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Month: August 2024

Oh, I Will Finish All these Books

Oh, I Will Finish All these Books

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I love to read books, which you might have figured out about me if you are familiar with this blog. I typically I am in the middle of mutliple books at once, reading each one in bits and pieces, so to speak. It can take me a long time to get through a book at this rate, but as long as it is well written I can pick it up even if I have left off of it for awhile. I have sometimes spent a year or two to finish reading a book. Taking notes helps with retaining comprehension, and also with the review that I will eventually write on goodreads, where I’ve been tracking my reading since 2019.

I read multiple books at once because I like to be reading books in different genres simultaneously, for example a work of fiction and a short work of popular history, and then also a heavier history book that will take longer to get through. It also happens because as I read a book, I get drawn into the subject matter, and then want to read other related books in my reading list.

For example, I was interested in brushing up my knowledge of the medieval period, so I started a book I had picked up at a thrift store, Life in a Medieval Village. But I also had a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine I had acquired around the same time, and was intrigued to compare and contrast the villagers’ lives with that of a powerful noblewoman. But then while reading about Eleanor I learned that she was a patroness of Marie of France, famous for her poetic lais, so then I broke out my copy of The Lais of Marie de France to brush up on those.

What have I done? How am I ever going to finish my 2024 reading challenge now if I am always starting new books?

So you understand what I’ve gotten myself into, I’ve posted a screenshot of what I am currently reading above. It’s from the sidebar of this blog, but I gave a screenshot since the dear reader could be looking at this post at any time, long after I’ve finished the books pictured. I will finish them all! Maybe not by the end of the year, though.

A Game for Old Grognards

A Game for Old Grognards

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One of my favorite old games is Titan, from Avalon Hill. I have played it since all the way back in high school. I’ve also mentioned it on this blog already. It’s one of my top 10 games on BoardGameGeek; in fact, it’s #10 on the list on my BGG profile, which means that it’s the oldest, not that it’s the least favorite.

It’s both a wargame and a fantasy themed board game, so there’s just no denying its appeal. It combines the delight of building armies of fantastic monsters with the thrill of rolling large amounts of dice in combat.

I played a lot when I was young; it was surely one of the more popular games among my circles as a teenager. I even wrote a BoardGameGeek session report about a game I played back in the early 1980s: Bad Luck in a Long Ago Game of Titan.

As I got older, I found fewer people willing to play. I did have a few friends who played in the late 1990s into the 2000s. That was when I developed a variant I called “Tactical Titan,” where you build a huge map and focus on the combat, ignoring the higher level strategy map. I actually hand made my own maps, coloring in hex paper, but photocopying the existing game components and assembling a map is another way it could work.

I devised scenarios, with special maps that had limited types of terrain and thus limited the monsters used. I came up with magic items that could be seeded on the map and would enhance the monsters in combat. There were some new rules to accomodate the large tactical map, and new monster types. This is similar to variants other Titan fans have come up with.

I managed to rope a few players into this version of the game, and played a lot of two-player games with one particular friend who sadly passed away in the early 2000s.

Later, I developed another variant that got a slight amount of play. It was called “Campaign Titan” and the idea was that your Titan (the leader of your armies) would earn XP from game to game and level up as a character, picking up all kinds of abilities, even spells. Again, I only got a few players into it (I think two total) and this version did not get played much, so the rules I have written around it are largely untested.

The last time I played Titan was probably in 2015. It’s just hard to find people interested in this kind of game, and willing to commit to the long hours it takes to play all the way through.

I have a bunch of pages on my gamer site devoted to the Titan variants I created here: Steve’s Titan Corner. You can also find links there to the content that other Titan fans have created. We old grognards are still out there, showing our devotion to this classic game!

Hulu, Take Us Back to the 90s!

Hulu, Take Us Back to the 90s!

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We watch a lot of streaming video, it can’t be denied. We’ve fully embraced the modern entertainment mode of binge-watching a television series. As a family we often watch shows together from beginning to end. For example, after finishing Better Call Saul, we just couldn’t help ourselves and rewatched Breaking Bad, all the way through, including the movie. Typically we watch a couple of episodes in a night, a couple of nights a week. You’d be surprised at how quickly you can go through multiple seasons of a series at that rate.

The girl and I have more time to watch other shows, when it is just the two of us, after the rest of the family has retired for the evening. We browse through our various streaming services, and pick a show we’ve heard good things about, or just try something based on the teaser. I like the mini-series format a lot; you can get a good story in without a huge time commitment. It’s a particularly good format for a mystery-type show – two that we’ve enjoyed recently are Bodkin (set in Ireland) and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (based on a young adult mystery crime novel).

