People can build stupid shit without alien influence, thankyouverymuch.

Wrote this to my wife after some time spent researching tombs, and realized I might as well post it here. It's tangentially related to my recent dungeon thoughts.

Whoops!

It's a constant source of humor to me that, any time a fictional Egyptian-style pyramid appears, it is full of rooms and halls to the point of being almost hollow. This is because we think of them as buildings - as architecture.

They are not architecture - they are tombstones. Most of them were not even designed to be as big as they are. They were originally short narrow step pyramids like the older ones, maybe a bit bigger, and then they started falling down so stuff was piled onto them to shore them up. In the case of the Bent Pyramid, they screwed that up and halfway up it started to crush the tomb, so they changed the angle. The result was an empty pyramid - the pharaoh had another built. After all, would you want to be the one buried in the fucked up pyramid?

At that point, they had these big things sitting about as a result of having to essentially repair the old tombs, but no one wants to go in a smaller tomb than the other guy, so they started making them that way on purpose. They built their little chambers, then built a large pointless step pyramid on top, then another on that and another on than, then finally a smooth outer surface. Essentially mimicking a process that had been accidental - "Oh shit! Guyfacemcdudeatep's tomb is falling! Quick, make the slaves shove bricks against it!"

This is why people who think there is anything magic or supernatural or alien about Egyptian construction are wrong (or at the very least, wrong that they needed magic or aliens to do what they did).

This is about as complicated as it got. By the way, this one
fell in because it was too complicated.

Egypt was full of people, and people are the dumbest, smartest creatures on Earth. We don't need aliens to tell us how to make thousands of slaves work themselves to death over a few decades ensuring huge stones fit together perfectly. Give me unlimited manpower and years to achieve it, and I'll make you a space station. And they weren't that smart, were they? If you actually know anything about architectural history, you know it was a process of trial and error and building up of knowledge and skill over the course of a 2000-year civilization. We look at the Giza pyramids, with their stones so tight you can't slide an index card between, and forget the slabs over holes in the sand, the step pyramids, the collapsed failures, the screw-ups like the Bent Pyramid. We forget almost every single tomb we find was robbed within years of first being sealed up, because a granite slab is hard to get through but the sandstone it's fitted in is not. The workers (and even priests) that stuck the body in there just came back and tunneled around the door.

Furthermore, and more to the point of why people want to believe those massive, massive things have something in them besides a tunnel and a dead guy - the dead need not justify themselves to us. We can hold them accountable in our minds, pass judgment on what they did... but it means nothing to them. They had their reasons, and those reasons went with them.

No.

No.

The pyramids map the stars, sharpen razors, cure cancer, contain our genome, are spaceships, etc. etc. etc... they have to be SOMETHING, right? They're so... big and devoid of purpose and that can't be true. And it isn't, but the truth is that they are devoid of modern purpose. They make no sense today. But when they were built, for the people that built them, they were the most important things in the world. To them, it wasn't stupid to build the biggest structure in the world to house one tiny room with a single dead guy and his stuff in it. It wasn't a comedy of errors that they had to keep shoring them up and rebuilding them. It was all extremely meaningful.

We are the smartest, dumbest creatures in the world - we do remarkable things for nonsensical reasons. But they are reasons.

I imagine all this can be applied to dungeon design somehow. You figure it out.

Skadi must Eat of Every Meat

Like barbarians? More accurately, like loving mockeries of Howardian fantasy archetypes? Even more accurately, appreciate a good butt joke?

You'll like Skadi as much as I do then. It's the Thursday update on Dumm Comics (several of the others are great too, though).

"Cry prettier, Jessica."

Another post unrelated to RPGs: sorry folks. But, I had to spread the word about this overlooked quote from Jessica Alba to Elle:

"I remember when I was dying in Silver Surfer...The director was like, 'It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry? Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like 'Don't do that thin with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'" And I'm like, But there's no connection to a human being. And then it all got me thinking: Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don't want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work?

Thanks to Written World for drawing this to my attention: You should really go read that author's thoughts on the subject. It got me wondering about not just Alba's post-Dark Angel career, but a lot of actresses I've long thought to be cast only for looks. In how many cases is that not their fault? How many are being directed to be bad?

On a Polygonal Horse He Rides...

Not dead, just busy. Anyway, here come this comic got nothin' to do with table-top gaming.

Unrelated: When we do Halloween, we do Halloween.

The daring steamship bandit Topper Lee, who never met a bank vault he couldn't blow big holes through.

Wanted across all seven skies, Evil-Eye Estrella has left a trail of death, destruction and flustered young ladies.

Left to right: Kitty's six-round mini-singularity instigator, this one's a Quantum-Industrial Labs "Imploder X-9Z." Only a handful of prototypes of the "Imp" were produced - the likelihood of adverse litigation made QUIL reconsider mass-marketing a purse-sized handgun that creates black holes inside people's torsos.

Chris's gun, also sporting a six-round chamber, is a Hydrogen-Carbon Fusion Cell Protocaster, a custom magnum version standard issue to the Priests of the Order of World Commerce. Rumors persist that Lee modified his to fire other ammo, probably due to the high rates of radiation poisoning among OWC's priesthood.

The problem with the Age of Steam was all the coal dust in the air. The problem with the Atomic Age of Steam is that the coal dust can mutate your lungs into a separate organism with its own motives that might clash with your own. Best to wear a mask when outside quantum-filtered air conditioning.

Unrelated: I think I may hate Google Instant

Started typing something that began with "How to become an" and this is how Google thinks people usually finish that sentence.

We Interupt This Blog for a Very Important Message

It's National Coming Out Day. All you have to do is look at the news to see the pain LGBTQ people are put through every day, and yet there are slimebags like Carl Paladino that STILL incite anti-gay violence and harrassment.

As a straight ally, I am SICK OF IT. My wife is bisexual. Many of my friends and clients are LGBTQ. The thought of anyone DARING to treat them as anything less than human is enough to make me violent.

2010 has to be the year it stops. Every gay youth that kills themselves in despair, every person beaten, raped or murdered for being who they are, every lost job, every slur, every time the word "gay" is used disparagingly, all the stupid jokes... every last bit of it is a stain on the soul of Humanity. There must be no more tolerance for hate.

You don't have to be LGBTQ to come out today. I'm prepared to fight for my loved ones, my friends, my fellow human beings... if you feel the same, announce it somewhere today. Twitter, Facebook, your blog, with a can of spray paint, wherever. And the next time you witness heterosexism or homophobia, remember that silence is no longer an option.

UNRELATED: Why Twitter is down today

@FiendAngelical figured it out. (I'm the one that edited the picture)