JHUS Staging

Blog

  • Who Watches The Watchmen (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUeD_ReLG6Q[/embedyt]

    In this video, filmed spontaneously on West North Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan (just west of North Park, I’ll embed a map) in the summer of 2010, we watch a police stop in the background while discussing the significant possibility that simply by recording this video, I was risking arrest.  As I write this in 2021, there is an active case in process that may make that more true.  Thanks to noted asshat and anthropomorphic suppurating rectal polyp James O’Keefe at Project Veritas and his bullshit, a court in the eastern district of Michigan has put this state’s long-standing position as a “single party consent” state for audio recording – meaning only one person, and not all of them, need consent to a conversation being recorded – into jeopardy, and the state supreme court is expected to rule on the matter fairly soon (if they haven’t already; I couldn’t find anything in a quick google search).

    The ability to record authorities in the execution of their official duties is absolutely critical to of a free state.  Honorable execution of the duties of public safety should never require hiding in shadows and forbidding an independent record.  It is absolutely incumbent of each of us as citizens to remain vigilant and diligent in holding our public servants to account, every time.

    These laws also represent something that I didn’t discuss in the video, and that is how the right wing has engaged in a long play of stuffing every possible office from president to dog catcher with fundamentalists advancing authoritarian and – as is now much less radical to say than when I was saying it at the time this video was filmed – even fascist agendas.  You have to keep your eyes open, you have to remain engaged, and even if it means running for office yourself you have to take an active and ongoing part in protecting the necessary freedoms that allow us to exist in a free nation, no matter how abridged that freedom may be at any given moment in any given circumstance.  To whatever extent American freedom is succeeding at all, it is succeeding because we, the people, keep our eyes open.

  • Not All Men

    So this is one of those things that I’ve been grinding my teeth about for a long time, and I’ve said all of this before many, many times but I feel like it bears posting and keeping at hand:

    Anyone whose response to any conversation about the sexual aggression, exploitation, abuse, harassment, and assault is “Not All Men!” needs to sit down, shut up, and not speak again until you’ve learned how to act like a decent human being.

    Let me tell y’all “not all men” types a little secret that’s only a secret to you:

    ALL women – ALL women, every single woman you have ever known – has personally experienced sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault at the hands or words or eyes of a man in her lifetime, and most of them have experienced it within the last five years statistically. ALL women, everywhere, including those so normalized to it that they themselves don’t realize that’s what’s happening.

    Not just in “those countries” or “those states” or “that part of the whatever” or “those people.” ALL women. Every. Single. One. And I don’t have to ask them all; I’ll concede that if there’s a woman someplace who has never once in her life been in the presence of a man who knew she was female, then maybe she has escaped that experience.

    I am telling you if you’re a man and you think I’m making that up, it’s straight up because the women around you think you at least might be, maybe, sometimes, part of the problem, if in nothing else than at least in being so obviously averse to dealing with realities you don’t like that people who love you avoid presenting you with them.

    You probably need to deal with that internally before you go rushing to her to ask if I’m right.

    TOO MANY MEN, which means “MORE THAN ONE,” engage in sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault against women, and until the number of men engaging in sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault against women is ZERO, the phrase “not all men” simply need not exist.

    It is a defense purely of the male ego, almost universally offered by men who feel guilty about their own behavior but not guilty enough to sit down, shut up, and look within themselves for the keys to change it rather than just making the same empty noises as they wheedle for social approval with performative blather.

    If you’re not one of those men and you’re saying that crap, the problem is not that you aren’t one of those men, it’s that in the very act of thinking now’s the time to say so you are much farther on your way to becoming one of them than you apparently believe yourself to be.

    Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I’ve been John Henry.

  • In My Room S1E1 – The New Poor & More

    Hey welcome to my ad-hoc replacement for the John Henry Show, which will last until I’ve got more stability and can properly plan Season 3 of TJHS. I think for iTunes we can do fractional seasons, so if it works you’ll see this as season 2.1, episode 1 of “The John Henry Show.” That’ll save subscribers the hassle of going back and forth between shows.

    This show we’re talking about fundraising, about evolution, about self-honesty, about how many times does someone have to see big public things coming way before the mainstream and have them play out as predicted before people start thinking that someone might know what they’re talking about? And “The New Poor” get a hard answer to “why is this happening to us?” All this and a ton more on “In My Room,” the new low-key, get the cool people in early show from longtime activist, musician, actor, writer, and director John Henry

    Don’t forget you can help support my work at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/join/ with anything from a one-time tip for coffee money to a monthly subscription. For those who prefer Patreon, membership is available through the link above as well.

  • I Shouldn’t Have To (2010)

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfxTj7_V8c[/embedyt]

    “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English, this is America!”  Another recurring theme that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.  As you can see from the screenshot/featured image for this article, which was captured on 25-March-2021, it’s still occurring.

    I’m not even going to bother with all the reasons this kind of bigoted, ignorant thinking sucks; anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the arguments backwards and forwards.  This video is pure bias reinforcement, shot spontaneously outside my home in Kalamazoo at the time.  It’s not likely nor intended to move any bigot who thinks this way.  It’s intended to be something others who feel the way I do about this ignorance can share when they encounter it in the wild, to reinforce and normalize the idea that we’re out here and not going away, and we won’t be gaslighted into hiding in a closet to please bigots.

  • The alt.games.morrowind FAQ (2003)

    [This is the final version of the alt.games.morrowind newsgroup I founded in 2003 as a huge fan of the game and level designer.]

    alt.games.morrowind
    Frequently Asked Questions List
    Version 1.2
    13-Jul-03

    alt.games.morrowind newgrouped by John Henry (johnhenry@lowgenius.com) on 23-August-02
    FAQ © 2002, 2003 John Henry. All Rights Reserved. This document may be reproduced freely via any public or private medium, as long as this copyright notice remains intact.

    Welcome to alt.games.morrowind!

    Preface: What is this document?

    This document is the Frequently Asked Questions list for Usenet newsgroup alt.games.morrowind. As such, this document pertains mostly to the newsgroup, as opposed to the game itself. If you are looking for an FAQ for the game Morrowind or it’s companion applications, we suggest you start looking at the official Morrowind website at www.elderscrolls.com, and continue on from there. There are a number of great game FAQs for Morrowind that deal with all aspects of the game; the scope of this document is merely to provide a simple game overview, and an explanation of the purpose and substance of the newsgroup.

    Be forewarned that while we try to avoid spoiling the game for you, there are some minor spoilers throughout this document.

    If your news server doesn’t carry alt.games.morrowind, they probably will if you politely request it!  If they ask, yes it has a properly formatted control message at ftp.isc.org, the repository of record for newsgroup control messages.

    1. The Newsgroup

    A. What is this place?
    B. Who put this thing here in the middle of my Internet?
    C. Why wasn’t I informed?
    D. Okay, but really, what’s the point?
    E. Isn’t [insert other newsgroup here] good enough? Is it really necessary to have a separate Morrowind newsgroup?

    2. The Game

    A. What Is Morrowind?
    I. The Game
    a. Overview
     b. The Elder Scrolls Series – History and background information
    II. The Place
    III. The Story
    IV. Game Play
    a. Character Races, Classes, Skills, and Attributes
    b. Guilds, Factions (“Great Houses”), and Cults
    c. Weapons, Magic, and Travel
    d. Non-Player Characters (NPCs)
    B. What Is Tribunal? Is it worth the extra money?
    C. What About Bloodmoon?
    D. Platform Variations
    E. The Elder Scrolls Construction Set
    F. Where can I get these wonderful, must-have, innovative, earth-shatteringly stupendous games?

    3.  FAQ Version History

    4.  alt.games.morrowind Control Message Archive

    ————————————-

    1. The Newsgroup

    A. What Is This Place?

          This is Usenet Newsgroup Alt.Games.Morrowind. It is a discussion group dedicated (mostly) to conversations about the PC and XBox Game “Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III,” produced by Bethesda Softworks. The Newsgroup Charter (every properly-created newsgroup has a charter, except for a collection of groups who’s charters were lost in a major crash in the early 90’s) reads as follows:

          “alt.games.morrowind is a Usenet newsgroup for the purpose of discussing all aspects of Morrowind. Excessive crossposting and binary posting are prohibited. Binaries may be posted to alt.binaries.games or a website. alt.games.morrowind is an unmoderated newsgroup; we strongly suggest that all users check out newsgroup news.announce.newusers prior to posting, if you are unfamiliar with Usenet.”

          In short, it’s a place where people gather to talk about Morrowind. What’s Morrowind? Keep reading.

    B. Who Put This Thing Here In The Middle Of My Internet?

    I did.

    You’re welcome.

          Okay, a real answer. Alt.Games.Morrowind was created by John Henry <johnhenry@lowgenius.com> in August of 2002. As of this writing, John maintains the FAQ, and CONTROLS THE PLACE WITH AN IRON FIST.

           Just kidding.

