Netflix and chill

This weekend I donated platelets. I’ve been a donor for about a decade and a half; I’m not exactly sure when I started, and my Red Cross phone app only goes back 100 donations, which was some time in 2013. It is more helpful in keeping track of the number of units I’ve given so far: 361. Platelets are measured in units of at least 3 x 1011 individual platelets, of which I give six each donation, along with two units of plasma. It’s hard to tell what this works out to in volume or mass, but each of the plastic bags containing a unit looks to hold about a pound of a thick yellow syrup that resembles butterscotch topping. If my guess is accurate, I’ve donated about two times my body weight at this point.

The donation process is called apheresis, and how it works is you get hooked up via IV tubes to a machine that sucks out a little bit of your blood at a time. Deep inside this contraption, a centrifuge spins the blood at a terrifically high speed, which separates the platelets, which are a different density from the other blood elements. The platelets get shunted away into the previously-mentioned plastic bags that hang in a row above the apheresis machine. You can watch them fill, which is oddly satisfying. The remainder of your blood gets returned to you—this can feel a little odd at first because it’s never quite the same temperature as the rest of your body. The procedure can either be done using two tubes attached to two arms, one for out and one for in, or by cycling the draw and return using just one arm. By the time the donation is done, all of your blood will have been removed and returned to your body, which will either fascinate you, if you’re like me, or make you feel faint, if you’re like most people.

Platelets are used in a variety of medical procedures and therapies. One of the most common uses is as part of courses of treatment for leukemia. The disease causes abnormal blood production and one part of that is a low platelet count. Units of platelet are also used in surgeries for traumatic injuries and organ transplants. In these cases, blood loss is a dangerous problem, and platelets produce clots that seal incisions and lacerations. Platelets even support wound healing and tissue growth.

One of the things I like best about the donating process is its anonymity. I get to know where donations go (in my case as far north as Maine, as far south as North Carolina), but I will never know who received them, or why. The recipients will never know me either. I like to think about the way a part of me traveled off in the world to be a part of someone else for a while, and the fact that I will never meet them is part of the charm.

This is an old photo. They no longer use the squeezy blue ball, I sort of miss it.

My wife has often told me that she thinks I am brave and selfless to donate because she absolutely hates needles and having blood drawn, and she couldn’t put up with it for a few minutes, let alone the two to two and a half hours a platelet donation takes. I feel like a fraud when she commends me like this, because needles have never bothered me, and I like sitting still and zoning out. I enjoy the fact that I have no responsibilities for the next couple of hours. I have even fallen asleep a few times during a donation (which isn’t a good idea if you have sharp metal objects stuck in your arm). When I give platelets the phlebotomists are doing all the work and I’m relaxing, watching foreign sitcoms on Netflix.

My wife, by contrast, has volunteered for the last couple of decades to lead a theological and philosophical reading group at a nearby prison. For this she has to develop a reading list and prepare notes. Every month spends an afternoon enriching the lives of men who are serving decades-long, or even life, sentences. The trip, including a substantial drive there and back, takes about four hours. To me, that’s work that deserves praise, and work I could never do, because I am autistic (have I mentioned this?) and I suffer from social anxiety even when dealing with people I know. So she’s the hero in the couple, or at least that’s what I think. She, of course, would say different.

I once saw a video in which a photographer said the best camera is the one you have on you. You can buy a top-of-the-line DSLR and outfit it with the most expensive lenses available. But ultimately, if your phone is what you carry around with you, that’s your best camera. Similarly, the best charitable work is the work that you are likely to continue. Volunteering isn’t about doing things that take the most effort or even deciding which cause is the most deserving of your support. It’s about finding something that lies at the intersection of what needs to be done and what you can do.

If you are like me, wanting to do good in the world but also very lazy and perhaps antisocial, you might consider platelet donation as well. You get a warm recliner with heated blankets. The staff mills around and coos over you like mother hens, asking how you’re doing and offering pillows. You can watch Veronica Mars for two to three hours and still feel virtuous. And when it’s over and the last of your blood is returned, they bandage you up and send you to a folding table they charitably call “the canteen.” Here you will eat the junkiest cookies you ever tasted and sip small boxes of fruit juice. And if you’re lucky maybe there will be a promotional tee shirt or tote bag that week.

This weekend the canteen was unusually crowded with donors. Two older guys with scruffy gray beards and worn jeans were comparing their lifetime donations. One proudly gave his number as 700. So I guess I have a ways to go yet.

Darkest Dungeons

In an earlier post I discussed the board games of my 70’s childhood. That one was popular, so here’s an essay about the games that came after.

