is a blog by Brendan
My dear friend Joe Mcdaldno–writer, game designer, and fascinating Renaissance human–was kind enough to interview me about Anacrusis for his nascent radio show/podcast, The Stories We Tell. This marks the third podcast to feature me, and my second time on Canadian radio. Soon, listening to my nasal drone trail off in the middle of half-baked jokes will be completely unavoidable!
Incidentally, the term I can’t think of at around 16:45 is syllepsis (and more generally zeugma).
Hey, remember Journey to the End of the Night, a game I played with the London crew and subsequently wrote an enormous blog post that I just linked to about? (It’s okay if you didn’t parse that.) Anyway, Newsweek did an article on urban exploration that includes it. Thanks to Mink for the tip!
I’m going to PAX for the first time this weekend! I hope it’s fun. A bunch of my GPNW cohorts will be running and demoing games in the unofficial indie RPG room (304), and I’ll be helping out there whenever I’m not wandering the show floor.
If you are also going to PAX, I will see you there! I hope it’s fun. Further updates atwitter.
I suddenly realized why I hate the “humor” in Shakespeare so much: comic timing depends on confounding your expectations of rhythm in speech, so nothing is funny in meter! Also Shakespeare was bad at jokes.
This is pretty spectacular.
“I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.“
That’s an excerpt from Erica Goldson’s valedictory address, which she wrote and issued earlier this year. Read the whole thing: it’s brief but convincing.
I wasn’t first in my class, but I was close, and I was aware of many of the issues Goldson raises even then–though less concerned, at a more self-centered time in my life, and mostly just happy that they were working in my favor. (Another thing we had in common: the textbook inspirational English teacher.) I’m less complacent these days, less willing to accept the cruel theater of fear and shame that we expect smart young people to suffer with piety. Our schools are bad, and their splash damage is everywhere.
I’m not sure what use I can be to education reform right now. It’s one of those issues that is never urgent but always important, and I need to figure out a path to involving myself in the cause. Erica Goldson’s example seems like a good start.
Thus begins… VOCABULARY WEEK on ANACRUSIS
And he’s doing a Kickstarter thing to fund the print run. It’s a game called Perfect, and it’s one of the best, most effective story games I’ve ever played: a Clockwork Orange-meets-Fahrenheit 451-meets-actual Victorian evil premise that the mechanics support to a startling degree. Playing it, you find yourself alternately drawn toward becoming a violent enemy of the state, and seduced by power like a guard in the Stanford prison experiment. It’s a nasty game, and I really, really like it. Joe talks more about it here.
If you’re interested by this kind of thing, you should chip in $5! If Joe meets his goal, you get a PDF of the game, and if he doesn’t, you get your money back (well, technically, it never even leaves your account).
After seeing it on LJ a couple times, I put some stuff from my blogs into the I Write Like tool. Different NFD entries came back as Stephen King, Douglas Adams and (oh God) Dan Brown. Anacrusis consistently gets tagged as Margaret Atwood.
I was prepared to disclaim this whole post, but I cannot argue with that at all. “The world’s longest-running Atwood microhomage” is a painfully accurate description of Anacrusis. You win, Mémoires.
Hey, remember how the Washington Post took down a president thirty-five years ago? They’re still riding on that little laurelmobile, and yet their current policy, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, is to censor themselves based on the likelihood of an argument from the administration. The merit of that argument is never even considered. Cameron W. Barr:
“After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding.”
Coates says these are the compromises one makes for a marriage. He’s right, and there was a shotgun-equivalent at the wedding, namely the threat of access withheld. Even Coates’s own house is a bit glassy in this regard, with Atlantic Political Editor Marc Ambinder bouncing around in castles with the Bidens. (Yes, castles. I’m not sure these people know what symbolism is.)
Among the biggest exposés of the past year was Matt Hastings’ infamous McChrystal article, published in Rolling Stone, of all places. Hastings is a freelance reporter whose highest-profile work was in covering the Iraq war for Newsweek, yet his piece ended up in Rolling Stone, which has spent the past decade sucking heartily on anything you have available.
The loudest media reaction to that article was not “oh hey, there’s dissension in the highest ranks of our government about the running of the longest war in American history,” it was “how could he risk losing his access?” When our military actually murders journalists, the people who tell us about it get arrested; meanwhile, news outlets are astonished at the use of journalistic currency to actually do it for a change.
This is the junkie’s mindset–I can’t do anything they wouldn’t like with it, or they might take it away! Access generates pageviews, and pageviews sell ads, and ad sales are an addiction as hard to kick as heroin or oil. This is what I was trying to say in my post about comments last month: a race for the bottom is a race we lose.
That is all.