My issue is I intentionally pay so little attention to Elmo it's hard to see his character on my head, as opposed to der Scheißführer who I'd be glad to never think about ever again, thank you.
The Kickstarter will raise money only for preproduction which can of course be an open-ended amount with a likewise open-ended time frame for development.
It’s both hilarious and pathetic (not to mention blasphemous) to see how garbled some people get their theology, their secular Christmas festivities, and their American Civic Religion. You know, like at Thanksgiving, when Santa and the Indians welcomed Jesus and the Pilgrims to celebrate the first football game between the Cowboys and the Lions. Or something like that.
My all time favorite was a columnist in the old Musician magazine who wrote about going into a department store in Tokyo and saw Santa Claus up on a crucifix for a Christmas display.
An unusually good one, Roy! Congratulate your personal assistant on my behalf.
I have been reading Seth Abramson on the subject of Musk. Very enlightening.
The only quibble I have is not an important one. Abramson likes to shoehorn references to Dungeons & Dragons here and there. He should leave these paragraphs aside. They are unnecessary, and speculative as to Musk's psychology. As someone familiar with game, I find them less convincing and insightful than a outsider might. Sure, Musk was apparently an aficionado. I maintain that it says nothing about his mind that couldn't be better explained by other means.
Here's a speculative point I haven't seen. I believe Musk experienced D&D alone, for the most part. I don't think that's uncommon, and it was my experience. I bought the books and supplements and read them avidly. I would think about playing, but seldom did; when I did, it was almost always solo. (Reading the materials carefully is an important part of the game, most especially for the referee. But in fact most people who bought the stuff did not read it carefully, which is fine.)
Solo reading and playing is a very, very different experience. It's fantasy on a different level. When we see depictions of D&D in pop culture, we are rightly shown a group of people sitting at a table, role playing, describing, negotiating, throwing dice. All very improvisatory, but most importantly it's *deeply social.* While D&D players are typically stereotyped as awkward nerds, the actual players are socializing frequently with a group of friends. They have to compromise their fantasies together, and resolve differences cooperatively. That's not how I experienced D&D, and I don't think it's how Musk did, either.
... Anyone curious about the culture should read the long-running comic book "Knights of the Dinner Table" published by KenzerCo. It's an exaggerated fantastical depiction, but there is much truth in it. At its heart it's about a group of friends. There are even some women!
I'm guessing Elmo forced a group of interns to get together on Friday nights, unpaid, and run a campaign for Elmo's character. Elmo wasn't there physically, of course, too busy and far too important.
I have a personal interest in solo RP, possibly due to my introverted personality, but what I find rewarding about the idea is the creativity, which is probably why I like making worlds and characters more than playing the game - I'm just a DM at heart, I guess.
I see Elmo as a solo roleplayer as less than interested in creativity and more as Michael Richards' character from Fridays, out in the back yard torturing green army men. The kind of guy who'd solo Tomb Of Horrors so he could elaborate on how the members of the party died in foolish and gruesome ways.
I mostly read D&D type stuff now, because I have no friends around that play, and when I tried on-line playing I found it very unsatisfying, mostly because of the group and the DM
I would disagree that you have to have read the materials carefully, particularly as a referee. I would say you need to understand the materials sufficiently to adjudicate the players attempts to do things, and do so in a manner that is mutually satisfactory and leads to everyone having fun. Players that know the rules too well have a bad tendency to be rules lawyers that suck the fun out of the game for everyone but themselves
There was a time early on when players were discouraged from learning the rules so they could concentrate on the game fiction. I'm not so sure that part of The Old Days was something we should have abandoned.
OK, perspective from someone not a gamer, so forgive me if this sounds uninformed:
Way, way too many people think of all this as a "game" that they, crucially, can *pause whenever they feel like*. They can pick up where they left off, so nothing's "real" to them, certainly not consequences. It's individuals playing against other individuals and stuff that happens on the side/periphery doesn't matter.
All of that to say that this version of "gamerism" for lack of a better phrase is infesting modern politics, to its detriment.
For susceptible people, it seems like so much time spent in fantasy worlds could contribute to tuning out the real world and lacking empathy. At the same time, the racism and misogyny of the real world have been very much present, and became harnessed for political use. Maybe that's to say parts of the gaming world engage in a particular way of policing in-group/out-group distinction. And maybe an addictive quality to the tech heightens all this.
