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via an argument on a website about a conversation about a comedian and a “journalist” arguing with each other.
Sarah, our cities are teeming with millions of fatherless welfare thugs, welfare super-breeders, illegals and their anchor babies, all parasites on the taxpayers. Do you refuse to acknowledge that??
We used to trust politicians to figure this crap out for us, at least on a micro-level. Maybe that, not the media, not the current national situation, makes our time and political circlejerking so interesting and unique.
A little background before the review proper: When I was a child, my mother had a campaign of “saving” me from Dungeons and Dragons. Since I was somewhat fated to enjoy the devil’s foreplay, I managed to get my hands on books much worse (The Mission Earth series comes to mind) and I am a D&D player and fan today. When I found about this quiet campaign of hers, she quoted the media backlash against Dungeons and Dragons that happened “a year or two before you were born” as the reason.
As I was born in the early 1980′s I wasn’t alive when Dallas Egbert went missing in August 1979. The story of his disappearance, and the wild theories that followed were based around his playing a LARP (Live Action Role-playing) version of D&D in the nine miles of unguarded and unmonitored tunnels that ran beneath the campus of MSU. Egbert was a genius, in the pure sense of the word, and was sixteen years old at the time of his disappearance.
“The Dungeon Master” is the 1984 book written by the flamboyant Texas-based private eye hired by Dallas’ parents. As this book was a single-serving social issue book that was subsequently never reprinted and ignored in lieu of the “cautionary tale” Mazes and Monsters, book, then movie with a damned-loose interpretation of the case, was released in 1982.
As who-done-it cases go, William Dear does a pretty thorough job of describing his process, albeit with some obligatory run-troughs of his super-cool gear. Many twist and turn lead investigators through many fruitless avenues and literal dead-end tunnels abound. The movie, and even the Newsweek review of the book printed on the back cover want to make so much hay of Dear trying a game of Dungeons and Dragons – either I must be totally desensitized to the idea of make-believe or again, the media looks for the best angle of attack. What happened to Dallas Egbert between his rescue and his tragic death is perhaps the least fleshed-out portion of the story and the most interesting.
By the end of this case, it becomes obvious that the boogey-man isn’t D&D, or role-playing; especially in the seen-through-the-minivan-windshield portrayal of it that William Dear gives us. Instead, it was the lack of support for a too-young person going to a large, impersonal university, drugs, and the hands-off, high-pressure treatment of gifted individuals. (Dear gets credit from me for posing this issue early and often)
Let us say for a moment that Egbert’s disappearance was due to his role-playing compulsion or addiction. Adult and child alike are known to descend into fantasy when reality becomes too much. The causes of these compulsions or fantasies aren’t to be blamed on the fantasy, but instead of a person unable to deal with the reality they’ve been placed in. I can’t blame the underclassmen that LARPed with Egbert for not seeing this as a mental illness, or at least a pressure valve stuck on “release” – the media is not the message. Novels didn’t destroy Victorian England, television didn’t destroy the children of the 1960s, and the Beatles didn’t cause the Manson murders. How much would of an enlightened mentor providing emotional support would have helped Egbert, an odd child with hardly any social skills? A lot more than D&D, and the drugs that Egbert used, thats for sure.
Ladies and gentleman, in this corner – a squareish piece of leather made in Thailand along with a 60 page notebook.
The Mirodi Traveler’s Notebook is a device that has some traction in the neigh-unimaginable delve that is Stationary Blogging. For various reasons (the most compelling I’ve seen that its hard to buy in the US and anything Amazon doesn’t sell directly is for PROs, of course) this notebook has captured the imaginations of many weird people that are “travelers.” I do not need a teardown of components (like the kind routinely done to Apple products) to figure out I can find a square foot of leather and a decent stack of paper for less than $50.
Thankfully, if you have $50, and thinking “hey, I was going to make sweet consumer love over this product” – allow me to provide a useful alternative for the American traveler:
An off-brand track suit. Thankfully, Uncle Sam (not that one) has us taken care of for just $26! (Wal*Mart)
A Moleskine traveler’s notebook. (Moleskine Direct, $11 retail) No, it won’t work very well with your $300 fountain pen, but that Bic you swiped from Motel 8? Magic. Also, this guy has more than twice as many pages. Have more memories!
A cheeseburger ($1-3, various) can be had, because you are a US American! $1 BK double pictured.
In which Nelson and I talk about the beginning experiences of playing Final Fantasy XIII. I’m a little disapointed so far, but Nelson (the die hard FF fanboi) tells me to keep my chin up until we get a little farther along.
As part of a micro-site I’m working on (I seem to be quite afflicted by the micro-site bug since I updated my “talk”), I’m reading and reviewing a book every week this semester – on top of coursework. This isn’t because I dislike myself, contrary to common sense.
