Fiasco at the Ice Capades.

August 31, 2013, 7:10 am

≫ Next: Lobster Day Weekend.

≪ Previous: They Love it When a Plan Comes Together.

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Yesterday I played Fiasco again, this time with Luke, Nicole&...onatopofthings? I've know Ryan since like, what, freshman year of college? & this is his first time ever breaking down & actually roleplaying. I think it went over like gang busters! He certainly picked up the knack for it. Both of the pictures in this post are his. It was originally going to be the Shogunate Oubliette campaign but too many people couldn't make it, though I am glad we did get to play something, & since Fiasco is Dungeon Master-less, I got to play too! This set was "The Ice," one of the default settings, at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. I guess I swallow the consonants when I say "McMurdo." Anyhow, I played Doctor Thor Reikmann, aged 70, an expert in retreating ice shelves, come to use his expertise from the Arctic down under. Doctor Reikmann is also an environmental extremist, a radical with a penchant for arson. His assistant was Sandra Jones, Nicole's character, the young woman who was outdoors with Doctor Reikmann when...they were the ones who found the body, & now they need to get out of responsibility for the accident. That's not Jones' only problem though; her criminal smuggling partner, Ryan's character Freyr Amundson, first mate on a supply ship. Freyr has a Beretta 9mm. When Freyr is docked at McMurdo, he dorm bunk buddies with Luke's character, Samson Messerde, or really, Thamthon Metherde, from Thenendoah, Virginia, a lisping seismologist with an untoward object that we eventually establish to be a fleshlight. He needs to get laid by anyone, anywhere, to dull the pain. Now, everything in bold in this paragraph is a game element, assorted from a chart; in a way, the tables take the place of a Storyteller. They are dominos, & our responsibility is to show just how unstable they are in the first act.

The second act, well, that is for knocking all of them down. So the first act had the Doctor running around trying to shift blame, to hide the body of "Deborah"; Freyr stows the body on his ship but a routine inspection leads to him picking up the body & taking it back to the dorm room. Samson ends up with some of the Doc's homemade explosives, which he uses to collapse an ice shelf at the Doctor's suggestion, intimating that Sandra will be impressed. Samson was in love with Deborah-- or in lust, at the very least-- & the Doctor wants to keep his attention off dead Deborah & on the alive co-conspirator, Sandra. The second act begins with The Tilt: innocence & collateral damage&paranoia-- a sudden reversal of sadness, fortune or sympathy. In the second act, things go horrible wrong. Doctor Reikmann steals the Beretta but falls during a struggle with Freyr, & breaks his hip...& is left outside to be hunted by orcas under the ice. Samson finds the dead body hidden under his bunk &...Freyr tries to convince him it is a hyper-realistic sex doll. Sandra keeps trying to distract people & stay loyal to the Doctor, but Doc is flailing. He's eventually rescued from the ice, but the evidence against him as the killer of Deborah, in from an ecoterrorist attack backfiring. Heck, Samson ends up hiding from Freyr & Sandra in the sleeping bag where Deborah's body is hidden. & he ends up having sex with her dead body. Because that is just the kind of game it is. Sandra gets a flare gun, shoots him, putting out his eye & setting him ablaze...& when he runs at her, the residue from bomb-making & the explosives she's carrying to dispose of Deborah's body once & for all go off...leaving the final tally as Sandra & Samson, dead; Freyr in a prison hospital with third degree burns & the doctor taking the rap for the whole thing.

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Lobster Day Weekend.

September 2, 2013, 8:19 am

≫ Next: Documenting Life.

≪ Previous: Fiasco at the Ice Capades.

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Nothing can put me to bed quite like a beach day. A little bit of exercise, a little bit of sunburn & I'm out like a candle. Went to bed at like, nine o' clock, woke up at like, nine-thirty. So that was a nice bit of dreamland under my belt, & not a single bad dream that I remember. So yesterday; roll out of bed, pick up some bagels for breakfast & then Jennifer& I piled into James&fatbutts' station wagon with fordmadoxfraud&Libby& set off for Jacob Riis beach. The water was dirty-- both with sand & with litter-- & stinky, but still! Beach day! There are storms around Metropolis, which is kicking up the stuff that normally lurks at the bottom of the ocean, rotting stuff, garbage, dirt. Oh well; we played Yahtzee & I got some decent bodysurfing in...until I bodysurfed too good of a wave. It carried me in all the way to the beach. You know how the beach is sand, broken shells, rocks, sand? Because of the way the surf kicks stuff up? Well, I just got scraped off the wave by the layer of jagged shells. Tore up my chest & poor little nipple. Just scrapes but you know, in salt water, so ouch. We left there for a local seafood joint, in FMF's old neighborhood, & we all ordered a pound & a half of lobster, every last one of us. It was murder in the first degree! Willful & premeditatedly delicious. Then home where I more or less collapsed into a puddle of playing Skyrim in a half-awake haze. Mauga gro-Dovah is level 95, after re-setting all my skills, & now I'm Thane of Falkreath & Hjaalmarch. I'm building houses & hoping that my steward-- I promoted my housecarl Rayya-- finishes furnishing it so I can adopt this little orphan who sells flowers, in honor of Aeris, from Final Fantasy VII. I changed Mauga's make-up again; I like having the option! Okay; now I have to go get ready for a picnic.

Documenting Life.

September 5, 2013, 4:44 am

≫ Next: ראש השנה.

≪ Previous: Lobster Day Weekend.