          The group is unmoderated, although, like any other usenet newsgroup, binaries and excessive crossposting are ‘forbidden,’ meaning that most news servers will automatically torch a binary (that is, non-human-readable-text) file that is posted to a non-binary group. You can tell the non-binary groups by the lack of the word “binaries” in the group name. Excessive crossposting may potentially trigger anti-spam bots or be a violation of your ISP’s terms of service. Posting in “rich text” (i.e. HTML), while not PROHIBITED, is STRONGLY DISCOURAGED, which is also true across all of Usenet. We also recommend, if you are new to Usenet, that you take a browse through the newsgroups news.announce.newusers and news.answers. It may prevent embarrassing mistakes, offensive body odor, acne, and erectile dysfunction.

    C. Why Wasn’t I Informed?

          That’s what you get for missing staff meetings ($1 to the alt.usenet.kooks FAQ)

    D. Okay, But Really, What’s The Point?

          Sharing information, tips, inside jokes, and various other bits relating to Morrowind. That and the sooper-sekrit nekkid pictures of the Suran Strippers.

    E. Isn’t [insert other newsgroup here] good enough? It is really necessary to have a separate Morrowind newsgroup?

          Well, that’s a long and rather convoluted story, but I’ll try and make it simple. When I first set out to create AGM, I searched for an appropriate newsgroup (other than comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg) for Morrowind discussion and didn’t find one. Now, contrary to popular belief, I’m not omniscient…but I’ve been on Usenet for about 7 years as of this writing (27-May-03), and it never even dawned on me to look for “elder-scrolls.” alt.games.elder-scrolls also never came up during preliminary discussions in alt.config, so I’m forced to conclude that it didn’t dawn on anyone there, either. That, if nothing else, indicates to me that chances are when people go looking on Usenet for information about Morrowind, they’re going to search for “Morrowind” long before it occurs to them to search for “elder scrolls.”

          Furthermore, there *is* precedent; Several game ‘franchises,’ including Sid Meier’s “Civilization” series, Diablo, Command and Conquer, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Final Fantasy, Quake, Sim City, Myst, Mechwarrior, Unreal, Vampire, and even Morrowind’s predecessor Daggerfall all have their own dedicated newsgroups.

          With all due respect for the question, I personally don’t understand it; by the logic inherent to the question, the entire alt.games.* hierarchy shouldn’t exist; after all, that’s what comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg is for, right?

          Finally, it should be noted that a.g.m currently handles between 70 and 100 messages, average, per week. Not exactly the kind of post counts you see in places like alt.politics or rec.sport.pro-wrestling – yet – but certainly enough to justify the group, and more than one of our regular readers has said that if not for alt.games.morrowind, they would have never known about alt.games.elder-scrolls. The general tendency is for people who have played the previous games in the ES series to go to a.g.e-s, and people who have not to come to alt.games.morrowind. That said, there is plenty of cross-pollenation between the two groups (and several others), and there is no effort in any quarter to encourage a “preference” for one over the other.

          As of this writing, addition to the Google archives of alt.games.morrowind is pending.

          As you may have guessed, I will not discuss this further on newsgroups, as it tends to be a pointless series of arguments that leads nowhere and eats into my gaming time.

    2. The Game

    A. What Is Morrowind?

    I. The Game

    a. Overview

          Morrowind is a combination first-person shooter/role-playing game for the PC and XBox published by Bethesda Softworks and released in 2002. The official website is located at http://www.elderscrolls.com. That’s the nuts and bolts of it; the full answer is much more complex and interesting.

    b. The Elder Scrolls Series – History and Background Information

          The Elder Scrolls series of games actually consists of (as of this writing) no less than *8* titles: Arena, Daggerfall,       Battlespire, Redguard, Morrowind and it’s two expansion packs Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and Oblivion. All of the games are set in a world called Tamriel. Unfortunately, Your Friendly FAQ Keeper has not played any of the previous titles, so I can only pass on information I’ve gleaned from other sources, but here’s the series in a nutshell:

         Arena, released in 1994 (not sure of the exact date, but the Unoffficial FAQ hosted at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (http://12.145.63.45/~uesp) was last updated in December of that year), was the first title in the series and was widely hailed at the time as a genuine breakthrough in PC-RPG’s. This is a watermark that is common to all three of the main titles in the series (Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind). The visual immersion (even back in the bad old days when $Mb was an obscenely huge amount of video memory to have) – including weather effects, seasons, and night/day – open-ended style of game play, and high-quality storylines have long been worshipped by many in the CRPG community. From what I gather in reading about it, the main quest in Arena is to gather the pieces of a major weapon and use it to defeat a “Boss” character in the form of a battlemage. However, with over 400 cities and uncounted side-quests and NPC’s, the main quest is – as with Morrowind – merely a small slice of what the game has to offer.

         Daggerfall, the second title in the series, was released in September of 1996. With some fifty thousand people, six thousand towns, and tens of thousands of houses, dungeons, caves, and so forth, it was far and away the largest CRPG world ever created at the time, and indeed remains so. According to the Unofficial Daggerfall FAQ, Daggerfall features “much improved plot over ARENA; your character is asked to undertake a special mission for the Emperor and obtain artifacts before rival groups of the court of the town of DAGGERFALL can get them & use them to instigate an uprising. In investigating the court of DAGGERFALL, stories of madness, unrequited love, dark sorcery, seduction, betrayal, and a plot to recreate a powerful force from thousands of years past will be revealed.” Daggerfall also was one of the earliest PC games to feature parental controls over sexual and violent content; indeed, according to what I’ve read, it’s quite possible to find full frontal nudity in this game. Again, like Morrowind, game play is open-ended; it is even possible to win the game by working AGAINST the main storyline. Further, details such as clothing, experience, player class, and the completion of side quests were calculated to have a lasting effect on the players world-wide reputation which had an effect on overall gameplay. All of this packed in to what was at the time the most advanced 3D graphics engine ever created and featuring many of the same environmental innovations as Arena – weather, day/night, etc. The FAQ keeper actually has a copy of this game; unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it run properly under Windows XP.

         Battlespire and Redguard were apparently intended to launch new branches on the Elder Scrolls tree, with Battlespire being touted as the first in the “Legends” series, and Redguard being billed as the first in the “Adventures” series. It appears that after these two titles were released, Bethsoft decided instead to concentrate on creating Morrowind…a process which took them nearly 5 years. Both games were less “open-ended” than the other three titles, and seem to be less RPG than action-adventure game, but they did provide a nice bit of additional information and structure for the world of Tamriel.

          Oblivion is the announced title for the next game in the series.  No further information is available about it, other than it’s next, it’ll be a while, and it’ll likely be different from Daggerfall and Morrowind.

    II. The Place

          Tamriel, the “planet” upon which all of these games take place, is a land rich in flora and fauna, as well as several different species of intelligent life – a few different races of elves (“Dwemer” and “Dunmer”), a ‘human’ race, the lizardly Argonians, and the feline Khajit, possibly among others – not to mention gods, demi-gods, and mortals who have usurped the power of gods for their own egotistical ends.

          Tamriel is quite probably the largest, richest, and best-documented fictional planet outside of a fantasy/science fiction series or the original Dungeons and Dragons games.

         Morrowind is an island continent, surrounded by archipelagos (archipelagi?   archipelaguses?  i’m so confused…), in what is usually drawn as the north-eastern quadrant of Tamriel.

    III. The Story

          Many years past, a group of powerful mortals – Amalexia, Sotha Sil, Vivec, the Nerevar, and others, if I’m remembering my legends correctly – found a key to power which would grant them the powers and longevity of gods. Unfortunately, it did not necessarily grand the wisdom of a god. There are various aspects to this key of power, and one of the group of mortals seized this key, betraying the others to gain control of for his own selfish greed for power. Now, a stranger “born of uncertain parents under a certain sign” has arrived in Morrowind, and there are rumors that this stranger may hold the power to divest the traitor of this key, and with it the power he has usurped. Note that by “key” we mean “an object which is primary,” not “something that unlocks a door.” There are several thousand “door keys” in Morrowind – we wouldn’t want you to get confused!

    IV. Game Play

    a. Character Races, Classes, Guilds, Skills, and Attributes

          One of the enduring traits of the Elder Scrolls series is the ability to create characters of various races and attributes. I won’t go into listing them all here – again, this is supposed to be an FAQ about the newsgroup, not about the game – but suffice it to say that you’ll find everything you’d expect from a full-featured RPG, and then some. Each skill is governed by an attribute; each attribute is improved with the used of the skills that use it, and you progress through “levels” as you gain higher skill and attribute values. For instance, the “Hand to Hand” skill may be a function of the “Agility” attribute…so if you go through Morrowind getting in fist fights, your H2H skill will increase, and when you advance a level, you may be awarded a potential bonus multiplier for your “agility” attribute. Each race has specific weaknesses and strengths, which are explains both in the game and in the various game tutorials that can be found on the web. You can also create your own custom Race and Class which has it’s own strengths and weaknesses.

    b. Guilds, Factions (“Great Houses”), and Cults

      Guilds are, as you might expect, professional associations…sort of like labor unions without all the contract disputes. There are several guilds in the game – Mage’s, Fighter’s, Thief’s, a guild of assassins known as the Morag Tong, and more. You have to be careful, though! All is not what it seems, and it is not uncommon for one guild to send yo on a quest which, when completed, will get you thrown out of another guild.

