Old is the New New

(Yoinked.) Posting will continue to be slow this summer, for reasons described below. And also below that. Do not despair: I am, like everyone else, on the Twitter.

This news has already gone out on other faster, more annoying social networking platforms, but it needs a mention here as well: this is my son Eli, born on Wednesday.

He is beautiful and awesome. His mother is a rock star. His big sister is giving him the benefit of the doubt for now.

Cigars all round.

[Edit: Comments page fixed. Not that I’m fishing–we’ve already been inundated by good words and well wishes. Thanks, all!]

Brett Holman (Airminded) is paleoblogging the phantom airship scare of 1909. Exactly one hundred years ago this month, Britain was bedeviled with a wave of mysterious zeppelin sightings. Brett’s written on the Age of Scareships before, but now he is actually walking through the panic day by day. It’s great. You could ask for no better guide to the Edwardian UFO invasion.

This is only tangentially related, but it’s also cool: Here’s a quotation a student of mine found for a paper on Percival Lowell and the Martian canal controversy.

The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 1907:
Look back upon the year 1907 and pick out what has been, to your mind, the most extraordinary event of the twelve months. Certainly it has not been the financial panic … That is, after all, a mere temporary disturbance, a mere passing cloud. The most extraordinary development has been the proof afforded by the astronomical observations of the year that conscious, intelligent human life exists upon the planet Mars.

Yeah. Get a sense of perspective, people!

When in doubt, quote Dylan:

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting, “which side are you on?”

Previously on the deep history of roleplaying games: When David Wesely created Braunstein, his seminal proto-roleplaying game, he was inspired, he said, by three books he’d found in the University of Minnesota library. One was a wargame by 19th-century crackpot Charles Totten. One was a primer on game theory by the Cold War eggheads of the RAND Corporation. And the third was Conflict and Defense, an assault on RANDian game theory by the Quaker peace activist, systems theorist, and mystical poet Kenneth Boulding. A catholic trinity, to say the least.

Like Totten’s Strategos and RAND’s Compleat Strategyst, Conflict and Defense is an odd duck. Written in 1960, it is a heartsick response to Cold War brinksmanship and a critique of RAND-style game theory, but it is written in precisely the same esoteric language of models and matrices the RANDies used. “Just as war is too important to leave to the generals,” Boulding concludes, “so peace is too important to leave to the pacifists.” The book is a forest of diagrams and equations, “indifference curves,” “bare-survival contours,” and “mutual submission equilibriums.” It seems to have been an effort to devise some universal geometry of conflict and peace, and in so doing save the world from nuclear war. Boulding was a prominent economist and a pioneer of general systems theory, but his quest for a unified ecology of knowledge ultimately became a kind of religious mysticism. The information revolution, he argued in the 1970s and 80s, was weaving us all into one planetary superorganism. (Which it is, but serious economists aren’t supposed to come right out and say that.)

I’m not claiming that all or even any of this found its way directly into David Wesely’s Braunstein, though I remain impressed at Wesely’s eclectic tastes, and consider the whole story yet more proof of the indispensable serendipity of open library stacks. But the fact that Braunstein was inspired by a spacey Quaker on the one hand and by the RAND Corporation on the other makes me wonder: which side of the culture war were roleplaying games on? Were the first D&Ders squares or hippies, hawks or doves? This was a hobby invented by young American men, men of draftable age, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Two of the biggest groups of early gamers were college students and the military. Is it strange that the conflicts of the era are not more reflected in the history of the hobby? Is it strange that the received history of roleplaying games barely mentions Vietnam?

[Read more →]

Historian Douglas Brinkley has an interview with Bob Dylan in the latest Rolling Stone. (We hosted Brinkley at CAS last year, so I guess I’m two degrees of separation from Bob!) At one point, Dylan bristles at a certain phrase used to describe his work:

Brinkley: Are you missing what some critics call the older, weirder America?
Dylan: I never thought the older America was weird in any way whatsoever. Where do people come up with that stuff? To call it that? What’s the old weird America? The depression? Or Teddy Roosevelt? What’s old and weird?

Yeah, where do people come up with that stuff?

Dylan to Nora Ephron in 1965: Folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts.

