Review: God is Great, God is Good

So I am home in Arkansas and it turns out that when you post on your public blog that you are an atheist you can be pretty sure that your grandparents will read it. So a while back I had lunch with my grandfather and we spent it talking about my atheism. His arguments, if I recall correctly, were "What do you think of the scientific principle that something cannot come from nothing," which is a) not scientific but rather philosophic, and b) actually directly contradicted by scientific evidence; "Evolution cannot explain love or morality," which is just false; and "If you are right, we will neither of us ever know it, but if I am right, you lose," which is of course Pascal's Wager, which is a) not a particularly valid reason for believing anything, b) based on a false dichotomy - if the only choices were between christianity and atheism, sure, but they aren't - you also have islam and buddhism and hinduism and scientology and raelianism and shinto and wicca and so forth and so on, and you have to pick the right one out of hundreds if not thousands of belief systems or you lose, and c) based on the assumption that neither being christian nor atheist has any relevant impact on the quality of this life, which is questionable at best. In fact, my grandfather went on to say that he thought there was no life better than that lived by christian principles, which I think is only a compelling line of reasoning if you have basically no experience with godless people in this country. But to my grandfather's credit, he politely listened to me explain all (or at least most) of the above, and it seemed to make sense to him. See I don't get my family at all - they are very intelligent and even open-minded to a point but this has never prevented them from being creationists or using Pascal's Wager as an argument. Anyway then my grandfather handed me a book called God is Great, God is Good which is a selection of essays by various Christians, pretty much explicitly targeted at what is called the "New Atheists" - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and so forth. So I'm going to go through this book and review it, but first I should make my position vis-a-vis the "New Atheists" clear.

I am not a New Atheist. I have never read any of Dawkins or Hitchens, though I probably should. I follow two New Atheist blogs: Pharyngula, by PZ Myers, and Daylight Atheism, by Ebonmuse. And I recommend both of these, particularly Daylight Atheism, and I agree with their positions on issues nine times out of ten, but I am not a New Atheist. What I am, first and foremost, is an Existentialist - which means that Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky are the people I agree with far more often - and you may have noticed that half of those people are christian. If you read Camus' The Plague (and you really should), it presents several characters, each with their own way of coping with the world. One of these characters is a Jesuit priest named Father Paneloux, and at the crux of the novel, he and almost all of the other important characters watch the effects of an experimental serum administered to a child afflicted with bubonic plague. The only effect the serum has is to drag the child's death throes out almost interminably, and afterward, one of the characters asks Father Paneloux essentially, How can you believe in God if this is what He does? Paneloux takes a long time to reach an answer, and when he does, it is that God is unknowable, that his ways are not ours, and rather than use this, as it is almost always used in my experience, to simply dismiss the problem of evil and to retreat into a fantasy divorced from reality (easy enough to do when you're middle-class and white in the First World), Paneloux instead comes to the apparently horrific conclusion that one's will must be in accord with God's, and that if God's will is to slowly torture a child to death, then we too must try to will that. Ultimately, the conclusion Paneloux reaches is that it is illogical for a priest to call in a doctor. Needless to say, this conclusion kills him when he too succumbs to plague. (I can't really do Paneloux or Camus justice here - you really must read the novel.) But the point is that this way of coping with the world is nowhere condemned in Camus' novel. It's portrayed, rather, as a meaningful and valid existential choice. It's not the one I choose, but the point is that I can have respect for and even approve of the religious choice.

Now, do I think most religious people in the United States or in the world have made that choice? Hell no. They live in denial. They make excuses for God. Do I think that religion, at least as practiced in the United States, is bad for society? God, yes. (Anyone who wants me to have even an iota of respect for their beliefs, why don't you stop lying to children about how evolution is false, and more importantly, how about you stop denying people I love equal rights? Seems reasonable enough to me.)

Where I differ from the New Atheists is this: they take truth to be the primary (and almost the only) criterion for beliefs, although to their credit they realize that they cannot be talking about absolute truth, but only whether beliefs are more or less true than other beliefs. This I cannot do - it is imperative, true, to ruthlessly confront oneself with reality as much as possible, to really plumb the depths of the absurdity of one's beliefs. But if, after that, one chooses to continue to believe the absurd (and I do not think there are truly non-absurd options available) then this, I think, is making one's existential choice, and that is good. But anyway, this apologetics book I have here: let's go through it.

