RoBoTNiK

Tags: The best four days in history?

The annual wargame, roleplaying game, and dressing up like an elf convention GenCon (to which I have never been, by the way) bills itself as “the best four days in gaming.” Will the American Historical Association’s annual convention, which starts tomorrow in Atlanta, be the best four days in history? I’ll let you know–I’ll be there. If you’re going to be there too, let’s meet up: drop me a line using the AHA’s weirdly archaic message system, email me (electromail chez robmacdougall dot org, not com), or just look for the guy in the totally bitchin’ elf costume.

Originally posted at (the all new) Old is the New New. Leave a comment there and make me look popular.

Tags: Kicking ass for justice.

I can’t believe I left this out of the History Carnival: I got an email last month from a guy named Jake Lowen, who saw my post about Superman vs. the Klan and did a video podcast about it. Jake is a community organizer in Kansas, Superman’s adopted home. He trains disenfranchised people, including kids, to fight for self-determination and political change. “I have the greatest job in the world,” Jake says on his site. “I fight evil for a living.” He keeps a video blog describing his adventures “kicking ass for justice,” and it’s pretty inspiring stuff. He gives me too much credit for digging up the Superman / Stetson Kennedy / KKK story, which was in Freakonomics after all, but I’m chuffed that somebody who is actually out in the world fighting for “truth, justice, and all that stuff” found something relevant or useful in my scribblings.

In other news, I’m leaving right this instant for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) annual conference in Vegas, baby. I’m commentator for a panel on “The Rhetoric of Telecommunication Policy,” comparing the political and rhetorical construction of telecom networks in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. We have scored the less-than-coveted Sunday morning slot, but it’s a good trio of papers, and I’m looking forward to the panel. And there’s lots of great stuff on the program this year, plus apparently this Las Vegas is something of a tourist town. So if you happen to find yourself on the Vegas strip early Sunday morning, in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace, fresh out of chips and looking for something to do… We’ll even waive the usual two drink minimum. Seriously, though, if anyone reading this is on their way to the conference, hit me with an email and we’ll get together.

In the hopper: What happens in Vegas, biographical sketches of eccentric characters, what I’m not reading.

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Hey, what happened to all the game idea posts? There was a lovely harvest of them early this week and then nothing. Is it because arctic weather snapped back into effect?

There ought to be a name for that last blast of winter that comes after a week or so of premature warmth, just when you start to let yourself think that spring has arrived. It's like Indian Summer's evil twin. I've heard people call the sneaky warm period "Strawberry Spring", but I don't know if that's real or just from a Steven King story. I was thinking something more like "Fuck You Winter".

Yeah, you're probably going to say, where are my game idea posts? Good point, but I did just put up 1300 words on Superman, sex pulps, and the secret history of weightlifting. That ain't knockwurst! I do have a few new GILT ideas, or reworked old ones, but they don't seem to come as fastly and furiously when you're living in gamer exile. Actually, there was a period, about two months after leaving Boston, when I felt like I was generating scores of beautiful mad ideas a day. I think I was sweating them out of my system or something. But now, not so much. Maybe I need more structure to bounce things off of. If I started up something like bryant's old weekly idea mash-ups, would people play along?

You can always stroll down memory lane with my de.icio.us/robotnik/gilt tag. All of my old LJ games-I'd-like-to are there, and a number of yours, although I know I'm missing some goodies.

I made the mistake this week of trying to upgrade Old is the New New to Movable Type 3.2. I foolishly believed the hype about it being “our easiest upgrade ever!” and only after crippling my website, apparently beyond repair, did I find the 10,000 or so blog entries by other disgruntled MT users saying it might not be so simple. (Memo to myself: When a 200-page users manual is replaced by a 60-second Flash animation, start worrying.) OK, maybe not beyond repair. I'm still working it out.

