jcarlhenders - Tumblr blog

[jcarlhenders]

Sansar Sunk–Second Life Rises From the Waves

Sansar isn't just sinking; it's resting on the seafloor now, being colonized by benthic life. The last employees working on Sansar were either laid off (including long-time Lindens Torley and Kona) or reassigned at the beginning of February. According to Ebbe Altberg himself, Linden Lab can no longer support Sansar and is seeking buyers for the never-out-of-beta virtual world platform.

At the same time, Linden Lab seems to have finally noticed that it has this product called Second Life that has actual real users and makes the company actual real money. The formerly infrequent house YouTube show, Lab Gab with Strawberry Singh Linden has suddenly started putting out new episodes weekly, including three with actual Lindens talking about Second Life and what Linden Lab's plans are going forward.

Linden Lab finally seems to be moving out of their self-imposed corporate groupthink that "Second Life can't be fixed", which was nonsense from the beginning. I guarantee that if Linden Lab had thrown Sansar level money at a Second Life overhaul (rather than reinventing a laggier, uglier version of last decade's Blue Mars) Second Life could have been renovated to work well into the future. The supposed insurmountable technical problems are not.

Looking at the recent post-Sansar New World Notes article "As Second Life Ages, Linden Lab Had to Try Something Like Sansar", I see a lot of comments on why Second Life is doomed and many misconceptions about what can and can't be done for Second Life:

One commenter stated people are now bringing in "textures larger than the engine can handle". Nonsense. In the early days of Second Life, it supported 2048 x 2048 textures, four times larger than the current maximum of 1024 x 1024. The same person claimed people were breaking the system with "mesh objects/bodies with entirely too many polygons".

Never mind that there never was a time before mesh; back in the days of prim-only builds, those prims were meshes. Just meshes that people could control and build inside Second Life. Never mind that most of the jewelry, furniture, and hair back in the early days of Second Life were made of cut, twisted, hollowed, and tortured prim toruses, rings, spheres, and tubes that generated massively high polygon counts. Never mind that mesh body creators begged Linden Lab for a Bakes-On-Mesh capability for over five years to reduce poly count, but the Lab was too busy building Sansar to have time for it, back when it would have mattered.

Even delivered too late, Bakes-On-Mesh has allowed some mesh body creators (such as the Maitreya Lara body) to now separate the onionskin layers of their mesh bodies into separate wearable layers that are no longer on by default. More than ever before, creators are very conscious of minimizing both mesh poly and physics impact via the constraints of the Land Impact and Avatar Render Complexity systems.

Ignore all that. The sky is falling. Second Life is doomed and will be surely closing next year. Just like it has been about to go under next year for every year since I first rezzed. The trouble with constantly predicting the end of something is that while you will eventually—someday—be right, you just look like a fool for all those years that you were wrong. And by the time you are finally right, no one cares anymore.

Another comment complains that Linden Lab broke Second Life and created a "Ken and Barbie Land. Vapid. Arrogant. Boring." But Linden Lab did not create a Barbie world; the free choices of thousands of creators driven by the demands of hundreds of thousands of users created a Barbie world—and you know what, that's okay. People can still have their quirky creative builds. No one is stopping them, and many, many such builds continue. Just wander through an event like Burn 2 if you have any doubts. And I imagine that Linden Lab would dearly love for Second Life to bring in the kind of money that Barbie brings in for Mattel.

Yet another post suggested that Linden Lab needs to create a Second Life 2. That's what Sansar started out as before feature creep, mission creep, and a total lack of vision on the part of Linden Lab management as to just what Sansar was to be, what audience it was seeking, and what it was to be marketed as. Linden Lab needs to fix its core product to work well into the 21st century. If their engineers and programmers tell them it can't be done without breaking some content, they need to break some old content. On the other hand, if their engineers and coders tell it would be easier to just start over, Linden Lab needs to point them at Sansar, and tell them to do their damned jobs.

