Mordecai was my PC for the Doc Lully’s Pulp Heros segment of this session. He was half-human, half-something else, a subject of great angst for him. Of course, he had a noble heart, despite his self-doubts.
Author: Bryant
The next three Dear Brothers are all writeups from one session. Only one of them is by Reese. Rob did the session in three parts. The first was a sideways trip to a pulp world in which we played Doc Lully’s Pulp Heros and explored the Hollow Earth; the second was a flashback to 1968, during which we played the Silver Age Knights of the Road, kin to the Merry Pranksters. The final segment was our usual characters, albeit in a situation they didn’t remember after the fact.
I’ve ambitiously adopted two new voices for the purpose of recounting the first two sessions. If they work half as well as Reese’s voice, I’ll be very pleased.
I’ve gotten my hands on the complaint in the White Wolf vs. Sony case. (Link to complaint back, since they redirected it to another server.) Be warned that there are big fat spoilers for Underworld in the complaint. Some notes, thusly.
The key White Wolf titles are Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Guide to the Camarilla, Guide to the Sabbat, The Book of Nod, Caine’s Chosen: The Black Hand, Under A Blood Red Moon, Children of the Night, Time of Thin Blood, and Transylvania Chronicles One: Dark Tides Rising. And, of course, Nancy Collins’ The Love of Monsters, which is apparently set in the World of Darkness.
There’s an extensive list of similarities between Underworld and various White Wolf titles. I have no doubt the similarities exist, but I think they’re on the same level as the similarities between L.A. Story and When Sally Met Harry. “Hey, the protagonists fell in love! And they live in major American cities!”
Some examples:
56. In the World of Darkness, some vampires are capable of amazing speed. In Underworld, some vampires move with amazing speed.
57. In the World of Darkness, vampires “have the strength of ten men.” In Underworld, vampires “have the strength of ten men.”
71. In the World of Darkness, the history of the vampires is written in an ancient text. In Underworld, the history of the vampires is written in ancient texts.
Cause, you know, histories of ancient secretive races are usually written in modern texts.
There are more specific correspondences, but nothing that doesn’t exist in prior art. White Wolf just doesn’t have the copyright on “tall and lithe” vampire assassins. Even female ones with “a dusky, classical tone to her skin and black hair.”
Clayton Cramer has more comments on Amazon; in fact, he posted my email to him (which is fine by me). I emailed him back, and since I don’t know if he’ll post it, I’ll summarize here.
I think it’s ludicrous to claim that nobody takes Mein Kampf and The Protocols of Zion seriously. (Let alone The Turner Diaries.) It’s not too complicated. Buford Furrow. Michael Ryan. Eric Rudolph.
Cramer has a bit of a persecution complex, which is no surprise to anyone who remembers his Usenet days.
Comic book pick of the week: Scarlet Traces. Ian Edington wrote it, and D’Israeli did the art. The story is a nifty little murder mystery, and the gimmick is that it’s set in England ten years after Wells’ War Of The Worlds.
“The Martians’ unwitting bequest to their would-be slaves was a form of technology as then undreamt of by mankind. Within a decade our brightest minds had unravelled its secrets, their machineries of war and subjugation adapted and assimilated into our everyday usage. The noble steed — our companion and carriage for millenia is replaced by a clockwork toy! Homes are heated and lit by a version of the once-dreaded heat ray. The great mills and factories of the North are now vast, mechanized estates. The British Empire is now truly a world power without peer, but I cannot help but wonder if we have lost something in the process.”
It’s kind of pricy, at $15 for 72 pages of story, but I like the sturdy hardcover format. It actually rather reminds me of Tintin, which I suspect is no coincidence — Edington and D’Israeli use the same regular grid as Herge, and some of the characters have those distinctive accents Herge loved to use.
Plus the world is a completely cool concept. The big panoramic views of London are beautiful; you can see a few of them here. Very striking.
Heads up to all the neocons going on about how Australia’s proven to be a true friend, who will be with us always and us always with them, here’s to the new Anglo-American ruling faction, etc. Australia ain’t sending peacekeepers to Iraq. Hope this doesn’t make anyone’s head spin with the complexities. Helpful hint to said neocons: you can’t always decide what the next ten years of foreign policy are gonna be based on the last six months.
White Wolf is suing Sony Pictures over Underworld. Just thought you’d like to know. Anyone read the Nancy Collins story involved?
Clayton Cramer is fairly unhappy with Amazon because they’re selling a book entitled Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers. It is an apology piece for pedophilia, and I feel pretty comfortable assuming it’s utterly vile.
I also don’t think Amazon should stop selling it, because of their position as a huge bookstore. Cutting off the channels by which a book reaches its readers is not strictly speaking censorship, but it’s a kissing cousin. This will become less of an issue as the Internet becomes a better medium for transmitting information, but at the moment I think a bookstore the size of Amazon still has an obligation to sell books without discrimination, however justified that discrimination might be.
Cramer disagrees.
“If Amazon.com sold a book titled, Fagbashing for Fun and Profit: How to Kill Homosexuals and Get Away With It or 99 Ways to Rape Women and Beat the Rap in Court, I would be just as incensed—and liberals would be hollering for Jeff Bezos’ head on a platter, instead of making excuses for Amazon.com publishing this trash.”
He’s incorrect. Amazon sells The Protocols of Zion, Mein Kampf, and (if you’re feeling like being outraged from the right) The Communist Manifesto.
We have a new candidate for the most chilling statement on WMD. They’ve actually been dancing around this one for a while, but John Bolton just got around to saying it. Here’s the AP lede:
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part because Saddam Hussein retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons, Washington’s top arms control official said Thursday.
In other words, it was justified because Saddam didn’t get rid of the scientists. And here I thought we were unhappy with Saddam’s tendency to kill inconvenient people.
But, OK, let’s be fair. That’s not a direct quote, and it’s completely possible that the Associated Press reporter is being a tad misleading. In fact, if you read the direct quotes from the article, you’ll notice that Bolton is saying that Saddam was keeping the scientists around in order to rebuild WMD programs. It wasn’t just that Saddam let them live, it’s that Saddam kept them around for that specific purpose.
Except that even if you’re that fair, it’s still ludicrous, because now you’re justifying the invasion based on what we think Saddam might have been planning — even though every captured Iraqi scientist and minister has said “Nope, wasn’t anything going on.”
And even if you accept that bit of ludicrousness, it still contradicts the stated justification before the war. In fact, let’s look at Bolton’s November 1, 2002 speech to the Husdon Institute:
“Iraq’s procurement agents are actively working to obtain both weapons-specific and dual-use materials and technologies critical to their rebuilding and expansion efforts, using front companies and whatever illicit means are at hand… It has rebuilt its civilian chemical infrastructure and renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin and VX. It actively maintains all key aspects of its offensive BW [biological weapons] program.”
One more time!
“Whether he possessed them today or four years ago isn’t really the issue,” versus “It has rebuilt its civilian chemical infrastructure and renewed production of chemical warfare agents…”
It’s possible to argue that the invasion was justified for humanitarian reasons. However, the issue is not simply whether or not the invasion was justified. The issue is also whether or not John Bolton lied to us one year ago.
Edward Tufte posted some links to rather striking GIF animations of air traffic patterns over the United States. You can see the waves of FedEx planes taking off from Memphis, for example. He also has a link to an animation of air traffic patterns on 9/11/2001, which is striking in a different way.
It being Tufte’s site, someone’s noted (accurately) the problems with the data presentation.