This sucks because I really want to clean that place up over the holidays and even start posting a little before January, when I’m “hosting” the next History Carnival. (The most recent carnival went up yesterday at Jonathan Dresner's fine Asian history blog Frog In A Well.) ANYWAY, if anyone reading this sees any interesting history-related blogging between now and January 15, please comment here or email a link to me at electromail-way at-way obmacdougall-ray ot-day org-way. It doesn’t have to be academic-style history or the work of a professional historian. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd love to expand the Carnival beyond the usual suspects. (princeofcairo's eliptony library will almost certainly get a plug.) So pointers to history-type-blogging at sites not specifically focused on history or just generally off the beaten paths of the academic blogosphere are particularly welcome.

There's new content on robmacdougall.org today. I note this because a) I basically always note it, and b) it's the kind of silliness (alternate Deep Throats) that I would normally post over here. But this time it's, like, historical, you know? I also have something new on Cliopatria, part of a group discussion of Barry Gewen's essay “Forget the Founding Fathers” in this Sunday's New York Times.

Way back in September, the very second post in this weblog was an account of lunch with Jason Kaufman, a smart young sociologist at Harvard who wanted to talk to me about the comparative history of Canada and the United States. Reading that post, it’s easy to see my respect and envy (as a historian) of Jason’s willingness (as a sociologist) to make big generalizations and bold, contentious claims. I now have another reason to respect and envy Jason: he had an op-ed piece in this Sunday’s New York Times. (If that link expires, try this one.) But the reaction to the piece by other smart people I also respect reminds me of something about big generalizations and bold claims: they can easily be disputed, and they can often be wrong.

The op-ed is a teaser for Jason and his co-author Orlando Patterson’s article in the next American Sociological Review. Their NYT piece is called “Bowling for Democracy,” which is cute because Jason’s first book was an extended take-down of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But they’re talking about a different kind of bowling here. The question they started with was, “why don’t Canadians play cricket?” Cricket remains popular in almost all the former British colonies; Canada and the U.S. are the two big exceptions. Kaufman and Patterson’s thesis is that in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States, cricket remained the preserve of upper-class elites. Anxious to maintain their class identity in an increasingly egalitarian society, Canadian and American elites clung to upper-class signifiers like cricket and kept the plebes off the pitch. When baseball came along in the late nineteenth century, it was all too easy for promoters like A.G. Spalding to caricature cricket as a sissy, blue-blooded game and position baseball as the manly, populist alternative. In India and the Caribbean, by contrast, British elites had little fear of class assimilation. There were easier ways to tell who was in the club and who wasn’t, so elites encouraged their colonial subjects to play the game.

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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

"See all that stuff inside, Homer? That's why your robot never worked!"

A quiet Sunday reading the paper, and books, and other nonelectronic things, and copying Season 2 of MI-5 from TiVo to VHS for jeregenest, who was in a scary and freakish and random accident. It sounds like he's going to be OK, mercifully, but he will, I assume, be convalescing for a while. (On reflection, odds are good that Jere's already seen the MI-5s, but it's nice to have a project.)

I was amused by this quote in the Sunday Book Review:

Here's the problem with 'Write what you know': What too many aspiring writers know, it turns out, is that a suburban American adolescence causes vague feelings of sadness—especially when one's formative years include a dying grandparent or housepet.

Yes, indeed. Substitute "Canadian" for "American" in that sentence and I know that problem all too well. (See, Homer? That's why my novel never worked...) The review in question goes on to say "It's the lucky writer whose story is familiar to himself and exotic to his readers," which then made me think of The Russian Debutante's Handbook, a bit of a trendy must-read novel a few years ago that I had somehow missed. L gave it to me over the holidays, and it was great. Highly recommended. One of the funniest books I've read in a long time. The feckless Gen-X hipsters therein reminded me an awful lot of me and my own friends in the PC 1990s, at least until the Russian mob shows up and starts breaking their kneecaps. That didn't happen to me and my friends as far as I can recall. (See how my uneventful Canadian adolescence has prevented me from being a literary prodigy? Oh the pain.)

