rant

Good morning, interwebs! Let's start the day with some bitching about commercial radio.

I'm becoming convinced that I need to get past being cheap and tech-underliterate, and get more ways of playing my own music in the car. I love variety and getting surprising stuff, even with the risk that not everything new will be good, but what I don't love are ads and random DJ blather.

If you think of music as equivalent to food, listening to the radio is like going out to eat. If listening to the radio is like going out to eat, then commercials are like having random strangers show up at your table to belch at you, whether you're enjoying dollar McDonald's hamburgers or a prime rib dinner at a five star place. If listening to the radio is like going out to eat, listening to DJs talk instead of playing music is a little like going to a restaurant for the service, when the service is insulting and alienating.

This morning commute's version of alienation comes through swapping stations to avoid commercials. I wind up on one of the stations that has music I like (when there is music) and DJs who talk too damn much. These guys are basically the demographic who were the popular kids in high school, and routinely make me feel like I'm from another species, but this morning they're reporting two interesting factoids - the first is that someone just broke the world's record for most piercings at one time (they hit 3200 and quit), and associated, the person with the most piercings in the world has over 5000. The DJs dissed on both, and seemed astounded that the record-holder is actually married. This is the point where I swapped channels and listened to some instrumental jazz on the college station instead.

But I'm not done ranting. If I'm not wrong, these DJs are probably people who consider it socially acceptible to have a few piercings here and there, and if that's true basically what they are telling me here is that it's not okay to have an actual passion rather than the acceptably popular level of interest. I have no piercings or ink, but I can see how sitting in one place, getting piercing after piercing after piercing, would be really intense and probably emotionally valuable. And you notice the record holder for piercings must have gotten her collection gradually over time - there must be so many places where she looks at her skin, and there are recordings of steps she's taken in her life. Not to mention there must be a lot of places where she can (or can also) look at her body and simply think that's cool looking. To me this is inspiring and amazing even though I want to eventually at most get a few ear piercings. And these vacant extrovert assholes are dissing that?

This presses my buttons. Something I feel getting older has taught me is that the world is a huge place, and so just because you don't like something or it's weird to you doesn't make it bad or worth mockery. I would never want to get over 3000 piercings at once, the same way I wouldn't want to live as a practical hermit in rural Alaska, devote spare time to fiddling with my car and tweaking the engine, work as pagan clergy, or following football games. (I mention the last four examples because they're all things my friends do.) That doesn't make them bad, it means they're not things I do. And that's fine. Part of self-worth is that you like what you like, you dislike what you dislike, and you can change your opinion, without desperately needing its intrinsic worth/worthlessness set in stone. So hearing the same old bullshit trotted out again just really rubbed me the wrong way this morning.

OK, thanks.

(no subject)

An inspiring friend is doing paleontology work, and talks about how after finishing a lot of tasks she'll do the dinosaur.

I am now trying to figure out what sort of dance move "do the dinosaur" would be. The only thing that comes to mind is kicking out with your legs, while hunching over and keeping your arms folded at chest level.

(no subject)

Games I'd like to run. May have posted this one before.

Standard D&Dish fantasy assumes a pretty standard set of human-ish player character races, there are usually older anachronisms, occasionally people posit all-non-human games, and true to both medieval Europe and a lot of fiction, our heros can look back at a much more technically advanced past.

Rolling these all together, a setting I think would be cool would be in the implied mythical age. The world would be dominated by elves and dwarves, the groups who'd pieced together the best magic and metallurgy, and they'd have fairly advanced Iron Age civilizations with innovations like veterinary medicine, indoor heating, and lateen sails, while everyone else chugged along at Bronze Age levels. The elves are plying the seas in graceful ships and riding bent-legged with stirrups, and the dwarves are perfecting the Bessemer process while humans have just figured out things like multi-tiered galleys, crop rotation, and riding. Part of this, dumb as it sounds, is about shields; in D&D a shield is a nice little extra boost to armor class, in real life plenty of people never had anything more than a shield, because shields are that useful.

Initially when I thought this up as a background I figured it'd have a Peloponnesian War like setup. Elves and dwarves wouldn't go after each other directly, but would support human or other client states which would come into conflict, and the tie-breaker would be gnomes, a group which isn't obviously elves or dwarves. All it would take to push the whole thing over would be a gnome client state deciding they wanted to side with the dwarves instead. But I can see how the setting would have other possible sources of chaos - for instance, a renegade dwarf circulating more iron weapons on the sly, or a conspiracy of half-elves trying to split off as their own kingdom. I think the political, investigative aspect of this would make this be an more suitable background for BRP games than D&D.