Chris is enchanted by his first DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game ever!

After being gone for almost a year I ended up back in North Carolina this past weekend.  Guess I’m still in "journey mode" since leaving Reidsville in June of 2016.  It was a few days to take care of some business, hook up with longtime friends, make new friends, do a lot of writing... and playing Dungeons & Dragons?!?

It happened, all two of this blog's faithful readers!  Saturday night in Burlington.  At the HyperMind game store on Church Street: the one owned by my friend Denise and her family and that I've written about a number of times.  The day before on HyperMind's Facebook page there was a notice about "Dungeons & Dragons for Beginners" on Saturday evening.

Those who know this blog and its strange curator are well aware: journalist that I be, I'll report on anything within reason.  Like the Facebook Live I did from a marijuana store just over the Colorado side of the border with New Mexico   And now here was a golden opportunity that had fallen into my lap to not just observe the return of a cultural phenomenon but to also participate firsthand.  The Muse was beckoning.

I had never played Dungeons & Dragons (often abbreviated D&D).  Not once.  Although when I was a wee lad somehow I had in my possession "the red box” now spoken of in whispers and hushed reverence at tables of geekdom laden with soda cans and Doritos bags.  Suffice to say, I was beyond out of touch with whatever had become of Gary Gygax's legendary RPG (that's "role-playing game", not "rocket propelled grenade"!).  I knew that it was now being published by Wizards Of The Coast (having acquired the original TSR company many moons ago) and that it was in its fifth edition.  And also that somehow lately Dungeons & Dragons has become crazy popular again.  It's more a widespread success today than it was during its celebrated heyday of the Eighties.  Celebrated... or condemned.  Yeah I well remember the bad rap that D&D got about how it supposedly encouraged witchcraft and Satanic rituals and child sacrifice.  Witness the thoroughly authoritative investigative work of one Jack Chick in his treatise "Dark Dungeons":

That's the only one of Chick's tract's to be adapted into a motion picture.  Behold the trailer:


And some people still think of Dungeons & Dragons as that.  When it's really just this:

A bunch of guys, ages 11 on up to late fifties, sitting around a table with various books, papers, pencils, and laptops and tablets.  Yeah mobile devices 'cuz this ain't your daddy's D&D.

"Dungeons & Dragons for Beginners" kicked off at 5 on Saturday afternoon at HyperMind.  And as always, we were hosted by the ever lovely and effervescent co-owner Denise.  And she and her family would no doubt love for y'all to come and see their wonderful shop and ogle their wares, which includes everything from Candyland and Monopoly to Settlers of Catan to Magic: the Gathering to X-Wing Miniatures and Warhammer 40,000.  They've also a sweet game room that's somehow mysteriously expanded since I was last in the area a year ago.

There were six newbies who showed up to an introductory game with a dude named Mike serving as "Dungeon Master".  The Dungeon Master... or DM as he or she is often called (would a female Dungeon Master be a "Dungeon Mistress", or is that too dominatrixish?)... is the one who "runs the game".  That means drawing up the outline of the adventure, populating it with various monsters and vagabonds, and trying to keep things on track as the traipse through the Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft or wherever draws toward it's intended conclusion (or not).  Think of the Dungeon Master as being the conductor of a symphony orchestra the members of which can't decide if they want to play Mozart or Rush or "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Here is Mike.  And he definitely knows what he's doing!  He's been involved with fantasy role-playing since the original D&D back in 1974:

First thing on the agenda, the most crucial part of the experience because everything else blooms from it, is to create our characters.  And you've a WAY humongous latitude here.  Not just what "class" aka career you have like Fighter or Druid or Thief etc. but also what race to be.  If you wanna take a break from being a baseline human for awhile you can be a dwarf or a half-elf or one of a jillion other species (I seem to vaguely recollect the Dark Sun campaign setting having giant grasshoppers you could choose as your race).

Anyhoo, I decided that befitting my surname I would be a Paladin.  Which is kind of a crusader knight but he can also use magic effects like healing people who need it.

Here’s where things took a WILD deviation from anything I'd expected.  A few years ago Wizards Of The Coast introduced an online tracking system that lets you record and manage how often you play, or something.  Since this was an Adventurer's League that means you could theoretically roll up a character in Burlington and bring it to play with others in Emporia, Kansas.  But you need something called a "DCI number".  Which most people in the group already had because they played Magic: The Gathering also.  And it can be used with Dungeons & Dragons.  It wasn't necessary per se for this evening's event but still kinda made it official.

I whipped out the iPhone and went to the Wizards Of The Coast website and created an account and got my very own DCI number.  Using a smartphone to play an old-school pen and paper RPG.  Huh.  Never saw THAT one coming.  I suppose that now that I'm "logged into the system" with a DCI tracking number it means that I have consigned myself to an eternity of torment.  Because the Wizards Of The Coast website is tied into a massive Cray cluster-booted mainframe known as "the Beast" controlled by George Soros somewhere in the bowels of the European Community bunker in Brussels and my name is now registered on it.  That's how some of the lingering hysteria over Dungeons & Dragons would make it out to be...

Or maybe not.

So, got my race (human) class (Paladin) Alignment (Lawful Good) who is part of some faction called "Order of the Gauntlet" and now a DCI number.  It was at this point that Mike whomped everyone upside the head with the announcement that we would be playing a pre-designed adventurer called "Tomb Of Annihilation".

WHAT?!?  PLEASE tell me this isn’t related at all to "Tomb Of Horrors".  Even if you've only a cursory knowledge of D&D and never actually played you've heard of "Tomb Of Horrors".  The infamous adventure module from 1975 and created by Gary Gygax himself in order to humble all the "hacker and slasher" players who thought they could simply murderize their way through a quest.  And... how shall I put this?  Let's just say that fewer players have survived "Tomb Of Horrors" than there are Star Wars fans who have survived watching the entire The Star Wars Holiday Special:

Yeah.  It's THAT perilous.

If "Tomb of Annihilation" was inspired by or derived from "Tomb Of Horrors", I didn't get to find out.  Most of the fun with a role-playing game is to just ride along and see what happens and act in character.  So it is that I didn't inquire about anything potentially spoiling the experience.

