Gamehole Con 2021 - Day 4

Day four was our semi-relaxed day.  The plan was for us to finish up ramen and the rest of the group to finish up Indian food and meet up at the Air BnB for some outside-of-GHC gaming.

E and I started the day by doing a long stint at True Dungeon "Weird Magic".  I think I've mentioned it in the past, but True Dungeon is a bit like a fantasy themed distributed escape room with a running story and experience and equipment.  Equipment is random depending on the tokens you get.  As a n00b this can be tough because if you land on an experienced team they'll want to try fighting at a higher difficulty to pull more treasure.  On the flip side, they can loan you equipment that levels you up, gets you more treasure, etc.  That was the kind of team we were on this time.  They did a great job of explaining it better than any team we've ever been with before. They even explained the "ghost" to us that no one explained last year as a friend who was ill and couldn't attend, but they could run him through on his pre-purchased ticket and use his tokens so he'd collect treasure.  

One of the guys amusingly explained to us that there were limits to ghosts as some obsessives had taken to running a dungeon with themselves and nine ghosts for a while to maximize their treasure [at an expense].  No photos because I don't want to ruin it for anyone.  The surprise of the story and the rooms is most of the fun.  This year's theme was sort of a cyberpunk witch  thing.  We did fail at one room where we had to align colored blocks by changing their colors in a machine with glowing lights on top....boom.  Damage.  But at least it doesn't eliminate you from the game.  E loves playing the thief...each class does something slightly different.  Pushes hockey pucks for damage, traces shapes to find clues or treasure, identifies symbols [oof, memorization] to cast spells, throws two hockey pucks, and more.

We played Space Invaders with Kane.  It's a branded version of Flip Ships, so it wasn't new for me or for E.  Also, a very fast game so we finished up early and found some lunch.  This is a GREAT game if you're looking for something party friendly.  Ms Klenko was there as well - just out of frame.

Some vendor hall photos.  E threatening me with a LARP-ing weapon. 

Kitsune, for sale.  A game E, and Klund, and I hate above almost all others.  We had a HORRIBLE time playing it several years ago and I made it worse by knowingly forcing an extra hour of play when it could have been over just to troll E and Klund.

I had to ask Apong if this was racist.

I own a Xeno game - an expansion for Axis and Allies - but this is downright weird.

Eryn came away with some loot.  Breast cancer suppotive Ticket to Ride trains, as well as Ticket to Ride Europe and Ticket to Ride India from the scratch and dent which was a holiday ask, so it was like Christmas early.  A cool pin, dice [including some not shown here that bend light like fiber optic cables - enough so that I initially thought they glowed], and a few bonus cards from Kane for Fuse.

 

Celtica was our last on-site game of the day.  Very old Ravensburger game with an ironic puzzle component where you build amulets.  Get a handful of colored wizard cards.  Move the wizards on the board any spaces that are all or part of your cards.  Some spaces good.  Some bad. Some draw another card.  We played two games and play was much better on the second game once players started taking some chances to score an extra card in a color to get past a bad space. It won a 2007 children's game award, so that'll give you an idea of the complexity.

 

Beer, local, spotted cow. I think Commuter was the other option in the gaming hall.  It might have been cheaper to keep a whole six pack in the car, but I saved most of my drinking for the AirBnB.  I don't like feeling tired while gaming with new players.  The little spider dude was already at our table.  I think that might be Eryn's third smoothie in three days.  The coffee/ice cream/smoothie stand is probably the best sustenance at Gamehole Con.

 

Back side of the beholder.  I sent it to my wife and channeled Michael Scott's "That's what she said."  Childish, but I felt it was a particularly fun use of the meme.

We had dinner at Morris Ramen.  Apong went a few times after we gave him the name/location.  Maybe my favorite place in Madison.  Young crowd and absolutely wonderful food.  We had the spicy ramen.  Can't recommend it enough.

Back at the house, we sat down for a five person game of Power Grid.  That might be the best number.  Boardgamegeek does say 4-5.  Apong added that red wall across the bottom to make sure we didn't stray into unusable German territory.

