More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted. Paradox. But an interrupted paradox is not simply edited—it is fundamentally changed, sometimes into the orderly, reasonable opposite it seemed destined to be. Because I never got to finish what I intended to say, a response (on the rare occasions when one was given) never seemed a response to my thought but, rather, to the simplified idea it had become.
Still, D&D has never quite resolved its relationship to reality. During the satanic panic of the ’80s, the game’s publishers stressed that D&D was a harmless leisure activity enjoyed by productive members of society — like reading a novel, only better. “This is a game that is fun,” a 1982 rule book amusingly stated. “You, along with your friends, will create a great fantasy story, you will put it away after each game, and go back to school or work, but — like a book — the adventure will wait.” Yet unlike a novel, a D&D campaign had no fixed ending; in fact, the game’s uncanny way of resisting all attempts to end it, like Scheherazade delaying her execution with yet another tale, was both a selling point and a real source of anxiety. “Game players often joke that they are ‘crazy’ or ‘insane,’ ” wrote the sociologist Gary Alan Fine in his 1983 study, Shared Fantasy, noting the community’s awareness of a “relation between psychosis and immersion in a fantasy world.” Early D&D media reflects this: Andre Norton’s 1978 novel, Quag Keep, the first book ever set in a D&D universe, concerned a group of players who are sucked into a fantasy world — and make peace with staying. A darker vision of the game would appear in the delightfully overwrought made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters, starring an unknown Tom Hanks as a delusional role-player who tries to jump off one of the Twin Towers and ends up in a permanent state of psychosis.
Pose a question to a Magic 8 Ball, and it’ll answer yes, no or something annoyingly indecisive. We think of it as a kid’s toy, but theoretical computer scientists employ a similar tool. They often imagine they can consult hypothetical devices called oracles that can instantly, and correctly, answer specific questions. These fanciful thought experiments have inspired new algorithms and helped researchers map the landscape of computation.
The Many Ghosts of Donahue Byrnes continuously challenges the idea that you can truly know somebody.
The story revolves around the concept of memory, mainly how we remember those who we have lost, and how we react when those notions are challenged.
If you long for the same kind of happiness a snowy day gave you as a kid, “How to Winter” will help you recapture that feeling. If you need a cold weather mood-booster, that’s here, too.