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Monday was Labour Day, which I always forget is the West Indian Day parade, we should have done that since fordmadoxfraud was in town. Weekend, weekend...Friday was played Fiasco, Saturday I...did mostly nothing & then hung out at Kuba & Diane's new place. Sunday was a beach & lobster day. Monday was supposed to be a picnic day, back down on the same lawn in Dumbo where we saw Vertigo, but just as we started to settle in, the rain decided to start...so instead we just walked up Henry Street to a bar on Atlantic called Last Exit, where a guy in a GG Allin shirt standing under a bust of Captain Eo took our drinks for our new impromptu indoor bar picnic. Which isn't a bad little turn of events, huh? & then the rest of the day was spent doing laundry, which makes me sad but needs to be done. We had a good plan! But Kira & Nino didn't go out of town, so we couldn't just hijack their apartment, which...was basically the plan. Anyhow, Tuesday was memorial drinks for a co-worker, & the CEO said a funny eulogy & then we all reminisced over whiskey, which is how you are supposed to do it, I think. Jennifer came & met me there, & then even though we were with Brian, Matt&Kat, & we were all going to the same place, they jumped in a cab & we ended up walking there? Drunken misadventure! I'm still confused how that happened, I was gone for like, thirty seconds to grab my bag! Which brings us to Wednesday. I've been having all of my old cavities drilled out & replaced. Apparently you should do that, because they found decay under some of them, which left unchecked would have become hidden cavities, under a filling, & end up best case scenario as a root canal, or worst case a lost tooth. They did it in four sections, each sit-down a quadrant, & now they are finally finished. The evening was Television Night, where we had over fordmadoxfraud&Libby, followed by ranai& Dennis; we watched Whodunit& drank pumpkin beer & lambrusco.

ראש השנה.

September 8, 2013, 1:09 pm

≫ Next: The Spice Must Flow.

≪ Previous: Documenting Life.

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Noa's Rosh Hashanah party was last night & I'm still trying to shake it off. Just stayed out a little bit late & drank a lot of wine, is all. Also this killer sage tea; not tea with sage in it, but just tea made out of just sage. I want it, always. Anyhow, went there with Reigh& Andrew & we met up with Jocelyn&Brian& hung out mostly with them, & Noa, & Gina. Today has been babysitting Olivia; she's not as into me as she was on the SF trip, but she still wants to talk about Mauga & orcs & watch me play Skyrim. Anyhow! That is really all I've been up to; I've been lazy about the gym, this has been a bad summer for me & discipline. I am going to go today, as soon as I've dragged myself out of this funk, this lethargy. Um, anything else? No, really not anything. Video games & scribbled notes, lots of scribbled notes, lots of genius ideas. Right now that is a struggle in my life; taking good ideas & weaving them into a whole. Character & setting aren't a problem for me; plot is the problem. I'm used to letting players create plot for me, used to being reactive.

The Spice Must Flow.

September 12, 2013, 1:14 pm

≫ Next: Tor.com Catch Up.

≪ Previous: ראש השנה.

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Kinslayer by Jay Kristoff.

Twelve stars in her lap,
The tsarina scatters them,
off, to catch lightning.

So, for me, the best thing about this series is that I, by happenstance, am running my Oubliette campaign in a similar genre. Mine is lower-tech, with guns & steamships on the rise at the forefront of an empire, & mine has the Toxic Jungle of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but we both cribbed the idea of clans from Legend of the Five Rings& have corporate dytopian elements. Mine is more "cyberpunk zaibatsu"& less "Dune Guild" but like, I also have used the Guild as a major element in other Oubliette stories, & will again. I like that we are part of a shared context. & I like that the "punk" element of "steampunk" is here; cyberpunk is about rebelling against corrupt corporations & puppet governments; steampunk should be about tearing down the oppressive colonial Europeans, if you are doing it right, but mostly people leave out the "punk" part. I covered all this when I read the first book, Stormdancer, but it is even more prevalent here. My problem with Kinslayer is that it goes two far in the other direction. Sure, this is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, but I think it goes a little too dark. Yes, he has female characters, & yes, oppression & war lead to...bad things happening to women. I just think Kristoff over-uses it; if you rattled off a list of "bad things that happen to women," you've got your prostitution, your rape, your domestic abuse, your unknown pregnancy, your being used as a brood mare, constrained freedom...yep. We get all that, almost like there is a checklist. There is a middle ground between "don't just have cosmetically female characters"&"don't just define your characters by gender." I don't think this veers all the way off the scale but it was tilted a little too much. Hard to balance, I know, I'm not condemning, just observing & noting that as a reader, I would have liked to have it mixed up. Even when Han gets tossed in the carbonite chamber, you get the "I love you" exchange, you know? Mostly I'm excited for the third book in the Lotus War to sweep up the pieces.

Tor.com Catch Up.

September 14, 2013, 4:13 pm

≫ Next: Out of Date.

≪ Previous: The Spice Must Flow.

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Wizards of the Coast interviewed me & Tim about our Appendix N read-through project, Advanced Readings in D&D. So...that is pretty cool. You know, just the guys who make Dungeons & Dragons got in touch with me because they wanted to interview me. & then you know, put it up on the front page of their website. So, that is a feather in my cap, huh? A little plumage to preen over? I also think Tim & I sound pretty smart in the interview, so that is fun. No big deal. Brush off my shoulder. Scuffle feet bashfully. Then I interviewed Dave Gross over at Paizo, which, you know, just the guys who make Pathfinder, the biggest rival to D&D, letting me blow up their spot, ask their star author some questions. Anyhow, so how cool is that! Pretty cool. Jennifer said to her co-workers, "he's basically a professional geek"& there is a degree of truth to it. It is my agenda! If you're good at something, never do it for free! Well okay I do it for free, plenty, but I'm working on getting more people to pay me for it. Oh hey, speaking of shameful self-promotion, here is a list of what I've been up to for Tor.com!

Elric by Michael Moorcock.

My Arioch was
"John Carter of Melniboné."
Raistlin is Elric.

The Humanoids by Jack Williamson.

The Inorganics
Are Cylons, Chaos Marines;
these guy's opposite.

Forerunner by Andre Norton.

