An introduction of sorts

Please welcome Tammy to the Geek Girls Rule! family as well.  She’s my resident LARP expert, having been LARPing for more than a decade.

Hi!

I’m Tammy and I was asked to blog here to represent Live Action Role Play (LARP). I’m also a late blooming gamer. I wanted to game but as a teenager all the people I knew who played D&D were the kind that didn’t want girls in their game as anything but arm candy – and as the fat girl I didn’t qualify for that. I was very much a tomboy and often considered “one of the boys” but that didn’t translate to D&D. So I was all “fine then – I don’t want to play your stupid game!”

Long story short – I didn’t start doing LARP until I was nearly 31 and recently divorced. Yep, the crazy time. I was looking to make up for lost time and do the things I always wanted to do and the ex didn’t. I briefly dated a guy that was into LARP and he introduced me to it. I joined the Camarilla almost exactly 12 years ago. It was still a non-profit fan club at the time.

Yes, I know some of you hate the Cam and I’ve heard the the stories and even experienced some of the bad. I came in after much of the epic stupidity had passed.  At this point, many of the problem children have been gone from the club for years. Get over it. Really, because I fail to think of any group or organization that doesn’t have it’s jerks.  It’s likely the current local Camarilla game does not resemble your memories.

Now, when I was introduced to the Camarilla I didn’t have a great time at first. The player that brought me into the game wasn’t popular. We broke up after about a month and I did the unexpected – I didn’t leave. I struggled though. Part of the problem is that the player that introduced me had previously brought a string of girlfriends to the game who disappeared in short order after their break-ups, so  people expected me to leave. That doesn’t completely excuse people for their behavior towards me though.

Frankly, I was stonewalled. I tried playing for a couple more months but I wasn’t getting anywhere, particularly in Seattle. Players would metagame – claiming their character wouldn’t talk to mine because of her age, etc. They gave me bogus reasons why their character would know details about my character and I didn’t know enough about the rules at the time to call them on their BS. I was also quite a bit more shy than I am now.

Eventually, I got frustrated and I took a 6 month hiatus until a friend I knew from another social circle joined the club. I scrapped the character created when I first joined and made a new one that was more suitable to my inexperience with the game and the rules and was easier for me to RP. I left the chapter I was in and moved my character to another domain (which later merged back with Seattle) and started over. I had a much better time from then on and have kept up with it.

One of the things that bothers me is that even though I’ve been doing this for twelve years, guys tend to assume I don’t know how to use my character creation points to full advantage and are often offering to help me with that. I smile and hand them my sheet and try hard not to smirk when they can’t really find anything wrong with it. They may question some of my choices but when I explain them they understand.

Now, admittedly, I’m more of a role player than a rule player.  I don’t read all the supplemental gaming books related to the games I play in.  I have neither the time nor the inclination.  I will read the ones that are pertinent to characters I want to play and places I want to take them.  I make well rounded characters and I *do* know how to min/max my points.  When creating a new character, it’s typical for me to do 2 drafts – one is me thinking about my character and what powers and abilities I want her to have (and have the points for) and then I do a second run through to make sure I’m making the most of my points.  I make characters based on the story I want to tell with them.  If you’re a power gamer you’re just not going to get that.

Several years back I had a character who was killed during a game.  It has been an intense scene that caused 2 other characters to lose humanity points.  I’d cried a little – but it had to do with being in the character mindset and the intensity of what had happened, not so much that I was upset about losing the character.  I could have avoided going to the game and cheesed her out of the situation.  I chose not to.  When another player asked me what was up and I told him my character had just been killed, he offered to help me make a stronger, harder to kill character next time.  The thing is, because of the character’s history and the story she was telling, I had relented all the challenges.  Had he asked me for more details about what happened I would have told him and he would have understood.  Instead, he assumed I’d just made a weak character, and not on purpose…

Geek Girls Rule! #117 – I Love the New James Bond.

I love James Bond movies.

All of them.

I remember Roger Moore as my first James Bond, and my Dad and I would argue the merits of Moore versus Lazenby versus Connery when I was a teenager. But for all Moore’s stiffness, because I saw him first in that role, he remained James Bond for me.  My father ranked Lazenby as the ultimate James Bond, with Connery a distant second.  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service remains his favorite Bond film of all time.

