Wait, what? Alan Moore has retold the New Testament?! Well, no. Not that Alan Moore, famously a Glycon worshipper from Northampton, not a Christian from Gloucestershire.
But he did hilariously retell Leviticus 20 in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (nearly banned in Sweden). Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 (the album has them out of order – use my links).
My goodness. Someone has transcribed three seasons worth of Michael Westen’s voiceovers from Burn Notice lecturing the audience on spy tradecraft and hacking.
Guns make you stupid; better to fight your wars with duct tape. Duct tape makes you smart.
Kicking it old school, here are annotated photos of the CIA’s historic spy kit.
And speaking of Exalted, Something Awful’s WTF, D&D? column covered it in Exalted’s Most Mature Content (A Mature Article) for Matures Only.
Zack: Exalted has had a fair amount of criticism about its sexual content over the years, so when Onyx Path announced they would be authoring a 3rd Edition version of the game people a lot of fans were hoping the core game would be tightened up and the writers would introduce new ideas and shed some of Exalted’s more repulsive content. Signs seemed good on the Kickstarter page. Early updates included well-received ideas.
Steve: Then came the rape ghosts.
Numenera set a record for the highest funded RPG kickstarter (now in third place after Exalted and Call of Cthulhu). The PDF is now out; in this rpg.net forum thread I read of Nibovian wives:
One of the monster types. A construct in the form of a beautiful woman who seems to be in all ways psychologically normal and reasonable (physically she’s super-strong and armored like a tank) except with a non-negotiable instinct to get pregnant and care for her children, where “get pregnant” means “use sexual congress with a man to open a rift using the transdimensional machinery that is her womb and bring into this reality an ultraterrestrial monster whose first programmed instinct is to kill its father.” Nibonian Wives are apparently kind and eager to please, but cannot be reasoned out of wanting to do the monster thing, so I’m trying to picture a rational discussion between a Nibonian Wife trying to make a case for why a dude should totally have sex with her, and the dude trying to explain why that’s not going to happen. Because, you know, she seems very nice, but he doesn’t want to get killed by a shoggoth that she’ll inevitably try to defend using her super-strength and armored skin while it tries to kill him.
I immediately thought “Yeesh, did someone just go through a bad divorce?”
Yesterday was the voting deadline for the Hugos and the Ennies (perhaps the biggest RPG award.)
I have a supporting membership in LoneStarcon 3, so I had Hugo voting privileges and received the voting packet that inluded most of the nominated work. I’m not going to say how I voted, but I will say I’m a big fan of Ken Liu’s Mono No Aware, originally published in The Future Is Japanese. (I could have sworn I remembered that Nick Mamatas released a free ebook of that some time recently, but now I find no trace of it. Have I dropped into a similar but not identical timeline again?)
Of the short fiction, I read all but one novella, and I read all but two of the novels. It’s not a coincidence that the three works I didn’t read were PDF-only in the packet; the three nominated novels I did read I took out of the library. Publishers: what is it you imagine you’re accomplishing when you withhold a more-pleasant-to-read (for many people) format from a voting packet for an award? I’d seen all but one of the long-form dramatic presentations (i.e., movies) so I felt okay voting in that category; everything else I left blank. It makes me sad that I haven’t read any of the nominated comics.
This is the first time I’ve paid enough attention to the Ennies to know it’s a free popular vote and I could have voted. But as au courant as I imagined myself to be in RPGs, I still hadn’t heard of most of the nominees. I was astonished to learn that a jury reads everything submitted to make the nominations. But there wasn’t a single category where I felt comfortable voting given that there was only one category where I had familiarity with more than one nominee.
Video of Violent, Rioting Surfers Shows White Culture of Lawlessness
Counter to the usual advice, read the comments, where it gets even better.
And for a related un-satiric take, see Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Color-Blind Policy and Color-Conscious Morality:
It would not be productive for the president to go before a white working-class Appalachian audience and say, “We know that economic unfairness exists, and has long existed, but government programs won’t keep your kids off meth and painkillers.” The fact that meth and painkiller addiction is higher in those communities, that one in ten kids born in Appalachia was born addicted to drugs, would not be seen as relevant to, say, a jobs program.
Nor would it be productive or wise for the president to go before a primarily Hispanic audience and say “We know that the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but what you really need to do is keep your babies from having more babies.” The fact that the Hispanic community has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country would not be seen as relevant to, say, immigration reform.