The big question is?
Are the Forerunners the Drow?
Or, well, vice-versa?

The Carnelian Cube by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt.

Wish upon the Cube,
and then, passive-agressive,
it grants it, but wrong.



King of Chaos by Dave Gross.

A roar of locusts:
Xagren! Antipaladin!
Silent Hill boss fight.

Shadows of the New Sun edited by J.E. Mooney & Bill Fawcett.

He hides his name in
the genetic lycanthrope.
These? In his honor.

On This Day: H.P. Lovecraft.

Airplane Grab-Bag Movies.

Out of Date.

September 25, 2013, 4:46 am

≫ Next: Colours.

≪ Previous: Tor.com Catch Up.

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I usually describe Ahmed as "Jennifer'sTerra," which isn't all wrong. Anyhow, he's been staying with us for the last few weeks, but I guess he's off to Brazil at the end of this one. He's a Canuck, so who knows what will happen from there. Only Uncle Sam, I guess. I have been bad at keeping up with life chronicles, but really I don't know if I've missed anything notable. It turns out paying me to blog is the best way to steal my attention, huh? Well, I can give a quick scattershot of random details. Corner pieces & an assorted jumble. Jenny woke up terrified in the middle of the night & I jerked awake too...wrenching my arm in the process. So I took the end of last week off the gym & have just been doing an hour of cardio when I've gone this week. I have been lax with my gym going this year, I don't like it but I can't quite pinpoint why; anyhow, lax isn't missing whole weeks, just not going as regularly-- more like two & a half times a week, at this point, rather than three & then some-- or pushing as hard. I've been getting lunch with Liz pretty frequently, as well as a host of the usual suspects. I'm behind on book reviews, but I haven't been reading as much, anyhow. Or well, I have, but I've been reading more for work, so less "stuff I can review"& more "fifty pages of something that needs more editing," you know? I watched Star Trek Into Darkness, the movie without a colon, & it wasn't good. Whitewashing Khan is one reason, "savage" alien natives is another, but ultimately the movie fails in the script, in needless confusion & complexity & in relentless parodies of the original Wrath of Khan. Fall television is back at least; New Girl was great, Neighbors was I don't care but I am glad it is back, &Sleepy Hollow was terrible, but maybe so terrible it is campy? But probably just terrible. I also have a project, banging some ideas into shape, & I think I've managed to assemble the bones; now I just have to articulate the skeleton. Along the way I've filled my notebook with doodles & marker, so my spellbook looks pretty awesome, though not as cool as kingtycoon's Spellbook Project. I don't know; I've been busy at work, I've been busy socially, I've been busy mentally, but I haven't been putting my chicken scratches down. In part because if I'm writing, I should probably be writing other things. Maybe I'll rededicate myself to thinking of my Livejournal as a place to be sloppy, as a place to just unpack thoughts & anecdotes. I've been kind of killing it on my Tumblr, come to mention it, too.

Colours.

September 27, 2013, 4:22 am

≫ Next: Oubliette Session Six: Shibaraku Desu Ne.

≪ Previous: Out of Date.

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So I did this colour test& I stared at it pretty hard & this is what I came up with. A 12. All my problems are in secondary colours, too; yellow-green, blue-green, indigo. Probably just one tile off. That doesn't seem very bad, especially not when viewed in a graphic format; I would really like to see the broader statistical analysis. xkcd has looked at it before & sort of backed up the whole cultural bias by gender trope; you know, men only having a category for "red" but women having magenta, cranberry, salmon, etc. Of course, there actually is a sex based bias, too, with males having more chances in the genetic lottery to wind up with legitimate colour blindness. I really liked Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, & while this only tangentially makes me think of it, well...here we are. Not to mention I wanted something to post in Livejournal; this is a personal result, after all. My Tumblr is great for resharing stuff-- my Tumblr is pretty badass, I'm into it now-- but it is a terrible blogging platform, you know? Who cares if I got a twelve on some test! I'll probably share it on there anyhow, but it makes more sense here, because as goofy as it is-- it makes me feel like this is 2001 & we're still embedding quiz results in our diaries-- it is an interesting snapshot of the intersection of biological context with online blogging. Here is some medical history, future digital archeologists!

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Oubliette Session Six: Shibaraku Desu Ne.

September 29, 2013, 5:59 am

≫ Next: The Pentacle: Occult Spy Headquarters.

≪ Previous: Colours.

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(Toshi Kyoryu; "Abacus" by James Gurney.)

In good news, my Oubliette campaign started up again! The bad news was that I wasn't very focused & I let the group fragment too much. I'm purposefully playing them off each other a little, a trick I learned from Vampire: the Masquerade, but I think I'm currently causing more chaos than strife, if you take my meaning. I want dramatic tension, not dramatic dissolution. Anyhow, it wasn't bad! I shouldn't have phrased it thus; a better term would be "ugly." We were also distracted by Silissa& Eric's baby Indigo! So those three (or well, two & a half) were back & so was fatbutts, so it was a full house, even though Mollie couldn't make it. Nicole&Luke are the reliable ones, when they aren't in New England. Come to think of it, what is with all the New Englanders I know suddenly? I guess that is publishing for you. We got everyone together & ordered pizza, cracked open a few beers, & got cooking.


(Hokusai Nezumi no-Kappa; "Hida Masatari" by Drew Baker.)

Our crew of trouble-makers is as follows. Ostensibly the leader of the expedition, Haru o-Kitsune is Luke's character, the kuge, the noble courtier. Lilly's character, Amina o-Kitsune, is his cousin, a bushi, a warrior from a less prestigious branch of the family. They are joined by a representative from the banking & mechanics zaibatsu, Mukade Keku Kin, played by Nicole. Mio Yudai, Mollie's character, is a warrior-monk turned yijimbo having a crisis of purpose, so since Mollie was absent I had her wander into the desert to meditate & find herself. Removing her all the was left was to insert Silissa's character, Moe no-Cho, as the representative of the creepy pharmaceutical megacorporation, &Ren Joko Izumi the Taikomochi host hired by Goro to make sure the auction went smoothly. Because that is what everyone is here for: the auction.