When we like an ongoing show, we’ll tend to get caught up on it, but then we’re left hanging. We’re all caught up on Abbot Elementary (it’s just adorable, and set in Philly!) and now trying to figure out how to watch the last four episodes of Evil (you haven’t watched it? – it’s a hot mess but super fun!) but, as often happens, we find that we run out of content. We try some stuff out (there’s so much out there) but more often than not, a show doesn’t pull us in. There is a craft to good storytelling and a lot of what’s produced just doesn’t pull it off.

So then we go to YouTube and browse random informational videos, or watch the news which is just depressing (unless we watch it through the lens of late-night comedy shows, our preferred medium). How to overcome this television malaise?

Luckily, in this streaming era, it is possible to binge-watch old timey shows, from the good old days. You know the ones I’m talking about – the 1990s!

When we were still young, and life was full of promise.

The streaming platform Hulu is especially good for this kind of television watching, as they have the license to share a variety of old shows. We’re watching two from the 90s on Hulu now, depending on which group of family members is available for the evening.

One is The X-Files, for when we are all together. This is a show I actually didn’t watch much back in the day, so it’s mostly new to me. I just remember the general vibe of this show and its popularity then. It was pretty cutting edge in terms of graphic content for its time, which of course pales now compared to the 2000s stuff like Dexter. It has great writing and pacing, and an excellent score as well.

The other show we are watching, after Gavin has gone to bed, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In this case, I have watched it all the way through, but Aileen and Tiernan have not. They own the whole boxed DVD set, but just kept stalling out in the later seasons when trying to watch it (I suspect they got bored at Season 4, which is understandable).

Buffy has a sly sense of humor, and oh so much heart. It’s a joy to re-encounter the beloved characters, like reuniting with old friends. With me having to bite my tongue to not reveal any spoilers about what happens to them. What makes the show so wonderful is how, despite its completly fantastical supernatural premise, it is ultimately about friendship, loyalty and love. It’s a very Gen-X show that way, in my opinion; like Friends, but much more interesting and clever.

There’s something about these shows that seems simpler, more innocent. I know, an odd thing to say about the 1990s. It’s just that they evoke an era when the world’s problem’s seemed less intractable, the stakes lower. Both of these shows – Buffy and the X-Files – deal with otherworldy powers with immense potential to harm humanity, yet the characters confront them in an easy-going manner, with tongue in cheek. We all know we’re just playing with the idea of apocalypse here.

Apocalypse doesn’t seem so playful now, and screen entertainment has gotten darker, and more earnest, in response to the changing times. We’re living through an era of real-life danger now, which calls for courage and resolution, faith and hope.

And sometimes, it calls for a little escape, to a safe harbor in which to rest our minds and hearts. In our case, to the television shows of our past.

Could There Really Be another Civil War?

Could There Really Be another Civil War?

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Recently we watched the new movie Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland, and distributed in the United States by A24. It’s about a near future civil war in this country, and I had been wanting to watch it since I heard about it. I like Alex Garland’s work a lot, both his writing (for example Sunshine) and directing (for example Annihilation). I was also drawn to the subject matter, as I am very interested in history, and history is full of civil wars.

We even had one here in the United States once, in case you didn’t know. It’s both fascinating and appalling to think that we could have a second one. I admit I’ve given the idea some thought, and even have a set of pages up on my old Web 1.0 site where I consider different scenarios, based on pop culture depictions or on sociopolitical theories: USA Breakup Scenarios.

The movie Civil War doesn’t go into much backstory of how the war starts or its exact outlines. We know that there are secessionists who oppose the sitting President, who apparently has made a power grab and overreached. He only appears briefly in two different scenes and seems to be modeled after a certain unpopular recent President. The primary opposition is the Western Forces, which include Texas and California, and has enough resources to muster a formidable army.

The flag of the Western Forces

The story follows a group of journalists, so you only pick up on all this background gradually, as you travel with them on the wartime East coast. They encounter various militias and armed groups and it’s often not clear who is on what side, or exactly what is going on. The cinematography is amazing, and the mood varies from eerily apprehensive to terrifyingly tense to action-packed war violence.

The film isn’t a political thriller or a historical film; it’s about photojournalism during war – about that experience on the ground. As such, it reminded me of the comic series DMZ, set in Manhattan during another version of a Second American Civil War. The city has become a demilitarized zone, and the comics follow a reporter who ends up stranded there. It’s a dangerous place, with the people living there being the ones who were either too poor or too stubborn to evacuate. Again, while the war is there as a backdrop, the story is about the people living through it.

