Wasteland Wrap-up #61

Lyndon's 13th birthday, the audio of my discussion about post-apocalyptic TTRPGs, some thoughts on the Thor films...

This week was when we celebrate Lyndon’s birthday — he is 13 years old. Which is rather remarkable; that’s over 90 in “human years.”

Lyndon contemplates modernity at the Pont de Bercy.

And yet he’s still quite active, and in good health. If the weather is decent-enough (it was in the 40ºFs here this week, not too hot, not to cold), he’ll happily walk for hours (and then sleep most of the day). For his birthday we went on a long walk along the Seine — he loves a good waterway.

My feeble attempt to capture Lyndon running in a dog park last week — he’s the blur at the bottom of the frame.

He’ll even, sometimes, get worked up into a good run at a dog park with younger dogs. I try to make sure he doesn’t overdo himself in these cases, but it’s still nice to see him running around.

I know we can’t take any of this for granted. Age doesn’t work that way. Things go well until they don’t.

That’s part of the package one accepts if one gets a pet. (I’d say it is part of the package one accepts if one is born, but one doesn’t exactly consent to that, does one?) We’ve been fortunate that his health has been extremely good his entire life. We’ve tried to make sure he’s always fulfilled as he moves through the phases in his life and through the many places he’s been with us.

We don’t know Lyndon’s exact age. When we got him, he was a rescue from Mississippi, and they thought he was around 6 months old. Here are some Lyndon-as-puppy pictures from way back in the summer of 2013, when we were living in Washington, DC:

When we went to the shelter, “just to look” (that old lie one tells oneself), Lyndon seemed to glom onto us almost immediately. He was an odd little dog, some kind of hound mix, with a head that was a bit too big for his lean body, and a very serious demeanor. We were impressed from the start that he seemed to understand that he was not meant to use the bathroom indoors and seemed pretty capable of communicating that to us.

As a puppy, Lyndon was very active, and had a few months of being obsessed with chewing — toys, rawhides, whatever. And then suddenly, he lost interest in it, and never chewed again.

Lyndon in December 2014, after we had moved to Hoboken.

He’s always been an urban dog, always lived in apartments. He knows elevator etiquette and how to ignore other dogs and people. It’s hard to say which city he liked the most that we’ve lived in, but he seems to find Paris endlessly interesting. He loves novelty, and there’s a lot of that here. It’s also an extremely walkable city, which means that I feel pretty happy to walk in pretty much any random direction and see where it takes me, and that’s perfect for him.

Anyway, he’s a good pupper. Even at 13, he’s our little puppy.

ICYMI, for Doomsday Machines this week I interviewed Malcolm Craig, a UK historian who is also a designer of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), about the ways in which Cold War TTRPGs reflected different kinds of imaginations about the nuclear age:

I had a lot of fun talking with Malcolm about these games, how they work, and what they tell us about how people “play” at the end of the world. I have also managed, I think for the first time, to get the audio in a decent working state, so below you can find a link to the full interview if you want to listen to it. Malcolm makes references to visuals (books and box art and so on) and those are shown in the original post for the most part.

Next week I am begin teaching a class at Sciences Po on “Nuclear Technopolitics.” I wasn’t sure if it would actually happen, as the Sciences Po system told me as late as early last week that I had no enrolled students, and I was prepared to accept that. But I checked on Friday and, in fact, the class is now full, which is either a blessing or a curse. We’ll see! But you can look forward to regular updates here about what I’ve been teaching. As for what I’ll be posting to Doomsday Machines next week, I’m not 100% sure, but I’ve got a couple things in the hopper…