I don’t have anything to post today
Posted: March 2, 2011 Filed under: weird 3 CommentsI’m working on mosaics, trying to fix my laptop and trying not to succumb to the hate. So here is a picture of an old fashioned penis pump to brighten your day:
Zodiac, ‘We explore Dungeons…" etc.
Posted: February 28, 2011 Filed under: OSR, philosophy, weird 2 Comments
First, nods to Al over at ‘Beyond the Black Gate’ for his brilliant Aulde Schoole Gamer’s Zodiac. I’ve just discovered that I am a displacer beast… which explains a lot.
I’m glad to see that my earlier thread on “We don’t explore characters, we explore dungeons,” struck a chord with some, but, again, I am not the originator of that phrase. Someone who calls himself ‘Evreaux’ (sp?) originally posted that over at Dragonsfoot (and I’m not certain if I got the quote 100% right or the original context right — but that isn’t bothering me since I am interested in the way the conversation has developed regardless of the author’s original intent). If the original author wants to contact me and set me straight on how I mangled or misrepresented his ideas I am ready to apologize and issue a full retraction.
On a related note, recently there was this post on a similar subject over at DF (it’s not a very good one so I wouldn’t bother). But as I have continued to read some other people’s response to Evreaux’s (sp?) neat aphorism, I’ve been thinking more on it. My basic premise is that when a half-a-dozen people sit around a table and pretend to be ‘Grizzo the Fighter’ or ‘Pablum the Elf,’ I’m less interested in seeing them reach inside of some ‘character concept’ in order to figure out what to do in a given situation and instead have the players decide for themselves what they might want to do in that situation. One of the great things about ‘rpgs’ is that they can offer a pretty complete range of choices without consequences. If I and my fellow players decide to save the village (or rob and murder the villagers!), at the end of the day no real harm is done, but we can have fun exploring the actions and just ‘seeing what happens.’ One of the phrases I hate hearing around a game table is, “My character wouldn’t do that.” Instead of hearing my fellow players tell me what their pre-determined character concept would make them do, I’d like to see more emphasis on players deciding what they (the players) want to do.
Finally, if you want to send me hatemail, go ahead. But if you want to make it seem like the hatemail is coming from multiple people (rather than just you), using multiple email accounts is probably not enough. Using the same basic syntax and flawed spelling in messages from “different people” makes you look like a pathetic douche with an axe to grind (hint: “patriot” has only one ‘a’ in it). It is also probably best that you not send it all from the same IP address.
Zombie Preparedness?
Posted: January 14, 2011 Filed under: weird, zombies 3 Comments
I’m afraid we are woefully underprepared for any impeding zombie attack. Knowing my interest in undead matters, my S.O. recently forwarded me a link to a blog where someone had done a situation asessment in order to guage their own level of zombie attack preparedness. This, of course, led me to do my own asessment — and I’m afraid I come out woefully unready.
I no longer own any firearms, which is probably a bad thing… but I’m familiar enough with them to know that even a great shot (which I am not) will be unable to hit a zombie in the head with a pistol while running down the street. If I had money to burn (which I don’t), I’d buy an assault rifle/semi-automatic first, and a shotgun second(even a 16 or 20 ga. with a low power field load will make a pumpkin explode like Gallagher, so I’d imagine it would work great on zombies that are 30 feet away). A pistol would be third on my list.
I am, however, well equipped with tools and hand weapons, including a crowbar, baseball bat, various hammers, etc. I think my short handled garden shovel might be a pretty good zombie-fighting tool… you could whack with the flat and I could use a file to give it a blade for decapitation… plus one could always also use it to dig a hole. I also own a chainsaw and even know how to start it.
We live in a single story house with an attached garage and half basement on a dead end street. Unfortunately, there are a lot of windows at ‘zombie crash-through’ height, so unless I had several hours, our house would fill up with the walking dead pretty quickly. The zombie lore I am familiar with is pretty scarce on the utility of dogs in a zombie attack, but we have 2 dogs, one of which is particularly alert and watchful. Most zombie movies have someone getting bitten by a zombie who has, at some point, wandered up behind them, so I’m putting dog ownership in the ‘good’ column. I don’t know if the barking of dogs would attract zombies… a dog was featured in Zack Snyders ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and the zombies in that film showed no interest in it because the zombies only at people… but the Zombie Survival Guide tells a different story.
