Sunday, I went to a wedding reception. My father supervises the inspector-engineers for the LA County Sanitation District. (The city of La Reina de Los Angeles has its own Sanitation Department.) One of these, Froiland Urfano, asked my father to serve as his best man. 58 year old Philippine immigrant has worked with him for twenty-five years. This event marked his second marriage, but his bride’s first, so they splurged with an open bar and inviting 175 people. Some cancelled their reservations early so my father substituted my sister, her boyfriend, and me.

Unlike virtually every other occasion, the wedding was extremely close by. My father’s condominium is five or so blocks from the termination of the 55 freeway. Froi chose the ‘Turnip Rose’ in a building that sits at that intersection where the 55 transitions into Newport Boulevard. Given the opportunity, I delayed more than necessary and arrived as the entourage had begun taking pictures in all the permutations: only the bridesmaids, only the groomsmen, each group with the bride and/or the groom plus the whole family.

My father wore a tuxedo chosen by the wedding planner. His coat had a half mandarin collar over a grey vest. Beneath that, he wore a white shirt, and, to his chagrin, a pink tie. The groom wore a similar outfit but he and Kun-shan maintained the Asian tradition of changing clothes several times. Froi later affected a grey coat with red piping.

I chose a look I saw in the movie Scotland, PA, albeit during a funeral scene. I wore all black except a thin white tie. The convention center relaxed its policy on facial hair last week, so many of my peers arrived with goatees. I considered growing my first full beard but confronted the realization that desire sprang from contrariness and curiosity. Nevertheless, not shaving allows for a bit more sleep, so I skipped the treatment then. Besides, I have been growing some longer side-burns already. After bathing, I decided to compromise and now sport an Amish beard.

My sister arrived ten or twenty minutes after me because she and her date worked until an hour before the wedding began. Monica brought a short, white sundress with orange flowers on it. Tom joined a black pixel tie with a light blue long-sleeved shirt that he resolutely kept at his elbows.

When I arrived, Kun-shan had on a normal strapless bridal gown of light peach. A royal blue strapless dress followed during dinner and during the money dance. Rather than damage the gown with pins, I believe they used stickers to hold up the bills. After dinner, she put on a red dress which may have had a collar. She may have changed another time, but I left soon thereafter. I woke six hours later to prepare for work. Mind, I begin Monday at 4:40, so the party undoubtedly continued.

Let’s return to the moment the reception opened and the guests tramped inside from the courtyard. My father had introduced me to Dan, the third and newest supervisor. Though it escaped me at the time, he looks like David Letterman, down to the gap teeth. Inevitably, age asks youth about education, so I told him I am studying History. He asked why the Roman Empire fell. He expressed concern that ‘the basis of our civilization, incorporating so many people just collapsed.’  Surprised, I gave an unsatisfactory answer comparing [Edward Gibbon’s] theory against Graeme Snooks’.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I own but avoid) is the famous exposition of the opinion that ‘decadence’ ground down the structure. I guessed that he cited the death fixation via gladiatorial games. The Wikipedia entry’s author(s) clarify that he believed the Romans entrusted their vassal Barbarians with all the important work and took to navel-gazing Christianity. While there are criticisms of his argument, understand that he published the three volume work in 1776.

Graeme Snooks, in Ephemeral Civilization, instead emphasizes the lack of growth after the Emperor Trajan. I made some ineffectual sounds about soldiers and land and gave up (so we could take our seats). Snooks classes the Empire as one of the conquest societies (as opposed to a trade or industrial society). In particular, the economy funded and drew predominantly from military conquests. So, when the Legions conquered a region, the officers were given governorships over the area and locals conscripted into the army. When the Empire failed to conquer new lands, the strategy soured and introduced proximate causes: tax evasion, provincial resistance, and so on. The military hierarchy could no longer promise its members adequate rewards for attrition warfare and so on. Though I think it the best of the interpretations I am aware of, it is one of many.

The reception proceeded, much of the rest pertains to the unified families rather than me. Perhaps I may relate the intricacies of her courtship, as revealed in five speeches given by Froi’s children and sisters, some other night.

In addition to playing tabletop D&D with my friends, I participate in the pale shadow that Wizards of the Coast licensed to Facebook. I have described encountering and rediscovering the ‘app,’ but not playing it. Basically, this resembles a card-based game wherein my character of the moment submits to drawing the cards of a particular adventure’s deck that (via simulated die results) determine whether he receives loot or blows to the face. I repeat this – distributing and buying equipment to maximize success – until he has graduated past the tenth level. The program retires the character and lets me pass on the particular benefits of that generation. Obviously, the GUI only barely resembles this analogy and incorporates a few other nuances.

