What’s New with Wu

Decided to get myself a new camera to travel with - and what a beauty it is. The 1978 Canon A-1 with a 1.4 lens.

I’m not exactly the only one to write on Gygax, but hey why not. I originally started writing this for Slate but didn’t finish in time. However the good part is that means I can put in a bit of autobiographical and D&D-specific stuff that would never make it in Slate.

On Gary Gygax’s Ideas

I was once a D&D player – okay! I’ve said it. My first real character was a strong and charismatic paladin named, yes, “Timothy.” He was perfect in every way, more or less, and advanced slowly through the levels, and since he was basically supposed to be me, I was rather attached to him. One day, however, I made the mistake of going into a place called the Tomb of Horrors. (created, I might add, by Gygax). Rather, I was lured. Jason the dungeonmaster, who was also our babysitter, had a sadistic streak, and he goaded my brother and I and even Onil into playing a game that was way too hard for us. After a promising start Timothy was crushed lifeless by a large marble juggernaut. When the death came it was sudden, unavoidable, and completely devastating.

It was only a character but I took the death of “Timothy” a little hard. Hey – I was nine years old! I kept thinking there must be some way to bring in him back; but he lay buried under thousands of pounds of rock. And for some reason my babysitter never thought to say, poor kid, and bring him back to life somehow. He just packed up the game and said, too bad. Later on I realized that he had actually cheated to make us die – and I’m still bitter.

(The Tomb of Horrors)

After that my next character was a much safer choice. He wasn’t me — Drowdabeer was a dwarf whose chief attribute was that he was very hard to kill. Under D&D’s rules he could jump off a 100′ cliff and just brush himself off. I didn’t really like Drowdabeer quite as much as Timothy, but at least he didn’t die on me.

Instead and unfortunately Drowdabeer was a bit of a bully. For some reason I can’t quite remember, I’d often find a way to kill my friend Cory’s characters. Just as Cory was about to grab the treasure he’d find a poisoned crossbow bolt in his back. Maybe still bitter about the Tomb of Horros, I took it out on Cory.  Luckily Cory and I are still friends, and maybe his D&D misfortunes played some tiny role in making Cory into the hugely successful author and Boing-Boing blogger that he is today.

(Cory Doctorow)
I could go on about our old D&D game but this is actually supposed to be about Gary Gygax, who died last week. I never knew much about Gygax the man, and in fact I didn’t know what he looked like until just now. But I know an awful lot about Gygax’s ideas. For Gygax was our patron saint – the man who had his name on every book; the guy who played the game first and played it right. It goes without saying that D&D affects your mind in all kinds of ways. (At some level, for example, I think of the classes I teach as just a sort of academic D&D campaign.) But Gygax had his own ideas within that world — a sort of ethos, a way of thinking, that affected all of us D&D players.

(Gary Gygax)

1. The main thing that Gygax taught is that you have to be very serious and rigorous about fantasy. I hasten to mention that this is an idea that can go too far. It can turn you into to someone who wears chain mail to work or refuses to associate with anyone who isn’t “chaotic neutral.” But what Gygax was teaching is that you sometimes have to lose yourself completely to get anything. Like Daniel Day Lewis acting, you have to inhabit the fantasy completely.

2. Along those lines Gygax also taught that the project of fantasy is collective. When I was in elementary and junior high school, the golden years of D&D, this was easy. Onil, Sean, Cory, Raja, my brother David, even Jason – we were all kids ready to get out of our heads. It helped that we went to an alternative school (the Alternative Learning Program) that regarded cynicism as a sin. And we actually had time set aside for playing D&D at school - it was great!

(more…)

Gone back to long hand to write my book - strange experience to write for hours with a pen and paper.

Well perhaps this is nit-picky but I’ve spent a week reading articles saying “Hillary won Texas” –
but if you lose the caucus and the delegate count and win the primary, why is that a win?

I just spent two days at a great Stanford - Google conference.

One of the ideas to emerge from the conference was that its time to get serious about working for a little more unlicensed spectrum.   There’s a chance to ask for that in the D block.  More coming soon.

They had this figured out in 1922 - that advertising could make radio awful.

Thanks to the Radio History web site.

I spent the weekend in Texas trying to convince Asian-Americans to vote for Obama. While Obama may win this thing anyway, it may be despite the opposition of most of California’s Asian-American democrats, and the interesting question is why, and whether Texas will be the same.
There’s probably not a single good explanation — maybe many Asians just think Hilary Clinton is a better candidate. But there’s no shortage of theories out there. One is that Asian-Americans don’t tend to vote in large numbers; those that are active in primary politics are close to the political establishment. A popular theory in the media is that Asian-Americans are racist. A milder version suggests that the Clintons are an established brand, and the stereotype is that Asian-Americans stick to brand names whether its Harvard for school, Goldman Sachs for work, and Coach for handbags, and so on.

My own feeling is that some of it may just come down to exposure, or lack thereof, and the related issue of risk.  Political junkies know more about Obama by now than they do about their own cousins.  But that’s unusual, and for various reasons, older, first generation immigrants in Asian communities may just get information a little later.

If you don’t know much about the Obama candidacy - it seems risky.  And pardon me the stereotype, but much though surely not all of the Asian-American population is risk adverse.  Good schools, safe jobs, and so on.
That may now change. With Obama ahead in delegates, Texas may turn out differently.  Obama is moving as fast as is possible from risky to routine.

Traffic to Altlaw.org doubled last month –