Chinese History lecture: Laozi and Taoism!

Yep! I finally got off my butt and did another entry! Huzzah!

( This one's 26k long, though, fair warning. )

(Memo to self: no matter HOW easy it is, don't EVER use MS Word to write one of these entries again, then paste it into DW, then try to transfer it to an LJ entry. yeesh.)

Gaming.

Today I got smacked between the eyes by the fact that I have not only earned the title of 'hard core gamer' - despite a shocking dearth of tabletop RPG experience - but by the fact that I seem to have wandered into the outskirts of 'old school' as well. Oh, not far in, because you have to have been there from the beginning to truly qualify; but close.

I went into Wizards of the Coast's store in the Willowbrook Mall today. The counter was staffed by the gray-haired, goateed fellow with glasses that I tend to think of as an underweight boggan. Very helpful, very friendly, very talkative and quite good at listening. I told him I was looking for something from Legend of the Five Rings, because a friend had recommended something very specific in it as background source material for a Mage campaign I was running. (Pause while people planning to be in the VicMage.Asia game scrabble frantically to figure out which bit.) He had several Rokugan sourcebooks and the GM guide to LOT5R, so I bought the appropriate volume, commenting that it would be helpful even though Mage was such a different setting... one of the other customers, a teenager of some sort, then asked about the game and whether Mage was as difficult as it seemed. He'd just bought the book and started looking at it. I told him I'd been playing it forever, so I was used to it by now, but that it could be a little confusing in the beginning. You had to get used to it - what other RPGs had he played?

I was expecting to hear 3e AD&D, or possibly Shadowrun or something from Palladium. Maybe even Ars Magica - I was assuming that if he'd gone to Mage it was because of an interest in AM. I was not expecting to hear video game titles rattled off, culminating in 'Baldur's Gate'...

Sheesh. Nothing against video games, but it's kind of a shock to suddenly realize that the generation coming up behind you (it turned out he starts college in the fall) has never yet dealt with pencil-and-paper RPGs, and that where you'd buy a game supplement, they'd buy an Electronic Gaming Monthly strategy guide.

I don't feel old. I feel like I need to go out and evangelize for tabletop, for these poor benighted souls that have no concept of what it's like to sit around a table with a bunch of friends and collectively go 'ouch!' as the dice come up double-sixes, then swat the GM's ferret away before it can steal the character sheet too close to the edge of the table. The videogames are a different experience altogether, a totally different form of entertainment, and they're valid in their own right. But it'd be a real shame for these kids to grow up thinking that there were only CCG's and computer games, not games where you could interact with people and get up the kind of weird creative synergy that leads to Triad members getting the character for 'Idiot' written on their forehead in lipstick before their unconscious forms are dumped on the steps of the local police precinct.*

Well, maybe Neverwinter Nights will be good for them. I still want to find some way to show them how much else there is.

*This is the same Feng Shui campaign that featured the lionfished ninja and Colonel Sanders' Gojira-Fried Eunuchs with Extra Crispy Skin.

Massive insecurity fit.

Had one today. I was reading this article about the phenomenon of 'Yellow Fever' - i.e., the way some American white guys go gaga over the prospect of Asian girls simply because they're Asian, usually Japanese, rather than for any reason to do with who they are or what they're like. Just as I was smiling to myself and thinking about the stereotypical Annoying White Wolf MUSH character, the Green-Eyed Lesbian Asian Schoolgirl, something hit me between the eyes. It started with this bit:

"I’ve definitely seen one too many dorky white-guy musicians who play "Oriental fusion" music, wear their hair in a samurai bun, and have Chinese characters tattooed on their pecs – all in the interest of aligning themselves with "ethnicity" in some way."

From there my mood rapidly went downhill - not into 'bad mood' territory, but into 'oh dear God noooooo' territory. By the end of the article, even though it was specifically about American men and sexual/romantic interest in Asian women because of perceived attributes associated with their ethnicity, I was mentally going through my entire wardrobe and wondering how many of the Chinese-inspired items I could get rid of before I looked like a total pretentious snot. VicMage.Asia suddenly looked like nothing but yet another Westerner hopping up and down excitedly and going 'oo, oo, exotic! oo, stuff from Asia is twenty times cooler than stuff from the West, automatically! oo, as a total outsider who's never had anything to do with the cultures involved I can still write about this stuff and portray it and be thought of as wonderful!'. I mean, geez, I've got a replica terra-cotta crossbowman from Qin Shihuangdi's tomb on my computer desk - next to the little red horse carving, with the big ol' poster of Zhanyinbao the Bodyguard on my wall and a bunch of Chinese bamboo brushes and a freakin' chop - I must look like some kind of utterly and totally idiotic Asian culture fangirl who's too stupid to recognize that she's on the outside of her chosen culture-of-obsession (Chinese) and always will be, no matter what she tries...

Didn't help that I'd made up my mind about five minutes before to get Hunan beef from Empire Szechuan, the local good Chinese restaurant (there are others nearby but they're kind of eck), then drive to the nearest Asian market and come home with chocolate mochi ice cream. Which I did, but I spent my entire time in the store with my head down, even though I normally wander through the aisles happily thinking 'I recognize that! And that! And I know what those are for! Oooo, LIVE FISHIES FOR DINNER! I didn't know you could cryovac that!'. For the record, green tea mochi ice cream balls ain't as impressive as chocolate ones, but they're still okay even if the long ride home got 'em a little melty...

*sigh* I dunno. I'm gonna hide behind my Cantonese phrasebook and try not to think about it before touching VicMage.Asia again. I know it's good, it's just... I'm terrified someone actually Chinese will look at it and smack me upside the head for being a pretentious little git, or someone Japanese will look at it and choke over what I did with that part of the setting, or... I'm just ... It keeps coming down to this massive fear of being seen as pretentious. Of being a poser. Of not even ever being AWARE of the fact that I'm a poser.

I'm gonna go freak out now, okay?