A Post Hobbit Pre-Mayan End-of-Cycle Day

We're five days away from the end of the Mayan Calendar, a phenomenon which has been excellent fuel for the Judeo-Christian obsession with End Times, and for which, had the original Mayans who crafted the calendar still been around, would have signaled that it was time to roll out a new large chunk of stone to...make a new calendar.

The Hobbit Part I came out last week. It would be a great and terrible irony if the world did end in a few days, with The Hobbit Part II still a year away from release, but luckily I have unshakeable faith in Occam's Razor, which says that it is a far more sensible explanation that "people are dumb" than that "Mayans knew the world was going to end two thousand years ago."

Anyway, the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was a fantastic movie, and you should probably go see it. I had a couple revelatory moments while watching it: first, it showed so clearly how indellibly the book influenced gaming at an early age, no matter how much people like to pull out the Gygax quotes about how he only added the Tolkien stuff to appease some of his players, but the truth is much more likely that (regardless of how he felt about the presence/absence of Tolkien in the game) that Gygax was at least mindful of how litigious Tolkien's Estates were, and that his game had an uncharacteristic level of influence by it in the final print form we're all familiar with (as so much fantasy did in the 70's and on).

So as I was watching it I was impressed at those bits that evoked childhood memories of The Hobbit for me, and also of how much of the structure of the book is embedded in pretty much all of my RPGs and specifically D&D) experiences ever since. We have the overland journey, the dungeon, the discovery of magic items, the wandering monsters...all of it has been indelibly embedded in our fantasy gaming ever since. The Hobbit is incredibly iconic for practically the entire hobby; it, along with Howard and a handful of others are practically the sum definition of D&D's roots, and their tendrils spread out from there.

So yeah, I liked the movie, although it did make me wistful for a time when this was all new to me, when the excitement of reading The Hobbit, or the Conan novels, or playing D&D for those first times was still a genuinely exciting experience. I do look forward to seeing what my son discovers in the future that will "grab" him in the same way. It could be literature and tabletop gaming for him like it was for me, or it could be something else, but ether way, I envy him his youth and appreciate that I get to see his interests and curiosity manifest.

Actual reliability for Predictions of Doom may vary

Calendar Countdown to the Apocalypse

Get it here while it's hot! I think I'll pick one of these up, they're going to be fantastic novelty items in a few years.

I can't even joke about it ironically....sigh.....actual familiarity with a subject sucks all the fun out of it. I wonder what it is about western European culture and it's wacky American offshoot that finds itself so obsessed with apocalyptic end times, enough so to co-opt a perfectly legitimate calendar from an entirely unrelated culture just to ascribe special significance to its effectively arbitrary termination/cycle date? After all, the end of the Mayan calendar to its original creator signified one thing: time to make a new calendar for the next cycle.

I think...correct me if I'm wrong....that the next big world-ending event to loom nigh after we get past December 22nd is the 2037 close pass-by of the 2004 MN4 NEO (near Earth object) that will no doubt lead to hillarious shenanigans my son can enjoy (and also hopefully myself at the ripe old age of 66).

In the meantime, I have an intense urge to find this guy, and forcibly shave off all his hair on national television while giving him a wedgie for the impressively anti-science, anti-rational thought show that is Ancient Aliens:



Seriously. Large Hadron Collider being a clear depiction of the Mayan (or Aztec?) Calendar? I'm eagerly awaiting the episode where he explains how ancient aliens brought us Michelin tires.




Y'know, I miss the good 'ol bad 'ol days of the Cold War, when an actual apocalypse was riding on the mental sanity of men like General Curtis LeMay. Now that was an era in which we could all validly place our collective terror of real annihilation.

So next time a wacky relative or friend goes off on a tangent about this (does anyone actually do that who's a real live person not on the internet?) link them this so they can fume and ignore it under the pretense its all a ruse to distract us from the horrible truth.