And it would not be productive or wise for the president to go before an audience of Native Americans and say, “Yes, this country stole your land and prosecuted a ruthless war against you, but what would really help now is if you stopped your kids from drinking so much.” The high rate of alcoholism among Native Americans would not be seen as relevant. And as I’ve said, it would not be wise for the president to go to Newtown and point to the absence of active fatherhood in the life of Adam Lanza.
But for some reason all of these kinds of statements are appropriate in the black community. Not because of higher rates of anything, and it not even because the president is black. They’re seen as appropriate because there a deep belief – even among black people – that morality lies at the seat of our troubles.
I was very sad that after just a few months, my used Kindle DX’s battery stopped taking a charge. But with this video, a replacement battery from an Ebay seller (same battery as the Kindle 2 – if it were DX only I’d probably have been out of luck), the plastic pry tools from a cellphone repair kit, and the precision screwdrivers I already had, it’s good as new.
You know what’d be nice? If it weren’t always a damned finicky ordeal to replace a damned battery.
Yeah, I know, crazy talk. Who wants to keep the same gadget for longer than its battery lifetime anyway?
I’ve mentioned my serious soft spot for the Teenagers from Outer Space RPG. I’m not the only one.
In TFOS, beating a difficulty number for your roll by too much often has worse consequences than if you just failed. Want to stack your stats to be the BEST SWORDSPERSON EVAR? Fine. You’ll regret it when you have five minutes left to get to your final exam, deftly disarm the arch-ninja blocking your path without breaking a sweat, and then get kidnapped and whisked off to fight in the equivalent of the Intergalactic UFC because you displayed such amazing skill! I hope your access to the family hovercar didn’t depend on maintaining that ‘B’ average. […]
No character concept is too weird. You go to a TFOS referee and say “I wanna play a Dalek stoner who fronts his death metal band ‘EXTERMINAITE’ (with an umlaut over the A)” and they’ll say “Cool. You want a bong attachment for your doom plunger?”
Interview with Joss Whedon on How to be Prolific
Very small humans playing guitars as big as they are very well.
Hey, there’s a new collection by writing wizard Howard Waldrop coming in September from Small Beer Press!
Ted Chiang lecture on lifelogging and memory. It references it having been preceded by Chiang discussing Ben Rosenbaum’s The Guy Who Worked for Money, an interesting story about reputation economy and the panopticon that struck me as talking back to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Maneki Neko among others. I’m disappointed that video of that doesn’t seem to be available online. But Rosenbaum’s collection The Ant King (and several other fine collections) are available as free downloads also from Small Beer Press.
The Comics Code Authority, whose seal would grace most comics covers for decades, was founded in 1954, and unabashedly made explicit the mores it advanced.
Then again, I think it’s a bad thing that so many comics creators take it as an obligation to flout some of them.
It’s been on the decline for a long time, the last nail in the coffin being when even Archie gave up on it. What I only just learned is that the fighters-of-the-good-fight Comic Book Legal Defense Fund bought up the rights to the Comics Code Seal of Approval and now the only place it appears is on t-shirts benefitting the CBLDF.
Truly, the greatest joy in life is to conquer your enemies, to drive them before you, to take from them all the things that they possess, and to wear those things on your t-shirt.
The zodiacal ages seemed to have so specific a definition – you’re in the Age of the sign of the zodiac in whose constellation the sun is on the vernal equinox. Trouble is, no one agrees what the borders of the constellations are, so maybe we’re already in the Age of Aquarius; maybe it’s hundreds of years away.
Now how am I supposed to plan my day?
Having often heard it invoked on the RPG.net forums as having the tone of the Unknown Armies RPG, I finally watched The Lost Room miniseries. The premise involves the existence of about a hundred magic artifacts associated with a hotel room that ceased to exist (even ceased to have ever existed) in 1961, and the various obsessives, secret societies and cults that have formed around them.
While I’ve liked Peter Krause in Sports Night and Six Feet Under, I think he was miscast in this role – he remains too jovial for the gritty setting. And Julianna Margulies is a good actor, but her character here was too blank for her to have much to work with. But there were several great supporting roles by Kevin Pollak, Peter Jacobson, and Dennis Christopher (the star of Breaking Away, I just realized.)
I frankly expected to be disappointed by the climax, having been burned so many times before by Big Mystery genre series, but it succeeds in offering something big and satisfying that’s true to the series. If the comic follow-up ever appears, I’ll be reading.
It makes we want to blatantly rip off the premise for a role-playing game.
Last night, talking to Malasada, I referred to a book page being dog-eared. She promptly took umbrage.
“Not all dog ears are shaped that way!”