Klund won this one with some spirited bidding on ecologically responsible power.

We played minimal hands of The Crew, but enough to understand the basics.  The goal is to have different players take different tricks, in specific orders, etc, cooperatively.  I'm not sure I can play with just my wife, but if we have the neighbors over I'll get it out as it gets incrementally [hand to hand] more difficult over fifty round and the general idea is easy enough to pick up in a few minutes.

And we finished off the night with a game of Cosmic Factory as E now has their own.  We reserved a few minutes for packing and cleaning so that 8:00 a.m. games didn't mean getting up at 6:30 to check out. I think I took home about 80 percent of the food I brought with me.  Definitely overkill.

Dinner and More...

My day...pretty casual.  I worked from home.  Which is a good thing for work as I get a lot of extra time in never leaving the house.  I even tend to move less unless I remind myself.  I was going to study spring boot all day and barely got started I had so many other things to do.

We went out to Buster's for dinner with Kyle and Lisa.  Wings and chips and beer and fish tacos and such.  Nice dinner, although we finished up a little early.  I think they were headed over to Elevated (liquor store) to pass some time before they picked folks up at the airport.  Kyle handed off a bunch of mugs he'd picked up for me at Good Will.  I'm going to try the mugs for developers thing again now that I'm at a new place and no one can find my list.  He's got some good ones.  I should add, not only are these new people who probably won't find my list, but the person who found my list last time retired and can't tattle on me.

Lara, our German foreign exchange student, left yesterday after two and a half weeks.  She was a great addition to the family.  Poot took her to the pumpkin event at the zoo and Parasite (movie) while we were at Gameholecon.  Peter took her trick or treating.  And we got her to the D Spot and Chipotle (three times) and she watched a lot of baking tv and played a lot of board games (Sushi Go was her favorite).  It was sad she was gone so soon.

And Joe flew back to Ohio.  It was great to go to wings with him at D Spot and out for a beer at Town Hall while he was here.  I'm glad he's got his new gig.

Ah....and Sandy (my first boss) had her severance party last night.  Whole bunch of my old co workers were at Union 32 for several different "lay off" events.  Crazy.  At least they're all pulling down a package.

Hitler's Furies

Hitler's Furies was interesting.  I guess I've always assumed women were complicit in the holocaust (and not in the sexploitation way like Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS).  It seems to me you can't run a genocide without the full participation of the culture, at least in the 1940s (I think governments have only gotten more skilled at deceit).

Wendy Lower's book tries to cover that aspect of the war, but eventually falls short.  She says herself that there's a lot working against her.  Societal expectations that women weren't truly involved in the killings, or ever involved in killings of any sort, particularly children.  Modified histories by individuals keen to cover their involvement or who still believe the Nazis were in the right, but know history is against them.  Time - some of those she interviewed died during her research period and World War II and even the post-war trials are now far in the past.  And a variety of rationales and silence that have been perfected over the decades, from "I was just doing my job" to "My dead husband did it and I was trying to protect him with my original testimony" to "I didn't know that's what they were doing next door."  The result is that she has a very small set of use cases to work from and Lower has to rely on more of a conjecture approach, pondering how many other women might have been involved based on modern crime statistics, Nazi-era internalization of Jews as less than human, psychology, and what little she does have as indicative of mothers, wives, nurses, administrators, and guards.  It falls a bit thin when it comes to facts and first person accounts, and it doesn't help that her end notes are truly at the end without reference within the text.  I found myself wondering whether I should have checked out two copies of the book so I could keep one open to the back as I read along.

Still, some parts stuck out as particularly horrifying.

On page 86, Lower details how the disposed bodies were everywhere.  That not knowing wasn't necessarily a plausible excuse because you could smell decomposing bodies when you picnicked.  Your feet would sink into ad hoc graves.  And road gravel was sometimes loose because bodies were buried in the middle of the road.  "The sites of mass murder were not in out-of-the-way places; rather, they often encroached on the shortcuts and paths that connected towns."

