various sundries

CelestiCon 2011

2011-09-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

Just back from CelestiCon, a (relatively) new gaming convention in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was my first year attending and I was mighty impressed by how it turned out. My usual Labor Day weekend gaming con has been PacifiCon, but after some lackluster years that have gotten so bad my face froze in horror, I decided to jump into CelestiCon just as it seemed to expand its presence.

And it was very worth it: CelestiCon ended up being just as good as DunDraCon and KublaCon, simply on a smaller but no less satisfying scale. There were plenty of good RPG games on the schedule, most of whom seemed to be getting filled up with players (something PacifiCon has had more and more of a problem with). Most of my games were played in an executive meeting space, but many were in communal rooms where the noise level got bad, but hopefully there can be more individual game rooms for RPGs in future cons. The dealer's room was tiny in comparison to other Bay Area cons, but I think that was mainly because CelestiCon and PacifiCon were splitting the available dealers between them, and, in talking to one of the dealers, they told me they had done good business. The con food was really bad (the usual fare of hot dogs and hamburgers was incredibly over-priced and somehow always cold), but the hotel was absolutely beautiful (yet the con rate for rooms was somehow the cheapest I've seen for any big Bay Area gaming con). I really wish I had taken photos of all the games and the gorgeous hotel, but the weekend was so jam-packed that it never slowed down long enough for me to do that.

Probably the biggest compliment I can pay CelestiCon is that I had an extremely rare perfect batting average when it came to the games itself. Besides my own game, I played in five games, which is great in itself considering I only played on Saturday and Sunday, and every single one was at the very least an excellent experience if not face-smashing awesome. Even when I was up in the wee hours of the morning operating on too little sleep, there was never a point in any game where I wished I was doing anything else. Outside of Dead of Winter and some smaller and more personal cons, it's been over a year of con gaming that I could really say that about another con.

Götterdämmerung, (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green)

Berlin 1945: With the city surrounded by the Red Army, a lone glider flies into the flames and ruin, carrying a group of Allied agents, haunted veterans on a final mission that will take them from this world at war to a land of dreams, where the SS and their occult research division known as the Karotechia have built Project HODDMÍMIR, the final gambit to escape their reckoning.

This is the third time I've run this scenario, and I'd been concerned since its first running at KublaCon that it's too locked to the rails and doesn't give the players enough agency to choose their own path through the story. However, this is now the second time I've walked away with the sense that the players had a great time with it specifically because it was a rail-shooter that allowed them to focus on simply enjoying the ride without worrying that they were doing the right thing in every situation. As Götterdämmerung was initially inspired by Inception, there's still a part of me that wants to do that scenario, where OSS/Delta Green veterans are manipulating the Dreamlands to stop the Karotechia and get a final retribution against them, whereas this scenario is more along the lines of "journey through nightmarish Berlin and then see even more fucked-up wrongness in the Dreamlands." I don't know if I'll have the time to edit Götterdämmerung more towards the caper-inspired Inception version by Big Bad Con, but I'm going to try. Nevertheless, this run at CelestiCon has convinced me that the scenario is already good as is, as the players seemed to have a good time and the game felt like a winner.

Have Ship, Will Smuggle (FATE Star Wars)

Setbacks and differences of opinion have left your crew on the verge of selling off the ship and going your separate ways. But every smuggler worth his spice would be crazy not to compete in Thespa the Hutt’s Gunrunner’s Gauntlet, a high speed, high risk scavenger hunt set to rage across the galaxy. Perhaps the winning ship’s 6,000,000 purse and lucrative contract position is just what you need.

I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but I played in a great game with this GM a few cons back and figured it would be solid. That it was and more, as we played the crew of a smuggling ship entered in race to gather certain items and find a course that would lead to riches and glory. The simple set-up was complicated by our individual goals, many of whom were against each other, as well as by the war raging around us between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance (the game was set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, so there were lots of jokes about how the Imperials wouldn't be dumb enough to build another Death Star). Most of the characters were pretty good, but I didn't want to play the leader so after he was taken I let the other players choose who they wanted to play. I ended up with a Devaronian ex-pirate who sold his own crewmates into slavery after his former captain refused to sell the cargo of slaves they had captured. The GM used portraits of real actors morphed with Star Wars portraits (which was really well-done, better than my efforts of using Photoshop to morph actors into SS uniforms), so my Devaronian was a horned Willem Dafoe, who I played as an alien Bobby Peru with Norman Osborn's gravelly voice. My Devaronian was arrayed against the Han Solo-esque captain, having bought his share of the ship by taking on the gambling debts of the captain's father, and used every opportunity to get the crew into trouble (my "Trouble" aspect was something like "Cannot Shut Up"). I ended up getting his father deeper in debt, nearly destroying the ship of the captain's friend, and trying to double-deal the Rebel Alliance before the captain took his opportunity to sell me to my ex-pirate comrades. I made it back to the ship in the middle of a battle, where the Devaronian and the captain drew down in an epic gun duel that left us both badly wounded and only my character still in the game (the other player had to leave to prep his own game). That was my only regret of the game, as, being a Star Wars game, it felt like the not-Han-Solo captain should win out and put down the not-Greedo Devaronian. Still, it ended well with us selling our cargo of arms to the Rebel Alliance for our own reasons (the Devaronian got a privateer's license and surplus Rebel ships for his new pirate armada). FATE is the perfect system for sci-fi swashbuckling like Star Wars, especially as it so easily handles everything from a raging battle between spaceships to social combat and all in the same scene, making it a surprisingly rich game. I had no complaints, although my throat-box was ripped raw from channeling Willem Dafoe for hours.

Here Be Dragons (Call of Cthulhu/Dark Ages)

The dragon banners of King Alfred have defeated the Viking/Danish forces at Ethandun, making their leader, Guthrum the Unlucky, bend the knee and receive baptism as a sign of his goodwill. During this peaceful time a group of fledgling investigators are given leave to go on holiday. One of the investigators has an invitation to a village wedding and he's gracious enough to invite the other investigators along. But holidays aren't always what they're expected to be and dark forces could be at work that make certain Alfred's dream of a united England never come to fruition.

I'd been trying to play this game for awhile, as I'd been jonesing for some Dark Age axe-on-cultist mayhem. The game was more investigative than that, although I got plenty of shield wall-action by choosing one of the warrior characters. After the rich roleplaying of the previous Star Wars game, I wanted to play a simpler character, especially not a female one as, knowing the GM, I figured those characters would have romantic complications I was uninterested in playing out tonight. I ended up accidentally choosing a woman-in-disguise, although my romantic complications were with a long-dead NPC allowing me to mix that in at my leisure. I used it instead to support a romance between two other characters, which I had a lot of fun with. I would've expected a ten-hour game to drag, but the game went by surprisingly fast and my energy level never flagged, and between the strong attention to detail by the GM and the great role-playing by my fellow players, we put together a pretty nice story with well-realized characters.

A Jury of Your Fears (Wraith: the Oblivion)

As the Empire of the Dead crumbles beneath the weight of corruption, ossification, and external aggression, six wraiths struggle to survive the end of everything.

After staying up until 3AM playing that epic Cthulhu Dark Ages game and failing to submit my signup slip for the session, I had no intention of gaming on Sunday morning and thought to sleep in. My natural clock wouldn't let me, and as I was wandering the main foyer, I crossed the GM looking for an extra player or the game might not run. As I knew my roommate Basil was in the game, I decided to play, especially as it was short enough to still make my next game. It ended up a happy circumstance, as the game was great. I've never played Wraith, but the setting was interestingly gloomy, as we four players either played Wraiths in the San Jose Necropolis out to capture a haunted train to ferry people out of the doomed city then under attack from Wraiths from the Jade Sea, or we played Spectres tied somehow to the Wraith PC's by their past. Essentially we were two couples with competing goals to bring the other closer to oblivion or away from it, and were faced with scenes full of metaphorical imagery on our way to capture the train. My only regret with the game is that I had to leave a few minutes before the ending, as it went a little over time.

Operation Atomic Wichita (Leverage)

World War II is heating up! The Axis powers recently captured Paris, and with it, France. And it looks like the war's about to get worse, if what's rumored is true. A motley crew of Allied commandos is tasked with making their way to a ruined castle where the Nazi occultists known as the Thule Society are working on some sinister project. Maybe they're deluded, but Command is taking no chances. Get it, deal with the problem, and get out. Salute!

This was the kind of a game where we started out parachuting into the Black Forest and getting attacked by a bear in assless lederhosen, only for my character to end up bitten by a werewolf and shoving a gold Star of David necklace into the mouth of an undead Nazi sorcerer as his malfunctioning jet-pack exploded in mid-air and falling to safety by landing on the canopy of an Allied fighter plane. And by that I mean the face-melting sweetness kind of a game. I played Cornelius Lipshitz, an Ethiopian Jewish commando Hitter blaxploitation lovechild of Officer URL and Omar Little (there was a scene where Lipshitz is strolling through the Nazi castle yelling "Cornelius coming... Cornelius coming...")

This was my second time playing Leverage and, while I'm definitely impressed with the mechanics, I'm still unsure how useful it would be to the kind of things I want to do with it. I want a capers game with exactly the kind of rules that Leverage has for turning failure into interesting complications rather than a binary yes/no, but also something a little more gritty and less over-the-top. I think Leverage can do that fine so long as the players understand those limitations and buy into the genre ("I can use a Plot Point to set up a flashback that will get me past this security guard, but not to drop-kick the moon with my big toe."), but once a supernatural aspect gets dropped into the mix and there are vaguer limits to reality, things can quickly go from gritty to gonzo, especially when there is a narcissistic nutjob like myself at the table. Still, between this and my experience playing the game at the last Endgame MiniCon, I've become quite enamored with Leverage and will look to purchase and run it at the earliest convenience.

Spirit of Metal (FATE)

You are a piece of mortal sludge that has somehow washed up on the bloodspattered shores of The Metal Realms, where Brutal Legends clash with an animated classic, featuring the vile machinations of the Loc-Nar. Bring your lyrics, guitar, sword, axe, or battle drum. It’s time to rock!

I've never played Brutal Legend and this was the last song I was listening to on my iPod before the game, but I love the fuck out of Heavy Metal, so a chance to play mere mortals-turned-rock gods fighting the Loc-Nar to free our metal realms from its corruption was something I wasn't going to miss. And Ozzy-dammit if this game didn't bring it hard. The GM was fully-prepped, laying out the world and mixing it with the FATE rules that it felt like the game had been made for just this kind of setting, infusing the room with a strong energy towards metal-mayhem, and delivering some of the finest metal tunes on his soundtrack that I think there's about a dozen or more songs I'm going to be adding to my iPod soon. The players were equally bringing it, creating characters and aspects based on metal songs and lyrics to either build archetypal rock characters like Den the Barbarian or something straight off an Iron Maiden cover, or they were simply born as Matt Steele. For the first six hours of this game, it was a one-way ticket to midnight, as we slayed hordes of animal men, banged bat-winged succubi, turned into a metal man made from WWI tanks and pissed napalm on ancient tomes, defeated castrating goat-woman roadhouse owners, freed southern belles in daisy dukes from meth-dealing Klan scum, brought the cowbell down to make the Reaper fear us in a battle of the bands, and unleashed Godzilla on Tokyo in a final apocalyptic battle against the Loc-Nar.

Now I had been able to get a little rest after the Leverage game, but I was still running on fumes when I started this game on Sunday evening. It is to the game's credit that, even though I was exhausted when it began, after the game reached its scheduled six hours and still had a lot of game left to play, I was disappointed because I wanted to keep going. And the game did keep going, but it was around then that I hit the two-fisted walls of sleep deprivation and the FATE point economy.

FATE (in over-the-top balls-to-the-wall incarnations like this) is a great system, but it strongly depends on the players constantly using FATE points to power their abilities to be awesome and the GM refreshing those points in exchange for the players trying to be awesome. I've never seen that done really right (mostly because it depends on both the GM being able to run a great game and do point-banking adminstrativa at the same time, as well as the players never hoarding chips), but the GM here did something fantastic in the form of "Fan Mail" (I think he took it from Prime-Time Adventures) where the players had a pool of slightly-stunted FATE Points to share among ourselves for players being awesome. Unfortunately, due mainly to my sharing the Fan Mail points perhaps too freely with everyone else and not getting many myself, and the "Bane" aspect I created (which the GM would use to compel me with regular FATE points) frankly sucking, I was left halfway through the game without any kind of points. Normally that would've been fine and I would be cool with fading into the wallpaper to emphasize everyone else being cool, but I had brung it pretty hard up until then and I could tell other players were now looking at me to be bringing the awesome. Since I had neither the points nor the energy to bring said awesome anymore, it left me a little frustrated and the GM sensed that. He efficiently dealt with the FATE point situation, but there was nothing to be done about the sleepiness, so the game didn't end on the high note for me that it so richly deserved. Still, even that tinge of negativity could merely bring this game from Godlike to Fuckin' Legendary on the ladder.

In between the Leverage and FATE Metal game, I got a chance to briefly sit and talk with Kenneth Hite about Night's Black Agents, World War Cthulhu, the next Delta Green book, and his future plans for Project COVENANT and Thirties' espionage in Trail of Cthulhu. It was a short but informative conversation, and while I was most interested in the stuff most-related to Our Darkest Hour, my biggest takeaway was Ken's description of Night's Black Agents. I think the game is going to be much more visceral than I initially appreciated, and I'm now really pumped to see it come out (hopefully sometime early next year). I had a strange nexus when I returned to my room to relax and eat lunch, and was listening to my iPod full of Massive Attack, The Heavy, Rob Dougan, and Crystal Method, and watched (with the sound off) what looked like a spy-fi film with a vaguely European setting filled with black-ops secret agents shooting and staking leather-clad techno-vampires shot with cool filtered cameras and shadowy angles that was looking great until Steven Seagal suddenly appeared in his goth-Tibetan-black muumuu and began doing his patty-cake aikido fat ninja-fu and ruined everything. So I'm already starting to groove with what I might do with "Jason Bourne vs. vampires" of Night's Black Agents.

So that was CelestiCon 2011. CelestiCon 2012 will have some big shoes to fill. My next con will be Big Bad Con in October, which with its stellar slate of RPGs is looking to overload me yet again with even more gaming goodness. Between DunDraCon, KublaCon, CelestiCon, Big Bad Con, Dead of Winter, and the Endgame MiniCons, truly do I live in gamer-paradise here on the Bay.

Who Owns P Division?

2011-08-22T14:21:00.001-07:00

Arc Dream and Pagan Publishing have recently announced that they will be producing their own RPG system for an updated iteration of Delta Green, which might also mean that Arc Dream/Pagan may no longer be using Chaosium intellectual property in the setting. Based on the GenCon seminar where this was announced, this doesn't seem like a big loss to the Delta Green crew, but it did get me to wonder just who has done what with one particular aspect: P Division.

P Division is a department within the Office of Naval Intelligence responsible for investigating the paranormal, particularly as it applies to naval concerns. Created during the First World War, P Division truly becomes a going concern with their participation in the raid on Innsmouth in 1928. Shortly after American entry into the Second World War, P Division is transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, where its files and operations are given the security classification DELTA GREEN. Eventually, the organization becomes more well-known as OSS/Delta Green than its original (and still official) title of P Division. The unit is disbanded along with the rest of the OSS with the end of the war, but is later resurrected in 1947 to control public knowledge of the Roswell incident. Now simply titled Delta Green, the unit remains an official section reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff until a disastrous operation in Cambodia causes its disbandment in 1970. The veterans of Delta Green decide to continue the fight as an illegal conspiracy, which continues up until the latest iteration of Delta Green (circa 1999).

That's the gist of P Div, but it gets muddied when we start separating who has created what in terms of the unit and its history. The following goes into all that, and contains spoilers for the books Adventures in Arkham Country, Delta Green, and Escape from Innsmouth.

P Division first appeared in 1993, with the publication by Chaosium of Adventures in Arkham Country. Within that book of scenarios was a three-part mini-campaign titled "With Malice Aforethought," written by Andrew Leman and Jaime Anderson, which is set at some indetermined point in the 1920s. In the first act, the investigators are relatives of inmates at the Arkham Sanitarium, where a Dreamlands sorcerer has taken on human form as a doctor and plans to use the inmates as part of a mad scheme to open a gate for his lords to come into the waking world and conquer it. In the course of the adventure, the investigators come across a Mythos tome titled Synarchobiblaron. In the second adventure, the investigators are detained by the Arkham police and charged with the murders that took place at the sanitarium. The Synarchobiblaron is locked by the police in the evidence vault of the Essex County courthouse in Salem, where it is potentially used against the investigators at their trial (as evidence of their Satanic worship as motive). Either the investigators are found not guilty or a new set of investigators are introduced to exonerate them in the third act, the Dreamlands sorcerer strikes again, using his agents to return him to the waking world where he can reenact the ritual to open the gate, a plan that requires him to reacquire the Synarchobiblaron. Stopping that plan also requires the Synarchobiblaron, as it contains the necessary spell in "The Banishment of Yde' Edat." In the way of both the antagonist and the investigators is Lieutenant Edward Brookstone and P Division, who arrive in Salem to confiscate the Synarchobiblaron "for use in an ongoing investigation." This is the first mention of P Division:

Lieutenant Brookstone is in charge of a small subsection of U.S. Naval Intelligence known as P Division. Informally organized during the War to look into certain bizarre occurrences in central Europe, the division is currently investigating bizarre and paranormal phenomena. The details of the Halloween trial attracted the attention of the division and the evidence has been seized as part of an ongoing inquiry into cultist activity.

Lt. Brookstone and a team of U.S. Marshals take the evidence, and load it into a Navy truck to drive it back to Boston for a flight back to Washington. What happens from there is up to the investigators, although, as Brookstone is mentioned as being able to get them all pardons from the governor of Massachusetts, it is implied that P Division is convinced to aid the investigators in their fight against the sorcerer.

This is the only mention of P Division anywhere in a Chaosium book, including Escape from Innsmouth. In that book, published by Chaosium in 1992, the man "in charge of the military contribution" to the raid on Innsmouth is cigar-chomping USMC "Colonel James Rothler of Naval Intelligence." While Rothler is described as working for naval intelligence, he is never explicitly tied to P Division. Escape from Innsmouth does create the code-name used for the raid on Innsmouth: Project COVENANT, with those involved identifying themselves with the phrase "Samson" to pass through the roadblocks set up around the town. The book also creates "The Book of Dagon," five conical stones covered with R'lyeh glyphs which Robert Marsh, the high priest of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, had been attempting to decipher when interrupted by the raiders. Finally, Escape from Innsmouth establishes the fate of the Innsmouth prisoners as being shipped to "various clandestine camps and military prisons across the country" before " a secret desert detainment camp is set up and all prisoners are confined" there, although nothing is said of it being in Arizona.

Then, in 1996 (or maybe earlier, depending on any pre-release write-ups of Delta Green in The Unspeakable Oath), Delta Green establishes the meat-&-potatoes of P Division. Fully titled for the first time as the Parapsychology, Paranormal, and Psychic Phenomena Division, P Division's history is laid out in the most significant detail it's received before or since. Delta Green ties P Division into Escape from Innsmouth by stating that it was headed by "Marine Colonel James Whelan, the ranking military officer of Project COVENANT," which re-names Rothler and makes him the head of P Division. The Book of Dagon is also mentioned, with its decoding by the Black Chamber causing the Navy to fully-support P Division and its fight against the Deep Ones. Delta Green also follows through on the containment of the Deep One hybrids, placed here in a secret containment facility disguised as a Naval Air Station in Arizona.

Since then, no book outside of those published for Delta Green have really addressed P Division. The Cthulhu Live books, the LARP version of Delta Green and Shades of Grey, each mention P Division, but neither expand beyond what was written previously in Pagan's Delta Green. Kenneth Hite's Trail of Cthulhu has an entire section on Project COVENANT, but it's not as simple as it might appear:

With former President Coolidge's death on January 5, 1933, the survivors of Project Covenant have nowhere left to turn when they start seeing the same sorts of things they saw that cold night in Innsmouth. Except to each other. They form a secret cabal within the US military and intelligence services, and provide cover and leads for each other where they can. They call themselves "Covenanters" or "Friends of Ezra" (after Ezra Weeden, an 18th century patriot who defeated a wizard), and use variations on "Ezra," "Samson," and the Ark of the Covenant as code words, contact signals, and warning signs.

While a cursory glance might see this as Trail of Cthulhu's version of P Division, it is in fact something entirely different: a secret and illegal conspiracy running parallel to the open (if nominally covert) and authorized operation that is P Division as described in Delta Green. It is instead Trail of Cthulhu's own 1930s version of Delta Green, which even utilizes its own network of "friendlies" in American and foreign embassies. Hite notes that Project Covenant can be "an official (though still secret) operation within the FBI and Navy bureaucracies," but he also states this as a "different sort of style," connoting that its default status is unofficial. Trail of Cthulhu doesn't add many details than those already established in Escape from Innsmouth, except to name certain NPCs differently than the way they were named in Delta Green (Treasury Agent Wade becomes Agent Drew, Rothler who is Whelan in Delta Green is renamed Maines in Trail of Cthulhu).

And that, as far as I know, is entirely it for P Division. Secrets of Morocco makes some mention of the Office of Naval Intelligence, but no other book outside of those published for Delta Green make any reference to the organization. Still, even though the vast majority of what was written about P Division was created by the authors of Delta Green, it may not be so easy to separate it from Chaosium's IP. The name itself was created by Chaosium, as was it's pre-Innsmouth history, although that only amounts to the "bizarre occurrences in central Europe" that inspired its creation in 1917 (and it is Delta Green that is responsible for fixing that date to 1917) and the Brookstone affair in Adventures in Arkham Country. Everything post-Innsmouth, which represents most of what has been written about P Division was created by Pagan Publishing. So what can Arc Dream/Pagan do in terms of separating themselves from Chaosium IP while preserving the history of Delta Green? Well, going back to the source, this is what Lovecraft wrote in The Shadow Over Innsmouth:

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the waterfront.

Lovecraft also speaks of the captives of the raid being dispersed to "various naval and military prisons," and he does establish the Navy's involvement in the raid by mentioning the "deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss jsut beyond Devil Reef.

Based on all that, it's reasonable that, strictly from The Shadow Over Innsmouth alone, the Navy was involved in the raid on Innsmouth. As the Office of Naval Intelligence was obsessed with domestic intelligence during the interwar period, it's actually likely that ONI officers would take the lead when Navy and Marine troops are dispatched against the town. The Shadow Over Innsmouth also establishes that the prisoners from Innsmouth were sent to military facilities. From this, Delta Green can safely be descended from an ONI unit that took part in the raid on Innsmouth. Calling that unit "P Division" and code-naming the operation "Project COVENANT" are probably not kosher. The same goes for "The Book of Dagon" (although there's nothing to say that vaguely described artifacts recovered from Innsmouth were deciphered by the Black Chamber) or that the naval intelligence unit was created during the First World War specifically due to "bizarre occurrences in central Europe," although Central Europe is a big place and it was Delta Green that established 1917 as the date of P Division's creation.

All that said, I happen to like canon specifically when it raises questions, within which lie opportunities to create stories; and there are a lot of such questions that disappear when what's been written on P Division starts to get fragmented. What were the bizarre occurrences in Central Europe that lead the U.S. Navy to create of something as fanciful as the Parapsychology, Paranormal, and Psychic Phenomena Division? What happened to the "intimidating" Lieutenant Brookstone so that the cartoonish Marine Colonel Rothler/Whelan/Maines (who seems so paranoid that he can't go anywhere without an alias) took over P Division within the (no more than) eight years between Adventures in Arkham Country and Escape from Innsmouth? What happened to the Colonel so that the lower ranking Lieutenant Commander Martin Cook had taken over by 1942? How did P Division going from investigating the Dreamlands with the Synarchobiblaron to focusing intently on Deep Ones affect the unit and its officers? Why do the officers involved in Project COVENANT abandon P Division en masse following 1933 and begin a new illegal conspiracy? How does J. Edgar Hoover go from the careerist afraid to tell President Hoover the truth of Innsmouth in 1928 to the regular visitor to the Arizona containment facility in the 1930s? Why would the conspirators of Project Covenant be unwilling to brief President Roosevelt on the Innsmouth raid in 1933, especially as FDR was historically closed to tied to naval intelligence, and how does Project Covenant react when P Division moves to the OSS and (supposedly) briefs President Roosevelt in full on what they've discovered?

It's a bit of shame that I can't easily see a book that covers all of P Division's history from 1917 to 1942, but that's mitigated by the fact that there's nothing stopping Chaosium from producing a book on P Division from 1917 to 1928 (thereby avoiding entangling themselves with all the background created by Pagan Publishing post-Innsmouth). Nor is there anything stopping Arc Dream/Pagan from retconning their own work, renaming P Division to something else and leaving its pre-Innsmouth history as "a strange division of naval intelligence created in 1917 to investigate the paranormal that was reorganized and renamed to [INSERT NEW NAME HERE] following the Innsmouth operation." And Trail of Cthulhu has already side-stepped most of this, as Project Covenant remains this separate conspiracy leading from Innsmouth that hasn't been connected to P Division since then. As for all the interesting questions that arise from the various melding of what's been written about P Division, the bad news might be that the publishers can't steal each other's IP to play around with it, but the good news, and what really matters, is that Keepers can always do it for themselves.

