It's called 'role-playing' for a reason

The long-expected confrontation finally happened last night during our weekly geek session.  It also happend with the player I expected it to.  The players got their hands on a bunch of gun-powder, and Ed decided he wanted to try to use it to make a sort of nail-bomb.

I told him he'd have to try it with huge penalties since he wasn't proficient in either engineering or natural philosophy (the term 'scientist' wasn't coined until the nineteenth century).  He was basically a guy setting fire to a can stuffed full of gunpowder.  After three failures and nearly blowing his hand off, he started getting upset.  He didn't understand why he couldn't just see what he did wrong and do it differently the next time.  It was just like when he found out his character couldn't read if he didn't take a reading/writing skill.  Things like reading and scientific process weren't as all-pervasive back then as they are now.  There wasn't enough of it around that you could just pick it up as you went along in life, you had to specifically go out and find someone to teach it to you.

I also tried to explain that things like catapult-thrown fire-bombs had already been invented.  It wouldn't be that far a leap for someone who was actually skilled in dealing with gunpowder and firearms if Ed suggested the idea to him.  But by then Ed was in deliberate ignorance mode, where he gets bored or irritated and entertains himself by pretending to forget how the game works.

Scary people

There's a guy on the radio who has a press pass that he uses to watch movies all the time at the theatre.  Nobody at the theatre likes him very much, because he's a little overbearing and tends to creep people out.  I generally keep him at arm's length as well, mostly because the first time I met him he had already talked his way into two or three free movies before anybody started asking if we were getting anything out of the deal.  And even now that he has an official press pass, he still every once in a while tries to get in without having to flash it and sign in.  He thinks it's fun.

Earlier this week one of the employees made no secret that he didn't like the guy.  So the guy came to me and complained.  I apologized and said I'd talk to the kid about being rude.  The conversation continued and it came out that the kid didn't like him.  That was when the guy got defensive and started getting scary.  He said, "Oh well, I'm pretty close to God sometimes and other people can sense it.  It makes them hate me."

Okay, I'm definitely not the most religeous guy, but I've read enough that I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work if you're close to God.

He continued, "Yeah, and when they're hostile or mean to me, Bad Things happen to them."

I said, "Wow, really?" putting as much of my own hostility and incredulity into those words as I could.

He caught the hint and backed off, mumbling something about telling the kid he was praying for him.  Yeah, I'm sure I'll be included in those prayers now as part of his divine hit list.

All religeous views aside, the thing that I find the most disturbing is the way the reasoning of people like him always starts with, 'Well, I'm a good person so...'  And since it's impossible that he might have been inconsiderate or rude to this kid, it must be that the kid is an evil little punk that deserves whatever he gets.

Highlands Festival

We've got another assistant manager, finally, so I've been getting a little time to myself every once in a while.  Soon I may be working less than 60 hrs!

I went to the Highlands Festival in Estes Park last week with a bunch of friends.  It was definitely an adventure.  Kiso accidentally booked rooms 50 miles past Estes, so there was much driving the night before on dark twisty roads.  Katie, inexperienced in the ways of navigating mountain passes, got severely car-sick more than once along the way.  For my part, I contracted a head cold shortly before departure, and got to endure crazy altitude changes.  The next day we set out again in the morning back toward Estes.  In preparation, I got doped up on decongestants and ibprofen, and Katie skipped breakfast.

We made it just in time to see the end of the parade.  We would have seen it too, except that two blocks from the main street Melissa stepped in a hole and nearly snapped her foot off at the ankle.  Fortunately it was within a hundred yards of a pharmacy, and we were able to get her an ankle brace.  Rather than force Melissa to limp all the way to the festival, we piled into Lindsay's car and dropped off her, Kirstin, Katie, and myself.  Once Lindsay and Kiso were safely out of sight parking somewhere, Melissa realized that she'd left her shoe in the car.  I loaned her mine while we waited for the drivers to bring it with them.

As it turned out, we were all too stubborn to let go of our high spirits.  Melissa limped bravely onward, I wandered through a haze of antihistimines, and Katie didn't eat a thing all day.  In spite of it all, we still all managed to have fun watching the dancing, jousting and corgie races.

We're the most versital species we've ever met

I stole a few hours of free time from the theatre yesterday and had put on some Babylon 5 reruns in the background while I was doing some much-needed housework.  I won't bore anyone with the details of each episode, but they kept going on about how awesome humans were.  About how if the Membari or some other race had build the space station they would have just filled it with their own people, but humans invited all the other races to live there too and created a community.

We see that a lot in various scifi and even some fantasy; Star Trek comes immediately to mind.  There's the Klingons, who are like humans but very violent and war-like.  The Vulcans, who are like humans but very logical and emotionless.  And so on.  When Gene Roddenberry first came up with these aliens, he took a certain set of human traits and amplified them until an entire culture was built around them.  You could say the same for elves and dwarves in fantasy settings.  The kicker is that none of these so-called aliens are so alien that we can't picture a human behaving the exact same way.

Now, decades of seeing and reading about these human-like aliens has created a sort of cultural feedback in our collective self-image.  Klingons may all be warriors, and Vulcans may all be intellectuals, but humans can be any of those things!  We've begun to see versitility as our defining attribute.  It's true that our concepts of what real aliens might be like (potentially posessing motives and beliefs we would find totally incomprehensible) have expanded, but the idea of ourselves as being the most versital and adaptable has stuck.

I think of Contact, where the alien representative and it's culture are potentially so bizzare that he appears as the astronaut's father in a childhood dream.  Even so, he tells her that they have never encountered a species like humans, who are at the same time capable of both breathtaking beauty and incredible horror.

Is it a bad thing?  I don't think so.  After all, versitility has become something we pride ourselves on.  We can relate to and find common ground with anyone, no matter how alien.  Or so we think.  When we do finally encounter true aliens, you can bet that there will be those who try as hard as they can to communicate with them and to see things from their perspective.  ...And since we're such a versitile race, I'm sure there'll be some who will want to blow them all out of existence too.

And now we're back to the BAD kind of tired.

I just broke my own record with a 76 hour week.  Yay me.
Jay was all set to lay into me this morning for hiring some guy he didn't approve in triplicate two weeks prior.  He must have sensed the utter disinterest in my voice when he talked to me over the phone though, because he suddenly backed off and barely even mentioned it.  The second candidate for assistant manager dropped out of the race yesterday, leaving us with numbers three and four, both of whom I interviewed and approved.  I've almost got enough energy to be smug about it, but I'm past caring who we hire just so long as we hire someone who will make it possible for me to leave the theatre every once in a while.
Scott Pilgrim wasn't spectacular, but I thought it was very clever.  I was disappointed it bombed so hard in the boxoffice.  I'm not even much of a Michael Cera fan, and I still saw it twice before it left.