If anything, Sydney Pollack’s legacy isn’t his roster of great character acting roles, nor his reasonable slate of directorial work. It’s his work as a producer – the most thankless of roles in the business, often unfairly dismissed as “money men” when the best producers are the most passionate hands-on creators of them all. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Sense and Sensibility, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Searching For Bobby Fischer – every one with his hands on it.

But this is probably his greatest single work: a timeless comedy.

There are worse legacies, by far.

Oddly, the thing that strikes me most about the passing of Robert Asprin is that if you’re looking for a better example to disprove the fallacy that substance abuse can create better writing, you couldn’t find a better example than him: it’s no secret that alcoholism turned his promising career to shit for a good swath of years, and no surprise that he used co-authors in his later years to keep up his expected output. You can even read his autobiographical allusion to his own alcoholism in one of the later Myth books (I think it was Sweet Myth-tery of Life), wherein he essentially scolds himself for being a bad alcoholic and letting it impede his career – which didn’t help him much.

It’s a pity, because the stuff he co-authored years later doesn’t come close to his early solo work, which is outstanding comic fantasy. I’m not sure how much of that had to do with his drinking problem (which I understand he eventually came to control) and how much of it with the simple degredation of talent that comes with age to ninety percent of all creative types. But when he was on, he was on.

And that was Jimmy Slyde at seventy.

Now that I’ve gotten over my initial impulse regarding any death (respectful nothings and maybe a joke to briefly dismiss the lingering fear of one’s own mortality), I wanted to write a little more about Gary Gygax passing.

When I was fifteen, I got kicked out of UTS, a private school in downtown Toronto. UTS was a school for the gifted of the gifted, the really, really smart kids. It was the best thing, in retrospect, that I did get kicked out, because I wasn’t popular and it wasn’t conducive to my mental health for me to be there. But at the time, it was devastating. I already “knew” I wasn’t likeable or cool; now, worse, I was being told by authority that I wasn’t smart, and if I didn’t have that then what did I have?

I’d picked up gaming while there, because gamers will more often than not tolerate people they don’t like in order to have a full round of players. (Some like to delude themselves into thinking this makes them more tolerant. It doesn’t, particularly, but everybody has their little, mostly harmless illusions.) I spent that summer reading guidebooks and feeling desperately lonely and absolutely terrified of transferring to public high school, where I didn’t know anybody and was convinced everybody was cooler than me.

I barely talked to anybody the first week I was there, but on my first Friday there, in my morning chemistry class, a couple of the burnouts in the back row who were already on the no-university-for-you track (partially by their own choice, partially not – this is almost always the case) were talking about their recently started up D&D campaign, and how they’d had this hell of a time with a kobold tribe their DM had thrown with them, and come on, kobolds? I said aloud, almost involuntarily, “wait, he threw a Tucker’s Kobolds at you?” [1]

And that was how I got into another D&D campaign, and made friends when I really needed them. [2] And the important thing to understand is that my experience is the furthest thing from unique. What Gary Gygax – along with the other patron saints of nerddom, your Roddenberrys and Lucases and Stans-and-Jacks – did was to give the nerds and burnouts and outcasts their very own lingua franca, their own culture. Even though the paper RPG market is diminishing with every year, a market of late-thirtysomethings not replacing themselves with younger players, it lives on in a thousand thousand iterations: World of Warcraft is just the most obvious, but they’re everywhere.

And I just wanted to thank him for that.

[1] Someone once said “girls can smell D&D on you twenty years later.” It’s true, but I’ve long since made my peace with it.

[2] To young high-school nerds reading this: the burnouts are your natural allies. They need smart friends and you need streetwise friends. The show wasn’t called Freaks and Geeks for nothing.

Whichever it might be, hopefully Gary Gygax has found his way there.

Heath Ledger dead at 28.

A good young actor, who I firmly believe was on the brink of greatness. Fuck.

Andrew “G’Kar” Olmsted, intelligent and well-written conservative blogger for Obsidian Wings, died in Iraq yesterday.

Son of a bitch.