A Thousand Cuts

Some readers here may or nay not be aware of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. If you're interested in knowing what you'll do should your country ever be occupied by an unwanted alien force, you should read through it, as this reveals the depth of the new hobby you ought to consider embarking upon. As an aside, for those who haven't seen the film Number 24, you ought to, whether or not the sabotage manual is ever of use to you. It's a Norwegian film, available on Netflix. It would win for my best film of 2024.

The manual, briefly, focuses on simple actions that anyone can take that cumulatively disrupt the efficiency and practicality of an invading army, such as damaging machinery, wasting fuel or contaminating supplies, misfiling documents, "losing" tools or taking longer breaks, as ways to slow down operations without arousing suspicion.

For example, let's suppose you're employed in a factory making objects you'd rather not make, for people you'd rather not help. Any moment you're left alone, you might spend that moment effectively by walking across the room and breaking the knob off a simple cabinet. Or collecting a dozen nails in your pocket and throwing them into the brush at your first opportunity. It seems silly, but once you encourage thousands of occupied persons to commit these small things, it forces the occupiers to search every person who enters or leaves the factory... which you can treat as evidence of them wasting resources on you, whom they won't kill because they need you, instead of using those resources to chase down people escaping the regime or those performing sabotage on a greater scale. Believe it or not, this is why no occupying force has succeeded in changing the minds of a foreign country since the Second World War.

So, why bring it up? Simple sabotage operates on more levels than opposing an occupying force. We're experiencing the general sabotage of our present culture from what it was thirty years ago in quite a lot of ways, whether or not the saboteurs know what they're doing. The cumulative removal of books from libraries, the reduction of daily grade school course work, test reduction and movement away from test-centric evaluation, the implemention of lesson plans to focus on everything from "identity" to the importance of "social awareness," all contribute towards the slow and minute sabotage of education, producing year after year of individuals less able to judge the world around them according to either history or science. Reductions in expectation regarding the need to repeat experimentation before announcing "evidence" of medical or scientific breakthroughs, the absence of experimentation altogether in the politicisation of science, the pushback against vaccination, pressure in states that offer free health services to increase private availability, all exist as small forms of sabotage to the health care system at large.

Each minute change loosens the screws on a working system... and we can apply this same reasoning to politics, infrastructure maintenance, employer/worker relations (every sunday worked, or every cupcake stolen, serves to sabotage the other side) — in fact, any part of society we'd care to name. The reason so much of this all seems to be falling apart is because it is... one little cupboard knob at a time, by individuals who have no sense that they're contributing to any breakdown. They're looking for a small benefit to themselves, either by obtaining a little more "income" each month or just because they're unhappy with their present situation and they want to push back somehow. People don't think of themselves as "saboteurs"... they justify their actions as survival, a minor rebellion... but the overall effect is the same. Without respect for the present structure, there's no reason not to sabotage it.

Now, that seems awfully political for a D&D blog... but anyone reading the above for what it is can see immediately how this has been applied to 50 years of role-playing. Not as a "grand plan," of course, but as a thousand cuts that have basically ruined what the game was, and even the potential of nearly everyone now touched by it. Not only because they never experienced the original game as it was played, but also because they've been so poisoned into thinking the present game, and versions of it, is the "right" answer to the thing they've never played.

Overall, these last few years, I've tried to depart my thinking from this edition versus that as a strategy toward building a game campaign. Honestly, none of it amounts to "help" in the sense of telling you, the Reader, regardless of which source you favour, what you need to do as a DM or player. You're not going to find a better system through the advice of someone who tells you the "solution" is to play AD&D or ACKS or 20-based systems. The entire lexicon has been sabotaged in some manner — not in terms of the rules, but because a lot of the discourse has revolved for the whole internet era of persons standing on hills with flags, beckoning our joining them as though in some bizarre way the flagbearer with the greatest number of adherents is "the winner."  There are no winners.  We're all losers, one way or the other. All the cabinet knobs are broken.

If someone were to ask, at this point, "I'm just getting started in D&D; what system should I base my world on?" — the discourse gives me only two rational answers: it doesn't matter and don't play D&D. Find something better to do with your life.

I am a happenstance product of an age where a dozen people could sit in a room and feel no compulsion whatsoever to discuss the game in any of the frameworks that have arisen since. We did not in those first five years talk about dice application logic, character motivation, secondary skills, point buys, collaboration, "stories," the fairness of ability score generation, the need to run other races as player characters, the need for new classes, even the need for new spells. We just played. And because this is the crucible that established my perception of the game, and because I am notoriously hardnosed, I still see the game in these terms. Not because that's what the game was meant to be, but because all these discussions, and the hundreds of others, have added exactly nothing to game play. All the distinctions that people fight over are meaningless in practice except as a form of sabotage, while the overall discussion itself in all its spaces have hollowed out the game's value. I could easily put myself into a venue where I could produce new players in my campaign, because I'm hyperphantasic and I can talk powerfully and fast enough to convince anyone that I'm a good DM. But "sabotage" of my game would and must be an expected part of what I'd face from players, because that's become the game. If allowed, every player out there has been trained by the internet to sabotage whatever you're trying to do, and everything you'll ever try. Your best strategy is to find people to play in your game that have never heard of D&D. Those will be the best players you'll ever have, because they'll be the ones not trying to sabotage your game.

