Something New And Quirky

     Many people think of boredom as a curse. I can’t imagine why. Boredom has been the source of all my best ideas... well, all right, some of my worst ones, too. Still, I find it a fertile medium for new and unexplored possibilities.

     Some time ago, Smashwords, where I first published my books, offered its writers space in which to post “interviews.” Mind you, Smashwords personnel didn’t conduct any interviews; they just gave you a space for one. Being a whimsical sort, I posted an “interview” with various of my fictional characters:

    Q: Mr. Porretto, just what is going on here? I didn’t ask to have my office jammed with all these bodies.
     Fran Porretto: Rather than do a “straight” interview, which tends to bring out my discursive nature, I thought I might change things up a little. So I rounded up some of my favorite characters and brought them here so you can talk to them. Enjoy! I always do.

     And so on.

     Well, just a few days ago, I got into a conversation with writer Abigail Lakewood, who also reviews books on Substack. Somehow, she caused Substack to start another account – for my old protagonist Armand Morelon, of the Spooner Federation Saga. It probably happened because I masquerade as Armand on X.

     Well, I was just a little bored at the time, so I wrote this:

     Good morning / afternoon / evening / night / whatever. If you’ve never made the acquaintance of a planetary Overmind before this, it can be a little overwhelming. But then, think of me! I have the whole of Hope to supervise. It can be quite busy, now and then.
     But enough of that. Hope, if you’re not yet aware of it, was settled in the Terrestrial 27th Century by a group of anarchists. They were driven from Earth under the threat of extinction by the States that oppress that unhappy world. They had to re-engineer a wandering planetoid into a starship to do so.
     It was quite a trip...

     And so on.

     But that got me thinking: Why not have Armand’s site be a place where characters from fiction – my own and perhaps that of others, as well – can get together to shoot the breeze? It could be good exercise for the imagination. Mine could use some, just now.

     So hold onto this link, and visit every so often. You might get a few laughs out of it. A laugh is something we can all use, no?

Just For Fun: Invent A Game

     Now and then in my sojourns through that magical wonderland called Amazon, I’ll stumble upon a product that intrigues me for no logical reason. Yesterday was such an occasion:

     That’s right, Gentle Reader: the product illustrated above is a bag of 140 polyhedral dice of the sort used in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Twenty sets, seven dice per set. Dice and bag for only $29.99!

     Now, I have no idea why anyone would want or need twenty sets of DnD / RPG dice. But the product listing mentioned above isn’t the only such; there are dozens of similar offerings. Therefore, there must be a market for them. That got me to thinking: What sort of game would need all the dice in the bag, plus the bag itself?

     So here’s a fun challenge:

• Invent a game that requires:
  • The Wiz Dice Bag of Devouring with all its contents,
  • A map of some portion of either our world or any well known fictional realm,
  • And one other item of your choice.
• Write rules for that game for two, three, or four players.
• Propose a tournament around it.

     I’ll publish the funniest and most imaginative entries here at Liberty’s Torch.

A Suggestion To Pro-Freedom Rally Attendees

     The following comes from Poul Anderson’s novel Operation Chaos. In the quoted scene, the CEO of a company is pleading with the leader of a disruption to disperse the crowd:

     "I see. I didn't expect anything else," Barney said. "But I wanted to put the situation in plain language before witnesses. Now I'm going to warn you."
     Those who heard whispered to the rest, a hissing from mouth to mouth. I saw tension mount anew.
     "If you employ violence upon those who came simply to remonstrate," Marmiadon declared, "they will either have the law upon you, or see final proof that the law is a creature of the vested interests . . . which I tell you in turn are the creatures of Satan."
     "Oh, no, no," Barney answered. "We're mild sorts, whether you believe it or not. But you are trespassing. You have interfered with our work to the point where we're delayed and shorthanded. We must carry on as best we can, trying to meet our contractual obligations. We're about to run an experiment. You could be endangered. Please clear the grounds for your own safety."
     Marmiadon grew rigid. "If you think you can get away with a deadly spell—"
     "Nothing like. I'll tell you precisely what we have in mind. We're thinking about a new method of transporting liquid freight. Before going further, we have to run a safety check on it. If the system fails, unprotected persons could be hurt." Barney raised his volume, though we knew some of the police officers would have owls' ears tuned in. "I order you, I warn you, I beg you to stop trespassing, and get off company properly. You have half an hour."

     ...

