Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

A Review of Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd

I was in middle school when I first encountered role playing games. My best friend at the time was into Dungeons and Dragons, and I have fond memories of imagining characters and adventures. The phase didn’t last long…we eventually transitioned into a new RPG, Star Frontiers. I actually went looking for that game a few years ago to find that it had been discontinued a long time before, which was sort of sad.

To be fair, I spent way more time creating elaborate characters and stories set within the worlds of these RPGs than I ever did playing them. I was just beginning to spread my writing wings, and the luxury of the world-building having been done for me gave great structure to let my imagination run.

The Saturday morning cartoon of Dungeons and Dragons was one of my favorites, because it gave visuals to the world-building that sparked my imagination. The character classes were well illustrated, and let’s be honest…that series was very compelling to an early-teen audience.

That series was also the last time I really paid much attention to Dungeons and Dragons (the tragedy that was the recent film doesn’t count). I’ve seen it pop up in various things that I’ve read, but the online adventures that people play today bear little resemblance to the game I briefly enjoyed so many years ago. I have occasionally picked up a player’s book at the local Barnes & Noble to browse things like character classes, alignments, etc., because it was that structure that I always found fascinating. So, when I was about to take a trip a couple of weeks and was deciding on an audiobook for the flight, I decided spontaneously to choose a Dungeons and Dragons adventure.

Ravenloft: Heir of Strahd is billed as an official D&D adventure, and looked at least somewhat interesting. Out of the gate, we’re introduced to a mis-matched band of adventurers, consisting a barbarian dark elf, a cleric, a wizard, an artificer, and a paladin (my character back in the day was a paladin, I seem to recall), who are thrust into an untenable situation. They must confront hideous monsters in the first chapter, and are forced to somehow find a way to work together in order to survive their plight. This, as I understand it, is a classic Dungeons and Dragons story. I can almost imagine the players sitting around the table as the adventure plays out.

By chapter two, we’ve entered painfully predictable territory. The adventurers go to a castle, which is dark and haunted by monsters, to be the guest of Strahd, a peculiar host who has something evil and foreboding about him that the others can’t quite identify. Even though the reader has immediately deduced that Strahd is a vampire, somehow the adventurers don’t arrive at this conclusion for several chapters, as they work their way through a blatant and unoriginal riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Of course, one of the protagonists, Fielle, has fallen victim to Strahd’s charms, and of course she’s going to be turned into a vampire. How anyone can not see this is just a source of frustration rather than a mystery in the process of being solved, and that frustration drags on for chapter after chapter until the reader is nearly exhausted enough to stop reading.

I’m not familiar with how vampires play into the collection of monsters in D&D, but their ability to make someone a sort of half-vampire was a different twist. There are, of course, the familiar tropes: they can’t come in unless they’re invited, etc., that would be familiar to anyone who has ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story progresses through a predictable search by the others for a way to save Fielle, that twists and turns through morbid and macabre tales of stealing corpses and hideous experiments that eventually had me rolling my eyes. Had I not the determination to finish a book I had started, I would have departed around five chapters from the end because I felt I just couldn’t take it any more, but I persevered out of sheer willpower.

In a climactic battle that is cut short on details and smacks of an editor trimming the book down with arbitrary cuts, the group seems to find a way to rescue their comrade, and we seem to have a happy ending. This progresses to where Fielle confronts her abusive parents under the ruse that she is leaving to travel with her friends, only to reveal that she is still, in fact, a vampire, and the final paragraphs are her killing her family.

That’s it. The book ends.

Really?

No redemption, a gratuitous exploration of darkness, and not even an ending to speak of. This is one of the few novels that I’m sorry to have finished, and it tarnishes any fond memory I would have had for Dungeons and Dragons. Needless to say, I don’t recommend that you waste your time reading it, and I’m tempted to not explore any more Dungeons and Dragons stories at all after this. I’m currently in the middle of the comic book adaptation of the Fallbacks. If that’s any better, perhaps I’ll change my mind, but the last page of Heir of Strahd has passed happily from my memory as nothing more than poor judgement in my choice of books, and time poorly spent.

The Inspiration of Cupcakes

As I write this, we are nearing the end of the Holiday break. Schools resume in a few days, and as our kiddos return to school, so must we return to the lives of responsible adults. The vacation has been life-giving…space to breathe, if you will. I feel as though the time period between back-to-school through Christmas sees a steady increase in activity that eventually reaches an unworkably frenetic pace, which then drops precipitously after the holidays. I look forward to that drop. The first few days of vacation were spent recovering from exhaustion. Youth is wasted on the young.

