Life Lessons

Here is a brief list of things that I learned today:

• You should always pay your parking tickets. If you don't, the next time you get pulled over the bench warrant for your arrest will land your sorry ass in the slammer for the duration of the weekend and cause you to miss two performances of the show you're currently in.
• I can sing well and beautifully (...most of the time) on a stage in front of two hundred people, but put me in front of a karaoke mike in a room with ten tipsy folk in and I instantly become hideously and painfully tone-deaf.
• "Lesbian buttfucker" is potentially the silliest and best insult ever.

I'm sure there are other, more profound things I could have discovered today, but why go in for profundity when there's funny to be had?

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I believe.

Idiocy or Genius?

I can't decide which one You Have To Burn The Rope is. It might just be the first ever example of a constructionist/reductionist video game. It distills gaming down to its absolute essentials--means, method, and execution in pursuit of an ultimate victory. The only way they could have made it any more compact would have been to do away with all the tunnel business at the start. That aside, playing through it is worth the ending credits song alone. But don't take this as a recommendation, per se.

I just want to see if anyone else is crazy enough to think this is actually weirdly neat.

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My world view allows for ghouls to haunt Weir outside of Halloween.

Cthulhu! In! SPAAAAAACE!

Well, not exactly, but still. I'm of the opinion that only great good can come of fusing giant biomechanical robots, human were-horrors, alien fungoid insects, and HP Lovecraft's Great Old Ones themselves. And that is precisely what CthulhuTech does. It's certainly a more upbeat form of the mythos, seeing how it is actually possible for humanity to fight back...and who hasn't ever felt the pressing desire to uppercut a great and ancient evil being from beyond the veil of reality? Because I know I have.

It seems to use some toned-down variant of the Storytelling system from World of Darkness and Exalted. Everything is rolled using groups of d10's, though the success mechanic is slightly different. The major players seem to be the military, backed up by pilots of the aforementioned biomechanical Engel mecha, an underground organization whose soldiers, Tagers, have fused with otherworldly horrors and can shape-shift into them at will, and then the Bad Guys, who are a motley collection of aliens and sanity-shattering terrors that have their own complex relationships among themselves.

I think this sounds awesome. Who's with me?

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You're naked.

The Conference

Sebastian Cross stood from his office chair and circled his desk, hands behind his back. The hologram of a dark-haired human female face mounted on the desk’s corner followed him intently.

“Well,” the face demanded eventually, “if you don’t have them, then who does?”

“I’ve been wondering about that precise question, Cara,” Sebastian said, pausing at a mirror to preen. He smoothed his suit and his long, glossy black hair, then turned back to the hologram of Cara Simmons. “And I have some ideas. I think you do, too.”

“Of course I do. Dr. Winter left in a terrible hurry.” Cara smirked. “I haven’t any idea why.”

Sebastian smiled widely. “Why should you? At the moment, he is the most likely suspect. Him and his…pet. Loathsome creature.”

“Kind of like you.”

The smile on the Aztechnology exec’s face twisted into a snarl that bared his teeth, in particular his long, pointed upper canines. “Watch what you say, slitch! I could have you turning tricks as a joygirl next week if I wanted.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Before Sebastian could spit another invective, the desk’s built-in commlink chimed. “Answer,” he growled instead.

Another face appeared on the desk, this one older, bespectacled, with snow-white hair and a pointed Van Dyke beard.

Sebastian’s eyebrows rose. “Speak of the devil. Dr. Silas Winter.”

“Most decidedly not at your service,” replied the man in the projection.

“You have Winter on the line?! I want to talk to the son of a bitch.”

“A moment, Cara,” Sebastian said. Then, to the desk’s commlink, “Conference.”

“Winter! You were the one who had ‘runner scum trawling through my warehouse!”

“Of course I was. Who else would it have been? But I am not calling to speak with you, Simmons. I washed my hands of you when I left Renraku. I did not much appreciate the attempt on my life.”

“I should’ve had you shot in the head. Can’t replace brains with cybernetics, can you?” Cara pursed her lips smugly. “How’s it feel to not be able to sling spells anymore?”

Winter’s face remained entirely impassive. “Sebastian, I was calling to inform you that I shall soon be in possession of not only the Elder Medallion but also the only extant copy of Al Azif. I have a—competent—team working to track it down. An unorthodox team, given, but competent.

