Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: February 2006

Tipsy turvy

Let’s turn it around. Let’s say a 78 year old lawyer shot Dick Cheney in the face while hunting.

Think it would have taken an entire day before the news was released?

Think the lawyer would have had at least made a statement within a couple days of the incident?

Think the lawyer would be able to skip being interviewed by the police until the morning after the incident?

It’s kind of an unfair comparison; you have to be a little more careful when someone shoots an elected official. Still and all, it’s not as if Vice Presidents shoot people that often. You can probably treat such incidents as serious — rather than “sure, we’ll come back tomorrow and talk about it” — without placing an undue burden on the institution of the Vice President.

Envelopes redux

I currently have 13 entries for the Oscar picks, as follows: Kirby, Chris T., dancingshaman, telepresence, michele_blue, doogs19, Chad U., kodi, Wyatt, Cass, Brant, Kit, and twillitts. I’m dead serious about the sponsorship thing. I’m gonna throw up a banner for the winner.

There is very little love for one movie as Best Picture, but I won’t tell you which one. Poor thing. I’ll post a summary of entries after the event itself, though.

Grim Satanic

So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly.

Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral.

I have never been adverse to layering a touch of the horrific into my settings.

Let’s say that the gears of the difference engines, when layered as closely together as they must be in order to achieve the necessary efficiencies, attract visitors. Angelic and demonic alike? That’s sort of cool. Actually, that’s really cool, since nothing says angels are going to approve of the Queen.

I’m almost lifting from Dark Inheritance here, but it’s a cool setting. I can pull the Brotherhood of the Iron Rose, the Eight Heavenly Dragons, the International Geographic Society, and the Promethean Order wholesale, so I will. Drop the godgenes, drop the titans.

I believe that this consequence is not widely known. In fact, the Engines are only just now getting big enough. Characters should be people who have some sort of relation to the Engines — whether people who live nearby, mechanists, members of the House of Engineers? (Our third legislative body, occupying an uncomfortable slot between the House of Lords and the House of Commons.)

Huh. Sure. Angels/demons manifest as mechanicals, a la the Turk. But with … well, I’ll save that.

Doodle, doodle.

Jingle of green

Rep. Boehner was elected House majority leader. This is kind of the most amusing outcome; it’s both a validation of the assertion that the Republican members of the House were too corrupt and a demonstration that the right-wing blogs aren’t much more effective than the left-wing blogs when it comes to Capitol Hill.

Intriguingly, Shadegg dropped out after the first ballot, throwing his support to Boehner. Thanks for campaigning for him, bloggers: looks like he was basically playing kingmaker rather than really running. You could view that as a win in that he’ll have a chunk of influence, I suppose.

Boehner is the guy who handed out campaign checks from the tobacco industry on the House floor in 1995. I’m sure he’s gotten a lot more serious about reform since then, of course. He’s only got… 14 former staffers working as lobbyists, which is almost three times as many as both Blunt and Shadegg combined.

Moreau

Bush said we shouldn’t make man/animal hybrids; like a lot of people, I was wondering what he meant. I was pretty sure there was some kind of scientific research going on that involved gene therapy, possibly stem cells. It smelled like something prompted by the religious right.

Yep.