(Iroha o-Lung; "The Queen" by Jed Henry.)

So the session was mostly cramming them into the story together, trying to re-set the scene, re-introduce the characters. I was not on my game, I don't think, but now that the sloppy mash of them getting back together is over, I think we can get on with things. Back onto a regular schedule of playing bi-weekly I mean. Every other week; a pet peeve of mine is how bi-weekly fails to differentiate between every other week or twice a week. Anyhow the big event of the session was the party meeting the first group of NPC bidders. Starting with the top picture, Toshi Kyoryu represents the Meikyu zaibatsu, the agribiz conglomerate, & he is in fact riding a giant ankylosaur; they say he's trying to breed a dragon! Hokusai Nezumi no-Kappa is representing the Kappa daimyo's interests; the Nezumi clan are an off-shoot, a lesser family renown for their adherence to bushido...but each member neglects on of the central tenants. Iroha o-Lung is a cousin to the Shogun herself, & represents the interests of that great house; a privateer, she lost her arm when a magazine on her ironclad exploded. She now straps a cannon on instead.

The Pentacle: Occult Spy Headquarters.

September 29, 2013, 10:15 am

≫ Next: Gothamist Trivia Night.

≪ Previous: Oubliette Session Six: Shibaraku Desu Ne.

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The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye.

"The bloody bird ran,
timothy-dickory-dock,"
said the copper star.

This was carmyarmyofme's pick for Eleven-Books Club; her first was The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum& her second was Vietnamerica by GB Tran. Carmen protested that this book broke the mold; instead of being non-fiction about New York, it was historical fiction about New York! We were just teasing her though; representing "your genre" is partially what the book club is about, so others can be exposed to the sort of stuff you like. Anyway, Carmen's thoughts are here. I was over at a party across the street at Chris&Autumn's apartment (with the usual suspects, Brian & Jocelyn, Matt & another Matt, Kat, Justin & Annie, plus Ahmed came with me), & then I came back home for things to get rolling. fatbutts was already here, followed up by littlewashu (her thoughts here) & May (also Kerry's dog Indiana), then fordmadoxfraud telecommuted in. No Terra; she just had her baby so she wasn't able to make it, digitally. Beatrice was last as usual, but also as usual, not least! Actually, Nino popped in to say hi, & while he's not part of book club, he had read the book so it...sort of counts!

So first off, let me address the first chunk of this book, the first thirty-to-fifty pages or so: get over yourself. Ugh, that clip at the beginning is just so precious & smug. I get it, I'm a self-satisfied preener, & I am all in favor of a liberal peppering of jargon! Reminds me of Planescape. The first chunk was just overweening, though once you get past it everything picks up; by the end I was enjoying it but for a thriller this was decidedly dense. Oh I meant to say-- it kind of reminds me of Hawksmoor, yeah? But really it is just Gangs of New York turned inside out to be about the police instead of the crooks. So a few things; I find the parallels & the lack of parallels to be really interesting. Everything that Protestants were saying about Catholics in the 1850s sounds...well, suspiciously like what people say about Muslims these days, right down to the bits where you can substitute "crusade" with "jihad." On the flip side, it is funny to see the Whigs & the Democrats & just to have a totally foreign axis of artificial partisanship. You know, it is crazy that people's opinions on economics are supposed to track to their opinions on equal rights which are supposed to track with their opinions on theocracy which match up to their opinions on the Second Amendment...when in fact those things don't neccisarily have anything to do with each other. Same thing for the Democrats & Whigs, but it is stuff like "The Irish-- what to do?" instead of whatever issues we'd assume they were about. Of course, you can substitute "Irish" for "Mexican"& see ready parallels, again. Apparently her second novel is about black & white racial issues, about slavery, so...that might either be interesting or a mess.

Spoiler paragraph! So I thought what was going on with Doctor Palsgrave was fairly obvious; I mean, the slash shape, the suspicious surgeon, yeah. Once it was established that he wasn't a child molester-- which, you know, the whole time you are on tenterhooks waiting for somebody to be revealed as a pedophile-- then it was only obvious that the real problem was a copycat killer, & from there once you drilled down the list of suspects wasn't that big, you know? Though I will say that the bit with Light & Shade in the Streets of New York was pretty lovely foreshadowing; the romantic arc was not what you'd expect from these, though this makes it all the easier for Mercy to come back in book four for a sequel fling. Normally in these types of serials the breakups happen in the gaps, with an episode being bookended at the start with a heartbroken & vulnerable hero & a "happy ending" with the romantic foil of the novel at the end. This one just moves the heartbreak ahead of schedule, making it an epilogue. Anyhow, as long as Bird remains a major character in the follow-ups, I'm good. A few other things, before I sign off: anthropology nerd stuff. So right, forensics was my speciality in undergrad, so these aren't problems I had with the book-- which is at the dawn of detectives in America, so working at a lower level of technology & methodology-- but I wanted to holler out anyhow. First off, on the subject of infanticide & orphanages, I recommend Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature, which I should re-read soon now that you mention it. Second off, when you find a mass burial, you don't count skulls. People have a habit of taking skulls, burying them separately, whatever...or in cases of natural disasters, they can get, well, knocked off. Better to count pelvises; what is called "The Law of Asses."

Gothamist Trivia Night.

October 3, 2013, 10:09 am

≫ Next: The End of the Anti-Superman!

≪ Previous: The Pentacle: Occult Spy Headquarters.

