The Miserable Annals of the Earth

Musings on A GAME OF THRONES

2012-01-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

So I've started rereading A GAME OF THRONES, and... it's like... hmmm... I never really noticed all these hints and portents before, but... is it possible that Jon Snow is Ned Stark's bastard child... by Ned's sister, Lyanna Stark? Is that the dreadful guilty secret he's lived with for the last fourteen years? Is that why Ned has never told anyone who Jon's mother is, why Ned won't even tolerate discussion of the subject? Most importantly, is it why Ned's response to learning that Cersei's kids were the product of incest was so bizarrely compassionate?

When you think about it, Ned's attempt to give Cersei a chance to run away with her and Jaime's kids is very strange. The typical response to children born of incest in Westeros is one of disgust and horror, and while Ned is certainly an unusually honorable man, and one could argue that he is even an unusually compassionate man, still, there's nothing in his character to indicate that his views on incest should significantly vary from his cultural norm... and certainly, there is nothing in his experience with Cersei and her children to cause him to want to save them, and, in fact, he has excellent reason to despise Cersei and, at the very least, Joffrey. Upon finding out that the kids are not Robert's, but are, in fact, the product of an incestuous union, why should Ned go out of his way to try to keep them from being killed by Robert's wrath?

Yeah, yeah... Ned has clearly been deeply troubled by the manner in which the youngest Targaryen children were slaughtered by the Lannisters, and so he grits his teeth and says "I don't kill children" to Cersei... but on the other hand, if Ned has no special reason to feel empathy for children born of incest, it seems like he might well feel that Tywin Lannister having to watch as Robert Baretheon murders his son and his daughter and his grandchildren is justice, or, at least, karma... and Ned is big on justice.

So, again... why is Ned so deeply moved that he goes out of his way to give Cersei -- a woman he despises -- a chance to take her kids and run, before he goes to the king, a man he loves as a brother, and tells him the truth about the parentage of Cersei's children?

The prevailing theory among fandom seems to be that Jon Snow is actually the son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaeryen; that Lyanna and Rhaegar fell in love and ran off together, and that the general belief that Rhaegar kidnapped and raped her hundreds of times over a course of months is mistaken... and that keeping the truth secret, while pretending that Jon Snow is his own bastard child, is what Ned promised Lyanna he would do, as she died in his arms, presumably as a result of complications arising from childbirth. Yet Martin makes it clear over and over again that Ned still thinks about Lyanna, and his promise to her, every day and night of his life... that his promise, whatever it may have been, is somehow tied to some guilty secret that has wracked him with remorse every since. However, on page 381 of my copy of AGOT, Ned thinks a peculiar thing: "For the first time in years, he found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen. He wondered if Rhaegar had frequented brothels; somehow he thought not."

Now... if a day hasn't gone by in fourteen years that Ned hasn't been haunted by his promise to his sister Lyanna, and that promise has to do with concealing the fact that Jon Snow is Rhaegar Targaryen's son... how in the name of God are we supposed to accept that "for the first time in years, he found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen"?

If, on the other hand, Ned and Lyanna were lovers, well, it accords well with Ned's passionate devotion to Lyanna's memory, his absolutely unwillingness to even discuss Jon's parentage (even, or especially, with Robert Baratheon or his wife Catelyn), and his strange sympathy for Cersei's relationship with her brother and the children that relationship produced.

What prompted all this musing in the first place is a strange remark Tyrion Lannister makes to Jon the first time the two of them speak: "You have more of the north in you than your brothers." How can this be if Jon is half Targaryen? In fact, how can Jon have more of the north in him than his brothers... and in fact, Jon is frequently said to look much more Starkish than any of his siblings but Arya... unless both Jon's parents are actually of the north?

That was yesterday

2011-02-14T15:20:00.001-05:00

So we headed over to one store to pick up a birthday present for me mum, and then stopped at Cold Stone Creamery for some ice cream, and then hit Half Price Books. I picked up a copy of SUPERMAN: THE DAILIES, reprinting the Superman newspaper strip from 1939 to 1942, none of which I've ever read. (They kind of thematically go with that BATMAN serial I picked up on DVD last week, though.) I also got a copy of THE ULTIMATES, collecting issues 1 - 13.

I swore I'd never pay for Ultimates nonsense, but I've heard too much about these stories (usually in tones of breathless, awestruck worship) and the library has the second volume but someone stole the first volume so I got tired of waiting for a chance to read them for free. (If there was any justice, someone would be paying me to read them; yes, Virginia, they really are that bad. But as all Larry Niven fans already know, There Ain't No Justice.)

So, anyway, I'm trudging through this stupid shit, and, honest to God, it really is stupid shit. Where to begin? Well...

Let's start with, why are people in the Ultimates timeline different ethnicities from their original versions in the Marvel mainstream universe? No matter how I angle it, I can't get this make any sense. In the mainstream Marvel universe, pretty much everyone is Caucasian. And yes, I understand that in the re-imagined, updated, streamlined, more realistic and modern and grim n gritty Ultimates universe, we're trying to be more politically correct and multicultural, but, still... why is Janet Van Dyne Asian in the Ultimates universe? Why is Nick Fury black? I don't get it.

The answer 'because it's cooler' isn't going to work for me, by the way.

Leaving all that aside, I'm about five issues into this thing now and, whoa, talk about moving things along at a glacial pace. We open with Captain America and Bucky leading thousands of Allied soldiers in an attack on a Nazi ICBM base, and that's pretty much all the excitement we get for the next five issues. (Bucky isn't a kid in the Ultimates universe and he doesn't wear a costume; he's an old buddy of Steve Rogers' and, apparently, a combat journalist/photographer. If perhaps you are starting to get the idea that one of the major imperatives of the entire Ultimates line is to suck everything fun out of all Marvel's Silver Age comics concepts, well, you'd be wrong, but only in scope. This is the major imperative of all 'realistic' superhero comics. 'Fun' is childish and we can't have that; superhero comics for the 21st Century must be deadly serious and in utter earnest at all times.)

Of course, there are no real heroes in a 'realistic' superhero universe. Everyone is flawed, everyone has issues, everyone is a little piss pot. It is probably this, more than anything else, that makes reading THE ULTIMATES such an exercise in masochism for me. I'm still old fashioned enough that I think superhero comics should have actual heroes in them. (I'm also old fashioned enough to think comics should have captions and thought balloons, but never mind, I'm a curmudgeon.)

Perhaps it's also curmudgeonly of me to wish that a British writer accepting an assignment to script American characters might take the time to learn how Americans speak. It's bad enough having to read page after page after page of pointless yet oh so hip and pop culture reference laden dialog about which actors should be cast as what character in an ULTIMATES movie, but when Millar occasionally has Hank Pym or Bruce Banner or, for the love of Christ, Steve Rogers, lapse into British vernacular it's just exasperating. If Millar's too lazy to do his job well (not that his lack of industry has anything to do with his lack of talent; Millar doesn't eschew captions and thought balloons just because it's trendy to do so; like nearly every other contemporary comics writer, he mostly does it because he's neither talented nor technically skilled enough to use either of them correctly).

Probably the biggest thing wrong with ULTIMATES, though (the biggest specific thing; the biggest general thing is the atmosphere of selfish, cynical meanspiritedness that permeates the book; it's like SEINFELD, if Jerry and Crew had superpowers) is the fact that the team has almost nothing to do for the first half dozen issues of its existence. Millar thinks he's clever, making an actual plot point of this, but in actuality, it simply underscores how bad the writing is. Absolutely nothing happens in the first four issues except yak yak yak yak yak yak yak -- we're supposed to believe that the Federal government is downsizing the conventional military and pouring billions into a superteam composed of four preening, posturing prima donnas, on the apparent off chance that at some undefined point in the very nebulous future, some kind of super powerful threat may manifest itself that will require these jackasses to successfully defeat it.

The first threat that does show up, naturally, is the Hulk. Bruce Banner gets tired of being treated like a second banana by Hank Pym (in the Ultimates Universe, Bruce isn't working on gamma bombs, he's trying to reinvent the Super Soldier serum that created Captain America), so he injects himself with the same flawed serum that turned him into the Hulk once already, just because, you know, he's a dickhead and Betty is ignoring him.

All told, ULTIMATES is unimpressive at best and revolting at worst... but I'm only halfway through it. Perhaps the infamous bit where the Wasp flashes the Hulk to distract him will make it all worthwhile.

I seriously doubt it, though.

Lies, Damned Lies, and... you know...

2011-02-02T21:40:00.001-05:00

So we just had a team meeting and the two team leads were pretty smug. Only two of our team members are hitting their repeat stats, and both of them are also hitting on their mandatory tool usage stat. "See?" they said, smirking like ocelots. "If you just do what you're supposed to do, it works."

So I pulled up the team's numbers and checked. Only one other person on the team is hitting on the mandatory tool usage stat, but her repeat numbers are horrible... second worst on the team. I pointed this out. And our supervisor -- the ...big boss, over the team leads -- told me earnestly that there are lots of ways to manipulate the numbers and get a false reading.

Got that? Any numbers that support the official policy are honest numbers. Any numbers that do not are by definition dishonest.

It's not that I've ever had any real respect for management at nearly any of the 100+ jobs I've had since the mid 80s (I put bread on my table using my typing skills in clerical temp jobs for most of the 80s and all the 90s), but, well, stuff like this tells me how right I am to regard nearly everything management tells me with utter and complete contempt.

Previously published on Facebook. The venue has been changed to protect the innocent.

Extreme awesomeness

2010-10-01T18:58:00.002-04:00

In 1987, I was a big Walter Hill fan. At that time, this was based on three movies of his that I'd absolutely loved -- THE WARRIORS, 48 HRS, and STREETS OF FIRE -- and two more I'd had a lot of respect for -- THE LONG RIDERS and SOUTHERN COMFORT.

But somehow, the movie EXTREME PREJUDICE came out completely under my radar. I hadn't heard a thing about it when a buddy of mine and I, driving around on a Saturday when neither of us had a damn thing to do, saw a pretty cool movie poster... for this film outside a 4 screen multiplex in North Syracuse and decided, knowing absolutely nothing about the movie but the title, and that it had Nick Nolte in it, that, what the hell, we might as well kill an afternoon watching it.

So we're sitting in the theater and the lights go down and the grainy leader stock starts to flicker up on the screen and then that cheesy Carolco graphic goes up, and I get a little tingle. I don't know why, the graphic means nothing to me, but if linear time really is an illusion and we actually do know everything, we just can't remember it all at once, I can only assume that at that moment, my subconscious knew that sometime in the future, I'd be watching a lot of awesome films following that logo -- movies like ANGEL HEART and THEY LIVE; JOHNNY HANDSOME and THE TERMINATOR; MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON and BASIC INSTINCT.

And then the names Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna flashed up on the screen and now I'm definitely getting a real good feeling; I know those names but at that moment, I can't quite place them, and then, there it is:

DIRECTED BY WALTER HILL

And I looked over at my buddy, sitting a seat away from me (he was always a little homophobic that way) and I said "Oh, THIS is gonna be GOOD."

And I was right. In fact, of the Carolco cinematic firmament, I would say that EXTREME PREJUDICE is its brightest star. This movie has no pretensions whatsoever, no redeeming social value or meaningful commentary on anything, it's simply ...a balls to the wall all out action flick loaded to the cannon-mounts with the finest gunfights ever recorded on celluloid. Nick Nolte is the keystone in the casting arch but he's got some heavy duty company in Rip Torn, Powers Boothe, Michael Ironsides, Clancy Brown, William Forsythe, and Tommy "Tiny" Lister ("Remember him from Monday Night Football?").

As with another favorite film of mine, CONGO, this is an obscure little B movie gem, well written, beautifully directed with a fantastic cast (even Maria Conchita Alonso as the dumbass chick who has to be rescued from the bad guy can't manage to fuck it up, that's how good it is) that has never gotten the credit or the attention it deserves.

The Good Ol' Daze

2010-09-04T20:53:00.002-04:00

I'm not one of those guys who goes on and on about how much better the world was when I was a kid, or a teenager, or a young adult in my 20s. For the good and simple reason that it wasn't. We didn't have videotapes or DVDs, gays still stayed in the closet or got treated like shit by mainstream society, there were no cell phones, and, of course, there was no Internet. Hard though it may be for anyone born after 1990 to imagine THAT.

But in some odd ways, the world of my youth was a better place, too, or, at least, more tolerant. As examples, I give you a couple of pop culture artifacts that absolutely could not be duplicated in the modern marketplace:
First, SON OF SATAN -

Seriously. No shit. In the early to mid 70s, Marvel Comics published a title called SON OF SATAN. There was nothing particularly distinguished about it; some not particularly good Steve Gerber scripts and some reasonably humdrum Jim Mooney art, and some stories full of pretty typical 70s hippie/horror cliches. But it was right there, on the spinner racks at the five and dime, right next to SPIDER-MAN and BATMAN and all that Harvey and Archie shit.

Sometimes I just imagine the reaction if some comic shop owner tried to put out a couple of copies of something called SON OF SATAN on the same shelf as BETTY & VERONICA or CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST. I stop after a couple of seconds, though, because otherwise, my head would just explode.

Second: ANIMAL HOUSE.

ANIMAL HOUSE was outrageous for the mid 70s; that was the point, that's why it was so funny. But in the mid 70s, at least, you could joke about that kind of stuff. Nowadays, you suggest making a movie full of racist, homophobic, sexist jokes that ends with the destruction of the homecoming parade, the movie's nominal hero banging a 13 year old in an outdoor stadium, and John Belushi being elected Senator, and everybody else at the meeting will have simultaneous aneurysms.

Now, I do understand that many if not most people alive at this time would regard all this as progress. We can't expose our children to Satanism, our young adults to racist, sexist, homophobic vulgarity and violence and especially, we can't make any of it look comical! This stuff is deadly serious! And never, never to be discussed!

I don't miss much about my youth, other than a flat stomach, a cast iron digestive tract, and a general absence of aches and pains. But sometimes, I wish the world was still as open minded as it used to be about controversial subjects.

Fettish

2010-09-04T06:05:00.000-04:00

Some people found THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK to be a miraculous event, for probably a million different reasons. I liked EMPIRE, I think it's the best of all the STAR WARS movies, but, then, there are only two STAR WARS movies, and a short feature about 20 minutes long where the cast from the first two films rescues one of their member from a big gelatinous mass on a desert planet. So that's not as major a distinction as it could be.

Many people were struck hard by a minor character in EMPIRE, a little throwaway part called Boba Fett. There was nothing at all to Fett; he had like six words of dialogue and that dialogue was undistinguished, to say the least. Those who eventually acquired lifelong obsessions with this character managed to grow their fanatical attachments from the tiniest and most minute of seeds... an interesting helmet design, or the fact that Fett's spaceship looked like a steam iron.

It's important, then, to keep in mind the facts of the case, and the facts of the case are this: Fett was an idiot, and an incompetent. His greatest accomplishment was handed to him in a block of carbonite. His gruesome death occurred when he fell off a sail barge into a monster's maw and was consumed, after being struck in his dimwitted armored noggin by a random swipe from a broomstick wielded by a blind man.

Fettishists like to tell each other stories about how Fett was the greatest bounty hunter in the galaxy and they dwell on all the amazing and wonderful things that he did (which they just made up) before the STAR WARS equivalent of Helen Keller smacked him with a hoe handle and knocked him into a big toothy stomach where he died, and some of them even make up stories where Fett somehow got out of the big toothy stomach alive and continued his career.

But these are like the stories where Batman and Superman have sex together, often times dressed in cartoon animal costumes while Kirk and Spock join them for a big gay furry fourway.

They are not real stories. They are just sad, silly, idle daydreams, and while sometimes some of these stories are well written, nonetheless, there is nothing to them.

Just thought we should have that clear between us.

Ah, originality...

2010-08-19T21:11:00.000-04:00

Somebody sent me this:

Subject: Novels "Transubstantiate" & "Trajan's Arch," and the "Kentucky Literary Newsletter"
Richard Thomas's newest novel, "Transubstantiate," is out.

The official website for the book is at http://www.facebook.com/l/ccea33lEgb6Y-4aZYd4_jzIxFSw;www.transubstantiate.net/ . Here you can fine a sample chapter, hear a podcast, read Richard's bio. Richard is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers.

Synopsis:

“They say Jimmy made it out. But the postcards we get, well, they don’t seem…real.”

When an experiment with population control works too well, and the planet is decimated, seven broken people are united by a supernatural bond in a modern day Eden. Most on the island are fully aware of this prison disguised as an oasis. Unfortunately, Jimmy is on the mainland, desperate to get back, in a post-apocalyptic stand-off, fighting for his survival and that of his unborn child. Back on the island, Jacob stares at the ocean through his telescope and plots his escape, reluctant to aid the cause. Marcy tries to hide from her past, sexual escapades that may be her saving grace. X sits in his compound, a quiet, massive presence, trapped in his body by ancient utterings and yet free in spirit to visit other places and times. Roland, the angry, bitter son of Marcy is determined to leave, and sets out on his own. Watching over it all is Assigned, the ghost in the machine. And coming for them, to exact revenge, and finish the job that the virus started, is Gordon. He just landed on the island and he has help.

Transubstantiate is a neo-noir thriller, filled with uncertainty at every portal, and jungles overflowing with The Darkness. Vivid settings, lyrical language, and a slow reveal of plot, motivation, past crimes and future hope collide in a final showdown that keeps you guessing until the final haunting words.

My first, and, honestly, only real response?

Jesus Christ, dude, just how many times have you watched every single episode of LOST?

Brain spasm

2010-07-27T11:53:00.002-04:00

Had one of those weird moments just a few minutes ago. I was thinking of the two issues of Moore's SWAMP THING where Swamp Thing ends up on Rann and meets Adam Strange (57 & 58). It occurred to me I hadn't reread them in a while and I'd like to, so, certain I had copies of them, I went to my bookshelves and thumbed along the shelf, past Superboy, Superboy and the Legion, Supergirl, Superman... to... Thor?

Wha'fuck? Where's SWAMP THING?

It was strange. Now, I knew I'd lost my original copies (the ones I'd bought off the stands back when they first came out) in the Comics Collection Catastrophe back in the late 90s. But in 2004-05, when I was living in Zephyrhills and had far more money than I could spend (due to cheap rents and a complete and utter lack of social opportunities), I put about a thousand bucks, maybe more, into rebuilding a lot of my lost collection... and I was absolutely sure I'd ordered new copies of several of my favorite Alan Moore SWAMP THING issues, including, of course, that 2 parter, which was the only readable part of a seemingly endless story arc where SWAMP THING went interplanetary and wandered from one solar system to another after being forcibly expelled from Earth's life force by a nefarious Lex Luthor death beam.

I mean, I was CERTAIN I'd done that. I had no specific memory, mind you, but it just seemed like I'd read that 2 part story relatively recently... much more recently than would be accounted for by my forcible separation from my previous collection in 1997.

But... no SWAMP THING on the shelves, none at all. And my middle daughter, who has explored my comics collection extensively since 2005, reports never having seen an issue of SWAMP THING on those shelves at all. (She likes Moore, so if I had any, she'd have spotted them.)

So I was absolutely certain I had a copy of those two issues, but, as it turns out, I do not. Which makes me sad, as I really enjoy them.

One wonders just how much one's mind would play tricks on one if one could live for centuries, instead of simply for decades.

Who watches the, you know...

2010-07-26T04:18:00.002-04:00

For those who may still care about this long dead horse, here's the book Moore ripped off large chunks of WATCHMEN's plot from:

Details vary, naturally, as Hawkey and Bingham were writing a science fiction political thriller, not a superhero comic. However, sequences such as the one detailing the murder of all the people working on the WILD CARD project (they're all on a plane, supposedly being sent to Bermuda for a vacation; the plane gets shot down by U.S. military aircraft) and, specifically, the ending (in which it is strongly hinted that word of the WILD CARD project will be released to the public, but not specifically stated) make it pretty clear that Moore had read this book prior to coming up with his WATCHMEN plot, and liked it enough to steal blatantly from it.

But you don't have to take my word for it. The book is out of print, but you can order copies pretty cheaply through the link above. Check it out for yourself.

Revelation

2010-06-29T17:09:00.001-04:00

So I'm really enjoying Alastair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE trilogy. I'm nearly done with the second book, REDEMPTION ARK and I'm very impressed with Reynolds' writing skills. The far future backdrop has a lot of scope to it and feels very credible to me, and I enjoy his characterizations.

Reynolds seems to stay away from the heavier emotions. Neither sex nor romance play much part in his characterizations - often times they're part of a particular individual's history, or a couple of characters may already have an established relationship - but Reynolds seems to have no interest in that soap opera staple, the romantic arc. Still, I like his characters enough that I don't feel they need that added level of intensity.

I am, however, completely disenchanted with one particular aspect of the Clavain/Felka interaction - this whole "is she or isn't she his daughter" mystery is just nonsense. This whole thing takes place 600 years in the future; technology has made HUGE advances, and both Clavain and Felka are Conjoiners - members of a cybernetically advanced human faction very similar to Star Trek's Borg. And we're supposed to accept that in three hundred years of wondering, Clavain has never had a fucking paternity test run? Please.

Other than that, though, I like the story a lot.

The critics speak!

2010-06-15T14:07:00.002-04:00

One of them, anyway. I hadn't even looked at the Amazon Kindle pages for my various e-novels in a long time, but today I swung by each and was astonished to see the following reader review, on TIME WATCH:

Don't waste your time on "Time Watch"., February 11, 2010
By Kelly Abney (Bentonville, AR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Time Watch (Kindle Edition)
A single, one-dimensional, unlikeable character who makes his way through a nearly incoherent plot. The author attempts to create a futuristic "slang" language that is periodically used to further confuse the reader. Throw in a little cyber-sex with a computer avatar and you start to understand where this review is headed. If the author had even started to develop our time traveling hero's character and then added a few plot lines to expand the story's basic premise, the book's hypothesis might have been more interesting.

Interestingly, TIME WATCH is pretty much my top seller, as such things go, and among my novels, probably my second favorite. I like the shifting narrative viewpoint and the relatively simple central story/character arc, and enjoy the (hopefully) unexpected romance that shows up in the story's third act.

However, I can't argue with anything Ms./Mr. Abney has said here. Presumably, he/she bought the book and are entitled to their opinion, as as TIME WATCH's protagonist is pretty much me, I certainly can't dispute the 'unlikeable' tag. Christ knows I am. As to one dimensional, well, I guess that's the risk you run when you essentially write about yourself. I chose to focus more on the story elements than developing 'Jim' overly, probably because I know Jim well and presumed the story of Jim getting hold of a time machine was more interesting than Jim himself. Which certainly could have been a mistake.

I will say that it seems Ms./Mr. Abney (Kelly is an indeterminate name; I'm not trying to be disrespectful) has some kind of personal issue with sexual depictions in their science fiction, and, well, I guess that happens. Sorry you didn't enjoy it, sir/ma'am. Maybe you'd like ZAP FORCE better.

And the beat goes on...

2010-05-13T17:26:00.004-04:00

Just sent this to all the mods over at LouisvilleRPG.net:

These communications in the past have netted me little (except, when I'm communicating with Chris, a lot of insults - and, I know, I'm insulting with him, too, but I'm not trying to set any kind of example of civil behavior here, nor am I in any kind of self imposed position of authority/responsibility, so the burdens of presentation fall a little bit differently on him and I) but, what the hell:

I take some issue with the way this site is moderated, at least, in respect to my posts.

As a general issue, well, this is part of the Rulez:

"This site was founded on the principals of free speech. It will take a lot for us to warn you, let alone ban you.".

I call bullshit. It has taken very little for any of the mods to warn me, much less ban me.

I realize 'a lot' and 'very little' are both subjective terms, but, well, subjectively, I feel that my first two warnings were for, well, something falling short of 'a lot'. My third one... okay, I can see where that post might have come up to something approaching a reasonable standard of 'a lot'. But on the third one, I have two very specific objections:

(a) If I got warned, why didn't Cosmic J? His post prior to mine, to which I was responding, was as insulting as mine, and as specific in its intent.

(As a subheading of (a), CosmicJ has been pretty constant in his snarky sneering and pretty bold faced flame baiting, as can most recently be seen in response to my most recent Shouts. I realize he does his best to walk just this side of that fine line between, you know, being a just another fucking piece of shit douchebag and actually openly insulting anyone, but I would also like to say that if one is going to repress people on the grounds of uncivil behavior, as all of you are clearly enthusiastically on board for, he's earned some goddam repression. At least as much as I have. Probably more so.)

And (b) warning someone three weeks after the post goes up is just fucking bullshit, and while it's hard for any of you guys to surprise me with your behavior any more, well, that surprises me. No, the rules don't indicate there is any kind of statute of limitations, but jesus christ. Have some self respect. A warning coming in nearly a month after the fact is retarded.

Beyond all this, while all the Rulez are obnoxious in the extreme (and, given the level of snark Chris frequently indulges in with anyone who dares to disagree with him in a comment thread, extremely self serving to the point of hypocrisy, but, whatever, certainly I never expected anything else), this final one about how one cannot engage the mods in any kind of public debate in re: the Rulez, or the mods' often retarded, childish, biased, and self serving behavior, is egregiously so. If there is any one topic that should ALWAYS be germane on any moderated site, it is the behavior of the moderators, and the rules underlying the act of moderation. When you don't allow any kind of public debate on this stuff, you're truly setting yourself up as above and beyond any kind of repercussions.

You guys weren't elected and have not subjected yourself to ANY kind of limitations. You apparently serve for life, or until you feel like stepping down, there is no oversight, no one can appeal your often incredibly wrong headed and dumb ass rulings, and just to make sure you can do whatever you want without any consequences whatsoever, you make sure nobody can call you on any of your bullshit in any kind of forum where anyone else would see it.

I think at the very least, you should create a board where members can publicly post grievances and comments on how the mods behave and invite public debate. I also think all of you should be up for re-election after some set period. You can, and almost certainly will, discount everything I've said here. But if you're unwilling to subject your actions to public debate, and further unwilling to let the members of the site decide on whether or not they feel you're doing a good enough job to re-elect you to your positions, then, well, in addition to everything else you are, you're a bunch of gutless weenies, as well.

Sincerely,

Your pal,

Doc

Having already been banned once, I have a feeling my account at the site is going to be disappearing permanently any time now. So, y'know... for the record, and all that.

UPDATE:

Got these back. First is from Chris, the new (sociopathic) site owner:

We are above repercussions. We own the site.

No, we weren't elected. We own the site.

You continually seem to think this is a government of some sort. It isn't. This is our private residence. You're able to post on here because we say you can.

I hate to be like that. I really do. I hate submitting the site to the vagrancies of a single person's whim, including my own, which is why there's a committee of people chosen because they don't get along.

If this site were to become a primarily democratic forum, its first action would be to ban you.

Kisses,
Chris

AND, from CruelDespot, another mod:

Dear Doc,

I realize Cosmic J is also breaking the spirit of the rules, but frankly he is just better than you at skirting the limits without crossing the line.

This seems to be the pattern:
1) You make a snarky but legal comment
2) He makes a snarky but legal comment
3) You escalate into a rule-breaking insult, or back-seat mod comment
4) You get a warning.

This is probably annoying for you, but I'm not going to give him, or anyone, a warning unless they clearly violate the rules. You have clearly violated the rules 4 times that I know about, so you have gotten four warnings.

Your initial post of "I am that guy" was fine. Then Cosmic and team provoked you into explaining what you meant, which led you to complain about your mod warnings, which is a rule violation.

If I see Cosmic J or anyone else clearly violate the rules, I will warn them. Unless I'm not in the mood. Then I won't. I haven't taken any sort of sacred oath. It's a fucking website.

You seem to argue that our moderation of this site is not professional. You are correct. We are amateurs. Fortunately, we don't owe anything to you or any of the other site members. This is not a government entitlement. You don't have any rights here. Neither do I. Only Chris does, because he owns the site.

Since you don't mind spicing your PMs with personal insults, in conclusion, fuck you.

So here's what I said:

Okay, so I did what you wanted me to do: I complained through a PM. And, once again, what I got back was "Naaah naah naaah naaah, we can do whatever we want, so suck it".

For the record, any time you put yourself in a position of authority over others, you take on a responsibility to handle that authority fairly and well. Assuming, of course, that you are people with any pretensions towards civility and maturity, much less... to use a trite and near obsolete phrase that is probably meaningless to all of you except for CD... honor. Your excuses are childish and emotionally retarded, as well as, well, dishonorable and unjust. I suspect you all know that, except for Chris, who is apparently pathologically incapable of ANY level of self awareness that might include any sort of acknowledgment of error or imperfection.

Again, the stated rules are "It will take a lot for us to warn you, let alone ban you." I was warned for trivial, stupid shit that other members of this site would not have been warned for, and, following your rules, I have brought this up to you, as men of honor and good will, and your response is to tell me to fuck myself, because you aren't professional and you feel no obligation to be fair unless you're in the mood to be fair.

And you wonder why I think this is all futile.

This is not, in Chris' words, anyone's residence. It's a shared community and frankly, I don't give a fuck who 'owns' it. That's a child's argument. That's what the fat spoiled kid who owns the bat and ball says, when he insists that he always be allowed to get on base no matter how badly he whiffs. That's... well, it's actually pretty loathsome and despicable. If that's cool with you, well, rock on with your bad selves, I guess.

Chris also advises that if the site became a democracy, the first thing the site would communally do is ban me. That's probably true. But he, and you, are frankly deranged if you think the list would stop with me.

I knew exactly where all this was going the instant I heard Chris had bought the site. Chris, who threw a monster hissy fit at being shown to be wrong about something in a thread, and deleted his account, and who refused to come back until he could be that fat kid who owned the bat and ball. None of this is any surprise to me.

Well, no. I honestly expected better from CD and CA. But people often disappoint me, so, whatever.

I'm pretty much done with this PM bullshit. It accomplishes absolutely nothing except, apparently, to aggrandize your already monstrous egos.

Thanks for all the fish.

D.

Friday night's all right for... global domination

2010-04-10T11:37:00.002-04:00

So, after a pretty lame start, last night took a pretty good bounce on me. Nate was asleep in the comfy chair and terminally uninterested in anything I suggested. Tammy was all like, 'Well, I'll do whatever everybody else wants to do', while not sounding excited about anything. So I suggested we go see a movie, but Nate didn't want to see CRAZY HEART, which is the only thing still playing that Tammy and I are interested, and the only new movie that started this week is DATE NIGHT, which is like, what? I mean, seriously. It's the weekend, I'm looking for something new and good to go see, I know KICK ASS and IRON MAN 2 are supposed to be opening sometime soon, I check new movies, and what do I get? Fucking DATE NIGHT. Say, Hollywood, blow me.

So then I'm all like, okay, let's go to ROLE OF THE DIE and play Magic. And they were like, nah, everybody at ROLE OF THE DIE hates us. Now, I don't think anybody at ROLE OF THE DIE hates us, but there are one or two people there who are not on our favorite person's list, but, still, we hadn't been to ROLE OF THE DIE in a long time, and the alternative seems to be, Nate goes home and goes to bed, and Tammy and I watch BUFFY DVDs all night, which is okay, but, you know, I was bored and looking for something a little more out of our standard activity stream. So then Tammy or Nate, I forget which, said "Let's get a new game", and the other one said "Where could we go to get a new game?" and I said "ROLE OF THE DIE, and hey, let's get FELLOWSHIP OF THE TALISMAN", which is this cool game that the one group of gamers I used to hang out with in Syracuse used to play all the time, except you have to get rid of the Prophetess, because everybody hates that little bitch. And they were like, blarg, okay, whatever.

So we rolled to ROLE OF THE DIE, with the back up plan being, if we couldn't find a good game, we'd head to Blockbuster and rent something. But first we hit the Smok Shop for Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and an energy drink for Nate to wake al our asses up.

At ROLE OF THE DIE we couldn't find FELLOWSHIP OF THE TALISMAN; in fact, most of their games seemed to be among the missing, which Brian's dad, who was apparently in charge for the night, told us was because Brian had taken nearly all of their stock off to ConGlomeration. But Nate spied ILLUMINATI and said "This sounds kinda cool" and I went totally apeshit, because ILLUMINATI is this game that I used to play all the time with the other clique I hung out with in Syracuse, my first gaming clique, the one with Jeff Webb and all the assholes that used to be my best friends for life and beyond and that I haven't heard a word from in twenty five years. But it's a really cool game, and I grabbed it and said "This is a really cool game, we have to buy it!" So we bought it and got it out of the box and played a game right there at ROLE OF THE DIE, which other than us and two guys playing D&D and Brian's dad, was totally empty all night. (I almost never see anyone in ROLE OF THE DIE buying much of anything; I'm convinced Brian is actually a covert billionaire who fights crime as a masked avenger most of the time, and the store is just a front hiding a secret entrance into his underground headquarters.)

And it was totally awesome. So Nate picked up the Y2K expansion, providing a lot more cards and two new Illuminati groups, which is also cool.

And then we were looking for a place to eat, and we tried Penn Station, but they were closed, so I suggested Spinelli's, which is this awesome local pizza place, so we went there and got a huge meat lover's pizza and I gorged myself, and then we came home, and eventually went to sleep, and now it's today.

Tammy totally kicked all our asses at ILLUMINATI, by the way. I had forgotten, over the last 25 years, that when someone is playing the Servants of Cthulhu, you need to kill them quickly, or they just roll right over you. I had also forgotten that the Network is about the weakest and most vulnerable group, and that was what I drew.

So how was everyone else's Friday night?

Interminable, my dear Watson

2010-04-07T07:28:00.002-04:00

So, we found some Sherlock Holmes TV shows from the 50s on DVD the other day, and picked them up. This is the 1950s series, starring Ronald Howard (not RON Howard) as Sherlock Holmes and Howard Marion Crawford as Watson. I had the time to sit down and try to watch the first episode yesterday.

It was hard to get through the first episode, for two reasons: first, the soundtrack is pretty tinny, which makes a great deal of the dialogue all but impossible to discern. That's a real problem for someone like me, who loves dialogue and whose only real interest in Sherlock Holmes is the characterization and all those cool deductions Holmes does, which you won't ever know about without the dialogue.

The second problem is even more aggravating - as with most TV shows shot in the 50s, there are no close ups, and all the camera positions are entirely stationery. My guess would be that the less expensive cameras used for TV work in this era had no zoom lens capacity. But the result is, as you may recall from other TV shows you've watched that were made in this period, everything is presented in long or medium shot. And it's all black and white, badly washed out sepia tone black and white at that.

So what you end up with is a visual presentation that is pretty stultifying, especially to a modern audience, used to color, tracking shots, close ups, audible dialogue, and all the other aspects of modern film making directors use to convey emotion and other nuances of characterization and story.

It's tough to get through. Perhaps a really serious student of Holmes, or of 50s era television, could glean enough of interest from the material to stay focused, but me, I just mostly found myself constantly drifting away from the narrative.

It's a pity. But those of us who can read will always have the Conan Doyle originals.

Go, Go, http://www.garagedelparco.com!

2010-04-03T09:58:00.004-04:00

auto usate milano !
vendita auto usate !
compro auto usate !

When you hear those ringing words, what does your mind automatically turn to?

Sell and buy car: http://www.garagedelparco.com has been in business since 1978 with experience and professionalism, always attentive to the needs and customer satisfaction. Efficiency, competence and thoroughness are our trump cards to continue to offer service and assistance, safe, guaranteed and worthy of trust. The website is in Italian if you can't read Italian here's the translated version - http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.garagedelparco.com&sl=it&tl=en

At least, that's what I think of.

Check it out for yourself. Check out http://www.garagedelparco.com/. You'll find it's one hell of a webpage, representing one hell of a phrase in Italian.

When top scientists like my personal friend Jix Casey or Dr. Emilio Lizardo tour Europe, http://www.garagedelparco.com/ is their go to website for fast, furious, friendly, frantic, frenzied fun. When you’re being pursued up one side of the Swiss Alps and down the other by Red Lectroids or Satan worshipping bovine growth hormone cultists in flashy red Miatas with the tops down, it pays to have http://www.garagedelparco.com/ on your speed dial. One lucky shot with a .45 Beretta and you could seriously need a quick tire change. Otherwise, it’s don’t ask for whom the lunch bell tolls, because you’re the one bubbling in the ancient Lemurian serpent man stewpot.

A blast of high energy particles from your orbital quason cannon later, you may have the strength and speed of a few dozen South American jaguars. Or you may be goo. But latter day jungle god or amorphous, pulsating jelly, you’re still going to need the services of a talented mechanic to keep that chick magnet Ferrari on the road. And petrol? Forget about it. The best, quickest, most high octane and competitively priced petrol in the Western Hemisphere is right there, at http://www.garagedelparco.com . It rocks!

