Ungi (2011)
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: art, monsters, Shaver 2 CommentsMonths ago I finished this ink drawing of an ‘ungi’ and never got around to looking at it or scanning it until now. This is a creature Richard Shaver described as having lived on Venus at some time in the distant past in the story, “Gods of Venus” in the March 1948 issue of Amazing Stories.
If I remember right, the ungi was described as a predator with rubbery skin, a bloated body, flexible legs and a mean disposition. The feet were said to be hairy and able to ‘grip things like a fly’ — which somehow made me imagine them being like hairy suction cups. My drawing was based on the drawings from the original story by an illustrator named Rod Ruth. I don’t know much about Ruth other than that he did a lot of illustrations for Amazing Stories and similar magazines that I like a great deal.
Maximalism
Posted: August 7, 2011 Filed under: art, wierd stuff 5 Comments
A sad day. I found out ‘maximalism,’ as a word, has already existed and was used as a negative term for novels by Pynchon and David Foster Wallace by some tight assed English guy. Here I thought a friend of mine and I had invented the term years ago while we were bullshitting about an art exhibit where every sense of the visitor would be employed… i.e.: you would simultaneously smell a rotting carcass, look at a painting or photo or video, listen to someone pounding on a sheet of metal with a live cat as someone else beat you on the ass with a hairbrush as you ate gummy worms dipped in yoghurt and hot sauce — smell, touch, taste, sight and sound all rolled into one motherfucking brain beating experience. Add strobe lights and a fog machine. Guaranteed to turn your brain to shit from over stimulation. Turns out some writer beat us to the punch.
Let that be a lesson to me. Never hesitate to pull the trigger and get it documented as soon as possible.
I was going to use ‘maximalism’ as the title for a comic book I was working on — a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of art school pretensions and too many hours in art history lectures. Now I find out it is old hat.
Baboons with pet dogs
Posted: August 5, 2011 Filed under: wierd stuff 6 CommentsBaboons kidnap the puppies of feral dogs and raise them as family members so the dogs can help guard the baboons.
Un-freaking-believable.
Black Spiderman
Posted: August 5, 2011 Filed under: comics 5 Comments
I can tell you when I stopped reading comics with superheroes in them. I had finished the 8th grade and was getting ready to go to high school and I gave my comic book collection to a friend. In retrospect, I regret the decision to give the comic books away, but I don’t really miss superhero comics. But it would be nice to still have all those comic books.
Spiderman was never one of my favorite comics. I used to complain that Peter Parker always seemed too ‘whiny’… and everyone (his boss, his girlfriend and everyone else) was always shitting on him. The Superman/Clark Kent thing was, of course, totally unbelievable, but I think I accepted the Superman/Clark Kent thing because a)it seemed so silly that having Clark Kent take off his glasses and allowing a ‘kiss curl’ to fall over his forehead would so completely change his appearance, and b) from what I remember, Superman took place in “Leave-it-to-Beaver-land” where everything was all rainbows and unicorns until Mr. Mxpxylyx or Bizzarro showed up… my expectations for realism hadn’t been ratcheted up the way they were when I was reading Spiderman and being treated to Peter Parker worrying about paying his rent or picking up his dry cleaning or agonizing over whether or not his girlfriend loved him. Besides, “Clark Kent” wasn’t Superman’s “real” identity… Superman was his real identity… he only pretended to be milquetoast Clark Kent so he could hang with the earthlings. The problem with Spiderman (at least from my perspective in ~1978) was that Peter Parker’s life was too much of a soap opera.
Fast forward to 2011. I’m still not reading superhero comics. I don’t have anything against them; I’m just not interested. Recently, people have gotten into an uproar over the fact that there is a ‘new’ Spiderman and he is not Caucasian; he is a mixed race Latino/Black guy. Peter Parker apparently died and somehow this new guy stepped in to replace him. But all of this happened in some ‘parallel universe’… so in another universe, Peter Parker is alive and well (and probably old enough to join AARP). Now ‘another universe’ seems about as cheesy as the stories that end with “…and it was all just a dream,” but it’s a comic book so I accept that this kind of shenanigans goes with the territory. But the new race of Spiderman’s civilian alter-ego in another universe has some people pissed off. “Yet more PC bullshit,” they claim. Glenn Beck somehow manages to blame it on Michelle Obama…
I was initially confused because there was a Spiderman movie that I didn’t see where Spiderman wore a black costume… and when I started hearing that people were complaining about a ‘black’ Spiderman, I didn’t know they were upset about the race of the guy under the mask… I assumed he was the same Peter Parker worried about his Aunt May and wondering if he should tell MJ about his secret identity and the flap was over the color of his costume. Then I found out that the ‘black’ they were complaining about was race.
I don’t think I’ve bought a Superhero comic in 30+ years… so I don’t feel like I have a horse in this race… but it occurs to me that many of the people complaining in public about the change in Spiderman’s race probably haven’t read a comic book in 30 years either… so I guess I’m having trouble seeing why they think this is a problem they need to complain about (especially since, as far as I can tell, there is still a ‘white’ Spiderman in one of the many universes that they can cling to — I don’t know which one is supposed to be the ‘real’ universe, but, technically, I suppose one could argue that not every Peter Parker is dead and at least one Spiderman is still white under his mask…). I don’t know why the new Spiderman is of mixed race… but for young kids growing up now, maybe a white Spiderman who still works for a ‘Newspaper’ (whatever that is) doesn’t seem very interesting… maybe they don’t want their parent’s old and boring Spiderman who probably watches Leno and uses ‘Sweet & Low’ in his Nescafe.