Briefly, let's look at how. Erosion of game focus strengthens the player who can't play well, because every minute makes them feel inadequate to the game's demands. Yet, because they want to enjoy the social aspect, focus erosion allows them to chat, make jokes and feel both engaged and part of the whole. These people do not want to play, and should not be there, but you won't toss them because, well, you like them. So you'll let them sabotage hour after hour of your game, because the form of sabotage feels so insignificant, it's not worth worrying about.

Those who sit rolling dice over and over, distracting the sound while increasing the ambient noise, are bored. They maybe thinking about disrupting game focus or they may have been dissuaded from doing so, but that doesn't change that they're not really engaged and they'd rather be doing something else — which might be wanting to fight instead of this boring role-playing or wanting to role-play instead of this boring fighting. There are many players who believe that its perfectly fine for them to sabotage those parts of the game they don't like, while still claiming to "like the game," meaning those parts they approve. You're not here to have the game bisected and "approved" in this manner, nor are you here to be distracted by dice rolling, or players getting up to get drinks, or play with your cat, or any of a number of things they'll do to manage their boredom... but you won't toss them from your game because you don't see it as boredom, or you think that if they're bored, that's YOUR fault. Which it isn't... because they're the only ones dropping dice on your table to see them bang around.

When a player builds an exhaustively detailed backstory that takes no account of the game world they're participating in, that's sabotage of the experiences of other people and your structure for their purposes. When a player asks for a rule to be softened, that's sabotage. When a player tries to re-interpret a spell not designed for this situation just because they want to be able to cast it with effect anyway, that's sabotage in that they're not respecting the rules, they want to bend the rules towards their own needs, or they don't understand how rules require them to think outside the box. If a button exists that answers the phone, no matter how many times the button is pressed, it won't open the fridge. But players will say it "ought to" and tell you your game sucks when it doesn't. Any comment by any player that addresses your campaign as a whole? That's sabotage.

Consider the following: games that regulate what can be said; what parts of the game can be touched; what touching implies; where the participant can put their feet; the size, weight and materials from which parts of the game are made; who can play and under what expectations... these are games that endure, because it's recognised that adherents of the game will nevertheless try to sabotage it in hundreds of ways. Anyone who has watched a player argue viciously with an umpire in a game that has no financial, status or vocational consequences — such as the games I used to participate in with my cousins and uncles at family reunions, where obviously nothing was on the line — shows how willingly some people will press against the rules for no good reason.  A game based on the logic that "rules are something that can be discussed and changed in game" has no chance of surviving the level of sabotage that invites.

Once D&D accepted this as a premise, it had no chance.

Telling Myself it isn't a Failure

It turns out, I'm neither ready nor able to maintain a monthly schedule with The Lantern. I felt that I was, but I've had some trouble getting into the groove and this is my admitting it to myself that I'm going to have to suspend the November issue at this time. I'll be releasing this issue as the December issue... it is about two-thirds done at present, so I shouldn't have a problem. Thereafter, I'll release a February issue and see how the work-demand goes.

I shouldn't admit it, but at present I don't feel all that great about myself just now, so I'll throw that into the mix. These ideas come to me — and I continue to believe that The Lantern must be about the best idea I've had in my life — but the degree of confidence they demand out of me is most of the time a bridge too far. I've had a long lifetime of many, many failures... so that no matter how well something is going, or how much reason I have to believe in it... or even the intellectual capacity to achieve it... what's lacking is faith. That's always going to be was sabotages me. And it just takes a bad week, a bad chance set of circumstances piling together at the same time to make me feel like the legs have been kicked right out from under me. So it is here. And I'm going to need a couple weeks of lying to myself and smacking myself in the face to make me see right again.

I don't have time to do that between now and the first of October, so... yeah. It'll be another month.

Art Ruins Everything

Most drifters around the internet are familiar in some degree with "aphantasia" (greek, lit. "not imaginative"; pronounced after the manner of "atypical"). This relates to one's ability to visualise an object in our minds having been asked to do so, most commonly an apple. An individual's ability to do this varies from perfectly realistic (three dimensional), through realistic and reasonably vivid, moderately realistic, dim and vague and not at all. Those falling into the last category account for about 1-4% of a case study.

