In light of McCain’s taking of the State of South Carolina, the nail in the coffin of the Straight Talk Express in 2000, I predict there will be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments today on conservative talk radio today. Listeners will get both barrels of the “McCain is a leftist” rhetoric that seems to dominate the right-leaning airwaves these days. I expect any day now for the words “Manchurian candidate” to be spoken into the Golden EIB microphone as a last ditch effort to put the Deseretian Candidate into the pole position.
I just commented elsewhere that, unless Diebold is already fudging the results, I still can’t figure how Romney has managed to steamroller Giuliani so badly. They’ve both flip-flopped on the same issues, and, out here in non-LDS red-state flyoverland, Giuliani had a heckuva lot more name recognition that the Mittster. Heck, I’ve always been something of a political junkie (the run for the White House being my Superbowl), and I couldn’t have told you what Romney looks like until 2007.
Perhaps the libs are right and a goodly number of conservatives do actually take their marching orders from Talk Radio. That is the only way I can figure that one out.
As a reluctant, yet loyal, GOPer, I think the water-boarders water-carriers of talk radio need to stop bashing McCain and start getting those folks in the states that have open primaries to vote Hillary. That way, when the Republican delegates send up the fumata bianca for McRomney, he will be more likely to be facing the Queen of Shrill rather than the man who pwns charisma. Of course, the way that Obama seems to be rolling now, all the GOPs horses and all the GOPs men couldn’t put her flagging campagin together again. Otherwise, when old, gray McCain or Hairplug Romney crosses foils with Obama in a televised debate, it will be Kennedy-Nixon all over again.
Of course, I have to hand it to Obama, it appears he has single-handedly (or double-handedly if you want to take into account Kennedy endorsement of his fellow son of Erin, Barry O’Bama) been able to accomplish what the entire Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been able to achieve: keeping the Clintons the hell out of the White House.
But, then again, maybe all of my fellow Americans will wake up this morning, swallow the red pill, step on board the Good Ship Nebuchadnezzar and vote for Ron Paul.
Filed under: Gaming, topographic tuesday | Tags: Gaming, topographic tuesday
Before I started blogging, most of my online time was spent MUSHing. I sampled a little bit of everything: Elendor, Narnia, Dune, WoD, and Star Wars, but the crème de la crème of Mult-User Shared Hallucinations was Aether.
It was a fantasy MUSH, but it wasn’t your standard “my elves are different” D&D/Tolkien dime-a-dozen ripoff (can we say “Wheel of Time”?). Based on several world mythologies, Aether was a world inhabited by four major races, each representing one of the four elements. Associated with the element of Air, the Empyreans were winged folk whose culture was Greco-Roman in flavor. Grounded in the element of Earth, the Sylvans were Fae-American-Indians. The element of Fire was represented by the Varati, who were a stout sturdy race with a strong Indo-Persian flavor. And the Atlanteans were associated with the element of water.
Although the game eventually spread throughout the continent, play was mostly focused on the city of Haven, a Classical Casablanca in which the four races could trade, interact, and intrigue.
My first character was an Empyrean named Argivus. He was a Hound, a member of the local multi-national gendarmerie charged with keeping peace among the four races. My second, and favorite, was another Empyrean, Aeneas Titus Acesian, a Praetorian Guard from a patrician family known for his patriotism (some would call it xenophobia and racism), honor, and arrogance. I eventually sampled a couple of other races, but as a Romaphile, the Empies were my favorite.
My description of Aeneas:
Aeneas is a tall, slender man of Empyreal descent. He has gray eyes, a light olive complexion that has been bronzed from exposure to hours of gliding under the Aether sun, and the lean muscular physique of a marathon runner. His stark white hair is cropped short, much shorter than Empyrean fashion dictates for its young noblemen. His face is clean-shaven and mounted with a sharp patrician nose. The face is marred by a single fleshy scar that runs across his right cheek. While his lips are quite thin and pale, his jaw is rigid and square, almost box-like. A gargantuan pair of wings sprout from the optio’s shoulder blades. While the feathers exhibit some wear, this does not diminish from the handsomeness of the snowy plumage. The mere presence of the wings seems to stiffen the man’s spine and give him a ramrod straight posture. His hands bear the typical graceful, almost effeminate, attractiveness of his race, but they also bear heavy calluses, the likes of which one would expect to see on some mongrel dockhand.
