Nostalgia

Edit: When I first posted this, the story about Gary Gygax was incomplete, so I've finished it and am happy with it.

Edit 2: When I first posted this, I thought the guy Ray met with was Gary Gygax. I was wrong and have corrected the blog to reflect the truth.

 When I started this blog, I knew it was supposed to be about the intersection between my nerdy side and my Christian side. Obviously, that's where the name Nerdy Church comes from. That's even where the alter ego I'm using for this blog comes from, obviously, the Holy Vulcan. 

Well, I have spent all my time being spiritual on here. That's okay, but I forgot to be nerdy on the way. One of my readers reminded me of this and it struck me as amazingly unfortunate. So, I decided to look back on myself over the years, take stock of the things that gave me joy, that helped raise me, mentally and emotionally, in ways that my faith and my family didn't. There were television shows, there were movies, there were books, and there were video games. 

I grew up in the golden age of Nickelodeon and before Disney stomped WB onto life support, so I had some great television shows to grow up on. Rugrats, Doug, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, All That, Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Histeria, Rocko's Modern Life, and Freakazoid. The Disney Channel was great back then, too, with Gargoyles, Bonkers, and a myriad of amazing made for TV movies. I loved Boy Meets World. I think it was a Disney show, but there was even a great space opera show for kids, called Space Cases. Actually, after a short visit with Google, I found that it was also a great Nickelodeon show. The 90's were an amazing time for kids entertainment. In time, I loved the Avatar series, and thankfully was old enough that by the time Spongebob came out, I recognized that for the trash it is. I'm laughing because I know how many people insanely like Spongebob. As I got older, I enjoyed shows like Hercules and Xena, Warrior Princess, as well as Earth, Final Conflict, Nowhere Man, the Invisible Man, and Eureka. 

I remember getting in trouble in elementary school because I used to read two Goosebumps books in a day, instead of paying attention to the teacher. I had a bunch of the Magic School Bus books. I bought each Dinotopia book as it came out. I loved Octavia Butler and her Lilith's Brood series. I owned something like 43 out of the final 52 Animorphs books. I read the Chronicles of Narnia and I loved Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy. I remember reading the Golden Compass, only to find that I had a few months before the Subtle Knife came out. I gobbled that up when it did. Then I had to wait years for the Amber Spyglass to finally be published. It was awful. Of course, I loved the Harry Potter books, too. One of my favorite authors of all time from when I was a kid was Bruce Coville. He wrote legitimate science fiction, fantasy, and horror, for kids. His two series, Aliens Ate My Homework and My Teacher is an Alien, opened up space opera to me in a way that worked for me. It was my introductory drug to things like Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate, and Star Wars. I loved the Dune books. I read all of them. I finished them before Frank Herbert's son, Brian, published any books. Like with the Amber Spyglass, imagine my frustration when Brian decided to come out with a series of prequels after his father's cliffhanger. And when he finished those, you know what he did? Another round of prequels. Years I waited for that cliffhanger to finally be resolved. Still, my favorite book in the whole series is God Emperor of Dune. 

I got to visit my dad for every other holiday, growing up, as well as every August. Christmases with him, especially when he lived in Virginia, on that farm, were some of my best memories as a kid. He was the first pirate I ever knew. He had two VCR's, and would regularly go the Blockbuster to rent movies, only to play them on one VCR and record them on the other. So, there was a Christmas vacation I got to spend with him and, for New Year's Eve, he used to put on these movie marathons, so that the kids could stay up late enough to enjoy midnight. One of my favorite movies from that era was A Muppet's Christmas Carol. To this day, I consider it one of the best versions of that story I've ever seen and I'll watch it multiple times a season to get me into the Christmas spirit. My mom and my stepdad were very responsible parents, and made a point to significantly censor the media I had access to. A big reason why I loved going to my dad's so much over the years was that I got to glut myself on hours and hours of movies that I had missed out under their protective view. I initially got into the Alien and Predator movies because my dad sat down and watched them with me. I watched the whole Godfather trilogy, back to back, with my dad. One movie that I could watch over and over again was Antz. For me, it was like sorbet at an extravagant meal. When I got tired of watching other movies, I would rewatch Antz and I felt refreshed, ready to keep going. 

I will say that there was one movie I credit my mom and stepdad for making really precious for me: Little Nemo. Now, I had no idea that it was based on some old comic strip in the newspapers, like Tintin. What I did know was that when I was six or seven, my mom rented it for me. I watched it twice the night she brought it home and once more before school the next morning. I loved that movie. But neither one of us remembered the name of it. I didn't see that movie again for years. I thought I'd never see it again, even though it was a beautiful movie. There was an independent movie rental shop by the house I grew up in, and I used to go there to peruse just like everyone else went to Blockbusters. Every now and again, I'd wander into the family movie section, because I'm a big kid at heart, and would see what's there. One day, after about ten years since I first fell in love with the movie, I found Little Nemo all over again. I stood there for twenty minutes in the video store memorizing the name so that I could look it up online when I got home. We had cell phones back then, but not smartphones. Years later, I told my then wife that story, and she made sure to buy me a DVD of the movie when for Christmas one year. I still have it and still cherish it. 

