Geek By Proxy

After leaving Christmas and New Year behind, one of my RPG groups started to play again (finally! ). But not without a fight…

Monday nights are for playing WOW RPG. We get together at my place and we play between 9.00 PM and midnight. I’ve got a good size dining table, and a large kitchen, so it’s the best place we can find to play. And for a while we kept up a good schedule, playing every week.

Because of Christmas and the New Year celebrations, and the flu, and people going abroad to work, and a miriad of other things, it’d been at least two monthes since we ‘d played last. Not that I’ve been idle all this time. First, my laptop got stolen, and I had to figure out how much of its contents I had backed up. Then my nephew was born and the whole family fell in love with this tiny little creature that, without doing or saying much, occupied as much of our time as his mother would allow. Then came Christmas and New Year and all that it entails. In the beginning of January, we started to get in touch with our RPG groups, so that we could start playing again…

Two weeks ago, we were able to get everybody from the WOW group confirmed to restart our sessions. My plan was to start tidying up the place monday after lunch, make some sandwiches and some drinks, and start playing at about 9.00 PM. Good, sound plan, not much potential for anything going wrong, right?

The major advantage of electrical appliances is that you can go about your business while they operate in their intended task. So, if you have some laundry in the dryer, you can go and do any number of things while its program runs its course, right? Most of the time, it will do just that, without a hitch.

I’m starting to think I’ve got some karmic price to pay related to RPG, because that monday afternoon, my dryer decided to explode. I heard a bang and when I got to the kitchen, there was smoke everywhere. Luckily, the circuit-breaker snapped immediately, so there wasn’t any fire, nor much damage to the dryer itself. However, playing an RPG session at my place became impossible, if nothing else, because of the intolerable smell of burnt rubber. By now, I’m not feeling very happy. Not only am I facing the prospect of not washing or drying any clothes for the forseeable future, but my long awaited RPG session is beginning to look like a teasing mirage.

I would like to declare now that I love my husband. My life would be much harder, if he was not around. He was home, when it happened, and he managed to find a repair technician that fixed the dryer in three days (by friday, I was doing my laundry normally ), as well as an alternate place for our session. I am a very lucky and very happy woman .

I’ve been without a single RPG session for more than a month now and I’m going crazy for it. I’ve got at least four active campaigns, in as many different systems, and, although some overlap occurs with some players, in as many different groups. Still, I don’t seem to be able to play. Between the flu, friends going to work abroad, and a miriad of other insignificant little things, we don’t seem to be able to get together and play.

I can tell that I’m turning into a complete and utter game geek, when I get so frustrated that life gets in the way of my gaming. I know that all the things that are going on are important, and have to be adressed responsibly. My days and nights won’t be empty if I don’t play at all. But they will be such a drag…

It gives me no comfort to know that Christmas is coming (well, only as far as gaming is concerns… ). When I was a kid, Christmas was something that I waited for. I had no responsabilities, nothing to get ready. All I had to do was wait for the presents and those special treats my mother and grandmother only made at Christmas. Old family recipes, closely guarded, only handed down from mother to daughter. Yummy recipes of cookies and cakes made from scratch, with a kitchen full of smells and my mother plunged elbow-deep in dough, with a ridiculous orange scarf in her head. She still does that part, but everything else, she passed on to me and my sisters. So, now, I have to literally get my hands dirty.

An then there’s the presents. I love to give presents. I even love to take the time to choose each one with special care, thinking of each person and what they like. I love gift-wrapping them individually and finding some nice little touch to top them off.

But all of this takes time and, since all the people I play with are within my age group, all of us need that time. I predict that in about three weeks, playing is going to get scarce again. The only advantage is that after Christmas, we normally come back with a vengeance. I hope we can keep our tradition of playing a session on the evening of the 25th…

A few monthes ago, a (female) friend of mine, who’s been playing RPG games for at least 15 years, came to me with an idea: to build an RPG campaign with no hubbies or boyfriends. Apparently, in a conversation with her sister, the question arose that the female players in our group of friends were only playing RPG games with and becase of their husbands and boyfriends. So we decided to test the idea and got a female group of players together for a PtA season. We decided we wanted a male producer, but it had to be someone who wasn’t envolved with anyone of the players.

