Note to self: the Miike RPG has six stats, arranged in three pairs. Love/Obsession, Violence/Brutality, and Sex/Possession. I suspect that when I write the game and stick it behind a content warning, that last pair will become something more explicit and raw; “Possession” is a muted form of what I have in mind. I think the rating in each pair remains constant — so you could have 3 dots in Love/Obsession. The question is how you manifest it. ...

“Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.” Mark of the Beast! Mark of the Beast! ...

Possibly it’s time to come to the conclusion that our government is not very good at preventing prisoner abuses. Yes, it happens occasionally, and a single incident doesn’t mean it’s endemic. But when DIA agents are being threatened in order to keep it quiet, and when the FBI is concerned about generally used coercive techniques, there is a clear problem. I manage people for a living. After a certain point, if a given problematic behavior pattern repeats, I figure out what the root cause is and I fix it. I do not say “well, that’s just one incident; it’s bound to happen now and again.” If you don’t think that torture is acceptable, you’ve got to ask why Donald Rumsfeld continues to allow this pattern to persist. And, of course, why George Bush doesn’t correct Rumsfeld’s failure to act. ...

Of interest to some: looks like Grimjack is coming back. Grimjack was John Ostrander’s first major work; he’d go on to write Suicide Squad and Spectre. It’s about a gritty cynical assassin/mercenary/detective living in a city where realities meet; Sigil and Nexus clearly owe the series a significant debt. (Via the Ghoul.)

There was some concern that Harry Reid wouldn’t be a combative Senate Minority Leader. Comes from a red state, so vulnerable to election challenges; moderate; all that stuff. Harry Reid on Clarence Thomas: “I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written. I just don’t think that he’s done a good job as a Supreme Court justice.” He then praised Scalia’s intelligence but said Scalia has some ethics problems. So, yeah, the guy has some cojones. I’m betting he’ll make Frist use the nuclear option (original) if it comes down to it.

If you’re still wondering about the vote in Ohio and the exit polls and so on, you ought to be reading [Keith Olberman](http://web.archive.org/web/20130115011342/http://web.archive.org/web/20130115011342/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6533008/ (original)/) (original). He’s been covering the story non-stop since the election; it’s probably not too overwrought to say he’s staking his credibility on it. He is also being very careful not to wear a tin-foil hat. What’s clear at this point is that the Kerry campaign is very quietly working towards a recount in Ohio. The Libertarian/Green effort is acting, consciously or not, as a stalking horse. Jesse Jackson has come on board to do the heavy rhetorical lifting. A guy named Cliff Arnebeck is about to file (original) a contest of election lawsuit, and he looks like he knows what he’s doing. ...

What’s that, Lassie? There’s a trailer for Carnivale season 2? Well, go get it (original)! (Via Twitch (original).)

In the where are they now department: Lance Mungia, director of the excellent Six-String Samurai, just wrapped up The Crow: Wicked Prayer. It’s got a surprisingly good cast for something that looks like it’ll go straight to video: Edward Furlong isn’t bad, Dennis Hopper is good (and will appear in anything, granted), Danny Trejo is good… and there’s David Boreanaz and Tara Reid for eye candy. And Macy Grey! Hm, and Tito Ortiz (no holds barred martial arts fighter) is in it. But at that point we’re well past “surprisingly good cast,” I think. Still, that’s a lot of fairly real people. ...

“What is there to do on a Friday night in LA?” Go to a trendy Thai restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. Flirt with the waitress, who turns out to be the lead in a new indie film directed by some guy who was discovered three months ago by Stephen Soderberg; she’s waiting to get experience so she can get further into the character. She invites you to an after-hours party thrown by Parker Posey. You get there, with her, but it turns out that Parker Posey lost all her indie cred when she appeared in Blade: Trinity so you and the waitress and a guy you meet at the party who plays bass for the best post-punk melodothrash band in Serbia all take off together in his original VW Beetle and wind up at a permanent floating poker game slash rave run by Wil Wheaton down in Venice Beach. He really digs finding out what you do and you and the waitress and the bass player and a hitchhiking chick who you picked up and who turns out to be an activist poet from Venezula on a speaking tour to raise money for the cause, you all go play some D&D with Wil as the GM. It rocks a lot. You fall asleep in the middle of the game and wake up sometime Saturday in a box at the Staples Center. There’s a cigar on your chest with a note — “You can play a rogue in my game any time, love, Wil!” You smoke the cigar while watching some kind of existential circus preparing for the evening’s show; while wandering out of the building later, you run into Arnold, who is smoking the same kind of cigar. He likes you because of this and offers you a job as an aide, but you turn it down because of moral qualms about the Kennedy family. As you make your way back home, you realize that the cigar was laced with some obscure hallucinogen, or maybe the street really is filled with mimes reenacting the siege of Stalingrad? It’s so hard to tell in LA. Finally you get home, where the waitress is waiting, and she made some soup in a really grounded down home kind of a way and it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will last at least for the rest of the day. Saturday night? Well, that’ll be a completely different story.

“ This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”