Just when you thought it was safe to go to youtube...

...just when you thought you were safe from "Numa Numa". Courtesy of iamradar, we have evidence of what navy crewmen on a nuclear submarine get up to.

The horrifying implications should not be understated. They are out there. Under the waves, lurking. They have nuclear weapons. And they have "Numa Numa".

I don't know about you all, but I am terrified.

Another Race, D&D and Pontiac Corvair discussion.

This Power Point presentation on "Race in D&D" really doesn't present any notions that haven't been brought up before countless times by trolls on websites like rpg.net and rec.games.frp.dnd. However, the discussion on race in fantasy that it spawned on the Atlantic Magazine website is actually quite interesting and wide ranging, including the perspectives from people of color who are fans of fantasy and science fiction, and how they dealt with a field where the characters for the longest time were almost all white males (exceptions noted by Andre Norton and Ursula K. Leguin). The metafilter discussion, while not as intelligent, has some incredibly good points as well., including a good critique by klangklangston.

Incidentally, my comments are here and here, and deal with the reactionary nature of most fantasy, and also a particular failure of suspension of disbelief when dealing with fantasy kingdoms.  Both of these are elements that lead to my current world-building exercise.

From all this, the one bit of excellent advice, one I'm going to remember for my world building efforts is that race should not overshadow culture.  that's going to be important, because Under the Green Moon will have a number of mixed cultures.  There will be culture clashes and mixtures that will only partially deal with race.  I want to avoid the "all dwarves are Scottish" syndrome.

Again, it just figures.

Never the Han Solo, always the Luke Skywalker.




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paper: the True Elves of Europe

I'm not going to vouch for the accuracy of this paper, but it is interesting, in that it traces the common elements of the "elven" legends of pre-Christian Europe. Highly abridged, and translated from the Russian:

Leonid L. Korablev
The True Elves of Europe

Abstract:

In view of (relatively) abundant references to Elves in surviving ancient and medieval texts, modern connotations of the word 'elf' as well as 18th-19th century related folk-lore ideas appear as grotesque distortions of a waning tradition. Observing the older references, we notice striking similarities between Elves and their counterparts of various names across the mythological landscape of North-Western Europe. We claim that these are traces of an integral tradition, which, with time, gradually lost its integrity and merged with other traditions and/or random elements of folk fancy. It is clear that Tolkien widely used the elements of that tradition in creating his Elves; we maintain that besides being a marvelous achievement of a story-teller, Tolkien's Elves (Eldar, Quendi) were a (veiled) attempt of a scholar at reconstructing the tradition in question. Similar treatment of the Atlantis myth (i.e. providing a 'real' story of which the known myth could be an echo) speaks in favor of our hypothesis.

And then there's more, including the common characteristics of elves, and comments on how Tolkein adapted them to his work.  Interesting stuff, I'd love to see the whole paper.