kind of amazed this still hasn’t been appropriated as a Bond villain base.

For all your postapocalyptic trash-scifi needs. It’s even Italian.

http://architizer.com/blog/brutalism-in-ruins///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

got half an hour between dropping the elder kid off and then picking him up and taking them both for dinner and I beat Emerald’s Elite 4 and so now I guess I’m done with the randomized Pokemon thing. Woo I am Pokemon Champion.

My life has never felt so empty. What am I doing with my time on Earth instead of living at my maximum potential for fulfilment?

…OK, it’ll pass. Just the post-Pokemon dysphoria.

Trying to avoid thinking about politics, working on a blog post about Tim Powers’s Nephilim, I was thinking “who would I cast as Jimmy Theodora, the avuncular, gay spymaster from Declare?”

So I googled “Jimmy Theodora”… Google, I’m not convinced.

and that’s why there’s a Turkish Coffee Pokemon.

Now, what were your puny concerns again? Why yes, that is quite a large dragon.

At last! All I had to do was wait long enough and someone finally put my favourite ever cigarette ad on the internet.

IS THERE A COW IN THIS PACKET?

(because you could win a cow, you see. Or a horse. The tractor one’s great too, but they didn’t upload it.

http://mashable.com/2016/03/02/russian-cigarette-ads/#2fVze_2Dkkq6 )

In other news, wicked Turkish coffee cravings this morning. I finally caved and bought the little warmer and your actual Turkish grind and now I’m waiting for it to arrive and the construction snafus today are up to the level I remember from when I made video games, like Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog level – Three of the horseman DIED. Two weeks before the end of principal photography and I’m just “you are distracting me from the important question of Turkish coffee.”

someone finally wrote this article so I don’t have to. The only thing really missing is a detailed analysis of the most important factor: the audience.

For that you need Barthes’ essay on wrestling, the best essay I’ve ever read about the US electoral process. 

http://www.ngca.co.uk/docs/Barthes_WorldOfWrestling.pdf

Originally shared by John Hardy

This also gets to a bone of contention I have with some who have praised Trump for having sharp insight into voter attitudes. Nonsense.

When wrestlers began creating a new character or a new angle for their character (going from face to heel or vice versa is a standard wrestling plot point), they test out lines with the audience. The entire point of this exercise is to get a rise out of the crowd and it doesn’t matter whether it’s cheers or boos. As long as you get a reaction, its working.

https://medium.com/@owillis/how-professional-wrestling-explains-american-politics-especially-donald-trump-5449df1db9de#.oqxsoc7fh//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

So imagine you could use your vote against someone instead of for someone.

Proper Chaos Monk technique.

Improper costume.

Originally shared by Kimberly Hurlbut

Almost!

I just now realized that The Shire is like the little town where your Pokemon character lives – very low level, with a limited set of starter problems, and that the rest of Middle Earth is arranged, like a Pokemon game, with higher level threats farther away. Wild barrow wights are probably level 7-9, like forest trolls. Frodo was foolish not to get one for his party, but I guess he was relying on his Gandalf (whose evolution path is, BTW, a huge pain).

The inhabitants of ME could predict with some certainty the path of their eventual messiah by mapping the levels of monsters geographically. Saruman can be refought after the Elite 4. The Grey Havens is obviously the Battle Frontier.

Perhaps there are other start points in Harad or on the eastern side of the Lonely Mountain – places with low-level djinn or mischievous wood-sprites.

I am now hugely disappointed that nobody seems to have hacked a Pokemon game to reproduce Mordor, or even mocked one up in a picture. Perhaps I should, after all, do that 32 Views of Mount Doom project I was thinking about years ago.

The best I can rustle up today is this fanfic (warning: not checked for quality):

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/48384/1/pokemon-new-roads-part-one

so is everyone already at Garycon? Since I’m holding the fort here in ny I could game tonight…

do you love theater?

Buy a mattress.

Buying a car is quite a production as well, but I’ve been treated to some really great ensemble work today. The salesman actually whispered to me while his “floor boss” scowled from a distance. Must be a great deal!

Thinking further about John Carter, it strikes me they made 2 serious mis-steps in the actual execution of the movie, rather than in the marketing:

1. Not just going ahead and casting Lucy Lawless as Dejah Thoris. Yeah, yeah they probably thought “she’s too old, she’s supposed to be this teenage fantasy at least that’s what she was for me” but then they took her in a Warrior Princess direction anyway and got someone who wasn’t as charming at doing that. Idiots.