Dungeons & Dragons isn't set on any one particular "world" per se.  It’s actually a vast cosmos of settings, from the prime material physical universe on through various dimensions of being (and our own Earth is in there somewhere).  I think my personal favorite campaign setting world is Ravenloft because of the Lovecraftian horror atmosphere of the place though obviously I've never played a game in it.  So after Mike announced we were seeking the Tomb of Annihilation he also noted that this was the classic Forgotten Realms country of Faerûn.  Oh yeah, and because of something called the "death curse" associated with this particular officially published adventure there was NO resurrecting dead characters.  Which normally would cost a bunch of in-game gold pieces.  Not here though.  Your character dies, there's no coming back.  High stakes indeed!

Here is a map of the part of Faerûn we'd be romping across.  It's on the players-facing side of the Dungeon Master's screen.  That's the gimmick which the DM uses to hide all his notes and plots and ambushes from the players.

Okay well, we were all creating our characters, using the core material like Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook (which shot up to #1 selling item on Amazon when it came out... and I mean #1 selling item of EVERY category of merchandise!) and some official apps on iPad and whatever.

Being a Paladin, I got to have two "spells" which in the D&D realm are really like different prayers that the character's spiritual order has.  Starting out with a first level Paladin you get "Divine Sense", which "senses evil to sixty feet" four times per day.  And also "Lay On Hands" for healing.

"Lay On Hands"?!  Far from Dungeons & Dragons transforming me into a Satan worshipper... it had converted me to a Pentecostal!  At least Paladins are by default "Lawful Good" in alignment.  Had it been "Chaotic Neutral" my character would be running around the wilderness like a medieval Benny Hinn.  But at least he would have made his money the old fashioned way: by earrrrrning it.

(Award yourself a thousand XP if you know what that's a reference to and which actor without having to Google it.)

It was about this time, an hour or so into the characters getting created, that it dawned on me.  That this was already a whole heap of fun.  It was creative writing of a sort that hadn't been engaged in for so long that I'd forgotten it was there at all.  All around me other players were doing the same thing.

Role-playing games can exercise the imagination as few things can, right from the getgo.  No wonder Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs are roaring back into popularity.  This kind of imagination on the part of the player is almost a novelty in a time of Xbox consoles and mobile gaming.  And the interaction is with living, breathing people who you are seeing and hearing and not looking at pixels of screennames.  There is a need for authentic gaming in our era.  Board games are returning with wild acclaim and traditional "pen and paper" RPGs with them.  And that primal need for real human interaction is an enormous reason why, no doubt.

Okay well my character has got his stats, his equipment and his spells, now all he needed was a name.  Once again consulting the iPhone (or as I often call it "the Mother Box") Google found a website that generates fantasy character names, for RPG use or hiding from the Internal Revenue Service or whatever.  Several "next screen" clicks in and there was Denvorn-something.  "Brother Denvorn" had a nice ring to it as a warrior monk, so that's what I went with.

And as a Paladin he's equipped with chainmail armor, a sword and shield, and also a holy symbol of his order, which can be worn as an amulet or emblazoned on his shield.  I thought on the shield would have greater psychological value.  I didn't have to design the symbol but there's space on the character sheets for a character description and I wanted to do at least a rough sketch.  So here's Brother Denvorn with his sword, armor and holy symbol-equipped shield:

Lookin' good!  Well enough to go into dungeons to fight dragons.  Or at least into thick hedges to fight unwary orcs.

And now we were all set.  Our merry band consisted of a Wood Elf Druid, a Ranger, a Sage, a Warlock, a "Self-Appointed Inquisitor", and yours truly the Paladin.

Mike's launch of the adventure was most ideal.  A quick synopsis: that we'd been hired to move some cargo for this rich dude on a wagon following a road down from Neverwinter.  However it seems that the guy and his guard had gone missing.  First order of business: decide who is riding on the cart, who is walking beside it and who is walking ahead and at the rear.  Since I was playing a Paladin the noble thing to do it seemed was to go in front of the party and act as a scout.  And we were on our way!

It was some time later that our little caravan came upon two dead horses in the road.  When asked the DM reported that they hadn't been there for more than a day.  We also found some ransacked bags and an empty map case.  Brother Denvorn moved closer to investigate, joined by Jaeger.

Roland and Azrael wanted a better look also, so they arrived and examined the scene also.  Little did we know however that there were four goblins lurking in the bushes!

The volley of arrows they let loose did little damage to us.  Had to make something called an Initiative roll:

We went into full retaliation mode.  And Brother Denvorn went charging at the assailants, shield hefted and sword raised...

BAM!! Two of the goblins went down.  But they bounded back and Leroy Jenk... I mean Brother Denvorn, who had been a hearty 12 points of health, got wounded by 5 points and went down to 7.  Our Mage was likewise hit.  One of the goblins was killed and after the melee I did the "laying on of hands" on the Mage and healed him for 2 and then gave myself a boost of 3.

A fine little battle to start the adventure off!  However, we now had a dilemma.  One of the goblins was greatly wounded but alive.  What to do with him?  An argument began: were we going to waste him now or keep him hostage and potentially extract information from him?  None of our characters spoke any of the languages of goblins.  I suggested that we keep him bound and then when we got to a town we would find someone to translate our interrogation.  Furthermore that we should give him some healing, demonstrate "a quality of mercy" that might loosen his filthy mouth.  And that’s what we HAD decided to do…

...except that TJ, the young lad playing Jaeger, went mad with power and with bloodthirsty relish made it an action to exsanguinate the goblin on his own.  And now we had NOTHING to go on.  Smooth move, kid!  You were ALLEGEDLY a ranger of somewhat marginal good character.  But then you had to go full Dexter Morgan-mode and now we've no leads on what happened to our employer.

Well, except that some of us had noticed a trail of dragged bootprints going off the path and into the woods.  Should we keep going as planned, or go looking for what might be our employer?  There was a chance he and his guard were still alive, and if we rescued them we might get rewarded with precious gold pieces.  Taking a risk by leaving the wagon unguarded, we followed the trail.

Shortly after that, two of us fell into a shallow pit, and one of us almost triggered a snare.  We decided that we had gone as far as we should for the night, and that it was time to camp and fully heal our wounds.  By this time it was almost 9 PM in the real world and HyperMind was about to close for the night.  Mike proclaimed that we woke up the next day, all healed up and with 75 experience points each to record on our sheets.  Thus ended this first leg of the journey toward... I'm assuming... is the Tomb of Annihilation.

