From The Morgue

So if you’ve watched TV or been on the internets lately, you’ve seen the footage of Miss South Carolina give a rambling nonsensical answer to the question, “Why can’t so many Americans find the USA on a map?” Whole lotta people have jumped in to mock and ridicule. It’s become an “internet sensation”. Heck, do we still have beauty pageants? What a bunch of ditzes those girls are!
But I can’t join in on the mockery, because what I see isn’t a girl with a pea for a brain, but a girl completely blanking on a tricksy question in a high-pressure situation and just talking through it anyway. And I sympathise.
That question is a hard one to answer. Put yourself in her shoes. You’re a contestant in a beauty pageant. You have to formulate, with not more than a second’s thinking time, a response to a politically dangerous query. Your response must at all costs avoid offending anyone, because this is a beauty pageant. You go to your training – open with one of your stock phrases while you try and figure out what else to say and how to say it – and *blam*. Your mind just goes blank. I’ve been there. Haven’t you ever been there? Hey, you’re on international TV and its the biggest moment of your life, no pressure!
She blanks out. But she’s been training for this for years, and what does she do? She goes to her training. At all costs, keep talking. Do not shut up. Speak. Say something, anything at all. And so she does, and what comes out of her mouth is mostly nonsense, but hell, at least she went for it!
I mean, I’m not saying this girl is a genius and we must respect her enormous intelligence. All I’m saying is, cut her some slack, willya, mockers of the world? There were extenuating circumstances. (And heck, I for one think “Because many Americans don’t have maps” is actually a pretty savvy answer to the question.)
Her name’s Caitlin Upton, by the way, and she’s 17 years old.
So, what say you, blogosphere? Am I just an old soft-hearted fool? Does Miss South Carolina deserve everything that’s coming at her? Is this just a bit of harmless fun?
And am I a hypocrite for all the times I’ve made an “O for Awesome” crack?

Jim’s funeral was on Saturday morning, spilling into the afternoon. It was a hot and sunny day, first day of Spring, and the church was packed. Many firefighters in attendance, and I think four appliances. There was a movie played to start the service, the Lone Ranger theme and then Sinatra’s My Way over photos tracing the whole course of Jim’s life. Three eulogies were given, all of them incredible – funny, sincere, heartfelt. stronger_light shared one of the eulogies with one of her sisters and was amazing. The lead celebrant was an old, old friend of Jim’s, and his close connection and gave the ceremony a deeply personal tone. To close, we drove in cortege to the cemetery, led by the fire service, who had stationed officers to close off traffic as our train of cars went past. As the hearse carrying Jim went by, the men on traffic duty stopped paying attention to the traffic and stood at attention. At the cemetery in the centre of Hastings Jim was lowered into the ground, and then the grave was filled. Everyone took up a shovel to help, brothers, son and sons-in-law and me, cousins, firemen, workmates, friends. When the last of the rocky soil was deposited on the pile, the assembled people left. We went for cups of tea and conversation at the church hall.
It was the conclusion to a week in which everything was pointing toward this moment. The family was carried along minute to minute and hour to hour and day to day by a constant stream of actions, small decisions, arrangements and requirements. All of those little things somehow added up to a process, more than the sum of its parts, which prepared everyone to say goodbye.
I think it was the same with the months prior, as the whole family, Jim included, went through the multitude of actions that went into diagnosis, medical treatment, care at home. Somehow these also added up into a process of farewell.
I don’t think I’m remotely doing this justice, but it’s a fresh experience for me and I wanted to write something of it while I still can’t think about it properly. One thing I know for sure: for me, these months and this weekend have been life-changing.
I’m back in Wellington now, but my head and heart are lingering up in Hastings. Much love to all my family up there.

Don’t know when she’ll get to blog again, so let this put the word out: Cal’s dad Jim died very early this morning. It was the end of a difficult journey.
Fate dealt the cancer to Jim, and none of the family had any choice in that, but everyone could choose how to respond to it: with dignity and humour and love. (Along with frustration and sadness and anxiety, of course. When someone you love is leaving, it hurts like hell.)
I’ll be heading up to Hastings shortly to be with everyone, so expect radio silence here for a while.