He is dressed in the uniform of a Praetorian Optio. Clutched in the crook of his left arm is a gleaming hawk-crested bronze helmet. In addition to the thick brown chlamys draped over his left shoulder, Aeneas wears a short bronze muscular cuirass, which has been stamped with the image of the dual-profile of Janus, the two-faced god. Several pteruges made of soft leather hang from beneath his armor to shield his groin area. Over his armor and a dull white short-sleeved wool tunic he wears an ornamented cingulum that loops around his waist and over his right shoulder. This baldric suspends a simple ivory-handled gladius and a pugio, a utility knife that seems almost too short to be used as a weapon. Muscular legs that seem to have marched as much as those of any Velite are protected by plain infantryman’s greaves. There is a molded crater in his right thigh – the souvenir of a Varati javelin that some Aesculapian had thought better to dig out rather than pull through. Beneath the calf armor, he wears a pair of sturdy but heavily-worn hobnailed caligae on his feet.
I’ve posted my praises for the damn thing a-plenty, but considering that the 23rd of this month would have been the old girl’s tenth anniversary, I thought the least I could do would be to post a map of the place I spent a goodly number of my Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
Happy Birthday Aether.
Since it’s Sunday and it’s been a long time since I’ve made a religious post, I will do so now. Sort of. Adherents.com has made a study of the religion of comic book characters. Ole John Wesley scored Francine Peters-Silver, Amanda Waller, Sylvia Danvers, Superboy, Atoman, Church Mice, Supergirl, and Superman. Granted, I didn’t know who over half of these folks were, but it’s nice to know there’s a few folks in Metropolis who follow the Book of Discipline.
Links:
Checking my blogroll, I found that on Saturday, the 19th, the Evil DM mentioned the most anticipated role playing game ever (at least on Planet Pithhelmet): Mission: Adventure!.
Mission Adventure
One of the guys looking over LoS is really pushing me to try writing “Mission: Adventure!” with the LoS rules-set rather than the FASERIP (Aka: four-color) system. He makes a good argument, since I have a system engine in place why use a different one? The LoS engine was primarily built around a low tech campaign, all I need to do is develop firearm, and vehicle rules, swap out magic for Psionics, and add some more contemporary skills.
One of the works that the Evil DM has listed as inspiration for Mission: Adventure! is Challengers of the Unknown, a comic book about a team of “non-super powered … heroes.”
Imagine the A-Team sans the Mini-14s that are sorely in need of some sight adjustment trapped in every episode of The X-Files or, better yet, picture Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and the Storm kids without their superpowers fighting every Jack Kirby monster that DC Comics could throw their way, and you have Challengers of The Unknown. If these four panels don’t look straight off of Adventure Team Joe boxes, I don’t know what does.
The four Challengers are pilot Kyle “Ace” Morgan (can we say, “Air Adventurer”?), mountain-climbing daredevil Matthew “Red” Ryan (sounds like a Land Adventurer to me), dim-witted Olympian and griz wrestler Leslie “Rocky” Davis (I’d call him a Man of Action), and oceanographer and former Navy frogman Walter Mark “Prof” Haley (Sea Adventurer anyone?).
Debuting in DC Comics’ Showcase #6, two years almost to the day before the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, and Buddy Holly’s pilot fatally ditched his Beechcraft Bonanza in an Iowa cornfield, the four adventurers decide to band together after miraculously walking away without a scratch from their own plane crash. Choosing the hourglass as their logo as a sort of momento mori, the quartet are soon facing challenges, both superscienctific and supernatural, battling everything from evil geniuses to genies.
There is an excellent fan site located at http://www.challengersoftheunknown.com. The cutaway diagram of Challenger Mountain alone, the team’s subterranean HQ which looks like something for which Nick Fury did the interior design, would make an excellent source for a Mission: Adventure! or even a Gamma World game.
Cleaning out my father’s closet, I found a Bachmann HO gauge Union Pacific starter train set that he had, no doubt, intended to give my son. While it is possible that he was waiting until the boy was older to give it to him, I was so overwhelmed by the gift my dad bought and never got the chance to give that I went ahead and gave it to him and told him who it was from.