1) William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God"

Bit of a disadvantage here, never having actually read Dawkins, but I'm more concerned with Craig's arguments than I am in his reading of Dawkins anyway, so onward. Okay, first we have the Cosmological Argument, which Craig formulates as follows:

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Note that the word "begin" is doing a lot of lifting for Craig. Had he left it out, and said instead, "Everything that exists has a cause," then it could be of course objected that this would require that God have a cause, and that cause would need a cause, and so forth into an infinite regress which Craig so deplores. However, it is unclear that the statement, "Everything that begins to exist has a cause," is any more true than the statement, "Everything that exists has a cause." It is, technically, a weaker claim, but as we have absolutely no experience of anything that exists without, at some point, having begun to exist, we are forced to conclude that, as far as we can tell, the statements have equivalent truth value. But one of them allows Craig's argument, and one spirals it into an infinite regress! To prefer one statement over the other is nothing more than special pleading - everything that exists has a cause, except God. It doesn't apply to him.

Further, I don't think that premise 1 is even true. My understanding of quantum physics has it that, for instance, particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously form and annihilate in vacuum. Whether that amounts under any circumstances to the spontaneous creation of a universe, I don't know. But it does cast doubt on Craig's argument.

But you know, I'm fine with the conclusion of the argument. The universe (as we know it, that is, from the Big Bang until now) has a cause. However, my understanding of cosmology (and I am admittedly a layman) is that the state of the universe just pre-Big Bang was a singularity, which means that no information about prior states of the universe was preserved. Far from confirming Craig's claim that the Big Bang represents creation ex nihilo, it seems to me that this makes his statement completely unjustified. The most we can say about the universe pre-Big Bang is that we can say nothing about it. Note, too, that as time and space and the laws of physics were created during the Big Bang, the universe prior to that may well have had no resemblance to our own in any intelligible respect - including entropy and causation itself. This makes Craig's subsequent argument mostly moot, but let's follow along anyway - he makes some rather awful mistakes which I feel I should point out.

Let's first examine Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor, which he says states that one should not multiply causes beyond necessity. I believe that a more accurate rendition of the principle would be that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Sadly, Ockham's Razor is, though an incredibly useful rule of thumb, and indeed one of the most reliable heuristics we have, it is not absolute. And it certainly cannot be used to say that an eternal entity is more probable than an infinite regress of events. To speak of an eternal entity is to posit an entirely new, unknown species of entity. This is the kind of thing Ockham's Razor is designed to prevent. To try to simply count the entities involved and then to say the one with fewer entities wins is to entirely miss the point of Ockham's Razor. Further: if we were to follow Craig's argument to its logical conclusion, we would be forced to admit that the only universe that exists is one moment of our consciousness, with illusory memories and illusory knowledge of an illusory externality. This (since Craig fatuously has declared "mind" to be "startlingly simple" - perhaps he means merely "divine mind", but I am led to think otherwise) would be by far the simplest explanation for the universe, and the one with the fewest entities. Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor has inadvertently but irresistibly led him to solipsism. I'm going to assert that solipsism is an unacceptable point of view and move on, if there aren't any objections.

Now Craig gets to the good stuff - the cause of the universe, he argues, must be personal, because it is timeless and immaterial, and there are only two things which possess these properties: mind, and abstract numbers. Leaving aside his extremely controversial and not-well-justified statement about the nature of numbers, we turn to his assertion that there exists this thing called 'mind' and that it is both timeless and immaterial. William: you do not get to posit things like that. What you are calling 'mind' is, first of all, inextricably bound to time. Your consciousness is dragged whether it will or no from one moment to the next. This is not timelessness. If you wish to reply that memory counts, first, no - there is an enormous and qualitative difference between memory and experience, and second, we have no memory of the future, which again doesn't look a lot like timelessness. As Lewis Carroll might put it, "It's a poor sort of timeless mind that only works one way." Second, positing that mind is immaterial flies in the face of all the scientific evidence which points to the identity of the human mind and the human brain - the case of Phineas Gage is the most obvious example, but the scientific literature is simply resplendent with these cases. The problem of consciousness - and it is a problem - is something I will discuss in a later essay - I merely wish to point out here how totally unjustified Craig's wild assertions are.

