There we go: Harris/Walz 24

Candidate swap complete. Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go win this thing.

The party conventions are always a sales event—they’re the political versions of those big keynotes Apple does—but this one was remarkably well put-together, probably the best of my lifetime, which is especially insane considering they had to swap candidates only four weeks ago. I’m acting like Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast, just staring at it asking “how is this accomplished?” I’m really looking forward to next summer’s deluge of tell-all behind-the-scenes books, explaining how in the heck they pulled any of this off.

This bit from Josh Marshall’s piece on the final night stuck with me:

What I took from this is a sense of focus and discipline from the people running Harris’ convention and campaign — not getting lost in glitz or stagecraft but defining a specific list of critical deliverables and then methodically checking them off the list. This was going on in the midst of what was unquestionably a high-powered and high-energy event. There was a mix of discipline and ability there that could not fail to have an impact but was also, in the intensity of the final day of a convention, easy to miss.

The other nights had some of this too. But it came through to me most clearly tonight.

I continue to think there’s more going on in this campaign than much of the political and commenting class has yet understood or reckoned with.

There’s a thing going on here that’s not just a “honeymoon phase” after a surprise switch-up. Personally, I think a big part is the Dem’s long overdue embrace of being the “regular people” party, but critically, without a self-destructive “pivot to the center.” In the US “The Center”, like “libertarian” is just a code word for a republican who smokes weed and doesn’t openly hate the gays. For ages now the Dems have surrendered so much American iconography—camo, flags, guns, the entire midwest—and it’s incredibly refreshing to see the Dems openly embrace all that “Real America” stuff, leaving the Repubs with nothing but looking like the creepy weirdo loosers they are.

I tend to think of the Democrats as, effectively, a British-style coalition, just without the framework the parliamentary system provides of actually having each member party having a public number of seats. Instead the factions are fluid and more obscure. Which makes intra-party negotiations hard even in better times, and even more so when the “other side” isn’t a coalition and is full of wannabe petty dictators. From the outside, and probably from the inside, it’s hard to tell how the various factions are doing versus each other.

There are, bluntly, a lot of issues that just aren’t on the ballot this year, which for whatever reason have fallen outside of the contextual Overton window of the ’24 election. The lack of formal coalition dynamics makes those so frustrating; there’s no way to know how close they were to being on the ballot. And, of course, the reason I keep calling this a “harm reduction” election is that for those about six things I’m subtweeting, the other side would be an absolute catastrophe. And that’s before we remember that the baseline of the opponents here really is “…or fascism.”

That said, it’s such a relief to see that the party seems to have finally shook off the Clinton/Blair era “Third Way” hangover and landed in a much more progressive place than I’d have ever hoped a few years ago. This feels like a group that would have held the banks accountable, for starters?

The first Bill Clinton campaign is the one this keeps making me think of, that explicit sense of “the old ways failed, here comes the new generation.” (Speaking of, can you imagine how hard Harris would kill on the old Arsenio show? For that matter, how hard Walz would?)

But more than any of that, this is a campaign and a candiate that’s here to play None of this gingerly hoping “we can finally talk about policy,” this a group that’s solidly on the offensive and staying there. The Dem’s traditional move has been to blow what should have been easy wins (looking at you 2000 and 2016) mostly by wrecking out the campaign to chase votes they were never going to get, or because actually trying to win power was beneath them somehow. Not this time. Non-MAGA America is deeply, profoundly sick of those assholes, and Harris has really captured the desire to move on as a country.

Finally!

In any case, we’re really though the looking glass now. No one has any idea what’s going to happen. Yeah, I saw that poll, and yes that one, and that one. We’re so far outside the lines I don’t think any of those mean anything we can interpret with the data we have. At this point, anybody who says what they think is going to happen without ending the sentence with a question mark is lying.

To quote Doctor Who: “Oh, knowing's easy. Everyone does that ad nauseam. I just sort of hope."

Further Exciting Consulting Opportunitues

I am expanding the offerings of my consulting company,we now offer a second service, which is this:

When someone is making, say, an eight season of a tv show for a streaming service, they can come to me and tell me what events will take place in those eight episodes. And then I will say,

“That is four episodes, max. What do ya got lying around that you’re saving for the second season? Let’s jam that in there too.”

“White Guy Tacos”

I just want to say that as a white guy with laughably-low spice tolerance, I never expected my demographic to be represented in a major national election, much less dominate a news cycle?

This is our time, fellow spice-phobes! You love to see it.

Feature Request: I Already Know That Part, Siri

I live pretty close to a major interstate highway. If you stand in the right place in my backyard, you can see the trucks! But, thanks to the turn-of-the-century suburb I live in, it’s at least 5 “turns” to get from my house to the freeway. I also live in one of those cities that’s a major freeway confluence, which means I’m another 2 or 3 “turns” away from at least 5 different numbered freeways?

So of course, when I need directions from Apple Maps (or any other nav system,) Siri very patiently explains how to get from my house to the freeway, which, yes Siri, I know that part.

I wish there was a way to mark an area on the the map as “look, I grew up here, I got this.” I wish, when I’m driving out to the mountains or whatever, Siri would start with “Get on I-5 south, I’ll be back with you in half an hour.” I want to be able to tell it “no, look, I know all these turns, I just want you to tell me when we’re at the destination so I don’t drive past the weird driveway again.” That’s an Apple Intelligence feature I’d be impressed by.

This Adam Savage Video

The YouTube algorithm has decided that what I really want to watch are Adam Savage videos, and it turns out the robots are occasionally right? So, I’d like to draw your attention to this vid where Adam answers some user questions: Were Any Myths Deemed Too Simple to Test on MythBusters?

It quickly veers moderately off-topic, and gets into a the weeds on what kinds of topics MythBusters tackled and why. You should go watch it, but the upshot is that MythBusters never wanted to invite someone on just to make them look bad or do a gotcha, so there was a whole class of “debunking” topics they didn’t have a way in on; the example Adam cites is dowsing, because there’s no way to do an episode busting dowsing without having a dowser on to debunk.

And this instantly made clear to me why I loved MythBusters but couldn’t stand Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!. The P&T Show was pretty much an extended exercise in “Look at this Asshole”, and was usually happy to stop there. MythBusters was never interested in looking at assholes.

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And, speaking of Adam Savage, did I ever link to the new Bobby Fingers?

Fabio and the Goose

This is relevant because it’s a collaboration with Adam Savage, and the Slow Mo Guys, who also posted their own videos on the topic:

Shooting Ballistic Gel Birds at Silicone Fabio with @bobbyfingers and @theslowmoguys!

75mph Bird to the Face with Adam Savage (@tested) and @bobbyfingers - The Slow Mo Guys

It’s like a youtube channel Rashomon, it’s great.

On Enthusiasm

Remember Howard Dean? Ran for president in 2004. Had huge grassroots support, got “the kids” really excited, and then got too excited in public, and went home to let Kerry lose the election.

I always thought the media kerfluffle around the “Dean Scream” was bizarre. Years later I saw a documentary where he was interviewed, about the election and other things, and he came across as sane, thoughtful, charismatic. Afterwards, he was a tremendously successful head of the nation party apparatus. Towards the end, the interviewer asked him if he’d do “the scream”, and he refused. Seemed embarrassed by the idea, kinda pissed the interviewer would bring it up. Oh, I thought, this is why you lost the election. You have a brief moment of actual personality in public, it’s still the thing you’re the most known for, and even now you can’t bring yourself to embrace it.

The Dems, at least for the last 20–30 years, have had a strange aversion to “enthusiasm”, treating it as somehow low-class or embarrassing. I guess this partly their self-identity as the “adults in the room,” and partly a reaction to looking over at Reagan and saying “screaming crowds are the thing the other guys do”.

So the guy in ’04 who has the kids all excited allows the media to shame him out of the race for being excited. And clearly he was actually embarrassed, based on that interview. He should have leaned into it, made that his thing. Opened every event with that yell, get a call and response going. Instead, nope, we’re gonna let the most boring man in the world lose the election to the war criminal running on ending social security.

And of course, the really maddeningly weird thing is that the Dem base is much more purpose-driven, more emotionally-connected to outcomes. They’re the ones who will stay home unless you fire them up! The main opponent has always been apathy!

So the Dems that win are (mostly) charismatic outsiders, whereas the party wants to run “grownups.” So you have Gore, who runs basically as a robot, and then as soon as he loses shows up on Futurama and is incredibly funny. Remember how scandalized the other Dems were by Clinton playing the sax on Arsenio? I think this was one of the dynamics that fueled the Bernie-Clinton feud too; somehow the Dems though people yelling “Bernie or bust” meant he wasn’t electable?