Earlier this week, our youngest kiddo spontaneously decided to bake. Like her sister, she has this creative drive that just doesn’t end, and, as her capabilities increase, its fascinating to watch. The result was cupcakes with home-made icing that tasted amazing. This particular kiddo always has a project going on. In the couple of days prior, she had started a scrap-booking project, researched tigers extensively, and created a ferris wheel from aquabeads. She’s always wanting to try something new, and always coming out with an amazing finished product. I have a framed drawing from her in my office as one of the best Christmas gifts of the year.

I envy her that drive.

I’ve had time to write over the vacation, but have yet to do so, not even a post in this space, which I have greatly neglected. I think that it’s because I feel like I need to have a full and complete idea organized in my head before I start typing any words, when really, I need to just start typing. I have this unhealthy dose of artistic angst that haunts me, telling me that I can’t let the words flow as I once did due to too many other obligations, not because of the time involvement, but because of the brain drain of everything else. When I take a few minutes to remember, though, I wrote in a previous career after my 9-5. When I was in grad school, I remember writing a scene of a play while I was waiting in line at the car wash.

There’s something to be said for positivity, for the feeling of optimism that leads to an almost disinhibited drive to get things done. I feel like that’s the most difficult thing with which to wrestle as an adult, the most stubborn obstacle to overcome when it comes to writing. There’s a feeling that I won’t be able to write anything worthwhile even if I try, because I have too many other pressures and life things taking up space in my head.

And yet, when I get these things out of my head and onto paper or onto the screen, there’s a feeling of relief and clarity, because keeping the ideas and characters and thoughts in my head is just not healthy.

So, while I didn’t do badly on my new year’s resolutions for 2025, I’m paring back for 2026 to this single resolution: I’m going to adopt the disinhibition of optimism, and see where it leads.

Because I was inspired by cupcakes.

Happy Holidays!

A Review of I, Robot

My copy of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. — My copy of *I, Robot* by Isaac Asimov.

Tillich, as part of his thoughts on theology and art, said that artists are the prophets of their day. I think of this sometimes when I read or recall literary works that have proven prescient to our present time. I wonder, even, if we would have made some of the mistakes we’ve made in our recent history were we a culture that is more well-read.

The obvious example that everyone immediately reaches for, of course, is Orwell’s 1984, having provided stark warnings regarding our current age of surveillance capitalism. The examples, though, are not necessarily always dystopian. When writers and creators imagined new worlds such as Star Trek, they inspired a generation of people, some of whom are technical geniuses, to build the fantastic technology that they saw and wanted to experience. Viewed through that lens, its no wonder that humanity has achieved some of the things that we have in the last two decades or so.

This sprang to mind for me recently when one of our kiddos asked me when the first robot was built. I recently read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and, while I read it during an insanely busy time in life and have not yet even managed to transfer it to my bookshelf as of when I write this, I found myself thinking about just how well this novel predicted the last few years, in spirit if not in fact.

What’s interesting about reading Asimov is that you’ll find his popular works have not translated well to the screen. The film adaptation of I, Robot and recent Foundation series are so far removed from the source material as to only share a name. You see, I also grew up watching Star Trek and dreaming about those possibilities, as well as reading Asimov and Henlein. To follow Tillich’s argument, Asimov is particularly prophetic in his predictions among this group. Reading his work, you’ll find he had difficulty imagining some things that are commonplace today, and he certainly got some things wrong. Characters in his novels tend to still read print newspapers, even when space travel is involved, and he imagines a world powered exclusively by nuclear energy. It’s easy to shrug off his work as that of a dreamer, especially if reading a story such as Foundation that covers such a huge swath of time.

I, Robot also covers a significant sweep of history. Asimov imagines the introduction of robots to humanity, and the development of the technology from its nascent, primitive stages into a critical lynchpin of society that humanity eventually cannot imagine functioning without. My initial inclination as I read this was to think that we’re currently in these nascent stages. Certainly, robots assemble things in factories, provide surgeons with more precise tooling, and vacuum our floors. Robots performing autonomous tasks still seem a long, long way off as I watch the last device on that list try to navigate my living room, however, and, were that the extent of where we are in Asimov’s imagined history, I think that his assertions would seem laughable.