Timothy Dalton never had a chance, what with them trying to make him the  safe sex-y James Bond and stuff.   He’s not a bad actor, but with the writers effectively “neutering” him as Bond there was no way.

For years I had wanted to see Pierce Brosnan as Bond, and quite frankly, while I liked him as James Bond I think two things worked against him:  A.  They waited too long to give him the role, and B.  No one could have lived up to the image of Brosnan as Bond that I had created in my head.

But Daniel Craig…

Daniel Craig is my favorite James Bond to date.

And it’s not solely that my first reaction to Daniel Craig is invariably, “I would lick it for hours!”

Wouldn't you?

No, I like the new depth they’ve added to James Bond in the Daniel Craig movies, and it’s a depth I don’t think either Moore or Connery could have pulled off.  Possibly, Brosnan could have done it, but he didn’t have the writing that Craig’s had, and would have been too old to believeably pull off some of the emotional responses to the situations in Casino Royale believably.

Plus, I love Judi Dench as M. Love, Love, Love her. I think she and Craig play off that “concern for a wayward son” thing very, very well.  I freely admit I love Judi Dench in absolutely everything I’ve ever seen her in.  She was spectacular in Mrs. Henderson Presents. Plus, although I’m not entirely sure it’s a bonus, Bob Hoskins goes full monty in one scene.

But, back to Bond.  I always kind of wondered, in the past, why the scores of dead women Bond left behind him never seemed to bother him. I like this new Bond where you can tell that it does indeed bother him, and it’s something M uses to prod him every so often, but he’s going to do his job regardless. And if part of that job means he can more easily avenge them, then all the better. Besides, in Quantum of Solace, whose idea was it to send a hot, sexy female agent who wasn’t anything more than a clerk to bring him in, I wonder. And I think in M’s reaction to him after Fields’s death, you see that yes, she shares some of that blame and they both know it.

I enjoyed the character of Camille in QoS, as well, but in the future, in this re-boot of the Bond franchise, I really want Bond to come up against his female equal. And I don’t mean a soul-less female killing machine parody of womanhood like Fleming wrote, I mean his actual equal. Someone who minds leaving a trail of dead men behind her every bit as much as Bond minds the dead girls, but who does her job anyways.  I’ve liked most of the female characters in the new Bond films, and I understand their reactions as far as falling apart after killing people for the first time, I mean, most men would/do, too.   But I think there’s more than enough room in these movies for a competent, experienced female field agent to give him a run for his money.

Nor do I want one night with him to “undo” her. If there is any “undoing” I want it to be mutual, kind of like his falling in love with Vesper in the first movie.  I want a meeting of two finely honed agents who will do whatever it takes, and who recognize that about one another, and have a mutual respect. I could definitely live with any conflict coming to a draw, or an honest victory of one over the other (it would have to be Bond winning, I know. It’s his series. Or not, she could just wound him, a la Molotov Cocktease in Venture Brothers, and disappear.  Yes, I know, speaking of parodies).

While the new Bond is definitely superlative to the old, I definitely think there’s room for improvement.  The new emotional depth is nice, and the stunts the new technology allows for are magnificent.  But I think it’s time we cast off the outdated idea that successful secret agent-ing is merely a Boy’s Club.  I think it’s time that Bond met his equal, and recognized that in her.

ETA 2-2-10:  Because I was immediately challenged in the comments, I present a list of female villain killing machines from James Bond:
Naomi in The Spy Who Loved Me
Xenia Zirgavna Onatopp in Goldeneye
Giulietta da Vinci (Cigar Girl) in The World is Not Enough
Miranda Frost in Die Another Day

I’m restraining myself to women who actively tried to kill Bond, as opposed to merely being bait.  If I added all the sexy, sexy lure women, this list would be far longer. Naomi and Xenia are probably the most true to the “soul-less female killing machine” stereotype, although Miranda Frost is a pretty good representation of that as well.

Just a note, once I got to a running machine, this research took all of about ten minutes.

