The compleat idiot (or, “What I did on my holidays”)

There are few things as likely to make me anxious as going on holiday. This summer, for example, instead of looking forward to a week of swimming and fishing at the beach with my family, I was mostly thinking about the number of tweets I was going to have to catch up on afterwards, and how many unread items were likely to be waiting for me in my RSS reader when we got home. For as well as transporting me from the stresses and worries of my regular life, our holiday at the beach was also transporting me several hundred kilometres from my wireless internet facilities and my designated cellular data network.

“I have laid aside business, and gone a’fishing,” wrote Izaak Walton in his The compleat angler. Not that it was particularly difficult to lay aside business back in Walton’s day. He presumably didn’t have to agonise over an out of office message whenever he took some time out from his ironmongering shop [“crisp and informative, or chirpy, personable and possibly slightly smug with excitement?”]. The most that might be waiting at the end of a fishing expedition would be a handful of unpaid bills and a few mouldering copies of the London Gazette. He certainly didn’t have to worry, as he was out casting flies on the River Dove, that he might be missing out on a truly excellent photo of a startled, grammatically challenged household pet that he could have immediately posted to Twitter to awestruck accolade.

(As it turned out, I was able to access an alternative cellular data network on my lady partner’s smartphone — dispelling all my anxieties and allowing me to remain blissfully up-to-date, albeit at a roaming data tariff whose total remains worryingly unknown at the time of writing.)

As a result of all this, I’ve found myself wondering — as I’ve wondered in the past, though evidently to no avail — whether I should cut down on the number of RSS items and tweets and other internet detritus whose permission I give to wash themselves unceasingly upon my consciousness. Granted, some topics — publishing, technology, web development — I have a professional need about which to remain informed. Less obvious is the need to be alerted whenever the internet is graced with a new photo of a bulldog in a Victorian frock, or a civil union between a space robot and an earthling, or a man with a cat in his beard. Nevertheless, I continue to scrapbook the strangest and most compelling of these photos, as I do various bits of science news and weird history and vintage advertising posters, in the hope that someday they’ll come in handy.

This is a ‘just in case’ attitude, at a period in the development of the internet when there’s a more compelling case for a ‘just in time’ attitude. The sophistication of search engines and the efforts of professional and amateur digital curators make it increasingly possible to find items of interest when you need them. To make a fishing analogy, it’s the difference between taking a boat and a rod out onto an ocean you know is teeming with fish and seeing what shows up, and standing beneath a commercial fishing trawler as it empties tonnes of tuna, salmon and cod all over you.

It was during the holiday referenced at the opening of this increasingly circuitous article that I went out fishing with my inlaws, including a six year old nephew who had recently come of sufficient age to go out in the boat, and for whom this was his second fishing expedition. After an hour on the water, said nephew’s tally of fish totalled two, while mine remained fixed, seemingly permanently, at zero. (Not that I was troubled by this — reluctant as I am to follow through with the subsequent unhooking, blooding and gutting.) This disparity in the total of our respective catches was something upon which the nephew saw fit to remark, less with actual ill-feeling and more with the casual impudence of the very young.

An additional layer was added to my already substantial coating of general self-disappointment when I realised that a similar race to ‘catch something’ was behind my quest for constant internet updatedness — an infantile desire to be the first to post a link to something cool and new and interesting. As if, by relation, this would make me seem cool and interesting. As if copying a link from my RSS client and pasting it into Twitter with the possible intervention of a URL shortening service were some herculean labour for which I deserved to be thanked and lauded in the form of endless congratulatory retweets, complete with the credit that it was I who had unearthed this prize for the benefit of Twitterkind.

At the time of writing, there are still as many RSS subscriptions in my feed reader as when I set out on my holiday. I still feel the competitive desire to post links to Twitter faster than I can properly read the articles I’m linking to. And I’m still in the mindset of scarcity that compels me to hoard potentially useful URLs as though in preparation for some information apocalypse. But I’m doing my best to bear in mind something else Izaak Walton wrote in The compleat angler: “No man can lose what he never had.”

Admittedly, he was talking about trout, and there was no way he could have foreseen the traps and temptation of the universal resource locator, but still.

Critically missed (cont’d)

In the days since news went ’round the interwobs about the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax, I’ve come across a number of tributes to the man who was truly the Dungeon Master’s Dungeon Master. Some of these have taken the form of fond — and surprisingly candid — reminiscences about old D&D campaigns.

Two pieces in particular caught my eye: Jason Heller's piece at The A.V. Club, about the impact of D&D on his “lack of a life”, and a piece by Wired editor Adam Rogers at the New York Times, which has some interesting things to say about yesterday’s D&D nerds being today’s Web 2.0 cyberlords.

I have a clear memory of being introduced to D&D in Grade 4. I’m fairly certain that the adventure involved an encounter with a carrion crawler (but then, show me an introductory D&D adventure that didn’t) and, possibly, a living statue. Or living ooze. Or living ooze on a regular, non-living statue. There was a statue, anyway. It may have been booby-trapped and concealing treasure.

At first I was fascinated mainly by the dice and the maps. By Grade 5 I was playing in a campaign with my friend’s Dad as Dungeon Master, and including among its players a number of guys from Melbourne University. Which was kind of intimidating for a 10 year old.

I started to get a sense of the storytelling at the heart of the game, the freedom to invent. One day while visiting my friend I discovered his Dad’s handwritten notes for an upcoming adventure, and piles of exercise books describing the campaign universe in exacting detail. The whole enterprise seemed huge, and compelling, and so much richer than regular life, or even the world of fiction. This was a fiction in which I was a player.

When I moved schools in Year 8 I discovered that people were playing D&D 550km away from Melbourne. Our Saturday night games through Year 11 and 12 weren’t dissimilar to today’s marathon internet gaming sessions in terms of duration, involvement of junk foods and surrounding air of fuggy fartiness.

I was still playing D&D a couple of years ago, playing in one campaign and running another, a gothic horror, slightly steampunk campaign set in Victorian London.

Adam Rogers’s New York Times piece describes the exhilaration of rolling up a new character or creating a new dungeon, and there’s a parallel to be drawn with the way we’re constantly signing up to new webapps:

Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

It’s true: every time we fill out a new profile and start hailing fellow internet travellers, it’s an opportunity to re-imagine ourselves, to roll-up a new character and go looking for rumours at the tavern.

In visible ink

Just a quick note to say that I have a story in ‘Junk’, this year’s Visible Ink anthology, published by students of the Professional Writing & Editing course at RMIT. Some wonderful stories (mine possibly not included) and wonderful design (love the perfectly balanced typography on the cover, minor quibbles over the line-length of the internal text).

My story is called ‘Great Hoaxes of the Twentieth Century and Beyond’ and reveals a few things you might not know about Orson Welles. You can find out not much at all at the Visible Ink website.

Copyright remains with the authors so I may eventually put the story up on the site, though I’d urge you to buy a copy if you see it around. Anthologies like this make for great holiday season reading.