Works in progress (Dungeons & Dragons)

Picture taken by Krystalle during one of our recent games

Editor’s Note – The following 2000+ word post is not going to be of any interest to you at all unless you’re into tabletop role-playing games (and even then you may not care if you aren’t playing Dungeons and Dragons). I give this warning in advance to spare your precious time.

If you follow my Twitter or Facebook feeds you’re probably aware that, over the last few months, some friends of mine and I have been regularly playing Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It has been a great deal of fun on many levels. Not only am I gaming again on a regular basis (a pastime that has played an integral role in my life since I was in my early teens), but I’m doing so with my family. Finding activities that all of us enjoy can be a bit of a challenge, and the fact role-playing fell into this category just makes it all the more awesome.

The more time I spend gaming these days, the more I realize that during the years where I spent most of my free time playing games like City of Heroes and World of Warcraft I was really just trying to fill the tabletop RPG void in my life. Now that I am tabletop gaming again on a regular basis I realize that it was a less-than-fulfilling replacement. As much fun as I had playing MMORPG’s (and let’s be clear – I DID have a lot of fun), there just isn’t anything quite like making up your OWN stories and having adventures that aren’t pre-determined by a set of programmers. The exhilaration of defeating an epic monster in a scripted encounter is nothing compared to the joy of defeating a party of kobolds while sitting around a table with your friends making Monty Python jokes.

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Sunday in the office with Mike

There is a stillness to the world when you’re up at 7:30 AM on a Sunday morning. At least there is in my house. No televisions are on. No music is playing. Nobody is walking through my office to get to the kitchen or sitting in the living room playing on a console. It’s nice, but at the same time it’s somewhat disturbing. I truly enjoy moments of quiet and solitude when I can find them, but when they occur at any time after the sun comes up it feels somewhat unnatural.

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By the light of the silvery iPad

Image via Silly Rabit, Trix are for Kids on flickr

Back in the late 1980’s Science Fiction and Fantasy author George R. R. Martin cobbled together a group of talented writers to create Wild Cards, a series of alternate history novels set in a universe where super heroes were real. One of the recurring characters in the series was a man named Croyd Crenson, alternately referred to as The Sleeper. In the Wild Cards universe people who were exposed to a virus had a chance to either die, become horribly deformed, or develop extraordinary abilities. The Sleeper was unique in that every time he fell asleep he would be infected with the virus anew, awaking in an entirely different form. Convinced that one day he would draw the “Black Queen” and die as a result of his re-infection with the virus, Crenson fought sleep for weeks on end.

Needless to say, this made him a bit crazy.

As anyone who has seen a Nightmare on Elm Street film can attest to, sleep is important (unless, that is, a scary dude who is covered in burns and has razors on his fingers is going to kill you in it). Going without sleep for long periods of time can have very negative effects on the psyche, but many of us aren’t likely to find ourselves in those kind of situations. What we do commonly face, however, are situations in which we simply do not get enough sleep. The average adult gets about 7 hours of sleep a night, but most studies suggest that in order to be fully rested they should be getting 8. Those numbers come from a study in Consumer Reports back in 1997. Chances are that if you did the same study today we’d probably be getting even less sleep.

One of the reasons? iPads.

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I’m going hungry

Image via just_clicked on flickr

In the 1987 Oliver Stone film Wall Street Michael Douglas, in the role of Gordon Gekko, uttered the famous words that defined the “me” era of the late 1980’s –

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the reviled Mr. Gekko, and while I won’t spoil the movie if you haven’t seen it (and if you haven’t, I do suggest you make an effort to do so) it is safe to say that by the end of the movie the philosophy that he espoused came back to bite him in the ass.

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