I suspect this is mostly a generational thing. The batch of boomer-age Dems that have been running the show the last 30 years have always treated “people being excited” as not grown up enough. And fair enough, if you grew up in the 50s & 60s, there was a very, very limited number of things you were allowed to “like” or express feeling about; maybe sports? Otherwise, stoicism was the goal. Maybe because an entire generation grew up with parents who had undiagnosed PTSD?

The younger generations aren’t like that? Or at the very least, have a different set of “things you’re allowed to be excited about” and aren’t fundamentally embarrassed by the concept of “excitement” or “emoting”. So those people start being in charge, and they’re like, no actually, stoicism isn’t the goal, let’s get the base fired up. Which turns out to be really valuable when the opponent isn’t “the other guy” but “staying home”?

Anyway, my Hot Take is that Harris/Walz is what you get when the Dems stop treating “enthusiasm” as something low class and embarrassing.

More than anything, Biden had a vibes problem; I see that Harris is now polling ahead of the convicted felon/ failed businessperson on “the economy”, as opposed to Biden who was well behind. It’s the same economy! Same administration! Same failed casinos! Vibes issue.

Being “the grown ups” meant being reactive, trying to stick to “serious topics”, with the result being that the other side gets to dictate the terms of the fight and then ground you down over a year(s)-long campaign.

But now we’ve got a team actually trying to fire up the base, setting the terms, taking the initiative. Part of why “mind you own damn business” has popped so hard as a campaign theme is that this is the kind of topic everyone actually cares about and has wanted a Dem to run on since forever, instead of the finer points of NATO funding or whatever.

This really does feel like a campaign run by people who at a critical age, instead of watching Mr Smith goes to Washington, watched Heathers. As they say, let’s not go back.

Apple vs Games

Apple Arcade is in the news again, for not great reasons; as always, Tsai has the roundup, the but the short, short version is that Arcade is going exactly as well as all of Apple’s other video game–related efforts have gone for the last “since forever.”

My first take was that games might be the most notable place Apple’s “one guy at the top” structure falls down. Apple’s greatest strength and greatest weakness has always been that the whole company is laser focused on whatever the guy in charge cares about, and not much of anything else. Currently, that means that Apple’s priorities are, in no particular order, privacy, health, thin devices, operational efficiency, and, I guess, becoming “the new HBO.” Games aren’t anywhere near that list, and never have been. I understand the desire to keep everything flowing through one central point, and not to have siloed-off business units or what have you. On the other hand Bill Gates wasn’t a gamer either, but he knew to hire someone to be in charge of X-everything and leave them alone.

But then I remembered AppleTV+. Somehow, in a very short amount of time, Apple figured out how to be a production company, and made Ted Lasso, a new Fraggle Rock, some new Peanuts, and knocked out a Werner Herzog documentary for good measure. I refuse to believe that happened because Tim Apple was signing off on every production decision or script; they found the right people and enabled them correctly.

At this point, there’s just no excuse why AppleTV has something like Ted Lasso, and Apple Arcade doesn’t. There’s obvious questions like “why did I play Untitled Goose Game on my Switch instead of my Mac” and “why did they blow acquiring Bungie twice”. Why isn’t the Mac the premier game platform? Why? What’s the malfunction?

Meet the Veep

And there we go, it’s Walz. Personally, I was hoping for Mayor Pete, but as Elizabeth Sandifer says: “…when you create the campaign's new messaging strategy you get to be the VP nom.". I love that he’s a regular guy in the way that’s the exact opposite of what we use the word “weird” as a shorthand for.

The Dems claiming the title of the party of regular, normal, non-crazy people is long overdue; this is a note they should have been playing since at least the Tea Party, and probably since Gingrich. But, like planting a tree, the second best time is now, and Walz’s midwestern cool dad energy is the perfect counterpoint to the Couch Experience.

“Both sides are the same” is right-wing propganda designed to reduce voter turnout, but the Dems don’t always run a ticket that makes it easy to dispute. What I like about the Harris/Walz vs Trump/Vance race is that the differences are clear, even at a distance. What future do you want, America?

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As I keep saying, this is a “turn out the base” election; everyone already knows which side they’d vote for, and the trick is to get them to think it’s worth it to bother to vote. Each candidate is running against apathy, not each other. Fairly or not, over the summer the Democrats found themselves with a substantial enthusiasm gap. The Repubs didn’t have a huge amount of enthusiasm either, but the reality is the members of the Republican coalition are more likely to show up and vote for someone they don’t like than the Dems, so structurally thats the sort of thing that hurts Team Blue more.

Literally no one wanted to do the 2020 election over again, and in one of those bizarre unfair moments America decided to blame Biden for it, instead of blaming the guy who lost for not staying down. But more than that, complaining about how “old” everyone was also a shorthand for something else—all the actors here are people who’ve been around since the 80s. We just keep re-litigating the ghosts of the 20th century. Obama felt like the moment we were finally done having elections rooted in how the Boomers felt about Nixon, but then, no, another three cycles made up entirely of people who’ve been household names since Cheers was on the air.

And then Harris crashes into the race at the last second with an “oh yeaaahhhh!” Suddenly, we’ve got something new. This finally feels like not just a properly post-Obama ticket, but actually post “The Third Way”; both in terms of policy and attitude this is the campaign the Dems should have been running every election in the 21st century. And for once, the Dems aren’t just trying to score points with some hypothetical ref and win on technicals, they’re here to actually win. Finally.

I’m as surprised as anyone at the amount of excitement that’s built up over the last two weeks; I was sure swapping candidates was an own-goal for the ages, but now I’m sure I was wrong.

Rooting for the winning team is fun, and the team with the initiative and hustle is usually the one that wins. It’s self-perpetuating, in both directions. (This is a big part of how Trump managed to stumble into a win in ’16, it was a weird feedback loop of him doing something insane and then everyone else going “hahaha what” and all that kept building on itself until he was suddenly the President.)

Accurately or not, the Dems had talked themselves into believing they were going to lose, and were acting like it. Now, not so much! The feedback loops are building the other way, and as Harris keeps picking up more support, you can see the air bleeding out of Trump’s tires as his support drifts away because he’s only fun when he’s winning.

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I have a conceptual model that I use for US Presidential elections that has very rarely let me down. It goes like this: every cycle the Republicans run someone who reads as a Boss, and the Democrats run someone who reads as a college Professor. And so most elections turn into a contest between the worst boss you’ve ever had against your least favorite teacher; with the final decision boiling down to, basically, “would you rather work for this guy or take a class from that guy”. (Often leading to a frustrated “bleah, neither!”)

And elections pretty consistently go to the team that wins that comparison. As a historical example, I liked Gore a lot, but he really had the quality that he’d grade you down on a paper because he thought you used an em dash wrong when you didn’t, whereas W (war crimes notwithstanding) seemed like the kind of boss that wouldn’t hassle you too bad and would throw a great summer BBQ. And occasionally one side or the other pops a good one—Obama seemed like he’d be your favorite law professor of all time.

Viewing this ticket via that lens? This one I like. We have the worst boss you can imagine running with the worst coworker you’ve ever had, against literally the cool geography teacher/football coach and the lady that seems like she’d be your new favorite professor? Hell yeah. I’m sold. Let’s do this.

Retweeting Feeds

There’s a feature I miss from the old twitter, or rather, there’s a use case that twitter filled better than anything else.

The use case is this: RSS feeds are a great way to publish content, but that’s where it stops—there’s no intrinsic way to (re)share an item from a feed you’re subscribed to with anyone else, to retweet it, if you will. I’d love to have an easy way to reshare content from feeds I’m subscribed to.

I think one of the reasons that twitter sucked the air out of the RSS ecosystem was that not only was it trivial to set up a twitter account that worked just like an RSS feed, with links to your blog or podcast or whatever, but everyone who followed your feed could re-share it with their followers with a single action, optionally adding a comment. I cannot tell you how much great stuff I found out about because someone I followed on twitter quote-tweeted it.

Here in the post-twitter afterscape, I keep wishing NetNewsWire had a retweet button. I’ve spent enough time in product design and development to know why that doesn’t exist; something that could re-share an item from an RSS feed out into a new feed with a connection back to the original feed requires about 80% of twitter, if you’re going to build all that, add the ability to post your own content as well and go all the way to a social network/microblogging system/twitter clone. And I guess the solution is either bluesky or mastodon.

But I keep thinking there has to be something between turn of the century–style RSS feeds and a full-blown social network. And I am putting this out in the universe because I absolutely do not want to build or work on this myself, I want to use it. (All my actual startup ideas are going to be buried with me.)

Somebody go figure this out!

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Edited to add: I am reminded by an Alert Reader that Google Reader (RIP) had a similar feature, you could “share” things from your feed. But google’s gonna google and the share list was basically your gmail contacts list? Which would lead to some really bizarre results like suddenly seeing a thing in your feed that got there because a friend of a friend shared it, because you were both on the same party invite a couple of years ago. Cool idea, but again, something twitter improved on by making those connections obvious.

