The Tao of D&D

I apologize for this.  But if you feel somewhat queasy at the sight of my finger, let me first say that I've been experiencing this personally for two weeks today.

This is the index finger on my left hand, which has turned septic.  I am on medication and I have full access to medical assistance; but I have been told this must run its course.  I feel that I've turned a corner, at least, as this looks better than it did five days ago.  Slightly.

These images show my finger after two hours of letting it drain.  It is all clean lymph and plasma.  No pus.

In any case, this is the reason I haven't worked much on the new wiki.  My apologies for showing the images.  I guess I feel I need some comaraderie.

Pardon me, as I write another short post about politics and not D&D.  There are things I'm never going to understand about the American electoral system.  There's a Democratic primary in South Carolina on Saturday, and a Democratic debate in South Carolina tonight, and every voice I hear is treating these events like they matter ...

But we know that South Carolina is absolutely going to go red in November, no matter who is running, meaning that every democratic voter's opinion about who should be the Democratic president is utterly meaningless ...

No Democrat in South Carolina at tonight's debate, or voting in Saturday's primary, will have dick to say about the next President of the United States ... so who gives a rat's ass who the fuck South Carolinians pick in the primary?  This week of discourse and babblejazz is a waste of goddamn air ... and I guess I just thought someone should say it out loud.  The candidates aren't going to, the news isn't going to and the internet seems dense as lead on the subject.

I get how the system works and why, historically, it was built this way.  What I don't get is why people are incapable of viewing the inanity of it intelligently.


P.S.
Consistent D&D content available for a $3 donation to my patreon account.

In a few days, my partner Tamara is going to be sworn in as a permanent resident in Canada.  On that day she will receive the right to work, to own property, to run a business ... and to bring herself to any doctor in the country receiving patients and receive free healthcare.

Yesterday, because I have been unsatisfied with my doctor over the last six months, due to changes in his attention to his practice, I made a phone call.  My former doctor's office is 700 steps (according to my phone) from my front door.  I called a different doctor's office, in another direction, that is 1,100 steps from my front door.  I made an appointment yesterday for a "meet and greet" at 10:50 AM this morning.  I arrived and waited 2 minutes in the doctor's office.  I waited 1 minute in the examination room.  By 11:05, I had a new doctor, he had complete knowledge of my conditions from the national computer health system, he had addressed the finger I cut a piece out of on Saturday, and I had a prescription in my pocket for the ramapril I've been taking the last five months to lower my blood pressure.

People in America talk about a national single-payer health care system meaning, (a) they won't be allowed to choose their doctor; and (b) it will mean long wait times.

Bullshit.

It stuns me to think that, despite the 15 months of lawyers and jumping through hoops with Immigration Canada, and the money that involved, that suddenly my American partner is able to go to a doctor of her choice, have her eyes examined properly, have an appointment made to address her cataracts, then to have the procedure, with the participation of nurses, doctors, accountants, administrators and so on, without insurance and without it costing any money, simply because now she is not only an American but is also a Canadian resident.  And, point in fact, not a citizen.  She is not a citizen of this country.  Yet because I am a citizen, and because I have stood up for her, my country has agreed that I'm valuable enough to be personally serviced in this way.  My partner, my country says, deserves to be treated for free because she is my partner.  And that is the only reason my country needs.

During my university years, I took several political science courses at the U of C, particularly those relating to the history of Canadian politics and political theory.  One prof I had, Dr. Jacobson, was fond of disparaging John F. Kennedy, whom he saw as a doofus ~ not because he was a Democrat but because ~ as Dr. Jacobson would stress ~ he didn't understand the first thing about what a government is for.  In his opinion, Kennedy was famous for saying the stupidest thing ever said about government:

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you ~ ask what you can do for your country.  My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."

Kennedy in the above pretends to speak for the country; but in reality, he's only able to speak for the country's government.  Americans are fond of saying that the president is the leader of the country, but in reality, the people of the country do not take their orders from the president, or from any other member of the government.  The government establishes laws and the people choose whether or not to abide by those laws.  But no one above the level of a police officer orders you to follow a law; and the officer does not give a good-goddamn what you can do for him.

We elect governments and create a bureaucracy in order that the government will serve US, and OUR needs, not the government's.  Deciding what needs are to be served is and ought to be above the government's pay grade.  When I, as a citizen, cannot go to my government and say, "I love this woman, and I expect you to keep her healthy so that we may be happy and live a long life together," then my government gives no more of a good-goddamn about me than does a policeman pushing me back behind a barricade or ordering me to the side of the road.  When I cannot make a reasonable request of my government and expect to receive it, then I am a slave.