And that was my first time playing Dungeons & Dragons.  And I had a blast!  I can readily understand now why it has come back with a vengeance.  Why it's rapidly gained appeal across a wide array of people, many of whom have never approached any role-playing game before.  This is NOT something confined to the basements of geeks, dweebs, nerds, and unbathed comic book guys.  Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition is a REAL thinkin' person's pastime.  One that requires and demands being able to act, to adapt, to bring forth wisdom and foresight toward a situation.  You know, much like skills needed in real life.  After playing even this brief introduction to the game, one can easily envision a role-playing game like D&D being a useful tool in corporate training, psychiatric counseling, teaching civics and ethics to high school students and perhaps younger... there are all kinds of practical applications for what Gary Gygax came up with more than forty years ago.

And since some will no doubt be wondering about it and maybe even leave a comment about it: at no time during the game or afterward did I feel "the pull toward evil".  Neither did I develop any inkling of obsession about it.  I doubt that I ever will either.  It was a few hours spent with a great group of people, and afterward we left feeling that it was a very enjoyable time and then we departed the store and went on with our lives.  Might some people out there get too much into Dungeons & Dragons than is healthy so far as normal interactions with others?  Yes, I would have to agree with that assumption.  But it would be no more so than being obsessed with video games, or sports, or eating, or drinking, or anything else taken to excess.  In that regard, a role-playing game is utterly mild in terms of hazard.

And neither did I have the sense that my spiritual life was impacted.  Was there a religious component to my character?  Yes, certainly.  But however that figures into him as a character, it starts and stops there.  Any further elucidation was not necessary, any more so than I would need to know the religious practices of Frodo Baggins or Princess Leia.  And as with them, Brother Denvorn and his adventure was put down like any other book or movie until next time.  And much of the next day was spent in time devoted to the relationship I have with God in the real world, with no thought whatsoever about how Denvorn might be spending his own quiet time.  Gary Gygax himself was a devout Christian.  Had he known that his creation would be an instrument to tempt people to turn away from God, he would not have published it in the first place.

So if you've been boggled at how a game that needs no board, no LCD screen, no batteries, and no wi-fi has made a raging comeback and has exploded at last into the mainstream, look around for a Dungeons & Dragons gaming group in your area.  Or form one with your friends and dive on in.  It's a LOT more fun than what you might have expected of it.

Oh yeah, one more thing: get yourself a set of dice.  They come in all kinds of sizes and colors and textures.  Like Harry Potter's wand, a good set of dice during an adventure becomes a part of you.  And it's just really neat to roll around that 20-sided die in your hand while weighing your options when suddenly confronted with one of those blasted rust monsters.

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BEING BIPOLAR, Part 8: Illumination

"Sir please return to your room.  PLEASE sir it's dangerous!"  A fleck of dark red was on her cheek and plainly she was anguishing to clean off her face, take a shower and likely dispatch her uniform to the incinerator.  Red smears also on front desk.  A crimson palm print, vigorously violent and vaguely human, on one of the support columns.  Not far away on the floor: shards of broken glass.  Some stained red like those among the ancient windows of Notre-Dame and other holy places I had seen in Europe long ago.

But it didn't register that it was blood... lots and lots of blood... until I was heading back up to the fourth floor.  Three hours later, as a commercial hazmat crew was finishing with cleaning and decontaminating the lobby, the desk clerk phoned up the "all clear" signal.  Once again the elevator doors opened onto the lobby.  The pungent smell of ammonia flooded into my nostrils.  And the same desk clerk who had screamed at me earlier, now in fresh clothes, told me what happened.

A man had walked into the lobby, began screaming about things that weren't there, and then he slammed his bare hand through the large-screen television just inside the front door of the hotel.  In doing so he slashed open an artery.  If it had caused pain he didn’t seem fazed by it, I was told.  He just kept raving and ranting about the dirty women all around him, and the irony of his own tattered clothing and penetrating stench was apparently lost upon him.

He had stood there screaming and flailing his arm and throwing blood all over the lobby and onto the two young ladies behind the desk for a number of minutes, then had fled back through the front entrance and into the streets of downtown San Diego.

I never learned if he had been apprehended and given medical treatment.  I've always assumed the best.  That much dark red pumping out of an arm or a leg would require a tourniquet if all else had failed in dire circumstance.  I pray that he was picked up and given attention.  That he didn't become another of the nameless men and women found dead every so often.  Nameless and abandoned and seemingly unloved, like so many other homeless I had seen around San Diego and in places like Phoenix and Dallas during my journey.

Late one night I was ravenously hungry, realizing that I hadn't had a meal since breakfast.  I headed out at 1 a.m. and my dog Tammy riding in my lap as she had for 10,000 miles across America.  There were few empty tables at the McDonald’s near Mission Beach.  Occupied, but not with customers.  Men and women slept at most of them.  The cashier told me that they were homeless.  That they came every night to sleep and that it was pretty much mandatory to give them their space.  It was the only place they had to sleep on a winter night like this one.

It would not be a far reach to declare that of all the homeless individuals that I saw and even had the chance to talk with a few times, not one of them could fail to be diagnosed with mental illness of one variety or another.  They were men and women from so many different backgrounds.  And the one common denominator of each of them was that they suffered delusions or hallucinations or uncontrollable mood swings, or deep depression.

Like me.

That could very well have been me on the streets, with no place to call home and no friends and family to encourage me and lift me up when I needed it.  Particularly in those times when I have been more than a little tempted to end it all and with grievous intent slash open my own wrist.

“There but for the grace of God…”

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Being Bipolar is an ongoing albeit wildly irregular series (the most recent installment was five years ago!) documenting what it is to have a mental illness.  Specifically, Bipolar Disorder Type 1.  As has ever been the case, I am doing my best to chronicle this with candor, with honesty, without embellishment, and also with levity and humor whenever possible.  Because, y'know... this is something you NEED to be able to laugh about when you can.  If you are new to this blog feel free to peruse the other articles in the Being Bipolar series.  And the rest of this site isn’t too boring either!

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"Meanwhile back at the ranch..."

So.  Five years since last time we did this series.  And needless to say, a lot has happened in that time.