One evening in 1977, my dad mentioned that some of the kids at the college where he taught were playing a strange new game that was played with pencil and paper and a variety of eccentric dice. Also sometimes lead figurines, but how they fit into the game did was unclear. He was talking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons, which at the time was only three years old and very much a niche activity for the kind of young man who owned several Frank Frazetta posters. My older brother Rob, who had been obsessed with fantasy since my father read us the Lord of the Rings, wanted to try this thing out, so the next Saturday my dad drove us out to the Hobby Models store in Peoria, Illinois.

Original D & D
The original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and its predecessor/supplement, Chainmail (1968). Rob bought all of these and if he hadn’t worn them to shreds they would now be worth approximately 100 bajillion dollars.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Midwest was a hotbed of indie game production, and the birthplace of role playing games. Dungeons & Dragons was the product of game publisher Tactical Studies Rules, and TSR was situated in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; the science fiction RPG Traveler, which was an early competitor to D & D, was published by Game Designers’ Workshop, located in Normal, Illinois. Even before he co-created Dungeons & Dragons, designer Gary Gygax had established the annual game convention that would become Gen Con (named after Lake Geneva, its original host city).

Computer Space
Computer Space: groovier than it had a right to be.

The first time I entered the Hobby Models store was as much a mind-expanding experience as if I had wandered into a head shop on Ocean Front Walk1. We may have come in search of Dungeons & Dragons, but the inventory ranged from model rockets to balsa wood and tissue kits to an enormous yellow Computer Space cabinet, the first coin-op video game (1971). Roughly a third of the floor space was dedicated to Napoleonic miniature war games. A small group of scraggly men in torn jeans and stained tee-shirts were hunched over a miniature battle ground made of green felt stuck on a sheet of plywood, supported by a pair of saw horses. On this battleground were hundreds of painted metal figures of infantry, calvary, and artillery. Players made their moves by measuring inches with a ruler; once a unit had fired in a turn, tufts of cotton smoke were placed as markers until the next turn, usually an hour or two later at the rate they played.

Miniatures
Waterloo: I was defeated, you won the war.

The front of the store was where the indy games were, and here Rob was able to procure a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. For anyone who has not seen the original booklets this game came in: the rules were next to indecipherable. There were only three ill-defined character classes and the text kept referring to an earlier game by Gygax, Chainmail, which was a set of rules for miniature play. The set actually told players they would need a copy of Chainmail, which seemed to me (and still seems to me today) like a cheap move by TSR.

Huh?
Some of the baffling rules from the original games.
Why not check the whole thing out on the Internet Archive?

In a way, the original game of D&D was a set of story-based interludes to spice up your figurine play, and it was only after a series of four supplementary books that the game evolved into its recognizable stand-alone form that charmed nerds across the nation and terrified their parents, who by the early 1980s believed the pastime to be demonic.

Dark Dungeons
Concerned mothers are warned of the inevitable progression from playing D & D to worshiping Satan in the Jack Chick tract Dark Dungeons (1984).

Rob was 13 when he began to play role-playing games with friends and I was 10. I wish I could say that I took to the game as well, but 1) I found the constant dice rolls took me out of the fantasy, and 2) Rob didn’t want his dumb brother hanging around and harshing his game night vibes. But while I wasn’t much of a player, I did find the rule books fascinating, and even more so the many odd games that emerged in Dungeons and Dragons‘ wake. There was Tunnels & Trolls, whose name was a bit too on-the-nose as a clone. There was Chivalry & Sorcery, whose rules were maybe 20 times more complex and were printed in blotchy 9-point text that looked as if it had been photocopied a dozen times. There was Bunnies & Burrows, in which players played as rabbits à la Watership Down.

But if RPGs were not for me, Hobby Models also was a doorway to the a fascinating world of small-press board games, and particularly microgames, that I did come to love. But since this essay is already longer than I planned, I will get to those next post. To be continued.

  1. I have searched in vain for interior photographs of this store from the late 70s or early 80s but I guess not everything has made it into the digital era. I did, however, find this charming advertisement from (I’m guessing) the 1960s: ↩︎
Hobby Models
Remember to keep your gifts constructive!

I always feel like somebody’s watching me

During my septoplasty convalescence I spent a lot of time doing nothing. I had optimistically planned that I would spend the time reading, or at least playing video games; but when your nose is sore, bloody, and full of plastic packing, the constant pain and exhaustion leads you to seek entertainment that requires no thought. So I ended up watching a lot of YouTube. More specifically, I ended up watching a lot of reaction videos. For those of you (perhaps blissfully) unaware, reaction videos are videos where you watch the host watch, listen to, read, or otherwise experience something else, normally in real time. These are extremely popular because they are relatively low-effort to make, requiring a minimal set-up and no fussy production values; and the videos tend to be long, giving ample opportunities for monetization (i.e., ads); and (most importantly) easy for the algorithm to index and recommend.