One is the buff and healing of fellow player’s characters, which I can neither use nor rely on any longer. I am the last of my social circle still putting time into it. The majority that did, quit some months ago and haven’t pushed past the fourth generation. Only Chase pushed beyond me, likely from beginning earlier and in sympathy with his brother Brent. Brent no longer uses it because he beat the game, as much as one can. He reached the twentieth level and either tired of the long summited plateau of perks or received his virtual cookie and was told to buy the real thing. The difference in between us all has been attitude or interactive strategy.

With the limited interaction, boredom or ennui (confrontation with meaninglessness) easily sets in. My path has been perfect to keep my interest despite evolving needs. Besides reviews off site, the first thing I read about playing D&D Tiny Adventures resides in its forum. Like most boards, it had a nostalgia thread on top, but more useful than any other. The originator asked people about whether they named their characters based on a theme (eg: successively using all the characters in the Wheel of Time series). While the replies escape me, I absorbed the idea that I should prepare a set rather than take the intuitive route – use the names of characters I actually roleplayed. That became the first warning to be stoic and bemused about any particular iteration.

I settled on a pleasing solution affording me uniqueness, propriety with irony, and a large set to draw from. I chose to modify the names of various font types into fantasy-esque names for each.

I made a grave mistake soon thereafter. Despite distancing myself from the character’s progress, I took too great in interest in the adventures themselves. Occasionally, I toy with the prospect of DMing an rp campaign. Chase’s example showed that store-bought material could furnish a complexity that a novice might omit. Cory somewhat made this mistake in his vampire chronicle when he sent us across Canada or something like that. Appearantly, he hadn’t planned out challenges for the trip and collapsed under Rob’s badgering of “and then what happened?”

Foolishly, I copied and pasted each encounter’s flavortext into a file for later study. While seemingly simple, mid-level adventures have thirteen encounters and high levels feature eighteen. The whole became unwieldy and unreadable, not in the least because the system reused encounters no matter the level. The game chafed under the class “work” rather than amusement. I quit the task midway into the second generation.

In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered copying the encounters at all. Others had done so already. The second character gets to inherit one item from its previous incarnation. Like many new players, I stressed about this and another aspect: potions. The program lets a character carry two potions during an adventure. Two types exist those that increase a particular statistic, whether strength or resistence to undead, or those that heal the character. The first time I played, I checked in every ten minutes to witness the encounter update. Then I’d copy the flavortext and sweat about whether to use a potion or not. My stoicism had crumbled under pointless obsession.

Finding the Tiny Adventures Wiki dispelled all that. Its contributors have uploaded every encounter (story and random), piece of equipment, and character class ability. They even revealed the different generation perks. For some reason WotC kept these a mystery, which works against them. Knowing that I could eventually inherit some of my ending money encouraged sticking with the game. Keeping it a big unknown fostered disappointment and ennui, especially after the third generation unveiled “ironman” mode. That gifts the user a character that retires when its character fails an adventure through death. Ordinarily, death (x<0 hitpoints) sends the character home to heal. Instead, you can have your character retired with midlevel equipment via underconservative choices. The wiki page dispelled the disappointment of similar features by fostering hope.

My relationship evolved in other ways with the app. I debated whether stat potions and then even healing potions are worth the price paid. I tried every class and resisted revisiting some when their best and otherwise unequipable items turned up. These struggles informed my current strategy.

The strongest character is one who has the highest mean ability modifiers with a given set of equipment. This informs most decisions. Which item do I pass on to my next generation? The wiki reveals the base ability scores and, depending upon gender, this could be two or three 10s or 11s. The best item plugs these gaps, preferably via a crown. Encounters reward crowns least frequently, so later items of greater frequency(amulets and bracers) will tempt less juggling. Shouldn’t I use items that beef up my hitpoints? No, I thought so too, though and kept wasting gold on troll skin armor (+10). The character loses hitpoints when he fails; using equipment that increases ability modifiers might have ensured success instead.

There is one exception to the above principle, story encounters. The wiki documents the scores each tests, so a dedicated player can check in just before the encounter updates and redistribute items to maximize the modifier. As I don’t care to time out this reappearance, I just leave them. As I am finishing up my ninth iteration, I sell all my useless equipment to bump up my gold inheritance. In fact, I will test a new technique. Normally, I end wearing my best equipment since these are tenth level encounters. I get to pass on a quarter of my gold. So, I saved the loot from the first levels to replace all the elite armor. Likely, Sam Bole will fail a lot more encounters. But, he is too close to retirement to chance wasting the opportunity.

