Reportedly, CafePress was showing their print on demand book offerings at the Alternative Press Expo. I’ve heard one second-hand description of the quality as very good. If anyone reading this happens to have been there, I’m exceedingly curious and would welcome a report.
Month: February 2003
Anyone wanna form a pool on when stuff like SMS flirting services is gonna appear in a major Hollywood movie? I’m thinking summer 2005. Won’t happen this year, and 2004 is just a little too early. Hollywood’s conservative about youth culture.
I was intending to have a busy movie weekend, but after City of God I really didn’t want to see anything else. I actually went down to the Copley Place to see Intacto, but it was sold out twenty minutes before showtime, so I punted to City of God. The Copley is a lousy excuse for an art house theater, but it was the only place in town showing Intacto; thus, I wound up in a cramped little bandbox with a floor that sloped up to the tiny little screen. Pathetic.
About ten minutes into City of God, I’d pretty much forgotten that I’d get a better cinema experience from a bargain basement second run theater in Iowa.
I suspect part of my enthused reaction was just meeting a new set of cinematic conventions; I’ve never seen a Brazilian movie before, so there was a lot of novelty in it for me. On the other hand, the energy of the direction and acting was universal. The directors, Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, are fearlessly willing to use bullet time and stop motion — but only for real emotional effects. You get the sense that they’ve never thought about the distinction between pulp and real art; for them, everything’s just another technique to use when telling the story.
The same egalitarian approach applies to the casting. Most of the actors are residents of the slums the movie chronicles, cast after extensive acting workshops. It pays off. Philippe Haagensen in particular has real star charisma.
I’d heard the story was very dense, and it was fairly compact, but it wasn’t the sort of fast cut patchwork you see in the average Tarantino homage. There were a lot of stories to tell, but they don’t intercut; they weave together, and elements of one turn up again later. This allows the nuances time to grow, and gives the audience time to absorb.
Highly recommended.
Hey, it’s about time for Richard Thompson to release a new album. There’s a sample song (in WMA format, boo hiss) here. (Thanks to Jim Henley.) The album looks pretty stripped down, just him and Danny Thompson and Michael Jerome, who was the drummer on his last tour. I saw one of those shows, and I thought Jerome was really good. The first track is titled “Gethsemane” — I can’t wait.
Hm. Actually, it’s out in the UK and Europe. Surely I have some adoring European readers? HEDGE!
This picture is reportedly a shot of the Columbia’s wing from early on her last mission. Maariv is an influential newspaper in Israel, so it would seem this is not a Photoshop job, although I wouldn’t rush to conclusions regarding dents and cracks. I don’t think there’s enough detail in the picture to be sure of what we’re seeing.
OK. I didn’t particularly want to poison the Columbia tragedy by saying something partisan, and I kind of hoped I wouldn’t find myself wanting to. For the most part, nobody in the blogosphere has gotten political about this. There’s been idiotic froth on both wings in comment sections, but you have to expect that, and for the record I find “Bush will use this to push the war!” and “This is Islam’s fault!” equally repellent.
However.
Sneering at the French (because he couldn’t be bothered to do a little research before passing along an unsupported rumor) and taking cheap shots at the left wing (in an essay which would have done just fine without that paragraph) are both over the line. On a day when I even agreed with Mischa’s sentiments, Glenn Reynolds managed to offend me.
He couldn’t hold the politics for a couple of days? Guess not.
I went on a mini RPG binge this weekend, and wound up with quite a bit of good stuff, but the gem of the lot was Charnel Gods, by Scott Knipe. It’s a PDF supplement for Sorcerer, and it’s so good it prompted me to buy that game, but it stands perfectly well on its own; at five bucks, there’s no excuse not to buy it if you’ve got any interest in — but I’m getting ahead of myself and reaching for the conclusion already. Tsk.
So what is it? It’s an innovative and original take on the pulp fantasy genre. By pulp fantasy, I mean stories like Conan and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane books, and Scorpion King on the lighter end of the genre. Charnel Gods is not light; it’s a grim world in which the heros bear the blasphemous Fell Weapons and battle the Nameless Ones, because the Old Gods are dead and can no longer fight. Magic is almost non-existent, with the exception of the Fell Weapons. The battleground — the world itself — is formed from the corpses of the gods, which are the only barrier between humanity and oblivion.