The Way Things Ought To Be

2010-04-01T21:03:00.003-04:00

It's clear to me that our Founding Fathers, in their haste to put together a final draft of a historically important document, left out a few key words. But it's an easy fix:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any decent Christian religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech for right thinking decent American folk, or of the press for same; or the right of proper hardworking Godfearing American citizens peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of good God fearing law abiding Christians and other true Americans to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house owned by any right thinking God fearing Christian American, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

The right of decent God fearing Christian people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No proper well behaved God fearing American person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any true right thinking American be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense, if the accused is a good God fearing patriotic American citizen and not some stupid wetback or dumbass liberal.

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted, on any decent right thinking American.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by proper decent hard working tax paying American folks.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the regular law abiding properly Christian folks who live in ‘em.

See? Add a few words here and there, and you can make it exactly the way those great American heroes no doubt intended it should be all along.

Quote of the Day

2010-03-23T06:52:00.002-04:00

From the Doonesbury website:

"What I dislike most about Obamacare though is this notion that the leftists in Washington think that they can pass this thing through, cram it through, with disregard to consider the will of the people, disregard of these constitutional legal traditional processes which have thus far been used in America's processes to allow policy to be adopted that do adhere to the will of the people."
-- Sarah Palin

Ah, the wit and wisdom of the right wing...

New story

2010-03-22T19:49:00.002-04:00

Just finished a story I've been working at, on and off, for several months now. Maybe I'll send it to someone. Maybe not... hard to figure a market that would want to buy it.

Anyway, it's called THE LAST TRUMP, and it's another of my pulp pastiches. Read it, don't read it, comment, don't comment. Whatever.

The Hub of London

2010-02-11T08:28:00.011-05:00

A site I've recently become aware of is http://www.qype.co.uk/ . It's a very useful resource if you're over in Great Britain and looking for restaurants, pubs, or any thing of that sort in London.

This site is very extensive. It provides information about events and occasions occurring all over the world. Whatever you're interested in, you can find it on this site.

What I hadn't realized until I found this site was that you can get Kentucky Fried Chicken in Great Britain. That's pretty awesome. And apparently you can also get Subway. Now, if they get a Jimmy Johns, they'll be all set.

So now I'm curious as to what British pizza is like. So I go over to this site and type 'pizza' into the search field. What do you know? They have Domino’s and Pizza Hut pizza in Britain, and some chain called Pizza Express, and even something called Clever Wally's Raw Pizza, which sounds more interesting than appetizing to me, but still, it’s knowledge I didn’t have before, which can’t be a bad thing.

Apparently they don’t have much barbecue, though. A search turned up only one place: www.JollyHogandSausage.co.uk. I’m not sure I want spare ribs from a Jolly Hog. But then, I usually get them from a feed store (Mark’s, just down Bardstown Road from me) so maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad after all.

There are, however, 55 Latin American restaurants in London, which is about 55 too many, in my opinion.

But what do you know? I do a search on ‘steak’ and I come up with Bodean's Barbecue in Clapham. So maybe the barbecue places are just hiding.

Also, apparently a lot of places in London are called “Gaucho” something. My guess is, if you want to open a business there, you could make a killing selling sombreros.

Restaurants
Pubs London
Restaurants London

I dare you to make less sense

2010-01-20T07:40:00.002-05:00

Or, VENTURE BROTHERS, revisited:

My initial impression -- namely, that THE VENTURE BROTHERS were little more than THE TICK meets JONNY QUEST, and overall, the show was consistently only about half as funny as THE TICK, turns out to have been premature. As Mike Norton said in the only comment this blog has had in over a year (I think), you can't judge the series by the first seven episodes. It does, indeed, evolve over the first and second seasons into something that is far more complex and valuable than merely the sum of all its inadequate, badly damaged parts.

I kind of wish I'd watched the first two seasons without having the Big Secret About Hank And Dean pre-spoiled for me. As it was, I probably didn't get the full impact of the death scene at the end of Season 1, or the revised credit scroll at the start of Season 2.

Having said all that, and having watched with real pleasure as what at first seemed an extremely formulaic show did indeed develop into something with real depth and breadth, something that was both nuanced and rich, something that actually rose above the limitations of the genre and became a multifaceted and almost beautiful and moving ongoing story of one of the world's most tragically disfunctional extended emotional families, replete with some of the most bizarrely developed and unhealthy psychic symbioses imaginable... for all of that, I find myself, in the end, feeling disappointed.

I know where it came from. I went into the last two episodes of Season Two psyched, thinking "Okay, next paycheck I'm buying Season 3". I emerged on the other end of that particular 2 parter... deflated. It was a big grand superhero wedding story, and all my favorite VENTURE BROTHERS characters were there... and overall, I was just kind of bored and disappointed and depressed by it. Phantom Limb had been kind of cool, but now he was just another jerk. Dean's addled, delusional wanderings through the Monarch's engine room filled me with a burning desire to watch nearly anything else, even ROCK OF LOVE, while they were onscreen. The ongoing saga of the Monarch, Dr. Girlfriend/Fiance, the Monarch's two numerically-named henchmen, the revelation of the true identity of the Sovereign... nothing really seemed to work for me. The only thing that really worked for me was watching Brock lead the Monarch's horde of nearly worthless goons in an attack on Phantom Limb's forces... and Brock always works for me.

Which is yet another reason I'm disappointed... apparently, Brock leaves at the end of the third season, and is replaced as Dr. Venture's bodyguard by Sgt. Hatred. Yay.

So, yes, THE VENTURE BROTHERS did grow up to be something far more than it seemed like it could in those first seven episodes, and I did very much enjoy a lot of what I've seen much more than I expected to. But at this particular moment, I largely feel disappointed in the series, and have little interest in watching any more of it, knowing what I do of its future direction.

For the exceptional mind...

2010-01-16T05:51:00.004-05:00

...there is no greater validation than the misapprobation of the mediocre.

Heh. Indeed.

Here's a bunch of guys who, apparently, spend most of their time arguing about stuff like this:

                  semicolonsrock posted:

Jut switching in from 3.5 I am frustrated at not being able effortlessly whip up a min maxed character, and kind of annoyed that the fighter seems to have turned into a solely melee class (This kind of forced specialization is awful). Longbow wielding human fighters were pretty much my favorite character.

                ManMythLegend posted:

Why don't people ever get this is meta gaming to the extreme? To the world in-game you are not a "Bow using fighter" you're "a guy who uses a bow". A ranger and fighter using a bow are, in-universe, no different in profession.

Yet, apparently, when they can't find enough jerk off fodder in their Monster Manuals to continue to fuel their massive mutual bukkake threads, they've decided to momentarily focus their miniscule attention spans on Your Humble Narrator, as per follows:

NorgLyle posted:

This guy is crazy for all kinds of reasons, but when he talks about gaming...

That whole blog is a peach - pure concentrated essence of grognard. He brags about the Kindle sales of his terrible, terrible books and repeatedly mentions how upset he is at the lack of comments on his blog. He also has the Angry Fanboy thing down perfectly (gently caress you, Neil Gaiman! gently caress you, Brian Michael Bendis! gently caress you, George R. R. Martin! gently caress you, John Rogers!) Dude's in his 40s and just starting training for a Call Center position. Not bad for a Master Class spouse/parent!

They keep using this word 'grognard'. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but just to make sure, I looked it up:

Grognard is French for "grumbler".^[1] It is not necessarily pejorative and is sometimes used as a compliment. Historically it meant a soldier in Napoleon's army, particularly a member of the Old Guard.^[2]

"Grognard" came to mean a veteran wargamer in the early 1970s.^[3] It was first used by John Young, at that time an employee of SPI, and subsequently popularised by Strategy & Tactics magazine.

Now, I suppose it's possible that I'm a soldier in Napoleon's army, particularly, a member of the Old Guard, and I just don't remember it... maybe I've been hypnotized into forgetting all that stuff, for the good of the timeline, or whatever. I can roll with that.

But I've never played a wargame in my life, other than some RISK when I was a kid.

They also seem to think the word is about the worst insult they can attach to someone. Apparently, it has become the new Cat Piss Man, which other frantically masturbating no life nerds have also attached to me in the past.

Do I really have to quote Inigo Montoya on semantics, here?

I have the love, respect, and admiration of my wife, my children, and some few friends. And that means a great deal to me.

Someday, the time may come when I begin to see some small or large professional success in the field of writing, when the eyes of the world turn to me and my work, and then, I may well know at least some small shreds of admiration from strangers whom are actually, well, admirable.

Until then, the continuing contempt of the weak, the stupid, the envious, the virginal, and the emotionally disfunctional will have to be enough for me.

I will say, it makes me sad that someone as cool as the original Invisible Kid has apparently come back to life as a D&D geek who mocks other people behind their backs. Bad form, Lyle. Mon-el and Ultra Boy would be ashamed of you.

Christmas, the aftermath

2010-01-03T14:45:00.005-05:00

Christmas this year was pretty wonderful. After some past holiday debacles which need not be detailed here, the two oldest kids were trying hard to stay on their best behavior, and having learned some valuable lessons ourselves, SuperWife and I put on a show. All presents were eagerly fallen upon and appreciated, although the biggest hit was the gift Santa left for our entire family - a karaoke machine, along with 15 mixed karoake discs.

It wasn't such a nice gift for our new neighbors, I imagine, but when we originally decided to get the thing, the apartment immediately above ours was still empty. Ah, well.

Super Drama Adult was delighted to find the new Beatles version of ROCK BAND upon unwrapping a gigantic box to the rear of the tree; Super Dependable Teen was equally pleased to open a tiny, tiny giftbag and find within a new I-pod. And Super Adorable Kid was over the moon about her new American Girl doll and attendant paraphenelia, although Nate entirely stole the show with his gift to her of a 17" flat screen TV for the top of her bedroom dresser, which he then also installed for her using his Level 7 Tech Geek skills to hook it up to our existent cable line.

As for me, well, it wasn't about me, but thanks to a last minute, unanticipated Christmas bonus, SuperWife and I okayed each other to spend a relatively small amount of money on each other at the last minute... about five days to the Day, actually. So I ran around like a monkey on crack trying to spend my allotment, and SuperWife, naturally, deployed her assets far more wisely and strategically, with the end result that she wound up with a lot of crap she has no use for, while I got huge stacks of incredibly cool loot, including many, many books (deep breath: WHISKEY AND WATER and BLOOD AND IRON by Elizabeth Bear, THE GIVEN DAY by Dennis Lehane, THE SPIRAL LABYRINTH by Matthew Hughes, INSIDE STRAIGHT by George R.R. Martin, and THE PREFECT by Alastair Reynolds), a couple of hardcover comics collections (the second DC Archives Supergirl volume, and the latest Fantastic Four Treasury), a Tampa Bay Buccaneers Santa hat, an extra special Snuggie with pocketses, a fabulous t-shirt, a card shuffler, some comic book image imprinted undies, a lovely warm corduroy winter jacket, the Director's Cut of WATCHMEN on DVD, and, in my stocking, a booster of HAMMER OF THOR, just for nostalgia's sake, and what appeared to be a pack of DISSENSION Magic cards, but upon opening, proved to be a customized booster created by my wife full of amazingly cool and rare vampire cards, which have already energized my vampire deck to the point where everyone else at the table groans when they see me breaking it out of the box.

Then from other people:

Nate gave me an entire booster box of DISSENSION packs, which was awesome, Super Dependable Teen gave me QUANTUM OF SOLACE on DVD, Super Adorable Kid gave me one of the books listed above (the George R.R. Martin one), Super Drama Adult and her girlfriend gave me a much appreciated copy of THE MARVEL VAULT, which I had pined and moped over ever since we bought the last one off a Books-A-Million remaindered table and sent it to Mike Norton last year, and which, now that I own it, has proven to be a fabulous treasure trove of wonderful and beloved goodies indeed (although the interior text by Roy Thomas and Peter Sanderson is generic, boring, imprecise, all but useless as either a historical or journalistic document, and in short, not much more than a fairly tedious advertiser's puff piece), my mom and stepdad got me a movie trivia game, my in laws gave me a sweatsuit and some microfleece pajama pants and a Christmas ornament and some socks.

But far more important than that is the fact that my kids had a wonderful Christmas and my wife had a wonderful Christmas and I suspect even Nate had a wonderful Christmas.

I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas, too.

And for Mike Norton: Pluto, Fandral, an Asgardian Warrior, Malekith, and Mico Minoru. I'm a little shocked at how crappy most of the sculpts I got look; Pluto is especially disappointing, although Mico Minoru looks like her mutant ability is stretching her neck like a giraffe, or something. The Asgardian Warrior looks by far the best of the lot, although Fandral isn't all that shabby, either. I didn't get any kind of Feat or other sort of card, besides the power cards for the sculpts, so I don't know if I got a bad booster or if the new company isn't including cardboard components any more.

Captain America Lives Again!

2009-12-17T10:55:00.004-05:00

...and various other assorted sundries.

The pic is from my birthday, the big 48, nearly a month ago. Time flies during the holidays around here. The shield was a gift from my eldest daughter, Super Drama Teen, who, being twenty years old now, should probably just be called Super Drama Daughter or some such.

I got other cool stuff -- a nifty Silver Age JLA and Flash t-shirts from Nate, the two FF movies from Super Adorable Kid, some magic cards and an awesome Silver Surfer glass from Super Dependable Teen, a copy of a very useful and avidly sought after, long out of print, roleplaying resource book from SuperWife, and... hrm... probably a few other things I can't remember. But the shield, which Super Drama Daughter found on vacation in Gatlinsburg and hid out for me for months, was the highlight.

I have such great kids.

Last summer, I started up another blogspot page, all about this pulp hero RPG scenario I came up with set in the fabulous 1930s. Check it out, if you've a mind to.

In other random bits of geek blather, I've been watching the first season of THE VENTURE BROTHERS on DVD over the last couple of mornings before I leave for work. Remember THE TICK cartoon? Remember how unbelievably hilariously hysterically bust-a-gut nearly laugh yourself into an aneurysm it was, pretty much constantly, in every single episode?

Well, if you're looking for another pulp hero parody/pastiche cartoon series that is consistently about half as funny as THE TICK, and that occasionally gets up to being nearly 2/3s as funny as THE TICK, then this is your show.

That may seem like damning with faint praise, but I can't think of anything else on that's even half as funny as THE TICK used to be, so, whatever. THE VENTURE BROTHERS is cool, mind you, and I'm enjoying it. It's just, kind of, THE TICK-lite.

Continuing the random, I think it's time. Time for Joss Whedon to just admit it. However much he hates it, he needs to stop running away from it, stop living in denial, and just embrace it: the only thing he can do right is BUFFY. (DR. HORRIBLE was cool, but it's not going to work as an open ended series.) He needs to stop wasting years and years and years that we and Eliza Dushku and Anthony Stewart Head are never going to get back, buckle down, gear up, and do a goddam FAITH series.

And if he'd honestly rather die than re immerse himself in the BUFFY verse, well, I'll write the fucker. I'm easily as fat as Whedon. And I have the same kind of whiny voice he does. Plus, I have a cool Captain America shield. What more could anyone ask for?

I just threw up a little in my mouth

2009-11-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

From my Inbox:

From Sgt Herman Hansley
Camp MXP-512 Third Infantry Division
UnitT.I.D.U,
Abul Uruj, Baghdad, Iraq.

I am Herman R Hansley, a native of Iraq.  I am a
Military Contractor with the America troop currently
serving in the third infantry division Unit in Iraq.

I am currently on duty break. My partner Darren D.
Braswell, 36, of Riverdale, Ga., died Jan. 7th near
 TalAfar, Iraq, when the  UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter
 in which he was a Passenger crashed.  Braswell worked
For the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, before
his death We secretly moved some abandoned cash in
a mansion belonging to the  former president,
Saddam Hussein and the total cash is
US$20,200,000.00 Twenty Million two hundred thousand Dollars.

As I write this letter to you, these boxes are in
 Security Company as I secretly moved it out of Baghdad
 to safe place.

Sir I seek your consent to help me move this money to
 your country location.

You do not have to be afraid of anything as no one else
 knows about this and everything is safe. I would be
pleased and grateful to you if you could assist me
and my late partner  Darren D. Braswel in receiving
this boxes for us on your behalf as I will be heading
back soon to camp in Iraq to join my colleagues.
Of course, I shall compensate you with an attractive
percent of the total funds for your role/efforts.
 We have limited time now as you know that our
evacuation agreement is been negotiated by the USA
 and IRAQI government, kindly get back to me
 immediately.

Moving the funds out of the security company is not
 going to be much of a problem as arrangements are
 being made towards that. All I want from you is your trust,

Please get back to me with your full name
Contact phone number

Preferable without delay and let's negotiate terms.

Your response will determine our subsequent correspondence.

You can read more on this website for more information and
 explanations:  
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm

Yours in Service.
Herman R Hansley

For years I've been getting these things... I suspect we all have. And like most of us, I've pretty much ignored them. I mean, if all these people actually were the relatives of deceased African ministers who had stashed millions in a numbered account, the number of deceased African ministers would start to rival the population of Brooklyn. It all seemed very... unlikely. And silly. And sad.

But this... this just makes me mad as hell.

I would like it very much if the United Nations, or Interpol, or some similar entity, would catch these people and put them in jail for a very long time.

Barring that, maybe we could track these pricks down and 'extraordinary rendition' their asses to Gitmo for a few dozen Presidential terms...

A novel approach

2009-10-05T22:53:00.002-04:00

Just a reminder: all this sf/fantasy goodness is now available in electronic format at Amazon's Kindle store.

WARREN'S WORLD
It's 1983 in New Sparta, NY, and Warren Dawson is beloved by everyone... his friends, his family, even random strangers on the street. Everybody loves Warren and wants to make him happy. The TVs only show his favorite programs, the radios only play his favorite songs, the movie theaters always have his favorite movies. And, naturally, all the women are beautiful, and all of them love Warren unreservedly and uninhibitedly...

When Warren's best friend Jimmy starts to notice just how strange the reality he and all his friends inhabit truly is, he becomes a threat to the odd, timelost Utopia that Warren has so carefully constructed around them all.

Which sets the stage for a final, epic battle between Warren Dawson and his closest friends. Utilizing powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, Jimmy and his buddies must go to war with a man who would be God, to settle the final fate of the entire human race...
and every living inhabitant of WARREN'S WORLD.

THE FEAR MASTERS
In the late 21st Century, the Global Union has mostly united mankind and brought lasting peace to the surface of the Earth... until the dead start rising from their graves to attack the living. Across the globe, panic and terror cause chaos to erupt, civilization to crumble,
and humanity itself to totter on the very brink of extinction.

Only three members of the Global Union's top secret Science Sector have any inkling of what is actually going on. Now they must undertake a perilous journey into the airless depths of outer space and beyond the borders of death itself in a last ditch attempt to save humanity from the evil alien Fear Masters that seek our utter, final destruction.

Can two tough as nails secret agents and a beautiful, brilliant super-scientist 'git 'er done'? For the answer, check out THE FEAR MASTERS, by D.A. Madigan.

TIME WATCH
When Jim, a thirty something bachelor geek with no life outside the pages of his favorite SF books, comes across a wrist watch that allows him to travel in time, he immediately sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream by traveling through time to assemble the greatest collection of
mint condition Silver Age superhero comics in human history.

But in the future, the secret agency known as Time Watch isn't pleased that one of their devices has fallen into the hands of an outsider, and they are ready, willing, able, and eager to do whatever it takes, up to and including killing Jim, to get their watch back.

As Jim flees from his pursuers across time and space, he quickly realizes that he may well be the human race's only hope for avoiding extinction at the hands of the insidious alien intelligence that is pulling Time Watch's strings from behind the scenes. They want humanity, ALL of humanity, dead... and Jim is now the only living human being who knows the truth.

Armed only with his wits, his time watch, and the aid of a beautiful female personal computer from the 22nd Century, Jim must avoid his pursuers and somehow thwart the genocidal agenda of an ancient, immortal, unearthly collective mind that seeks to bring all human
history to a most final termination.

ZAP FORCE: ROYAL BLOOD
Welcome to Sparta City, circa 1995, where seven super-powered teenagers fight for their lives and their freedom against covert cabals of ancient, evil immortals who yearn to outfit them all with high tech alien mind control slave collars - or low tech earthly bodybags, whichever works.

Yes, here in Sparta City, it's the neurotically networked 90s as they never really were, a time and a place when centuries old evildoers scheme, conspire, machinate and manipulate, while teenage superheroes leap, flip in midair, hurl lightning bolts, cast illusions, punch, kick, fly at supersonic speeds, kick ass, take names, and generally blow stuff up real good.

Seven stalwart students at Sparta University, inadvertently given unique and insane ultrapowers by an exotic on-campus psychology experiment gone horribly awry, and now avidly sought after as super-powered slaves by every other secret super society on the planet -

GALLANT, team leader, who at the age of 19 is both selfless and cynical, and whose super-agility and inhumanly unerring aim make him an all but unbeatable hand to hand combatant and absolutely deadly with anything he can throw, especially the hard energy discs and explosive energy globes his alien tech gauntlets generate;

TESLA GIRL, an 18 year old French Canadian hottie who can turn heads with her high voltage beauty and whose electrically supercharged metabolism can generate lightning bolts powerful enough to melt a combat tank into molten slag;

STRAIGHTLACE, the 18 year old diminutive blonde babe with the attitude of a pit bull who can fly faster than a speeding Sidewinder and smash through solid concrete without taking a scratch;

RAMPART, 19 year old African-American star athlete and honor student who can leap tall buildings in a single bound while carrying a Cadillac Seville over his shoulder;

LOBE-O, wheelchair bound 16 year old supergenius with an advanced college placement whose telepathic powers can trace a fleeting thoughtwave through a million muddled mundane minds;

GLAMOUR, a husky Innuit plain Jane psych major whose psychically projected mental illusions seem real enough to leave lipstick marks on a frat boy's cheek, or boot shaped bruises on a bad guy's ass;

WARPER, the 19 year old star college quarterback who can open teleportals with his mind, when he's not charming phone numbers out of any nearby cuties with his All American good looks;

MAINFRAME, the ageless, bodiless former maintenance man who now only exists as a self aware electronic impulse haunting any machine or set of circuitry he cares to inhabit at any given time;

Together they are ZAP FORCE, reluctant heroes fighting to protect an innocent and ignorant global populace, or at least, their own damn selves, from enslavement or death at the hands of the ancient evil immortals who secretly run the world:

BARON SAMEDI, centuries old blustering boss-man of the voodoo-themed Clan Loa, whose sheer raw strength can crumble solid concrete and whose brutal will to dominate will not be denied by uppity interfering newcomers like those no good Zap Force punks;

THE BARONESS, Baron Samedi's crafty, malevolent and utterly ageless wife and co-Monarch, whose vast mental prowess can (and does) enslave entire populations, including, of course, her own entirely unsuspecting husband;

THE OLD ONE, an inhumanly brilliant schemer born before written history began, who remembers the angels, gods and devils of ancient Sumeria and Babylonia as his contemporaries, peers, and more often than not, siblings, and whose own Royal Clan, the Eldest, is the most respected, hated, and feared of any in existence on Earth today.

STEPHEN SANTERIOS of Clan Loa, psychic assassin and master of the incomprehensibly advanced technology left behind on Earth by the long gone alien H'nnr

Put it all together and what do you got? ZAP FORCE!!

Of all of those, THE FEAR MASTERS is so far my top seller... in the last three months, I've sold 7 copies of it to discerning and apparently satisfied customers (at least, they didn't ask Amazon for a refund). This is so far a break out month for me; from May 1 through today, I've sold 10 copies, total, of my work. In 60 days or so, I'll get $34.80 direct deposited to my bank account. I may buy my wife flowers. Or, you know, just my kids some groceries.

Anyway. To the above tally, I'm happy to say I've formatted and added the following:

ENDGAME : When Webster Madison awakens at the far end of the universe in the super powered fantasy body he'd always wished he had, he was thrilled... until he learned that the price for his power would be his participation in a deadly alien game that could cost him not only his new avatar-form, but also his sanity, or even his life.

Now Webster and thirty other transformed roleplaying gamers from Earth find themselves enmeshed as living chess pieces in a contest whose rules they cannot comprehend, and where every move can result in sudden, horrible, grisly death, while the alien overlords responsible for their transformations test their new champions, often to destruction.

Those transformed human champions who survive these trials will be sent on a mysterious mission even more hazardous than the game itself, with an enormous reward waiting at the end for those who finally win through. Or so they are all told... but Webster suspects that in a world where no one is what they appear to be, nothing they have been told is the truth, either... and if he cannot somehow determine actuality from illusion in this dangerous labyrinth of perilous power, neither Webster nor any of his fellow super powered pawns will make it through the ENDGAME...

EARTHQUEST : When Webster Madison, Hired Gun is dumped at the other end of the galaxy from Earth by treacherous aliens, he must fight his way back home across the hostile stars. Hijacking a ship full of slaves, he successfully leads the human cargo in rebellion against the crew and embarks on a career as an interstellar buccaneer and liberator of the oppressed.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Sam Curtis is using his newly found superpowers to reshape the world in his own twisted image. Should Webster somehow manage to set foot once more on his native planet, he will find himself walking into a deadly trap elaborately planned and set by his deadliest foe...

Man vs. Swine

2009-10-04T18:37:00.003-04:00

So, the plague has infested Castle Anthrax.

It started last Friday. Super Adorable Kid was finishing up a week's stretch at her biodad's, and he called to tell us she was spiking a fever. When she got back to us Saturday morning, her fever was around 101, and over the next 24 hours, it went as high as 103.9, never quite breaking the magic '104' mark we had set to ourselves as the point at which we'd take her to the emergency room.

It was an eerie Saturday night. I'd worked until, I think, 7:30 in the evening, and upon getting home, I got to watch what SuperWife had been describing to me all day (on my breaks, I always call home) - Super Adorable Kid flushed from fever, every square inch of her skin radiating heat like a sun lamp, shivering and complaining bitterly of the cold and begging for a blanket, which of course SuperWife wouldn't give her, due to the high fever.

We tried kid's ibuprofen and cool showers, and could not get that fever down. By ten o'clock the next morning, we were near panic. My mom was due for a visit starting tomorrow; we were worried even at that point that we might have to wave her off, and anyway, she's a nurse, so we called her to consult over the phone, and she advised us to get Super Adorable Kid to a doctor immediately, as it sounded to her like the swine flu.

So we called our doctor, and it turns out they have an after hours acute care facility just for kids, and thought she sounded bad enough that she should come in immediately. So we took her over there, and after waiting for an hour and a half in a lobby full of coughing kids, and another 45 minutes in a small consultation room, a doctor we didn't know came in, swabbed her throat, advised us it was probably just the flu but he wasn't sure if it was swine flu, came back in ten minutes later to tell us she was negative for strep, and sent us home, with instructions to keep doing what we were doing.

While we were there, a nurse took her temperature, and it was 99.6... the lowest we'd seen in 48 hours. But the digital thermometer she used had a little plastic roller that you run along the forehead, whereas ours is a digital that you insert the contact point into the ear, so I'm still not sure their thermometer got a good reading of her core temp.

So we got her home and took her temp with our thermometer and it was back up to 102.

That was last Sunday. Sunday is the one day a week I always have off; you can imagine, it wasn't a very restful day of rest for me.

Along about Tuesday, Super Wife started showing symptoms. Now, Super Wife has had bronchitis before, and anytime she gets anything remotely like a chest cold or the flu, it goes straight into her lungs and turns into bronchitis. The last time she got sick was a month and a half ago and although she got a Z pack, and it seemed to get her most of the way back, she never quite got to a point where she wasn't coughing if she laughed too much or breathed too hard. So she started heading downhill fast, fast enough that I didn't have to exert anything like the amount of pressure I normally do to get her to go to the doctor's. (She's quick on the trigger to send me or any of the girls to the doctor if we get a sniffle, but she will not go herself. She's the last person in the family she ever wants to spend any money on. It drives me insane.)

So she was home sick from work Wednesday and went to the doctor's office Thursday and came home with an inhaler of medicine and a double Z-pack, and she seems to be improving, but she's still weak and wheezy, and given that the people who seem to be dying from this thing are doing it because it gets into their lungs, I'm pretty worried about her.

Also on Thursday, our pediatrician called us back and advised that they were pretty sure Super Adorable Kid had swine flu. Yay.

Thursday I also started to cough, just a little bit, at work. I work for a call center (no matter how assiduously I try to avoid call center work, I always seem to end up being sucked back into it; it's like I can get away from hell for a little while, but eventually I always end up back there) so I was hoping it was just allergies combined with having to talk to idiots all day, but Friday, which was my day off, I started to spike a fever and feel pretty crappy.

I would have loved to have stayed home on Saturday, when I was scheduled to work 11 to 8, and any sane employer would have encouraged me to do so rather than bring swine flu into their workplace, but if anyone has ever called my current employer sane, they need to take it back. At the call center where I work, employees earn no sick time until they have worked there a year. You get no PDO (paid days off) until you've been there six months. If you get two full attendance occurrences within a year, you get fired, and there are no exceptions made for any reason, and I'm not kidding.

Different types of things trigger different levels of 'occurrence'. If you're between one minute and two hours late, or you punch out between one minute and two hours early, it is an infraction, and technically you need 10 infractions to add up to an occurrence... but there is a sliding scale. In your first 12 months, any one infractions actually equals 6 infractions. In your second year, that goes down to like 4, I think. In your third year, it drops to 2, and when you've been there four years, your attendance infractions actually count as one for one.

Now, missing a day of work unexcused, for any reason at all, is a full occurrence, so you can only miss 1 day of work in your first year... the second day, you are fired. No exceptions. It doesn't matter why you missed work, your supervisor cannot excuse your absence, it is zero tolerance.

So, if you come in late or leave early twice, you have eighteen infractions. Miss a day of work, and you have 10. Get up to two full occurrences, and you're gone.

If this sounds very confusing to you, well, it is. I believe that it is deliberately made very confusing so that at the uppermost levels of management, somebody somewhere can be a little bit subjective about it if they want to... in fact, I know they can, because a month or so ago, when we had bad flooding in downtown River City, about half the call center couldn't make it to work, and management decided that that particular day would not count as an occurrence. (You didn't get paid for it, but it didn't count against you.)

I understand the policy. At any other job I've ever had -- and having temped since 1985, I've had over a hundred, I'm sure - where they have sane attendance policies, people will generally, at least once or twice a year, call in sick when they're not sick. Maybe you've got a sick kid, or maybe you've got to go to an appointment, or maybe it's a nice day out and you need a mental health day, or, whatever... if you work for an enlightened employer, you call up and say "I've got a sick kid, I can't come in today", and if your employer is a dick, you call up, put on your sick voice, and say "I've been throwing up and I can't get off the toilet, I'm gonna try to make it in tomorrow". And nobody fucks with you.

They may not like it; they may very well suspect, when they hear the 'sick voice', that you're faking it to get out of work, mostly because they've done the same damn thing themselves; everybody has, one time or another, unless you have the kind of employer who will let you call in for any reason besides sickness.

My current employer has decided they're not having any of that. But how do you eliminate fake sick days? Well, you eliminate ALL excuses to call in for work; you enact a policy whereby, if an employee misses any work at all, they're fired. No excuses. No exceptions. Show up for work on time when you're scheduled and work your whole shift, or don't show up at all, ever.

The analytical part of me also wonders just how much this deranged policy has to do with the fact that I only have this job because my employer had to get permission from the Federal government to do a pretty big merger last year, and the Federal government stipulated that if they were going to do that, they had to agree to bring about 2000 jobs that they had previously offshored back to America. Given how hard it is to actually stay employed by this employer, what with the policy I am describing, and several others I have not, I'm wondering if they aren't positioning themselves to go to the Feds in another year or so and say "We've tried to staff these jobs with Americans, and Americans are no good... they won't show up for work, and we can't keep the positions filled. We need to offshore these jobs again." This little bit of paranoia is especially born out by what a supervisor at my call center once told me - any month where they only have 51% turnover in staff is considered a good month. But they don't often have good months.

So, yes, I do understand the policy, but it's either malevolent or insane. The elimination of people calling in sick when they're not sick is, on one level, a laudable goal, and call centers do need to be pretty strict about attendance and punctuality. But this is my fifth call center, and it's the first place I've ever worked where, no matter how sick I actually am, I absolutely do not dare to call in sick if I think I have the strength to crawl to the bus stop.

So, even knowing that I almost certainly have the swine flu, I went into work on Saturday. I was pretty miserable, with my fever spiking up and down all day, but I took a lot of medicine in with me and I'm not bronchial like Super Wife is, so I got through it. Most of the people I spoke with, however, opined that I should really be at home, a sentiment I heartily agreed with.

Today I'm doing okay. I've been stuffed up, but taking a handful of pills every 12 hours or so... ibuprofen for fever, Mucinex for the cough and congestion, sudafeds for the runny nose. I had no fever all last night, but woke up with it back up to 101.7... took some ibuprofen and a shower, and got it back down. Now I have no fever again, or didn't last time I checked it. I just feel kind of punk.

After a restless night, I switched over to sleeping in my 9 year old's room (she was back at her biodad's for her weekend visit earlier today). Her bed is the futon I used to sleep on (my mom and stepdad bought it to put in the guest room when I had to stay with them for a while back in '97, and when they moved out of that house, they gave the futon to me, and I've had it ever since, and slept in it until I moved here in 2004, when I turned it over to Super Adorable Kid). I mostly did it so SuperWife could have the bed in the back room and watch TV; she wasn't tired and I was. I wound up sleeping until 2:30 in the afternoon, which seems to have done me a world of good.

Super Adorable Kid had been scheduled to go camping at Red River Gorge for a family reunion this weekend, and SuperWife had been scrapping with the ex all week long, trying to get him to see that even if Super Adorable Kid weren't feverish on Saturday, she might still be contagious and she shouldn't be sleeping on the ground in 40 degree weather. He finally, grudgingly, saw reason on Friday and agreed not to go to the Gorge; it was only when SuperWife called his sister and told her that Super Adorable Kid probably had swine flu and the sister called him and gave him an earful that he came around. It's unfortunate that things are this way, but the kind of relationship he has created with us, if SuperWife or I say "stop", he immediately says "go". He honestly thinks that everything is about him, and if SuperWife or I are expressing concerns about our mutual daughter's health, well, that's just a blind, what we're REALLY trying to do is mess up his camping trip, and he has to dig his heels in just to spite us.

So, anyway, she didn't go camping, and she seems to have been fever free all weekend, which is something. Now she's got a rash and is scratching her head and neck a lot, and she's still coughing too much, but I think she's getting through the flu, at the very least. Which is a huge relief.

This thing isn't hitting me anywhere near as hard as it's hitting SuperWife. I can hear her coughing her head off from down the hall in the bedroom, and it's really stressing me out. I have to go back to work tomorrow, and risk spreading this thing to any number of other people who, I'm sure, if they could take a vote, would much rather I stayed home... but I can't lose this job. There is nothing else out there for me; I keep looking. I'm amazed that in the middle of a recession bordering on a depression, I managed to find work at all. I've called our personnel department twice to ask if they are planning to make any exceptions to the attendance policy for swine flu, and both times the person on the other end of the phone has said, basically, "Uh...." followed by a long silence.

Of course, whoever I get on the phone isn't authorized to make an exception for any reason, that has to come from the very top. And I know that. And I also know that if someone were to decide, okay, we'll let people with swine flu stay home and recover, well, anyone who wants to call in sick will say they've got swine flu, which is exactly the sort of thing that this completely fucking demented and utterly irresponsible attendance policy is intended to prevent.

But the end result is going to be, the entire call center is going to end up down with the swine flu.

Anyway, that's my ongoing battle with swine flu. I strongly suggest that if you haven't already gotten it, you wash your hands every twenty minutes, carry antibacterial spray with you everywhere you go, and avoid the infected like lepers.

SuperWife is coughing again, so I'm going to wrap this up.

George R.R. Martin is not my bitch

2009-09-01T07:24:00.002-04:00

Daniel Keys Moran's latest comment threads point me to this driveling idiocy, which, given the source, surprises me not at all with either of those two qualities. In that comment thread, I respond thusly:

As for entitlement issues, and Neil Gaiman:

It's interesting that Gaiman opens that essay complaining because American Airlines won't provide him with what he considers to be a necessary tool to facilitate his writing while on one of their flights, at a price he thinks is reasonable. American Airlines provides him with a service (getting him from point A to point B within an acceptable time frame) for a price he's willing to pay. Gaiman seems to feel there's a contract between him and AA, that they will also, for the price of his ticket, facilitate his word processing while he's in their care, just like, apparently, all the other airlines he normally flies with do. But, as he points out later on in an entirely different context, the contract doesn't exist. His sense that they should give him this thing that he wants cheaply, that is not part of the service they render, is, er, hm, what should we call it... oh, yeah... an 'entitlement issue'.

Then he goes on to say this, in re: the astonishingly lazy George R.R. Martin:

You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.

Yeah. We want to know what happens next. And the author isn't telling us. Know what he's doing instead? He's taking the money we've paid him to tell us this story and he's spending it doing pretty much every other thing in the world except what we're paying him to do, which is, finish the story.