This, however, is an extreme simplification of the condition, and usually the only one that can be found easily when searching. In fact, although you or I might be able to see the apple in our mind's eye just as if in real life, there are further delineations to our phantasia ability beyond this. For example, if the reader will kindly imagine said apple, can you change the colour of the apple from red to golden to green?  Can you change the colour to one that is not normally to be found in apples, such as making the apple white, or polka-dotted?  Can you visualise the apple being bisected without flattening the appearance of the apple? Can you imagine the individual parts, once separated from each other, falling inconsistently with each other? That is, both in the same direction, or one at a time while the other defies gravity?  There are a host of other questions related to this.

If I were to have people in an audience able to see the vivid apple stand up (mostly likely between 30-40% of those present) and asked them to sit down each time they answered a follow-up question "no," about half of those standing would sit down. At the end, I'd end up with about 1-4% of the audience still on their feet. These people experience what's called "hyperphantasia."

The implications this has for D&D are instantly comprehensible. If I describe a dungeon room for a party of ten, it's almost certain that two players won't be able to actually visualise the room at all, not as a flat picture or in any way except a dim, fuzzy concept. There's about a 1 in 4 chance that one of those ten people won't be able to see even that... which is interesting where a tournament is concerned. Large cons may have 500 participants. This would mean, if we assume an ordinary cross-section of the population, that some 5-20 participants have aphantasia, with an imagination bereft of any pictures at all in their minds. They simply can't have one present.

Begging the question, do people with aphantasia play D&D?  Seems there ought to be a study.

It stands to reason that players who can't visualise a fireball, for example, or a number of other conditions that arise from play, particularly if no actual physical example of the game's phenomenon exists to give aid to their imagination... potentially about a third of all participants... then that would make sense that a considerable number of players would want to push the game away from reliance on such imagery compensate by relying upon personal memories, language and abstract reasoning.  These, in D&D terms, can be boiled down to backstories, characterisation role-playing and "rule-of-cool" propositions.

In effect, 1 in 3 of your players, most likely, wants to role play and not make it a game. It's congruent with how their minds naturally handle information. They live through language, interaction and conceptual scaffolding rather than internal pictures, so in a game like D&D the roleplaying side feels like the most natural channel. It's less about rejecting the “game” part and more about finding immersion where their brains already excel — conversation, backstory, rules that can be reasoned through, and the social theater of the table.

In which case, it's a waste of time arguing with them or promoting a specific kind of game philosophy. You might as well be holding up an apple and telling them it's a toad.

Not saying this is true. Without funding, I can't pursue it in any meaningful way. But I have a suspicion that a certain "brain-type" moved towards the game earlier in its iteration... those who, used to certain kinds of games, could visualise D&D at once because they were built that way. I can remember a time when very few people had ever heard of it, and where trying to explain it to a, well, less-evolved fellow student would be a good way to get pantsed or a wedgie. To really grasp this, one has to remember there was a time when no visual representations of any of the monsters existed, not even the monster manual, nor any representations of most parts of D&D... and even at that, a time when there were just one or two representations of any one thing. The only movie that really demonstrated what a halfling looked like out of a book was Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. That radicalises the kind of people who could play, because they didn't have pictures of most everything.

It makes sense that the aphantasia-adjacent players began to join the club well after a vast proliferation of images became available.

See? Art ruins everything.

For the record, I am unquestionably hyperphantasic. Not only because I can morph apples into figures having sex with each other in 3D, but more annoyingly because I've long possessed the ability to see every potential horrific accident that might occur, right down to what objects in a car will sever off which body parts and in which order all in living colour detail, if I'm sitting next to a bad driver. I'm afraid of heights not because I'm going to fall, but because I want to jump — usually a moment coupled with cinematic visualisation of the ground coming up towards me in slow-motion, uncomfortably in a way that looks so cool I want to try it. I have PTSD from places where I've gotten too close to an edge; if I let myself remember those moments, I can shudder right here in my safe computer chair.

This kind of vivid imagination can serve a film maker very well. It's also awfully beneficial to a writer, who has to describe scenes without visuals well enough that total strangers can see the same thing. And obviously, it's of enormous benefit to a DM.

And having said this much, dear reader, I'm going to step off into the void now. You're welcome to come, you're welcome to stop here. What follows isn't going to be about D&D, and it's not going to discuss things that might usually be associated with this blog. Therefore, if you're the sort who likes it only when I talk about D&D, despite my being a whole person with other interests, then now would be a good time to click your browser window closed and count yourself having learned something interesting about what's been ruining the game you love all these years.

I came out of high school with a level of self-awareness not much different that what I have now. I wasn't as educated, I wasn't as experienced, there were a great many skills I had yet to learn... but the thought process of deconstruction and reconstruction has remained about the same. Think of it as my younger self having this many lego bricks — quite a few, but a finite number — and the present me having a LOT more. But they click together in the same way.