Lost a relationship.  Then lost my father.  Lost all desire to live for a while.  Have been hospitalized twice: once voluntary, the other not.  Tried to finish writing a book about having bipolar disorder but Dad's passing took the wind out of my sails on that one, though I’m hoping to return to it sooner than later.  And then through circumstances which don't have to be shared here, there was the need to leave my old hometown in North Carolina.  So I set out with my dog and a car packed with "the barest essentials" and headed out across the fruited plain.

That didn't work out as I had envisioned either: with God leading me to someplace new to put roots down at.  But here it is now, almost two years since embarking upon the road, and I'm in a new place that I had never thought about coming to.

And now?  There is, at last, the shot at real happiness that I've been searching and grasping to have, for so very long.

But the bipolar disorder is still there.  Still throwing a shadow over my mind.   The "dark fountain" erupts every so often, as it has since the winter of 2000 when the symptoms began.  The flood of depression and racing thoughts that I have to struggle to keep my head above those black waters, lest I drown.

Thankfully the meds are still working.  Pretty much the same regimen, albeit with some tweaking of dosage, that I was on last time.  The one significant thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer on lithium.  It wasn't out of vanity that I stopped taking it because of massive hair loss.  But it was out of concern about what else it might be doing to my body.  A few months after stopping the lithium my hair was as thick as ever.  However as I wrote three years ago, being on lithium carbonate seemed to have been a potent anti-allergen for me so far as hay fever goes.  There might be something to that because ever since the use of lithium ceased my seasonal weed and grass allergies have been as wretched as ever.  Oh well.  Guess even in bioengineering there's always a trade-off.

"You won’t be the same."

Something happened to me when I was out on the road.  And I still count myself as being on the road even now.

What it was, is most difficult to express.  Except that I began to come to see my own mental illness in a different light.  Maybe that is a gift that God has given me.  Perhaps it is the prize of my quest, though I didn’t and couldn't see that in the beginning.

Because the Chris Knight who last wrote words for this series was very much a bitter and angry and confused person, who was desperate to find meaning and purpose in his condition.  He was hurting himself in his vain effort to "be normal", to be accepted and recognized by others as "just as good" as everyone else.  I think it's valid to say that he was also doing his damndest to force God to weigh in on the issue.  To make Him explain why it is that even in a world as fallen and corrupted as this and with this weak and failed flesh, that my own neurons are so whacked.

It hasn't seemed fair at all.  And there is a spiritual component to this.  How DARE God let anyone have a medical condition that might imperil one’s very soul?!  Or are there some people who He allows to go mad because, hey, SOMEONE has to be populating Hell, right?

That’s what it's been like for me.  So often then.  And even at times now.  When it's night time and I want God to tell me that He has heard me all along.  That He hasn't abandoned me.

He never does.  I've come to accept that He never will. Not in an audible voice anyway.  But that doesn't mean He hasn’t been hearing me.

Looking back over the past two years since leaving my original hometown, though it wasn't the journey that I thought it would be... it was still being directed by God.  And all the people and situations and predicaments that came about along the way and are still coming about.  Those have had an enormous impact on my life.

Maybe that's how God works now.  Maybe it took making that leap of faith two years ago into the unknown to be prepared for what He was guiding me to.  It wasn’t a "destination" that I was going to be led to so much as it was the journey.  The process that God was going to use to radically alter my life as it had never been altered before.  When Gandalf saw Bilbo again after his adventure to the Lonely Mountain, he exclaimed that Bilbo looked different.  Indeed, he had told him that if he came back "you won’t be the same."

So it has been with me.  I'm not the person I need to be.  Not yet.  Probably never will see that work completed in this lifetime.  But the Chris Knight with bipolar disorder who went out is not the same Chris Knight with bipolar disorder who returned.  THIS Chris Knight is more accepting of who he is and what he has.  He is far more thankful for what he has than resentful about what he does not have.  He also recognizes that despite how his neurobiology might be he has had a life that most never get to experience and it's a long ways from being done with yet.

That could just as easily been me, with filthy clothes and a tattered sleeping bag and empty hopeless eyes and wandering the streets of some major city with no promise of food in my stomach or of being killed for a few dollars of potential drinking money.  Instead, God gave me more than many with mental illness have or ever get to have.

Appreciating the Warmth

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago, once shared about how he had visited the office of a Soviet general.  The winters are fiercely brutal in Moscow, and the general's office was toasty warm from the crackling fireplace.  Solzhenitsyn – who had lived through winters more brutal still in the distant east of Siberia's prisons – observed that one cannot appreciate the warmth without having first endured the cold.

All of these past several years I have been bitter about the dark, when it could have been far, far darker.  Turns out, things were brighter in my own life than too many ever get to enjoy.

I have good therapists. Good psychiatrists.  The medications are working well.  Most of all, I have been blessed with friendships who are as true as any family.  They have seen me through situations where many would have been abandoned as beyond all hope.  Even when I forget it during those times in the valley, God has provided and has sustained me through much.

I should not be here.  Not in clean clothes and with an iPad to type these words into.  Not even alive.  A dozen times over and more, I should be dead.  But I'm not.

If nothing else was gained from the road behind me, then I will have gained this.  Thankfulness.  Humility.  Appreciation for what I have that others do not.

And I look forward to taking those along the road still ahead.

This chapter of Being Bipolar is dedicated to the many who my life has crossed paths with during the course of the past two years since I left Reidsville, North Carolina.  I could not have come to the place where I am now... in mind and spirit as well as body... were it not for God letting them be met along the way.

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Video Post: Stop Hating Donald Trump!

So this is not only the first video blog post I've made in... well a VERY long time.  It's also the absolutely FIRST blog post that I've made about now-President Donald Trump ever!

To be fair though, it's not about Trump himself.  It's about what I've seen waaaaay too much of in the way of hatred toward the guy.  It's not warranted and it's not worth it.  Anyhoo, roll the clip!

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Snoke is just a gigolo

Had to get a few supplies yesterday and on a lark I went to the Star Wars toys to ogle the stuff from the upcoming Solo movie.  The timing was fortuitous apparently because some fresh figures had just been put on the pegs including... gasp!... one of the new Supreme Leader Snoke 3.75 scale figs!

"AYYYYYY ain't got no-BAAAH-day!"

