It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Bush is ready to hire a lawyer in case he has to testify in the Valerie Plame case. This is quite right; you should be ready to hire a lawyer if you suspect you may be the target of a grand jury investigation. Clinton hired a lawyer, Charles Ruff, during the Whitewater investigation.
Mind you, that came after Ken Starr began his investigation. But if there’s a chance you’re being investigated, it makes sense to be prepared.
Hey, I have my game schedule for The Black Road.
Slot 1: Le Cygne: The Lost Swan of Amber
Slot 2: If You Can’t Take the Heat
Slot 3: Nine Losers in Akron (Amber/Kill Puppies for Satan)
Slot 4: My Life With Corwin (Amber/My Life With Master)
Slot 5: empty
Saturday appears to be my day for Amber-flavored indie games. This should be a whole lot of fun.
The antepentultimate WISH asks:
What are three games or settings that you’ve bought or seen recently (in stores or previews) that you’d really like to try? What interests you about them and why?
Nocturnals from Green Ronin; I like the unique genre niche carved out by the creepy heros, and the sourcebook gives me so many details to play with. Just — cool. Pacific Northwest-feeling monsterpunk.
Dogs in the Vineyard, because I dig the clerical harshness of it all. I’ve played a lot of clerics and I usually enjoy it even though I never do it by choice. Religion in gaming fascinates me.
Hm, and I kind of want to play something really heroic — doesn’t have to be superheroes, could be heroic fantasy or heroic transhuman or whatever. But there’s nothing out there that’s grabbing me. HeroQuest, but that’s not a new release. Charnel Gods (which Rob will be running soon), but that’s not a new release either. Big heroes. Larger than life heroes. Maybe Fireborn? FFG is doing such good setting work these days.
Oh, speaking of which, honorable mention to the Horizon series. Grimm and Spellslinger whet my appetite for gaming something fierce.
Someday I want to read a book on what exactly happened in Iraq last week.
The Iraqi Governing Council chose a Prime Minister, ignoring the UN envoy and the US. Or maybe the US pushed the IGC into doing its bidding. But then the IGC forced the issue and chose a President over the objections of the US and the UN. Adnan Pachachi was offered the Presidency, but turned it down. And now the IGC has dissolved itself a month early.
I think I’m glad in the abstract that Iraqis are asserting themselves, but I don’t know enough about the people involved to have an opinion on whether the decisions they’ve made will lead to greater freedom in Iraq.
In the spirit of Neel Krishnaswami’s recent post on sports games, today’s mashup is Hoosiers. It could be any sports movie, but I happen to like basketball a lot. I guess if you’re a football fan or something it’s OK to break away from the pack and do Any Given Sunday; the Mashup Ninjas will not pay you a visit. This once only.
Hoosiers is a nice simple story. Washed up coach comes to small town with a basketball team and teaches them how to win a championship. (Mostly discipline.) He alienates people with his fancy coaching ways but it turns out that in Indiana, winning is more important than anything else. He also finds love and redeems the town drunk.
Go Liralen! Go Cera! Go Ambar! The Population: Too team has proofread 7,000 pages for Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. That is an awful lot of text and I am deeply pleased to have had a small part in getting such productive proofreaders involved in the project.
If anyone’s interested in proofreading for a good cause, check PGDP out. You only have to do a page at a time, there’s no commitment, it’s really easy, and every little bit helps.
My current favorite piece of gaming slang is “lasersharking.”
“Hey, you know, that game concept would be better if the sharks had lasers on their head.” Lasersharking. Leave the poor concept alone; not all concepts need lasers to reach their full potential.
Rifts is all lasersharking, all the way to the bottom turtle.
The Boston Globe bought the Boston Dirt Dogs. I guess this means that there’s been a truce on one front in the sportswriters vs. fan site war.
If the Chalabi story is true, it’s an incredible intelligence coup for Iran. The short form is that Ahmad Chalabi may have been an Iranian agent for the past several years. If this turns out to be the case, then the information he passed the US — information which helped Bush make the case for war — was generated and shaped by Iranian intelligence needs. That’s an astoundingly impressive piece of work, which may in the end be ranked up there with Eli Cohen.
“Elvis’ entire career was a big mystical ritual, you know. He knew what he wanted to do all the way back in Memphis, and he put his whole life together so that he could pull it off. All those years, all those songs, all those different costumes — why, he was gathering up orgone energy decade after decade after decade. All flavors, too. Fat person orgone energy. Skinny pelvis orgone energy. Wartime orgone energy. All of it flowing into Elvis.
“Then he took that energy and used it to build an exact spiritual duplicate of Graceland in the afterlife. That’s why Graceland looks kind of funny in our world. You know, overdone and all that? It’s really meant to be viewed in the Great Beyond. When Elvis died SNAP his soul went straight to the place he’d been building all those years and he gave it the energy he’d been collecting and it became real.
“Now, this is what’s important. Graceland was designed to be a magnet for dead rock stars. Elvis didn’t cotton to the idea of rock stars getting caught in Hell just because they weren’t good enough for Heaven. You have to know that’s where most of them were bound, especially Elvis’ cousin Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis didn’t like to see anyone go to the bad place, let alone family, let alone fellow musicians. So he fixed that problem.
“Pretty quick all the souls of most of the rock ‘n’ rollers found their way to Afterlife Graceland. Jimmy, Janis, the Bopper, Buddy — all of them, or anyhow most of them. And whenever another rock star dies, there’s a little signpost on the way to Hell and Heaven which says ‘Hey, good buddy, come on over here and look what we got for you.’ Elvis put it up and most folks pay attention to it.”
“A couple of years after Elvis died, he led a raid on Heaven. Jimmy really wanted to jam with Bach, and that’s where Bach was, and Elvis thought Bach might want to come jam with Jimmy and the rest of the bunch. Long story short, it turned out Elvis was right and they got Bach out safe. Now there’s an angel on permanent duty at Graceland to make sure things don’t get out of hand. He’s not too fun to be around but we don’t mind him so much.
“But this is where it starts to get interesting. See, Elvis had one more thing in mind when he made this whole plan of his; there’s one more piece of the puzzle that needs to fit into place before Elvis feels complete. There’s one soul lost to Graceland and that soul is maybe the most important of all. There’s a man in Hell needs to get out as soon as he can, and Elvis intends to make that time come pretty damn quick.
“Tomorrow, Elvis is leading a raid on Hell to free the soul of Robert Johnson.”
PCs are the dead rock stars living in Graceland. Elvis taught everyone kung fu, so the system is Feng Shui. The rest is obvious.