I met him at a D&D Con in Wisconsin almost 30 years ago. I admit he was kind of full of himself, and didn't make the best impression on this then teen. But he certainly inspired a lot of fun over the years, and at least a small part of my current career as a novelist can be attributed to the creative practice of dungeon-mastering lo these many years ago.

Good hunting wherever ye be, Master Gygax.

How does he continue to have a platform? The man is deeply creepy.

CSMS is truly wise.

CSCS is truly wise.

Is how humorless so many are.

"quoting anonymous blogger" RAWR! Anger!

"Obama is NOT" RAWR!!! Rage!

"Hillary is SO" RAWR!!! Spittle!

"I heart NADER!" RAWR!!!11!1 Heartattack!

That "anonymous" post hit you folks right between the eyes.

Oh, and cscs is not particularly "anonymous", which a moment at TPMCafe would reveal. The blogger in question has a long history there available for anyone who wants to see. Sure, maybe we don't know name, address, and phone number, but then who the hell is "A Billion Angry Bees"?

That is hilarious.

Omigawd, he had sex for money. That anyone cares says more about them than it does about Spitzer.

But then, Spitzer is such a hardcore law-and-order type in other areas, and given that he lives in a nation that FREAKS OUT about sex on a daily basis, it's no surprise if he goes down for this.

But whatever. At least there's still King.

And, golly, he sounds so proud of himself. Who'd've thought?

I wish I'd named my son Bumpus.

She's rude, talking over her guests over and over and over. Her thoughts are rarely fully formed. Her callers don't dare disagree with her (Rush Rhodes?) And she gets prime drive time?

Right after her in my market is the amazing, funny, thoughtful, appropriately biting Rachel Maddow. She should be in the Rhodes slot. She's much smarter, much more interesting, and much more respectful of her guests.

This kind of crap has been going on for a long time. Bullying, harassment, and misplaced violence is as old as human memory. Some people are just mean and petty and cruel, often poorly parented. MySpace didn't make those idiot savages laugh their crime off in their holding cell while worrying petulantly that they might miss cheerleading the next day.

I'm going to make a possibly unfair generalization here, but when I hear "X is the Anti-Christ", I'm guessing a conservative said it, i.e., those folks who blather on about "personal responsibility." And yet those same types are the quickest to point to some "other" to place blame. It's always something else.

Dear Sheriff Judd, In many ways you sound like a sensible person and a good cop. Don't fall into the trap of blaming them god-durned intertube interlopers from what those eight young adults did. They did it. Them. Not YouTube. Not MySpace. They did. Don't let your fear give them an out. They're responsible all by themselves. And here's the thing, they would have done it anyway. That's clearly the kind of people they are. Don't let them off the hook by blaming a computer server somewhere. Blame them. They did it.

Let's face it, if the risk of getting caught were a deterrent, there'd be a lot less of this sort of thing.

My time as a cop was mostly pre-YouTube/MySpace. Could be they were both around by the time I left police work, but they definitely weren't around for the majority of my time in the bureau. As a patrol officer, I took plenty of calls to local schools for bullying and assaults. Trash talk happened, and kids flipped out and tried to resolve things with their fists. They didn't need YouTube to instigate them.

Beyond that, bullies and fighting were more than plentiful when I was a kid, well before this so-called evil thing called the internet. And they were plentiful when my dad was a kid, and his dad was a kid.

It's fatuous to claim that current culture has desensitized kids. As a species, we're generally prone to violence as a problem-solving technique (hardly unique among the animals kingdom, of course) and always have been. Trash talk has existed throughout history, and petulant bitchiness has as well. Hell, they used to paint it on the walls in Rome a couple thousand years before the internet.

If anything, the current media culture, internet, teevee, etc. has made discussion and condemnation of this all-too-commonplace behavior more common. Violent hazing, violent bullying, domestic violence, peer group violence, all of these are things that are now discussed and analyzed in ways they never were before. Too often the analysis is idiotic ("movies are the devil, MySpace is the anti-Christ"), but at least we're talking about it more than we were in the past. Used it be, it was one of those things we ignored, or even encouraged. "You got beat up? Well don't whine to me, go be a man!"

We're savages. The only difference between now and the magical, non-existent then is now our savagery is better documented.

Silly typos.

With one click, all the interesting letters could be on one page.

She's been pushing me toward Obama for months now, but the moment she invoked 9/11 to make a specious attack, I'd reached the final straw. To hell with her.

But King writing about them makes them interesting. Even hockey.

I'm also in the shut the hell up about this bullshit already camp. Good. Fucking. Grief.

Chisel and granite, charcoal and bark, iron gall ink and parchment to Outlook is not an upgrade.

I lol'd.