Only in our very recent memory, though, have we shifted our aspirations to being digital. When Asimov wrote this novel, these amazing technologies were imagined as complex electronics, focusing on the hardware and how the “positronic brains” of the robots could function. Now, we think of what we can achieve with code, and how that code drives the hardware. While the black swan event of the Internet was not in Asimov’s story, the blending of the digital and physical…the software and hardware…was very present, even though he couldn’t really articulate how that would work.

This book, of course, is famous for the Three Laws of Robotics, and much of the novel centers around how robots, becoming sentient, navigate these pre-programmed laws and, ultimately, work around them. As humans make robots responsible for the day-to-day operations of society, the laws, which center around obeying and never harming humans, become more loosely defined as the machines coldly calculate the good of the many over the good of the few.

As we are now at the beginning of the use of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, and are already beginning to offload a disturbing amount of decision making to this opaque and inhuman engine, I realize that we’re seeing what Asimov foresaw in a blurry dream arrive in an abrupt and distinctly sharp focus. Our AI’s are developed by corporations for profit. There is no concept of Asimov’s three laws (honestly, I might feel less reticent about AI if there were), and, if we’ve learned anything about technological advances, it is that they are certain to be weaponized. I, Robot ends on a sinister note, as the creator of much of modern robotics is left wondering if a new leader of the global world order is, in fact, a robot. Imagine a single individual leading the entire world, and our not being able to disprove that this person is actually an AI in an incredibly realistic robotic body. That concept is, or should be, terrifying.

Another theme that is developed is, can human beings create a life form which can become sentient? If we can, what are the rights of that sentient life form? We are already hearing discussions around this, pondering if AI will have rights. Asimov saw a Frankenstein realized, a thinking, feeling digital creation that could take control of all of us while we tried to simply grasp the extent of what exactly it is that we’ve managed to create.

As we encounter the extinction-level event that is artificial intelligence, I, Robot gives us a startlingly clear portrait..or prediction…of the direction we are traveling, quickly, blindly, and with reckless surrender. While some details differ from what Asimov pictured, the results, I fear, will ultimately be the same.

Memories, Re-Mixed

I have a couple of drawers in my home office that are entirely given to the relics of my childhood and teenage years. I don’t go through them often, they’re a bit cluttered, and to be honest I couldn’t tell you the entirety of what’s in them. Occasionally, though, I’ll be in search of something specific and end up opening one of those drawers to rummage through them. Inevitably, this leads to my pulling something out and spending some time in the fond memories attached to that object.

Some time ago, I was doing just that, and found some old cassette tapes. I was sorting through these, mostly because I’m constructing a list of songs that I used to own on this medium and that I now want to have digitally, when I stumbled onto an old mix tape.

Now, if you’re of a certain generation, mix tapes were a hallmark of your childhood. I think that a constant for every generation is the importance of music. It filled my years all the way through high school and college, with songs coming to represent specific moments in time, certain events. When I was in high school, everyone had a mix tape or two alongside the rest of their music collection. I was an audiophile early on, and my pride and joy through my middle school and early high school years was the stereo system that I had assembled in my room. CDs didn’t become commonplace for a while, and everyone owned music on cassette. Even in college, cassettes were the way to purchase singles when you didn’t want to buy the entire album.

Mix tapes were different in many ways. When I stumbled onto this old one, it was a window into what I was thinking, what was important to me, my dreams and struggles at that time. Even though I can’t play them now …because who has the hardware to play cassette tapes anyway?…I think that the physical objects are important. Sure, we can reconstruct them with playlists now, but playlists are ephemeral, or at least they tend to be for a generation that seems content to rent and never own their music.

Now, I anticipate a (justified) philosophical argument here that music, like any other art form, isn’t intended to be owned, but permit to me offer a counterpoint. When I was young and I waited by the stereo, listening to my favorite FM station with my finger hovering over the record button of the tape deck, ready to press down as soon as I heard the opening notes of that favorite song, I was doing so because that song was important to me. The music had value, and was not expendable.

We’ve lived in a handful of apartments in our life, and some of them have been excellent places to live. They were always expendable, though. I knew we would never owned them, and thus never invested in them. I knew they would go away one day, and so never became overly attached. I’ve purchased albums, though, that I’ve nearly worn out on physical media. They were that important. I memorized the lyrics to those songs, often without even intending to, and can still remember many of them today.

A few months ago, my daughter and I were shopping at a bookstore. There was a section dedicated to vinyl, because it’s a niche now, and she was exploring. The conversation went something to the effect of:

“Dad, what are these?”

