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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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Text of the page (random words):
ied living person was according to wikipedia a touch over 122 years old life and death are a natural cycle and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality or at least a much longer lifespan i m not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that whether here or in an afterlife but instead i want to look at how we write about species races with vastly different lifespans than ours let s get the big one out of the way shall we this was the version i had as a kid i have no idea whatever became of it from ebay we write what we know so we project our lives our understanding and our emotions onto anything we create frequently that includes animals that don t live as long as us anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species 101 dalmatians anyone and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it s a direct 1 1 correspondence of course that s not exactly the case other animals are not us and while they may have individual personalities they don t have the sense of impending death that we have that means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn t impact what other animals experience while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things it s pretty likely that they don t have any real thoughts of the rainbow bridge like we do okay that s us looking at the lifespan of animals but what about our examination of other races species that are much older than us there s a quote by the science fiction writer editor john w campbell about approaching alien intelligence that applies here write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man but not like a man the other big one that we might as well talk about are the elves and dwarves of middle earth alan lee s cover of the tale of beren and lúthien by jrr tolkien star crossed lovers from two separate races beren and lúthien represented tolkien and his wife edith as they came from two separate worlds elves are immortal assuming they don t die due to violence or merely wasting away and while dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans even the númenóreans descendants of men who fought alongside elves in the elder days have a much longer lifespan than that of the regular folk our experiences of elves in tolkien s lord of the rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters they provide the world s exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead think of dumbledore s here s what happened part at the end of the first few harry potter books and you get the idea i ve mentioned this before unfortunately since google doesn t have this blog indexed i can t easily find it but when fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it s not a big deal we are doing ourselves a disservice think of it this way the entirety of middle earth s third age was over 3000 years which puts the equivalent in our time to be 975 bce the zhou dynasty in china divided rulership in egypt splitting of the kingdom of israel into two the gradual rise of the assyrian empire and decline in the old babylonian empire and the rise of the olmecs so looking at all the upheaval that s happened from that time to today the timeline presented by tolkien in the lotr appendices is incredibly simplistic no country nation has lasted 3000 years in our world the current nation of egypt bears no resemblance to the medieval mamluks much less the hellenistic ptolemaic or the new kingdom yet gondor and the elven kingdoms remained relatively intact and with a similar political structure over that time sure some empires have come and gone but nothing even close to what we ve seen in the real world however as time in middle earth has progressed the elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left middle earth for the undying lands even the threat of sauron didn t mean armies of elves marching against him in the war of the ring peter jackson s movies notwithstanding and the battle of the five armies from the hobbit was the largest military action the elder race performed in the latter half of the third age in one sense the gradual retreat of the elves from view leaving the world to the mortal races is rather natural if you re an elf you don t change but everything else around you does men dwarves hobbits and woodland creatures all grow old and die and you don t in the elves that manifests in terms of grief and weariness which is why they re drawn to the undying lands where they ll find a respite from the world s mortality my son years come when hope will fade and beyond them little is clear to me and now a shadow lies between us maybe it has been appointed so that by my loss the kingship of men may be restored therefore though i love you i say to you arwen undomiel shall not diminish her life s grace for less cause she shall not be the bride of any man less than the king of both gondor and arnor to me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting but to you hope of joy for a while alas my son i fear that to arwen the doom of men may seem hard at the ending from the tale of aragorn and arwen the return of the king appendix a tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the elves on a racial and personal level particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality and the rejection thereof brings to a person and their family however i think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality in the end the elves society didn t really grow or change over time but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification now that i think about it if there s one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long lived people in fiction or gaming it s that we really don t know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around or even a couple of people for that matter would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness such as tolkien s elves would they dominate society like the emperor of mankind in warhammer 40k would they become more rigid and black white in their worldview would they lose what makes us human the ability to connect on a personal level to someone to feel intense emotion to love and grieve to emphasize to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others while there s a lot of fantasy and science fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal in pop culture there s frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story but i think this is something that can t be avoided forever merely hand waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like well a regular person is missing the boat yes i pulled this out from my meme monday on age disparity memes from imgflip obviously the physical part of being immortal is one thing and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games the elves parted and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the speaker at sight of her caramon s mouth sagged open riverwind s eyes