Fortunately, Second Life can be updated to work for the future. Linden Lab is now working to do it. The first part of this push is to move all of Second Life to the cloud (“Cloud Uplift”), so Linden Lab can get out of the business of buying and building servers and leasing out space in server farms. While Bakes-On-Mesh was half a decade too late, it is now helping to reduce the complexity of avatars.

Also encouraging was that during the same episode of Lab Gab that Ebbe announced that Sansar was up for sale, he also dropped the news that three “heavy hitters” from Second Life’s past had returned to the company to work on improvements for Second Life.

Finally there are a lot of lessons learned and things invented for Sansar that can be brought back to Second Life to improve Linden Lab's core platform. While Linden Lab claimed this would be impossible, way back when they were sure everyone would leave Second Life for Sansar, more recently, they have quietly admitted there is stuff there they can use for Second Life.

I’ve been running Windows in some form on my computer for twenty-five years. B-52s built before I was born are still flying. Many, many “Second Life Killers” virtual worlds have come and gone in the years I’ve been watching. Obsolescence is a decision—or in most cases, the lack of one. And Second Life’s users have voted with their USD and L$ that Second Life is not obsolete. At last, Linden Lab seems to be listening to them.

[jcarlhenders]

Short Takes and Offensive Opinions

Or Ten Reasons to Tell Me I’m a Bad Person

1. #blacklivesmatter was right; the police and criminal justice system in the US are pretty damn racist. And of the two, prosecutors are by far the worst. Bad cops may make the news by shooting innocent people. When it happens, it is frightening and rightfully sparks outrage.

But prosecutors routinely and quietly undercut justice in many ways. Some pile on multiple charges for the same act in an attempt to force people accused of crimes to plea bargain down to a “win” for the prosecutor. Some withhold exculpatory evidence. Some go to trial with witnesses they know are lying. Some use asset forfeiture laws to confiscate any funds an accused person may have to pay for their own defense. The system is full of perverse incentives that encourage a win-at-all-costs mentality, and cloaks bad prosecutors in a shield of Qualified Immunity.

2. I am skeptical of significant anthropogenic climate change. Science remains our best method of learning about the universe, but when it meets politics is subject to corruption. See the history of Eugenics in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century.

3. The differences between Communism and Nazism were pretty much down to the Nazi's having designer uniforms, and the Communists retaining power long enough to kill more people.

4. The government is not your friend, no matter what party is in charge. A state with the power to restrict the speech of your enemies, no matter how vile you may find them, also has the power to restrict the speech of your friends. Or you.

5. Much of the American political right are as huge a group of control freaks as the leftist Social Justice Warrior types. Americans wisely vote in divided governments most of the time.

6. The 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms is a civil right, and the NRA is the nation's largest civil liberties group.

7. The "It's okay to be white" fliers are one of the most brilliant acts of political satire I've ever seen. It is a simple statement that should be utterly noncontroversial in an egalitarian society. But in practice, it drives various officials and (especially) university administrators to public paroxysms of anger so extreme that they threaten to expel or even imprison people who post the fliers.

4Chan's /pol/ once again demonstrates that they understands how to manipulate the media and politicians better than any public relations agency or campaign consultant out there. I'm also fond of their sequel poster campaign: "Islam is right about women", an equally elegant mindfuck aimed at performative wokeness.

8. Opinion polls are very often rigged (by selection of percentage of demographic groups surveyed and wording of questions) to say what the commissioning entities want them to say.

9. All drugs, from marijuana to heroin, should be decriminalized—except for antibiotics. Antibiotics should be more closely regulated, and never used for agricultural purposes. Antibiotics when overused breed drug resistance in bacteria putting everyone at risk of a horrible death from an untreatable infection. Yet, people can go to any feed store and buy antibiotics by the pound.

10. I propose an "Equal ID" compromise between the left and right on the issues of voting rights and gun control. Voting and buying a gun should have identical ID requirements and restrictions placed on them. If you have to show two forms of ID to buy a gun; you have to show the same two forms of ID to vote. If you have to register to vote three weeks in advance, then you can require a three week waiting period for gun purchases. If you can vote by mail, you can buy a gun by mail. And etc.