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Last night I played trivia & was a big winner! In that my team won second place & I won a raffle. It was a Gothamist even, & so the Trollathon crew showed up in (minor) force. Now I am a bit of a blah today, but so it goes! Let's talk about what I won! First off, the raffle was for a couple of cronuts, the legitimate Dominique Ansel kind! Which are obviously ridiculous & not worth waiting in line for, but hey, free fancy pastries that people apparently are willing to wait in line for! I shared 'em with the team but got a few big mouthfuls. Then our team won second place at trivia, out of like seventy teams. Good for us! I didn't know how useful I'd be-- with trivia I either dominate it & know everything, or I look blankly at an empty piece of paper where I'm supposed to be writing an answer-- but I totally contributed. That magazine on Just Shoot Me was called Blush, the East River froze &"Finding Foster" is pretty close to Finding Forrester, maybe they gave us half credit! So second place nabbed us loot galore; I came home with tickets to some Janis Joplin musical, tickets to see Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, a free week of Citibike, some Doctor Who DVDs & a Doctor Who beach blanket, beer coozies, & probably some other random stuff. That was fun! Nice to see those folks. Then today Sherene& I got lunch at Madison Square Eats. Oh, & the other day I went there with Jim, & then the day before that I went there with Liz! What did I eat? I've eaten the new Tacotown stuff; barbecue tacos. I ate the old standby & probably one of the best choices possible, the lobster BLT from Red Hook Lobster Pound. & then today I went to Slide & got their slider made from chorizo & beef. All pretty great! Then I grabbed a triumvirate of macaroons & took them over to Jennifer, because she's been hard at work all week & deserves husbandly thoughtfulness.

The End of the Anti-Superman!

October 3, 2013, 11:13 am

≫ Next: Mustard, No Wait, Catsup!

≪ Previous: Gothamist Trivia Night.

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Action Comics Volume Two: Bulletproof by Grant Morrison, Sholly Fisch, Max Landis, Rags Morales, et al.

I am the I am!
Behold! I am this lightning!
I am this madness!

So I guess I failed to blog about the first volume of this series, but as I said when I reviewed The Court of Owls, it was a no-brainer that I'd read Grant Morrison's Action Comics run. As I've said roughly one million times, All-Star Superman is probably the best Superman story of all of them, & listening to Grant Morrison discuss his opinions on the character (& other such characters) in Supergods would have been enough to convince me to follow along, even if I hadn't read All-Star. The thing is...halfway through this comic, the artist changes. Then two-thirds of the way through, different writers jump in...ah! This isn't a real graphic novel collection at all, this is "padded" with other stuff, stuff that just...isn't as good. Fisch & Landis aren't terrible, but the panel transitions are harder to follow & there is a distinct lack of "tell, don't show." Yes, we get it, Superman inspires people to be better people themselves, that is the theme, but you don't have to say that out loud. So yeah, this collective is very uneven, much like...well, much like DC has gotten a reputation for being. The big story arc involves Captain Comet, who shows up to spit some game about Neo sapiens& four lobed brains &"Oort-kind"& other such Invisibles-ish lines. I liked it, I like having a weird cuckoo-child arc, the changeling child is my jam, as it moral grey. It takes a lot to do ethical ambiguity in a Superman story, of all places, but Morrison pulls it off. Honestly? I think this might be plotted a little too "Silver Age." A lot is crammed in there, without space to breathe. I know it is passé to admit it these days, but the Bendis-style decompression can really help a story grow & achieve impact. That said, at least this is Captain Comet & not some new creation; the strength of serial storytelling is that you can bring in a stock character & assume people get the backstory, or at least the jist (or in this case, vibe) of it. Morrison has been creating a lot of new characters for his run-- Obama Superman is back-- but he knows when to use other methods, too. In the end? I wish this was volume two of a complete Morrison run, but on the other hand I will now have to buy volume three, & I plan on it, so I can't fault their business tactics. Other than to say this: I have an impression of the New 52 that is slapdash, uneven, "extreme"& padded with fluff. That means I assume I'd have to sift through to find good stuff, which sounds like a lot of work. The signal to noise ratio is why I don't care about floppies & why I don't buy more comics; I don't trust quality. Heck, even the flagship title, Superman, done by the blockbuster author, Grant Morrison, & the popular artist, Rags Morales...even that gets diluted. On the plus side, Superman can totally do surgery with his bare hands.

Mustard, No Wait, Catsup!

October 9, 2013, 4:01 am

≫ Next: Oubliette Session Seven: The Arboretum & the Pterodactyl.

≪ Previous: The End of the Anti-Superman!

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(Photo by Greg M.)

Let's see. So Jennifer is officially out of town. She's actually still in town, she's at work, but she's not coming home after work, so it counts. No big deal; I've got Television Night tonight & then Oubliette tomorrow. I'll keep it real. So what have I been up to? Went to the gym with Chris last night. Like I said, I've been lazy all year, & I recently hurt my arm, so I've been feeling a little sour in my skin. Monday I wanted to go, step up my game, but there was a reception for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America that I was supposed to go to, so go to it I did, even mingling despite myself. That's me with the Tor.com crew, up there. Before-hand I'd hung out with Kat&Dave; After-hand I rode the train home with Bridget. Oh, my lunches have been going hardcore, too. Marie is back from France, I saw Allison's new ink, & then hung out with Liz on Monday. Crap, I was going to mention something but I lost it when I got up to get coffee. Doesn't matter, what else? Sunday I stayed inside, we babysat Olivia & I wrote Tor.com stuff. Saturday, um, oh yeah! Saturday was Jocelyn's birthday! We went out to Astoria & got Greek food, obviously, then went back to her &Brian's apartment with everybody. Then, took a cab home! Since Chris & Autumn live across the street now, we could split it with no stop-offs. So that sort of stuff, that is what the snapshot of my life right now looks like. Oh I should point out that in like, the "feelings" zone, it was a really nice weekend with Jennifer, we totally made out on the couch all sweetly, I dug it. Being married to her is cool. I'm feeling a little bit over-extended socially; having Terra in China is a bummer, since our friendship deal is that we can hangout & be lazy. Hanging out & doing something is pretty exhausting. I've been doing too many somethings, & it isn't going to end this week; I'm already jam packed. I mean, let's be real, I spend my nights mostly at home on the couch watching the new fall season of shows, so this is mostly misanthropy talking. Speaking of shows: Sleepy Hollow is pretty stupid but occasionally actually spooky; The Blacklist needs to decide if it wants to be a fun mastermind/heist show like Leverage or if it wants to be a "serious" crime drama with torture & stuff in it. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is...fine, I like it okay but what is it? Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't blowing my mind, except insofar as there is a S.H.I.E.L.D. show that exists, but I dig it. Oh, you know what has been firing on all cylinders, the hero of the season? New Girl. Also, as usual, Parks & Recreation. Anyhow, so when I come home from hanging out with people-- I always leave first-- & Jenny comes home from her late night of work, that's what we do, we open a bottle of champagne & flip on the tube. Oh, & I've been watching Attack on Titan but that might be a whole post in & of itself. Oh, &Bravest Warriors, I finally found a compilation of it.