Craig has another argument for why the cause of the universe must be personal, and it is even worse. Given that the first cause of the universe is beginningless, and that the universe began to exist a finite amount of time ago, the cause of the universe must be personal, he says, for a non-personal cause would have created the universe infinitely long ago, and only a personal cause could choose to create the universe a finite amount of time ago. William: literally two paragraphs ago, you called the first cause of the universe "timeless". As in, "outside of time". Now you are using the word "beginningless" to suggest, instead of timelessness, merely an infinite past. Hey, William, pop quiz: when was the universe, including space and time, created? How about, "at the beginning of time"? There's no such thing as "before time" - the concept is incoherent. I'm going to assume good faith here, William, and merely conclude that you are an idiot. Is this the best Christendom can muster against the New Atheists? (Answer: no, it's not. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, does a much better job handling Dawkins at the end of this book. He's still wrong, but he's much less stupid, and much more of a gentleman, than is Craig. I know, of course, that the tone in this debate is vitriolic on both sides, and I'm (obviously) okay with that, but the only thing worse than an idiot is a smug idiot, and Craig couldn't be smugger if he had just been awarded top prize in the annual "You're Always Right" competition for the third year running and Dawkins was the guy who had to hand the trophy to him.)

I'm also pretty sure Craig is blatantly misreading Dawkins, but I don't have The God Delusion on hand, so this will have to remain an unwarranted aspersion (but if someone wants to compare p. 17 of GIGGIG to p. 77 of The God Delusion, you can see for yourself.)

More to follow.

Edit: Augh the font and line-spacing is all wrong I can't fix it. Does anyone know how because otherwise we are all stuck reading something with inconsistent formatting oh nooo.

Local Music!

Well so short update I am on leave from school and therefore back in Arkansas and it is, in general, boring as hell. On the other hand, I'm starting to edge into the local music scene and freelance music criticism, and have what is sort of kind of my first music criticism gig. Which is nice. Anyway I will post the details on that later; here are my thoughts on my introduction to the music of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Tyrannosaurus Chicken, Attack of the Chicken

Tyrannosaurus Chicken is a two-person folk/bluegrass band, which means that everyone plays everything, but generally speaking, Smilin' Bob Lewis is the one on the banjo with the gruff bluesman's voice, and Rachel Ammons is the one on the fiddle with the twangy voice. And as might be expected, their album Attack of the Chicken is pretty unpolished: the percussion (foot drums and hi-hats only) lags, and Ammons has absolutely no idea when to come in with the back-up vocals on one of the tracks. Of course, if you care that much about polish, then "two-person folk/bluegrass band" is probably not a descriptor that appeals to you. Tyrannosaurus Chicken has it where it counts: both of them are damn good at their favorite instruments, and the songs are a charming mix of bluesy sentiments - which, in my experience, are rare to hear from a female vocalist, and Ammons does a good job with them - and apocalyptic imagery.

A must for: people who put III as their favorite Zeppelin album (really? over Physical Graffiti? huh.)

For the rest of us: Hey, III was still a great album. Plus, they're named Tyrannosaurus Chicken. That is awesome.

Randall Shreve, The Entertainer

Ponderous, bloated, and self-indulgent, Randall Shreve's The Entertainer staggers onto the stage already inebriated, slumps at the piano, and attempts to bang out a song or two. He gets through them alright, but he has to slow them way down, and it's painful to watch. The music's devoid of energy, and pulls listlessly from stereotypical carnival music on the one hand, and the worst posturings of Muse and Radiohead on the other. The lyrics are narcissistic and can't decide if the conceit of the album is carnival or cabaret or Hollywood. If the album had a bright spot, it would be "Karma Girl", which is reminiscent of Radiohead in more than just the title. "You make color out of all my gray/ I can't repay that with a cheap cliché," Shreve sings, and apparently the conclusion he reaches is that if he could just get enough cheap clichés, they'll eventually add up to something worthwhile.