There is a contract. When you pay your money to the storyteller in the marketplace, the contract is, he tells you a story. Now, I'm willing to accept that when I toss a shekel in his upturned turban, maybe I won't LIKE the story, but unless the motherfucker dies before he chokes out the ending, at the very least, I believe that the implicit contract betwixt him and me that came into existence when he said "I'll tell you a story for a shekel, my good man" and I said, "Very well, here is your shekel, prate onward, o scribe", encompasses him telling me the ENTIRE story. Not just half or two thirds of it, at which point, he'll decide it's much much more important for him to watch a Giants' game, or go off to some storyteller's convention where people will kiss his ass for a week or so, or head back into his hotel, where he can sign a lot of merchandising and film contracts regarding the half or 2/3s of a story I've paid him to tell me and that he hasn't finished yet.

I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for a STORY. He hasn't finished the story yet. And sure, if it's a long story he's entitled to breaks and meal time and some rest & recreation, but when I keep coming back to the marketplace looking for him to pick up where he left off and he's still over by the fountain under an awning watching the Punch & Judy show while good looking matched Swedish twins put butter on his toes, and it's pretty obvious that the operators of the Punch and Judy show and the good looking Swedish twins are both being sponsored by my shekel, I'm going to start feeling a little bit put upon, a little bit aggravated, a little bit as if someone is failing to live up to their end of the unstated contract.

But there is a contract, and the contract is this: You start a story, you finish it, and if you're having trouble finishing it, you at least show that you're making an effort to do so, that your contract with me is a priority for you, that it matters, that it's important.

You want to break that story down into increments and charge me for each increment, that's fine, but I want to see that you're making progress. I want to see good faith. And if I don't, I'm going to scream my head off about it, and why? Because that's really all I can do. If the storyteller is indeed so feckless and faithless that, while continuing to take my shekels through all his merchandising contracts and such, he still puts every other thing in his life ahead of continuing to tell me the story I'm paying for, well, there's not much I can do, except scream my head off, which I'm going to do.

This is one of those things where you're either a paying audience member or a story teller. If you're one, you simply have no sympathy for the POV of the other. I can understand this, vaguely; there are only six people in the world who have read my first novel UNIVERSAL MAINTENANCE, but I regularly hear from all six of them, wondering when I'm going to write the sequel. And I tell them all the same thing: when someone wants to pay me a realistic amount of money to set aside a year or so of my finite lifespan to turn out that sequel, I'll write it. Which I think is fair.

George R.R. Martin has been fairly compensated for not only the entire projected SONG OF ICE AND FIRE series, but, most likely, at this point, for every single other thing he's ever written in his life, and, most likely, he's been compensated at a pretty high rate for every football game he's ever going to watch again before he dies, too.... all of it, out of the coin that has been generated by A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE... a story that he has, as yet, to finish. The contract is for the story, not the increments of the story. If he can't finish it, he can at least keep working on it. He can show us it's a priority for him.

Or he can start issuing refund checks.

And if he can't do that, or he chooses not to do that, then, at the very least, while he's living in the million dollar home the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, watching football on the big screen high density TV the Ice and Fire fans bought for him, jetting to various exotic foreign lands using tickets that his Ice and Fire fans bought for him, and staying at hotels that his Ice and Fire fans are paying for, and going to cons to receive the adulation of his Ice and Fire fans, when we ask him "say, George, when's the next Ice and Fire book coming out", he could not whine and shriek and stamp his feet and wave his arms and cry like a giant fucking grey haired baby and call all of us names because, you know, we've given him millions of dollars for this story and he doesn't even want to bother pretending he's actually working on finishing it.

There is a contract. There is. I'm sorry if other authors of serial fiction out there take all this personally and find it all very inconvenient, but there is. And it's not for the book, it's for the story. You start a story, you need to at least make a pretty game attempt at finishing it. George R.R. Martin not only wants to cop out on his contract, but he also demands universal respect, admiration, and adulation from his fans while he takes our money with one hand and flips us off with the other.

Beyond all that, let me say this: Nobody, not one single Ice and Fire fan, has ever assumed that George R.R. Martin is our bitch. That's a straw man, and an egregiously dishonest, ludicrously stupid one, at that. We just think George R.R. Martin undertook to tell us a story, and he's fucking off, on our dime. And it pisses us off.

Or at least, it pisses me off.

Here endeth the lesson.

It's not exactly succinct, and given that nobody reads this blog any more, it's not going to inspire any fawning sycophant to record a catchy little You Tube ditty, but, still, I think it's much more cogent than the entirely self serving nonsense it refutes.

The Random

2009-08-13T12:21:00.003-04:00

Random nonsense as it occurs to me:

* My new job sucks. I could go on and on and on, as I once did about previous jobs on previous blogs, and it would be hilarious and all the people who aren't reading this blog would find it hilarious if they read this blog, but then one of those people who aren't reading this blog would mention it to someone I work with and I'd get fired and my wife would kick my ass. So all you get is 'my new job sucks', and 'you' are me, anyway, because nobody else is reading this blog, so 'you' already know all this stuff, anyway.

* Tip of the oscillation overthruster to that master of fuck a doodle doo John Rogers for tipping me to the phrase shipping, which I still can't believe I never heard of until a few minutes ago. In addition to being an asshole, I'm apparently an ignorant wipe, too. WhatEV.

* The guy over at Perfectly Cromulent Blog isn't getting any comments these days, either. This makes me feel simultaneously sad and comforted, reinforcing once again the long standing realization that I am, indeed, a dick.

* So far, out of all my e-novels at the Kindle site, my runaway best seller is Time Watch. Now, mind you, I like Time Watch fine, but why it should outsell everything else I've got up there for an order of magnitude I could not possibly tell you... except that so far, it's the only book that anyone else has ever linked to from anything like a popular blog. Which is probably all the difference there is.

* And at that, when I say it's a runaway bestseller, I mean, over the last six months, it's sold about 20 copies. Which is about ten times what any other title I've got up there has sold over the same period.

* My new job REALLY sucks.

* And so do nearly all Republicans/conservatives, from what I can see.

Please Help If You Can

2009-07-24T19:17:00.001-04:00

Back in September of 1979, I was wandering aimlessly on the third evening since my family had helped move me into the dorms at Syracuse University. I heard music coming from the quad, and drifted over. A band with a female lead singer was playing AMAZING rock and roll, so I sat down at the periphery and listened. I caught the name of the singer after a few more songs, and a week later, bought her self named debut album at a local campus record store.

Along with the first two albums by The Cars, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' DAMN THE TORPEDOES, Blue Oyster Cult's SECRET TREATIES and AGENTS OF FORTUNE, and Carole King's TAPESTRY, that self titled debut album, CAROLYNE MAS, became a vital and permanent part of the musical backdrop of my adulthood. I've always thought it was a great pity that Carolyne Mas never caught on; she had a fantastic voice, was a wonderful guitar player, and a terrific songwriter. A few years later I managed to find her third album and snatched that up, too. It wasn't as good as the first, but it still had a lot of really solid tunes on it.

Fast forward to last summer -- I came across an article online about Carolyne Mas, about how she'd never quite made it in rock and roll and was currently, in her early 50s, running a shelter for abandoned animals in Florida. I put up a blog entry lamenting the unfairness of a world in which hack non creative types become incredibly successful while genuinely talented artists languish as unknowns.

Fast forward again to a few weeks ago, when that blog entry got its first comment... from Carolyne Mas. She thanked me for the entry, said she loved my writing style, and suggested I help her write her biography.

That began an email correspondence, the latest installment of which is below (in response to a note I sent on Monday, asking if she was doing okay, as I knew from a phone call on Friday she was heading into a rough weekend):

"We're not okay...I have been desperately trying to raise money. I have no money for cat food, dog food, and now people food. No matter how many times I post my plea on FB or MySpace...we are all on the verge of starvation. I am trying to make sure my mother and my son have something to eat. There is a place that gives free meals on Sundays, so we will be able to eat then, all of us, if we can get the gas to get there. I am worried about the cats and dogs, too.

I have sent this letter to all the production and publishing big shots I have known, who are all wealthy, with no response. When you are poor, no one wants anything to do with you. It's a sick world, especially the entertainment business...if you cannot serve them in some way, you are invisible.

Here is a link to my letter...

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=90734634069&id=637561082&ref=mf]http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=90734634069&id=637561082&ref=mf

Hope I can hang on long enough for you to finish this...

Love, Carolyne"

This is not a joke or a hoax. This is a real person who is really at the end of her rope and has no idea where else she is going to turn, or how she's going to eat, or feed her husband, or the hundreds of abandoned animals in her care, past this Sunday, assuming they manage to get to a food bank and the food bank actually has any food.

I don't know this woman at all well, but I believe her to be one of the genuinely good people in this world, as well as an enormously talented performing artist, and while there is little to nothing I can do for her, or my family can do for her, at this distance and given our own financial situation, still, I can reach out on the Internet, and I am doing so.

If you check out this link and scroll down a little, you will find a lot of information about Carolyne's life and career and current undertakings and desperate situation, and you will also find a PayPal link. I'm sure Carolyne will be deeply grateful for any contributions whatsoever that may come in. As will I, for whatever that may be worth.

These are a few of my least favorite things...

2009-07-08T22:26:00.001-04:00

...a bunch of blog posts in a row with no comments.

It's tough to stay motivated.

It's just a jump to the left

2009-07-03T19:06:00.007-04:00

Okay. So, I started a new job on Monday, and I could do a whole blog about what I've learned regarding this job in the last four days, but the economics of our day to day family life demand that I not get fired, so I will abstain. Suffice to say, it's a call center, and when I complete my classroom training in another three weeks, I'll be taking calls from disgruntled and stupid customers at horrifying hours of the day and night. You can review my old blog entries made while working in other call centers for anything further you might need; nothing is different about this job, except in the ways that this job is worse than those I've held previously.

I'm pretty much over LouisvilleRPG.net, and I'll tell you why.

The latest thing was, I had set up this scenario to run for my Monday night gaming group using the SAVAGE WORLDS RPG system. SAVAGE WORLDS is extremely simple minded and unrealistic and I'm not crazy about how several of its essential mechanisms work, but the system's slogan is "Fast, Furious, Fun!" and that, at least, is accurate. I would never use the system for any kind of serious campaign, but for different, more shallow adventures, it's pretty workable. So I came up with this scenario and I was really psyched to run it, as it's set in 1938 and features larger than life pulp hero/villain archetypes, which is a subgenre I've loved since I was a kid reading DOC SAVAGE paperbacks at my babysitter's house. I was really looking forward to it, it was going to be a lot of fun.

But those hopes began to die when I started my new job.

See, I'd known that after six weeks of training, I'd have to bid on a shift and chances are that, having no seniority, I'd end up with one nobody else wanted, meaning, I'd be working nights. My Monday night gaming group ran on, well, Monday nights, so it seemed pretty certain that once six weeks went by, I'd no longer be able to game with those guys, but that was okay, as the scenario I'd come up with was designed to run maybe four sessions at most. So all was cool. Yes, it seemed likely that after training was over, I'd have to drop out of the Monday night group indefinitely, but at least I'd go out with a bang.

Now, the path to getting my new job was long and arduous and required several phone conversations/interviews with various HR people and supervisors, as well as a drug screen and a background check, over the course of several months. During these contacts, I was told repeatedly by several different people that for training, we'd be working Monday through Friday, 8 to 5. After training, we'd have to bid on shifts and most likely would start out working at night, as very few people want to work at night and that's what we'd get stuck with... a very familiar dynamic to me from past call centers. But for the first six weeks, Monday through Friday, 8 to 5.

Which worked well with our Monday game group, as it met from 6 to 10. Four hours isn't much to run an RPG in, and I wouldn't have wanted to try running any kind of RPG for much less than four hours a session, but getting out of work at 5 would leave me ample time to make a 6 o'clock start time.

So I thought, anyway.

But Nate's going on vacation next week, so that was one Monday we weren't going to have. Which was no problem, as my scenario was only supposed to run 4 sessions, and I still had 5 weeks available for sessions before training concluded and I had to quit the group. So it was still going to be cool and I was still totally psyched.

But then, one of the other guys (he doesn't like his real name used on the internet, on the sight he goes by Cruel Despot, so I'll call him CD) announced he'd be out for a week in there, too... not the same week Nate was going to be out, but a different one.

So that dropped my six weeks of availability down to 4. But I could still do it, no problem. Gonna be fun, totally psyched...

So then Nate found out on a Thursday that the following Monday (last Monday, the 29th of June) he was going to have to go out of town for work and wouldn't be around. Fuck. Okay. At first I figured we just weren't going to get to play that week, which sucked, and I was sad and disappointed. But then, everyone in the group -- CD, another guy named Chris, and Nate -- agreed to do it on Wednesday night instead. Okay. Going to be cool, totally psyched...

Then at work, first day, right out of the box, we were informed that our fifth and sixth weeks of training we'd be working 2 pm to 11 pm, instead of 8 to 5. Which meant suddenly I'd have to quit the Monday group two weeks earlier than I'd thought. So I started sending emails on my break again, and that dialogue went something like this:

ME: I only have four weeks until I start working evenings. Two weeks of those we can't play. Suggestions?
CD: Run it anyway as a one shot, or for two sessions. I want to play.
NATE: Hell to the yeah.
CHRIS: Whatever, dudes.

So... okay. I could cut back, I could streamline, I could cram. I could run the scenario for one or two sessions. I could make that work. And I was incredibly psyched to run. Even comopressed, it was going to be SO much fun. I just love Golden Age pulp.

So there were two other guys who were kinda sorta thinking of joining the Monday night group, which as I have noted, met from 6 to 10 on Mondays. I'd been hoping they'd both play in the scenario, as 5 player characters would be better than 3. One of them, whom I knew only by his board sig, ElSanto, had sent me a few emails full of excellent ideas for Golden Age type pulp heroic player characters. So I was really hoping he'd be able to play on Wednesday.

Another, a guy named Conner, I hadn't heard a word from. But after the run had to be pushed from Monday to Wednesday, I heard from ElSanto... he was sorry, but the only night he could make it was Monday. Goddamit. Okay, that was disappointing.

Then I heard from the other guy. He wasn't really interested in the 1930s or 'the whole pulp thing', as he put it. So he wasn't going to play, either. Bummer. Oh, well. Anybody who doesn't like Golden Age Pulp is a waste of space and organized protoplasm, anyway, so... whatever.

But I still had three players for Wednesday, and was totally psyched. It was going to be SO cool. I was really looking forward to it.

So then at the end of our first day, after I'd made all these adjustments and absorbed all of these changes, our trainer mentioned that she was changing training hours from 8 to 5 to 9 to 6.

That dialogue went like this:

TRAINER: Did they tell all of you you'd be working from 8 to 5 for the first four weeks of training?
CLASS: Yes. Over and over again.
TRAINER: I'm going to change that just a little, to 9 to 6. I really think it will help you to get a little later start in the morning. You'll be more awake.
ME: You fucking bitch. I will kill you, I will skin you, I will suck the marrow from your bones, tan your filthy hide and make it into taut, supple drumheads that I may beat out the rhythms of my rage with the long and weighty lengths of your femurs, which will feel so very right and comfortable in my vengeful hands.

Or at least, that's how it went in my mind.

(Should the human race become telepathic, I will find it impossible to remain employed.)

So, I sent emails out again. Did people still want to try to run this thing, if I couldn't be there until 6:30, quarter of 7? I hated losing any time at all from such a narrow, finite window. But I only had two potential sessions left to run this thing where a reasonably sized group could get there, and I really wanted to run it, despite what seemed to be an absolute determination on the part of God to do everything short of hitting the Earth with a planet killing meteor to stop me doing so.

That went like this:

ME: Uh, so, my hours just got changed and I'm working until 6 and I probably can't get there until like 6:30, quarter of 7. I hate that. Do people still want to play?
CD: I'm cool.
NATE: Totally.
CHRIS: Uh... I forgot to tell you guys but like two months ago I promised my girlfriend I'd do something with her and her family on Wednesday and she just reminded me so, uh, too bad, so sad.
ME: You fucking bitch. I will kill you, I will skin you, I will suck the marrow from your bones, tan your filthy hide and make it into taut, supple drumheads that I may beat out the rhythms of my rage with the long and weighty lengths of your femurs, which will feel so very right and comfortable in my vengeful hands.

Okay, I didn't really say it, or even type it, that time, either, but I badly, badly wanted to.

It was especially exasperating, as I'd gone to great efforts to attend a couple of RPG sessions that Chris had GMed, the previous week. But... whatever, dude. Skin you later.

At this point, I just gave up, because it seems obvious that if I persist in this folly, God is going to send a plague of boils or a voracious and unstoppable onslaught of hideous mutated giant boll weevils or some such shit to keep me from ever running this scenario.

Which makes me sad. And frustrated.

Just to add further general aggravation to the situation, it appears that apparently by some bizarre alchemy, this complete collapse of my planned scenario has transmuted itself into the complete collapse of the Monday night gaming group. Those two guys who were going to join the group? They decided to start their own Monday night group instead. Chris and CD? They've joined the new Monday night group, abandoning our previous one.

It's like, I get a job where I'll have to work evenings, and everything falls apart all around me.

I had no idea I was such an essential person.

Anyway. By itself that wouldn't have been enough to sour me on the RPG site, but, well, it's been coming for awhile, and this is just that fabled final straw. Beyond all the crap I've already reported above and in previous entries, well, I'm just tired of the idiocy and, more importantly, the hypocrisy, that is redolent on the site. What do I mean? Well... listen, O Prince, as I weave for you the tales:

A while back, I happened to casually mention in a thread on the site a particular incident that had occurred in my RPG back in the 90s, in Syracuse. I thought it was funny, and that others would find it amusing. As nearly always happens, I vastly overestimated the intelligence, maturity, open mindedness, and wisdom of my fellow gamers, especially those at LouisvilleRPG.net. But let me tell you this anecdote as I told it to them:

The group of player characters in my game at the time had broken into a wizard's lair and stolen several valuable items. One of the most valuable they couldn't sell in Ona Tengu (the area where they were) because it was powered by a kind of magic that was very illegal there (necromancy) and they would have been executed if anyone had suspected they had such a thing.

So they had booked passage on a ship to a less lawful realm, but it didn't leave until the next morning. They were pretty sure the local underworld was aware they had the item, and would try to kill them and get it. So they rented an inn room, and took turns sitting up on watch in the hallway outside the inn room door. (In a previous scenario, a different group of characters played by the same guys had been in a similar situation, and they'd stood watch inside the inn room, and an assassin had snuck up to the door and pumped the room full of toxic gas through the keyhole. So this time, they posted their guard outside the door, to preclude that.)

So I was going to have the local crimelord send an attractive bimbo to try and lure the PC guarding the door away.

Naturally, the players were going to be suspicious of any kind of approach... players generally know when an encounter or occurrence is random or planned, based on what kind of dice the GM has them roll. So they were suspicious of anything that happened, especially if they hadn't rolled a random encounter. (Some GMs roll such things behind their DM screen, specifically so that players won't have this kind of information, but I make rolls like this where people can see them, so they know I'm not cheating. It's just how I DM.)

Now, what the players were doing in this instance is called metagaming... playing your character with knowledge that only the player has, usually based on a game mechanic the character has no idea exists... and I have rules to deal with it. There are skills in my RPG that allow characters to Persuade each other to do things, even if the player of those characters knows better and does not want their character to do those things.

So I was going to have a cute dancer or tavern servant or something go down the hall and make a Sex Appeal roll on whoever was standing guard. The player would be pretty sure it was a trick, given the lack of a random encounter roll... they'd be fairly certain this was an event planned by the GM, and therefore, part of some scheme... but if the non player character succeeded at the skill roll vs the player character's Willpower, then it wouldn't matter what the player suspected... the PC would be successfully seduced and removed from position.

At the last second, it occurred to me that in my RPG setting, there is no homosexuality taboo and nearly everyone is bisexual... so it could just as easily be a male cute young thang as a female assigned to the seduction/distraction task. Certainly, it would never occur to the local crimelord that he needed to specifically send a woman to do the job. So I told the player whose character was on guard (his name was Chris) to roll a d6. He said "What do I want?" and I said, "Well, knowing you, probably an odd number". He rolled a 4. So the cute young thang set to seduce the big burly male mercenary was, indeed, male.

In my RPG setting, this wouldn't make any difference, which was why I did it... to underscore that the world my players were gaming in was not our world, but an entirely different reality, and their player characters, having been raised in that world, would have somewhat different values, morals, and taboos than the players themselves did.

So this is how that went:

ME: So you see this incredibly sexy inn servant coming up the stairs... you saw this same NPC serving drinks in the bar downstairs when you came in. Long reddish blonde hair, silky soft, beautifully applied make up, young,soft skin the color of coffee with cream, big brown eyes... you smell just a hint of a very pleasant, musky perfume mingled with a very sexy natural body scent as this sexy thing sways past you in the hall, carrying a tray of drinks to one of the rooms further down. You get a wink and a smile as you watch the NPC go by with the tray. A few minutes later, this same server comes back out and walks back down the hall, and pauses a few yards away from you and says "Gods, I hate this shift. What are you still doing up?"
CHRIS: Uh... I ignore her.
ME: Ignore beauty such as this? Roll 2d6 and add 2.
CHRIS: Goddamit... okay. Erg. 9.
KENNY: Dude, you are totally into her.
ME: In character, I don't think your character would just ignore her.
CHRIS: I want a Willpower roll.
ME: Okay... roll. (rolls dice) I have a 19 total.
CHRIS: I can beat that... (rolls dice) Fuck. A 12. Okay, I'll say "Well, I'm keeping watch and I need to concentrate so I'll talk to you later."
ME: Okay. You see a disappointed pout come to the NPC's lovely features. "Look," that lovely voice says, dropping to a whisper, "it's dead downstairs; the barkeep won't notice if I don't come back for a little while. This room across the way is empty... wanna slip into it with me for a quickie?"
KENNY: Dude, don't do it!
NATE: She's going to make a Sex Appeal roll and I'll bet she's got this huge rating.
SCOTT: It's a good thing it's not my watch or I'd already be there. She wouldn't even have to roll on me.
KENNY: Dude, you're a horn dog.
NATE: You'd get us all killed.
CHRIS: I tell her I can't, really, but I'm flattered.
ME: Well, your character knows he SHOULD say that, but I'm not sure he actually can. Roll and add to your Willpower.
CHRIS: Goddamit. (rolls dice) A 23.
ME: (rolls dice) Yeah, but I have a real good rating... 29. Your character totally wants to go.
CHRIS: Goddamit, goddamit! I know this is a total set up from the Kinship!
ME: Your character goes off with the good looking young waiter, and I'm sure has a great time...
NATE: Wait. 'Waiter'?
SCOTT: It's a guy?
ME: Well, I've told you guys before, there is no homosexuality taboo on the River, so your characters wouldn't care. It's not our world.
CHRIS: What the fuck...? It's a GUY?
ME: It wouldn't make any difference to your character, Chris...
KENNY: Dude! It's a DUDE! You're totally going to bone a DUDE! Your character is a fag!
SCOTT: {coughs into hand} Homo!
NATE AND KENNY: (playing air guitar) Lolaaaaa... Lo Lo Lo Lo Lolaaaaaa... Lo lo lo lo lo Lolaaaaaa...
CHRIS: (yelling) That is so totally stupid my character is not gay I would totally never play a gay character I would never even let a guy get close to me that is so fucking bogus I AM TOTALLY NOT QUEER THAT IS SO UNFAIR YOU CAN'T DO THAT...

So I told this story on the site. I mean, it's fifteen years later, right? People are more enlightened now. Everyone would see how funny the whole thing was.

Or so I, entirely erroneously, presumed.

You would have thought I'd confessed to killing someone's kid.

IDIOT 1: You can't make people be gay. That's crazy. Players should have total control of their characters, especially something as important as whether they're gay or not.

ME: It.. okay, in my rpg setting, the kind of homosexuality taboo we take for granted in our world does not exist. People can be attracted to other people regardless of gender. I'm not 'making' anyone be gay, it's simply that my culture does not place enormous social pressure on all its members from birth to only behave in a heterosexual manner.

IDIOT 2: You are totally overestimating the impact of culture on sexuality. People are born straight or gay. And all my characters were born totally straight. Totally.

ME: Look, in most RPGs, characters are pagan, right? You don't get a choice in that. The background culture worships many gods, so, so do your characters. You don't feel offended or outraged that your character is going to worship some weird made up deity from a Monster Manual because that's what people do in the world where he grew up.

IDIOT 3: That's not the same, being gay or straight is totally different from that, and all my characters are straight. The world they are born in has nothing to do with it.

IDIOT 4: Also, you can't just make somebody's character do something they don't want to. Even if it was a girl trying to lure me away, I should get to decide if I go or not.

ME: So, if some good looking NPC makes a Sex Appeal roll on you, and you fail a Willpower check, there should be no consequences?

IDIOT 5: The player decides what his character does. Unless you're using a mind control spell or something. Sure she might be hot but my character might think about the good of the mission and how the party needs him and decide not to go with her. Or maybe my character is married or just isn't in the mood to have sex right then. It's up to me, not you.

IDIOT 2: Also, my character isn't gay. I would never sleep with a man under any circumstances and neither would any of my characters.

ME: So, the player always controls the character, even if the behavior is out of character?

IDIOT 1: It isn't out of character. My character might decide to go with the chick, but he might not. It depends. I'd play my character in character. But only I get to decide what that is.

IDIOT 3: And he would never under any circumstances be gay. That's final.

This "how dare I make anyone be GAY" thing is, in my opinion, beneath contempt... it's nothing but homophobia, which was made pretty clear in the succeeding posts in the thread. The more the members of this particular posse protested that they had nothing against gay guys, it's just that THEY weren't gay, and weren't interested in roleplaying gay characters, and none of their characters should ever be gay, or would ever be gay, under any circumstances, the clearer it became that these were some deeply homophobic motherfuckers, at least some of which were probably repressing their own particular impulses and fantasies to an entirely unhealthy extent. And I have no time for that idiocy, any more than I had time for the one player who rolled up a member of a dark skinned race in my game and didn't want to play him, because he just wasn't comfortable if his PC wasn't a white guy, like him.

So all that soured me on the site, too. But the last straw was an incident that occurred just last week.

As background, let me take you back to the height of the Doc Nebula Flame Wars. This was a period when most of the site was up in arms at me, because I do not like Dungeons and Dragons, I think it's an incredibly stupid fucking game system, and I also think that adults who play Dungeons and Dragons instead of using any of a hundred or more better game systems, or making up their own, are kind of retarded, or, at the very least, have no idea what roleplaying actually is, and are apparently unwilling to learn. And I'd said so, repeatedly, on the site.

Now, this is a site devoted to roleplaying games, and one where supposedly, freedom of expression is cherished and championed. However, apparently one of the big unwritten taboos of the site was and remains, Thou Shalt Not Talk Shit About D&D Because We Worship It Beyond All Sense or Reason. D&D is a childish system, a simple minded system, an unrealistic system, a brainless, dumbass, fucked up and retarded system, and this is inarguable to anyone who has ever roleplayed using it and who has more than four functional brain cells. Everybody I knew who was serious about roleplaying started out with one of the various D&D versions, eventually (usually quickly) became disgusted with its limitations, and moved on to more sophisticated systems allowing greater depth and breadth of roleplaying.

And, in point of fact, many of the people on the site made similarly disparaging remarks about D&D, although they still played it. And many site members also insulted each other with great regularity. However, apparently, my derisive comments regarding D&D, and those who played it irregardless of its obvious limitations and built in stupidities, were intolerable. And so, the flame wars raged.

So at one point, I posted an essay on what freedom of speech meant, and how it was necessary for people of maturity and good will to take responsibility for their own responses, when something that was not intended to insult them wound up offending them gravely. I truly believe that we generally choose to be offended by something, although often we are not consciously aware of it, and if we spend all of our time reacting with umbrage and outrage to everything that offends us, we are not being particularly adult. Freedom of speech doesn't work well in an environment where people scream like four years olds every time somebody says something that conflicts with one of their precious provincial biases or dearly held preconceptions.

I posted that essay in a sub forum where I had moderator privileges, and warned people in advance that while I was looking forward to a spirited debate as regards the ideas in the essay, I would, as moderator of the forum, delete any posts that were simply abusive and/or pejorative.

The first response I got was "DOC STOP BEING SUCH A FUCKING DOUCHE!!!!" And, as I had said I would, I deleted it.

And oh my God. You would have thought I'd bombed downtown Louisville with flaming grandmothers, or something. I could barely keep up with deleting all the abusive, insulting, infuriated tirades of personal invective. I deleted and deleted and deleted. Every once in a while someone would post something pertinent to the actual discussion, and I'd leave that up and respond to it, but those posts were about 1/10th of the flood of hysterical abuse that came pouring in. And most of the abuse was no longer about my hateful intolerant insults in regard to D&D and those who played it, or even what a jackass I was to post essays on freedom of speech and how mature adults should behave in response to it. No, now I was horrible, appalling, and a megalomaniac because I DARED to delete people's posts. I should be stripped of my privileges as moderator in my own sub forum. I should be thrown off the site. I should have a rebar shoved up my ass. It was an outrage.

Well, all that was months ago, but it served to convey to me that apparently, on the site, it is considered to be an absolutely unforgivable offense for a moderator in a forum to delete anyone else's posts, for any reason whatsoever, period, the end.

So, last week, a site member who was posting in another site member's sub forum hit 1000 posts, which is quite a milestone on the site. And he mentioned it in his post. And was clearly pleased at the accomplishment.

So the next day, the member with moderator powers in the sub forum, who has a long standing personality war going on with the first guy, went in and deleted half a dozen of the first guy's posts, to drop him back below 1000. And then he changed the visible signature paragraph on all HIS posts, to make it clear he'd done it just to be a dick.

So the first guy started a thread in which he described what had happened and replaced all the posts that had been taken down. And I read this, and I could not believe what a complete asswipe the other guy had been, and I also could not believe that the rest of the site, which had come after me so hard and furious when I'd deleted posts by other members for what was a very good reason, was going to just sit there and let the dumbass get away with deleting another member's posts for a completely childish and spiteful reason.

So I went in and posted something about what an amazing jackass he was.

And the sky fell in on me.

I'm not kidding. Here's how that went:

IDIOT 1: You fucking hypocrite. You did the exact same thing deleting other people's posts and now you're getting in someone else's face for it? You are scum.

ME: Uh... I deleted posts that were personally abusive and insulting, after advising people that I would. He deleted posts just to be a dick. That's not the same thing.

IDIOT 2: Shut the fuck up, you're stupid.

ME: I... hold on. Even if it is the same thing, when I did it you people crucified me for it, and now, none of you are saying a word to him about it...

IDIOT 3: It was just a joke. Those two have a history. You should just stay out of it. You're such an asshole.

ME: Okay, wait. So when I delete other people's posts for a good reason, I'm scum, and everyone screams at me, but when some other guy does it for a joke, just to be an ass, that's okay?

IDIOT 4: Shut the fuck up.

IDIOT 5: Somebody wake me up when he stops crying like a little bitch.

IDIOT 6: I can't believe you're trying to start a flame war over this. Delete your thread or I'll delete it for you.

ME: ...what...?

IDIOTS: Shut the fuck up.

I want to say I don't understand, but of course I understand. The guy who deleted the other guy's posts, just to be an ass? He plays D&D, albeit with about a thousand house rules loaded on top, and frequently brags about how much he loves D&D and would never play with another rules system. So apparently, as long as he loves D&D and says so frequently in public, he can do no wrong.

Me, on the other hand... my input to the site is only just barely suffered by most other members as long as I never express any kind of negative opinion regarding Dungeons and Dragons. My constant suppression of my opinions regarding that particular gaming system, and the retarded morons who game with it, is the price of my continued sufferance on the site.

So, I'm pretty much over LouisvilleRPG.net.

But if you love Dungeons and Dragons, it is definitely the place for you.

Go to it. Bear its children.

I'll be over here, scheming to make all your characters gay.

If an eye offend thee

2009-05-20T15:49:00.000-04:00

So over the past week or so I've learned a lot more than I ever really wanted to know about how the human eye functions.

It's like this -- your eye is basically a big sack of vitreous jelly. Inside this sack are various things like the cornea, the pupil, the lens, the iris, the conjuctiva, and many other really funny sounding words. Most of these things take in light and then beam it onto the retina, which is not, as I had thought, the center of your eye, but is, in fact, this lining at the back of your eye that essentially acts like film in a camera... the light image that is taken in and focused by all the other whatnot gets beamed onto this film at the back of your eye, where the image is then passed on through your optic nerve to the cells of your brain that interpret this data.

Now, when you're young, your vitreous jelly is, in fact, jelly, and that works really well. But as you get older, and especially if you are very nearsighted, your vitreous jelly becomes less solid and more of a fluid. And this doesn't work so well, because when it's a fluid, it doesn't press so firmly against the retina, and in fact, it kind of falls away from the retina. And when this happens, all sorts of little fuck things that were always suspended in the vitreous jelly, but which were held firmly there by the vitreous jelly and which didn't move around, start to float around.

So you start seeing flashing lights and a lot of great big hairy floaters, pretty much all the time, or, at least, half to a third of the time, and this gets very fucking annoying and makes it hard to see and you think "Jesus fucking Christ I'm going blind". Which is terrifying to any member of our species that has enjoyed functional vision for 47 years, but is especially terrifying to me, among whose greatest joys in life are reading and writing, which I will no longer be able to do if I'm suddenly fucking Matt goddam Murdock without the goddam radar sense.

Anyway, last Tuesday I started seeing flashing lights and a lot of great big hairy floaters and these phenomena persisted until they were very nearly driving me batshit and I did some internet research and found a lot of interesting phrases like retinal detachment and macular degeneration and "You too can be just like Stevie Wonder without the musical talent or dreadlocks" and so we scheduled me an eye exam. And as soon as we scheduled me an eye exam the fucking floaters and flashing lights went away so I canceled it and said "Hurray!" And then the floaters came back like gangbusters so I scheduled me another eye exam and went to that yesterday.

The eye doctor who examined me was a bona fide sonofabitch. His bedside manor was, er, brisk and robust, to say the least. When my head was not where he wanted it to be in the apparatus that holds your head where the doctor wants it to be, he would grab me by the face and move my head until it was where he wanted it to be. His fiendish assistants put nasty stinging shit in my eyes that dilated the fuck out of them, and then the doctor beamed gigantic laser photon particle rays into my dilated eyes which caused me the closest thing to pain I have ever experienced without actually experiencing pain. And he did this for hours. And when I did not look exactly where he needed me to look at any given time he would snap "No, no, down to the RIGHT" and when I finally got it correct (it was hard, due to the photonic particle death ray shit), he sneered "That's better, little learning curve there". Which made my wife kind of gasp at his rudeness.

But then he said "Well, you're fine, there are no retinal tears or detachments, this is just the sort of thing that occurs to people at your age, especially very nearsighted people. It will happen to your left eye at some point, too." So that was kind of a... relief? Although I wanted to ask him if his first name was puh-Rick. But I didn't.

Then he said "However, you're at risk for a retinal tear for the next three weeks, so I'd like to see you again at that time for another exam". Then he led us back out to the front where another of his evil assistants put more stingie shit in my eyes to undilate them (it didn't work, I was pretty much blind the rest of the day) and then yet another evil assistant charged us $140, as I am unemployed and have no insurance.

Then we left, and I made an appointment with the Kentucky Lions Eye Clinic, which is much, much less expensive and has a sliding scale for unemployed people with no insurance, for my follow up. Which I should have done before I went to Dr. puh-Rick, but I tried and they couldn't get me in for a couple of weeks.

So, anyway, I'm kind of relieved that I'm not going blind at the moment, but, on the other hand, this whole "your vitreous jelly turns into snot and collapses inside your eye when you're approaching 50" thing seems like a design flaw. I'd like to sue someone, please.

Lack of expertise

2009-05-18T07:23:00.002-04:00

Over at Kung Fu Monkey, John Rogers asked people to submit their Odd Areas of Expertise, positing first that you needed at least 10,000 hours of practice in a field to qualify as an 'expert' at anything. Here's my response:

::sigh:: My odd area of expertise is Game Mastering. Sad. Hit me with the Geek Bricks now.

I GMed my first game sometime in... call it early 1980. That was college, and I was the one in my clique that would always DM, so figure I ran 30 sessions a year for the next 3 years, 10 hours a session, which is a pretty good approximation, as we often gamed all weekend back then. So that's 900 hours... throw in another 100 hours for KILLQUEST, a game that the Late, Great Jeff Webb and I invented where you had identical maps in each of 3 pizza boxes and two players running teams of 5 superheroes denoted by numbered push pins on each map. You needed a GM to keep track of all the different heroes' movements on the master map, and I did that a lot, too, because no one else wanted to. Plus, GMing individual 'conflicts', when, like, Kurt would run Wolverine and Andy would run Batman and they'd fight each other.

