Categories
asides

Biden is Not Obama

From ‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden:

“Biden doesn’t come from the wonky angle of leadership,” said a senior Obama administration official. “It’s different than the last two Democratic presidents. Biden is from a different style. It’s an older style, of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson of ‘Let’s meet, let’s negotiate, let’s talk, let’s have a deal.’”

Categories
religion & atheism

50,000 Killed Over 300 Years

From The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism:

The history of witchcraft can be quite grim. From the 1400s through the 1700s, authorities in Western Europe executed around 50,000 people, mostly women, for witchcraft. The worst witch hunts could claim hundreds of victims at a time. With 20 dead, colonial America’s largest hunt at Salem was moderate by comparison.

Categories
dungeons & dragons

Rolling Deep in the Forgotten Realms

Earlier this week, a young woman named Sara, who describes herself as “a writer, disability consultant, sensitivity reader, and advocate for better disability representation in tabletop role-playing games,” released a mechanic for Dungeons & Dragons to provide players with a “Combat Wheelchair.” Many in the D&D Twitter-verse did not approve. 

Written as a seven-page supplement, the Combat Wheelchair allows disabled characters in the Forgotten Realms to live a life of adventure.

Fan artwork by Claudia Pozas

The wheelchair “takes its design from the chair used in sports such as wheelchair basketball and rugby.” Its slanted wheels allow for easy passage over most terrains; its side pockets allow for easy access to water, swords, and other weapons; its seat-tilt level makes it easy to get in and get out of the chair; its seat belts ensure secure and correct positioning in the chair; and magical Beacon Stones provide the energy to power the chair with the push of a button and give it the magical boost it needs to hover two feet in the air and glide up and down a short flight of stairs — long flights are more difficult, however, because the stones require a 30 second break for every 25 feet of hovering movement (in D&D, 30 seconds can equal five rounds(!) of combat).

There’s a lot more to the Combat Wheelchair.

Sara has developed a suite of upgrades that characters can use as they level up. Along with affixing weapons to various parts of the chair (a battering ram, knives coming out of the sides of the tires, etc.), players can upgrade their wheels to Suppression Tyres, which “absorb the sounds the wheels typically make when moving across certain terrains (e.g., crunching stone/gravel/puddles, etc.).” From a mechanical standpoint, this means the wheelchair-bound player now receives advantage on their Stealth checks. Other upgrades include Shin Shredders, a Mounted Sniper (a crossbow mounted on the armrest), Scatter Tacks, and more.

As is typical, many folks used Twitter to decry the idea of disabilities in the Forgotten Realms. It got to the point where Sara had to take a break from marketing her free mechanic because “today has been…a lot.” She later added, “I’ve only had one breakdown so I consider this as ‘I’m doing okay,’ I guess?”

I don’t want to provide a survey of everything the trolls spewed up in response to the Sara’s release of herCombat Wheelchair, but the general response was “In a world with magical healing, why would anyone be disabled?”

It’s a fair question, I think (outside of the ableist ideology at its root that assumes disabled people require “fixing”).

After all, the multiverse of D&D includes magical spells such as the seventh-level spell Regenerate, which allows a spell caster to touch another creature to “stimulate its natural healing ability” and fuse its severed body parts back into its healthy body, which would, of course, allow leg amputees to walk again. It also includes a second-level spell named Lesser Restoration, which allows spell casters to end another creature’s paralysis, and I imagine, could allow for the curing of a spinal cord injury that caused a character to require a wheelchair in the first place.

Sara’s response to her critics make it clear that she has thought about these facets of the multiverse. First, she points to Banak Brawnanvil, a disabled character in a series of novels canonical to the Forgotten Realms, to highlight the previous existence of wheelchairs in the multiverse. Brawnanvil lost the use of his legs when a goblin’s spear broke his spine. Thankfully, he knew a gnome alchemist named Nanfoodle Buswilligan (how great a name is that!). Buswillingan possessed the tinkering skills to build Brawnanvil a wheelchair. 

So if wheelchairs are already canonical in the Realms, why should a specialized Combat Wheelchair designed for disabled adventurers be a problem?

Second, Sara highlights the high costs associated with magical spells. A scroll containing a seventh-level spell such as Regenerate could cost a character anywhere between 5,000 and 50,000 gold pieces. The Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of Dungeons & Dragonswrote back in 2006 that a gold piece in the Forgotten Realms contains approximately a quarter ounce of gold. Using today’s prices (which are near record highs, by the way), a single gold coin in the realms is worth roughly US$500, which means the cost of a seventh-level spell scroll equates to (at minimum) US$2.5 million.