I tender a public apology to all of the pointy-eared, floppy-eared, and cropped-eared dogs of the world (or, in doggy language, I crouch, lower my head, lift one forepaw, and whimper.)
Say, did you know you could get the complete Land of the Lost on DVD for about $10? Now my nostalgic memories can be ruined!
Yes, the effects and sets are horrendously bad except for the stop-motion dinosaurs and pakuni costumes which are actually pretty impressive. What I didn’t remember is how bad the acting is. And yet still, it had David Gerrold as story editor, and a roster of writers that included Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, D.C. Fontana, Ben Bova, and Theodore Sturgeon (and Walter Koenig). In 1974, there was more continuity and more chance for the characters to learn than on prime time; Dallas wouldn’t bring serial drama back until 1978.
The credits get things rolling right away, with the familiar theme song (I could still sing it with only a couple of words wrong these more than three decades later) leading us from the “routine expedition” to coming to underneath a tyrannosaur and making a dash for a cave in the side of a cliff.
The first episode is very soon after; Rick Marshall (yes, he’s Ranger Rick) is explaining the theory that they’ve fallen into another world as if it’s fresh news, casually mentioning “last night I saw three moons” for his supporting evidence. My recollection is that we see the three moons all the time during the show, night and day, so is this the day after arrival?
Yet they already have a rope and pulley to raise a bamboo basket to their cave; they already have an established anti-tyrannosaur protocol – the “flyswatter”, or a sharpened pole they shove in its mouth, and the implication is that this isn’t the first one they’ve made. And they appear not to have explored at all yet, as they’d seen dinosaurs, but had yet to meet the pakuni, or encounter a pylon, or see the giant fruit.
The Tyrannosaur gets the name Grumpy in the first episode, and I know why: for all he keeps chasing things, he never actually catches anything. Also, he has an itch between his shoulder blades. (I doubt there’s ever any convincing evidence that he’s a he, but I’ll try to follow the characters’ usage.)
And we meet the Pakuni, who are maybe actual hominids; they have a language, know how to make fire with flint, know how to make and use sharpened sticks as weapons.
I had pretty much forgotten the end-credit theme.
Anything I could ever say about Land of the Lost pales in comparison to Pop Apostle’s Land of the Lost site.
Some current Kickstarters of interest:
At almost half a million bucks, it doesn’t need any more publicity, but the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition kickstarter is in its last day.
Greg Stolze’s novel Sinner made its funding with 3 days to spare. Stolze is a monster of creativity and $5 for an ebook of a Stolze novel sounds like a sound investment to me.
A kickstarter whose future remains uncertain with $12,000 to go in 5 days is Radio Free Albemuth, a film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel that isn’t trying to use the source material as a touching off point for an action movie. I remain a little disappointed I missed the screening at Renovation. And I remain more than a little concerned that they’re declining to say what the “digital download” offered in the pledges means, implying it could mean not a download at all but a code to use a DRM-ed streaming solution that won’t work with any computer in my house.
A way cool bonus for all backers is the Left Coast role-playing game of phildickian weirdness, which I previously blogged about. (I’m generously credited under “editors and advisors” for the feedback I offered on previous drafts.)
Another already highly successful RPG kickstarter is for The Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine by one of the RPG world’s mad geniuses, Jenna Moran, author of Nobilis. But it’d be nice to see it hit more stretch goals.
And Alan Moore is finally associated with a movie he won’t disclaim. Well, at least probably not soon. With Moore, it’s probably best not to try to make predictions. I will probably fail to resist this mighty Wizard of Northampton t-shirt (not its official name.)
Not a kickstarter, but there are 3 days left to get the Bundle of Holding, a large stack of fiction intersecting the RPG world. Exceeding the current average ($14 would do it as of this writing) gets you 9 books, fully four of which were things I’d already planned to get to – the aforementioned Greg Stolze’s Switchflipped, Robin Laws’ New Tales of the Yellow Sign, which talks back to Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow, which includes the stories that cemented Hastur’s and Carcosa’s places in the Cthulhu Mythos, and, more substantially, contributes the trope of the work of literature that can drive the reader mad. I’ve been reading these recently; despite actually being 19th century works, their tone is very modern, very unlike Lovecraft’s affected pseudo-19th century voice. The text is available on Gutenberg and elsewhere. The Repairer of Reputations:
In the city of New York the summer of 1899 was signalized by the dismantling of the Elevated Railroads. The summer of 1900 will live in the memories of New York people for many a cycle; the Dodge Statue was removed in that year. In the following winter began that agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 1920, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.