KublaCon 2011

2011-05-31T01:06:00.000-07:00

For the second year in a row, I came out of KublaCon without playing in a single bad game. Some were better than others, but none of them were stinkers and at no time did I ever want a game to end just to move on to something else.

The Wolves of St. Croix (Godlike)

Winter, 1944. As the sky turns grey and snow blankets the French countryside, Patton’s Third Army creeps forward against orders during an uneasy winter stalemate. Your Talent Operation Group has been assigned to vanguard elements of the 25th Cavalry Recon Squadron, currently deployed in hills above the provincial village of Frahan. The last patrol sent to reconnoiter the surrounding forest hasn’t report in and you’re being sent into those dark woods to find out why.

Friday involved a very horrible choice: there were nine games I would've loved to play that evening, all of them in competing slots. I settled on Jack Young's Godlike game as my first choice mostly due to knowing Jack to be a great GM, loving the setting, and wanting to get my One Roll Engine experience under my belt. I was not disappointed, as this was a fantastic game and, besides my own game, the highlight of the con for me. It was a damn good bunch of players, and we gelled quickly as a group. Some of the best moments include the badger (our TOG mascot) that a character kept in his backpack that we addicted to morphine to keep it sedated, my secretly homosexual character (something I added, which Matt Steele pointed out that I often add to my characters... odd) who kept having to deal with innuendo about cigars and pinup girls, and my most metal moment of the con... after getting set on fire, my character dropped his B.A.R. and charged a Nazi brainwashing Talent, brass-knuckled trench knives in hand, screaming "BADGERS GO FIRST!" (the TOG motto is "Talents Go First") that soon degenerated through pain to "BADGER! BADGER! BADGER!" and finally punching dead the Nazi (who has pissed his pants due to failing Will vs. Will contests) through the face as he simultaneously shot me dead through the face. A thing of beauty.

A Knight's Tale (Savage Worlds)

When two monks ask Sir David of Winchester and his entourage for help it seems like a righteous quest is beginning. But the monks of Muchelney Abbey lead a colorful and interesting life, and their problem is no earthly one. To save the monks physical bodies, and maybe their eternal souls, the knights must deal with a divine servant who guards a holy weapon and a French raiding party attacking southern England before facing down the true monster.

Somehow Saturday turned out to be all Savage Worlds, all the time. My first game involved a knight (played by me) and his retainers competing in a tournament before getting recruited Magnificent Seven-style by some drunken, lascivious monks to defend their abbey from having its new construction torn down by a woodland demon. Evidently a published scenario, the game was okay but made much better by having great players at the table, as almost everyone (one player kind of checked out) just dived into their characters. We never encountered a French raiding party, and getting the holy weapon was pretty easy (although it was interesting when my squire, secretly a girl in disguise, failed to pass the test of morality to enter the tomb and was nearly attacked by an angel, while the lascivious, morally-loose herald entered with ease), but the fight with the wood-demon was intense and I felt satisfied after the game. In fact, after my experience running Savage Worlds at Dead of Winter, I was almost lured into again believing that the system could be simple, light, and easy...

The Witch of November (Realms of Cthulhu)

Early November, 1975. You and your crew are about to embark on a routine journey across Lake Superior with a full load of taconite ore pellets in the belly of your freighter. The National Weather Service has predicted clear skies with the nearest storm passing safely to the south... But there is something deep under the water that defies logic and nature. The witch of November is about to come stealing... And she's hungry.

... but then I played this game and quickly returned to reality. It was quite a good game, and I had a lot of fun, but I sat between the GM and someone who mentioned doing editing work for the game, both of whom seemed very familiar with the system, and there were several times when they had to reach for their books to look up rules. There was even a time or two when I knew what the rule was in a situation and they weren't immediately aware of it. If even people like this haven't mastered the system, what hope is there for rules-retards like me?

The game itself was decent. As I suspected, it was based on a rather famous song, so I knew how things were probably going to end from the very beginning. SPOILERS! We were sailors on the Edmund Fitzgerald, so we were all going to die. It ended up being a run-&-fight kind of game, and since I had no melee skills and many of the players had handguns while I didn't, I felt pretty limited in what I could do. On top of that, since I suspected MORE SPOILERS! we were all going to die and survival really wasn't an option, I spent the game waiting for an objective different than "survive," which didn't come until the end of the last combat round in the game. I came away respecting Realms of Cthulhu for its lethality ("gritty" damage rules where you can't Soak damage with bennies are indeed quite gritty) and its Sanity mechanic, but the highly tactical nature of the combat serves more to draw me out of the game than into it. I think I'm done with any notion of running Savage Worlds, although I'm still happy to play in games that use the system.

Fighting for Freedom (Exalted)

Ever felt like you were a demi-god? In Exalted, you are! Your character has been blessed with godlike powers by the Unconquered Sun. However, you've been captured by a rival Solars who feel that only the strongest of your kind should survive to take over the world. Do you fight in their tournament to prove you're the best, or do you fight your captors for your freedom? The choices are yours in this game of Exalted.

I tried to crash in 4 games on Sunday morning: I spent nearly an hour camping to get into a Doctor Who game (which filled up with all its signed-up players, although I was okay with that when I found it the characters would all be from the show rather than original), then a Dark Heresy game that a friend was also trying to crash (who also failed), then a Star Trek game using one of my favorite systems (Cinematic Unisystem) that I thought would be full (and was right), then a Hellcats & Hockeysticks game that sounded so quirky I thought there might be a chance (there wasn't), before my friend from the Dark Heresy game and I ran into an RPG coordinator who told us this Exalted game needed players.

This was an odd game, but a fun one. Talking it over with a friend later, it almost seemed like the GM would've preferred if there hadn't been enough players to run the game, and once we got past the initial set-up, there didn't seem to be much more to the game. Regardless, it was still pretty awesome, as we ripped out trees and beat the Solar into submission with them. I've played Exalted before, which is a strange mix of this interesting setting of highly empowered characters that should be able to pull off amazing stunts and would be an easy fit for something like FATE, but is mated to this incredibly crunchy White Wolf system that goes into far too much detail than is actually required. Still, it works in play, especially under an efficient GM, which this one was, and, after we all picked up the system, it ran smoothly.

Operation Albion (Delta Green)

Delta Green cell Kilo is activated to investigate the odd remains of several animals found in Albion, Washington. Kilo cell is a group of experienced federal law enforcement agents who have worked successfully on supernatural cases in the past. The cell is called to the Hyatt Regency, Burlingame for a briefing provided by A cell.

The Exalted game ended so quickly that I was still able to get into "Apocalypse Tao," a Savage Worlds game using the Tour of Darkness setting. After only one other player and myself showed up, the game had to be cancelled for lack of players. While unfortunate, that did allow me to play in a Delta Green game, a very rare treat for me as I almost always have to run Delta Green myself to see it on a schedule.

This was a good game, but it was one of those situations where I got a little pissy over planning details with a couple of players as I kept getting called on the carpet for my character's decisions. It's very difficult, especially in a con setting where you don't often know the other players, to differentiate when a player is calling your character a moron or when they are calling you personally a moron. It's made even harder when the offended player doesn't really act out their character, using the same tone of voice and perspective whether in-character or otherwise. I'm an immersive role-player, so when I role-play characters in stressful situations that go temporarily insane, I'm not focused on what's the best tactical option but what is the most interesting response. And I'm a geek with self-esteem issues, creating a toxic mix when combined with criticism. I do think that a myopic focus on getting just the right plan in a horror game is rather silly, as no matter what you plan, it's all going to end up going wrong somehow. Nevertheless, I wish I hadn't let it get to me, and while I didn't go into a full-blown funk, I still wish I'd found a way to ignore it completely.

For the most part though, the game was a lot of fun, and had some great moments. I got to yell "The pudding's gone bad!" as my character went crazy and ran away from the protoplasmic monster. One player got killed half-way through by said pudding, and then his replacement character failed a Climb roll and fell to his death about a minute after coming into the game. Another player had an absolutely metal moment where he went nuts and charged the pudding, guns blazing and yelling "I can take it!" as my character grappled with him to hold him back from certain doom.

Götterdämmerung (Delta Green)

Berlin 1945: As the city collapses before the advancing Red Army, a lone glider flies into the flames and ruin. Onboard are a small desperate group of Allied agents disguised as German paratroopers, who must journey through Hel to breach the final stronghold of the SS occult research division known as the Karotechia, where Projekt HODDMÍMIR waits to open the way for the Third Reich to escape its reckoning, as others arrive to reap what black science the Karotechia has sown.

This was my game, and the first time I've run it anywhere. It went very well, in no small part due to an awesome group of players. I'll break it all down...

The Good
Everybody (including myself) had fun, which is the most important thing. A very solid story was created by the end of the game, and most of the characters ran through some kind of personal arc. As the game ran through without any major hitches, I left it confident in my GM'ing abilities, which is the first time I can say that about a con game since... well, the last KublaCon. I was really surprised to see that I almost brought it in on-time (6 hours) without having to sacrifice too much, although the early scenes in Berlin do have to get trimmed and character introduction took way too long. The props came out well and it was good to see that the Soldbuch character sheets held up under use. Listening to it on the drive to KublaCon, I was afraid the soundtrack I'd put together was less than optimal, but it turned out to be okay.

The Bad
At the end of the game, one of the players said he would've paid good money to see this scenario if it were a movie. That made my day, but I also felt like I kind of did run it as a movie, as in it was all very scripted. I didn't give the players enough chances to roleplay their characters (although the players made the most of the few chances I did give), and the game itself pretty tightly runs on rails so that there are too few opportunities for the players to make choices within it. This is something that I can definitely edit in the game, so it'll ultimately be stronger for it.

The Awesome
Like I said, I had great group of players for this one, everyone at the table brought something to the game. One player interpreted his character on a much deeper level than I expected (and I wish I'd been better prepared for that). Another player really followed through on some aspects I was prepared for (and hoping to see), but when something happened (which I had pre-scripted in a dumb way, so it's all on me) to cause almost everyone to drop to zero SAN, that story got ended prematurely.

One thing that I learned from this game was that I never want to run on a Monday ever again. I was on high-energy throughout the game, but I completely crashed after it was over and was at the most tired I'd been in a very long time. It was also weird having a bunch of folks telling me how much they wanted to play in my game, which felt great for my ego but also built up the pressure to deliver. I'd much prefer to run on Friday, release that anxiety, and spend the rest of the con just enjoying the games I'm playing in.

In general terms, KublaCon delivered once again, but I do think there is room for improvement. Unlike DunDraCon, KublaCon uses a wholly electronic sign-up system through off-line terminals at the registration desk. This makes signing-up for games during the con difficult, as a bunch of folks will have only 4 terminals to work with any time and queues can develop. What's more, I'm certain the system could be used on-line, as it's possible to sign-up through their website for a short period before the con starts. If the system were on-line throughout the con, there'd be less need to queue up at the kiosk, and it'd be much easier to change sign-up choices if you get into one game that will overlap with games you signed-up for in the next.

I also feel like the con was very front-loaded this year, with 9 great games on Friday for me, and then fewer great ones (but still several okay choices) the rest of the con. There might've been less games than last year, but I have no data to back that up.

In the dealer's room, I avoided making purchases, but it was a tough job to do so. I thumbed through Black Devil's Brigade and am seriously considering getting it and creating a short-lived group to run it as a mini-campaign. It will probably be a bit raw to begin with before I master the rules, but I'm coming around to the idea that the only way I'll ever master the One Roll Engine is to just jump in and run it a bunch of times.

So, all in all, another great time from KublaCon. It was my first and it remains my favorite. I can't wait to go back next year.

SS Soldbuch Investigator "Sheet"

2011-05-21T20:24:00.000-07:00

In less than a week at KublaCon, I'll be running Götterdämmerung, a Call of Cthulhu scenario set during the Battle of Berlin, where OSS/Delta Green agents, disguised as Waffen-SS paratroopers, infiltrate Berlin (which is surrounded by the Red Army) and try to stop the final machinations of the SS occult division known as the Karotechia. I got the idea to mock up an abbreviated and simplified version of an SS Soldbuch (a pay book carried by German soldiers which included unit information, issued equipment, and various other stuff), since the Soldbuch was also used as a kind of identity card, figuring it might make a nice prop for the investigators' cover identities.

Then I got another idea: why not turn the whole thing into a character sheet?

This was a lot of work. I used Word to create most of it, put into a PDF (the raw files are here), and printed it with the cover on grey card stock (which looks much less grey than it actually is in the photos) and the rest on light beige paper. Then I "bound" it with a long-reach stapler, and covered the spine (and hid the exterior of the staples) with black fabric tape.

2011-04-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

A recent thread on yog-sothoth.com inspired me to do a little bit of Internet necromancy and try to find the earliest mention by Pagan Publishing about Our Darkest Hour.

From: owner-dgrpg@delta-green.com on behalf of PaganArt@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 6:15 PM
To: dgrpg@delta-green.com
Subject: Re: DG: Books?

The following books are ready for printing:

DG Eyes Only 3 Project Rainbow: Which is going to press on friday.

DG: Dark Theaters trade paperback: This revised edition will be available soon, most likely by the end of next month.

The following books are in production:

Delta Green: From an Dim and Ultimate Thule: A WWII era Delta Green novel dealing with the Great Race, Deep Ones and other nastiness. This should go to press some time the in the forseeable future, maybe within the next three months...

There are several DG: Eyes Only volumes in the works including:

Agents, Friendlies and Bronsons: 41+ Fully detailed NPCs for any Delta Green campaign.

Black Cod Island: An ancient Deep One colony located in southern Alaska still survives today, despite an attempt by the Haida indians of the northwest to stomp out the alien threat in the 1730's.

As far as big books go, the next planned biggie which is already underway is

Delta Green: Our Darkest Hour, a sourcebook for playing DG during WWII. Most likely it will make Countdown look like a slim little volume.

Cult of Transcendence is in the middle of its endless rewrite as we speak, no definite idea on when (or if) it will ever be released.

Other plans include a large campaign (modern day) for DG and more fiction.

Suggestions are welcome.

Dennis Detwiller.
Art Director/Co-Creator of Delta Green/Silly Rabbit
Pagan Publishing

But that's not the earliest mention of Our Darkest Hour, as there are posts as early as April 2000 mentioning the product. I purchased Delta Green sometime after August 1997, when I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I almost immediately got the idea for running a WWII campaign with it. I had created a website (two actually: one for WWII Delta Green, the other for Delta Green set before the Second World War), but I shuttered it when Dennis Detwiller announced on the DGML that Our Darkest Hour was in production... and that announcement was not in this email above.

That means that ODH has been announced for at least 11 years, and maybe even as long as 13 years. That's about the time it took the actual war to be fought twice over. All I can say is that both Scott Glancy and Shane Ivey have recently expressed strong interest in getting the book done, and not in the long-term but in the immediate future. I have delivered my own (very) rough draft of the OSS/Delta Green chapter, and have been working on similar drafts for the other "organization" chapters. Still, more definitely needs to be done, at least on my end.

Charlie's in the wire!

2011-03-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

It's looks like the Vietnam War issue of The Black Seal, which has been in production for a very long time, is finally nearing publication. Instead of being issue #4 of TBS, it'll be it's own book, two in fact: Cthulhu by Arclight and Missing in Action. Considering one of those volumes should include the article I wrote on the Tcho-Tcho in Vietnam, I'm quite excited to see it finished and finally see something of mine in print.

To Portrait or Not to Portrait...

2011-03-02T22:48:00.000-08:00

[I have no idea where to put this, and it's a question I can't get out of my head, so I'm slapping it here.]

I've submitted a game for KublaCon, which has put me knee-deep into creating characters. Set during the Battle of Berlin, the Call of Cthulhu game will involve OSS/Delta Green agents (dressed as SS-Fallschirmjäger) flying a glider into the besieged city to infiltrate the Berlin headquarters of the Karotechia. Right now, the characters are:

2 veteran OSS/Delta Green field operatives
1 OSS/Delta Green research specialist
1 former Karotechia research subject
1 US Army glider pilot
1 US Army Japanese-American infantryman

Of these six characters, two are definitively male but the rest are gender-neutral. Whereas the glider pilot and the infantryman have to be men, any of the OSS/Delta Green personnel could be either male or female.

Now this would not be an issue if I simply used tent cards which gave the character's last name, organization, and nationality. In that case, the player could choose what gender they want for their character and could create a physical description of them on their own terms, both for themselves and the other players.

However, I've become enamored of using character portraits that are put in clear plastic photo stands instead of tent cards. Here is an example from the Call of Cthulhu scenario "The Burning Stars" in Terrors from Beyond:
And here's another example, from a Vietnam War Call of Cthulhu game I ran involving the disastrous Cambodian operation that lead to Delta Green being deactivated in 1970:And here is a character portrait from a Deadlands Reloaded game I ran at Dead of Winter:

I find these props much more evocative than simple tent cards, and, in the case of the Deadlands characters, capable of conveying important game information (the portrait shows the characters vice/virtue and the white space is where that character's particular "demon card" from a poker deck is supposed to go).

My problem is that when I create a character as gender-neutral, it means I have to create 2 sets of portraits for that character. I could simply fix the gender to one or the other, but then I run into the issue of forcing players into certain roles based on their gender preferences at the table. Even if I create an equal number of male and female characters, I'm still forcing a player that is comfortable with a certain gender to pick from a less than possible pool of characters.

There's also the rougher problem that it is just damn hard to find character portraits for the kind of female roles I need. In the case of my KublaCon game, it is relatively easy to find 4 sets of portraits of Waffen-SS soldiers (for the gender-neutral characters' disguises), but it's tough as hell to find even 1 decent portrait of an SS-Helferin.

Compounding the problem is that I don't like to use historical photos for character portraits, preferring instead to use photos from movies and television shows. It's partially because it feels a little like disrespecting the dead (or in the case of using Nazi photos, just plain creepy), but it's mostly because I'm really trying to emulate a fictional portrayal of the period rather than history wie es eigentlich gewesen. I wasn't a WWII spy and I doubt anyone else at the gaming table was either, so what we're really working off of is the fictional portrayal of the war as seen in movies, books, and tv shows.

I have no idea where I was going with this. It's just something I needed to write down, and maybe get other GM's opinions on. I'll probably end up using tent cards.

The To-Do List...

2011-02-23T16:56:00.000-08:00

... is pretty freaking huge. Here's what's on the docket:

1) Start my diet. I started exercising today, but I need to get to eating right.

2) Figure out what I'm going to run for KublaCon. Right now, the choices I'm either most interested or are the deepest in terms of pre-production are:

Golden Gate (Call of Cthulhu) - a noir game of corrupt cops set around the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, involving a ritual murder aboard a Key System train passing over the Bay Bridge near Treasure Island.
Götterdämmerung (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green) - As Berlin falls to the Soviets, the Karotechia attempts to preserve the Third Reich through the Dreamlands, and an OSS/Delta Green team is sent in to stop them.
Safety Not Guaranteed (Call of Cthulhu) - "WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before."
To Live and Die in the Magic Kingdom (Don't Rest Your Head, or Call of Cthulhu) - A degenerate group of Disney character impersonators must survive when the Magic Kingdom becomes a very bad place.

3) Begin working on Our Darkest Hour again.

Rewrite the rough draft of the OSS/Delta Green chapter that I submitted last year.
Organize my notes so I can create rough drafts for the Karotechia, Black Dragon Society, SMERSH, and PISCES chapters (in that order).
Read my half-finished copy of The Last Hero, a biography of Wild Bill Donovan by Anthony Cave Brown (so I can read the new biography of Donovan that just came out).

4) Begin working on something for P Division (the section of the Office of Naval Intelligence that executed the raid on Innsmouth and would turn into Delta Green during the Second World War). I talked about The Black Chamber (a once-proposed book by Chaosium on espionage in the '20s for Call of Cthulhu) with Charlie Krank during his seminar at DunDraCon, and Ken Hite might be working on something like this for Trail of Cthulhu. I'd like to get something substantial together by KublaCon to show both of them (assuming Hite will be at KC this year).

5) Edit my version of the Vietnam scenario based on the disastrous Cambodian operation that resulted in the deactivation of Delta Green in 1970. I promised the files on this for a gamer buddy by the next Endgame Minicon, and I'm thinking that I'd like to run it again myself to playtest some new combat optional rules.

Writing all that down made it feel much less huge. I should do this more often.

DunDraCon 2011

2011-02-20T22:12:00.000-08:00

[long time no blog...]

DDC was a real blast this year. There's still the depressing odor (both metaphorically and literally speaking) of the grognard hanging over it, but the games were all enjoyable if not legendary.

Breakfast on Pluto (Eclipse Phase)

Yesterday was February 2011, and you were a college student, trying to score beer money for the three-day weekend. Now it's ten years after the Fall, and you're having breakfast on Pluto...

This was a hot tranny mess of a game, which was appropriate considering the source of the game's title. The characters were modern-day college students that had their minds digitally copied by proto-sleeving technology, with that data ultimately being collected in the age of Eclipse Phase by a fringe "Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Scientological" monastic order based on the Omega Point theories of Frank Tipler. The college students were resurrected at the order's central archives on Pluto by a member of the Order working for egonappers who needed similar brainwaves to pull off an elaborate egonapping of the college students' future selves, all powerful gerontocrats intending to complete a synergistic hive-mind communication technology called CONSENSUS that would be the next step in transhumanity but ultimately fail, dooming the interlocked humanity to widespread economic, political, and psychological meltdown. The characters faced an Exurgent virus among the animatronic robots (the Order had sold out and was turning the place into a nostalgia theme park, and the egonapper-hired monk had come to believe that the Omega Point would be realized through releasing the virus), then (some) got saved by the egonappers, informed of the plan, jacked a farcasting crew on Nova Vegas (my idea for what Las Vegas becomes on Mars, basically Space Reno), and barely completed their plan to egonap the gerontocrats while a neotenic Lost PC gave his genetic mother (one of the gerontocrats) a hysterectomy by Wasp Knife, a Slyph PC went insane and bashed another gerontocrat into goo then collapsed due to mental trauma and was taken advantage of by a delta-forked imbecile mercenary (that he had previously dosed with Hither) in a closet... good times. Unfortunately, in the course of my prepping the game I forgot to learn the rules or develop a proper plot outline. People had fun, no doubt about that, but it was more about being goofy than playing the game. This is the third (maybe even fourth) game in a row I've come away dissatisfied with my GM'ing performance, and I don't think it's a coincidence that those games were all either new systems for me or based on pre-written material. I need to get back to my comfort zone, which means I'll probably be running something like a prop-heavy game of Call of Cthulhu set during the Second World War for Kublacon.

The Flying Misfits (Godlike)

With the formation of the Talent Operations Groups, Section 2 also formed a handful of TOGs specifically made up of flight-capable Talents, hyperskilled pilots and aircrew, and certain specialized Talents whose abilities could support air operations...

A great game by a solid GM that was well-versed in the game mechanics, and had prepared a beautiful set-up of maps, personnel folders, and plane miniatures. Although it was a pretty slim plot (we flew out of our airfield, blew up their airfield and harbor, and returned home), that set-up was so complete and well-executed, and the other players were all so into and fully role-playing their characters, that it was a really nice game. I played a Goldberg Engineer responsible for keeping his experimental plane aloft but not actually flying it or using any of its weapons. It initially sounded like one of the boring roles in Battlestations, but the ability to create all kinds of on-the-spot gadgets to improve the efficiency of the plane made it interesting.

(Altered) Resonance (Call of Cthulhu)

A cabin in a desolate forest. Snow encrusts your boots. Someone screaming in German. A sullen wind moans outside. You can't remember what your mission is. You can't remember anything. Something's gone terribly wrong...

I'm totally stealing a bunch of the way this game was run. The music, which consisted of dark ambient beats mixed with weather sounds and the occasionally creepy touch (like Nazi marching music), was extremely effective. The game started in media res, so was jarring from the get-go. And the rest was just well-executed, which I won't say more about to avoid spoiling anyone who plays it at a later con.

There was a strange moment where the rules for burst fire against multiple targets came up, which was just your regular rules question that the GM quickly and efficiently adjudicated. What made it strange was that I should be fully versed in that particular subject, not just because I've run CoC many times but also because I've discussed just that very rule previously on forums. Yet I couldn't for the life of me remember it correctly in the heat of the game. Between this and my spotty rules-work on running Eclipse Phase, I thinking I'm getting early Alzheimers limited specifically to remembering game rules.

On the Eve of the Election (Call of Cthulhu)

People's Candidate Eve McClusky, of the Pointe District, has been reported missing by friends and family prior to important mid-term elections for city council. The police have no leads, City Hall is calling for an investigation, and the press smells a cover-up. Is it murder or something else? Investigators must delve in to the mystery facing one of the city's favorite daughters, before time runs out.