2. Making their central conflict old life/Earth vs new life/Mars. This is why John now has this tragic backstory because it dramatizes the nostalgia/barren past vs. embrace the new/exploration thing they imported so that the scriptwriters would feel they had something to work with. That’s why the film is called John Carter and not John Carter of Mars – because then the title would give away their whole point.

I want to time travel back to that first meeting and slap whoever it was who said “well obviously it’s about the stresses of planetary migration.” NO.

Here’s your central conflict: loyalty. John’s a Confederate officer who feels like he’s been let down by his country and every cause he ever fought for. And he gets to Mars and can act like a selfish murderhobo and the Tharks, at least, love him for it. Fighting without the cause, just ’cause.

But then Tars Tarkas can teach him about loyalty. He can do his whole “I thought something new could come into the world” speech and the point of it can be that he would die for John because John is his friend. And then John can go “oh, it’s actually OK to be a reliable ally” and he can teach loyalty to the Red Men and earn the loyalty of Dejah and that can be the key to his success.

…..too much like Elvis stealing rock ‘n’ roll from black radio stations? That’s OK, the racial business will be a strong, complicated undercurrent and get even more uncomfortable in movie 2.

Can Taylor show us your shoulders Kitsch handle this? Maybe not. But talented young white male actors are not a tough commodity to find. Now you know the character’s (new) dramatic arc, you know what you’re looking for. Apart from sex appeal.

So imagine you’ve won the lottery and kidnapped all the Disney execs’ chihuahuas and you can force them to make the sequel to John Carter, The Gods of Mars.

Who do you cast as the mad, charlatan goddess Issus?

Since Eartha Kitt’s no longer with us, the obvious choices would be Alfre Woodard or (imagine it) Cicely Tyson, but there’s a little shameful part of me that wants to cast Denis o’Hare.

…as far as the racial politics of the book go, I’d keep them intact – the black pirates should laugh like Geoffrey Holder’s hoodoo skull-man in Live And Let Die, like colonialism’s worst nightmare. 

eldest has been reading the Barsoom books; youngest asked to watch John Carter again.

….it’s really quite a good film, albeit with definite weaknesses. But this time I got to hear the eldest complaining all the way through about ways it deviated from the book.

He is in danger of becoming an alpha nerd.

I pointed out to him that maybe some of what he thought were abominable innovations in the film actually might come from the other9 books he hasn’t read. 

how many people here are genuinely worried that Trump actually is like Hitler in 1932 – i.e. a complete abdication from reasonable discourse for the political system as a whole?

(note: I’m not comparing him to Hitler in 1942. Comments about genocide are totally missing the point of the poll)

How did I not know about this guy? Penis anemone with a… tongue? Or just a suggestive marking? Evolves from a Root Fossil.

Man, this is what Pokemon would be like if Mateo Diaz Torres designed them. Adopting as my primary critter.

……..which is really my problem with Pokemon, I’ve discovered: I can never just settle on a team and level them up. I’m always underleveled because I keep chasing the new one.

140 Hirelings

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/sketches-in-bedlam-1823///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Today’s idea that could easily derail me for 2 months if I didn’t have iron will and too much to do anyway:

…Ars Magica Tiki.

Why did I never think of this before? Spells as cocktail recipes.

That’s a Jamaican rum and pineapple, 3 shots. You want to try shaking it spontaneously, or are you going to let someone else have a go that might have something useful already written out?

colds suck. Can’t taste this Sazerac at all.

Chris Kutalik trawling Spotify I ran across Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya

and immediately thought of you. And Calvino, of course, but is this already in the HC?

…Path of Batu sounds like something from Pokemon. And I’ve been thinking Mongol type thoughts recently anyway…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitezh//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

you know what GURPS China is perfect for? Running a Nephilim or time travel campaign that depends on some Chinese buildings or bronze drums or other artifact.

…you know what would be great? A Doctor Who/Nephilim mashup.

Just got my pdf of Tom McGrenery’s  Malandros and it looks like everything I hoped it would be. I’ve never played Drama System before (and I might yet run this in something more mechanically Old School) but I’m willing to learn and the setting notes hit most of my buttons, although that might be because I’m at least a little familiar with Rio and its types.

I particularly like the fact that you start with no wealth, no matter who you are. Immediate Top Cat/Chaplin motivation, but the rest of the setting offers more restraint from immediate slapstick than, say, GURPS Goblins, with which I might otherwise compare it.

Also, this intrigues me as a simple method of dealing with Godfather/gift economies in general:

give in to others’ demands for a couple of scenes and you’ve already got enough drama tokens to force someone to do something they don’t want to do. This is intentional. It reflects the give and take of relationships between people who are emotionally connected, and you can use that. This approach to play works well if you’re playing a character who’s a bit of a hustler, a social manipulator or a politician.