My next and final character will be a rogue, so I will have played with every class. The male’s dump stats are Intelligence and Constitution. I will inherit a ring to plug int and use the five thousand inherited gold pieces to buy whatever will fix my con. While I would like to have used a woman for variety, the female rogue has three dump stats instead of two. His name will derive from Haettenshweiller. It isn’t as popular a font as Calibri or Tahoma, but the name I chose is cooler than “Cal Ebree” or “Ted Oma.”

But for the opportunity to throw lots of gold to the last character via a naked, final adventure and writing this review, I have no interest in playing Tiny Adventures any more. The stoicism necessary to play a game with almost no interaction nulls my interest. The real benefit comes from justifying visits to Facebook, which I would otherwise visit less frequently. Besides checking on Sam Bole, I check our D&D group’s page for updates and comment on other’s status updates or renew my own with whatever book I am reading.

Still there is one final word on maximizing the encounter survival: potions. They are not worth the gold paid at any level. I didn’t intuit this because I had stopped checking what stat the encounters tested. The wiki has noted the two most likely for each terrain type. Since these seldom last more than a quarter of the adventure, I didn’t bother studying. But, I wanted to know when it was worthwhile to buy healing potions. Seeing the answer pushed me toward the realization that succeeding individual encounters benefits more than lasting to the final one.

To test, I noted the total gold awarded for each adventure, grouped by level, for two generations. I averaged the three or four adventures per level to hide the idiosyncracies resulting from completion or early death. In writing this review, I noticed my first character’s encounter notes could have been used to further dilute outliers. But, it isn’t altogether important since the success rate (and rewards) reflects the strength of the presiding strategy rather than a general reflection of the adventures themselves.

So while you could buy healing potions as soon as the fourth level (on average), it isn’t really conscionable until the sixth level because the hero would spend all his income on the potion itself. The stat potions are even worse value because – during the four encounters each lasts – the adventure will test it once or never. Money buys potions or equipment, so equipment’s permanent benefit justifies the expense.

Wizards of the Coast likely hopes we will use potions or test our luck with potions or iron man mode because of the scoring system. Encounter success under these conditions or higher challenge ratings net a higher score. What they ignore is the very point of a scoring system in the mind of the player. The app fails to maintain scores into the new generation. Somehow I suspect others parallel me in not writing down my scores so I can measure how lucky I am now compared to two weeks ago. They show our friends’ scores, but these are incomparable when we are different levels. I wouldn’t even mention the “feature” if it didn’t reflect the generally foolish design of the whole game.

And yet, Tiny Adventures figured largely into my visits to Facebook. I would log in every three hours or so (90 minutes for the adventure, 90 minutes to heal) to send himer back out. Now, I am only returning to check and comment on my friends’ status updates. I did it before incidently; but, without other justification, the whole feels like an exercise in stalking. This realization came before its time because I failed to make the right character. I inattentively pressed a Fighter character rather than a rogue. In protest, I decided to stop early.

I have some options at this point. I can visit Facebook less frequently, just daily. Tiny adventures holds no value, but it gives some structure to my schedule. Or, I could try some other game app. Mafia, which I tried months ago in sympathy with the forum version of the game, blows chunks. Scrabble is nice but demanding, in time and effort. I guess I will check out Mafia wars. My cousin does not shelter his friends from occasional, obscure updates (Mark is looking for a tie and a rubber ducky). Chase also mentioned he plays it, so now is the best time to try it. Facebook runs counter to a solitary experience.

I read the chapter for an argument class that waxes on summarizing or paraphrasing arguments and how to do so. In total contrast to its banality, the author ended with Susan Jacoby’s “First Amendment Junkie.” I encountered it elsewhere but time hasn’t blunted the editorial’s clarity. On a lark, I read the suggested exercise for the chapter. If the professor had assigned it, I would be writing 250-500 words about freedom of speech. Specifically, the author solicits opinions in regard to a hypothetical letter to the editor in a school paper that included a racist/ethnist remark (“deny Arab immigrants entry because they want to destroy America”). He even did some of the work by offering three general responses that reaction letters gave both in favor and against (favor).

For a couple seconds, I considered answering unabashedly, as practice. In my notebook, 350 words is roughly a page and three-fourths. But, I can’t let myself. Obviously, the prospective task tests neither our summarizing ability nor our conclusion. It is practice forming a reasoned argument, how cute. The likely majority of responses suffer from a general lack I sense in argument classes (and some philosophy classes): conveying a sense of a totalized context.

