Administrivia

It’s long overdue, but we’re in the midst of cleaning up some of the chaos in the management of Freethoughtblogs. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean firing the CEO with a hefty golden parachute so he can retire to his mansion, but we are reopening the application process, which has been neglected for a long long time.

One of the reasons for the neglect, besides the CEO’s laziness, is that we changed a significant bit of how we operate: NO ADS, therefore NO FUNDING, therefore our bloggers don’t get paid anymore, unless they work out independent sources of income (Patreon, for instance). We’re also facing a SLAPP suit…but don’t let that scare you, our bloggers aren’t subject to that, just me, personally. We do provide a space to write, and of course, the dubious benefits of associating with a rabid mob of SJWs.

If you applied to blog here in the last two years, you don’t have to resubmit, we’ve still got it on file, and we’re just now in the process of injecting the sluggish beast of our review machinery with potent drugs to stimulate it back into life.

There may be a few other projects that rouse themselves to shamble onto the stage in the near future, since there are also a few other developments, to be announced later.

Gahan Wilson is dead

Oh, this is sad. Gahan Wilson hasn’t produced much new in recent years — he has been suffering from dementia — but I discovered his work in the 70s and loved it. He and Gary Larson plucked my brain out and shaped it before stuffing it back in my cranium.

“I won’t bring any more friends home unless you let me play with them first!”

His work was always distinctive and recognizable, and unlike anyone else’s. That’s a great legacy.

Elric!

Someone thinks they can make a television show about a demon-worshipping, god-killing, inbred albino warrior-wizard with a drug habit and incestuous lust for his cousin, who slaughters his family in dynastic warfare? That would be awesome.

Of course, it’s only at the stage where some writers have bought the rights and are shopping it around. At some point, the networks will recognize how deeply weird and heretical the source material is, and they’ll reject it from further consideration or they’ll butcher it beyond recognition.

Maybe they should try selling Moorcock’s Behold the Man around. That would be a hoot. The heart attacks in network boardrooms would clear a lot of deadwood, anyway.

Every family dies a different way

Michael Chabon’s father died slowly, over the course of days and weeks, and he sat by his bedside writing Star Trek scripts. Now he’s written about how he felt during that long lingering time.

I’d tried talking aloud to my father a few times in the hours since he’d lost consciousness, telling him all the things that, I’d read, you were supposed to tell a dying parent. There was never any trace of a response. No twitch of an eye or a cheek, no ghost of a tender or rueful smile. I wanted to believe that he’d heard me, heard that I loved him, that I forgave him, that I was thankful to him for having taught me to love so many of the things I loved most, “Star Trek” among them, but it felt like throwing a wish and a penny into a dry fountain. My father and I had already done all the talking we were ever going to do.

He made me think of my father’s death, which was different in every way possible. No slow decline, no confinement to bed, no slipping into unconsciousness for my family. The last time I heard his voice was in a phone call on Christmas day — I talked to my mother for a while, she asked if I wanted to talk to my father, and “Sure,” I said. She called out to him, where he was working on Christmas dinner, a very Dad thing for him to do, and all I heard in the distance was a strangled yell and “GOD. DAMNED. CAT!” and Mom laughed and said he can’t come to the phone right now.

So those were my father’s last words to me. I have tried to live by them ever since.

The next morning my mother called to say he had died in his sleep. I missed my chance to talk back and tell him all the things Chabon said to his father. Oh well. We were never estranged, there was never any conflict between us, so I guess we just lived those things instead.

I’d still like to have that conversation, though. God damned cat.

You’ll have to come and get me, coppers!

I just got an email from the campus police — they want me to come in for questioning. I’m in trouble now!

I am investigating a complaint levied by a student group in which several posters were taken down in the tunnel between the Science Building and Student Center. During this investigation your name has come up as someone with involvement in the incident. I was hoping that you would be willing to come to the police department office to speak with me regarding this matter. This is voluntary and you are under no obligation to answer my questions but I am giving you the opportunity to respond to some of the things that I have found. Thank you for your time.

This is all about the hate signs posted by the College Republicans all over campus. They have been a bone of contention: they’ve been torn down, put back up again, new signs put up, people have been scribbling messages like “Fuck you” on them, it’s been a roller coaster of low key stupidity.

Apparently, the College Republicans/North Star contingent have been telling the police they suspect it’s all my fault — which is silly, there’s a broad consensus among most of the students and faculty that these trolls are posting garbage — and trying to get the police to pester me. I’ve been here before, gone into the campus police station, been questioned, and then released because they had absolutely no grounds for the accusation. That then led to Comma making incessant demands that they release the criminal investigative data for [my] vandalism of a UMM newspaper, so it really wasn’t worth it. My response this time was short and sweet.

Oh, not this nonsense again. These students have no evidence that I’ve done anything, so no, I am not at all interested in giving their claims a moment of my time.

On second thought, maybe I should talk to the police about this ongoing baseless harassment.

What killed World of Warcraft for you?

I used to play World of Warcraft. I thought it was great fun, but something drove me away, and this article on WoW addiction helped me see what it was.

It really is a rich, well-made, enjoyable game, with lots of challenging stuff and fun stuff. I’d probably still be subscribed and playing it if it were tailored to what they called “casuals”, and if that elitist distinction between “casual” and “hardcore” players hadn’t emerged. I would be rolling my eyes at the accusation that Warcrack was addictive — just manage your life, people! — except that I was seeing more and more artificial goal-setting that was intended to suck players into an addictive vortex.

“I don’t particularly harbor any strong feelings of resentment towards the game itself,” said Nick Peake, who dropped out of college while addicted. “Obviously it is acknowledged to a certain extent as an ‘addictive’ piece of entertainment, but I think to view it purely in those terms belies what an extraordinarily immersive and lovingly crafted game it really is, and risks it being viewed as entirely analogous with other aspects of addiction and gaming, such as the ongoing lootbox/microtransactions debate within the industry in recent years.”

There are parts of World of Warcraft, then and now, that seem, at best, irresponsible. Achievements that could only be earned by spending spectacular amounts of hours playing, designed knowing it would force players to stretch and contort their lives, day in and day out.

But it’s also true that many of the people I talked to who became addicted to World of Warcraft also had trouble with other addictions. The game’s impact wasn’t unique.

Making a great game would mean, to me, that I could log on on a weekend evening and play happily for a few hours. I would still be subscribed if that were a possibility, and Blizzard would be making just as much money from me. It’s a subscription service, so they get the same amount of cash whether I log in once or twice a month, vs. whether I log in daily and grind for 18 hours straight.

I gave up on it when I realized it was catering to the latter crowd, for some unfathomable reason. There were all these setups where you were expected to jump through a bunch of hoops — and it was pretty much the same hoops every day — in order to get some meaningless title or a fancy geegaw or even some indispensable gear that would allow you to keep up with the Joneses.

I even remember the precise moment the game died for me. There was some widget I learned about that I could win by following some mission some panda bear would give me, and all I had to do was talk to it every day for months and months, and it would be mine. I realized that that wasn’t exciting, or fun, or challenging — it was just tedious and repetitive. It sunk in that a lot of the game at that point was just repetition and boring grinds, so I said “Fuck you, panda bear” and unsubscribed instead.

I guess some people get a sense of accomplishment from doing the same thing over and over for tiny rewards, so good for them, they’re well prepared for a life under capitalism. It wasn’t what I was looking for in a fantasy role playing game, though.