I will spare folks my rant about the fuckknobs in the gaming world who pisswhine about "politics" in their elf games and how a space on the character sheet for pronouns is a major personal attack. "Escapism" has changed from a pleasant respite from stress and bullshit into "the golden age when men ruled and changing a character's sex was big laffs".
This is the real Elon, the moron behind the mask. Only a Party that worships Trump could fail to see how perfectly disgusting he is. Jay Gould would be green with envy!
Coincidentally I am reading Arendt, the section in Origins of Totalitarianism about South Africa. My key takeaway is that members of a group feel just as good to see another group suffer as they do to get advantages for themselves. That's what actual research has showed since.
Arendt notes that inflicting violence against the oppressed other is sufficient to elevate one group over another, and takes the energy out of them which otherwise might be used for doing something positive for themselves or for anyone else.
Antisemitism is the weird piece. Arendt gets into the explanation in peculiar detail. Jewish financiers got shoved aside. They stayed in South Africa because they had no home country to return to. This all coincided with the most severe pogroms in Eastern Europe more or less.
The Jews in South Africa started businesses outside of gold and diamond mining, according to Arendt, and that step towards establishing a local productive economy was another strike against them. It would lead to labor movements and other social changes more like in the home nations, and to anti-imperialism. Plus, the Boers didn't like Jews having a deeper claim as Chosen folk, according Arendt.
There's more, like the Boers going backwards on the usual march of progress notion of history. They became more tribal and went back to hunting and herding, and away from commercial agriculture and industrialization. Having just finished Snyder, On Freedom, there's a lot more to connect and update, to get to our oligarchs and their fine mess.
And that loops back to Roy's follies here. It's not that far out and more fun than what can happen once the mob is unleashed.
HEY NOW, I had a copy of frickin "Ralf und Florian" I listened to heavily back in high school AND taped the local college radio station's Kraftwerk special off the air.
My favorite slur on musk is calling him Apartheid Clyde 😂
"Try the apartheid, Clyde" is a line from "Fifty ways to ruin a country."
Roy, the death of democracy is inspiring you. "Over and done with, like WWII or Knot's Landing" is another spray your monitor with coffee line, lol.
Fortunately, no clothes on the monitor.
Yeah, Knots Landing killed me too.
I did Knots see that coming.
Elon, the Second Coming of Don Knotts!
The Repugnant Astronaut
The Incredible Mr. Limpest
The Shadiest Gun In The West
The Ghost and Mr. Chickenshit
The Pump-And-Dumpling Gang
Under Me problems is that I find Musk too repellent to find funny. (That said, Roy comes as close as humanly possible to make Musk funny.)
So on top of that is this:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jimstewartson/p/technate-of-america-musks-game-of
I mean, on top of everything else, he’s not just a Trump enabler but giving him some really awful ideas.
Musk also did a lot to get my RepubliQan Congress-thing reelected so, like, maybe I have a special personal antipathy in addition to everything else.
Cherish, nurture and weaponize alla the reasons.
What th—???
Yeah, I know – I don't understand it either.
Maybe was thinking the outrageous congress-critter rightly should not be forgotten, and indeed actively repulsed.
Dunno. Seems kinda dumb upon further review. Feel free to forget it.
😂
My issue is I intentionally pay so little attention to Elmo it's hard to see his character on my head, as opposed to der Scheißführer who I'd be glad to never think about ever again, thank you.
Lucky!!
Dick Shawn was born too early to play Elon Musk.
Woulda been epic.
Now that I think about, maybe a remake of “The Producers” can fly…?
Springtime for Twitler!
Cute!
Let’s start a Kickstarter but without any of that refund nonsense if it doesn’t fly 😉
Got it!
The Kickstarter will raise money only for preproduction which can of course be an open-ended amount with a likewise open-ended time frame for development.
A sequel, a musical about President Trump. Roy Edroso has already written the book, just need some catchy songs.
I think Roy could find alla the cash he needs just inside our building. The number of impressionable ladies of a certain...is not to be overestimable.
I looked up" sorgeloos" and all I got was pictures of some extraordinarily white people.
Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg -richest people in the world. Trump - president.
. Drunken Pete Kegsbreath is Secretary of Defense....
Man, are we doing something wrong.
"sorgeloos" seems to mean "careless" in Afrikaans.
