The Silence of the Past

June the 17th, 2022 Anno Domini

I’ve recently begun tracking and rating my movies on Letterboxd.com at the advice of a coworker. I realize I watch a few a week – we rarely watch TV shows, and this is the best thing to throw on when I exercise (and try to forget the pain). Sometimes, however, the wife and I just sit down to enjoy a film – and last night it was Encino Man.

The thing that struck me this morning was the fact that the caveman (played by Brendan Fraser) is mostly silent throughout the movie. When he does speak, it’s only to mimic the teens who thawed him out (Sean Astin and Pauly Shore), who inevitably teach him pop culture references and surfer lingo. At no point during the movie to the teens try to get him to communicate to them or ask the caveman a question. To be fair, the movie criticizes their egocentric view, as later on Astin and Shore fight over the fact that one of them fully intended to use the caveman to improve their social standing with no thought for his neolithic well-being.

The same is largely true of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where two California teens bring historical figures to the modern world and introduce them to the wonders of shopping at the San Dimas mall. Most of these historical figures don’t speak English, and even those that do are largely passive recipients of modernity and parrot it on cue (Abe Lincoln’s “Be excellent to everyone, and party on dudes!”). The incongruity between the antique outfits and the contemporaneous speech is done for laughs, and of course it works.

Still, though, there’s a sense here that the past has nothing of value to say to us. None of these teens seems remotely interested in asking the people of the past what they think of all of it – the brightness and cacophony of it all. I’d be far more interested in hearing what the people of the past could tell us than in getting them to repeat back to us our own shallow fascinations. It’s hard not to see these as the hallmark of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” – perhaps less sneering than Mark Twain was in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but there nonetheless.

Disappointing. The past is a different country, and it’s one to which we may never return, but it’s the easiest one to hear from – especially given the prevalence of translations for those of us who speak English. The further back one goes, the more strange and different those people thought – certainly they weren’t perfect, but their different values and perspectives can teach us. Many of our collective ancestors went to great lengths to make sure that their best wisdom was recorded so that we could build on it…how often do we dive in? Of course, given that I’m watching movies like these rather than reading the works of the ancients…guess I’m not one to talk.

Would we welcome Christ’s return?

March the 5th, 2022 Anno Domini

Simulated blast radius from a nuclear bomb launched at Washington, D.C.

When we learned this past week that there was a fire at a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, we began to get worried. A nuclear explosion would threaten nuclear war, and we live close enough to a major U.S. city that we’d probably feel some effect – maybe not have the home outright destroyed, but face the threat of radiation.

There’s an odd passage in the Bible in 2 Peter 3 where it talks about the world being “stored up for fire” – the idea that everything we see and experience is sitting around like a woodpile, and some day it’ll burn in judgment. It’s the reason why Terminator 2 was called “Judgment Day” – a reference to the idea that nuclear bombs are dropped in judgment of the human race. It’s hard not to connect the two, but at the same time people have been connecting dire events to Christ’s return for centuries. Surely the people who lived through the “Black Death” of the 12th century thought that they were living through mankind’s final days, and that the “rider on the pale horse” had come to usher in the world’s end.

Would we, the people who call on God’s name for salvation, pray earnestly for His return to the earth in glory if it meant that the preceding days, weeks, or even years were filled with suffering? If a nuclear holocaust happened prior to the end of the age, would we want it to come? Or would we want our comfort to continue? I’m sure it would be the latter, for me. It’s a difficult and morbid topic, but when war and pestilence arrive so unexpectedly and vividly, it’s a tough one to completely avoid thinking.

Not dead yet…but feeling Atari-old

February the 2nd, 2022 Anno Domini

You’d be excused for thinking I’m dead, but not yet – just busy. The year of 2021 was a wild one, filled with a lot of extra work. I’m kind of exhausted, truth be told, and while I have ideas for posts I’ve lacked the energy and motivation to put them out there.

But tonight…tonight, I saw something that I couldn’t pass by. You see, I keep telling my wife that I’m old. There’s more than a decade between us. Truth is, I don’t look my age – I look younger. No one can tell that there’s this big age gap between us, and to be honest…I’m in middle age – I’m not old yet.

However: tonight I went looking for the Atari game Centipede to see what year it had been released. I had this game on the family’s old VIC-20 computer back in the mid-1980s. We bought it used for $30 around 1985 and then went to Toys R Us, where we found a bunch of games for it floating around for $2 – on clearance. The place I grew up in was still becoming suburban and was a bit more rural, and I remember these VIC-20 games sitting beside a Nintendo display with Robbie the Robot – the video game crash hadn’t yet rebounded.