I know, I know: you are shocked, shocked! to catch Bob Dylan in a contradiction, or shrugging off a label applied to him by his fans. Alert Greil Marcus! Still, I’m protective of the old weird America idea.

“See all that stuff inside, Homer? That’s why your robot never worked!”*

Here’s what I’m doing this weekend, unless a certain fetus has other plans: The Hacking as a Way of Knowing Workshop organized by the excellent Bill Turkel and the awesome Edward Jones-Imhotep.

This three-day workshop will explore the theme of E-waste and environmental data. Working in small groups, participants will be given the task of hacking some typical consumer e-waste to create reflective technological assemblages that incorporate ‘nature’ in some form while calling one or more of our basic assumptions into question.

Translation: We’re making killer robots. Reflective, nature-incorporating, assumption-questioning, killer robots. The twitterpated can follow this foolish meddling with secrets beyond our ken at #hackknow. Confession: I’ve been on Twitter for a year now (as “robotnik“) but have only managed to emit one tweet.

*I googled “that’s why your robot never worked” to be sure I had the quote right, and discovered that my own elderly LiveJournal is the number one hit for the phrase. Andy Warhol would plotz: I’ve become famous to myself.

Two pieces on this site that I’m rather proud of are my essays on the secret history of tabletop roleplaying games: Dungeon Master Zero, on the eccentric Indian fighter, pyramidologist, and Anglo-Israelite who brought refereed wargaming to America, and R&D, on Cold War simulation gaming at RAND. One of the things I’m not proud of is that it’s been two years and I haven’t completed what was to have been a trilogy of posts, not to mention a long-promised article for Jonathan Walton’s journal PUSH. The idea for the trilogy came when I read that David Wesely’s Braunstein, a seminal proto-roleplaying game from 1968, was inspired by three books: Charles Totten’s wargame Strategos, the RAND Corporation’s Compleat Strategyst, and Kenneth Boulding’s Conflict and Defense. And it seemed to me that each of those three books could tell us something unexpected and as yet untold about the roots of the roleplaying hobby and maybe something about geek or gaming history more generally.

But a funny thing happened on the way to my third post: two years went by! And in those two years, the whole landscape of information and interest in the history of roleplaying has been transformed. A renaissance in “old school” gaming, that is, gaming that tries to emulate the feel or philosophy of the hobby in the 1970s, has brought with it a new interest in the early history of tabletop rpgs.

[Read more →]

I like the idea of the zombie as having been evacuated of all real consciousness, in ravening pursuit of the living who do. A brilliant analogy. The idea of the zombie was the product of the political and economic system. Of course in the original Caribbean figure zombies are about what slavery does to you…

Another fine post from Barista, involving the origin of zombies, and stories, and stories about zombies. (The image actually comes from artist Travis Pitts, via Action Typist, who has more Moe Berg action too.)

When you start a blog post like this, you are setting expectations pretty damn high:

There are certain individuals whose names have been adopted as shorthand in the fiction community. When you see their name, it usually means weird and/or wild shit is going to go down. There is no reason for a writer to throw in a reference to Nikolai Tesla, for example, unless they want to later have a death-ray or giant killer robot or just some sort of weird science in general. Similarly, if you see Aleister Crowley show up in a story, you know that there’s going to be magic involved, or possibly cults. Or maybe orgies, because that is how Crowley rolled.

I say it is well past time that another name was added to that list.

The amazing thing is that the post that follows lives up to that opener. It’s the somewhat true story of Moe Berg: major league baseball player, top secret OSS agent, and would-be assassin of Werner Heisenberg–and all that’s in the actually true part of the post. (Check the infallible Wikipendium for collaboration.) The made up part, in which Moe, as forerunner to Marvel Comics’ Dr. Strange, fights a decades-long occult battle against J. Edgar Hoover, is fun too.

OR, why one ought not expect the frequency of posts around here to increase.

I’ve dropped cryptic hints here and there, but I can now announce three happy chunks of news, each one about a fun and challenging project that will be occupying me for the next few months, possibly years, and in one case probably decades.