     "Ready?" Barney asked. In the restless pale glow, I saw sweat gleam on his face. If this failed, he'd be responsible for unforeseeable consequences.
     I checked the connections. "Yeah, nothing's come loose. But let me first have a look around."
     I joined Ginny at the parapet. Beneath us roiled the mob, faces and placards turned upward to hate us. They had spied the floating containers and knew a climax was at hand. Behind his altar, Initiate Marmiadon worked at what I took to be reinforcement of his defensive field. Unknown phrases drifted to me: "...Heliphomar Mabon Saruth Gefutha Enunnas Sacinos..." above the sullen mumble of our besiegers.
     The elflight flickered brighter. The air seethed and crackled with energies. I caught a thunderstorm whiff of ozone.
     My darling wore a slight, wistful smile. "How Svartalf would love this," she said.
     Barney lumbered to our side. "Might as well start," he said. "I'll give them one last chance." He shouted the same warning as before. Yells drowned him out. Rocks and offal flew against our walls. "Okay," he growled. "Let 'er rip!"
     I went back to the generator and started the motor, leaving the circuits open. It stuttered and shivered. The vile fumes made me glad we'd escaped depending on internal combustion engines. I've seen automobiles, as they were called, built around 1900, shortly before the first broomstick flights. Believe me, museums are where they belong a chamber of horrors, to be exact.
     Ginny's clear call snapped my attention back. She'd directed the canisters into position. I could no longer see them, for they floated ten feet over the heads of the crowd, evenly spaced. She made a chopping gesture with her wand. I threw the main switch.
     No, we didn't use spells to clear Nornwell's property. We used the absence of spells. The surge of current through the coils on the generator threw out enough magnetism to cancel every charm, ours and theirs alike, within a hundred yard radius.
     We'd stowed whatever gear might be damaged in safe conductive-shell rooms. We'd repeatedly cautioned the mob that we were about to experiment with the transportation of possibly dangerous liquids. No law required us to add that these liquids were in super-pressurized cans which were bound to explode and spray their contents the moment that the wall-strengthening force was annulled.
     We'd actually exaggerated the hazard...in an attempt to avoid any slightest harm to trespassers. Nothing vicious was in those containers. Whatever might be slightly toxic was present in concentrations too small to matter, although a normal sense of smell would give ample warning regardless. Just a harmless mixture of materials like butyl mercaptan, butyric acid, methanethiol, skatole, cadaverine, putrescine...well, yes, the organic binder did have penetrative properties; if you got a few drops on your skin, the odor wouldn't disappear for a week or two...
     The screams reached me first. I had a moment to gloat. Then the stench arrived. I'd forgotten to don my gas mask, and even when I'm human my nose is quite sensitive. The slight whiff I got sent me gasping and retching backward across the roof. It was skunk, it was spoiled butter, it was used asparagus, it was corruption and doom and the wheels of juggernaut lubricated with Limburger cheese, it was beyond imagining. I barely got my protection on in time.
     "Poor dear. Poor Steve." Ginny held me close.
     "Are they gone?" I sputtered.
     "Yes. Along with the policemen and, if we don't get busy, half this postal district."
     I relaxed. The uncertain point in our plan had been whether the opposition would break or would come through our now undefended doors in search of our lives. After my experience I didn't see how the latter would have been possible. Our chemists had built better than they knew.
     We need hardly expect a return visit, I thought in rising glee. If you suffer arrest or a broken head for the Cause, you're a hero who inspires others. But if you merely acquire for a while a condition your best friends won't tell you about because they can't come within earshot of you-hasn't the Cause taken a setback?

     The mix detailed above might be a bit expensive to procure, but a cheap yet effective substitute exists. (Thank you, Texan!) Food for thought, Gentle Readers!

Frivolous Decisions Dept.

     I make all my impulse purchases on a Friday:

     Now I need a name for her. Suggestions?

For The Triskaidekaphiliacs

     Today is, of course, Friday, January 13. There are any number of triskaidekaphobiacs – persons who fear the number 13 and everything associated with it – who’ll leave their homes today in a state of fear and trembling...some only under duress. It’s one of the most common superstitions, with a history that trails off into the shadows of time. No one really knows how it started. As far as I know, no one has produced a “12 step program” by which to combat it. (It probably wouldn’t be popular in any case. The first thing a potential enrollee would say is “But my next step after that would be number 13!”)