widened even raistlin stared his eyes seeing true beauty at last for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden from dragons of autumn twilight by margaret weis and tracy hickman pg 323 that impression by raistlin where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things really hit home the concept that elves had such a long lifespan in ad d 1e that laurana appeared to have no decay at all back in those days the lifespan of ad d 1e elves were about 4000 years so yea point taken the more you know from 9gag and given that the average video game player doesn t really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character i guess it s not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most if you re one of those in the back raising their hand and saying yeah but i do i care i m right there with you after all i played tabletop rpgs and i ve read a metric ton of sf f so yeah i ve got opinions about excessively long life or immortality another way of looking at intra species romances from the pathfinder comic hollow mountain posted on reddit the problem is we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who but a larger question is how does the longer lived person behave toward others do they look at their short lived brethren as merely cattle as playthings as children to be parented either strictly or gently as the great unwashed who need religious and social purity imposed upon them as agents of chaos to be destroyed or an annoyance to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim for me one thing is certain people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun what s it like to live forever grandfather he asked i don t know wolf said i haven t lived forever you know what i mean the quality of life isn t much different wolf said we all live as long as we need to it just happened that i have something to do that s taken a very long time he stood up abruptly this conversation s taken a gloomy turn he said from pawn of prophecy by david eddings pg 258 as you could probably figure out i disagree with david eddings presentation of belgarath in the belgariad from a story standpoint it works fine but i m under no illusions that the belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story if a person is 7000 years old i have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human if we are the sum of our experiences hundreds or thousands of years are a lot of extra experiences that literally nobody living or dead could possibly comprehend plus memory is a bitch and that s when people live our current lifespan can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago or 1000 we don t even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive there s also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people and if we ve done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens that s just for those of us with a normal lifespan so extend that out several centuries and what have you got someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else if you think it s hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view just try to do that if you re 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview at least he admits it from reddit i was thinking about this when i realized that the freakiest thing that any npc ever said to me in wow was this yeek think about the implications of power and vision that statement had in the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst but only someone with the age and prestige and power of the dragon queen could pull that off even then becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of alexstrasza is concerned in terms of age and power imbalance it s a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog which reminds me from reddit yeah sounds about right there s plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history but given what we know about physiology that s likely inaccurate to put it politely stick a pin in that we ll see that again later given that the so called cognitive revolution roughly 50k 60k years ago gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts we d have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that i realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times but sapiens by yuval noah harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book most well known for his decades of running astounding science fiction analog science fiction during the golden era of sf campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure i was first introduced to him throughout the essays in isaac asimov s asimov on science fiction if you can find a used copy around it s very much worth a read it feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about wasting sickness and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer i ve read a ton of tolkien over the years and so the only book i can definitively point to for some of this is the silmarillion although unfinished tales might have parts of it posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels books comic f sf memes musings video games tuesday march 17 2026 okay break s over one thing i learned while i was away from mmos for a week was that the world doesn t end if i stop playing okay that s a bit of hyperbole but given how fomo driven video games tend to be these days you d be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the virtual world rested on your shoulders that s the sort of quip that i could see seth mcfarlane make from reddit i have wondered whether i have the willpower to give up playing wow again especially given that i do have an active circle of friends in game which is something that simply did not exist in 2014 that wasn t why i took the break but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if i weren t around certainly kept me on edge to a degree sure enough after the weekend i got pinged by my questing buddy to see if i was doing okay while we hadn t actually played together in game for close to a year now she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids and even managing to get an atiesh we do still chat regularly and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3 4 days at that point after assuring her i was fine just doing other things for a while i concluded that i couldn t simply vanish unlike 2014 and to a lesser extent in 2022 from the simpsons via tenor so when i felt ready to login once more last friday evening i discovered a few items of note my friends were doing their own thing as they always had and that the active population on the anniversary servers had shrunk the former wasn t a surprise to me at all since everybody in our friends group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them but the latter was after a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers worth of active players on the anniversary servers we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend the layers as of 6 51 server time on dreamscythe us on march 16 2026 now admittedly i ...
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