It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
This is the first PITF Index for Season 2 of Heroes, the superhero TV show where people like to punch each other in the face. Really. Go back and watch the first season; there’s an awful lot of face-punching going on.
Therefore, it makes sense to do a weekly recap of who deserves to get punched in the face the most. At least, in our world it does.
Face-punch count: 3, or 2 if you don’t count the face slap. Susan does not.
PITF Index after the cut.
Amazon now has a Print on Demand service. The pricing is a bit more complex than the competition (namely, Lulu), but everything gets an ISBN and you can publish into Amazon. Which is pretty huge.
I don’t think this is a Lulu killer, but it’ll definitely be competition, which hopefully will spur both companies to improve.
There are enough theories about the Broken Maiden to busy a university of scholars for semesters on end, so we will begin with what is known.
Once, the Maiden dwelt in the heavens. At times, during the month, she looked down upon the world with one eye. Other times, all you could see was her white smile curving through the sky. She blessed magicians with her wisdom, and was known to be the patron goddess of jesters.
And then she fell, not more than forty miles from Vain’s Rest. Among the things that are not known is the cause of her fall; we will return to this. The effects of her fall are clearer. There is a crater some miles across, and in the center, her marble body lies, surrounded by earth turned to glass. Her clothing has not decayed since she fell. Nor has her flesh.
The Broken Maiden is the most powerful source of magic known to man. By the term Broken Maiden we mean both the body and the crater that surrounds it. Some theorists would have it that she fell to save us: some mad genius created a magical source so powerful that the Maiden elected to give her own life in order to stifle it to the point where humanity could remain intact. Some theorists, who believe that she fell for some other reason, simply attribute the magical energies that surround the Broken Maiden to the Maiden’s own nature.
Those energies are dangerous. Animals enter the crater from time to time, and are inevitably transmuted. Coming close to the crater is not immediately deadly, but it is a surefire method of changing one’s life. No human lives less than twenty miles from the Broken Maiden. There are edifices much closer, both above and below ground, and many find it worth the trouble to visit them, but few spend more than a week at a time in such pursuits.
Not all of those structures, by the by, were known before the Maiden fell. Some of them seem to have grown from the sands of the desert without the need for human hands.
Vain’s Rest is conveniently located just far enough from the Broken Maiden to be reasonably safe for its inhabitants.
DKM’s Emerald Eyes is up for download. Picoreview: worth reading, a youthful book, author who’s in love with his characters.
Oh, yay, the Weinsteins are investing money in Asian film…
“Titles slated for the fund include… a remake of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950’s epic The Seven Samurai.”
What the hell?
The TIFF Midnight Madness film list is out. It’s always interesting comparing their movies to Fantasia; you don’t generally see movies at both, because (as I understand it) there’s a mild rivalry.
As is generally the case, Toronto got the big names — Romero and Gordon this year. Naturally, Fantasia has more depth in the fantastic film category, given that they screen rather more fantastic films. And, of course, Toronto has a lot of other movies to offer. In my ideal life of the idle rich world, I go to both.
There’s a thread over at rpg.net called “Lost Victoriana,” which is actually about the RPG Victoriana, but it got me thinking about a sort of lost history of the Victorian era — a history of technology that dwarves our own, a world of crystal skyships and sophisticated colonies on the surface of Jupiter. The Queen’s Patrol jousts with philosophical criminals who will toast the Queen despite their anarchic ways. Not a steampunk world at all.
Not sure what I’d do with it.
Not greatly to my surprise, Rowling’s got plans for more Harry Potter stuff. There are some spoilers in the article, but the gist is that she intends to write an encyclopedia containing backstories for some characters, plus details on what happens after Deathly Hallows.
[Game background; not to be taken as literal history.]
It’s 69 AD. The Han Dynasty rules China in the form of the hard-working but sometimes cruel Emperor Ming. He has been emperor for over ten years, and previous to his ascension, he was intimately involved in matters of state. Perhaps this is why he was so diligent and capable.
But there are shadows over his reign. It is well known that Prince Jing plotted to rebel, some years ago, going so far as to employ sorcerers to curse Emperor Ming. The Emperor resolved the issue by forcing Jing to commit suicide, and slew literally ten thousand others who were implicated in the conspiracy. It is whispered that Emperor Ming’s eunuch advisers were responsible for counseling the Emperor to this extreme act, but perhaps it was necessary in order to maintain the Celestial order and the Mandate of Heaven.
Some time after that unfortunate incident, the Emperor’s chief general was sent to hunt down the dangerous rebel known as the Jade Dagger. Much to the surprise of all, Ban Chao never returned from the hunt, and was has in fact been seen many times since cooperating with the Dagger Bandits, as the Jade Dagger’s men are known. Where there was once an annoying but ultimately ineffectual band of rebels, there is now a skilled, well-led fighting force fomenting tumult at the edges of the Empire.
And, finally, China is plagued by demons. While the Emperor’s men have always been successful in defeating demonic incursions, province by province — the eunuchs are rumored to be instrumental in these successes — it yet seems that no man is capable of pushing the demons back for good. For no matter how often they are defeated in any one place, a new infestation arrives in another province soon thereafter.
The Emperor continues to battle these shadows. He has the assets already mentioned; his current general, Guo Xun, is only slightly less formidable than Ban Chao. His twin bodyguards, Lin Bao and Lin Bo, are never-speaking pillars defending him from all harm. He is far from helpless, but he is also far from victory.