          There are three “great houses” – Hlaalu, Telvanni, and Redoran – and again, each has it’s distinct advantages and disadvantages. You can only join one Great House (unless you’re using a mod that allows otherwise), although I Have heard rumors that you can join 2 houses IF you pick the right two.

          There are also several religious organizations – the Imperial Cult, and the Temple, for instance, that you can also join; I don’t believe that membership in one will prevent membership in another.

          In all the guilds, houses, and temples, there are things you can do which will cause you to be kicked out, or which may prevent advancement higher through the ranks. In my first character, for instance, I made a mistake which caused the Mage’s guild to refuse to promote me any further.

    c. Weapons and Armor, Magic, Items, and Travel

          TRAVEL in Morrowind happens in a variety of ways – you can walk or run over the landscape; you can get real good with potions or spells and fly over the landscape; you can take a silt-strider (sort of a bug bus) to and from major cities in the game; you can travel by boat to and from certain places; you can travel by something called a Propylon Chamber, which is sort of a teleportation device; or you can make use of one of the Mage’s Guild transporters (I think you have to be a member of the Mage’s guild to use these). Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages, and chances are you’ll use just about all of them in the course of playing the game. There are a dozen or so major cities, quite a few minor cities and towns, and small settlements (such as the Ashlander camps) scattered all across Morrowind, and each one has it’s own surprises and challenges. Of course, there are also literally hundreds – perhaps over a thousand, I haven’t counted them – of dungeons to explore.

          MAGIC in Morrowind is unlike any other game your FAQ Keeper has played, and – along with the spectacular graphics, incredibly immersive game play, and just plain fun of it – is one of the reasons why it is far and away my favorite CRPG since Betrayal at Krondor. Not only do you have spells, but there are scrolls, ‘soul gems’ in which you can trap the soul of vanquished foes and use it to enchant weapons, clothing, and armor, potions which you can create from alchemical components you gather on your journeys (more on that later), inherent powers that you may be gifted with depending on how you elect to build your character. There are ranged spells, contact spells, and spells you cast on yourself. You can control fire, ice, electricity, poison, and paralysis; you can fly, walk on water, enhance or restore your skills and attributes, drain or enhance the skills and attributes of hostile or friendly NPC’s. You can combine spell effects – in-game, without creating mods – and there are hundreds of scrolls, potions, spells, and enchanted items that are already canned and placed in the game for you to use. If magic is your forte, you’ll love this game without a doubt.

          WEAPONS and Armor in Morrowind are just as varied as magic; in part, because they can be enchanted with any magic effect that is in the game. There are multiple classes and types of swords, maces, staves, bows, crossbows, knives, clubs. They might be made of chitin, glass, steel, silver, ebony, or other material, each with it’s own set of strengths in varying degrees. Ditto the armor…and it can all be enchanted (and often is!) with any given magical effect…if you’ve gained the skill or have the money to pay someone to do it. Plus, again, there are several hundred (thousand?) “canned” items already placed in the game for you to find or buy.

          ITEMS in Morrowind are ridiculously plentiful – nearly EVERYTHING in this game can be picked up and manipulated. The products of native flora (flowers and plants), fauna (animals and monsters that you kill or harvest), and other natural resources (like gemstones) can be used as alchemical components to make potions with; there are lock picks and probes; armorer’s hammers and metal-working tongs so you can repair your own armor and weapons if you’d like; there is a HUGE variety of clothing in different styles and qualities that can be enchanted with spells just like armor and weapons…but even such mundane things as spoons, napkins, and pillows can be picked up, bought, or sold as you wish. Additionally, there is property ownership in Morrowind; many things are laying around for the taking, but many more are “owned” by an NPC, and if you steal them you will be caught by an Ordinator or Imperial Guard (Morrowind Cops) and forced to give the property back, plus pay a fine or serve time. There are even illegal drugs – some traders will refuse to deal with you if you have certain things in your possession.

    d. Non-Player Characters (NPCs)

          There are two major classes of NPC’s in the game – essential and non-essential. Essential NPC’s – leaders of guilds and factions who give you quests, wise women of the Ashlander camps, and all sorts of other interesting characters – may give you quests or challenges which will help you complete the Main quest. Unlike many other RPGs, these characters have personality – just wait until you get to meet Crassius Curio! You maintain a level of favor or “disposition” with *each and every NPC in the game*, which, together with your overall reputation, determines how they act toward you throughout. You may find yourself being looked at with contempt early on by characters who will become almost slavish in their admiration as you progress. The non-essential NPCs are, perhaps, not *quite* as versatile and interesting as the essential ones, but in any case, especially early on in the game, it pays to talk to EVERYONE about EVERYTHING. Plus, of course, there is the usual assortment of shopowners, regents, bad guys of all caste, slave (yes slaves – buy them, sell them, or set them free), and even – if you know where to find them – a trio of erotic dancers (all human ;-)). Sometimes you may have to escort them from place to place – other times you may take great pleasure in killing them with no remorse…as long as they attack you first. You can pick their pockets. You can strip them naked (nearly) and leave their corpse laying in the street as an example of your power. It’s your game – play it your way!

    B. What Is Tribunal? Is it worth the extra money?

          Tribunal is the first official expansion pack for Morrowind, released in fall of 2002. It adds a new city – Mournhold – and a whole new set of NPC’s, quests, caverns, dungeons, new flora and alchemy components, new weapons, new armor, and new reasons to continue playing. The original Morrowind game is required for Tribunal on the PC. The Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions are not available for the XBox; however, Bethesda recently released an XBox version called “Morrowind Gold” that incorporates elements of both expansions.

    C. What About Bloodmoon?

          The Bloodmoon expansion is now in stores worldwide. Hailed by most as yet another stunning advance, Bloodmoon incorporates new creatures, new alchemy ingredients, new spell abilities, a new island, Sothseim, that is about 1/4 the size of Morrowind, and of course, a whole passel of new quests. Also added is the ability to become a Werewolf, which carries with it a whole new dimension of game play.

    D. Platform Variations

          Your FAQ Keeper is not a console gamer; therefore, I can’t speak much about the XBox version of the game beyond what has already been written. However, many of our readers are owners of the XBox version, and questions regarding it are certainly welcome. If someone here can’t answer your questions, chances are we can point you to someone that can. The biggest variations are in regard to expandability – there is no “modding” for the XBox version; hence, the Elder Scrolls Construction Set does not come with the XBox version. As mentioned above, the expansions will not work with it either (and are not offered for XBox as separate products) although Bethesda has created an XBox version called “Morrowind Gold” which implements elements from both expansions.

    E. The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, and “Mods”

          Included in the PC version of Morrowind is The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, a “level editor” unlike any you’ve ever seen. Basically, anything that is part of the game, you can create, recreate, or modify here to suit your own needs. While there is no included tool to re-texture (“re-skin”) existing models or create new models, re-texturing can be done fairly easily with the help of a decent graphic program (I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop) and several available tools; if you’re loaded with extra cash, you can pick up the 3DStudioMax software from Discreet and make your own models. Even without new models and textures, however, there is an unlimited range of things you can create with the level editor – new interiors (caves and houses), exteriors (land and building exteriors), characters, weapons, armor, jewelry, spell components, quests, storylines, alchemy tools, clothing…even create entirely new factions, races of characters, or (as several folks have already done) create an entirely different *game*. If you don’t want to do all that work yourself, there are literally thousands of mods out there to be downloaded and enjoyed as you see fit. A caveat – some modders aren’t as careful as they should be about changing things; we highly recommend that you install one mod at a time and make sure it works, rather than going and downloading 50 of them and installing them all at once.

          You can find sites full of mods all over the net just by typing “morrowind mods” into your favorite search engine. However, there are a handful of sites which this author, and many regulars of AGM, have found to be of particularly high quality and wide selection. These are:

          The Official Morrowind Site – Bethesda has written several very good “official plugins” for Morrowind – you can find these by browsing their site at www.elderscrolls.com.

       The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages – http://12.145.62.45/~uesp (or www.m0use.net – this URL is sometimes not as reliable as one would like) – source for much of the background information in this FAQ regarding previous ES titles, plus has full quest walkthroughs for Morrowind and Tribunal, and a great selection of mods.

          http://www.morrowindfiles.com – this is where pretty much everybody uploads their mods to at some point. A huge selection, ranging from the simple weapon to entire quests. Well worth taking the time to browse through.

          The FAQ keeper (who, being the FAQ keeper, is allowed ONE gratuitous plug for his own site!) also keeps a small selection of his own custom mods at his website, http://www.lowgenius.com. Just check the menu and you’ll see a link to several Morrowind-oriented pages. I also operate an official mirror for the Morrowind FPS Optimizer, which is a most excellent little tool to help you get the most out of Morrowind on your particular computer system.

