On the New Journalism

Tenkar has a post recently about EnWorld (RIP), and how it has gradually degenerated from a useful news-source in the 3.0 release era into an advertising-delivery vehicle.  Unfortunately, I'm having issues commenting on blogs, but my unposted response was effectively "welcome to journalism in the internet era!"  News is advertising is news.  Somebody has to pay to produce it, and there's no money in subscriptions anymore.

But then I got to thinking...  EnWorld is already Old Media.  Its integration of advertising is ham-handed, in much the same way that rpgnow's featured reviewers are.  Internet forums?  Very 2001.  There's room in the market for a more 2016 RPG newsvertising site, after the buzzfeed model.  Here are some sample headlines that I wrote instead of sleeping:

• Eleven reasons you drive your DM to drink
• Five pictures that explain why Dark Sun was the best goddamn RPG setting every published
• The seven dumbest monsters in the Monster Manual V will leave you wondering what the author was thinking
• Six amazing games and why your group will never play them
• Five terrible fantasy novels that we all love anyway
• The nine most underrated magic items in the DMG, and why they're actually awesome
• Six terrible OGL splatbooks that you might remember nostalgically
• Six phases every new player goes through, in Conan the Barbarian gifs
• Top ten D&D villains of all time
• These seven derpy dragons will make you chuckle
• The six types of weird people at gaming cons, and how to survive dealing with them
• The five worst Forgotten Realms NPCs and why everyone hates them
• Six heavy metal albums you should base your next campaign on 
• These five cats just want to play too
• Eight ways you know you're an old-school gamer

I could keep going.  This shit writes itself.  I already have pictures of cats and pictures of dragons on the agenda; all you need now are reaction buttons and gifs from Game of Thrones, and it'd be a hit with "the Millenials."  Even if it weren't a commercial success, it'd be pretty funny to write.

Wigle Whiskey Tasting Notes

Totally unrelated to gaming, except inasmuch as it has become traditional for certain of my players to show up to ACKS hungover.

Wigle Whiskey (not to be confused with WiGLE) is a Pittsburgh distillery named after Phillip Wigle, a local hero(?) of the Whiskey Rebellion.  Anything having to do with liquor is a bureaucratic nightmare in Pennsylvania these days (what with the state Liquor Control Board's monopoly), so Wigle is one of just a handful of distilleries (well, legal ones) in what used to be a very still-heavy part of the country.  They had a free tasting last night, so being a whiskey drinker of unsophisticated palate, I decided to go try their goods.

After a bit of a wait in the cold, I tried the following things (in roughly the following order, so it might be expected that things I tried later have slightly less accurate reviews):

• Landlocked Spiced: Landlocked is a honey spirit that has been compared to rum.  I rather like honey spirits (eg Bushmill's Honey Whiskey, with Barenjager on my to-try list), and this one was OK but not amazing.  Tasted a bit flowery almost?  From their notes, I was probably getting too much vanilla over the honey, which is not what I was hoping for.
• Small-Batch Maple Wheat Whiskey (which I'm not seeing on their online store, curiously): Wheat whiskey aged in charred oak barrels with maple staves, if I recall correctly.  I went through an "mmm, tastes like drinking a tree" phase a year or two ago, and this is representative of that style in the best possible way.  Not to my current tastes, but if that's what you're into, probably pretty good.
• Walkabout Apple Whiskey: Wheat and rye whiskeys, barrel-aged, blended, and cut from cask strength using local cider rather than water.  A promising premise, but there was definitely a discordant note that threw things off for me; I'm not sure if it was the rye or the woodiness from the barrel aging or something else, but something did not combine well with the apple flavor.  Not a fan, but it's an experimental on their parts so I think we'll see further refinements in future.
• Landlocked Clear: I know, you're supposed to mix clear spirits, but this was pretty good.  An unapologetic, uncomplicated honey spirit, would probably blend well with apple flavors.
• Straight Wheat Whiskey: One of their flagship whiskeys, and quite good - not as sweet as a corny bourbon, not as woody as a Tree In A Barrel, nicely balanced, tasty.

On my way out I ran into some friends in line who decided that the wait wasn't worth it, and we went and got thai food while I metabolized before driving home.  So that all worked out rather well.

Natural Language and Causality

Does it strike anyone else as strange that all natural languages (that I have met so far) are built around cause, effect, and intentionality?  The whole separation of subjects, verbs, and objects necessarily injects causal inference into every statement - verb happened to object as a consequence of subject's nature.

Contrast this with the nature of raw experience, where causal relations are never explicit in any single action, and can only be extracted from prolonged observation.  The causal information density of language is much higher than that of sensory experience, but at the expense of accuracy and nuance.

Contract this also with the mathematical formalism of the function, where we relate a 'cause' and an 'effect' through enumeration of all causes and all effects which follow from a certain 'law', and none of which are really actions.  Here there is no inference - only truth, of a sort.

What does this have to do with RPGs?  Not sure.  Am tired.  Maybe relevant to players forming causal inferences about sandbox settings, and the value of providing NPC adventureres and rumors to inform them of some of the details of the universe's operation (like "Wait, you killed a bunch of wyverns out in the wilderness?  I bet they had a lair and it's full of unguarded treasure...").  Causal information density there is evidently much higher than traipsing around in the woods for a couple of months...  and the mathematical formalism corresponds to letting them read the encounter tables.

Maybe also relevant to learning new games, which is a topic I have been considering lately (coworkers desire one-shot).

I suspect that this will not be the last philosophical, maybe-but-probably-not-relevant-to-gaming post in the queue.