So, up through 1982, call it 1000 hours.

Right around there people started graduating and moving out, but there was still a core group to game with. So drop it back to 20 sessions for '83. That's 200 hours GMing... maybe more, if you factor in a few hours every week prep work, but, still, call it 200 hours. Then around 1984 The Eisner Award Winning Comics Writer (who hadn't won any Eisner Awards yet) returned to Syracuse from New York with his first regular assignment, and also, with the CHAMPIONS superhero RPG system. So we started running CHAMPIONS... 4 DMs, alternating, whenever we could. Call that 20 more sessions a year. So another 200 hours. And now we're up to 1985, when I DMed hardly anything... maybe 30 hours total the whole year, as people were moving around and the old crowd was pretty well broken up.

But around then I started gaming fantasy stuff, not superhero, with an entirely different group. In 1985 I came back from Basic Training and created my own fantasy game, ran the first session in July. Changed that around a little bit, started running it regularly in January 1986. I've run that game, and, occasionally, a few other random things, for at least ten sessions a year every year since, about half the time much more than that (like, 48 sessions a year). Run length has shortened as I've grown older gracelessly. Call it 35 sessions a year, 8 hours a session, TWENTY THREE FUCKING YEARS... Jesus. 6,440 hours. Conservatively.

Add in the 1400 hours I had in superhero RPGs and you get... 7,880 hours.

However, for, what, 10 years of that elapsed time, at least, I played probably 2 or 3 hours in someone else's game for every 1 hour I GMed my own scenarios, and I studied how they GMed for... I dunno... call it half that time. So figure at least another... I dunno, call it 5,000 hours GM training/apprenticing.

So that's 12,880 hours GMing roleplaying games.

Fuck.

Now. I've written 7 novels and a memoir of my time in Basic Training, call it 100 hours for each, with seems fair. That's 800 hours. I've written... fuck, I don't know... 40 LONG articles on Silver Age superhero comics, gaming, TV shows and movies, and other geek crap, and probably 50 short stories/novellas. Approximate 3 hours each, that's 270 hours. I've blogged a LOT since, oh, 2000, and posted a lot of comments on other people's blogs. Written a fuck of a lot of email. Say 10 hours a week every week since 2000, that's 4,680 more hours pounding the keyboard, trying to put words into some kind of reasonably elegant and occasionally witty order for someone else to read and understand. That's 5,750 hours right there. Plus all the plots and scripts I did in college understudying the Future Eisner Award Winning Comics Writer, and have done since on spec or just for fun. That's... fuck. Got to be another 10,000 hours writing excellent entertaining funny ass bullshit I can get five different sources to 'publish' if I don't want them to pay me, and can't get anyone with the power to cut a check to even take off a slush pile and glance at.

All this, and a lot of the time in there, I've held down full time jobs. Not voluntarily, mind you. And the last four years, I've pretty much been a full time husband and stepfather to three daughters. And that last is a 24/7 deal, so, that's 34,944 hours being a husband and stepdad.

Huh. So I'm an expert Game Master, an expert writer (of crap no one will pay me for), and a Master Class spouse/parent... and yet, while I do feel reasonably expert at throwing a game scenario together and running it, or sitting down and pounding out a story in nearly any format not intended for adaptation into moving pictures, I'm still a rank goddam amateur at husbanding and stepfathering.

So which of these things is more demanding?

Or maybe I just suck.

"It's not STAR TREK"

2009-05-14T12:20:00.002-04:00

I saw the movie with an avowed Trek fanatic. When the lights went up, I asked her what she thought. Her response was that it was good, but it “wasn’t Trek.” Not having paid much attention to the Roddenberryverse since “TNG,” I didn’t have much of a response. But then as I left the theater I thought: “Not Trek? The movie has gaping plotholes, a skirt-chasing Kirk, time travel, and a bullshit pseudo-scientific resolution to a life-threatening situation...who are you kidding? It’s totally fucking Trek!"

Thus spaketh Pete Vonder Haar, in his review of the recent STAR TREK movie.

I haven't seen the movie, so I can't speak in any way to its actual content. Nonetheless, I will say a couple of things:

'Avowed Trek fanatics' are not good people to go to movies with. Or spend any kind of time with. They're not as bad as avowed Warren Ellis fanatics, but neither are suicide bombers. For whatever that's worth.

And, I'm pretty sure Pete is missing the point here.

The definition of STAR TREK is not, unfortunately, anything to do with sensible story structure, a sexually predatory Kirk, moronic time travel, or insanely egregious abuses of anything and everything remotely resembling science in the name of plot convenience. Now, it's true, if one were to do a STAR TREK movie or TV show that didn't have these things, the average Trek fan would be enraged, baffled, and perplexed all at once, but, still, it's possible, if only in the most extremely theoretical sense, to do a STAR TREK dealio that makes coherent sense and that doesn't scoff at all accepted laws of physics. It's so unlikely as to qualify for Dr. Manhattan's 'thermodynamic miracle' tag, but, still, it's possible. You could do a good SF movie and it could be STAR TREK.

But you'd need William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk.

Unfortunately, when Pete's movie date said it 'wasn't TREK', whether she was aware of it or not, that's what she meant. This is the first time we've seen anyone try to make anything called STAR TREK that had a character in it named James T. Kirk who wasn't portrayed by William Shatner. And like it or not, this is the crux of the issue of the movie's acceptability as 'real' STAR TREK: will fans accept a non-Shatner Kirk... or won't they?

Obviously, it's going to depend on the age of the fan, and how much of the 'real' STAR TREK they've actually seen, and/or enjoyed. But it's important to note that this movie was not made for Classic Trek fans, nor was it made BY Classic Trek fans. This movie was made by young punks who don't give a shit about STAR TREK for other young punks who don't give a shit about STAR TREK.

So the answer to the 'is this real STAR TREK' question will largely depend on what marketing demographic you fall into. If you're a geezer, like me, and you have very fond memories of watching the original STAR TREK when it was actually broadcast, and you still get a nostalgic tingle when you catch the occasional old ep on G4, and you loved WRATH OF KHAN and pretty much hated every STAR TREK movie since WRATH because they all sucked, but you went to see them anyway, right up until they started making STAR TREK JR movies instead of actual STAR TREK movies, well, this will never be 'real' STAR TREK for you.

But nobody on corporate Earth gives a shit about you; you are, like me, not in a desirable target demo. And as far as everyone who makes any kind of decisions about entertainment gives a shit, nobody gives a shit. We can go fuck ourselves.

So this movie will never be STAR TREK to those of us who actually know what STAR TREK is, but it will become STAR TREK to all the young dickweeds who have no idea what STAR TREK actually is. And that would aggravate me, but, well, long ago, STAR TREK became 'science fiction' to everybody in my generation, and succeeding generations, that did not know what 'science fiction' actually was, and that was REALLY aggravating, so I have no aggravation left for this nonsense.

But let's be clear: William Shatner is James T. Kirk. Nobody else can do it. If you want to reboot the franchise in an alternate universe where you can do all new stories and completely ignore everything that is established as real, actual STAR TREK, well, do it with a new goddam Captain.

Bitches.

More reasons to beat the living shit out of Brian Michael Bendis

2009-05-14T09:26:00.004-04:00

Apparently, the Wasp is dead.

I'm so much happier when I don't know these things.

The Return of the Late Great Jeff Webb

2009-05-12T13:05:00.003-04:00

Just a brief note to say that I spent most of the morning reloading much of Jeff's artwork onto two separate Blogspot sites. As blogger seems much more tolerant of 'adult' material than Angelfire was, I'm hoping this time the stuff will stay where I fucking put it.

Anyway, if you love fine fantasy art, you must check out No Costumes Required, where you'll find the majority of Jeff's superheroine good girl art, and The Fantasy Worlds of Jeff Webb, reprinting that art book of Jeff's more fantastic art that I did for an Australian publisher, who disappeared on me the minute I got it finished. But you get to see it free! You lucky, lucky person, you.

It's all definitely Not Safe For Work, though. So be advised.

X marks the spot

2009-05-05T09:40:00.002-04:00

So, this will make X happy, anyway --

All right.

Give me a minute to lay this out. This is tough for me.

It‘s not admitting to error that I find difficult. I don’t have any trouble with that. I’m not invested in maintaining some façade of personal perfection; I make mistakes and it really doesn’t bother me to admit to it. I’m far from perfect… as everyone who’s paid any attention to my behavior on this site already knows.

I’ve been both incorrect, and ethically wrong, in some or much that I’ve done, and I’ve caused a lot of bad feeling here. I regret that, and that’s a sincere declaration of contrition and remorse. Not so much for the consequences it’s had for me, but because I genuinely don’t enjoy confrontation or hurt feelings. Regardless of how it may seem when you look at my track record with these things, I really don’t like causing these kinds of emotional explosions that spread so much ill will so far, so fast.

These kinds of conflagrations do seem to follow me around the Internet. For what it’s worth, there are general reasons for that, and then, specific reasons for each specific instance.

In general: I’m a strange guy. I don’t fit in anywhere all that well, not really. Just as one example, while I consider myself a progressive liberal, many of my political and social opinions put me at odds with most others who identify themselves that way. I don’t mean to go into details on that here, but trust me when I say, when I get into it on things like affirmative action, or gun control, or legalized abortion, or any number of other hot button political/social issues, many if not most others who identify themselves as ‘liberal’ look at me with horror.

I try not to have knee jerk opinions. I try to think things through. I don’t think quickly, but I try to make up for that by thinking both deeply and broadly, by doing some research, by listening to a lot of different people, before I synthesize all of this, think about it some more, and then finally formulate how I feel or think on any particular subject.

Because of this, I’ve learned that whenever I voice an opinion anywhere, it will nearly always be a controversial opinion. Long ago, I tried very hard to be extremely diplomatic when I voiced such opinions. I employed circumlocutions and verbal finesse. I went to great lengths to express myself in the mildest possible terms, mortaring every statement with delicate euphemism and subtly artful understatement, if not outright vacillation. I was at great pains to find ways to state what I felt about a subject in such a way that I could not possibly offend anyone.

It was an enormous amount of effort, and it had the following results:

(a) Many, many people had no clue what I was trying to say, and
(b) there was always somebody who got offended anyway.

After this happened again and again and again, I, perhaps, overreacted. I shrugged and said what the hell. I decided diplomacy was not my bag. I decided it would be better to be clear, to be straightforward, to try my best to communicate my points and views as saliently, as openly, as simply, and as bluntly as I could. I decided that, given that I couldn’t seem to avoid offending people with a controversial, non mainstream opinion anyway, I might as well stop presuming other people couldn’t handle my truths, and start presuming that honesty really would be the best policy.

The results of this have been a mixture of success and failure. Success, in that nobody ever seems to have any great difficulty figuring out exactly where I stand on any subject I voice a view regarding. Failure, in that I now offend a great many more people.

But, again, I’m going to offend people anyway, because my opinions are rarely opinions people seem to want to hear, regardless of where I go. That being the case, my choices seem to be that I can either (a) shut the hell up about what I think on subjects when those subjects are being discussed, or (b) I can lie to make other people happy. Circumlocution and diplomacy don’t keep people from being offended, and they don’t make people happy. They simply make people more confused.

You know what makes people happy? Agreeing with them. On every subject they bring up. At all times, and under all circumstances. They will love you forever for this. Anyone will. It is nearly impossible to dislike someone who feels exactly the same way as we do about every subject that is important to us. Or at least, who presents a persuasive and convincing charade of doing so.

But I never agree with anyone about everything, and I rarely agree with any group of people about anything.

As a general rule, if you’re out on the Internet talking to people, you aren’t inclined to shut up about your views. And as a matter of personal ethics, I’m not inclined to lie about mine.

That’s how, in general, I’ve reached the point I’m at now, as regards how I communicate with others, especially on the Internet.

In specific, on this site (and I’m not trying to excuse or justify my behavior, I understand and accept my own part in recent events, and as I’ve said, I regret those events -- I’m just explaining, for what it’s worth to those who take the time to read all this):

Here’s how I remember things. And this may be wrong, and if someone with more emotional fortitude than me wants to prospect back through old threads to try and confirm or deny this, have at it, but I can’t handle that kind of stress right now. Anyway, what I remember happening is something like this:

I came on the site looking for players for my home brew campaign. I posted a lot of stuff about the campaign, mostly having to do with the setting, which, for what it’s worth, I’m very proud of, as it’s entirely original… which is to say, it isn’t based on any other game setting I’m aware of. There are bits and pieces I’ve stolen from some of my favorite novels and movies over the years, sanded the serial numbers off, and repurposed to my game setting, but still, pretty much the entire setting, and it is a very detailed setting, has come out of my head.

I heard from several site members saying things like “Sounds really interesting. I read those articles you linked to about your GMing style too and that sounds good. I’m very interested.”

And hope would soar in my heart that I had actually found someone who would genuinely enhance the gaming experience for myself, my wife, my daughter, and my buddy Nate. I would get all excited. I would actually dare to dream.

And then: “Are you running 3.5 or 4.0?”

I’d say “I don’t play D&D; I’m using my own original system.”

Please understand, I have been largely unaware until I came to this site that over the past 20 years or so, Dungeons and Dragons has come to so completely and utterly dominate the fantasy roleplaying scene. When I was younger, there was another pattern entirely. I hesitate to describe it for fear of offending people again, but, well, let’s just say, when I came to the campaign that I picked up the precursor of the system I use from, my fellow gamers there were all people who had started with D&D years before, and who had wanted to play in a different style of campaign, and who, not finding that kind of campaign commercially available, had made up their own, along with their own rules systems that allowed them to do the kind of roleplaying that D&D really wasn’t set up to facilitate.

In other words, I came out of a context and continuum of gamers who did not view Dungeons and Dragons as the only acceptable sword and sorcery system; who, in fact, felt that Dungeons and Dragons was much too limited for the kind of roleplaying they wanted to do. And I was not prepared for… well… the kind of response I immediately got from people who had told me they really liked what they’d read about my campaign and my DMing style, when I indicated I did not use D&D, which was:

They’d say “Oh. Not interested.”

And that was the end of it. Even if we’d already set up a meet. The instant they found out I wasn't running D&D, they were done. None of them were willing to try out anything new and/or different, none of them, despite liking the setting and what they‘d read about my GMing style, were willing to give me, my campaign setting, my rules system, or my other players, a shot. These were site members who had ardently advertised on the site about how much they wanted to get into an RPG… but… if it wasn’t D&D -- they were flatly not interested.

To be as fair as I can be, I didn't know D&D was a prerequisite, but by the same token, most of the members of this site have no reason to believe they need to specify, when they advertise they are looking for a game, that they are only interested in D&D if the setting is sword and sorcery. They take it for granted, and that's perfectly reasonable. I simply didn't know.

And I didn’t react well to that. In fact, I reacted poorly to that, and I'm aware of it. And again, I’m not trying to make excuses. This is simply where I was coming from. I was extremely disappointed, and somewhat insulted, and rather offended.

So, I got snarky about D&D, and by extension, about the D&D players whom I had just had such disappointing interactions with. It was never my intention that my snarkiness be taken as a general statement about everyone who played D&D, but, well, I was pissed.

So that’s specifically where all that came from. I was disappointed and angry and upset and I let it show. And that's a deep regret for me.

That, in and of itself, didn’t have to lead to volcanic insult exchanges, though. The flame apocalypse happened because of a second, compound aspect of my personality -- I dislike being disrespected when I don’t feel the disrespect is merited. (Most people feel similarly in this regard, but, still, I am genuinely strange this way; I cannot stand having people praise me, either, if I don’t feel the praise is deserved. Asskissers bother me as much or more than ad hominem attackers.) And I enjoy writing, and I love crafting insults.

The way those two combine is, if I feel someone has launched an unmerited and unprovoked personal attack on me (a flame, in other words) I will do my best to return the favor to that person ten fold. I genuinely feel that when most people flame, there is little artistry in it, little actual wit… it’s usually the same old tired sexual aspersions, genitalia references, and strings of profanity one can see on any unmoderated message board anywhere on the Internet, or hear, for that matter, in the back of any public or private school bus inhabited by kids older than 9 any where in America. I enjoy attempting to elevate the insult to an actual art form. I don’t start out going for the jugular, but I feel that if someone steps up to me and aims a kick at my crotch, well, they are licensing my response… and I enjoy accepting their invitation.

In fact, I must confess that I've lately been moved to admiration for a site member I never liked very much before this, when I read something he'd said just recently that seems to justify the flame in all its glory: [i]"In this medium, flame wars and vitriolic commentary are the only fire and acid with which to properly slay a troll. They will come back from everything else. "[/i] When I read that, I felt a genuine bond with the site member that wrote it. I cannot tell you how heartfelt and fervent my agreement with that sentiment is. If I could get a good Latin translation of those two sentences, I would carve them over my mantle. Seriously.

Unfortunately, we’ve all seen where that attitude, however wise or cogent or sapient it may seem to me to be, has led recently on this site. And however much those words resonate with me, still, I regret my part in the recent flame wars, and I sincerely apologize for my contributions to them.

One significant reason that things have gotten this far -- much farther than on other sites -- is that Sysop says he values freedom of speech, and he doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk. The behavior that has been manifest in the flame wars that have erupted all around my presence on this site over the past four months would be enough to get me banned forty or fifty times on any other hobby site I’ve ever been to. Sysop doesn’t want to do that. I respect that. The result of that has been that I’ve been able to be the catalyst of much more prolonged hostilities here than on any other site I’ve been to… but also, that I’ve had the opportunity to really think, for probably the first time, about the consequences on a community of (a) being extremely blunt in voicing my always non-mainstream and generally provocative, controversial opinions, and (b) in reveling in opportunities to return flames tendered towards me ten or a hundred fold back on their originators.

So I’m rethinking my approach once again, and I have this site, and Sysop particularly, to thank for that. Also, specifically, I have to thank Caesar Agumbus and DefJeff, for their sage counsel through PM and in threads, that has helped me work through all this in my head. As I say, I do not think fast. But I try to think both deeply and widely. And I try to listen to others, when I have the opportunity.

So I've come to a point where I have this to offer: my sincere apologies for the truly excessive amount of conflict I've caused on this site in the past four months, and my genuine willingness to undertake to try to be more aware, and more considerate, of the various hot buttons and tender spots of various site members in the future, all in an attempt to maintain a greater level of civility in future exchanges between me and other site members.

Obviously, much is going to depend on the reception this particular apology receives, and in point of fact that's so obvious I don't think it needs any further elaboration. Presuming that, as a result of this apology, there are further interactions between me and other site members who are not immediately involved in game sessions with me, then I'd like to make the following respectful observations and/or requests:

As I will be trying earnestly to avoid provoking further hostilities or reigniting past ones, I'd like to pray forbearance from other site members. If I offend you, and you feel there is even the remotest chance that I did it inadvertently, please let me know in as civil a fashion as you can, and give me a chance to work things out with you. Either a PM or a "WTF, Doc?" in the thread will be fine. But though I'm going to try hard, I have to say, if I write something that I don't feel is aimed at any one in particular, but which is just me saying what I think about something, and I get a truckload of obscene personal abuse back, it's going to make it much more difficult for me to stay civil.

To this I will add, I am very proud of all my stepdaughters. They are all smart and strong and they take zero shit and that's because they all take after their mother in these regards and it is the constant wonderment and delight of my life that all four of these amazing, unique and incredible women have allowed me to share their lives. My middle stepdaughter has come to this site looking to make friends and increase her roleplaying experience, and she can certainly take care of herself, and I have no problem with her making friends with anyone she chooses to. She's got a good head on her shoulders and is a very good judge of people and whatever she wants to do with her life and her time is okay by me, because she has to date demonstrated an extremely unusual level of maturity and wisdom in those choices she has made. Based on what we have seen of her intelligence and decision making abilities, my wife and I trust her judgment implicitly.

That's not to say we don't worry about her, because that would be impossible, and I'm sure those of you who are parents know exactly what I mean.

Still, barring absolutely dire circumstances, I'm going to let her take care of her business herself, and I'm not going to get in the middle of anything unless she specifically asks me to... and she won't. But anyone who cares at all about maintaining any kind of friendly or even civil interaction with me on this site should remain aware at all times that, just as everyone else has their buttons and/or sensitive spots, my children are one of mine.

If I annoy you or displease you, if you wish to maintain a grudge against me, if you don't think you can ever be friends with me, or even for the sake of politeness and the general well being of the community attempt a facade of civility towards me, okay. I doubtless earned your opprobrium and I'll wear it.

But I'd ask you to leave my daughter out of it. If you're mad at me, be mad at me. Don't snap at her. Don't put her in the middle of it.

I hope that's understandable to, and understood by, everyone.

To summarize: I've fucked up, I know it, I'm sorry, and I'll try to do better moving forward. I hope we can all play better together in the future.

In terms of pouring oil on troubled waters, this has worked very well... while responses came slowly at first, eventually a few of those I'd been feuding with allowed as to how gracious I was, and once it began, as always happens with our essentially herd dwelling race, the effect snowballed. Now I'm, if not exactly popular on the site, then, at least, reasonably well respected.

A few of those who dislike me most were very grudging in their acceptance of this apology, hedging their bets with "well, okay, as long as he behaves" type nonsense. But once a lot of other people, especially a few tribal elders, had accepted, they really had no choice; either they publicly manned up or they looked like utter tools. (Either was fine with me.)

Which was the point of the exercise. It's psychological jui jitsu. With one stroke, I turned everything upside down. When you're the guy who has offended everyone at the party and you just go sit in a corner and sulk because they're all such assholes, it doesn't matter if you're right. Everyone else at the party feels very righteous in their indignation as regards your behavior. (Especially if you're right about them all being assholes.)

But when you come back with your hand held out spouting a sincere seeming apology, they often don't know what to do. It befuddles them. It sure isn't anything that THEY'D ever do.

But it puts the onus on them. Where before I would have had difficulty meeting many of these people in real life and staying pleasant, now I can walk into any group any of them play in with my head held high. Some of them I'm sure still don't like me at all, but now they're required to either be hypocritical or look like jackasses. Either way works for me... although, to be honest, the hypocrisies that civility always requires are a big reason I don't mix much in real life.

Now, mind you, the wild card here was my stepdaughter. If she hadn't been on the site, and if certain of my jackass attackers hadn't been so willing to hold a grudge against her as well as me, I'd never have apologized. I would have made a career out of trolling those motherfuckers until either they left the site in tears or the site administrator broke his own rule by throwing me off it. I would have flamed them down to the bedrock; as Heinlein has noted, some jerks you simply have to insult until they apologize. But with someone else in the mix whose feelings are important to me, I had to take a different approach.

I don't regret it; everyone is happier now, and the apology, for what it is, is sincere... I certainly acknowledge that I played a big part in all the trouble. But here's what tact is... not saying all the shit that's really important, because all the important shit is what really offends people. And the problem with that apology is that it's a tacit agreement between me and them that (a) I will no longer point out the hypocrisy of imposing one standard of behavior on a stranger while not requiring yourself or your friends to adhere to that same standard, and (b) I will no longer express my opinion that D&D is a fucking retarded system and anyone who has been gaming for longer than five years and who claims to be a roleplayer and who is still rolling up half-gnoll ranger/wizard/ninjas who will spend their entire imaginary lives killing imaginary orcs and goblins with an imaginary sword in an imaginary underground dungeon has something badly, badly deficient in their essential character matrix. At least, if that's the only kind of game they're comfortable playing, they do.

This is a basic truth. It offends many of the people on the site, surely. Yet one of the people who plays in my regular RPG session also plays in another D&D session, mostly because he's pretty young and has a lot of free time. He admits my game is much, much better with far better roleplaying and a much more believable setting and rules system, but he has buddies at the other session. Still, he's described all the other guys at the session, and apparently he's the youngest by a decade, the only one there who weighs less than 300 lbs, and other than one of the guys who is married, he's pretty sure he's the only one there who has ever actually had sex with another human being who was conscious at the time and not being paid for their services.

And this is hardly an atypical description of an adult group of 'roleplayers' who play D&D.

Once upon a time, D&D was what you started out with if you wanted to roleplay. It was, in Nate's wonderful term, 'training wheels'. If you roleplayed and you liked it, you would invariably and naturally begin to find the inherent shallownesses and limitations of the D&D rules system and two dimensional backdrops frustrating, and look around for something else to play. And if you couldn't find another system you liked available at your local game shop, you'd make up your own that suited you better, and which didn't require your Lawful Good character to kill every Chaotic or Lawful Evil entity they ran into... or die trying.

To me, when I walk into a geek shop and there are a bunch of 30 year old guys sitting at a table playing D&D, I can't help but feel a vague contempt. It's probably a character flaw; who am I to be judgmental? I roleplay too. But to me, D&D is the roleplaying equivalent of Chutes & Ladders, while my game system and campaign setting are, I don't know, Civilization, or at the very least, Risk. You walk into a public place and see a bunch of obvious adults spinning the little arrow and getting all excited because they hit a ladder, or screeching in rage because they landed on a slide... to me, that's pretty much the same thing as watching a bunch of adults rolling d20s so their 17th level Paladin can do 12 hit points of damage to a beholder, while the thief is picking the lock on a door down the hall, and the cleric is standing by to throw a Cure Light Wounds when necessary. It's just childish. It ain't real roleplaying. And the people I know who get into their late 20s and early 30s and D&D is still the only RPG they want to play? It may be tactless to say it, but anybody that looks at these guys knows there is something badly wrong with them.

However, these are truths that I may no longer articulate, else I shall be exiled once again.

Now it will turn out that out of the three people who still read this blog, two of them love D&D and never play anything else. And I will be in deep fucking doo doo again.

Happy Anniversary!

2009-04-21T07:51:00.002-04:00

Totally freaking out, dude

2009-04-15T13:32:00.004-04:00

Here's how it goes when I join a website... well, it happened when I joined an APA back in the early 90s, too, so I guess it applies to any kind of social organization where people communicate with each other through text. But, anyway, here's how things go:

If the website has any kind of content moderation, I will, inevitably, post something at some point or do something at some point (usually the latter) that is either an inarguable violation of the Terms of Service (if only because most websites that are moderated deliberately leave their TOS somewhat subjective, so creative mods can generally find a reason to get pissy with anyone if they really want to) or that isn't actually a violation of any known written TOS but that pisses someone off anyway.

When this happens, I will get a Come To Jesus email from a mod telling me I've fucked up, explaining how I've fucked up, and warning me in no uncertain terms that if I continue to fuck up this way, I will be suspended or banned.

When I get this kind of email from a mod, one of two things will happen. If I'm in an unusually pleasant mood, and the mod him or herself isn't being a total little bitch about it, I will acknowledge the error, apologize, thank the mod for pointing it out, and advise I'll do better in the future.

This has happened, I don't know, maybe three times in my storied history with such organizations.

If I'm not in an unusually pleasant mood, as I usually am not at times when mods end up sending me warnings because when mods end up sending me warnings it's usually because some fucktard on a site who has been there longer than me has done something to piss me off, and it's already escalated to flamewar status, and by that point half a dozen to a dozen other regular users of the site will be jumping all over my shit while completely ignoring, or actively supporting, the fuckwad who originally pissed on me, because that's how it works with these things, and I'm pretty goddam aggravated by all this, and then, to top it off, I get some shitty note from a mod telling me my behavior is unacceptable and I need to mend my ways OR DIE... ::DEEP breath:: ...as I say, if I'm NOT in a great mood when I get one of these aggravating little "Dear Huck You Suck" notices, and especially if the mod sending the note is coming across like they're God on the Throne and I'm some scabby little pederast trying to sneak a cigarette in the holy lavatory, well... then I will respond in a much less pleasant way.

Which will result in me being banned from that site.

In the old days, if I still had any interest in the site, I'd just set up another account using another email address, but nowadays, with everyone hip to the ISP number dealio, you have to go to a public library or use a buddy's computer to do that, and sometimes it's not worth the effort just to get back into a place where you're clearly not welcome anyway.

Now, every once in a while I happen across a site where the management has a wonderfully enlightened attitude towards free expression and they've taken a vow to never, ever, under any circumstances ban any user no matter how provocative, controversial or confrontational that user may be.

When I come across these sites, one of two things happens:

Either (a) within a few days, a week at the most, I so infuriate the operator of the site that he or she make a one time only exception to their rules because I am just SUCH a total shitbag and they can't STAND it, or, (b), within a few weeks, a month at the most, I have so utterly alienated everyone on the site that there's little point in me hanging out there any longer. Anything I post becomes the equivalent of trolling, because no matter what it is, the only responses I get are bile, vitriol, and screaming abuse.

This happened at Aaron Hawkins' site. It happened at MTG: Salvation. It happened at HCRealms. It happened on the old AOL boards I used to post to frequently. It happened in the Amateur Press Alliance I was once a member of. It happened when I was writing for that dickbag Dave LeBlanc at CBEM. And it's happening again right now at LouisvilleRPG.com.

It's not like I don't understand what's going on here. I'm different from most people... better... and even when I share a hobby interest with others, I tend to do so in my own special and unique way. Sometimes being different (better) is all it takes to get me booted from a site; Aaron Hawkins, who was a pretty cool, pretty funny, pretty smart, and goddam articulate fellow in his own right, simply could not handle the fact tht I was indisputably cooler, funnier, smarter, and more articulate than he was. (Also, I was white, and male. Aaron didn't have race problems, as long as the white people hanging around on his site were female, comely, and frequently flirtatious. White guys, on the other hand, seemed to baffle and annoy him in about equal measure, and white guys who were smarter than he was just pissed him off like you wouldn't believe.)

Hardly anybody running a social website likes anyone who is smarter, funnier, and cooler than they are, and I nearly always am, so I start out with that against me going in: once I start posting on a site, I tend to get a lot of attention, and that tends to put some people's noses seriously out of joint. (Again, see Hawkins, Aaron, above.)

When you're posting to someone's blog, the above is enough to get you booted in short order. When you're posting to some hobby site, well, what happens there is that I generally enjoy the hobby, yes I do... but I enjoy it in a different fashion from other people.

For example, I used to play a game called HeroClix. This game is a brilliant idea, but it had pretty rotten execution, which is to say, the rules for it sucked, as they would force your clix representations of Spider-Man or Captain America to move and do battle in ways that greatly contradict the way Spider-Man and Captain America are presented in the comics. For the vast majority of clix players, this is a matter of no import; it's a game, after all, separate and distinct from the source material, and sometimes when you adapt from one media to another, you have to make some changes.

I never accepted that, so I created my own House Rules for HeroClix which made the game far, far superior to the official version. And whenever I'd go on a HeroClix related site, inevitably the subject of my House Rules would come up. At which point, a great many people would become offended by the very notion that someone out there would dare to create house rules for Their Beloved Game, and as tiny minded tools have done when offended since time immemorial, they would immediately begin launching personal attacks and abuse at me. And I would respond in kind, because that's what I do, and then, well, see above.

The situation at LouisvilleRPG.com is essentially the same as this. I roleplay, but I don't use the Dungeons and Dragons rules system when I do. I have my own roleplaying campaign called World of Empire, and I use my own original rules system for it. I didn't completely create the system; I inherited a system from a guy I used to game with up north and I added a lot of my own original subsystems to it. But the system works extremely well for the kind of detailed, nuanced roleplaying... TRUE roleplaying... that I enjoy... far far better than Dungeons & Dragons, which isn't designed for real roleplaying anyway.

So I went over to LouisvilleRPG.com to try and find a few more players for my campaign. At that time, I had only three -- my wife, one of my stepdaughters, and Nate. Three is an okay party size, but a few more is better, and anyway, about half the time my stepdaughter had to miss sessions, and two is just too small a party to get a lot done. Anyway, I wanted a few more players, so off I went to the site.

Where it was basically the HeroClix thing all over again. I posted a few notices saying I was looking for players. A few people responded that my game sounded cool, and what version of D&D was I running? To which I would spit venomously and say "I don't use D&D, D&D isn't a roleplaying system, I use my own system". (No, really. I'd type back something like ::spitting contemptuously:: I don't use DnD, I have my own system. I want to actually ROLEPLAY, not move a cardboard stand up around through a dungeon packed with monsters and treasure and moronic magic items.)

Which, for some reason I will never understand, would tend to really piss some people off.

Fortunately, LouisvilleRPG is one of those very enlightened websites where they never ban anyone no matter how big a jerk they are. So I still have an account active there. But I've pretty quickly alienated a great many people there through what they describe as my 'arrogance' and 'rudeness', which I myself prefer to think of as 'refreshing directness and blunt, straightforward honesty'.

I'm not quite at critical mass there yet. But it's getting there. I'm not yet at the point where anything I post draws screams of outrage and bellows of derision. I am, however, at the point of diminishing returns and rapidly escalating flamewars. Here's how this goes:

I'm posting in some thread. Or someone mentions me or something related to me in another thread, innocuously.

Out of nowhere, some cretin will suddenly swoop into the thread and toss a few ad hominem insults at me. These insults are often poorly spelled and the words in the sentences frequently don't mean what the writer clearly thinks they mean, but, nonetheless, the hostility is clear.

Me being me, I'll respond in some way, advising the person who has just attacked me that no, it's Dickheads Get In Free Day on some other site, not here, or merely wondering out loud how he can see to type with his head wedged so far up his ass. Something like that.

Then it's on like Donkey Kong. Out of the very ether a screaming horde of snot-spackled fapwads will condense in a boiling knot of poor grammar, creative spelling and vigorously incorrect punctuation, screaming at me for being rude and crass and mean and unkind and generally taking enormous issue with the way I'm being so insulting to that poor, poor guy who... er... um... well, you know, just that poor guy I'm attacking, for no reason, apparently, at least, as far as these hobblewits are concerned. So I start returning fire at all these new hecklers, and here's the thing about me in these circumstances -- if someone starts up with me in a textual environment, they get the whole ammo belt back from me. I do not stint, nor do I pull punches, nor do I hold back any troops once I've been engaged. I bring the fucking heat. I'm not firing a few warning shots, I'm out to scorch the entire region where my attackers are standing down to the bedrock and then piss in the smoking ashes. You come at me, you insult me for no reason, you disrespect me in a textual environment where I'm not worried about losing my job or getting beat up, then the gloves are fucking off, bitch. And if you were stupid enough to come unarmed to this battle of wits, if you were dumb enough to bring a butter knife to a goddam orbital nuclear exchange, my friend, well, that's too goddam bad for you. I'm the nicest, sweetest guy in the world IRL, and I'm still the nicest, sweetest guy in the world in a textual environment as long as we've got the mutual love and respect mojo working, oh yes I am.

But if you decide to get it on with me, if you decide you really need to get down and get funky all over my ass, if you feel it's absolutely imperative that you get right up in my face and spray spittle, well... brace yourself. The sky is about to fall.

But, again, here's what really pisses me off about these situations: I never, and I mean, not EVER, insult anyone first. I don't fire until I'm fired on. That's a constant; that's who I am. And yet that carries no weight in these things. Some fuckwit drops into a thread and calls me a piece of shit, I tell him he'd better stop typing so fast or he might accidentally bite his boyfriend's dick off, and suddenly, I'M the bad guy! Suddenly there's blood in the water, the posse is out, and the lynching is well under way, and nobody says a word to the first guy who started the whole thing.

No.

It's all about ME. Naturally.

We had one of these things flare up yesterday. I'm bopping along in a thread, having a good time, and some dicknose comes in and starts bitching at me. So I verbally slap the shit out of him. Abruptly, forty three other bungholes swarm the thread, calling me every name in the book, and when I say "okay, SHITBAG over there started it, what about him?" all I get back is "Well, you're a bastard and you don't like D&D so shut the fuck up".

It's, as they say in the trade, a total bummer, dude.

But fuck them all, anyway. I'm right, they're wrong, I'm weak, they're stron... no, wait, I screwed that up.

Anyway. I have a fabulous wife and great kids and I run a fantastic roleplaying campaign and the objective truth of the matter is, D&D is a suck system and anyone who plays it when they could play something better is a retard.

So screw it.

* * * *

And here's the latest, starting with the last paragraph of one of my most fervent detractor's latest screed about me, and then moving into my response:

Also if I were a better man, I would take Merlin's approach and turn my back on you and have all the others follow suit, I wonder how long it would be after you started to post and realized no one was responding to you before you just disappeared, your last active date drifting from days to weeks, weeks to months, and finally months to years.

I'd enjoy that. But here's the thing -- the people with the character to actually do something like that on this site are the people who have enough character to realize I'm much, much more than the description above. They have enough presence of mind to see that I've posted an enormous amount of original material to the site, I've linked to a lot of interesting stuff, I have my own subforum devoted to my own original campaign and game system, that I contribute significantly. Unlike certain others, and despite what some of those people insist, the insults that get thrown in various threads do not define me, nor do they comprise most of what I offer to this community.

And they will also never acknowledge that if you really want me to stop offering personal insults, the answer is so simple even a dimwit could implement it -- STOP INSULTING ME.