The Power of Words

Please welcome Jen Doering as the latest member of the Geek Girls Rule! family!!

http://www.wow.com/2010/01/22/drama-mamas-we-hate-hate/

If you’ve been playing an MMO in the last five or six years or so, you’ve been conscious that some of the language involved can get a bit…salty. Sometimes the only thing you can say in response to a particularly bad wipe is an f-bomb or other bit of profanity. And, I’ll be honest, things get a bit risque in my guild’s Ventrilo channel. (For instance, a husband and wife weren’t responding to ready checks, so there was all sorts of speculation as to their whereabouts, when they were merely getting a snack. We didn’t buy it either.)

If you play an MMO and still have general chat channels on, then you’re aware that certain words—such as “gay,” “rape,” and “fag”–are thrown around quite readily. Combine this with the new random dungeon finder that Blizzard added in December, and it’s a given you’ll be tossed together with players you probably wouldn’t associate with normally. If I find myself in a random dungeon and there’s profanity, I’ll stick it out. If people are using the word “gay” as an adjective that doesn’t refer to sexual orientation and “rape” as something that gets done to monsters or other players, I’ll immediately drop the group and wait out my deserter debuff.

The people who use such terms are quick to throw out free speech and their rights, but the WoW servers are not public spheres. It would be as if I went into someone’s home and swore a blue streak. Sure, there’s nothing to stop me doing so, but odds are good I’d be asked to leave and not invited back. In the same manner, Blizzard can (and does) ban people for such behavior.

The thing is, words have power. I know too many people who’ve been sexually assaulted or been targeted because of their sexual orientation. I’ve seen what these evils do to their lives, and I’ll be damned if I continue it or passively condone it. Every time someone talks about “raping” a boss or an opposing faction, they’re contributing to the mindset that rape is acceptable. If “gay” is used as an epithet, it’s reinforced that some sexual orientations are undesirable.

Of course, the objection is raised that they really aren’t talking about rape or homophobia, but “nice” people don’t use words that hurt other people. Because of the nature of MMO’s, you never know who’s the person behind the toon. Isn’t it better to just not use words that could hurt? In the end, it’s a more fun time for everyone involved, if we do what we can to make things a little better for everyone else.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled ranting…

For cuteness in the Household What Rules.

The Grrsl and Jimmie Superfly Snookums, aka The Enemy of Sleep

Geek Girls Rule! #116 – Smart Girls are Undateable, yeah right.

So, that whole not being pissed off about anything I mentioned in the last post?

I lied.

Ok, I didn’t lie.  I just hadn’t found my new raison d’être furieux.  Yet.

TA DA!!!!!

Ok, the article title isn’t that bad, “More Men Marrying Wealthy Women,” apart from that whole thing where it makes guys sound like gold-digging floozies (see sexism isn’t attractive applied to either gender).  The actual statistics from the Pew Research Center cited in the article are good,  more men are marrying women who make more money and have more education than they do.  This runs counter to “common knowledge” about educated women and their likelihood of finding a partner.  However,  the NY Times’ attempt to disprove these statistics with “anecdata” and prove that educated women are a bunch of loveless harpies, is a touch on the vexing side.  In fact the article opens with the following quote:

“Beagy Zielinski is a German-born 28-year-old stylist who moved to New York to study fashion in 1995 and stayed. Just before Christmas, she broke up with her blue-collar boyfriend, who repaired Navy ships.
“He was extremely insecure about my career and how successful I am,” Ms. Zielinski said.”

Really NY Times?  In an article reporting on statistics that show men are marrying more educated and successful women, this is how you want to start it?

Or this quote:
“I’m not married, I would like to be married, and my friends are all in a similar situation,” said Dr. Rajalla Prewitt, a 38-year-old psychiatrist in New Jersey. “We’re having difficulty finding someone where there’s a meeting of the minds, where we can have the same goals and values.”

Or back to Ms. Zielinski:
“Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

Maybe it’s because I both have more education and make more money that the Geek Husband What Rules.  Trust me, we’re not wealthy by a long shot.  If he was trying to marry someone for their money, he did it wrong.  But while we personally could care less, it’s been a source of consternation for some of the members of our extended families.  Ok, I’m sure my joking about having a “kept man” and saying things like, “Bitch better get in the kitchen and cook my dinner,” in front of them doesn’t help.  I can’t help it.  I get cantankerous in the face of egregious sexism, it brings the evil out.   I’m sure swatting him on the ass and calling him “Cupcake” doesn’t help either. 

