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My friend Jen is due to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed. This led to a discussion around the gaming table about each of our experiences with getting our wisdom teeth removed. Some of us were better off than others, needing only upper teeth removed, or suffering lesser degrees of impaction, or growing teeth more exposed to surgery, but we’d all been compelled to surgical removals. Which got me to thinking about evolution.

Homo sapiens sapiens has smaller jaws than our immediate relatives in the evolutionary family tree, which is why we have wisdom tooth trouble: our genes still tell our bodies to produce the same number of teeth in a smaller space. The last teeth to come in get crowed aside, often failing to grow out of the lower jaw at all. Failing to grow out is bad, but growing out part-way is much worse—or would be, in a pre-industrial, pre-surgical environment, where being able to reach the tooth easily for removal doesn’t count for much—because the irregularities and inaccessibility of the partially-grown tooth are magnets for tooth decay. Again, in a pre-industrial, pre-surgical environment, that’s very dangerous, because the blood and lymph vessels serving the jaw are closely tied to those serving the brain; untreated or maltreated tooth decay often leads to death as infections are carried brain-ward. Even today, people who neglect their teeth to an extreme degree occasionally succumb to brain infection.

(Since the change in jaw predates surgery, I’m at a loss to explain how our jaws could have shrunk in the first place. There must be some link to an evolutionary advantage even more important than reducing the chances of death by brain infection. Greater mating potential from the attractiveness of neotenous features?)

The idea that modern medicine renders humans immune to the pressures of evolution and natural selection is plausible only so long as you don’t think very hard about it. Okay, maybe we’re no longer subject to the same evolutionary pressures as animals in the wild, and increasingly rapid changes in society and technology may shorten the timespan over which a given pressure might operate, but that just means we’re subject to different evolutionary pressures. Behaviors are just as subject to natural selection as gross physical features. Perhaps a modern, industrial, urbanized lifestyle selects for greater comfort in enclosed spaces, or the beauty of youth in place of the beauty of health, or a reduced territorial drive. Your guess is as good as mine.

The adaptation of Gaiman’s Coraline to an off-Broadway musical format was another stop on our whirlwind of activity last weekend. I didn’t care for it, although I confess that doesn’t mean much. I don’t like theater as a general rule, especially not musicals. As both a musical and an adaptation of a story I liked very much in its original (book) version, and the show had two big strikes going against its chances to impress me before I stepped through the door.

It wasn’t all bad. They did some interesting things with sound, including an introduction played in disjoint notes on four or five toy pianos (which much have taken a lot of practice) and the opening, closing, locking, and unlocking of the door to the other house. They had a few funny jokes breaking the fourth wall, including the belle dame (or, strictly speaking, her hand) pausing just before she sings a song to narrate falling into the well to remind us that it does take an awfully long time to reach the bottom.

Mostly, though, my attention was taken up by how hard the musical would be to understand for anyone who had not read the book, or at least watched the movie adaptation. The production was very small, playing to about 200 seats, and employing only seven cast members. That meant that the cast doubled up on many roles, and not entirely in a natural fashion: the roles of Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, naturally enough, were played by the same actors who played the other Mrs. Spink and Mrs. Forcible, but those same actors also played Coraline’s mother and father, while two entirely different actors played the other mother and other father. The characters and their speech are quite distinctive, and I was never at a loss to distinguish one from the other…but I read the book, and quite closely, too. Someone coming in cold would likely be bewildered.

Bewildering, too, was the very brief attention paid to important plot points. The loss of the belle dame’s hand happens “off stage” in the book, the penalty for breaking an oath taken on her “good right hand,” before appearing for one last attempt to spoil a happy ending. The musical duplicates the movie’s decision to lop her hand off as she grasps after Coraline through a closing door, which is fine, but it happens so quickly, amid such a confusion of noise and flashing lights, that an audience not primed to watch for it is likely to miss it.

Knowing my prejudices, I can’t give Coraline a thumbs-down. I only warn potential audiences to read the book first, especially as it is a short read, aimed roughly at bright grade-schoolers, and very tightly written, masterfully turning out plot turns that consistently strike the sweet spot between predictability and non sequitur.

One stop on our whirlwind weekend was the MoCCA convention (Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art), a combination of lecture series and fundraiser and indie comic dealer room. Our particular interest was in watching some graphic animated shorts in the “cartoons from hell” seminar, but we also stopped, inevitably, in the dealer room.

It was a graphic (ha ha) demonstration of the rough pyramid of talent that applies to every creative field: for every comic artist with real skill and something clever or engaging to say, there’s ten who are merely adequate draftsmen going through the motions, and for every one of those, there’s ten (or more) who never learned to draw—or lay out a page, or lay out a panel, or much of anything comic book-y, really. And that last category, in indie comic books, hides behind the fig leaf of a self-ironic postmodernism. I lost track of the number of titles in the vein of “Bob’s Crappy Comic,” or “Learn to Draw!” or “Pretentious Art Comic.” (And for those who are truly on top of the self-ironic pile, titles like “Bob’s Absolutely Terrific Comic”—plastered across low-grade monochrome scribbles.)