And stop taking my opinions regarding various game systems personally. If you think you're one of the exceptional few who can play DnD while still being an intelligent, creative, and imaginative roleplayer, well, you probably are. Certainly those people exist on this site. They have apparently always been able to discern that whoever I'm talking about, I'm not talking about them, and, well, the fact that they can discern that means, they are correct.

If, on the other hand, when you read me saying things like "DnD is a system generally designed for gamers who do not want to roleplay on more than a two dimensional level, and who are not interested in engaging either their intellects or their imaginations while gaming in more than a rudimentary way", you completely disregard the word 'generally', or the self evident fact that this is simply an opinion expressed by some guy you've never met whom you would simply ignore if you actually had any level of maturity or self respect, and instead, your hackles immediately rise, your craggy brow ridges furrow, and you say to yourself, in whatever glottal sublanguage it is you speak in the echoing, cavernous, yet still shallow depths of what your betters might generously label your 'mind', "Garsh, he's talkin' about ME, I'm gonna throw a FIT", and then, you throw a fit, well, you have created a self fulfilling prophecy, and then fulfilled it yourself. Congratulations.

But in point of fact, I wasn't talking about you, I was speaking in general, (the tip there is the word 'generally', easily overlooked by morons, dimwits, slopebrows and mouthbreathers throughout the ages), based on my experiences and observations. Which I am entitled to do, as is everyone else on this site.

Those who insist on seeing me only through the lens of the various spirited defenses I have made of myself after (and ONLY after) being attacked by tiny minded trolls, are, well, tiny minded trolls. Said tiny minded trolls, who regardless of what I post, where, on what subject, will continually find occasion to barrage me with insults simply because, well, I don't know what it is simply because, it used to be my arrogance but I owned my arrogance so then suddenly it wasn't my arrogance any more (personally, I think said people just can't stand the fact that I actually know how to spell; I think it drives them berserk), anyway, these soulless small brained little dimwits who continually buzz around all the threads I participate in whining and sniveling and crying and wringing their hands and sobbing and whimpering like bitches and throwing out their little fifth grade invective, these are the people who can [i]never[/i] ignore me.

They do not have it in them. They know they should. They bluster. They huff and they puff. They strut around, as much as they can strut with the piss from their last tantrum still dribbling down their legs, and they fume, and they sputter, and they snarl like little rat dogs.. "Oh, we should just ignore him and be above him and not engage him and oh that's what we should do and yes, let's by all means just ignore him and OH MY GOD DOC NEBULA IS A LOAD!!!!! SMITE SMITE SMITE SMITE SMITE SMITE!!!!"

These people... and they know who they are... will never be able to stop screeching at me. They do not have that level of self control, and they will never have it. They cannot fathom that (a) I never insult anyone who hasn't insulted me first, and (b) there is much, much more to my presence on this site, or on any site, than the vituperative exchanges that other people incite, and then cry like little fucking toddlers about.

These characterizations of my detractors are doubtless what some of those detractors (the ones who have managed to edge, barely, into triple digit IQ ranges) would characterize as 'passive aggressive', as I'm not specifically naming names. (They use that term because they heard someone smarter than them, probably some guy on an afternoon talk show, use it once. They're not really sure what it means.) However, to name names would be to pay far more individual attention to these droning gnats than they actually merit. They know who they are, and right now, they are fuming at these descriptions, largely because deep down in their hearts, they know I am entirely correct about them. They will posture and preen endlessly about how they should just walk away from the altercation, and stand above it all with the lordly majesty that will forever be beyond their grasp. But they can't. They can't.

They don't like me, so whenever I post, on whatever subject, they will have no choice but to come buzzing in like the insects they are and start pelting me with their dung yet again. It's simply beyond their capacity to control. It's what makes them what they are... and what will always keep them from being what they aren't.

They will never contribute anything but abuse. They have no creativity in them. They cannot add anything to the sum of what was here when they arrived except offal. They have never created anything; if ever an original thought stirred by spontaneous generation arose from the sterile, empty barrens of their minds, it would have immediately gone mad and committed suicide from the overwhelming existential horror of the emptiness around it. They use the products of better human beings, while simultaneously sneering and jeering at same. They beat their chests and declare proudly that they don't care if they spell the words they use correctly, that it isn't important to them if they actually know how to use the language they are attempting to communicate in appropriately, and, hell, why should it be, when all they want to do with it is attack, attack, attack?

They are lazy, they are stupid, they are insecure and insanely jealous of anyone who has any ability to create something worthwhile out of nothingness, and like jackals to a campfire, they will never be able to keep themselves from continually heckling anyone whom they dimly perceive with their vestigial little protosentiences might be their better.

So ignore me, bitches.

I fucking DARE you.

* * * *

I present this because it's a pretty good summary of how I feel about this sort of thing. Not just to drive X crazy. ::grin:: Although, you know, I say good business is where you find it...

Back from the dead?

2009-04-01T11:03:00.006-04:00

Maybe.

I've got some stuff I want to write out of my system, anyway.

A lot of reality shows parade across the various TVs in my home these days. Back when I was single I rarely watched TV at all, mostly, I suppose, because I never had cable until I moved in with SuperWife (then SuperGirlfriend) but also because to me, a TV is largely a monitor for whatever technology I hook up to it that shows me movies. I love movies, I hate most TV.

And the TV I hate above all other TV is reality TV.

So there really isn't any reality TV that doesn't fill me with the warm sweet urge to empty a full clip of ammo into the television screen, but even amongst the intellectual and creative wasteland that is reality TV, there are pockets of horror that transcend the normal horrors of the banal, arid, and sterile genre. Such pockets go by names like ROCK OF LOVE, or I LOVE MONEY, or pretty much anything that features a family we're supposed to find fascinating because apparently the parents either refuse to make responsible use of birth control or are too stupid to figure out how.

But even with all of these, well, I generally figure that the one saving grace of reality TV, if it can be said to have one, which is probably doubtful, is that everyone involved in these horrifying shows is there voluntarily. In fact, they line up by the stadiums full in hopes of being singled out for the wonderful privilege of being humiliated, insulted, and abused on national TV. And I figure, if they're that stupid, well, they get what they get.

Still, the longer I live, it seems, the shorter the list of People I Do Not Want To Kill With A Chainsaw becomes.

Stacy London and/or Clinton Kelly, of the TLC reality show WHAT NOT TO WEAR, are definitely not on that list.

I've occasionally gotten glimpses of this show as others in my family have avidly perused it. And the brief glances I've had before I flee screaming from the room have always infuriated me. These two morons London and Kelly, who have somehow gained the apparently unshakable and nearly criminal delusion that their opinions of what other people choose to clothe themselves with actually matter in some meaningful way, essentially walk the Earth like Cain in KUNG FU, seeking out poor hapless dumbasses who fail to dress they way these buttheads think is proper. Having found a victim, these twittering shitbags then prance about snarkily for the next several days, belittling and badgering their chosen target over said target's taste in clothing, after which they destroy the poor guy or chick's clothes and replace them with a batch of froo froo crap that looks like the sort of thing a human version of Barbie or Ken might wear, if we presume Barbie or Ken is homosexual, was raised by retarded preppies, and is so neurotically insecure that upon being braced by a couple of fashion Nazis who have apparently been spying on her without her permission for the last several weeks and who want to invade her closet and destroy all her shit, she doesn't immediately smash both their larynxes with the heels of either hand and then coolly watch these fuckwipes choke to death on their own thin, inbred blood.

I hated this show when I thought the poor cretins who were taking this abuse were actually volunteers, as seems to be the case with every other reality show. But yesterday my children informed me that on WHAT NOT TO WEAR, the people singled out to have their fashion sense forcibly upgraded are not, in fact, volunteers... they are folks whose relatives and friends have sent in their names to the producers of WHAT NOT TO WEAR, after which, cretins London and Kelly film them surreptitiously for days or weeks to establish exactly how poorly they dress, prior to walking up to them and saying "Surprise, you don't know how to dress yourself, we're going to insult and abuse you on TV!"

It amazes me that nobody has killed these little shits yet.

Amazes, and appalls, and disappoints me.

That's one thing, and I feel much better about it now, thank you very much.

Here's another:

I have a lot of geek t-shirts. Nowhere near as many as I'd like, mind you, but, still, I have a lot of them. Some of them are reliable attention getters when I wear them outside the house, and none has proven to be more so than the one pictured to the right.

There are many interesting things about this t-shirt, but probably the thing I find most interesting is that it's like an Instant Geekiness Level test. You can pretty much figure exactly how deep into the Nerd Abyss a particular comics fan is by how many of the heads on that t-shirt they can correctly name. (You get into a whole different level of Comics Nerddom when you find you can name every artist represented on the shirt, too, although, really, there are only three... but, still, you have to be a pretty dedicated comics nerd to know that every head on that shirt except two were drawn by the same artist... and while many comics nerds can quickly tell you who that artist is, only a small percentage can pick out the two heads that weren't drawn by said artist, much less who drew those two.)

And, well, I have to tell you, to date I am the ONLY person who has ever named all 16 characters depicted on that tee shirt correctly. Even the serious geeks I encounter at geek shops who can name every other person shown on that shirt always falter and fail at the guy in the bottom row, second from the right as you're looking at the graphic. You know, the guy next to Wolverine. (I'm sure you knew that was Wolverine. If you can't pick Wolverine out of that kind of line up, then I cannot imagine what wild concatenation of circumstances brought you to this blog, much less saw you reading down through any one entry on it to this point without either surfing onward in irritated bafflement or simply falling into a coma from rampant boredom.)

Now, if you can name every other character on it, but you can't name that one guy, well, don't feel bad. To describe that character as obscure would be a vast, vast understatement. There is no way that character deserves representation in any format alongside all those other characters. I mean, some of those other characters are kind of obscure to a non-serious comics fan (by which I mean, some of them have never appeared in any other medium besides comics, and a few of them haven't appeared in any comics for at least ten years, that I know of, anyway), yes. But that one guy that nobody but me has ever been able to identify? That guy isn't even a sidekick. I don't think he even qualifies as a supporting character. His greatest claim to fame to date is that once upon a time the She Hulk used him as a boytoy for several issues of a not particularly good run of a classic comics title featuring a superteam this bozo was never a member of back in... what... the early 90s? No, more likely the mid to late 80s. And Jesus, I'm old.

(Now, if Mike Norton is reading this, of course, he knows who that guy is. But comics fans with the kind of insane indepth knowledge of arcane Silver Age superhero trivia like Mike Norton and I are pretty rare on the ground these days, I think.)

I'd like it if someone out there would put out a similar t-shirt as the one pictured, but with all female heads from the Silver Age Marvel Universe, instead. It would be a nice little item for the girl geeks in the audience, and what the hell, I'd buy one, too.

Here's another page with some really cool t-shirts, too. Don't just look at the first page after either link. Go on to the next several. For me, at least, there are several "OH MY GOD I WANT I WANT!!!" items on each page.

But I'm shallow like that, I guess.

Tieing this all back to the opening item in this post, if some horrifying cretin were to sic London and Kelly on me, well, I'd certainly have to render London and Kelly down into gruel, and I would be entirely justified in doing so, because I'm fairly certain that the very first thing they'd sneer haughtily at would be any t-shirts I had like those on these pages. And for such an offense, a slow boiling down in a 55 gallon drum to one's component chemicals would be justice, pure and simple.

Sad but true...

2009-02-11T16:02:00.002-05:00

...I've very nearly given up on this blog.

It's an arid wasteland, a vast, shrieking abyss... or, to be more to the point, its comment threads are all those things, and an empty, screaming vacuum, as well. I cannot stare into them any more. They make me sad.

Recently I've been posting some political stuff here, where, you know, amazingly enough, people actually comment on what I write. What an astonishing thing it is, to have people read my work, and reply in some meaningful way.

And I've been putting some roleplaying stuff here, where, again, wonder of wonders, people actually respond to what I post.

I'm not saying this blog is closed, but if you'd like to see me do more posting over here, I suggest you leave a comment.

If it's not too much trouble, or anything.

Later.

Maybe.

Maps

2009-02-09T17:50:00.006-05:00

Nothing new here, just some old maps from my RPG --

New rules

2009-01-21T13:22:00.002-05:00

So, I've started posting somewhat over at this one Magic site.

I got interested because they have a Writer's Forum. It's a secret forum that normal people can't get into, where all the Official Site Writers get together and blow each othe... er, I mean, put up drafts of potential articles and offer each other critiques and such. They have all these rules about how each draft has to have a different tag on it and you have to have your own special graphic on the top of each article and lots of interior graphics and honestly, they are just about the most uptight bunch of tight ass no funs I've ever seen; you'd think they were actually PAYing people.

I didn't know all this when I applied to join the Writer's Forum; it only became apparent after they let me in.

So I wrote this one essay thing on Magic and put it up in the Writer's Forum for criticism and they all went like this:

Seriously. They were all like "This is all opinion" and "You aren't writing about MAGIC you're just writing about YOU" and "It has no SUBSTANCE" and, you know, like that.

But there were a few encouraging words, and when I took the same article and posted it to a public thread, quite a few people who weren't members of the stuck up tightass secret Writer's Forum said very nice things about it and encouraged me to write more articles just like it which they would enjoy.

So, based on the few encouraging words from the Writer's Forum and the many many encouraging words I got with the same piece on the public thread, I rewrote the first article, and I republished it on the tight ass top secret Writer's Forum, again, asking for criticism and feedback.

And, again:

Seriously. Some subliterate nut job with a flashing graphic featuring rotating head shots of every different Dr. Who in his sidebar thinks my article isn't very well researched or written. He writes nearly as well as you'd expect a subliterate nut job with a flashing graphic featuring rotating head shots of every different Dr. Who in his sidebar to, and when I pointed this out to him, he said (this is a direct quote) "So I am not a particularly good writer... so what? That should not affect my ability to provide valid critiques of other peoples writing..."

Yeah, baby.

The general consensus seems to be, my article on Magic isn't really about Magic, because, apparently, all Magic is, is, statistics and deck building and How To Massacre Your Opponent With Two Land, A Spellstutter Sprite, And A Half Empty Bottle Of Jones Chocolate Watermelon Diet Soda.

Anyway, the first article I wrote is the previous entry on this blog.

Here's the latest one.

WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD: Rantings of an Old School Magic Junkie

Remember when a Serra Angel was the shizzle?

Most of you certainly don't; it was long ago and far away, the world was younger than today, and, well, for one thing, nobody back then had even heard of the word 'shizzle'. (Actually, I'm not sure 'shizzle' is a word, but whatever it is, we hadn't heard of it. Ah, sweet bird of Youth...)

But it's true, once upon a time, a Serra Angel was the very shizzle itself, and a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward on it... glorious day, glorious day, it was a combo to be dreamed of, because, yeah, that creep across the table from you could still Terror your wonderful no-Tap attacker, yes he could, and certainly he could Fireball or Disintegrate or Drain Life her if he had the mana (although your Angel was, pleasantly and thankfully, out of Lightning Bolt range, a distinction that, back in the day, really used to mean something) and he could even Swords to Plowshares her, but here's what he couldn't do -- he couldn't Unsummon her, he couldn't Twiddle her (Serra Angels used to be the most triumphant possible response to that vile and unconscionable Meekstone deck all the really obnoxious jerks inevitably threw together, but because of that, those guys always had Twiddles, the bastards) and most importantly, he couldn't Control Magic her.

9 out of 10 of you are reading this with a look of utter bewilderment (perhaps mixed with no little contempt) on your faces; you have no idea what the hell I'm writing about and furthermore, you just don't care. But the tenth, whoever that tenth reader may be, perhaps he or she is now remembering the insane pain of finally getting out that second white mana, tapping five lands (or three and a Sol Ring, or two Plains and a Basalt Monolith, or, just to show off a little, maybe even a Mox or two, you never know), slapping that Serra down on the table with a triumphant little grunt... and then looking with trepidation over at your opponent, who didn't appear to be worried. And why should he or she be worried? This was long before anyone had ever heard of Haste, so your Serra was nothing but a blocker for the first round, and then, on your opponent's next turn, he or she naturally tapped two blue and two colorless, chuckled evilly, casually tossed out his or her Control Magic, crooked his or her finger at your poor hapless innocent Serra Angel, and said "She is for me, James T. Kirk".

(Okay, none of your opponents ever said that because none of them are as geeky as I am, but you know what I mean.)

And the really tragic thing? Back then there were only three possible solutions to the situation: an Unsummon, a Disenchant, or a Tranquility.

So a Serra Angel -- the only creature in the game that could attack without tapping, a big flying 4/4 and, say hey and by the way, the only Angel in the game, too, can you dig that? -- was the very spiff, yes she was, but a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward... that was the bomb diggity.

(Of course, even if you got out your Serra and slapped a Blue Ward on her while your Meekstone/Twiddle playing opponent was tapped out, it wouldn't matter, because that annoying buttmunch always played with 4 Icy Manipulators, too. FOUR of them. While you were ripping open booster after booster and trading frantically trying to get your second, that guy always had four, which he proxied in EVERY deck he had. Oh, I hated that guy, I really, really did.)

Those days are dust and less than dust now, of course. I've lost track of how many creatures there are with Vigilance currently, and it hardly matters, because at this point if you really want your creature to attack without tapping, you just stick a Vigilance on it. Stick a Vigilance on your Gate Hound and ALL your creatures can do it.

We've lost so much.

Here and now, Serra Angels mean little to nothing. Throw one down on the table at your local card shop and the most common response (unless you're playing an Old School Magic Junkie, like Your Humble Narrator ) is "What the heck is THAT?" (Except, of course, you're playing a 17 year old punk who thinks Mirrodin is, like, from medieval times, dude, so they won't say 'heck', because when you're 17 years old and there are no authority figures around, it's like you're constantly set to the All Profanity All The Time satellite channel, or something. Some things really do never change.). And they'll pick the Serra up, and they'll turn it around, and they'll scrutinize it from every direction, and then they'll toss it back down with a little sniff and say something like "A 4/4 Flyer with Vigilance? Is that all?"

(Actually, a lot of times they'll just leer and say "Nice hooters". But never mind, I'm not talking about that aspect of Magic right now.)

And the Serra Angel really ain't such a much, I sorrowfully admit... not compared to some of the Angels flapping around the Magical ether nowadays. (Platinum Angel. Privileged Position. Merely one of a near infinite number of broken combinations to which the only logical response is pulling a high powered cattle prod out of your backpack and using it to run about 15,000 volts through your smirking opponent's internal organs.)

I'm not saying the old days were better. Magic was broken back then. However, I'm also not saying the old days were worse, either, because Magic is still broken now. Magic has always been broken. It started out as a very complex game and it's only gotten more complex since, and it's never going to be fully functional in every parameter. The number of cards out now is in the tens of thousands (I'm pretty sure); the number of possible card combinations is large enough to qualify as its own statistical universe. No matter how one tweaks (or demolishes entirely and rebuilds from the ground up, for that matter) the rules system, it's never going to work all the time for all the cards and all the combos. It can't be perfect.

In that way, it's a lot like life.

When I started playing Magic the local comics shop still had a half empty box of Arabian Nights boosters sitting on the counter top next to the cash register. The other guys I knew who had been playing Magic for a little longer at that point were bored with Arabian Nights by then and really looking forward to the next expansion, Antiquities. I didn't buy many Arabian Nights because I just didn't care for the flavor of the set; I did buy a great many Unlimited boosters, and I even recall getting a Mox Pearl out of one of them. That was pretty cool.

I kept playing Magic right up through, I think, Homelands. I stopped playing with whatever set brought in Phasing and Flanking, two powers I simply hated at the time... Phasing because it just made Magic, which already had way too many different effects and powers to try to keep track of, more aggravating than I wanted to deal with, and Flanking because I'd long been a zealous disciple of the old school Magic principle that it should always be easier to defend than to attack, and Flanking tossed that right in the dumper. (I've since become reconciled to Flanking, but Phasing is still waaaaaay more trouble than it needs to be.)

Then, a couple of years ago, I moved from one city to another and married a wonderful woman with three fabulous daughters, and my oldest stepdaughter played Magic, kinda-sorta, and she was bored and wanted someone to play with, so I said, okay, I'd play with her, but only because she was bored, and I wasn't buying any new cards, I'd just play with hers.

Yeah, right. I'm sure you can guess how that worked out for me... especially when my wife, after watching me and our oldest daughter play a few matches, decided she liked the game and wanted to learn how to play, too.

And then, a week or so ago, I stumbled across this site while looking for a Conflux spoiler, and I joined, and applied to the Writer's Forum, and they accepted me provisionally, and, well, here I am, telling you my story.

A few days after I joined, I posted a first draft of an article I called WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD in the Writer's Forum.

It was a long, rambling, opinionated rant, which is, generally, pretty much all I write.

I fully expected, that, if I got any feedback at all, that feedback would mostly confirm what I already knew, namely, that it was indeed a long, rambling, opinionated rant, and that, furthermore, it lacked the sort of weighty, chewy substantial subject matter one had come to expect from this site's Writer's Forum, and, for that matter, from WOTC's official Magic site -- meaning, it wasn't an article on How To Win Win Win By Killing Everything In Four Turns, or, alternatively, This Cool Completely Wigged Out Thing I Figured Out You Could Do With State Based Effects, Split Second Cards, Seven Different Triggered Effects, And A Spatula.

I was not disappointed.

MrSuperLove was the first to be kind enough to give me his opinion; among other things, he advised me that:

"First up there are some amusing moments in the article, and apart from using the obnoxious and played out 'shizzle' thing you start well by drawing the reader in. But there's really no meat to the article, it's just a long personalised rant... Who cares? You need to think about how you might add more substance to the article.... tone it down. I get what you're going for with the piling on of adjectives... but it's just tiring to read after a while and makes you sound like that nut who corners you at FNM and rants about his unlucky game loss or why mana screw sucks. Some simpler, more balanced sentences will make the jokes stand out more."

And then, Evil Betty, the very first mod who ever interacted with me on this site, and therefore, my favorite, jumped in with:

"However, at just the point where you could have/should have launched into a more meaty discussion, you instead turn to... the realm of personal opinion... and it's a substanceless article. ...go more into concrete reasons... Or say something more definite... instead of simply lumping juxtaposed polysyllabic adjectives together and hoping the reader's laugh reaction replaces any need for actual content."

All of this was, as I've already noted, pretty much what I'd expected.

So then I took the entire article and posted it to a public thread, just to get a broader range of responses.

The article drew a lot of commentary in that thread, and some of it echoed the feedback and advice I'd already gotten, but, gratifyingly, a lot of it didn't. Quite a few people advised me that they thought the article/essay was very funny, very entertaining, that it made their day, that it made them laugh, that they hadn't thought about the early days of Magic in a long time and it was nice to read something that recalled that long vanished era so vividly to mind.

Also, apparently not a few folks out there share my loathing of Kithkin, which is very gratifying to know.

So, after seeing some of those responses, I came back to the Writer's Forum and typed out a long, rambling response to Evil Betty and Mr SuperLove.

See, I agreed with both of them. I hadn't really written an article, as such are understood to be on this site. Rather, I'd penned a long rambling unprofessional rant, just as they'd said. I'd started out on the nostalgia thing -- Wheeeeeere's the Love For Serra ANgels HEY You Kids Get Offa My Lawn --and then I'd segued from that into how I just loved one particular set because it was sooooooo kewwwwwwwl and then from that I jumped off into how much I hated a preceding set because one of the new races in that set was really, like, heinous, dude.

And they were entirely correct to point this out. There was no "meat" to the article. There was no in depth, research based, game tested, numbers backed insight. There was no 'Such and such was a poor set because it didn't have enough library windmilling or it had too much power creep or out of X cards Y cards had combined powers and toughness of 15 or there were X cards that were first round drops and Y cards that were second round drops and combine that with the Z cards that allow for quick creature bouncing combined with cheap counterspells you get an ungodly high gradient-curve on the quantum flux level, which anyone with an advanced degree in thermodynamic particle research knows is BAD'.

There wasn't any of that for two profoundly simple reasons: (a) I don't think I'm capable of writing articles like that and (b) if I am, I don't want to.

I write funny, opinionated rants. (All three of those words are subjective, but only the first, alas, is at all in debate.) I've been all over the Internet since the 1990s with my perhaps somewhat funny, always opinionated rants, and just as when I write about Silver Age superhero comics or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the works of Robert A. Heinlein I rarely have actual specific numerical citations because I'm working from imperfect memory and talking about my emotional responses to stories from long, long ago, so too when I write about Magic I'm not going to have all the math right. I'm writing from emotion, not logic; from the right brain, not the left.

Hell, I don't even know what all the slang terms the pro Magic players habitually use actually mean.

I applied to the Writer's Forum because I write well, and as soon as they were nice enough to let me in (a kind-hearted gesture for which I was and am deeply grateful) I started to read a lot of the articles that the other members of the Writer's Forum had produced for the site. And I quickly realized that those guys were WAY out of my league.

So, yes, I absolutely agreed with all the criticisms of my essay that had been leveled there in the Writer's Forum, but here's the thing -- I don't play on a tournament level. I can't. I'm not smart enough. I don't have a natural head for numbers and I can't keep the equation of an ongoing Magic game constantly in my mind, calculating and recalculating all the possible variables of what is on the table, what I have in my hand, what is in my graveyard, what is in my opponent's graveyard, and all the new cards that my opponent might have in his hand, or all the old ones, for that matter. I read articles on this website about how 'strong' and 'powerful' certain cards are and, for the life of me, I cannot comprehend why in the world anyone would think a Mothdust Changeling or a Spellstutter Sprite is a 'powerful' card.

See, there is this thing that top flight, tournament level players do. They look at a set and a light goes on in their heads and it's like a holy nimbus of glory hovers around certain cards and they say "Oh yes, with a Spellstutter Sprite, a Mothdust Changeling, an Oona's Gatewarden, and a Ninja of the Deep Hours, I can REALLY raise some hell. Heh heh heh."

I don't do that. My responses to cards are emotional, not intellectual. I like this card because it seems to me to do cool things, and yes, occasionally a cool combo occurs to me, like putting a Blight Sickle or a Quietus Spike on a Prodigal Sorcerer, but these four and five card combos that the other Writer's Forum guys talk about in their articles, where they describe using all these obscure card draw abilities and trigger effects to 'churn' or 'windmill' or some friggin thing in order to get the perfect combination out so they can bodyslam their helpless, hapless opponent into next week before he so much as twitches.. I don't get that.

I can't write about that stuff. I don't understand it. Hell, I don't understand a lot of the slang words those guys casually use (although I will offer a hint, from someone who has been a semi professional writer since the early 80s -- when an author uses a particular piece of very specific vernacular in an article for the first time, that author should always define it. Not everyone who reads the article is going to be at the same level of expertise as whoever's writing something; in fact, most people probably won't be, or they wouldn't be reading the article to learn something. Many of us are noobs. Even those who have been playing Magic since the early 90s. I, for example, barely know what 'windmilling' is.)

I write very well. I can write some entertaining stuff. When one is doing something social for no fiduciary reward, then one is doing it for the attention, and I'm getting attention (more than I ever do on my blog) and that's fine.

But I cannot write articles like the stuff I see over at the official Magic site, or here on this one. Articles by actual competitive tournament players about how to build decks that allow one to draw five cards a turn while countering everything the opponent tries to do and simultaneously blowing up all his land and filling his shoes with genuine Louisiana bayou mud, simply by combining three obscure commons from the KAMIGAWA block with a mostly despised HOMELANDS Rare, or some such nonsense.

I can't write articles like that. And if I could, I wouldn't write articles like that, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have any fun doing it. It simply doesn't occur to me to do it. I wouldn't want to play that way anyway, because I wouldn't want to play against that sort of thing. It's... y'know... no fun.

I generally don't really enjoy reading articles like that, either; I don't play on those guys' level, and when I read that sort of thing, it makes me feel stupid. (Which, compared to all the tournament level Magic players out there, I'm sure I am, but nobody enjoys being made to feel that way.)

But I still love to play Magic and I still love to write, and I believe there are probably many, many other Magic players out there who play more on my level than on the exalted one of the pro and semi pro tour. So when I have an opinionated, rambling rant to get off my chest -- and I will, it's the nature of my beast -- I will type it up and post it somewhere on this site in hopes that other people will read it and respond to it. Favorably or otherwise.

And just so there is no mistake, MrSuperLove: I am indeed 'that nut who corners you at FNM and rants about his unlucky game loss or why mana screw sucks' -- or I would be, if I hadn't long ago learned my lesson and stopped going to tournaments. I am, in fact, that most dreaded and despised of all Magic players: the guy who plays 'for fun'.

And I really do think that 'mana screw' sucks, although I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to when you say it. Remember, I don't get all the slang terms; I'm a noob... albeit a noob who's been playing since 1993 or so. (And I'll take this opportunity to repeat an earlier point, because it's important -- when you're using an obscure, hobby specific slang term, please define it. For example, I'd love to know what 'mana screw' actually is, although my guess is, it's either not drawing enough land, or playing against someone who deliberately destroys their opponent's mana sources. Either way, yes, that sucks, and yes, I'd certainly corner you and rant at you about it if you were silly enough to make eye contact with me after a tournament, or I were silly enough to attend one in the first place.)

However, even if I am 'that nut who corners you etc etc', I do try to be witty and entertaining while I'm complaining about how much mana screw sucks, whatever mana screw may actually be.

It's not much, but, hey, if you can't be smart, be funny, right?

So I typed out my response to MrSuperLove and Evil Betty, and posted it, and it was much like the several paragraphs above, although I've rewritten them somewhat to flow better in this larger and more expansive metadocument I'm constructing now.

And Evil Betty promptly responded to my original response with:

"Ironically enough, that last post would make an excellent article."

After which, DarkRitual advised me:

"You know... I bet if you retitled the article something like "Ramblings of an old magic player", you might could sell this as something opinionated, yet borderline funny. Cause I did a quick read through, and if before hand you have the idea "ok, this is a serious article where reason and logic prevail" then you are going to hate it when you start going on a rant... because you don't really bring any facts to the table. But if you have the idea beforehand that this is just an opinionated rant, it almost comes off as funny... I thought it was funny actually."

And Metamorphaze said a lot of constructive things, too, amongst which was:

"I would like to see this article. It makes me smile. Which I believe is the point."

Which is true. In fact, I think it's pretty much the point of existence in its entirety.

So... here it is.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

That's the article.

I don't think I'm going to last much longer in the top secret tight ass Writer's Forum, but hopefully I can manage to not get banned from the site itself. We'll see.

Also, I finished adapting "The Chained Lands" to actual Magic cards, or something that looks like them. Check it out here, if you've a mind to.

When Knights Were Bold

2009-01-15T14:32:00.002-05:00

yore

/yɔr, yoʊr/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yawr, yohr]
–noun 1. Chiefly Literary. time past: knights of yore. –adverb 2. Obsolete. of old; long ago.
Origin:
bef. 900; ME; OE geāra

Remember when a Serra Angel was the shizzle?

Most of you certainly don't; it was long ago and far away, the world was younger than today, and, well, for one thing, nobody back then had even heard of the word 'shizzle'.

But it's true, once upon a time, a Serra Angel was the very shizzle itself, and a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward on it... glorious day, glorious day, it was a combo to be dreamed of, because, yeah, that creep across the table from you could still Terror your wonderful no-Tap attacker, yes he could, and certainly he could Fireball or Disintegrate or Drain Life her if he had the mana (although your Angel was, pleasantly and thankfully, out of Lightning Bolt range, a distinction that, back in the day, really used to mean something) and he could even Plowshares her, but here's what he couldn't do -- he couldn't Unsummon her, and, most importantly, he couldn't Control Magic her.

9 out of 10 of you are reading this with a look of utter bewilderment (perhaps mixed with no little contempt) on your faces; you have no idea what the hell I'm writing about and furthermore, you just don't care. But the tenth, maybe, whoever the tenth reader is, maybe he or she is now remembering the insane pain of finally getting out that second white mana, tapping five lands (or three and a Sol Ring, or two Plains and a Basalt Monolith, or, just to show off a little, maybe even a Mox or two, you never know), slapping that Serra down on the table with a triumphant little grunt... and then looking with trepidation over at your opponent, who didn't appear to be worried. And why should he or she be worried? This was long before anyone had ever heard of Haste, so your Serra was nothing but a blocker for the first round, and then, on your opponent's next turn, he or she naturally tapped two blue and two colorless, chuckled evilly, slapped down his or her Control Magic, crooked his or her finger at your poor hapless innocent Serra Angel, and said "She is for me, James T. Kirk".

(Okay, none of your opponents ever said that because none of them are as geeky as I am, but you know what I mean.)

And the really tragic thing? Back then there were only three possible solutions to the situation: an Unsummon, a Disenchant, or a Tranquility.

So a Serra Angel -- the only creature in the game that could attack without tapping, a big flying 4/4 and, say hey and by the way, the only Angel in the game, too, can you dig that? -- was the very spiff, yes she was, but a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward... that was the bomb diggity.

Those days are dust and less than dust now, of course. I've lost track of how many creatures there are with Vigilance now, and it hardly matters, because at this point if you really want your creature to attack without tapping, you just stick a Vigilance on it. Stick a Vigilance on your Gate Hound and ALL your creatures can do it.

We've lost so much.

Nowadays, throw out a Serra Angel at your local card shop and the most common response (unless you're playing a geezer-mage, like me) is "What the heck is THAT?" And they'll pick it up, and they'll turn it around, and they'll scrutinize it from every direction, and then they'll toss it back down with a little sniff and say something like "A 4/4 Flyer with Vigilance? Is that all?"

And it's not much, I sorrowfully admit... not compared to some of the Angels flapping around the Magical ether nowadays.

Platinum Angel? What @#!!&$! brain trust came up with that... er... interesting... card, anyway?

I'm not blind, though, even in my nostalgia. Magic was broken in my day and had to be fixed. Interestingly, of course, Magic is still broken right now and still has to be fixed... but I grant you, over the past near two decades, the rules-mongers at WOTC have done an excellent job fixing nearly everything that was broken back when I had yet to see my first grey hair. Fast mana is pretty much gone now... by which I mean, you're not going to find any in Standard or Extended formats. WOTC has been absolutely meticulous in getting rid of everything that might give you a fast start... Dark Rituals, Sol Rings, Moxes, dual mana... it's all gone, replaced by stuff that does the same thing, but that costs more than you get back out of it, or comes into play tapped, or something else meant to make sure you aren't going to nuke your opponent into radioactive fragments on your first turn.

Which I don't mind. First round nukings always suck. I'm happy that they are mostly a thing of the past now. I miss my Sol Rings... hell, I miss my Moxes, and my one, beat to hell Black Lotus that was so worn down I never dared to shuffle it, just kept it in a sleeve so I could show people I really had one when I played the proxy... but I really do prefer to play in an environment where a game takes just a little bit longer to develop before some snotty 12 year old taps 4 mana and makes me draw 117 cards, or hits me with a 22/22 Trample creature. Or something.

And because I like slower developing games, and always have, I like SHARDS OF ALARA.

I know, I know, many people don't. (Or so I gather from what I read on the 'net and hear down at the shop when I wander in for a game.) And mostly, the complaint seems to be that it's much too slow, that it takes too long, that there isn't enough direct damage, that there aren't enough counterspells or control effects or Unsummons, that there isn't enough land destruction, that the only really effective SHARDS decks rely entirely too much on creatures, and creature decks are so boring, etc, etc, etc.

I like SHARDS for all those reasons. I don't need much permanent destruction; a couple of Naturalizes work fine for me. I love the multicolored creatures and lands and artifacts, I adore all the mana fixing, and I really REALLY like the fact that you can kill my creatures all you want, but they'll probably be back (Unearth) and when they go out, they could make something else bigger (the Algae creatures).

And I really love the fact that one of the Shards is a great big creature Shard! That's REALLY cool.

So I love SHARDS, for all the reasons most people seem to hate it. And I can't wait for CONFLUX.

But the biggest reason I love SHARDS is very simple --

It isn't goddam LORWYN.

I cannot tell you how much I hate, loath, despise, detest, abhor, abominate, scorn, and disdain LORWYN. And it's not because of the card design (although Hideaway pretty much bit the big one) because, like SHARDS, it was a block of cards filled with interesting tactics that built slowly into fun strategies mostly based around permanents interacting in intruiging ways, which is the stuff I like best in Magic. And I've always loved to build tribal decks even before people called them tribal decks, so LORWYN should have worked pretty well for me there, too.

And there are some damn fine cards in the LORWYN block, cards I'm happy to have, cards like all the Planeswalkers, and the various Commands, and Sage of Fables, and Battle Mastery.

Yet, overall I despised LORWYN and could not wait for it to be over (and just when I thought it must be over, WOTC rolled out a fourth LORWYN set to really aggravate me). And why did I hate it so much?

Two reasons. The art, and the miserable wretched no good lousy hateful disgusting despicable rotten horrifyingly filthy Hobbi -- er, Kithkin.