But really, in an article ostensibly about how gender stereotypes about who should make more money and be more educated are breaking down, you dedicate that much space to proving how wrong those stastics actually are, because here are all these educated, lonely, sad, “successful” women* with empty beds and freezers full of Haagen Daas? 

Screw you, NY Times.  You call yourselves journalists. 

There are plenty of guys out there who really don’t give a damn who makes more money, who has more schooling, who brings home the bacon.  Really.  I do, in fact, know several couples where Dad left his job when the kids were born because he made less than his wife, and it was far less of a sacrifice for him to stay home.  And there’s nothing revolutionary about it, it’s all very practical.  The one what makes the most money and has the best benefits keeps doing that.  It’s basic math.    

Look, women, ladies, girls, sure there are going to be some neanderthals out there (some of them with PhDs even) who are going to freak out if you’re smarter or make more money.  But there are also a whole lot of men who just don’t care, and even dig on smart, successful women.  As it should be.  Trust me, you don’t want to date anyone who’s going to get all butthurt if you beat him at Star Wars trivia or get a better promotion anyway.  Do what I do, use your intelligence as asshole repellent.  Believe me, jerks being afraid of smart girls?  It’s a feature, not a bug.    

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a couple of magnificently scathing articles on the subject.

And just a final word from a geek boy who digs on the brainy girls, Nerd Porn Auteur by Ernest Cline.  You’ll have to follow the link and click on Nerd Porn Auteur in the list.  Oh, yeah, check out Air Wolf as well. 

*I mean, how successful can they be without a man, right NY Times?  Bite me.

Geek Girls Rule! #115 – What’s on a Geek’s MP3 player?

In lieu of any real postings, because nothing is pissing me off overly much except that my teenaged years were FAR too recent to be retro thank you very much, you get a post on my musical tastes, apart from Adam Ant.

Some of you may have noticed the inclusion of the NerdCore category on the right hand side of the page.  If you haven’t, go look, I’ll wait.

Yes, yes, I know Jonathan Coulton isn’t really NerdCore, but I don’t know where else to put him just yet, so you’ll just have to deal.  I am highly familiar with the work of all those fine gentlemen listed, however.  The three I am most familiar with are Bloodhag, MC Chris and MC Frontalot.  And any of the three might be found on my mp3 player at any given time.  The Geek Husband What Rules is a huge fan of those three, as well as Beefy and Dual Core.

Bloodhag are a local speedmetal group, who come out dressed like the scariest shop teachers ever in short sleeved white shirts, ties, black slacks and birth control glasses, sing songs about SF/F authors and throw paperback books and library card applications at the audience here in Seattle. 

MC Chris is more into the NerdCore/NerdHop genre, and is perhaps best known for “Fett’s Vette.”  I, however, am highly entertained by “White Kids Love Hip Hop.”  But since the only video I could find for “White Kids” kind of sucks, you get the “Fett’s Vette” video from Zack and Miri Make a Porno. 

MC Frontalot rocks the dorkness so hard.  I was torn between “Pitch Dark” and “Goth Girls,” but I think “Pitch Dark” showcases him better.  It is a bit long, though:    Also, he has all of his songs available for download on his site.

Dual Core don’t have any good videos on YouTube.com, however there is a video on their homepage.  We’re both big fans of their song “What Have We Done.”

The husband, also really digs on Beefy.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  1.  Beefy’s good.  2. He is also from the special flavor of hell that is Eastern Washington.  Game Store Girl: 

And of course, Optimus Rhyme. 

Perennial favorite, MC Hawking, because nerds are a bunch of sick freaks:  “All my Shootin’s be Drive-bys.”

Now, this isn’t all of what we listen to in the Geek Household What Rules.  We’re also big fans of Devo (big surprise), with our favorite song being their cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Are you Experienced?”  However, we also listen to a lot of recent, non-geeky stuff as well, like the Blue Scholars, Spoon, Yeahsayer, and just about anything played in general rotation on KEXP.  We’re big Dancehall fans, love punk, hip hop, ska, oi, rockabilly, metal, new country, we listen to just about everything.   Just about.  There are limits.  The Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and Blowfish are two of those limits.  Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus shall also never darken our CD/mp3 players.