My ‘spiderlore‘ is probably lacking, but I think Spiderman first arrived on the scene in the 60s (edit: Wikipedia says Spiderman first appeared in1962). By the time I started reading him, the ordinary people in the comic books were not still driving Ford Fairlanes or listening to Do-Wop records… and Peter Parker probably eventually got an iPod and a digital camera so he could email in his assignments at “The Daily Bugle.” The details didn’t stay ‘trapped in amber’ (although, clearly, time did not move at the same rate in comic book land — how many decades was Peter Parker a 20 something?). But I don’t know why, as someone who has not kept pace with Spiderman, my opinion about what happens to the character in 2011 or 2012 should matter. I suspect the original ‘Peter Parker’ character was created in order to seem sympathetic to whomever Marvel thought their readers might have been when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko originally created the Spiderman superhero. Obviously, a lot of time has passed since Spidey first showed up, so it should not surprise us that the idea of who might be a good / interesting / sympathetic comic book superhero might have changed as well.
And, really, fuck it, why not?
Dragons always have big piles of loot…
Posted: August 3, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 5 Comments
The idea of dragons having big piles of loot seems pretty much a given in the fantasy genre… but the only ‘dragons with loot‘ stories that I can think of are Fafnir from the tale of Sigurd from Norse mythology and Smaug from “The Hobbit.” I’m unclear if Fafnir from the Norse saga qualifies since in some versions I think he is actually a dwarf who has somehow transformed himself into a dragon in order to guard the gold.
As I recall, Saint George killed a dragon that was living near a pool of water that was a water source for a city and thereby extorting maidens as food from the locals, but in the case of the St. George & Dragon story, I’m not clear on if the dragon was ‘guarding’ the water or just happened to be living near it and the locals were tossing it maidens because the dragon demanded them or just to distract it long enough to fill a couple of buckets. I guess if it was a town in the desert, water could be seen as a treasure, but I’m not quite ready to give players XP every time they fill up their water skins. It’s been years since I read the St. George story, but I don’t recall getting the impression that the dragon in it was particularly ‘human’ in it’s thinking (unlike Smaug).
Are there other ‘dragons guarding treasure’ that I am just not thinking of? I know dragons are quite popular in Asian folklore, but I don’t know much about the folklore of the far east and how dragons behave in the old stories from Japan, China, etc.
Who needs more stuff?
Posted: August 3, 2011 Filed under: OSR, philosophy, publishing 1 Comment
My S.O. and I have been discussing getting another freezer for food storage — we are putting away vegetables from the garden for winter consumption. I have a spot for the new freezer chest in our ‘junk room’ but she will have to clear out a shelf of her books to make room for it. This, coupled with a few other home improvement projects that usually start with me trying to clear out the space in which the project takes place, makes me realize how much crap we own. It is a fucking nightmare.
I don’t think I’m a hoarder. I’m just often too lazy to make a decision about whether or not I ‘need’ something anymore — so I stuff it in a closet or stick it on a shelf and forget about it.
Inevitably, this leads to thoughts of, “If, by my own admission, I have too much stuff, why would I want to make more stuff?” And when I say “make more stuff,” I am thinking about making all of the books, drawings, paintings, etc., that I find myself involved in either as the primary creator or as a contributor. Variations on the theme of, “We already have more games/adventures/source materials/etc., than anyone can possibly use, so there is no point in making more,” seems to roll through the blog community or OSR discussion with the same regularity as the tide. And many who voice this criticism often share a single point: Who needs a clone when we still have the original?
Limited storage space aside, I think many people like making stuff. Not everyone has the same degree of creative drive and ambition; a few people might love a certain edition of a rulebook and want to make a few small changes, or rewrite things that they felt could have been more clearly stated. Everyone seems to be using computers and the internet to do this, so print-on-demand and .pdf have made publishing easy and cheap. Editing a text document on a computer and saving the changes is easy. Back when Gary Gygax was putting together Original D&D boxed sets in his basement, everything had to be typed up on a typewriter, then pasted out by hand, taken to the printers, folded, bound, etc. Expensive and time consuming. If you found a typo on page 4 sometime late in the game, more than likely you just said, “Fuck it — the readers will be houseruling the shit out of this anyway...” rather than redoing it.
I enjoy the creative enterprise (both on my own and in collaboration). Since most of the OSR producers are doing this for the joy of it, they don’t really need to spend all of their time worrying about, “What will the overwhelming number of consumers buy in order to make my OSR publishing venture as profitable as possible?” I suspect if OSR producers were really out to chase the dollar, they wouldn’t be in the OSR game anyway — more money is to be made creating the next ‘Angry Birds’ app or selling groups of ‘Potemkin’ followers on Twitter. When I look at many of the more ‘mainstream’ products on the game store shelves from the bigger companies like WOTC, I don’t feel tempted. I put a little bit of money in my pocket creating illustrations for a small number of publishers who are willing to pay me for my work, but it isn’t enough to live on… I have to do a lot of other things to make ends (barely) meet.
Let’s get something straight right now…
Posted: August 2, 2011 Filed under: bitching, misc, politics 2 CommentsOpen letter to the US media: I refuse to accept that ‘potential’ or ‘possible’ presidential candidates are worthy of my attention. Someone is either a candidate or they are not. Do not enable ‘media-whorism’ or public displays of narcissism on the part of has beens, almost weres, also rans and book-deal chasers.
“Are you a candidate?” should have only two possible and very simple answers (‘Yes‘ and ‘No‘). If a ‘potential’ refuses to answer those questions, do not report on him/her until he/she gives a straight answer.