As I was on my way to a literature class, clutching a copy of Jenner’s 18th century work on the vaccination against smallpox in my hot little hands, I happened by a little student-ran book sale. Seeing this book popping from 3 year old organic chemistry books was quite a surprise, although not an unwelcome one at all.
After hearing the excellent Skeptoid podcast on the subject, I decided to determine if any ambiguity remains about this issue. And the answer, unsurprisingly, is no. The podcast uses Offit’s work pretty heavily in order to describe the landscape of “alternative medicine” treatments that parents have bankrupted themselves, including an anecdote about parents who were encouraged to take out a second mortgage to finance a hypobaric chamber for their autistic child to sleep in.
As my literature professor said at the beginning of class when we covered the material about vaccination (more on that soon), he said that there exists a controversy surrounding the sharp rise in autism in the US and UK in the last two decades; some blame the preservatives in the MMR vaccine. The link between the two becomes increasingly-inplausable as the book goes through the argument (read: not debate) since its inception with Wakefield (a now-unlicenced doctor from the United Kingdom).
A humorously-partisan clip regarding his “science”:
The book describes the increasingly-unprovable, wildly made theories about a link between preservatives in vaccinations (specifically the MMR), culminating with Jenny Mcarthy’s battle cry:
“My son is my science.”
I’m alright with the idea that modern medicine is like half guesswork, and largely not as effective as advertised, on the other hand, though, magic seems to work even less. The cottage industry surrounding autism, the descriptions of the increasingly-amatuerish pseudoscience developed for trial lawyers, and the incredible amount of flak that Offit himself received at the hands of his detractors are worth the price of admission – I’d suggest the podcast first, to make sure its not enough (as it would be for most people).
It is geting pretty late and I’m supposed to be studying for a Physics final, but I just finished watching the documentary The War on Kids. I’d suggest it to pretty much anyone, especially if you have pre-school kids. I’m not really qualified to make any points the film didn’t, but I wanted to share a quick story from when I was a high schooler.
I used to get in trouble for being defiant. I’ve always had trouble accepting authority, of course I had two parents who weren’t ready to accept authority and hate institutions more than I do. The punishment regime at my high school was pretty tame, though, this being pre-Columbine. You’d receive demerits. A demerit was 1/6 an after-school detention. So, I’d manage to rack some up by being late, or talking back (I love being talked back to, myself), what have you, and then I’d have to “suffer” a 2 1/2 hour after-school detention.
Detention was in the library. There was no talking in detention. You could work on your school work, read a book, or quietly write. Of course, kids from the age of 13-16 (the ages I went to that Jr./Sr. high school) would just think it was all sorts of hellish. Except I never really let it bother me. Why? Because I read and write as a hobby. Sure, I’d rather go home and play Super Nintendo or a rousing game of Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, but it was pretty easy to blast through half a Tolkein or a (easy) history of the American revolution instead. Or maybe I’d write that golden missive, that wonderful single page of tightly-packed handwriting that would make that girl finally swoon over my manliness interpretation of bad heavy metal lyrics. And I’d go home, not a better person, not really a bother to anyone.
What was the lesson? If you are a bad person, you have to sit in a quiet library? I want to be a villain, then.
Of course, I didn’t have to worry about being tazed or screamed at by some Loch Haven alum who never had problems fitting in when THEY went to high school. The punishment regime would work as long as I pretended it did. And in turn, the school would pretend that I was being taught some sort of soft music-backgrounded sitcomesque life lesson. The only life lesson I really learned is that I could read a book through the apocalypse before it truly bothered me, and to always have something to read in case life got boring on me.
nless you can name hundreds of people who read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, took some Econ 101 class and then drove a bomb-laden car into a welfare office, you are a dipshit for saying Islam causes suicide bombings.
Who thinks their laptop is too damned thick? Wait. Lemme start in the beginning.
First, there was this mockup by Gizmodo regarding a patent Apple filed regarding, in a nutshell, shoving a compact (12″ or so) notebook into a big ole imac. The idea of having, what was in effect, a buy-one get one free computer offer was simply astounding to me. (more…)
Adult Swim just started running six days a week, which sounds like a super idea on paper. Adult swim has content that I enjoy and all, don’t get me wrong. I have a secret suspicion that maybe the coolness of A.Swim is going to be diminshed by being on so much. It’s (animation) such a bohemian-super-rad gradual process, and I seriously doubt that they have the legs to make me want to watch the entire summer with two seasons of robot chicken, the five seasons of Family Guy I’ve already seen, and the other stuff I could give and take (and have seen).
Am I alone with this? I imagine I could cook up the numbers online to see how they’re doing.
nless you can name hundreds of people who read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, took some Econ 101 class and then drove a bomb-laden car into a welfare office, you are a dipshit for saying Islam causes suicide bombings.