If I had time, I could probably fortify the house fairly well. I’d probably nail furniture and wood over most of the windows and make the garage our place of ‘last retreat’ where we could use the chainsaw to cut through the roof and retreat to the rooftop and draw the ladder up after us. If I had time, I’d set up a tent on the roof to keep us out of the wind and rain. Although the garage is not the most comfortable place, I would want access to the cars so we could drive through the zombies if we had to (although a Toyota Prius is probably not the best vehicle for plowing through a crowd, it does have a long range on a full tank of gas).
We also are pretty well supplied with food and water. I’d fill the bath tub and the basement utility sink with water for drinking and we could use a bucket in the garage as a toilet. Once the water runs out, we could drink the water from the basement sump (assuming I filter it with my camping water purifier).
We also have a lake in the back yard. If worse came to worse, we could jump into the canoe and paddle out to the middle of the lake. Not the most comfortable place to be, but seeing as the lake is apparently about 80 feet dep at the center, unless the undead can swim we would be safe there.
Blood Libel: Ignorance, stupidity or political doublespeak?
Posted: January 12, 2011 Filed under: politics, stupidity, weird 5 Comments
(image of a ‘Blood Libel’ at right courtesy of a circa 1939 German Nazi newspaper)
In response to criticisms over the gun related metaphors and imagery used by SarahPac and other politically right-leaning pundits, political candidates and media gadflys in light of the Arizon shootings, Sarah Palin has responded with a video in which she stated, “Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”
Her statement is bizarre for so many reasons, and I’ll make no apologies for admitting to my dislike of Palin. For one thing, it seems strange (and ironic) that Palin, who poses as one of the great supporters of the doctrine of personal responsibility, should feel aggreived when someone else gets shot. My own view is that if you encourage someone else to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, people are going to be angry at you if they get injured in the stampede for the exit, whether or not you were one of the ones doing the stampedeing. Using terms like ‘reload’ and ‘second ammendment remedies’ and putting ‘surveyor symbols’ on ‘target’ state representatives is going to be viewed as ‘questionable’ when someone does go out and shoot people. That’s one of the risks of making public statements — they can (and will) come back to bite you in the ass.
But I’m also disturbed by Palin’s use of the term, “Blood Libel.” It apparently dates back to the gospel of Matthew where Matthew reports that the Jews who agitated for Jesus’ execution said, “Let the blood be on our heads.” In the middle ages, ‘Blood Libel’ was used to encourage hatred of Jews and to support the false claim that the Jews used the blood of Christians in secret ceremonies. This reasoning was later picked up by the Nazis and other anti-Semites. So “Blood Libel” has a long (and hideous) history.
Unfortunately, Palin didn’t present her remarks in a historical context, so we don’t really know what she intended to mean by the ‘blood libel’ claim. Was it just an accidental pairing of two words? Given Palin’s fundamentalist christian bent and the wording of the phrase, “manufacture a blood libel,” (rather than something more direct and less biblical in tone, like “commit libel”), that seems unlikely. Is Palin an anti-Semite? It wouldn’t surprise me. Or is the inclusion of the word intended as a double meaning to Palin’s supporters and foes alike? Is she tossing this offhand reference to ‘blood libel’ into the mix in order to stir up the obvious claim of anti-Semitism from her foes so she can once again turn that accusation around and say to her followers, “See? The lamestream media really IS against me! Now they are accusing me of anti-Semitism!”
I’m thinking the latter is a definite possibility.
If you lie to me, why would I trust you?
Posted: November 23, 2010 Filed under: consumer, culture, stupidity, weird Leave a comment
The envelope at the right arrived in my mailbox today. At first glance, it looked like a 1099 of a w-2 form. Since some of the companies I do freelance work for send me 1099s, I normally keep an eye out for them and stash them away for tax time. The big ‘2009’ in the upper right makes it look like a tax document dealing with the year 2009. I also lost my job this year and had to claim unemployment, so all sorts of ‘official’ documents requiring my response end up in my mail.