I abhor Kithkin. Why? Because they STINK, that's why. Because they bite, lick, and chew. Because they're dorky little midget freaks who gnaw on your kneecaps in battle, THAT's why. They're stupid looking and have moronic names and they're really short and they use table knives instead of swords and they have big ears and flat heads and what have they got in their nasty little pocketses anyway?... and in FOUR FREAKIN' SETS OF TRIBAL CARDS we didn't get so much as ONE STINKING SPELL to make all the little vermin explode.

Just one spell. Something like "Massive Kithkin Explosion" or "Kithkin Extinction Event". Make it cost eighteen mana, and make it be a Sorcery I can only cast on alternate Tuesdays when there are no Enchantments or Artifacts or non basic Land in play and a guy named Bruce is visiting my upstairs neighbor. I don't care. Make it a gold. Make it a mythic rare. It doesn't matter, I'll buy 20 on Ebay. As long as it's something like "All Kithkin in play are removed from the game and their controllers take 2 damage per Kithkin removed in this way plus you may kick them over and over and over again in the kidneys while they writhe in agony on the linoleum" I'll be happy. More than happy. Delirious. Ecstatic. Capering like a dwarf, chortling and chortling. Oh, all the Kithkin exPLOded! Oh that's so deLIGHTful! Do it again, do it AGAIN!

Leaving aside Kithkin -- which is all but impossible as they're just so insanely horrifyingly aggravatingly mind bogglingly awful, but, still, doing our best to move on for the moment -- nearly everything in the LORWYN block looked really, really stupid. Changelings could have been cool, if, you know, anything at all about them had been cool, but, especially, if there hadn't been some global mandate handed down from WOTC to their artists to make all Changelings looks as dopey as possible. I'm serious, I'm sure the word 'dopey' was in the actual memo. Capitalized. As in "make them all look like the Disney Dwarf of that name".

But new creature types are always chancy; I give WOTC credit for continually taking shots, even after past godawful flops like Thallids and Saprolings and Thrulls and whatever those appalling Blue shellfish things were. They took a lot of shots at new creatures in LORWYN and, yes, pretty much all of them sucked steaming piles, and it was especially sad when new creatures that really should have been cool, like Scarecrows, refused to do anything but sit in the corner and whimper miserably at their own absysmal suckitude (unless you managed to get 4 Reaper Kings, in which case, fill a deck with really cheap other Scarecrows and 4 Fabricates and then just BLOW STUFF UP! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!). But a crapload of original creatures who are all sucktastical isn't a mortal blow for an expansion. As long as an expansion gives props to the classic creatures of yore, it can still work fine.

And here, I have to say, LORWYN did give some props. Merfolk, Giants, and especially Fairies rocked hard once LORWYN came out... and yet, still, there was the Dopey Memorandum that must have gone around to all the LORWYN artists, commanding, nay, demanding that every creature in a LORWYN set look like, you know, the Disney Dwarf who has no beard, and fewer braincells. Merfolk looked... freaky. Giants looked... goofy. Fairies came closest to looking cool, but even they couldn't quite get all the way there.

And then there was the ongoing horror, the insufferable insidious vileness, that LORWYN inflicted on Goblins.

Boggarts. I mean, excuse me, WOTC, put down the SANDMAN trade paperback and the crack pipe and back away slowly. BOGGARTS? That enormous sucking sound you hear is, well, the sound of all those poor LORWYN goblins sucking and sucking and sucking.

It's not that some of them weren't cool, conceptually. And it's not that there haven't been lame-o loser Goblins before this. But never in MTG history has there been an entire block of expansions in which Goblins all had such stupid frickin names (Squeaking Pie Grubfellows? Bring me the head of the card designer who came up with THAT name, right NOW) and all looked so uniformly retarded.

I grant you, Quill Slinger Boggarts nearly saved LORWYN all by themselves, and if only WOTC had given every Boggart the Quill Slinger's power as a standard tribal ability, the whole block could have turned itself around. But they didn't.

Yes, LORWYN gave us evil black elves and nasty black treefolk and that was very nearly cool enough, especially along with the nifty new Merfolk and sweet new Fairies and awesome new Giants, lousy art or no lousy art. (Balancing that, the white elves were boring and the white giants were just plain straight out disturbing. Cloudgoat Ranger? WTF? What exactly are those Kithkin doing with that Giant to make him fly, anyway?) Yet it was all in vain, all for naught, all a terrible, horrible waste.

And why?

Because of Kithkin.

And Boggarts.

::shudder::

Of course, future sets could still redeem LORWYN. All it will take is one Predatory creature with "Devour Kithkin/Boggart: When this creature comes into play, sacrifice any number of Kithkin or Boggarts, or remove from play any number of Kithkin or Boggarts you do not control".

That would be cool. And reduce Kithkin to what they should always have been -- fodder.

River of Blood

2008-12-29T14:28:00.000-05:00

Spent all morning looking through discs hoping to find a couple of different things that would otherwise be gone for good. Then I spent an hour or so this afternoon cleaning up the files once I'd saved them to the new computer, as the WP program I originally wrote them in was so old that the latest version of Microsoft Works garbled them pretty badly opening them.

Anyway, in case of more crashes (which will make all of us here cry and cry, but, regardless), here's the first thing:

"...it must be remembered that the River to the South is home to those who choose to dwell outside the grace of the Samaqel's union. Is it any wonder, then, that those who spend their days there are savage, immoral, and brutish? That violence and degradation are as much a part of their lives as ugliness, disease, and filth? That, without the exaltation of spiritual oneness with their Creator that we take for granted, they are lost, damned souls, forever locked in conflict one with the other, in an endless terrifying round of hand to hand carnage, whose only goal is to enslave all others, or failing in that, to kill and eat them?"

Dwellers in Darkness
Chaotrianiasarian U'Viashoniassian
Priest and Master of Archives, Do'Samaqel,
in the year 7624 since Creation

Captain Rakas A'Gurdon brought the twelve pound bastard sword around in a brutal swing, hammering the blunted edge hard against his opponents' scored and dented buckler. The small shield crumpled, folding back around the arm it was strapped to like a wet vellum scroll.

A'Gurdon's foe, a burly male yeelar whose deep yellow fur was seamed with hard, whitened scar tissue, snarled a curse that was inaudible over the screams, bangs and metallic clashes resounding from the battle around them.

The Jeopard tried to scrabble backward, but footing on a moving deck is problematic at the best of times, and at that particular moment, the widespread carnage -- strewn bodies, heavy puddles of blood soaking into the planking, and the occasional gruesome splatter of violently relocated viscera -- made any movement at all a distinct risk. The felinoid's backpedaling heel thudded hard into the ribs of what had until recently been A'Gurdon's Third Mate; for a crucial moment, the Cat tottered off balance, leonine tale lashing the air frantically behind him.

A'Gurdon's shoulder muscles shrieked in protest as he brought the bastard sword up from the deck again into a perfect 45 degree extension behind and above his head; the yeelar saw the killing stroke coming, but could do nothing in response but widen his eyes and begin a protesting growl - which was cut cleanly off, along with his lion-snouted head, when A'Gurdon whirled the bastard sword around again, neatly bisecting the Jeopard's flowing mane.

The Cat's furry body and dark-tressed head thudded to the deck two paces apart, the smaller of the two bouncing twice and finally jarring to a halt against the starboard rail. Rakas could smell the yeelar's deathshit even above the blood-sweat-powder-and-piss stench of the battle around him.

A'Gurdon turned away, his upper lip wrinkled in a vain attempt to block out the smell coming off the yeelar's corpse -- mostly from just below the dead Jeopard's midsection, not to put too fine a point on it -- putting his armored back to the rail and the River beyond, scanning for new opponents.

As he did so, he muttered a brief word of thanks to his Third Mate - even dead, she'd been a help.

That could have been a lot worse,, the ebon-skinned mercenary commander thought to himself as he watched the battle raging around him with the battlewise eyes of the 20 year combat veteran he was. Yeelar are bad, and nurkala are worse, but those Samaqel shat darokai are like fucking lightning with fur and a tail. He shook his head. Only the gods-be-cursed Samaqel could be so perverse as to not simply create an entire race of cats walking upright with opposable thumbs, but to make a lot of different types of the shrakking things as well. The leonine yeelar were strong and tough and ferocious as any hellspawn, the tigerlike nurkala were even stronger, and could fucking swim into the bargain, but the leopard-like darokai were horrors to fight. Strong and tough was very very bad in an opponent, but quick as wildfire and elusive as smoke on top of it... it was enough to give an aging mercenary captain nightmares.

The deck A'Gurdon regarded as he thought all this was a-swarm with fighters; a few one-on-one duels clattered and sparked here and there, but for the most part, a huge mass melee that raged like a flickering cloud of lightning between the ship's two masts.

There was, at least, no unengaged enemy to leap into immediate battle with him. A'Gurdon had a moment to be proud of his fighting company - despite the surprise grapeshot volley roaring out of a sudden pea soup fog that had strewn thirty of his people across his deck like sides of beef in a butcher's market, his remaining crew was holding hard against what looked to be half again their number.

Of course, his crew were elite, battle-hardened mercenaries while their attackers were only nameless, scurvy River pirates -

A'Gurdon's thoughts were interrupted as his eye fell on a figure at the center of the swirling melee. Tall, paleskinned, his hair a metallic gold shot through with streaks of silver pulled back and woven into a long, intricate braid falling down his chainmail clad back - a metal and leather helm shaped like a bear's skull - a tower shield painted with the same emblem - and a flailing, blood smeared battle axe.

"Serpent shit," A'Gurdon cursed under his breath, "Harzeel..." The Samaqel sucking River Wraith himself...!

A'Gurdon dropped his bastard sword to the floorboards with a wet clatter and vaulted across a drift of bodies towards his ship's raised foredeck. Dumping the weapon wasn't necessarily a fatal risk, since he still had a broadsword swinging scabbarded from his waist that he could quickdraw if he had to. Still, running empty handed across a rolling, corpse-laden, blood-slicked surface, where an enemy - or two, just for fun - could lurch armed and swinging into his path without warning, wasn't the smartest thing he'd ever done. But he needed speed and agility, two attributes not consistent with hauling along a six foot length of Giantish steel as he ran.

Dodging and twisting across the slimy planking, A'Gurdon reached the raised platform at the bow of his ship. The narrow ladder-stairs giving access to it were on the port side, beyond a knot of entangled fighters. A'Gurdon lunged upwards, slamming his hands down with a reverberating thump onto the foredeck railing, twisting acrobatically in mid-vault to bring his feet down onto the elevated flooring beyond.

Straightening, he looked around though the flickering orange light from the lanterns still burning up here by the untended Navigator's chair. Yes, over there...

The Navigator lay sprawled in a blackish red puddle beneath his tall wooden seat. A'Gurdon deftly slid his booted foot under the Navigator's short rips and with a sudden flexing of his leg muscles that drove a momentary shank of pain into his upper thigh, flipped the limp form over onto its back. Ignoring the hideous grapeshot wounds in the corpse's chest and stomach, A'Gurdon stabbed a hand inside his former Navigator's shredded, bloodsoaked tar-jacket. His fingers encountered curved hardwood and inset metal, wet and sticky.

Breathing a prayer to the Northark gods even his father hadn't much believed in, A'Gurdon yanked the pistoloon out of the dead man's shoulder holster. A'Gurdon knew very little about "powderfangs" -- like most Riverscum, he instinctively distrusted the noisy, deadly things. However, his Navigator had always carried one loaded, and A'Gurdon had often seen him cleaning and re-loading the weapon after practice sessions potting at waterwings from the deck. He'd also heard the Navigator grumble that, in addition to costing a Sottle's ransom, the black powder used to charge the nasty things - which only the Giants knew the secret of making - became useless if wet.

A'Gurdon's nearly unconscious prayer was that the man's blood hadn't already soaked his pistoloon so much as to make it useless.

Holding the pistoloon tightly in both hands, A'Gurdon whirled around and pointed it down into the swirling melee, looking for Harzeel.

Two arms' lengths below the level of the foredeck, and five arms lengths aft, the pirate Captain fought. A'Gurdon could see two more members of his Company sprawled on the deck in Harzeel's immediate vicinity, huge slashes across their torsos testifying mutely to Harzeel's skill with his Sothark battle-axe. Harzeel's tower shield was scratched and furrowed but still undented, which similarly testified to his experience at deflecting attacks with it. His obviously old and lovingly cared for chain mail gleamed in the lantern light, as yet untouched other than by blood spattered from his enemies'- that is, A'Gurdon's people's - wounds.

Like all Sotharks, Captain Harzeel was a handsome creature; in full battle array, slashing and hacking through his opponents as if they were practice dummies, he was an impressive sight indeed.

But he'll look better with holes in him, A'Gurdon silently grunted as he aimed the pistoloon and yanked back the trigger.

The weapon bucked and boomed in his hands, a flat cracking report that almost drowned out the moist thud of impact fifteen feet away. Harzeel cried out, a sound too shrill to be a bellow, and spun around in place. His axe clattered to the ground as his right arm, to which his tower shield was strapped, fell limp. A hole the size of a woman's fist had appeared, as if by evil sorcery, in his right shoulder. A'Gurdon, blinking through a raft of hot black stinking smoke, watched with mixed satisfaction as blood started pouring out, washing in streams down Harzeel's no longer shiny chainmail. A pity it's not his heart or head, but at least I hit the Samaqel sniffer... and if I'm right...

Harzeel's pirates, not as disciplined as A'Gurdon's mercenaries, looked around wild-eyed for the gunner who had shot their leader. A'Gurdon leaned over the rail and shouted several commands to his officers, who promptly started rallying their squads around the squalling knot surrounding Harzeel. Harzeel was now lost to A'Gurdon's sight as his men closed around him, hacking frantically at the tightening circle of mercs.

From somewhere within that knot of men, A'Gurdon could make out a strained voice giving commands in Sothark, a language A'Gurdon had never bothered to learn. The results of the orders were immediately evident; the knot of men surrounding Harzeel promptly started scuttling like a broken backed beetle towards the starboard side, where half a dozen spiked boarding rails held Harzeel's vessel and A'Gurdon's together.

At A'Gurdon's command, several of his missile experts - mostly Frodds, but with a few Jeopards and Men among them - had swarmed into the rigging. Now a fusillade of missile fire rained out of A'Gurdon's sails onto the deck of Harzeel's ship, concentrated around the two cannon mounted on the port side. The Frodds' fire was especially deadly; not only did their four fully articulated arms allow them to shoot and reload their wrist-mounted light crossbows - stingers, as they were generally known - twice as fast as non-Frodds, but their inhumanly high dexterity made each shot dangerously accurate, as well. Harzeel's cannon crews had no choice but to seek cover, which would make it impossible for Harzeel to get off a parting broadside after he was safely back aboard his own ship.

A'Gurdon intended to let him go; Harzeel's men were fighting too desperately to be overcome without an unacceptable loss to Rakas' fighting complement, and Harzeel's boarding party was too heavily armored to be taken down by light missile fire - even if A'Gurdon wanted to order missile fire into his own crowded deck, which he didn't.

Even as Rakas watched, the flailing group surrounding Harzeel reached the foot of the boarding plank. Harzeel, one hand clasped over his shoulder wound, crossed the plank in two broad strides; his men, still fighting, began rushing across it as well. From A'Gurdon's rigging, the missile deluge continued, with a few of the archers snapping off shots at the pirates as they ran back across their own boarding planks. Most shots went wide, but A'Gurdon saw two pirates struck with stinger darts lose their balance and fall into the River. In their heavy armor, it was doubtful they'd surface again, especially when you factored in the schools of predatory kreelok that were usually drawn to lurk just below the surface where any prolonged naval battle was taking place.

The last of the pirates leapt from a spiked plank to Harzeel's deck; Harzeel had begun shouting hoarse commands in Sothark as soon as he himself had reached safety. The effect of those commands was suddenly felt; Harzeel's sails abruptly filled with a booming crash as a brisk breeze roared out of nowhere. Harzeel's ship heeled away, the spiked boarding planks holding it to A'Gurdon's Dream of Glory yanking free with a screech and dropping with a splash into the foaming River.

As the aft end of the pirate ship hurtled past A'Gurdon's perch on his own foredeck, he saw a short, wide, four armed silhouette gesticulating there, and the sound of chanting carried across the waves. Rakas pointed and screamed "WIZARD!! KILL IT!!!!" Simultaneously, bowstrings twanged and crossbows snapped in the rigging above him. In the orange light cast by the navigating lanterns, Rakas clearly saw the arrows and darts tumble and veer in the strong wind carrying Harzeel's ship away from him; on A'Gurdon's own deck, barely a breeze could be felt.

A'Gurdon cursed, but only half heartedly; he would have actually been surprised if Harzeel's wizard had been stupid enough to leave himself unprotected. Using the wind he had summoned to drive the ship as a missile shield in addition was a neat trick, though. A'Gurdon made a note to try and recruit him, if they ever ran into Harzeel's ship in a neutral port - a mage who could whip up a driving breeze at a moment's notice was no small benefit for a ship based mercenary company. Doubtless, the Frodd wizard had been responsible for that Snake sucking fog that had blown up right before the ambush, as well.

Still and all, Harzeel had gotten an unpleasant surprise - what he'd probably thought was just a lightly armed merchantman had turned out to be fighting ship full of heavily armed, intensively trained, extremely well disciplined bad asses. A loss of 30+ fighters wasn't something to be taken casually by any merc captain, but all in all, Rakas decided, things could have been a hell of a lot worse.

# # #

"You could have done much better," the guest in Captain Harzeel's cabin said dryly.

Harzeel looked up angrily. It was bad enough just having the stinking Sottle on his ship; if his men ever found out that this 'random raid of opportunity' had actually been commissioned by the Sottli Ban Merchant's Council, he'd be lucky to keep enough crew for an ice-raft. And now it looked as if he weren't even going to be paid for his trouble.

Harzeel had spent the last thirty years accruing an entirely accurate reputation as a bad man to try and cheat... or cross in any way at all, really. It had probably been foolish of him to accept a commission... one he'd had to keep secret from his own crew, at that... from one of the few beings on the River that he couldn't cowe with a brandished battle axe. But the offered payment had been too lucrative to turn down... or so he'd thought. Harzeel's father had often told him that when a deal seemed too good to be true, it was usually exactly what it seemed.

Harzeel had always hated it when his father turned out to be correct.

The Sottle, his buttery yellow, hairless head glowing dimly in the cabin's lantern light, noted the anger in the Sothark pirate's face... and smiled coolly.

Captain Janaar Harzeel's knuckles itched with a fervent desire to smash that bland, infuriating smirk into a bloody, toothless paste. But Harzeel was, if not smart - few Sotharks were all that bright, they were, for the most part, an unintellectual, physically vigorous race - then at least, experienced and crafty. His guile had enabled him to survive and prosper in a dangerous trade; more than that, it had allowed him to become one of the most feared and capable pirates on the River.

He was too canny to physically attack this Sottle, who sat high up on the Merchant's Council, and who had somehow appeared in Harzeel's cabin shortly before the attack on the mercenary ship, despite the fact that Harzeel's own mage, a Frodd called Fisher, had sworn blind on many occasions that magically traveling from or to a moving ship was all but impossible. Any mage who could do that, Harzeel reasoned, would have no difficulty at all doing something very unpleasant, and probably mortal, to unprotected attackers.

So Harzeel's knuckles itched... and with an effort of will, Harzeel ignored the sensation entirely.

"Ve hurd him," Harzeel said, finally, his Riverish faintly accented with his native Sothark. "Ve musd haff left forty, fifty dead... dot has to be haff his company. Dot should be vorth sometink."

The Sottle continued to smile. Fat, greasily golden, hairless, with a plump face and round, seemingly guileless eyes, dressed in elaborate silk lounging robes that shimmered constantly through every conceivable shade of green, with a high, jeweled collar and brightly begemmed rings on all of his fat little fingers, the Council Member looked ostentatiously soft and harmless. Only a faint gleam far back in his eyes betrayed even a hint of the ruthless power Harzeel knew full well he represented.

"You left 37 dead," the Sottle said levelly, his piping voice somehow not even remotely amusing, "five wounded. The River of Blood Fighting Company has 235 full members, and is currently training 40 apprentices. Counting the apprentices at two-for-one rate, that means that you've killed or incapacitated 42 out of 255 fighters... about 20%. Which might be worth something. Yes", the Sottle went on, his high pitched voice becoming soothing, "that might very well be worth something..."

Harzeel turned from the other end of the cabin, three long strides away, eager greed on his features. His men didn't know this was a commission; they wouldn't know anything about any payment, they'd just write this off as a failed raid. Any fee he collected here was his alone...

"If," the Sottle said, his voice suddenly becoming flatly harsh, "not for the fact, clearly stated in our previous discussion, that your commission was to kill Rakas A'Gurdon. I believe there was some mention of bringing me his head, now that I think back on it."

Harzeel winced; he had indeed boasted, when last he and this obnoxious Sottle had spoken, that he would obtain such a trophy. It had seemed like it should be easy. A surprise grapeshot volley from out of a cloaking fog, then a quick, overwhelming rush across the boarding planks... it had never occurred to Harzeel, as it never occurred to most pirates, that discipline and training could more than offset a near 2 to 1 advantage in numbers.

And the ice-cursed turdsucker had a frost-taken powderfang, too,, Harzeel cursed silently to himself. Nobody had told him about that. That hadn't been fair at all... although it never occurred to Harzeel that the powderfang he was so thoroughly reviling to himself was little more than a miniature version of any of the four salvaged Imperial cannons he himself had mounted, two to a side, on his own River Wraith.

The Sottle stared at him contemptuously. Harzeel could think of nothing to say... nothing he wanted to say out loud, any road. Clearly, the Sottle had no intention of paying him anything, regardless of the trouble and cost of this night's failed work. A dozen of his own men dead, two dozen more wounded, a winter-cursed pistoloon hole in his own shoulder big enough for a fucking kreelok to swim though, and nothing to show for it but empty pockets, a nicked up battle axe, and a dented tower shield.

Harzeel stood in humiliated silence, grinding his teeth, wishing fervently that the greasy goldskin would just get the fuck off his ship.

Finally, the Sottle broke the silence.

"Remember, Captain," he hissed softly, "you are to say absolutely nothing of this business to anyone."

"Of course," Harzeel blustered angrily, without lifting his gaze from the seelar fur rug that covered his cabin's floorboards. "Dot vas understood." Funny thing about that seelar fur; it had been loot from a raid on a Sottle merchant ship, which might have belonged to this particular Sottle. Of course, that had been years ago; this Sottle probably hadn't been on the Merchant's Council then...

The Sottle spoke again; Harzeel dragged his attention back to their conversation.

"If I hear even so much as a whisper of a rumor that the Merchant's Council has any interest whatsoever in a Northark mercenary named Rakas A'Gurdon..." the Sottle was saying.

"I know, I know," Harzeel interrupted. "You keel me, und blow up my ship, und send demons to feast on my spirit's testicles in Hell."

"Oh, yes," the Sottle said pleasantly. "All that." He paused. "But first," he went on, his voice never varying from its even, piping pitch, "I'll make sure that the entire River knows that Janaar Harzeel, the River Wraith, fearsome pirate captain and renowned Sothark warrior... takes orders from Sottles."

Harzeel looked up, his face contorted with rage. He started to step forward. The Sottle perched infuriatingly on the Captain's own fur heaped bed smiled an aggravating smile, and began turning transparent. Before Harzeel could complete another stride, the gorgeously robed apparition faded almost entirely away.

For just an instant, though, the annoying smile hovered in the air.

Then it, too, vanished.

Harzeel cursed and checked his fist in mid-swing. His father, in addition to advising him sagely as to offers that appeared to be too good to be true, had also told him often never to sit down at a council fire with women, demons, or Sottles.

Harzeel had laughed uproariously when he'd heard the news that his father had gotten drunk and been pushed into the River in the winter by an Ulvane slave girl. He had laughed again, longer and harder, when told his father's body had been found the following spring, embedded in an ice floe, wearing an expression of befuddled disbelief.

Now, though, he thought that somewhere in Hell, his father must be laughing his balls off at him.

The Chained Lands

2008-12-29T14:10:00.000-05:00

And here's the second --

The Chained Lands

129 Cards

CC = Casting Cost

LAND

Slave Barracks
Tap: Tap any number of Enslaved Creatures you control. For the remainder of the turn, these Enslaved Creatures cannot be targetted by spells or effects, and
all damage done to them is reduced to zero.

Freedom's Gate
Tap: Tap any number of target non-Enslaved or non-Master creatures you control and remove them from game. When Freedom's Gate becomes untapped, return
removed target creatures to game, still tapped.

Thaddosian Slave Market
(x)(y)Tap: Place a 0/1 Enslaved Creature token into play under your control. Assign this creature the colors of the mana used to activate this land's power. Once
color is assigned, it is permanent. (x) and (y) in activation cost must be two different colors of mana.

Zaran Mines
Tap: Tap any number of Enslaved Creatures under your control. Zaran Mines produces (x) black mana, where (x) equals the number of Enslaved Creatures tapped
by Zaran Mines. Creatures tapped this way do not untap on their controller's next untap phase.

Ashturan Fields
Tap: Tap any number of non-Enslaved, non-Master creatures under your control. Ashturan Fields produce (x) white mana, where (x) equals number of creatures
tapped by Ashturan Fields. Creatures tapped this way do not untap during their controllers next untap phase.

Remarian Quarries
Tap: Tap any number of Enslaved and/or Master Creatures under your control. Remarian Quarries produce (x) red mana, where (x) equals number of creatures
tapped by Remarian Quarries. Creatures tapped this way do not untap during their controllers next untap phase.

Brinterian Logging Camp
Tap: Tap any number of green Enslaved Creatures under your control. Brinterian Logging Camp produces (x) green mana, where (x) is number of green creatures
tapped by Brinterian Logging Camp. Creatures tapped this way do not untap during their controller's next untap phase.

Vylkerian Fishing Ground
Tap: Tap any number of blue creatures under your control. Vylkerian Fishing Ground produces (x) blue mana, where (x) is the number of blue creatures tapped
by Vylkerian Fishing Ground. Creatures tapped this way do not untap during their controller's next untap phase.

Thaddosian Jewel Mines
Tap: Tap any non-Enslaved Creature you control. Place a permanent Enslavement Token on that creature. Treat this creature as an Enslaved Creature as long
as Enslavement Token remains.
Tap: Tap any number of creatures with Enslavement Tokens. Thallodian Jewel Mines produce (x) amount of any colors of mana in any combination, where (x)
is equal to the number of creatures with Enslavement Tokens tapped by Thallodian Jewel Mines.

ARTIFACTS

LEGENDARY ARTIFACTS are played as Legends, in that there can only be one in any given game. However, when Legendary Artifacts leave play, they are removed
from the game completely, and once a particular Legendary Artifact has left play, it cannot be summoned again for the remainder of that game, even if another player
draws one.

Zar's Orb of Banishment CC 6
Summon Legendary Artifact
4 Tap: Place a Banishment Token on Enslaved Creature. While Token remains, Enslaved Creature is removed from game. When Zar's Orb leaves play, remove
Banishment Tokens from all creatures.
4 Tap: Return Master Creature to owner's hand.
"I see no reason to tolerate either master or slave if they do not serve me." Zar

Soul Chain CC 1
Tap: Place a permanent Enslavement Token on target non-Master or target non-Enslaved creature. Creature is now treated as an Enslaved Creature for purposes
of all spells and effects.
(x)(x) Tap: Place a permanent Enslavement Token on target Master Creature. Creature is now treated as an Enslaved Creature for purposes of all spells and effects.
(x) is the equivalent amount in colorless mana of the original casting cost of target Master Creature.
Creatures that will not obey are an abomination and must be disciplined.

Zar's Collar CC 6
Summon Legendary Artifact
6 Tap: Gain control of target creature while Zar's Collar remains tapped. You may choose not to untap Zar's Collar during your untap phase. If creature controlled
by Zar's Collar leaves play, return Zar's Collar to controller's hand.
"Most masters can only make you choose between service and death. I give you no choice at all." Zar, after placing his collar on the neck of the Brinterian
Emperor.

Soul Lash CC 1 (x)(x)
Place (x) counters on Soul Lash when cast.
Tap: Controller removes any number of counters from Soul Lash to do that amount of damage to any target Enslaved Creature, or half that amount of damage
(rounding up) to any target Master Creature.
(x)(x) Tap: Place (x) counters on Soul Lash. Use this power only during controller's upkeep, and only when Soul Lash has no counters on it.
Why discipline disobedient creatures when you can destroy them instead?

Chariot to Freedom CC (x)
Place (x) counters on Chariot to Freedom when cast. Sacrifice Chariot to Freedom to remove (x) Enslaved Creatures from game. Chariot to Freedom may not
be sacrificed to remove fewer than (x) Enslaved Creatures.
Freedom is a goal worth any sacrifice.

Harness of Brinteros CC 3
(x)(x) Tap: During any upkeep phase, tap (x) creatures you control. Add their combined power to the power of any target untapped creature.
(x) Tap: Tap (x) creatures you control. Add their combined toughness to any target untapped creature's toughness.
Once put into mass production these sold very well to many markets; but only a slave society could possibly have designed and developed them in the first place.

Grommel's Head CC 6 0/1
Summon Legendary Enslaved Artifact Creature
Place Enslavement Token on this creature when cast. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
If Grommel's Head is ever declared as a blocker or attacker, it does 6 points of damage to its controller and is removed from the game.
T: Instead of drawing from your library this turn, you may name a card. If target opponent has this card in his library, graveyard or hand, opponent must find
it and place it in your hand. Treat this as if you had drawn this card normally, but if you do not either cast it or discard it this turn, it is placed in opponent's hand
at the beginning of the next turn. If opponent looked through his library, he must shuffle his library afterwards. If card is discarded by controller of Grommel's
Head this turn, it is removed from game. If card leaves play after being cast by controller of Grommel's Head, it is removed from game.
"So valuable were Grommel's services to Zar that Zar refused to allow him to escape even in death. Rumor has it that to this day, Grommel's head pleads to be
killed from its tank of preserving nutrients."

Master Machine CC 4 2/2
Summon Master Artifact Creature
If Master Machine blocks or is blocked and survives, the creatures blocking or blocked by Master Machine gain permanent Enslavement Tokens. If such creatures
already possess Enslavement Tokens, they come under the control of Master Machine's controller until one of their Enslavement Tokens is removed.
No matter whether Slave, Master, or Free, all were united in their hatred of the Master Machines.

Clockwork Servant CC 1 1/1
Summon Enslaved Artifact Creature
Tap: Add 1 colorless mana to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
(x)(x)(x) Tap: Add 1 mana of any color to your mana pool. You many only add 1 mana to your mana pool this way. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Place Enslavement Token on this creature when cast. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, creature is removed from game.
"Although admittedly a lesser effort of mine, I still find these busy little wretches quite useful." - Zar

Thaddosian Pearl CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Add (W) to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

Thaddosian Jet CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Add (B) to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

Thaddosian Ruby CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Add (R) to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

Thaddosian Emerald CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Add (G) to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

Thaddosian Sapphire CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Add (U) to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

Crystalline Lotus CC 1
Summon Legendary Artifact
Tap: Sacrifice Crytalline Lotus to add 3 of any color mana in any combination to your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt.
Creating these powerful artifacts nearly bankrupted the Thaddosian Kingdom, especially since no one could afford to buy them. For that reason only the prototypes
were ever made.

GOLD CARDS

Thaddosian Mercenary CC (x)(y)(z) where each (*) is a different color of mana 3/4
Summon Mercenary
First Strike, Banding
Pay an upkeep cost of 2 different colored mana or bury Thaddosian Mercenary. Treat Thaddosian Mercenary as a card of whatever colors were used to summon
him.
Thaddosian Mercenaries work well with any troops, and work willingly for anyone who can pay them.

Thaddosian Jeweler CC (x)(y), as above 0/1
Summon Jeweler
(1)Tap: Place a counter on Thaddosian Jeweler.
(1)Tap: Remove 2 counters from Thaddosian Jeweler to put one mana of any color into your mana pool. Play this ability as an interrupt. Treat Thaddosian Jeweler
as a card of whatever colors were used to summon him.
Ah, you like my little pretties, eh? But have you enough to pay for them? Thaddosian Jewelers don't bargain, you know...

Thaddosian Slave Master CC (x)(y)(z) as above 1/3
Summon Master Creature
(3)Tap: Place a counter on Thaddosian Slave Master. Declare the counter as white, black, blue, red, green, or colorless.
(3)Tap: Remove one Counter from Thaddosian Slave Master. Place one permanent Enslavement Token on any creature corresponding to the color of the counter
removed. Gain control of that creature as long as the Enslavement Token remains and Thaddosian Slave Master remains in play. Treat Thaddosian Slave Master
as a card of whatever colors were used to summon him.
We're equal opportunity enslavers. Heh, heh.

Thaddosian Pleasure Slave CC (x)(y) as above 0/3
Summon Enslaved Creature
Tap: Tap any target creature whose combined Power and Toughness do not exceed combined Power and Toughness of Thaddosian Pleasure Slave. Controller
may then sacrifice Thaddosian Pleasure Slave to remove target tapped creature from game. If this is done, remove Thaddosian Pleasure Slave from game as well.
Treat Thaddosian Pleasure Slave as a card of whatever colors were use to summon it .
Many succumb to the wiles of the Thaddosian Pleasure Slave; some few are never heard from again.

Thaddos CC (xx) (yy) (3) as above 0/6
Summon Elder Wurm Legend
Flying
Tap: Add 1 mana of any color to your mana pool. Whenever this ability is used, place a -0/-3 counter on Thaddos. Use this ability as an interrupt.
Tap: Remove a -0/-3 counter from Thaddos.
Treat Thaddos as a card of whatever colors were used to summon him.
According to legend, the jeweled dragon Thaddos sleeps in a cavern at the heart of the Thaddosian Range. Supposedly, the jewels dug out of the Thaddosian mines
are the scales he has shed over his long, long life.

WHITE

Ashturian Lancer CC WW 0/2
Summon Ashturian
Banding
W: Gains First Strike Until End of Turn
W: Gains +1/+2 to until End of Turn. May not spend more than WW this way each turn.
Tap: Ashturian Lancer removes Enslavement Token from any Enslaved Creature it blocks. When this power is used, place a -0/-2 counter on Ashturian Lancer.
Bravest of the brave, noblest of the noble, the Ashturian Lancer will sacrifice his own life gladly to free some poor enslaved wretch from bondage.

Ashturian Bishop CC W 0/1
Summon Ashturian
Tap: Remove Enslavement Token from target Enslaved Creature.
Be free, my child, be free, as thy Creator always intended.

Ashturian Paladin CC WW5 4/4
Summon Ashturian
Flying
Ashturian Paladin untaps during all untap phases
WTap: Remove Enslaved Creature from game.
WWTap: Bury Master Creature.
Slaves I gladly, gladly free, Masters I gladly, madly slay, evil of any nature a'tal, into my path you'd best not stray.

Ashturian Pikemen CC W2 1/1
Summon Ashturian
First Strike, Banding with Ashturians
Ashturian Pikemen gain +1/+2 if blocking or blocked by Enslaved Creatures.
Poor slavey things! I feels bad mowin' em down, but if they keeps comin', we keeps hackin'...

Primate Ashtur CC WWW2 1/1
Summon Legend
Protected from Enslaved Creatures
Primate Ashtur cannot be targeted by spells or effects that would allow any player other than his summoner to control him
+2/+2 to all Ashturians in play
Sacrifice to remove from game all Master and Enslaved Creatures
The greatest sacrifice for the greatest result. How can I do any less, when my followers do so much more?

Ashturian Physician CC W2 1/1
Tap: Prevent 1 point of damage to target non-Enslaved/non-Master Creature.
I wish I could help those poor wretches in chains, but their masters won't let me come near. As for the Masters, I wouldna spit on them if they were on fire.

Ashturian Wizard CC WW 1/2
Summon Ashturian
Tap: Add up to WW to your mana pool. This mana can be used only for summoning white creatures.
I may not seem like much alone, but give me a moment and I won't be...

Ashturian Pegasus CC W1 1/1
Summon Ashturian
Flying, Banding with Ashturians
Gains +1/+2 if blocked by or blocking Enslaved Creatures
They say the Ashturian Pegasi have the souls of reincarnated slaves. Perhaps that's why they hate slavery so much.

Ashturian Unicorn CC WW1 2/2
Summon Ashturian
Gains +1/+2 if blocked by or blocking Enslaved Creatures
They say the Ashturian Unicorns have the souls of Lancers fallen in battle. Perhaps that's why they fight so fiercely.

Ashturian Plains Lion WW 3/1
Summon Plains Lion
Bands with Lions
Gains +0/+1 for each Lion in play when Banded.
This enormous predator is dangerous enough on its own. Unfortunately, it prefers to hunt in twos, threes, and even fours.

