It's been a week full of contemplation and thought for me, and while some of it is related to my lingering vestiges of Catholicism, I've also spent a lot of time thinking about the people behind the games I love and what their deaths mean.

Dave Arneson died this week. He helped shape Dungeons and Dragons, and through it, shaped the entire modern fantasy genre. I'm told that because of accreditation issues, we'll never really know how much he contributed to the first edition game. However, it's safe to say that he was no less influential than Gary Gygax in shaping three generations of gamers, and so I mourn his loss just as much as I mourned Gary's last year.

The other death was in baseball, where a young man named Nick Adenhart was killed in a drunk driving incident just hours after he flashed his major league potential in six innings against the Oakland A's. Unlike Mr. Arneson, he was made of pure potential, the kind that makes old men talk about "fireballs" and "filthy stuff" without feeling self-conscious. That one was a reminder that there are things in life that you just can't control, and there's nothing you can do about them (the SF Giants baseball community reeling at the frighteningly random injury to Joe Martinez later that day hammered this fact home).

It's been pretty sobering looking at both ends of the spectrum of death, from a well-respected and fondly remembered pillar of the geek community to a too-young tragedy that just so happened to get a lot of media coverage because he could throw a baseball into a mail slot.

Anyway, that's enough being morbid - on to the self-flagellation of watching the Dragonball movie so we can talk about it on the S-Words Podcast!

Man, sometimes it's really hard to deny that I'm a masochist...