Some additional linky from the weekend that I am compelled to share:
Maupuia Masala mediawatches coverage of the Hyderabad explosions.
Judge and Jury presents some extremely dubious evolutionary pop-psychology for your evaluation. EDIT: LINK FIXED.
Robert Fisk singlehandedly pushes 9/11 conspiracy questions a few rungs up the legitimacy meter.
The Tall Man musters a list of key sites for factchecking the environmental record of corporations.
And how the heck did I not know Aliens vs Predator – Requiem was coming? That’s a link to the IMDB page; a bit of searching will uncover the trailer, which in three and a half minutes features more gory onscreen deaths than you saw in all of the other Aliens and Predator movies combined. The premise: the titular monsters come to a contemporary town in the midwest of the USA and kill lots of people. So, yes, it will suck; but the question is, how much will it suck? And will I go and see it regardless like I did the last one?

I has srs linky: the indispensible Digby provides “It’s the Blacks”, a fantastic overview of the way the media played out the Hurricane Katrina story. Remember all those accounts of wild, looting gangs that were making people fear for their lives? The ones that led to the Red Cross being forbidden to go down there for safety reasons? Well, turns out these accounts were… less than accurate. Go read and find out just how much the story you know doesn’t match what really happened there.
Other linky:
An EC Shock Suspenstories called “The Monkey” about the perils of the reefer! Check it out and get your lingo up to date: “Hey Eddie, c’mon along! Me and some of the gang are going to blast a few of these!” “What are they, Sid?” “Pot grass butts, you square! Don’t you pop this stuff yet?” “MARIJUANA?!” “Cool it you jerk! You want to get me twisted? Some narc may be pinning us!”
Also on the comics tip, if you know that ROM was from Galador, you must not miss the ISB’s ROM-week.
Finally, via the other moose, I give you Giger Alien Salad.

I’m busy marking, so this will be short.
The Women / D&D post has fed into a bunch of useful discussion, particularly over at Iris. Of particular interest there is the arrival of one of D&D’s Associate Brand Managers, keen to tap into the wisdom found there. It cheered me up 🙂
Rumpus plans continue apace. I think the website is visible now to all but me. Damon’s computer took my computer’s lunch money.
Also, I has a moneys. The eager will find a description of my research if they follow the link and search around on the other side. Thanks, BRCSS, I’ve never been a recipient of any funding before and its kinda neat.

Rumpus 07 will be the party of the year.
Rumpus invitation with full details
The above link works, but as of this writing, there are some problems with getting to the party page itself – bear with us.
Rumpus 07 on Facebook
Roundup of last year’s Rumpus 06
In Achewood the Rumpletron is a Fiesta Wheel

As most of you will know, I’m a big ol’ role-playing game geek. I love it all, from the cheesiest old-school Dungeons & Dragons experience to the most cutting-edge slice of indie goodness. I’m also what my buddy Dave Wright calls a “community builder” (he’s one too) – and building communities to support my hobby, and in which my hobby can thrive, is really important to me.
This includes thinking about demographics. The RPG hobby is overwhelmingly white and middle class and, the subject of this post, male. I’d estimate about 4 in 5 RPG gamers are men. This isn’t a problem in and of itself – if women aren’t into playing RPGs, then that shouldn’t bother anyone, right? The problematic aspect is that we’re not dealing simply with free and informed choice. There are, in fact, barriers to participation for women. And I consider the existence of barriers around my favoured hobby to be offensive.
All of which brings me around to this weekend just gone. At Gen Con, the big RPG dance in Indianapolis, Wizards of the Coast announced that there will be a new edition of D&D next year. This is big news, with major ramifications for the RPG hobby industry. As part of the roll-out of this news, Wizards set up a special messageboard with a bunch of pre-set discussion threads, ready and waiting for fans to come in and discuss, cheer and complain. Just before the launch I’d seen a preview screengrab of the page, which had one line that interested me: a thread called Astrid’s Parlour: A Haven For Women Gamers. My community-building brain switched on – this was a sign that WotC, the company that makes D&D, was taking a positive step to lower the participation barriers for women. If nothing else, one of the barriers is that walking into an environment obviously dominated by the other gender can be intimidating; this thread would be a big flag removing any doubt about whether women were welcome there or not.
As I posted on Gametime, it didn’t go well.

I quickly realised that I had forgotten something important: aggrieved guys with internet connections… [It is] notable for being the most heavily moderated thread I’ve seen on a WotC forum. Dozens of posts have apparently been deleted, and every dozen posts a moderator turns up to say something like “Will people please stop being sexist idiots?” A game attempt on the first page to get some positive discussion going (“I am a guy. Women, tell me the story of how you got into gaming.”) garnered some neat responses which were rapidly drowned out by the bleating, pooing, whining masses.