I've often wondered what a truly Lovecraftian CoC game would be like. Rather than (often artificial) notions about characters being unarmed or incompetent, I think it should include rambling descriptions of architecture inconsequential to the plot. While there weren't any gambrel roofs in this game, the GM had set up a whole lot of detail in this investigative saga about a missing politician and the corrupt powers that would rather see her remain missing. All that detail meant that the GM's city felt like a real place, but it also slowed the pace of the game down to a crawl, made worse by the fact that there were eight players in the game and we were encouraged to split up. I (and half of the players) spent a whole two hours doing nothing but eating con pizza while I waited for my character to do something as the other investigated one site. But it was fun, mostly because we just laughed our ass off at each other's absurdities, both in and out of character.

I didn't get into any of my choices for an afternoon game, and there wasn't anything on the schedule I wanted to play in the evening. I took the opportunity to attend the Chaosium seminar (and later made what I thought would be minor post on the subject but has now been plastered on the front page of Yog-Sothoth.com), where I kinda sorta broached the subject of my taking up the moribund Black Chamber project.

There was a Pendragon game on Monday that I could have driven back for, but I decided I'd rather spend the day relaxing with my wife. Like I said, DDC was solid this year, even though I only played in three games besides the game I ran.

Election Day

2010-11-02T00:02:00.000-07:00

Although of no interest to out-of-staters and possibly of marginal interest to Californians, here's how I'm voting tomorrow:

Governor: Jerry Brown
Lt. Governor: Gavin Newsom
Secretary of State: Debra Bowen
State Controller: John Chiang
Treasurer: Bill Lockyer
Attorney General: Kamala Harris
Insurance Commissioner: Dave Jones
U.S. Senator: Barbara Boxer

All of these people are the Democratic candidates for their position. I did consider each office on individual basis, and there were a number of cases where I would normally think of voting third party: governor (I doubt Brown can even get himself excited at the though of his possible future term), lieutenant governor (I respect Newsom a great deal for his stand on same-sex marriage, but, even with a collection of shitheads in the Board of Supervisors, he's been a failure as mayor), and, most especially, attorney general (it seems it's a tradition among SF district attorneys that they be absolutely worthless). However, there has never been an election year where the choices are more clearly defined. Thanks to the polarization of the irrationalism, bigotry, and sheer ignorance of the Tea Party (otherwise known as the Republican wing of the Republican Party), I simply will not consider a third-party vote when it might it possibly benefit the Republican candidate on any level. It would be like voting for anyone but the SPD seventy-seven years ago.

As for the propositions:

Prop 19: Yes. Structural flaws or not, it's essential that the push towards drug legalization gets rolling, and state legalization of marijuana will hopefully be a major step towards that. As of today, the War on Drugs has cost $42,524,538,184 this year alone. That's over half of what the federal health care reform bill will cost on a yearly basis, and, while the health care bill gives us something tangibly beneficial, the War on Drugs has provided nothing but misery and frustration for all involved.

Prop 20: No. There is a very simple and easy solution to gerrymandering: mobilize and elect politicians that support your views. Gerrymandering isn't what is keeping the Republican Party out of power in California, it's your baffling adherence to extreme positions that don't play in the sane part of the country. Republicans and other parties have done nothing to deserve an equal representation in redistricting, and if Judge Walker's decision on Prop 8 was against "the will of the voter," then establishing unelected committees to redraw districts is just as equally undemocratic.

Prop 21: No. I like parks. I like representational democracy even more. I elect politicians to have balls and pass taxation when they need money (although I recognize that's not so simple in California, see Prop. 25 below). Vehicle license fees are regressive taxation that pays no mind to the income level of the person being taxed. I will vote for officials that will increase funding to state parks. I will not vote to do the job they should be doing themselves.

Prop 22: No. It sucks that Prop. 13 has set up a budget structure by which city revenues can be so easily raided by the state to pay the bills on the gargantuan administration needed to manage what should be city services that can't be carried by the city because they have no money because their revenues can be so easily raided by the state to pay etcetera et-fucking-cetera. Lockboxing revenue is never a good idea, especially during tough economic times when it needs to be flexible to meet our most necessary demands. The problem is Prop 13, and this is just another band-aid on what has been the ever-growing cancer at the heart of the California government.

Prop 23: No. Do you like Texas oil barons spending millions to keep California's from even attempting to do anything about climate change, regardless of what they've already supported at every level of the decision-making process? Do you like being anally-raped by your corporate overlords? If you answered yes, then vote yes on Prop 23. If you are not a complete tool, vote no.

Prop 24: No. Basically this an attempt by the Californian Teacher's Association to work around tax breaks given as consolation prizes by the Democrats in the state legislature to moderate Republicans to get a budget passed. Regardless of whether those tax breaks hurt or help the California economy, this is another example of an attempt to use the proposition process to micromanage the budget and have voters do the jobs we elect legislators to do for us. Hopefully if we can pass Prop 25, we can end this nonsense. Speaking of which...

Prop 25: Yes. HOLY FUCKING YES. This is the most important item on the ballot. California has tried this experiment of a two-thirds majority requirement for voting in a budget for decades now, and it was all fine until Prop 13 added a supermajority to taxation and screwed everything to hell. We have been living by Howard Jarvis rules for 32 years now and California ain't exactly been the Libertarian Utopia that was promised. As long as we keep the supermajority for the budget, Republicans can continue to stymie the process, Democrats can continue to claim it was all the Republicans fault, and the legislature will continue to pass bonds that are so devaluing the state's credit and no one will ever get held accountable. Only Arkansas and Rhode Island require a two-thirds supermajority for passing a state budget, and that might be all fine and dandy for Sister-fuckingville and Tinyland, but this is the 8th largest economy in the motherfucking world. Do the right thing.

Prop 26: No. See Prop 23, just here the attempt is to neuter Prop 25 and keep the carbon emissions flowing. Do you like the taste of corporate ass? If so, vote yes on 26 and get licking, slave.

Prop 27: Yes. See Prop 20. Right or wrong, democracy means you get the government you deserve people. When less than three-fourths of all eligible voters bothered to make a choice in 2008 for the California state senate, you can't tell me that democracy is being subverted by anything other than apathy in this state. And if it turns out to be true that Californians do overwhelmingly vote Democrat in this state, then change or die, Republicans.

PacifiCon 2010

2010-09-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

This is my face. This is my face on bad gaming conventions. Any questions?

That's probably not fair, as PacifiCon 2010 wasn't that bad, at least not the half I was able to attend. I ran my game on Friday, played in a couple of games on Saturday, and woke up on Sunday to find half of my face had gone dead. Luckily, it was just my face (and not the rest of my body, which would suggest a stroke) and, following a visit to my local emergency room, I was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy, an almost-certainly reversible but highly-annoying disease that is a lot more common than I realized. As I write this, I still can't make a proper smile, but I am getting better and expect a full recovery by the end of the month.

PacifiCon 2010 was pretty much the same as PacifiCon 2009: same hotel, same sign-up procedure, same dwindling number of role-playing gamers. The big difference between last year was the number of games. There were about 47 RPGs at Pacificon this year, whereas there were something like 120 games at KublaCon and almost certainly more than that at DunDraCon. It also didn't help that the games were poorly scheduled (there were more RPGs scheduled for Friday afternoon before people got off work than there were for Friday evening). Now, with such a small number of gamers and an equally small number of games, PacifiCon is looking more and more pointless, especially as there will be a new weekend gaming convention in October next year.

As for what I played:

The Last Flight of the Cathay Clipper (Call of Cthulhu: Delta Green)
My game, running it for the last time. A good time seemed to be had by all, and the game itself unfolded in some different ways than it had previously. I still think it's always been a good premise in need of a much reworked climax, but I'll never run it again.

To End All Wars (Savage Worlds)
This was a pretty straightforward pulp game where the characters (stock two-fisted heroes) found out about a Nazi plot to gas the Lincoln Memorial from a zeppelin and foiled the plot. The GM didn't have enough characters so I ended up creating one (a Chinese teenage baseball player named Wide Load). It was short but fun, and I got to play more Savage Worlds, which is good because it's the system I'll be running at the Dead of Winter convention this December.

Gre'thor Rising (FASA Star Trek)
We were a bunch of Klingon officers (I played the Captain of Marines) commanding a fleet of warships to recapture a lost vessel and destroy a nest of mutinous separatists. The system is quite old (percentile-based with the highest skills in the 50's) and the GM was very old-school (must roll to do pretty much anything). Ordinarily, this kind of game would've been my fifth or sixth choice on a schedule, but beggars can't be choosers at PacifiCon. Nevertheless, it was a surprising amount of fun, primarily because the GM had crafted a nifty starship combat system onto the game (and every player got some role to do, either handling some part of ship operations or commanding a lesser vessel in the fleet). Once I had recognized the parameters of the "fun" in the game, I focused on that and ended up having a great time.

The next morning, I got into an ICONS game run by a good friend of mine, but very early on I realized that there was something seriously wrong with my face and I would need to see a doctor, so I had to bail out. That was a shame, as that ICONS game and a later Cthulhu Dark Ages game were pretty much the only things that really looked interesting to me on the schedule (or I had not already played at a previous convention).

I repeatedly stated at the con that this PacifiCon might be my last. It's just not worth the hotel expense for so few games (and so few gamers). However, my plans for 2011 also included a pilgrimage to GenCon, and with my sister getting married next September, that's looking much less likely. So, I may end up attending PacifiCon 2011 after all, although if I do, I'm thinking I may just ignore what little RPGs are available and concentrate entirely on wargaming, something I've never tried before.

From the Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence

2010-07-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce; and this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and to purchase the liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on which he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

We could have been better then, and over the course of hundreds of years, we have become better. The lesson of America's past is not in how great our country has been, but in how much greater our country can still become, so long as we continue the revolution to expand the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.

KublaCon 2010

2010-06-01T21:50:00.000-07:00

This year's KublaCon was fantastic. I didn't get into a single bad game, and it was surprising how consistently good all the GM's and almost all the players were in the games I played. Usually there's at least one problem player that drags the game down, but there wasn't anything like that at this con. Although there wasn't as great a variety as I'd hoped to see in terms of games (no Eclipse Phase, Dresden Files or Doctor Who, and the Supernatural games both got cancelled), KublaCon gave the great experience I've come to expect from it, and was so much more satisfying than this year's DunDraCon.

Hitting the Bottom (Call of Cthulhu)
Most of us played professors that had burned down part of our university to stop a Mythos ritual encoded in a music performance, and were now hiding out in Seattle. I played a physicist with a scoped AR-15 and some proficiency in Martial Arts, which gives a good impression of the kind of game it was. We ended up saving some creature that was being tortured by a punk band managed by Men from Leng in a raid that killed half the party. That part was fun, but we spent a good fourth to a third of the game corralling one character that didn't want leave his mental treatment center and (we believed) we desperately needed to continue the story. That was not fun, at least for me, although, considering that player was voted best of the game, I'm assuming the other players had less of a problem with it. I like player conflict, even just internal conflict within a single character, but not when it goes on forever and turns into the rest of the group watching one player's performance. The GM did try to step in and force the player to get on board the plot, and ultimately it was an interesting story, but it seemed to get rushed near the end because so much of it was spent dealing with that one situation. That did a disservice to what might have been a really great game, but was still a pretty good one.

Operation Queckselbradler (Story Engine)
We were all (except for a British spy) the crew of an American B-17 bomber during WWII, who was assigned to bomb Hanover and then drop off the spy on the way back. After some nasty scrapes with ME-262s we ended up being catapulted through time into an alt-England where the Germans won the war. When the game started, it looked like it would only be three players, so I made a pilot character thinking we'd need one; but, then a bunch of folks turned up and I ended up playing a command role I didn't expect to. The system was designed to be very cinematic, so I had to cast my character (Brad Pitt's Aldo Ray from Inglorious Bastards, the only Southern kick-ass type in recent movies I could think of that wasn't Sawyer from Lost) and we rolled a group die roll to determine how the scene played out before we actually role-played it. It was like a lot of narrative games for me - great fun as a one-shot, but nothing I could see playing for even a short campaign. A very good GM though, and a good group of players.

Strange Bedfellows (Spycraft)
The last time I played Spycraft it was run by two of the most incompetent GMs I've ever played with, and my strongest memory was of spending most of an hour trying to get from one side of a balcony to another as we ran through the combat actions of over a dozen PCs. This was so much better, although I had a bit of a panic attack when I saw all the pages of character and equipment stats. We definitely seemed to play by the rules, but the GM had a steady hand on them, and they didn't turn out to be very difficult to learn once we got into the game itself. Having now played Spycraft with a good GM, I can say that the rules work well for a strongly tactical game, but are far too crunchy for me. Still, the game felt very cinematic and pulled off a bunch of over-the-top action scenes one would expect of a Bond movie.

Last Flight of the Cathay Clipper (Call of Cthulhu)
My game. This was a great bunch of players, and every single one of them really took ahold of their character and played it to their fullest. Besides playing with less people (a cap of 6 players) and speeding up the second half a bit, I didn't do anything particularly differently than before, but the game did seem to run a little more smoothly. My only complaint was myself: I felt really tired and bumbling through the whole game, and don't feel that I brought my A-game. I've decided to try and run my next con game on Friday evening (when I'll be fresh) and hopefully be a little slimmer and more healthy so that I'll have a higher energy level and a clearer mind.

Planasthai (Cinematic Unisystem)
Another really good game, this one based in the Star Trek universe (it was never settled whether it TOS or the "new movie" Trek). The Cinematic Unisystem rules (the same one used in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel games) worked flawlessly, and made me wish more GMs were still using that system because it works so well for genre games like this. Again, there was a great bunch of players, especially the one playing the Captain who did a dead-on impression of a starship captain somewhere between Kirk and Zapp Brannigan that still managed to be original. I played a Vulcan security officer, perhaps a little too strongly, as one of my friends (who also played in the game) was concerned afterward if I was feeling alright because I had been so quiet during the game. The game itself nicely captured the feel of a TOS episode, especially as it dealt more with philosophical issues of violating the Prime Directive than how awesomely we might blast monsters with our phasers.

The Replacements (Storyboard)
I didn't get into any of my choices for Sunday evening, so I threw caution to the wind and crashed into this game, mostly on the fact that I knew and liked the GM. A high-magic fantasy game about mephits who serve an elderly wizard too old to be adventuring that are sent on a deadly errand into the Underdark and face drow and spider queens is not my usual cup-o-tea, but, even though I was exhausted, it turned out to be a lot of fun. The game had the feel of a Miyazaki movie, at least to me, and was light-hearted and full of laughs. The Storyboard system worked fine, but it was (again) the high quality of the players and the creativity of the GM that really made the game for me.

The Backups (Mutants & Masterminds)
There were not a great deal of choices on Monday morning, and as this one was GM'd by a guy I used to play Shadowrun with, I thought I'd give it a try. It had some really good players who were also a bit loud, which faded out some of the other players at the table. All that became a non-issue once we got into the action, which was fun and well-paced but I get the feeling it was never as threatening as the GM intended it to be. The M&M system was easy to pick up, enough so that I might take a look at if I ever get another hankering to run a superhero game. The real highlight of the game was probably the greatest superhero character I've seen made for such a game: the Metagamer, a guy whose powers were that he knew he was in a role-playing game, and had the (limited) power to rewrite reality but also anything the player said at the table was always considered in-character. The guy who played Meta-Gamer did an exceptional job, and half the fun of the game was everyone just dealing with the nonsense created by the character interacting with the GM. A really good game.

I can't believe how good KublaCon ended up being. So many good games run by thoughtful and inspiring GMs trying to create something more than just the average con game, filled with people (I think there might've been a single game that didn't get filled-up by the shuffler) that were not all mouth-breathing, neck-bearded, morbidly obese, t-shirt torturing grognards. Which probably just means that I was that guy in the room for everybody else. It still worked for me.

Endgame Mini-Con April 2010

2010-04-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

I made a serious mistake with this mini-con at Endgame - I waited too long to sign-up for games. In the past, I've signed up as soon as games show up on the schedule, and, while I almost always get into a good game, there are usually one or two unique games that get posted late that I really would've liked to play but can't now that I'm already locked into something else. So with this con, I waited to the last minute. On the one hand, this meant I did get to play two very unique games; but on the other, the morning session filled up so quickly that I couldn't get into a single game, and ended up only playing two instead of three games.

My afternoon game was Agon, run by Sean Nittner (of the Narrative Control podcast). Agon is a game of Greek heroes doing mighty deeds and overcoming great odds to gain glory. Most of the game was narrative-based, with mechanics where players rolled off against their various skills (a D4 to D10 die + their D6 "name" die) to succeed in a conflict (to further the plot) and against each other (to be the one that claims credit for the success and thus gain greater glory). Players can help each other by offering their skills to another when not directly involved in the roll, in exchange for an oath that will compel the other player to return the favor at some later point. As oath-taking and failing conflicts quickly degrades skills and depletes the "divine favor" useful to make rolls highly successful, there is a mechanic where the characters engage in a week of revelry, challenges, or rituals to regain some of their original values (although this can be very slow, in particular to regaining skills). This aspect of the game works pretty well, moving the story quickly and favoring aggressive role-playing. Combat gets a little more crunchy, with a positioning mechanic similar in feel to the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but is still relatively smooth and quick. My only real criticism of the game is that, while there were a time or two where I felt my character was less than effective (this was mitigated by an interlude of revelry), I never felt my character was in danger. A fate mechanic, where the character gets closer to the end of their story, never really came into play, and wounds never got terribly serious. I think this might have been due to the one-shot nature of the game, and those aspects could come up more in a campaign. All in all, I liked the game, the GM was good, and the players were fun, so I'd like to try it again.

My evening game was a playtest of an unpublished system run by Paul Tevis (of the Have Games, Will Travel podcast) based in the Delta Green setting. I won't talk about the mechanics of the game (as Paul may be thinking of publishing it) except to say that it was a quite effective story game that emphasized the interpersonal relationships of the agents and the internal questions each character was grappling with during their battle against the Mythos. I was little worried when I saw we'd be playing characters from Paul's campaign, as that situation has never worked well for me when I've played it at other con games; but, the players were all top-notch and we so quickly got into our characters that it worked out great. It was a fantastic game and lots of fun.

The next Endgame Mini-Con will be the Good Omens Con on July 17, although KublaCon at the end of May is what's next on my agenda.

DunDraCon 2010

2010-02-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

After this year's DunDraCon, I've come to the conclusion that it, in terms of good role-playing experiences, DDC is the worst of the three gaming conventions in the Bay Area. DunDraCon still sounds better than what I've heard of non-Bay Area cons, which seems to be fixed to 4-hour game slots in communal rooms rather than the local standard of 6-8 hour slots in individual rooms. And I plan to go next year. I've just realized that, for this and every other year I've attended, the games I've played at DunDraCon tend to be mediocre.

Once again, I almost didn't attend the convention. I was sick (so much so that my doctor sent me to the ER the previous week) and still have something (possibly a fatty liver) as of yet undiagnosed, but on the second day of the con, I was feeling well enough to go. So I only played in four games, and was never feeling 100% solid throughout the entire con, and that could be considered a factor in why I had such a mediocre experience... except that I've had a lot of mediocre experiences at past DunDraCons.

DunDraCon has a reputation as the premier RPG convention in the Bay Area, as it's the oldest, not just in Northern California but on the West Coast as a whole. It has more RPGs than KublaCon, which is considered more of a general gaming convention as it equally focuses on card, board, and miniature gaming. It also has more RPGs and number of attendees than PacifiCon, which has been an almost ad-hoc affair over the last few years. Nevertheless, PacifiCon has such fewer players that it's easy to get into your game of choice, and there's more of a feeling of "can do" attitude (or least, lowered expectations) that I almost always have a good time there. KublaCon is just always a great time: the hotel is gorgeous, the atmosphere feels vibrant as everyone is getting their game on with so many choices (even if there are less RPGs), and the slate of RPGs tends to be more varied than the usual Call of Cthulhu, Hero, and endless iterations of Dungeons & Dragons that make up most of DunDraCon's schedule.

Whereas KublaCon always feels fresh and new, DunDraCon always feels stale and old. Although the systems may change (often though they don't) gamemasters at DDC tend to run the same kind of games with the same kind of standards for the same kind of players they have, year-in and year-out. Whereas at KublaCon and PacifiCon, I've played in games where the GM put a strong effort to create a compelling story, cool handouts, or run a new kind of system, at DunDraCon, GM's tend to run something just good enough to fill 6-8 hours. DunDraCon also feels choked to death with mouth-breathing, neck-bearded, morbidly obese grognards; and while I myself may fit some or all of those descriptors, I don't wallow in it. The players at DunDraCon are often more likely to want to joke around at the table than to get into their characters and role-play out a story, whereas I often run into players at Kubla or PacifiCon that really try to create an exceptional experience. DunDraCon feels to me like it's become comfortable in its own mediocrity, and it shows in the quality of the games and gamers it attracts.

As for this year's games...

Tales of the Singing Skull: The Clipper (Call of Cthuhu)
We played actual passengers onboard the Hawaii Clipper, which disappeared in 1938. My character was a Chinese-American restaurateur bringing 3 million dollars to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. Since I was the only character expecting trouble, I was the only one armed when three black-clad "ninjas" armed with submachine guns burst into the lounge in mid-flight, took over the plane, and started killing everyone onboard once they found the two American scientists they were looking for. One of those scientists was the only PC not be killed (in the first five minutes of the game!), and then we were all resurrected by the Singing Skull, a skull packed in cargo containing the spirit of an ancient Italian sorcerer compelling us to take back the plane and bring him to Ponape where his "friends" were waiting to take him home. The "friends" ended up being Deep Ones, who we allied with so as to take over a Japanese patrol boat. The Deep Ones sacrificed the Japanese to power the ritual which sent the sorcerer home, while we tried to make for Wake Island with the captured patrol boat. As a Japanese destroyer barreled down on us, the Singing Skull returned to ancient Rome, causing everyone who had been resurrected to die, and the sole surviving PC got picked up by the U.S. Navy.

The Dirty Half-Dozen (Millennium's End)
The characters were American military convicts during World War II, assigned to blow up the air defenses and steal the experimental plans of a Nazi V-3 rocket facility. Completely ill-equipped and unprepared for the mission, we parachuted into occupied France, killed a bunch of guards at a checkpoint, killed more Germans who came down the road, and then, because the GM felt we were moving too slowly, got fast-forwarded to the secret Nazi base. After a rushed plan to ambush a couple of trucks with noisy explosives, and then infiltrate the base in our own (flaming) truck, most of us successfully got onto the base and started blowing up the anti-aircraft emplacements when the Nazis suddenly fired off six V-3 rockets that spun around and turned into cyborg "Iron Men." The Iron Men then proceeded to kill us all with great ease.

The Fight for Gailea (Star Wars Saga)
My character was a heavy weapons expert on a three-man Rebel squad assigned to disable the sensor station for the Imperial anti-aircraft defenses, then wreck havoc on the local garrison to keep the enemies' attention away from the other teams (a group of spies capturing the corrupt planetary governor, a team of local revolutionaries inspiring a popular uprising at the palace, and squadron of fighter-bombers). We pretty easily took out the station, and then, with a quad laser on the roof, we knocked out many of the AA guns themselves, as well as the communications array the Imperials were using to jam everyone's communications. This drew the attention of the elite 501st Legion, who we fought off long enough till the starfighter pilots could drop a danger-close bombing run on us and wipe them out. Then we were attacked by two "dark troopers" who nearly killed us before we whittled down their shields and cut them down. After posing with the corpses and broadcasting the footage over an open channel (still trying to draw the enemy's attention), we met up with a Jedi (a PC shuttling between the tables) and fought our way into the garrison, where she commandeered a vehicle to infiltrate a Star Destroyer now sitting over the city. With nothing else to do, we blew up the garrison, took control of an AT-AT, then blew it up to finally just end the game and wait for the other tables to finish.

Project ACORN (All Flesh Must Be Eaten)
As the last game of the con, I didn't take the time to write out a synopsis of what happened, which basically boiled down to black ops spies shooting zombies on a cruise ship.

So that was my DunDraCon for 2010. Like I said, I'll go next year, but with significantly lowered expectations.

Blood's a Rover

2010-01-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

Even though Blood's a Rover, the conclusion of James Ellroy's Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, is not a bad book, there's no way I can recommend it to anyone that hasn't read the first two books. While it might stand on its own, it doesn't really do anything that American Tabloid didn't do better, and the book ends up working best as part of the greater work than a standalone story.

Taking place between 1968 to 1972, the novel moves from the cover-up of government and organized crime conspiracies in the assassinations of RFK and MLK (the subject of the previous novel, The Cold Six Thousand) to an attempt by the Mafia to set up a Cuban-styled wise-guy wonderland in the Dominican Republic while the FBI attempts to destabilize fringe black-power revolutionaries with undercover agents and heroin trafficking. Tying it all together is a 1964 armored car heist and the ubiquitous presence of the "Red Goddess Joan," a female post-Grapes Tom Joad with a mysterious vendetta against J. Edgar Hoover.