    F. Where can I get these wonderful, must-have, innovative, earth-shatteringly stupendous games?

    Flattery will get you everywhere. Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Bloodmoon have shipped worldwide as of this writing. If, for some reason, you can’t find them locally, you can purchase them via the FAQ Keeper’s website, gratuitously plugged in the previous entry.

    ————–

    So endeth this FAQ, at least for now. I hope you have found it informative, and if you would like to see something added in the future, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at agmfaq (at) lowgenius.com, and I’ll see to it that it’s included in the next version.

    3.  FAQ Version History

    1.2 13-Jul-03 Added information about Bloodmoon, more spelling corrections, added section 2F with purchasing information.

    1.1a 29-May-03 Web-only revision to include some minor spelling corrections, information about Oblivion, an FAQ Version History, and a copy of the alt.games.morrowind newsgroup creation message

    1.1 28-May-2003 – a huge overhaul of the FAQ, to include history of the Elder Scrolls game series, information about the history of the group, and detailed information about gameplay components such as character creation, magic and weaponry, and mod creation.

    1.0 23-August-2002  Newsgroup created, simple FAQ written

    4.  Alt.Games.Morrowind Control Message

    From johnhenry@lowgenius.com Fri Aug 23 16:25:29 2002
    Newsgroups: alt.games.morrowind,alt.config
    Subject: cmsg newgroup alt.games.morrowind
    From: “John Henry, King Of The Night-time World” <johnhenry@lowgenius.com>
    Organization: LowGenius.Com
    User-Agent: Xnews/5.04.25
    Control: newgroup alt.games.morrowind
    Approved: johnhenry@lowgenius.com
    Lines: 24
    Message-ID: <Ylt99.134$eS.26242@news.uswest.net>
    Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 16:25:28 GMT
    NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.96.231.239
    X-Trace: news.uswest.net 1030119928 68.96.231.239 (Fri, 23 Aug 2002 11:25:28 CDT)
    NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 11:25:28 CDT
    Xref: news.isc.org control.newgroup:344636
    [posted and mailed]
    For your newsgroups file:
    alt.games.morrowind Bethesda Softworks’ RPG/FPS for PC and XBOX

    CHARTER: alt.games.morrowind discusses the fantasy role-playing game Morrowind. This discussion may contain spoilers, or be relative to The Elder Scrolls construction set, or the X-box version of Morrowind, as well as the PC version. The newsgroup is unmoderated. Binary postings are not allowed. Use of [SPOILER] tags, or other relevant tags for filtering, scoring, or killfiling (for instance, [TES] or [XBOX]) are strongly encouraged.

    JUSTIFICATION: According to a google search on 22-Aug-02, the word” Morrowind” had appeared “about 38,300” times. The discussion is obviously there to justify the group. Currently discussion is spread across usenet, with some in the *games* groups, and some found elsewhere. There is also a strong existing community of Morrowind users who would certainly populate the group once it propagates. The alt.games.* nomenclature/subhierarchy is already established and active on Usenet. Discussion took place on alt.config 22-24 Aug 2002. Suggestions for improvement were incorporated into this message.

  • The Twelve Steps Of Elder Scrolls Anonymous

    I originally wrote this back in the summer of 2003 as “The 12 Steps of Morrowind Anonymous.”  Since then of course the Elder Scrolls universe has expanded mightily, so I’ve revised it a little bit to reflect both the expansion of the game world and of its popularity.

    Step 1: Came to believe that we were powerless over Morrowind, and that our lives had become unmanageable…

    Step 2: Came to believe that Vive…er, a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

    Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Azur God as we understood Her Him.

    Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourscrolls OURSLEVES! Ourselves. I mean ourselves.

    Step 5: Admitted to Almale…er, God, to ourselves and to another NPC human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

    Step 6: Paid the ordinat Were entirely ready to have Azur God remove all these defects of character.

    Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our vampirism DAMMIT! shortcomings.

    Step 8: Made a list of all NPCs and demi-gods we had killed…shit, I mean persons we had harmed, and became willing to brag about it in Steam comments make amends to them all.

    Step 9: Paid the Imperial Guards...no, that’s not right…oh, yes: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others, or would cause us to lose Reputation points or be ejected from a Guild, Great House, or Temple.

    Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and fence it before we got caught when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

    Step 11: Sought through prayer and Minion medication meditation to improve our conscious contact with Azu God as we understood Her  Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out, and a longsword that would do 300 damage to hit, plus cast Soul Trap and Armor Eater so we could wipe out that annoying little bastard Gaenor outside the Temple complex in Mournhold during the Third Era

    Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to Twitch, and to practice our marksmanship in anticipation of the next expansion pack.

    And now for a little prayer:

    Azura,
    grant me the septims,
    to buy the armor I cannot enchant,
    to learn the spells I don’t know,
    and the wisdom to save my game often.

    Amen.

  • Real Talk About No Means No

    Wishing Doesn’t Make It No

    [Disclaimer: most of this article is framed with male-female pronouns and cis-het identity assumptions for simplicity of prose.  To be clear: yes, it is true that abuse and consent violations are perpetrated by and against people of all genders, and any given dynamic or example can have any gender role changed and still be valid.  With that said, the great crisis of abuse and disrespecting consent still appears to be centered in the straight community, with the perpetrators usually being male and the targets female, so I’ve chosen to write the discussion in that frame.]

    It’s okay, read it again and think about it.  Take as long as you like, it’s text, it’ll still be here.

    I’m not having a problem with no meaning no here.

    I’m not saying “no never means no.”

    I’m not saying “no shouldn’t mean no,” nor that we should ever, ever assume that any given “no” is insincere.

    I’m saying that “no” manifestly does not mean “no,” a significant enough percentage of the time with consistency over a long enough period that we’ve developed entire social infrastructures and an entire subset of the language around the clear, present, and ongoing reality that not every “no” means “no.”  We say that and we pretend to believe it both as a matter of seeking social approval and a matter of expressing a core normative believe, that is a belief in how things should be, rather than how they are.

    The problem is, the full implied assertion – “no always means no and every time you hear no it means no now, no forever, don’t even think about asking again” – simply isn’t true.

    A significant if not majority portion of the time “no” might mean “no,” or it might mean “no right now but later hell yeah” or “maybe” or “I don’t know” or “I’m not even thinking about sex right now and your proposition barely registered, try meeting me for the first time again in a week” or “that depends on if you act like an asshole when I say no” or “not right this minute because I don’t owe you a because, but if you hit me up in a week I’ll eat you alive.”

    Sometimes it means “try harder,” sometimes it means “I want to say yes but I’m afraid of the negative reaction of family or friends who may be present” and sometimes it means “I want to say yes but I’m deeply concerned by the social stigmas and judgements attached to female sexuality, so I’m going to pretend to be less turned on by you than I really am because I don’t want you or anyone else who may be observing to think I’m a ‘slut’ or ‘easy.’”  Sometimes it means “I just got laid this afternoon and like to keep at least a couple of days between different partners to let myself feel like I’m exercising some discretion, but get with me the day after tomorrow.”

    And lest we get too #notallmen here, it ALSO means “you’ve got to be out of your mind” and “I’m trying really hard to hold back spontaneous laughter because I’m afraid it’ll hurt your feelings and not only am I not an asshole but it’s been my experience that men with hurt feelings have an increased tendency toward aggression” and “I wouldn’t want you to touch me if I was dying and you were E.T.”

    It means “I’m f***ing terrified of you and I want to go home,” and it means “I’m absolutely repulsed by your attempts to touch me but see above re: hurt feelings” and “this is the most inappropriate damned thing I’ve ever heard but if I say anything other than the single word no it could cost me my career, my family, everything.” It means “if I get your creepy ass in a dark alleyway I’m going to kick you in the balls as hard as I can and run like hell.” It means “I am currently having ongoing fantasies of violating your dying body because I think you’re an absolute disgrace to the concepts of humanity and romance.”

    Because it’s TERRIFYING to be female, everywhere on this planet, pretty much all the time. And a lot of men are seriously jerks.

    Maybe The Problem Is You?

    Not a day goes by that I don’t see a female friend on social media post a picture of *any* female, and immediately you see a response like “OMG Your so BEAUTIFUL dear!” attached to a profile showing a middle aged guy with an unironic porn ‘stache.  I’m sure the PM’s are even more ridiculous – and I mean I’m sure because I’ve seen plenty of them. Not sincere compliments, but obvious half-blind troll accounts shotgunning for the most easily manipulated and vulnerable rubes they can find to con with badly phrased “compliments” that sound a lot like the kinds of “compliments” from the early-mid 20th century that’d get you arrested for sexual harassment in 2021 and rightfully so.

    The first time my daughter got sent an unsolicited picture of a grown man’s genitals she was 11 or 12, through one of the like three websites she could access (NeoPets). She wasn’t doing anything, she just made herself obviously enough female online that someone targeted her.

