Sometimes it's hard

But you gotta understand...


When the lord made me, he made a ramblin' man...

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Philosophy with Dice

I like White Wolf's D10 Dice Pool mechanic.

And WoD certainly takes you places:



It's just that...I don't know...I never could quite exactly explain the feeling, until Chris Gunning aptly and somewhat poetically put it this way, here:

Reading one of these books is like...



Truly excellently put. That's the feeling, exactly.

That, and also the fact that White Wolf is a publisher in the business of...
publishing—obviously!

And it shows!

The more books, the better (for the publisher—quite obviously!):

The books cover what they choose to in exacting detail, and send the reader for more and more books to complete the big picture.

Most of them can be fun:

- Spirit Rules – the Storyteller’s Companion
- Spirits – Book of Madness
- Demons and Infernal Pacts – Book of Madness
- The Spirit Wilds – Umbra Revised (for Werewolf)
- The Shadowlands – Wraith: The Oblivion
- The Dreaming – Changeling: The Dreaming

But the list is endless, not to mention that it can rapidly become costly, and role-playing a predefined "paradigm" (especially in the Mage series), as opposed to something less constraining, like, say, the more generic D&D characters alignment system, can feel like too much of a straitjacket, at times.

Ideally, a good tabletop RPG settings should give just enough of a shared-universe for players to manifest their characters without burdening them with so many details and so much game mechanics that the players and GM's imagination can no longer take flight.

Because, otherwise, it would be too much like the "real world" out there—the make believe world of our politicians and economist and media pundits—wouldn't it?

Master of the game is he who creates the rules—not he who just follows them.

In my experience, most Game Masters seldom bother following the letter of any given system's law, anyway. The best of them eventually end-up generating their own material independently, and, oftentimes in contradiction with the rules and premises of all the painstakingly pre-written material laid out for them in these books.

They do make for a fine collection, though.
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What care I for human hearts?

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The Man, the Legend

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.
When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
— Buddha

Am I the only one here to see another wasted opportunity for the Dems—yet again—out of all that nonsensical mass media nonsense?



On a peripherally related matter, speaking of missed opportunities and all: a genuinely progressive President with some lead in his pants could have been some "change we can believe in" . . . for a change.

I am just saying.

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Whiners and Winners

Now, you know.

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You're like a sheep, my brother

You're like a scorpion, my brother,
you live in cowardly darkness
like a scorpion.
You're like a sparrow, my brother,
always in a sparrow's flutter.
You're like a clam, my brother,
closed like a clam, content,
And you're frightening, my brother,
like the mouth of an extinct volcano.

Not one,
not five--
unfortunately, you number millions.
You're like a sheep, my brother:
when the cloaked drover raises his stick,
you quickly join the flock
and run, almost proudly, to the slaughterhouse.
I mean you're the strangest creature on earth--
even stranger than the fish
that couldn't see the ocean for the water.
And the oppression in this world
is thanks to you.
And if we're hungry, tired, covered with blood,
and still being crushed like grapes for our wine,
the fault is yours--
I can hardly bring myself to say it,
but most of the fault, my dear brother, is yours.

— Nâzım Hikmet, The Strangest Creature on Earth
(Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, 1993)
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The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

I was busy watching this, last night:



So . . .



. . . don't ask me about that:



I wouldn't know anything about it.
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Facebook and Twitter are just so passé

Q:



A:

You know what your problem is, Don? You just need to grow up.

You remind me of Armand. You two are just so afraid you're going to be left behind and fall off the "bridge" to the next century.

You're clinging to youth as if your lives depended on it, but do you know what youth is?

Do you remember when you were five?

Of course, you don't. Not to worry, most people don't.

What about thirteen, then?

Remember what it felt like when you were thirteen, Don? The other kids, older than you, on the playground? Two feet taller and looking down at you?



You and Armand, you're just like Will, aren't you? All grown-up, and yet still so scared you're going to be ditched.

You realize how Adlerian all of this is, don't you? Über den nervösen Charakters!

I mean, look at Armand. Armand is 400 years old. Remember when you were thirteen and how you looked up back then to the kids three or five years older than you were? Now, imagine facing a kid much older than you are. A kid twice your age. Three, four, five...ten times your age, or more.

No wonder, Oedipus killed his father. Who wants to live in the shadow of another, your elder forever?

Biologists call it SAS (Shade Avoidance Syndrome).

It's a pretty universal theme, really.



Modern moms nowadays, they are trying so hard to stay fit and trim; like some of your colleagues, Don, they've become so intent mimicking what the next generation is doing.

This is the reason why they follow the same fashion their daughters do, and wear the same things—or try to. And vice-versa—don't ask—clothing fashion can be so elusive (way more transient than any technological trend).



And this is the reason why their daughters are trying so hard to create their own style and eventually end-up wearing clothes that would look utterly ridiculous on their moms—it's the whole point.



I don't blame them. I mean, Madonna is great and everything, but who wants to live forever in the shadow of anyone, regardless of how great they are?

This is the reason why these kids aren't exchanging emails with you anymore, Don. This is your thing—that's what your generation did. Kids, they don't want to just catch up and follow in your footsteps, they don't want to play by your rules, Don, you know that! Not if there is another way around. Not when they can change the rules and have it "their way."

As for Facebook and Twitter, they are so passé, already. Do you know how I know that, Don? Your generation has just begun getting into it... Time to move on to the next thing. I wonder what it will be, next year.
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