If my American partner was living in America right now, that's what she would be.  But I fell in love with her, and brought her here ... and though I did it all wrong, and feared what my country might say about it, I've learned to my pleasure that, in fact, my country is here to serve me.  Dr. Jacobson was right.

When your American government tells you that you're only entitled to live when you give money to a private corporation, who will then decide whether or not you're healthy enough to insure ... when your American government tells you that you're entitled only to go to certain hospitals according to the private insurance you've had to buy ... and when you're told by your American government that the value of your life, and the life of your partner, and the lives of your children, is subject to the decisions of corporations and hospitals who are motivated by money, and not by your personal well-being, then you are a slave.

And when others rise up, and say, "Let's not be slaves, like other countries, who do not ask their people to subject themselves to the dictates of privately-driven profit," and still others make up lies about not being able to choose your doctor or about how long you'll have to wait before you receive care, and you do not see this as a scheme to ensure that you remain a slave, then you are not only a slave, but you are a fool also.

I, with Tamara, feel sorry for you.

As it happens, I have every reason to continue loving my country.

Following the situation we were in last week, Tamara and I have just heard from our lawyer, about an hour ago.  Following the receipt of the immigration landing fee, she is approved by the government to remain permanently in Canada.  The "interview" we have on the 25th is a rubber stamp.  We have to present ourselves together, to prove we're both here, but the result is a foregone conclusion.  She's approved to stay.

This has been a long 15 months, and a long nearly 18 years altogether.  As it happens, we still owe a thousand dollars to the lawyer, but on this there is no time limit (apart from being sure it does get paid in reasonable order).  After the ceremony on the 25th, Tamara will wait 2-3 weeks for her papers; and then we can begin moving ahead on seeing what we can do with the health care system regarding her vision and her diabetes.

We're all in a state of shock here.  Disbelief, I think, is the appropriate word.  We were told to go out and celebrate but we're having trouble letting go of the stick.  We were so sure this was going to end in a horrible wreck, the idea that it won't seems antithetical.

Still, here we are.  Happy.  Thank you, Canada.

Let me start by saying thank you to those who have jumped to support me, both financially and emotionally, in these times of troubles.  I am very grateful.

A good friend of mine has recently launched his web service company ~ and as a gift he's providing me with an unlimited traditional wiki.  It is live now, at http://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/.  This will be officially my fourth D&D wiki since 2009 ~ and hopefully I won't have to relaunch it again.  My friend assures me that whatever happens, he'll be able to continue hosting me.

This means that, as it did in early 2018, my wiki will be moving.  The plan this time around is to rebuild the wiki from scratch, since I don't have to worry about blogger going down.  In fact, I'll probably leave the blogger wiki active, for those who have made bookmarks and probably don't want to change them.

I've given this some thought.  The move last time taught me that shifting the content is a mere annoyance compared to shifting more than 10,000 page links.  My wiki is also 350 pages larger than it was two years ago.  As such, I've decided the first step is to create ALL the page titles up front, so that any existing page can be linked before the first actual content is copied.  This is about 1,400 pages; I was able to create 603 titles today (since about 1:30pm).  As it happens, coincidentally, I have a little time off as yet another restaurant undergoes a renovation.  This has allowed me to write more than usual this last week or so.

Going back to a traditional wiki grants me an improvement in tools that I've had to forego using a blog.  I don't know who remembers, but I looked into several wikis back in late 2017, only to find they did not have enough memory or that they had content rules that did not suit my needs.  Both of those restrictions are now gone.

A proper wiki enables me to search for orphans (nothing links to the page) and dead ends (the page links to nothing else).  It allows me to make changes without worries that the changes will be lost, as all changes are recorded in a history.  It means the content is no longer posted linearally, so that I can control what is seen first.  I haven't tested this yet, but I believe it gives me a menu so that the reader can skip down the page, like with wikipedia.  And, once again, since I can fix any bad changes that might be made, it means I can allow other people to participate.

Here's what I learned from previous volunteers who joined my wiki:

1.  It wasn't as much fun as they expected.  They learned that making rule and content pages for public view is taxing and somewhat less than emotionally rewarding.

2.  Wiki-design does require some experience and training.

3.  They found themselves intimidated by both my output and the quality of appearance I created, or so I was told, and this turned out to be discouraging.

4.  It is hard to invent something worthy to add.

5.  They did not want to bother me.

6.  Fixing grammar and spelling mistakes sucks.

This is my 3000th post.