A must for: self-obsessed teenagers in tight pants and eyeliner, whom no one understands, and who think that Thom Yorke would be a better vocalist if he sounded just a bit whinier.

For the rest of us: Unremarkable in every way except its mediocrity. Pass.

Candy Lee, The Gate

My first experience with Candy Lee was opening the lyrics booklet for this album and saying, and I quote, "Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck is this shit?" Then I actually listened to the album, and let me tell you, never has music this good been paired with lyrics this bad, and yes, the music and the lyrics are all from Lee. It sounds vaguely like Sixpence None the Richer, but Lee's voice is more given to rococo turns and Andrews Sisters-type harmonies. It's a voice which, impressively, can pull off lyrics like "What makes this reality/ Any different from a dream?/ Well, maybe the truth is/ That things aren't always what they seem," a gem from "Existential Dilemma". (Note: Existentialism and Solipsism are not the same thing.) The songs make extensive and good use of strings and winds, and are musically complex enough that I could almost overlook the lyrics if it weren't for the fact that - did I not mention this yet? - they're so damn preachy with their inane sentiment. I had to invent the word "sophomoralistic" just so I could adequately describe them. Still, for every failing of the lyrics, there's a corresponding triumph of the music. Very confusing.

A must for: people who are legitimately surprised by the fact that what the speaker of "Another Island" really needed all along was inner peace.

For the rest of us: I mean, the music's worth loving, and the lyrics are worth hating, so I'm gonna say that's a win all round.

Hardaway & The Commoners, Off the Record

Hardaway & The Commoners were introduced to me as "not the best hip-hop group, but certainly the best local one". Now, I know very little about hip-hop, and even less about local hip-hop, but I'm inclined to believe that claim. Off the Record bills itself as "certified organic hip-hop", a phrase whose meaning remains obscure through the radio static intro and minimalist lead-in track, until you hit "Automatic" where it becomes clear: this is fresh. The guitar/keyboard hooks are great, the saxophone solo is excellent, the lyrics are almost always interesting and tight, and by the time a digital voice informs us that the sounds we are listening to are "certified 100% organic. Live MCs, no gimmicks", we've pretty much already figured out what it means. Mostly, the album's laid back, with occasional bursts of manic energy. Highlights are "Automatic", the beat poem "21st & Forever" (which contains the lines "Mediocrity called, and asked us to turn down the music/ Because they keep a nine-to-five to stay alive"), the cool groove of "Tangible Thoughts", and "Leave It at That", which is one of the best examples of Off the Record's laid-back, minimalist attitude.

A must for: I dunno, people who really like good hip-hop? Ain't got snark for this one, it's good.

For the rest of us: I said it's good. Listen to it.

Golden Age, indeed.

You know this song. And if you're anything like me, your reaction to it is, "oh, excellent one-hit wonder there, Mr. Dolby." It's difficult to imagine anything like a steady, consistently good artistic output from the creator of "She Blinded Me With Science". And, apparently, you would be wrong. The Golden Age of Wireless (1982) is difficult to categorize - there's a lot of Bowie in there, some Elvis Costello, but what it reminds me of most is Donald Fagen's masterpiece of the same year, The Nightfly. I'm going to justify that comparison eventually.

The Golden Age of Wireless is an album with a bit of a complicated history - it's been through a couple of versions, and the one I have is actually the 1984 CD release (it's what was on iTunes). There's songs missing, songs rearranged, and, most notably, Thomas Dolby's big hit (which came out after the initial release of Wireless) shoehorned into the beginning to boost sales. The dysjunct is very apparent. "She Blinded Me With Science" is unrestrained, bouncy quirkiness - a far cry from the chilly Cold-War-era paranoia of "One of Our Submarines", for instance, or the subtle modulations and almost atonal arpeggios of "Radio Silence". Understand: "She Blinded Me With Science" isn't a radical departure - all the elements are still there: the syncopated synth-drums, the thin melodic lines, the lyrical sensibilities (the ones which aren't just putting more exclamation marks after "Science!") - but here in Wireless, everything's cooler, more anaesthetic, less...one-hit wonder.