The protagonists include: Wayne Tedrow Jr., fresh off of murdering his Mormon racist publisher father in The Cold Six Thousand and now serving as a bagman to both the Mob and Howard Hughes; Dwight Holly, a minor character also from the previous novel transformed from a cardboard thuggish FBI caricature there to a conflicted leftist sympathizer here; and Don Crutchfield, a young L.A. wheelman/peeping tom who quickly becomes enmeshed in the various plots that permeate the book. A couple other perspectives are clumsily brought into the narrative in the last third of the book, but it's these three that fuel the story to varying results. Tedrow is basically a shadow of his character from The Cold Six Thousand, and his chapters make up more of an epilogue to that book than anything compelling new in this one. It also doesn't help that, in that book, Tedrow's character was most interesting in relation to the other protagonists, and here he's equally dry. Holly is the classic Ellroy "killer with the heart of pyrite," cut from the exact same mold as Kemper Boyd in American Tabloid and Ward Littell in The Cold Six Thousand, with similar results. It's a great character, but it's beginning to feel like Ellroy has come back to that well one too many times. Crutchfield is best thing about Blood's a Rover, not the least interesting of which is that he's an actual guy. Based on Ellroy's history (his murdered mother, his criminal record as a peeping tom), the Crutchfield character feels like the closest thing he's ever written to his own self, and the novel is at its most raw and original when it focuses on him. How Ellroy uses Crutchfield in the last pages perhaps speaks more truly to his own politics than anything the author's actually said, and how Crutchfield himself speaks of his own fate at the very end might have something meaningful to impart on the arc of Ellroy's own fiction from the L.A. Quartet to now.

Overall, I enjoyed Blood's a Rover, but it does have some problems. A voodoo murder that parallels the investigation track into the armored car heist comes off as flimsy and tacked-on, almost as if Ellroy were making some perfunctory nod to the L.A. Quartet books. The revelation behind Joan's longtime hatred of Hoover is rather pedestrian. The murderous LAPD cop character of Scotty Bennett that becomes a major character halfway into the book feels like Ellroy resurrecting a fatter, dumber version of Dudley Smith. The terse telegraphic style of prose from the previous two books is still here, but where it was intense in the rich story and characters of American Tabloid it only points out the less adequate elements of Blood's a Rover. Ultimately, Pete Bondurant's final scene in The Cold Six Thousand was an effective end to the Underworld U.S.A. story, while Blood's a Rover makes little more than a satisfying but unnecessary epilogue.

The White City

2010-01-13T18:33:00.000-08:00

The White City by Alec Michod is pure shit. The author can't write: his characters act like he scripted them with Mad-Libs, the prose is equally turgid and confusing, there is no mystery, and he doesn't do anything interesting with the setting much less explore its themes. I could give a synopsis of the plot and explain, point-by-point, why this hack should never be allowed to publish anything ever again, but this book was so utterly lacking in value that I can't even muster the disgust to go into why. Let this simply be a warning to those that might care: do not read this book.

Dead of Winter 2009

2009-12-14T04:22:00.000-08:00

I spent this weekend at the first Dead of Winter Horror Invitational, a very small gaming convention held at the Brookdale Lodge deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. My friend, Matt Steele, did an incredible job running this little monster, and despite a bunch of problems that could have wrecked any other con, I came away from Dead of Winter with a fantastic experience.

Just getting to the Lodge was an experience in and of itself. After getting out late and fighting through traffic to pick up my friend Basil in San Francisco, Google lead us astray and onto several miles of winding, mountain roads in hard, slippery rain, until we finally reached Boulder Creek for a good but late-coming dinner at the Boulder Creek Brewery Company (do not eat here unless you have hours to spare waiting for your food and resolving your bill). It was late by the time we got to the hotel, where we found most of the 30-or-so other DoW guests drinking it up in the bar.

The Brookdale Lodge, with a history of iniquity during Prohibition as well as a number of deaths (the most recent in September of this year) has a reputation for being haunted. As Basil and I discovered upon entering our room, "haunted" may simply be synonymous with "broken" or "code violations." Our original non-smoking room, for which we signed a document stating we would pay hundreds of dollars if we smoked in it, was filled with the stench of cigarette smoke. Also the lights wouldn't turn on. So we got ourselves checked into a new room, where the heater was covered by heavy-drapes but the window door to the patio wasn't (so morning light woke up whoever slept next to it), the lights worked (until Sunday morning, the bathroom light shorted-out in a rather explosive fizz... and the bathtub was made of steel, so no shower for us), and there wasn't a smoke detector in sight (speaking to others, they didn't have a smoke detector in their rooms as well). And these were the renovated rooms, as the un-renovated rooms had holes in them and windows in missing. All this might sound horrifying, but I actually had a decent time and, besides the shorted-out bathtub-of-doom that prevented showering on Sunday, was no different than any other room I'd stayed in at a con (for much mucho bucks).

I woke up around 8:45 on Saturday to receive my 8 o'clock wake-up call from an apologetic and addled front desk clerk, and, without any time for breakfast after showering, I made my way through the hotel (filled with buckets catching leaks and water-sogged carpets, past the electrical wires wrapped around a water faucet, and by the half-completed renovation of part of the hotel that burned down only recently). The hotel's main attraction, a long, three-level hall with a roaring creek flowing down the middle, was lovely in pictures, a bit worn-down and poorly maintained in person, and cold-as-hell in the rainy weather. Beyond that was the Log Room, a meeting room made like a log cabin (you could see daylight through the some of the slats) whose only heat was a large fireplace and the many space heaters Matt had place around the room (which went on-and-off intermittently as the outlets regularly shorted-out). This where we ran our games, and my first one was...

Silent Night (All Flesh Must Be Eaten)

It’s beginning to look a lot like TERROR, as a bunch of naughty department store Santas and their not-so-nice little helpers learn that the true meaning of Christmas is FEAR while trapped in a shopping mall full of last-minute shoppers and equally sinister things. You better watch out, you better not cry, and pouting won’t save you on this slay ride straight to HELL.

This was my game, which can more easily be described as Bad Santa with zombies. Absolutely the most offensive game I've run, the players got totally into it from the get-go, and everyone seemed to have a good time. AFBME was a nice, rules-light system for it, staying pretty much in the background, though I did feel that the characters were able to take down the main baddie a little too easily just with normal weapons. I liked the game, but I can't see it running it again (except for my regular gaming group next weekend) as it is so specific to the Christmas season.

Our catered lunch was surprisingly good, and was going swimmingly until just after the end of the session, the power went out throughout the hotel. This seemed fine as we had a two-hour break for dinner. Unfortunately, we all went to the Boulder Creek Brewery for dinner, so what should've been two hours stretched out into four hours as the place took forever to get us our food and then let us pay them for it. We were two hours late when all of us got back to the Lodge for the evening session, where it was discovered that the power was still out. This meant that we had to do everything - navigate the creaky hotel with the history of accidental deaths, go to the bathroom, and play role-playing games - by the dim, flickering light of candles or flashlights. In the "haunted" Brookdale and playing a bunch of horror-themed games, this was AWESOME.

The Night Tide (Basic Role-Playing)

Spring, 1721. Welcome aboard the privateer frigate Revenant. Crew: 261 Souls. The storm season has arrived with a fury and a venegance the likes of which no living sailor has ever seen. And while on a treacherous patrol through the dark heart of Kingbreaker Islands, the Revenant finds what she always seems to find: trouble and the unexpected.

My evening game was run by Jack Young, a great GM who I've had good experiences with in the past, and, despite the conditions (and kind of because of them), this game was no different. The game was set in his homebrewed world of a slightly fantasy version of 18th century piracy, where we played a cursed crew of privateers moving inexorably towards some watery doom of which we only had a vague foreboding. Playing all that in candlelight with a hard rain falling on a rustic cabin was the best atmosphere imaginable, but even after the power returned (by around midnight) it was still a pretty spooky game. BRP is the base system behind Call of Cthulhu, so it fared well for the horror game.

With the power back on, I slept easy through the night, woke early enough to get breakfast, and headed down for my last morning game...

At the Circus (World of Darkness: Mortals)

Dec. 15, 2000 - The small town of Circle Pines, Kansas, was shocked 18 hours ago when the horribly-mutilated body of local girl Ursula Wells, 16, was discovered. The shadowy Paranormal Investigations and Combat Bureau has noticed an unnerving trend, and is sending a team to investigate the cause and stop it before it claims more lives.

A solid and fun investigative horror game in The X-Files mold, this game played out well. I like nWOD as a system to play if not to run (the mechanic to spend Willpower to increase your chance of success is the only advantage I really find it has over BRP), and the investigative process ran smoothly. The GM, Travis Smiley, created a well-textured story of a German who shows up in the American Midwest after WWII, and creates a circus where accidents regularly happen and death toll strikes on a weekly basis. I liked how all the players, including me, immediately think Nazi occultism when we hear that, but it turned out to be something completely different. I played a hard-ass female ex-LAPD cop, and got to shakedown locals in a rough and abrasive manner. There were probably some things that we should've done differently, but the pacing was good and I had fun throughout.

There was an evening game slot, including a Jack-the-Ripper themed Don't Rest Your Head game that I really wanted to play, but I didn't want to drive home in the rain at 1 in the morning nor did I want to pay for another night at the Brookdale Lodge, so me and couple of others headed out in the afternoon. Even though it might sound like a nightmare with all the hauntings/code violations, power outages, and dinner snafus, Dead of Winter turned out to be one of the most fun times I've ever had at a con, and not in spite of all those mishaps. When the power went out at DunDraCon last year, there was a panic about how people would know what games they were in, much less how we would all play in the darkness; but, at Dead of Winter, there was a kind of glee in the air, as though it was all part of some (mis)adventure. That was the general tone throughout, and with such great players and GMs, and so many friends in general, Dead of Winter had a charm that just couldn't be beat. So long as it doesn't bankrupt him, Matt has to do this next year, and I am much looking forward to it.

Zombieland

2009-10-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

This was a very stupid movie. An awesomely stupid movie. And, between this and being dragged to see G.I. Joe, I am now convinced that stupid movies tend to attract stupid audiences. Zombieland was no different, and as every zombie got killed and dismembered in an ever wider variety of cartoon violence, this audience of Neanderthals cheered it on like grape-gorged Romans screaming for blood in the Coliseum. It was mindless gore-porn, without plot or meaning or certainly anything approaching art.

I loved every fucking minute of it.

Sure, it can't beat 28 Days Later for nihilistic horror, or even Shaun of the Dead for managing to be both funny and a real movie with actual characters and plot. Nebbish Geek hooks up with Redneck Wahoo, they fall in with Hot Chick and Spunky Kid, they drive to Los Angeles, have a zombie celebrity cameo, do something really stupid to move the non-existent plot along, and then kill a lot of zombies. That's it. If you're pissed that I just spoiled the plot for you, when it comes to Zombieland, you're doing it wrong. Forget character, forget plot, this is about laughing at carnage and nothing else. It ain't much - but just as Tallahassee feels about Columbus - it'll do, pig.

Dr. Octopoid, Occult Detective From Beyond Space and Time!

2009-10-06T15:52:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of Flames Rising's Horror Plot Generator:

A gigantic octopus with psychometry, whose home base is in a Victorian funeral home, wants to bring the Earth closer to the sun. Supported by falcons, the gigantic octopus appears to have one weakness - bat tongues. Interestingly enough, the gigantic octopus is from the not-too-distant future.

Sounds silly at first, but consider this rewrite: in the last years of the twenty-first century, as civilization collapses due to an apocalyptic Ice Age, a small band of scientists use time-travel technology to send the consciousness of one of their own back in time to prevent this coming catastrophe. Now trapped in the body of a giant octopus, the futuristic Doctor, armed with hi-tech psychic powers that allow him read the sensations of memory by touch and control the minds of lower life-forms (like his flying army of falcons), plots from his tank in the basement of a Victorian funeral home, where he builds, with a workforce of cadaverous conscripts, giant rockets underneath London that will push the Earth further towards the Sun and save mankind from an icy demise two hundreds IN THE FUTURE!

And he also solves crimes and shit with the help of his plucky monkey assistant and a hot corset-wearing suffragette.

And he's allergic to bat tongues.

Once I Lived For Hate...

2009-10-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

... but now I live for suck. For years, my entire enjoyment in watching the NFL has been based on schadenfreude. Sure, I've rooted for the Pats and the Steelers on occasion, but what really gets me off is the annihilation of those teams and players I detest. I hated Peyton Manning, and I watched him win a Super Bowl. I hated his brother, Eli, and watch him hoist the Lombardi. I hated Brett Fav-ruh, and am watching him tonight prove true the douchebags of ESPN. I can hate no longer. I must choose a team and stick with it, so I flipped a coin to choose between my two "home" teams.

And, starting tonight, I am officially a fan of this guy's product.

May God have mercy on my soul.

At least no one will accuse me of being a fair-weather fan. The starting quarterback has a passer rating lower than some major leaguer's batting averages. The head coach could soon be up on assault charges for knocking out his own assistant. The owner is so batshit-crazy old, I think his face has literally begun to melt. But, hey, at least I can now say I am rooting for something. That's a positive thing, right?

Right....

Procrastination

2009-09-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

After a day spent cataloging them, I can now say that I own 424 Call of Cthulhu scenarios. Taking away PDFs (many of which are very short one-shots) and my own original scenarios (which may be still in-development), I still have 278 fully-written scenarios. Were I to run these scenarios back-to-back every week (and they were each completed in a single session, which ain't going to happen as a number of them are campaigns), I would be finished with them in over 5 years.

I really need to get an ongoing Call of Cthulhu group going.

Why I Don't Buy More Comics

2009-09-16T21:33:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was reading through my latest issue of Previews, a catalog I get from my local comic book store to order my weekly dose of books, and came across the most obvious example of why I am buying less and less comics these days. Behold, Batman/Doc Savage Special #1:

Doc Savage returns to DC Comics…and comes face-to-fist with the Batman! Superstar scribe Brian Azzarello (100 BULLETS, JOKER) and the breathtaking art of Phil Noto combine to shine the first light on a shadowy new version of the DC Universe, where the thugs run rampant, corruption runs deep, and even heroes can't be trusted!

The "shadowy new version of the DC Universe" that this issue inaugurates is what most fascinates me, as this seems to be setting up a new pulp setting for the DC superheroes. I love this stuff, both the author and the artists look solid, and I would be quick to gobble this issue up, except for one niggling little detail...

On sale November 11 - 56pg, FC, $4.99 US

$4.99. Four dollars and ninety-nine cents. $4.99 for a "prologue" (so not a self-contained story) that also includes a sketchbook that the publishers think is a plus but is actually just filler when you charge over FIVE DOLLARS with tax for fifty measly pages of story!

I don't care if it's the greatest comic on the planet, I'm not paying five bucks for an issue of anything sight unseen, especially when I don't even know if it will be total and complete ass. Maybe I'll wait for the trade, when, in the unlikely event that it doesn't disappoint, I can pick up the complete story on Amazon at a 20-30% discount off the cover price in a format that looks good on my bookshelf.

Over the past year, I've dropped more than a few comics that I was enjoying (Booster Gold comes immediately to mind) and never picked up others (the Lovecraft pulp one of the independents put out) because I refuse to pay more than $2.99 for a comic book. I wonder if the publishers really understand what I could do with $5... I can buy a used paperback of most novels, a used copy of many current-generation video games, a DVD of even recently-released movies, or go on Ebay and get a trade paperback of their own comics. I've heard rumors that the Disney buy-out of Marvel might result in a price drop to as low as $1.99 to rebuild the casual market that's been lost over the past two decades. Based on this kind of nonsense, I can only hope it's true or I might end up not buying any comics outside of trades on Amazon and Ebay.

The Strain

2009-09-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Strain, by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan, is the first book in a trilogy about an outbreak of vampirism in modern-day New York. A jet lands at JFK airport with its entire crew and passengers seemingly dead (a la the Demeter), with a mysterious coffin-like cabinet aboard. This first sequence is taut, and the free preview available on Amazon.com is what lead me to check the book out, but it's misleading. Whereas those first 28 pages are full of foreboding, that quickly fades as the book then goes on for literally hundreds of pages before anything interesting happens. The book is padded with repetitive sequences of uninteresting characters stumbling to their doom (usually at the hands of vampirized family members), and whatever is mildly interesting (the ancient vampire clans, the corporate conspiracy behind the outbreak) is left implied, presumably to be fleshed out in the next two volumes.

All that said, the real cardinal sin of The Strain is that it's just not scary. The vampires, an uneasy mix of traditional folklore and biological pathogen, are too mindless to work as the "monstrous human" of traditional vampires, while remaining too silly (the Master vampire still runs around in a cape) to work as scientific horror. It also doesn't help that none of the characters are engaging enough to fear for their safety. The protagonist is a recovering alcoholic workaholic who blames his ex-wife and her new boyfriend for the dissolution of his marriage, so you can guess how the authors lazily have this whiny jerk get his satisfaction. The rest of the supporting cast are cardboard cutouts, except for the absurdly over-the-top Van Helsing-esque vampire hunting ex-professor pawn broker, an 80+ year old with a heart condition and crippled hands who still swashbuckles around decapitating vampires with his silver cane-sword while belching his ridiculous catchphrase: "My sword sings of silver!"

Yeah, it's that bad. In the end, the book reads more like the pilot script for a television series, with more effort spent on creating antagonists and situation than resolving conflicts, setting us up for the next episode (book two) but not offering anything like a good read. Mercifully, it was a quick read, although I admit that by the end, I just shuffled through the tedious action scenes. The Strain was shit, and del Toro should still to movies.

April 6, 2055

2009-09-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

According to Wolfram Alpha, April 6, 2055 will be a Tuesday. The sun will rise in the San Francisco Bay Area at 6:49am in the morning and set at 7:40pm in the evening. It will be a waxing gibbous moon that night. And according to this website, that's about as far as I can expect to live.

45 years, 6 months, 28 days...

PacifiCon 2009

2009-09-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

Evidently ConQuest is dead and it's long live PacifiCon now. It was all Cthulhu all the con as I ran a game of Call of Cthulhu (Toteninsel), and played in games of Call of Cthulhu (A Black Brothers Production, Here There Be Tygers, and Once Men) and CthulhuTech (Nemesis). SPOILER WARNING for those that might play those games at future Bay Area conventions.

Toteninsel (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green)

1943: On a remote German island in the North Sea, the Nazi “resuscitated casualties” program has broken the barrier between life and death. Your team of Allied commandos must infiltrate the island and discover the true purpose of Projekt DRAUGR, or much more than the war may be lost.

I first ran Toteninsel (at a convention) at ConQuest 2007, back before they changed the name to PacifiCon. The game is a Nazi zombie sequel to Herbert West: Reanimator, with plenty of Where Eagles Dare action involving characters like an OSS/Delta Green spy, a descendant of Herbert West's first victim, a Bavarian ex-bergfilme actor, and a PISCES necrophagistic interrogator, among others. The game has seemed to work for almost every player I've run it for, and this time was no different as everyone said they had fun. Almost all of the players were very solid roleplayers, and the only slightly hairy moment came up when it looked like the characters weren't going to get a key bit of information to easily proceed forward with the scenario. They still got it and I could've winged it otherwise, but it proved another example that such instances usually have more to do with scenario design than game mechanics. Even if I'd been running Gumshoe, I can't give the players a clue if they don't go to the scene where the clue is located; although, that system's greatest strength is, had I been using Gumshoe, it would've forced me to pay closer attention to the clue tree when designing the scenario and take these questions into consideration.

A couple of changes I made was to add some house rules, most importantly the use of the Professional Competence rule, where the players could flip a percentile roll (change 84 to 48) once per scene on an occupational skill. I'll have to try it again as I forgot to ask the players whether it worked or failed, but it didn't seem to have a negative impact. I also changed impales from 20% of a skill chance to rolling doubles (44, 77, etc.), which made the rolls less math-intensive and thus quicker but did reduce the chance to 9%. Next time I run CoC, I'm just going to come up with character sheets that include the impale chance % with the skill.

A Black Brothers Productions (Call of Cthulhu)

Like their fathers before them, film producer/writer/directors Wally and George Black plan to make "adult" movies until they can break into legit film. Their latest big-budget production "Deep Behind the Iron Curtain" is shooting in an ancient unrestored castle in Estonia. A pre-production crew was sent to the location a week ago to make it livable. A sat-phone call from the Production Manager 2 days ago let everyone know they're ready to begin Principal Photography tomorrow. The cast and crew head into the mountains...

Saturday morning I played in my friend Matt Steele's game, and it rocked HARD. Everyone was either a porn star or a member of the film crew, and I played "Shank", who was the lead co-star before the Ron Jeremy character joined the production and took it over as his comeback film. Shank, an egomaniacal idiot who always spoke of himself in the third person, was less than pleased. This is the first time I've ever roleplayed out an orgy scene (as part of some "Lord of the Rings" parody porn), where my retard character mispelled the ritual summoning in his script ("H'ahys e rro eeh'll ghta hgn-nhu's...") as "Here's a real phat gnu", causing him to wonder if antelope bestiality would be part of the movie. The naked Shank almost helped by going insane and trying to "shank" the giant tentacled plant-monster like it's never been shanked before (which would also have fed him to the beast and made the necessary human sacrifice), but one of the PC's fell unconscious from above and landed on his back, bringing up Shank's memories of his pre-feature bear work as he fell into oblivion. Fantastic game, every player at the table instantly got into the spirit of things, and a telling example of why DunDraCon's family friendly RPG policy is misguided.

Here There By Tygers (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green)

An old pullman car, a surly lawyer, a gung-ho reporter and four relatives who have never met. What could possibly go wrong? Other than the fact that you seem to be somewhere... unexpected.

This game was made for me. A Call of Cthulhu game involving Delta Green, the Karotechia, and the Fate, set during World War II, filled with insanely-detailed prop handouts, run by a well-paced GM that was a trained actor (so he role-played the hell out the NPCs) and was also rock-solid with the rules.. this was the kind of experience I always hope to find at cons. It also helped that all but one of the players at the table was a friend of mine, so the game was more like a home group and was tons of fun as we got into proceedings while cracking wise at each other.

We started out in the modern-day (I played an ex-Peace Corps doctor), got catapulted back to 1943, and were quickly recruited by our great-grandfather Delta Green agent to find our missing great-grandmother, taken by what first seems like Nazi spies but slowly develops into something even more sinister. There was a LOT of stuff in this game, moving swiftly from scenes set across the country, and we eventually had to compress some investigation at the end due to the late hour, but the GM brought us to a very satisfying ending. Besides all the WWII DG vs. Karotechia goodness, I also got to enjoy the scene where one of the players, who had just remarked that his B.A.R. seemed so powerful on burst fire that it broke the game, then immediately come face-to-face with an Outer God in the next round. Good times.

Once Men (Call of Cthulhu)

Here you are trying to make a honest (?) living driving spirits into USA from Canada when someone is taking a cut.

Sunday morning, I was signed up to play a Call of Cthulhu involving bootleggers in the 1920s, but the GM couldn't print the character sheets, so we ended up playing a scenario in the "CoC in space" monograph Once Men. We were members of a rescue vessel in the late 21st century, sent to investigate a derelict spaceship lost 6 years ago while testing an experimental Gate system. The other players including my con roomie Basil, and trio of young guys who had all either played Toteninsel the night before or at previous cons and were very good players to a man. What I most took from the game was that, after games like Eclipse Phase and even Shadowrun 4th Edition that put a lot of effort into exploring future tech, this kind of "sci fi" with the standard Alien-esque setting (we live in the future exactly like now but inside a spaceship) seems as old-school as the ray-gun pulps of the thirties must've seemed to Alien itself. Any futuristic game that doesn't take into consideration the ramifications of commonly projected advances like nanotechnology and genetic engineering just doesn't float my boat anymore, unless they fully embrace themselves as the "classic" (tired) space opera they've become.

Nemesis (CthulhuTech)

As the Aeon War rages around the world; a darker, more secretive battle is fought in the shadows. As the chosen of the Eldritch Society, you are among the elite who have given yourselves to Rite of Transfiguration, bonding yourself with a “higher being” to protect mankind from your former comrades, The Children of Chaos. But are you ready to face what could be your most harrowing challenge, yet?

This was a happy surprise. The pickings were slim on Sunday evening, so I chose this game as I knew the GM was good and was kind of interested to see if CthulhuTech would be as cheesy as I thought it would be. Though there may be a tradition of Lovecraftian elements in anime, I haven't seen anything that really captured a Lovecraftian mood, and the idea of Evangelion-esque mecha blasting Deep Ones has no real appeal for me, as I'm not an anime fan... but then I actually played the game, and it is good. While it's not a horror game and (without reading the book, which has some gorgeous art btw) the Mythos entities are used in such a general fashion that there's nothing particularly Lovecraftian about them, the basic premise of young humans and their alien allies using inhuman technology to destroy even more inhuman enemies is just full of fun. CthulhuTech is Evangelion-vs-Cthulhu, but once I actually started playing that, I really got into it. The game mechanics themselves felt close to White Wolf with added-on Drama Point mechanics, and, though the rules were intuitive and functional enough that I'd have no hesitation playing CthulhuTech as is, I think I might want to use a simpler system if I (being a rules-retard) ever tried to run it. I was pretty sleepy come Sunday evening, so I didn't get into the game like I wish I had, but it was a great taste of the system and a solid roleplaying experience.

