This week includes the 32nd anniversary of my delivery into this manifold life, which is to say, my birthday.

Some of you might be thinking about getting me something, though I suspect a large percentage of you potential gift-givers are my parents, to whom this post almost certainly does not apply. Just in case you wanted to express your birthday wishes through generous materialism or filthy lucre, though, I am happy to oblige you with easy venues.

First, take note of this, my Amazon wishlist, and its atomic components: Max Headroom DVDs and a William Gibson novel. Don’t pay too much attention to the order of the contents, though. Lower items just mean, in some cases, that I’ve wanted the thing for longer.

Of course, I welcome unasked-for books and DVDs and games, as you no doubt have exceptional taste and, hey, who am I to pass up free stuff?

Or, in light of my upcoming and unexpected trip to PAX Prime in Seattle, you can just donate cash to keep me fed and drunk, or, rather, watered. Or rather drunk. I’m on a shoestring budget for this show, with big plans to donate blood (to get the cookies) and to rent myself out as an experienced Fiasco player. That these are terrible ideas, doomed to financial failure, should tell you just how ill-equipped I am for Seatown. So, equip me. Slip me ten bucks and I’ll drink coffee in your honor.

Here’s that donate button:

If you get me something, be it a nice comment here on the blog or a few dollars to eat in the Emerald City or some kind of spinning media disc, thank you for taking the time and effort to do that. Really. I make fun of my materialism (and my birthday, and my pauperism), but I appreciate you coming by the blog and reading what’s here, truly. That’s already some kind of gift to me, so thank you for that. Happy birthday, me!

But, seriously, I’m also out of cigars. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

I should be making stuff, not keeping stuff.

My closet is full of boxes. In those boxes are old RPG books, collected over twenty years. This isn’t some fine collection, though. These are used books with bent corners. These are used games with dented boxes. These aren’t collectibles. I don’t really know what they are.

It’s not just the boxes of RPG books. These are just the straws that are breaking my back. I’ve got stacks of old papers, notebooks, note cards, notepads, filled with notes for games and books that one day I thought I might write. All of these competing with the notes I put down daily in my Moleskine — the ideas I now think I might write. How long do I hold on to a stack of notes before I accept one of two truths:

1. The idea is not getting written.
2. The idea is absorbed enough into my imagination that it’ll surface one day, notes or no notes.

The idea, I suppose, was that I’d keep all these worn books and old video games and ill-kept comics and pile them up. Then I’d climb the pile and, from there, reach my potential. Never happened.

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My local record store is selling the remastered Beatles CDs for ten bucks each today, so I resolved to get one—just one—to make up for the fact that I don’t have any Beatles albums in the house, except for Revolver, which I got half of when I got married. The album I bought today? Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The White Album[1]. Because, come on.

Why didn’t I own any Beatles music? Ubiquity. I don’t own a lot of music staples because I simply don’t need to own them to hear them. The Beatles are so soaked into the popular cultural fabric that the dye may never come out. They’re like water—I’d have to go to a desert to get away from them, and if I’m in a desert, real or proverbial, Yellow Submarine will be the least of my worries.

But I’m not trying to get away from them. I’m not sure I could if I tried. I listened to them on vinyl back in the day, over and over again, to the point that I can summon them up on my internal jukebox if I need to, and they’re so tightly woven into my high-school years that, for me, remembering Beatles songs feels more apt than hearing them. If that makes any sense.

Still, I’m a pretty nostalgic guy, so here I am not remembering but listening to The Beatles on the day one of my best friends from high school turns 31. (”They say it’s your birthday,” Tony.)

Yeah, maybe I should’ve gotten Magical Mystery Tour, because I could be the walrus, or Abbey Road, because it’s Abbey Road. There’s something to be said for Past Masters, obviously (one example of that something is “Hey Jude”), but that thing will presumably be worth regular price somewhere down the line. I have fond memories of “Norwegian Wood” and “Michelle” (as anyone else who has ever loved a girl named Michelle probably does), but these are not songs that I own anymore. As of today, I still don’t own them again.

For all this talk of memories, though, it’s not like my memory of the songs is that clear.[2] My memory is full of holes, but between those holes are palpable details that tighten around my lungs like a coil of rope.