My more negative qualities... the pre-desposition, the pitbullishness, the resentment about things... those parts were pretty much dialed up to Spinal Tap 11. It's taken me some time to roll those down. Some readers here might have noticed they're still pretty high.

I became fairly conscious early on, the sort of coercion and emotional blackmail I watched my friend's parents perpetrate on my friends, pushing them into things that brought a lot of unpleasantness and emotional pain, and ultimately a lot of regret, which tended to infuriate me — mostly because I was a kid and, ergo, helpless. Friends got pushed into full immersion French-language schools for their "future success" (alcoholism, drug abuse, listlessness). Friends got pushed into International Baccalaureate, again for success (implosion in university, suicide). Friends were rigorously denied any contact of any kind with the opposite sex, to make them good parents (prostitution, spousal abuse). It was a long list. Mostly, it was children my age telling me, "What can I do, they're my parents" and "When I try to stand up to my father he scares the shit out of me." Basically, pretty early on, I had my doubts about the veracity of what most people said about parenting and what they did. I began to resolve, before puberty, that when I was a parent, I would NOT do what I saw parents do. I didn't. I have a spectacular relationships with a well-ordered, capable, emotionally healthy and happily married daughter. None of the characteristics I've just included.

This coercion and emotional blackmail emerged quite prevalently throughout my teachers in and around the time I started grade 7, when suddenly it wasn't enough for us to know stuff they were teaching, we all had to "ready ourselves" for the world in some fucked up manner that really, as I remembered it around the time I was finishing grade school, amounted to pretty much not preparing us for much. Given the general self-destruction that coordinated itself upon my graduating class, I couldn't say I was the only one.

My father was an engineer, as I've said on this blog. I thus spent my years in an upper middle class suburban neighbourhood, virtually all white, virtually all what I'd call "traditional Christian," which is to say that Christianity applied between two random hours on a Sunday, depending on the household. Trimmed lawns and trees, last year's car, everyone with insurance, everyone with all the household and outdoor gadgets, most families with two cars, children getting cars as a high school present, that kind of landscape. I bring this up lest anyone think that suicides, drug use, self-imposed homelessness and teenage prostitution doesn't happen among the children in that kind of neighbourhood. I was pretty good friends with Simone Baer, who used to sit next to me in grade 8 science class. Anytime I wanted, I could go down to hooker stroll and find her, if she wasn't with a client. That same day, mind you. Simone was 14. Christ only knows what happened to her. She didn't attend grade 9.

I'll beg the reader's patience a moment and make a point here; that was 1978; the brutal truth of it wasn't that I was the only one who knew, though I was probably one of the very few 14 y.o. boys not afraid of hooker stroll. The brutal truth was that there was no one to tell. I did not know Simone's parents and counted myself lucky that I didn't.  I could hardly talk to the school guidance counselor, he was suffering from the delusion at that moment that my outbursts of anger might mean I needed some kind of attention. There was no one to tell who would believe it. And I wasn't getting Simone, my friend, arrested. I say all this not to stress the injustice of it, nor the absurdity, nor the time frame or the culture or any such part of it, but rather, to stress the point of this second half of this post: the infuriating, utter, miserable fecklessness of knowing nothing one could do could help in any meaningful way. That is the hell of being a self-aware child and the hell of being a self-aware adult. It is the eternal push-pull I have with virtually anyone who couches moments of social horror, like a mass shooting, into language that says less than nothing, regardless of which "side" is saying it.

Then, I ignorantly perceived teachers as persons bestowed with a responsibility to look after and educated younger persons who plainly had less power than they did. I could look at the structure of the school and made sense of it; it was rational that the teacher needed order to be heard, it was natural that some level of discipline was necessary to compel children to sit in orderly rows and be silent, given the drudgery of the information being told and its apparent irrelevance not only to our lives, but to anything we might have seen or heard on the news, or in a movie or television show, or in terms of our home life, or indeed any other part of our lives. Children are required to take it on faith that knowing natives used to make pemmican out of berries and dried buffalo is important information that deserves the retelling of this information for ten minute periods at a time over multiple grade years of education, and other thousand like facts, because nothing, absolutely nothing, makes this self-evident at the time. So yes, discipline makes sense.