Anyone Else Remember This Giant Maze Thing?

I have this vague memory that floats up into my mind every couple of years. There was this amusement park that was just a giant, human-scale maze. I remember the walls being basically plywood fencing? I think it was in the Bay Area, or at least “in that direction” from the central valley. This would have been 1990-ish?

I never went, but I think we drove by it a few times? There were a bunch of TV commercials, which I was sort of fascinated by. What I mostly remember is that they had a mascot that I thought looked exactly like The Noid from Domino’s Pizza, and in the low-information environment of the world before the web, I was confused about if this place was now both a bad pizza place and a maze?

Anyone else remember any of this?

…

Anyway, this bubbled back up again this week, and I decided to finally figure out what the heck I was remembering. I’m gonna put some space so you can see if you can remember any of this before you scroll down.

.

..

…

….

It was a real thing!

It was called The Wooz.

Opened in 1988, closed in ’92, it was in Vacaville, basically across the freeway from where the Nut Tree used to be, adjacent to that whole outlet store cluster that was going to be the future of retail back before the Roseville Gallaria opened up. Apparently mazes were a fad in Japan in the late 80s, sort of the Escape Rooms of theirtime, and so someone tried to expand that out to North America.

The idea isn’t great on it’s own, but why Vacaville? I guess they picked it because of that outlet mall thing, but let’s talk about your competition. Ignoring that you’re only a couple hours away from Disneyland, at the time you’re less than an hour away from the pre-Six Flags Marine World, Great America, and even the old Waterworld USA at Cal Expo. Hell, there’s even two Scandias in range. A big maze with no shade made out of redwood fencing is a hard sell, even without that many rides nearby?

Some links for you!

The history of the hottest, most ill-advised theme park ever made: The Wooz

The Wooz - Vacaville - LocalWiki

Do not sleep on the embedded video in that first link, an episode of the That’s Incredible Show on the park which includes a race through the maze, one of the participants of which was Steve Wozniak, who is introduced only as “a computer whiz”. I love, love, love that there was about a 5-year window where “co-founder of Apple Computer” was not something to be proud of, of which 1989 was the absolute peak. He’s basically here because he was a minor local celebrity. Presumably he got the call after Cal Worthington (and his dog spot) turned them down?

And the mascot did look an awful lot like the Noid.

Pretty Weird

Absolutely loving this new Gen-X energy the Dems have suddenly discovered by just pointing out that the Repubs are super weird.

And they are! The republican party has been an absolute freakshow since at least the Gingrich era, and certainly since those tea party assholes. I distinctly remember wishing that Gore had run on a platform of “look how weird these guys are” and W looks positively sane next to the current freak farm. Normal people don’t actually care what goes on in other people’s bathrooms, houses, or pants?

This has completely thrown the repubs for a loop. I see they’re basically trying a Pee-Wee Herman “I know you are but what am I” move by trial-balooning various flavors of “we’re not weird, you the ones with ____” with various totally normal things in that blank spot, with a side-order of “weird is what all the bullies called me, who then is the real bully” crap.

The past couple of decades have tought the repubs that saying things like “ahh, who is the real villan” or “but you participate in society, interesting” or “then you are no better than they” is the equivalent of the roadrunner painting a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain, and that the dems will reliably run right into it, Wile E. Coyote–style.

So it is incredibly refreshing to see that the dems have finally discovered the correct response, which is “shut the fuck up, you freaky weirdo!”

Because everyone who has actually lived a life knows there is a difference between weird (kid plays too much D&D) and weird (do not, under any circumstances, leave your drink uncovered near him).

This election, more than usual, is everyone in that first group vs everyone in the second.

Cognitive Surplus

I finally dug up a piece I that has been living rent-free in my head for sixteen years:

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing--there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

...

This was a talk Clay Shirky gave in 2008, and the transcript lived on his website for a long time but eventually rotted away. I stumbled across an old bookmark the other day, and realized I could use that to dig it out of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so here we are!

A couple years later, Shirky turned this talk into a full book called Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators, which is presumably why the prototype vanished off his website. The book is okay, but it’s a classic example of an idea that really only needs about 20 pages at the most getting blown out to 200 because there’s a market for “books”, but not “long blog posts.” The original talk is much better, and I’m glad to find it again.

The core idea has suck with me all this time: that social and technological advances free up people’s time and create a surplus of cognitive and social energy, and then new “products” emerge to soak that surplus up so that people don’t actually use it for anything dangerous or disruptive. Shirky’s two examples are Gin and TV Sitcoms; this has been in my mind more than usual of late as people argue about superhero movies and talk about movies as “escapism” in the exact same terms you’d use to talk about drinking yourself into a stupor.

Something I talk about a lot in my actual day job is “cognitive bandwidth,” largely inspired by this talk; what are we filling our bandwidth with, and how can we use less, how can we create a surplus.

And, in all aspects of our lives, how can we be mindful about what we spend that surplus on.

Tales of the Valiant

In order for this game to make sense, you have to remember why it exists at all. Tales of the Valiant is Kobold Press’ “lawyer-proof” variant of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, created as a response to the absolute trash fire Hasbro caused around the Open Game License and the 5th Edition System Reference Document early last year.

Recall that Hasbro, current owners of Dungeons & Dragons, started making some extremely hinky moves around the future of the OGL—the license under which 3rd party companies can make content compatible with D&D. Coupled with the rumors about the changes being planned for the 2024 update to the game, there was suddenly a strong interest in a version of 5th Edition D&D that was unencumbered by either the OGL or the legal team of the company that makes Monopoly. As such, Kobold Press stepped up to the plate.

Because history happens twice, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, this is actually our second runaround with D&D licensing term shenanigans spawning a new game.

For some context, when 3rd Edition D&D came out back in 2000, in addition to the actual physical books, the core rules were also published in a web document called the System Reference Document, or SRD, which was released under an open source–inspired license called the Open Gaming License, OGL. This was for a couple of reasons, but mostly to provide some legal clarity—and a promise of safe harbor—around the rules and terms and things, many of which were either taken from mythology or had become sort of “common property” of the TTRPG industry as a whole. The upshot was if you followed the license terms, you could use any material from the rules as you saw fit without needing to ask permission or pay anybody, and a whole industry sprung up around making material compatible with or built on top of the game.

When the 4th Edition came out in 2008, the licensing changed such that 3rd party publishers essentially had to choose whether to support 3 or 4, and the rules around 4 were significantly more restrictive. The economy that had grown up under the shade of 3rd edition and the OGL started, rightly, to panic a little bit. Finally, Paizo, who had been the company publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines under license from Hasbro until just about the same time, stepped up, and essentially republished the 3.5 edition of D&D under the name “Pathfinder.”

There’s a probably apocryphal line from Paizo’s Erik Mona that they chose to create Pathfinder instead of just reprinting 3.5 because “if we’re going to go to the trouble of reprinting the core books we’re going to fix the problems”. (Which has always stuck in my mind because my initial reaction to flipping through the core Pathfinder book the first time was to mutter “wow, we had really different ideas about what the problems were”.) Because Pathfinder wasn’t just a reprint, it was also a collected of tweaks, cleanups, and revisions based on the collected experience of playing the game. There was a joke at the time that it was version “3.75”, but really is was more like “3rd Edition, 2.0”.

When 5th edition came out in 2014, it came with a return to more congenial 3rd edition–style licensing, which reinvigorated the 3rd party publisher world, and also led to an explosion of twitch stream–fueled popularity, and unexpectedly resulted in the most successful period of the game’s history, and now a decade later here we are again, with a different 3rd party publisher producing a new incarnation of a Hasbro game so that the existing ecosystem can continue to operate without lawyers fueled by Monopoly Money coming after them (and yes, pun intended.)

(This isn’t the only project spawned by last January’s OGL mess either; Paizo’s Pathfinder 2 “remaster” was explicitly started to remove any remaining OGL-ed text from the books, it’s not a coincidence that this is when Tweet & Heinsoo chose to kickstart a second edition of 13th Age, the A5E folks are doing their own version of a “lawyer-proof 5th edition.”)

However, Tales of the Valiant had to deal with a couple of challenge that Pathfinder didn’t—primarily, vast chunks of 5E just aren’t in the SRD.

The 3rd Edition SRD had, essentially, the entire game, minus a few minor details and trademarked names, including quite a bit a material published after the core books. For Pathfinder, Paizo could have taken the SRD, bound it as-is, and had a ready-to-play game.

