Brodor

From Imgur:

Hodor, in the Millennium Falcon, wearing a Nightmare Moon t-shirt. Your argument is invalid Hodor.


UPDATE:  Someone on Facebook suggested the name "Hoofdor."  I'm ashamed I didn't think of that.

SHTFriday: More reviews of camping stoves

Over at Blue Collar Prepping, I review a trio of stoves from Bushcraft Essentials: The Bushbox, the XL, and the EDCBox.

If you desire to leave a comment at BCP but do not wish to deal with Google+, I encourage you to leave your comment here instead.  All questions will be answered and all statements considered. 

Having trouble collecting my thoughts this week. Wonder why.

So sometime in the last week or so, some rich kid with too much money and too much time on his hands did a terrible thing, and between that and the internet's general knee-jerk reaction has put me in such a terrible mood that I can't really focus my thoughts terribly well.

That, and I realized far too late just how much fiber is in trail mix and spent most of the week with terrible cramps.

I have a few scattered thoughts to share while a much more positive message forms for next week.

• 4 young men and 2 women are dead, and there are people using them to push their political agenda. Someone's life should not be political currency, even if you think you're the good guys.
• If you're going to point a metaphorical shotgun with a wide spread at a crowd of people, don't be shocked if people in the crowd are offended when you pull the trigger, whether you were specifically aiming at them or not.
• You've got one voice. You're entitled to use that voice to speak for exactly one person. You start saying everyone has the same experience as you, and that erases the experiences of people who've had it worse, better, or just merely different to you.
• At the risk of being called an 'ableist' or just plain insensitive, the words of a crazy person are just that.

Coherent thoughts next week. For now I've lost my Ability Toucan and must replace it. I leave you with the internet's current version of logical thought for now:

Things Which Surprise and Confound Me #1d20

Given that most role-playing games are built around combat -- with killing being the main means of character advancement, and weapons & armor being glorified both as prizes worth killing for and epic upgrades to make my glorious character even more lethal -- it's always a surprise to me how so many RPG designers and publishers are staunch liberals who, when they aren't designing games about killing, want to pass laws that would disarm the populace and turn us all into zero-level serfs.

In related news, my political beliefs pretty much guarantee I will never be hired by traditional RPG publishers to write anything, ever.

[AFHOTWTTGS] Kapt. Von vs. The Generic D&D Setting

"Look at us. We're an age so steeped in escapism that we manage to find mundanity in something that doesn't exist, and never will, no matter what your Otherkin friend might say. Why is it accepted fact that elves fire arrows and commune with trees? That was Tolkien's thing - without him, elves would just about be qualified to sell Rice Krispies - and he made dwarves all wear braids and beards and have battleaxes... Are we all but children, playing on the same swing set while J. R. R. is the grumpy dad watching from the park bench and trying not to get aroused?"
-- some other British beardy-weirdy gaming type who is funnier and more successful than me because he's into console gaming and yellow backgrounds

Libellous comments at the expense of Professor Tolkien aside, the man has a point. One of the things that's always ground my gears about D&D is the rather slavish adherence to Appendix N - and yes, yes, there's nothing inherently wrong with the four Tolkienan races, Vancian magic, stealing all your best lines from Robert E. Howard or any of the other flim-flam that fantasy indulges in. I can see the argument for them being the default choice for those players out there who are not in and of themselves predisposed to arguing about the novelty or otherwise of fantasy settings, for whom 'fantasy' is either Middle Earth or, I guess, in these modern times, Westeros.

(As an aside: I'll take a setting with politically interesting humans, ominous armies of undead or whatever amassing on the far side of a capital-W Wall built by our ancestors and patrolled by bastards of all stripes, and dragons that actually do things, thanks. Game of Thrones has a lot to answer for, not least the sudden rise of everyone sticking 'of House' between their characters' names and incompetently running political storylines all over my WoW-RP server... but Westeros itself has potential. ANYWAY.)

There's already quite enough buy-in crap with RPGs - a hobby where you have to fill out forms before you can participate is always going to impose buy-in problems, and if you have to recruit newbies as often as I do you become very, very good at streamlining that process of getting people into the game - without asking people to negotiate a quagmire full of unfamiliar choices. A player like this one is not going to have the patience to wade through your setting bible before they even choose who they want to be - hell, I'm not going to and I am naturally predisposed to playing these games.

'Elf', 'dwarf', 'orc' and - sigh - 'hobbit' have a certain cachet. They are recognisable: they are, as some smug bastard who nevertheless says halfway clever things about D&D now and then puts it, things you can refer to and generally expect people to recognise and have some idea about, regardless of what those people get up to at the weekend.

However. The new players I tend to recruit are people who already know Fantasy and are often in similar positions to me; they look at post-Tolkien generic 'elf' and 'dwarf' and bloody 'hobbit' as concepts, yawn hugely, and ask why we can't play Race for the Galaxy instead. Right now, as I snuffle around the prospect of doing a spot of D&D over the summer holidays, I find myself wondering about how to handle these core notions and the concept of buy-in. My instincts are pulling me every which way. My options, as I see it, are as follows.

1. Roll with the generic D&D experience, regardless of my contempt for it, and save any bright-eyed ideas I might have about My Fantasy Setting for some more appropriate medium.
   