So because of my personal history with Centipede, I have the arcade marquee as a desktop background. She mentioned that the font and art style looked very 1970s, and I went to see if it was indeed one of the few games released in the late 1970s or if it was more in the 1980 – 1981 years when arcades were at their peak. But lo and behold…where do I find the Centipede arcade game available to play as a browser game online?

It’s on the website of the AARP, along with a few other Atari games:

Atari arcade games on the AARP website

Yeah…if I wasn’t really old before, I definitely am now.

Embers of the Last War: Warming Up (Session Zero)

December the 2nd, 2020 Anno Domini

Before this plague shuttered us all in our respective homes, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of people up at a friend’s house. He was the dungeon master, and I played a humble elven druid trying to make his way in Mystara after having been kicked out of his homeland in the forests near the Rugalov river in Karameikos. To be honest, the character was an expression of myself: someone trying to forge a new path in their career after having been laid off in the middle of last decade. I met “CP”, the dungeon master, at my first job after that layoff.

I really enjoyed playing D&D. It involves creative problem solving with socializing in a group, all wrapped up with a fantastic world and exciting adventures. When the pandemic hit, I missed it – so I eventually decided I would become the dungeon master so that I could still have fun. Different fun, but I find it a great creative outlet to run the game.

So I went to the DM’s Guild, a website where you can purchase Dungeons & Dragons adventures pre-made, and bought the “Embers of the Last War” campaign. It’s designed to be used with the Adventurer’s League, but it works just fine for a home game. After firing up Roll20.net for our virtual tabletop, we started off with Session “Zero”, titled “What’s Past is Prologue.”

From here on out, I’ll describe how each of these sessions went – consider this a “spoiler alert” in case you’re planning on playing the “Embers of the Last War” mini-campaign.

Set in the world of Eberron, the first session sees the players (students at Morgrave University in Sharn) hired by a shady professor-turned-wandslinger to assault and hijack an experimental airship. The players pick out pre-generated characters and become unwitting accomplishes to piracy in the sky. My players were suspicious from the get-go when I couldn’t figure out a good lie about where the “artifacts” they were supposedly retrieving were located.

Nevertheless, they fought bravely against some enemy sailors, and then realized when the dust cleared that they and the shady professor were the only ones left alive. The prof-turned-thief goes into the cabin, when suddenly the airship they arrived on lists to the side and begins to fall. The players hop on the new, captured ship as they watch the professor begin to fall with the ship.

The next segment entails the party exploring the ship to discover what it’s about and how to operate it. This was my favorite part of the adventure, as the players discover the enclosed “cockpit” and figure out a way to open it. The players eventually figured that the thing had an “autopilot” feature that would return it to Sharn. The players are on rails and they clearly realize it at this point, but they gamely play along.

The (real-life) hour grew late at this point, so I had them wrap things up. Upon returning to Sharn, the professor meets them in the shipyard as they try to find someone willing to repair their ship so that they can skip town. The professor is slated to die at the hands of thugs in the Boromar clan (a halfling gangster outfit), but my players decided to kill him off anyways. They do so handily, and make off into the sunset in their new experimental airship. Thus ends the “session zero” story.

We were mostly getting used to how Roll20.net worked at this point, warming up to the process of gaming online. I liked it a lot – the system has a lot of tools for dungeon masters to easily run the show. With a good Excel spreadsheet where I tracked everyone’s HP and basic stats, combat went quickly and efficiently. We’ve since gotten better at using the system and, so far, it’s been a great way to continue doing D&D during the pandemic. Next time I’ll describe how the “session one” went, where the players solve a murder.

The Game Goes On – Quick Update

November the 12th, 2020 Anno Domini

Haven’t even thought about the blog for a few months, and have been pretty busy with a few things:

I’ve started a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign with a few friends. I’ve really missed getting together with folks to play since the pandemic hit, and so I decided to do something about it. I fired up my Roll20.net account, purchased some of the D&D material, and became the dungeon master of a new campaign with five of my friends. We’re running through the Embers of the Last War campaign set in the Eberron universe. Been a lot of fun so far. I haven’t run a “paper-and-pencil” role-playing game since high school, and I think my skills have grown considerably since then. I hope to keep doing this into the foreseeable future. This runs every other week.

Tuesday nights are board games; Friday nights are video games. Both nights have been consumed by Among Us lately. Friends’ kids have gotten in to playing, and we’ve all enjoyed lying to one another and killing each other and trying to find the killer. We’ve almost entirely moved on from Civilization VI, but I hope we return to it.

There have also been some commitments at church that have heated up. We’re looking for a new pastor and I’m on the “search committee”. It takes a decent amount of time and thought.

Not sure when I’m going to get back into blogging. I might try to set up a series of posts describing how our ongoing D&D campaign has been going. Stay tuned.

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