Ever since The Force Awakens I've been wanting a Snoke action figure.  Most of my own Star Wars collection got sold a few years ago before I left North Carolina.  The thing about collecting Star Wars: you don't need to get everything.  Just whatever interests you.  Some collect nothing but Artoo-Detoo memorabilia, others for Yoda and some are into Darth Vader.  Snoke has intrigued me from the moment I saw him and now my new collection is complete for now.

But in all seriousness...

EVERY time I see a picture of Snoke from The Last Jedi - either as a still from the movie or as a toy - in that ridiculous gold lamé bathrobe and matching slippers it makes David Lee Roth's voice singing "Just A Gigolo" start playing in my head:

Could be worse, I suppose. I mean, Kylo Ren's waist supporter didn't get much screen time after all, right?

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Some musing on the meaning for life

A thought:

Earth is the only world out of countless trillions spread across the universe that holds the perfect conditions for life, because the universe needed to be seen and recognized and appreciated.  The universe requires life to justify its existence and give it meaning.  Even if that life is constrained to one small speck of dust in the limitless cosmos.

Had there been no life whatsoever anywhere with consciousness and sentience to acknowledge and accept and observe the universe, would the universe exist at all?

Either the universe alone created life on Earth for its own sake, or something higher than the universe itself created life on Earth with conscious intent.  Which followed to its logical conclusion means that the universe as an entire reality is created with conscious intent.

Merely something that's been on my mind the past week or so...

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Karl Marx's real gift to the world...

Perhaps if Ambrose Bierce were still with us (and who knows, we don't know what became of him since he disappeared somewhere in Mexico during its revolution) he might have made the following addition to his famous work The Devil's Dictionary:

COMMUNISM, n.
A simple idea, that with innocent charm and seductive promise makes monsters of men.

"It just hasn't been attempted correctly!"  How many times are we going to hear that one?  Looking around the past few days at the celebrations of the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, my head cannot but shake in disbelief.  That even today, there are many who will scream that communism will not only work but be a raging success... if the right people could be in charge of it.  And of course they will claim that they are the very "right people" who should be at the controls and trusted to guide the people into a bright and shining socialist utopia free of hunger and suffering.

Except, it has never worked out that way.  And it never can work out that way.  And every time that Marxism in whatever form it takes has been attempted, the result has invariably been the same: a small oligarchy at the top of the heap living in excess at the expense of "the workers".  You know, the very same ones who were promised that utopia to begin with.

It never happens.  But would you like to know what might happen, what will probably happen given enough time and what HAS happened?

Thousands if not millions dead from starvation, political purges and outright incompetence.  And often even armed conflict with neighboring countries or countries thousands of miles across an ocean basin away.

I'm historian enough to admit: no social system is perfect.  No legal system is perfect.  No system of government at all is perfect.  But at least some of them allow for a striving toward that perfect ideal within the boundaries of human dignity and the acknowledgement that life is sacred and worth defending for its own sake.  That the individual deserves a chance to be successful, even if that success doesn't work out as it was envisioned.

Communism, and socialism in general for that matter, brooks no favor for that.  It is an ideology for its own sake.  To its adherents, other people are grist for the mill on the way to that glorious promised paradise.  And it tolerates no dissent or individual effort.  Try to break away from the will of the masses as determined by those few at the top, and you'll end up with a bullet in the skull, or smothered with a plastic bag, or wasting away from caloric intake being rendered zero, or sent off to fight and die for the good of the state.

In short: communism can never improve on itself, as is possible with republican government and capitalist economy.  Communism can do nothing except stave off the inevitable demise of the countries that have adopted it... and in the end, none can be spared from its death throes as it desperately tries to survive at all costs.

All of this and more stems from the "radical and revolutionary" philosophies of Karl Marx.

How this merits commemoration as a virtue of societal evolution, is something that boggles my mind and no doubt forever will.

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The premiere of SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRES!

If you were to timewarp to some day many decades hence (I hope, gulp!) and find me about to depart this moral realm for the Great Beyond, and of all the questions you could ask me the one thing you would want to know is "What were your favorite websites of all time?"...

Even then, one of the top three would be WWWF Grudge Match: that hilarious page from the earliest days of widespread accessible Internet featuring epic battles between Mister T and Mister Clean, a Rottweiler versus a Rottweiler's weight in chihuahas, John McClane versus the Death Star, and that immortal bout between English Soccer Hooligans and the French Army.  Grudge Match ran uninterrupted in a few iterations between 1995 and 2005, but its impact on Internet humor will ever live on.

Thing is... since 2005 there's been so much crazy new stuff come about that's just SCREAMING to be put into a Grudge Match-style.

Just for fun, the past several months I've been making posts on my personal Facebook page with match-ups between various characters from fiction, real life, whatever.  Those who will courageously admit to knowing me seem rather entertained by it.  And so I thought "hmmmm... maybe this could be made wide open for others?  Perhaps honor the spirit of the original Grudge Match and make it appreciable for a modern audience?"

And so it is that as of today Saturday Night Massacres has been launched on Facebook.

Barring unforeseen circumstance, every other Saturday at noon EST there will be a new battle between two or more combatants, and they could come from anywhere: the real world, movies, books, television, games, sports, ancient mythology, toys, politics... anything and everything is in play.  All in good humor, all in good taste (which is sadly something that too much "comedy" these days is not).  Nothing cruel or mean-spirited, just good clean wholesome family carnage.  For two weeks the matchup will be active and if you've a Facebook account (ehhhhh... "I have no further comment Senator") you can cast your vote.  At the end of two weeks voting ends and the victor will be declared.  And then a whole new contest will begin!  As things stand now, there are matches in the pipeline that will carry us well into late summer.  And new ones are being thought up all the time.  Fans of the page will always be free and welcome to suggest future matchups (with proper accreditation of course).

And for the inaugural edition of Saturday Night Massacres, it's a good one:

Archery contest between Robin Hood - the legendary defender of the poor and downtrodden - and Katniss Everdeen - the "Girl on Fire" herself and champion of District 12 - and only one of them will take dinner home for his or her friends and family.  High stakes indeed!

So let fly those arrows and vote now for the winner at Saturday Night Massacres!

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Star Wars: Making sense (?!?) of THE LAST JEDI internal timeline

Okay, this is probably going to fanwank me into utter oblivion but since today is the quasi-holiday of May the Fourth and in light of the festivities here are some thoughts - that have been nagging at a lot of us these past few months - about Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi...