2. Keep the elves and dwarves on board, mechanics unchanged, but alter their manifestations within the setting. My elves are urbanised and virtually extinct, bred in with humans (lots of half-elves), but pure-blood ones occasionally pop up as a kind of parasitic supra-aristocracy in 'high magic' parts of the setting, with playable ones being minor scions on some eldritch elf business of their own; my dwarves are heavy metal theocratic fascists who live in an infernal underworld, summon fire demon things to do their dirty work, and occasionally throw up someone who's not a complete gobshite and runs off to be an adventurer instead. My hobbits are absent without leave because this isn't Middle-Earth and I insist on drawing the line somewhere.
   
3. Say 'sod the lot of them' and maybe allocate the same niches to things I find more interesting, or maybe not. Rakshasa are interesting; they wander into your reality from their own and act like they own the place. Goblins are interesting; the little blighters get everywhere and anyone who's seen and likes Labyrinth should see the merit in a playable one. Hamakai (vulture-headed geezers I might have stolen from Fighting Fantasy and who did something catastrophic and stupid to their civilisation a long time ago) are interesting. Even drow are quite interesting (matriarchal, highly stratified but still 'chaotic' society, murder as legitimate tool of advancement, deranged theocracy, slave-taking... I can work with that) and are more uniquely D&D than anything nicked from Tolkien. Humans are... not especially interesting but feel more or less mandatory so that there's something pretty familiar, something to contrast the fantasy elements against.

1 would be accessible and reassuringly 'this is the D&D thing I've always wanted to try' for the newbies' sake, 2 seems like an unfortunate compromise since the whole point of having elves and dwarves is that you know what they're like, and 3 is intrinsically cool but I worry about creating buy-in issues.

What would you do if you were me?

Palette's Quick & Dirty Grammar Clinic

Herein are some useful tips on how to improve your grammar. I have attempted to make these rules "fast and fun" rather than "painfully accurate", because I understand that some folks' eyes glaze over when they see terms like subjunctive case or subject/verb agreement.

Instead, take it for what it's meant to be:  a lighthearted romp through some minefields of English grammar, using shortcuts that I've either been taught or invented myself, in the hope that we can have some fun while learning at the same time.

If at any time you are confused, comfort yourself with this quotation from James Nicoll:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

And now, let the Grammar Clinic commence! (And if you heard that in Shang Tsung's voice, you're doing it properly.)

Remove Yourself from the Equation
Not sure if you should say "me and him" or "he and I"?   Remove yourself from the sentence and the answer will reveal itself.

Example 1:

• Me and him are going to the store.
• Me and him are is going to the store.
• Him is going to the store?  No, this is clearly wrong. 
• You can double-check by leaving yourself in and taking out the other person: Me is going to the store is also clearly wrong. 

Example 2:

• He and I are going to the store. 
• He and I are is going to the store. 
• He is going to the store.  That's clearly the right answer. 

This also works with proper names, i.e. "Jane and I."

Protip:  If you are still confused, use "we" whenever possible.

Put Yourself Last
All right, but is it "He and I" or "I and he?" As the title says, your pronoun should always come last.

I'm not sure why this is, other than "The English language was carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary."

Lie About Getting Laid

When to use "lie" vs. when to use "lay" is a source of constant confusion for many folks. Let me break it down for you:

Lay is an action you do to another.  A chicken lays an egg, a mother lays her baby down, you get laid by your lover. 

Lie is an action that you take.  You lie down for a nap. A baby refuses to lie quietly. Let sleeping dogs lie. 

You lay a shirt flat, but you lie flat on your back.  

Whom? Him.
Not knowing when to use "whom" is another common error. The easiest way to remember it is "If the answer is 'him', then you use 'whom.'"

Example:

• To whom does this belong?  It belongs to him. 
• Who was at the door? He was at the door. 

Reversies

Sometimes the easiest way to detect proper grammar is to reverse the order of the sentence.  Not sure if you should say "This is her" or "This is she?"   Switch the order around and you should be able to hear the difference:

• "Her is this."  No one talks like this. (I hope!)
• "She is this."  This is correct grammar because it sounds correct!

Author's note:  Nowhere in English exists the rule "If it sounds correct, then it must be correct." I am simply using this technique as a shortcut to help a reader quickly determine which pronoun to use while hoping that their knowledge of spoken English will see them through the rest of the way. 

Similarly, reversing the order of the sentence can help with "was vs. were".  Let us consider the classic sentence "If I were a rich man."

• "Were I a rich man" sounds like a statement. 
• "Was I a rich man" sounds like a question, which this sentence clearly was not. 

Let's do it again, with "I wish I was young again."

• "Was I young again" sounds like a question. 
• "Were I young again" sounds like a statement.

What do both of those sentences have in common?  They're both wishes. Fanciful desires and fantasy use were.  

Conversely, conditional statements like "If it was Tuesday, I was in Belgium" have an inherent question -- in this case, that question is "Was it Tuesday?" 

To conclude this post with a bit of levity, I leave you with this classic Lewis Black line:  If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college. This one is a bit harder, because it's a negative.  But don't worry, just use the same principle:

• Was it not for my horse
• Were it not for my horse

I leave the answer as an exercise for the student. 

Memorial Day

Memorial Day almost always makes me feel sad and incompetent. I grew up in a military family, so I feel a kinship for my brothers and sisters in arms, but not having myself served (I was medically DQ'd from ROTC in college) I feel like I'm not qualified to properly comment on the somberness of the day.

Oh, I know that I'm allowed to comment; I just feel like I lack the proper vocabulary for it, as I've never served nor have I known anyone who died in service. The best I can do is say "I wrote a science fiction story in honor of this day,", and even then that feels like I'm Kermit-flailing my arms in the vague direction of propriety.

Over at Blue Collar Prepping, however, Chaplain Tim offers a soldier's perspective on Memorial Day.  It's worth a read.