Oubliette Session Seven: The Arboretum & the Pterodactyl.

October 11, 2013, 9:46 am

≫ Next: All These Moments Will Be Lost...

≪ Previous: Mustard, No Wait, Catsup!

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Even the music was on point; Godspeed You! Black Emperor's F♯ A♯ ∞&Yanqui U.X.O. where synched up to the moods of the room; the music was sinister when it was meant to be & swelled to a crescendo when it ought to. A really big gang at the game table last night: Nicole road the train with me, eager to play her cunning & cold Zaibatsu agent, Mukade Keku Kin. Luke or Mollie was next, the watchful Kuge noble Haru o-Kitsune& his loyal yojimbo, the warrior monk Mio Yudai. Silissa was next, with baby Indigo in tow, ready to play Kemushi Moe no-Cho, the Zaibatsu pharmacopia researcher. fatbutts was one the scene, with Amina o-Kitsune, the noble Bushi with dark interests. Eric was last but not least, ready to play the hoodlum turned Taikomochi courtesan, Ren Joko Izumi. Last session saw them all going to the strange arboretum; the Shogun's cousin, Iroha o-Lung-- a woman with a cannon instead of an arm-- elected to accompany them. I had a really good game; a pterodactyl, mummy mythology, & a samurai showdown? That is a recipe for success.

The greenhouse is a strange place; Mio, Moe & Haru have all been to the Toxic Jungle, which is truly weird & horrifying, & this isn't that but there is something about the plants inside of the place, strange cycads, ginkos & ferns. The sounds of fauna are just a little bit off, & it is Ren who places it-- he's seen these on old scrolls! These plants are extinct. The group elects to enter a sort of gatehouse first; there is a frenzied business-- the proper collective noun!-- of frolicking ferrets, but Mio's pet wolf, Toto, clears them out. Aw, & I have so many cool "rat swarm" minis! It is noted that the ferrets, when they flee, don't flee by the most direct route, into the arboretum, but instead scramble elsewhere. The Players note that the doors are wood; old but not ancient; the pyramid of Kakusui-en is incredibly ancient, & the arboretum seems to date to the historical but now ruined Empire whose death throes spawned the Shogunate. Haru, versed in some of the occult secrets of the world, & Amina, who traveled with a weird circus, recognize the symbol of the peacock vulture; it belongs to the Royal Physician, an ancient Al-Kem figure, a sort of cross between Galen & Imhotep, who achieved alchemical enlightenment & remembered his past lives in detail every time he was reincarnated. When he would die, his cult & companions would preserve his old body, & the mummy would be an undead vizier, a council fit to advise the new Royal Physician from their tombs.



What is it that spurs the attack? After all, Haru has calmly been gathering samples, with Moe & her research assistant Gale's help. Maybe it is Amina trying to kick down one of the sturdy doors. Maybe it is Ren, shouldering down the crumbling door into the tower inside the arboretum that they find right past the gates. Could just have been bad luck...but the thing itself is no joker. Like a giant plucked bird, or a strange bat with a bird skull for a head, a strange creature from yesteryear. A pterodactyl with a twenty, thirty foot wing span. It buffets Amina about with its wings, hooking her with a claw on its wing, slashing her & knocking her down, while then hovering away out of reach. The party scrambles, against the wall of the tower, into it. The insides are filled with guano (of which Moe grabs some); the first floor has two other doors, leading back out, the second is also stuffed with pterosaur poop but has a skeleton embedded in it; Ren searches it but finds nothing. On the roof is the nest, part constructed from sticks & logs, part from paper, almost wasp-like. There seems to be a magpie tendency in the creature, because besides the three soccer ball sized eggs, there is also a bunch of sparkly stuff, & a long black shiny scroll case.

Keku, up on the roof with the nest now, is attacked again, this time the pterrordactyl's mouth swelling like a pelican, ready to engulf her, to swallow her whole-- but Keku's familiar, a snake named Nagini, blessed by the naga Hebi-no-Hime darts out, biting it inside it's mouth, causing it to swerve off, making a noise like a cross between a squawk & a wookie. Keku grabs an egg & bolts! Down the stairs during the following hubbub & confusion, & out! Up on the roof, Ren grabs some gold & the Black Scroll case & darts back down, unharmed. Mio tries to keep it at bay with her naginata while Moe tries to get an egg...& she butterfingers it, dropping it, & it cracks, red blood oozing out instead of white albumin. While Moe is fumbling with the egg...the fell beast, which had disappeared for a round, game back carrying a giant stone...which is dropped on her head with a sickening crack that mirrored the humpty-dumptying of the egg. I roll pretty well for damage, & decide to make some of it aggravated, rather than tons of lethal, to knock her unconcious & to give her the new character trait, "Drain Bamage."