Component of Kraft durch Freude?
Could be a name for a breakfast cereal, or maybe a hard candy racist grandpa keeps in a crystal dish by his easy chair.
I haven't even finished reading it, I had to come here and say -- that logo, is that REAL???
Have you never seen a Calvin peeing on a Ford or Chevy logo before? Back in the day they were as big as Def Leppard in the Midwest.
And here in Redneckistan.
I still see them, and its variant--Calvin kneeling to a cross.
My favorite one is Santa Claus kneeling before a cross.
To blow Jesus? (OK, now I'm DEFINITELY going to hell.)
It’s both hilarious and pathetic (not to mention blasphemous) to see how garbled some people get their theology, their secular Christmas festivities, and their American Civic Religion. You know, like at Thanksgiving, when Santa and the Indians welcomed Jesus and the Pilgrims to celebrate the first football game between the Cowboys and the Lions. Or something like that.
My all time favorite was a columnist in the old Musician magazine who wrote about going into a department store in Tokyo and saw Santa Claus up on a crucifix for a Christmas display.
Sure, of course, but that DOGE logo -- they can't be serious. Or is it another case of "Ye shall know them by their atrocious graphic design."
You must know the ways of the Edgelord to truely understand. When you can snatch this BitCoin from my hand you will be ready.
Alas, I'll never be ready.
There is no Never Ready, only Never Try.
DOGE trucks are Ram Tough
That Calvin highjacking hurts. Always has. Disgusting what good people have to put up with just to be in this abominable society.
An unusually good one, Roy! Congratulate your personal assistant on my behalf.
I have been reading Seth Abramson on the subject of Musk. Very enlightening.
The only quibble I have is not an important one. Abramson likes to shoehorn references to Dungeons & Dragons here and there. He should leave these paragraphs aside. They are unnecessary, and speculative as to Musk's psychology. As someone familiar with game, I find them less convincing and insightful than a outsider might. Sure, Musk was apparently an aficionado. I maintain that it says nothing about his mind that couldn't be better explained by other means.
Here's a speculative point I haven't seen. I believe Musk experienced D&D alone, for the most part. I don't think that's uncommon, and it was my experience. I bought the books and supplements and read them avidly. I would think about playing, but seldom did; when I did, it was almost always solo. (Reading the materials carefully is an important part of the game, most especially for the referee. But in fact most people who bought the stuff did not read it carefully, which is fine.)
Solo reading and playing is a very, very different experience. It's fantasy on a different level. When we see depictions of D&D in pop culture, we are rightly shown a group of people sitting at a table, role playing, describing, negotiating, throwing dice. All very improvisatory, but most importantly it's *deeply social.* While D&D players are typically stereotyped as awkward nerds, the actual players are socializing frequently with a group of friends. They have to compromise their fantasies together, and resolve differences cooperatively. That's not how I experienced D&D, and I don't think it's how Musk did, either.
... Anyone curious about the culture should read the long-running comic book "Knights of the Dinner Table" published by KenzerCo. It's an exaggerated fantastical depiction, but there is much truth in it. At its heart it's about a group of friends. There are even some women!
Huh.
I'm guessing Elmo forced a group of interns to get together on Friday nights, unpaid, and run a campaign for Elmo's character. Elmo wasn't there physically, of course, too busy and far too important.
I have a personal interest in solo RP, possibly due to my introverted personality, but what I find rewarding about the idea is the creativity, which is probably why I like making worlds and characters more than playing the game - I'm just a DM at heart, I guess.
I see Elmo as a solo roleplayer as less than interested in creativity and more as Michael Richards' character from Fridays, out in the back yard torturing green army men. The kind of guy who'd solo Tomb Of Horrors so he could elaborate on how the members of the party died in foolish and gruesome ways.
Three good paragraphs
I mostly read D&D type stuff now, because I have no friends around that play, and when I tried on-line playing I found it very unsatisfying, mostly because of the group and the DM
I would disagree that you have to have read the materials carefully, particularly as a referee. I would say you need to understand the materials sufficiently to adjudicate the players attempts to do things, and do so in a manner that is mutually satisfactory and leads to everyone having fun. Players that know the rules too well have a bad tendency to be rules lawyers that suck the fun out of the game for everyone but themselves
yeah that’s true
and overall the point is to have fun (regardless of fidelity to the rules) and if a given group can do that, more power to em
There was a time early on when players were discouraged from learning the rules so they could concentrate on the game fiction. I'm not so sure that part of The Old Days was something we should have abandoned.
