Thief Essay

[Margaret Sigars]

I wrote this essay about a band I hate in a way I hate no other band. I wrote this essay about the depth that can be found in hating something in such a special way. It was supposed to be for a sort of collection. Maybe it still will be. Enjoy or don't!

Miranda Reinert is a music adjacent writer, zine maker, podcaster and law school drop out based in Chicago. Follow me on Twitter or Instagram for more insights into the stuff I love and hate and love to hate: @mirandareinert. This blog does have a paid option and I would so appreciate any money you would be willing to throw me! You may also send me small bits of money at @miranda-reinert on venmo/on Paypal if you want. As always, thanks for reading!

I try to be an ethical thief, people admire Robin Hood, right? I'm not stealing to sell it, or buy drugs or be bad. It's just that my wages don't buy clothes and a roof and heating and pay all the taxes and bills. There are guys a block away that pull 300 an hour when I scrape 10. How are they worth 30 times more than me? Seriously? So I steal. I take the cheapest thing that will do the job and I feed my kids. It ain't luxury; it's survival and if you don't like it you can stick it because I do what I gotta do.

I was born for the love-nexus but society is a socially darwinistic money-nexus. We evolved for cooperation and support, we got competition and emotional indifference. I became a thief because I had no other way to live right. I'm not going to live as a slave in some mildew apartment. I have more self respect than that.

I have a right to dignity, but that comes with a huge price tag these days. Maybe I should be all composed and have self esteem some other way. I guess with all that love and care I got in those cheap-ass daycare centres and schools that treat you like an enemy from day one, I should have some resilient core. Maybe it's all excuses; I really don't know. All I know is that when I put on them nice clothes from them nice stores I feel like I might get some respect at least. It ain't love, but it ain't being given them shifty looks that say folks are scared of me cos I'm poor. I like that. I like it a lot. So I walk in all casual like and take it. Self esteem the easy way. Maybe one day I can shoot for more, something real, I damn well hope so.

They call it theft, I say it's ethical redistribution. I'm not going in noone's house, not beating on old ladies or pulling knives - I just do my thing, flow along, enjoy the day and stuff finds me. It's weird like that. But those ones in the suits they don't see it from where we are, that all these stores are their oasis, their bounty, but for us it's a mirage in the desert, cruel. We can see all that stuff we need, our kids too, but it might as well not be there at all. How would them suit people like to wake up and see only cheap unhealthy shit on the shelves and no decent clothes, cos that's our life. When does stealing become something else; I'd say when it's filling a real need. That's all I do, peaceful facilitating of providing for urgent needs. It's the fifth emergency service.

But when I came across it, I was one of very few role-players in my country. I often had to reinvent a lot of content simply because it was not available or prohibitively expensive. For a long time, our whole gaming group shared a single set of polyhedral dice because there was nowhere we could buy a second set!

Or, imagine making a TV series that was basically a rehash of Lord of the Rings with more knights and dragons, and fewer elves and high ideals. Can you imagine that kind of tripe ever getting even a second season, much less a third or fourth?

After H.P. Lovecraft, the horror genre is basically done. I doubt anybody would believe that something as ridiculous as a book about a haunted hotel watching over some remote Colorado mountains would ever amount to anything, even less that a director would turn it into an iconic movie, right?

The business and economics promulgated by that essay, that there was no market for fantasy games based on D&D, turned out to be hilariously off the mark. A mere few years after the publication of that essay we saw the flowering of the OSR, Pathfinder, and the 5th Edition.

At a vulnerable time, finishing university and unsure where to turn, lonely in a remote province, that rambling post was a crucial pair of cement boots that confirmed there was no point in writing the games and stories I enjoyed.

I think of all those young writers, young gamers, young artists, who love their Dungeons and Dragons, love making up new classes, inventing elaborate spell lists, drawing ridiculous dungeons, watching weird actual play videos.

This post has generated some controversy and some clarifications are in order. Twitter user CoalhadaTM suggested I append such a section, and I thought he had a fair point. Therefore, in no particular order.

