New on Desk #31 — Con sales days

My brother’s geek cruft library — thousands upon thousands of comics, etc. random stuff — finally got too much to bear, so now we’re trying to get rid of it all. I’m too much of a conservationist to just throw it all away, so I’ll at least make a gesture for recycling. A local swap meet seems like the place to begin.

Overview on Project KonMari

I live in a pretty rural part of Finland, and the library’s here, so taking this multiple-van-loads stash of books, games and random geek trash to the inhabited parts to sell it to hobbyists still in the wood pulp game is a project that takes some deliberation. Furthermore, the corona pandemic has put a nice crimp on doing that in an effective way, as all the major hobby conventions went and cancelled themselves this summer.

Selling used geek cruft is a bit difficult in a part of the country where people with a reading hobby are a bit sparse on the ground, and people into things like superheroes or spaceships or elves are even more so. The geek library I’m trying to off-load consists of a large bulk of genre pulp — softcover scifi and fantasy novels, mainly American — and thousands of comic books, mainly superhero trade paperbacks, and a range of game consoles from the ’90s and early ’00s with hundreds of games, with some anime and manga and CCGs and whatnot thrown in for good measure. The TPBs and other comics probably carry some resale value in the scene, but mostly this stuff is so specialized that it’s questionable whether you could find anybody willing to pay the postage to have it hauled over. A shame, as culturally speaking, distinct from commercial value, this sort of collection is an education and a half. Reading’s just not very popular nowadays, and at least I’ve moved over to digital sources pretty exclusively myself, so paper books aren’t the hottest property.

My current mega-smart plan that won’t be at all an endless hassle is to box the library up and move it to a friend’s attic for the winter, and then see next year if e.g. Finncon makes for an efficient off-loading nexus for this kind of stuff. The name of the game would be to move stuff with a reasonable combination of speed and profit, so firesale prices and seeing if any used book people want to make a deal would be the thing to do. If I did a vanload at a time I could be rid of the entire collection in something like three or four trips to the south, even. Just need to make back some gas money and such so this book charity (as in, saving books from being outright thrown away) doesn’t start seeming entirely like a waste of time. Maybe visit some friends on the side and try to otherwise make a palatable hobby of lugging wood pulp across the country.

Meanwhile, though, I’m interested in seeing what you can do in Upper Savo, the Finnish flyover country, to lighten the load a bit.

Rural Swap Romance

The “scene” is a bit light on the ground here, so if you want to sell old video games or whatever geek trash, your best bet seems to be to put it up at a mainstream flea market or swap meet and see if another hobbyist happens to amble by. Best to have low prices so it’s a “find” when somebody who understands what the thing you’re selling even is happens by. There are a few permanent flea-markets in Iisalmi, the regional center, so I guess I’ll see about those in the winter; maybe I can get some stuff moving through them.

My first try in these waters, though, is this large swap meet that conveniently happens this weekend nearby, the “Rompepäivät” (“Junk Days”, I guess; it’s a specific flavour of swap meet in these parts). The event draws like a hundred casual and professional trash sellers and customers in the low thousands, so if it was a hobby convention, it’d be a sizable one — but of course it isn’t, so most of the customers won’t be into geek stuff. The Rompepäivät overall theme leans towards things like car parts, glassware and old people collectibles (plates, medals, coins, etc.), but people sell all kinds of used junk there, so a geekcore sales table fits right in.

I did a quick inventory dash through the library earlier and filtered out a couple cubic meters of materials more likely to sell to Finnish muggles: Finnish-language comic books and DVD movies, music CDs and family-friendly boardgames with Finnish rulebooks. The family saddled me up with some random junk — old skate-boards and “retro” lampshades and whatnot — while we’re at it, and that was pretty much it. The arrangements at the Rompepäivät were pleasantly simple and professional, with free tables for the sellers, so participating isn’t an awful lot of trouble all in all.

The event itself runs on Saturday and Sunday, and I’m writing this in between, so we’re midway through it at this writing. The first day wasn’t any huge success sales-wise, I think we’ve made like ~150 € with music CDs and boardgames being the top sellers. The low interest in comic books is a bit surprising, as the prices are I think affordable (2–3 € each for mags and albums); the crowd has just generally been non-reading, we had like two people show any interest in comic books over the day. I heard a myth about Sunday being the “family day” at Rompepäivät, so maybe there’s more kids with more flexible interests visiting tomorrow.

So not exactly a resounding success, but at least it paid for the gas if nothing else. The time taken to prepare this mainstream-friendly selection of stuff won’t hopefully go to waste entirely, as I’m planning to put the selection up at the Iisalmi flea-markets next. A friend made the cogent suggestion of waiting until the schools start; apparently students delve the flea markets as well, and there might be more people appreciative of geek culture stuff in that crowd. I’ll have to see whether there’s profit in that, but with luck we might be able to get rid of some stuff before next summer’s convention season.