Taken at face value the internal chronology makes little to NO sense whatsoever. There is ENORMOUS incongruity between the events of the Rey and Luke, and the Resistance fleet, and Finn and Rose, and even Kylo Ren and Snoke. And it's bugged the mynocks out of me... until I began studying this film alongside The Force Awakens and now... it kinda jibes pretty well after all.

(Mind ya though, these are the words of a maniac who once upon a time composed a mini-doctoral thesis explaining away midi-chlorians. So parse all of this as you may.)

The key is bearing in mind what the opening crawl of The Last Jedi tells us from the very start: the First Order has struck across the galaxy. In the aftermath of the destruction of Starkiller Base, Snoke isn't playing in the shadows anymore. He's laying ALL his cards on the table and the First Order has come out of the Unknown Regions to take the galaxy in a cosmic blitzkrieg. As crazy as it sounds, the First Order is apparently more powerful militarily than the Empire was, if it's being able to assault the former Republic worlds on all fronts. This was sadly understated across the span of the film (though I suspect it will be emphasized in Episode 9).

This did not transpire instantaneously after Rey left the Resistance base to find Luke. In fact, it was likely several days between her departure and the First Order fleet's arrival at D'Qar. Snoke was taking his time coordinating the invasion of the civilized galaxy. It was also during this time that Kylo Ren was recovering from the wounds he received from the duel in the forest on Starkiller Base (and that hit in the leg from Chewie's bowcaster). General Hux had to rendezvous with the Supremacy and Kylo got bacta treatment, stitched etc. before appearing before Snoke. That all takes time.

Meanwhile, some days after leaving the Resistance base, Rey arrives at Ahch-To and finds Luke Skywalker. And she is NOT going to persuade him quickly by any measure to get back into the fight. It's likely, given the changes in weather and time of day, that she spends a number of days following Luke around the island.

And that is a beautiful thing, actually. This is a common motif in the story of master and apprentice: the aspiring student having to demonstrate patience and tenacity and a refusal to surrender, until at last the master takes him or her on as an apprentice. As Rey told Luke, she has seen his daily routine: intimating that she has had time to understand how he spends his time in self-imposed exile.

So again, there are several days between Rey's departure and when Luke acquiesces and concurrently several days between the First Order's galaxy-wide assault and its arrival at D'Qar. Why didn't Snoke come out and hit the Resistance immediately? Well, for all how they have just broken his new toy, he still considers them a minor nuisance at best in the greater scheme of things. The bigger threat is Skywalker returning and that's not necessarily something to be solved with all-out military action. So the First Order is taking its time. And only when it is unavoidably clear that the First Order is en route does Leia begin a proper evacuation. Which underscores why there wasn't frantic fleeing from the base at the end of The Force Awakens.

And when the First Order does arrive, it is several MORE days possibly between the jump into hyperspace by the Resistance fleet and its arrival on the outskirts of the Crait system. And it's not long after that when the Supremacy and its entourage arrives. And so begins the long slow pursuit across realspace.

(Kylo enters Snoke's chambers after he's sufficiently recovered, which is after the battle at D'Qar. Again, a clue that The Last Jedi's series of events are more protracted out than is initially assumed ).

So why didn't the First Order simply sent a second task force to jump in front of the Resistance ships and end them all there? Two reasons. The first is that the First Order has committed ALL its military resources to attack systems of the former New Republic. Likely a reinforcement for the pursuit of the  Resistance couldn't be spared.

More likely though: Snoke is being cruel. Making Leia and her comrades suffer the agony of knowing they've limited fuel, limited time, limited life left to them. It's prolonged psychological sadism and Snoke is reveling in it. He's enjoying every moment of this crawl across space, picking the Resistance fleet off one vessel at a time.

Now here is the wild supposition on my part. I've a sense that Finn and Rose were off to Canto Bight and back in much longer than within 18 hours.

How it works out fuel-wise for the Resistance fleet, I can't explain unless that was their overall optimum fuel supply before hitting reserves (which has a real world analogy, by the way). Finn and Rose and Poe must have figured that there was some time afforded them though, 'cuz there sure doesn't seem to be utter desperation on their part. I mean, Rose takes time to admire the fathiers racing, fercryinoutloud! So again, possibly a few days travel to Canto Bight, finding the Master Codebreaker (or someone loosely approximating him) and then getting aboard the Supremacy.

It was during the time that the Resistance fleet was in hyperspace on the way to Crait and then for much of Finn and Rose's mission that Luke was teaching Rey, and also Rey and Kylo Ren's "communion" through the Force. And it was a number of days after Rey abandoned Luke before the Millennium Falcon dropped her off in an escape pod to be captured by the First Order. When she is taken captive, at that same time Finn and Rose and DJ are infiltrating the Supremacy to find the hyperspace tracking device.

And it is at this point that the separate chronologies of the film at last convene and take place simultaneously. Everyone is at Crait and the final moves of this chapter of the saga begin to play out.

Between Rey and Chewie and Artoo taking off on the Falcon in the final minutes of The Force Awakens and that coming together of all the elements in The Last Jedi, there could have been a week or even TWO weeks or more of "story time".

But, it really doesn't matter in the end. Star Wars is after all a legend. And no legend is without the quality of being protean and open to interpretation.

Just my two Republic credits...

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Alfie Evans and Prince Louis: A Tale of Two Britains

While the western world has been obsessed this week with a baby boy born into a family that to be perfectly honest lives in ultimate luxury while producing nothing but a tourism industry and fodder for gossip magazines, another little boy - born to parents who work hard to provide a happy home without need or desire for celebrity - was denied nourishment and life support by order of the High Court in Great Britain.

But few people outside of England, it seems, heard or ever bothered to hear about Alfie Hastings, who had a severe brain condition.

His parents and others tried their very best to save his life, but the judges of Britain decreed that Alfie was a lost cause and a drain on the system.  And so Alfie should die.

Which, he now has.  As of this past hour or so.

Louis and Alfie.  Baby boys born in the same country.  One will never know want or hunger or discomfort, the other has been taken from a Mommy and Daddy who loved him very much and did everything they could to give him a fighting chance to live.

If the situation had been reversed, and Prince William and Kate given birth to a child with the same medical condition as Alfie Evans... would the British courts have ordered and enforced a mandate that their baby boy must die?