The 5E SRD, on the other hand, has significantly less. Looking at that SRD, vast sections of the game are missing—every Class only has a single Subclass, there’s only a single example Background, there’s only a single Feat, the 5E rules for personality traits & roleplaying hooks—ideals, bonds, flaws, and so on—aren’t present, various monsters aren’t present, the Alchemist class isn’t there, nothing from any book other than the three original core books is there, only the “core” races are there and the races with subraces only have a single example, and so on and so on. All of these gaps needed filling with new material on top of the other mechanical tweaks and cleanup.

The result is that Tales of the Valiant ends up in a sort of “neither fish nor fowl” situation; it’s not just a cleaned up 5E because it literally can’t be, but on the other hand it’s not different enough to give it a clear hook or independent identity.

But with that out of the way, it’s pretty great.

The initial release for ToV is two books—a Players Guide and Monster Vault. (Supposedly, Hasbro has also been getting stropy about other companies using the name “Player’s Handbook” which is why both Kobold and Paizo have moved to other titles.)

The writing in both books is outstanding. This is all, broadly speaking, the same material as the 5E Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual, but every section is better written, clearer, generally shorter and more concise. It reads like someone took the original 5E books and ran them past a really, really good editor. All of the language has been made much clearer—for example, spell “levels” are now “circles” to avoid confusion with character levels.

Most of the changes are excellent. The whole thing reads like a set of well-presented house rules by a group of really good DMs who have been running this game for a decade, which I’m pretty sure is what it is.

However, for better or worse, it’s still 5E. All the weird edges of that game are still here—the strange economy around bonus actions, there’s still too many weird custom per-class mechanics around pools of dice, Bards are still mostly just junior wizards, the “other two” arcane spellcasters are still underbaked, there still isn’t a caster that just uses spellpoints.

There’s still just too much—too much complexity without getting anything for it. The core book is 370+ pages, which seems increasingly absurd.

It’s not a secret that 5E was game made by a small team on a short deadline, the game was barely finished, and as a result on a pretty regular basis the rules throw up their hands and depend on the DM to sort things out. As such, many of the changes feel like the result of a decade of people having figured things out— for example, the rules around tools vs skills are clearer, the list of tools is shorter, there are actual rules for hiding, the rules are all reorganized.

Other changes are more structural, but still in the “obvious fixes” category—every class gets subclasses starting at level 3 now, and at the same levels thereafter, although the many of the new subclasses have a certain “golden arcs” to 5E’s “golden arches” quality. For example, Mage Blades are now Spell Blades, and can mix cantrips with physical attacks when using multiattack, which is… pretty great, actually? And a couple of the classes, like Warlock, have been pretty extensively overhauled, with just regular-ass spell slots.

The big ticket changes are all improvements:

“Race” has been replaced with a dual system of “Lineage” and “Heritage”. Lineage is, essentially, your species, and Heritage is where you grew up. This immediately lets you easily cook up some unusual combo—urban Orcs, nomadic Halflings. Backgrounds work similarly to 5E, but the list is new and grant some actually useful bonuses. “Inspiration” has been replaced with the much more flexible and interesting “Luck”. Spell lists have been reorganized around 4E-style “power sources” instead of being unique per class. 5E’s optional Feats have been replaced with Talents, which are, effectively, 3E’s Feats. Like 3E, those Talents are everywhere; your background gives you one, you can pick them on a pretty regular basis as an upgrade option. This is one of several changes that brings back something from 3E. As another, magic items—and magic item upgrades— have prices again. And the revised text around using attributes and skills make them feel a lot more like how the 3E skills worked. I’ve often said my personal ideal version of D&D would be a 3E-5E hybrid, and ToV very much has that feeling.

And, thank goodness, alignment is gone.

(For the full list of changes, see: Tales of the Valiant: Conversion Guide )

The books themselves, like all of Kobold’s books, are very nice. For a small press, they’re outstanding. The usual full-size hardcovers, full color, nice layout, good art. As a nice touch, the covers of the two books represent the same scene, but a few minutes apart.

Uncharacteristically, my favorite of the two volumes was the Monster Vault. This is where the aspect of “collected house rules from a good DM” really shines. The layout is not that different from the 5E Monster Manual, but very cleverly rethought to be useful during play. Each monster gets at least a one whole page, with a nice piece of art and a really thoughtful layout of stats. For example, the book doesn’t waste space with the monster’s stats, it just lists their stat modifiers, which are also their saving throw modifiers. The monster name is always—and only—the first thing in the top left corner of the page, which makes the book so much easier to navigate than either 3rd or 5th edition’s “YOLO!” approach to page layouts.

Every creature gets at least half a column of description, and this is where removing alignment becomes an asset to design. Without alignment as a shorthand, they give each monster an actual personality. To wit: Red Dragons are still bad guys, but instead of just being “chaotic evil”, now they’re assholes. Continuing with the dragons as the example, the metallic ones are still mostly “good”, and the chromatic ones are “bad”, but each kind gets a distinct set of ticks and behaviors. Green dragons are now something like Nazi scientists, Copper dragons are friendly but love a fight, and so on. It’s a really solid set of role-play hooks and ways to deploy them in a game.

This also really shines as a way to distinguish things like oozes or creatures acting on instinct from monsters you’re going to fight because they thought about it and want to take your stuff.

And then there’s the section on encounter design. Encounter design in 5E is notoriously tricky, mainly because the “challenge rating” system in the core rules is blatantly untested and unfinished. The 5E books barely cover it, one more subsystem that ends with a shrug and “you can figure it out?” The ToV Monster Vault has pages and pages on how to design encounters, how to use the existing challenge ratings to compare opponents to the party’s level, notes on adjusting difficulty, you name it. It’s clearly the work of a group that’s played this game a lot, and have really figured out how to make this part sing.

It’s probably the best D&D-style “monster book” I’ve ever read.

The Player’s Guide is a little more of a mixed bag. Again, the layout is clear and well-thought, each class has an icon representing it when it comes up in the rules. Character creation is presented in a different order, which isn’t really better or worse, so much as it shows there just isn’t a best way to present 5E’s overly-complex material.

It also pulls in a bunch of material that 5E leaves in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Magic items, for example. It really is the only book you need to play the game, which makes me intensely curious about the ToV Gamemaster’s Guide which is coming out later this year.

But while the organization is different from the 5E Player’s Handbook, I’s be hard pressed to say it was better.

It’s also remarkable what isn’t here.

The section on “what is an RPG” is perfunctory to the point of being vestigial. There’s actually less material on role-playing and the like here than in the 5E books. There’s essentially nothing on how to actually play; there’s nothing here on how the authors intend this game to work in practice, I guess that’s left up to youtube?

There’s fewer mechanics for role play hooks than even 5E had. The thin-but-workable Ideals/Bonds/Flaws system wasn’t in the SRD, but hasn’t been replaced with anything. The section on using Charisma skills is basically the same content as the 5E book, and that was thin at time. (Meanwhile the 4E non-combat skill challenge system is just sitting there, waiting for someone to rediscover it.) (Edited to add: I went back and checked, and in fairness skill challenges were a DMG item in 4e, not in the PHB.)

There’s a section on Safety Tools, but it’s less than a page. The phrase “session zero” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, which seems insane for a 300+ page RPG book published in the 2020s.

All of that would be acceptable in a small game, but this this book is 60 pages longer than the 5E book, which was already too big. And this isn’t the early teens anymore, where we were having serious conversations about if the TTRPG industry was going to keep existing. This is the twenties, and whatever else that means, TTRPGs are a huge business now, and narrative and character–focused play is in. It’s a strange set of oversights for an otherwise well-designed game.

Finally, Tales of the Valiant is… not a great name? It’s not terrible, but it’s a surprisingly hard name to use in a sentence. And that’s a lot of syllables. And something I’ve learned about myself over the last couple thousand words is that I can’t spell “Valiant” right the first time. (You know what’s a great RPG name? Mörk Borg. That’s the new bar, guys.)

But in case this hasn’t come through clearly, I like it. A lot. As it stands, it’s the best version of 5E out there. Well, at least for the moment, because the shadow of the incoming 5th edition update is looming on the horizon.

It’s not clear to me where this game sits in the broader hobby. Is there room for another D&D-alike? I’m not sure this makes a compelling case why you should play this instead of Pathfinder or 13th Age or the new 5E itself. I don’t understand who the target audience is supposed to be.

The folks that want to play Dungeons & Dragons are going to play that. The whole OGL trashfire/5th edition update ended up going a different direction than any of us expected a year ago; I think the ’24 update is going to be a lot better than we expected, the license terms actually got better, not worse, and I’m sure sure what the sales pitch is for “it’s like D&D, except slightly different.” There’s no hook, no “here’s why this is cooler.”

My overall response is that I wish Kobold had used Hasbro’s total surrender over the licensing to pivot, and to build up a more-different game. Pathfinder succeeded because 3rd edition went away and 4th edition, whatever its strengths, was a very different game. That not what happened this time, and a flavor of 5E is going to stick around for a while yet.