That was PacifiCon for me. I didn't attend Monday as my funds are too tight right now to waste another night on the hotel room. The con itself was run pretty much exactly as last year, so it's still a little less polished than DunDraCon and KublaCon, and there still seem to be less games available than at those other Bay Area cons. That said, I got into the first choice of every game I signed up for, and all of my games were either filled up with players or close to capacity. I can see no reason not to attend PacifiCon next year, although for godsakes I need to find something else to run other than Toteninsel.

Inglorious Basterds

2009-08-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

I had to see this film, not out of any affection for Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof sucked so hard, I ended up fast-forwarding the DVD to the end, something I almost never do), but due to childhood memories of the original Italian movie. I saw The Inglorious Bastards numerous times as a kid, since , besides being just the kind of cheap knockoff of WWII commando movies that I love, it also had a scene where the heroes nearly get killed by machine gun-wielding topless German maidens frolicking in a stream. Back in my day, we didn't have "bittorrents" or "Redtube" - we had Eurotrash titties, and they were pimply and pasty, and you only got to see a second of them, and WE LIKED IT!

So like any other right-headed American boy obsessed with floppy titties and dead Nazis, I loved The Inglorious Bastards, and had to see the Tarantino remake. Turns out though that Inglorious Basterds has absolutely nothing to do with the original, being an entirely new story consisting of two different plotlines - a French Jewish girl escaping an SS intelligence officer, and "The Basterds" a special American unit of Jews terrorizing the Nazis in occupied France - that converge upon the gala screening of a Nazi propaganda film that provides the opportunity for both the girl and the Basterds to take down the Nazi elite in a fiery Götterdämmerung. And it's all completely mediocre.

I mean that literally, not as a synonym for "bad" because this is a mostly well-acted and executed movie. Despite its 2.5 hour length, I felt it moved speedily along and was (mostly) interested in every scene. Of the performances, much has been made of Christoph Waltz as the "Jew Hunter", but just because an actor doesn't devolve into a Germanic Snidely Whiplash as soon as he puts on SS black, doesn't make him Oscar-quality. Brad Pitt tries well, but he ain't no Lee Marvin. Melanie Laurent gives the best performance of the film, which is not surprising as the most fully-realized and only human character amongst a cast of caricatures.

A movie about burning/blowing up a Parisian theater full of Nazis is not a bad idea, but it is not original nor is Inglorious Basterdds interesting enough to be elevated above its mediocre lineage. Tarantino's direction doesn't even try to elevate Inglorious Basterds above the spaghetti war-xploitation genre. It's not funny enough to be parody, and not biting enough to be satire - although the Nazi film-within-the-film, Nation's Pride, does a spot-on eviscerating of American war films like Black Hawk Down and even Saving Private Ryan, where faceless enemies are gunned down in exacting detail by amoral patriots:

But don't be fooled - this film isn't about the dangers of war as spectacle, or anything else deeper than how far one can bury a baseball bat through a Nazi's head. And even that is pretty tepid - while the violence sometimes goes over the top and there's lots of loving shots of scalping and carving swastikas into foreheads, Inglorious Basterds is surprisingly violence-free. So the gore-porners will be disappointed by all the talking, and the history nerds will have heart attacks over what may be the most ahistorical WWII film ever made, leaving this film only for douchebag hipsters who think Tarantino is still relevant. Or even still trying.

All this said, I can't fault Inglorious Basterds for not being more than it appears to be. It's a dumb over-the-top WWII spaghetti western with Nazis instead of bandits and Schmeissers instead of six-guns. It's also talky as hell, and not as full of action as represented. It's not really stimulating, either to the intellect or the testosterone, but if you really love watching Nazis get murdered in every manner imaginable, you might like this flick. I do, and I did, but even I could've done with it as a rental.

SuperMax

2009-08-16T19:02:00.001-07:00

I just finished running my BRP superheroes-in-prison one-shot game called SuperMax, which boils down to my take on The Authority meets OZ by way of The Boys. I went overboard creating a faux-Wikipedia as setting background and didn't put as much effort into constructing the plot, but it was refreshing to play it by ear, and the players seemed to have a really fun time. The best moments came from the Superhung character, from Fedayeen getting his leg caught in his urethra as Superhung created a "penis elevator" for everyone to ride down the ventilation shaft to freedom, to Superhung dealing the killing blow by stretching out his penis to launch himself through The Redeemer's chest, with the Jesus-Freak Superman sliding lifelessly down his member. About my only regret was that I didn't get a chance to work in my Wolverine/Punisher/alcoholic Boston sports fan character Boston Crab, because the PC's found a way to escape early on.

While the game was insane, BRP leaves much to be desired as a system. The way the effects of powers are handled requires a lot of math, stripping away the best quality of the BRP system (its quick simplicity) and leaving all its vices (too easy failure). I mitigated this by including "Luck Points", poker chips that could be spent to re-roll, flip rolls (turn an 81 into an 18), and other stuff that made the characters significantly more competent. Still, I had to fiddle with almost everyone's powers during chargen, and handwave a lot of effects to keep things moving. Spirit of the Century would've worked much better, but I wanted to go with a system I knew when running a setting I'd created wholly on my own.

The Devil in the White City

2009-08-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

The Devil in the White City is an odd duck. Erik Larson's well-received "history" of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair seeks to tell the tale of "Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that changed America" through the parallel stories of Daniel Burnham, the architect that oversaw construction of the Exposition, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer that preyed upon young women attracted to Chicago and the "White City" of its Fair. Larson is a good writer, and the story of Burnham, Holmes, and the Fair are interesting enough; but, while the book is a decent read, it's not really satisfying.

For one thing, there's no real theme that unites Burnham and Holmes, whether in the similarity of their passions or the juxtaposition of their accomplishments. Larson's well-crafted pace, which uses a lot of foreboding to build suspense of the doom sure to strike at some point in the narrative, only makes the constant switching between the two plotlines aggravating. There were several times where I wished I was reading a single book on either Burnham or Holmes, but I held hope that Larson would tie it all together in the end. He doesn't, and that failure is compounded by the fact that Larson never really gets into how the Fair "changed America." The epilogue lists a number of new ideas and inventions that the Fair inaugurated, but that should have been the meat of the book rather than a paragraph (and sometimes just a sentence) at the tail-end of the story.

I was also unimpressed with Larson's approach to the subject as history. While I don't really have a problem with his "novelist" style of prose (Larson frequently writes of what his subjects were thinking), I think it failed him with the Holmes story. He creates a narrative of Holmes that portrays him more as a Hannibal Lector psychopathic god than the more banal portrait the evidence shows: a psychopath, but one ultimately motivated by greed, more fraudster than Jack the Ripper. And it feels as though Larson wrote Holmes like this simply because it makes for a more interesting story.

On the flip side, Larson's story of Burnham is a waste, as he becomes much more concerned with personality duels between board directors and the administrative challenges of building the Fair than what is the most interesting aspect of his story: how Burnham's vision of the Fair affected the course of American architecture for the next half-century. Although Larson finally brings the subject near the end, and while he obviously admits its importance as it becomes a central part of the book's climax, he only devotes a few paragraphs to what should have been more fully explored.

The Devil in the White City is an okay book and I enjoyed Larson's writing style; but, it doesn't achieve greatness in theme nor does it fully capture its own subjects. It probably makes a good starter for those interested in late nineteenth-century Chicago, American architecture, and serial killers of the period, but nothing more.

Witchcraft in the Southwest

2009-07-24T23:14:00.000-07:00

Witchcraft in the Southwest, Marc Simmons' 1976 work on "supernaturalism" among Native American populations along the Rio Grande isn't much of a read. As an academic work, even forgiving that it is now over a quarter century out of date, it lacks theme or focus (as well as an index). And as a work of popular non-fiction, the prose is unengaging and reads more like the author listing out a series of sketchy anecdotes.

The most striking aspect of Simmons' writing is his uncritical approach to the subject. He strongly connotes Native American paganism with European witchcraft (although he does nothing interesting to explore how that was transmitted or its cultural effects), and when he describes the condemnations of Catholic missionaries and local villages fetted upon "evil" witches, there is a distinct tone of sympathy with such attitudes. You can almost read the glee whenever he describes how some witch (usually an old, lonely woman) receives "just" punishment for her curses, which almost always results in getting flogged to death or suspended from a mission rafter by her elbows. That he doesn't question why the villagers have these attitudes, how the role of witches (whose herbalism seems to harken to practical medicinal purposes couched in occult trappings) might've been marginalized in the move from paganism to Christianity, or any other meaning than that these are witches and they deserve death is both frightening and ultimately boring.

The book is too small and Simmons' treatment too facile to really do the subject justice. There are a bunch of details that suggest the richness of the subject, both to the academician and those simply curious, but Simmons never provides anything other than a simple description. An example is the following:

One night Juan Perea, a notorious male witch who died in San Mateo in 1888, sallied forth on a nocturnal ramble after depositing his eyes in a saucer on the kitchen table and borrowing those of the cat. While he was away, his hungry dog upset the table and gobbled up his eyes, leaving Juan to spend the rest of his life wearing the green eyes of the cat.

That's deliciously crazy (even moreso as it's only one of three times in the book where a witch loses their eyes and ends up with those an animal), but that's also the entirety of Perea's story in the book. Simmons does this with every anecdote: write a few sentences describing the instance and then going on to the next one, with little comment or detail. Ultimately, this is a maddeningly underwritten work by an author with a dull, conservative perspective on what could have been a much-more promising subject.

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

The Hurt Locker is the best movie I've seen this year, and the best war film I've seen in quite awhile. A series of vignettes depicting the last days of a three-man EOD team before they rotate out of 2004-era Iraq, the film moves briskly from one frightening encounter to another, as though the movie is trying to give some sense of the terror of war. While terrifying, The Hurt Locker never becomes anything more than action movie - a gritty, powerful and highly effective action movie, but in the end, just an action movie.

Directed by Katheryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Point Break), the film's three protagonists are James, Sanborn, and Eldridge. James is a veteran EOD man, an adrenaline junkie in love with war and nothing else. Sanborn is a professional just looking to get home but unsure of what he really hopes to find there. Eldridge is a younger soldier haunted by a death he might have prevented and generally burnt out by Iraq. Besides a few scenes inside the wire that define the characters' backgrounds and relationships, the bulk of the film is taken up by six set-pieces on the battleground, where the characters either have to defuse improvised explosives or dodge ambushes.

Despite an opening quote about war being a drug, The Hurt Locker doesn't really have any message. The greatest focus is on James, and the he could be seen as an archetype for modern-day America, so desperately dissatisfied with our suburban Wal-Mart existence that we crave overseas combat just to jolt us from our ennui, that we might have once fought out of love for democracy and freedom but have come to love war for its own sake.

But that's a stretch: this film is about explosions, about men facing death and being manly about it (the scene where James and Sanborn punch each other comes off more like a hurt/comfort slashfic than male bonding). The character of James - the angst-ridden death-obsessed badass who is the best there is at what he does, but what he does best isn't very nice - might've seemed original once upon time before almost every action movie made since the 1950's used that character as its protagonist. Jeremy Renner's portrayal of James is okay, but he is so underwritten than there's just no depth.

Which is also true for the movie. The Hurt Locker packs an immediate edge because of its timeliness, and it will mistakenly be lauded as the first movie made about the Iraq War to capture the grunts-eye view of the war. However, it's not Platoon or The Big Red One or All Quiet on the Western Front - I may be naive or uninformed, but I doubt that the average grunt is like James, so high on war that he often forsakes basic precautions just to get to the action quicker. If the film focuses on Sanborn or Eldridge, it might've be closer to The Grunt's Tale that critics want to paint it as, but James is such an action hero cliche that The Hurt Locker can't rise above those genre roots. And while the film's portrayal of almost all Iraqis as sinister figures ever-ready to explode hidden bombs may be spot-on for a film that is from the American soldier's perspective, it also means that the film can't be taken seriously as a more general perspective on the war.

But this is a good movie, a damn fine movie, one that belongs alongside other full-muscled if simplistic military meditations like Hell is for Heroes or Hamburger Hill (it starts with "H" too!). And if Bigelow had mixed in some well-considered commentary, The Hurt Locker would have probably ended up sacrificing its visceral energy for labored pretentiousness. It may just be an action movie, but the film does reminds us that you don't need robots terminating or transforming to make an exciting summer blockbuster: you can also do it with poorly thought-out tragic misadventures in the Middle East.

Children of Earth and Curse of Yog-Sothoth

2009-07-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

This is a joint post to my gaming livejournal and my personal blog, due to the cross-topics being discussed.

This week, I saw that latest (last?) Torchwood series, Children of Earth, and read the first act in the Curse of the Yellow Sign series for Call of Cthulhu. I expected one to be marginal and the other to rock, and was surprised on both fronts. MAJOR SPOILER WARNING for those that continue...

Torchwood defines the term "uneven." When it premiered three years ago, I had expected a darker, adult take on the Doctor Who mythos, one where humanity faced the same kind of otherworldly threats as the Doctor but had no Time Lord know-how or status to succeed without loss and sacrifice. Instead, Torchwood saw "adult" as an excuse to inject more sex and violence into the mix, while maintaining the goofy cheese of the new Doctor Who series. There's nothing wrong with trashy sex-&-gore (see the current HBO series True Blood), but British have always been able to inject a dark and unsettling political subtext when they made adult sci-fi. Torchwood failed in this, and could never elevate itself beyond cheese-tastic in those all-t00-few moments where it was more than adequate. Yet, in its latest series, Children of Earth, it finally became something more.

The first three episodes of the mini-series were effective, with its murkily-seen alien antagonist and hints at a horrifying exchange of children in the past. Then, with the fourth episode, Children of Earth ramped up the horror in a brutal and intelligent manner, as political leaders sat around a table and slowly descended into a moral hell where not only would children be given over to the aliens, but it would the "right" kind of children (first the illegal aliens, then the poor, then all those but the politically-connected). Even in its absurd trappings, that scene is frighteningly realistic, and, as with the best sci-fi, more about our present than anything fantastic. Then it gets even darker in the finale, where a political figure who was in that room murders his family and commits suicide rather than watch them turned over to the aliens and live with his complicity in the act. And then the usually cheesy Captain Jack pulls the switch to sacrifice his own grandson in the only chance humanity has to end the alien threat and save the 10% of the world's children that would otherwise be handed over. Both are unimaginable crimes, made all the more horrifying in that they were also absolutely reasonable things to do in that situation, carried out by "good" men.

On the other hand, we have Curse of the Yellow Sign: Act 1: Digging for a Dead God, a Call of Cthulhu scenario by reknowned game designer John Wick. As its title suggests, it's only the first part of a trilogy of scenarios, so this individual product is rather thread-bare: nothing particular of the Hastur Mythos appears, and the scenario doesn't end with any kind of conclusive climax. Indeed, there are no set events in the scenario beyond introducing the characters to the plot. What does exist is the premise: the setting is sub-saharan Africa in 1939, and the characters are German SS personnel working on a covert operation to mine diamonds when they unearth something alien and malevolent. While that alien prescence exerts a sanity-damaging influence on the characters, there is no plan to foil, ritual to carry out, Gate to close, or cultists to slaughter. All that is likely to happen in this unstructured game is that the characters will carry out acts of depravity and violence until... well, I guess everyone decides they've had enough and call it a night.

That actually appeals to me, as I've been thinking about running a "sandbox" game to work out the railroad-y tendencies I'm worried might be prevalent in my GM style. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be running Digging for a Dead God for reasons that became apparent after I'd finished Children of Earth. You see, the reason Children of Earth was so effective was not that horrible acts happened, but that it was good people carrying out those acts, honorable and empathetic characters forced into a very dark situation. Yet in Digging for a Dead God, you've got Nazi player characters (mostly), so that when they murder and torture and fall into darkness, there's hardly any moral distance from which they have to fall. I am a great proponent of the kind of personal horror Digging for a Dead God is trying to attain, and I definitely agree that CoC needs more of that than yet another ritual to disrupt; but if you play scumbags, there's no room for personal horror when all the story asks them to do is engage in scumbaggery.

I could probably avoid this if I changed the characters from Nazis to something less intrinsicly evil, but it means nothing if I simply file the serial numbers off to make the characters mercenaries or put them in another setting. I would have to establish the characters as intrinsicly "good" (ie. likely to be upset about putting villagers in a hot box) and still create a situation where they would be doing the kind of actions they are in the written scenario. In other words, I'd have to write a completely new scenario, and considering how little there is in Digging for Dead God (literally, you're Nazis, you torture Africans, and a dark god whispers to you - that is pretty much it), it just wouldn't be worth it. So, while I will probably pick up Act 2 of the trilogy (I do want a sandbox game focused on personal horror), this first part does nothing for me, except reinforce why Nazis make for lousy player characters.

Obama's Speech at Notre Dame

2009-05-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that his wisdom is greater than our own.

This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness and service that moves hearts and minds.
For if there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the golden rule — the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this earth.

I may lack the faith to believe in this kind of Christianity, but I would be proud to stand alongside those believers who profess this faith.

The full speech can be read here.

Star Trek

2009-05-13T20:06:00.000-07:00

(warning: mild spoilers)

I enjoyed Star Trek. Watching the endless previews, I expected a big dumb summer blockbuster, full of explosions as hollow as the film's meaning, one that would abandon the rich subtext and ambitious social dialogue that the original series often (but not always) aspired to. And that's pretty much what Star Trek is, but it is so well done that I didn't care.

I liked The Next Generation, couldn't care less about Deep Space Nine, avoided Voyager, and was bored by Enterprise, but I've never considered any of them a worthy successor to the Original Series. Whereas TOS was a space western where JFK-like figures civilized the final frontier with equal parts brain and brawn, TNG and the others were tech-obsessed project managers solving the problem of the week by sitting around a conference table and technobabbling the episode to a conclusion. These shows shared in Roddenberry's vision of the future as a secular utopia, but they were bloodless and had none of the vibrant earthiness of TOS. As an origin story, Star Trek has yet to show that it heeds to Roddenberry's ethos, but it certainly brought back the gutsy bravado of TOS.

Now, the movie is far from perfect, though I think the reviews have made a little too much of the plot holes supposedly endemic to the plot. It makes sense for the narrative for certain characters to be placed in certain situation, but it takes a big suspension-of-disbelief for the narrative to flow the way it does. That said, the weakest part for me was that which so many folks (including my wife) enjoyed the most: all the connections between TOS and the movie. The quotes throwing back to the old days got a bit cheesy, and the appearances of Leonard Nimoy as Old-Spock did more to jar the story than to really connect it back to anything positive.

The film was really going to stand-or-fall on its cast, and both Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto delivered hard as Kirk and Spock. Quinto made me remember why I liked him as Sylar in the first season of Heroes (and thus forget how much I've loathed him in every season since), and Pine perfectly captured the likeability and swagger of the smirking Kirk. What Pine didn't capture was the hypercompetent masculinity of the serious Kirk, which can be forgiven this time as the whole film is about how rebel alt-Kirk grows back into the Kirk of TOS. It won't be forgiven if that growth isn't complete when Star Trek 2 rolls into theaters some future summer, nor will it be kosher if the sequel(s) don't move beyond the subtext-free nature of the origin story and start to explore the future while melding Roddenberry's ethos with modern storytelling.

Star Trek is nowhere near the best Star Trek film ever made, a nod that goes to Wrath of Khan, but then it simply can't be, as Khan had years of dramatic background that earned its story. We're just getting introduced to these characters in Star Trek, so there's no such background to call upon. Yet, that Abrams and crew made me feel that these characters were that new is an accomplishment in its own right. Star Trek is fun and exciting, but it is also a fresh start, and I am very interested to see where it's going to go from here.

The Perfect Summer

2009-04-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

Subtitled "England 1911, Just Before The Storm", I read this non-academic history as inspiration material for the P Division Call of Cthulhu campaign I'm in the process of brainstorming. I'd hoped it would live up to the title and provide of a portrait of Edwardian life on the brink of the cataclysm that would soon engulf the world, but what I got instead was a superficial sketch of English socialites and assorted rich folk dawdling about in the midst of an abnormally hot summer.

The 1911 summer was certainly eventful enough in England, with the passage of the Parliament Act that officially established democracy in a country that had been lurching that way in fits since the 17th century, divisive fights over Home Rule in Ireland, women's suffrage, trade unionism, and a growing crisis with Germany that solidified the Anglo-French alliance leading towards the war that would wreak Europe three years later. All of these things are touched on, but that touch is utterly inconsequential. The author, Juliet Nicolson, is more concerned with the adultery and mild scandals of the noble class, which would all be fine and good if she focused on that subject and brought some meaning out of it. Instead, Nicolson gives it all the attention of a contemporary society page, foregoing any attempt at historical context. Her apathy is the ruin of the book, which fails so utterly that the only attention she pays to "the Storm" is to end with the wartime death of a character she writes all of one paragraph on in the 294 page book. This was crap, a slog to get through, and a waste of my time.

Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

Well that was garbage.

The first season of Galactica was some of the best television I had ever seen, and feels now like a the truest cultural monument to 9/11 to come out of those times. It's unrelenting approach to apocalypse, where, regardless of how one dealt with certain death - either by faith or reason - it didn't change the fact that Death was still there, and all you could hope for was one more day and fill that with life - that was more accurate than any patriotic paean that directly addressed the crisis.

But this... this was pap. Touched by an Angel kind of pap. And if the ultimate message is that humanity with its technology "has allowed its head to outrace its heart," anyone with a brain cell can see that's a load of shit. Religious fundamentalists who blew up buses or launch missile-fueled crusades, these are the real villains of our times, and they do not spread their evil because they have allowed their head to outrace their heart. Quite the opposite in fact. Humanity suffers from a surplus of faith, not a lack of it, and I mistakenly believed the show was better than that.

So yeah... garbage. I'm off to delete Caprica from Netflix queue.

Why Can't I Have Nice Things?

2009-03-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Watched Kings last night, and loved the hell out of it. It was imaginative, original, and literate, filled with good acting and interesting storylines. It is everything that I want out of a television series and so rarely find these (or any other) days. And, of course, America hated it:

Marc Berman's PI Feedback:
Beginning with Kings, the aforementioned two-hour debut was stalled at the gate, with a mere 4.1 rating/7 share in the overnights from 8-10 p.m. Take a look how Kings declined in every half hour (never a good sign, of course):
Kings (NBC) – series premiere
8:00 p.m.: 4.6/ 8 (#3)
8:30 p.m.: 4.3/ 7 (#3)
9:00 p.m.: 3.8/ 6 (#4)
9:30 p.m.: 3.7/ 6 (#3)

One year earlier in this block, the second half of a two-hour edition of Dateline and a repeat of Law & Order was considerably stronger at an average 6.3/10 in the overnights. Do the math and that is a loss of 35 percent. Let’s be honest: did anyone really think this show would work?

It's doomed, as the 18-49 demo made the result even worse (around 1.6). Television shows very rarely improve from their premieres, as most get cancelled before they get the chance. If Kings were an HBO or Showtime series, it would've probably turned out fine, at least getting a second season to bring the show to a decent conclusion (unless the creators couldn't care less); but on network television, there's just no incentive not to replace what looks like a relatively expensive drama with some cheap-&-easy reality show that can't possibly do worse.

Bah.

Watchmen

2009-03-08T15:39:00.000-07:00

Herein be spoilers, ye have been warned...

I can't judge this movie outside of my own experience of having read the graphic novel twice, and from that perspective, Watchmen was mostly boring. The production was so faithful that I knew what was coming up each and every scene, and while it was sometimes interesting to see how the the filmmakers would translate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' work to the screen, that source material was never vital or interesting enough to really capture my attention in the first place.

Watchmen is the Citizen Kane of modern comic books: it added artistic techniques and adult themes that matured the medium beyond what had hitherto been solely children's literature, but it has since been so copied that it's often hard to see the original work as anything other than quaint and tired. The truth is that Watchmen wasn't all that revolutionary, as the deconstruction of the superhero goes back to its earliest creation, when Philip Wylie created a superman in his novel Gladiator and then showed how that kind of power is ultimately rather powerless. Yet Alan Moore is a great writer and created the best comic book I've ever read... it just wasn't Watchmen, but rather his true masterpiece, From Hell.

So it's no surprise that the problems I had with the film are almost all down to the graphic novel itself. While at first I found the performances (particularly Patrick Wilson's Dan Dreiberg) clunky and uninvolved, the truth was that this was mostly due to Moore's bad case of Lucasitis when he wrote the prose-like dialogue in the comic. That the film takes so long to get started was also a failing of the comic. And that so few of the characters are likeable or interesting enough to empathize with is also inherent in their portrayal in the comic. Watchmen is a case study in why the anguish of fanboys should be ignored and filmmakers should first try to create their own good movie from comics rather than treating the source material like holy scripture that cannot be edited.

The film may actually be even worse than I found it, because, while I could easily keep track of all the various subplots and characters, and while I knew what emotions and ideas the film was trying to capture, all that was due to my having read the graphic novel. I wonder if someone who hadn't would able to do the same, and, when we get the shot of the pudgy costumed Nite-Owl screaming with over-emotion in the snow at Rorschach's blood spot, I can't help but feel the whole thing had descended into cheesy camp for the non-initiated. All that said, as the film neared its end, I began to feel it was turning out marginally alright. That Zack Snyder changed Moore's ending by replacing the giant alien squid to the threat of Doctor Manhattan himself actually felt like an improvement, but then they screwed it all up by leaving out the comic's most lasting note (for me).