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Review of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2008.  A friend was running for state office in North Carolina and I had been serving as his campaign treasurer.  And at a rally in Chapel Hill he had been given the hearty endorsement of then-presidential candidate Ron Paul.  Meeting Dr. Paul was a great honor and I was feeling pretty good about things.  So en route back home, just on a whim I decided to take in a movie that was just released that same day.

Said movie was Iron Man (read my review here).

Ten years later, dozens of movies and many television spinoffs later (and maybe someday we'll see those intersect with the main films... I mean how hard is it to get Peter Parker into the offices of Nelson and Murdock for legal advice?!) and what seems to me like two or three other lifetimes, the grand experiment that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come to this: Avengers: Infinity War.  And if you had told me when Iron Man was coming out that this would be the result of an unprecedented concerted effort across a full decade, I would have said "Not possible.  It's never going to work."

It worked.  And when the final credits began to roll at the premiere screening last night here at a local cinema somewhere in North America...

There was no applause.  There was no cheering.  There was no praise.  There was no laughter.  There was no crying.  There was nothing at all.  Except collective shell shock.  It was an audience reaction I had never seen during a lifetime of watching movies at at theater.  To be honest everyone looked drained.  Like seeing Joker at the end of Full Metal Jacket: that "thousand yard stare".  It was like all of us had the same thought: "did that just happen?  Did that REALLY just happen?  What was that?  NOW what?!"

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been pure orchestrated cinema magic.  And Avengers: Infinity War is the massive conflagration that it has all been building up to.  EVERYTHING that has come previously ties into this film, even the bits and pieces that seemed so inconsequential.  Now we know: nothing has been inconsequential in this saga.  As with all the best magic tricks, when it's happening before your eyes and you don't even realize it, and then you whomp yourself upside the head stunned by the sheer genius of it...

Everyone who has contributed to this over the past ten years deserves utmost appreciation.  And the Brothers Russo - Anthony and Joe - are going to see their work on this film the subject of study in storytelling for many years to come.  Avengers: Infinity War is a perfect ensemble film.  With a cast of zillions it would seem nigh on impossible for everyone to have a chance to show their virtues.  And yet, there is not a character you've come to love (or hate) across the MCU that doesn't get their moment to shine.  They play their parts in a tapestry stretching across the cosmos, the stakes couldn't be higher.  And the Russos pulled off a dance most elegant with them all.

If you've been following every iota of the MCU material, you will be rewarded immensely with this movie.  And even if you haven't (memo to self: need to watch Black Panther) you are most likely still going to have no problem following along with Avengers: Infinity War.  I still haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 but found it no trouble at all to accept Mantis with the barest minimum of exposition.  Again, more of the beauty of this franchise at work.

It's been a long time since I've reviewed anything on this blog.  And maybe I'm just out of practice.  But more likely it's because Avengers: Infinity War shatters the superhero movie oeuvre wide open, that I find myself inadequate to write more about it without risking tipping a hand about the details of the film.  And this movie merits more than any other in recent memory going in cold.  If you've seen it already, heed the hashtag campaign of #ThanosDemandsYourSilence and be considerate of those who haven't the opportunity yet.

However, I will remark on something and if this doesn't whet your appetite then I don't know what will.  For the better part of ten years we've been seeing Thanos teased on screen, either as silent cameo or in fleeting "stingers" mid-ending credits.  And apart from the Marvel comics themselves Thanos has remained a pretty obscure figure in pop culture.  Most people outside of the comics fan base have been seeing Thanos and probably asking "Who's he?  Why should we care about this corrugated-chinned purple guy?"

After this opening weekend of Avengers: Infinity War, they will care.  Thanos has just shot up the charts to the top of the Greatest Film Villains Ever.  And somewhere Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin must be wielding massive grins on their faces.  That the character they created forty-five years ago has come out of left field to threaten all of creation.  Bookstores this weekend are going to be selling out of 1991's The Infinity Gauntlet trade paperback.  And if there is any sanity left at the Academy, then Josh Brolin will get a Best Actor nomination.  There has never been a cinematic bad guy like Thanos before: someone with this kind of complex character and motive and power to manipulate.  Brolin breathed an all-too rare depth into Thanos and he's set a platinum standard for all movie nemeses to come.

If Star Wars Episode 9 is even half as good as Avengers: Infinity War, then we are gladly going to forgive every mis-step that saga has made.  Even Jar Jar Binks.  Yeah, I said it.  I went there.  THAT is how mind-blowingly awesome Avengers: Infinity War is.

I gotta give Avengers: Infinity War my highest possible accolade for a comic book-based film.  Go see it as soon as you can.  And remember: DO NOT DISCUSS SPOILERS AND AVOID SPOILERS HOWEVER YOU CAN!  Because Thanos wouldn't like that.  Don't make Thanos angry.

(By the way... and you should know this by now... stick around for the end of the credits.)

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When the odds are against you, remember Luke

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Social commentary from the grim darkness of the far future

Y'know, if the Emperor of Mankind hadn't embarked upon his crusade to wipe out ALL religion from humanity, the galaxy would have been a much better place.  Some things are too ingrained into the human psyche.  The need for spirituality is one of them.  Attempt to deprive a people of that, and disaster will be the outcome.

Anyhoo, just an idea for a pic that crossed my gray matter last week.  Had a dilly of a time finding the right image from the Horus Heresy but in the end Horus himself cuts a fine jib.

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Retro-Internet on an iPad Pro

For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the "classic" Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro...

Turns out: quite a bit!

Here's what I came up with after reaching back into the inner fog of time immemorial, or at least those strange days of college. Trying to find analogies on the App Store of everything that most of us had as Internet utilities on our PCs or, if you were fairly wealthy, laptops. Don't even think that we had smartphones in those days. "Internet" and "phone" usually meant waiting until your roomie was finished talking to his girlfriend before you could fire up the 14.4 baud modem (sorry about that guys).

The resulting group of apps, which with usual creative flair I dubbed "Old School Internet":

 

I still hate that %#$@ Gopher icon, looking at me, grinning, mocking...

That's pretty much what most people had on their Windows and Mac machines, absent having an account on a UNIX server (which students at most colleges and universities were given access to so even if you didn't have your own PC then, you still had quite a bit of Internet power to do uhhh... "work" with).