Haru & Iroha are talking about the eggs when everyone comes down to the second floor-- he wants to destroy them so the strange dinosaur breeding old man from the auction, Toshi Kyoryu, can't give them to the Meikyu Zaibatsu to breed. Iroha is more ambitious; think what we could do, if we bred them! Iroha heads up, as does Amina, to the rooftop, while Mio carried Moe down. Not wanting to kill the mother, Iroha holds a lit fuse-- she lights it with her teeth-- & waits, while...well, while Amina dons the mask of a demon, a mempo contorted into rictus, & tears open the bloody egg from the pterodactyl. It gushes all over her, & the embryo plops out...then Amina bends, & it seems as if her mask laps up the blood. Only Iroha sees this, as the rest of the party is downstairs. Eric says "Ren has the Character Trait of 'Scrounger' so can I spend Willpower to have grabbed something from the nest that could help Moe?" It is a perfect use of the Character Trait system-- which Lilly also says she "gets" after this session-- & actually, there is totally something on the "dungeon" map that could help, so I just let his invoking of his trait guide the story, as it is meant to. Yes! The gold he grabbed...among it is something that isn't a coin, but is instead a golden pill, the size of a horse tranquilizer. Liquid gold! She swallows & sees a vision, understanding the story of the Royal Physician in a flash.

...but meanwhile something insidious has taken hold of Mio Yudai, the sohei yojimbo. You see, when the naga blessed some of the members of the group, only Mio fully refused, & the so naga gave Ren his forked tongue, Keku her serpent, Haru his tsuba...& Moe poison blood. Which Mio has all over her, now. I ask Moe what kind of poison it is & she says "hallucinatory," so I go to work on Mollie. The whole group has been hallucinating on spores from the weird plants since they walked in here; only now did Mio suddenly sober up, breaking the enchantment. Moe is dead-- not just hurt, dead-- & that is where those bones in the middle of the room came from. Haru killed her! So begins one of my favorite Oubliette scenes: the Reservoir Dogs-esque stand-off. Mio, with one of the eggs in her kit, whips her naginata around to point it at Haru. Haru is speaking softly but Amina whips out her katana & puts it to Mio's throat. Mio's wolf, Toto, starts to growl & slavery, & so Amina draws her wakizashi, pointing it at the canine. Having distracted everyone, Haru sleight of hands a random packet of powder from Moe's herbal kit. I ask Silissa to make up a random chart is in there, so she gives me: "1, cure; 2, poison; 3, burn; 4, hallucination; 5, freeze; 6, put to sleep; 7, choke; 8, bleed uncontrollably; 9, extract poison; 10, scratch skin like meth." Haru rolls a 10, & we leave off there, on a cliffhanger.

All These Moments Will Be Lost...

October 18, 2013, 8:33 am

≫ Next: Me & My Notebook; by Danielle & Jocelyn.

≪ Previous: Oubliette Session Seven: The Arboretum & the Pterodactyl.

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Ah, I've already let too much of my week slip away, I've lost it, just whoosh, right through my fingers. Oh, Saturday, let me start there, & maybe I can piece my way forward, retrace my steps, reconstruct the scene of the crime. Saturday we babysat for Olivia, of course, & I think I was maybe productive, like, did I write or something? Maybe. I'm due another Tor.com catch-up post. We decided to have dinner with Kira & Nino on Saturday instead of Sunday, for kicks, & ended up cutting loose a little more than we already do, since we didn't have to be at work the next day. We played Dixit, a French story game that I'd only played once before-- I think, maybe I am lying & I've played it twice before-- & hilariously enough, Nino was the best at it. You wouldn't naturally think "French story game? Right up Nino's alley!" but here we are. Then Sunday! I hustled all morning, getting some more work done, going to the gym, that sort of thing, & then my brunch plans up & got cancelled! Carla was in town, & so I shouldn't be surprised that scheduling was...fluid. Anyhow, Jennifer went out with her for dinner, while I stayed home. I did go out after work on Monday to meet up with her & Cindy & the crew; there were some of her other friend & Jason & Kevin rolled in as I was leaving. Jenny stayed out all night with them, but I'm an old fuddy-duddy, I bowed out early. Then fast-forward past Tuesday-- nothing happened, I don't think?-- to Wednesday, & Television Night. Beauty & the Geek makeovers! With fatbutts&James. Gilbert loved only ovals-- beard & curly ginger hair one oval, badly fitting clothes another-- but when they shaved him & dressed him it turned out he was pretty much a beach jock underneath? Fun. Last night, Thursday, I hung out with another regular crew, the Matt, the Brian, the Jocelyn, the Dave, the Kat. I got Jenny an engraved Guinness glass with her motto-- Top It Off!-- & left just as the baseball game was starting. So that...is what I've been up to. Oh I hooked up some friends of mine on a date & I think it went off well; I like playing meddling matchmaker! Oh, onatopofthings was here! I don't know if I mentioned, so that was fun, too.

---

Me & My Notebook; by Danielle & Jocelyn.

October 18, 2013, 11:53 am

≫ Next: Em Kay.

≪ Previous: All These Moments Will Be Lost...

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Em Kay.

October 20, 2013, 4:11 am

≫ Next: Sleepy Hollow.

≪ Previous: Me & My Notebook; by Danielle & Jocelyn.

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

Like an Eels album,
electroshock therapy.
(It's still a real thing!)

