Generally, I am not too thrilled about the proliferation of government agencies. The FVZA, however, is the sort of thing we need much more of. Good work, men.
Population: One
I’m very sad to hear that Hogshead Publishing is going out of business. It’s not that they’re bankrupt or any such; apparently it’s just not fun any more, and I can certainly understand that. Still a shame.
Hogshead and its founder James Wallis have provided high quality gaming for the last decade. They started out as the holders of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG license. WFRPG has been an important alternative to D&D in the fantasy RPG genre in both mechanics and style. I believe the prestige class system in D&D 3E owes a lot to Warhammer’s career system, and the Warhammer world beats 7th Sea all hollow as far as alternate Europes go.
Hogshead also published the tremendously influential New Style line, which deliberately broke expectations of what an RPG was. I wouldn’t count all the New Style games as successes, but the line was bookmarked by Baron Munchausen and De Profundis and those two alone would make the New Style line important to the industry.
As if that wasn’t enough, Hogshead recently rescued Noblis from the abyss, republishing it in a beautiful coffee-table edition which raises the bar for RPG layout and design. Simply lovely stuff. (Fortunately, Guardians of Order will be picking up the Nobilis line with the full cooperation of the author.)
Hogshead, you’ll be missed.
Inspired by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I present shrpshr.html, a global filter plugin useful for mockery and little else.
Sound Bites was a very good breakfast, but the memory is somewhat tainted by the tainted pizza I had for dinner. I liked their mashed potatoes, and I liked the corned beef hash very much, but I will probably not go for the poached eggs again just in case they were at fault.
I have a mini-essay about the necessity to rethink the way governments interact with relevant non-governmental organizations, which I will write when I am feeling somewhat better.
n o w h e r e g i r l is a pretty tasty online comic. The protagonist is perhaps a little whiny, but the art is just lovely.
One of the annoying things about being a wrestling fan is the difficulty of watching the classics. Wrestling is meant to be entertainment, right? What kind of entertainment makes it so difficult to see the old stuff? (Well, comics, but that’s another rant.) There are just insane amounts of really good footage locked up in Vince McMahon’s vaults, and most of it never emerges. Here and there a Ric Flair match, here and there some old Hogan stuff, but never any classic wrestling for the sake of classic wrestling.
That makes this really exciting. Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling (later UWF) was very good stuff, and now his ex-wife is making videotapes available online. Not just “best of” or “wrestler we think you should like.” The whole damned thing. 93 Mid-South house show tapes. 101 Mid-South TV tapes. More to come. Wow.
The author of the infamous “The Eye of Argon” has been found.
Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smoldering soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones.
That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Nortec Collective looks just amazingly cool. Traditional Mexican music, some of which is itself an appropriation of German polka styling, filtered through electronica sensibilities? With wrestling? Check ‘em out on your favorite music-swapping network today, cause they love that. There’s also a record label. Neat.
It really pleases me to see the WWE TV writers working on the WWE’s press releases. That’s just a hugely impressive document. It starts out pretty sane, discussing some WWF strongarm tactics, but around about the third paragraph it takes a sharp left into a very odd place.
“The demand was contained in a letter sent by a Mr. Michael Rogers, an English Barrister who has resided in Switzerland for 30 years and who holds no Swiss license to practice law. Rogers is held out to be the Fund’s ‘Legal Advisor.’”
From there the press release just goes for broke:
“‘Today, according to public records, he [Rogers] is the only authorized Switzerland representative for an entity known as “The Gaia Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action”, a phony environmental fundraising scheme reportedly under the influence and control of Tvind, a shadowy international syndicate under investigation around the world, whose leaders are sitting in a Danish jail. In between, Rogers was involved, in the mid-1980s, in establishing an Islamic charity known as Dar Al Maal Al Islam or DMI, which is being named in numerous lawsuits after the events of September 11, 2001, as one of the principal vehicles used to funnel Saudi money to fund the Al-Quaida terrorists. Further investigations are underway.’”
Links are mine. The absence of any linkage showing any connection between Michael Rogers and Dar Al Maal Al Islam (which should be, I think, Dar al-Mal al-Islami) is due to the fact that, well, I couldn’t find any.
Still, just a classic press release. It’s not often that you see the losing party in a lawsuit come out of the corner with that much aggression.
I picked up the Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys DVD last week, and watched it over the weekend. I’d managed to miss it in the theaters, since although Jodie Foster is a strong selling point for me, Todd McFarlane is not. However, after watching Igby Goes Down I was pretty pleased at the thought of watching Kieran Culkin again.
Not a bad little movie. Not great — it probably overreaches at the end, in terms of plot — but pretty good. The core of the movie is the nature of teenage desire and ennui, and if you forgive the twist at the end you won’t have much to complain about. I think the actors did a great job of nailing the complexity of first love, teenage sexuality, and the sheer boredom that leads one to be a complete idiot.
Despite the title, it’s not really terribly important that the kids go to Catholic school. I gather it’s a semi-autobiographical story, which explains that choice. The animated sequences, on the other hand, are pretty important. It’s not that they reveal anything very surprising about the way the kids think of themselves, and they certainly don’t reshape any of the plot. They do, however, provide the movie with a propulsive sense of action which I think distinguishes it from a lot of indie coming of age flicks. The animation ruthlessly strips away sentimentalism, because it’s so cheesy and in places tawdry.
Definitely worth owning, for me.