I posted another rambling essay today about Ben Franklin and the Turk and 18th-century robotica over at my big boy website. Halfway through that post I mention that I have "another cool anecdote about the Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg in the 1700s that I want to tell you." I know, I know, most people would be content with just one such anecdote in their life, but you are blessed with me as a friend, so you might as well enjoy it. Check this shit out: Peter the Great, Tsar from 1682 to 1725, was a passionate collector of monsters. In the 1690s, he began assembling a collection of anatomical and zoological monstrosities and abnormalities, living and dead. In 1704, he ordered that midwives throughout Russia were strictly forbidden to kill or hide newborn children with deformations. All "monstrous" births were to be turned over to the clergy, who would deliver them to his Cabinet of Monsters in St. Petersberg. After Peter's death in 1725, the Cabinet came under control of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

"Cabinet of Monsters." Nice ring to that. Well, I doubt I have to tell you what I'm thinking: If those "monsters" were not giants and hermaphrodites and hydrocephalic kids but actually, you know, monsters... you could have a crazy 1700s Russian League of Extraordinary Gentlemen adventure, or some very cool backstory for the Russian version of the BPRD in a certain long-threatened Soviet Hellboy Delta Green game.

What else? Oh yes. bryant's Best Movies of 2004 post is up, which is great, and relieves me of having to write one. I spent a lot of 2004 passing off a combination of Bryant and Anthony Lane's opinions about movies as my own, so it seems appropriate to just link to his Best Of list now. My only gripes with his list? I'd drop Sky Captain. I found it dull and disappointing, and I can't help thinking that caffeine and a sense that "I should like this" is deluding Bryant and my other geek chums who still champion the film. And where is the love for Napoleon Dynamite? But other than that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm absolutely charmed by the lost frog meme, a child's poster for a lost frog that internet funsters have run with a la All Your Base. L & I have been telling one another, "I lost my frog!" "Him name Hopkin green frog!" and chortling over our deathless wit all week. I even posted my own modest contribution to the meme.

Last night we tried out an Akira-Kurosawa-meets-Reservoir-Dogs roleplaying game called The Mountain Witch, which I really liked, but I think I ended up in the minority on that subject. I did make one huge mistake in how I ran it, a rookie error that pretty much mystifies me. In the long run, I think my skin might be too sensitive to keep trying to sell these indie games to our Ad Hoc crew. I wrote a loooong post about the game and how it went on the Forge. I should write something about it for the 20'x20' Room, too, pitching it there not as feedback for the author, but for a more general audience. I feel bad about how derelict I've been at 20'x20' lately. I've still got a half-written post waiting around about my Paranoia game back in September. Say, isn't the 20'x20' Room's one year birthday like, tomorrow, or the next day? Maybe I can do something with that.

I also posted something today for Veterans/Remembrance Day on the newly unveiled www.robmacdougall.org, backdated to conceal my tardiness. Mucho blogging!

p.s. I'll find my frog. Who took my frog?

New York Times article about pessimistic Canadian historians and pundits:

[A] growing number of historians, foreign policy thinkers and columnists from some of the nation’s top newspapers … see themselves as part of an informal school that has no name or single mentor … [All] are writing the same assessment: Canada is in decline, or at the very least, has fallen short of their aspirations. For these thinkers, Canada is adrift at home and wilting as a player on the world stage. It is dogged by not only uninspired leaders but also by a lack of national purpose, stunted imagination and befuddled priorities even as its economy prospers.

Here we have the conjunction of two very common phenomena. One: Canadians who think Canada is a great country that would be much better off if Canadians, and Canadian leaders in particular, weren’t so lame. Two: A Times article that identifies a long-standing situation and declares it a novel trend. (Canadians are pessimists! Brides go crazy about weddings! Parents love their children!) Still, it’s always nice to see CanCon in the NYT.

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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.