[Facepalm] Remember when we were just playthings of Satan? Those were the days.
Yesterday at the semi-weekly D&D game, we decided to hold it at the new gaming store in town rather than at the house. It's a nice place, well-decorated with great design sensibilities. Although one of the house artists has a problem with basic anatomy, the other's taste runs toward the awesomeness that is Frazetta-on-Velvet.
While we were there, a woman walked and identified herself as being part of a local business newsletter. She wanted to greet the new business and find out what it was "you did in here."
The proprietor on call leapt up and proceeded to tell her all about role playing, and he literally had to come in from the back and explain to her that Dungeons and Dragons is like World of Warcraft, only you got together with your friends and used your imagination, rather than sitting in front of a computer playing with strangers thousands of miles away. Where computers generate random numbers, we used dice, but it was all looking up the consequences in a rulebook somewhere, after all.
Right?
[Facepalm]
More Peter Watts: First-person sex-real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it- was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.
Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening-just kinks, today. Options for the masochistic.
While we were there, a woman walked and identified herself as being part of a local business newsletter. She wanted to greet the new business and find out what it was "you did in here."
The proprietor on call leapt up and proceeded to tell her all about role playing, and he literally had to come in from the back and explain to her that Dungeons and Dragons is like World of Warcraft, only you got together with your friends and used your imagination, rather than sitting in front of a computer playing with strangers thousands of miles away. Where computers generate random numbers, we used dice, but it was all looking up the consequences in a rulebook somewhere, after all.
Right?
[Facepalm]
More Peter Watts: First-person sex-real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it- was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.
Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening-just kinks, today. Options for the masochistic.