I can’t remember what device I played those records on (it probably wasn’t but may have been the same Fisher-Price turntable that I remember pretty clearly playing the Return of the Jedi soundtrack on), but I know I inherited those records from my mother, who I assume has them now again. I couldn’t remember any of the lyrics to “Within You Without You” until I played it again today, but I know I used to sit on this hideous red shag rug in my room and listen to that song over and over again and feel deep. That rug, which was in our dining room when I was a kid, had this orange-and-yellow shape in it that was either a rounded hourglass or an infinity symbol, which makes my mental image of me sitting on it (I had lengthening hair and knick-knack necklaces back then) all the more ridiculous. I would’ve been surrounded by ill-kept D&D boxed sets, too. I’m not sure what I thought the song was about, back then, but I dug that sitar. I’m sure I read something significant into the fact that it was a song written by Harrison, who was so meaningfully not John or Paul.

This is now as long ago as I was years-old at the time. (Whereas then I was a fifteen-year-old lunatic, today I am more than two whole fifteen-year-old lunatics fused together.) The song plays differently to me today.

Try to realise it’s all within yourself/no-one else can make you change/And to see you’re really only very small/and life flows on within you and without you.

Still reasonably significant to me. Where once I thought little of people who didn’t see how big a deal shit like feelings and life were, though, now I’m struck by how bold the Beatles had to be to say things as plainly as they did—and not just George. Sure, maybe it’s easier to sing about love and shit when you’re rich and high, but the these songs somehow play as meaningful even when the meaning is just a reminder of simple things. As a kid, I imagine I saw that line, “no-one else can make you change,” as some kind of girding phrase, telling me I could be impervious to the pain that people wanted to inflict on my weirdly nerdy self. Now it’s a simple, even rote reminder that if I want to be better than I am—a better person or just better at the things I do—I have to make that happen, not someone else. Simple, but not untrue.

Now, when Harrison sings about seeing beyond yourself and finding peace of mind, I don’t feel the wisdom flowing into me and I don’t nod along. I just feel small. I’m reminded that, outside of this room, the world is full of dudes who would shiv me for my iPod and that, if I die, I’ll be a short obit. Existential dread from a Beatles song? I’m not the same kid from that shag rug, for better or worse.

But it’s got me thinking, and that’s always been the point, right?

These songs aren’t the same as I remember them, but neither is obliterating the other. Now I’ve got the ones I heard through my warped teenage ears and the ones I hear through my warped adult ears, and with them as a reference point, I can more easily measure some of the ground between that lovesick kid and the person (I won’t say adult) writing this now. I’m reminded that these songs are something that exist wholly separate from me and my memories.

So now I can now hear these songs without the emotional echo chamber of my own neuroses distorting them. I can play the song as I’ve remembered it, within me, or I can just shut up and enjoy it for a change, without me. That’s worth the ten bucks.

Music: “Within You Without You,” The Beatles

^{1. As I understand it, The White Album doesn’t get italicized, because it isn’t the real name of the record.}

^{2. My mental jukebox is so defective that I am almost incapable of singing “Hey Jude” without it becoming Pink Floyd’s “Hey You.” Yeah, I know.}

Messier M31

Later this week, I turn something like thirty-one years old. I don’t know exactly, I sort of stopped counting when I realized I was going to fail to be a novelist by age thirty.

Thirty-one is a self number, which I think means it recognizes its own reflection as an image, unlike my dog. Messier object M31 is also known as the Andromeda Galaxy. 31 is a prime number, properly written in Roman numerals as XXXI.

My birthday is August 27th, the same date the Visigoths abandoned their sack of Rome in 410 BCE. You might better remember it for the Battles of Castelbar, Dresden, and Akhalzic. I know I don’t. I share the birthday with people like Sarah Chalke (Scrubs) and German figure-skater Sarah Hecken. Famed bow-tie-wearing weirdo Paul Reubens and Swedish maniac Peter Stormare will also be celebrating their birthdays with me — but not with me, you understand. Lyndon B. Johnson was born the same day, too, so poor a little out for him, and everyone else Wikipedia lists born on the date. Remember, if they were born after 1978 and they’re listed in Wikipedia, they’ve done more with their lives than I have.

If you feel like perusing it, here’s the link to my Amazon wish list. It’s a tad out of date, but at last check I still don’t own any of that stuff, so shop with confidence, people. There’s a fine mix of things in there, either for entertaining me or for making me smarter. You know you want me to be smarter.