People may argue that the two are not comparable. That you can kill people with a firearm, but not with a vote. They are wrong; enough votes for the wrong person can kill far more people than any mass shooter.

[jcarlhenders]

FTC Threatens to Hold YouTube Video Creators Responsible for YouTube Actions

But It’s Okay, They Are Doing It “For the Children”

You may have read or seen recent news about at “record” 170 million dollar fine against Google subsidiary YouTube for illegally collecting data on under aged users, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). You may have considered such stories and thought, “that’s okay, Google probably did violate kids; privacy, and they can certainly afford the fine”.

But its not over. As far as the FTC is concerned, it’s time to screw over video creators. The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection Director, Andrew Smith, has been quoted in news stories as saying, "We would have strong penalties in future cases against content creators and channel owners, as well–particularly when we would have a situation where the channel owner was specifically asked 'are you child-directed?,' and the channel owner said "No'."

In other words, people who made videos may be targeted by the FCC is the FCC, unilaterally decides based on unpublished guidelines that the video was somehow “targeted” at children. The policy as stated in the news is idiotic. (My suspicion is that Google/YouTube has influenced policy to offload some of their responsibilities onto otherwise uninvolved YouTube content creators.)

So once again, I’m asking both of my readers to stand up and do something. If you regularly watch any YouTube content that could be even remotely considered as “aimed at children” in the minds of a nanny-state bureaucrat, please go to the regulation.gov page taking public comments on this policy, and give them one. Explain to the FTC why this is a misguided, and likely unconstitutional policy. Don’t bother with the change.org petitions going around; they are next to useless. The FTC has extended public comment to 9 December 2019. Help bury them in comments.

Here’s mine:

COPPA YouTube Enforcement Actions Must Not be Aimed at Content Creators.

The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection Director, Andrew Smith, has been quoted in numerous news stories as saying, "We would have strong penalties in future cases against content creators and channel owners, as well–particularly when we would have a situation where the channel owner was specifically asked 'are you child-directed?,' and the channel owner said "No'."

However, many channels clearly aimed at adults may attract the occasional child viewer, and creators of such content should not at risk of being fined by the FTC for the following reasons:

As quoted above, such a policy interpretation is misguided and potentially illegal for the following reasons:

• YouTube creators collect no information as defined under COPPA. All information collection is done by YouTube/Alphabet. YouTube creators are neither employees or contractors of YouTube/Alphabet.

• The FTC's threats of such fines constitutes a classic "chilling" of free speech under the First Amendment.

• Without clear and detailed guidance on what is or is not "content aimed at children", such a policy also falls afoul of the Vagueness Doctrine.

The FTC should immediately reverse course and cease to threaten individual YouTube creators for actions by YouTube/Alphabet.

[jcarlhenders]

Sansar Sinking

Sansar, Linden Lab’s much-promoted and eternally in beta virtual world, appears to be taking on water. According to separate articles by virtual worlds reporters Hamlet Au and Ryan Schultz, Linden Labs has laid off twenty to thirty employees that were working on the next generation virtual world, and put it in “maintenance mode”.

Linden Lab is, of course, the company behind Second Life the virtual world that I’ve been kicking around in for nearly fifteen years now, and have frequently written about here. Under Linden Lab’s current CEO, Ebbe Altberg, most of the engineering and programming staff that had been working on Second Life was moved over to Sansar about five years ago, and most of Linden Lab’s new development on Second Life slowed drastically or stopped.

That began to turn around about two years ago, as some major improvements to Second Life started to be released again, starting with Bento Avatar Rigging, significant server pipeline work, and most recently Bakes on Mesh for avatars. I thought it only made sense after three years of being mostly ignored, that Linden Lab would put more time and energy into the product that was actually making them money, Second Life.

I suspected Sansar might not be living up to the hype, as the hype kept changing over time. Either Linden Lab management and marketing department were unable to come up with a coherent vision as to what Sansar was supposed to be, or they were chasing whatever was in vogue at the moment. Sansar went from the next generation virtual world (and inevitable successor to Second Life), to a VR-centric virtual world, to a sort of half-assed MMO, then most recently, a place for live events requiring support of massive concurrent numbers of avatars in one location.