    I am telling you right now clearly and plainly to your face in as unambiguous a manner as I can:

    If you are a man and you think you don’t know a woman who’s been sexually harassed and/or at least verbally assaulted by a man, the women around you don’t trust you, and it’s almost certainly because you are one of the men who is sexually harassing and/or at least verbally assaulting them.

    “No” ALSO means “Due to the ridiculous social structures created by patriarchy I don’t really feel safe saying anything BUT plainly and simply ‘no’ to any man unless I’m at least somewhat prepared for and ready to accept an immediate high-pressure ‘seduction’ attempt that may include anything from wheedling and cajoling to offers of payment in cash or goods to threat and perpetration of extreme violence to include death, disfigurement, and or permanent disability. So I’m going to say no, and I’m going to stick around, and maybe if I feel comfortable enough with you later after getting to know you better I’ll let you ask again.”

    I’m not pointing all this out because I have some basic problem with the idea of no meaning no, or with respecting a woman’s wishes to not be accosted by me just because she’s outside and I think that means I’ve got the right to ask (I don’t, really).

    I’m pointing it out because this is another example of how we have built up these dishonest structures and public lies in some cases throughout human history, and the necessary reality that simply sloganeering the problem, and dishonestly at that, isn’t going to solve anything.

    What is going to solve everything is taking the time and making the effort – which we’re doing right now, believe it or not, even this post is part of it – to fix our thinking at the root, which means getting honest with ourselves about some things we really, really seem to hate being honest about.

    I’m pointing it out because it’s a lie, and it’s a lie we need to get honest about – radically, without flinching, and right now – if we ever expect to put an end to all the hangups and dysfunction and ignorance and arrogance that supports and energizes rape culture.

    Fixing The Problem

    We don’t need to move into a paradigm where we all keep pretending to prop up a lie that’s used to gently avoid telling someone we don’t think they’re attractive.  We need to move into a paradigm where we’re taught, explicitly, how to deal with the fact that someone we’re attracted to doesn’t think we’re attractive, and we need to stop acting like the very suggestion that such things need to be explicitly taught reflects weakness and particular lack of masculinity.  (Caught you.)

    We need to move into a paradigm where women are able to openly discuss the honest reality that they like sex, and some of them like sex a lot, and some of them like kinky sex, and some of them even like being dominated or controlled or even spanked and more in the bedroom, without attracting the unwanted aggressive attention of every 45 year old virgin within a 500 mile radius.

    We need to move into a paradigm where women can admit that some of them are just as perverted as any man and maybe then some, but they’re afraid to talk about that openly because when they do, every man in hearing range thinks she’s giving them permission to sexually assault her.

    We need to move into a paradigm where it’s perfectly unremarkable for some variant of the following conversation to occur:

    Person 1: Say, Person 2, even though we’re in entirely the wrong social context to get into it deeply right now, I think you’re really attractive and I’d love to maybe get some food and get to know each other better sometime if you’re interested!  I apologize for the improper context, but one must take one’s opportunities where one finds them, no?

    Person 2: I understand completely.  I’m not interested, but I appreciate the offer!

    Person 1: Okay, back to this thing we were working on just as if the last conversation was no more strange or remarkable than asking about the weather.

    We need to move into a paradigm where we stop assuming all men want sex and all women don’t.  We need to move into a paradigm where someone besides the knuckle-dragging men’s rights activists is pointing out that men are very much subject to sexual aggression, harassment, and assault every day too, and that there’s a definite connection between our refusal to deal with that reality, and the ongoing persistence of all this ugliness and interpersonal disrespect.

    We need to move into a paradigm where that conversation above doesn’t “make things weird,” because there’s not a single reason that it should except that women are rightfully afraid of men they’ve said no to, because men tend to not take no for an answer.  One of the reasons men tend not to take no for an answer is that the social norm is and has been for centuries that “no” means “you’re doing something wrong, try harder.”  There are entire mythologies that rely on this dynamic.  Even in the midst of being programmed with ‘no means no’ we are told every day in a thousand ways that no definitely does not mean no, that’s just a story we tell for gatekeeping purposes to keep us safe on the rare occasion when it really does.

    What I’m saying is that this is an old, destructive, hurtful lie, and this is a great time, right now while we’re in the middle of taking this huge evolutionary step, to face that and admit it and let’s start constructing new linguistics and new paradigms that accurately reflect reality instead of perpetuating these old, stupid games.

    Not because “what about me,” but because the social mechanisms which keep that reality under cover are the exact same social mechanisms that perpetuate the things that people broken and evil enough to deliberately engage in sexual assault use to rationalize and excuse their behavior or act as though it’s something other than what it is.

    Making It Matter

    See, that’s the problem with “no means no.”  It’s not merely that it’s inaccurate or that I have some personal feeling of threat or discomfort caused by that idea and am thus motivated to “mansplain” it.

    It’s that the fact it’s inaccurate, itself, both reflects and helps to perpetuate the root causes of very violence that it seeks to solve.

    In reality, if “no means no” then sentences like this need to be normalized immediately:

    Not now, I have to maintain the social appearance of chastity to avoid unpleasant and invasive discussions with family and friends.  But I want you, so let’s make some arrangements to build on.

    No. [You don’t need a reason.  While a general-principle “thanks” does no harm and helps take the sting out of rejection, it’s not required.]

    Not yet, I’d like to see how you act when you’re not on your best behavior and trying to impress me first.

    Well, I think you’re super attractive, but on principle I don’t get sexual until I reach a certain level of comfort with my partner.  Usually the level of comfort I feel is directly related to how much pressure I’m not under to have sex with you.

    I’m really not the right space for this now, but get hold of me maybe next weekend or something?  I’d like to talk about it later, but right now I can’t even think about sex and attraction.  Nothing to do with you.

    Hell yes, let’s get naked.

    Let’s normalize saying out loud that just because a woman likes sex doesn’t mean she’s even remotely interested in knowing whether she’d like it with you, and even if she would like it with you that doesn’t mean she would like it with you right now or all the time.

    Let’s normalize it being okay to simply not be sexually attracted to someone without accusing them of “shaming” some attribute the person they’re attracted to feels self-conscious about.

    Let’s stop sneering at people in age-disparate adult relationships and calling the older member a “pedophile” – nevermind that it’s insulting to the older member, it’s outrageously insulting to the younger member that the default assumption is they’re too damned ignorant to know when they’re being used and exploited.

    Let’s normalize saying out loud that while it was a long, hard, and worthwhile fight to create a world in which no woman is ever forced into a subservient, servile, or dependent relationship with a man, she also has every right to take that role that if she wants to.

    Let’s normalize saying what we mean and having honest and forthright conversations about consent, including saying firmly and repeatedly that the simple fact of someone expressing that they are sexually arousable does not mean they are or want to be aroused by you.

    Let’s make sure no means no.

  • Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNt7ZGCW-o[/embedyt]

    The Problem

    Sweet’s “Fox On The Run.”  Perhaps the distilled essence of what we now call variously “glitter rock” or “glam rock” or “power pop.”

    Another great song that’s gonna get canceled as soon as the “woke” folk read the lyrics.  You can find ’em yourself if you want, but allow me to summarize:

    “[verse 1 & 2]Hi, I’m a rock star.  Yes, you’re a female indicating you want to have sex with me, or at least you’re a female in my general vicinity and that’s close enough because it’s 1974 and we still think “leaving the house” constitutes consent.  From a distance in the dark, you appeared to be a female of legal age to have sex (note well:  that’s not 18, this is a UK band from the 70’s; “underage” is 15 and under, not 17), but now that you’re up close you’re clearly too young and [chorus] you have to go.  [Verse 3 & 4]  Hi, it’s years later and I’m still a rock star.  You’re still a female and you are again indicating you want to have sex with me.  I remember you from when you were too young, but now you’re old enough and you’ve clearly been around a bit and had some fun…and I liked you better the other way, that is to say ‘innocent,’ that is to say ‘underage.’  [Chorus] Bye, Felicia.”

    So let’s take this one thing at a time.  First, I think it’s about time we had a clear, open, and straightforward conversation about sex in popular culture.  That conversation goes like this:

    FFS, people. POPULAR MUSIC IS ABOUT SEX. GETTING LAID. DOING NAUGHTY THINGS. BREAKING RULES. DOING THE NASTY. ROCKING. AND. ROLLING.  Even when it’s not, it is.

    I’m so, so, so, SOOOOOOOOOOO sick of living in a culture where we all pretend very loudly to hate sex on social media and in public, where we all act like nobody’s got any kinks or hangups, and absolutely every single person waited until they were a happily married adult before engaging in sexual congress for the purposes of procreation only, when we all know better and just don’t admit it.

    THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET MRS. GRUNDY MAKE THE RULES.

    Everybody lies about sex.

    It’s bullshit. Just another facet of that same old big picture where some old white guy goes ‘NO’ and we all go “hhhokay” and from now on that’s the rule and we all have to cooperate with it (or pretend to) on pain of shunning. BULLSHIT.