Noise: Ministry, “Khyber Pass” (thanks to The Hurt Locker)

Looking back, I can put my finger on part of it I couldn’t reach before.

Chris Anderson, author of FREE, argued to Malcolm Gladwell that writers don’t need to be paid, but the people who wrangle writers do. Writers, after all, get reputation and praise, so they don’t need to be paid, is Anderson’s argument. Editors don’t get the same praise, so they earn money. This is like directors and actors working for Oscar noms and thumbs-up while studio executives get a cut of the box office. We could discuss several ways the argument is flawed — Guy LeCharles Gonzalez has a great post about here about Free versus Freemium — but I’m going to start with this one: it poisons my excitement.

Part of what troubled me about this argument of writing for free being not just viable (which I do not contest) but also fine and unavoidable (which I think is tricky and, coming from a working editor, insidious) is the way it interacts with the messages of your Merlin Manns and your Matt Joneses. They advocate enthusiasm and creation over doubt and preparation. As Matt Jones puts it, “get excited and make things.”

The idea is to not fret over the perfect process, to avoid all the bullshit deterrents and procrastination, to dodge those obstacles we put in our own path and just go forward. Just make things. Make a lot of things and increase our average; embrace the ones that stand out and celebrate the fact that you’re making things, even if some of them suck.

Do it because you love to do it. Be excited, and use that excitement. It’s a wonderful and useful message — a psychic pry bar. Good stuff.

But how can I trust that message if I think the reason it’s being given to me is to keep me happy and singing and toiling in my plot of land so the guy above me can get paid out of the ad revenues for posting my work to his blog?

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From Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s book, Free:

“Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas [news]paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?

[via The New Yorker]

Or, as it was put at a site called The Awl:

What [Chris Anderson] is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of “attention-paid” enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.

This is neo-feudal just like the blood-drinking monster society of Vampire: The Requiem was neo-feudal. Yes, the people at the ground level will continue to produce those things the more lordly need to survive — whether the “content” is crops or writing or blood — but the ones getting rich off that, the vassals who shuttle that content from the serfs to the lords, are all vampires, feeding, feeding, feeding. They keep the serfs fed well enough to labor but hungry enough to fear and love the teat, and like vampires these vassals might fight and fuck but they don’t create. They take advantage of people desperate to be heard. They take.

The notion is that the free economy created when everyone is publishing solely for free, writing just for the privilege of being read, investigating simply for the mad props of being in the know, will be the end of scarcity and that this will be great for the people with the microphones and speakers, who charge people to stand within earshot, and great for the open-mic talent, who write and speak and sing and report in exchange for a turn on stage. What’s unclear here — what’s still scarce in this model — is what these artists are eating and where these journalists are sleeping. How are their bills paid? Can they eat fan mail and send their Google Analytics data to their landlords as rent?

That Chris Anderson is both an editor and an author means that, in this interstitial economy, he got paid both to get others to write and to write his own book. Would you have written it for free, Mr. Anderson? I write for free because I’ve found no value in withholding my work, but if I continue to write for free, and discipline myself, can I be paid as my own motivating force? As my own visionary editor for my own career?

In a response to Gladwell’s review, Anderson wrote a bit about the (generally wonderful) GeekDad blog at Wired:

The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

It works great for all involved.

I’m going to take advantage of Anderson’s language here and say this: he notes that a piece of writing would have to be “insanely popular” to warrant paying a writer. Thus he seems to be saying that it’s crazy to pay for writing — only the most over-the-top situation would call for it. His GeekDad model is also based on the notion that writers should be already employed somewhere lucrative, somewhere that doesn’t absorb all of their time, doing something that has real value (i.e. not writing). That his understanding of the process seems no more refined than “somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary” is almost shocking.

People near the bottom often write for free because they have the luxury of doing so or because they are desperate to be heard. Or both. When the possibility of breaking out and writing for a living is taken away, some valuable voices will go in search of other work.

Anderson also argues that passionate amateurs can write better in some areas than trained professionals. I agree. And they’re willing to write for free, which has value to the aggregator, but here’s the rub: If you’re the money-making aggregator, why not pay the amateur?

The Internet audience has indicated that it has a large hunger for that which is free. The consumer is not the only one to have a voice in the determination of value, however. The ability to find free and capable writers is not justification for getting paid for their work. That’s the point.