Multiple people have also informed me that the essay accurately addressed a specific economic situation at the time (late 90s, early 00s). I have no reason to not believe them. They generally agreed that it no longer reflects current trpg market dynamics.

Some people attacked Ron Edwards in comments on this post, or on social media after I shared this post. I removed or asked them to remove such comments. This post is explicitly not an attack on Ron Edwards the person.

Finally, I would like to add that over multiple online venues the response to this post has been 80% positive, 20% respectfully disagreeable, and in one Twitter case a troll making a false accusation and an unprovoked personal attack.

This was the first time I have experienced direct harassment like this as a result of publicly sharing a post exploring my creative process and work online. After significant consideration, it led me to create a community standards section for this site to codify how to conduct online and offline communications with WizardThiefFighter in a productive manner.

I think there needs to be a term for that kind of thing, but detached from the Forge-y attitude that sees it as mediocre money thrown after bad. For a long time the official D&D rules were a fudgepile of wargame mechanics and bolted-on hacks, and the urge to make combat more eventful or characters more distinct is a natural one that was expressed in the early days of roleplaying through Arduin and the like. Maybe ID&D for Improved or Idiosyncratic D&D?

Ron was writing in the early 2000s, a time before print-on-demand. Back then, if you wanted to publish your game, you were looking at a minimum print run of 1000, or more likely 2000 if you wanted to bring the cost-per-copy down to a reasonable level. And people did. And it cost them a lot of money, because when you have 2000 copies of a book you need to ship them, and warehouse them, and then ship them to anyone who wants to buy them, and distributors in the games business pay 40% of RRP and expect you to cover transport.

Thank you for your comment James, and for describing the scene back then. I utterly agree, the publishing world was a very different place back then. I arrived at the essay from a very different place and time, and with the authority it assumed, it had a very negative impact on me. It seems to have had a similar chilling effect on many people.

The irony of that essay was that it came out at a time just on the cusp of the flowering of the modern self-publishing / POD era. The personal tragedy (for me) was that I accepted it at face value, even though it was already outdated, as a critique of what I wanted to do.

The terrible emotions I was filled with are the truth of what it means to be alive. When you live, something else dies. Even if you only eat plants, animals die for you to be able to eat. We do not talk about that often enough.

My house is high up in a river valley, surrounded by hills and trees. On clear fall nights I get a full view of the stars. All the many voices of the mountain wind sing around the dormer windows that I built. It is a little magic cottage, not quite wilderness, but a good place to write, paint, meditate, or live. I pay the bills with my own work, and when I die, maybe a bit of the magic will be there for someone else to enjoy.

Such peaceful, isolated rural houses, obscured by woods, miles from the nearest police, are sitting ducks for thieves. My neighborhood had ten burglaries in a single summer. Before robbing an area, burglars often take pictures of the houses, watch the residents, and make hang-up calls; they might pose as door-to-door evangelists. They hit most often in the early morning. On one job they bypassed the locks and cut right through the wall with a chainsaw. They take guns, stereos, cameras, VCRs, tools. They will even pull out sump pumps and cut up plumbing for the copper. Sometimes they defecate on rugs and smear their excrement on the wallpaper.

If the mark shows up unexpectedly, what began as a burglary may explode into homicide. The owner of a local marble company interrupted a robbery at his place of business, and the thieves beat him to death with crowbars. In the same town, while robbing the house of a handicapped man, burglars tied him to his wheelchair and smothered him with a pillowcase.

I had good reason to believe they would come back. They now knew the inside of my house and the rest of its contents. A few nights later I heard human footsteps in the woods. The next morning I found things displaced: lumber askew and the shed door standing open.

To keep things in perspective, I reminded myself that robbery and pillage are the rule in history, not the exception. The Vikings lived on plunder for generations. If you were a Saxon farmer on the east coast of Britain in the ninth century, your worst nightmare was the sight of those long, curved-prow ships, lined on either side with round shields, rowing up the estuary toward your village. Plunderers are almost always young: only the young have the energy for this lifestyle, or the stupidity to find it appealing. Their most common victims are the weak, the disabled, the solitary, and the old.

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