    You know what else? If you DON’T like sex THAT’S FINE TOO. You don’t HAVE to. Those of us who do might feel like maybe you’re missing out, but in the end it’s your business and nobody else’s.  There are WAY more than enough folks who are into it procreationally to cheerfully accommodate and fully staff a population of those who are into it more recreationally, or not at all!

    And guess what? As long as we’re not putting our hands on anyone who can’t give or hasn’t given informed consent for our hands to be on them, it’s FINE. It’s all FINE. And we nearly all do it. The very fact of something being forbidden or taboo or socially risky is commonly what tends to turn people on about it; I’m telling you, we’re not as different as we think we are and you’re probably not nearly as big a pervert as you think, relatively speaking.

    Feathers vs. Chickens

    With that in mind it’s not unreasonable to say every damned single one of us has SOME kind of kink. All a kink is, is something that you find sexually pleasurable that, generally speaking, falls outside the range of “strictly one man, one woman, missionary position, no funny talk or spank and tickle.”  Your kink might be oral once a year, that guy over there’s kink might be the only way he can really enjoy himself is with six Armenian jugglers.  Long as he can find six Armenian jugglers who consent, I fail to see any problem with that at all.

    That’s where the term “vanilla” as used in communities related to kink comes from – because some folks like vanilla ice cream, and some folks like rocky road or black cherry or mint chocolate chip.  Some folks might like them all on alternating days, or at the same time, and as long as the ice cream is cool with it, it’s all good.

    And some folks might not like ice cream at all and that’s cool too.

    Heck, your kink might be simply the wonderful feeling you get from being intimate with someone you love.  Destigmatize that word “kink” in your head a bit, it’ll do you good.

    We have seen incredible growth in our understanding of human dignity and interpersonal respect, in my lifetime.  Things I did in my twenties I wouldn’t do if I was twenty now, because back then we didn’t really know the less egregious stuff was as bad as it manifestly proved to be.  That’s good change – that’s GREAT if you are (or present as) female.

    But it sucks if you really are just a person who was part of the context of groupies and nobody’s checking ID’s at the afterparty and all that stuff, never set out to hurt anyone, never got pushy or shitty with someone when you got told no, didn’t take advantage of anyone when they were passed out or otherwise so incapacitated as to be unable to give meaningful consent, did your best to be respectful and decent, and twenty, thirty, thirty-five years later you’re supposed to feel like an asshole because you *should have* known in 1991 that when a woman walks up to you and offers you free drugs and sex after a gig, she’s probably got serious issues and may need immediate help.

    No, in 1991 the expected and entirely common response to that situation was “let’s party,” and frankly I think it’s well worth discussing it with the participants of the time on the “female side” of that conversation before we go assuming all or even most of them feel or in fact were abused, exploited, or assaulted.

    Kill Your Idols

    The simple reality is that not all our heroes are all we wish they were, and we’re coming to grips with that.  We haven’t yet developed a clear and consistent standard to retroactively apply – what Kevin Spacey did was a million miles away from what Al Franken did…but they both paid the same price, didn’t they?  Because Spacey was an active predator whose behavior wasn’t even acceptable under the morals of the time and place it happened, whereas Franken is guilty of incredibly tangential and minor involvement in a bit of ribald humor typical of its time and place, and has expressed regret and even self-loathing at the idea that he participated in anything that genuinely hurt anyone.  It was “all in fun,” and in that time and place there wasn’t anything abnormal or really even mildly offensive about it, as evidenced by the clear and unmitigated enthusiasm and fun being had by the woman Franken’s accused of sexually assaulting visible in the tape of the incident.

    I think these errors of scope and scale, the refined discernment that truly must become a part of this process of recursively examining our past in the every-increasing light of new knowledge and wisdom, will sort themselves out in time.

    I just hope we can remember how to enjoy an old pop song with a good hook – and this one’s on the same heap as “You’re Sixteen” and “Only Sixteen” and all of the other work, in many cases full of beauty and talent, that stands as an uncomfortable and inconvenient reminder of the reality that as recently as thirty years ago it was still socially acceptable enough for a thirty year man to write a song about having the hots for a minor to have it become a hit.

    There’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look, just like there’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look at Twain’s use of the n-word in his writing.

    Unintended Consequences

    There is something wrong with pretending that stuff never happened or even that it doesn’t still constitute aesthetically pleasing art of its type.  Not only all of the sort of liberal and sex-positive things I’ve already outlined, but there’s one more much more ominous facet to all of this sweeping under rugs of dirty little secrets:

    It gives cover to predators.

    It drives people who engage in “non-vanilla” but still entirely legal behavior further into the shadows, where it becomes harder for communities to self-police and social stigma makes it much more difficult to prosecute active sexual predators.  Victims of abuse are already afraid to come forward because they’re like to be kink shamed and maybe even arrested by police, especially in same-sex situations because bigotry.

    Making everyone who’s a little kinky feel like Ted Bundy doesn’t solve any problem and makes it much easier for the real Ted Bundys of the world to do their damage, and that’s the end result of all this pearl-clutching.  Making it impossible to talk about sex doesn’t protect anyone, or at least not from much or for long.

    So definitely, hold people responsible.  Let’s not have Gary Glitter raking in millions in royalties from US sports broadcasts after being convicted multiple times of active and predatory pedophilia.  Let’s not just keep on with the “boys will be boys” crap.

    But let’s also make sure we’re keeping a fair and reasoned perspective.  No matter how many enlightened individuals there are, there simply is no reason to fault a person in 1955 for accepting as normal that his wife wasn’t allowed to get credit without his permission, because it was normal back then.  Many of those present at the time fought and even died to help secure the rights and privileges we’re now trying to retroactively condemn them for not supporting.

    Credit Where It’s Due

    It is in fact the very considerations of that guy in 1955, Mr. Joe Slightly-More-Progressive-Than-Average, asking himself whether that normality was really fair that advanced the conversation far enough that you can look back at him in condescension now.  The same’s true of the stuff I’m talking about above; those of us who were “on the ground” so to speak were the ones who by and large explored and defined and brought to life these new ways of understanding, new boundaries, new rules of respectful communication.

    We fought, hard, not just in public rhetoric but in our own heads to resolve that cognitive dissonance between our norms and our values, and to adjust our behavior and make it acceptable.  Sure, not all of us were on board, and not everyone who’s 21 is free from bigotry and sexual aggression now, either, but we – particularly “us” as in people now called “generation X” as well as the hippie segment of the Boomers who preceded us – had to actually *discover* this stuff through trial and error, and genuinely wrestle with the dawning realization that some of our behavior wasn’t acceptable even if she DID say yes, and we needed to make some changes.

    So I don’t want to get into some dumb inter-generational argument, but try to keep all this in mind when you’re standing there, immersed since birth in the values that we made norms, and thinking about getting sanctimonious because we didn’t adhere perfectly to those values before they were even fully developed.  Trust me, your kids are gonna do the same to you, and in retrospect they’ll have just as much cause.

  • Doublespeak (2001)

    This article was originally written in 2001, which is especially interesting in light of my pursuit a decade later of a degree in communication with a polisci minor.  (Still got a year’s worth of electives left; money.)  I didn’t realize it when I wrote this repost, but I actually started to put this up like a year ago and ended up rewriting it.

    As I write this preface to the March 2021 republication of this article I haven’t re-read it or changed anything, and I don’t intend to do so outside of perhaps a bit of spelling and grammar checking.  I’d like to think I’ve developed a little bit as a writer in the last two decades, but the purpose of these posts from way back when is to archive and curate the content, not retroactively polish it to make myself look cooler than I really am.

    At any rate, I find it interesting to watch myself trying to explain these things without having the formal education with which to properly frame and express my understanding of them.

    I notice immediately as I glance down that the first paragraph contains a swipe at “political correctness” and would remind folks of the fluidity of language and meaning over time.  That phrase has taken on different connotations, as has the critical examination of substituting the surface appearance of being “politically correct” for the far more difficult and energy-consuming task of really and truly trying your best not to be an asshole.

    I will add some annotations as I read through this, I’m sure; they’ll be marked as [2021: …]

    Thanks.

    Doublespeak:  the art of saying things that make absolutely no logical sense in such a manner that the inattentive listener hears something more positive to their ear than what is actually said.  Another function of Doublespeak is to strip (or sometimes, to intentionally include) “trigger” words and phrases, those things which might give the listener a reason to react unfavorably.  A good example of this is the “political correctness” that has invaded the English language – especially in the US – over the last decade or so, like the motion by the San Francisco city council to stop referring to “manhole covers” and instead call them “personhole covers.”  [2012: As you may imagine my thoughts on this have evolved considerably in the last twenty years, and even ten years ago I wouldn’t have written this.  Concepts like microaggression and a more refined understanding of the impact of language and inclusion were way ahead of this point in history, and my own attitudes have matured as well aside from riding along with social progress as a passenger.  The actual source of this, which amounts to my retelling an urban legend in the original writing, is here:  https://apnews.com/article/3962c20a9b644607b5d509aba29079f1 A contest in 1990 by the city of Sacramento to rename “manhole covers” as a joke that then got blown way out of proportion.  A great example of how we can get caught by our own biases and preconceptions, and get lazy about our research.  I don’t mind having some egg on my face 20 years later to help illustrate that point.]