On page 93 and elsewhere she accounts that whole sections of towns were cleared out, such as 10,000 (out of a town population of 15,000) were murdered in Novogorod Volynsk, and that Germans would recount pillaging in neighborhoods left vacant but still littered with Hebrew texts and personal belongings.  The visual of the texts scattered on the floors is a powerful knowing that the owners wouldn't leave them there unless they had no other choice.

The story of one woman feeding starving children who had escaped from a boxcar only to subsequently walk them to a mass killing pit and personally shoot them in the head one by one while they cried isn't an image I'm likely to forget.  And to leverage feeding them as a sympathetic instance in a trial rather than as an indicator of someone particularly cruel or psychotic (to feed them acknowledges them as human in my opinion, but then again I was never in Nazi-era Germany) speaks to the how deeply society was skewed.

There are significant portions dedicated to the aspects of the Holocaust run by those who weren't soldiers as those were more likely roles for women.  Administrators who handled the paperwork.  Women comforted the men who couldn't handle the killing and got them going again. Nurses potentially euthanized German soldiers injured on the Eastern Front (rumored under Action T4 - see Opposition).  And "The first Nazi mass murderess was not the concentration camp guard but the nurse.  Of all the female professionals, she was the deadliest.  Centrally planned mass killing operations began neither in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau nor in the mass shooting sites of Ukraine; they began instead in the hospitals of the Reich.  The first methods were the sleeping pill, the hypodermic needle, and starvation.  The first victims were children.  During the war, nurses gave thousands of deformed babies and disabled adolescents overdoes of barbiturates, lethal injections of morphine, and denied them food and water." (120).  Lower states elsewhere that midwifery was a role of power, and midwives could condemn a child as non-Aryan, resulting in the death of the child and potentially the mother, based on an assessment of the features sometimes tinged with personal bias.  The Child Euthanasia entry on Wikipedia covers many of the details including financial remuneration for reporting a child.

I found the Nazi mottoes and linguistic constructions Lower cites more frightening than Orwellian mottos and those from The Circle:

• "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" - children, kitchen, and church (30)
• "Juden Kaput!" Which gave me the willies.  Turning that phrase into a slogan, including for women's rallies, sums up the mindset.
• Ostrausch - the intoxication of the East (164) - the idea that going to the East, Poland and Ukraine, was akin to the wild west of the US and gave one a euphoria that led to a certain hedonism, wildness, and that even nobility.

One can smell a bit of Orwell's 1984 in the language, and if you look back at possible origins of his Newspeak (Wikipedia): "The Principles of Newspeak" is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, the Party's minimalist artificial language meant to ideologically align thought and action with the principles of Ingsoc by making "all other modes of thought impossible". (For linguistic theories about how language may direct thought, see the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.) Note also the possible influence of the German book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in 1947, which details how the Nazis controlled society by controlling language.

I'm going to end on the stupidest thing - in my opinion - I read in Hitler's Furies, because it speaks to what Lower was up against in trying to research the book and craft an idea of women's role in genocide.  Good historical work is often built on the accumulation of sound theory as historians leverage the ideas of each other and other disciplines and first person narrative.  Because so much of the first person narrative is potentially lies or obfuscation, Lower relies more heavily on the other aspects.  Trying to analyze the role of women in the Nazi regime obviously abuts the fields of criminality and psychology and those studies are full of a preponderance of nonsense about women as mothers, sex fiends, wives, and more. Before you can craft a meaningful story about women's roles in The Holocaust, you have to overcome meaningless statements like, "Another dubious theory posits that women have committed more crimes than have been documented, given that women are "naturally deceitful" and secretive.  The "evidence" provided is women's skill at concealing menstruation and faking orgasms (158)."  And yet those were attitudes that were believed and applied during the era and therefore important to acknowledge, not as fact, but as perception of fact that was acted upon by courts and doctors and actively leveraged by women themselves when faced with punishment.

A good book in many parts, just not executed well as a whole.