More Gary

Just a few more bits about Gary before he's laid to rest on Saturday.  Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report did a simple but touching tribute on his show after Gary's death.  "How much will we miss him?" Colbert asked at the end of his show.  "Let's find out."  He produces a 20-sided die, rolls it, reads the face, and declares, "Twenty."

Former TSR compat Kevin Hendryx turned up a piece on Slate.

And Doug Niles' grown children found this amusing cartoon.  Too bad the drawing's not better.

While Brett Favre's retirement on the same day did overshadow Gary's death somewhat, there was still good coverage worldwide from what I can tell.  My wife noted, "I guess D&D is a lot more mainstream than I thought."  That was Gary; he changed the world.

DESTINATION TRUTH - Yeti

SciFi - Original Air Date: 3/5/08

Now this is the way to run a paranormal investigation!  The second season premier of Destination Truth ups the ante, showing they learned a thing or two from their successful first season.  The crew, with some new members, treks to Nepal to check out recent yeti sightings.  Josh Gates (our host) intrepidly pokes his nose into caves that may contain a yeti -- or a bear -- and generally does crazy things in the name of finding out the "truth."  Armed with good equipment and night vision cameras, he boldly goes ... well, wherever he needs to.  (The cave turns out empty, by the way, despite the big droppings outside.)  So, the crew braves the thin air and considerable dangers at 11,000 feet in the Himalayas.  Gates himself is engaging, by turns cordial and snarky, and the show's narrative moves along briskly.  If this show is any indication, the commercial break cliffhangers are less forced this year, a trend I find encouraging.  After failing to obtain a hair from a supposed yeti scalp, they take a nighttime trek along a rushing river bank where a yeti reportedly attacked a woman (and killed some yak).  The IR camera proves dodgy, but their night vision is still good.  After seeing a few moving shadows, they discover... a footprint.  Two, in fact, or maybe three.  Out comes the casting powder; prints are taken.  Camera traps are set, and the crew tramps through the night trying to stir something up.  They see something moving on the IR, but can't track it down.  The next day, they head back to the US to analyze their data.  The heat pictures they end up discounting as likely a Sherpa moving near their camp.  (A victory for skepticism!)  The footprints they run through a battery of tests and conclude that they could be real and, if they were a hoax, the hoaxer would have to be very clever.  However, the luck of finding such good evidence right out of the box (even with careful planning) seems pretty large to me.  (I always distrust the producers and PAs on shows like this.)  Another annoyance that I've had with this show is that they turn up such interesting leads so quickly, it's a shame they don't get to stay and investigate longer.  Maybe we need a Josh Gates feature film with some serious long-term tromping around.  All in all, though, this is a good start to the second season of one of the best uncanny shows on television.

BBC on Gary Gygax

A good article about Gary, culled from AP and other sources.

BBC Gary Gygax

My friend Doug Niles, who found this, reports it was the most emailed article on the BBC yesterday.  The blog entry is kinda nice, too.

And I hope y'all caught the NPR news item.  It's probably up on their web site: www.npr.org by now.

UFO HUNTERS - Hist. - Cops vs. UFOs

History Channel - Original Air Date: 3/5/08

Yes, I find myself watching this show again. Think of it as the fascination that some people have with road accidents. (Traffic collisions as they say in Hot Fuzz.) Those of you who have been reading my reviews of this show will not be surprised that this episode starts with a Daytona Beach case from 1991 in which a surveillance helicopter picks up a dumbell-shaped UFO on infrared camera--though they didn't see anything visually. You also probably know how I feel about evidence which technology catches that wasn't observed at all by a reliable witness. But, as usual, the show guys "investigate" and decide it couldn't be anything but a UFO. Amazingly, though, the scientist declares, this case too old to effectively investigate. Yow. Good thing they only took 20 minutes of the show, then. From there, they move to UFOs observed by British Police; there's an official unofficial police reporting site for UFOs in the UK. First up, a mysterious hovering light on a video. Despite tracking down the location of the video (though not going there on a map), the team decides they can't determine what it is -- though they're sure it's not a plane or astronomical object. Then they talk to a former officer who has a wild story about the UFO, but no proof there, either of the UFO or of time loss/abduction. After that, they hear of a UFO at Stonehenge in 1987 seen by many cops -- though only one is interviewed. The cop says the UFO made a sharp 90-degree turn which no plane could do. Other police refuse to come forward, but the one witness speculates the UFO seemed to be flying in a mapping pattern. (Though what that is or why the cop thinks it is not shared.) The team speculates that the UFO may have been homing in on the sacred geometry of Stonehenge; that's right, the monument is a UFO signpost. So, they build a replica of Stonehenge with acrylic and mirrors and shoot lasers around it. As one of the team points out, "This is all hypothetical." Well, at least this time they admit it. And yes, it is all as silly as it seems. Amazingly, they come back to the helicopter sighting at the end of the show. Almost as amazingly, the crew -- for once -- manages to re-create the sighting fairly convincingly by de-focusing the IR camera. But then the crew refuses to conclude that's what the film is. After all, it just couldn't be that, because the witnesses don't think it was. Evidence be damned; witness opinions are what counts. I remind my readers of Neil Degrasse Tyson's statement that "Eyewitness reports are the lowest form of evidence in science" and viewed as practically worthless. Too bad this team of UFO Hunters seems willfully ignorant of that.