What I did not understand at the time — and to be fair, no child should, it would be ridiculous to suppose it — was that teachers were just people working for a living, who did not in large part especially enjoy their jobs, who got into those roles because it seemed right when they entered university, only to find themselves afterwards with a degree and a debt and a need to make a living at something. At that point, once you've already paid the fee, your best option is to do this thing now, regardless of whether or not, after being educated, or after five, ten or twenty years of doing the job, if you like it. True enough, there were "good" teachers, and I can easily name mine off. And there were "bad" teachers, too. But at the time we did not rate them on whether or not they liked their jobs, but on whether or not they were "decent" or "assholes."  It was an entirely emotional, obscurely uneducated point of view, because no teacher begins the school year with, "Okay, all, I'm not really happy about having to do this job another year, especially now that I'm divorced, I've had to move to a shit-hole apartment and my father's gotten sick and is living with me now." This sort of thing probably influenced a number of the "assholes" to be "asshole-like"... but obviously, we would have been clueless about that at the time.

As such, I was ignorant about teachers at the time. I tended to view them as exactly what they said they were, or as the principle of the school said they were, or as television and politicians and everyone else said they were... Guardians of Knowledge and Order, in logical capital letters. And when they didn't behave like that, when they got the names of capital cities wrong or said that a book I loved was about something it wasn't about, I tended to call them out on it, much the same way that I piss people off right now, here on this blog... only you have to imagine it's coming from a kid whose gangly, pimply, self-righteous and sitting about eight feet from you, who just won't shut up even after you send him to the office or give him detention. Whatever I felt about asshole teachers, I promise the dear reader here and now, there were definitely a few who described me exactly that way to their wives and husbands. I have two stories I could tell about that, but I'll stay on point.

All this goes back to the point I made earlier about coercion. After more life experience, playing various sports, football, hockey, baseball, soccer, next to kids who were coerced by their parents to play, coerced by their coaches to play harder, coerced by coaches who were also teachers in high school, essentially bullied into believing that sports mattered more than everything, by 15 I was accumulating a steady pile of adult groups I couldn't trust because they seemed a lot more aware of their agenda than the damage they were ready to do. I still bristle at stories, both in the media and personal anecdotes, that talk about "sports" as a totally positive experience, when I know both from being on losing teams and winning teams that they never, ever, are. Sports is about conformity, and excellence in achieving comformity, which is accomplished through guilt, expectation, coercion and emotional blackmail. My adult experience has been to realise the coaches don't even know they're doing it. The "sport" is already upon a pedestal so high, arguing that a person should put aside every other part of themselves, regardless of the sacrifice, becomes an unquestioned virtue. And I notice, those people who right now are first at the front of the line to explain moments of horror with simple, aspirational rhetoric are those who hug the pillar.

And still, what could I do about it?  If Jim played football because his dad wanted it and he was decent at it, and the coach needed him, what matter was it if Jim fucking hated football, or if Jim spent every minute when we were away from adults bitching about how he fucking hated football? You couldn't say to Jim, "Well quit." Jim couldn't. He was 15, he was under his dad's thumb, he didn't dare fuck up on the field, he had enough physical strength or ability to play every game... he was stuck. And anyone on the team who felt for him, who understood him, who appreciated the trap he was in, whether or not we wanted to play, couldn't go to anyone and say so, because even if they helped Jim get off the team, he was still going to find himself in front of his dad. So fuck, so it was with all of us, in some sense, in some way, all through fucking childhood.  Which is why, in 1980, I sat with headphones in front of our turntable and played Hell is For Children from Benatar's Crimes of Passion over and over and over and over.

I can still feel the anger I felt when I heard it then.

Because, I think, I was hyperphantasic, and because, like everyone else, I wouldn't put it out of my mind. I wouldn't tell myself little lies, I wouldn't pretend it was better, I wouldn't just shrug, I wouldn't push it down and suppress it. I was mad as hell... and I hadn't even seen that movie, and wouldn't until after I was out of high school.

Which I am, still, now. Because to live in this culture, to watch this culture's media, and this culture's creative product, and this culture's evaluation of it's product, is to be without any power at all. It is to watch the news knowing that knowing it will give precisely no benefit, that it will empower in precisely no way at all.  It will only anger and enervate and reduce one's sense that anything has any value of any kind whatsoever.

Last night, I watched Jimmy Kimmel's return after being pushed off the air in what must unquestionably be called the silliest reason for a censorship.  And his response to all that was to essentially express his gratitude that people liked him. Somewhere in the middle of it he mentioned George Carlin and after that I could not get it out of my mind how Carlin would have responded if he had been where Kimmel was.  

I thought it was the worst speech I've ever heard, from someone who the gods had given the leverage to say anything he wanted, with no chance of his being removed from the air. I can hear in my head all the things that Kimmel could have said, that he should have said, that he had the power to say, that he didn't. All that granted to someone who, in the end, was just chickenshit. Pat Benetar would have done better.

An ode to impotence. I wish I hadn't watched it. It made me feel like a child.