Nucky Thompson (not Johnson) and John Snow paid too much attention to their major token sponsors, and got shanked by problems they ignored. Watching Narcos right now (which is excellent, BTW) I’ve a feeling Pablo Escobar is going to just run his pot of tokens dry.

I’m really looking forward to having the time to read and play this.

http://pelgranepress.com/index.php/malandros-a-new-dramasystem-game///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Originally shared by Richard G

an elderly idea just couldn’t die quietly. So it woke up my similarly elderly blog.

https://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/regrettable-spells///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Which book do you want to make into a movie because you don’t trust anyone else to do it right?

What’s the one thing about it that, when you see it realized exactly the way you want it, you’ll say “OK, now I believe we’ve got this.”

Title

Originally shared by Paolo Marino

https://www.flickr.com/photos/osmapping/25012985956///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

yeah you’ve already seen this a dozen times today. I’m reposting it because it’s the neatest encapsulation of historical bullshit I’ve ever seen.

This is Orientalism. It applies to foreign lands, historical periods and any other difference.

Originally shared by Mikael Andersson

legit fact is legit

That moment when you lose respect for an author.

I’ll need some persuading to read anything Tim Powers writes after Hide Me Among The Graves. Which is painful because his earlier books are so good. But… oh dear.

It starts out like a bad parody of Powers and descends into Narnia.

Once you have established the stakes, don’t give your characters special extra chances. It’s cruel to kill them, true, but you’re being crueler to your reader if you suspend the rules of the fiction.

Meaning is a delicate thing, it requires a frame to hold it in place. Readers do a lot of work in constructing that frame (especially Powers’s readers); inferring the rules of the world and figuring out the stakes, the realm of possible actions. It’s within the frame that the characters’ decisions take on weight and colour, can be judged good or bad. Destroying the frame, so carefully constructed between writer and reader, destabilizes the reading, devalues what’s already been read, and leaves the reader and characters and action adrift. It’s worse than just losing the suspension of disbelief – the reader loses their frame of reference and the continuing action loses its meaning.

This here is a delightfully crochety piece of writing and is worth reading just for that. I’m copying you gamers, though, because it contains a highly gameable list of “denominations:”

Mor­mons (122 denom­i­na­tions), Jehovah’s Wit­nesses (229 denom­i­na­tions), Masons (28 denom­i­na­tions), Chris­tadel­phi­ans (21 denom­i­na­tions) Uni­tar­i­ans (29 denom­i­na­tions), Chris­t­ian Sci­ence (59 denom­i­na­tions), Theosophists (3 more denom­i­na­tions), British Israelites (8 denom­i­na­tions), Pros­per­ity Gospel groups (27 denom­i­na­tions), One­ness Pen­te­costals (680 denom­i­na­tions), “Hid­den Bud­dhist Believ­ers in Christ” (9 denom­i­na­tions), wan­der­ing bish­ops (12 denom­i­na­tions), Inde­pen­dent Nesto­ri­ans (5 denom­i­na­tions), occultists (3 denom­i­na­tions), spiri­tists (20 denom­i­na­tions), Zion­ists (159 denom­i­na­tions), even “Arab radio/​TV net­work” (19 denom­i­na­tions), “gay/​homosexual tra­di­tion” (2 denom­i­na­tions), and schis­matic Catholics (435 denom­i­na­tions)

….what if your fantasy world only had one religion but hundreds of fierce internecine, interecclesiastical fights?

1. go play Credo

2. I’m tempted to add schisms and scandals to the list of dnd supplements I’m halfway through writing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NoOX9-kcv7g

Originally shared by Barton Gingerich

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/scottericalt/we-need-to-stop-saying-that-there-are-33000-protestant-denominations//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Shopping for stickers for my kids I ran across this little beauty:

Literally piss on Obama toilet sticker. And right behind it Obama and Hillary toilet paper.

http://patriotdepot.com/obama-hillary-toilet-paper-pack/?gclid=CPz-6bPo7coCFViRHwod1YoIuQ

…and I thought well, this must be a universal political gesture. It can’t just be the minority guy and the woman being treated like this, can it?

And indeed no, it turns out you can get George Bush toilet paper

http://www.piehole.net/printed-toilet-paper.html

and a bunch of stickers comparing Trump to shit and/or reptoids…

 http://www.redbubble.com/shop/funny+trump+stickers

………..but oddly enough none of the other current candidates get this kind of treatment. Not even Sanders, who I figured half of America must hate.

