Blackmoor Vituperative

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.

No spoilers.

If you’ll take my suggestion, do not read anything about it or watch any trailers. I didn’t, and I’m glad. This is a much better film than I expected it to be. Susan called it “a lovely surprise”. Maybe you will enjoy it, too.

Have you seen “The Swimmer” (1968), with Burt Lancaster? I love that movie. At the risk of a possible spoiler, I consider it one of the creepiest ghost stories I have ever seen. (*Is* it a ghost story? It might not be. That’s one of the things that makes it so creepy. But *I* consider it a ghost story.)

It’s based on a short story that I had never read until recently: “The Swimmer”, by John Cheever, originally published in “The New Yorker” in 1964.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

— Rita Mae Brown

On the one hand, it’s my opinion that the specific word someone uses means very little compared to what they mean by that word.

On the other hand, yes, vocabulary changes over time. “Decimate” used to mean “kill one person in ten”; nowadays it means “destroy most of”, almost the opposite of its archaic meaning.

But context matters. Intent matters. Chasing the term-of-the-moment is a distraction from what actually helps or hurts people. This semiotic scavenger hunt is one of the ways in which well-meaning people are kept occupied by trivia, while the Republican death cult burns the United States to the ground.

That being said, if someone from Mexico tells me that they consider “Mexican” to be pejorative because someone, somewhere has used that word as an insult, I will make an effort not to use that word around them. (Note: this is a hypothetical example, but it very easily could be a real-life example tomorrow.)

If you are annoyed that you download images in Firefox and they save as “*.webp”, install this addon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/

In honor of the 20th Anniversary of Cinema Insomnia, I present to you a papercraft Miss Mittens. Miss Mittens is the co-host of the cult TV show Cinema Insomnia (as seen on OSI74!). Now her paper doppelgänger can be your co-host!

Click the image below to download the PDF. For help in assembly, review the photos after that.

And now for the step by step visual instructions. Careful with those scissors!

All done! Wasn’t that easy?

P.S. As a special Canada Day treat, here’s a Special Canada Day Edition of the papercraft Mr. Lobo!

From time to time, I will see a story about the Stonewall riots, or about a person like Ruth Coker Burks, and the story will use a phrase like “drag queen”. And some well-meaning but painfully naive person will wag their finger and comment, “Correction! It’s not ‘drag queen’, it’s ‘trans woman’.”

I don’t (usually) argue with them, because I try to follow the admonition of picking big fights with my enemies, not small fights with my friends. But what I want to say is,

You little snot, you have no fucking clue what DRAG QUEENS did for you. DRAG QUEENS hurled bottles at cops. DRAG QUEENS held fund-raisers for AIDS patients. DRAG QUEENS marched to remind the straights that they existed and would not be erased. You want to sneer at your allies and “correct” them for not using the term-of-the-moment? Be my guest. Today, it’s “trans woman”. In two years, it will be something else. Just know that you can keep “correcting” people on your own side from now until the end of time, and you won’t come close to doing what DRAG QUEENS did for human rights in this country in a single day.