In some ways the lowly reaction video belongs to the high-brow tradition of criticism and analysis. A scholarly monograph on the works of Faulkner could be seen as a reaction by a fan; a New Yorker movie review is likewise a record of the writer’s experience watching. More recently, since around the early 2010’s there have been “Let’s Play” videos in which a host plays, and comments on, a video game. These can be demonstrations of skills or interesting play styles, but they’re just as often a chance to watch someone’s shocked reaction to the big twist in Bioshock1 for the 52nd time. But the modern react-to-anything trend really got started with the pandemic, like so many other stuck-at-home-on-the-internet pastimes.

Some reaction videos fall into the category of “professional” commentary. For example, an M.D. might discuss the accuracy of an episode of The Pitt, or a Michelin-rated chef might critique the techniques used in an episode of The Bear, or a lawyer might count the number of criminal offenses in a Fast and Furious installment and tally up a suitable prison sentence. These sorts of videos are what attracted me to reactions in the first place, and they remain my favorites, because I love watching experts bullshit about stuff that doesn’t really warrant analysis. Beyond these, there are long-form video essays that provide deeper analysis and historic or cultural context for a work of media, or obsessive three-hour fan videos whose recap is much longer than the episode or movie being discussed.

But the vast majority of reactions out in the wilds of the Internet today are simply those showing John and Jane Does respond to stuff. It’s a way of vicariously enjoying the pleasure of seeing or hearing something for the first time—the main criterion is that the reactor have never been previously exposed to the subject: a virgin. These videos can be fun, particularly if the movie/tv show/song is a work for which you have a lot of fondness, or one that none of your friends or family is interested in. But let’s be real, it’s a form of emotional voyeurism. If you look at the histogram of what the most-watched parts of a reaction are, you will see predictable spikes where a big reveal happens, like the end of The Sixth Sense2, or two characters have their first romantic encounter, or the hero drops the movie title into their dialogue.

This communal catharsis is something that disturbs me a little as an autistic person. Neurotypical folk are very big on shared emotional states, on group opinion, and these can feel to me a bit like coerced assent. I guess it’s akin to the experience of watching a performance with an audience, but even that also can feel onerous to me—like I have to constantly monitor and adjust my responses to fit the group. For most non-autistic viewers, of course, the concurrence is the attraction, and I can appreciate that emotional reactions can provide a feeling of community, even if that community is an artificial one consisting of comments by dogeball28319 and IamFartGuy.

All in all, these videos are a pretty harmless, albeit frivolous, way to waste time online. However, there’s a category of reactions that are performative in way that skeeves me the hell out. These are ones in which the theme is “member of specific generational, national, or racial group reacts to something outside of their culture—and likes it!” These videos have titles like “Gen Zer listens to Led Zeppelin for the first time: mind blown!” or “Guy who only ever listens to rap cries real tears over the Carpenters” or “I never got the hype about Star Wars until I watched every movie in release order: some thoughts.” Like a Puritan conversion experience or a Congressperson apologizing for an affair, the reactor publicly performs the scales falling from their eyes: they have been missing out, but now they’re down.

These videos are pure confirmation bias, assuring viewers that their tastes and/or childhoods were the best ever. Comments are patronizing toward the reactor: “yes, kiddo, this was before fancy digital engineering, when artists could only record on adhesive tape using tin can microphones—back when music was still real.” Or they are selective in their nostalgia: “Imagine living back in 1985, when every single movie produced was a stone cold classic, and also gas was so cheap they gave it away for free out of garden hoses.”

But the weirdest comments of all are the ones that are pure pathos, in which the commentator claims a special connection to the movie/program/book/song by virtue of their own trauma. “This song was my mother’s favorite song that I played to her every day she lay in hospice wasting away to Glaubner’s disease.” “This movie was the last movie I saw with my dad before he joined the cult.” These comments are so pervasive and the misfortunes they describe are so severe that I assume they’re just made up, but I’m not sure if this is some sort of extremely dry humor, or if it’s some sort of kayfabe at work, or if the poster is enjoying the emotional response they get in the form of likes. I guess some could be real? Online discourse is problematic.

Anyway, join me next time on the blog when I read On the Road for the first time and learn that Boomer culture is the best, actually.

  1. Spoiler for a 19-year-old game: there’s a big twist. ↩︎
  2. Spoiler for a 27-year-old movie: there’s another big twist. ↩︎