Yeah, so we’re kind of elitists.

Oh yeah, if you want a way more comprehensive sampling of NerdCore and other Dork Music, then check out Radio Free Hipster.

Promotion post

A friend of the Geek Girl What Rules, Dmitri of Tormented Artifacts (link to be found along the right side of the page) has created this absolutely brilliant card deck.  The images are all steampunky, Cthulhu-esque and just gorgeous.  He had initially thought he’d sell just a couple and print them up at home, since he has a really awesome printer, being an artist and all.  Well, so far he’s gotten 50 pre-orders which is going to sort of outstrip his resources at home.  so in order to get them professionally printed, he needs more pre-orders.

To pre-order go here.

Trust me, you want this deck.

Ravenswood Four of Gears

The Back of the Ravenswood deck – Isn’t it gorgeous?

Geek Girls Rule #114 – On Being Authentic

Several years ago I discovered Adam-Ant.net, the official Adam Ant website, which is not run by him but by fans.  Which is totally cool.  I’ve been an huge Adam Ant fan since the early 80s, pretty much from the first I had ever laid eyes on him via MTV and Nickelodeon’s Saturday Night Concert series.  Ecstatic at finding the website, I dove into the forums only to find myself and other US Ant fans being badmouthed as “Johnny come lately”s who didn’t, couldn’t, truly understand what it’s really like to be an Ant fan because we hadn’t discovered him before he  got big.  I believe I posted something in return about how I was sorry I hadn’t had the foresight to will myself born in the UK at the correct time for them to consider me a real fan, and then never went back to the forums.* 

Yeah, it’s petty and stupid, and I freely admit that, now.  But it hurt at the time, and it illustrates something that a lot of us struggle with:  Feeling Authentic. 

From Merriam Webster Online: 
Authentic – adjective
1 obsolete : authoritative
2 a : worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact <paints an authentic picture of our society> b : conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features <an authentic reproduction of a colonial farmhouse> c : made or done the same way as an original <authentic Mexican fare>
3 : not false or imitation : real, actual <based on authentic documents> <an authentic cockney accent>
4 a of a church mode : ranging upward from the keynote — compare plagal 1 b of a cadence : progressing from the dominant chord to the tonic — compare plagal 2
5 : true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character

Let’s focus on 2, 3, and 5. 

Feeling authentic is something with which a lot of people have trouble, especially those of us from, shall we say, less than hip areas of America.  We were never in on the birth of anything.  Punk rock happened nearly simultaneously in London, New York, Detroit and several other places thousands of miles away from Idaho, the same with Nu Wave or the Nu Romantics.  Every cultural phenomena came down to us second or third hand.  MTV helped a bit, but we still had to wait for the mainstream to recognize something enough for it to filter down to those of us in the hinterland.  As a result, a lot of us spent much of our lives feeling like pretenders to the movements/sub-cultures that spoke to us. 

I’m getting to the geek parts, I swear. 

This has, in the past, included gaming for me.  As you’ve all heard repeatedly, I didn’t get to start gaming until I was 19/20, because I spent most of my adolescence surrounded by He-Male Woman Haters.  When I did start, most of the guys I gamed with had been gaming since Jr. High or Elementary school.  I felt very much like a Johnny Come Lately.  I would run games only rarely, and when I did, praise would be negated with the inner voice telling me they were only saying those things to be nice.

Last year, just before Ambercon as the Evil Little Voice in my head geared up its campaign to turn me into a basketcase about running games for “real” gamers, I suddenly realized.  “Hey, wait, I’ve been gaming for nearly 20 years now, and I’ve been running games for at least five years.  People keep asking me to run games for them, the Girl Game’s been going for more than two years… I don’t suck at this.  I’m not a pretender.  I AM a gamer.” 

Now if I could just have that freaking epiphany about my writing.

Thing is, I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling in-authentic about a lot of things.  In Grad school, my advisor told me that feeling like a fraud was incredibly common for female scholars in any field.  My “Gawth”-ness, regardless of the fact that I’ve lived in black since I was 12 and light bends toward my closet.  My writing, my Feminism, my Kink, my progressivism, everything.  No matter what it is, it seems someone else has always done it first, better, or to further extremes.  What on earth makes me think I can claim any of these labels with any justification?

