This is a documentary that you should see. That everyone should see.

I’ve been concerned for years by the apparent over-prescription of mood-altering drugs in our modern society. Watching just the first five minutes of this documentary has raised that from a mild concern to a serious concern. We are living in a society where entire families live in a drug-induced fiction; where sadness is combatted as if it were an abnormal lesion upon the brain; and children who don’t behave like miniature adults are sedated until they become good little citizens.

And why is this happening? Because we’re lazy. Because society wants us to be sheep. And because the drug companies benefit by creating life-long customers of their drugs.

It is easy to simply blame the parents here. But, increasingly, we’re seeing schools and government organizations working hand-in-hand to force unwilling parents to put their “disorderly” children onto drugs. (Is it truly coincidental that the number of children supposedly suffering from ADD/ADHD suddenly shot through the roof just as schools were given more money based on the number of ADD/ADHD students they had?)

But what is truly disturbing is that this Ritalin obsession is that it’s masking the actual source of the problem, rather than correcting it: Precocious children are bored in school; the solution is not to drug them, but to challenge them. Children are suffering from allergic reactions or lead poisoning or PCB exposure; the solution is to treat the actual medical condition, not drug them into submission. Children are over-stimulated by television or hyperactive on excess sugar. The list goes on and on.

Is there an underlying condition of ADD/ADHD that some exceptionally small percentage of our society suffers from and which can be successfully treated with Ritalin and similar drugs? Yes.

Is there an underlying condition of chemically-induced depression that some exceptionally small percentage of our society suffers from and which can be successfully treated with anti-depressants? Yes.

But 10% of boys from age 6 to 12 are now taking psychotropic medication. We, as a society, are becoming as warped as 19th-century China with its opiates. Our behavior is being shaped by drugs instead of brains. And if we allow this trend to continue, we will destroy ourselves.

To read a spoiler-free review of Rainbows End, click here.

For some spoiler-filled thoughts about the book, go ahead and read more…

(more…)

It seemed to me that Rainbows End was the perfect storm:

For starters, Vernor Vinge was an author who could truly boast that every single novel he’d ever written was better than the one he’d written before: The Witling was better than Grimm’s World; The Peace War was better than The Witling; Marooned in Realtime was better than The Peace War; A Fire Upon the Deep was better than Marooned in Realtime; and A Deepness in the Sky was better than A Fire Upon the Deep. If Rainbows End followed that pattern, it was going to be a tremendous book.

Rainbows End also saw Vinge returning to a fictional universe which had been the setting for two excellent short stories: “Fast Time at Fairmont High” and “Synthetic Serendipity”. An analogy could be drawn, I felt, between this relationship and the relationship between “The Blabber” and A Fire Upon the Deep. Both of these latter stories are set in in Vinge’s Zone of Thoughts universe, and “The Blabber” was the first peek we had into that universe. In that story, Vinge gave us a glimpse — from the edge of the Slow Zone — of what an amazing place the near-Singularity of the Beyond would be like. Frankly, when I first read “The Blabber” I didn’t think Vinge or anyone else could really deliver on that promise. But Vinge did. And A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the most amazing science fiction novels ever written.

“Fast Times at Fairmont High” excited me even more than “The Blabber”. Vinge was working his future history talents at their finest: He forwarded half a dozen different technical fields all at once and then started looking at how that would change us as a society and as individuals. His vision was compelling, startling, dynamic, and utterly believable. If those technologies become prevalent, society is going to look a lot like “Fast Times at Fairmont High” — you can already see the beginning of those trend lines forming in the high schools of today as the technology of today reshapes the contours of daily life. And those trend lines are even clearer today than they were in 2001 when he published the story.

So when I approached Rainbows End I was excited: Even if Vinge did nothing more than expand his previous treatment into a larger, more intricately woven plot it was going to be one of the most exciting science fiction novels I’ve read in the last decade. And if he followed his previous trends, I was fully prepared to be dazzled by his vision of the future

Finally, on a personal level, Rainbows End was being published just as I was tearing through Vinge’s entire corpus work of work: As you’ve seen in my recent reactions, I worked my way through his short stories and then tackled his novels one by one. It seemed as if I was working my way up a triumphant crescendo that would culminate in Vinge’s most recent and most brilliant work.

Unfortunately, I was to be disappointed in this.

To be clear, the book – considered in and of itself – is just fine. It’s a solid near-future techno-thriller. It’s very well executed, with some really interesting twists, and I give it a B+ with a solid recommendation to accompany it.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that, with Rainbows End, Vinge played chicken and he lost. He got into a staring contest… and he blinked. Rainbows End reads like a giant step backward from the vision he conjured forth in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”.

To take one example, in “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, Vinge looked at the ways in which augmented reality would fundamentally change social interaction. In Rainbows End , by contrast, there was essentially nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a cellphone and text messaging. (The only exception I can think of is when a character virtually pops over to a beach in Indonesia … but once she’s there in virtual form, there’s nothing remarkable about the experience at all. It’s one step up from a webcam, but there’s nothing fundamentally transformative.)

There was, to put it more bluntly, more complexity of world-building in his short story than there was in his novel. And, ultimately, I consider that to be a colossal failure.

Vinge seems to have suffered a failure of imagination. And that’s not a flaw I ever thought I’d see in him.

