This week.

I saw Dungeons And Dragons Honor Among Thieves! It's really great and people should see it!

I got some free swag!
( exhibit A )

I'm going to do a follow-up post because for as long as I have been a tabletop RPG gamer (i.e. since 1991 or so) I have had sort of a love/hate relationship with some aspects of the Forgotten Realms, including the weird way it addresses (or doesn't address) some of its weird political themes. So, more to come on that. But the movie is great! I feel like I'm going to have to see it a dozen times just to catch all of the easter eggs. Gonna preorder the Blu Ray.

And, I got my first Microsoft Cloud Cert! (AZ-900)

( exhibit B )

(LOL, the testing site needs to clean their printer or check the cartridges.)

Why this cert, you ask, after all my recent bloviating about tech having gone down the wrong path over the past ten years or so in my opinion? Well, 1. It and any future cloud certs will potentially put me back in the running for a hosting job, 2. my personal precept of "learn as much as you can about stuff that scares you," and 3. my current job required it and paid for it.

In other not-so-great news, Booster Gold the sugar glider is dealing with some health issues due to the fact that he is now an Old Old Man. Chief among those is ankylosing spondylitis. He's on (a much, much lesser dose of) the same meds my Mom is currently taking for her arthritis, as well as some antibiotics. I know this is basically one of those long term maintenance care things and will be for the forseeable future, but thankfully he has a good vet and we're just taking things one day at a time.

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Politics of Forgotten Realms I: The Elves.

OK, here goes.

One thing I was curious about in the anticipatory run-up to the Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves film was if, or how, they were going to depict the Drow if they showed up. The "Always Chaotic Evil (Except For a Few Exceptions) Elves in Blackface" issue has been a long-running problem. The fact that their defining physical characteristics are, as some have characterized it, "like a high fantasy magical equivalent of the Curse Of Ham" is not lost on a lot of people.

There are players who take the opposite viewpoint - basically, that people who feel that this is problematic are being oversensitive SJW killjoys; and that for the whole D&D dynamic to work, there have to be inhuman soulless, evil-just-for-the-sake-of-being-evil bad guys to squish without having to think about nuance or politics. But I just find that boring. Heck, even the more jingoistic aspects of Warhammer 40k are more complex than that.

"But why do you have to make everything political?" They whinge. Well, because:

Everything is political.

Everything. You can't get away from it.

Of course you can just play a silly fun campaign without referring to any of the heavy stuff. Most groups do, I think. But it's all already there - in the novels and modules and sourcebooks and the hearts and minds of the respective authors and the people at TSR/WOTC/Hasbro who wrote them over the decades. The politics are already baked in.

And if you want to squish enemies for the sake of squishing enemies, there's plenty of undead, automatons, and jellies/oozes to choose from: and not even those are without baggage (see also: Zombies.)

( The rest is cut to save people's reading pages, and also because of movie spoilers. )

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