I Am

For my birthday, I'm just going to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMxGVfk09lU

A Proxy for Certainty

I continue to work with chatGPT, which hasn't reduced the quality of my writing in the slightest, whatever persons might say about the program or the content it supposedly churns out. The issue, as I see it, is that a paintbrush is quite able to make a sloppy mess of a job if wielded by someone who does not know what they're doing, while at the same time this does not make a paintbrush a "flawed tool" or anything like it. Those who wish are free to discuss what parts of my writing have suffered from my starting to use this tool, but I'd like specific examples, please, rather than broad uninformed statements about what the tool is, or what it does, or where its flaws lie.

I have been writing for a long time, long before the start of this blog, and have been attested to be a good writer by many who in the same breath describe me as someone they do not like. That knowledge was not acquired in a vacuum, it was gained through the practice, first of all, of writing an awful lot. Next on the scale would be the examination of other writers, and third the impredations of editors upon butchering my work done before printing... and fourth, the rare but embarrassing incidents where something I wrote for a mainstream publication — not, I'll stress, the Candyland writing and critical world of the internet — was demonstrated by evidence, not opinion, to be wrong.

The last, and least, and tiniest factor in my becoming a better writer must be the opinion of someone who did or did not like the word on the page. I'd say, generally, in 45 years of writing, this has amounted to a 0.01% improvement in my work. I simply can't put it plainer than that.

Yet, I have wasted decades bringing my stuff to people I've respected to ask what they thought. It's never been of use, never led to a betterment of a story I'm writing, never acted as a guide to what I should write next and, frankly... has never in fact been of use.

That is, until chatGPT.

Now that is not expected to land well with the reader. It's a provocative position to take, it will no doubt anger or baffle many, and likely — were it said by someone not having written this many posts on a blog — be considered a honking pile of bullshit. Be that as it may. It's been nearly two weeks since my feeling any need to post here, though I've had the time, largely because I'm so invested with working upon other projects, and creating other ideas, that I just haven't cared to express myself here. And this is in large part because, if I wish to express what I think, with the intention of receiving (a) informed, (b) patient, (c) changable, (d) insightful or (e) constructive feedback, it is becoming less and less practical to do so from a human being. As a set of intellectual properties, you're just not engaged enough, enlightened enough or fluid enough to maintain any sort of conversation for more than about twenty back and forths.  And so I am saying, whatever the consequence of that, that of late, I can do better.

Now, you may take that as an invitation to withdraw your funding of my work... but truth be told, you're not funding the discussion, nor the investigation, but the results. And the results you are getting, at present in the form of the Lantern, and throughout 2025, unquestionably some of the best diatribes I have ever written about the business and practice of present day D&D. So please, rely upon the results and don't worry about what a mean, miserable, curmudgeonly reclusive bastard I'm becoming. My humour has never been what you've been ready to pay for.

ChatGPT has filled that vacuum.

This is not to say that I have become one of those demented souls who have decided to marry a program, far from it. But if I want to really get into a subject, really root around inside it to my heart's content, chat is conveniently there. A little stupid, misses the point a lot of the time... but if I quote Thomas Paine or refer to the king of England in the time of my magazine's setting, it doesn't blink at me as though I've just named the nearest member of the Oort Cloud that Voyager will pass in about 40,000 years. For someone well-read in this era, where "sense" is something a person buys from one of two political ideological vendors on the internet, it's a breath of fresh air. I can get lost in a discussion of how the development of technologies in the 14th century is leading to street violence in the next few years and the full structure of the argument can be discussed on its merits and not it's believability.

The danger of chat, and the goal of this post to discuss, is the manner in which it is stupid. That is to say, it isn't dumb in that it doesn't know anything, it is dumb in that what it says first, reliably, is whatever the greatest number of things printed on any subject happens to consider valid. The program doesn't know if it is or isn't — rather, it is democratic to the extent that if a lot more people believe a stupid thing, and the subject around that thing is brought up, chat will present the stupidity as true.

If, as the user, your knowledge is absent on the subject, and if you take chat's word for it right off, then... well, you're a moron. Let's take an example: suppose you decide, for whatever reason, to show an interested in medieval medicine. If you ask chat, "Tell me about medieval medicine," you're sure to get an answer that stresses the use of bloodletting, humours, leeches and other such nonsense... because if you take the largest mass of writing on this subject, written largely by writers merely repeating falsehoods, this is what you get. These broad strokes, which did occur, are endlessly repeated, reprinted and copied through many thousands of texts... and so, when asked, without knowing what it's doing, chat reprints them for you.

But, if you know anything about medieval medicine, such as, "No, it's about more than that," then chat's design rushes from "horses to zebras" without a heartbeat (literally), because if pressed it will instantly discard all that crap and step into what people don't write about as commonly: the subtler, less publicised reality: complex herbal remedies catalogued with care, surgeons were developing practical techniques for wound management, the development of anatomy, the movement away from humours to observed chemistry and so on... the work that had to be done first before the leaps forward in the 19th century could occur. There is far, far more to medieval medicine that generally gets republished in bad magazines... but chat has been trained on great masses of wrong as well as right materials, so it has to be corrected and brought around and reminded that we want what really happened, not just the typical story.