To be fair, I’m not really in the center of this particular crosshairs anymore either. I mean, the game I’m running now is a “cozy witchcore” modern fantasy game using the Cypher system, where we’ve never even bothered to fill in the player character’s attack bonuses on their character sheets. (Off topic but: it’s really fun to see what Modern Fantasy looks like once it has both “Lovecraft” and “90s goth vampires” washed completely out of its hair.) Thats miles away from D&D’s home turf of “fantasy-flavored superheros”. That said, we’ve got a D&D game we’re talking about kicking off, and if we do I’ll advocate heavily for using this instead.

And that’s the review in a nutshell: next time I want to run a game with Magic Missle in it, this is the one I’m going to run.

It’s a cool game by a cool company, making something good out of a stupid situation. Check it out.

Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (2002)

There are multiple interlocking tradegies of Douglas Adams’ death—not the least of which is the fact that he died at all. But also he passed at what appeared to be the end of a decade-long career slump—well, not slump exactly, but a decade where he seemed to spend his time being very, very irritated at the career he’d accidentally found.

After he died unexpectedly in May of 2001 at 49, his publisher rushed out a collection of previously unpublished work called Salmon of Doubt. It’s a weird book—a book that only could have happened under the exact circumstances that it did, scrambled out to take advantage of the situation, part collection, part funeral.

Douglas Adams is, by far, the writer whose had the biggest influence on my own work, and it’s not even close. I’m not even sure who would be number two? Ursula LeGuin, probably? But that’s a pretty distant second place—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first “grown-up” book I ever read on my own, which is sort of my secret origin story.

As such I gulped Salmon down the instant it came out in 2002, and hadn’t read it since. There was a bit I vaguely remembered that I wanted to quote in something else I was working on, so I’ve recently bought a new copy, as my original one has disappeared over the years. (Actually, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened to it, but it’s a minor footnote in a larger, more depressing story, so lets draw a veil across it and pretend that it was pilfered by elves.)

Re-reading the book decades later, two things are very obvious:

First, Adams would never have let a book like this happen while he was alive. It’s self-indulgent in exactly the way he never was, badly organized, clearly rushed. I mean, the three main sections are “Life”, “The Universe”, and “And Everything”, which in addition to being obvious to the point of being tacky, is an absolutely terrible table of contents because there’s no rhyme or reason why one item is in one section versus another.

Second, a book like this should have happened years before. There was so much stuff Adams wrote—magazine articles, newspaper columns, bits and bobs on the internet—that a non-fiction essay collection–style book was long overdue.

This book is weird for other reasons, including that a bunch of other people show up and try to be funny. It’s been remarked more than once that no other generally good writer has inspired more bad writing that Douglas Adams, and other contributions to this book are a perfect example. The copy I have now is the US paperback, with a “new introduction” by Terry Jones—yes, of Monty Python—which might be the least funny thing I’ve ever read, not just unfunny but actively anti-funny, the humor equivalent of anti-matter. The other introductions are less abrasive, but badly misjudge the audience’s tolerance for a low-skill pastiche at the start of what amounts to a memorial service.

The main selling point here is the unfinished 3rd Dirk Gently novel, which may or may not have actually been the unfinished 6th Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel. However, that only takes about about 80 pages of a 290 page book; by my math thats a hair over a quarter, which is a little underwhelming. It’s clear the goal was to take whatever the raw material looked like and edit it into something reasonably coherent and readable, which it is. But even at the time, it felt like heavily-edited “grit-out-of-the-spigot” early drafts rather than an actual unfinished book, I’d be willing to bet a fiver that if Adams had lived to finish whatever that book turned into, none of the text here would have been in it. As more unfinished pieces have leaked out over the years, such as the excerpts in 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams, it’s clear that there was a lot more than made it into Salmon, and while less “complete”, that other stuff was a lot more interesting. As an example, the excerpts from Salmon in 42 include some passages from one of the magazine articles collected here, except in the context of the novel instead of Adams himself on a trip? What’s the story there? Which came first? Which way did that recycling go? Both volumes are frustratingly silent.

It’s those non-novel parts that are actually good, though. That magazine article is casually one of the best bits of travel writing I’ve ever read, there’s some really insightful bits about computers and technology, a couple of jokes that I’ve been quoting for years having forgotten they weren’t in Hitchhiker proper. The organization, and the rushed nature of the compilation, make these frustrating, because there will be an absolutely killer paragraph on its own, with no context for where did this come from? Under what circumstances was this written? Similarly for the magazine articles, newspaper columns, excerpts from (I assume) his website; there’s no context or dates or backstory, the kinds of things you’d hope for in a collection like this. Most of them seem to date to “the 90s” from context clues, but it’s hard to say where exactly all these things fit in.

But mopst of what really makes the book so weird is how fundamentally weird Adams’ career itself was in the last decade of his life.

In a classic example of working for years to become an overnight success, Adams had a remarkably busy period from 1978–1984, which included (deep breath) two series of the Hitchhiker radio show, a revised script for the album version of the first series, a Doctor Who episode, a stint as Doctor Who’s script editor during which he wrote two more episodes—one of which was the single best episode of the old show—and heavily rewrote several others, the TV adaptation of Hitchhiker which was similar but not identical to the first radio series, the third Hitchhiker novel based (loosely) on a rejected pitch for yet another Doctor Who, and ending in 1984 with the near simultaneous release of the fourth Hitchhiker novel and the Infocom text adventure based on the first.

(In a lot of ways, HHGG makes more sense if you remember that it happened in the shadow of his work for Doctor Who, more than anything it functions as a satire of the older program, the Galaxy Quest to Who’s Star Trek, if you will. Ford is the Doctor if he just wanted to go to a party, Arthur is a Doctor Who companion who doesn’t want to be there and argues back, in the radio show at least, The Heart of Gold operates almost exactly like the Tardis. If you’ll forgive the reference, I’ve always found it improbable, that Hitchhiker found its greatest success in America at a time where Who was barely known.)

After all that, to steal a line from his own work, “he went into a bit of a decline.”

Somewhere in there he also became immensely rich, and it’s worth remembering for the rest of this story that somewhere in the very early 80s Adams crossed the line of “never needs to work again.”

Those last two projects in 1984 are worth spending an extra beat on. It’s not exactly a secret that Adams actually had very little to do with the Hitchhiker game other than the initial kickoff, and that the vast majority of the writing and the puzzles were Steve Meretzky doing an impeccable Adams impression. (See The Digital Antiquarian’s Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhiker’s, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style for more on how all that happened.)

Meanwhile, the novel So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of his middle period. It’s not really a SF comedy, it’s a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. It wasn’t super well received. It’s also my personal favorite? You get the feeling that’s the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. There’s a real sense of his growth as an author. It also ties up the Hitchhiker series with a perfect ending.

Then a couple of more things happen. Infocom had a contract for up to six Hitchhiker games, and they really, really wanted to make at least a second. Adams, however, had a different idea for a game, which resulted in Infocom’s loved-by-nobody Bureaucracy, which again, Adams largely had nothing to do with beyond the concept, with a different set of folks stepping in to finish the project. (Again, see Bureaucracy at The Digital Antiquarian for the gory details.)

Meanwhile, he had landed a two book deal for two “non-Hitchhiker books”, which resulted in the pair of Dirk Gently novels, of which exactly one of them is good.

The first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, is probably his best novel. It reworks a couple of ideas from those late 70s Doctor Whos but remixed in interesting ways. The writing is just better, better characters, funnier, subtler jokes, a time-travel murder-mystery plot that clicks together like a swiss watch around a Samuel Coleridge poem and a sofa. It’s incredible.

The second Dirk Gently book, Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, is a terrible book, full stop, and I would describe it as one of the most angry, bitter, nihilistic books I’ve ever read, except I’ve also read Mostly Harmless, the final Hitchhiker book. Both of those books drip with the voice of an author that clearly really, really doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing.

(I’m convinced Gaiman’s American Gods is a direct riposte to the bleak and depressing Teatime.)

The two Dirk books came out in ’87 and ’88, the only time he turned a book around that fast. (Pin that.) After wrapping up the Dirk contract, he went and wrote Last Chance to See, his best book period, out in 1990.

Which brings us back around to the book nominally at hand—Salmon of Doubt. The unfinished work published here claims to be a potential third Dirk novel, and frankly, it’s hard to believe that was ever seriously under consideration. Because, look, the Gently contract was for two books, neither of which did all that well. According to the intro of this compilation, the first files for Salmon date to ’93, and he clearly noodled on and around that for a decade. That book was never actually going to be finished. If there was desire for a 3rd Gently novel, they would have sat him down and forced him to finish it in ’94. Instead, they locked him in a room and got Mostly Harmless.

