Blackmoor Vituperative

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming“, W. B. Yeats, 1919

Fun fact! Yeats went on to embrace fascism and authoritarianism — the “passionate intensity” of “the worst“. “The Second Coming” is the most compelling proof I know of that an artist is not their art — and if we insist on conflating the two, or on depriving ourselves of great art by less-than-great people, that it is we who suffer for it.

Yeats, after all, is long dead, and quite beyond our reproachment.

What had me thinking about this was, of course, the results of the election yesterday, in which the “the worst” — angry, hateful, and completely detached from reality — won virtually every election.

I am glad that I don’t have children. The United States is a dumpster fire, and it won’t get better in my lifetime.

If it ever does.

I’ve spent the last week or so watching the 4K extremely-high-definition blu-ray of the extended 11 hour “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy. The difference between this and the DVD is truly breathtaking. And the trilogy itself is, of course… it has no peer.

I am glad that I lived to see this.

“School choice” is to education what “right to work” is to worker rights. The powerful get more power, at the expense of everyone else.

If one were cynical, one might even think that was the goal.

If you run into an error in Windows that a file name is too long, here is how to fix it (read the whole article before you do anything).

https://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/how-to-fix-filename-is-too-long-issue-in-windows/

Bic introduced the Bic Metal disposable razor in 1988. I still prefer it to any other disposable razor.

Letting “Alligator” (1980) play while I work. I remember seeing this when I was 15 or 16 and thinking it was really funny. I’m only five minutes into it, but I feel so sad for the baby alligator. That’s true of pretty much any old movie I see that has real animals. I am a lot more sensitive to it now than I was when I was a kid. I have a hard time watching “Night Of The Lepus” (1972) nowadays.

I prefer fake-looking CGI animals over seeing real animals mistreated.

My very first RPG character was Dinara, a Chaotic Evil Magic User in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I repeatedly manipulated the other PCs into betraying and killing each other so they (and I) could get the dead PC’s stuff. Back then, we always started characters at 1st level, so after a while I had the highest level character by a significant margin.

Unfortunately, after the … fifth time, I think? … the other players must have compared notes, because at the beginning of the next game session, Dinara walked into the tavern, and all of the other PCs stood up from the table and drew their weapons.

“We need to have a talk,” one of them said.

“Fireball,” I replied.

That killed all but two of the other PCs, who then killed Dinara.

It was worth it.

Keep in mind that this was 1980, we were 15 (or maybe 14, now that I think of it), we were friends, we were all new to the game, and we were the only AD&D players we knew. Also, we weren’t as emotionally invested in our characters as everyone is now (including me). It was a game. Those of us with dead characters made up new ones and moved on. My next character was a Lawful Good Fighter.

While I was typing this, Susan asked if that experience taught me that playing a character like that was not a good thing to do. I said no: I have never played a PC like that again, but I have run a few NPCs like that in games I have GMd since then. But what I did learn is that you can only pull something like that once with a given group of players.

Winaero has a step-by-step tutorial on how to revert Firefox (more or less) to its pre-Proton user interface. I am giving it a try. I have been using Chrome as my default browser for the past day, and I like it better than Protonic Firefox, but not as much as pre-Protonic Firefox.

We watched a movie called “The Colony” (2021) last night. It was kind of like “Escape From New York” (1981), but without the bright colour palette and upbeat tone.

Today we watched a very interesting movie on Netflix DVD, “The Current War” (2017), about Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and (to a much lesser extent) Nikola Tesla. We enjoyed it.

If you get a chance to see “Nancy Drew And The Hidden Staircase” (2019), do. It’s cute and fun.