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# NASRTG
I downloaded an 8 gig torrent containing what appears to be scans of every Dungeons & Dragons manual, rulebook, expansion pack, module, &c from Chainmail all the way up to 3rd edition. There may well be 3.5 ed in there as well and I just didn’t notice. That’s including the game worlds, so Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk as well as the esotorica like Maztica and Spelljammer. It even has the Greyhawk Wars boardgame. Blackmoor. I haven’t checked for the Basic/Expert/Masters/Companions sets, but I bet they’re there too.
What the fuck? I mean really. What. The. Fuck?!? There is simply no way in the world I am going to peruse even a tenth of this let alone all of it. And I’m just talking idle scanning of it on screen. There’s buckley’s chance of me ever actually printing any of this, using it in a gaming experience, enjoying it. I have, in essence, just condemend myself to an eternity of having eight gigs less space than the file system is actually reporting. I can never get rid of this stuff; come on! It’s every D&D game book published! You do not just delete that kind of thing. You might as well officially give up and start trying to meet girls.
It’s not like I didn’t know what I was doing, either. When I found the torrent I stopped for a moment and flashed back to when Third Edition was published and I paid for it, one book every month on the day each was released in Australia, knowing full well that I was never ever going to use themi. I flashed back to buying the CD collection of Dragon magazine – and its forebear, The Strategic Review – despite knowing, as I lay down my credit card on the counter, that this was a collection of scans of a publication with a hit to miss ratio that makes the bad guys on any given A Team episode look like Carlos Hathcock.
Possibly it is an indication of how ludicrously cheap secondary storage is now. I have found my own personal Non-Accelerating Triviality Collection Rate of Storage – if actual storage space rises above the NASRTG the collection of pointless junk is likely to rise quickly. Tonight I kick off the torrents for a collection of MERP books and a horribly incomplete, but Malloryish collection of various Chaosium products. Not Runequest, more’s the pity, but Stormbringer, Elric! ii, Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu and Thieves Sanctuary.
Or maybe it just fills in the time while I pretend that I don’t really want to write, that all those little scenes that keep floating around in my brain have no legs.
And now for some small talk:
Cameron Reilly, a guy who went to my high school and started a podcasting business, advised in a blog post that people need to feed their brain with new material, that we should spend 10% of our income on books. If only; if I followed every “spend x% of my income on y” advice I encounter, even just the ones I agree with, I’d probably be spending twice the GDP of Tonga per year.
Duran Duran are in town. The pop band, that is, not the intergalactic villan. We are going. Or more precisely, D is going, I will be in the Entertainment Centre because D came to The Cure last year. She somehow managed to get tickets in the second row, despite only finding out about it last Friday. So there I will be, surrounded by women in their mid-to-late-thirties, close enough to count the wobbles in Simon le Bon’s jowls when he turns too quickly; I’ll turn and across the hall I will spot the only other man in attendance and we will nod in quiet ackowledgement. “Yes,” our eyes will say. “I too.”
i That I did in fact use them for some abortive attempts to find a gaming group doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination make me any less pathetic.
ii It is mandatory to pronounce the exclamation point when mentioning the game otherwise you are a liker-of-girls.
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20 days since 09/07/2010