This would probably be a good time to mention one of my ongoing problems with this show: the recreations. Every week, we get a CGI recreation of the incidents described in the show. Trouble is, where the witnesses describe lights, we get spaceships a la George Lucas with beautiful surfaces and flashing lights. A triangle of lights? We get something like an Imperial Cruiser. A cigar shaped light? We get one with lights and windows and all sorts of things. And when the movement of a UFO is described, we get these amazing Star Wars exaggerated movements. One 90-degree turn? Make that dozens! the more the merrier. The point is, that the recreations always support the show's most outlandish theories and interpretations. Watching the recreations, you'd be hard pressed to reach any conclusion except that the sightings were caused by alien spaceships. And that's what the show wants; more true believers to drum up ratings and buy UFO Magazine.

More on Gary

A good article by the Milwaukee paper:

Journal Sentinel Article

Complete with quotes from old TSR compat Jim Lowder.

A Good Gygax Article

Here's the article running on Google News about Gary:

Arstechnica Article

It's very good. Gary's feelings about 60 Minutes were also my own. I was at TSR when that piece was done, and what made it onto the air reflected neither what Gary had said nor what was actually happening with the game at the time. The "news story" was merely an attempt to cash in on the game's notoriety and, perhaps, fan the flames. (A letter read on the air the following week took the 60 Minutes crew to task for falling into the trap of sensationalism.) I've taken everything from major news organizations with a big grain of salt ever since -- especially since 60 Minutes is supposed to be the best of them.

If you want to see Gary as I remember him, I'd suggest checking out the special features on the 2nd D&D movie. There's a nice interview there, and the film is quite good, too. (Far better than the first one.)

Gary Gygax RIP

Gary Gygax, co-creator and main proponent of Dungeons & Dragons died today. He was co-worker and a good friend to me, and the game he created changed my life.

In 1980, just after my 21st birthday, I moved from Sharon, Massachusetts to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to work on the D&D game as an editor. Just over a week earlier, I'd come west to attend GenCon and have a job interview for that position. While at the con, I'd fallen in love with Kifflie Scott, the woman who later became my wife. Kiff and I met because she played D&D with my DM (gamemaster) from high school.

So in a very real way, Gary Gygax is responsible for both my long career and my happy family. (Tolkien was, too, but that's another story.)

Thinking about it, I'm not sure I ever thanked Gary for that. He'd brought a lot of us to Wisconsin to work for him, so probably my story isn't that unique. TSR, at its peak, employed over 300 people -- and many of those folks had, like me, traveled a long way to work on a game that was fun and thrilling. We came not for money, but for love of the game. Gary knew that, and he liked working with people who liked gaming. I was lucky: not many people who came to TSR got know him as well as I did.

The funny thing is, I didn't really know him that well when we were both working at TSR. He was an executive, and didn't even work in the same building as those of us producing the games. Often, those of us downtown only experienced Gary as a voice from "on high," barging in with a thundering (and often inconvenient) memo. This tendency to shoot off fiery memos gave Gary a reputation of being something of an ogre. (A reputation he sometimes fanned with his columns in Dragon magazine.) Later, I came to realize that these memos were largely a reflection of two things: 1) He was engaged in a difficult struggle for control of the company, and 2) He really didn't want to be an executive; he would have been much happier designing and running games.

I distinctly remember the day that Gary went from being a boss or an ogre to being a friend. It was GenCon in 1984, and I had recently left TSR to help found Pacesetter, Ltd. (creators of CHILL). I was in the dimly lit underground cafeteria/lounge of UW Parkside (where the convention was still held) having lunch with my fellow rebels (Troy Denning and Mark Acres, and perhaps some others) when whom should we spot across the room but Gary. As I recall, one of us (maybe me) waved and called out "Hi, Gary!" Much to our surprise, he marched right across the room, greeted us warmly, and shook our hands. Far from being annoyed that we had "deserted" TSR, Gary thought it was thrilling that we'd struck out on our own, and he sincerely wished us all the best.

I couldn't help but feeling that he wished he could have done the same. And a bit later, he did, forming New Infinities with another group of "rebels" from TSR. I was a freelancer by then, and worked with Gary and his cohorts on a number of projects for that company. Later, he and I worked on an adaptation of his original Greyhawk dungeon, a project that, sadly, never saw print. (I did, however, have the distinct privilege of having the original D&D dungeons stored in my house for several years as we worked. How many people can say that?)

Both New Infinities and Pacesetter dissolved, but the friendship Gary and I had developed remained. I enjoyed both his company and the company of his family on numerous occasions -- though I'm sad to say that we never played many games together. If a family is the measure of a man, Gary did well, indeed. He did well in other areas, too.

The game he created has had a lasting effect on both the gaming industry -- my son once spent a fruitless afternoon trying to come up with an adventure video game that wasn't influenced by D&D -- and on our society as a whole. Gary opened up people's imaginations and allowed them to expand their horizons. His work influenced not only games, but also books (look at all the D&D and D&D-type novels), and movies. He changed the world in a good way -- and not just by joining Al Gore's Time Patrol on Futurama.

Now, I know that some factions out there have, over the years, seen D&D as a tool for "evil" or "dark powers" or some such rot. As someone who knew Gary, I can say that neither he (nor anyone I knew in TSR) was ever into the occult. For him, magic and dragons and demons were all just backdrops for great storytelling. (And, more often than not, backdrops for bad puns and inside jokes.) The magic of D&D was that you, as a player, got to be part of the story.

Gary created that. That was the gift that he gave to all of us: the gift of our imaginations set free by his imagination.

My friend, travel writer Edward Readicker-Henderson, put it this way:, "Anybody who put that many smiles on that many faces--and did it by harming no one else--did very, very well in life. Astoundingly well."

So, thanks, Gary. I owe you more than I can say: home, family, career. And of course, friendship.

I'll miss you, my friend.

See you at that big adventure-gaming table in the sky.

Rest in peace.

-- Stephen D. Sullivan