This, in addition to the 107 posts I have written on the closed blog, The Higher Path.  It has taken me quite some time to reach this number of posts ~ and as it happened, I did not notice myself approaching this number.  I only noticed with my last post, two days ago, that I was at 2,999.  Just in time, as it happened.

The subject today is not a comfortable one.  And it isn't about D&D.  I've been holding off writing it for exactly 15 months now ~ and even now, I can't tell the whole story.

Some readers will have been following me long enough to have heard the name Tamara.  My partner Tamara is an American citizen living here in Canada with me, as she has been doing since May 2, 2002.  We came here together after my living with her a month in Flint, Michigan, where she was when we met.  After that lengthy time, there was no way of our remaining together without coming back here to Calgary, as at that time my daughter was only 13.

At first, we did not know for sure what to do.  Tamara came into Canada at a time when U.S. citizens did not need a passport to cross the border.  Still, we knew that sooner or later people here were going to notice that this non-citizen had been in the country for at least six months ~ at which point we feared our being separated.  I will tell you frankly: neither her nor I could bear the very idea.  And so we did the very best thing we could do: we did nothing.

Whether that was right or not became a constant discussion of the first years of our being together.  In the end, knowing it was wrong, we loved each other.  We still do, more deeply than we did then.  And so Tamara stayed here and we made an agreement very early on.  In order to keep from compounding one wrong upon another, Tamara agreed that while she was in Canada, she would not get a job.  She would not work under the table.  This would mean that whatever I did, I would be forced to support her, no matter what.

And so I have, these last 17 years.  If some readers have wondered from time to time why I seem to be perpetually in a situation of dire straits, this is why.  Throughout the 2000s, I had good work; and I had a very good job for the first half of the last decade.  But it has been five years since I have been able to find a proper office position, most of that time being dominated by the fall in oil prices, which has produced a recession here in Alberta that will not go away.  Since 2015 I have been forced to work a series of low-end, largely restaurant-based jobs, doing things like cooking or customer service, just to make ends meet.  If it had not been for Patreon, we wouldn't have made it.

Progressively, Tamara and I have become older.  I was 37 when she came to Canada; she was 43.  Today I am 55 and Tamara is 61.  And as we have both aged, this mess we put ourselves into has become increasingly more difficult.  No one ever did turn up to oust Tamara from the country; but health issues have meant that from time to time I've had to pay for things out of my own pocket, because while I have health care, she does not.

This came to a head in July to October of 2018.  At that time, Tamara began to develop cataracts, a clouding of the lens in the eye which leads to a decrease in vision.  We looked into how to have them treated, which informed us that ~ even if we had the money ~ the procedure could not be done in Canada on a U.S. citizen because it was considered optional.  This meant, to manage the issue, we'd have to send her back to the States.

She has no family there or connections.  And we haven't the money to set her up properly to live on her own, particularly as she was finding it increasingly hard to see.  So we took the next best option, as of November 2018.  We came clean.

We sought out a lawyer and explained our situation.  For these last 15 months, we have been jumping through hoops in the hopes of retaining immigrant status.  This has so far cost us about $5,000 ... which we have managed to pay through austerity, hard work and (about 10%) with the help of Patreon and direct donations.  It has been a year of self-denial and a great deal of stress; and yet, steadily, we've gotten closer and closer to our goal.  This, despite the very real danger that we will be forcibly separated after being together for 17+ years.  And worse, Tamara has been reduced to where she is forced to get about with a white cane, to let cars and others know that she can't see all that well.  I am right here, beside her, making her as safe as I can; but progressively, we're losing this battle too.

On top of all this, we found out through the government examining Tamara to see if she had a communicable disease (standard policy, as most immigrants are just arrived from overseas) that she has diabetes type-2.  As I say, our age is catching up to us.  I'm fine and healthy; I recently had a full battery of tests to check me for cancer and what else, but I'm good to go for a while longer.

Writing this today, we're closing in on the last step.  Tamara managed to obtain her first ever passport from the United States in mid-January, which included our travelling to American soil (so-called) at the U.S. Embassy in western Canada.  Thank the spirits the office was in Calgary and not in Vancouver, Winnipeg or Edmonton.  I don't know how we would have swung a trip like that.

And now we have an interview to meet with the government immigration officer on February 25th, to look us over personally.  We've been together so long, I don't think there are any questions they can ask us that won't produce positive results ~ but of course we're both scared and stressed out of our minds at this point.

And we've also been asked for an "immigration landing fee" of $490.  To be produced by the 22nd.

We don't have it.  My friends might, but I've been around the horn once already and most of them are hurting from the recession also.  The tradespeople I know are struggling to hold onto their property as their facing constant and inconsistent layoffs.