I feel sorry for the Sansar engineering and programming team. They must have felt like they were living in a Dilbert comic.

Meanwhile, even while mostly ignored by its corporate parent, and operating on a skeleton staff, Second Life kept chugging on. But the Second Life train was being propelled by the creativity of its users. During that time, elaborate mesh bodies, then clothing to support them, and then mesh heads became the norm over much of Second Life.

Creators ingeniously overcame lack of interest and guidance from the world’s nominal overseers, Linden Lab, and came up with workarounds for issues that the Lab would not address. Lacking any way of baking textures to mesh bodies and heads, creators came up with multiple invisible “onion skin” layers over their mesh bodies for skin tight clothing, tattoos, and make-up, and alpha cut HUDs where bits of the bodies that might poke through the clothing could be hidden. Without true animated mesh, creators hacked together ways to simulate it.

Meanwhile, Sansar seemingly remained forever in beta, then “open beta”, and people stopped paying attention. At best, after all the time and money spent, Sansar seemed to deliver not much more than lag with ugly avatars, a depressing starting area, and a generally frustrating user experience. People in Second like began to jokingly refer to Sansar as “Blue Mars 2.0″; but that was unfair to Blue Mars. Sansar, even before the layoffs, had become irrelevant.

I hope that Linden Lab will be able to use some of the technology they developed for Sansar to improve Second Life. After all the hype of being a next generation platform that would be fundamentally incompatible with Second Life, there may not be that much they can salvage from Sansar’s tech base. But undoubtedly some of Linden Lab’s “Sansar is too advanced to be of any use for upgrading Second Life” talk was just hype.

Second Life may hold a reputation as  mostly “virtual Barbie for adults”—a reputation that Linden Lab’s ownership and management hoped to distance themselves from with Sansar. But what Linden Lab missed was that the real “Barbie” and the real adult industry makes hundreds of millions of dollars annually.  Linden Lab may disdain the virtual sex and the fashionistas of Second Life, but they are among their biggest customers. But Linden Lab should consider carefully before they ignore their core product again.

[jcarlhenders]

Callooh! Callay! My Twitter Account is Finally Dead!

I am finally quit of the world’s greatest online time waster. And just in time for the political season! I would like to think that my deliberate campaign to get banned (after multiple failed attempts to cancel my account via Twitter’s system) paid off, but the truth is, I think they just fixed their software. Goodbye Twitter. I shall not miss you.

[jcarlhenders]

Freebies

One thing that Caledon Oxbridge has always lacked compared to other Second Life Community Gateways (new user help areas), is a first-class collection of freebies for new residents. While did have some nice items, the bulk of the collection was very, very old. As barely touched over the last eight years.

I blame me; at the time I was getting Oxbridge up and running I'd just finished putting a lot of effort into upgraded freebies for NCI, and I just could not face doing that all over again. So I took a very lazy way out. I told people who had generously contacted me about donating freebies to put them out in the gazebo by the shore, so long as they were G-rated. The subsequent chancellor, Martini Discovolante, took a big step forward in building a Train Station for the Caledon Rail stop at Oxbridge, and devoting part of the interior to a place for people to put freebies out. If it had not been for Martini’s work, there would have been nothing for me to start with. But pressures of time and real life, never gave her or any of the subsequent Oxbridge chancellors or their staff any real ability to focus on the freebie collection.

So when I came back to SL and Caledon after an absence of several years, I looked around Oxbridge for places I could help, and not step on the toes of anyone currently doing some very difficult jobs there. The first thing I did—with the permission and support of Wordsmith Jarvinen (current Oxbridge Chancellor) and Phrynne (current Oxbridge Dean of Commons)—was an update of all four of the “Explore” posters at the start and end of the Tutorial. Then I did a similar update to the “Web Resources for New Second Life Users” posters.

That took a few weeks, but I decided I was ready to tackle a major upgrade, overhaul, and expansion of the freebie collection; to finally finish something I’d left undone when I co-created Oxbridge (with Desmond Shang) more than ten years ago. Again with buy in from Wordsmith and Phrynne, I began the big project. And after months of work a few hours at a time in the evenings, I’m starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Behold, the remodeled Oxbridge freebie area...

