“What do you mean you only play Go?!?”
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I wish your life was mine to tell,
To scribe each day with utmost care
And so I write a Villanelle!
Your eyes a dance of caramel
That taste delight with every stare
I wish your life was mine to tell
I pen your laugh, a silver bell
As bright as song, too soft to tear
And so I write a Villanelle!
Your voice, once raised, a righteous swell
Your hands, contrite, a bashful pair
I wish your life was mine to tell
One day we’ll build a citadel
Inside our stained glass hearts may lair
And so I write a Villanelle!
I’ve writ your joy and its impel
Each line a cup for us to share
I wished your life was mine to tell
And so I write a Villanelle!
I fear I might lose you as well
My ardent light in sinking lair
And so I write this Villanelle
The brightest stars only foretell
A blank page death, entropy’s snare
I fear I might lose you as well.
Your eyes of burning caramel
I wish to taste with every stare
And so I write this Villanelle
Your laugh, too short, a dying swell
Your hand and mine, too rare a pair
I fear I might lose you as well.
Upon your tears I wish to dwell,
Those sparkling mirrors to ensnare
And so I write this Villanelle
Anxiety, love can’t dispel
But which is ruler, which is heir?
I fear I might lose you as well
And so I choose a Villanelle
We left him in the Wasteland
Under canopy of mammoth bone
And the tepid remains
Of other species overthrown.
He fell, stumbled perhaps,
And faced the flooded grave
Of some dead and fallen star.
In the pool, not even a wave.
We left him there
For we could not see
What paroxysm seized his mind
And refashioned it an endless plea
What antithesis he found in reflection
What evil puzzle of the soul
He would not say
and we cannot know
The glee of his spite
His despair, like a vow
We could not eulogize
For none of us knew how
He was our brother
By blood and by corps.
Now, a raw unending sough
Crying “I will bear this pain no more”
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This nightmare has followed me for a long time.
The nightmare happens entirely in a car, and I’m the driver.
Sometimes I’m alone, sometimes there are others. Sometimes it’s my whole family, crammed and talkative in the back seats. Sometimes it’s a friend on the passenger side, telling me about his day. Sometimes it’s an old intimate, sitting right next to me, looking outside and thinking about what went wrong and what went right.
I am always driving. Driving fast to somewhere important. A dentist’s appointment that started ten minutes ago. Going to buy butter fifteen minutes before the supermarket closes. A meeting at work that can’t start without me.
I guess those things aren’t that important after all. I have other dreams about saving the world or meeting Her by chance at the beach. These destinations aren’t like that, not life-changing, just urgent. If I don’t get there in time, something bad will happen. So I’m driving fast.
I’m a terrible driver. In the dream and in reality. I got my license when I was 18, drove my dad’s old SUV to college and then didn’t touch a steering wheel again until I was in my mid-twenties. I just never got much practice, I guess.
I don’t see why anyone even likes cars: they’re ugly, expensive and bad for the environment. I don’t get the appeal. Besides, they’re dangerous. Did you know 37 thousand people die in car accidents every year? You know how many die on bikes? Barely half a thousand. For public transport? Less than a hundred.
So I’m in this car and I see a light coming up and I go to slow down, but I press the gas instead of the brake. The light stays green. No big deal, I think, just a little embarrassing. I try to brake a little bit just to make sure I’ve figured out where it is. I hit the gas again. Now we’re going even faster.
I’m starting to really move up on the car in front of me and it’s only a matter of time till we hit … Continue Suffering
A player’s guide to a custom Dungeons and Dragons setting I’ve been writing: sort of an Ancient Greek/Science-Fiction/Fantasy mash-up. Ancient Greek Gundams, Communist Dwarves, and extraterrestrial Israelites abound!
Okay, yes, that’s a bizarre combination. No, I haven’t lost my mind (well, not recently); there is a method to this madness!
I wanted to run a game where the players had a lot of control over the aesthetic of the world: realistic, traditional fantasy, science-fictional, etc. My solution was to create a charming, but undramatic, world (“Inciting Incident”? bah to that!) and allow the players to define the central conflict themselves. Perhaps they’re the first to discover magic, the first to make some technological breakthrough or the first to radically change the political landscape.
This guide introduces the Mariners, effectively an adventurer’s guild for every walk of life: soldiers, scientists, priests, politicians, farmers, and so forth. Players make a Mariner and choose their qualifying accomplishment and a personal goal they had to surrender to join. These choices enable the DM to create an adventure where the players commit the Inciting Incident.
In any case, this is still very much a work in progress, but you may enjoy perusing it anyway (or, be forced to, if you’re one of my players :P). Sharing your thoughts and feedback is also very very appreciated. You can download it below or see it online at the source.
Current Revision Goal: Right now, my main goal is to get the word count down and add more reference art. After that, I may start reorganizing to highlight the good bits… when I find some.