“That’s how we used to buy music when I was a kid.”

Often, when this same daughter wants to watch a favorite movie or program, one that we frequently own physically, she will just reach for the Apple TV remote to stream the program. Once I asked her why, and the response was that it’s easier. Certainly, I and everyone reading has done the same thing, but I think that the convenience has cheapened the experience somehow. While incredibly useful to be able to watch whatever whenever (especially when traveling), there’s a lost sense of discipline and community that occurs when you waited a week for a new episode and knew that all of your friends would be watching it at the same time that you were. Or, gathering with your friends at a theatre to watch a movie together. Having that within reach anytime I want insinuates that it is not as valuable, not a work of art but rather just data to be transferred over the wire.

Last year, my daughter received a record player as a Christmas gift. She’s become very interested in purchasing music on vinyl, and we’ve started shopping for music together. That’s a really great experience, and I suspect that, at some point, she’ll become aware of the value in the music she physically has rather than the music she can instantly access, because (hopefully, at least, in part) she’ll remember a event attached to that album when she picks it up to look at the cover…maybe even that she and I shopped for it together. And while I doubt that she’ll ever get to experience making a mix tape, I think that this may be the next best thing.

The Power of Photographs

Over the long weekend, Liz was going through some old photos from the before times that are still on her Facebook. The girls piled on and were ooh-ing and ahh-ing over these memories (“Dad looked like that??”). Of course, the time distortion field was in full effect, as these photos aren’t that old. And yet, to the girls, they feel like a lifetime ago because many of these photos pre-dated their births.

In all honesty, they feel like forever ago for me, as well. I’m not certain I’ve really experienced the full impact of seeing these photos of myself from around 15 years ago and thinking about how much younger I looked, how much more full of life and excited about possibility that I appeared. To be more precise, I’ve never experienced the cognitive dissonance of seeing those memories and then looking in the mirror today in quite such a profound way as I did this weekend. For what could be the first time, I observed myself and thought, “I look old.”

I also feel old in many ways, as all of the normal rush and pressures of just living seem to be taking more of a toll on me, of late. Of course, these pressures only increase as the girls grow into amazing young women, and their adventures through school continue. As most parents can relate, I’m exhausted.

The memories are taking a toll also, in their own way. I had to step away from the reminiscing we were having at one point because I missed those days so badly it almost physically hurt. So much was this, that I actually momentarily regretted deleting my Facebook account years ago, as it was the only connection I had to so many people from that time (what I truly regret is that it was the only connection I maintained to those people, but I digress). Part of this is the inevitable and distorted lens of nostalgia, pining for a world “that was so much better then” (although, given the rise of AI and our current political climate, I think we could objectively say that it was, in fact, better then). Another part, though, and perhaps this one is the larger part, is wanting to grasp back some of the sands that have flowed through that hourglass.

After our first daughter was born and I returned to work, I remember a colleague walking up to me one afternoon and asking me how the family and new baby were doing. I made the requisite joke about not sleeping much, as I recall. What I remember as if it were yesterday was his response:

“You cherish every day.” He said pointedly. “Because tomorrow she’s going to be in college, and you’ll have no idea where the time went.”

Looking back on that moment, I’m struck by how much more seriously I should have taken that advice. It’s not that I didn’t take it seriously, I just couldn’t frame the unknown in my mind. I had no idea how fast those years would go by. Because I had no idea, I wasted so much of them in ways I had promised myself before my career change that I never would…long hours of work, trying to achieve things, trying to be secure financially. I wasted them because I was bored and just wanted to move on. I wasted them because of my discontent.

And as we were looking at those photos together as a family, this struck me the hardest, because there were many things that the kids remembered so well…often when I was included in the photo…that I just don’t remember. I was there, but I wasn’t present.

So, I feel old. There are dreams that I wanted to accomplish with my life that I haven’t, and that I’m not sure I will now. There are things that we dreamed of doing when we were first married that seem just as out of reach now as ever. Those feelings are real. Much more, though, I feel regret because of the time I wasted that I’ll never have back. I’ll regret that until the day I die.

But I’ll also make every attempt that I can to not waste any more, whenever it is in my power to do so.

Those memories not only bring happiness when looking back on those times together, but they also motivate me to learn from my mistakes. In that lies a huge part of their value.

And in that lies my greatest challenge.

Here’s to tomorrow.