s-che

[s-che]

[s-che]

citationless behavior

[s-che]

is there smth that you could say is definitely not art?

this is a very difficult question that peole have spent their entire life's work writing about, so i wouldn't necessarily, like, stand by this as a thesis -- but if i had to give an off-the-cuff quick-and-dirty ballpark i'd say that anything that is not being read through an aesthetic or affective lens by anyone is not art -- & the moment someone does read it in that fashion or invites such a reading, it becomes so. 'art' is not a quality stored within an object or event itself, it's a relational quality it has with its observers

[s-che]

[s-che]

Most of the surviving works from Aristotle are on Ethics and Politics. We don’t care about those. When it comes to esoteric history, we are far more concerned with pseudo-Aristotle. 

When Alexander the Great died, legends about his life sprang up like weeds. Aristotle, being a major character in his life, was given a legendary role. He was no longer the sober, empirical, tutor to a great military mind. He was cast as Alexander’s court wizard, a font of occult insight who taught cosmic secrets to a legendary hero. Plus, if you wrote something, and you wanted it to have some real clout, you could just lie and say Aristotle wrote it. This trick would be pulled for several hundred years. Thus, pseudo-Aristotle became equally as influential as the actual historical Aristotle. 

Ancient Greek Philosophy and the birth of Western Esotericism, today on patreon.

[s-che]

I feel like it's really easy to discuss your fiction work online as like, a replacement for actually working on the fiction. You can post all day about who a character is, and how they might react to stuff. But you have to actually make the character good in the book first.

[s-che]

[s-che]

step 1. get everyone in the world to want to fuck me

step 2. vow of celibacy

[s-che]

not many people know about “goldilocks code” from the 80s where queer men would have hot porridge in their left pocket if they were a papa bear and cold porridge in their right pocket if they were a mama bear

[s-che]

being pro-copyright is like a cartoon "i hate cool things" political stance

[s-che]

[s-che]

Have there been any works that you've read that you would say have genuinely changed your life? Reading your posts on occultism suggests that there's a careful balance to be struck between acknowledging when something is woowoo and letting oneself be affected by the material one takes in. As a recovering embittered cynic, I'm curious as to how one engages emotionally/spiritually with a work while simultaneously recognizing that a non-insignificant portion of it is hogwash.

idk it's like reading philosophy. You don't really believe or disbelieve in the works of Aristotle, you kinda just read him and now you know what Aristotle thinks about a bunch of stuff.

I dont think I've read a single text that truly revolutionized my worldview, but the process of putting it all together has been quietly profound. I feel like I have a highly nuanced understanding of why people belive in ostensibly strange things, how systems of thought interact with themselves, and how the world shapes systems of thought.

[s-che]

Procedurally Generated Hobbit nonsense

The Dream Library played Under Hill, by Water this month, which means that I ran Under Hill, by Water this month, which means I had to figure out how to run an OSR game this month, which is hard, because I don’t know shit about running games in the OSR.

If a year and a half of running games extremely quickly has taught me anything, it’s to try and meet things where they are and play them exactly as they’re asking you to play them. That’s part of why we slowed things down to just one game a month, giving ourselves the sessions necessary to fool around, make some mistakes, and then figure out what a game was actually asking for and hit extremely hard on our second punch. This isn’t just an OSR thing, either — Bluebeard’s Bride, and the excellent work Molly did to get us where we got for the final session of that game, is a great example of what I mean.

But I do struggle with OSR, though. Sometimes, with the wealth of writing which I know is out there — with the density of conversation which I know is occurring... I feel a little bit like I’m peeking in the window at a subculture that’s totally inaccessible to me. I know doesn’t have to stay inaccessible (everybody has to go to their first house show sometime), but at the first pass, piecing together what is being said and why they’re saying it feels a little bit like trying to read Linear B. 

I think this is a feeling that’s worth seeking out sometimes, especially if you’re dealing with a medium that you’ve got an expertise in. It’s humbling, of course, but beyond that getting those ideas to cross-pollinate, looking at why it is that someone did what they did in a certain way and trying to figure out what they’re responding to that you aren’t is worth more than an ego check. It’s a pathway to making better art, whatever your genre, medium, or form. Go read the shit you don’t know anything about.

You know what I do know something about, though?

Hobbits.

The itch page for Under Hill, by Water tells us that “The OSR is pretty metal. And metal rules. But it’s fairly far away from the source material of Tolkien and the eclectic, rustic, anachronistic little British gentry that were the center of his stories.” There’s an obvious joy for the Hobbitish — and not just “the Hobbitish,” in an iconic, commercial nerd culture way but The Hobbit, the 1937 fairy-tale — which runs through basically the whole book. This is maybe unsurprising if you’re familiar with Joshy McCroo’s Whole Deal, but it really was the selling point on this game for me, and a huge part of why I wanted to play it so badly (and want to keep playing it — having finally figured out how to do it well and, more importantly, no longer needing to be the host).

There’s a reason The Hobbit sticks around, even as Tolkien himself worked to supercede it with Rings, and it’s that charm — summoned up to great effect in Under Hill, by Water, especially in the systems of village- and gossip-generation — which kept the book club ticking this month. Hobbits have a kind of fairy-tale vague specificity — a Hans Christian Andersen effect, where even if you can see all the marks of 19th century Denmark (or 20th England), the stories still carry a kind of archetypical familiarity. Does hobbitishness map best today on rural England, or New Zealand, or the American Midwest? Is Bilbo more like Frodo or like Sam? Do hobbits heat water in the microwave? These are the sorts of questions that, as it turns out, people in the Dream Library have a real investment in. 