I think I mentioned before, but I grew up an outcast in school. I kept moving around through elementary school, so I never got a chance to make really good friends, until I ended up at Noxon Elementary school. There I got to stay with the same grade of kids, through Noxon, to Titusville Middle, the Lagrange Middle, to Arlington High. I started, just started, making friends with the other ostracized kids at the end of elementary, but I really started moving on that trend through middle school, until we had our own clique, our own group to insulate us from the asinine bullying behavior of the jerks we went to school with. One of those wonderful kids was a boy named Raymond. He turned out to be my best friend for years. He wanted to grow up to be a tabletop roleplaying game designer. So he experimented on us first. He started a system that was pretty modular. I loved it. From the beginning, I was a fan of mashing things together, coming up with new takes on old tropes, and together we made me a character I named Kriphtin. He was half-dwarf, half-troll. I loved that Ray made half-racial templates, because every other system I had ever seen had basically made humans the mutts of the humanoid universe, apparently the only race capable of crossbreeding with any of the others. My guy was supposed to look like me. Relatively tall, but built like a dwarf, with a barrel chest, a big belly, and large limbs. I got to play him, with Ray as the Gamemaster, for about eight years. As he evolved, so did the game system Ray used for our games. Sometimes, my character's development drove the game's development. In the end, he was angry, and stoic, and spiritual. He used his anger to empower his spiritual connection, using he supernatural rage to control seismic and volcanic events. I identify with Kriphtin a lot and I'll probably talk more about him in the future. 

Then Ray went to college in Florida, to Full Sail. While he was down there, Dave Arneson, the guy who invented Dungeons and Dragons, was down there for a book signing. Obviously, Ray went. Ray happily told him that he was really interested in designing tabletop games, too. Arneson told him that was a mistake, told him that all the money in gaming was electronic, between computer games or mobile games. Told him to focus his energies more on computer gaming. A few months later, Dave Arneson died, leaving Ray with almost a kind of deathbed warning kind of thing from one of his biggest heroes. That was the beginning of the end, I think, and irreparably damaged my friendship with Ray for the coming years. After eight years of playing the same character with the same gaming group, you can maybe imagine that this game system was a big part of our ongoing friendship. My heart broke when he came back to New York, announcing that he had no interest in further developing it, leaving me, and Kriphtin, halfway through a story line that Ray and I were working through together. So he moved on. He began to focus on his coding skills, on his design skills. He got a job in Manhattan. At this point, I was married and living in the Bronx. We saw each other for a while. But through his work, he got caught up in a "rationalist" community. Effectively an atheistic doomsday cult I'll talk about another day. But his values changed. The things he wanted for himself and his life stopped including being nostalgic with me. Stopped including me at all, for the most part. Finally, he moved to the San Francisco bay area, for work. Now, he and I will reach out and tell each other about something that reminds us of the other. But we're not the same and we never will be. 

Of course, I was still a gamer. I played Magic: the Gathering, which was something my group had picked up in middle school and never really put away. I found friends in college to keep playing Magic with. After I stopped playing Kriphtin with Ray so much, I moved on to other systems. That was a golden age with Dungeons and Dragons. They had published the third edition of the game, and published an open license, for third party developers to create original material that was compatible with their game. I bought hundreds of dollars of 3.5 dnd stuff. When they decided to make a new edition, 4th edition, they did away with the open license and a lot of things they did with dnd 3rd and 3.5 that was amazing. 4th edition was a bust, very few people liked it. I never bothered learning how to play because I still loved 3.5. I wasn't alone. Paizo, the publishing company that printed all the dnd magazines out there for years, saw an opportunity. Most of the gaming community was pretty upset about the shift to 4th, so they took the rules in the 3rd edition open license and rebuild the game from the ground up, fully backwards compatible, so that gamers who still had all their stuff, like me, could still use them. There was a brief period between the fall of 3rd ed and the rise of Pathfinder, the game Paizo made based on it. 

In that period, I found the World of Darkness. Dungeons and Dragons is, and has been, the most popular tabletop roleplaying game for years. World of Darkness has comfortably been the distant second place holder for almost as many years. Around the time Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, came out with 3rd ed, White Wolf, the company that was then publishing the World of Darkness, came out with their second edition, what they called their New World of Darkness. That's when I got into the game. I still have all my World of Darkness books. They have since sold off the rights of World of Darkness, the new company coming out with their version, basically a 3rd edition, which they now call Chronicles of Darkness. I feel the same way about Chronicles as I do 4th ed Dnd. It's garbage. 

I had treasures in my childhood. As you might be able to tell, I'm very nostalgic. It's a blessing and a curse. But this is where so much of my nerdiness comes from. Hope it helps understand me better, which I hope, in turn, helps you understand where I'm coming from better.