“Considering how Ms. Simmons relieved me of all magical ability when she had my body crushed under several tons of concrete and steel, I have no actual way to use either item. But considering that you have a condition you wish to have remedied, and that what we seek may contain answers to both our problems…”

Cara’s sharp laughter cut into the conversation. “I’m sorry to tell you gentlemen, but an individual in my employ has already acquired the book. Rhea has gone to retrieve it from him and should be back momentarily.”

“Well,” Sebastian said, smiling a little too pleasantly as he took a seat behind his desk. “It would seem we are at an impasse.”

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"The Pink Lynx? Is that what we're gonna call it?"

Mission Aftermath

"Aaagh, my face...God..." Legs touched the scorched, blackened swath of charred skin that covered the better part of the right side of her face. She tried feebly to heal it magically, but could only convince the edges to close in about half an inch before she felt exhaustion overcome her. "God damn them, my face..." She fell to her knees on the highway's shoulder, gripping the guardrail to keep herself upright.

Behind her were the burning, twisted remains of the team's van. The gas tank's eruption had blown out the back completely, severing one of the doors at the hinges. Helen and Sturmdrang had managed to claw their way out after Legs and were standing a few feet away, bleeding freely but still alive, looking down the highway as though they could catch sight of the other shadowrunner van.

"They killed Pretty Boy," Helen whispered. She tossed her dark hair back, revealing pointed ears, and clutched at her right shoulder. Blood oozed between her fingers. "That fragging elf killed Pretty Boy. Ripped right through his vest."

"His own damn fault," Sturmdrang rumbled. The dwarf pulled the cracked goggles off his face, revealing the mirrored eye-shields behind them. "It's what you get for bringing gloves to a gunfight. Screw him and the elf that dusted 'im. I wanna piece of that scrawny ork bastard that shot me up."

"If I hadn't been driving I'd've given him something to reckon with. Don't like shooting blind."

Sturmdrang laughed, rolling the cigar in his teeth as he evaluated the damage to the goggles. "Who does? Besides, what could you do if Martha hardly fazed him?"

Helen grimaced. "I can think of a few things." She popped her neck and sighed. " ...Mr. Johnson isn't going to like this."

"Those sons of bitches."

Helen and Sturmdrang looked at each other, then to Legs, their attention drawn by the raw venom in her voice. After a tense beat Helen stepped forward, extending a hand cautiously. "Legs? You all right?"

The magician's features, half beautiful and half horribly burned, were twisted into a horrific snarl that only emphasized the grotesquerie of the dichotomy. "They fragged up our run. They killed Pretty Boy. And then they called up a fire spirit in the gas tank."

Helen's eyes widened. "Shit. Is that what happened?"

"Yeah. That's what happened. It's all over the astral plane, I could see it blind. And when I get my hands on that mage, they're going to fucking die." Legs hauled herself to her feet and wheeled on Helen and Sturmdrang, her blonde hair flying, scorched flesh livid in the moonlight. "BECAUSE THEY SCARRED MY FACE!"

Literary Bushido

I've just made the first post over at my protected writing blog Literary Bushido, for those of you who are interested (and who are allowed to read it). It's a brief swatch of my most recent addition to The Fair Folk, a story which seems to be insisting on becoming a novel as I compose it. And seeing how I composed both the new section of Fair Folk and this post while fueled by Mountain Dew at this ridiculous hour of the night/morning, I think I'm going to go on to bed now.

It's the sensible thing to do, after all.

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So you heard Big Blue's pitch. Now for the democratic response...

Personal Archaeology

Some time ago I was shoveling out my room (this is a more or less constant process, as my room is never fully shoveled out) and stumbled across a collection of writings from my not-so-halcyon days as an eighth grade middle school student.

There wasn't anything especially bad about my life back then, to be honest, there was just the overwhelming and undeniable fact that I was in middle school. But I digress.

Its strange, to look back and see how my style has evolved over the years. There were hints of my sense of humor even back then. It was also painful to see the pomposity that pervaded my science fiction. I was a conceited little shit when I was writing sci-fi. I used to think that hard science fiction--serious, factual, and scientifically-supported--was the One True Way. I came to this conclusion after being exposed to far too much Star Trek and Michael Crichton. It took me a long time to discover that, while hard sci-fi is all well and good, that space opera is way more fun. I'll take high adventure in hard vacuum over believable military tactics anyday.