In the end of Moore's Watchmen, Veidt implores Doctor Manhattan to reassure him that he did the right thing, that "it all works out in the end," but Manhattan simply leaves with the ominous parting words of "It never ends." It is a damning statement on the very nature of superheroes: the old-time heroes of the forties either faded away, their exploits having been little more than media-generated advertising, or turned into fascist nightmares like The Comedian; the later generation of heroes had become equally obsolete, serving as tools of a government that would later outlaw them, and finally are made irrelevant by the truly superpower of Doctor Manhattan; and Ozymandias, the last real human superhero, the "smartest man in the world", the only one who really understood how the world worked and the only one who was able to use his powers to actually change things, ultimately will likely also accomplish nothing, as Manhattan's final words suggest that human nature will one day take its course and mankind still likely awaits its own destruction. Watchmen's final message is that superheroes cannot save humanity from itself (these "heroes" are far too human to begin with, and are simply acting out their own "too human" neurotic fetishes). While it is clunkily delivered in the comic, it remains a compelling theme.

None of that is in the movie. The "nothing ever really ends" line is still there (spoken by Laurie to Dan in the next-to-final scene), but that it is not delivered by Manhattan to an apprehensive Veidt strips it of its thematic power. Watchmen the comic book may have its flaws, but it did try to be about something. Watchmen the film is, like all of Snyder's other work, absolutely meaningless - superficial and lovely in short doses, but with nearly three hours to examine it in detail, Watchmen is far too long to hide the fact that Snyder is a vapid storyteller.

I could go on about other things: the film is gratutiously more violent than the comic, Snyder's usual slo-mo camerawork destroys the pace in a film nearing three hours, all the Nixon scenes looked like Snyder was trying to rip-off Dr. Strangelove more than adapt Watchmen, but whatever. It should have been a rental.

In War Times

2009-03-03T15:55:00.000-08:00

Kathleen Ann Goonan's novel is subtitled "An Alternate Universe Novel of A Different Present," but nothing like that appears until nearly the last third of the book. Strangely though, that's exactly where the book begins to fall apart, and, before then, In War Times serves as a rather charming WWII memoir with occasional ruminations on how DNA, string theory, and modern jazz can create the conditions for time travel and parallel universes.

The story concerns a brilliant but naive young engineering student named Sam Dance, who gets caught up in bureaucratic meanderings as a soldier-technician during the Second World War. This part of the novel reads more like Catch-22 or any other countless memoirs penned by ex-soldiers who eschew realism and put a slightly fantastic sheen on their experiences to capture the craziness inherent in the war machine. Here Goonan relies heavily on the diaries penned by her veteran father, but it works well.

The other part of the story deals with an attempt to rewrite reality by moving members of an international conspiracy into a parallel reality where war has been made obsolete through genetic manipulation, resulting in a liberal technocracy instead of the past fifty years of our own history (that is, in the author's opinion, war, oppression, poverty, and the inevitable threat of nuclear annihilation). This is carried out by a strange device that relies on DNA as the programming code of reality, and has a parallel in how modern jazz (i.e. Dizzy Gillespie and Bird Parker) rewrote the conventions of jazz to create a new musical reality.

It's all rather vague and tantalizing, but it's also not really explored by the author. Though the characters are unique (jazz-obsessed radar technicians, female OSS superspies), their personalities are utterly boring and don't change much over the course of the narrative. And Goonan's treatment of alternate history is completely facile (does anyone really still believe that a non-assassinated JFK would've ushered in a limousine-liberal utopia where civil rights would've been pushed through and a Vietnam-style quagmire could be avoided into the present day?), so the book is at its weakest when it finally gets around to focusing on that part of the story. It was a decent read, mostly as a memoir of non-combat soldiers in WWII, but it was definitely nothing more than that.

Southern California: An Island on the Land

2009-02-23T22:27:00.000-08:00

Carey McWilliams "interpretive history" of Southern California from the appearance of the Spanish missions to the time of its first publication (1946) reads less like a history than a series of articles. This is no surprise, as McWilliams was primarily a journalist, but this is not to say that it reads like a reheated compilation of old work, such as that of other newsman who turn to the long form. Rather, McWilliams' book reads more like the history section in a Fodor's or Lonely Planet guidebook: ruthlessly condensed, lacking in sources, but readable and, if not factually accurate, then something that sounds true.

Each section focuses on a specific topic, from race to weather to socioeconomics, and McWilliams never blatantly attempts for a narrative except a constant theme that Southern California is a much darker place than it appears in the propaganda of city boosters, tourism boards, and Hollywood. That seems rather unnecessary, considering the modern popular vision of Southern California is that of a polluted suburban hell-hole plagued by gangbangers and yuppie douchebags; but in 1946 this was probably shockingly original. It is easy to see how this book supposedly provided Robert Towne with the inspiration for Chinatown (even though the water wars get little attention in the actual pagecount).

I liked the book and sense the truth in much of what McWilliams is railing against (his point-of-view is very pro-labor and progressive, and he portrays the strike-breaking and racist mobs of yesteryear in a distinctly, and probably deserved, bad light), but the lack of sources render it less than ideal as a history. That said, some of what it has to say remains strong, even over sixty years after it was published. McWilliams' description of the hard lot of Mexicans, both immigrants and native-born Californians, as perpetual outsiders hostile to assimilation, remains as much a glaring wound as it did then, and his interpretation is sadly better layered than today's simplistic "good guy, bad guy" viewpoints. His description of Southern California as a series of busts and booms seems like it could be extrapolated to the state as a whole (at least the urban centers), and that might be as much a part of the Californian identity as the "everyone is a immigrant here" meme. And, for those so inclined, there is a whole chapter on occult weirdness that is a must-read for anyone setting a Call of Cthulhu game in Southern California during the twenties and thirties, not so much for details but for the zeitgeist of the period.

All in all, a good read. I just wish he had included some footnotes.

All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

2009-02-19T23:05:00.000-08:00

I am listening to Paramore while looking over my brand-new Facebook page. I am either very with it for my age, or an inappropriate old man.

I do not feel with it for my age.

Push

2009-02-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

This movie was supposed to suck, but boy did I enjoy the hell out of it. I am, as my friends have told me, a notoriously picky reviewer. I consider films like Schindler's List and American Beauty to be facile and devoid of serious introspection. And yet I liked Push, which I can only describe as X-Men meets Twilight in Hong Kong. That sounds absolutely awful, but it works. This is a movie goes straight for your adrenal glands, not your head, and, while the pace never lets up, it's not a monotonous bore-fest like The Dark Knight.

The basic premise is covered during the title sequence: Nazis experimented on babies to create psychic powers, Americans carry on the research, creating a whole class of superhumans - "movers" (telekinetics), "sniffers" (folks that can read images from smells), etc. Now the psychics are escaping various government agencies that experiment on them to enhance their powers as Persons of Mass Destruction, experiments that have always killed them up until now. It all sounds very RPG (I can see the splatbooks already), so that's maybe why I liked it so much. Getting that exposition out of the way in the first three minutes also means that there is no time wasted dealing with mundane reactions to a preternatural world: the crazy psychic shit is considered matter-of-factly. That makes the film seem even more like an RPG on the big screen.

Everyone I've mentioned Push to says they thought it would be like the excrable Jumper, but what seperates those two are the characters and acting. Unlike the unlikeable douchebags in Jumper, all the good guys in Push are really good guys, acting not out of self-interest but because they don't want to see their friends get hurt. And whereas Hayden Christiansen can be out-acted by a block of cheese, Chris Evans can actually deliver a performance (also check him out in Sunshine if you can't get past the Johnny Storm thing). Dakota Fanning gives her typically weird "adult in child's body" thing, but it works for her character and she only stumbles when she tries to play drunk (somebody should've loaded the kid with booze and called it Method). The supporting characters are likewise strong, with only one real shit performance coming from the vapid Camilla Belle, but she spends so much time off-screen that it does no real harm.

The flick does stumble a tad in the last third, where it goes all Oceans' Eleven as the characters have to "con themselves" to avoid precognitive psychic knowing what they're going to do as they do it; but, I kept up with it and admired that they put some serious thought into how these powers work. It was a solid, fast-paced action flick, and while it's not going to win an Oscar or save Darfur, it was a damn good time.

Schadenfreude Forever!!!

2009-02-01T19:50:00.000-08:00

About two minutes into this game, I turned to Jeannine (trembling with fear in her Ben Roethlisberger jersey) and declared that if the Steelers lost this game, I was done with football. No more watching the games, no more rooting for "winners" that fall apart at the last moment, and most of all, no more schadenfreude - the joy of watching those icons I hate crushed in defeat. I am a bitter little man, and get most of my pleasure from from watching people with vastly greater talent, character, and accomplishments than me have their dreams ground into dust. These last few Super Bowls have been hell for me: the Manning brothers, who I felt were frauds forced on us by the League and a sports media that craved the archetypal white, Southern pocket-passer, showed they were the real deal. Now it looked like Kurt "I love the retards unless they need the stem cells" Warner was headed for a second Super Bowl victory and I was being told by some Higher Power that a) "I exist, dumbass" and b) "I hate you and everything that you like." But instead, God is dead, Jeannine has now spurned the Raiders and declared the Steelers her first love, and I have all that I want from professional sports: gloating.

Life is good.

Night Over Water

2009-01-22T23:09:00.000-08:00

I believe this excerpt from Ken Follett's novel best sums up its literary quality:

Now, while most people on the plane were still asleep, would be his chance of getting into the hold. Luggage locks would not delay him long. In no time at all he could have the Delhi Suite in his hands.

But he was wondering whether Margaret's breasts were not the most precious jewels he would ever hold.

Yeah, this was garbage. Like other Follett novels I've read (mostly when I was a teenager craving slightly richer stroke material than Penthouse Letters), all I'll probably end up remembering are the sex scenes (although, for some reason, I do retain the detailed passage in Lie Down With Lions on how shaped charges work using C4 and a Coke can). Still, I read the book because I needed inspiration for my upcoming game at DunDraCon (both involve Clipper planes and wartime intrigue, although less with the squamous horror here), and it certainly provided plenty of that. And I have to admit that Follett's formula of "MGM epic WWII romance if they had sex scenes on par with Caligula" is as much a part of the zeitgeist that informs my take on Our Darkest Hour as anything else.

This was trashy but mostly fun, basically Grand Hotel on the last commercial seaplane flying from Britain to the United States just as war is declared in 1939. Night Over Water lacks the excitement of Follett's espionage novels like Eye of the Needle and The Key to Rebecca, mainly because the characters' motivations lean more towards adultery, business fraud, and theft than in the great struggle that looms over such mundane proceedings. Indeed, nothing really happens until the last twenty pages, and when it does happen, the bad guys are so toothless that it feels like Follett just got bored with it by the end. Any climax that involves a German U-boat where the author never shows the U-boat is by definition perfunctory. So yeah, I guess it sucked. A very readable kind of suckage though, I'll give it that.

Winterbirth

2009-01-19T00:30:00.000-08:00

I really wanted to like this book, and for the most part, I did. It kept my attention throughout, there were parts where I really didn't want to put the book down no matter how late the evening was, and I do plan on reading the following two books in the trilogy... but, for over 600 pages of just Act One of a three-part story, I came away from Winterbirth feeling rather unsatisfied.

I was expecting Winterbirth to follow along the formula set up by its fantasy genre relative A Song of Ice and Fire, and, in some sense, it does: a low-magic setting based on Anglo-Scottish history with the serial numbers filed off, forest-dwelling Elves-not-called-Elves as both antagonists and allies, all as background for a bunch of political struggles between short-sighted feudal barons while the Great Big Bad™ rises unseen in the shadows. What might sounds generic and unoriginal can, in the right hands, become deeply effective and mythic; and, the author Brian Ruckley, a Scottish eco-hippie turned genre novelist, is a solid writer.

That said, there's just not enough meat in Winterbirth. Whereas every paragraph of the Ice and Fire books are crammed with little details hinting at the myriad vastness of the world outside Westeros and the rich history yet untapped by Martin, Ruckley's world seems rather plain. Worse, his characters have no real complexity (the primary protagonist Orisian is particularly vanilla) and Ruckley spends such little time fleshing them out before dropping them straight into the narrative (which, in the first novel, consists almost entirely of people either fleeing or being pursued around the countryside) that it isn't until nearly the end of the book that I actually start to care about them. That's a real problem as a good third of those characters are killed off by then.

Where Ruckley does shine is in establishing the gritty and bloody mood these books are well-regarded for. Maybe it's that I watched the BBC's History of Scotland documentary before I started reading Winterbirth, or that the Black Road antagonists (think the love child of John Calvin and Osama bin Laden) are so grimly different from usual fantasy baddies, but the novel does give the reader the sense of wind-chilled mail rubbing on calloused flesh. It may have its roots in Tolkein, but its heart is of refreshingly sterner stuff.

I. Am. Old.

2009-01-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

The new Doctor is...

My knee-jerk reaction is horror. It looks like we've ended up with some emo hipster hybrid of that douche in Twilight and k.d. lang after a sex change. The new show-runner is Stephen Moffat, who crafts more adult and more effective Who stories than the previous king Russell T. Davies; but this kind of thing has happened before, where darker scripts are wedded to an inadequate actor with goofy hair, and it didn't turn out so well.

But then... I realized, as the title suggests, that I am old, and when I think "he needs a hair-cut" and "how can anyone so young be taken seriously as the Doctor", I must admit that's just my age talking. The truth is that we know nothing about this guy, as we knew nothing about Tennant, who turned out to be one of the best Doctors we've yet had. And my Doctor - the one who was there when I first discovered the show - is Peter Davison, who was not much older than this Smith character. So I will remain optimistic.

Though I still think Paterson Joseph would've been superb. While he would've probably played it differently, his Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere would've made for an excellent interpretation in and of itself.

No We Can't

2008-12-20T14:23:00.000-08:00

Turns out Jeannine and I will not be attending the presidential inauguration. We didn't get the inaugural tickets as we hoped, finances are pretty tight, and Jeannine was scared off by the size of the crowds and the weather. So no D.C. vacation for us, although it does free me up to attend the January Mini-Con at Endgame. Woo-hoo.

Survivors

2008-11-25T21:05:00.001-08:00

The BBC has a new (kinda) mini-series about average people surviving a global pandemic that leaves them virtually alone in a depopulated Britain, forced to recreate society in the face of their own human foibles. I say kinda because Survivors is a remake of a 1970's BBC series, created by Terry Nation (who created many of the best bits of Doctor Who). I only saw the first episode of the original series, but I did read Terry Nation's novelization of the first season (his only season with the show) completely by accident, and didn't realize that it was based on a TV show until well after watching that sole episode. The novelization was as good (if not better) than The Stand, The Day of the Triffids, and similar post-apocalyptic treatments, with its violent and downbeat climax (which diverges sharply from the TV series) remaining particularly haunting. The TV series also seemed like good stuff, but, having missed the second episode in the days before DVRs, Hulu, and Netflix, I didn't bother to keep up. So I am really comparing this modern remake to Nation's novel, if anything.

And, after watching the first two episodes, it doesn't really measure up. Having decided to avoid the "dreary" pessimism of the original series, the producers of today's Survivors plan to focus on the hope and triumph of plucky Brits retaining their values and humanity in the face of civilization's collapse. A noble thought, but the truth is that half the "fun" of post-apocalyptic fiction is watching average folks survive through grim efficiency, often requiring them to compromise those modern values to live through the day. Case in point is the second episode, where the survivors are kept from foraging the local supermarket by a tiny gang because their leader is armed with a double-barreled shotgun. Now my first thought would be to find the nearest TA depot or an abandoned Armed Response Vehicle and get something like this or this and take out the wannabe warlord with his Elmer Fudd gun. But then I'm an American, and I can't help but think that the Brit creators of this show would see that resolution as some kind of horrifying failure rather than the upliftingly human "solution" where the survivors flee the scene back to their cozy cottage in the woods, leaving the yobs in charge of the town and the threat unresolved. When much of the attraction is to see how characters use their intelligence to survive, Survivors knee-caps itself by forcing the characters to behave by the same moral sensibilities they owned before the collapse.

It also doesn't help that the lead character has been turned from the "hausfrau turned coldly-efficient tribal leader" of the original series and novel into a shrill soccer mom obsessed with finding her lost child. The original character had the same goal, but the creators there had the good sense to see that it was dramatically uninteresting to have her do this same act every damn episode, and gave her the larger motivation of creating a community in which to raise her child when the kid was found. That said, the other characters of the new series - an escaped convict who is either sociopathic or grimly realistic about the situation (or maybe both); an Arabic playboy forced into caring for a Muslim fundie kid; a lesbian (maybe?) doctor; and the next Doctor Who - are all improvements on the otherwise vanilla characters of the original series.

All in all, Survivors feels a lot like Jericho, another show where the creators thought it should be about something (the strength and spirit of hometown America) when the viewers wanted something else (radioactive zombies snacking on Kansan brains). It's not awful, but it's already so veered itself off the path of "reasonable response to this situation" that I'm strictly hanging on because it'll be over soon (there's only six episodes in this season) and because I'm a sucker for anything with a British accent.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-22T17:32:00.000-08:00

It was good. Not as great as Casino Royale, but only in the sense that it isn't as full-fledged a film in its own right as its predecessor. You'll probably be completely lost in Quantum without having seen Casino Royale, and will surely be missing whatever emotional power the film tugs at with its constant references to Bond's ill-fated love for Vesper Lynd. It exists mostly as the epilogue to Casino Royale, but I still found it fun, exciting, and deep enough (in a rather disposable pop culture sort of way) to sustain itself.

While I very much liked Casino Royale, I remained concerned that this reboot of the Bond franchise had yet to deal with the central problem afflicting most spy thrillers these days: the Cold War is over and ignorant religious nutjobs in caves don't make nearly as interesting devious masterminds as our mythical versions of the KGB did back when Bond had a Scottish accent. So, taking its cues from Jason Bourne, Quantum pits Bond as much against the Americans and his own government as it does against a not-too-original alliance of a tinpot dictator and an omnipotent secret cabal, finally making a Bond film whose subtext doesn't play as an anti-Communist screed but as something matching modern-day concerns. Indeed, if Quantum is anti- anything, it's anti-globalization, with the real villain being the influence of amoral corporate interests on government intelligence policy.

Yet Quantum of Solace is still a Bond film, and is really about an ultra-cool badass playing the "kiss-kiss, bang-bang" game. Lacking a new Vesper for James, there is less "kiss-kiss" than in Casino Royale, but the more "realistic" subtext saves the film from being less human because of it. The film is also tighter (though just slightly) than Casino Royale, with nary a breathless moment between it's numerous fight scenes, yet more than enough plot (it starts to feel like Syriana at times) that it doesn't feel like one damn battle after another (i.e. The Matrix sequels).

If there is any real criticism, it's that Quantum ends too abruptly. Having set up so many plotlines, many are left to be tied up unsatisfactorily in dialogue exposition after all the explosions have burned themselves out. While it makes a nice coda to Casino Royale, it's nothing more than that, but it does a very good job of laying the groundwork for where this new Bond is headed.

"Some Kind of Special Mustache?"

2008-11-07T11:30:00.001-08:00

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Some Final Thoughts on Prop 8

2008-11-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

I've spent way too much time today reading through various progressive blogs gauging the reaction to the passage of Proposition 8, and the postmortem that is developing leaves me cold. My thoughts:

Blacks are not to blame for Prop 8 passing: It's disturbing that 70% of African-Americans would vote Yes on 8, while whites and Hispanics averaged out to around 50-55%. This does not change the fact that the vast majority of voters who voted for 8 were the same majority of voters who vote in anything in California: whites. It would be just as easy (and equally fruitless) to blame the over-65 voters for the proposition. This sentiment that it was the blacks that sold out the gays in California seems based more on hurt feelings over the huge positive outcry forthe Obama win in the midst of the hurt over Prop 8 passing. I can understand that sentiment, but it serves no purpose.

Mormons and their out-of-state money are not to blame for Prop 8 passing: The Mormon money that poured into California from Utah was sickening, not simply because the church has a long history of institutionalized bigotry against minorities but also due to their own history of discrimination based on "traditional marriage". Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the No on 8 group had more money in its coffers than Yes on 8, and more of that money came from out-of-state as well. To claim that it was Utah that caused Prop 8 is simply hypocritical.

Californians are to blame for Prop 8 passing: Prop 8 ultimately had majority support (albeit marginal) among a wide variety of ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. Claiming it was Blacks or Mormons or some other small portion of the state population is both ill-reasoned and serves no purpose in future action for gay rights. We needed a widespread, grassroots movement, backed by solid canvassing action at the field level to sway undecided voters, rather than fruitless visibility efforts in solidly liberal areas and wasting gobs of money on television commercials that never defined the issue in anything other than a reactive manner. We had the volunteers, we had the money, we simply lacked the leadership.

And ultimately, it was that lack of leadership that resulted in failing to get out the vote, to making certain that progressive voters understand the magnitude of the proposition and remained at the polls even when Obama's victory was certain. Only 49% of San Francisco came out to vote on Tuesday, which is simply inexcusable when the No on 8 leadership was already myopically focusing on GOTV efforts in liberal bastions like SF. If their best effort at GOTV garners only 49% of voters in San Francisco County, then something really stinks at the top of this movement.

Why Prop 8 Lost

2008-11-05T09:34:00.001-08:00

There's a really good article on Calitics on why Proposition 8 lost this morning, and I gotta agree with most of its conclusions. While I don't fault those progressives who concentrated on the Obama campaign rather than work for No on Prop 8 (I think it's wrong to assume that the Obama supporters were necessarily No on 8'rs, much less that they were enthusiastic enough to work for the cause), I definitely agree that the movement's emphasis on preaching to the choir in liberal areas and failing to define the argument before the Yes on 8 folks could bring in the "What about the children?!!" shit was a significant mistake.

There should have been no money and effort put into preventing Prop 8 from getting on the ballot, as it's far too easy to get anything on the ballot in California through the referendum process and this issue has too much support on both sides to really hope that it could be marginalized into non-existence. Though Prop 8 may get struck down by the California Supreme Court, we need to get a "repeal Prop 8" proposition out there for 2010, despite fears that it could turn the gubernatorial election for the Republican candidate, and get out the vote in what should be a simpler message to voters than it was this election cycle.

Big Fat Change Day: A Long Way Left To Go

2008-11-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

According to the LA Time's nifty gadget, Proposition 8 now sits at 52.4% Yes vs. 47.6% No, with 62.8% of the precincts reporting. There's no true comfort in believing that most of the No on 8 leaning precincts have votes left to report, as the real hope there was LA County, which, at halfway reported, is actually trending towards Yes. My county in Contra Costa, where I put in the work this morning, is admirably trending No and is only half reported; still, my gut tells me that this won't be enough and the writing is on the wall: Prop 8 is going to pass.

This is shameful, but it would've been so much worse if not for Obama's victory tonight. There is some relief now that, if and when the issue of gay marriage does make its inevitable way to the Supreme Court, there will be Obama-appointed justices to see that this kind of hate legislation is overturned and expunged in the manner of Loving v. Virginia. And there is a deeper resolve, engendered by the Speech, that, though this is a setback, we can and will overcome it simply by the consistency of our effort.

This is not over. There will be a day when all Americans will share the same freedoms, the same rights, and bear the same respect. There will come a day when America will live up to its own ideals.

Yes we can.

Big Fat Change Day: Yes We Can

2008-11-04T21:37:00.000-08:00

It's not yet up on the Barack Obama Youtube channel or I'd embed the Speech. There is nothing that I could say that could anyway express what I'm feeling after I heard Obama's first speech as the President-Elect of the United States of America. I just wish I could embed it here and simply post "Listen".

Jeannine and I donated, we pamphleteered, we phonebanked, we wrote postcards, and we voted for him. We didn't always do these things together - sometimes it was me on the cellphone and Jeannine writing the postcard - but I couldn't have done any of that without her and she without me. We did this together.

And we did not do this alone. Obama is a good man, and I believe he will be a great President, but this movement was always more than one man, more than one party, more than one color, maybe even more than one nation. I trust that Obama will lead us to a more perfect union, to the America that we have so long been promised but never deserved, not because I believe him to be better than us, but because I believe him to be one of us. We did this, and my heart sings for what we might do tomorrow.

Big Fat Change Day: Much Ado About Nothing

2008-11-04T19:48:00.000-08:00

So all my worries about Yes on 8 ugliness turned out to be unfounded. My day working the polls for No on 8 turned out to be remarkably civil, rather hopeful, but ultimately sedate. I got up way too fucking early this morning, and me and my poll partner headed out to Antioch, the ass-end of Pittsburg, the ass-end of Concord. This place is seriously gangsta, and I expected a heavy turnout of religiously-oriented minorities backed by the occasional Central Valley redneck. There was more than a little of that, but in truth, it felt like more than 50-50 between the No vs Yes on 8 supporters. And as for those Yes on 8 supporters, when the banner-wavers figured out what we were doing, they quickly brought some folks over to wave their signs beside us and not do to much else. While I often left my perch to approach folks, hand out pamphlets, and engage them in conversation on Prop 8, the Yes'rs were very docile, doing nothing more than waving their signs and not really stepping forward to hand out materials to voters (we suspected they didn't have enough literature on them to share it). We had conversations together, mostly on non-Prop 8 stuff because whenever they tried to convince us that disallowing gay marriage was somehow not discrimination, I only had to bring up all the joy and love I witnessed in City Hall, and how Prop 8 would ruin that for people, to render them dumbfounded.