With those kinds of prices, methinks the Realms might need a Universal Spellcare policy.

The point, of course, is that a typical adventurer won’t have the coin to regenerate or heal herself, if we even assume she wants to heal herself. As Sara writes to her critics, “Some of us? Well, we don’t want to be ‘fixed’.”

For myself, I think the mechanic adds a lovely sense of diversity to the potential for adventuring parties, and if my character gets killed by the three night hags and dracolich whom we have to fight in our game tomorrow night, I may just roll up a new character whose lived experience requires the assistance of a Combat Wheelchair.

Thank you, Sara, for expanding my vision for what is possible in the Realms.

Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum.

Categories
life

To Travel or Not to Travel

My grandfather bought a camp in Maine back in 1960. He passed away last Fall at the age of 100, and now the camp belongs to my father and his sister. With my grandfather’s house sold to a developer, the camp became, in a real way, the central hub of my extended family on my father’s side.

Except for my wife, my daughter, and me (who live in Vermont), every living member on my father’s side of my family lives within six miles of each other on the north shore of Boston: my parents, my brothers and their families, my aunt and uncle, my cousins and their families.

As of this past Monday (July 17th), their county in Massachusetts had a COVID-19 infection rate of 778 Active Cases Per Million. According to Vermont’s interstate travel guidelines, we can travel to see our extended family members in that county, but we have to quarantine for fourteen days when we return. If the Active Cases Per Million were 400 or lower, it would be safe for us to travel and return without having to quarantine.

The county in Maine where our camp is located has a current infection rate of 348 per Million, but I’m not dumb enough to think that because I visit my Massachusetts family in Maine, I won’t have to quarantine; the virus won’t magically disappear when they drive through the New Hampshire tolls.

But then I found out that my parents, my oldest brother, and his family were vacationing at the camp for over a week, partially quarantining their hypothetical Massachusetts germs. Eight days isn’t the science-recommended fourteen days, but I figured it was better than nothing. If they all still felt healthy at the end of the week, then maybe we could drive over to see them.

The camp has enough beds for about 15 snoring and farting people, but us Vermonters would stay in a tent in the yard. We’d venture inside to use the bathroom (wearing a mask the whole time), but that would be it. We’d play, eat, and sleep outside.

We’d also practice social distancing, paying special attention to my seven-year old, and do our best to help her maintain that distance even when playing with her cousins in the lake.

We’d wash our own dishes, cook our own food, etc.

It’d be a pain in the ass for two nights, but it’d be worth it to see my family again.

The problem, really, was what could happen on the other side of our visit, despite our absolute best intentions.

The pandemic of COVID-19 does not help people, such as myself, who have been diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder. Coping strategies work, but having a general anxiety disorder can mean that sometimes, just sometimes, you overthink it.

But when the scientific community sounds an alarm as loudly as they’re still sounding this one, a wise person takes notice.

Like all of us, I have people I worry about in this pandemic: my parents in their seventies, friends and family members who are immunocompromised, students who are unable to take care of themselves, friends who live on the edges of poverty and homelessness, my wife and daughter who are…my wife and daughter.

I cannot imagine the guilt I would feel if my inability to follow my state’s guidelines caused one of them harm.

The chances of doing so by visiting the camp are low, especially given that our Vermont county has an infection rate of 132 per Million and my town has had less than six infections since the pandemic began, but there’s a reason why Vermont set the number of Active Cases Per Million to 400.

The state admits that the number isn’t based on any “scientific evidence or scientific literature that we could rely on” because Vermont was “really the first state in the country…pretty much the first jurisdiction in the world that contemplated this, and it’s the first time we’ve had a pandemic of this level in 100 years.”

According to Vermont’s state epidemiologist, “The 400 threshold was determined based on a comparison of Vermont’s active case count compared to that of counties in the Northeast.” The Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner who announced the number added, “400 was a relatively safe number in terms of the low transmissibility. It looked similar to Vermont’s disease prevalence.”

In other words, if it was relatively safe to travel from one county to another in Vermont, then it had to be relatively safe to travel to other counties in the Northeast, provided their prevalance looked like Vermont’s.

Any honest estimate must acknowledge that the science backing the 400 threshold is less than stellar.

Any honest estimate must acknowledge that the science backing the 400 threshold is less than stellar (even before you take into account the weaknesses of the underlying data, which is mostly related to how margins of error in the raw data get exacerbated when converted to Active Cases Per Million), but 400 is the number the people I’m trusting to look out for my community say is optimum, so that’s the number I’m going with.

If I trust scientists when they talk about climate change, I need to trust scientists when they talk about the pandemic.