I can't afford to take an advance from work.  There'd be no way to pay for March.

And so, hat in hand ... can the reader help?  Can you make a donation?

I don't need all of it.  I'll get whatever I need from someplace, one way or another.  Supporting Tamara all these years, I've learned how to eat hand-to-mouth ambidextrously.  But I have turned to the internet in times of troubles before ~ and you've come through for me before.  I apologize that I have to ask again.

Please.

I love her.


UPDATE:

Please do not donate.  We've received the money already.  I'm on the verge of tears.

"We are participating in these massive experiments in behavioral psychology; organizational behavior.  We are the lab rats."

"Change itself really overwhelms people's brains and it does really bad things to people ... when you think about new antidepressant drugs; when a pharmaceutical company develops one, you can't just test it out on humans and see what happens.  So they start them out on rats to see if they work.  But then the question becomes, how do you make a rat depressed ~ to see if the antidepressant works? ... they had to come up with something and this is it: unpredictable chronic mild stress protocol.  All they do is make tiny changes in the rat's environment.  So you tilt its cage a little bit; or you change its bedding, you put in wet bedding; or you put in shavings that have urine and feces from a different animal, from a different rat; or you might change the cycle of night and day to throw it off; or play sounds of a predator bird for ten minutes and then stop ... you just make small changes, but they have to be unpredictable."

Dan Lyons, describing his book, Lab Rats

I strongly recommend the whole video; Lyons is an excellent, relaxed speaker and a realist.  I haven't read the book yet, but the premise fits my own experience with working in office environments, particularly the sort where training sessions and purposeless work was de rigueur.

I find the above piece interesting, as it suggests that anti-depressant drugs don't actually remove depression; they simply stop you from caring about the momentary discomforts and inconsistencies that cause stress.  This explains so much about the behaviour of those friends I've had who were put on anti-depressants, as was my first wife, after she became a quadrapelegic.  They don't "free" you to think positively about things.  They simply cause you not to care about the constant changes going on around you.  I should go to the hospital because something is wrong?  Whatever.  The boss has cut my pay by 20%?  Sure.  My team won the superbowl?  Meh.  Anti-depressants even you out; and apparently, since they're designed to help this rat live in some other rat's feces, that makes a lot of sense now.

 Lyons talks about the effort that companies make to sell you on things as "amazing experiences," innundating the discussion with allusions to other people who were moved or changed by this experience you're about to have, or how this seminar revitalized other players in the industry, or how hugely successful people swear by this technique or that "tool" where it comes to their success.  This tactic is said to work; it is said to achieve results; but if you've never been a part of a company seminar, allow me to bring you up to speed.

First of all, the person who BUYS the seminar is never part of the group who TAKE the seminar.  You take it because you're told to, because your job is at stake, and you are not given a choice.  You're also told its for the good of the company and success and all that, but you don't go because it's good for the company.  You go because it's your job.

Secondly, the people who enjoy seminars are the same people who plague their co-workers' lives with frivilous noise that steadily becomes antagonizing.  For example:  I once worked in a payables department of a 350+ retail chain, on a floor with 125 other people.  And every time someone on the floor had a birthday, a birthday party was organized.  With this many people, it means (with some double and even a triple-birthday) that you're being asked to leave your desk for twenty minutes in order to a) sing and b) cheerfully participate.  The sort of people who love to organize birthday parties are work love seminars.  Let's call these people "boosters."

Yes, it is just like Office Space.

As a seminar-selling company representative, it is your job to sell the boss on the whole "this would be great for the company" spin, so your boss knows what to say when it gets sold to YOU.  And then, it is your job to pretend to like it, while being around a small percentage of boosters who actually like it.  Boosters are nobodies; they never get promoted past a minimal management position, but they are always the first to report any lack of enthusiasm.  Guess how much fun this is?  Yes, that's right.  It is like laying in a cage full of someone else's shit.

On every level, reading most online content related to D&D is chock full of boosterism.  The pattern is somewhat predictable.  Begin with a good hard sale of the game preferably by connecting it with some very recent cultural phenomenon, like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones.  Nevermind that D&D dwarfs these things in staying power, we must first prove the game has legitimacy by attaching it to something hugely popular with scads of people who will never play an RPG.