My son was so elated that he had a new “controller train,” he was dancing around, giggling giddily.
To commemorate this event, this week’s Topographic Tuesday will be a few
maps of the Island of Sodor, the fictional island on which the Rev. W. Awdry’s Railway Series takes place.
My son was first introduced to and become hooked on Thomas The Tank Engine at the local Books-A-Million. Thanks to Books-A-Million’s in-store Thomas the Tank Engine play area, I, and thousands of parents like me, have spent thousands of dollars on Thomas toys, clothes, VHS tapes, DVDs, etc.
The first map of Awdry’s world was drawn in 1949, when Thomas’ branch-line from Knapford to Ffarquhar was drawn, along with the connecting line to Tidmouth.
However, the advent of Google Earth gave us this fan-created (Jim Gratton) Google Earth map of the Island.
But, the one from HIT Entertainment is the most easily recognized of the lot.
BTW, all of these images came from The Real Lives of Thomas The Tank Engine: A Railway Series Reader.
Filed under: Uncategorized
h/t James Groman
Sylvester Stallone appeared (by phone) on Friday’s Glenn Beck Show discussing the new Rambo movie.
You know, it’s really am an act of attrition. Nobody wanted to make Rambo just like nobody wanted to make Rocky because the whole business paradigm has changed so much that it’s all about use films and concept films and Rambo’s considered low concept compared to what’s happening today. And luckily there is a man named Javy Lerner of New Image Films, said “Let’s give it a shot.” I said we’ve got to find something pertinent to write about. So I wrote a story about Mexico and MS-13 and let’s go into that area. I thought that would be kind of intriguing like a modern day western. I thought that’s a little too close to home and I don’t know if that’s going to be around the world. So then I called Soldier of Fortune magazine and certain individuals and said where is the most egregious display of human right violations on the planet? They said, Burma, and no one knows about it because the Chinese and the Burmese spend millions of dollars a year with Washington and lobbyists to suppress what’s going on. So I investigated and it almost simplified it. It’s like The Magnificent Seven. You have a group of small peasant being overwhelmed by the second largest Army in the Far East and they’ve held on for 60 years, Glenn, and they are hanging on by their nails and they have these missionaries, these Christian workers, from Oklahoma, Chicago, bus drivers, policemen, they pool their money together, they go and they bring medicine and Bibles and I thought, I could create a story around this, of Rambo being this atheist and he’s a boatman going up and down the river and he’s the only way they can get into Burma down the river and then the adventure begins. His story begins, a man completely pessimistic about a man who spent his entire life up to his waist in blood and realizes war is natural; peace is an accident.
Magnificent Seven? I doubt very much it’ll be John Sturges, and it certainly won’t be Kurosawa, but the whole Burma story and the comparison to the Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai peasants may have just sold me my very first ticket to a Rambo movie.
However, rather than comparing the new Rambo to either of those films, Beck compared Stallone’s synopsis to another classic:
I don’t know — I don’t mean this in a bad way. It’s almost like Father Goose. I kind of got the Cary Grant image of, jeez, you’re on the boat and you are kind of going and you’re going against your will. Kind of?
Licorice Nazgul
(I forget for whom the hat tips)
And people say I have to much time on my hands. Oh yeah, at least I never had the time to build a diorama of the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of The King using nothing but candy.
When I was growing up, one of the cool places to go was the local abandoned Nike base. I only visited a handful of times. After all, the place was allegedly the haunt of devil worshippers, and, even more frightening, drunk redneck jocks in pickup trucks. But, I remember even then thinking what an excellent place to LARP (live-action roleplay) a game of Gamma World. Of course, you have to remember this was long before the term “LARP” was invented, and the whole LARP notion was kind of frowned upon thanks to the hype generated by Rona Jaffe’s Mazes & Monsters, William Dear’s The Dungeon Master, and Mecha-Shiva-like juggernaut that was formed when local concerned parents joined together ag’in’ something.
I recently ran across Ed’s Nike Missle Web Site: an excellent resource for Nike base information. In addition to numerous photos, stories, and technical data, Ed also includes a PDF of the old T-1 Field Manual and a scanned copy of The Martin Company’s Missle Master brochure. One of my favorite pictures on the site, a Nike missleman with a Ranger tab, comes from that brochure (captioning courtesy of Yours Truly).
