May 09, 2005
I know where I get my ideas from, and it ain't Poughkeepsie
(Hm. Looks like my co-bloggers are busy this Mother's Day. Best fill the gap with weird blather.)
So I get these migraines sometimes.
Because I am me, I classify my headaches. Stress, sinus, and migraines, which might (or might not) be triggered by the first two. I don't get the aura, dammit -- which would be neat -- but I do get the classical hemicrania, the pain on half the skull which Galen named, as well as the urge to vomit and the sensitivity to light. It's a little like being badly hungover, but without having the good time beforehand.
One upside of these migraines is that I can use them to track how I associate concepts. When I am not contemplating my own death, or wondering where the bucket is, I can drift into a dreamlike state, and 'watch' however it is concepts form connections in my head. (This might be a hallucination, with no reference to how the brain works at all, which makes it even cooler, in my opinion.) It's a little like the old TRACE commands in slow, interpreted computer languages.
Anyway. A few days before, I had been reading God's Long Summer, about the various strains of theology that went into the civil rights and anti-civil rights movements in the US, not so very long ago. I'd also been reading R. Sean Borgstrom's amazing short fiction at Hitherby Dragons. It turns out that she wrote some supplements for the In Nomine role-playing game -- which Doug has played, I know -- as well as a very interesting sounding game called Nobilis, where one plays the personification of an aspect of reality, like Night, or Flowers. I'm not sure how that works. There's a live action version of it as well, and I am even less sure how that works.
I also was sent a picture of Bad Mama's Peanut, sitting in her crib amidst a pile of books she had pulled down. I recognized one of the books on the top of the pile as Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic. It's bright green and hard to mistake. It's about the odd pop culture legacy the old Confederacy has in the US, Civil War re-enactors and the like. Not something the Balkans has much of, I imagine. Peanut herself is half Yankee, half Rebel, so it was an appropriate choice, even though I think she still views books as 40% delicious teething toy, 60% word repository.
So all these things were sifting through my migraine-blurred mind yesterday. I sensed them attempt to find connections of meaning. They felt as if they were turning and rotating, although there was no visual impression. Then they 'clicked' -- no auditory impression either. And suddenly I had a new idea:
The civil rights re-enactment live action role-playing game!
Now, what can I do with it?
Posted by coyu at May 9, 2005 01:03 AM"The civil rights re-enactment live action role-playing game!"
Sweet Mary Mother of God. I wanna try that. Sort of.
But any live action re-enactment role-playing game that involves college students has a required drinking component. Take a shot of Everclear every time you kill a member of SNIC as the KKK, or The Man as a Black Panther, etc.
Cheers
L
Posted by: Luke at May 9, 2005 02:34 AMLive action RPGs are hardly where the money's at. What I want is the Massive Multiplay Online Civil Rights Re-enactment Roleplaying Game. Or MMOCRRRPG for short!
I've only had a migraine once, complete with crenellations in the center of my visual field, projectile vomiting and the sensation my right eye was about to burst. I wouldn't want to have them more often, even for the ability to see how my ideas form.
And on while we're discussing Hitherby Dragons, I wouldn't want to have a childhood full of abuse even if it meant I could write this:
http://rebecca.hitherby.com/archives/000575.php
Posted by: Graeme at May 9, 2005 04:48 AMGraeme, I found this recent comment of Borgstrom's thought-provoking:
"I think suffering actually creates craft, not art. Causation is not instrumentality. I think that pain helps people express the beauty that was already in them. One of the things that makes pain into suffering is the lack of consent."
Luke, there has to be a more... irenic way to get drunk in a civil rights re-enactment LARP. (And isn't that a great word? It practically screams "Protestant seminarian!".)
Luke, there has to be a more... irenic way to get drunk in a civil rights re-enactment LARP. (And isn't that a great word? It practically screams "Protestant seminarian!".)
"Irenic"?!?! That's the just prissy Ivy League way to say it. Besides, what's the fun of a LARP if you can't use the sawed off shotgun at your neighbor, or toss TNT into a church basement. That's what the civil rights movement was really all about. Killing thy neighbor, and then getting tanked.
Cheers
L
Posted by: Luke at May 9, 2005 04:50 PM"One of the things that makes pain into suffering is the lack of consent."
Well, that has some interesting theological implications.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 9, 2005 06:12 PM"Besides, what's the fun of a LARP if you can't use the sawed off shotgun at your neighbor, or toss TNT into a church basement."
Heh. I recall that my brother got into a bit of hot water in grade-school over this idea. Some gifted-and-talented presentation where he and a bunch of his cronies got together and wrote their own RPG rules system. At the end of the presentation, the principal gets up and asks why all RPGs seem to use violent, destructive settings. Why not write a set of rules that simulate solving world hunger or something? My brother immediately piped up with "Well, yeah, but it would be boring. Who would play?"
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 9, 2005 06:32 PMComplete aside, Carlos, but I'd like to hear what y'all think of this discussion on Popper and Kuhn.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 9, 2005 06:44 PMWell, that's the thing. There a lot of non-hack&slash role-playing games out there.
Analogy: did you ever read Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net? There's a scene where a thirty-something woman of 2030 or so is exposed to the videogames of the 1980s, and is shocked at how depressing and less than zero-sum they are? Like Missile Command, which only ends when the US's eastern seaboard is finally bombed to bits. (Sterling took that idea from Freeman Dyson, actually. I like picturing Freeman Dyson playing Missile Command. 'Cause you know he's playing to win.)
And now, yes, we have Grand Theft Auto, but we also have that bizarrely addictive Japanese game where you try rolling the world up in a sticky ball.
And Borgstrom, as far as I can tell, is a genius.
Posted by: Carlos at May 9, 2005 06:56 PM