In the end, the main reason my wife and I decided not to visit our Massachusetts family at the camp in Maine was because of the quarantine we’d have to do when we returned. While there’s no state enforcement of that quaratine, I (again) can’t imagine the guilt I would feel if we brought COVID from the camp to one of my friends, neighbors, colleagues, students, or students’ family members.

Like so many of us (but not enough), my wife, daughter, and I work hard to do our part in putting an end to this pandemic. We wear and wash our masks, and we limit our social circles to what seems our emotional minimum.

Even here in Vermont, where the infection rate is among the lowest in the country and where, according to data for my county, cases are actively decreasing and we’re on track to contain COVID-19…even here, we’re still wearing and washing our masks, still limiting our social circles, and still following our state’s guidelines.

Even when it sucks.

Fourteen days with just the three of us, stuck on our quarter-acre property, unable to visit with neighbors or play with friends, unable to restock at the grocery store (without depending on someone else), with a seven year old whose energy levels cause her to dance and cartwheel whenever she talks, and the anxieties and pressures of two still-working teachers and parents…fourteen days locked in quarantine…

That shit just sounds bad…like, lasting-damage bad.

Especially when you consider that, almost immediately following those fourteen days of quarantine, all of three of our schools would be back in session, adding to our already considerable stresses.

I love my Massachusetts family with all my heart, and I hate that I cannot yet visit them in Maine without going into quarantine, but according to everything that seems to be true, that has to be the decision for us.

Fuck Trump and fuck his useless administration.

Categories
asides

Slavery is Barely Past

From I’m a Direct Descendant of Thomas Jefferson. Take Down His Memorial.

That is how close we are not only to Jefferson but also to slavery. When we visited [my great-grandmother] as children, there was only one dead man between my brother and me and Thomas Jefferson.

Categories
asides

Scholar Eve Ewing on Why She Capitalizes ‘White’

From Why I Capitalize “White”:

As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.

Categories
education

The Mental Health of Middle Schoolers

The 2019-2020 school year marked my tenth year of teaching. I taught at the college level for the first two years. The next two years were at both the college and high-school levels. The next four years were at the middle-school, high-school, and college levels, and the last two years were at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels. 

All of which is to say that I approach middle schoolers in completely the wrong way — I expect them to be college students before I expect them to be themselves. 

My understanding of middle schoolers doesn’t get much beyond the idea that all the middle-school brain cares about is the social dimension. Regardless of whether you ask them to parse a sentence or divide a fraction, all their brain will focus on is what they believe everyone else around them thinks about them.

The progressive response to this reality suggests taking middle-school kids out into the world and letting them explore: bring them to museums, theaters, natural wonders, local haunts, places of work, places of worship, places of celebration, places of mourning, carnivals, recycling factories, beaches, forges, bridges, trollies, ferries, abandoned warehouses, hospitals, sawmills, canning factories, coffee shops, activist headquarters, state houses, volunteer fire departments, parks, science labs, concerts, car garages, wood shops, architects’ offices, etc,

The key to the middle-school brain is exposure. If they focus on how they relate to their various peer groups (what this person thinks about that person, what those people think about them, etc.), let them focus on those things while being surrounded by a wide variety of opportunities. If their brain coincidentally blinks into focusing on something other than the social dimension for a moment, we want to make sure they have something interesting to focus on.

If that’s what their brain is going to do regardless of what adults might want it to do, the question becomes: how do adults help them do it in a healthy way?

First we have to recognize what it means for a middle-school brain to act healthy. In a lot of the education-focused literature I’ve read, the problem comes from the difference between the adult’s expectation of what a middle-school brain ought to be doing and what a middle school brain naturally does. Advice usually revolves around a foci of engagement and excitement, anything that will distract the students from being distracted by their peers.

Instead, I say let them be distracted. Social skills are way more important than math and reading, so adults ought to focus attention there. While we shouldn’t stymie any middle-school child from diving into a book or working on a numerical problem, we don’t want to push too hard in those areas either. We need to work to build an honest and trusting relationship so that the middle schooler is willing to take our healthy advice on how to approach their social challenges. If a teacher struggles to get a student to comply with a homework assignment, how much more will they struggle to get the student to share their hopes and fears?

So, after six years of working with middle school students, I guess that’s my advice: offer them opportunities to explore the wider world and earn their trust so they will believe you when you tell them the only thing they can do to solve their problem is have a difficult talk with the person they most don’t want to talk to.

Oh, and PS: get rid of their fucking cell-phone. You’re handing them a crack pipe, and while it can make a parent’s life so much easier in the short term, it’s doing untold damage to their brains that you (and they) will pay for later.

[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]