It is easy and possible to pay writers in pats on the head but it is better to pay them. It is adult. It’s the menschy thing to do.

To be fair, I’ve not yet read Free, so I may be reacting to nothing. (I’m reacting more to Anderson’s reaction, anyway.) But you can bet I’ll be getting this book from the library now, instead of the bookstore.

How much do you want to bet I’ll regret posting this tomorrow?

My TV is blue. It is sad, for sure, but it is also blue. It shows us the colors green or red rarely and at random. The color red, like a stray cat, has been gone for months, and only seldom comes back. Coaxing fails. The television won’t listen to reason. The picture is practically black and white, except it cannot manage the phenomenon of “white.” Everything’s blue or black. It’s… really difficult to look at for very long.

It doesn’t matter all that much, really, since we also haven’t had a TV signal since the swich-over to digital broadcasting. We don’t have a working antenna, it turns out, so even with our converter box there’s simply nothing to see. And if we could see it — whatever the bold future of television looks like — it would be all blue.

DVDs? Also blue.

Fortunately, we can get some TV through Hulu and Netflix’s instant-viewing technology, but still we are concerned. We’re concerned we’ll turn Amish or something, I guess. We’re concerned we won’t have good reason to hang out in the living room — the largest room, with the best air conditioning. We’re afraid we’ll starve to death without a TV to eat in front of. These are dark times.

We’d buy a new TV except it turns out they cost money, and we don’t have any of that left. If we did, we’d have to fix the attic or the wiring or the poisonous spider problem first, if we wanted to consider ourselves adults. So it goes.

The lesson here? If you talk to me about television, remember that I have not seen what you’re talking about and, if I have, it may have been blue.

Descent: Quest Compendium

Did I mention this? Fantasy Flight Games recently announced this book I developed for them — the Descent: Quest Compendium. The FFG website puts it like this:

This Summer, some of Descent’s biggest fans in hobby gaming have met at the latest milepost on the road to adventure and have assembled the Descent: Journeys in the Dark Quest Compendium.

This is part of FFG’s “designer series” of books, which call upon great and popular game designers to devise new scenarios for some of Fantasy Flight’s most renowned games. In this case, I wrangled folks like Mike Selinker, Monte Cook, John Kovalic, Keith Baker, Kenneth Hite, Chris Pramas, Teeuwynn Woodruff, JD Wiker, Jeff Tidball, Kevin Wilson, and still others, as they plundered Descent and its expansions to create dungeon-delving adventures in their own, unique voices.

Actually, that’s not really accurate… I didn’t get designers like them. I got them. Huge, big lucky, there.

It was a treat to watch these people work, as they combined the mechanics and miniatures that we all have in our copies of Descent into new scenarios of high-fantasy drama, bizarre dungeons, and unexpected twists on gameplay. A bunch of new Descent scenarios is great and all, but for me the real fun of this book was being inspired by watching these designers at play.

Yesterday, John Hodgman, in all his @hodgman-liness, cunningly broke apart the word meh, practically pantsing it in front of the whole school. Waxy.org has his multi-tweet sermon up for you in not-reverse order. Go there if you want the links to work — I reproduce it here just to show off my coffee ring in there. (Update: And now BoingBoing’s got it too: “John Hodgman explains whats wrong with ‘meh’”)

He calls meh “a rejection of joy” and that’s the killing blow, to my mind. Too much joy gets rejected. I like joy. I like to celebrate things. Let’s.

I’m guilty of using meh, for sure, because this language is the only language I have. We may want to virginize her, but she’s a universal whore in the meantime. So with meh in reach, I’m going to grab it now and again. But with visibility being the treasure of the Internet — where dropping a name can be like dropping coins in its guitar case — every post or comment spent on a meh is time that could be spent promoting a friend’s work or offering actual criticism somewhere else. Meh is so often the whiff of a passionless bore.

But Hodgman put it better in a couple of tweets that didn’t get caught up in the Waxy or BoingBoing posts:

Honestly, the idea that there is a smart, passionate person out there who can’t be bothered is far scarier [...] …than knowing the actual Internet handle of one malcontent jerk who took the time to write “meh.”

Anti-meh to that, @hodgman.

This reminds you of Minority Report, because they have designers in common:

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Found on Liz’s blog.