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Questions from sanguinity from several months ago, I am bad at being prompt on memes

1) When did you first know your talent for good-humored trolling?

This is definitely an inherited talent. I think I've told the story of my grandfather's fishing boat on the East River that my father told us throughout my childhood definitely existed, and which we gradually realized was total nonsense. So I don't know what my first troll was, but it was almost certainly in some way directed at and in revenge for something my father pulled.

But one I remember very clearly dates back to my sophomore year in high school. It was Homecoming week or some such and they told us that to support the football team, each class had to wear one of the school colors. Sophomores were to wear white, but there was a dumb rumor circulating that the reason sophomores wore white was so that they could be targetted for egging by upperclassmen at the pep rally to be held after class. This almost certainly wasn't true in any wholesale way, but also you wouldn't be surprised if some dumb junior decided to make it true, and in any case, I didn't much care about the football team. I wasn't particularly planning to go to the pep rally anyway, and I found the whole thing silly, so I wore a dark t-shirt and I hung an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper off a string around my neck bearing the legend "THIS SHIRT IS WHITE"

Oh, another one of roughly the same vintage! Summer camp for several years was CTY, a summer program on a college campus where we studied math all day and then did sports and other activities in the afternoon. It was not a particularly outdoorsy kind of summer camp and many of the traditional summer camp activities were not considered appropriate for liability reasons. One day we were bemoaning the distinct lack of bonfires, but it's not exactly like they were going to let a bunch of thirteen year olds build a bonfire in the middle of the Franklin and Marshall College quad. Until I hit upon a brainstorm. What if we just skipped the fire part? I managed somehow to convince the program director who set the after-class activities to let me put Wood Gathering on the program and we spent an hour collecting sticks into a big pile and then we tossed some glowsticks in the middle and um... chanted things? told stories? danced around the non-campfire? I don't entirely remember the payoff. Mostly what I remember was feeling very satisfied in a Tom Sawyer way with having gotten a bunch of teenagers to assemble an entirely unremarkable pile of sticks for no good reason.

3) Tell us about one of your kitchen spices that brings you particular joy.

I think the reality is that in terms of spicing, I'm okay but not particularly skilled at getting good balances of flavors, so what really brings me joy isn't spices but spice mixes, where someone smarter than me has pre-balanced the flavors into a nice effective package. I am super-fond of Badia Sazon Completa. Someone raved to me about the Goya Sazon years ago, but it doesn't have a hecksher. But I recently learned that Badia has a Sazon and it's kosher and it's kind of magic! It's like, all the spices you want in one shaker. Salt and pepper and garlic powder and onion powder and MSG and some tiny bits of herbs, mixed together so you can just dump it on your meat before cooking and everything tastes better. I also like my Garam Masala, which captures a nice blend of Indian flavors, I don't remember what brand, but it's good, and I like adding a bit of it to my cholent pot as well as using it on curries. Oh, and recently I've gotten enjoyment from these fajita spice mix packets, the supermarket brand.

4) What advice do you have for a first-time RPG player?

This depends on the player, but I'd say I could sort my advice for two general types of players. One type of player finds the idea of RPGs interesting, so they go off on their own and start reading sourcebooks, and actively trying to join a game. For them my advice is specific. A player like that doesn't need general rpg guidance, they need guidance in how to find the right games for them in a sea of content, so my general advice is to find a guide who will learn their tastes and help them figure out what they want from gaming. There is truly such a wide range of things that are called RPGs that it's almost unintelligible to call yourself an RPG fan- everyone has kinds of games that won't be satisfying to them, and types of games that will. And I'm happy to be a guide for such a player, within the sphere of my own knowledge, or point a player to more knowledgeable people I know.

The other type finds the idea of RPGs interesting but finds the sourcebooks intimidating, so they go off to try to find a game to join and hope they will learn from the other players. I run into a lot of the latter type at conventions when I'm running games. And my advice for them is always to not worry at all about the game part of RPGs and only worry about the roleplaying part. Get involved in the story, tell me what you want your character to do, and we'll figure out how to translate it into gaming terms. The weird thing about RPGs is that they aren't quite games in the sense of being a competition, they're a set of mechanical structures to make collaborative storytelling fun, and so I think the key is getting a feel for collaborative storytelling before worrying about what a Saving Throw is.

I'm constantly semi-joking about how my platonic ideal D&D session is one in which nobody ever rolls a die. I do think that the gamier parts of D&D can be fun, D&D structurally presents really interesting optimization problems because of the interplay between the rules and DM discretion. You design your character to be a really competent archer, and that means that she is likely to be successful in combats when she is able to maintain a long range relative to her targets, but it also can mean a lot of other subtler things. It means that she is likely to be successful in social situations when she needs to win over other archers, it means she is likely to be successful in shooting an arrow that will trip a hidden button to open a door. The mechanical joy of D&D is in figuring out how to use your character sheet to be successful in the most interesting and narratively satisfying ways. But ultimately the end goal is the narratively satisfying part. You're not competing to see who can roll the most 20s on their dice, or even necessarily competing to see who can kill the most bad guys, you're competing to see who can progress their character in the most interesting way. I also like to semi-joke that the Bard is the most powerful character class in D&D, because all the other classes fight the battles, but after the battle is won, the bard is the one who goes into the tavern and tells everyone who was the hero So when I'm playing with new players who are apprehensive about the mechanical parts, I feel like my priority is getting them acclimated to achieving that end goal.

2) What's the most underrated thing about New Jersey?

I think maybe it's the diversity of its geography? It's the Garden State and there's still a lot of farmland in some places, but it's juxtaposed against some of the densest urban areas in the country. We have deep forest in the Pine Barrens and rocky mountains in the Watchungs, we have beaches and ski resorts and swampland... and all of that geographical diversity is crammed into a really small state so you can rapidly transition from one to the next. And I know that in other places, any of those geographic features might be more dramatic, bigger, vaster, but I really appreciate having all of it so accessible.


5) What is the most brilliantly genius lyric match of all time?

I'm very, very fond of "so I tried a little Freddy" in the Selfie vid "I Could Be" by actiaslunaris. I'm an absolute sucker for that kind of lyric match where a specific word or phrase means something in the song and in the vid it means something else equally specific, so taking a lyric about Freddy Mercury and turning it into a lyric about Freddy from the show is just pure perfection. It's not just the names matching, though, it's that the whole entire lyric "tried a little Freddy" unambiguously refers to a specific arc in Eliza's journey to Henry. Like, one of my own favorite clever lyric matches is "September's coming soon" in "Nightswimming", where in the original song September is a month and the lyric means it's the end of the summer, and in a Fringe vid September is an Observer and the lyric means that Olivia still has greater challenges yet to be faced.

In a much subtler and more complicated way, I love the way purple_fringe used "There's a Starman" in her Galaxy Quest vid "Starman". It starts out being the Starman is a random alien, and the first verse is almost asking a question, who is the Starman? And then in the middle it seems clear that Mathesar is the Starman, he's the one who most literally fills the song's narrative position, and then by the end there's been a shift and the crew of the Protector have also become Starmen, but not crowding Mathesar out, just joining with him. It's really exceptional vidding work throughout but the way it pegs it all to a single lyric is brilliant. I aspire to do things like that in my vids, to build structural connections between the lyrics and not just a single visual but the whole song.