     Equally obscure is the special superstition attached to Friday the 13th. All I’m certain of is that it didn’t originate with the movie. As every calendar year will contain at least one Friday the 13th, there will be at least one day each year on which the hard core triskaidekaphobiacs will endure an agony of apprehension.

     But as has often been observed, given any proposition there will always be more than one side. The C.S.O., for example, is a triskaidekaphiliac: one who celebrates the number 13 and Fridays the 13th in particular. Today is a big day for her and others who share this affinity. There will be party hats and hooters at the Fortress of Crankitude this evening, and very likely an especially festive pizza for our repast. (But please, dear, don’t order it with multicolored sprinkles again. They just don’t go with pepperoni and anchovies.)

     The number 13 was pretty big with some of the earliest Americans. Consider, for example, the Great Seal of the United States:

     Note all the following:

• There are 13 stars in the ring at top center.
• There are 13 letters in the phrase E Pluribus Unum (“Out of many, one”).
• There are 13 stripes on the eagle’s shield.
• There are 13 leaves and 13 berries on the branch in the eagle’s claw.
• There are 13 arrows in the eagle’s other claw.

     Yeah, yeah, the 13 colonies became the first 13 states, so 13 figured pretty big at the time of the Founding. Still, the flag has been updated every time we’ve added a state; why has the Great Seal been left untouched? I doubt it has anything to do with reverence for our history; in what other regard has our political class ever shown itself to respect that?

     If you need a few more reflections on 13 and the ominous reputation it’s borne, here are a few places to go for them:

• 13 Reasons People Think 13 Is Unlucky
• Hotels and their “missing” 13th floors
• The 13th of the Norse gods was Loki the Trickster.
• The Knights Templar were arrested en masse on October 13, 1307. That worked out rather badly, both for the Knights and for Philip IV of France, who did it so he could confiscate their wealth and properties.
• Our 13th president was Millard Fillmore. Fillmore became president upon the death in office of Zachary Taylor, and had the shortest presidency of any man who did not die in office. Fillmore’s sole achievements were to be the last President from the Whig Party and to have his name attached to two concert venues.

     Enjoy your Friday the 13th...and be careful to avoid tottery mirrors, black cats, and ladders, of course!

Off The Mishnory Road: Fun And Games

I’ve subjected my Gentle Readers to three “Politically Insoluble” essays. The themes in those essays have kept me going back to the core concept behind them all:

“They say here ‘all roads lead to Mishnory.’ To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.” [Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness]

If we’re going to get “off the Mishnory road” – i.e., if we’re to stop looking to political processes for the restoration of freedom – we must do so deliberately, fully conscious of what we intend.

I gave a few examples of what I have in mind in the last of those three essays. They addressed problems that are normally left in the political sphere as if that sphere did not exist. Were the approaches perfect? Assuredly not. But the driving force – turning away from political processes in the vain hope of solutions from those processes – is the important thing.

One of the keys to an improved future is the conservation of what remains good and worthy today. Once again: don’t think ‘politics’ as you read this. Think rather of what you, the Twenty-First Century’s Robinson Crusoe, would carry away from the slowly submerging wreck of contemporary American civilization before the chance is lost.

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For today, I’d like to focus on the critical distinction between the psychologies of Right and Left. It’s one that the media have attempted to efface:

1. Leftists regard all of life as fodder for political processes and State intervention. No subjects, no activities, and no attitudes are regarded as intrinsically private.
2. Rightists believe in a private sphere in which politics and the State have no place. (Some Rightists disbelieve in any sphere for State action, but that’s a separate subject.)

In this connection, ponder well this essay on the Sturm und Drang besetting the video gaming community. Take particular note of the following highly revealing snippet:

[W]hile watching a video about GamerGate, I clicked on a link to an archive of one of the original articles, “A Guide To Ending Gamers” by Devin Wilson at Gamasutra....

I was scrolling down through the article’s list of strategies for eliminating gamers, trying to keep an open mind, and actually thinking there were one or two somewhat valid points. Then I got to item #11:

We stop upholding “fun” as the universal, ultimate criterion for a game’s relevance. It’s a meaningless ideal at best and a poisonous priority at worst. Fun is a neurological trick. Plenty of categorically unhealthy things are “fun”. Let’s try for something more. Many of the alternatives will have similarly fuzzy definitions, but let’s aspire to qualities like “edifying”, “healing”, “pro-social”, or even “enlightening”. I encourage you to decide upon your own alternatives to “fun” in games (while avoiding terms like “cool” and “awesome” and any other word that simply caters to existing, unexamined biases).