About the only bit of ugliness was a man, driving out of the polling place, yelled out to Yes on 8'rs that what they were doing was bigotry and that it paralleled the hateful legislation that banned interracial marriage before activist judges struck those laws down with Loving v. Virginia. I agreed with the man, but there was no reason to scream it from a moving truck to people that were behaving civilly up to that point.

There was an early morning rush, but by the time my shift ended at 2pm, the polling site was virtually deserted. So, with my legs utterly ruined from standing for so long (these legs of mine are meant to sit on an ottoman, not stand), I bowed out for the day. Due to the heavy number of people that confirmed they were voting No on 8 in what should be a relatively conservative part of the Bay Area, I felt optimistic if not convinced that we might win the day.

Big Fat Change Day: Yes on 8 Invades My Home

2008-11-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, I underwent training to work the polls for the No on Prop 8 effort, which will have me and others handing out pamphlets and offering quick information to voters as they head to the polls. I was feeling comfortable with this until this evening, when Jeannine and I headed out for our usual Monday restaurant dinner with her family, and saw, amidst a very cold and soggy evening here in Concord, a horde - literally dozens - of Yes on Prop 8 supporters crowding the streets, waving signs and jeering at passer-bys.

This is going to be ugly.

I know an awful lot of the Yes on 8 folks are actually out-of-staters. Most of the money funding Yes on 8 has come from non-Californian conservatives and religious groups, and more than one church has bussed their faithful to the Golden State. The presence of so many of these folks in my city does not fill me with dread: the fight on Prop 8 is tight, both sides are strongly-motivated, and while many Obama supporters are voting Yes on 8, his impending victory is more likely to suppress Republican turnout (certainly enough to offset those Democrats shunning the polls under the false assumption that their man has it in the bag) which make up the core support for Prop 8. Nor do I think this turnout of Yes on 8'rs on Concord's streets is troubling for the state on the whole: Concord is not nearly the paragon of liberalism that exists west of the Caldecott Tunnel, and for every hatemonger on my city's streets tonight there are many more lovemongers that will turn out tomorrow in San Francisco and Berkeley.

No, what is troubling is that these people are likely going to be my problem. The prevailing mood during my training session Sunday was that No on 8 would be focusing their efforts on getting out the vote in areas where they expect heavy support, California precints so blue they look black. Most folks are going to preach to the choir in the progressive heartlands beyond the Caldecott and in the limousine liberal suburbs in my county. I however will be in Concord - heavily Hispanic (and thus Catholic), utterly blue-collar, gloomily regressive Concord. There's always been a part of me that's hated this place, and I think I may hate it no more than I do tomorrow.

Those Yes on 8 bigots I saw tonight are likely to stay here, to work the same polling locations I will. Not only might they outnumber us, but, while my fellows seem well-organized and disciplined, these folks are very much a rabble, and will likely have little respect for common decency. I expect us to be manhandled, our pamphlets taken out of our hands, epithets screamed into our faces, and so on. This won't hurt the No on 8 effort, and might in fact turn some voters, having seen the hate blatantly up close, to vote against Prop 8. And I am not concerned for myself: I was raised by an ex-Marine who believed in corporal punishment and a law enforcement officer whose toughness garnered her the nickname "Sergeant" amongst her fellow feds. This will be a cakewalk compared to coming home to those folks with a report card marked up with D-minuses.

That said, I am worried about what will happen to my fellow No on 8'rs, who, from that training session, seem like a bunch of kind, emotionally-stable, well-raised and well-educated, plain-old-decent people who are absolutely unprepared to be screamed at for hours by a bunch of hate-filled rednecks. So yeah... it may end up getting ugly in my neck of the woods.

We'll see what happens...

Big Fat Change Day: Phonebanking for Obama

2008-11-03T23:47:00.000-08:00

You're wasting your time, brother. You can't tell me nothing that'll make me vote for that son-of-a-bitch.

That quote, from an old angry Iowa man, and the one Pennsylvannia woman who, when I called for her much younger son, stated with quiet desperation that "no one in this house is voting for Obama," amounts to the full amount of NObama response I received when I phonebanked for Obama this morning. I went through many sheets of phone numbers from Iowa and Pennsylvannia, and while I mostly talked to answering machines, a surprising percentage of the human beings I did connect with happily passed on that they had either already voted for Obama or were planning to do so tomorrow.

What brought on this last-minute scramble to do something for Obama was a poll I read on FiveThirtyEight.com on Sunday evening, which, for the first time in weeks, gave McCain more than 200 electoral votes in their projection. This ended up being an outlier, as Monday's polls have pushed those projections back down, and once I learned that most of the polls that give Obama only slight leads in the battleground states don't use voters with cellular lines, it's become certain to me that the only question for Tuesday is whether Obama will enjoy a landslide or just a simple victory. Nevertheless, by then I had already signed up for a full 8 hours of phonebanking on Monday.

It wasn't fun, although it was so very encouraging. In the middle of a workday in Walnut Creek - rich, white, and as close to Republican as it gets in the Bay Area - the phonebanking room was filled wall-to-wall with folks of all ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, so many that people ended up being forced outside to phone under tarps in the rain. If re-evaluating the polls had not encouraged me, that turnout finished the job. That said, it was really tiring work, and when my fully-charged phone finally died out, I was kind of relieved. I can't say I feel satisfied that I did everything I could in this election cycle - either for Obama or for No on Prop 8 - but it was nice to get in a little more activism before this all ends on Tuesday.

The End of Cynicism?

2008-11-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

There's a great article this morning by Joe Klein (he of Primary Colors infamy) on Time's Swampland blog. First he discusses how Obama's early days might parallel the rookie mess of the Kennedy Administration (probably wrongly*), but he then goes into how, as it did with JFK, such calamities might not change the national mood, which will brighten and become less cynical about its institutions:

Why? Because Kennedy changed the American zeitgeist. He was a rebirth of American youth and vigor--or, as he pronounced, vigah--after a very hard midcentury slog. His arrival announced the coming of age of a new America: where most people owned their own homes, where a much larger number of people went to college, where the prejudices of the past regarding race and sex--and eventually sexual orientation--had no future. He embodied the return of prosperity, optimism and idealism (a bit too idealistic and optimistic, in fact--in Vietnam). He changed the way the world looked at America, and changed the way we looked at ourselves. He inspired my generation to join the Peace Corps, march for civil rights, get involved in politics. The nation became more adventurous, bolder, sexier, more prosperous and more powerful.

Klein expects Obama will engender much the same cultural changes as JFK, and I agree. My generation has been defined by a cynicism that has been toxic, both culturally and politically. We expect our politicians to be frauds, and thereby wallow in an apathy that self-confirms our worst fears. As for our postmodern culture, irony has replaced insight, leaving us satisfyingly hollow but with little human feeling. When was the last time you saw a film or read a book that presented a vision of the world that was neither depressingly cynical nor some by-the-numbers manufactured pablum? When was the last time we had a political campaign that was any different?

I realize that hope and change might be too ephemeral to truly put a stake in the cynicism that has marked my generation. We have been indoctrinated that all politicians are used-car salesmen, that nothing really changes except to get worse, that everything exists in shades of gray and that "good" and "evil" only exist for the blind fanatics of intolerance and ignorance. Now we accept these cynical tenets as facts, as "common sense", without realizing that they are as much based on faith as hope and change are.

Obama might not live up to the faith people like me are putting in him, but that's not entirely the point: that I have hope for the future gives me peace in the present. On Friday, for the first time in the six presidential elections I've been allowed to vote, I (early) voted for a candidate that wasn't the lesser of two evils, wasn't the one I felt the least cynical about, but for someone that I truly believe in, both out Faith and Reason. Win or lose, succeed or fail, Obama and the rest of us who have created this movement gave me that moment, and that is the kind of change that I believe in.

* History is not cyclical - historians are, because comparative analysis is always the easiest available tool. It's a common but lazy effort to equate our current leaders with those of the past, one that I am definitely guilty of, but the truth is that Obama will be, like those before him, something completely different. I don't expect him to be as radical as FDR, though I expect he will supercede JFK in many substantive ways (LBJ was responsible for much more policy action - both good and bad). We are heading into dark times full of peril but thereby offering much opportunity, and no one can really say how Obama will react, except, IMHO, with significantly greater competence and ethics than anything we've seen in the past 16 years. He is his own man, and will be his own President.

Presented Without Comment

2008-11-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

From today's Day in Pictures on SFGate

Dead Set

2008-10-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching the first episode of Dead Set, a British TV mini-series that is basically Big Brother meets 28 Days Later, and it is very good. I love 28 Days Later, and the American version of Big Brother used to be a guilty addiction of mine, so this should be right up my alley, but I think it would work for any zombie-horror fans.

The premise is that a zombie outbreak takes place outside of the Big Brother set, so that the contestants inside end up surrounded by zombies with no knowledge (until the end of the first episode) of what has occurred. The camera style is cinema-verite, and the grainy, washed-out look and British setting makes it all look very 28 Days Later-ish. There are to be five episodes, leading up to the finale on Halloween; and, as they were written by Charlie Brooker (who is known for surreal satire), it should end up with some biting commentary on the way reality television deadens culture. That said, this first episode had little of that, and was just spot-on effective horror. So watch it if you're in Britain and get the E4 channel, or torrent it like those of us who aren't and don't.

The Obama Ad

2008-10-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

I think it was a waste of money. It sounded like a great idea, a way for Obama to control the narrative heading into the homestretch, and, considering how little traction McCain/Palin are getting with their latest fearmongering, maybe that's how it's actually working out. The media is trying to keep the tension up (and their ratings) by making much of the slight tightening going on in the polls, but the outcome doesn't really seem in doubt: Barack Obama will be the next president, and the $3 million spent to run the ad would probably have been better spent helping the DNC with Congressional races to push a 60-senator mandate for Obama. The actual ad was too vague, too simplistic, and ultimately too short to maximize its emotional appeals to have any significant effect on undecided voters.

That said, in its final moments (when it hits 26:42 on the clock), Obama's parting words perfectly encapsulate why I have faith in the man. It's not simply that he's a Democrat, not just that he represents change from the baby boomer incompetence of the past 16 years, nor that he embodies racial transcendence: it's that I believe him when he says that he will listen to the American people, and I trust that his judgment to act upon what he hears from us.

Obama is 44

2008-10-27T09:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since I heard a panelist on The McLaughlin Group pass on that Lawrence Summers is all-but-assured to become Treasury Secretary under the new Obama Administration, I've been doing more reading and thinking about what the Obama Cabinet will look like. If it were anyone else (i.e. Hillary), I'd be a lot more worried: Summers is an acolyte of Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration who bears no small role in engineering the current financial crisis. Furthermore, Summers, while President of Harvard, made some remarkably sexist statements, implying that innate genetic differences between men and women play a role (but not the only role, or even the most important role) are responsible for the gender imbalance in science and math careers.

Now there is an article in The New Yorker that supports the hypothesis of Summers as Treasury Secretary, as well as details other possible members of the future Obama Cabinet. The article reveals (to me, at least) the place of Rahm Emmanuel within the Obama think-tank, placing him almost as close to Obama as his confidante David Axelrod. Emmanuel is a leading figure in the DLC, tried to torpedo Howard Dean as chairman of the DNC, and then tried to frame the 2006 resurgence of the Democrats in Congress (which Dean's 50-state strategy deserves significant credit) as a triumph of conservative "blue-dog" Democrats rather than the netroots and new progressive-derived supporters of the party flexing their muscles.

Essentially, the article paints a portrait of the Obama Cabinet as riven with Clintonites and blue-dogs, and, like I said, if this was any other man, I would be very unenthusiastic. Not worried, because even these are the worst sort of Democrats, they are still Democrats and are unlikely to lead this country down a sequel to the eight years of hell that Bush and the Republicans who've supported/rolled over for him have brought us. But this is Obama, a man from a deeply progressive and liberal background who has consistently been willing to put pragmatism before dogma without betraying his core ideals: whether it was getting elected president of the Harvard Law Review (achieving the central goal of becoming the first African-American to do so) while disinviting controversy by allowing conservative Federalist Society members onto his masthead, to treating the American public like adults in his "A More Perfect Union" speech but finally repudiating Jeremiah Wright when he couldn't act like one. If Obama is surrounding himself with Clintonites, it makes the most sense for his Presidency as it will have to start running at day one (honestly, he's going to have start running the country from a shadow government on day minus 75), seeing as how they are the last Democratic advisors to hold these positions, and they (hopefully) have learned from their mistakes of Bill Clinton's disastrous early Presidency. As the New Yorker article quotes about Summers, he "knows the building" when it comes to Treasury, and won't need to be brought up to speed before he can start putting the new policies into effect.

Emmanuel's presence remains disquieting, but I can't argue that the priorities he lays out for the Obama Administration - "financial-regulatory reform, tax reform, health-care reform, and energy" - are among the most pressing issues on the docket, moreso than any kind of social reforms (which would define the Obama Administration as the kind of "out of control liberalism" that the Republicans were able to tar the Clintons with that ultimately lead to their taking control of the Congress) or ambitious issues requiring long-term development and full support (i.e. education reform) better dealt after the 2010 Congressional elections (assuming the Dems hold power). While I am getting the sense that Obama, at least until 2010, is going to come off a lot more conservative and measured in his agenda than progressives would care for, and that the netroots that are singing his praises now may start to turn on him starting January 20th, it can't be argued that this is the most responsible thing to do. And that, moreso than "hope" or "change" (or "socialist" or"Muslim" or "terrorist" for that matter) is what has defined the calm and measured Barack Obama up to this moment: responsible.

Even McCain Knows It's Over

2008-10-23T16:02:00.001-07:00

Rather than appear before a crowd of his supporters inside his election night watch party at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, John McCain will instead speak before "a small group of reporters and guests" on the hotel lawn. Nobody who believes that McCain can still win could possibly think that he might win by more than the thinnest of margins: his path to victory requires that he win every single battleground state, most of which lean Obama, some by nearly double digits. So if he did win, he'd be facing a very divided nation, and giving his acceptance speech before a large crowd of his fiercest supporters would be mandatory (rather like what Obama is preparing for himself in Chicago) to cement his new position. There's no way that McCain will be giving anything other than perfunctory concession speech before a "a small press pool", so this has got to be the strongest indication yet that McCain realizes that the fat lady is well into her opening act.

I pretty much felt there was nothing that McCain could do to change the course of the election
after the second debate. He could still win, but it would take either an act of fate or some blunder on Obama's part to give him the victory. After the third and final debate, it was obvious that McCain was likely going to lose and that the RNC should redirect their resources into shoring up their shakier Congressional elections (to provide some hope of reacquiring a majority in 2010); and, John McCain would best serve his party in some Goldwateresque fashion that, while it wouldn't win him the election, might change its suicidal focus on the far-right Christian extremism of Palin towards the economic and social libertarianism that might give it some appeal to the future of the electorate (i.e. not old people). Now he is left with nothing, except to share his loss with a group of reporters that have lost most of their respect for him over the Ayers/media elite/pals-with-terrorists strategy, and probably end up bearing the (only partially deserved) blame for the loss as his party unites behind Palin for her 2012 run.

I firmly support Obama, and I am well-aware that McCain's "maverick" image is mostly smoke-&-mirrors. Still, I could've voted for John McCain* and there is a part of me that is saddened by how this turning out.

* It would've taken more than simply Clinton getting the nomination - a lot more - in fact, but I recognize the possibility.

The Significant Other Meme

2008-10-18T12:53:00.001-07:00

1. They are watching TV. What are they watching? House, or a Food Network show

2. You're out to eat. What kind of dressing do they get on their salad? Ranch

3. What's one food this person doesn't like? Captain Crunch milkshakes (at least I couldn't get her to try it) What's one food this person could not live without? Chocolate

4. You go out to the bar. He/she orders... She doesn't drink alcohol, but if pressed, she'd probably have a beer

5. Where did he/she go to high school? Mount Diablo H.S. in Concord, California

6. What size shoe do they wear? I have no idea.

7. If this person were to collect anything, it would be... Trade paperback collections of comic books is her latest love.

8. What is their favorite type of sandwich? BLT's, I think.

9. This person could eat ______ everyday. Shake & Bake Chicken and baked potato, which I know because we practically did for a couple of years. Although I think she'd prefer something like veal picatta instead.

10. Favorite cereal? Cocoa Pebbles. Like Rico Suave, she eats them raw like sushi.

11. This person wouldn't be caught dead wearing? This would cause her to burst into flames.

12. Favorite sports team? The Oakland Raiders, but she cheats on them with the Pittsburgh Steelers. "Ben is dreeeeeeamy..."

13. Who will he/she vote for? Obama. She was a diagnosed Obamatard even before I was.

14. What is their sign? Aries

15. What is something you do that he/she wishes you didn't? Be an anger ball. Grrr...

16. How many states has this person lived in? One

17. What is his/her heritage? Her mother is Welsh/Mexican, her father was Dutch.

18. You bake them a cake for their birthday. What kind do you bake? Cheesecake

19. Did he/she play sports in high school? No

20. This person could spend hours... playing isometric POV hack & slash button-mashing video games involving mounds of dead kobolds.

21. He/She wants a new... home.

22. The CD I would probably find in their vehicle is... CD? What is this, the Middle Ages? She has an Ipod. It's filled with stuff.

23. What can you do that will guarantee a laugh from him/her? Just be me. That's why it works.

24. Does he/she get along well with their family? Oh yes, maybe too well. See question #21.

25. If money wasn't an option, I would buy him/her... a copper-colored '66 Ford Mustang with automatic transmission and all original equipment except for ABS brakes and air bags (despite her objections).

W.

2008-10-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

After W. abruptly ended and Jeannine and I walked out of the theater, I turned to her and said, "Well, that was deeply disappointing and way too long... kind of like the Bush presidency itself." That pretty much sums up my thoughts on Oliver Stone's Nixon-like treatment of Bush 43, but keep reading if you want the full spoiler-filled review.

If you believe that the inadequacies of George W. Bush can be defined entirely as an epic case of "daddy issues", then this the film for you. If you have other explanations for the incredibly dramatic failures that have marked the Bush Administration (i.e. Bush is a blind, pampered, wannabe-cowboy bully backed by powerful but incompetent business and religious conservatives who have successfully used the fear-induced prejudices of Walmart America to preserve and expand their power until now), then this will be one long bore. The theme of the film is established within the trailer - Dubya is a mildly-retarded redneck who only craves the approval of his distant father - but the film goes on for over two hours, most of which is filled with Josh Brolin's Bush drinking and carousing, interrupted with James Crowell's inaccurately-virile Bush 41 looking on disapprovingly. As Jeannine pointed out to me afterwards, there isn't a single scene devoted to 9/11, nor on on either of Bush's presidential campaigns, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse (the first one he inherited in 2001, I can't expect that the film could be that up-to-date), the Republican Congressional loss in 2006, Terry Schiavo, or Bush's questionable stint in the Air National Guard. We do get a long scene about some Texas bimbo Bush may have knocked up after college, at least a couple of drunk driving scenes, dream sequences of him in the Texas Rangers stadium that never pan out effectively, and lots of scenes of him watching ESPN (even when he's not choking to death on a pretzel).

Most of the performances are far too good for the film. Brolin is spot-on, Thandie Newton is even better as Condi Rice, and the dude from Capote does a good job as Karl Rove; but, George Dreyfus can't really pull off Dick Cheney (why not just get Danny DeVito to reprise his Penguin role from Batman Returns?), Jeffrey Wright is forced to play Colin Powell as an uninterestingly earnest voice-of-reason (rather than as the speed-bump of a pussy he was in reality), and Scott Glenn is badly-miscast as Rumsfeld. Ultimately, what really sinks the film is that Stone has nothing interesting to say about Bush, and this is a damn shame. Dubya is the most interesting President in history since FDR, have been in office during (and often directly responsible for) the worst crisises I've known in my lifetime, yet all Stone can muster is that his daddy never gave him enough attention. This inadequacy is brought home by the final scene, another dream sequence where Dubya is in the stadium trying to catch a baseball that never comes, alone in an interminable emptiness. While that might be a powerful statement in the personal drama of Bush's life, it would've been a much more powerful statement to instead have Bush surrounded by the dead soldiers, bombed civilians, and drowned citizens, all the lives he has wrecked in the historical drama that has been the Bush Presidency. I expected politics and instead got psychodrama, and quite frankly, I don't think there's enough to Bush's psychosis to make a good film, especially one this long. He's just an asshole, and what's really interesting (and funny) is why this asshole was able to get away with what he did for so long.

McCain Becomes Human (For A Moment)

2008-10-16T22:18:00.001-07:00

Was watching The Rachel Maddow Show this evening when they broke off to cover both John McCain and Barack Obama at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Dinner. McCain is charming and funny (which is what most folks are picking up on), but what really struck me was when he started describing Obama plainly in terms of the man as President(around 3 minutes in the video):

McCain doesn't just acknowledge the historical importance of Obama's nomination and approaching presidency, but seems (to me) to tip his hat to Obama, not simply as a skillful politician, but as a statesman in whose hands the country need not fear. He didn't need to do this (and I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed that Obama didn't follow suit, although he has always been respectful of McCain), and I am sure there those in his camp that would have rather he didn't. John McCain should not be President: his vision for America is ill-defined and he has no new policies that will change the direction set by Bush, I do not trust his judgment both for the Palin nomination and due to his ill-sighted insistence that the Surge has succeeded when it has not completed its course, and his "maverick" nature can and will result in a possibly even worse form of governance than Bush's incompetent model... but, there is something in him that makes for a good man, and this is the perfect evidence.

I had hoped that we would have seen this McCain in this election, not because he is funny and charming, but because this McCain would've made this race about the issues affecting Americans, and about the differences between each party's plans for dealing with those issues. Perhaps Ayers, ACORN, "class warfare", and "health of the mother" is all that the Republican ideology stands for anymore. If that is true, then this election should not be seen as the failure of John McCain, but as a failure of the party itself.

Cause You're Never Too Young For Watersports

2008-10-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

So you know how I just said that the libs had won the culture war and all... well, I'll gladly concede surrender if it means nothing like this would exist in McPalin's America:

Something tells me there's a bulk order already shipping out to Dubai addressed for "M. JACKSON".

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

2008-10-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

Picked up the story off PTI that Romeo Crennell has suspended any political talk from his players, due to Willie McGinest attending an Obama voter registration drive while Brady Quinn introduced McCain and Palin at a rally. Here's Quinn in all his rugged manliness impersonating a Village Person:

That's former Notre Dame (that bastion of liberalism) QB Brady Quinn, who, when you type his name in Google, the first thing that pops up is "brady quinn gay". These are the young celebrities who personify the future of tomorrow's Republican Party. When the most metrosexual player in the NFL, that holiest of symbols of American masculinity, becomes the icon of young Republicanism, it is obvious that the culture war is over. Now it's simply about waiting for the paleoconservatives to die off.

Passion versus Plastic

2008-10-02T20:23:00.000-07:00

Succintly, Biden beat the tar out of Palin, but that was expected. What was unexpected was how comfortable Biden has made me as Obama's choice for VP. He would do more than be a caretaker for Obama's movement should something horrible happen, and he is certainly more than just a choice to fill out certain lines in the campaign resume (experience, old white guy). He is a man deeply in touch with the needs and thoughts of middle-class America.

But beyond all that, there was this one moment in the debate where everything about this election was made crystal clear:

I suspect this clip will get a lot of airplay over the next few days, but what should get equal attention is Palin's follow-on response, that being nothing. Biden connects his own personal tragedy with the struggles of middle-class Americans, and her response is to ignore it, keep to her notes, and rattle off some soulless sound-bites about "mavericks". Her response was completely plastic, and that is what McCain-Palin has in store for America: empty rhetoric that doesn't even acknowledge how badly this country has been shafted over the past 8 years.

As for Palin, she was god-freaking awful, but expectations have been brought so low that talking heads will be able to say she did okay until the polls start going even farther south in the next few days. There were few Miss Teen USA moments, although there was a hell of winner when she responded to the question of whether the VP was a member of the legislative or executive branch by talking up her experience as a business executive.

Grumpy Old Men

2008-10-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

My Post-Post Debate Analysis

2008-10-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

Evidently, I am the one that needs to go down to the garden supply store, buy some plant food, pour it over my heart, and grow a little faith...

Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight.com, the best place for polls available.

It's obvious that Obama played the debates with much greater skill than I gave him credit for. By not going for the quick kill as I'd hoped, he instead presented himself as calm, thoughtful, and most importantly, presidential. That may not have enthused his base but it also didn't fire up the competition by antagonizing them, and seems to have convinced independents that he can do the job. Now they see that he should do the job through the double-whammy of the economy going into the toilet this week and McCain's ludicrous stunts.

