Gary Gygax, Dead at 69

Gary Gygax died this morning.

Didn't really know Gary. Only met him once. But I have no idea what kind of person I would be without the fruits of his creativity and labor.

Dungeons & Dragons has been a pillar of my life, starting in childhood, straight up through my time spent working at TSR, the company he founded, and into now. D&D was not merely my hobby, it was my job, and it was the banner under which I made many dear friends, all over the country.

The influence the game has had on every member of modern Western civilization goes largely unrecognized, but it is there. Does that sound grandiose? It is not. It is not. The good gained from D&D's existence wildly outweighs any harm ever done by it, even fake, trumped-up harms imagined in the early '80s.

I ran through the standard D&D joke headlines for this post: "reduced to 0 hp", "failed his save". Har har. But those are ways you describe a simulated "death" in a game. We won't be rolling up a new Zagyg.

Gary Gygax has moved on to the next thing, and though I know nothing about his spiritual state, I genuinely pray that God has mercy on his soul.

Good Things About Leap Day

February, the month that gets its lunch money stolen by cooler months every year, gets a tiny comeuppance today. Other benefits:

• Once every four years, free day of rent
• Early reminder to vote and watch the Olympics
• Opportunity to consider that measurement of time does not equal time
• Slight lengthening of winter prolongs return of allergy season
• Hilarious ribbing of friends with quaternary birthdays
  
• Free donuts at work (only on Fridays)

I'm No Superman

Yesterday morning in the shower (where the water is more creative) I was thinking about how much of my interior life contains cartoon cues. When I'm angry, I imagine a steam whistle burst out the top of my head. When something smells bad, I expect stink lines radiating from it. When I want to move fast, I imagine that I pedal the air for a second and leave a dust cloud behind.

Then I thought, "This would be a good premise for a half-hour comedy program. Just have the main characters react in ways that are hand-drawn animated. But it would have to be done with caution... it's easy to take over-the-top too far." I walked around with that idea for a while.

Then I watched the Scrubs Season 1 DVD my lovely wife got me for Valentine's Day, and it was like, "Oh, well I guess they sort of already did this." And then I also remembered Parker Lewis Can't Lose neither of which is exactly like my idea, but they both come close.

My point, before I lose it completely, is that oh my sweet baby Moses is Scrubs funny. If this show was a person, you would accuse me of being a suck-up, because I laugh at everything it says.

I laugh out loud at even the only slightly funny jokes, and the really funny ones have me stopping the DVD player so I can laugh and repeat the line out loud several times and then laugh some more and then go to another room and regain my composure and then come back and watch the scene again and laugh again, but not quite as hard the second time.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is that it's full of jerks. Funny jerks. I first noticed this watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but maybe you noticed sooner than that--jerks are funny. You didn't notice? This probably says something awful about me. Probably something obvious that I'm just missing.

Even the nice characters you root for are occasionally funny jerks here, and the full-time jerks are most of the reason to watch the show. Dr. Cox's lines are so well written, I want to copy them into a notebook.

We're only five or six episodes into the season, and haven't watched any extras or commentaries, but I see myself sucking on this thing like a pixie stick, trying to learn how they make this show so funny.

71F3H4XX0R

I hate inventing new passwords less now that I've learned to think of it as a creativity exercise.

EPIPHANY UPDATE: Come to think of it, anything I don't like can be viewed as a creativity exercise.

Man Power Mad

The urinals in the men's room at work are missing divider walls, leaving some of them distressingly open. It's meant to look like this:

|u|u|u|u|u|u|

But it actually looks like this:

u|u|u|u|u u

This means that for total coverage, and leaving a one-urinal space, as required by man law, there are only TWO urinals available for simultaneous use:

u|U|u|U|u u

This morning, when no one was around, on a lark, I used the one in the middle:

u|u|U|u|u u

Then, another guy walked in.

I have no idea what the chick equivalent of this is, but it's probably something pretty bad, like telling you you have lipstick on your teeth unsurreptitiously.

He played it cool, and for what it's worth, he made the right choice in a tough spot:

u|u|U|u|U u

Leaving his right flank open, but maintaining proper spacing.


I finished up quickly and moved on to wash my hands, but the compact was breached, and we both knew it.

I probably can't ever be a freemason now.

A Baby Step

Some time ago, I loaded a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot and then forgot about it.

Today, I noticed a series of officious-looking, mystery phrases appearing in the lower right corner of my browser. Excerpt from today's batch:

Transform ation Commission Report
pages from this location
wall street journal
independent record shop specializing
MANAGERIAL BARGAINING POWER
winning kentucky powerball numbers
Interactive Measurement Conversion
MasterCard Worldwide manages
HONORABLE CHIEF JUSTICE
Save Your Time
down arrow keys

So I reviewed what the hell that was all about, and the Internet paranoiac in me was delighted anew.

TMN sends random phrases to search engines from your computer, masking whatever real searches you're doing in a white noise of plausible nonsense. Like falling snow covering your tracks, Google can't follow what I'm looking for from minute to minute.

Of course, Google has unhindered access to everything about my BLOG. But I'll take the baby steps toward reclaiming privacy.

Why I'm Not a Reporter

I've been at my current job site for six months, and only last week I discovered there's a coat hook on the back of my door.

Disillusionment is recognizing the shadow off enlightenment.

Watch out Stomach, Here it Comes

More from the "grow your own" system of wonderful and creepy healthcare:

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells

Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Understand, I don't want to live forever. I just don't want it to suck while I'm alive.

Who's Your Patriarchal Figure?

Since a man is measured by his enemies, I like to go around punching respected people in the stomach. I wish I'd gotten a shot at Gandhi. Because, look at me! Big man!