Meanwhile there’s Bachman and Palin on the TP pile.

 http://www.redbubble.com/shop/funny+trump+stickers

Not quite sure what conclusions to draw. Maybe it’s that there are too many Republican candidates to make it worthwhile. Or that Trump draws the ire off the rest. Something about the partizan/gender mix here keeps nagging at me, though.

I prefer these:

http://www.toiletovhell.com/what-metal-sticker-will-you-slap-on-your-whip-this-election-season/

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Literally-PISS-ON-OBAMA-Toilet-Bullseye-Target-Pee-Men-Vinyl-Decal-Sticker-funny-/380917571010//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

I’m tempted by the Innsmouth Fogcutter. This might be the one post that both Doug Ford and James Maliszewski would disapprove of.

Originally shared by Rob Endicott

Combining two of my favorite things HPL & tiki mugs!

“Horror in Clay” http://shop.horrorinclay.com/collections/pickman-s-cove-collection/products/preorder-horror-in-clay-tiki-mug-series-1-open-edition-green

and the “Innsmouth Fogcutter” http://shop.horrorinclay.com/collections/gilman-house-collection/products/preorder-innsmouth-fogcutter-tiki-mug-series-1-open-edition-blue-green

http://shop.horrorinclay.com/collections/pickman-s-cove-collection/products/preorder-horror-in-clay-tiki-mug-series-1-open-edition-green//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

alarming.

And I’m even familiar with galettes de roi

DO NOT EAT THE BABY

Kevyn Winkless a horrid little thought: you know that paper that said scarce men tend to be more aggressive? What if that’s simply explained by an increase in testosterone?

If so (which I doubt but bear with me) is it possible that Geert Wilders is not full of shit when he describes Muslim men in Dutch asylum camps as “testosterone bombs” who are more prone to committing acts of sexual violence? IF (a) they are actually exposed to more women in their new situation and (b) that unfamiliar contact increases their testosterone levels AND (c) such an increase can increase aggression then might there be something there after all?

Ugh. So many things I hate here. But I wonder if it’s worth doing any kind of study on the question (and how one would, ethically).

I’ve been on a forced hiatus from research and writing for the past few months. I can tell that I’m finally seriously considering returning to it because my head is suddenly full of displacement projects.

This morning it’s the adventures of Vita and Boffer Sackville-Baggins – thrown off their land during the Scouring of the Shire, Vita turns to prostitution to support her now destitute parents while Boffer becomes a gunner’s mate with the corsairs and preys on elven ships headed for the Grey Havens. Neither can return home when Saruman is driven out: there’s no place for them in the cozy, restored middle-class paradise.

Back in 2000 Chris Crawford published a little essay on two motives for play that I thought was kind of interesting at the time but didn’t really know what to do with. Following more famous thinkers he called the motives agon and paideia, and characterized them more or less as struggle and joyful improvisation respectively. Tavis Allison mentioned a Caillois essay where he calls the struggle part “a taste for gratuitous difficulty”(1) and it strikes me that most games set this part forward front and centre, and tend to avoid talking about paideia by instead using the don’t ask me to explain it term “fun.” Tavis’s post is a really good read on the value of agon (or “ludus”) in allowing paideia to emerge.

At the time I was still making interactive computer stuff, and I was having a hard time finding anything that tried to lead with paideia, which to me is still best explained as “what small children are doing when they’re ‘just playing’ – exploring possibilities, amusing themselves with their own creations or manipulations.”

Some years later, I can see that paideia-forward video games have emerged – notably Rock Band and Just Dance. Playing and, even more, watching my son’s friends play Rock Band, it strikes me that the quickplay mode is close to pure paideia… and shifting gears to the agonistic Tour mode creates conflict in the player group. It’s a different mood, a different goal. It’s suddenly not just for fun any more, and for some players it’s not fun at all (perhaps unless/until they master the tools, perhaps inherently with the introduction of failure – karaoke, after all, has its roots in expression freed of failure-anxiety by the application of alcohol).

In my own experience of playing DnD, I find the roleplaying to be almost all paideia, with the occasional dip into agonistic dungeoneering. Sometimes I even resent the agon a little bit. But there’s a lot of disagreement about what the fun of DnD  is (perhaps because there’s a lot of space inside DnD for individuals to find their own joy). I don’t much want to read people’s pure paideia play reports.