After about twelve hours of this, the thread was pulled entirely from the site with no explanation. It had been a complete trainwreck. Obviously, because it’s gone you can’t view it – but essentially it was lots of guys saying “why do we need a special thread for women? this is inappropriate! where is the special thread for men?” “why do women need a special hiding place, that’s sexist, they don’t need your protection” etc. etc. etc. All the usual stuff. The moderators said that it was meant to tie in with an upcoming book written by a woman gamer about getting into D&D (Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress), but because that book hadn’t been released many commenters felt entitled to question and ridicule and attack the existence of the thread. The subtitle, A haven for female gamers, was forgotten in the chaos.
It was not a good look. I felt very sad, to be honest. The thread was dogpiled by aggressive messages questioning its very existence, the vast majority from men. Women who posted their support for the idea were absolutely drowned out by the massed negative response. Somehow, the very existence of this thread was offensive enough to rouse these masses into action. Thinking about it now, I’m not sad any more. Instead I’m kind of nauseated.
Look, here’s the thing: if a minority group in your community says, “hey, maybe it’d be nice if we set up some kind of haven over here”, and even if you think it’s unnecessary, would you really stomp on over there and loudly insist that it be taken down? Surely, as the majority, you’re not the right person to say whether a haven is needed or not? And what does it matter to you anyway? How exactly does it hurt you that this group has a haven somewhere?
Arguments over “womens rooms” at university campuses always go a bit like this, but at least in those cases there are actual resource issues at stake – money from a student pool is being directed at one section of the student body. In this case, all that was at stake was one one-screen link – and this as part of a free service, to boot.
In any case, a few hours ago the thread was resurrected in new form. You can find the new thread here. It has had a significant change. The title is now Astrid’s Parlor: Ways to Support Female Gamers.
“A Haven For Female Gamers” has become “Ways to Support Female Gamers”. The first was clearly intended as a female-friendly space. The second… well, the title seems to imply that it’s meant for male gamers to discuss ways to support female gamers. It just seems like a horribly misjudged title.
Stepping inside, we find instructions to “Use this thread to discuss the interiew [about Shelly’s book], Shelly’s book, or your ideas on ways to encourage and support female D&D players.” And following that, a whole lot of men saying that female gamers don’t need any support, so what is the purpose of this thread anyway?
The thread starts with a link to an interview with Shelly Mazzanoble, author of Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress. (Interviewed by her fellow gamer Sara Girard.) In the interview, the subject of the discussion thread comes up (around 5.10 to 5.38):

In response to a question about where women can go if they are interested in finding out how to get into D&D or to increase their knowledge and involvement
“Check out the messageboards, there should actually be a forum for women up there [now]… Men can be on there too, but there should, there really should, there is a place for women to just get on there and ask these questions and find out how to be involved and get support from one another, and hopefully people like you that have experience in gaming or working in the industry can get on there and respond to some of that or I can use my experiences… We can all just be out there to support each other.”
“Do you think that women need a special forum just for their gender, or…?”
“No, I don’t think it should ever be a gender specific thing, but I think that women might feel like they’re not being supported in this community or in this industry, so it might be nice for them to feel that there is a place that people are listening and we want to know what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and what they’re interested in.”

I think that when Mazzanoble, and Girard, see what happened on the messageboards while they were at Gen Con, they’ll be very disappointed indeed. And they’ll be right to be disappointed – in WotC, in the people who dogpiled the thread, and in the gamer community at large that seems so complacent and ignorant.
Botttom line:

• The people who dogpiled the thread should have refrained from doing so.
• WotC should have given their moderators a clearer idea of what the original thread was for, and should have instructed that anyone questioning the value of the thread gets bumped into another venue.
• The moderators should have been vigilant in pushing criticisms of the thread out of the thread and clearing space for it to actually be a “Haven for female gamers”.
• WotC should not have restored the thread with a new, “less controversial” title.
• WotC should not have pulled the thread in the first place even if it was a trainwreck.

All of these failures add up to a big unpleasant situation. I will be watching with interest to see where this goes from here, if anywhere. It all serves to tarnish the 4th edition launch for me; which is a shame, because it sounds to me like 4th Ed is going to deliver the goods.