That paragraph represents everything that is wrong with social justice thinking in less than 100 words.

Indeed it does...but be sure to isolate the central concept rather than merely turning away in disgust:

The Left abhors fun because it’s inherently apolitical.

It’s worth a moment or two of your time to reflect on why that is so.

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Fun – that which we strive to attain through the “play impulse” – is one of the keys to a successful life. C. S. Lewis noted its importance in The Screwtape Letters:

I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy. You will see the first among friends and lovers reunited on the eve of a holiday. Among adults some pretext in the way of Jokes is usually provided, but the facility with which the smallest witticisms produce laughter at such a time shows that they are not the real cause. What that real cause is we do not know. Something like it is expressed in much of that detestable art which the humans call Music, and something like it occurs in Heaven—a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us. Laughter of this kind does us no good and should always be discouraged. Besides, the phenomenon is of itself disgusting and a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell.

Fun is closely related to Joy—a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct. It is very little use to us. It can sometimes be used, of course, to divert humans from something else which the Enemy would like them to be feeling or doing: but in itself it has wholly undesirable tendencies; it promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils.

We play – i.e., we engage in activities that have no deliberate gain in view – specifically because it’s fun. It comes naturally to us to do so, especially when in the company of those we love. One of the great quantitative differences between America and other nations is the fraction of our resources we have available for play. It could justly be said that Americans are the world’s foremost players – no pejorative intended.

Americans are so fun-oriented that we devote whole industries to it, most emphatically including the video gaming industry. We even seek to make our work lives fun, to the extent that might be possible. My favorite source of business advice, Robert C. Townsend, put it this way:

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all. Because if it’s not excellent it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing here?

(Granted that not much can be done for coal mining or grave digging. But note how such jobs are the ones most swiftly put to automated techniques.)

The entire point of video gaming is fun, delivered through virtualized adventures in which a gamer can face all sorts of challenges and trials without actually risking life, limb, or loot. The gamer can imagine himself to be an intrepid explorer, a mighty warrior, a brilliant detective, a pioneering spaceman, or whatever. For a few hours he can experience challenges and take risks that his mundane life doesn’t offer. Afterward, he can pop out the DVD, turn off the console, and return to that mundane existence nicely refreshed.

But while we’re having fun, we’re not focused on some Cause. We’re not straining under some heavy load of moral obligation. We’re not engaged in some humorless, self-righteous attempt to remake others according to our priorities and preferences. To whatever extent we ever indulge such considerations, the play impulse shoves all of them to the back of the stove.

Fun and the Left are mortal enemies.

---

The following tangent should give any thinking American pause for thought:

"There is no room for play in Islam. Islam is deadly serious...about everything." [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini]

Islam, like Leftist politics, attempts to absorb all of life into a single, all-encompassing set of prescriptions and proscriptions. Both mindsets demand that nothing be allowed to exist independent of their dictates. Their hostility toward fun is probably the best indictment one could lay against either. Note also that though many, perhaps most Leftists denigrate and deride Christianity, the very same folks never have a word to say against Islam. Cowardice? Perhaps. But the sub rosa recognition among Leftists that Islam is “the enemy of my enemy” should not be overlooked.

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Play – the quest for fun — is a bastion of freedom. It’s inherently invulnerable to the attacks of the “social justice warriors.” They know it, which is why they’re so anxious to anathematize it.

The “social justice warriors” would simply love to take over the gaming industries and put them to use in their preferred directions. However, it’s impossible by the very nature of gaming. As they awaken to this immutable aspect of gaming, they will shift to an all-out assault on gaming. If they cannot conquer it, they must destroy it.

Developments such as “GamerGate” point in that direction. They also point to the best countermeasure available to us: laughter.

Laugh at the “social justice warriors.” Exclude them from your gatherings. Ostracize them so completely that they have no one to rant and rave to but one another. Conserve and propagate the fun in gaming. Make it profitable to produce highly involving, fun-filled games utterly devoid of any political, economic, or sociological message. Then play them, independently or in groups, and hold them out to the unaware as among the under-appreciated fruits of freedom and capitalism. Just because they hate fun doesn’t mean we have to put down our toys.

I’ll leave it to others to draw the parallel between gaming and the independent-writers movement.