This is probably my last post, for several reasons.
First, I appear to have well and truly fucked my blogger settings, probably by accidentally hitting some sort of unicode key combination or obscure hotkey that changes whether lines run left to right or right to left in the composition window. This makes writing posts rather inconvenient.
(No, I did not find a solution by googling. Yes, it persists across deleting and starting a new post. It is wreaking hell with my punctuation placement, so I apologize for anything that gets messed up.)
More importantly, I'm pretty well done with fantasy, RPGs, and related. The more nonfiction I read, the paler it all seems; our worlds are shallow and simplistic, our characters likewise. Even if they weren't, what's the point? To pretend to heroism or godhood has lost its appeal to me; better to strive for true abilities in this beautiful, chaotic, universe in which we find ourselves.
I understand the necessity of the underlying social ritual, the weekly gathering, but the overt pretext, of The Game, is growing increasingly empty. I've picked up a couple of useful things in my several-thousand-hours of gaming and thinking about gaming over the last decade (exploiting systems, intuition for probability, memorizing rulebooks, historical trivia), but is it really worth putting in another couple of thousand hours to master DMing? I look at Alexis of Tao of D&D, who has made that investment, and I have to conclude that it doesn't seem sensible to me. There are so many other useful, interesting things I could be learning with that time. Opportunity's cousin, Opportunity Cost, also comes a-knocking on occasion.
Finally, I have recently made... not exactly an oath, and not exactly a wish (it was a weird, perhaps even wyrd, experience), and I feel that I must bring it to pass. It seems that the time has come to stake my fortune on an outcome dubious, to commit, to toil and bleed, and (universe willing) to work some figurative magic. Should I fail, perhaps pretending to godhood via DMing will regain some of its luster.
Watch this space for a link to a programming blog to-be-established, but expect no further updates thereafter.