There’s a longstanding rumor that Mostly Harmless was largely ghostwritten, and it’s hard to argue. It’s very different from his other works, mean, bad-tempered, vicious towards its characters in a way his other works aren’t. Except it has a lot in common with Bureaucracy which was largely finished by someone else. And, it has to be said, both of those have a very similar voice to the equally mean and bad-tempered Teatime. This gets extra suspicious when you consider the unprecedented-for-him turnaround time on Teatime. It’s hard to know how much stock to put into that rumor mill, since Adams didn’t write anything after that we can compare them to—except Last Chance which is in a completely different mood and in the same style as his earlier, better work. Late period style or ghostwriter? The only person alive who still knows hasn’t piped up on the subject.

Personally? I’m inclined to believe that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was the last novel he wrote on his own, and that his contributions to both Teatime and Mostly Harmless were a sketch of an outline and some jokes. Which all, frankly, makes his work—or approximation thereof—over the course of the 90s even stranger.

In one of the great moments of synchronicity, while I was working on this, the Digital Antiquarian published a piece on Adams’ late period, and specifically the absolute mess of the Starship Titanic computer game, so rather than me covering the same ground, you should pause here and go read The Later Years of Douglas Adams. But the upshot is he spent a lot of time doing not very much of anything, and spawning at least two projects pawned off on others to finish.

After the garbage fire of Starship Titanic and then the strangely prescient h2g2—which mostly failed when it choked out on the the reams of unreadable prose that resulted from a horde of fans trying and failing to write wikipedia in the style of Adams’ guide entries—there was a distinct vibe shift. Whereas interviews with him in the mid 90s tended to have him say things like “I accidentally wrote a best-selling novel” and indicate a general dislike of novel writing as a profession, there seemed to be a thaw, a sense that maybe after a decade-plus resenting his found career, maybe he was ready to accept it and lean back in.

And then he died in the gym at 49.

One of the many maddening things about his death is that we never got to see what his late style would have looked like. His last two good books provide a hint of where he was heading.

And that’s the real value of Salmon of Doubt—the theoretical novel contained within would never have been finished in that form, the rest of the content is largely comprised of articles or blog posts or other trivialities, but it’s the only glimpse of what “Late Adams” would have looked like that we’ll ever get.

As a point of comparison, let continue getting side-tracked and talk about the guy who succeeded Adams as “the satirical genre writer beloved by nerds,” Terry Pratchett. Pratchett started writing novels about the same time Adams did, but as the saying goes, put the amount of energy into writing books that Adams spent avoiding writing them. He also, you know, lived longer, despite also dying younger than he should have. Even if we just scope down to Discworld, Pratchett wrote 40 novels, 28 of which were while Adams was also alive and working. Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, which is Discworld-adjacent at least, came out in 1990, and serves as a useful piece of temporal geography; that book is solidly still operating in “inspired by Douglas Adams” territory, and Pratchett wasn’t yet Terry Pratchett, beloved icon. But somewhere around there at the turn of the decade is where he stops writing comedy fantasy and starts writing satirical masterpieces. “What’s the first truly great Discworld novel?” is the sort of unanswerable question the old web thrived on, despite the fact that the answer is clearly Guards! Guards! from ’89. But the point here is that was book 8 after a decade of constant writing. And thats still a long way away from Going Postal or The Wee Free Men. We never got to see what a “Douglas Adams 8th Novel” looked like, much less a 33rd.

What got me thinking about this was I saw a discussion recently about whom of Adams or Pratchett were the better writer. And again, this is a weird comparison, because Pratchett had a late period that Adams never had. Personally, I think there’s very little Pratchett that’s as good as Adams at his peak, but Pratchett wrote ten times the number of novels Adams did and lived twenty years longer. Yes, Pratchett’s 21st century late period books are probably better than Adam’s early 80s work, but we never got to see what Adams would have done at the same age.

(Of course the real answer is: they’re both great, but PG Wodehouse was better than both of them.)

And this is the underlying frustration of Salmon and the Late Adams that never happened. There’s these little glimpses of what could have been, career paths he didn’t take. It not that hard to imagine a version of Hitchhiker that worked liked Discworld did, picking up new characters and side-series but always just rolling along, a way for the author to knock out a book every year where Arthur Dent encountered whatever Adams was thinking about, where Adams didn’t try to tie it off twice. Or where Adams went the Asimov route and left fiction behind to write thoughtful explanatory non-fiction in the style of Last Chance.

Instead all we have is this. It’s scraps. but scraps I’m grateful for.

---

This is where I put a horizontal line and shift gears dramatically. Something I’ve wondered with increasing frequency over the last decade is who Adams would have turned into. I wonder this, because it’s hard to miss that nearly everybody in Adams’ orbit has turned into a giant asshole. The living non-Eric Ide Pythons, Dawkins and the whole New Atheist movement, the broader 90s Skeptic/Humanist/“Bright” folks all went mask-off the last few years. Even the guy who took over the math puzzles column in Scientific American from Martin Gardner now has a podcast where he rails against “wokeists” and vomits out transphobia. Hell, as I write this, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the definitive biography of Adams and whose first novel was a blatant Adams pastiche, has turned out to be “problematic” at best.

There’s something of a meme in the broader fanbase that it’s a strange relief that Adams died before we found out if he was going to go full racist TERF like all of his friends. I want to believe he wouldn’t, but then I think about the casual viscousness with which Adams slaughtered off Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless—the beloved character who made him famous and rich—and remember why I hope those rumors about ghostwriters are true.

The New Atheists always kind of bugged me for reasons it took me a long time to articulate; I was going to put a longer bit on that theme here, but this piece continues to be proof that if you let something sit in your drafts folder long enough someone else will knock out an article covering the parts you haven’t written yet, and as such The Defector had an absolutely dead-on piece on that whole movement a month or so ago: The Ghosts Of New Atheism Still Haunt Us. Adams goes (mercifully) unmentioned, but recall Dawkins met his wife—Doctor Who’s Romana II herself, Lalla Ward!—after Adams introduced the two of them at a party Adams was hosting, and Adams was a huge sloppy fan of Dawkins and his work.

I bring all this up here and now because one of the pieces in Salmon of Doubt is an interview of Adams by the “American Atheist”, credited to The American Atheist 37, No. 1 which in keeping with Salmon’s poor organization isn’t dated, but a little digging on the web reveals to be the Winter 1998–1999 issue.

It’s incredible, because the questions the person interviewing ask him just don’t compute with Adams. Adams can’t even engage on the world-view the American Atheists have. I’m going to quote the best exchange here:

AMERICAN ATHEISTS: Have you faced any obstacles in your professional life because of your Atheism (bigotry against Atheists), and how did you handle it? How often does this happen?

DNA: Not even remotely. It's an inconceivable idea.

One can easily imagine, and by “imagine” I mean “remember”, other figures from that movement going on and on about how poorly society treats atheists, and instead here Adams just responds with blank incomprehension. Elsewhere in the interview he dismissed their disconnect as a difference between the US and the UK, which is both blatantly a lie but also demonstrates the sort of kindness and empathy one doesn’t expect from the New Atheists. Every response Adams gives has the air of him thinking “what in the world is wrong with you?”

And, here in the twenties, that was my takeaway from reading Salmon again. It’s a book bursting with empathy, kindness, and a fundamentally optimistic take on the absurd world we find ourselves in. A guy too excited about how great things could be to rant about how stupid they are (or, indeed, to put the work into getting there.) A book full of things written by, fundamentally, one of the good guys.

If Adams had lived, I’m pretty sure three things would be true. First, there’d be a rumor every year this this was the year he was finally going to finish a script for the new Doctor Who show despite the fact that this never actually ends up happening. Second, that we never would have been able to buy a completed Salmon of Doubt. Third, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be on twitter asking people to define “a woman.”

In other words: Don't Panic.

On the Other Hand…

…based on the amount of panicked flop sweat coming off of the republicans, this crazy gamble might pay off.

Is this where Gen X—the ignored generation—slides in, saves the country from a wannabe strongman, and then gets no credit? Because that would be pretty great.

C’mon, man

Well, there’s Undecided Voters NOW.

But not, I suspect, the kinds they have in mind. Good work, morons. This is what’s going to motivate the base, huh? Backstabbing the guy who won the last election for us?

That queasy feeling of knowing you’re watching a Historical Event that’s gonna be talked about in your grandkid’s history classes, but you don’t yet know what the end of that conversation is going to be.

My inclination is that this is one of those catastrophic miscalculations, a game-threatening bad play call. The premise is that that “america” has gotten “less sexist” since 2016? As they say, we’re about to run an experiment to see if Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton or if it was because she was a woman.