Aesthetically the most glaring omission from this group is Apple's Quicktime Player, which was the precursor of the H.264 video standard now so ubiquitous on most devices. Quicktime became the most commonly used - and most trusted in terms of security - video format on the 'net in a fairly short amount of time, supplanting RealMedia and some other competitors. But since the descendants of Quicktime are built into every browser (and Apple-built product) nowadays anyway, a dedicated Quicktime app would be worse than redundant.

For the web brower app, instead of using Safari as comes with the iPad Pro, I opted to include Firefox. Why? Because Firefox is the successor of Netscape Navigator, which was derived directly from Mosaic: the first "killer app" in Internet history. Mosaic was the first browser to incorporate the ability of using graphics and also gave greater control over fonts and text sizes. So let's pretend that this is Netscape Navigator, or even Mosaic:

 

The last website that Kip Chalmers ever saw...

That's the "official" website of Wyatt Oil. If you get the reference without Google-ing it, go buy yourself a candy bar and pretend you bought it from me. I'm not going to give you the candy bar because if you know the reference you already realize that giving it would be a violation of moral code.

If we seriously wanted antiquated Internet by any means, we would have to get e-mail through a UNIX system and using the Pine program. We used Pine with our accounts on the server at Elon (my own account name was was knigr5c0) but I don't have a UNIX server handy at the moment. So instead let's find an app that approximates the kind of program most of us used with commercial Internet providers. For a long time I used Eudora, made by Qualcomm. But there is no Eudora on the App Store and I didn't want to use the E-Mail app that comes with iOS devices, so I used the Google Mail app instead:

Just imagine it without the Nigerian scammers...

And now we're getting into the good stuff! I'd venture to say that the vast majority of Internet users have either never heard of Usenet or it's a vague notion playing on the edge of memory. But once upon a time Usenet was how a LOT of productivity - more or less - happened on the Internet. I know of at least two major websites, still going strong today, that spawned from their founders being active on newsgroups.

Okay so what's a "newsgroup"? Basically a big trove of publicly posted e-mails on just about every subject imaginable and some that Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't hallucinate matter how much acid he'd drop. I'm still trying to figure out what alt.muppets.bork.bork.bork was supposed to be about. Anyway, if you were a Star Wars geek, rec.arts.starwars was the big central place to pow-wow at. There was a hierarchy (more or less) and to be an "official" newsgroup it had to be voted on by Usenet, errr... users. Otherwise they were an "alt"-something. And of course this being the Internet even then one had to take anything you'd find on Usenet with a massive cow lick of salt.

I sincerely thought that Usenet wouldn't be around anymore, and I can't even remember the last time I went to a newsgroup. But there are a few Usenet servers still around. Most of them are with ISPs and are included with monthly subscription, but some out there are free... IF you can connect to them. No luck on that. Still, having a Usenet reader on my iPad is pretty neat:

 

Before Facebook and the Russian hackers THIS is how we got our fake news...

Telnet is a utility that is still often used in academia and other purposes. Not so much today by most private users but once upon a time this was one of the best arrows in your quiver. Telnet is remotely logging in to another computer, and usually a very BIG computer, and using it on your own desktop. It's how most of us checked the e-mail on our student accounts when we lived off campus. It's also how you could play MUDs (Multi-Level Dungeons) and join in the community on ISCA BBS. Operated by Iowa Student Computing Alumni, ISCA BBS was the "hang out place" for all the cool kids... even if we only had plain ASCII text on a screen.

So I found a Telnet client on the App Store and out of pure muscle memory typed the address, expecting it to not be there at all...

... but it WAS!

"I'm BAAAA-AAAACK!!"

Holy crap!! ISCA is still running!! Wish I could remember the name of the account I last used on there. My first screenname was "The Man Eating Cow" and over the next couple of years I was "Jedi Master Yoda" and "Let My People Go" and a few others (why so many names? There was a girl at Elon who was stalking me. Long story...). I joined this time as "TheKnightShift" and was welcomed by pretty much the same screens that came up every time I ever logged in before.

And then there were MUDs.  Something I never got into but they were popular enough that you knew what they were.  The MUDs were essentially an MMO like World of Warcraft, except all-text.  If you ever heard of a waaaaay old game called Zork well, a MUD was pretty much Zork with a few hundred people running around inside of it.  And some of them are still online!  If you want to telnet into one of the more famous ones from the ancient times and give it a try here's the official website for ShadowMUD.

FTP means "File Transfer Protocol" and is one of those things that is now running under the hood even if you don't know (or care) that it's there.  Still, it gets a fair bit of usage, particularly when bulk uploading or downloading material.  Here is one FTP utility I found in the App Store:

 

Meh...

I could never make sense out Gopher.  It was a search engine thingy that let you look for material on Gopher servers, usually at universities and major libraries.  If it was out in "Gopherspace" you could easily find it.  IF it was in Gopherspace that is.  But it must still be used and appreciated because there is at least one Gopher client for iOS devices and I'm assuming for Android also:

 

"Gophers, ya great git! Not golfers! The little brown furry rodents!"

I figured that a text-based browser like Lynx wouldn't be on the App Store.  If it is, it's so obscure that it didn't show up in a search.  And some might wonder about the point if a web browser that shows only text.  But there is quite a good rationale for it.  Lynx and other text-only browsers can tie in to software that converts the words into audible speech.  Hence, even thoughs with little or no eyesight at all can "surf the web".  Pretty neat aye?  There are some textual web browsers for the iPad Pro and other mobile devices. However none of them make it plain "Amish-style text".  All they do is strip out the graphics and other bells and whistles and generate text with the formatting, fonts etc. intact:

 

The Knight Shift: Apocalypse Mode
Because the wasteland cares not for your bandwidth...

And that's pretty much how it was two decades or so ago.  We were the pioneers.  The ones who had to dial in through a landline and hope that there weren't so many connections that we couldn't log in.  Who could only share photos with other users (like that girl who sounded so cute) by giving them our snail-mail address and wait a week for a Kodak print to arrive.  Who had to trust that the character waving at us inside a MUD really did have a sword equipped before we stormed the castle.  Who had to uudecode that file from a newsgroup, having good faith that it really was a pic of a computer-animated dewback from A New Hope: Special Edition and not something obscene.

That's how we had our Internet.  And we LIKED it!

"Now get off my lawn!"

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