The lesson of antimaterialism

I’m pretty big on simple living in my own tastes, and generally anti-consumerist, so despite my varied reading I haven’t accumulated this kind of geek cruft library myself. Part of it has, of course, been that I’ve been an avid reader of my brother’s library, so I can’t say that I wouldn’t have been a minor beneficiary of his process of consumption. Nevertheless, I feel comfortable critiquing the traditional geek lifestyle, particularly as we move into the new, bold information age and I struggle under this weight of dead paper here. (Seriously, you need a muscle wizard to move this library around.)

Consider these ideas:

Education is a human right. (I think; you may disagree.) It is inherently wrong to set up artificial obstacles to people trying to learn and civilize themselves. (And yes, copyright fundamentally counts here, insofar as it implies economic obstacle to personal growth.) This principle encompasses geek culture, it’s not some unworthy island of “pop culture” that can be set aside for the market forces to reign supreme. So yeah, I won’t deny the worth of a book, that’s not the crux of my point.

We’re moving towards a digital age. The entire construct of culture costs us less than ever before today in terms of education and replication. What used to rely on paper and plastic, whether books or games or whatever else, is now increasingly virtual, with crafting your own stuff easier than ever. It’s a great time to question the ideas of ownership and collecting when things like books exist as simple patterns of data, capable of being multiplied essentially for free. Significantly, it’s all remarkably eco-friendly once you get rid of those frigging coal plants and solve a few ecological issues involved in computer production.

The culture industry wants your vapidity. The ideal consumer is one who’s bought into the idea that their working life exists to produce money to be sunk into things that make life bearable. Culture industry is the “bearable life” part: they want you tired, impatient, impulsive, willing to pay for some daydreams. They do not want you creative, strong-willed and self-sufficient. That’s why the shelves of the geekdom fill up with all this questionably useful cruft. Collecting is a consumerist defensive reflex, ego trying to rationalize the economically unsound purchasing behaviors by elevating mere matter to totemic significance. The entertainment you buy won’t fill the holes you are buying it to salve.

It’s a great time to stop with the collecting. Your worth as a human or geek hobbyist is not commensurate with your collection of stuff. That’s just paper and plastic, essentially trash once you move past the shaky sentimentality. Read that book and give it away, if it even has to be on paper in the first place. Pare that collection down to the half a dozen titles that you really wish to carry through life. A better life exists in investing your time and money in the learning, relationships and your own creativity. Putting large amounts of money into the geek junk ultimately has the most impact on your life not in the form of satisfaction, but rather in the form of the economic debt you engender: to pay for those over-priced plastic figurines representing your dreams you put yourself in hock to the Man. Let go of buying so much stuff, and you will counter-intuitively find that you can afford to enjoy it more. The other geeks won’t notice, they’ll think that you’re a lion among men — trust me, I’ve tested this out, nobody’s going to check you on library weight. It’s being well-read that counts, not ownership.

Off-loading a large personal library accumulated over decades of conspicuous geek consumption is a pretty depressing thing. The library manages to simultaneously symbolize the immense weight of human civilization, the futile struggles of a geek trying to fill the emptiness inside by consumerism, the digital revolution making paper obsolete and the disrespectful way that the middle-class waste their lives, slaving away and wasting their money in a meaningless rat race. It’s thought-provoking.

A bit on our forthcoming cabin retreat

I’ll be doing a bit of a gaming cabin in Kainuu on the weekend of 21.8. with a few friends — my father has this dumb timeshare hobby that ends up with him haring off and leaving others to vacation in his stead. I’m not into vacations at best of times, really, but apparently we can muster together the enthusiasm to gather a few people to get out of home and go play games for a few days. Plus frisbee golf and such, there are a few pretty nice routes in Vuokatti. So yeah, I guess that’s a vacation, but I’ll be tsundere about it and pretend that it’s for game development purposes.

I might actually do a special arrangement on that week — a few weeks away at this point — and write the newsletter after the trip, which would be a day or two later than usual. I suppose it depends on whether I have anything fun to write about earlier in the week, or if the gaming retreat is the only interesting part of the week.