Oops, I digressed. I was talking about the Bundle of Holding. It also includes Matt Forbeck’s Dangerous Games: How to Play, a wonderfully indulgent murder mystery set at the ginormous gaming convention GenCon. I’ve already read this one, and it was fun. “They killed Allen Varney! You bastards!”
The last of the books I’d already been specifically interested in was John Tynes’ Delta Green: Strange Authorities, set in the espionage meets aliens meets Cthulhu Mythos meets conspiracies RPG campaign setting Delta Green. (I’m playing in a sporadically meeting DG campaign now.)
Finally, not a kickstarter, Chris Chinn punches cancer in the face. He’s had a lot of very smart things to say about RPGs and social justice for a long time, and was recently diagnosed with cancer, fortuitously treatable:
Through the greatest Mercy of God, I must have rolled some exploding luck die on a saving throw, because, 2 weeks ago a combined study was released on the New England Journal of Medicine which gives a 97% cure rate with this particular chemo mix. If they had caught it earlier and tried to treat, I’d be facing a much harder path with complications and less guarantees, and well, if it got caught later I’d be dead. I like to imagine I’ve spent every single Fate point, Luck point, or dropped 100 points in character creation to “Flip off Cancer once in your lifetime” advantage.
For obvious reasons, I’m reminded of Jim Henley’s 20 by 20 Room, another indispensible RPG blog where Jim blogs about mortality disguised as blogging about RPGs. Save vs. Death:
I got cancer, and it has me thinking about dice mechanics. […] Here’s what that means, as an inevitably simplistic gloss on five-year survival rates for Stage II Tongue SCC: roll a D8. On anything but a 1, I’m alive in five years.
Geeks. Gotta love ‘em.
There are many things of import going on in the world. So I’m going to spend some time bitching about bad GUIs.
We’ve known since some lab results a couple of months ago that our cat was not long for this world. So, for a while, I had planned the before and after montage I posted. I haven’t done a lot of image manipulation, and am not familiar with the tools, but how hard could it be – cut rectangular excerpts from two different pictures, resize one of them to be the same height as the other, put ‘em next to each other and save as a single image.
I tried MTPaint. I tried GIMP. After several minutes in each, I couldn’t figure out how to do these things. Excerpting was easy enough. Resizing I could sort of do, but then the canvas was too big or too small and I didn’t see how to fix that.
Finally, I cut my losses. I saved the excerpts and then it took just two ImageMagick commands to resize the one and to concatenate it with the other. And unlike with the GUIs, it was straightforward to look up how to do that, because I could search through text for it instead of doing a drunkard’s walk through 15 levels of menus in the intuitive, discoverable interface.
RIP L’il Miss Thing 1998-2013. You were a pain in the ass, but we loved you.
A current X-men title features an all-woman team, led by a black woman.
An upcoming Avengers title features a mostly black team, led by a black man.
Mainstream superhero comics have kind of sucked on representation issues, and these are promising developments.
A heartbreaking veterinary tale. Dog #86234
I recall a drunken conversation, years ago, in a student bar at Bristol University. It’s a conversation I’ve been dragged into many times since, but this is the first. A trainee biochemist has discovered that I’m learning to be a vet, and is now informing me at length how much money I’m going to earn. […] ‘You, mate,’ he says, finally focusing on me, and pointing a finger at my face, ‘are going to make a killing.’ He pauses for a moment, then concedes generously, ‘A small killing.’
This is from a blog on the Yog-Sothoth forums, a venue dominated by accounts of Call of Cthulhu game sessions.
A Brief Survey of the Accomplishments of Chappie Writers and Editors
Boy writer John Scalzi wrote charming space adventures that supplemented serious work by writers like Bujold and Bear.
The Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game is often cited as one of the best campaigns ever, a globe-spanning adventure that takes the investigators from New York to London to Cairo to Nairobi to Shanghai to Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. For seven long years the Call of Cthulhu RPG enthusiast site Yog-Sothoth has been working on a mammoth companion, featuring supporting details for the locations, advice on running it, side-journey scenarios, and more, intending for Chaosium to publish it as a monograph, with proceeds to benefit the site.
A draft PDF has now been released, weighing in at more than 500 pages.
Meanwhile, Pelgrane Press is producing their own ginormous globe-trotting campaign for Trail of Cthulhu, Eternal Lies, available for pre-orders, with the book scheduled to come out in August. I’ve briefly looked at the not-final PDF they circulated to pre-orderers, and it looks like a good time.