I think the case against Biden was badly overblown, a case of a panic spiral getting out of control. Letting that debate happen was clearly an act of breathtaking political malpractice, but the what polling there was still showed the difference between the candidates as being within the margin for error? And, wildly under-discussed is how bad polling has gotten the last decade or so. All the polls are just cooked now, we’re a long, long way away from Nate Silver calling all the races correctly ahead of time. And to paraphrase a tweet I saw and now can’t find, “Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel” is the sort of sentence that would have been shocking in 2016, but now the response is like the people in Clue finding another body, just a shrug and then walking back to the other room.

I think this is a huge unforced error, but one after a year of own-goals and stepping on rakes. This should have been one of the easiest cruise-to-reelection second terms of all time, but instead—here we are. There’s a just-so-story–style lesson here about not flaring off your goodwill a year out from the election.

I still don’t believe there are any actual undecided voters. And I simply don’t believe that there was anyone who was unwilling to vote for Biden who is willing to vote for Harris. Who are we even talking about here? What’s this mythical demographic the Dems can now access?

The plural of anecdote is not data, but in my orbit, the only people who actually brought up Biden’s age or ”mental state” were people who were always going to find a reason not to vote for him. Because, of course, none of those people ever bought up the other guy’s mental state. Get ready for that same crowd to start saying things like “well, of course I support a Black woman as president, but Harris…”

There’s three options in this election: “Harm Reduction”, “Fascism”, and “Fuck it, I don’t have enough empathy to tell the difference between the first two.” Anyone who is actually still describing themselves as an “Independent” “Undecided” voter here in the middle of the Disaster of the Twenties is, at best, an Asshole. And is probably actually a Trump voter, but needs the pageantry so they can blame “the libs” for “making them do it”. But this is the solution? Harris is going to unlock the middle-aged white guy asshole vote? Really?

Deep Breath

On the other hand, if you’ve bought in that Biden had to go, this is about as good as solution as exists. And dropping the news after the whole RNC news cycle has burned out makes it clear that they made the decision longer ago than it looks. “White women in the suburbs” is going to be one of the deciding demographics of this one, and Trump does the worst there when he’s being an unhinged racist bully and wanna-be gangster, and Harris is going to be drawing that foul constantly.

Credit where credit is due, there’s no more narrative about how everyone is too old. We’ve got a real sharp contrast between the parties now, let’s see if they can leverage it. Here’s hoping I’m wrong and this’ll move the needle with both of “the youths” and the “mad about Gaza” demographics. And, for once, the Dems have an actual move to respond to the GOP claiming to be “the law and order party”—“convicted felon” vs “former prosecutor” is a hell of a hand to be able to play.

This was winnable in January, it was winnable a month ago, and it’s winnable now. But god damn let’s stop giving up points.

All that said, the ticket is still the same as it has been: Warm Body/Warm Body vs Fascism. President Harris, let’s go.

More Musings on the Starcruiser

Over the various overlapping illnesses and convalescences of the last two months I finally caught up with the rest of the western hemisphere and made my way though Jenny Nicholson’s remarkable four-hour review/port-mortem of Disney’s “Galactic Starcruiser”—The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel.

It’s a outstanding piece of work, not only reviewing her own trip, but also providing context and some attempted root-cause analysis for the whole misbegotten project. Go carve out some time to watch it if you haven’t already. It’s the definitive work on the subject.

We’ve covered the Star Wars Hotel on Icecano before, but that was based on a trip report from someone whose trip went well. Nicholson’s trip didn’t go so well, and the ways systems fail often shed a lot more light on how they really function then when they work as intended.

The thing that has always stuck me about the Starcruiser is that it was so clearly three different attractions:

• A heavily-themed hotel with a direct “side-door” connection to the park
• A collection of low-barrier-to-entry interactive “games” somewhere between an arcade and an escape room
• A 2-day LARP summer camp with a stage show at the end

Those are all pretty good ideas, but why did they do them as one thing? All those ideas would have been so much cooler as an actual fancy hotel connected to the park, and then separately an EPCOT-style “Star Wars Pavillion”, in the style of the current space restaurant or the old The Living Seas “submarine base” you got into via the “Hydrolater”.

I thought Nicholson’s sharpest insight about the whole debacle was that all the “features” of the hotel were things originally promoted as being part of the main Star Wars Land, but the hotel allowed them to put them behind an extra paywall.

I maintain my belief I alluded to last summer that I don’t think the hotel was ever meant to last very long, it really does feel like a short-term experiment to try out a bunch of ideas and tech in a way where they can charge through the nose for access to the “beta”. So many strange decisions make more sense if you assume it was never meant to last for more than about 2 years. (But still! Why build it way out there instead of something you could turn into a more-permanent fixture?)

But that’s all old news; that was stuff we were speculating on before the thing even opened. No, what I’ve been stewing on since I watched this video was the LARP aspect. Nicholson’s video was the first thing I’d seen or read that really dug into what the “role play” aspect of the experience was like and how that worked—or didn’t. And I can’t believe how amateur-hour it was.

Credit where credit was due, Disney was going for something interesting: an open-to-the-public Diet LARP that still had actual NPC characters played by paid actors with storylines and semi-scripted events. Complexity-wise, not all the way up to a “real” LARP, but certainly up above an escape room or a murder mystery party or a ren faire or something of those ilk. Plus, you have to assume basically everyone who will every play it is doing so for the first time, no veteran players. And at a premium price.

One would think this would come with a fairly straightforward set of rules or guidelines; I imagined an email with a title along the lines of “To ensure you have the best possible experience…” And instead, they just… didn’t?

For example, the marketing made a big deal about “starring in your own story” and guests were strongly encouraged to dress up. But they really didn’t want guests to use character names. That seems mostly logistical, with guest profiles and whatnot tied to their real names. That’s the sort of obvious-in-retrospect but not-so-much ahead of time detail that is the reason Session Zero exists! This isn’t Paranoia, it’s not cheating to tell the players how to play the game, just tell them! For $6000, I’d expect to be told ahead of time “please wear costumes but please don’t use a fake name.”

But it’s the lack of any sort of GameMaster/StoryTeller that stunned me. The just-shy of 40-year DM in me kept watching those video clips going “no, no, no, someone put your thumb on the scale there.” The interaction that really got me is the part of the video where she’s trying and failing to get pulled into the First Order story, and is attempting to have a conversation with the Officer actor to make this happen, and they are just talking past each other. And this made my skin crawl, because this is perfect example of a moment where you need to be able to make the “out of game” hand sign and just tell someone what’s happening. I can’t believe there wasn’t a way to break out of kayfabe and ask for help. Again, this is basic session zero safety tools shit. This is shit my 12 year old figured out on his own with his friends. Metaphorically, and maybe literally, there should always be a giant handle you can pull that means “this isn’t working for me”.

Look, this is not an original view, but for 6 grand, you should be able to do everything wrong and still get a killer experience. You shouldn’t be begging an underpaid SoCal improv actor to let you play the game you paid for halfway though your trip.

I get that they were trying to do something new for Disney, but The Mind's Eye Theatre for Vampire came out in 1993. Running a safe and fun LARP is a solved problem.

I get wanting to make something that’s as mainstream and rookie-friendly as possible, and that you don’t want to just appeal to the sort of folks that can tell you who the seven founding clans of the Camarilla were. But something we talk about a lot in tabletop RPGs is “calling for buy-in”, and holy shit clicking CONFIRM ORDER on a screen with a juicy four digit number of dollars on it is the most extreme RPG buy-in I’ve ever heard of.

I know I keep coming back to the price, and that’s partly because for a price that premium you should get an equivalently premium experience, but more importantly: there was no-one casual at this thing. No one “impulse-bought” a trip on the Starcruiser. Everyone there was as bought-in as anyone ever has been, and they couldn’t figure out how to deliver an experience as good as any random night in the park with the other vampires in the sleepy NorCal farming town I went to college in.

It’s tempting to attribute all that to general Disney arrogance, but I don’t think so. It all feels so much stupider than that. Arrogance would be ignoring the prior art, this feels more like no-one could be bothered to find out if there was any? The most expensive piece of half-ass work I have ever seen. This all could have worked? Beyond the obvious budget cuts and trying to scale down, this could have worked. It’s wild to me that they’d spend that much money, and energy, and marketing mindshare, and then not make sure it did. I mean, really, no one employed by Imagineering used to be the Prince of Glendale or something? Unlikely. I don’t think anyone intentionally sandbagged this project, but it sure doesn’t look like anyone involved cared if it was successful.

Weird.

Bad Art is Still Art

It’s “Spicy Takes Week” over at Polygon, and one of the bits they’re kicking off with is: Roger Ebert saying video games are not art is still haunting games.