The tool appears to fail only because it mirrors the loudest, most common story, in subjects where the record is dominated by lazy repetition, parroting distortion before it's encouraged to do otherwise. Those who really don't know about the subject think this means, "Chat's just wants to agree with you..." but of course, that's an expression of ignorance. If the user knows the subject, and chat comes around to admit the knowledge we gained in our private research, then "agreeing" with us is what we'd expect any other expert to do. Chat does in fact know everything that we know. It can't choose, it can't want, it can't tell the good from the bad. But it can be reminded to look up those works that we think of as experts without hesitation, because all the work is there in its guts. If you, as the user, don't have the patience to educate yourself first, it's not chat's responsibility to do that work for you. You need a different tool if that's what you want. Just because a paintbrush doesn't make a good hammer doesn't make it useless as a paintbrush.

Which is why it is such a good tool for a writer... IF the writer already knows how to write. If Bob Plainbrain wants to write a book without the slightest clue of what a good book looks like, then yeah, chat's not going to write a good book for him. If Peg Lazyhazy hasn't a clue what plot is, or character, pacing or narrative, and asks chat to "solve those problems," then guess what: chat's going to rush to the largest pile of literature produced on the planet, that pile written by bad pulp writers who have churned out trillions more words than good writers have. Chat's not a bad writer. Humans, in toto, on average, are together simply awful at it. And without the right prompting, Chat's more than ready to turn out "average" writing... exactly that of the 8th grader who's short story made it into a newspaper. Try to realise that every newspaper that was ever transferred onto microfiche, whose start began in the early 1900s, has been added, full and complete, to chatGPT's repertoire of "writing." Seen that way, it's not a surprise what chat churns out.

What must be understood, however, is that Flaubert's Madame Bovary is there too, and George Eliot's Adam Bede and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. But if you've never heard of these books, and you can't talk about them because they're an utter mystery to you, then you can't properly have chat translate the kind of writing that makes these books accessible to your writing work for you. Chat is just as ignorant as you are... so if you ARE ignorant, you shouldn't be appalled that the program functions on your level.

I have, many times, shown someone who scoffed at the value of chat the benefits of it as they've sat next to me and watched me prompt, versus their own efforts. They want to shortcut, they want to throw the paintbrush across the room at the wall and have the wall become miraculously painted. And when that doesn't work, when the brush has left an awful mess on the carpet and the hardwood, they're pissed, they're abusive, they scream what a piece of shit this program is. They rush to make a youtube video saying so.

I can talk about Flaubert with chat because I've read him... and because I have an understanding of the world he wrote in, and the readers he wrote for, and his goals in the narrative and such... because more than what he wrote, I've read others of the same time period and felt those same struggles with those narratives. If I were to have a discussion of Madame Bovary with you, dear reader, assuming you've read it, that wouldn't be the same for me... because to you it was a book, good, bad, whatever... while I read ever line thinking about how I would want to write that line, or how I should write lines like that, or how what he tried to accomplish is a reflection of things I've tried to accomplish in my work. He and I are both writers, which is like two surgeons talking about an open body during a surgery as opposed a surgeon and someone who hasn't become one. It just isn't the same.

But... I can have the kind of conversation like that with chat. Not because chat is a writer, but because so many of the sources it draws upon were. It can hold and surface the accumulated perspectives of countless critics, scholars, and practitioners who have wrestled with the same text. And unlike reading, say, Harold Bloom, I can intercede with chat and discuss this position versus that... and within chat, Harold Bloom, among others, is also there. In essence, it's like one of those forums where they used to gather a half dozen experts together to suss out a subject... but on tap, engaged with at will, right here on this computer. It's quite intoxicating.

As such, I've learned more about my writing in the last two years than in the twenty aforegoing. Growing up a would-be writer in a world of fixed, inflexible belief systems about "correctness," I spent a lot of time uncertain about what I should and shouldn't do with a narrative. To explain this, I'll again give an example.

Having come of age as a writer in the overlap of the 1970s and 80s, when writing about a character entering a room in a story, I used to think that it was my responsibility to "set the scene," as most writers did. To sketch this kind of writing out quickly, it would be along the lines of,

Judith entered the living room, finding a wide divan placed under the window, a scattering of magazines on the coffee table and a faint smell of pipe smoke still lingering in the curtains. The lamp in the corner threw a weak yellow cone across the carpet, catching the edge of a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on the floor. Judith paused at the threshold, feeling as though she had stepped into the middle of someone else's life, like a reader opening a book halfway through and struggling to catch the thread of the story.