Regarding the gaming program, here are my ideas so far:

• A friend’s been talking of trying out Condottiere, a minis wargame (and not the card game by the same name, note) that he’s been painting minis for this year. We’ve talked about how it might be something to bust out at the cabin; I’m not a minis gamer myself at all, but I know my way through a rulebook, so if somebody else brings the toys I can get by. While this was one of the first ideas, I think it’s been encountering headwinds due to the hassle of transporting the minis.
• Refereed wargaming of a particularly roleplaying-like blend has been simmering in the local scene, and we’re all eager to do some more of that. We’ve talked about setting up a Chronicles of Prydain scenario (it’s a surprisingly epic and intricate fantasy war scenario once you pull everything together) in particular, which I’d find interesting to do. I think it isn’t going to happen for this retreat, though, as my Prydain ambitions are generally high and I think it’s a game concept that requires like 8–12 players to truly do justice to it.
• I watched a couple of episodes of Macross last month, and the Unification Wars involved in its backstory (think near-future world war typical of many science fiction timelines) has been tickling my wargaming funnybone as an alternative to the Prydain thing; it would work much better with just a handful of players. Basically a quick-ish grand strategy WW III wargame set in 1999, the height of the American Empire. We’ll see whether I have the time to put this together, I sort of have lots of things I should be working on.
• Play some old school D&D, duh. I have some stuff that might make sense to play with as a side quest for the on-going Coup campaign. This’ll be the plan if everything else falls through, I suppose.
• We could just play some board games, that’s something that we haven’t been doing as much as we could over the last few years. There are many mid-to-heavy weight boardgames that would work just fine for a cabin retreat. Get War of the Ring as a loaner from a friend, say, and that’d take care of any spare time, or just something from the local collection like that Conan boardgame that’s been barely touched, or just some good German-style games. A mix of German and Ameritrash could be very satisfying right now, I think.

Monday: Coup de Main #8

Our old school D&D campaign had a good work-out session in terms of combat stuff as the party encountered a crazy amount of giant rats in the cellars of the Chateau Ysgrame. I have my weird opinions about initiative, and unfinished rules for everything else, but we get by on experience and core principles while waiting for the processes to firm up.

The players displayed their usual considerate tactical micro-managerial skills; a consequence of having a group with a high awareness of what they’re doing is that they’re capable of using tactical formations and maneuver play that acts as a massive force multiplier as long as they hold the strategic initiative. Because the enemies here were merely scores upon scores of giant rats, they generally continued dominating the strategic scene — despite talk of a “Skaven horde” the enemy as far as we know does not seem to have anything resembling an intelligence. In other words, the adventurers are outplaying some giant rats by use of shields, stairs, barricades and such, so good for them. It’s a basic level of competence in that how will you fare against intelligent foes if you can’t even handle 200 points worth (this was looked up in the Skaven army book mid-play, because we know what’s important) of giant rats?

The party didn’t want to stay in the rat-infested house for the night, so we returned back to Yggsburg lugging a couple of pieces of furniture in the hopes of gaining some treasure XP. The frustration was evident as Phun Eral, the party sage, ended the session just 11 XP shy of 2nd level. Pretty amusing if I can catch him off-guard in the next session! Not likely, but a rat king can surely dream.

The MVP of the grand rat war was clearly the 2nd level ringer Sven the Barbarian (as a dimensional traveler from 2015 or so, in another campaign, he’s already 2nd level to begin with), as his humongous 19 HP total was quite helpful for a point-man in the rat massacre. Sven’s been learning the language, so at Yggsburg he’s been listening to the tales, getting interested in the native Sword Cult of Flanaess, the Cult of Kelanen the Prince of Swords. We’ve established all kinds of fun cultural material surrounding that, but ultimately Sven seems to be too much of a barbarian to really get into the Sword Quest for Swords that the Kelanen followers seem to be into. “He’s like a dwarf!” was what Sven said after hearing more of the reclusive sword-smith Hero-Deity; not as in a Flanaess dwarf, but like a dwarf in his native Sweden, a duergar who spends their life on the forge and mainly interacts with the world by bestowing magic items upon the worthy. Certainly not somebody Sven would worship, although he might commission a weapon from such a man!

Thursday: Flame/Star/Night

Club Hannilus has set aside the midsummer Land of Nod stuff and returned to the travails of playtesting, starting with Tommi’s FSN, the fantasy farmlife slice of life drama game. We had a new player show up as well; I got a good impression, so I hope the new guy sticks around.

The game was pretty slow to get going this time around; the GM seemed pretty distracted, the reason apparently being that his prep had gotten entangled by the minutiae of player participation and whatnot. Not the strongest start, but it’s a learning opportunity, and we’ve been discussing the ways in which the game could be made easier to prep for the GM. It’s not like a traditional adventure game, really, so prepping it like one makes for a fragile process.