We put up an ad in the portuguese RPG forum and a couple of candidates to the producer role replied. After some interviews and a healthy discussion between the players, we decided we would have two producers, alternating episodes on a “L-word” meets “Desperate Housewifes” meets any generic beach located character centered series. Simple project, hey?

I admit I had some doubts about the feasability of the project. Specially, because summer vacations got in the way and we didn’t seem to be able to find a common date to start the season, for a couple of monthes. My friend’s persistence had won over all our qualms so, last saturday, nonetheless, we played our pilot episode.

For those who are familiar with PtA, you know that a lot rides on the pilot. If a chosen concept doesn’t work, the pilot will surely provoke its undoubtable demise . Truth be told, I was expecting it to be so on this pilot. The concept for the series was complicated and a little (or maybe more than that ) crazy, there were several people at the table who had never played together, so there wasn’t much going for it.

I bow in eternal reverence to my friend, because I had the time of my life on that pilot, and most important, everyone around the table seem to have the time of their lives too. Enacting the love troubles between a group of very different women, that all they had in common was the fact that they were all lesbians was a blast.

Better than that, we are all, as far as I know, heterossexual. And it dawned on me that people in love are people in love, no matter their sexual orientation. Their character and their traits are going to determine how they react to situations much more than the fact they’re same sex lovers. The stupid and hilarious situations people get themselves into over sex are exactly the same.

So, the game’s afoot. I’ll continue reporting on our PtA season, as it unfolds. We’ll be changing producer for the first episode, and I’m curious to know how this two producers situation will play out.

The Dalai Lama has come on a four-day visit Lisbon and I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the 1200 people who attended his three-day teachings on Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. The text itself is a wonderful poem about generating compassion and fighting off negative emotions and about taking the Bodhisattva’s Vows. The Dalai Lama knows it extremely well and has stated several times how important this text is in his own life. So it was wonderful to be able to listen to his teachings on the different chapters of the poem, watching his enthusiasm and feeling his own personal conviction about compassion and loving-kindness.

But the most important day, im my opinion, was the fourth. In the morning, the Dalai Lama attended an inter-religious conference, with representatives of the major religions present in Portuguese society. The meeting itself is nothing new to the Dalai Lama, since promoting inter-religious tolerance is one of his self-declared main goals and he attends them wherever he goes. This was the first time, however, that such an encounter of the differents visions of the divine was held in a mosque. Islam has been taking a beating from a lot of quadrants around the world, for the last several years. It has largely been held responsible, as a whole, for the actions of a few deranged fanatics. It is seen, unjustely in my opinion, as a particularly intolerant religion. The fact that the muslim community commited to host such an event on their place of worship validates and encourages the hope that someday we may look first at our similarities rather than at our differences.

In the afternoon of that same day, the Dalai Lama held a public conference for about 10000 people, which I was fortunate to attend too. On a much more secular note, His Holiness talked about the need to develop a good heart and compassion on all aspects of human life. Compassion, in Buddhism, has a very clear meaning, as does loving-kindness. The Dalai Lama used the example of the relationship between mother and child, the closeness, the self-sacrifice, the unconditional love and acceptance that, in its higher form, that relationship ensues. Compassion means taking that unconditional, fully accepting love, that expects nothing in return and extended it to the whole of Mankind and to all living beings. It means being left without a single enemy, in a world full of brothers and sisters, without having to depend on the actions and words of anyone to feel it. And you don’t have to be a buddhist to pursue it. You don’t even have to be religious. Because, although every major religion has this concept at the core of its doctrine, the beauty of his notion is that it focus on us humans, on the respect and care we all should have for each other, no matter who we are or where we come from.

Asking for world peace has been banalized to the point of being turn into a caricature of empty speech (after all every Miss Universe candidate is supposed to ask for it in her interview, right? ). The difference of generating compassion is that it comes from inside out. You don’t ask for world peace, you make it. You build it every day of your life, in every interaction with others and the world, no matter how short or distanced it may seem. You build it at home first and then translate it to the outside world. You make it a core value in your life and measure every single thing you think, say, feel or do against it.