I’ve done my best to preserve as much of the old freebie collection as possible, while expanding it with other stuff I’ve found over my years in Second Life. A few items are missing but I have promises that they will be returning when people return to Second Life. I’ve still got a lot of work to so, especially in the Avatars, Clothing, & Accessories freebies (and I’m working on that), but help me welcome in the new collection.

It is only going to get bigger and better from here.

What Oxbridge needs are:

If you are a creator of anything, but clothing or avatar related accessories, and are interested in donating some freebies to Oxbridge (perhaps some retired items), please contact me either in-world via Notecared (Carl Metropolitan) or at my RL email of j.carl.henderson@gmail.com. Please note that I cannot reliably receive IMs when I am not online. Please contact me via email j.carl.henderson@gmail.com or notecard. My IMs ALWAYS cap due to error message spam from items old free maps I created residing on the Beta Grid. (Yes, it makes no sense to me, either.)

1) Items that you created. Such items can include licensed scripts, textures, mesh components, so long as the license allows for redistribution as freebies.

1.a) Items that would be especially useful would be mesh clothing, shoes, hair, and skins for old style system avatars. (Most new residents start out with SL system avatar.) Low to medium land impact houses and furniture are also very nice (especially mesh), as are creator tools.

1.b) I'm working on a separate process for evaluating existing freebies to ensure that they were intended to be redistributed and are not stolen content. If you have something that you think would be a good fit for the Oxbridge collection, please drop me a notecard or email. I welcome such donations, but the more information you can give me about the provenance of such freebies, the easier it is for me to confirm they are okay to redistribute.

What we prefer is:

2) We prefer items that are full perm, but recognize that many creators are reluctant to do that. We can take items that are "No Transfer" and/or "No Modify" so long as we can move and repackage them. Which means that the creator will need to give Mod rights to the OxbridgeFreebieManager account. Contact me via email for instructions on how to do that.

2.a) Keep in mind that you can give us freebies with Transfer rights, and we can then set those to only be given out "No Transfer". Just make it clear in the folder name for the item and/or other accompanying info that is what you want us to do. We can't protect Transfer rights if we don't know you want to preserve them.

2.b) One reason we would really like Transfer rights is that eventually we would like to have the option of moving Oxbridge's freebies collection onto a server-based system for reasons of future proofing, expandability, and Land Impact conservation.

2.c) OxbridgeFreebieManager is a new role account at Oxbridge. Currently, the only people with access to him are Wordsmith Jarvinen (Oxbridge Chancellor), Phrynne (Oxbridge Dean of Commons), and myself (Carl Metropolitan). Access to this alt will be restricted to high level staff only.

If you are a creator who has something they would be willing to contribute, please email me at j.carl.henderson@gmail.com or drop me a notecard.

You can also drop freebie items directly on the OxbridgeFreebieManager account. Please include instructions (License, No Transfer requests, etc.) in that case.

[jcarlhenders]

Has Anyone Else Noticed That “It’s For the Planet” Has Become the “It’s For the Children” of the 2000s?

Both mean, of course, that the politician saying it intends to screw you over.

[jcarlhenders]

Trying Again to Get Twitter to Close My Account

Still have a Twitter account. Just checked. Now for a new strategy...

And some specific responses, also copied to Twitter Safety!

Will this work? We will see. Its not like trying to cancel my Twitter account via their online form worked...

[jcarlhenders]

Fighting Twitter With the Right Side of the Force

Having failed to get Twitter to cancel my account by tweeting “#LearnToCode” to prominent left-wing journalists on the platform (NYT, BuzzFeed), I’m giving right-wing reporters a try. Today, the Washington Examiner.

If this fails, I think I will tweet it to Daily Beast reporters. Nobody likes them, right?

[jcarlhenders]

I Fight Twitter; Twitter Always Wins

I just want to cancel my Twitter account. A sad story in multiple tweets.

To be continued...