In tip-top running condition, a Nike base would make an excellent setting for a Mission: Adventure! game, or, after a GM replaces the Nike missles with bio-/nano-/cyber-weapons, substitutes the RC Cola drink machines with Star Trek-style food replicators, and adds the wear-and-tear of a half-dozen centuries of abandonment, it would make a great setting for that aforementioned Gamma World game.
Over the last six years, I have grown more and more disgusted by my fellow Republicans, specifically the CTUnuchs, those guys who spend their Monday nights hetero-man-crushing on Kiefer Sutherland and grooming their entire world view during that hour. This phenomenon is so commonplace that it has infected all of the biggies of talk radio (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, etc.).
Now, I’m a big fan of Glenn Beck. He’s a funny guy, and I tend to agree with about 99.9% of that which he speaks into his microphone. I even own both his books. But while listening to January 15’s show, I was so disgusted, I could have easily mashed the Diebold button for “Mike Gravel” in protest.
Glenn and crew (“crew” being Stu and a guy named “Dom”) were yucking it up about the practice of waterboarding, and someone suggested that they actually have someone undergo the procedure
Glenn suggested, “We need to find somebody who is willing to be water boarded by professionals and show if it’s torture or not.”
When it was suggested that Executive Producer, Head Writer and longtime water-boarding advocate Steve “Stu” Burguiere submit to the practice, Stu suffered a grande mal Freudian slip. After years of saying that water-boarding isn’t torture, when it was suggested that he have a go at it, he immediately squawked, “No, I’m not going to be tortured.”
Quickly Glenn echoed Stu’s previously stated belief, “It’s not torture.” Realizing how busted he was, Stu corrected himself, “Oh, that’s right, it’s not torture..”
The banter continued until finally Stu exhibited one of the most blatant acts of mealy-mouthedness since Laird Arlen Specter exhumed the phrase “not proved” from the hoary annals of Scots law.
GLENN: Wait a minute, you are the one that’s been telling me beat the drum, waterboarding’s not torture.
STU: I would say that’s true, you are accurate. I don’t want to be interrogated. How about that.
Later, after the other guys had moved on, Stu made a poor attempt to save face, “I should make my position clear here. I’m not for torturing average citizens. I’m thinking for waterboarding and maybe worse with terrorists. This is the one distinction you are missing here.”
Why doesn’t he just fess up and say, “The thought of immobilizing a person on his or her back, with the head inclined downward, and pouring water over the face and into the breathing passages never really bothered me until I thought it could happen to me.”
Rather than listen to folks who actually have endured water-boarding, like John McCain and Malcolm Nance, or look at legal precedent, like the case in which the United States prosecuted Japanese officer Yukio Asano for water-boarding and other acts of “interrogation,” folks like Stu, and Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani would rather look to the Jack Bauer Movement for guidance.
Defenders of water-boarding and other torture often suggest that banning torture would put our troops in danger of prosecution for doing their duty. What about those servicemen like McCain and Nance who recognize the practice for what it is? The last time I checked, the only orders that a soldier, sailor, airmen or marine can legally disobey are illegal ones. By making no prohibitions against water-boarding, we are setting these soldiers with a conscience up for courts martial.
But then again, the real warriors against terror don’t get the ratings that Kiefer Sutherland does.
Today’s Topographic Tuesday features the exterior map of the TSR Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module S2, better known as White Plume Mountain.
The “S” series were “special,” stand-alone, thinking-man’s adventures that could also be used as part of an existing campaign. The series included probably my favorite dungeon, S1 – Tomb of Horrors, and my least favorite S3 – Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. These adventures are meant to be especially challenging and unique in the canon of early, first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons products.
S2 – White Plume Mountain was written by Lawrence Schick, and it hinges on recovering three artifact weapons from the evil wizard Keraptis: a trident named “Wave,” a war hammer named “Whelm,” and a soul-sucking sword named “Blackrazor.”
If I remember correctly from when my Lawful Good fighter, Ulric, went through, the party is dispatched by the rightful owners of the three weapons. However, Ulric, like pretty much everyone I’ve known that has gone through it since, couldn’t resist the temptation of owning that Stormbringer replica.