And as much as this might seem like a troupe of storygamers avoiding talking about an OSR game, I don’t think that’s true. In our sessions, Under Hill, by Water worked as a platform through which people could bring together their competing images of hobbits to do collective, transformative work on a piece of media that matters to a lot of people. Which is, I think, the highest compliment I could pay to an adaption of Tolkien: it produced new and interesting stories. 

It also had some absolutely sick fucking tables. I cannot express how much fun it is to spend fifteen minutes pulling hobbit names and social clubs out of a hat and then spinning up some gossip to link things to each other. By the end of the first session, I was genuinely invested in the extremely stupid world we’d made and all the little freaks who lived in it. Shout out to Drungo forever, and to his efforts to That is, I think, as close as I’ve ever made it to getting the itch which seems to drive the OSR.

Hobbits do microwave their tea, by the way.

[s-che]

[s-che]

may god guide the glorious philadelphia eagles in their holy war against the infernal kansas city chiefs

[s-che]

What’s your favorite article the Bakers have written? Reblog this with a link to it, right now. Don’t have one? Then here’s your assignment: start reading. There’s an index at lumpley.games. None of them are enormously long, but take your time. Find the ones that interest you, or piss you off, or confuse you. Meditate on them for a couple of days. Let them affect you. Disagree, where you want. Write a game about it.

Then come back here, and reblog this with a link to your favorite.

For me, I think it has to be Meg’s article on  Ritual in Game Design, where she offers both a practical ritual structure and a theoretical system for understanding what it is that rituals actually do. Or maybe my favorite is Vincent’s article on the philosophic fundamentals of Powered by the Apocalypse, especially Part 4 and the conversation about concentric design. Rituals in rituals. Games wrapped in games.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two articles as I put together my reflections on the Dream Library’s monthlong discussion of Under Hollow Hills, one of—hands down—the best games of the last decade and arguably one of the best of all time. Under Hollow Hills is a game full of games: big games, small games, mortal games, fairy games. Games as brief as a single play, as long as a session, as eternal as death. Games that overlap and interlock and flow together in continually new and interesting ways. Some of my favorite moments in playing Under Hollow Hills are when I get to feel the games bleeding into each other. Sitting and listening to two players bicker in a session last month, I felt inclined to interrupt only when things got really heated:

“Greshkorn,” I said. “That’s an insult, if you like.”

“I know,” said Greshkorn the Boondoggle Hob. “I’m going to shrug it off.”

Each of the mechanical layers of Under Hollow Hills—the concentric circles of Vince’s article—is a game unto itself. Many of them have multiple games within them: little forms, conversational algorithms that will lead us to the next thing worth talking about, or the next little treasure to uncover and play out. Another word for these might be rituals. 

Meg doesn’t give us an easily quotable definition of ritual in her article, but she does tell us that in order to be effective, a ritual must be intentional, contained, conscious, creative action. For a thorough breakdown on what she means by each of these terms, I really can’t suggest anything better than reading the article, but (to gloss them irresponsibly quickly) Meg’s “effective ritual” is in essence both set aside (intentional, contained, conscious) and willingly performative (conscious, creative, action). I use “performative” here in the Butlerian sense of active self-replication: by participation in ritual, we create ritual again. Its meaning comes from our making meaning of it, and our making meaning comes from our doing it, and we do it because it has meaning. If I wanted to be a little more “scholar of religion”* about all this, we could say that effective rituals are both sacred and magical. And magic is, as the poet wrote, fake as shit.

Why bother, then? Why create something special and set aside—and necessarily limiting and restrictive—when those limits are only given substance by our abiding by them? Why create social structures? Why play games?

Well, in the case of that last one: because they’re fun. Because effective ritual is effective. It has an effect. In the case of a game, that effect is fun. 

Sometimes, people talk about play and games as though they were entirely separate from the real world: locked away within the much-discussed “magic circle” through which nothing can pass, and within which we are safe to explore worlds beyond our own. I’ll tell you, there’s only one person who has ever lived in a real magic circle: it’s that twink from Severance. A ritual without porous borders is nothing. It’s dead air. It’s a locked box. Why would we bother going on a journey if we weren’t going to come back a little different? 

The permeability of the magic circle is made obvious by the issue of bleed. Things are clearly coming back and forth across the border—out of the game—all the time! And, importantly: we want them to! We build boundary-rituals not to prevent transmission, but to structure it in a way which keeps us safe and happy—to let us visit the fairies without being trapped there forever. 

I think the Bakers know this. The deep desire of fairyland is to go and return changed. J.R.R. Tolkein thought that change was necessarily restorative. It is not. There are many games fairies play, and some are downright perilous. Why else would Puck apologize? Because he knows the stakes of play. Maybe, if we call that a dream—or a fantasy, or a fairy-story, or a game—it will make our position a little bit less frightening. At very least, we’ll tip better.

Under Hollow Hills is a game full of games. We would be foolish to think that we could play them unchanged. But we would be equally foolish to think that our own plasticity means these rituals are no longer “play.” After all, we change. That’s the game.

This month (February) the Dream Library is moving on to another fairy-game with Under Hill, By Water, an OSR-adjacent game of hobbit-trouble. If you're interested, come along and join.

* I had a big old paragraph here I decided to cut from my rambling, about A.J. Heschel and the “palace in time.” If you want to hear more about that, come and ask.

[s-che]

behold, a newsletter!