As with any other path, chosen or not, you’ll trip or even fall along the way. There are times in any of our lives when anger or sadness or pain seem to be overwhelmingly strong, when patience is the last thing on our minds, when nothing seems to matter more than being right and standing our ground no matter what. The beautiful thing about compassion, is that we can extend it to ourselves, and ask forgiveness from ourselves and others and get up and get back on the path. As with any trained habit, each step becomes easier, after you’ve taken the first stride.

Six years have passed since the 9/11 attacks and my memories don’t seem to fade. I didn’t know any of the victims personally. I have never been to New York or Washington. I can only empathize and sympathize from afar with the survivors and victims’ family members. So I’m quite amazed at the pain I still feel, when remembering the events. True, genuine, personal pain.

I was in college back then, studying to be a journalist. I had a report to do about TV media coverage on different events,throughout the week, so I had been watching news reports continuously, from the moment I woke up until I went to bed. That day, when I woke up, the first thing I did was to turn on the TV. The first image I saw was the the second plane hitting the towers. There was no comment, no reporter speaking, just that one image. For a moment I almost dismissed it as a commercial for a new movie. I didn’t want to believe that it could be anything but that. And for about two seconds I manage to stay in that mental comfort zone. Then tears started to roll down my cheeks.

I always kept myself emotionally distant from the news reports I watched on TV, no matter how gruesome and horrifying they were. After all, I was studying them. That day, however, I couldn’t stay dettached. If there is one place I think of as the capital of the world, it’s New York City. For me, it has always been the crossroads of the world, transcending its own nationality, welcoming every single nationality, race or creed. It can’t be a coincidence that it houses the UN headquarters. The WTC towers were a part of that image, the place where everybody from everywhere came to do business with everybody from everywhere. So, to me, it wouldn’t have hurt deeper, if the attacks had defaced my hometown.

In the days immediately after, new dimensions of pain were etched in my heart, as the total number of victims was beggining to come to light. Not only that, but also the number of different nationalities touched by the tragedy. That one single event put the entire world in mourning. East and West, North and South, christians, jews, muslims, hindus, buddhists, agnotiscs, atheists and everyone else in between, no one was left unscathed. Globalization had a new meaning that day.

Then, inspiration ensued. The stories of courage and sacrifice of people turned into heroes as they helped others, with total disregard for their own lives, were the first to touch us all. Then, the story of Flight 93 was the most inspiring tale of colective sacrifice for the good of others.

September 11 is the one day in the whole year when I don’t feel a Lisboner, Portuguese, European, or anything else but a citizen of the world, a member of the immense colective miracle we call Humankind, and of life itself. It took an immense tragedy to make me truly understand what that feeling is and how no matter where we are, where we come from or what we believe, we are all brothers and sisters. Nothing else could make me feel so deeply about another human being, that I don’t know and is an ocean away. Nothing else can explain that I’m so touched by this.

To all survivors and victims family members, to all new-yorkers, know that my heart weeps with yours. I want to say thank you to all of you. Thank you for the inspiration, thank you for the unity and the feelings of global brotherhood that six years later still overwhelm me on this day.

There is a software called Team Speak that some people use while playing WoW, that basically allows players to talk to each other, instead of writing what you want to say. Due to the lack of a headset and microphone, my husband doesn’t use it, but keeps it on, coming through his speakers, when he’s playing. Sometimes, he asks me to keep him company. So, I spend a lot of hours doing my crochet, with the sound of Team Speak in the background. Now, people are having fun, when they’re playing, and sometimes funny things happen, so people laugh. Except for this one guy.

He doesn’t laugh, he says LOL. In the most dettached and bland tone of voice I have ever heard. The same he uses to say just about anything. I mean it has pitch variations, just enough of them so that you can recognize a genuine human voice. I don’t know if his thoughts come to him, in the form of sentences written across a screen, or if he just spends too much time on his computer, or if he has a direct interface between his keyboard and his mouth, but saying LOL instead of just, aah… I don’t know, laughing?

