Day 35: Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors,
Coming home across the briny sea!
When the anchor's weighed and the journey's made,
Then we'll start the party with a "Heave-Ho Me Hearty!"
Forty-Seven Ginger Headed Sailors...
You can bet you're going to hear them when they hail us!
An old maid down in Devon
Said my idea of heaven
Is Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors!
-British novelty song, circa 1910.
I have missed a couple of days. Apologies.
I usually begin my post closest to Sidewalk with a quote from Aaron White... "Oh, I had me a time at the Sidewalk..." This year was delightful, but I only actually attended one film, given Lovey's illness and the weather. It was, however, a good one...
We saw a documentary on the world of role-playing games. (The kind with people around a card table rolling dice to see what the knight or spaceman does next...not the sexy kind.) I thoroughly enjoyed the glimpse at this little world that exists far beyond what I imagined to be a somewhat silly game played by chubby teenagers and nerdy college students. These people take their gaming very seriously.
I won't go into a lot of detail here, but the film was immensely entertaining and a bit tragic at times. All the cliches were there...the not-so-pretty girl who paints herself solid black to get into character as a dark elf, the overgrown geeky guy who slaves away over a most-likely-less-than-wonderful novel while schlepping through life, and the quirky nudist (yes, I said nudist) who takes an almost unhealthy delight in "killing" other characters. Odd to a (wo)man, but each with some sort of endearing quality...not quite pathos, but close...they were the sort of people you just wanted to hug and take in hand.
But would you really? Are these strange folks basically happy? Do we allow their daily travails (normal ones, mostly) to appear more tragic because of their gamer/nerd-dom? On the other hand, do we see their travails because they are so plentiful? Is a Dungeons And Dragons game the gateway to escape for these socially awkward people? (I'm not being mean, nor am I implying that everyone who plays these games is socially inept...but the three individuals in the film definitely were.)
Like everyone else, I assume they are a mixture of every point along the continuum of human emotion. Here endeth the observation.
In today's News From The Motherland...a giant fish emperiled...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8269000/8269414.stm
Cheers!
FLT3
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1 comment:
I played these games in college. In our running game we were basically insurgents in a fantasy kingdom that had been conquered by an Empire. In one game we burned down the enemy's temple. I thought of this years later when a pair of theatre majors from the same school were arrested and convicted for burning down real world churches. eek!
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