The answer lies in definition #5:  “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.”

Whatever you are, you are authentic.  Like the scene in SLC Punk when the punk band from England tells Heroin Bob they’re never coming back to Salt Lake City, Bob asks if it’s because they’re too tame, and the lead singer tells him it’s because it’s too fucking violent.   Frequently the imitation takes on a life and a reality of its own, and becomes something more.  So don’t ever let anyone tell you you aren’t nerd enough, punk enough, whatever enough… 

I want to include “Black enough” not because I equate race with these other things, but because not being “Black enough” is a charge I frequently hear leveled at my African-American Nerd brethren and sistren.  They are frequently told that their interest in all things nerdy means they’re trying to be white. 

Now, a final word from the man responsible for most of my kinks and sexual vagaries: 

*The rest of the site is awesome, and you should definitely check it out.  The forums may well be awesome now as well, but I  hesitate to go back.

A Proposition for all of you.

Ok, if I were to make Forgotten Fiction a regular feature here, would you, my readers, be interested in nominating books for me to read?  The caveat here is, I have to either own them, or be able to pick them up on the cheap. 

You can either respond here, on the Facebook entry that will be coming or shoot me an email about it. 

So, how about it?  Forgotten Fiction a regular feature?  Any books or authors you’d like to nominate?  Drop me a line.

ETA:  There’s a heck of a discussion going on in the Facebook fan group.  Feel free to chime in either here or there.

Geek Girls Rule! #113 – The Wild Hunt… Are you kidding?

The Wild Hunt comes out this year, and I, for one, will be skipping it.

A friend of mine posted the trailer in his Livejournal, and I’m sure if you really want to you could track it down.  The tagline for the movie is “It’s no longer a game.”  Yes, you guessed it, a Medieval Re-enactment/LARP goes horribly awry because us Nerds, we’re all just one vaguely annoying incident away from a psychotic break.  As a group.  All of us.  Together.  My only consolation is that SCA-ers can share some of the angst and woe this time, instead of just roleplayers/LARPers.

The premise according to the trailer, and what I’ve been able to suss out, is that one of the players’ boyfriend comes looking for her, gets into a fight with her and a scuffle with some of the other players and suddenly NERDS GONE WILD!!!!!  There’s real killin’ and rapin’ and sacrificin’ because, as I said before, we’re all one annoying encounter from sociopathy here in Nerdville.

Can you tell I am displeased?  I knew you could.

Mostly I am displeased because after decades of dealing with the bullshit caused by THIS movie, and also working on a concom both the year that a young man who had at one time played roleplaying games killed the family of a girl he had a crush on, and the following year when it went to trial, I am full up on bullshit Nerdist tropes like this.  Seriously.  The year the kid killed that family, the press were all over Rustycon like flies on poop.  We actually had to eject the reporter and cameras for one local station for trying to crash the Pagan Drum Circle at midnight after we had asked them to please respect people’s spiritual beliefs and leave them the hell alone.  They wanted to know “what we were hiding.”  The next year was only marginally better.  I don’t believe I have ever said “No” quite so many times to so many clueless mundanes.

And believe me, if THAT didn’t push me over the edge into becoming a whirling machine of death, nothing will.

Ok, look, I can see one of two motivations for this movie.  The first, and most likely, is that it was made by a couple of clueless dickheads who buy into “NerdRage” being more than just frothing at the comic shop over the new Enterprise schematics.  The second, and infinitely more annoying one, is that it’s a couple of nerds themselves who see this as a revenge fantasy.  In either case, knock it the fuck off, assholes.  Because I’m one of the people who are going to have to field the plethora of idiotic questions and assumptions engendered by your “masterpiece,” and I’m already sick of it.

Although, I think the SCA people are probably going to get it worse when people who’ve seen the movie start asking why events don’t look like the scenes in that movie.  The nerds in that film had a WAY better costuming budget than most of my SCA friends anyway.

Anyone want to get in on a betting pool as to when local “newsmagazine shows” start doing specials on the dangers of D&D and the SCA?