I’m around a lot of geeks, a lot of the time. Despite their strange and odd topics of conversation and the ocasional going off the deep end, they function pretty much as normal human beings (well, most of the time, anyway). This guy takes the cake for me. I cannot fathom whatever benefit is accomplished by what he does… but, hey, I’m not a real geek, right?

I first came in contact with RPG, soon after I started dating my husband. He wanted me to see what he and his friends were up to, in all those nights “he just couldn’t go out with me”. He had already given me a short explanation of what it was all about, which had registered in my brain like a “boys with toys” kind of thing… If only I had known that about ten years later, I’d be writing a blog about it!

One night, as he was preparing to leave for his RPG session, he asked me to come along and see for myself how it all went down. Half curious and half condescendent, I agreed. Fifteen minutes later I was entering a room within the grounds of his Engineering college, looking back at about fifteen male faces, all half puzzled, half embarassed to have a girl in the room, although I already knew half of them from some other contexts. They soon got over it, however, and they all sat down to play. It was an AD&D campaign. The DM invited me to sit down next to him, behind the screen, and he began the session. I don’t remember exactly what kind of characters each of them was playing, but I think there was at least one representative of each of the most played races, a lot of humans and … a minotaur.

Now you’ve got to remember that I had NEVER been in close contact with anything related to medieval fantasy before. And I had a grown man before me saying he was pretending to be a minotaur… with a pair of fifteen-inch horns. Not only that, they were all trying to get into a tube-like transporter, akin to the pneumatic tubes used by the postal service. It should be propelled by a giant spring coil attached to  the wall, that was completely ruined. I bring to notice that we were in a room full of engineers. So, they tried to fix it, so that they could use it.You can’t imagine how fast the conversation became a discussion about the physics behind a spring coil…

So, now, I’m looking at a guy who’s supposed to be a minotaur with fifteen-inch horns, discussing Hooke’s Law. By now, I’m laughing hysterically and completely sold on the whole concept. Two weeks later, I was playing my first character on a Shadowrun campaign and I haven’t stop playing ever since.

This little pearl of RPG history came to my mind, as I was writing this last post. Some years ago, some friends of mine were playing an AD&D campaign and one of them got engaged. For weeks, he would come in, play for a little while and them go off to meet his girlfriend, to take care of something or other relating to the wedding.

One of these times, he came in saying, “I can only stay for half an hour. We’re meeting the caterer today”. and he sat down to play. Three hours later, his girlfriend enters the room, with a half puzzled, half furious look on her face. “We waited for you for an hour and a half. What are you doing?”, she asks. He looks back at her, with a desperate stare, half dazed, “You don’t understand. I lost my spell book. I can’t leave till I find my spell book!”

She’s was a wonderful girl, and the wedding went on as planed. They’re still married, I think, though I don’t think he played much after that…

Men and women have a hard time talking to each other. That’s a given. No matter how bright you are, if you’re a woman talking to a man, or vice-versa, the words coming out of your mouth are going to trigger different concepts in your counterpart’s brain. Even the things we worry about are going to be different.The best we can do is find paralels and metaphors to relay different meanings. And that’s not always the easiest thing in the world to do. But there is hope.

The other day, during one of our D&D sessions, I saw a small light at the end of the tunnel, when a (male) friend of mine, who’s been playing a wizard, after spending some time looking at his spell list, says to the table, “Now I understand how a woman can say she’s got nothing to wear, in front of a closet full of clothes.” So there, they can understand what we’re saying. It’s just a matter of finding the right metaphor!

Just when I thought there was nothing my geek hubby could do that would surprise me, he goes and pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Last night he showed me some pictures of a wedding he attended. They were WoW (World of Warcraft) screenshots of a wedding held on the 18th, between two WoW characters. If that wasn’t enough, my husband, with his Forsaken undead priest, was the officiating minister! I’ve been at a loss for words to describe the whole new level of geekdom this entails… I’m still pretty much without words to describe the utter sense of twilight zone I felt. If you would like to travel to a whole new dimension, check out his latest blog entry.