Next, talk about how hugely popular D&D is.  Yes, okay, we just had to put a crutch under it's arm to give you a reason to care, but that just proves how HUGELY popular this roleplaying game is.  While pitching the game on its merits, be sure to talk about the vast number of genres and mythologies it embraces, and how wonderful it is because of all the complexity and imagination of structure in includes.  Don't worry about saying this, because in the very next paragraph we're going to talk about YOU won't have any problem at all stepping into the game and becoming instantly popular with your friends.  After all, it uses just pencils and paper!  It's not like it's so complicated it needs modern technology!

From here, it's all over the map.  The dice are fun, there are all these great books, the new character sheets get rid of any need for you to do math, and hey!  You don't need rules.  Rules are for suckers.  And so, just like that, you're ready to play!  Yay you!

I know a lot of these web pages pitch so hard because they're selling something on the side: dice or sheets or whatever.  Most of the comments are obviously sock-puppets because there's a scam being sold here.  But I also know that a fair number of the commenters ARE actual players, because we see these same people on every post in the game's blogosphere.  Someone writes a fairly humdrum, middle-of-the-road post on running an elf in a campaign, with no new ideas, pretty much the same stuff we can find in Dragon Magazines forty years ago ... and someone comments, "Great article!  Best ever!  I can't wait to run my next elf!"

I find myself raising an eyebrow at that recently appeared rat turd and thinking, "There's no way that's mine."

Now, I will measure my commitment to this game, its concept, its value and its brilliance against anyone's.  I don't just talk, I do.  And if you, dear reader, were to sit across from me at a table and ask me to talk about D&D all night, I will talk your ear right off your head.  But this boosterism is crap.  The game's genius is not based on how cool the elf character is.  It outclasses garbage television sputum on levels I can't begin to describe ~ as evidenced by the graveyard of ex-fantasy television shows and films that a very few still remember (all once used to boost D&D).  I don't think it is particularly relevant to sell dice and character sheets to would-be players ~ that's like being concerned with what the boss gets out of the seminar we're being forced to attend.

What I do think is there is a small number of people who simply like to boost stuff.  Who also, unfortunately, know how to find a keyboard with their fingers.  They don't really care what they're boosting ~ in a year or two it will be whatever the new show is on Netflix or Disney+ ... and five years after that it will be whatever pyramid scheme they've got themselves into.  But this is what's come across their plate right now so damn it, they're going to boost this to the moon.  It's a damn pity they never seem to have any real, useful advice to give ~ that is, that hasn't already been written down or vlogged by a hundred other people already.

I'm sorry to say this; it sounds like an excuse or some Aesop's Fable, but the boosterism is certain to break hearts.  Thinking about those seminars, that small, sarcastic crew I inevitably found myself standing with did hate those long afternoons, but hell ~ we were being paid and we weren't dumb enough to fall for that crap.  The boosters were just riding the wave.  The really sad group, however, were those young enough or desperate enough to try to buy into the bullshit.  They didn't know what the kool-aid was, they didn't know why they were drinking it, all they knew ~ or thought ~ was that if they wanted to get ahead in the business world, they had to really buy in and believe.  And I don't doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of tombstones in the hearts of little children who built up their hopes, bought the books, paid the emotional cost for admission and ended up feeling stupid ... and ashamed to admit they ever tried to play.  I don't doubt there have been millions of pristine copies of D&D books and modules, at $60 a copy,  that were pulped or found their way into landfills, because the spines were never cracked often enough to get beat up with playing.  I'm sure those would-be DMs, who were told, "It's surprisingly easy to get into the game," learned instead that it is surprising how little real information or help they were given, once they had the books in their hands.

I'm sure, because I've met these people far, far more often than I've randomly met real players.

Of the five people at work (besides myself) who have an interest in D&D, one DMs.  One used to play but hasn't played in two years.  And three have never played.  They'd like to.  And they've asked me to run them.  But I can't do it because I simply cannot take on another campaign; and I can't fold these people into the campaigns that are already stuffed.  There's no point in giving them one game, because what would that accomplish?  Should I invite you over to my huge, palace-like house to swim in my pool and hang in my jacuzzi, only to tell you it will never happen again?  I'm not that kind of asshole.

Ten thousand boostering webpages and all the flippery they sell will not fill the hole inside people who always wanted to play but could not learn how.  It's just making kool-aid and pushing it for these people to drink, "for their own good."  I know now that what's needed will never come to pass: D&D has become one of the worst scams on the internet ... and I often feel ashamed to have ever been any part of it.

I've tried to change that.  I've tried to build an island of sanity.  But it is a very, very tiny island; and not at all on the radar.  It cannot compare with the cacophony of voices screaming how wonderful it is that the game is complex, and how wonderful it is that the game is so easy to play.

Maybe writing a blog is my form of anti-depressant.