Talking about the artistic process itself is usually—not always, but usually—a strong indicator that the artist has nothing to talk about. When what the artist has to say is “This all sucks, but I’m really sophisticated in that I am able to realize it,” he really has nothing to talk about, apart from the semi-expressed urge for attention.

I’m at the Toyota dealership, giving our car a routine checkup before taking it to its annual inspection, making sure it won’t pollute the spring-fresh New Jersey air. The dealership works hard to make the wait as comfortable as possible, and I appreciate it. There’s free donuts in the morning, free popcorn in the afternoon. Three televisions air three different programs: CNN, daytime talk show, and Spongebob Squarepants for the kids. The chairs are comfy, and more than adequate for the number of people in here. And you can play video games for free. One machine is hooked up to a modern (though not quite the latest model) console game system, but my attention is on the other: a stand-up booth from the video arcades of the ‘80s.

It’s undergone some modifications. The games of that era were embarrassingly primitive by today’s standards. The memory demands are slightly larger than those of a digital watch. You could fit dozens, probably hundreds, of them onto a single CD, so the machine is designed to play several dozen games from several companies: Space Invaders, Defender, Joust, Robotron, 1942, Qix, and some titles you’ve forgotten ever existed.

And my very favorite is the cheapest-looking one of all: Red Baron. I don’t know whether it really is less sophisticated than some of those classics, or that it requires less processing power, but to the casual eye it sure looks like it. A close relative of Battle Zone, it employs those same bright-line vector graphics left over from Asteroids and, before that, Space War. Mountain ranges are two-dimensional zig-zags rising in front of the horizon like angry M’s—good luck estimating whether you’ve passed one or whether a sharp wingover will result in a crash. The only sounds are an understated siren to let you know an enemy is on the screen and beeps to count out your score: low tone for 100 points, high tone for 10 points. Shoot a gun emplacement (250 points), and you’re rewarded with a congratulatory “boop boop beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.” There’s no sound effect for blowing up enemies apart from score, nor for firing your guns. Or gun, more precisely—Red Baron places you in a pure fighter, not a fighter-bomber, thus overlooking a chance literally to add another dimension to the game, and your gun is never upgraded.

But guess what. It’s still fun, after twenty-five or thirty years. Not so fun that I’d shell out money for it, but fun nevertheless—more fun than some of the more recent offerings on the machine, like Bust-a-Move. I enjoyed Red Baron a lot at my local arcade where, rather than the stand-up booth, it was packaged in an enclosed space with a seat and a joystick with the fire button built into it (rather than placed separately on a dashboard), meant to simulate roughly the tactile experience of sitting in a cockpit. The arrangement helped block a little of the noise from the other games in the arcade, and, once I’d worked out a weaving infinity-symbol pattern to avoid enemy fire while keeping my guns more-or-less in line, Red Baron was my favorite for about a year, when they replaced it with some other game. I can understand why: Red Baron wasn’t very popular, and it took up the space of two or three upright booths. Still, its passing was mourned by at least one pimply teen, who only once experienced the thrill of being confronted with a wave of five biplanes at once, and bringing them all down.

Rants are traditionally understood to do anyone but the author much good. A particularly witty and scathing one can be entertaining, to be sure, but the usual purpose of a rant is a therapeutic release for the writer, more an unleashing of frustration than a reasoned argument, and careful attention to the details of argument are likely to be counterproductive.

So the way this rant provided me, the reader, some therapeutic value is surprising.

I’ve complained here before about the state of the RPG industry. The hobby is dying, its aging devotees squeezed by demands on their adult time, younger blood drawn to other interests: first to CCGs, then internet gaming, with a brief flirtation with miniatures in between. The d20 indian-giving fiasco didn’t help: disrupting the distribution leg of the industry did nobody any good, but the costs were born disproportionately by small press and indie designers, so that almost all we see on the shelves today is D&D and White Wolf—maybe a little GURPS, if you’re lucky.

But dying? Probably not. The defining test of a true artist—that he must create, that he will create whether or not he’s paid to—applies to a lot of the best talent among RPG designers. The internet is a fertile ground for distributing small-press and indie games, especially those of the rules-lite variety. My sister-in-law’s surprisingly good showing as a novice GM, experienced only in online RPGs (literal RPGs, not merely MMO hack-and-slash) suggests that that medium is becoming sufficiently refined after a long period of growing pains to replicate the tabletop experience.

The picture isn’t entirely rosy. There’s a lot to be said for glossy products that a GM can use to whip up excitement among his players, for professional writing, and especially for rigorous playtesting, which the freeware model finds difficult to support in comparison to the heyday of the 1980s. Even if the internet makes it easier for gamers to stay in conversation with one another, and to exchange ideas, it won’t prevent the isolation of gamers who live outside metropolitan centers. Nor will it replace talent lost to the need to make a living.