We’ll continue practicing how to play FSN (that’s the big part at this point, really; the game is more solid than our skills in playing it, so we need to learn to be better before developing the rules any further really helps) in two week’s time, as the current plan is to have it take turns with Varangian Way, Petteri’s medieval viking slice of life simulator. (Yes, the two games have a bit of a similar theme.)

Gentlemen on the Agora

I’ve gotten some heat for not reporting on Agora last week; I think it was because I hadn’t noticed any good topics, plus didn’t have time to write, so contributors graciously pointed out some good topics that we’d discussed (yes, I forgot conversations I participated in). Now I’m obligated to report on what the group-think has thought recently:

• If you actually wanted to make D&D morally upstanding, you’d presumably support adventurers working with rules of engagement similar to the police. (Not American police of recent repute, just ordinary non-imperial humdrum nation state police.) That would make adventurer violence generally acceptable, right? Measured self defense in face of threat, yes, but such RoE would presumably forbid e.g. unprovoked aggression, murder of enemy wounded and captives, and similar outlaw behaviors.
• Why does the Coup campaign have this strange concept of “leadership” involved in distribution experience points? In our on-going old school D&D campaign characters who “lead” the party in the sense of leading them on various quests get a 50% share of the XP rewards off the top before the rest is distributed to the party. I guess it seems pretty peculiar to gamers more used to carefully egalitarian arrangements. The purpose is, of course, to reward initiative and model the dramatic idea that the leader progresses faster than the sidekick.
• A random interwebs article compared stoic and existentialist philosophies, concluding that they have some pretty similar advice on the human condition. Namely, that humans shouldn’t kill themselves because they can’t discover their true purpose in life if they’re dead. Fair enough.
• A contributor has been reading “Return to White Plume Mountain”, a D&D adventure from the middle school era, which nevertheless has surprisingly old-schoolish contents. The adventure features spell malware — magic that acts in unexpected ways when a wizard memorizes it. This inspired the channel to extend the concept in various ways; it is an interesting idea after all. How do you know what you’re installing in your meat brain anyway when memorizing new spells…
• I’ve been struggling with the underpinning metaphysics of Greyhawk, specifically its arcane magic. What is it, and where does it come from? If arcane magic is about elementalism (as much arcane magic seems to be), then how does it Charm Person? We massages the question to and fro, and I ultimately had to abandon the elementalist position (which I still think holds true for Druids, though — their magic originates in the Inner Planes) in favour of declaring that “arcane” doesn’t actually mean anything and Wizards are just generic spell hackers who don’t actually master any magical metaphysics per se. Wizard magic is so grab-bag because it literally just consists of the most exploitable arcane secrets of the universe, picked from here and there with little regard for an unified metaphysical purpose. Different from divine magic, druidic nature magic and illusionism/bardism in that regard.
• We talked about the historical fantasy D&D conceit of replacing goblins with human minorities again; a contributor who practices this in their own campaign was concerned about the credibility of having cave-dwelling primitives living in medieval Europe (as per the “historical fantasy” genre premise). I argued that it’s actually pretty credible to have all these weird and excluded minorities living wherever, and why not in caves; Cagots were mentioned as an instructive example of how awful things could be in real history. We agreed that not all “goblins” live in the dungeons, they can easily have villages or nomadic tribes living overland as well.
• Another Greyhawkian cosmological hangup I have is with the existence of the Positive and Negative Energy Planes; they just seem pretty dumb and unnecessary in a cosmology that also has places like Heaven and Hell in it. After the gentlemen massaged the question for a while (suggesting e.g. “Planes of Tragedy and Comedy” to replace the Energy Planes, for hilarious cosmological reasons) I arrived to the conclusion that the Negative Energy Plane may not exist, but that the Positive Energy Plane has a role as the origin of the spiritual “motivating force” — namely, the spirit — that distinguishes living matter from the lifeless. It’s a fantasy concept, of course, and a cogent one. (“Soul” is distinct from “spirit” in this formulation, to be clear; they’re different things with different metaphysics.)
• Even more old school D&D: contributors got into discussing dungeon scouting procedures, which is of course always interesting. The theme this time was about the difficulty of not getting model-fixated on a thread model in a situation that can develop any which way. The most hilarious anecdote was probably about a party that used to lug a heavy rock around, rolling it ahead of the party the best they could to trip any traps and such. When faced with a rickety bridge, the party refused to throw the rock ahead because the bridge might fall and then they’d lose the rock. When the party then crossed the bridge, it did fall, sending the adventures down into mud and rot grubs. I don’t know what the lesson here is supposed to be, except that the rock apparently didn’t fall down into the mud.

State of the Productive Facilities

Yeah, no progress with anything real this week. Too much gardening and forestry and swap meets. Summer’s a busy time for me. Maybe next week.