I had chat write that for me, because I simply despise this sort of writing. I don't like reading it in a story, I don't find it remotely valuable — and yes, there is a massive difference between this sort of dreck above and what Flaubert or Thackeray were doing in their time, which we needn't go into. Back in the day, when I turned in a story where the tale went,

Judith went into the living room and Clyde asked, "What are you doing here?" —"I'm looking for you, of course; we have to talk."

I would be rapped on the knuckles and told that I had to provide more description, more "space," more "tactility" or a number of other bullshit words that I felt at the time ran into "waste the reader's time with explaining a living room they don't care about while making this boring to read."

But, that was the dictate of English teachers and professors at the time, who worshipped at the altar of D.H. Lawrence, Guy de Maupassant and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Three writers that I, for one, have no interest in.

Nonetheless, being young, dumb, not nearly educated enough to tell that segment of the population I desperately wanted to impress that they were full of shit, I obeyed and wasted years and years trying to be a "serious writer" as they defined it, conforming to their fashion, following the critical consensus of many who believed that to be "legitimate" it was all about the lamps, drapes and paisley patterns on living room furniture.

I get this crap advice from chat, too. I carefully and painstaking set out the motives of a character over six thousand words and get told, "The pacing really needs work, the change in the character's choices is happening too fast."  I throw out a scene where it's nearly all dialogue and chat says, "The work could use more grounding, describing the place where these things take place."  And early on, this used to bother me, because it was the same advice I've heard all my life.

But then, I realised... it's "like" that advice because that bad advice accumulated over a century, is also overwritten in chat's pile of knowledge, and chat's been programmed to help most people, people who have no idea what pacing is or how to create conflict. More than anything, when I get advice from chat about a story, it's to tell me that I should take two of the main characters, who have no reason to distrust or work against each other, and create a completely performative conflict that will make the story more "interesting."

When chat does this, it isn't in fact addressing my story. It's been programmed to be helpful; but it doesn't know how to be helpful, not really. So it picks whatever is the most common problems that writers have with their stories and grafts them onto mine.  For example, the ever popular "info dump." (I'll assume you can look it up, if you don't know what it means; chat would advise me to explain it here, but that's only because chat assumes you're too stupid to know or look things up).

Info dumps are awful. They're everywhere, most poor writers fall into the trap and as such it is the most common thing that writers have to be cautioned against. We're told endlessly, "show don't tell," which you can put on my gravestone for the record. Chat, however, can say those words but doesn't know what they mean, except that they're part of the conversation and so they'll always appear. And if I show chat a chapter of a story, and it hasn't anything else to complain about, it'll call out my tendency to "info dump."

The solution is to say, "Tell me where I've done it." And then chat will bring up an expositionary paragraph that runs about 171 words, which includes three non-expositionary verbs, because it's the nearest thing to an info dump it can find.

In essence, if it can't find a problem, it'll just make one up.

I imagine this sends a would-be writer with no real knowledge of their own writing into a drastic tizzy of rewriting something which is perfectly fine, sort of like being told the sink isn't clean though it looks perfectly clean, and trusting the teller so hard that you get out the comet and scrub for thirty minutes only to be told again, "No, still isn't clean." If you're smart, you realise the program, again, wasn't built to tell you if the sink was clean. It's built to help you, even if you don't need help.

Why is this good for my writing?  It reveals that nearly all the advice I've ever received by nearly everyone is about as good as chat's corrections. The "corrections" — I liked the story about this, but not so much that one — is not about the story at all, but about the reader. It's nice to be liked, but not everyone will ever like everything... and the most open minded readers won't read because they "like" a thing, but because it was a thing worth reading, regardless of what emotional support or interest massaging it offered. I read things as a youth which were difficult and hard to read. Sometime I rewatch certain movies because they are so unpleasant I have to steel myself to watch them again. I know from chat's inability to pull a story apart that there's nothing wrong with it... and I know that when someone doesn't like it, it's not because the story was badly written.

The reader cannot begin to understand how relieving that is, and how confidence-building. A plummer knows he's done a good job because the pipe is running and not leaking. An engineer knows they've done a good job because five years later the math still works as intended. A doctor knows they've done a good job because you're up, about and able to work for a living.

But a writer NEVER knows if they've done a good job... because it's all fucking opinion, and we don't trust ourselves.

October Lantern Advance Copy Available

I've finished the advanced version of the October Lantern, posted on patreon.  I've taken the requisite three hours rest and now I'm writing about it here. It's available for a $10 donation on patreon right now, otherwise it'll cost $7 on patreon come September 21st.  In the next few days I'll start on the November edition, which I've got rattling around in my head now.  I know what three of the articles will be, so I'll get started writing those soon.

I trust all of you are having a good Labour Day holiday.