Gary Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) died March 4th at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at age 69. The Associated Press reported that his wife Gail said he had been ailing and had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm.


Many consider him to be the intellectual and spiritual father of all modern role-playing games. Certainly, much of modern console, computer and online gaming can directly trace its lineage to Dungeons & Dragons, the pen-and-paper fantasy role-playing game that he and Dave Arneson created in 1974. I wonder if either of them realized that they were ushering in a whole new era in gaming that has major ramifications to this day.


Darren Zenko writing in The Toronto Star:

The antecedents of D&D were heroic fantasy literature on the one hand and tabletop war-gaming on the other. Both were proto-nerdy pursuits, and had been around for centuries by the time Gygax and collaborator Dave Arneson published their first set of role-playing rules in 1974. The singular genius of D&D was in bringing the two together, creating a statistical framework for simulating the fantastic worlds of Tolkien, Malory, and Robert E. Howard.

Overnight, fantasies of knights, wizards and rogues went from products you consumed (or maybe even created) in the privacy of your own head, to something you played – unique experiences generated with other people according to ground rules everybody (usually) agreed on: role-playing games were born.

Dungeons & Dragons was perfectly timed, and perfectly of its time. The leading edge of Generation X had turned teen, and D&D offered an escape – and a social life – to the bookworms, brainiacs, daydreamers and malaise-ridden misfits who opted out of punk. As the '80s drew near, the game Gygax had thought might sell 50,000 copies to a niche market had become an underground craze. The world's disparate geeks had unified into a subculture with its own language, iconography, rituals and fetish objects – and the modern Nerd was born.

Still, although he understood the rise of electronic gaming including a D&D version, Mr Gygax was not a huge fan of it:

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.’”

Adam Rogers, a senior editor at Wired, writing in The New York Times on the death of Gygax:

Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.

The article also included a flowchart graphic by Sam Potts which neatly detailed the possible results of early exposure to D &D:

Examples of D&D in action:


Rest in peace, Dungeon Master:

Wealthy racist homophobe William F. Buckley finally dropped dead today at 82 from emphysema.

While some are singing about his "intellectual fervor and gentlemanly demeanor", I'm not. So he was smart and had good manners, so what? The man was a FIRST CLASS ASSHOLE, good riddance, one less rich republican scumbag on the planet is a good thing.

Hopefully he suffered huge as his lungs were eaten away from a lifetime of bad habits: "I stayed off the cigarettes but went to the idiocy of cigars inhaled, and suffer now from emphysema."

Here's a very small sample of the hateful filth which spewed from his rethuglian mouth:

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.

"...[G]ay marriage, gay marriage, gay marriage—I wish more gays would move to Canada. Just kidding."—National Review, July 28, 2003

"Resentment is firm against homosexual advances toward children, but the question is not explored whether that crime—which was then, continues to be, and will be in the future, a sin—has increased in proportion to the toleration of the practice at an adult level."—National Review, May, 6 2002

"When it was black men persecuting white or black men—in the Congo, for instance—he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him."—On Martin Luther King, Jr., 1979

"Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."—To Gore Vidal, 1968

"[The civil rights movement] called for nothing less, when analyzed, than the evanescence of color. Since no such thing could be brought about, can be brought about, there is a sense of disappointment among those civil rights workers who somehow permitted themselves to believe that the passage of a few bits and pieces of legislation would transform the life of the American Negro..."—National Review, July 19, 1966

"New York should undertake to quarantine all addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague."—The Unmaking of the Mayor, 1965

"The Beatles are not merely awful.... They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."—September 8, 1964

"But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement'—that is, the Negro revolt.... But the Court carries its share of the blame."—National ReviewJune 2, 1964

"[T]he White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

"The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class.... Let the South never permit itself to do this."

"[T]he South's premises are correct.... It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority."—National Review, August 24, 1957

Madeleine L’Engle, the beloved and famed writer, died today at age 88 of natural causes at her home in Connecticut, USA.


Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was probably best known as a the writer of the children's classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,”. It won the John Newbery Award (best children’s book) in 1963, and it had sold more than 6 million copies by 2004 and was in its 67th printing and still selling 15,000 copies a year. "A Ring of Endless Light" was a Newbery Honor Book (medal runner-up) in 1981.

The book begins with the classic line, "It was a dark and stormy night," which originated with 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and embodies concepts from both Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory. She did not like to be classified as a children's author, and said that she did not write down to them. In the novel - one of the most banned books ever - protagonist Meg Murray, with the help of her psychic baby brother, uses time travel, ESP and the power of love to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing.

According to Douglas Martin, writing in today's, New York Times: "The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity." It seems that the right-wing claims it promotes Satanism.

There were actually five books in that series which is called a quintet, and they have all just been re-released with new covers:


View Ms. L’Engle's bibliography. See her photo gallery. Watch the book trailer. Read the the "A Wrinkle in Time" SparkNote.