    Which is kind of funny.  But the following examples…well, they’re not always so amusing.  Take a look at some of the smoke  your leaders, elected officials, military personnel, and court officers are blowing up your posterior.

    Each year, the National Council of Teachers of English announces the Doublespeak awards, given to those public figures or groups which engage in using deceptive, evasive, or intentionally confusing language.  Source material for this article includes the Book of Lists #3, and the Book of Lists of the 90’s, from the editors of The People’s Almanac, with additional source material provided by the NCTE website at www.ncte.org.  Read on, and get educated.

    • President George Herbert Walker Bush –
      • When the US invaded Panama in 1989 to bring Manuel Noriega to justice for allegations of drug trafficking and a host of other charges, Bush was positively bent over backwards trying to avoid using the word “invasion.”  Instead, he “sent troops down to Panama.”  He “deployed forces.”  He “directed United States forces to execute…preplanned missions in Panama.”
      • During his campaign for President in 1988, Bush swore that there would be “no net loss of wetlands.”  After he took office, he “clarified” his promise to really mean there would be no net wetlands loss “except where there is a high proportion of land which is wetlands.”  In English, this means “except where the protection is needed most,” like the Alaskan Tundra, the Florida Everglades, and the Outer Banks and Great Dismal Swamp areas of North Carolina.
      • After the Oil War in 1990, Bush proposed a Middle East disarmament initiative that was supposed to stop “the proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons in the Middle East.”  Less than a month after this proposal was made, the Bush administration announced plans to sell over $5 billion in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
    • President George W. Bush –
      • Although he hasn’t won one yet, I suspect that GHW’s little boy is gonna get a nomination himself, for declaring a war on terrorism and then announcing the sale of 50 brand new F-16’s to Israel, a country which is by any standard engaged in terrorist acts, covertly and overtly.  Even more disconcerting is the fact that this author is questioning whether to delete this entry altogether, because one of the first acts in the “war on terrorism” was to make dissent against the actions of the US Government in this “war” a crime in and of itself.However, this author is of the mind that this very prohibition is an act of terrorism by the US Government against it’s own citizens, and I hope that any arrests attempted in the enforcement of this new law are met with a public outrage to make the Vietnam war protest look like a love-in.To commit a terrorist act against the free country you lead even as you declare a war on terrorism…this is the very essence of doublespeak. [2012: GW won three times, twice by himself and once as part of his entire administration.  However, the specific violation of logic I mentioned above was not listed as a reason for any of these “honors.”]
    • President Ronald Reagan – In spite of still being held as a hero by many right-wingers and Republicans, Reagan was probably the most dishonest and euphemistic Presidents this country has ever had.  I have a couple of features planned just on his lies and misquoted “facts” all on his own, but for now, we can note a few peccadilloes for the record…
      • During his 1980 campaign, Reagan was positively effusive regarding the great works he had performed as Governor of California.  One of his favorite red herrings was that he had “refunded 5.7 billion dollars in property taxes to Californians.”  What he didn’t say is that this was only possible because he had raised taxes by $21 billion.
      • Reagan also liked to point out how General Motors “has to employ 23,000 full-time employees to comply with government-required paperwork.”  A GM exec pointed out at the time that the actual number was 4,900, and that included employees for all paperwork.
      • Another favorite campaign lie of Reagan’s was that the Alaskan petroleum supply was greater than that of Saudi Arabia.  When this “fact” was proved to be ridiculously in error, Doddering Ronnie just kept on repeating it.  As the New York Times so eloquently pointed out, Mr. Reagan never “let the truth spoil a good anecdote”.
    • President Bill Clinton –
      • Most of Clinton’s more egregious violations of logic and sense occurred recently enough that readers should remember them fairly well.  His most famous, of course, were the “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, however, we did have a relationship that was…inappropriate,” and the infamous “define ‘is’” defense.  Apparently, a blowjob is not considered sex.  Wish I’d known that a few years ago when a girlfriend caught me “not having sexual relations” with another woman… [2012: It shouldn’t need pointing out, but that’s a joke, it didn’t actually happen.  I’ve had plenty of relationship issues over the years but being unfaithful was never one of them.]
    • President Jimmy Carter –
      • In late 1979, when the US military failed miserably in trying to recover US hostages being held in Tehran, Iran, Carter reported the action as an “incomplete success.”
      • Carter went on to justify the government bailout of the Chrysler corporation by saying that “this legislation does not violate the principle of letting free enterprise function on its own, because Chrysler is unique in its present circumstances.”
      • Like his successors, Carter was less than forthcoming about foreign diplomatic policy relating to arms reduction.  He bragged that his administration never supported “nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree, and which are completely antithetical to our principles.”  In spite of this heroic stance, the US under the Carter administration continued to provide aid both military and financial to some 26 governments which were known to systematically violate the unalienable rights of their people.
    • The United States Supreme Court – The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows:  “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
      • In 1991, the Supremes heard a case in which a defendant had been sentenced to life without possibility of parole for the possessing 672 grams of cocaine.  In their ruling, it was decided that while such a punishment might be cruel, it was not unusual, and therefore it was constitutional.  The logic behind this ruling, in simple English, is that as long as a punishment is frequently inflicted, it is constitutional, regardless of how cruel it is.  Perhaps our founding fathers should have said “cruel or unusual…”
      • In 1980, the Refugee Act was passed, authorizing political asylum to a person with “a well-grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, membership in a particular group, or political opinion.”  In a small town in Guatemala in the late mid-80’s, assault weapon equipped masked men guerillas showed up at the home of Jario Elias-Zacarias, 19, and demanded that he fight with them against the Guatemalan government.  Rather than fight, Zacarias came to the US, but he was denied asylum.  Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his judgment to deny the young man asylum, said that he had failed to show that the guerillas would persecute him for his political opinions “rather than because of his refusal to fight with them.”
    • US Representative Newt Gingrich and GOPAC – [2021: pay attention, there’s some serious foreshadowing of how misinformation is communicated through social media now.]
      • Congressman Gingrich heads up GOPAC, a conservative Republican political action committee.  Congressman Gingrich is an author, and GOPAC prints various pamphlets and tracts designed for use by Republican political candidates in speechwriting and public speaking.  They would be perhaps better off communicating through some cabalistic system of cells or something, because they have an unnaturally well-developed propensity for churning out pure bullshit and claiming that it’s fudge brownies.
      • In one of GOPAC’s booklets, there is a list of sixty-nine words which will “help define your campaign and your vision,” as well as sixty-four words of a less positive nature to “define out opponents.”  The “good” words, to be used only when talking about one’s self, one’s party mates, or one’s party, included “environment, peace, freedom, fair, flag, we/us/our, moral, family, children, truth, hard-working, reformer, and candid.”  Appellations to be hurled at opponents included “traitors, betray, sick, lie, liberal, radical, corruption, permissive attitude, they/them, anti-flag, anti-family, anti-job, unionized, bureaucracy, and impose.”
      • But it doesn’t stop there, ooooh no.  Remember what we said above:  Gingrich himself is also an author.  In 1995, Gingrich won the NCTE Doublespeak award for his book To Renew America.  In one example, pointed out by Robert Wright in a Time magazine article (“Newt the Blameless,” 17 Jul 95), Gingrich states in his book “When confronted with a problem, a true American doesn’t ask ‘Who can I blame this on?’”  Later in the book, Gingrich proceeds to “survey America’s problems and blame them on various people…the ‘bureaucrats’ have helped destroy the family, undermine the work ethic, and dumb down education.  Meanwhile, the liberal ‘elites’ (in a ‘calculated effort’) have helped ‘discredit this civilization,’ sapping faith in American values.”
      • NCTE Doublespeak Awards committee chairman Keith Gilyard, director of the Writing Program at Syracuse University, said Gingrich was also cited as a “winner” (bit of doublespeak it itself, eh kids?) as a key author of the Republican Party’s “Contract With America.”  (Even the title is doublespeak – if anything, this piece of fluff was a contract ON America.)  The award nomination reads in part:  “The Republican Party’s 1995 Congressional agenda consisted of ten acts with glittering, euphemistic titles that in many cases concealed key details that, in the manner of classic doublespeak, were calculated to produce the opposite effect from that promised by the titles.”  Examples given at the NCTE website include the “Personal Responsibility Act,” which deeply cut or restricted welfare benefits; the “Common Sense Legal Reforms Act,” reduced the likelihood of succeeding with legal action against corporations for securities fraud; and the “Job Creation and Enhancement Act” contained a proposal for a cut in capital gains taxes, which are levied on income derived from the sale of financial instruments and real estate, among other things.
    • US Senator Orrin Hatch – Hatch, a proponent of the death penalty, once said that “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”  While this commentator feels no passionate regard either way for capital punishment [2021: No longer true; I have long opposed the death penalty on general principle while allowing for the barest sliver of possibility that there may be a set of circumstances under which death is the only appropriate means of dealing with a person who has made themselves odious to the rest of the species], having a nonsense-spewing jive-talker like this spout such unbelievable nonsense is almost enough to force consideration of an anti-death-penalty stance, just because its supporters appear to be utterly ignorant.

