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 (original). The final segment was our usual characters, albeit in a situation they didn’t remember after the fact. ...

Clayton Cramer has more comments on Amazon; in fact, he posted my email to him (original) (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 (original). Eric Rudolph. Cramer has a bit of a persecution complex, which is no surprise to anyone who remembers his Usenet days.

White Wolf is suing Sony Pictures over Underworld. Just thought you’d like to know. Anyone read the Nancy Collins story involved?

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.” ...

WISH 63 (original) asks: What kinds of game-related things do you do when you’re not gaming? Do you write journals or fiction, create web-pages, make character images, or indulge in other outside game-related business? If you game regularly face-to-face, do you play by email or chat outside the game? Does your GM give you experience or character rewards for your efforts? And if you don’t do any of these things, what are your reasons for not doing them (disinterest, insufficient time, insufficient interest, etc.)? ...

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 (original). 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.

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. ...

We have a new candidate for the most chilling statement on WMD (original). 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. ...

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.

As per expectations, initial reaction to the first attempt to get more international aid in Iraq was not good. Germany is being negative (original), and Russia is making it clear that they need UN involvement. From one angle, it looks like Russia is making concessions, but note that Russia is implacable about UN approval. They’re letting us know that we can get what we want… if we do it their way. Chirac, unsurprisingly, is on board with Germany and Russia (original). ...