It was also strange just how caught up I was in science fiction. I'm not sure I had any real awareness of fantasy as a genre at that point. I'd read Lord of the Rings, but I'm not sure if I fully comprehended it. Which is an odd distinction, but one I've run across often enough that I'm not afraid to make it. It took me a long while to actually understand how difficult it was to write good science fiction. There's a certain suspension of disbelief inherent to fantasy that I find much easier to work with nowadays. I still attempt to make the worlds believable (insofar as they need to be), but I don't have to worry about having thoughts like, "Wait...shit. Relativity. Dammit."

That's a freedom I'm rather fond of.

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"Leave my mother out of this."

Plot In Potentia

...That title would be a lot more gripping and intellectual if I knew what the Latin word for "plot" was. Oh well.

That aside, I stumbled across a strange little wiki that has a collection of short pieces of fiction collectively called "SCPs". It stands for Special Containment Procedure, and they're stories written in the form of brief government documents detailing the protocol for containing and maintaining weird-shit artifacts, individuals, and creatures (including a succubus, a dryad, and half a cat that insists on moving around like it's a full cat). Josie the half-cat, of course, is the least dangerous of all the artifacts listed, which also includes a prion that effectively creates zombies, an ancient piece of sheet music that compels individuals to attempt to finish it in their own blood, and an entity that inhabits a fault while it seeks out a host body. Some are more amusing than unsettling, and others are just plain creepifying, but they're all almost equally strange.

So what I got to thinking was that it would make an incredibly interesting framework for a series of stories for some newcomer to a sort of specialized containment team to be taken on a tour of the team's facility, being introduced to the objects held there one by one, with the tale of each being told as they're come across. The main thing would be avoiding making it too much like, say The X-Files, but that oughtn't to be too difficult. For one thing, there's no reason that the characters have to be any kind of government operative. They could just have to deal with this shit, for some reason--ancient curse, obsessive compulsion, or maybe they just feel an obligation to help their fellow man, seeing how they're the only ones with any idea how to. It could make for an interesting jaunt into gritty comic urban fantasy. ...Does that even exist? I might've just made a new niche genre.

Awesome.

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Personnel report sounds of scraping stone originating from within the container when no one is present inside. This is considered normal, and any change in this behaviour should be reported to the acting HMCL supervisor on duty.

A Sign From God

Well, I've been kicking around the idea of buying a used PlayStation 2 for a while now, and I think I've finally seen the sign that now is the time. As I was meandering aimlessly through Target the day before yesterday, I discovered that Shadow of the Colossus, one of those incredibly pretty and artsy games that first put me in mind of buying a PlayStation, had been marked down from twenty dollars to a clearance price of--get this--five bucks. Five friggin' dollars.

I was able to resist while it cost twenty. My will could keep me stalwart in the face of overwhelming pretty (Shadow of the Colossus, Ico) and unrelenting awesome (Kingdom Hearts, God of War, Final Fantasy XII) so long as the cost remained somewhere in the realm of the reasonable. But the siren song has grown strong with this descent into madness, and I'm no Odysseus, ladies and gentlemen. I didn't get a chance to lash myself to the mast. So I bought Colossus today, and now I suppose I must look into actually getting a console to play it on.

I gathered that there were two versions of the PS2: the original and the slimline. The slimline is considerably more expensive, and the only bonus it has seems to be a built in network adapter. A network adapter I'm not likely to use, so I think I'm going to go in for the cheaper, bulkier original model. They both play DVDs, and I figure I'll need summat that will do that. More's the better if I can play video games on it, too.

Well, I guess I know where the next chunk of my last acting paycheck is going.

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What happened to the days when you had to be charming, full of wit in order to woo the lady back to your place for a good banging. Apparently those days are gone.

Fresh Beginnings

My old blog, which here shall remain nameless, is now inching close to being three years old. It's crammed with far too much, and as well as it has served me I feel that I must retire it. Which brings me here, of course. To Blogger, whose services seem simpler and cleaner--elegant, even. I suppose one would expect that of a Google service, though.

Prepare to see all manner of weirdness on this blog. I'm going to attempt to keep its public aspects restricted to my random thoughts and occasional transcriptions of tabletop RPG hijinks (yes, I am that kind of geek, thanks for asking). I will also be posting (as you may have guessed) snippets of my prose writing on another blog, Literary Bushido. Access there, however, will only be available to a select few. I'm very touchy about posting my work on the internet. Does sketchy things with copyright if too many people can read the bloody stuff.

In any case, as an introductory post this has gone on quite long enough. I suppose I must bring it to an end. Being seeing you soon (I hope).

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This isn't Dungeons and Douchebags. If you want something to happen, you have to play a card.