Still, the blog rant, and the more perceptive comments attached below it, forced me to pause and rethink the glass as half-full, which has proven good therapy. As long as gamers can continue to find players around them, we’re good. Fewer, but still provided for.

I had this editorial called to my attention today, care of Congressman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI). Although it shares a “double down” devotion to doctrinal purity in the name of Saint Ronnie with Michael Steele’s announcement of the return of Republican power, and shares too a sort of vague wish that energetic new ideas will arise—among *cough* conservatives—in place of an actual offering of energetic new ideas, it doesn’t come across quite so batshit crazy, swinging between a need for apologies and a refusal to offer apologies or trumpeting a grass-roots initiative secretly engineered in private conferences.

Still, there’s a kind of desperation there, a desperation that reminds me of nothing so much as Jefferson Davis’s speech following the fall of Richmond, claiming, in part:

“Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense…nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve.”

Stirring words, skillfully composed, but painfully at odds with observable reality to anyone who paused to think about what they mean, rather than the sentiment they hoped to be realized: without all those pesky centers of population and industry, our armies are finally assured victory! Davis was reduced to inflating morale with lies, because he’d reached a point where hope was all his cause had left. Were he not defending a nation founded on nothing more than a desire to preserve slavery, I could consider him a tragic figure, shouldered with leading a rebellion he did not approve and forced to keep hope alive when all hope was gone. But he did, and I don’t.

Thaddeus McCotter’s essay displays the same empty sentiment, although McCotter differs from Davis in that he believes what he’s saying: without the support of all those pesky moderate voters, ideas arising from our renewed purity must surely be victorious! No actual ideas, merely the hope that ideas will arise if everyone just believes hard enough. Were he not defending a generation of sabotage to American wealth, power, prestige, and principle merely to further enrich the very wealthy, McCotter too might seem a tragic figure. But he is, and he doesn’t.

Conservatives have been coasting for years on a mixture of bullying and faith: faith in unregulated business, faith in a hateful god, and bullying of anyone who dared challenge either. They finally broke the system far enough that even bullying and faith aren’t enough to win elections outside the reddest of the red states. But they’ve been coasting so long that, now that bullying and faith aren’t working, they have nothing else to offer—not even the opportunity to engineer a convenient crisis just before election day, now that they aren’t setting policy. And once the general public stops buying into the faith, and stops fearing the bullies, there’s nothing left to run on.

Nothing in politics is forever. Some day the right wing will be back, probably sooner than is good for anyone. But not as long as this remains the party line. It’s a different kind of faith-based politics. Not politics motivated by religious faith, but politics rooted in a faith in inevitable victory. If we just believe hard enough, it will be true.

Which suits me just fine. Faith is no way to run a government; witness the recent results of running an economy on faith, or launching wars on faith. When the Republican party breaks its reliance on faith, and starts to measure policy, whether for elections or governance, on objective reality instead of what it might prefer to be true, they may come back in touch with reality, and I may have to start taking their ideas seriously again. Wouldn’t that be nice? Two political parties with meaningful ideas instead of merely half a party? But until they break the habit, they deserve the wilderness they’ve found themselves in.

The library has some heavy-duty air conditioning. Come the height of summer, that is quite welcome. There isn’t much need to lower the temperature artificially, however, when it’s uncomfortably cool outside, as it is today: about 64°F, breezy and drizzly. There’s no need at all to lower the temperature artificially below that.b

Yet the A/C is pounding away today, keeping the library a frosty 62°F. I can’t make up my mind which of two problems is to blame, but they’re both stupid. Possibility one: the central air is programmed to keep the temperature below an expected outside value, rather than keep it within a fixed target range. Possibility two: the air conditioning is set to run between certain dates, regardless of what the weather may be like on those dates.

Neither case is wholly nonsensical. You see such behavior a lot in old heating systems. In the first case, the regulator is so old as to be mechanical, and allowing the target temperature to vary with the strain on the system presented by the outside conditions is cheaper than aiming for a fixed target. In the second case, the expense of firing up the boiler only to shut it off again a day later, or vice versa, is greater than the expense of running it needlessly, or the inconvenience of a few days’ over- or under-heating.

But these systems are not wholly nonsensical in the context of the industrial age, when control systems were crude, mechanical devices, insensitive to small changes, difficult to design so as to handle multiple variables, prone to getting stuck or broken when designed to be too responsive. Isn’t this the information age? A generation or three after electronics became widely available? Even granting that the library’s temperature control may be old, it isn’t that old. World War II had electrical control systems. By now, even if the original control system depended on wires and circuit breakers, it should be easy enough—and cheap enough—to replace all such systems with a microchip with more processing power than the world’s largest calculating machine back when the original system was built. Programmable. Able to handle numerous variables: target temperatures that vary by date, by outside conditions, by time of day, by time since the last adjustment, by what flavor of ice cream the current administrator likes—anything. And any or all of them in combination.

So why the hell is it so cold in here?