Age-of-Atlantis-Players-Guide-v2Download
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I wanted to be a writer
To tell tales and make fun
Of the world and all its peril
But I was the one undone.
I wanted to be a writer
To prove that I could hum
A tune of such beauty,
It could never be unsung.
I wanted to be a writer
But I never learned to sing.
And so I sit, miscounting meters, pondering
Why I wanted to be a writer
When all I can do is cringe.
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I wrapped up running a very long Dungeons and Dragons campaign last week. It’s been two years with the same characters, the same story, and the same goddamn unbearable amazing players.
For the epic finale, I wanted an engaging villain who would be more than just a hit point balloon- that would engage the players in roleplay, not just rollplay. Sadly, the adventure’s prefabricated villain wasn’t quite up to snuff. Azarr Kul, from the classic Red Hand of Doom third edition adventure, isn’t a bad villain but he’s not that complicated (think Napoleon, but he’s half dragon and worships Satan).
So I rewrote him. I kept the canon consistent, he still did all the things Dragon Napoleon did, but I wrote a backstory for him based on an incredible short story (find it free to read or listen to here) by Scott Sigler. The original story has an incredible economy of language: the paragraphs are tight, the sentences always moving the action forward. You almost feel out of breath reading it. I loved it so much, I wanted to try imitating Sigler’s style and story- so I wrote a short little origin story for the new and improved Azarr Kul.
If I did this right, it should stand alone as a mediocre (if unoriginal) piece of fiction. Enjoy (but probably not):
Coughing into the moonlit smoke around him, Angel was aware only of his fear. His eyes watered, but he could still hear. Shouting, marching, the crackle of houses burning, and, still distant, screams. The entire village was on fire.
Angel turned away from the chaos outside his home, but his mother held him at the threshold. He wanted to run behind her, hide his juvenile body behind her height. But she held him fast.
“Let go of him! We have to go and find Hector!” cried Angel’s grandfather, already peering into the fire and dark surrounding their home.
Angel’s mother would let neither of them pass. She breathed slowly, in rhythm with the pulsing light of the fires.
“My husband is … Continue Suffering
Just what the world needs, another novelty Twitter account!
Well, lack of originality aside, if you miss the brilliance that was Modern Seinfeld and like sci-fi tropes, you may enjoy this list of Seinfeld plots with a genre twist. Take a look:
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It is a long and storied objection that moral philosophy is only a form of hostile autobiography- a way of dictating rules for the world without embracing it. Meta-ethical debates continue, but it is at least some proof against this claim that contemporary moral philosophy concerns itself deeply with how we live our lives, how friendships, relationships, and the demands of everyday life can be attended to while continuing to be moral. Alienation is just one obstacle among many in such efforts, but it is this obstacle which Railton believes he can dissolve by reworking the way we schematize and apply morality. Railton establishes a subjective/objective duality in interpreting a given moral philosophy and posits that by adopting the objective and dismissing the subjective we become sophisticated and avoid the problems of alienation. While Railton’s sophisticated consequentialism is an innovative and structurally sound approach, it fails to defeat alienation by being impracticable: no human being constrained by the limits of ordinary psychology could possibly live such a life.
If only for a fleeting moment of believability, let us admire Railton’s sophisticated consequentialism. His motive here is a worry that the moral points of view, being necessarily universal and impartial, tends to alienate one from life itself, to create “a kind of estrangement, distancing, or separateness resulting in some sort of loss” of that which “compels his allegiance to life itself” (Railton 134, Williams 18). The strict and upright consequentialist might do all the right things for all the right reasons, but he is still going through life as if following a handbook and a (very undependable) calculator- he has lost touch with humanity.
The solution to this alienation then, is to bridge universalized moral principle (in this case consequentialism) with actions that fully (emotionally and otherwise) acknowledge one’s “special relations” within the world (Railton 136). We begin on the starting embankment of moral law- Railton specifies a pluralistic consequentialism aimed at maximizing a set of goods but notes that the bridge he aims to construct “could be made, mutatis mutandis, by a deontologist” (148). From the bank of ideology we … Continue Suffering
“It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self… It is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.”
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace’s account of depression: a solemn display of artistic mastery. From his body of work and biography, we know that the depression Wallace describes is one he himself often felt- and yet, experience with depression is no prerequisite in feeling the power behind his words (Weber). Somehow, through Wallace’s artistic expression, we are able to gain sudden insight into a way of being, a way of feeling, that we may never have comprehended before. This perspective sharing enables us to understand something important about life (depression is, after all, a real thing, which real human beings suffer with) and is a fascinating component of art. Sadly, our study of art often fails to investigate this connection between life and art. The purely formal (“art for art’s sake”) and institutional approaches which can dominate our study do have their own merit, but they never seem to explain this profound link between art and our individual lives.
Broadly speaking then (for details will be forthcoming), our aim here is to utilize Tolstoy’s What is Art?, … Continue Suffering