This was littlewashu's pick for Eleven-Books Club; that means she's got a batting average of .333, right? Because of her other two books I sure liked her pick The Yiddish Policemen's Union, & I didn't really like The Big YearJourney to the Center of the Earth. I hope you've read between the lines enough to realize that yes, that means that I didn't like The Bell Jar. To be fair, I don't really like this genre, I don't really like "drama"-- that includes psychodrama. I don't like Academy Award bait movies, I don't like feel-bad indie movies actors make to keep their "cred," I generally feel like the tricks & tools used by the writers of drama are sloppy sledgehammers; the "sadness" equivalent of a Farrelly brothers fart joke. So that is my baggage going into it; on the place side, I had this impression that it was a feminist novel, so I hoped I could find a paradigm of appreciation on that front. I guess I must have formed that impression out of the weird reality of the patriarchy, where any book about women gets shoved under one heads, Women's Studies. Esther Greenwood is not going mad because her choices are constrained by being a woman. She's no Cersei Lannister from A Song of Ice & Fire. Oh I mean, there is inequality in the book, & pressure to marry, but there are also risque girls who break that mold, female doctors, successful female writers-- no, the eponymous "bell jar" isn't the glass ceiling.

No, Esther's problem isn't womanhood...it's adulthood. For at least the first half of this novel, I utterly despised her. She's really frequently racist, & is exactly the kind of lucky privileged kid who gets everything handed to them on a platter, & then squanders it & complains that life isn't fair. Oh no, tell us again how awful it is to live in New York for free & get editorial experience before your scholarship, what a real nightmare. As a lazy gifted kid who misspent his potential it is hard for me to feel bad for...a lazy kid wasting her potential. I mean, I managed to end up living in New York working in publishing, & she gets is served up to her on a silver platter? Yeah, forgive me if I don't cut her a lot of slack that to actually try would be hard, & that indecision means opportunities pass you by. The story is filled by would-be men-- the would-be husband, the would-be rapist-- & punctuated by Esther taking every opportunity to be mean to those who are her friends. So no, Esther, I don't like her. Roman à clef or no, I can't pretend I could even stand her.

Of course then she pivots to actual depression & insanity, & that is a different matter. The second half of the book is an asylum tale, which is its own little subgenre, isn't it? Institutionalized stories are big now; has anyone explicitly tied Orange is the New Black into Sylvia Plath? I'm guessing yes. So what happens at the end? I can tell you what I think, if you want to know. Esther breezes through her interview, is released, lives her life for a few years, has an episode, doesn't quite succeed at trying to kill herself, & ends up back at the private institution. Lather, rinse, repeat. Part of the issue is, well, the past. Not that today is incredibly better, but psychology is one of the areas of medicine being advanced at a rapid pace. Today is better than yesterday, tomorrow will be better than today, & there are all too many people & institutions that are still living in the past. For me, the thing is...I don't like Esther, even divorced from the cycle of the grip of her depression.



So I read this book just this week; most of the book club folks did too, in many cases having read it just the day of the meeting. Liz arrived first, since she's new, but it actually was a pretty clean attendance! Liz, then fatbutts, then carmyarmyofme, then piped in Terra&fordmadoxfraud in from California & China, then littlewashu& then finally Beatrice. People didn't fully agree with my point about the book not really being feminist, but then-- uh, putting myself in a position of questioning feminist credentials is a losing opposition! & I wasn't articulating what I meant all that well, either. In general people really liked the language, & those of us who'd had struggled with depression recognized it as a pretty stressful rendition; that is, it was so spot on it was anxiety causing. Anyhow, we stayed on topic for a good long while, & then sort of drifted into weird youtube videos. Plus, we were congratulating ourselves on being such a stable club; we're been doing this for a little while, huh?

Sleepy Hollow.

October 27, 2013, 2:32 pm

≫ Next: Poppycock.

≪ Previous: Em Kay.

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Poppycock.

October 29, 2013, 3:45 am

≫ Next: Hollow Ween!

≪ Previous: Sleepy Hollow.

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Let me see if I can't prevent a big torrent of "oh gosh I haven't been keeping up!" by actually trying to keep up a little bit. Yesterday was Monday; I went to work & got a bunch of annoying stuff done, but still have a lot graves to dig up this week. I was saying to Jennifer that one project she was working on sounded exactly like a project I am starting on, so that is "fun." Had lunch with Nicole, Silissa& Kate (the gif below) & then came home. I was sort of despairing of the world, so I decided to just stay in. Jennifer had plans but said she was coming home early...so when I woke up on the couch again having fallen asleep waiting on her, I was bummed. Anyhow, let's skip back farther, let me retrace my steps. Sunday was Sleepy Hollow; we went up with fatbutts&James& met up with ranai& Dennis in the graveyard. Dinner with Kira & Nino followed, & I took a silly selfie in Olivia's "Halloween Pig" bathrobe. I've since been informed that "there is no such thing as a Halloween Pig." Saturday was us babysitting Olivia. She wanted to spend a while sitting next to me while I showed her my Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, which was pretty freaking cute. "This were-rat is terrific!" Also threw her around in a TARDIS blanket I got a Gothamist Trivia Night. Oh & I took her over to Chris& Autumn's apartment to see them & their dog Murphy. Otherwise, I don't know. Oh, Jennifer & I watched some baseball with Kat&Matt on Thursday; Jenny met up with us after Jocelyn&Brian left. Besides that, uh...we watched Dracula, which is a pretty weird show. It is basically "Dracula, like the novel Dracula, only he is Nikola Tesla." Which actually, I am a big fan of. It comes from Ravenloft, which means Hammer & Universal, but I totally think that Dracula has a mad scientist laboratory in his dungeon, Dracula totally makes a flesh golem & casts awareness on it, right? Also Nonso Anozie plays Renfield? The story is basically...Dracula is a class hero who wants to destroy capitalism by creating free wireless electricity & wiping out the petroleum-based pocketbooks of the plutocrats. Oh, Daniel Knauf is showrunner! Oh suddenly it makes a lot more sense.

Hollow Ween!

October 31, 2013, 7:18 pm

≫ Next: I Am the True American.

≪ Previous: Poppycock.

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