There is a lot of daylight left before the books close on this election, but it is looking extremely dire for McCain. The Obama road to victory was always to win the states Kerry won in '04 plus one extra - not only has he accomplished that, Obama is on track here for as close as a Democrat has had to a landslide in decades. McCain has no option to stop the Obama strategy by taking away his "plus one" state in Pennsylvannia or Michigan; instead, he's got to play catch-up and simply try to preserve traditional red states like Virginia, all the while watching deep red states like North Carolina possibly make the jump to blue. And the Obamamentum may not be over yet: Georgia could also go to him before this all said and done.

McCain doesn't have a lot of chances left to turn this around. The Palin-Biden debate will more likely be a case of damage control than any opportunity for them. The next two debates give McCain some options, but unlike this first debate, they won't be concentrating on his supposed strength in foreign policy. And what McCain really needed to do - break off from the conservative base and appeal to the moderate roots he has become famed for (albeit without reason) - is pretty much lost as he's too long abandoned the maverick McCain of 2000 to ever regain that edge. All he has left is an October Surprise, and there really aren't any on the table that could help him. Any serious scandal would've already been brought out against Obama by now, after all the mudslinging, first by the Clintons and now by the Republicans. Another 9/11-style terrorist attack would only show how ineffective the McBush strategy on the War on Terror has been in protecting the country, and would more likely result in an Obama landslide. Invading Iran would do the same, as it would further expose the overstretched American military and bring the issue of re-establishing the draft to the fore. About the only thing that might swing things in McCain's favor is the capture of bin Laden, but we all know where the bastard is (Waziristan) and the only way to get him is to do what Obama has long counseled which McCain has lambasted him for - unilateral military action into Pakistan without that government's consent when the intel is credible.

I don't want to jinx it by saying it's over, as polls can change and Obama's lead is not insurmountable; but, if the fat lady isn't singing yet, she surely is warming up in the wings of the stage.

My Post-Debate Analysis

2008-09-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

I just donated $25 at www.barackobama.com. Hopefully he can use that money to go down to his local garden supply store, buy some plant food, pour it on his crotch, and GROW A FUCKIN' PAIR OF BALLS!!!!!!!!!

For fuck's sake, he's supposed to be the next John F. Kennedy. I'm hoping he'll actually end up the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Tonight, he's playing like he's going to be the next Adlai Stevenson. Fuck being deferential to the old war hero, take that gimpy bitch out at the knees, and finish this damn thing already.

Adventures in "Fag Enabling"

2008-06-16T21:09:00.001-07:00

I am running on fumes so this might not be very coherent. Jeannine and I just got back from the first same-sex marriage to be officiated in California since our state's Supreme Court had the courage to do what all but one of our politicians failed to do and gave the right to marriage to all of this state's citizens. My original plan was to stand outside the San Francisco City Hall with other supporters, to run against the professional hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church, who invaded our state to peddle their bigotry. Instead, we ended up inside City Hall, smack-dab in the middle of the cake-cutting ceremony for that historic marriage.

Jeannine and I met up in front of the City Hall around 3:30pm, when the only ones there were a few (and I mean very few) anti-gay protestors carrying signs and a bunch of SFPD and County Sheriff personnel. A Westboro van full of placards - which I dubbed the Hatemobile - was running a circuit around the park in front of City Hall, followed by a similar van but this one run by pro-Islam protestors ordering people to convert to Muslims. Irrational hatred makes for strange bedfellows.

The scene was pretty dead, so we went ahead into City Hall, so I could at least figure out where I'd be going tomorrow when I start my volunteer work. Once inside, we noticed a bunch of cameras on a second-story balcony overlooking the main hall, and we tentatively made our way over to see what was what. That's where we found ourselves right outside the Mayor's office, with a white wedding cake surrounded by more television and photo cameras than I've ever seen. Obviously this was going to be where Mayor Newsom would meeting the press and the lovely couple would be cutting their cake after Newsom officiated the marriage in his office.

At first, I really wanted to get out of there. The hallway was filled with about 70% press, 25% friends of the couple, and 5% lookie-loos like us. I felt like I was intruding on what should be a private affair, even if the hallway was filled with so much press. But, as long as we kept ourselves edged back on the periphery of the crowd, I felt we were not imposing. So we positioned ourselves against the wall, where pillars (and people) blocked any view of the cake ceremony.

By about a half-hour before the ceremony, the place got ridiculously packed, and security had to clear a path for the guests to get out once the ceremony ended. Jeannine got tangled up sitting on one of the hallway benches, and she nearly fell onto Tom Ammiano when she tried to get untangled. There was much clapping as the lucky couple and Newsom came out to cut the cake, give some speeches, and take a few questions from the media.

Now, up until today, I've hated Newsom. He's not really delivered on straightening out San Francisco's corrupt and inefficient way of government, but that would take a miracle worker so I can't really blame him for that. What turned me off to Slick Gavin was the unsubstantiated smear he made on Obama the day of the California primary, followed by the craven way he handled the Olympic torch run debacle. But in that hall, seeing the faces of all those people who waited so long and fought so hard for this day, the joy in the eyes of the invited, I suddenly realized that I had been wrong. What Newsom did in 2004 may have simply been a political maneuver that benefited him in progressive San Francisco, but it could just have easily gone the other way and destroyed his career beyond local politics. The Democratic Party elite were almost calling for his head in 2004, and few thought he then had any chance of progressing on to gubernatorial or even presidential politics. It was an act of bravery, the kind of thing we should expect from our politicians, to stand as a statesman for what is right and not simply what is popular.

So in that hallway amid all that excitement, I got a little caught up in things. After Newsom ended his speech and the applause was going, I yelled out "GAVIN FOR GOVERNOR!". That went over well, there were a few laughs, but then someone replied "Why not President?" and I, like a complete retard, yelled out "PRESIDENT!" And that got some shooshes. It was a yell too far.

We stayed through the ceremony, clapping and hooting frequently, and then made our way outside. We already knew there'd be a much larger crowd, as we heard them yelling, even from the other side of the building, when 5:01pm struck and same-sex marriage became legal in California; but we had no idea of the size:

The crowd stretched out into the park across the street of City Hall. As we came out, there was a Westboro nut screaming about how God hates this and God hates that, so I yelled at him to stop telling God what to do. One of the Westboro signs stated "Fag Enablers Doom Nation", but I didn't get the chance to get a decent picture of myself with it. We hung out for awhile and enjoyed the chaos, but once it became obvious that no other local luminaries would be coming out, the crowd dispersed and we came home.

I cannot describe how giddy I am, as I was literally a witness to history. When I was a kid, I remember reading about the Civil Rights Movement, and counted myself lucky to be of a generation of Americans who would not need to bear the kind of stains that previous Americans did for allowing the institutionalized mistreatment of racial minorities. Everyone was equal under the law now, I naively thought, but it wouldn't be till I got older that I realized that this didn't apply to homosexual citizens in my country. My generation will have to bear the stain of that, but after days like today, my hope grows that the next generation of Americans will be able to state the following words without some bigoted qualification:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Starting tonight, all Californians will be free to pursue their happiness through the covenant of marriage. That I was there to witness this freedom born was both a privilege and a joy.

I Would Totally Pay To See This...

2008-06-15T21:37:00.001-07:00

Number 11 of 20 Superhero Movies We Hope They Never Make, courtesy of Cracked. Number 2 is also frighteningly dead-on accurate.

June is for weddings...

2008-06-14T16:56:00.000-07:00

... and I'll be playing my part. I just confirmed that I'll be manning a welcome desk at San Francisco City Hall from 12:30 to 5pm this coming Tuesday, helping to shepherd couples of all gender as they arrive to get married. In fact, I ended up volunteering to run that shift for the whole period, from Tuesday to Friday the 27th. Utterly excited.

God is Algae, or Theology According to Bad Rap Artists Turned Underwear Models

2008-06-09T19:58:00.000-07:00

Behold, the reason I have not, and undoubtably will not, watch an M. Night Shyamalanadingdong movie in the theater since The Sixth Sense: The Happening is all about how God is real and science is dumb...

But asked what specific religious faith inspired The Happening, Shyamalan went super vague. He said he drew on "the Native American culture and relationship with nature, the relationship with the sky, the earth, the rock the bear." He also claimed that cast he Mark Wahlberg because of his strong faith in Jesus. But Wahlberg's religious faith ended up causing a ton of reshoots. Whenever Shyamalan would ask Wahlberg what he was thinking about, and Wahlberg replied, "Jesus," Shyamalan would make him reshoot the scene in question. (Until he was no longer thinking about Jesus?)

Self-sodomizing Jeebus on a pogo stick, will the stupid never end. There have been many very well-thought out and deeply-researched arguments why logically, reason leads to religious faith. I may not buy any of them, mainly because none of them fully complete that bridge on logic alone, but I can at least admire those philosophers who refused to submit to some ill-thought out, touchy-feely bullshit to prove that, as Shyamalanadingdong would claim "There are limits to rational thought." I can even respect those who still hold to their irrational, unreasoned emotional feeling in religious faith, as long as they don't try to sugar-coat it as anything more substantial or valid than that. But to spew this kind of nonsense that neurotoxin-releasing algae somehow lead to evidence of God and thus proves a limit to reason is absurd. There are no known limits to rational thought itself, there are simply limits to currently available human reason. That we tool-using hairless monkeys may not have (yet) developed far enough to fully comprehend all the wonders of our universe does not mean that there is some anthropomorphized bearded thunderer up in the heavens that we can understand in our imaginations with all the answers to our questions.

And to use Albert Einstein to buttress this kid of shit, because he saw "the hand of God", is just insulting:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal good and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. - Einstein

Personally, I blame Spielberg. His Capra-esque approach, where deep social issues are drowned in a thick syrup of feel-good agnosticism rather than faced with any kind of honest intellectual bravery, was mimicked by most of the new Hollywood intelligentsia, and no one drunk so deep of this attitude as Shyamalanadingdon. Honestly, I would have no problem with this kind of semi-Christian anti-science agnostic attitude if it weren't just so prevalent now in recent genre fiction. Lost, Battlestar Galactica (maybe), The X-Files, anything not created by Joss Whedon, and countless movies (The Lord of the Rings and Prince Caspian most eggregiously) are all prime examples of this kind of anti-reason subtext. Although to be fair, it's not like there isn't a long track record of anti-faith science fiction where religion is public enemy number one.

Anyways, watching Marky-Mark look confused into a camera for two hours was never my idea of good time to begin with, but this kind of crap is enough to make me write off The Happening even as a Netflix rental. I'm betting it's going to do a moderately-well opening weekend followed by disastrous 50%+ drops leading to more questions as to Shlamalanadingdong's box office viability; but, once he comes out with his adaptation of Avatar the Last Airbender, enough of the anime freaks are going to buy tickets and refuel his place as Spielberg's heir in Hollywood. Bah.

The battle is joined...

2008-06-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

My front yard, as of today.

The Case For Hillary as Veep

2008-06-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

Let me be clear: I despise the Clintons. I can excuse the race-baiting strategy of Hillary's '08 campaign as part of a legitimate effort to win at all costs, and while I find her incompetent - from the health-care and fundraising debacles during Bill's administration to the blindly overconfident manner in which ran her campaign (whose pig-headed "stay-the-course" strategy brings uncomfortable comparisons with our current President's leadership style) - my distaste for the Clintons focuses almost entirely on Bill. I don't hate Bill Clinton because of the right-wing mudslinging on his sexual mores or his own sleazy relationship with the truth, but because of what he failed to do while in office: this was a President with the cowardice to ignore genocide in Bosnia, to actively attempt to hide even worse genocide in Rwanda, who forced our military to engage in lies with "don't ask-don't tell" rather than have the bravery to end that bigotry outright, and then institutionalized that bigotry with the Defense of Marriage Act, who back-stabbed the industrial middle class with NAFTA, and worst of all, became the leading example of the DLC philosophy (pro-corporate, anti-progressive) that betrayed everything the Democratic Party has stood for since FDR brought us a New Deal. While Clinton-lovers deify him for leading the party out of the wilderness of losers like Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter, Clinton the DINO did much more to harm the party in the past few decades than anything else, damage that can only now be healed by the truly progressive values and populist strategy of Barack Obama.

That said, I think there is a very strong case for Obama to take Hillary as his running mate. It has nothing to do with what I think Hillary adds to an Obama Administration, nor what she could do to bring her supporters in-line with Obama's presidential bid. The current polls as they stand show that Obama can beat McCain, narrowly but at a time when the Clinton backlash is at its strongest. Those numbers can only get better for Obama as he nears the convention, so I don't find a lot of legitimacy in the idea that Obama somehow needs Hillary to win this. However, Hillary can do a great deal of damage to torpedo Obama's chances in November, and indeed, considering her age and better chance to win in 2012 than in 2016, it may be in her interests to see Obama lose. That is the most compelling reason for Obama to make her his nominee: Hillary as Veep would mean that if Obama loses so does Hillary, in such an open and irrevocable manner that even Hillary (and Bill) would understand that she can't safely torpedo Obama without sinking her own chances to win at a later date. Keeping her within the campaign would also mean keeping an eye on her and Bill, so that they can be kept on message. It follows the basic philosophy of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.

My only concern is how much this might alienate some Obama supporters, particularly among Independents and Republicans. The charge that Hillary will dilute Obama's "change" message by allying him with such Washington old guard as the Clintons has little weight when we look at the alternatives: with the exceptions of Kathleen Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, and Claire McCaskill, every other potential Obama Veep is an old white male whose going to dilute the "change" image just as much (if not more) than Hillary. As for those three, Napolitano is probably a lesbian (I dearly wish my bigoted country were ready for that, but I'm afraid they aren't... yet), McCaskill would be fantastic but she's a serving Senator in a seat the Democrats can't yet afford to lose, and Sebelius would be nearly 68 when she runs for her own presidential seat in 2016 following a successful two-term Obama administration. Honestly, I would still be very happy with Sebelius, but I don't think her advantages outweigh the opportunity to keep the Clintons in the fold and unable to make as much mischief.

And there is still this: if Obama takes Hillary as his veep and wins the Presidency, she is most likely to want to spearhead the administration's universal health care proposal. Hillary's current plan has zero chance of getting through even a Democratic-controlled Congress, and all evidence points to her inability to create bipartisan compromise. So I believe that if Obama gave her enough rope to hang herself with this, she'd do so, her health-care proposal would go up in flames, laying the groundwork for Obama to step in and get his more reasonable plan passed. This would also give Obama the excuse to ask her to step aside in 2012, allowing him to almost bloodlessly replace Clinton with a second Veep during his second term, perhaps Sebelius or (my hope) someone from his same generation that could maintain the youthful vigor and progressive values he is bringing back into the party.

Inauguration Day: January 20, 2009

2008-06-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

I just put down the reservation on the hotel for a trip to see Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20th of next year. Yeah, I'm that confident, and watching the speeches tonight makes me only more so. By the most accurate polls, Obama is narrowly beating McCain by slightly less than ten electoral votes and has been doing so consistently for weeks now. This is when his support among Clinton Democrats has been at its nadir, and as it begins to sink in that Obama is the undisputed nominee and that McCain only offers to ensure all the policies that Hillary Clinton has worked against, those numbers can only get better. Obama may suffer some wear-&-tear in the debates and there may be some hiccups if he poorly chooses his Vice-Presidential nominee, but after seeing this guy weather the Clinton machine, Revered Wright, and Bittergate only to come out stronger, I have faith in the man.

Only problem is, that because so many hotels around Dulles Airport are already booked up, we had to settle for a place all the way out in Prince Frederick, Maryland. That'll mean a couple of hours of driving from the airport to the hotel, and then nearly an hour of driving back into Washington, D.C. Still, the die is cast and Jeannine and I are set: we're going to watch history made as what I believe may be the best president this country has seen since FDR begins his own first Hundred Days in office.

Elmer Fudd Gets His Dolchstoß

2008-06-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

An interesting article out of something called S.W.A.T. Magazine today shows that gun owners are not very enthused about the Bush Administration's legal defense on the Washington D.C. gun ban. It seems they would've much preferred they use D.C. vs Heller to set precedent that would overturn most if not all legal restrictions on gun ownership, but when the opportunity came, the Republicans punted:

So much for the old saw that Republican leaders, if only they could, would get rid of all those unconstitutional federal gun laws, but we just need to be patient until they are in a position to do so. Now that they had their chance, they did the exact opposite. You need to dispense with the notion that your rights are somehow safe just because the men in power have an "R" after their names.

What makes this interesting is how this plays out over all the other wedge issues Republicans have been running on to remain politically viable with an increasingly progressive American electorate: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action, even illegal immigration, all lead to same result: Republicans win using them as wedge issues, but immediately face defeat once they are in a national position of power to actually change them at the federal level. They are left damned if they do (pissing off the moderate swing voters that put them into office for which ever part of the wedge issue pie - usually economic reform - they voted them in on) or damned if they don't (pissing off their extremist base that demand action once action is possible). And that lack of action will eventually erode even that extremist base: I know anti-abortion Christian conservatives and libertarian laissez-faire capitalists that are voting Obama this election not because they expect him to cede to their values, but because, as long as the other guy is never going to do anything, might as well set these particular issues aside to vote on those that will get attention (Iraq, health care, basic mental competence, etc).

The solution for the Republicans is to stop giving lip-service to their libertarian roots, squash all calls for activism on these wedge issues (both for and against) at the federal level, and drop it to the state and local level as part of their "state rights" propaganda. This would mean ignoring the wedge issues where they are unlikely to gain play (i.e. urban areas) and driving regional legislation in those areas where the electorate are still willing to get behind them (i.e. rural Bittersville). Of course, this is only putting a finger in the leaking dike (that sounds so dirty), as even the most gun-loving, gay-hating, life-pro'ing region full o' bitter is being opened to progressive values due to netroots and the growing penetration of popular culture through new media channels. The Republican Party will have to change or die, and while I once thought (and feared) that McCain would be leading that change, his McBush third-term campaign makes it obvious that they have chosen to die, albeit in such an incompetent manner that they'll maintain just enough weak allegiance to these wedge issues to piss off their base while also alienating moderates.

As for this particular issue, I'm modestly for gun rights without being a gun owner myself (my finances can only support so many hobbies, and I'll always want to drop more dough on fantasy miniatures than on a new reloading press). I don't believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, but I've done enough research to know that gun restrictions do little to alleviate violent crime (and paper over the true underlying causes, poverty - which legislation can help solve - and culture - which society must take responsibility for itself). Whether or not Elmer can have a bayonet lug on his shotgun will do nothing to end inner-city gang violence or domestic abuse that leads to murder-suicide. Unlike gay rights and reproductive privacy, gun legislation does not involve basic civil rights and should entirely be a "states rights" matter, as anyone that's spent time in either knows that that gun laws that make sense in an urban center have little relevance to a rural community. That's why gun owners need to start working hard at the local rather than federal level, electing regional candidates who support their values, and phase out the massive lobbying efforts of the NRA, who are facing obsolence as the netroots-style fundraising of the Obama campaign becomes the norm.

June 17th

2008-06-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

This is the email I just sent the San Francisco Office of the County Clerk:

Hello,

I would like volunteer my help to the Office of the County Clerk on Tuesday, June 17th. I am assuming that this day will be very busy for your office as it will be the first day same-sex marriages will be allowed in the state, and would very much like to support your office in this task. If necessary, I would be happy to carry out the One-Day Deputization to assist in officiating the actual marriages; but, if not, I would be more than willing to assist in any other tasks on that day, for the entirety of the day.

I could not find any information on your website that directly addressed this matter. Considering the high number of marriages and the need for volunteers during the previous event when same-sex marriages were available, it might be useful to have some mention of your need (or non-need) of volunteers on June 17.

Thank you for time and I look forward to your response.

I don't really expect a response, as I'm betting they've received a ton of these kinds of emails. Still, I do plan to at least be there on Tuesday morning, dressed in my Sunday best, carrying about $100 worth of flowers to hand out to all the happy grooms and the blushing brides (and vice-versa). It is to my eternal regret that I wasn't there the first time San Francisco offered this most basic of civil rights to all of its inhabitants, and I won't let history pass me by yet again.

Baracky

2008-04-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

So this is why nobody seriously tries to build a time machine. It's not because of causality paradoxes or the lack of traversable wormholes. No, it's because why would anyone bother when stuff like this clearly proves that everything before Al Gore invented the Intertubes sucked balls:

Catching Up

2008-04-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

So it's been a very hectic last couple of weeks...

My sister Renee came out to stay with Jeannine and I. We tried (and failed) to see the Olympic torch run (I might post with pics later), took her to the usual tourist haunts (Coit Tower, Golden Gate, etc.), ate vomit-flavored candy and drank absurdly strong blueberry lager during factory tours of the Budweiser and Jelly Belly plants in Fairfield, and ate a lot of very good (and quite expensive) food. She also had us watch WWE wrestling, something I haven't done in years. The matches are just as boring as I remember, although the womens' coverage has gotten remarkably sleazier.
Didn't pick up comics while Renee was here, which is why I haven't done a Weekly Pull.
Ran Trail of Cthulhu for my monthly gaming group in San Francisco. We all had fun, but we also all agreed that the system sucks. This makes me very sad, as I really want the game to be successful, but it's just so mechanical.
Played Combat Commander tonight. Tons o' fun. It is a continual shock to my friends that I don't play war games and only played my first one a couple of years ago.

Barry O'Bomber

2008-04-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

So Obama did an interview on HBO's Real Sports, discussing his love of basketball, and said:

No, but I do think you can tell something about people from how they play basketball. For example, people who keep on shooting even though they have no jump shot. You can tell that there's a certain self-delusional aspect to their game. Right? That says something about who they are.

Another reason why Obama is my horse in this race: not only does he come off as human and likeable, but he also finds the most subtle ways to get in digs at his opponents.

Jim Butcher Book Signing

2008-04-06T12:58:00.001-07:00

So, on Friday, Jeannine and I went into San Francisco to attend Jim Butcher's book signing for Small Favor. Jeannine has been a big fan of his Dresden Files series ever since watching the now-cancelled television show based on those books. I enjoyed the series too, but I can't say I'm really a fan. I've only ever been to one other book signing, that one with George R.R. Martin. Whereas Martin seemed tired and perfunctory, Butcher was lively and conversed candidly with the fans. There were a surprising number of questions about upcoming The Dresden Files role-playing game, and I was a little shocked to hear that it won't be coming out until sometime next year. This is odd as I'll be playing in an alpha-stage playtest later this month, so I thought it'd be closer to release. I wanted to know how close the game would hew to other Evit Hat games like Spirit of the Century, but didn't ask figuring I'd find out in a couple weeks time anyways. A recent post from Fred Hicks' livejournal implies that it'll be Fate-based, so the SotC Aspects and Stunts system may see play in Dresden as well.

Jeannine seemed to have a great time, which means that I had a good time. I'll be reading the Dresden Files books before I run the game, so maybe I'll then find out for myself if he's a good writer and the books are worthwhile. If the books are anything like the author himself, they should be very geeky and very fun.

For Want of a Nail... and a Brain Cell

2008-03-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

So Ed "We don't vote for blacks here" Rendell decides to play Utau (if the Watcher was a whiny white male) and gives us an issue of What-If... Obama Was the Poor Loser:

"Just flip it for a second," Mr. Rendell said. "Let’s say Senator Clinton was ahead by about 110 delegates and ahead by less than 1 percent of the vote cast, and she and her supporters started to call on Senator Obama to get out. Just picture what the media would be saying. They’d be saying you’re being racist, you’re being everything in the world. It’s nuts! It’s nuts!"

Forget the fact that the mainstream media, in all their racial sensitivity, has been using the Wright controversy to hammer Obama as a dangerous black man come to roost his chickens because whitey gave us all the AIDs. That alone makes me suspect they'd be less likely to call an Obama a consumate survivor and scared to declare his chances over, even if the math makes it so - which has been the MSM line on Clinton even in this late hour.

No, the most salient point here is that the right course for alt-Obama is the same one for the Clinton in our timeline: quit. Alt-Obama would be in the same position, whose only hope is that alt-Clinton stumbles into a scandal big enough to wreck their inevitable victory. And, presuming that alt-Michelle Obama doesn't engage in gender-baiting after their upset loss in South Carolina and alt-Samantha Power doesn't spew bigotry about how the only way alt-Clinton got her position was because she was a woman, alt-Obama would actually be in an even better position than actual-Clinton, because he'd still have enough goodwill to negotiate a vice-presidency.

Clinton is quickly waning as a threat to Obama, so whether she stays in or quits really only hurts her at this point. And it is hurting her - dirty politics has manuevered her out of the vice-president position on Obama's ticket (unless he seriously swallows his pride and offers it to shore up the base); she is quickly destroying her goodwill in Congress through hard-selling the superdelegates, which creates enemies that block her chances of eventually becoming Senate Majority Leader; and if Obama does go on to lose in November, she will be painted as the Democratic Nader, whose political ambition caused her to tear the party apart, so that she has no chance of coming back to win it in 2012. She might still salvage her career by going after the governorship in New York, but does a state that has now had one governor fall and another one tarnished by sex scandals really want to invite Slick Willie to Albany?