west of the Tulsa Foot & Ankle Clinic on E 47th Place.  Just saying.

All right.  What do I think of the raid on the Capitol Building ... hm.  No, it's not as bad as 9/11.  It just seems comparable because this happened 8 days ago and 9/11 is just shy of 20 years past.  If 9/11 and the raid took place on the same day (whew, what a day that would be), the raid on the Capitol Building would be an afterthought.  And we'd be told that, even though all the people were white, the Arabs were responsible.

One thing I haven't heard pointed out is that during the BLM marches this last summer, a very large proportion of the people marching were NOT black.  Understandably, hundreds of summer campaigners have pointed out the disparity between police responses between the present episode and numerous episodes we saw in 2019.  But while the blue wave attacked crowds demanding action against corrupt police officers during the summer, those cops kicked, beat, hospitalized and drove over protesting white and non-white people indiscriminately.  These crowds in Washington and at State Capitols are almost entirely white.  It really stands out in the photos, along with the total absence of face masks.  For the record, male facial hair also seems to be a prerequisite, while both sexes seem to have an extreme resentment of personal grooming.  This is a crowd where the men really feel they need to broadcast that they're men, while the women need to broadcast any sentiment that they might be mistaken for women.

[go ahead; vilify me; like I care]

The U.S. is now officially a failed state.  It has been a progressively failed state going back to Reagan, whose personnel walked off scot-free or nearly so after questionable activities in Iran and Nicaragua, breaking the law regarding lobbying and the HUD rigging scandal, the EPA and ultimately the S&L crisis.  Anyone alive and paying attention could see the power elite in America had abandoned the high ideals of the 50s and 60s, without any real consequence landing in the laps of the real people in charge.  At worst, a few stooges were allowed to plead guilty and step into low-security prisons for short sentences, or get off with probation or not even that.  The only thing that has changed in the last 35 years is that it has been increasingly difficult to hide the level of bullshit from the American people.  Thankfully, video games and the internet made it possible for most countries in the world to invent "bread & circuses" on a scale that paralleled Rome's ability to keep its people satisfied.  If any of the events of the last four years had happened in 1969, the city of Washington would be smoking now.  If you don't believe me, look up the riots of 1969 and see what those people felt was worth rioting over, and compare it to this bullshit now.

I've been alive for 56 years and I can say without hesitation that I've never experienced a Prime Minister in either Canada or Britain, nor a President in the United States, that I felt deserved their authority.  At best, I've been able to tolerate these leaders.  I'm fundamentally a liberal reactionary; I believe in an unchallenged welfare-support system and severe restraint on business, particularly big business ... but I've worked in enough crooked small businesses to know the social abuse that gets carried on by a tiny-minded shithead with 14 employees can be staggeringly abusive.  However, these petty tyrants are rarely able to turn on spigots that poison rivers, or make phone calls that start wars; so, yes, I'm for watching the big bruisers a little more closely than the little ones.  I don't believe a corporation is a "person."  I believe the owners of the corporation should be held accountable for every death a corporation causes second-hand.  I believe in a staggered tax rate.

I believe that property is sacrosanct.  I believe religious organizations should pay taxes equivalent to any corporation.  I don't believe the government should provide grants for the production of art or the investigation of social science; but pure science will get my support.  I don't support charities.  Any charity.  I've seen their books, I know where the money goes, and it is not where the charity pretends it goes.  I'm opposed to the politicization of personal choices; I'm fine with what individuals do, but when individuals gather in groups to enforce their political will upon outsiders, then no, I'm not aboard.  If the only defense that can be mustered is that there are more of us than there are of you, because alone we're terrified and we feel persecuted, then I am definitely not your ally.  As such, I do not get along with virtually every liberal on the planet.

I say these things to help make clear my perspective on politics.  I'll go further with the next paragraph.

After Joe Clark faceplanted in the early 1980s, and after Pierre Trudeau's anti-capitalist agenda was attacked by his own party, Canada was handed to the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney, who faithfully followed the gutting instincts of Reagan and Thatcher—though more restrained, because the left is more powerful in this country than they are in Britain or America.  Mulroney gave it up for Kim Campbell, whose legacy was the creation of a rightest group of fartheads that you'd recognize as the present Republicans in power in America.  Those fartheads didn't get into power.  Campbell faceplanted after 132 days, followed by Jean Chretien, who—HATED by the right—remained in power for 10 years because, well, Canada.  But then the moderate left turned on Chretien and we got Paul Martin, who accomplished nothing.  He was succeeded by Stephen Harper, who proceeded to lead austerity measures like every other conservative group of hacks intent on gutting the country and handing it over to the highest bidder.  Harper did this for nearly 10 years, until finally he was removed for the sake of Trudeau's son, Justin.  Who is a nice guy.  A really nice guy.  And excepting the response of his government to Covid, which is paying the country to sit on its collective ass and therefore not superspread the disease, I would have called him a "do-nothing."  Because, regarding the way the country was raped under Harper, there's been nothing done.

All right.  America.

Carter was a well-meaning idiot.  Nice enough, and a good man at heart no doubt, but not a leader and not up to scratch as far as foreign or domestic politics were concerned.  Reagan cleaned his bloody clock in 1980.  Reagan was a crook.  He was a smarter crook than Nixon but his agenda was to remove as many restrictions and restraints created by the governments under Roosevelt and Eisenhower as he could, in the time he had.  The elder Bush then went ahead and carried on that good work, silently enabling American business to cement their position against retribution from the courts or future governments.  And then Clinton did absolutely fuck nothing to reverse that clock.  I was there, I watched it.  Eight years of sitting on his fucking hands, except when he let himself get talked into continuing the Republican agenda of removing even more restraints on business.

Then we got the younger bush and 9/11.  What an opportunity that was!  Not only did we continue to gut restraints on business, we invented government institutions that would deliberately oppose any attempts to reverse those restraints for the "Security" of the country.  Good for us!  And after 8 years of austerity and that bullshit, in which the infrastructure of America was allowed to continue rotting, as it had since the 1960s, we got Obama, Mr. Hope Man.  Who then DID NOTHING.  For eight more fucking years.  Except, again, in the interest of "working with the right," carrying out more of the The American Government's Crusade to Make Business Untouchable.

Well, that donut was followed by the biggest hole in the world.  Yay.  Who didn't have the intelligence to hide the agenda, but what the fuck, who cares, too late now to do anything about it.  So we have watched the consequence-free retard strut and retard himself on stage, wondering how a country can function if it can't remove a stain this black from its own bib.  But that's okay, because the answer turned out to be Biden.  Biden who stood next to Obama while they both did nothing.  Biden who says we have to reach out to the right.  Biden who wants things just like they were, when the agenda was to fuck over the American people and support Business ... whom, I might add, have been given the front and center position in Biden's cabinet.  So we know, regardless of anything else, what sort of four years it's going to be.  By 2024, you'll be lucky if you still have the right to quit your job.  The job that will be assigned to you.

So, that said.

If you think the Capitol means jack shit, you're just looking at the man's right hand before he shives you with the left.  You, dear citizen, don't own your failed state.  It was steadily handed over to other people right in front of you, while you continued to think it matter which party you voted for.  I'm not really keen on Canada either, for the present, because it's going on in just the same way here.  My only solace is that I'm going to be an old man when they shove me against a wall to shoot me, because some group of liberty-loving rebels won't give themselves up.  Don't worry.  I'll remember to spit on the guard after he shoves me.