Ashturian Skyhawk W2 1/1
Summon Skyhawk
Flying
May be untapped to be declared as a blocker. Use this power when opponent declares an attack phase, before any creatures have been declared as attackers. This
power may not be used if opponent does not attack this turn.
Gains +0/+2 if declared as a blocker.
The Ashturian Skyhawk is a fierce enough hunter, but more than that, is a ferocious defender of its own territory.

Ashturian Freebooter CC WW2 3/4
Summon Ashturian
WW2 Tap: Counter Summon Enslaved Creature spell.
The Ashturian Freebooter is a fine fighting man, but he excels at stopping slavery before it starts.

Signpost to Freedom CC WWW
Instant
No Enslaved or Master Creature may attack this turn. Play on target player's upkeep.
Just the thought of liberty can be enough to distract an entire army of slaves.

Ashturian Harvest CC WW1
Sorcery
Target player gains one life per non-Enslaved, non-Master creature they control.
The sight of free men gives me strength to go on.

Road to Freedom CC WW2
Enchantment
WW: On upkeep, remove Enslavement Token from target Enslaved Creature. If target Enslaved Creature is removed from game, place a 0/1 Ashturian counter
into play. Treat this as a white creature you have just summoned.
You only have to offer a slave its freedom once.

Emancipation CC W
Interrupt
Target Enslaved Creature loses its Enslavement Token. If it remains in the game, it is now a non-Enslaved, non-Master Creature.
Drop thy chains, my brother, my sister, and join us all in freedom.

Mass Emancipation CC WW4
Enchant World
All Enslavement Tokens are removed while this Enchantment is in play. Any creatures which remain or come into play cannot be Enslaved while this Enchantment
is in play, any Enslaved Creatures summoned are countered while this Enchantment is in play. Master Creatures are not affected by this unless they are affected
by the loss of Enslaved Creatures.
If any are enslaved, then all feel the fetters; for one to be truly free, all men must be free.

The Freed CC WW3 3/4
Summon The Freed
Bands
Any Enslaved Creatures blocked by or blocking the Freed lose an Enslavement Token before the damage dealing phase of that combat is reached.
Any Master Creatures blocked by or blocking the Freed are destroyed before the damage dealing phase of that combat is reached.
If an Enslavement Token is ever placed on the Freed, remove them from the game.
No one fights slavery more furiously than those who have felt its shackles on their own wrists.

Live Free Or Die CC W2
Instant
Sacrifice target creature under your control as a fast effect response to any spell or effect that would place an Enslavement Token on that creature and/or remove
that creature to another player's control. Caster/Controller of Enslavement or control effect takes damage in the amount of sacrificed creature's combined power
and toughness. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

Cry Freedom CC WW3
Sorcery
All Enslaved Creatures receive -1/-1 until end of turn. All Master Creatures receive -0/-2 until end of turn.
Sometimes even the thought of freedom is too much for a slave or a slaveholder.

RED

Conscription CC RRR1
Enchant Creature
You gain control of target creature. You may only use this creature for attacking and blocking. Under the effect of Conscription, creatures lose all special powers
except Flying, First Strike, Trample or Protection from a color. Even those abilities that are constant effects, such as a Lord of Atlantis giving Islandwalk and +1/+1
to all Merfolk or a Serra Angel not tapping when it attacks are nullified by Conscription.
Over there you may be high and mighty, but over here you're just more catapult fodder.

Mass Conscription CC RRR4
Sorcery
For the remainder of the turn caster gains control of all creatures under the control of target player. Any of these creatures that are tapped untap when this spell
is cast. Caster of this spell may use these creatures only to attack. When turn is over, tap all creatures affected by this spell. This spell is considered a non-targeting
effect.
I may only command 'em for a few seconds, but when those seconds are over I'll have the world at my feet.

Remarian Slave Soldier CC R 2/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
Remarian Slave Soldiers will not attack or block unless a Master Creature is in play under the control of their controller.
If the masters ain't lookin', why natcherly, I'm sleepin'.

Remarian Master Soldier CC RR1 3/2
Summon Master Creature
+1/+1 to all Enslaved Soldiers
All Enslaved Creaturesunder your control gain Banding while Remarian Master Soldier is in play
While Remarian Master Soldier is in play, place a -1/-1 counter on any non-Wall Enslaved Creature under your control that neither attacked nor blocked in the
previous round of turns.
They fight or they die when I'm around, and no arguments.

Remarian Catapult Master CC R2 1/2
Summon Master Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
Tap: Sacrifice Enslaved Creature to do 2 points of damage to any creature or player.
Send those cowards over here, Master Soldier; I'm runnin' out o' ammo...

Remarian Rocket Scout CC R1 1/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
R: Remarian Rocket Scout gains flight until end of turn.
Sacrifice Remarian Rocket Scout to do 5 points of damage to any creature blocking or blocked by it.
Don't get in my way! Please please please don't get in my way!

Remarian Firehawk CC RR3 4/4
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
Bands
RR: Target non-flying creature that bands with Remarian Firehawk gains flying ability until end of turn. No more than RR can be spent per round in this way.
The proud, free Remarian Firehawks of ancient times are no more; their descendents have been broken to the yoke for too long.

Remarian Master Engineer CC R1 1/1
Summon Master Creature
Tap: Bury one wall.
RR Tap: Place a 0/4 wall counter into play. Treat this as a red Enslaved Creature.
I build 'em, I blow 'em up; I'm not picky.

Grapeshot Balloon CC R(X) 0/2
Summon Wall
Flying
Sacrifice Grapeshot Balloon to do (x+1) damage to any creature it blocks.
The little ones only make a little bang, but the big ones can take out a Dragon!

Hidden Powderkeg CC R
Instant
Target non-flying attacking creature takes 5 damage.
Careful where you step, fella... oops, too late!

Rock Giant Worker CC R2 3/3
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
Bands
Rock Giant Worker may not be declared as an attacker or blocker unless it is banded. Damage may not be distributed to Rock Giant Worker when banded.
Remarians don't dare train Rock Giants to fight; no one could keep 'em enslaved if they knew how to kill. But they're still a big help on the battlefield.

Master Remaros CC RRR3 5/3
Summon Legendary Master Creature
R: Target Red creature gains Protection from White
When target Red creature controlled by Master Remaros' controller goes to the graveyard, Master Remaros may do target Red creature's combined power and
toughness in points of damage to any creature or combination of creatures, dividing the damage any way controller chooses. If Master Remaros uses this power,
remove target Red creature from the game.
These are my minions, under my command, and under my protection. Threaten them at your peril.

Remarian Warlord CC RRR2 *+1/*+1
Summon Master Creature
Bands with Red Creatures
Remarian Warlord's Power and Toughness are equal to *+1, where * is equal to all Enslaved Creatures under your control.
The more slaves he has to order around, the braver he is.

Magmite Soldier CC R2 2/2
Summon Enslaved Soldier
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
R: Magmite Soldier gains First Strike.
Walls blocking Magmite Soldier are destroyed.
You gets within a yard or so of em and suddenly the heat flares up... next thing you know you've made an ash of yerself.

Wall of Molten Stone CC RR1 6/2
Summon Wall
R: Wall of Molten Stone gains flight until end of turn. Destroy Wall of Molten Stone at end of turn.
RRR: Regeneration.
There was no way any of us were going any further. The molten rock flow twisted and turned to stay in front of us, and even spouted into the air when we tried
to fly over it.

Magma Monster CC RRR4 6/4
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
First Strike, Trample
Magma Monster may only be blocked by 2 or more creatures.
Magma Monster does 4 points of damage to its controller whenever it becomes tapped. This damage may not be reduced or redirected through spells or effects.
Yes, it hurts to have this damn thing on our side, but it hurts the enemy MORE!

Defiance CC RR2
Enchant Enslaved Creature
Target Enslaved Creature becomes tapped on controller's upkeep and does its Power in damage to its controller. Controller of target Enslaved Creature may choose
to have target creature's damage done to any other creature he controls by tapping it on his upkeep as well. Controller of Defiance must pay RR upkeep cost or
bury Defiance.

Uprising CC R3
Sorcery
All of target player's Enslaved Creatures become tapped, all of target player's Master Creatures take (x) damage where (x) is number of Enslaved Creatures tapped.
The problem with slaves, even the most passive, is you can never safely turn your back on 'em.

Rumor of Rebellion CC RR
Sorcery
All Master Creatures are removed from game for rest of turn. Return them to play tapped at beginning of next turn.
All it takes is a whisper and whsssttt! they vanish into thin air.

Rebellion CC R4
Enchant World
All Enslaved Creatures become tapped, all Master Creatures are removed from game; each round, controllers of Enslaved Creatures takes (x) damage where (x)
is number of enslaved creatures they control. Any player or combination of players may pay (4) upkeep cost or Rebellion is buried at end of turn. If Rebellion
leaves play, return all removed Master Creatures to play tapped.
Any slave society is a powder keg with a lit fuse, just waiting to go off in your face.

BLUE

Master Psionicist CC UU2 1/3
Summon Master Creature
Tap: Do 4 points to any target creature. If target creature is not Enslaved, put a -0/-1 counter on Master Psionicist. If target creature is a Master Creature, put
a -0/-2 counter on Psionicist and Master Psionicist does 2 points of damage to controller.
If Master Psionicist is ever declared as an attacker or blocker, do 5 points to his controller and remove him from game.
I don't do battle; it's beneath my dignity. I just glare and kill.

Rewrite Contract CC U
Interrupt
Caster of Rewrite Contract may change the text of any card containing the phrase "Enslaved" or "Master", transposing those two phrases - for example, "Summon
Enslaved Soldier" would become "Summon Master Soldier". If an Enslaved Creature is changed in this way, it loses its Enslavement Token but does not leave
the game, becoming instead a Master Creature. If a Master Creature is changed in this way, it immediately gains an Enslavement Token and is treated as an
Enslaved Creature; if ever it loses that Enslavement Token without being changed back to a Master Creature, it is removed from the game. If this card is played
on a Summon Enslaved or Summon Master Creature spell as it is being cast, the creature is summoned as whatever it is permanently changed to.
It's astounding what changing a few words here and there can accomplish. Heh.

Counter Slavery CC U1
Interrupt
Counter any Summon Enslaved Creature spell, or any other spell or effect that would result in an Enslavement Token being placed on any target creature.
At this point in time I find it fashionable to detest and despise slavery. So there.

Counter Emancipation CC U1
Interrupt
Counter any spell or effect that would result in an Enslavement Token being removed from any target creature.
At this point in time I would find it most inconvenient to lose the services of that slave. So there.

Purchase Slave CC UU2
Enchant Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on target creature and take it under your control for remainder of game or until this Enchantment leaves play. At start of his next
turn, player who formerly controlled target creature gains the equivalent of the casting cost of this spell in any combination of colored mana he chooses, and may
add this mana to his mana pool at any time and in any increment he chooses during his turn. If this Enchantment leaves play, remove Enslavement Token from
target creature and return it to previous controller.
What an excellent creature you have! Will you sell him to me? No? I'm afraid I can't accept that answer; I've already paid you a fair price...

Lord Vylkera CC UU4 5/4
Summon Legend
Protection from Blue
On your upkeep, remove a creature from play or destroy all creatures under your control except Lord Vylkera. If you remove a zero casting cost creature from
play, discard it to the graveyard. Any other creature removed from play to pay this upkeep cost is placed in your hand; if it is still in your hand at the end of your
turn, discard it to graveyard.
Tap: Lord Vylkera counters any spell or effect that would result in a creature under your control coming under the control of any other player.
Tap: Lord Vylkera does 2 points of damage to any player successfully removing a creature from your control to theirs. As long as that creature remains under
their control, Lord Vylkera may use this ability.
I am a jealous lord, and will brook no one taking from me those creatures that are mine.

Vylkerian Fishing Serf CC U 0/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
UU: Place a 0/1 Vylkerian Fish token creature into play. Treat this as a blue Enslaved Creature. Vylkerian Fish tokens will neither attack nor block unless a
Master Creature is in play under your control.
Tap: Sacrifice any number of Vylkerian Fish tokens. Add +1/+1 per Fish token sacrificed to any Blue Creature.
Eat yer fishies; they make you grow up big and strong.

Vylkerian Battle Captain CC UU 2/2
Summon Master Creature
Vylkerian Battle Captain gives +1/+1 to all Blue Enslaved Creatures.
Get up you lazy worthless thralls! Get in there and fight!

Vylkerian Reef Engineer CC U2 1/2
Summon Master Creature
Controller of Vylkerian Reef Engineer may block Islandwalking creatures as if they did not have this ability.
UU: Put a Barrier Reef token into play. Treat these tokens as 3/2 blue walls that may band with each other.
The last bunch of islandwalkers that tried to get past us didn't see our coral reef barricade until it was too late. That was messy.

Vylkerian Surf Sergeant CC UU2 3/2
Summon Master Creature
Bands with Blue Enslaved Creatures
+2/+0 to all Blue Enslaved Creatures banded with Vylkerian Surf Sergeant to attack
+0/+2 to all Blue Enslaved Creatures banded with Vylkerian Surf Sergeant to block
Of course some of you slaves are going to die! That's what slaves are for!

Vylkerian Surf Soldiers CC U 1/1
Summon Enslaved Creatures
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
If declared as attackers against an opponent controlling at least one Island, Vylkerian Surf Soldiers gain Flying ability.
Well, no, they don't really fly , but when they're coming in riding the back of a hundred foot tidal wave, how are you going to get in their way?

Vylkerian Surf Sentinels CC U 1/1
Summon Enslaved Creatures
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
If declared as blockers against an opponent controlling at least one Island, Vylkerian Surf Sentinels gain Flying ability.
They lurk just under the surface and wait, and then BOOM! they porpoise up forty, fifty feet in the air and harpoon you good.

Vylkerian Catapulter CC U1 1/2
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
(x) Tap: Give target Enslaved Creature flying ability until end of turn. Target creature's power may not exceed (x) where (x) is the amount of mana spent to
activate this ability. Target creature does (x)+2 damage to itself at end of turn.
They laughed when we threw fish at 'em, until we started throwin the big ones...

Vylkerian Jellyfish CC UUU1 1/3
Summon Enslaved Creature
Islandwalk
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned. If Enslavement Token is ever removed, remove creature from game.
When Jellyfish does damage to player, give player 1 poison counter. If player ever gets 10 poison counters, they are dead. When Jellyfish does damage to creature,
give creature -0/-1 counter.
It looks nasty and feels worse. I especially hate it when they throw them at you out of catapults.

Vylkerian Rays CC UU1 2/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Bands, Islandwalk
Vylkerian Rays give Islandwalk ability to any creature they band with when attacking.
The surfboards are bad enough; when those Vylkerians come in riding these things, I toss down my sword and head for high ground.

Illusionary Sea Serpent CC UU1
Enchantment
If opponent controls no Islands, place a 5/5 Sea Serpent token creature in play after casting this Enchantment. As long as opponent controls no Islands, this token
creature may attack and block as a normal 5/5 creature. If Enchantment is discarded from play, remove token from play. If token creature is removed from play,
return enchantment to controller's hand. If target opponent ever controls an Island, this Enchantment is discarded.
It didn't look like no sea serpent I'd ever heard of, but the fellas who'd never been down to the shore thought it was real enough.

Seawater Corrosion CC U2
Sorcery
Tap all artifacts controlled by target player. At end of turn, place all tapped artifacts in play in graveyard. Players may pay (1) for each artifact they control to
keep them in play.
You'd be amazed how fast salt water can ruin a delicate mechanism.

Mental Electricity CC U(x)
Instant
Tap all artifacts in play and place (x) counters on them. Artifacts may not untap until all counters are removed. Each player may remove 1 counter from an artifact
they control on their upkeep.
Somehow my thoughts seem to interfere with the working of your magical machines. How odd.

Vicious Current CC U3
Enchantment
Creatures with Islandwalk no longer untap normally on their controller's untap phase. Instead, controller must pay (2) during the upkeep phase to untap them.
The waters around here are just too treacherous for anyone to sneak through.

Grand Illusion CC UUU2
Enchant World
Controller of Grand Illusion must pay UUU each upkeep or discard this enchantment.
While this enchantment is in play, all free and Master Creatures gain Enslavement Tokens and are treated as Enslaved Creastures, and all Enslaved Creatures lose
all Enslavement Tokens and are treated as Master Creatures. If Enchantment leaves play, all creatures revert to their previous status.
The slaves become Masters, and Masters slaves; ah, what a glorious dream, and how glorious indeed if it could come true, even for a fleeting moment...

GREEN

Brinterian Gibbon CC G 0/1
Summon Gibbon
Tap: Take control of target non-creature Artifact whose casting cost does not exceed Toughness of Brinterian Gibbon. Controller of Brinterian Gibbon loses
control of target Artifacts if Brinterian Gibbon leaves play.
The gibbons of Brinteros love small pretty shiny things.

Brinterian Beast Master CC GGG 2/2
Summon Master Creature
+1/+1 to all Green Enslaved Creatures
Tap: Sacrifice Green Enslaved Creature to give another Green Enslaved Creature a landwalk of controller's choice until end of turn. Combined power and
toughness of sacrificed creature must equal or exceed that of creature given landwalk. If more than one Brinterian Beast Master enters play under your control,
all Brinterian Beast Masters under your control become tapped and do not untap as normal on your untap phase.
Brinterian Beast Masters are perfectly willing to sacrifice one creature if it lets another one get through your defenses.

Brinterian Parrot CC G 0/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Flying
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
(x) Tap: Give (x) Green Creatures banding, where (x) is the number of green mana spent.
Brinterian Parrots are trained to relay commands quickly through miles of forest.

Brinterian Battle Sprites CC GG1 2/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Flying
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
All damage done to Brinterian Battle Sprites by creatures during combat is reduced to zero.
They're little buggers, sure, but they're tougher to kill than cockroaches, and they hit a lot harder.

Dryad Warriors CC G 1/2
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
Forestwalk
Dryad Warriors will neither attack nor block unless a Master Creature is in play under your control.
Brinterian lumberers hold entire tracts of forest hostage to guarantee the obedience of these fierce folk.

Brinterian Archers CC GG 2/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
First Strike
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
(x)Tap: Sacrifice a Forest to do (x) damage to target creature or creatures, divided any way controller of Brinterian Archers chooses.
Brinterian Archers will not use their special ability unless a Master Creature is in play under your control.
Most Brinterians either work in the lumberyards or get conscripted into the army. Either way, you've got to watch them every minute to get any work out of them
at all.

Brinterian Coral Snake CC GG 1/1
Summon Coral Snake
If Brinterian Coral Snake is blocked by more than one creature, all blockers but one are destroyed at end of turn. Controller of blockers chooses which blocker
survives. If Brinterian Coral Snake does damage to any player, that player may not put any mana into their mana pool until Brinterian Coral Snake's controller's
next untap phase.
The coral snakes of Brinteros are especially nasty; their bite doesn't kill, but it does completely paralyze for a matter of hours.

Brinterian Lumberers CC G2 2/3
Summon Master Creature
G: Remove Forestwalk from target creature.
Those axes look impressive, but they're too big and clumsy to hit anything smaller or quicker than a tree.

Brinterian Marching Beetle CC GGG2 5/4
Summon Enslaved Creature
Trample
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
Brinterian Marching Beetle does 4 damage to its controller whenever it becomes tapped. Effects that prevent or redirect damage cannot be used to prevent this
loss of life. Brinterian Marching Beetle must attack every turn, if possible.
The problem with Brinterian Marching Beetles is not getting them to attack; it's getting them to stop when the battle is over.

Lord Brinteros CC GGG4 7/7
Summon Legendary Master Creature
Tap all untapped forests you control at the end of your draw phase or Lord Brinteros becomes tapped and does 7 points of damage to you. If any green mana is
drawn from any other source you control during the remainder of your turn, sacrifice that source after the mana is drawn.
Tap: Any mana generated for the remainder of this turn is colorless.
Lord Brinteros aspires to be the greatest Nature Mage in existence, and gets very angry when other people use mana in his presence.

Brinterian Bush People CC G 1/1
Summon Bush People
Forestwalk
G Tap: Target forestwalker gains +2/+0
The Brinterians have never managed to enslave the Bush People, which is why some sections of the forest still have no Brinterian lumber camps in them.

Brinterian Moss Colony CC GG
Enchantment
G: Regenerate target creature. Regenerated creature does not untap as normal on its controllers next untap phase.
GG: Add +0/+3 to target creature. Target creature does not untap as normal on its controllers next untap phase.
Brinterian moss was famous for its healing qualities, and one of Brinteros most profitable exports.

Brinterian Geyser CC G3
Enchantment
G: Do 1 point of damage to target attacking creature with flying.
GG: No creatures do damage to each other in combat this turn. Unblocked creatures still deal damage as normal.
Just fly right over it, he said. It's just a little smoking hole in the ground, he said. Okay, I said, you fly right over it. And you'll notice he isn't here any more.

Brinterian Lumber Camp CC G
Enchantment
(x): Sacrifice (x) Forests to put (x)(x) Palisade tokens into play, where (x) is the number of mana spent. Treat Palisade tokens as 3/2 first strike green walls that
band with each other.
Brinterian forces excel at quickly fortifying their positions with walls of razorshape stakes.

Brinterian Axehandlers CC G2 2/2
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
Tap: Destroy target tapped creature or land that has the ability to produce green mana.
A phalanx of Brinterian Axehandlers can raze an acre of dense woodland - and every living thing in it - to bare stumps in an hour.

Slave Holiday CC G
Instant
All Enslaved Creatures become tapped.
Brinterians work their slaves even harder than Zarians. If they didn't give them a day off once in a while they wouldn't last a year.

Slave Frenzy CC G
Instant
+4/+4 to target Enslaved Creature. If target Creature does damage this turn, it is destroyed at end of turn.
Brinterian Masters brew mosses and saps into potions that can turn a warrior into an unstoppable fiend. Unfortunately, this uses up warriors rather quickly.

Fresh Growth CC G1
Sorcery
Take a Forest out of your graveyard and put it into play. This does not count towards the limit of placing one land per turn into play.
The Brinterians don't bother to replant their forests, but even they can't keep trees from gradually growing back.

Runaway CC G2
Enchant Enslaved Creature
Target Enslaved Creature becomes tapped when this Enchantment is cast and may not be untapped while this Enchantment is in play.
The Brinterian Forests are a frequent haven for runaway slaves. Maybe that's why the Brinterians work so hard to chop them down.

Eternal Woodlands CC GGG4
Enchant World
All lands in play produce one green mana when tapped, in addition to any other effect caused by tapping that land. Controller of Eternal Woodlands must pay
GGGG on their upkeep or discard Eternal Woodlands at the end of the turn in which upkeep is not paid.
There are no limits to the power of nature.

BLACK

Endless Labors CC BB
Sorcery
Take an Enslaved Creature from any graveyard and return it to play under the control of the owner of that graveyard.
Slacking off just because ye're dead, eh? We'll see about that!

Enslavement CC B3
Enchant Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on target creature. If this is target creature's first Enslavement Token, treat target creature as an Enslaved Creature as long as token
remains. If this is not target creature's first Enslavement Token, take target Enslaved Creature under your control. This creature will remain under your control
until at least one of its Enslavement Tokens is removed.
Give me enough slaves and I'll reshape the world in my image.

Mass Imprisonment CC BB(x)
Sorcery
Tap (x) Enslaved Creatures of your choice. If an Enslaved Creature targetted by this spell is already tapped or becomes tapped by its controller in response to this
spell, you may choose to keep it tapped on its controllers next untap phase.
Putting slaves in dungeons is rarely profitable, but sometimes one has no choice.

Mass Execution CC BB(x)(x)
Sorcery
Do (x) damage to all Enslaved Creatures in play. Enslaved Creatures destroyed this way may not be Regenerated this turn.
The stench of thousands of former slaves rotting in the Zaran compounds wafted all the way to Brinteria.

Global Enslavement CC BBB4
Enchant World
Caster of this Enchantment must pay 3 life per upkeep. This loss of life may not be redirected or negated by any spell or effect.
All non-Master creatures gain an Enslavement Token and are treated as Enslaved Creatures while this Enchantment remains in play. Any Enslaved Creatures that
already have an Enslavement Token when this Enchantment comes into play are taken under the control of this Enchantment's controller. If this Enchantment leaves
play, all Enslavement Tokens generated by its effects are removed.
Conquering the world is easy. Surviving long enough to do anything with it is hard.

Dark Promotion CC BB
Enchant Enslaved Creature
Remove Enslavement Token from target creature while this Enchantment is in effect and treat target creature as a Master Creature.
Congratulations! Now you get to hold the whip... for a while...

Zarian Bog Miner CC B1 0/2
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned into play. If ever this Enslavement Token is removed, remove this creature from the game.
Tap: Add B to controller's mana pool. Do not untap Zarian Bog Miners on controller's next upkeep phase.
B: Sacrifice Zarian Bog Miners to add BBB to controller's mana pool. Play both these powers as interrupts.
Zar is insatiable in his quest for more and more necromantic power, and he'll snuff out the lives of a thousand slaves with as little feeling as you or I snuffing out
candles.

Zarian Factory Worker CC B2 1/1
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when summoned into play. If ever this Enslavement Token is removed, remove this creature from the game.
(x): Add (x)(x)(x) colorless mana to controller's mana pool where (x) is equal to number of B spent. This mana may only be used to summon or activate artifacts.
If more than BBBB is spent in this way per turn, Zarian Factory Worker is destroyed at end of turn.
It's not at all out of the ordinary for Zar to work a hundred factory hands to death in a single afternoon.

Zarian Slave Overseer CC B2 2/2
Summon Master Creature
Tap: Do 1 point of damage to any Enslaved Creature.
The Overseer was only slightly less hated and feared than Zar himself... or so said those who had never actually met Zar himself...

Zarian Master Clerk CC B3 1/1
Summon Master Creature
(x) Tap: Controller of Zarian Master Clerk looks at target player's hand. Target player discards (x) Summon Enslaved Creature and/or Summon Master Creature
cards from hand, where (x) is the amount of B spent. This power may only be used on target player's upkeep.
The Zarian Master Clerk has an amazing faculty for keeping track of slaves no matter where they may be.

Great Batwinged Swamp Lizard CC BB4 5/5
Summon Enslaved Creature
Flying
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
Great Batwinged Swamp Lizard gains +1/+1 when blocking non-flying creatures.
Creatures blocked by or blocking Great Batwinged Swamp Lizard may not band.
This huge, horrible monster is much too clever to be an unwilling slave. It must be assumed that it serves Zar for the simple joy of killing things.

Swamp Giant CC BB2 3/3
Summon Enslaved Creature
Place an Enslavement Token on this creature when it is summoned into play. If this Enslavement Token is ever removed from this creasture, remove creature from
play.
B: Do one point of damage to target non-Enslaved, non-Master creature and one point of damage to Swamp Giant.
Swamp Giants must dimly remember the days before Zar came to power, when they were a free people. Why else would they hate other free people so much?

Zar CC B6 0/4
Summon Legendary Master Creature
Tap: Zar's controller may search his library or graveyard and take into his hand any one card that has the phrase 'Zar' printed on it.
(1): Add 3 black mana to controller's mana pool. Use this ability as an interrupt. If more than BBBBBB is generated this way per turn, bury Zar.
Legend says that Zar knows whenever and wherever his name is spoken or written. I can tell you from my own experience, the legend does not exaggerate.

Flogging CC B
Enchant Creature
B: Do one point of damage to target creature.
Disobey me once and you suffer. Disobey twice and you'll never suffer again.

Enfetter CC B
Interrupt
Place an Enslavement Counter on target non-Enslaved Creature. From now on, treat this creature as an Enslaved Creature for all spells and effects.
You're a slave now, and you'd better get used to it, see?

Forced Submission CC B
Interrupt
Turn any or all creatures in play into Enslaved Creatures for remainder of turn. Caster chooses how many and which creatures become Enslaved for remainder
of turn. This spell does not cause creatures to actually gain Enslavement Tokens.
The horrible sensation only lasted seconds, but they are seconds that none of us will ever be able to forget.

Glare of Mastery CC B2
Sorcery
Enslaved Creatures may not be declared as blockers this turn.
Those cringing worms? They won't dare get in the way of their masters.

Zarian Tar Pit CC BB2
Enchantment
B: Do one point of damage to target non-flying attacking creature.
Those poor wretches that wandered into the tar pits rarely wandered out again.

Wall of Toxic Smoke CC BB1 0/1
Summon Wall
Flying
B: Do one point of damage to any creature blocked by Wall of Toxic Smoke.
B: Regenerate Wall of Toxic Smoke.
They say the smoke over Zar's factories is so thick that birds bounce off it and fall to the ground dead.

Zarian Slave Drums CC BB
Enchantment
All Enslaved Creatures gain +1/+1.
It got so we knew; when those damn drums started up, the battle was going to be a fierce one.

Christmas 08

2008-12-25T14:34:00.000-05:00

Just to keep track (lack of comments for, like, the last three months has discouraged me from updating this blog, but someday I may want to look back and see stuff like this)

What did I get SuperWife for Christmas this year? Let's see -- a giggling baby doll she liked a lot when we saw it at Target, a snowglobe (I get one for her every year), some buttons for her coat (which she didn't really like so she hasn't sewn them on yet), a couple of divided dishes she saw in a shop and indicated an interest in, a kitchen decoration she saw in the same shop, a baking sheet, a set of flannel sheets, some Magic cards... I think that's about it. It was a cheap Christmas this year, things being what they are. Most of the money got spent on the kids.

I got a lot of Magic cards, several books (the next three installments of the WRINKLE IN TIME series from Madeline L'Engel; SuperWife got me a copy of A WRINKLE IN TIME years ago), a few comics from Mike Norton (something by Neil Gaiman, and something else by Will Eisner, neither of them things I'd have ever bought for myself, and thus, perfect gifts), a sweater, a pair of jeans, a couple of pairs of pajama bottoms, a copy of Lois McMaster Bujold's WINTERFAIR GIFTS on CD, and probably some other stuff I can't remember right now.

The kids all did fine, especially Super Adorable Kid, who badly wanted an American Girl doll and wound up with two, plus extra stuff. Well, okay, we did end up with a pretty big fly in the ointment.... Super Drama Barely A Teen wasn't happy with her presents because it was all grown up stuff and she wanted toys, apparently (although she'd put all grown up stuff on her list) and she sulked quite a bit and that made SuperWife unhappy and me very very angry with my eldest daughter's gracelessness, so to that extent it was not our best Christmas ever. But SuperWife concocted a fine Christmas dinner of ham and various different wonderful side dishes and we all got through it and now we have survived yet another holiday season. Everything is back in the boxes and the boxes are back in the basement and we've even gotten through Super Adorable Kid's 9th birthday party, which was held at Build A Bear, God help us all.

And that's about all. Be about your business.

Readin'

2008-12-16T14:36:00.002-05:00

Text of an email I just sent to Daniel Keys Moran:

Here we go:

"I cannot today read what I wrote only five years ago without wincing."

That, after telling me that five years before, you wrote what sound to me to be a couple of essential Continuing Times novels that you now think, you know, suck, so I will never get to read them.

So I have this to say to you --- you should not attempt to judge the quality of your own writing, for the pure and simple reason that you are incapable of doing so in any meaningfully objective way.

You've mentioned that you finished AI WARS years ago, thought it was dreadful, and trashed it.

As with the other Continuing Times novels you have written that you thought were dreadful and trashed, this makes me very sad.

I have to assume, based on everything you have said on your blog and in your various fore and afterwords that you probably now think that EMERALD EYES and THE LONG RUN and THE LAST DANCER suck. And if you could, you would trash them, and wait until some theoretical time in the future when you feel you write well enough to do them justice.

And that strikes me as, pardon my non-French, fucking madness.

I love EMERALD EYES. I love THE LONG RUN a little bit less and THE LAST DANCER a fraction less than that. But this is like saying that I love THE CHRONICLES OF AMBER slightly less than I love LORD OF LIGHT, that I love TITAN slightly less than I love WIZARD and I love WIZARD slightly less than I love DEMON, that I love THE UPLIFT WAR slightly less than I love STARTIDE RISING. It does not mean that these books I love slightly less are terrible books which should never have seen print or which have not in some way greatly enriched my life. It simply means that the books I love slightly more are, you know, slightly more fucking fantastic than those books I love slightly less.

That's all.

You say you have been writing for a very long time, and you have been planning The Continuing Time for a very long time, and that's fine and wonderful. I have been reading The Continuing Time for a lesser period, but that does not mean that I am not and have not been looking forward to new Tales of the Continuing Time for a very, very long time.

If George R.R. Martin were to announce on his website that he had actually finished A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE but on rereading he felt it sucked hard so he'd trashed everything, including all the books already published, and was starting over with A GAME OF THRONES, rewriting it to the standard he felt the epic deserved, the anguished screams of millions would reverberate throughout Earth's atmosphere.

Personally, I think EMERALD EYES is equal to anything Martin has ever written. That's just my opinion. But it is the opinion of a reader, not the guy who wrote it, and as such, much more objective than yours can ever be.

Please stop trying to judge your own writing, especially if such judgment leads you to destroying stuff that I would like to read.

I've been waiting for THE AI WARS, and whatever comes after THE AI WARS, for a really long time now.

I know you're busy, and real life has to take precedence. But if it's just that you think the writing sucks and you want to wait until you can do it better, please, please, please, stop thinking that.

Or, at least, stop letting it get in the way.

As should be obvious, I just reread EMERALD EYES again. And, yeah, there are passages in it that seem a trifle... immature... and maybe, yeah, you could have done a better job with it if you sat down to write it now, but you know what?

It still fucking ROCKS.

It ROCKS OUT LOUD.

That is all.

D.A. Madigan

So, there's that.

EMERALD EYES, THE LONG RUN, and THE LAST DANCER are currently out of print, which is a goddam shame. However, if you chance across this entry and read this far and care at all about my recommendations, I recommend you do a Google search and find used copies of all these books and read the hell out of them. Because they do, indeed, rock out loud.

If you like them half as well as I liked them, you might consider going over to danielkeysmoran.blogspot.com and advising the author there of your regard. You could tip him through his PayPal button, too, which, given that he'll never get a royalty on a purchase of a second hand out of print book, wouldn't be at all out of line.

Something else that's out of print, and really hard to get? Alan Moore's MARVEL/MIRACLEMAN stuff. Apparently there's some huge legal dispute about copyright on the characters and those stories cannot be reprinted until that's all settled and it seems unlikely it will be settled any time soon.

Which makes me sad, as I had a lot of that stuff in my previous comics collection and I'd like to have it back because a lot of Moore's MIRACLEMAN stuff, and later on, Gaiman's MIRACLEMAN stuff, was pretty frickin' brilliant, and I'd enjoy rereading it.

Plus, if you're any kind of scholar of superhero comics, well, Moore's MARVEL/MIRACLEMAN is a pretty significant part of the arc of the development of the modern superhero.

Ah, well.

The Crash of 2008

2008-12-16T12:20:00.003-05:00

So.

Where to start, where to start...?

Okay, let's try this.

Prior to just recently, the horror of a computer crash had been no more than an urban legend to me. I'd known people who'd been whacked with that particularly ugly Ugly Stick, but it had never come close to smacking me. Since the early 90s, I've had three different personal computers, and I'd worked those beasts pretty hard, and not a single one of them had ever crashed.

But then, a couple of months ago, I tried to boot up my old computer, which has been sitting in the back of our apartment, in the bedroom I share with SuperWife, since we moved into this apartment. It's a very obsolete computer and back there it had no Internet connection, so nobody had much use for it (we're all Internet junkies in this house) but it had a lot of my files on it accumulated over the ten years or so I'd owned it -- a great deal of my writing, a lot of my art, a lot of Jeff's art I'd scanned, a lot of digital photos my family had sent me over the years, some other stuff -- and I used it sometimes to do some writing when the other computer was in heavy rotation (i.e., any time all the kids were in the house).

And it wouldn't boot. And it wouldn't boot. And it wouldn't boot.

So eventually I got Nate in, who is kind of our techno-wizard now, and he watched it not boot, and then said "Your hard drive's crashed".

And I lost my mind and gibbered and shrieked and leapt up and down and pulled the drapes off the windows and threw my shoes at Resident Bush. And then, when I'd calmed down, the hard drive was still crashed, which sucked.

But, you know, moving on. Maybe, someday, I can salvage the drive from that chassis and get someone knowledgeable to do some magic and see if any of the data can be pulled off. In the meantime... sigh... goodbye to a decade of my computing life, but... yes, resolutely, stiff upper lip, never show weakness, keep up the side, old bean, yes, yes, moving the fuck on, indeed.

To this last weekend. One of SuperWife's friends has a desk she wants to get rid of, and as we have kids of Moving Out Age, we try never to turn down free stuff that might be useful to them. So we go over and load up this desk and it's a nice desk, much nicer than the tiny tin thing I found on a street corner that is currently holding up the computer we all use in the living room.

So the plan is, we'll shift all the computer equipment off of the old desk onto a nearby card table, move the old desk out, put the new desk in its place, and shift all the computer equipment back.