Not light at all.
The game is designed to be episodic. The heros are more fated than any White Wolf character, but the rules include a mechanism for inheritance; after each epoch ends, and each epoch will end, another will form atop the corpses of the gods and new heros will take up the Fell Weapons. This structure permits wide variation of genre inside the basic theme, and ameliorates feelings of futility, which is very elegant. Now that I’ve read it, it’s only natural that opening up the possibilities for the campaign also relieves the potential depression inherent in the setting, but I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own. Pay special attention to the maps of the sample epochs, by the by.
The balance of lost humanity (unavoidable for a bearer of a Fell Weapon) and impending doom of the epoch is masterful. The two downward trends are wholly separate and unrelated, except insofar as the Fell Weapons were created to battle that doom, which provides for excellent contrast. There are certain ambiguities about the setting which I won’t spoil, but which heighten that contrast. There’s a bit of the cliche in the ultimate weapons created to battle evil which corrupt the wielders, but I think that’s muted by the fact that the weapons weren’t created for humans. It doesn’t fly as a parable for nuclear weapons, for example.
That sort of elegance permeates the book. Another example: we all know players are gonna read the rulebook. So in Charnel Gods, knowledge of the Fell Weapons and the Old Gods and the rests is one of the things that separates heros (I should, perhaps, be saying “protagonists”) from the rank and file. Another: in Sorcerer, sorcerers can sense the Humanity level of other sorcerers. So in Charnel Gods, there’s a really good reason why the heros would want to do this. The economical synergy between rules and setting is very impressive.
As I mentioned, the game’s intended for use with Sorcerer. I think you could use it as a standalone, with whatever ruleset your heart desires. This may be blaspemy, but you could even pound D20 into working — perhaps by using something like the rules in Mutants and Masterminds. I don’t think stock D20 would work; since Charnel Gods is a low magic world, most of the D20 balancing methods would be absent. Something like Over the Edge would be great. You’d just need to include some sort of Humanity mechanism, since that’s essential to the setting.
It’s five bucks. The layout and art are really nice. I’d have paid $15 bucks for it and not felt ripped off. Go buy it.
Warren Zevon’s holding in there, but this piece isn’t really about that. His bravery awes me.
I was musing about pulp settings the other day. Off the top of my head:
It’s the 1930s, and the Romany have taken to the skies. After the Hindenburg disaster, the public shied away from hydrogen dirigibles; but Paulo Pettersen, the sort of engineering genius who comes along once in a generation, believed he could make the vessels safe enough. What’s more, he convinced quite a few others of the same, and la! Before anyone realized it, the Romany flew, rising up above Europe in first a dozen and then a hundred great silvery balloons.
The second part of his genius idea, you see, was to provide a place for the gazhe to do the things they couldn’t do down below. Gambling, women, privacy — and luxury, for those who had the money to spare. Why not? If Bugsy Siegel could build a paradise out of desert, surely the Romany could build one out of air.
It worked, and within a few years the skies of Europe were the playgrounds of the well-off… and the hunting grounds of the political services of Europe’s nations. After all, the dirigibles were a much more convenient neutral ground than Morocco.
Paulo oversaw it all with a benevolent smile, which hid a worried frown. The inspiration for the flying nation was not his alone, as it happened; his wife, Zigana, was a seer. It was she who’d guided Paulo to success — and it was she who’d foreseen the coming clouds.
All historical and cultural inaccuracies are mine (and yeah, I slipped some dates here and there for the sake of fiction). In fact, anyone who takes anything in this as solid history should be gently mocked until cured of the habit.
The London Times published this thoughtful discussion of reasons to be anti-war; it sums up a lot of what I’ve thought and said, but better, cause they’re the Times and I am not. (The epitome of blogging, here: all I’m really doing is pointing to an article that agrees with me. But damn, it’s a good article. Oh, and yeah: via The Volokh Conspiracy. Now it’s a real blog post…)