Both of these stories – the movie Civil War and the comic seres DMZ – invite their audience to consider what it would be like for Americans to experience the political collapse and devastating warfare that they have become used to seeing happen only in far away places, such as Iraq, Syria, Ukraine…the list goes on. There’s almost a feeling of schadenfreude coming from these storytellers, like they want to give Americans a taste of what their hubris and lack of foresight has done for people in other countries. Yeah, it could happen to you, too.

After watching Civil War, I added a page for it on my Web 1.0 site, as well as one for The Handmaid’s Tale, which in its own way depicts a civil war, or at least an insurrection. We’ve had decades now of speculative fiction about the U.S.A. breaking up. But how likely is that to happen?

According to current public sentiment, there’s a pretty good chance. The problem is having such a strong partisan split, where each side in the red zone-blue zone conflict simply can’t accept the other side’s perspective. Or the legitimacy of the other side’s leaders. If that’s the case, what choice is there besides war?

Is it possible that by speculating so much about civil war, we are in danger of bringing it about? A self-fulfilling prophecy, as it were. I may be guilty of this myself, what with my web site and all. Just to make the record clear, I do not believe that would be a desirable outcome. It would be an absolute horror. As these fictional accounts make clear.

I will also add that in the generational turnings theory of which I am advocate, we are currently in a Fourth Turning, or Crisis Era. This is an era of political upheaval which in retrospective are seen as “founding moments” in which America passes through the “gates of history.” The American Civil War was such an era. Does a Fourth Turning mean there has to be a civil war? No. But if there were to be one, it would likely by in a Crisis Era.

I hope we can find another way out of our partisan quandary. Having support for the two major parties split evenly between voters, leading to narrow margins in every election, is a huge problem. Only by overcoming it, one way or another, can we pass through the gates of history.

Are We at the End of Time *Already*?

Are We at the End of Time *Already*?

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I stole this off a book cover because I liked the art – just like generative AI does

There is this really cool sci-fi trilogy written by Michael Moorcock, called The Dancers at the End of Time, which takes place far, far in the future (warning: mild spoilers ahead). Human technology has advanced to the level implied by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There aren’t many people left on Earth, but those people live like gods. They wear power rings attuned to their minds, and can alter the physical world in any way they want with a thought.

The rings they wear tap into these huge machines in the center of the planet that draw on vast energy sources. It’s like the matter replicators from Star Trek, but on a planetary scale. Sometimes the machines generate images instead of actual matter, like the Star Trek holodeck on a planetary scale. I suppose this is to conserve energy.

So for example someone in this distant future might decide they want to live in a fancy castle, and then just dream it up, and the machines will make it for them. They can create any kind of landscape around it, maybe a lake of rainbow colored water with crystal mountains all around – why not? They can change the color of the sky and add a few moons. If they get bored with their castle and landscape, they can disintegrate it and imagine up a new one. All with a wave of the hand.

The denizens of the end of time are a frivolous and wanton people. After all, their tech level makes them immune to any consequences for their actions. They can’t even die; if they do, the machines recreate them from backup information. Their existences are pure recreation and socializing in a world where everyone lives like an insanely wealthy elite.

How is this matter-altering technology even possible? That is irrelevant to the story, which is an exploration of morality and its connection to the material limitations of existence. At least, that’s what I got out of the trilogy. It’s been ages since I read it, but I’ve been reminded of it lately when reading about the technology of our time.

You see, as part of the plot in the sci-fi books, aliens come to Earth to ask the humans to kindly stop their machines, because as it turns out their energy source is wormholes to the far reaches of space, and they are using so much energy that they are accelerating the end of the Universe. Humanity is sucking the cosmos dry just to have fun. Naturally, the humans brush the E.T.s off and continue with their careless lifestyle.

This is kind of happening already, here in the real world of actual technology. The advent of digital cryptocurrencies has incentivized computationally-intensive processes which require significant amounts of electricity. For example, one estimate is that a single bitcoin transaction uses as much power as it takes to run a household for 36 hours. Generative AI, which for whatever reason has been integrated into every major platform on the Internet, is also a huge consumer of power and has a major environmental impact.

Yes, we are accelarating climate change and causing lasting environmental damage, just for a little amusement. It’s a similar story to the one in the sci-fi books. We’re not destroying the whole Universe with our latest and greatest Internet technology, just the planet. But that’s all the Universe we realistically have, so it amounts to the same thing, from the perspective of our puny civilization.

We didn’t get to the stage of mastery of the physical laws of the Universe so we could live like gods, but a few of us got rich from speculative bubbles and we generated massive amounts of creepy images and canned text. All while cooking the Earth dry. It’s really quite pathetic.

If we keep it up, we just might reach the end of time. I mean our time, on Earth.