Dolby doesn't really engage the viscera that much, targeting instead the intellectual half of the listener - even his hit is a sort of vulgar engaging of the vulgar intellect ("Science!!") - not to knock it or anything - and it is this which most reminds me of The Nightfly. (Well, that and the bass hooks and piano work in "Weightless".) Fagen's work was always cool, never stooped to engaging the viscera - was more groovy, certainly, but not in a grips-you "Feel Good Inc." sort of way. No doubt the retro-futuristic feel both albums have for a listener in 2011 (certainly intentional for Fagen - Dolby seems to have been going for just "futuristic", but time has slapped a "retro-" to the front of that) has something to do with the perceived similarity - it calls to mind Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and the whole pulp genre (thought to expand on later, possibly: "Pulp engages the viscera of the intellect").

Point is, Dolby's lyrics are lined with wires and technical details that enhance rather than distracting from the humanness he's primarily concerned with - most of these songs are poignant ("Europa and the Pirate Twins" is even heartbreaking, and the mention of a hoverport in the final verse does nothing to detract from that, though it does intersect oddly with the old-world-nationalistic refrains of "Oh My Country, Europa" and "Ta République, Europa"). Two further miscellaneous facts: "Commercial Breakup" is very Elvis Costello, and "Brooklyn is crawling/ With famous people" is a fantastic line (from "Airwaves").

In conclusion: The Golden Age of Wireless is an intellectually engaging work, full of both musical and lyrical subtlety. Dolby really does not deserve the one-hit wonder status that's become attached to him.

The Perfect Game

So crash course in RPG theory: the basic trichotomy that gets tossed around is the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist, which in its extreme cases works like this:

Gamist thought tends to treat RPGs as though they were games like Go or Chess - that is, there's a focus on making the game mechanically balanced, and the point of the game is for the players to win - to beat the DM. Games like old-school D&D and I think to some extent Paranoia tend toward a gamist perspective - and I have to say: that's fine, and that can certainly be fun, but it's not intuitive to me - which is interesting, as I am extremely competetive with regard to board games. RPGs just don't hit those same switches with me, I suppose. Scorpio has a heavily gamist bent, and that has led to some friction in the past. (Jack, near as I can tell, doesn't really have any particular bent, but tends in practice to fit somewhere between narrativist and gamist, probably weighted toward narrativist.)

Narrativist thought views the players as providing the protagonists for a story, the rest of which is written by the GM. Extremely narrativist games, like Polaris or Universalis, dispense with the GM entirely, instead relying on things like ritualistic interplayer negotiation (for Polaris) or an interplayer economy (for Universalis) to determine things about the game world and resolve conflicts. I'm much more in sympathy with the narrativist perspective, obviously, but even though I have no problem viewing my own life, human life in general, and indeed the life of humanity as a whole as a fiction - and in fact probably couldn't view it any other way if I tried - I am not entirely satisfied with narrativist gaming.

Simulationist thought tries to model the game world as accurately and realistically as possible. It tends toward the complex rules systems - Shadowrun, for instance, which can fill several books with mostly rules and tables of vehicle stats, or D&D 3.5, the Dungeon Master's guide for which is very possibly the most stultifyingly boring RPG book I have ever read - and the point is that a realistically modeled world is more immersive - which is a relatively difficult quality to achieve when what you're looking at is the people you're in college with, a bunch of funny-shaped dice, and a Word document with a lot of numbers on it. And here's a weird thing: perhaps because worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of fiction, I am at heart a zealous simulationist. I know that byzantinely complex rulesets are no fun to play with. I understand that there is relatively little difference between rolling to throw a grenade, rolling to determine scatter, rolling the target's dodge, and rolling the target's damage soak, and and the GM simply interpreting the results of one die roll, except that the first one is a bitch to do and will make combat unreasonably long. But, dammit, it feels different. And of course there's no way so far as I can tell to have quick, clean combat resolution and accurately modeled conflicts. The rules hack for Shadowrun I and my players are working on is supposed to contain various levels of granularity, to allow you to make that trade-off on a case-by-case basis, but that's a makeshift solution to an apparently insoluble problem.