[jcarlhenders]

A Short Rant About Linden Lab

How incompetent is Linden Lab? Not satisfied with spending most of their time and effort on a "next generation virtual reality" platform (Sansar) that rarely has more than a hundred people on it at any one time, they have decided to plumb new depths of corporate idiocy.

They won't take your money.

I've been sitting on a slowly growing -987 L$ balance, and tonight I decided to buy some L$ and get my negative L$ total positive. So I click the "Buy L$" button. Says I need to set up a payment method. That made sense. The card I had in there was probably expired. No problem. Just go to the SL website and update, right?

Of course not.

The web page for adding a credit card has issues. Like most credit card entry pages, the SL page requires your card's expiration date. But—the "Year" field is broken. It has a selection of "years" from "19" to "44". As this is not the time of the early Roman Empire, no credit card entry can be completed. Typing your Expiration Date's year does not work. The field won't accept typed data.

But wait Carl, isn't it possible that they mean the last two digits of your credit card's expiration date? That would kind of make sense with a range of "19" to "44". After all those extra two bits must cost lots and lots of money). I thought of that. Nope. It did not take "19" (the cards' expiration year). I tried this and had the same issue on three different browsers, current versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.

Having things set up to let customers give you money is pretty basic for a business.

But Linden Lab is special. In the "special needs" way.

[jcarlhenders]

For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

If you are going to organize your life around believing something absurd—go big. The Flat Earth Theory is boring and pedestrian. Believe in a Hollow Earth!

Illustration by Max Fyfield (Regular Cover Artist for “Hollow Earth Insider”). I love this drawing, and this post is mostly and excuse to feature it.

[jcarlhenders]

#DnDGate is Dumb

I just found out about #DnDGate. Wow—is it silly.

Whoever is behind it just does not understand tabletop role-playing games (RPGs). Unlike fixed forms of entertainment media (movies, TV, books, comics, video games, etc.), the content of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)—ore other RPG game—ultimately comes down to the choices of the Gamemaster and the players at his or her table. #DnDGate is essentially a movement with nothing to oppose. It does not matter if the people writing a role-playing game are hardcore Social Justice Warriors or scions of the Alt-Right. The GM and players are always take what they want from the source material, leave the rest in the books, and use their imagination.

#DnDGate aside, this has been going on with every bit of RPG content since the beginning of the hobby when someone first cracked open the "White Box" edition of original D&D back in 1976, read through it and thought, "not bad, but I think these Gygax and Arneson fellows were smoking something* when they made Elf and Dwarf character classes; I'm going to change that rule." #DnDGate's complaints about SJW influence is nonsensical, not because there is no SJW influence in RPGs, but because any such influence just does not matter.

Every GM and group does their own gatekeeping. No matter what SJWs in the RPG industry—or #DnDGate declare—each table of gamers will be as welcoming, or as insular, as the people that make it up want it to be.

Very Poor Photo of My RPG Collection—About Ten Feet of Shelf

I've been playing and running tabletop role-playing games since I was 17—for almost forty years (I can't believe I'm that old). I've also been an active and vocal supporter of #gamergate (under my real name, J. Carl Henderson), since October 2014. And I think #DnDGate is just dumb.

*Recent biographies of Gygax, at least, indicate he was sometimes quite high when game mastering.

[jcarlhenders]

OG D&D 1979

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1979 as a 17 year old. Our first campaign started with the original three D&D booklets (the white box set) and supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demigods, & Heroes, and Swords & Spells).

In addition, we had the brand new (to us, at least; I know it came out in 1977) Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) 1st Edition Monster Manual. I still have those original D&D booklets and supplements. Sadly the now highly collectable “white box” did not survive more than a few months.

Below are a few photos of one of our earliest games. I believe these show our first game after the 1st Edition Players Handbook had come out (shifting a lot of our characters to AD&D from OD&D). The final volume of the core AD&D rules, the Dungeon Masters Guide, had not yet been released.

The room we are playing in was my bedroom at my parents house. You can tell because of all the books and comic books on the shelves behind us. It was quite crowded, and we only played there a few times.

