Upon initial scroll-through, The Nomad Tavern struck me as a clean-looking site with a lot of links to trawl through. The name reminded me of all the deeply serious medieval-named chat rooms my Fantasy genre-reading friend Shelby used to frequent, and I hoped the site wouldn’t be an RPG nightmare.
I was glad it wasn’t, as I really didn’t feel like getting pelted with 12-sided dice today. In the most recent entry, “btm” (ben, tom, and mike, I presume?) make fun of “Tell Your Mentor,” a program that seems to serve, basically, as yes-man, toady-filled chat room, and blog all at once. As the “inspirational quote” at the top of The Nomad Tavern seems to promise “words as hard as cannon balls,” I was a little disappointed that the Nomads didn’t take full advantage of the ready cannon-fodder Tell Your Mentor could have been. Personal blogs have a habit of making apologies for themselves, a habit the modern world, so afraid of stepping on toes, has sadly encouraged, and the Nomads fall into this trap, chiding themselves for “being a little judgemental and perhaps harsh,” when there’s probably NO chance the creators of Tell Your Mentor will ever see their critique.
Props for even trying to decipher moral relativism, (“Raskolnikov, Napoleon, and Paul”) even though – and Tom must know this – it’s difficult to hold a surfer’s interest long enough to tell them the latest celebrity “news,” let alone breach their brainpan with words like “casuistry,” and “portray.”
The archived posts (from May 13 onward) are still mostly relevant, and it is geniuinely nice to read interesting analyses written by smart people, as most bloggers are duller than wood and as intelligent as a knothole. There are plenty of good links to explore, and a nice balance of personal and topical. The Nomad Tavern, though clean and easy to navigate, seems to be mostly geared towards the Nomads themselves and their circle of friends. But if you’re interested in current events, Japan, moral relativism, and Libertarianism (and too few are, really), there’s plenty to read. Special props go to this hugely entertaining entry, in which Tom ponders whether Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski”) actually does “abide.” The Nomad Tavern