For everyone that made better choices about how to spend the early 00s than I did, almost two decades ago film critic Roger Ebert claimed that video games were not and could not be art, which was an opinion that the video game–playing denizens of the web took in good humor and weren’t weird about at all. HAHA, of course I am kidding, and instead it turned into a whole thing which still has occasional outbreaks, and the vitrol of the response was in retrospect was an early-warning sign of the forces that would congeal into gamergate and then keep going.

At the time, I thought it was terribly funny, mostly because of the irony of a critic of a new-ish artform that was only recently regarded as art kicking down the ladder behind him, but also because the movie that inspired him to share this view was the 2005 adaptation of DOOM, and look, if that movie was my only data point I’d deny that games were art too.

Whenever the videogames-as-art topic pops back up, I’m always briefly hopeful, because there are actually a lot of interesting topics here—what does it mean for authorship and art if the audience is also invited to be part of that authorship? If video games are art, are tabletop games? Can collaborative art made exclusively for the participants be art? (For the record, yes, yes, and yes.) There’s also fun potential side-order of “games may not be art but can contain art, and even better can be used to create art,” which is where the real juice is.

But no, that’s never what anyone wants to talk about, instead it’s always, as polygon says, about people wanting to sit at what they see as the big kids table without having to think through the implications, with a side-order of the most tedious “is it still art it you make money” arguments you’ve ever seen, surrounded by the toxic sheen of teenagers who don’t think they’re being taken seriously enough.

I think one of the reason’s that the “Ebert thing” specifically has stuck around long past his death is that of all the mainstream critics, he seemed the most likely to be “one of us.” He was always more sympathetic to genre stuff than most of his colleagues. He loved Star Wars! He called out Pauline Kael by name to argue that no, Raiders of the Lost Ark is great, actually. He wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for heavensakes. It sure seems like he’s be the kind of guy that would be all “heck yeah, I love video games!” and instead he said that not only they weren’t at the adults table, but that they could never get there.

Kind of a surprise, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. And look, whatever argument that there might have existed to change Ebert’s mind, a bunch of 16-year olds telling him that Halo of all things was the greatest piece of art ever created was the exact opposite.

Mostly, I’m “yes, and-ing” polygon’s article so I finally have an excise link to this interview with George Lucas at Cannes from a few months ago, which apparently only exists on the wreckage formerly known as twitter?.

The whole interview is great, a classic sharp-and-cranky Lucas interview. It’s all worth watching, but the bit I’m quoting here starts at about 7:40. The interviewer asks him about Martin Scorsese saying that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, and Lucas manages to look even grouchier and with a sort of sigh says "Look. Cinema is the art of a moving image. So if the image moves, then it’s… cinema.” (Seriously, the look on his face, a sort of patronizing exhaustion, is great.)

And I think that really cuts to the core of these weird semantic gatekeeping debates: Cinema you don’t enjoy is still Cinema. Bad Art is Still Art.

There’s so much to enjoy here. It’s not clear from the way he asks the question if the interviewer knows how much backstory there is to that question. Does he know that George and Marty have been friends for half a century? Does he know that Marcia Lucas edited a bunch of Marty’s movies. Does he know Marty has been talking shit about Star Wars since before it was released, in exactly the same way he talks about Marvel movies? Lucas’ demeanor in this is as if that Franco “First Time?” meme came to life, an air that he’s been having this exact conversation since before the guy asking the question was born, and is resigned to continuing to do so for the rest of his life.

But it’s the same set of arguments. It’s not art because it’s fun, or made money, or has spaceships, or because I just didn’t like it very much. I have a list of qualities I associate with art, and I can’t or wont recognize their presence here.

All these arguments, with video games, or superhero movies, or Star Wars or whatever, always centers around the animus of the word “art”, and the desire to make that word into a synonym for “quality”, or more importantly “quality that I, personally, value.”

It always seems to boil down to “I have a lot of emotional investment in this word meaning this exact list of things and I find it threatening whenever someone suggests the tent should be wider,” which semantically is just “TRUKK NOT MUNKY” with extra steps.

Anyway, if people make something for other people to enjoy, it’s art. Even if it’s bad.

Handicapping Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases, Updated

Previously: Handicapping future Doctor Who Blu-Ray releases

…And they’ve announced the next release: Season 25. I’m pretty pleased with myself, since that was one of the ones I predicted for release this year. Also delightfully, this make my boy Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor the first classic series Doctor to have a complete run on blu-ray. This should be a great one, extended cuts on all four stories, new sound mixes, and they really did get the rights to that PBS documentary I was thinking about. Mark Ayres, who did the music for several Seventh Doctor stories, was the last employee of the Radiophonic Workshop when it closed down, and has been a key member of the restoration team for the home video releases has been working hard to make sure the McCoy episodes got the absolute gold-star treatment, and this looks like a fitting conclusion.

On the other hand, I get docked some points since I guessed this would be a three-release year, and it sure looks like they’re only going to do two. Looking at the pattern now, it sure looks like two a year is going to be the standard? That implies they won’t be done until 2030, which is in keeping with this show to finish a set of releases long after the format has been surpassed. I was hoping they’d be done before the kids all moved out of the house, but what can you do? This also means the Jodie Whittaker logo is now the “Classic Who” logo, and is going to stick around probably long past the end of the RTD2 run? That’s funny.

This also means that for the rest of the run, we’re now even between color and black&white seasons left to do, with five of each—1 & 3-6 for B&W, and 7,11,13,16,21 in color (plus the hypothetical but almost certain “Wilderness Years” set.)

Looking back at my predictions from January, I think my reasoning is still sound, but assuming only two a year changes things a little. I genuinely can’t believe they’d have a year with only B&W releases, so that implies a color and B&W every year from here on.

So, re-dealing them out, my revised predictions look like:

• 2024:

  • 15—done.
  • 25—and done.

• 2025:

  • 11—this has got to be less work that 7, even if the rumors are true and they are replacing those dinosaurs.
  • 6—there’s no universe where they’re going to animate “The Space Pirates”, so this is pretty much ready to go?

• 2026:

  • 4—they’ll probably also blow off animating “The Highlanders?”
  • Wilderness Years—for 30th anniversary of the TV movie.

• 2027

  • 16—It’s the Key to Time, so that oughta sell pretty well.
  • 3—I can’t believe they’d release a blu-ray without animating “The Dalek’s Masterplan”, but it’s also five and a half hours long, so who knows.

• 2028

  • 7—it feels like you wait until the last possible second in hopes the prices go down for the compute time needed to fix the color here.
  • 5—The last missing one in this season has the Cybermen, so they’re absolutely going to animate it eventually.

• 2029

  • 21—one last Davison set.
  • 1—the checks should have cleared by this point.

• 2030

  • 13—Zygons, shutting off the lights.

Not the Time For Trick Plays

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats—both the party and the pundit-and-commentary class—have had an unfortunate fascination, a weakness really, for magical-thinking schemes. Magic Bullets, somewhere between a Captain Kirk plan and playing to a theoretical referee. There’s always some “thing” thats going to happen and solve The Problem, so we don’t have to do anything. The Mueller report, the state criminal charges, hell, the Supreme Court is gonna decide in favor of Gore. Anything to avoid doing the actual work. And this usually comes as a late-in-the-day last-ditch effort to make up for not having done the work.

But this thing about swapping out Biden as the candiate really takes the cake.

This seems insane to me. I understand that I like Biden more than most people as far to the left as I am, but that’s not the point. This is a single-issue election: beat Trump. Everything else is commentary. The incumbent in American Presidential elections has a huge structural advantage, and Biden is literally the only guy whose ever beat Trump in an election. Seems like a slam dunk to me, no matter how many bad debates we have.

(Also, buried in the background noise is that neither of them did well in the debate. And the other guy has a pretty hard ceiling of support.)

And look, I get it, there’s stuff he’s doing you hate, there’s issues you disagree on. Me too! But I guarantee whatever issue those are, the game show host will be worse.

I heard a lot the last week that the Dems have this deep bench full of people who could take over as candiate. Great! The 2028 primaries start now. Get them out on the trail today stumping for the sleepy grandpa. Let ‘em show us how great a campaigner they’d be. Whoever makes this happen gets the next nomination. While we’re at it, let’s make sure to tell folks about what this administration has actually pulled off the last couple of years? Take the credit. The fact that there is anyone over the age of 3 who can grump with a straight face that Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime” is a catastrophic PR miss. That’s the work they skipped, and all the hypothetical candidates in the world aren’t going to counteract forgetting to tell anyone what you did.

I love a good trick play as much as the next person who knows what an “onside kick” is, but there’s no crazy stunt where we pull Zaphod Beeblebrox out of a hat and he wins the election for us. The next president is gonna be one of those two guys. Let’s focus on making sure, at the very least, the wrong one doesn’t get there, not daydreaming about fucking unicorns.

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Programming Note: Icecano will be off next week. Regular service resumes on July 15th.