Three players, miniatures, a table, and Lego dungeon walls. And lots of Dr Pepper. (I am the person in the center of this photo.)

The Dungeon Master. Note the yet-to-be-used group of miniatures on the chest-of-drawers behind him.

The other side of the table. Note the party in marching order in the dungeon hall. I still own that table.

Click on the links under each photo to go to a high resolution copy on Imgur.

[jcarlhenders]

White

Most white people in America can't trace their ancestry back to any single European ethic group. Whites in the United States have intermarried so much, it would be silly to do so. I'm reasonably certain I have one five-removed great grandmother who was the bastard daughter of a minor English noble. I also have ancestors who were Cherokee at about the same remove. My mother's family was from the Deep South, so I likely have a fraction of African ancestry, too. Does that make me English, Cherokee, or Black? Of course not. I'm white.

Granted one's skin color is a silly thing for anyone to have pride in. But as our culture seems to think people are incomplete without an ethnicity, and won't accept "American", it is not surprising some people try to finagle "white" into one. Especially, when Academia, Politicians, and Media often push a "white" identity as a source of shame. But being ashamed of being white is just as silly as being proud of being white.

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

[jcarlhenders]

Fox News is Still Fox News

Even though they can’t spell “immigration”, at least they are not CNN. They do that to cling to.

[jcarlhenders]

Elves: Gender-Fluid Since AD&D 1st Edition

Apparently Wizards of the Coast is releasing a new source book for D&D 5E (Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) that will allow some elves to chose to have the power of switching gender. As America seems to be addicted to outrage, predictably some people are outraged.

What’s funny is the outrage seems to be fairly evenly divided between the “SJWs are Ruining D&D” crowd and the “Gender Isn’t Sex! TERF! TERF!” crowd.

To the first group I say, no one can ruin your D&D campaign other than the players and the gamemaster. If you don’t like what WotC is doing, you don’t even have to buy D&D 5E to play. Download the Basic Set and SRD, and use your imagination. This is not some weird SJW tactic. Gender fluid elves are nothing new, unless you define “new” as 1980:

Portion of Corellon Larethian, Elven Greater God, entry from 1st Edition D&D Deities & Demigods (1st Printing, 1980)

Note the following text “Corellon is alternately male or female, both or neither” in “his” description. This is from Deities & Demigods, a AD&D 1st Edition product published in 1980—and edited by Gary Gygax. If it was good enough for Gary Gygax, it’s good enough for me!

A person I was discussing this with on Twitter pointed out that Corellon is a god/goddess and what applies to him/her does not necessarily apply to normal mortal (ish) elves, and that no where in D&D canon is there any precedent for such.

But gender changing elves to have another precedent in D&D, this one from Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood from 2006:

Yes, you heard me right: there now ARE a few males among her [Eilistraee’s] church, but to enter it they have all “Danced The Changedance” and spent time as female, just as Mystra caused Elminster to spend time as Elmara—and for the same reasons: greater understanding and sensitivity of “the life of the other gender.” One cannot truly feel the Divine Dance of Eilistraee PROPERLY except as a female, and so her (still very rare, few, and generally secretive about it) male priests must spend some time as a female (not just for the duration of a ritual, but they must do some everyday living as a female). The most accomplished drow, elf, half-elf, and human male priests seem to feel the need to take female form for some days every few years or so (if they wish to “cleave more fully to the Goddess” and thus rise in levels), and most spend longer and longer times in female form. Not all female priests of the Goddess fully trust the males, and they don’t tend to rise much in the church hierarchy (no matter what character levels they achieve).

To the second group I say, stop trying to police the English language. It will never work. For most people “gender” is synonymous with “sex”. To quote James Nichols, “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

As for the accusations that this is some how Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism, because the Drow don’t like gender changers? Is anyone really that clueless?

That was a rhetorical question. Of course there are people that clueless. Okay, let me spell it out. The Drow are (mostly) the bad guys. They are Evil. They are not intended as your role models. You sound just like the fundamentalist idiots who complained D&D was satanic back in the 1980s because the Monster Manual had fictional demons & devils.