But that's only a problem because we have a limited amount of processing power, yeah? Given the ability to easily remember a very large number of rules and the ability to perform complex calculations very quickly, simulationist games really come into their own. More than that - we can get more complex than that - truly three-dimensional space combat, computer hacking that involves actually finding holes in the programs and systems the game has constructed, magic duels with ebbing and flowing mana, attacks and counterattacks on your opponent's qi, fights won by wits and swordsmanship rather than by dice rolls (which, just between you and me, has always seemed like an unsatisfactory conflict resolution mechanic - though comparing static numbers is worse). And since we're operating theoretically - the things we could do with unlimited processing power! And so on until, like the map of Borges' cartographers, our simulation is precisely as complex and as intuitive as the universe itself. That, to my mind, is the perfect game.

Turns out, we can't do that. So near as I can figure, the difference between an actual simulationist and an actual gamist or narrativist is that the simulationist probably sighs and looks up at the stars, half-imagining what cannot be, before going and playing a gamist or narrativist game.

Addendum: that perspective on games certainly opens one up to accusations of escapism. That's valid insofar as games are actually used as an escape from the burden of actually doing something with one's life. And this runs into the problem of me being a very bad existentialist. See, I think that a person's life is inherently meaningless - that the meaning of one's life is self-determined. I then want to turn around and tell some people that the meaning they seem to be deriving from their life doesn't count - people who work their way up the company ladder and then retire to a country home and a yacht, people who work in a factory nine-to-five and drink beer with their friends on the weekends in front of the TV - in fact, my (totally unreasonable) instinct is to exclude politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers from the category of people who have meaningful lives, leaving only scientists, artists, and people like Joshua Abraham Norton I, Emperor of these United States and Lord Protector of Mexico, whose lives are in themselves such interesting narratives that it counts as production. Of course, this is only my own personal existential choice - these are the lives that I personally would find meaningful.

So, back to the point, which is: I don't think playing games is sufficient for a meaningful life - it certainly is not for me, and I want to say (but can't) that it isn't for anyone. However, I do think that it can be part of one - whether I end up doing the art thing or the life-as-narrative thing (scientist being, unfortunately, not really one of my options), that games can add to it. I learn a lot about storytelling, among other things, from playing these games, and that is valuable. It's just not valuable enough, on its own. (I should reread Nabokov's The Defense, which if I remember correctly is on more or less the same subject, but with chess instead of Shadowrun.)

Further addendum: it's pretty clear that many of my positions are philosophically incoherent. I'm okay with that - in fact, it's somewhat deliberate. The line of reasoning is this: I am never going to be right about everything. If I attempt to construct a coherent philosophical weltanshauung, any error in the initial premises is like to be amplified until I find myself believing unacceptable things once I get down to particulars. Besides, I have a certain amount of faith in human instinct - not in any mystical way, but simply that our ethics, our art, and our drive to know are all products of pretty nonrational impulses, which means we already have pretty okay heuristics for a lot of things. Not, obviously, unimprovable, and I'm certainly not rejecting reason - I can be logically convinced that some of my heuristics are bad and should be changed - but by and large, I think it's pretty reasonable to go with one's initial reactions on a lot of things.

A new thing

So I was reading this blog and watching the associated video series, both of which are a good deal of fun, and I thought to myself, hey, the people I play RPGs with are just as interesting and we have a good deal of fun and maybe I should write up some of that. In the past I've hesitated to do that because really, who wants to hear about people playing RPGs? But the answer appears on further reflection to be "precisely the people I'd want to talk to about people playing RPGs", so that works out well.

So the games I'm currently involved in:

I'm running Shadowrun 4e (urban fantasy + cyberpunk dystopia), set in Hong Kong, with a group of relatively small-fry PCs trying to make some sort of living in the midst of crime syndicates fighting it out. We all love the setting, we all hate the system, and we're trying to kick it to pieces and make a new one, which is apparently just the done thing with Shadowrun.

Apocalypse World is, as you might imagine, set in a post-apocalyptic world. (See Freakangels for a pretty good approximation. Also see Freakangels because it's good.) There's hard choices and constant vying for power in the ruins of a once-great civilization. So sometimes you agonize over what to do with the loyal lieutenant who's also murdering relatively innocent people with his mind, and sometimes you shoot him in the face with a ballista. Good fun.