[Read more →]

The question should not be, “Had Edison never lived, would we have had an incandescent light bulb?” but rather, “Had the Western world never discovered electricity, would non-Western cultures eventually have developed the incandescent light bulb?” My answer to this question is basically negative. Western knowledge of nature was neither “better” nor “deeper” than the beliefs of the Chinese, Africans, or Aztecs. It just happened to be the kind of knowledge that led to the emergence of light bulbs.
–Joel Mokyr, “King Kong and Cold Fusion: Counterfactual Analysis & the History of Technology”

Like just about everybody else in the humanities wing of the ivory tower, I’m grading papers this month and not exactly loving it. You’d think somebody who can go on at such length about writing pedagogy wouldn’t find the actual doing it such a drag. I did have one assignment this term that was a pleasure to grade: in our course on Science, Technology, and Global History, Bill Turkel and I had the students critique, and suggest alternatives to, the Civilization technology tree.

[Read more →]

(OR, “I was Watching the Watchmen, I swear, but then I looked away and missed them.”)

Sunday Times (UK):

Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US

There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who are willing to dress up as comic book heroes and patrol the urban streets in search of, if not super-villains, then pickpockets and bullies. They may look wacky, but the superhero community was born in the embers of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when ordinary people wanted to do something short of enlisting. … In recent weeks, prompted by heady buzz words such as “active citizenry” during the Barack Obama campaign, the pace of enrolment has speeded up. Up to 20 new “Reals”, as they call themselves, have materialised in the past month.

… Mr. Invisible is cheered that at least his grey one-piece “invisibility suit” works, proven when a drunk urinated on him in an alley. [more]

Bonus link, for those of you who have kids haven’t seen it yet: what I assume are the best five minutes of Watchmen. A little found history, a little alternate history, a little Dylan. What more do you need?

Edited to add: Hat tip to my man in Tel Aviv, Dotan. And I hope it’s clear that this is part of a well-established genre of “those wacky Americans” stories which should generally be read with salt shaker at the ready.

Hide your puppies, there’s metablogging ahead. Writing that tribute to Digital History Hacks (call it data point no. 1)  got me thinking, if I wasn’t already, about weblogs and their natural lifespans, about when and how they change or end, and about how you know when you are done. Oho, you say, could Rob be talking about his own increasingly cobwebby weblog? Very clever of you to spot it. But first, a few other data points:

Data point no. 2: I don’t think I can overstate how much I love the blog Snarkout–named for my favorite Daniel Pinkwater novel, and that just adds to its swelliness. I don’t even know the name of Snarkout’s author but he (I’m taking a wild guess) writes long, smart, link-lousy, digression-infested posts on just about everything under the sun. His posts start out about one thing, like how Isaac Asimov is “the boringest man ever to inspire a Japanese death cult,” then somehow wander off, like late-era Simpsons episodes, to work in the invention of the Pringles potato chip, then end up being about an insane CIA intelligence officer who insisted he was a galactic emperor and may have been the pseudonymous science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith. That’s one post, you understand, and they’re all like that.

But here’s what really impresses a slow blogger like me: [Read more →]

I just sent the following off to Ralph Luker to add to Cliopatria’s Hall of Fame for important history weblogs:

It seems like just yesterday I was toasting Bill Turkel’s Digital History Hacks for winning Cliopatria’s Best New Blog Award. Now Bill is moving on from the blog to other things, and I have the sad task of bidding DHH adieu. Let’s see what I said back then:

William J. Turkel’s Digital History Hacks goes beyond new media platitudes and internet hype to demonstrate in word and deed what history in the twenty-first century will be all about. From the nuts and bolts of spidering and scraping to the loftiest questions about what historians do and why, Digital History Hacks points the way to a brave new world with infectious enthusiasm and blazing imagination.

All that proved to be true and [Read more →]

My U.S. history class is (appropriately) discussing the civil rights movement today. In addition to their usual reading, I pulled together a bunch of YouTube clips of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and others. You can check them out here. Most of those are probably familiar to anyone reading here, but Eldridge Cleaver is fun to watch, and there’s something surreal about seeing Malcolm X on the ur-Canadian talk show, the CBC’s Front Page Challenge.

I’m also posting this to show off my students, frankly. Scroll down the course website and see how much time and thought they put into their comments on the reading each week. I really am quite proud of them.