I ripped open the envelope and discovered that I had been selected for special financing on a new car by a local Ford dealership. I felt that the sender had intentionally tried to make the envelope look like ‘official government correspondence’ and left off the return address in order to increase my chances of opening it (as opposed to printing “We want to sell you a car!” or something similar on the envelope, which , admittedly, would have resulted in the envelope and contents going right into the recycle bin).
As far as sales pitches go, though, this one seems really flawed. The sender attempted to deceive me about the envelope’s contents in order to get me to open it, and, once I had opened it, wanted me to come in and buy a car. I understand that the real goal of the car dealership is to make money by selling cars, but isn’t gaining the trust of the customer important in the process? The thought that immediately occurred to me, once I opened the envelope, was, “Geez, this person lied to me to get me to open this envelope (true, in the scheme of things, a pretty unimportant lie)… and now they want me to trust them to give me a good deal on a car?”
As I tossed the letter into the bin, though, I began to wonder if such a pitch did work… after all, this isn’t the first time I have received a letter that looked like something important and turned out to be a sales pitch (my favorite was one that was printed up to look like a refund check from the IRS… and when you opened the envelope you saw that they were offering you a loan or something). Part of me thinks that deceiving people into listening to you long enough to hear your sales pitch is an asshole thing to do, yet, amazingly, it must work because I keep getting these letters.
Maybe the true ‘seller’ is a breed apart — he or she is someone who can lie to your face to get you to open the envelope, and, once you have opened the envelope, then unashamedly switch tactics and try to get you to buy whatever they are selling, even though I think my reaction should be, “Hey, you just lied to me! Shut the fuck up and leave me alone, you slimeball!” The ‘effective salesperson’ is perhaps someone who is not encumbered by the same degree of shame that the rest of us are handicapped with.
I dare you to post this to your blog…; NSFW
Posted: October 1, 2010 Filed under: art, douchebaggery, monsters, weird 4 Comments
The other day I read this on Raggi’s LotFP blog:
So I’m contacting some artists and actually using the words, “Give me something that will get me arrested for publishing it.”
I am not one of the artists that Raggi contacted, but his challenge touched something in my base nature… and I wanted to see if I could draw something that would get Jim Raggi arrested for publishing it. Several ideas were considered and discarded. Zak S. (of Pornstars fame) submitted a link to a particularly good drawing that involved dildo-wielding midgets with T-pins in their eyes. I decided to consider the gauntlet thrown down and tried to combine things that would make Larry Flynt uncomfortable (for the record, I don’t think I managed to produce something that would make Larry Flynt squirm).
Cannibalism is pretty bad, so I had to put that in… but necrophilia is worse… so why not both? For some reason naked females don’t make most viewers uncomfortable, but seeing men with their dicks hanging out does… so I had to have several dicks in the drawing. But not just men who were naked with flaccid dicks — they had to be naked men sticking their dicks in places where most decent people would think they didn’t belong. Hence a goblin throat-fucking a decapitated human corpse. In retrospect, I should have included pedophilia, but one can’t think of everything. One of the goblins is eating a still living human baby while shitting in the mouth of a severed human head… that ought to count for something.
I finished the drawing and emailed a scan to Raggi, hoping to hear him say, “This will be the cover of my next adventure!” Unfortunately, all I got was:
I dare you to put that on your blog.
Maybe that’ll start one of these meme things I keep hearing about.
That Raggi is all talk.
Unfortunately, even the most casual perusal of art history reveals that all of this stuff has been done before (and usually done better — Goya’s “Saturn devours his Sons“* is so sick and cool). I’ve seen a shitload of medieval woodcuts illustrating “Der Kinderfresser” (The child eater). They even erected a statue of him in Switzerland. Torture and impaling has been well covered, especially in the illustrations of the Catholic Church going to work on the heretics and the Protestant denominations going to work on the witches. Images of rape are as old as pornography. About the only new idea I have is a goblin fucking the throat of a decapitated corpse… but surely I cannot be the first person to think of that?
*Goya apparently put this picture on the wall of his dining room where he and his family ate their meals… which must had lead to some interesting dinner conversations.
Update 12/29/2011: This picture apparently has a cult following now and is being cited as proof’ of my degeneracy and/or genius. I guess that means that as an artist I have finally “arrived.”
