Car News

Hi everyone. Hope y'all had a Merry Christmas and got plenty of
gaming in over the holidays.
Look, I don't know what to make of this letter I got from Paul
Cardwell, so I decided to post it here and let everyone read it---no
editing done, this is just a the way I got it; a simple cut & paste
(which by the way is the extent of my computer graphics knowledge.

It seems Paul thinks I've insulted him and if I did, I apologize. I
read something that I didn't agree with, and I wrote a note basically
saying same. In fact
as I re-read the posts, I find I agree with him on most counts. I
don't think he wants game conventions to get a bad reputation, and
neither do I. We seem (or I thought we seemed) to have othet things
in common as well--like freedom of speech without being bullied.

When I first met Paul, it was by phone, waaay back when D&D was still
owned by TSR and I answered an small ad about CAR-PGa. He was
gracious and informative. He was a Methodist minister, and I grew up
Methodist, so I felt a kinship of sorts. He explained the toils and
troubles CAR-PGa had had with GAMA and some other insider stuff that,
of course, I was completely ignorant of. I thank him for widening my
horizons. Then, about a year later, I made a horrible faux pas. You
know when your sub to the newsletter ends? And Paul puts a check mark
on the back page indicating it was time to renew? Well, I took great
offense at that--somehow thinking it was wrong to assume I was going
to renew, or wrong becuase it seemed rude, or really--I was just an
ass that day. Paul wrote me a note explaining the situation and
offering to NOT use the checkmark method with me again and letting me
know that at one time he thought it would be fun if I lived closer, so
we might game together--but now he had changed his mind. I can't
blame him. As I said--I was an ass, and far from tactful or
considerate. I did apologize, and have tried to send pertinent
material for the archives over the years (though my contributions are
admittedly very slim).
Now that the history lesson is over, recently it has seemed to me that
a lot of this forum has devolced into political discussion and
intrigue that I find....BOOO--RING. If you can figure out the what
the last 3 paragraphs of Paul's missive to me (republicrats, and
Soviet non-people people, and Al Gore) mean, and how they are relevant
to role-playing games, please write me and let me know. I felt the
same way before: there was some discourse a while back about the Boy
Scouts, and I never followed that one into this little niche hobby we
all share. But, I figured--no skin off my nose.

As for Paul's mention that tradition dictates that all posts remain
true to the title, as I said earlier, I'm not a computer person. As I
also said, I'm a freedom person and I don't believe going off an a
tangent in a forum about fantasy games that encourage thinking is
going to cause the world to slip off its axis.

To all of you, a Happy New Year! And now, a few words from the
Chairman:

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Tact and consideration? Is that what you call an ad hominem
outburst? You have previously asserted your t-totaler status,
therefore how can my comments be directed at you personally?

If there has never been an Animal House game convention (and to my
limited knowledge there has not), does it follow that there can never
be, no matter how the environment is changed? That has always been my
concern, considering that high-priced alcohol has always been
availble, but not free and promoted.

Yes, the "previous letter" was quite innocent and on the general
subject at hand, but you chose to employ the tactics of the schoolyard
and the reprehensible aspects of the recent election and accuse the
opposition of the tactics you are emplying in order to make any
defense against that accusation easily reduced to "you're one too".
Yes it worked quite well in the last election campaign (although not
quite as effective as the Soviet "nonperson" tactic used by
Republicrats against me), but just as that has damaged the country, so
your tactics are damaging CAR-PGa.

second letter

It is the tradition in online discussions to keep to one topic. You
kept to one topic (personal attacks on me) in two postings in the same
day, it shouldn't be too hard to separate two topics into two postings
on the same day. The reason for this is particularly relevant to CAR-
PGa - archival cataloging - as any of the multitudinous professional
librarians and published researchers in the group can explain.
Remember, the Internet was originally set up for communication between
the Pentagon and the various universities they had under contract.
When Congress expanded it to the general public (and Al Gore was
indeed a sponsor of that bill), many of the same academic features
were retained, this being one of them.

As for parsnips, I have not tried them either, connecting them to the
great line from Pogo, "There's nothing worse than unignited love,
'cept maybe coddled parsnips or french-fried watermellon!" And I
would put Andre Segovia or Pepe Romero, or on a different but related
instrument, Ravi Shankar, far above Page and Hendrix.

Paul

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