Without powering down, unplugging, or any such goddam thing.

See, I hate unplugging and replugging. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I live for the day when everything goes wireless, when all you have to do is put various components of various systems -- stereo, TV, VCR, computer monitor, CPU, speakers, printer, external modem, whatever... within a few feet of each other, and they will automatically link themselves up, no fuss, no muss.

Until that glorious time, if I have to move an interlinked electronics array from one point to another, I try very hard to do it en masse. Sometimes it's not possible, like when you have wires running around shelves in an entertainment center; then you just gotta bite the bullet and power down and unplug and replug. But our computer array was all on one level, and in the past, with similar computer arrays, I have had great success just moving the whole thing in toto, without turning anything off or unplugging anything.

And, as it turns out, this is what SuperWife wanted us to do, too, so, clearly, it was The Way Things Ought To Be, as my wife is pretty much the Voice of Reason providing a vital and necesary anchor to the chaotic walking shambles of cluelessness that is Your Humble Narrator.

But, well, that wasn't what happened. Nate, our techno-wizard, wouldn't have it. It tasked him. The wires were all tangled up and it wasn't safe and I don't know what all, but he wouldn't have it, he wouldn't have it, he wouldn't HAVE it. So I said, okay, buddy, do it your way, but all unplugging and replugging is on you, and you ain't leaving tonight until everything is back up and working correctly. And he said, yeah, fine, whatever, dude, and he went to work.

So everything got powered down and unplugged and the wires all got untangled and we moved stuff off the old desk onto a card table and then moved the new desk in and moved the old desk out the front door and around the house and onto the back porch (if you could see the labyrinth of narrow hallways and narrower doorways replete with 90 degree hairpin turns between our front door and back door, you'd understand) and covered it with a tarp (someday soon, the story goes, Super Drama Teen will take it away to her new apartment), and then went back and moved the computer stuff back onto the new desk and then Nate got down and crawled around under the desk replugging everything and we powered up the computer and...

It wouldn't boot.

And it wouldn't boot.

And it wouldn't BOOT.

And Nate's putting it in Safe Mode to see what's up with it and it still won't BOOT and now I'm in a fine frothing panic because we can't LIVE without a computer we just CAN'T and SuperWife is going to kill me (I don't mean hurt me, I mean, she's going to murder me and hide the body somewhere, probably our storage room, under a blanket) and the SuperKids are going to weep and wail and guh nash their teeth and rend their garments and it's going to be very VERY ugly and goddamit if we'd just moved the whole fucking array without powering down we'd be FINE, we'd be FINE, and we can't AFFORD a new computer, and...

...and Nate points to the gigantic box he'd put under the Christmas tree a week or so ago and says, quietly, "Open it."

So I report to SuperWife and she sighs and says "Okay", and we open the gigantic box and, yes, it's a brand new computer, to replace the one that now will not boot, which Nate had often referred to, usually garnished liberally with obscenity, as "stone knives and bearskins".

So we get this one all hooked up and yes, it's a wonderful new Dell and very fast and has lots of cool features the other computer didn't have, and I'm trying very hard not to dwell on all the digital photographs we no longer have and all my writing I've done since moving into this apartment that may not have made its way onto the Internet yet and the card set I did with Magic Set editor and all the stuff the kids may have had on the previous computer and all SuperWife's spreadsheets (SuperWife wields a spreadsheet the way Cyrano deploys a rapier) and I don't know what the hell all else, but, anyway, we have a brand new computer and it's a wonderfully thoughtful gift and thank you Nate, very much.

I do not really blame Nate, or anyone else, for the previous computer's crash. If powering it down was enough to crash it, then it was no doubt going to crash sometime very soon anyway. The machine was at least ten years old and we had a LOT of shit on its hard drive and I feel pretty certain it was going kablooie some time in the near future regardless.

I just wish it hadn't.

And I wish the one in the back room hadn't.

Why? Because Nate also gave us a whole ethernet set up that he was going to install for us, and if the other two computers were still up and running, we'd have THREE computers in this house... four, counting Super Dependable Teen's laptop, which we gave her for her 18th birthday.

And my God, wouldn't THAT have been sweet.

Ah, well.

On an entirely different note, last week Nate, SuperWife and I were all talking about our respective blogs. Nate and SuperWife don't update theirs much any more, and I don't do it here anywhere near as much as I once did, and we wondered, why? Yeah, we've been busy lately, but, still, you find time for the stuff that's important to you, and we could do it more, we just don't.

And Nate shrugged and said "I never get any comments anyway, so what the fuck".

And, you know, there it is.

I have never had one of those big, much read blogs like Jim Henley or John Rogers or Mark Evanier has, or like Aaron Hawkins used to have. I don't know what you have to do to get that kind of readership (besides be a reasonably attractive female willing to post pictures of her naked boobs a lot, like the chick who used to run the Tampa Tantrum blog was, I mean, I understand how that would be effective, but it won't work for me) but it has always eluded me.

Yet, still, I used to have a few regular commenters, people who would show up reasonably often and post pretty thoughtful comments on most if not all of my nonsense. And lately, they have all vanished, into the very ether, as it were.

Page hits are down a little according to statcounter, but the usual suspects still seem to be coming around... they just no longer seem to have anything to say.

That's probably my fault... maybe I've just gotten more boring. Maybe, when you're reasonably happy in your personal life, and have a fabulous wife and wonderful kids and things are going for the most part well, you just don't post interesting material any more.

Whatever the case, though... what Nate said.

Big time.

The greatest show on turf

2008-12-11T13:45:00.006-05:00

As always, click to make the graphic larger.

Remember, Super Bowl champion Cthulhu wants you to tip the website. ;)

When I think of heaven

2008-12-08T13:18:00.002-05:00

I wanted to take a moment to thank those who have used the new PayPal icons, near the top of the sidebar, recently. I'm not sure on etiquette for this; in my younger days, I'd have thanked these people by name without a second thought. Now I'm hesitant, I'm not sure these guys want their names plastered all over a public blog, even one that has as little traffic as this one... although I was pleasantly surprised to find a previously unheard from commenter in my latest entry this morning when I got up, so, I guess you never know.

Anyway, those who have tipped me are wonderful folks and I am very appreciative of their generosity. If any of them would like to be thanked by name, there are various avenues where they can let me know that. Until then, I will default to respecting people's privacy... but please understand I'm very grateful.

If I didn't make it clear enough in the previous post as regards these PayPal posts, first, I don't think of the PayPal tip jars as 'begging'. I've written a great deal of material (linked to from the sidebar) that I really believe is, if not good, then, at least, entertaining. The publishing and media industries being what they are these days, it's almost impossible to get any kind of real notice from editors or publishers unless you have an influential contact on the inside, and I don't... but while I can't judge the actual quality of my own writing, I do firmly believe my writing has enormous commercial potential... that it's the sort of thing that would make a publisher money, if I could get a publisher to put it out there.

So, I think I've worked hard and the work is worthy of remuneration. That's one.

The other point I want to reiterate is that very little of any money I make these days gets spent on me. I'm not saying I'm never going to drop a few bucks on a couple of second hand paperbacks at the Book and Music Exchange, or something like that. But I have few vices and most of what money I bring in goes, always, to my wife and my daughters. That's how it is when you're a husband and a father, and that's not a bitch, a moan, or a gripe... it's a pleasure, an honor, and a privilege. Rest assured, if you like something you've read here and you tip the site in recognition of that, the money isn't going to go on something stupid. In fact, for the next few weeks, barring emergencies, it's all going into Christmas presents. So if you want to tip, that's great, you'll be making the holidays for SuperWife and the SuperKids a little bit shinier. Which is without a doubt MY favorite budget expenditure; your mileage, of course, may vary.

But it shouldn't. ;)

So, to those who have tipped, or who are thinking of tipping, or who will tip in the future, my deepest, utmost gratitude. Which will not keep me from thanking you specifically in the future, too.

Thanks, and happy holidays, from me and mine to you and yours.

And all the roads that led you here are winding

2008-12-07T23:58:00.004-05:00

So after looking forward to it for months, I finally got to see some of the commercial free premiere of LEVERAGE tonight:

So SAUL RUBINEK walks up to a pretty drunk TIMOTHY HUTTON in what is apparently a sizable airport bar that is inexplicably empty except for them and the bartender. RUBINEK blathers a lot of data-dense dialogue telling us HUTTON's character's name and background. HUTTON's character, Nathan Ford, threatens to hit RUBINEK in the neck eight or nine times. RUBINEK says he's not there simply to spout off a lot of obstreperously expository dialogue, but also to offer FORD a job. The inebriated, belligerent FORD... looks interested. CUT TO CREDITS.

I found myself wondering, what airport bar of that size anywhere in the world is completely empty at any time of the night or day? It struck me as a budget issue -- here's a show that doesn't have enough money to build a set and fill it with extras -- which brought home to me that this was a TV show even more intensely than the crappy expository dialogue already had.

I realize that the whole bit may have been meant to underscore the bitterness and alienation of Nathan Ford. But I think it would have worked better for the writers of the show to set the scene, not in an airport bar, but in a large, otherwise empty auditorium, or, maybe, a large otherwise empty movie theater. Rubinek and Hutton's dialogue could only have been improved by more shadows and a cheesy movie of some kind flickering up on a big screen in the background. And it would have made Hutton's character seem a lot lonelier, and been a great deal more plausible all the way around.

So Ford takes the job and Rubinek earnestly explains that he's hired three other people, the best there is at what they do (But What They Do Isn't Very Nice), to steal some stolen airplane designs back for him and he needs Ford to supervise these people, as Ford is honest and these people are not. There is some more expository dialogue about how these three other people are all prima donnas; solo acts who hate to work with others, and who are only doing it on this job for $300,000 each, a price tag which Rubinek will double for Ford's participation. And I'm thinking to myself This guy is shelling out $1.5 million bucks to get his stolen airplane plans back? Okay, the designs must be worth a lot of money to him but gee it's a good thing this is a TV show because otherwise the idea of spending $1.5 million on a bunch of felons who have all already been caught at least once (or you wouldn't know who they were in the first place) and putting them under the supervision of a belligerent drunk would probably be a non-starter for most if not all successful businessmen/women in the real world.

Not to mention the fact that no single legitimate businessman as desperate as this guy seems to be can move $1.5 million in cash without leaving some kind of paper trail, and the last thing in the world you want, after you've hired felons to steal your airplane plans back, is for the corporate rivals you stole them from to be able to prove you did it.

Again, it reinforces to me that this is a TV show. On TV shows and in the movies, people routinely stage elaborate schemes and/or put on productions that would cost millions if not billions in the real world, said schemes and/or productions which often if not always have little realistic chance of success. If Saul Rubinek were a real life business tycoon, the last thing in the world he would ever do is spend $1.5 million dollars hiring crooks to steal his plans back, because the odds of them actually doing it are insanely poor and the odds of it blowing up in his face derangedly high. He certainly wouldn't hire a belligerent drunk who was threatening to hit him in the neck eight or nine times to do such a thing, no matter how sorry for the belligerent drunk Rubinek might be, and last but not least, he certainly wouldn't initiate the illegal transactional conspiracy in a fucking airport bar. I mean, jesus christ.

Now, I admit at this point, I'm four minutes in and this is already looking horrible and in another 11 minutes I'm going to call it a night and go back to watching the fifth season of WEST WING on DVD. So maybe at some point in the 45 minutes or so I didn't see, it turns out that at least some of this makes more sense. Maybe Rubinek is conning Hutton and the other three for some reason. Maybe he isn't going to pay them. Maybe he has the psychic ability to read the script and see that it's all going to turn out okay. I don't know. But in the following 11 minutes before I turned this horror off, here's what I did see:

There's this black guy and apparently he's some kind of electronic whiz kid thief/con man. We see that a number of years before, he scammed a major hotel into giving him a luxury suite and charging it to Mick Jagger's credit card number. And the hotel management breaks in to the suite and this black guy is in there with a couple of chicks and they're having a duel with toy light-sabres and the black guy waves his hand and says "This is not the suite you're looking for". Which is kind of half-lame, half-clever, but, honestly, cutesy STAR WARS dialogue? Ralf. Plus, maybe it's really hard to steal Mick Jagger's credit card number, and I just don't really get that the way I should, but, honestly, I'm not impressed. If the guy was really good, he'd never have been caught, right?

Then there's Christian Kane, you know, Lindsey from ANGEL. His character is supposed to be this really deadly mercenary/fighter type, and we see that several years before, he walks into this room and says he's there to get a package, and he has no weapons out at all, and about fifty guys pull guns and point them right at him, and then we cut to the outside of the building, and we see and hear a lot of gunshots go off, and then we cut back to the room and he's standing there and the air is full of gunsmoke and the fifty guys who were pointing guns at him can't be seen any more and the one other guy who is left alive quickly takes something out and puts it on the table. (It's a baseball card, which is, y'know, another 'ohhhhh that's so cuuuuuuute' touch like the STAR WARS reference that makes me want to hurl.) And my reaction is, are you fucking KIDDING me? FIFTY GUYS HAD THE DROP ON HIM and somehow he KILLED THEM ALL? There's no way. There isn't a gun with that much ammunition. It's impossible. He'd have to be from the planet Krypton, or have got chomped on by a radioactive mongoose in his youth, or something.

I understand that the character is supposed to be mythic and larger than life, I do. But he's also supposed to be at least nominally human, right? I mean, he's not a mutant superspeedster or a vampire or anything, right? This isn't that kind of show, correct? So... seriously, dude, what the fuck?

But here's the best one. There's this petite blond chick who's halfway decent looking and she's supposed to be a con artist or a re-acquisitioner or a thief or something. And in her flashback/origin background sequence we see her at the age of 9 or thereabouts, and some asshole -- maybe her father -- is yelling at her, something about a stuffed bunny and didn't she think he'd find it and if she wants to get bunny back then she needs to be a good girl or, at least, a better thief. And somebody else, maybe her mother, is crying quietly in the background. And we see her, this 9 or 10 year old little blonde girl, walking away from the house empty handed, and she looks kind of expressionless, and then THE HOUSE BLOWS UP BEHIND HER, and she pulls the stuffed bunny out from under her coat, and smiles.

And we're supposed to be like, WHOA, dude, she's a fucking psycho! But here's what I'm thinking and/or feeling -- these characters we are being introduced to are supposed to be, more or less, the kinda-sorta heroes of the dealio, they're supposed to be modern day high tech ROCKFORD FILES type Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich and stealing from the poor, and despite their outlaw natures we are supposed to like and admire and sympathize with these people, and this 9 or 10 year old girl BLEW UP HER PARENTS TO GET HER STUFFED ANIMAL BACK!

It's the kind of thing you'd expect to see Heath Ledger's Joker do in a flashback scene; it's NOT the sort of thing that makes you like and admire and sympathize with a character. Plus, I myself am also thinking that, in addition to the fact that this is one terrifying little blonde, well, how does a 9 year old girl arrange for a house to blow up, anyway?

And then all these characters were all doing the robbery-dealio and Christian Kane's character called the blonde creature "Twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag" which is such a gigantic phlegm-wad of truly execrably bad dialogue hawked and spat right out of the TV screen into my lap that I had to stop a minute and reset my brain, which was good, because the really cheesy 70s caper movie soundtrack running behind all the incredibly cliched 'seen this a few billion times before with better actors and a bigger budget' plot up on the screen was giving me a headache anyway.

Occasionally when I'm watching an episode of BUFFY or ANGEL on DVD I'll kick up the commentary track and Joss Whedon or David Greenwalt are always right there talking about how BUFFY and ANGEL had, in addition to fabulous writers and a tremendous cast of actors, an incredible crew -- from the set design guys to the lighting people to the folks who cast supporting characters to the ones who wrote and even performed the background music, everybody involved in those shows was just brilliant. And you listen to that and if you don't really know what goes into these shows you kind of nod and say "yeah, but they're just being professional, they're not going to complain about the people they worked with, they're going to say nice things about them".

But then you watch nearly anything else that's ever been on TV and you realize, it must all be true. Because LEVERAGE won't be considered to be bad TV by most people who watch it, or even most critics. But it is. It's crap. It's poorly written, the direction is amateurish, the sets look uninspired, the acting is wooden, the dialogue is clumsy and flailing two thirds of the time and self consciously psuedoclever the other third.

But that's what most people expect from TV, and it's why, I guess, I can bring myself to watch so little TV, why I could only bear 15 minutes of LEVERAGE before turning it off, even after I'd anticipated it for months. Because as flawed as BUFFY and ANGEL were, or as any of the other shows I've watched and loved were and are, they were epochs, quantums, orders of magnitude better than LEVERAGE, so much better, in fact, that they really weren't TV at all. And LEVERAGE is just, you know, normal TV, maybe slightly above average TV, which means, it's really, really, really bad, and horribly unoriginal, and terribly cliched, and still, a lot of people are going to watch it and maybe it's going to be a hit.

Like, apparently, that dreadful godawful piece of shit RAISING THE BAR is a hit.

But I'm not going to watch it, and, honestly, I don't even know why I was looking forward to it. John Rogers writes a pretty entertaining blog, when he's not squealing and thrashing and pissing his panties in his comment threads because somebody he doesn't know typed in something he erroneously perceives as being mean to him. But what has he actually written, professionally? THE CORE and CATWOMAN and a first treatment for THE TRANSFORMERS movie and several episodes of THE COSBY SHOW. I mean, based on that crap, why in the world would anyone expect another TV show he co-created and co-wrote to be any good at all?

Although he is, apparently, living proof that in the entertainment industry, it's much more important to be lucky than good.

LEVERAGE was half of what I was really looking forward to watching on TV this weekend. I have to hope that the Bucs-Panthers game, on ESPN's Monday Night Football later tonight, will work out better for me.

For what it's worth...

2008-12-04T20:29:00.003-05:00

A nearly Zen phrase, given what I'm typing about here...

I've added PayPal buttons to this, my 'usual' blog, (on the sidebar -- eyes slideways, spuds), and the home of the Red Tiger, Redline Comics, as well as a new blog, Tales of the Nebula, set up specifically to house several of my newer short stories (links on sidebar).

There are seven novels, one novella, a military memoir, 50+ geek topic articles, 25 or so short stories, and around two dozen cartoons available from the sidebar here, all by yours truly, any or all of which are available entirely free, and all of which, I hope, are at least reasonably entertaining.

And, over at Redline Comics, you have an entirely original 17 page superhero comic.

Whether you want hours of bemusement or just minutes, you can find something here. If you're bored, and have some time to spare in front of your monitor, and you enjoy geek pop culture stuff related to science fiction, fantasy, geek TV shows, or superhero comics, you could do far worse than browse the sidebar for a little while.

If you find anything you like here or over there, it wouldn't trouble me in the slightest if you hit the PayPal tip jar while you're there. And by all means, tell your friends.

Thanks. And happy holidays!

From the ashes...

2008-12-02T21:25:00.003-05:00

Sometime in 1978, I believe, I created, for Russ Wiseman's art class at Holland Central High School, a comic book written and drawn by myself featuring a poorly designed character named Paul William Baker, rather melodramatically code named "Fury". Fury was a secret agent type who had been blown up by a supervillain and rebuilt with solid steel fists that could fire some sort of energy beam out of them. He rebelled against the villain, natch, becoming the villain's worst enemy (as the Late Great Jeff Webb once wryly noted, the number of villains who have stupidly created their own worst enemy by taking some stubborn heroic sort and doing something mean to him which ended up giving him superpowers is just staggering. You'd think they'd stop doing it, it never works out.)

I wanted to make the dreadful thing look as professional as possible, so I created a company name for the cover -- Redline Comics. I don't know why I called it that; it had nothing to do with the concept of things going broke, but rather, with the idea of an engine working at some kind of overdrive speed... past the red line, as it were. But that was what I had on top of the cover, instead of the Marvel Comics Group tag I was so obviously ripping off, at least, graphically.

Anyway, CODENAME: FURY (very nearly FIGHTING FISTS OF FURY, but at the last minute I, probably wisely, demurred) was an appalling thing indeed, but for some reason it impressed a classmate and fellow comics fan of mine who drew somewhat better and wrote somewhat worse than I did. And this guy, Jim Marek, proposed that we collaborate on a project together.

So, I sat down and wrote a script (literally wrote, by hand, on lined notebook paper) for a character called the Red Tiger. I had no idea what the Red Tiger looked like, but my artistic collaborator, whom I never quite got to the point of actually being friends with, took the script and drew up the first issue.

Jake (as Mr. Marek preferred to be called by his friends, and even, I guess, by me) and I went on to collaborate on one more title, REBEL, FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM FROM THE FAR FLUNG FUTURE, before our partnership lapsed. I no longer have either comic, of which there was only ever one issue (literally, one issue) which I somehow wound up with. But it's worth noting that the Red Tiger, such as he is visually, was entirely the creation of James Marek. (That's not a knock. While the red trunks over tights, crimson wifebeater, and odd mask concealing much of the face but leaving the lower nose, mouth, jaw, and hair revealed was savagely iconic of the 1970s, still, it's a look I love, and I especially like the tiger stripes on the headband, gloves, boots, and belt... it lends itself to an iconic look in silhouette, rather like Batman's cape and chest symbol.)

I don't think Jake did his best work on our collaborations, and certainly my scripts were weak, to say the very least. But 30 years later (for all I know, to the day) I've finished a new version of RED TIGER #1. Alas, my only collaborator on the title's current incarnation is myself, and my artwork at the age of 47 is far, far worse than Jim Marek's was at the age of 16... and I doubt my scripting is much improved over the past 30 years, either.

But, for what it's worth, here it is. The art is horrible, the concept is stupid, and the script is... well, I can't judge my own writing, but it's probably pretty fucking bad, too. But there it is. Do with it as you will.

As a final note, I had to call the new blog where this thing is posted Redline Comics because both redtiger.blogspot.com and theredtiger.blogspot.com are taken. What the hell is THAT about?

POSTSCRIPT -- December 4, 2008

And already the reviews are pouring in. From my Talking Points Memo blog:

Dude. You gotta work these into your blogs. Just drop a nice circa 70's panel into a blog on something else. Let 'em work.

Made me smile. Donno whether's good or bad, just enjoyed it. that's all.

Cheers.

-- Quinn Esq

I enjoyed the comic as well. I used to read 'The Sandman' comics written by Neil Gaiman and yours had some of that same dark energy. I liked your illustrations.

-- miguelitoh2o

And finally:

Of course I checked it out, and it looks like fun. You're right that the art's a tad weak, but that's not really the point, now is it? It's the fun of creation.

-- Steve Englehart

A comparison to Sandman ain't too shabby, and hey, "Stainless" Steve Englehart said my artwork was a tad weak. Life don' ged much betta dan dis!

The fun of creation. Yes, indeed.

Holiday momentum

2008-12-02T04:12:00.004-05:00

24 days until the holidays... I know because the Santa nutcracker on the entertainment center tells me so.

Four days ago our living room was in the throes of autumn, with lovely fall decorations everywhere -- rustic autumn leaves wrapped around wood and copper and bronze ornaments on the mantle, a huge and beautiful cornucopia SuperWife made herself two years ago atop one of the bookshelves, a big stuffed turkey on top of the entertainment center. Then the most delicious Thanksgiving dinner in my personal history (entirely prepared by SuperWife, with hamhanded 'assistance' from yours truly, and celebrated this year with all the SuperKids, as well as SuperNate and SuperWife) came and went (along with one of the most historic nationally televised Turkey Day pastings of the Detroit Lions ever), and we found ourselves sucked in to the dizzying Christmas whirl.

Now, our living room, as well as both bathrooms, the kitchen, and the comic book hallway, firmly reflect the Yuletide season, and we're all exhausted from the effort... which is only 2/3s done, as weather and relative fragility due to recent sicknesses have prevented us from getting up the outside decorations as yet.

I'm targeting this weekend as a hopeful date to complete that stage.

I love this time of year; the holidays (starting with Halloween and stretching to New Years) and especially Christmas itself (from Black Friday through the Day) are always much too short and precious a time for me. I enjoyed the Christmas month even back in my miserable bachelor days, kind of idly and in a bittersweet fashion, and now that I have SuperWife and the SuperKids to share them with, I find them to be generally a joyous occasion indeed, unmixed with the gut twisting loneliness they once used to instill in me.

There's more stress to them this year, though. Our financial circumstances are not as dire as they could be, as long as Congress keeps extending my Unemployment benefits, but the perpetual strain my continuing joblessness places on our fragile domestic economy cannot help but be somewhat corrosive to the holiday spirit around here. It's entirely fair, of course, that my personal failures should harsh my buzz somewhat, but it kills me that it so dampens the seasonal joy for SuperWife.

I look around the Internet and everywhere I see writers more qualified than I am on much more popular blogs than this one begging for reader support, in the form of tips as to paying online writing gigs and direct contributions to their tip jars. It fills me with fury and resentment; the world is densely overpopulated with people who want the same jobs I have been running after most of my adult life, and those slots have never been scarcer or more invaluable than they are now.

My baffled rage upon seeing this sort of blegging solicitation by other writers for leads and direct sponsorship reflects poorly on me, I know; I should be feeling sympathetic, and perhaps formulating grand schemes for organizing my fellow out-of- work authors into some powerful and lucrative online tide that will somehow lift all our boats to economic salvation. Yet instead of this, all I can see is a forest of greedy hands waving back and forth as they frantically grab for an ever diminishing resource that I myself have yet to be able to access in any meaningful way, and all I can hear is a cacophony of needy voices drowning my own out.

It drives me crazy.

Worse, of course, is that the wisest and most knowledgeable among us all opine sagely that this is going to get worse before it gets better, and how much worse, none of them will hazard a guess.

Will we all be trundling wheelbarrows full of nearly worthless hundred dollar bills up to the supermarket cash registers in six to eighteen months, while the wily wealthy rub their gold krugerands together and smirk knowledgeably at each other from behind their tinted, bulletproof limousine windows?

Will I finally find work on a Federally funded works project somewhere, rebuilding a national highway infrastructure we don't need and will never use as the global oil supply continues to mercilessly deplete, and a ruined America with its broken military and worthless currency can only watch helplessly as China and Russia suck up the steadily lessening dregs of crude that continue to ooze and trickle out into the international marketplace?

Will I have to scramble to secure a precarious position with some local warlord, or just hide out in my basement trying to keep my kids from breathing too loudly as the scavenging cannibal gangs sift through the empty boxes stacked up outside the storage room door, hoping they'll give up before they find us?

My deepest fear, of course, is the starkly realistic realization that, as older, wiser, more authoritative and infinitely wealthier heads confer on a new economic engine to drive us out of the current quagmire, their primary point of contention is, as Westinghouse once reputedly asked Tesla -- "where do we put the meter?"

I don't mind my tax dollars going towards some kind of grand mutual civilization with a built in social safety net for the worst off among us; I won't do well in a lawless anarchy where the lights don't work and the furnaces don't start up and the pipes won't pump hot water, and I truly believe that all societies are fundamentally measured by how well they take care of their weakest and most helpless members. You can increase my taxes and I'll pay them with a smile, as long as I have a decent job and I'm sure that a good part of my payroll deduction is going to help those that need it most.

I am, however, getting sick of watching my labor, and the labor of millions like me, go to prop up the exorbitantly decadent lifestyles of multi-million and -billionaires who, when asked if they might be willing to give something back in exchange for the mountains of steadily devaluating cash they are asking for to bail out the companies they have run into the ground, respond as Ford CEO Alan Mullaly recently did -- "I think I'm OK where I am".

These people have wrecked the world while lining their pockets, and when asked to put something back in the pot now, well, they're okay where they are.

Bleak, bleak holiday thoughts.

Best to think that America's own Magical Negro, despite a disturbing proclivity for appointing the same corporate lackeys who got us into this mess in the first place to positions of power in his own administration, will, nonetheless, somehow pass a miracle and save our happy consumer culture for another generation.

Hey, at least a Democrat won the election.

Ho ho ho.

* * *

Postscript -- sorry, this post went to a much darker place than I intended it to when I first sat down to type it. As Stephen King once noted, at 4 in the morning, you're either asleep or staring around yourself in utter despair, with no middle ground... the paint is off that gaudy old whore, the world, and there are no illusions left in the dark, cold gun barrel of the predawn.

Sometimes the dark place is the only place you can go to.

I thank whatever karmic dregs I have built up over the course of a mostly wasted lifetime that I somehow stumbled onto SuperWife and the SuperKids, and if I were a praying man, I would mostly pray that I can somehow find a way to bring them the things they need and want in the days ahead. I wish I had more faith in my own individual resourcefulness, but, well, if this and other past blogs of mine reflect anything, it's a complete lack of that.

Still, things could get better. You never know.

I have RED TIGER substantially finished; I need to color in about five more pages (I think) and then I can throw the whole sorry lot up online, where everyone but X, Whoever He May Be, will pretty much entirely ignore it. But at least I'll have managed to start and finish yet another useless, pointless, mediocre and stupid creative vanity project. That's got to be worth something, right?

Sneak Preview

2008-11-23T08:42:00.004-05:00

Here's a random page out of a project I'm currently working on.

Maybe next weekend. We'll see.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last

2008-11-21T16:30:00.003-05:00

Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday Happy birthday
Happy birthday to me

Gots a card from me mum and stepdad, X stopped by the blog to wish me a H.B., SuperWife of course is being all birthdayie with me, and tomorrow when we get the kids back from the evil Bio-Dad I'll have a party and cake and prezzies and stuff.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday to me!

UPDATE, 11/23/08

Okay. My mom and my brother Pat called on Friday to wish me a Happy Birthday. In addition, on Friday night I received a $50 gift certificate to ROLE OF THE DIE from Nate, which, after a large double pepperoni pizza at Spinelli's, I pretty much entirely spent while playing Magic there with SuperWife, Nate, and Brian, the proprietor, who was nice enough to give me a gratis booster of SHARDS OF ALARA.

On Saturday I got IRON MAN and THE HULK on DVD from SuperWife, more Magic cards from SuperDependable Teen and Super Adorable Kid, the Magic: Battlegrounds X-Box game from Super Drama Teen, a pair of blue jeans from my sister in law, and a pair of pajama bottoms and a new battery for the cordless phone from my parents in law. Also, SuperWife spent hours in the kitchen making me a chocolate Bundt cake with a coconut filling and a vanilla glaze icing, which Super Adorable Kid contributed to as well. It was delicious, and is mostly mine, as hardly anyone else around here will eat coconut, the Philistines.

All told, there are much worse ways to turn 47, I devoutly believe.

And now for something completely different

2008-11-19T13:29:00.003-05:00

Okay, so SuperWife had this great idea for doing another list of movies that start with each letter of the alphabet, only in this case, trying to pick all ROTTEN movies. And she did a great job, which doesn't surprise me and shouldn't surprise you.

But on her list, she mentioned that 'a few guys she knows' would have liked to see a particular film listed at her F spot, but she felt it was necessary to put that stinker of a FLINTSTONES movie in there instead.

I shan't argue with her; there are doubtless many films worse than the movie she referred to, and some of them also start with an F, no doubt.

All of which has motivated me to post my own, similar, list. A list that contains what I consider to be some truly, truly awful material. Not the worst ever, no, the hands down all time champeen Worst Movie That Ever Has, Ever Will, or Ever Could Exist, is irrefutably SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE, which SuperWife already listed. Yet, while S4:QFP is without a doubt the worst, most unthinkably horrible shitastic abomination ever captured on celluloid, it has one advantage -- nobody likes it. Nobody thinks it's great. Nobody ever puts it on their lists of Favorite Movies or The Best Movies Ever Made. And, especially, nobody, but NObody, ever calls SUPERMAN IV 'Capraesque'.

With that in mind, here is my list of Wretched, Wretched Films for each letter of the alphabet:

*A FIELD OF DREAMS film festival

*Boy, does FIELD OF DREAMS ever suck

*Cetaceans won't watch FIELD OF DREAMS because they're way smarter than we are

*Doc Nebula would happily throw a burning torch into a great big pile of kerosene drenched celluloid composed of every existing copy of FIELD OF DREAMS

*Ewwwwww, FIELD OF DREAMS

*FIELD OF DREAMS sucks sucks sucks

*Goddam FIELD OF DREAMS

*Hulk smash FIELD OF DREAMS (please, please)

*Idiots prance about ululating about how Capraesque FIELD OF DREAMS is

*Jesus Christ I can't believe what a craptastical suckapalooza FIELD OF DREAMS is

*Kill without mercy whoever first conceived the notion of filming FIELD OF DREAMS

*Lick me, FIELD OF DREAMS fans

*Mulch every existent copy of FIELD OF DREAMS, and then immerse the mulch in acid

*Nuke FIELD OF DREAMS until it glows, then piss on it in the dark

*Oh HELL no you can't ever make me watch FIELD OF DREAMS again

*Punch FIELD OF DREAMS right in the throat

*Quash resolutely any attempt to ever show FIELD OF DREAMS anywhere at any time

*Riot in the streets before watching FIELD OF DREAMS

*Say, FIELD OF DREAMS is bilious tripe

*Tomorrow, FIELD OF DREAMS will still be a shitty, shitty movie

*Under no circumstances imaginable is FIELD OF DREAMS worth watching

*Violence is never an appropriate response to anything except someone trying to make you watch FIELD OF DREAMS

*Winged monkeys attack FIELD OF DREAMS!

*X-rays reveal that the extraordinary suckitude of FIELD OF DREAMS pierces all known dimensions

*Zatanna, saying "eivom taerg a si SMAERD FO DLEIF" could still not make FIELD OF DREAMS into even a vaguely palatable movie, much less a good one

There.

Well, I feel better...

Alphaville

2008-11-18T15:27:00.003-05:00

I originally typed 'Movies, A to Z' in the title field, above, but then, checking back on Mark Gibson's blog, where I got tagged for this thing, I see he titled his post on this subject that, so, er, I'll call mine something else.

The rules are these:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

Commentary: I understand the intent of this rule, but in application it comes up stupid and wrong a great deal of the time. For example, I loves me some A Few Good Men, and the notion that that film should be listed under F instead of A is idiotic. But, whatever.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi.

Commentary: Of fucking COURSE it does. Anyone referring to THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK or, for the love of God, STAR WARS, as Star Wars Episode anything should be summarily bastinadoed. But then, I'm the kind of surly curmudgeon who doesn't believe that Episodes 1 through 3 and 6 are 'real' STAR WARS movies, anyway, so what do you want from me?

This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Damn straight.

Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgment to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

Commentary: If you'd also link back to The Miserable Annals of the Earth, I will give you a cookie. It's a dried out nasty cookie I just found down in between the cushion and the left arm of the recliner, and you don't want it, but I will give it to you anyway. Or, actually, I won't, but only if you link to me. Okay?

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

Commentary: I don't know five more people, so I'm passing on this part.

Now, given that the rack containing all our movies is about four inches to my right as I type this, this should be eeeeeeeeasy --

Animal House (This could have just as easily been Apollo 13, All That Jazz, An Officer and A Gentleman, An American Werewolf in London, Addam's Family, Angel Heart, or Arsenic and Old Lace, but for some reason Animal House is appealing to me most right now)
Big Country, The (I like very few Westerns, but the ones I like are very GOOD Westerns)
Color of Money, The (I nearly went for Can't Buy Me Love and/or The Commitments, but this may be Scorcese's best overall movie, so...)
Dawn of the Dead (we have very few movies that start with D, and while I like Dazed and Confused just fine, I like the original Dawn of the Dead better)
Extreme Prejudice/Eight Men Out (two very different movies, both favorites, I ain't pickin', watch 'em both)
48 Hrs, although I'm real tempted to put up Frequency, too, and A Few Good Men
Goodfellas narrowly beating out GalaxyQuest, Glory, Groundhog Day, and Glengarry Glen Ross
How The Grinch Stole Christmas, shut up, it's a movie if I say it's a movie
It's A Wonderful Life
Johnny Handsome, okay, so I like me some mid-list Walter Hill movies, sue me
Kiss of the Dragon, because Kill Bill is just waaaaaaay too self indulgent
Last of the Mohicans
Miller's Crossing because it has to be, but Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is barely the thickness of a wet kleenex behind it and... and... what about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, oh, God, I don't know, I don't know...
Nobody's Fool
O Brother Where Art Thou, with a blast of the pool table warp drive to Ordinary People, also
Predator 2, Prestige, and Primer, because I say so
Quiz Show
Robocop, Rocketeer, Road Warrior, Reservoir Dogs, Reanimator, Raising Arizona, and Run Lola Run
Shaun of the Dead, but, you know, Sommersby is good, too
Terminator. And This is Spinal Tap.
Unbreakable, although Unforgiven would have made that a tough choice if Mark hadn't already used it
Victor/Victoria
Wolfen
X-Men
Year of Living Dangerously
Zathura

Wow, and I only had to Google for a 'v' and a 'z'. And we actually own 'Zathura', it's just on the shelf where Super Adorable Kid's movies are, which is why I didn't see it when I looked.

Okay, that killed twenty minutes... thanks, Mark!