    But don’t get the idea that this sort of nonsense is limited to US politicians, or to prominent government leaders.  3rd-string congressional representatives, leaders of other countries, sects, and ethic groups, military personnel, as well as many members of corporate America also engage in this sort of thing regularly….

    • Col. David H. E. Opfer, USAF – in a press conference following a bombing raid in Cambodia, Col Opfer opined to reporters:  “You always write it’s bombing, bombing, bombing, bombing.  It’s not bombing, it’s air support.”
    • Yasser Arafat –  In 1975, then-PLO leader Arafat was quoted as saying “We do not want to destroy any people.  It is precisely because we have been advocating coexistence that we have shed so much blood.”
    • Harry Volweider – President of the Springdale Golf Club in Princeton, New Jersey, Volweider was questioned in 1975 about the rejection of a black applicant for club membership.  His response?  “We didn’t turn him down.  We just didn’t accept him.”
    • The Nuclear Power Industry – After the 1979 “accident” at Three Mile Island, this group of doubletalking automatons went absolutely insane with the redefinition or re-labelling of certain words and phrases.  Explosions were no longer explosions, but “energetic disassemblies.”  Rather than a “fire,” there was “rapid oxidation.”  At Three Mile Island, there’s no such thing as an “accident.”  Instead there were “events,” “incidents,” “abnormal evolution,” “normal aberrations,” and “plant transients.”  Of course, radioactive “plutonium contamination” doesn’t exist; instead there was “plutonium infiltration” and most laughable of all, one speaker’s report that “plutonium has taken up residence.”  Hi, I’m your new neighbor, Plutonium!  I have a half-life of 35 thousand years and I’m deadly to any living tissue that I come near!  Where’s the Welcome Wagon?
    • Gen Joao Baptista Figueiredo – When this Brazillian President was sworn in in 1979, he was quoted by reporters as saying the following:  “I intend to open this country up to democracy, and anyone who is against that, I will jail, I will crush.”
    • The USDA –
      • While some of the USDA’s more egregious offenses against the language have been eliminated by the passage of time and increasing public awareness of and interest in what goes into their food, it will forever be remembered that in 1981, the USDA reclassified catsup as a vegetable so that it could be included as one of the two vegetables required as part of the school lunch program.
      • The department also changed the label for chickens which had been stored in a 28° environment from “frozen” to “deep chilled,” allowing the chickens in question to be sold as fresh.
    • The Exxon Corporation – Shortly after the Exxon Valdez ran aground under the command of drunken skipper Joseph Hazelwood in the late 80’s, Exxon declared 35 miles of Alaskan beaches to be “environmentally clean” and “environmentally stabilized.”  Upon being informed that the beaches were still saturated with millions of tons of raw crude oil, Exxon cleanup general manager Otto Harrison revealed that clean “doesn’t mean that every oil stain is off every rock…it means that the natural inhabitants can live there without harm.”  Even with that rather underhanded caveat, the designation was completely off the mark, as the beaches remained poisoned to fish and wildlife, and in the eyes (and by the evidence) of many environmentalists, the affected areas are still not safe for wildlife, and may in fact still pose long-term health dangers to humans as well.

    And let’s not leave the “Men of God” out of this, shall we?

    • Pat Robertson – When Tom Brokaw referred to Robertson on an NBC news telecast as a “television evangelist,” Robertson accused Brokaw of religious bigotry because he had not used the phrase “religious broadcaster” instead.

    The moral of the story is this:  Pay Attention.  More than any other factor, it is the willful ignorance and apathy of the “average Joe” which allows these sorts of “incomplete truths” and “clarifications” to take place with impunity.

    If you’re young enough to still be in school, this is why English class is important to you in your adult life.

    If you are old enough to have already graduated, this is why you should have been paying attention.

    Any one of the entries on this page should have been grounds for a massive outrage on the part of intelligent people worldwide.  Instead, they are left to linger in the pages of out-of-print books and fringe-politics/ odd-facts websites to remember.

    Especially in democratic countries, where people fight and die every day to protect the right of the “average Joe” to form his own opinion, unimpeded by propaganda or flat-out dishonesty, it has never been more important for YOU (yes, YOU) to listen carefully to what you are told, and do your very best to understand what is actually being said.  If something doesn’t sound quite right, it probably isn’t.

  • The Buddhas of Bamiyan and The Taliban (May, 2001)

    The following article was originally published on my then-current website on May 27, 2001.  I know it can get eye-roll-y sometimes when I talk about having had something right long before most people were paying attention, and the potential consequences if they’d listened.

    At the time this article was written, most Americans had never heard of the Taliban except perhaps by reference in popular movies, and if they really had any familiarity at all it was with the previous name they were called in western media – the mujahadin.  The vast majority of people had never heard of Mullah Mohammed Omar, either. 

    I recall that what prompted me to finally write this a couple of months after the fact was this news story:  https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/05/17/us.afghanistan.aid/ In this story, we read of the $43 million grant given to the Taliban – ceremonially presented by Colin Powell – in May of that year as incentive for them to continue controlling the production and export of opium and its derivatives from Afghanistan.

    Just six months before 9/11.

    This representation has been altered from the original solely by the removal of two paragraphs expressing opinions I no longer hold and containing no information critical to understanding the story or my position.

    I want you to read the last paragraph of this article and consider what the world would look like right now if that mass civil disobedience and immediate high-priority focus on the human rights crimes of the Taliban had happened when I suggested it…and just think about it next time you want to mistake ol’ JH for Yet Another Internet Know-It-All.  Thanks 🙂

    This rant might be dated by a few weeks, but  I still feel the need to rant on it.  On March 2, 2001, a radical Islamic sect in Afghanistan known as the Taliban announced that they would be destroying all of the centuries-old megalithic statues of Buddha that are carved into the cliffside near Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, including the largest known statue of Buddha in the world.  The reason for this mindless destruction, according to Taliban supreme leader Mulla Mohammad Omar, is that their presence could induce the worship of ‘false idols,’ a sin under Islamic law.

    This same Taliban, on May 1 2001, announced a complete ban on all non-Islamic music within the borders of Afghanistan.  The only music now permitted there is the singing of Islamic hymns and Taliban chants.

    On May 22, 2001, in a move frighteningly reminiscent of pre-WWII Nazi Germany, the Taliban announced that all non-Muslims must wear distinctive marks on their clothing to set them apart from the country’s Muslim majority.

    Since the Taliban began seizing  power in the mid-1990’s, their rulers have implemented a very strict series of laws aimed at adhering very closely to they hyperconservative letter of the ‘law,’ that is to say the Koran.  Today in Afghanistan, women are not allowed to work or attend school, and may not leave home unless veiled from head to foot; men must wear long beards and pray in Mosques 5 times per day.

    Somewhere, right now, in Afghanistan, a beautiful wife is being beaten mercilessly for disobeying her husband, under sanction of law.  That beautiful wife has no choice – she cannot get a job to support herself, and even if she could, due to the illegality of educating women in Afghanistan, she’s not likely to have the skills to *perform* a job, other than as a maid, au pair, or whore.  Those are the only functions that women in Taliban Afghanistan are allowed to fill, and I personally find that offensive against the very nature of humanity in the highest degree.

    It’s 2001, for crying out loud.  How in the world can this be going on today?  How can such oppression be allowed to continue?  I’m not a big one on war – it’s destructive and the usual victims are anyone BUT the people you’re shooting for – however, I firmly believe that strong, polylateral military action is not just required, but a moral imperative.  The idea that one madman, or a small collection of them, can be allowed to dehumanize people and destroy centuries-old artistic treasures – to hell with the religious import – is absolutely mind-boggling to me.

    I call upon you, reader, to do whatever you must – write articles, letters to the editor, contact your congressman, write the president, whatever you have to do – to put an end to this unchecked madness in Afghanistan now, rather than waiting for 6 million more Jews (Gypsies, Catholics, disobedient wives, insert your afghan religious minority here) to be gassed to death before we step up and put a stop to it, like we did last time.

    How many people have to die in the name of God?  How many priceless and timeless works of art, which are by convention and agreement the property of all humankind, will be lost forever to the ages due to the horrific acts of a few loose screws.  Afghanistan is the ONLY country in the world in which human rights were *more* protected under communist soviet rule.  The worst part is, WE helped put the Taliban in power by running out the Soviets.

    I would like to make this a cause celebre amongst those of you reading.  Ideas – a petition?   a march on Washington?  some sort of mass civil disobedience? – are welcome in my mailbox – perhaps together, we can manage to do something about this.