It seems like Tomb of Horrors is supposed to be strongly agonistic but for me it would have to deliver paideia along the way – maybe you even have to have a certain affinity for schadenfreude in order to find the paideia in that situation. Maybe a DM who presents it as strongly agonistic(2) is playing that side up and losing the opportunities for paideia? Missing out a bit on the journey in favour of the destination. Or something. I haven’t really worked it out yet, but I feel like there’s something useful here.

(1) https://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-taste-for-gratuitous-difficulty/

(2) note: laughing in your players’ faces about their characters’ deaths is not necessarily part of being strongly agonistic – it seems like it’s more about performing dominance, which I think is another thing worth distinguishing from the other factors here.

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-interactivity-Chris-Crawford/dp/B0006RO8ZA//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

Imbolc is my favourite intra-uterine spring festival linked to chthonic cults and hierarchical wedding cake designs.

If I were feeling less busy and more creative I’d come up with some kind of secret history aquifer that linked it all to the esagila and the spiral minarets of Samarra but as it is, that’ll have to remain an exercise for the reader.

Screw those Pennsylvanians, though, trying to hijack it with their bullshit about some whistlepig. Happy imbolc!

oh Arnold K. what have you done? I absolutely can’t take any time to play Pokemon this month and yet the only thing I can think about is getting some dodgy rom off a back alley of the internet and randomizing it.

I. Will. Not.

Dammit.

No.

That’s a long way from mainland Australia. It’s Heard Island, my Most Likely Location for one of the corner anchors holding down the Elder Sign over R’lyeh.

You know, next to the sunken continent known as the Kerguelen Plateau and equally spaced around the South Pole with St. Helena and Elephant Island.

https://lurkerablog.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/real-maps-are-the-best-maps/

And now it’s lifting off.

Originally shared by Kristin Milton

One of Australia’s two active volcanoes has erupts!

(I bet you didn’t know Australia had active volcanoes.)

This one is on Heard Island which is about as far south as you can get without hitting Antarctica.

The image is from the CSIRO Blog – https://blog.csiro.au/big-ben-erupts/

The RV Investigator team are about to start mapping the seabed around Heard Island, so they were there in time to see the eruption.

Mike Davison can my daughter enter the lists? She would have to play via my computer, while I wasn’t looking. I understand there are risks of unfair play somehow (especially if she and I joust against each other). Let me know and I’ll understand whatever the decision.

Every six months or so I find myself wanting to run a game where everyone’s the same class/has the same skill set, like all fighting men, or all thieves or all houris. And you have to solve every kind of problem but you don’t happen to have the usual DnD party swiss army knife of class abilities. You just have to think. No rolling dice to pick the lock – you can spend hours trying to learn how, or you can figure out some way to nobble the hinges.

Imagine how much fun that would be.

goddamnit I really want this to exist.

In fact, now I want to do a whole series of fake osprey and dorling kindersley books.

Paolo Greco maybe this is the missing link for Castoordam.

[if I can ever get the time to do it]

Originally shared by Marko Bosscher

Nazi Moonbase, a definitive guide?

Most info on the Moonbase is sketchy at best, but Graeme Davis is giving it the Osprey treatment.

For the first time, the history of the Nazi space program has been revealed – with a focus on the design, construction, and layout of the moonbase. Using detailed maps, the entire moonbase is reconstructed, noting the locations of various important features, such as weapon emplacements, the Vril generator, the air recyclers and water extractors. The book also covers the various attempt by the allies to overcome this last Nazi stronghold through both subterfuge and outright battle.

https://ospreypublishing.com/nazi-moonbase-pb//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

one for Claytonian JP

croodle

vb. 1 (context UK dialect obsolete English) To cower or cuddle together, as from fear or cold; to lie close and snug together, as pigs in straw.

2 (context UK dialect obsolete English) To fawn or coax.

3 (context Scotland dialect obsolete English) To coo.

not, in fact, to creep up on someone.

Audiobooks keep me awake and alive if I have to drive several hours in a day, so I tend to binge-listen when I have a lot of long-haul errands to run. And so I tend to form strong opinions about particular readers. If I never have to hear Simon Vance’s pompous, leaden tones again I will be extremely grateful. And I will actively avoid anything read by Fiona Hardingham, who has exactly one accent to put on beside her narrating voice and whose stilted, mannered delivery would remind me of Christopher Walken if it weren’t so painfully apparent that the pauses signal the ends of pages.

http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/audio-books/Hide+Me+Among+the+Graves/199967/?link_num=1&//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

unbelievably brilliant. Also obviously London. Or Viriconium, if you insist on its proper name.

Originally shared by John Reiher

http://www.shortlist.com/news/this-map-of-every-city-is-absolutely-perfect//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js