What would I normally write? “Our country was (somewhat) populated by religious exiles. They fled the notion that the beliefs they espoused were spiritually deviant. [Feh, argument from Authority.] We, a more enlightened populace can ignore the intellectually bankrupt rather than censor them.”

Alternately, I can argue the opposite just as easily. “The editors were chosen to ensure a level of quality within the publication that the ethnist letter subverts. Certain acts are impermissible in any society that endeavors to escape self-immolation. [Snore, slippery slope.]  Giving space to similar opinions cultivates the impression that all is encouraged and nothing is forbidden.”

These – and any artificial debate constructed between those two representatives – fails because they are ships passing in the night. Namely, they are trading premises, or selected facts supporting them, without either listening or convincing the other. The pointless exchange happens in every forum’s political/unrelated section. The atheist says “god doesn’t exist;” the theist says it does. (Oh, that is why it is so important that people take these critical thinking classes. They progress past the juvenile mud slinging.) No, not at all. Here they learn about sophist tricks to use and catch opponents invoking; but, no one pursues a totalizing view of the world so as to make lasting decisions. (Nicholas, that is outside the scope of any single class.)

Yes, that is why I pursue a major in History. I am not interested in teaching history (at least not initially). I am not interested in learning the daily routines of the third Ming empress and Charles De Gaul. History, to my mind, presents the simplest means of obtaining a totalizing education.

Consider a ‘perennial problem:’ recreational drugs. Nimrod says, “Addiction drives people to steal and impoverish their families.” Dimwit responds, “Such already happens to alcoholics, even underage alcoholics.” I want these student presentations to involve greater depth. (Presumably they encounter that depth in the books they use to write their research papers.) Fine, permit superficiality as a consequence of impacted time. But, my coworkers, my father argue or exchange complaints about the world at that same level.

I acknowledge that the level of competence I desire for myself and others demands a lifetime of study. Rigorously testing the idea of only legalizing marijuana requires searching out specialized statistics that even congressional commissions and reports summarize. That constitutes the reply to ‘read a book about it.’ Which book do I read? The great majority present facts and eloquent arguments in support of a specific thesis. Any student of history knows this bias as Historicism. To my understanding, a totalizing view can counteract, or at least indicate the level of compensation required to mitigate limited viewpoints.

I am not the only person to desire a totalizing reference. Consider the Utilitarian, who survives in the mainstream under the aegis, “do the greatest good for the greatest number.” Obviously, that is a gross simplification of the philosophy. Still, generally utilitarians should subscribe to a periodical of the sort I imply. If I am to spread the fruit of my labor to those who most benefit from it, it is imperative that I be able to compare the (universal) return of donations to surgically correcting cleft lips versus paying for African’s school supplies. Yet, previous searches returned nothing. (Perhaps, the problem is my search term.) Nevertheless, without a central (usually liberal), comparative encyclopedia, the utilitarian relies on the inefficient osmosis his social circle offers. (Hey, check out this new NGO I learned about.) For any committed Utilitarian, the philosophy represents a rejection of suboptimal charity schemes that typify factionalized altruists (communists, Christians).

This post can not end effectively. (Unfortunately?) I am self-aware enough to know I did what I discourage: declare my core belief and bid you adopt it. (Well, attitudes are rather hard to measure and correlate against ‘decadant’ societies.)

Learn all you can about an issue before forming (arguing) an opinion about it.

Oh, but I don’t have time to learn about minutia. This particular Aspect ought to shock you into agreement anyway.

Well, here is an opposing (limited) set of facts to counter-balance your own. Is this really an effective way to learn about contrasting facts? We are in an arena where one is called to integrate and respond to them with short notice. Sure, we could go home and research the other’s citations, but wouldn’t I have done that if I were interested beforehand?

Well at least more facts are aired in these situations than people otherwise encounter.

But the presentation is somewhat jarringly structured. Who are we informing, a mythical ‘undecided’ person? Those who hold – comparatively – weaker convictions will more likely hear soothing arguments to support their initial feelings than use this as an opportunity to rethink the issue entirely, especially with the hectic pace of conversation.

You short-changed my side of the argument there, reflecting your own bias, Nicholas. You haven’t transcended your position because yours isn’t neutral. Despite dismissing the ‘for or against’ positions to the question of free speech as superficial, your entire thesis revolves around examining all facts and interpretations of those facts. You can’t bootstrap yourself beyond the dualistic answers via any logocentric dialog.