References

Warning: This post contains self-indulgent meanderings on the passage of time. If you young’uns can’t handle that, skip this post and get off of my lawn.

A few weeks ago I was in the lunch room of Nevis Labs. I was the oldest one there. The rest were summer students about 20 years old. The topic had shifted to assigning everyone there an alignment according to the D&D system. I was assigned “Chaotic/Good”, which I accepted.

I’ve had problems with the D&D system that were older than the students there, and its alignment system is one of those problems. In an attempt to be satirical, I said, “Okay, now we can figure out which of us is Samantha, or Carrie, or Miranda, or…”

Dead silence. They looked at me blankly. They had no idea what I was talking about.

I muttered something about Sex and the City and retreated into my private thoughts. Three feelings washed over me:

  1. I felt the usual disappointment of a geek who made a reference that no one else got.
  2. I felt old. I’m almost three times the age of the summer students this year. In a couple more years, I will be more than three times the age of summer students at Nevis. Will I even be able to understand what those kids are saying as time goes on?

    After all, it’s normal for most culture to be ephemeral. A couple of personal examples come to mind:

    • Back at Cornell in 1978, I had a friend named Adams Douglas; his mother wanted to remind him that he was a great-to-the-nth descendant of John Quincy Adams. You can try to do a web search on Adams Douglas, but he’s hard to find because you’ll get thousands of results about some other guy.

      Adams was the son of the actors Jan Sterling and Paul Douglas. They were household names in the early 50s. But by the time I knew Adams, they were already forgotten, footnotes in cinematic history.

      Adams himself has become a footnote. He passed away in 2003, a year before his mother did.

    • Also in 1978, I happened to read a play called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. It was written in 1901, and assumed that the audience would be familiar with a song of the same title that was written in 1868.

      The song had been popular for 33 years at that point. It probably felt reasonable to assume that it would stand the test of time. It didn’t. When I read the play 77 years later, I had no idea that the song existed. It’s now 41 years after that, and despite an opera written in 1975, I’m probably one of the few people left who still remembers that the song/play/opera ever existed.

  3. Triumph! The geeks had won after all!

    Let’s look at some dates. Sex and the City was broadcast from 1998 to 2004. It’s only 15 years later, and it’s beginning to fall off the “cliff of relevance”. If you consider the Nevis summer students as a representative sample (and there are many arguments that would suggest they are not), then if you’re 20 years old or less you will never have heard of it.

    Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974. It’s 45 years later, so it’s three times older than Sex in the City. (Note the similar age ratio of me to the summer students.) Some of the students took the superior-intellectual stance and claimed they had never played D&D, but they all knew what it was and knew about the alignment system.

    I got my copy of D&D in 1975. (I still have it; it’s probably worth some money.) I remember parental disapproval, the claims that D&D caused teenagers to commit suicide, the claims that it was Satanic (BADD). All of that has pretty much fallen off the cliff of relevance (though my father still doesn’t “get it”).

    What’s survived? The D&D alignment system, obviously. So have half-Orc Barbarians, Lawful/Good Paladins, dual-class Sorceror/Rogues, Dwarven warriors, Elvish wizards, Mages’ towers, Lich pits, Demogorgons, Beholders, platinum pieces, Bags of Holding, armor classes, experience points… and of course, dungeons filled with treasure and dragons filled with menace.

    They’ve not only survived, but thrived. Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are fading. The geek dream lives on!

Obviously, I’m glossing over a lot of cultural complexity in order to make a mildly amusing point. Sex in the City appealed to thirty-something women looking for relationships; that’s not likely to have much appeal to 20-year-old science students. For my part, I may have seen no more than three episodes out of the 94 made, though I do know about SitC‘s four-fold path.

Also, the “cultural competition” associated with SitC is different than that of D&D. There are lots of relationship comedies out there, and the genre is continually reinventing itself as new issues come to light. For example, did SitC ever explore the difficulties of the transgendered to find relationships? (I have no idea.) I know such series exist… but they’re not SitC.

On the other hand, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game fixed in a general fantasy setting. The existence of other media in the same setting (the Lord of the Rings movies, the Game of Thrones TV series) tends to increase interest in D&D, not push it off the cliff of relevance. Even the existence of competing fantasy role-playing games such as Pathfinder and Rolemaster tends to reinforce the ideas and memes associated with D&D even if their players have never read the D&D rules.

Does this mean D&D will pass the “test of time”? By my own arbitrary definition, we won’t know until everyone who was alive in 1974 has passed away. If they’re still talking about hit points and character stats by then, then the geeks can score permanent victory. By that definition, I will never live long enough to be certain.

In the meantime, I can stave off some of the pang of aging into cultural irrelevance by shouting out with glee: “Stuff it, Carrie! And suck it, Captain Jinks!”

Song lyrics meme

Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever music player you have on random.
Step 2: Post a line/stanza from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly. (No cheating with search engines!)
Continue reading “Song lyrics meme”

Views of Hell

I like to listen to audio books. I typically listen to books I’ve read more than a decade ago; the Harry Potter books are the main exception (Jim Dale is a fine reader). I listen to them when I drive, or when I do my exercise walks.

When I set up the order of the books in my playlist, I usually try to vary the mix as best I can: different authors, different time periods, different moods.

What I forgot to consider was whether two adjacent books have similar plot devices. I just finished listening to Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which is set in Dante’s description of Hell.  I’ve just started listening to Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein, which has several chapters set in another type of Hell; it’s reserved for those who didn’t follow the Gospel, but it’s a not a place of punishment.

On top of that, I watched Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey a couple of nights ago, with yet another version of Hell: the moron rocker version.

I’ll survive the experience. But right now, I’m a little deluged on moral instruction. I respectfully request that no one lecture me on Right and Wrong for a week or two.

Favorite poem meme

From lovediamond :

When you see this, post your favorite poem in your journal.

Unfortunately, my favorite poem is too long to post here.  Here’s how it begins:

Midway this life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! How hard to speak of it–that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith.

Just for the heck of it (clue!) I’ll leave it to you to identify the poem. I’ll give you another hint: It may be that the reason why you didn’t recognize it is that I’m using one of many different translations, this one by a noted writer of mysteries.

Memories… like the corners of my mind…

Leave one memory that you and I have had together. It doesn’t matter if you know/knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember! Don’t send a message, leave a comment on here. Next, repost this in your notes and see how many people leave a memory about you. It’s actually pretty cool (and funny) to see the responses. If I neglected to tag you and you see this, PLEASE feel free to chime in.

Except that, as usual, I shall tag no one.

OK, let’s see how hard this is.

It’s harder than it looks! Copy to your own note, erase my answers, enter yours, and tag 10 people. (As is my wont, I won’t tag anyone else. Deal with it.) Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real … nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can’t use your name for the boy/girl name question.

Continue reading “OK, let’s see how hard this is.”

Fake memory meme

From catbirdgirl :

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don’t speak often or ever) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me.

It can be anything you want – good or bad – BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you’re finished, post this little paragraph in your LJ and see what your friends come up with.