GRADE: B+

For additional comments on Rainbows End, which include SPOILERS, click here.

Vernor Vinge
Published: 2006
Publisher: Tor
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812536363
Buy Now!

Dream Machine Productions is proud to announce its largest product to date. Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat is 90 pages long, giving you everything you’ll ever need to incorporate mounts of every size and type into your campaigns.

One of the things that sets Dream Machine’s Rule Supplements apart from the pack is the innovative system of sidebar cross-referencing that they use. If you’ve seen Ptolus (which is excellent and comes highly recommended), then you’ve seen a similar system applied to setting material. We’re expanding it and applying it to rule systems.

For example, on page 8 of Mounted Combat I look at what happens when a mount tries to squeeze into a space (one of many scenarios not address by the core rulebooks). And right in the sidebar on that page is this entry:

Penalties for Squeezing – PHB, Chapter 8,
Terrain and Obstacles: Characters move at half
speed through narrow space (at least half as
wide or high as their fighting space) and suffer a
-4 penalty on attack rolls and to AC while in the
narrow space. When moving through a space
requiring an Escape Artist check (less than half
as wide or high as the character’s fighting
space), a character cannot attack, suffers a -4
penalty to AC, and loses any Dexterity bonus to
AC.

Using this format, rules are presented exactly when and where they’re needed whenever it’s possible to do so. When the rule is too lengthy, a specific page reference is given. Not only does it make it easier to reference the rule if you need to (since you’re being told exactly where to look for it), but it keeps those page references and other unwieldy repetition out of the actual body of the text (which makes the explanation of the immediate rule being discussed smoother and easier to use).

UNLEASH THE MOUNTS OF WAR…

Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat is the most complete and authoritative resource for mounts and mounted combat in the D20 System. It includes rules for:

Flying mounts
Burrowing, climbing, and swimming mounts
Large and small mounts
Intelligent mounts
Multiple riders
Riding platforms
Cavalry maneuvers
Warpacks
Contest Jousting
And more!

Buy PDF – Print Edition
90 pages

Inside Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat you’ll also find new equipment, dozens of new skill uses, expanded descriptions of the Handle Animal and Ride skills, and more than 50 feats, along with all the rules you’ll ever need for riding a mount — no need to flip back and forth between the core rulebooks!

As I talked about a couple days ago, Rule Supplement 1: Mounted Combat will be followed by Rule Supplement 2: Flight and Rule Supplement 3: Flight. We’ll be using these products to gauge whether there’s still a market for 3.5-related crunch supplements. If they’re a success, we’ll be following up with Rule Supplement 4: Advanced Skills and Rule Supplement 5: Advanced Training.

Where we’ll go from there will depend a lot on what happens to the market with the release of 4th Edition.

As the result of random conversational tangents, I found myself wandering through the Lost Play of Shakespeare as described on Wikipedia. This random intellectual sampling has reminded me of why I find so much of the scholarship surrounding Elizabethan theater so amusing.

For example, here’s a quote from the discussion of The Puritan:

The play clearly dates from the year 1606. The text contains an allusion to an almanac that specifies July 15 as a Tuesday, which was true only of 1606 in the first decade of the 17th century.

Stop for a moment and think about the bare thread of logic which is being employed here. Consider that other possibilities include: The author had an out of date almanac. The author made a mistake. The author just didn’t care and referred to July 15th as a Tuesday because he needed it to be a Tuesday or because “Tuesday” fit the scansion and “Saturday” didn’t.

Now, in this particular case, there is supplementary evidence which clearly suggests that the play was written at some point during the first decade of the 17th century (and no later than 1607 when it was published). My point is that, when trying to date the composition and performance of Elizabethan plays, scholars are working in a near-vacuum when it comes to reliable information. Thus they scramble for any potential tidbit of correlation like a desperate man trying to find a wisp of oxygen.

This is probably made all the worse because the field of Shakespearean scholarship has been so thoroughly masticated over the last four centuries that there is little room for fresh insight. In such an environment, the need to secure tenure creates a tendency for over-reaching convolutions and the resulting navel-gazing simply makes matters worse.

Here’s another example, this time from a discussion on the authorship of Sir Thomas More:

Consider one example of what attracted attention to the style of Hand D.

First, from Sir Thomas More, Addition IIc, 84-7:

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.

Next, from Coriolanus, I,i,184-8:

What’s the matter?
What in these several places of the city
You cry against the noble Senate, who
(Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else
Would feed on one another?

These are two passages with completely different subjects, contents, and structure (one is a question and the other is a statement). But they have five words in common, and thus they are offered as “evidence” that Shakespeare must have written it. Using this type of “logic” one can demonstrate quite aptly that J.R.R. Tolkien is responsible for The Sword of Shannara, The Dark is Rising, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

It’s also entertaining to watch scholars try to “prove” authorship by comparing plot structures. As if the similarities between Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs, and The Hard Way demonstrate that all buddy cop films were written by the same guy.

In general, when Shakespearean scholars say things like “clearly” or “obviously” what they really mean is “I have no evidence that this is true, and it’s not even particularly logical to think it the most likely explanation, but I’m hoping that you won’t notice”.

But this is likely to get me started on Hamlet. And we should be here all night if that were the case.