OK, perspective from someone not a gamer, so forgive me if this sounds uninformed:
Way, way too many people think of all this as a "game" that they, crucially, can *pause whenever they feel like*. They can pick up where they left off, so nothing's "real" to them, certainly not consequences. It's individuals playing against other individuals and stuff that happens on the side/periphery doesn't matter.
All of that to say that this version of "gamerism" for lack of a better phrase is infesting modern politics, to its detriment.
that would explain some people pretty well
"The other team is complaining, so that means we're winning, right?"
For susceptible people, it seems like so much time spent in fantasy worlds could contribute to tuning out the real world and lacking empathy. At the same time, the racism and misogyny of the real world have been very much present, and became harnessed for political use. Maybe that's to say parts of the gaming world engage in a particular way of policing in-group/out-group distinction. And maybe an addictive quality to the tech heightens all this.
I will spare folks my rant about the fuckknobs in the gaming world who pisswhine about "politics" in their elf games and how a space on the character sheet for pronouns is a major personal attack. "Escapism" has changed from a pleasant respite from stress and bullshit into "the golden age when men ruled and changing a character's sex was big laffs".
Poopwaffe. Death from above!
Thank you, Roy, for often including something for those of us who are still 11 years old.
I am SO tempted to call Trump's jerkoff militia The Poopwaffen SS.
Led by General Poopmouth (formerly Specific Poopmouth)!
And a whole army of Poopmouths General.
This is the real Elon, the moron behind the mask. Only a Party that worships Trump could fail to see how perfectly disgusting he is. Jay Gould would be green with envy!
Coincidentally I am reading Arendt, the section in Origins of Totalitarianism about South Africa. My key takeaway is that members of a group feel just as good to see another group suffer as they do to get advantages for themselves. That's what actual research has showed since.
Arendt notes that inflicting violence against the oppressed other is sufficient to elevate one group over another, and takes the energy out of them which otherwise might be used for doing something positive for themselves or for anyone else.
Antisemitism is the weird piece. Arendt gets into the explanation in peculiar detail. Jewish financiers got shoved aside. They stayed in South Africa because they had no home country to return to. This all coincided with the most severe pogroms in Eastern Europe more or less.
The Jews in South Africa started businesses outside of gold and diamond mining, according to Arendt, and that step towards establishing a local productive economy was another strike against them. It would lead to labor movements and other social changes more like in the home nations, and to anti-imperialism. Plus, the Boers didn't like Jews having a deeper claim as Chosen folk, according Arendt.
There's more, like the Boers going backwards on the usual march of progress notion of history. They became more tribal and went back to hunting and herding, and away from commercial agriculture and industrialization. Having just finished Snyder, On Freedom, there's a lot more to connect and update, to get to our oligarchs and their fine mess.
And that loops back to Roy's follies here. It's not that far out and more fun than what can happen once the mob is unleashed.
It's nice to see that Musk is requiring his minions to wear identical onesies or jump suits, like a proper Bond villain.
Sad Beige Villain
https://youtu.be/Fxf5GDZ_o1w?si=q6_Il6cho4XsPWbF
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEQ3OxYL2Co
Haha, that story was news to me, thanks!
DITTO!
"You know it’s all meaningless, all so long ago and over and done with like — like World War II. Or Knots Landing."
This is when I started uncontrollably laughing.
This is what L. Ron Musth and his ilk do: "Move Fast, Break People".
Move Fast, Break Wind
Country and Western... rap.
🤨
Oh KAY, then.
I would imagine Elmo as more of a Euro-techno guy, myself. "Now is ze time on Xprocketx ven ve DANCE!"
This is Kraftwerk slander, and hier es ist verboten!
HEY NOW, I had a copy of frickin "Ralf und Florian" I listened to heavily back in high school AND taped the local college radio station's Kraftwerk special off the air.
He’d be more Eurotrash partying at Ibiza
Broers.
KKKool-ade.
Funny AND horrifying.
Our Roy is a master as threading that needle.
Torn between "Your Elon Musk is pitch-perfect, sir!" and "I'm extremely sorry you had to develop this particular talent."