There's a game of In A Wicked Age, which is more or less an episodic Arabian Nights-style game which over the course of a campaign sort of develops its own mythology based on your previous sessions, which is fun. Also fun: the fact that every session ends in a massive clusterfuck. In A Wicked Age has been on hiatus for four weeks, so in the interim, we've been playing one-shots of Universalis, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, and Dread again.

And sometimes there's also Paranoia, which is roughly 1984 meets the Marx Brothers. Which is just as fun as that sounds.

Just as important as the games we play are the people we play them with (I think I will not use their real names, just as a formality):

Jack is the guy who runs Apocalypse World and In A Wicked Age. He's really good at winning arguments, game design theory, and GMing awkward moral choices. He's less good at playing characters, but realizes this, so he uses random personality generators and tends to play people who really like punching things - as he does in my Shadowrun game. And that works well.

Scorpio is the other guy who knows a lot about game design - mostly from hanging out with professional game designers on the internet and having played D&D more or less since he could walk. As a rule, he and Jack are pretty good about poking at my incoherent vague feelings about games and trying to render them intelligible so they can disagree vehemently. He's very concerned with game mechanics, and his medic character in Apocalypse World is currently making my character's group of machine cultists look sane by comparison.

Kali, in games as in life, is very often the one holding everything together. In Shadowrun, she plays a fairly normal decent ex-smuggler who has a couple of fantastically nuanced relationships in his backstory and is trying to hold together a team consisting of of himself, Jack's amoral face-puncher, Sam's currently soulless killing machine, and Bertrand's deeply inept mage. She's also been working on a Lovecraft game system that in its first incarnation was a horrifying frankenstein of four or five different systems. Her character in Apocalypse World is, again, the sane one - a dredlocked techie who serves as a go-between for Scorpio's psycho and power-hungry medic, and my crazy cult.

Sam is a deeply creepy child, but that's okay. Her character in Shadowrun already had an excellent backstory consisting entirely of pain and death and the most terrifyingly Machiavellian crimelord - and then he got his soul eaten by an eldritch being in-game and is now incapable of feeling emotion, and must kill hundreds of people before he dies of apathy.

Bertrand is a genius logician, and also manages to be extremely well-versed in Kafka, philosophy, and foreign film - from whence he derives truly excellent characters, such as the genial sociopathic gambler who shows his affection for Bertrand's Shadowrun character by trying to have him assassinated every year as a birthday present.

Moishe is a skinny ur-nebbish who runs a damn good game of Paranoia, and also of Dread. Only seen him as a player in In A Wicked Age, so I dunno much about his play style.

Ann is kickass, but I've only seen her play in IAWA and also my one-shot Don't Rest Your Head session, which was less successful than it could have been, so again, dunno much about her play style. She seems to be good at it, though.

Jill I played Dogs in the Vineyard with, back when Jack was running that. Now she plays In A Wicked Age. She's not bad, but she's not a person you'd expect to powergame - and IAWA is really not a system that you can powergame in - but that certainly doesn't stop her from trying.

And that's the group, more or less. So I'll go this direction with the blog for now, trying not to forget to also write about music and stuff. In other news - I like Duran Duran way too much.

In which I continue to have excellent taste in music.

Actually you know what: you want to read a review of Plastic Beach, go read the Midnight Insomniac's. I'll just say that, where Demon Days is an acoustic nighttime junkyard, Plastic Beach is a glitzy casino resort. Also that the music video for Stylo is awesome, and Superfast Jellyfish is a much, much better song than you think it is.

What I really should talk about is Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, which I've been putting off because, frankly, this is a daunting album to review. But here goes anyway:

Steven Wilson is of course the creative genius behind Porcupine Tree, a more-or-less contemporary prog rock band, whose musical trajectory is an interesting one: initially drugged-out psychedelia, it evolved into a more alt-metal sound, with I think mixed success. Check out On the Sunday of Life... for the early sound, Deadwing and In Absentia for the later sound. There's a lot in the middle there too, but I haven't really listened to it. But anyway, the point is that Insurgentes is a very different sound from any of that. It's a very introverted sound, a sort of musical omphaloskepsis, fading between beautiful melodic reveries and heavy dissonant pounding. It's an intensely beautiful industrial dreamscape. The first track, Harmony Korine - look, there's no way I can do it any kind of justice. Just go listen to it, now. Okay? Now listen to it again. I try to be frugal with superlatives, but that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, Allegri's "Miserere", Gravenhurst's "Black Holes in the Sand", and everything Simon & Garfunkel wrote notwithstanding. (I've talked about Gravenhurst, yeah? Can't do it here, I already used up my superlatives for this post.) Abandoner is next, with a hollow drum loop overlaid with high wavering melodic lines, leading into immense monolithic guitar chords toward the end. Salvaging rides hard, with air support via guitar and synthesizer, which melts into a constantly modulating orchestral melody, before crashing back into what sounds something like hitting a piano with the sostenuto pedal down - intensely dissonant, and very enjoyable. Veneno Para Las Hadas starts with a monotone bassline under the same three distant chords, and Wilson's quiet vocals and a subtle, excellent use of piano - and though it builds a little from there, it's content to do basically that for the song. And that's excellent. No Twilight Within the Courts of the Sun is an eight-and-a-half-minute virtuosic display - a very complex piece reminiscent of King Crimson, with excellent performances on drums, guitar, and piano. And here I have to resist the impulse to go through every single track on the album, because all of them are worth discussion. So I will just say that Insurgentes is a complex, layered work which far surpasses in depth, consistency, and beauty, Steven Wilson's earlier work. And while the album, on first listen, may well seem monochromatic - quiet melodic piano alternating with heavy dissonant chords - repeated listens will reveal a meticulously crafted, intellectual, gorgeous piece of work.

What hath science wrought.

Opening shot: sand gusts through the streets of a long-deserted Mediterranean town. The camera pans past abandoned stucco buildings, overgrown with weeds.

Text: They Thought It Was Over

Camera continues to pan, as music begins to fade in. It is tinny, as though played through an old radio. A gust of sand completely obscures the camera’s view, and clears to reveal a shot centered on a small stucco building, door hanging off the hinges, part of the roof fallen in. The camera zooms.

Text: But Some Memories Never Fade

Music becomes recognizable: “As Time Goes By”, a oldies-style instrumental rendition. Camera zooms through doorway; a crackling radio stands on a table across the room, illuminated by light shining through the doorway.

Text: And Some Wounds

Zoom in on radio, music crescendoes accordingly. A silhouette of a man wearing a fedora falls across the radio.

Text: Never Heal

Silhouette raises gun, fires. Radio sparks. Cut to black as music ceases.

Fade in: timpani sounds once, extreme close up of a man’s mouth, chewing a toothpick.

Mouth: Play it, Sam.

Brief shot of Samuel L. Jackson cocking a shotgun, fade to black.

Another timpani; Bruce Willis and Robert Downey, Jr. walk slowly toward camera, putting sunglasses on.

Bruce Willis: Louis – [an enormous explosion in the background] – I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The timpani begin to accelerate, heightening the excitement. Robert Downey, Jr. stands atop a ruined building, shouting to a courtyard full of dehumanized faceless soldiers.

Robert Downey, Jr.: [sneering] Round up the usual suspects!

Brief shots, now, one timpani per: Samuel L. Jackson, dual-wielding shotguns, in the smoking ruins of a building, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Robert Downey, Jr., face contorted with hatred, standing in the rain, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Angelina Jolie, wearing a kevlar corset and holding a katana, steps toward the camera and poses as it zooms; Bruce Willis, wearing a fedora and an overcoat, turns only his head toward the camera as it zooms down the length of the bar; Christopher Lee, above a machine torso and behind a mostly metal face, stands and glowers down at the camera. Silence.

Bruce Willis steps onscreen, looking down at the camera, pistol in hand. Points pistol at camera.

Bruce Willis: [sardonically] Here’s looking at you, kid. [Fires. Cut to black.]

Text: Return

Text: To

Text: Casablanca

Bruce Willis crouches behind the bar, reloading his pistol. Fragments of glass fall to the floor around him.

Bruce Willis: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world – [slams clip into pistol] – she walks into mine.

He turns to fire over the bar. Cut to view across bar. He fires into the camera.

Text: In Theaters June 6