Real men of genius

This is going to ramble. I know I’ve promised you that many times before, and, well, if you think about it, I meant it every time, didn’t I? So brace yourselves.

Utterly unique Britchick blogger Vanessa is a lot of fun to read, even when she’s trying hard not to be. Her latest entry is this utterly indescribable thing on effluvia, including some personal reminiscing on her part that makes me realize that, yet again, I simply don’t belong anywhere, with anyone, apparently. But that’s my ineffably brilliant gift, to read something totally about someone else and make it somehow about me.

The caption above, “Real men of genius”, is in actuality just because the Budweiser commercials (which are usually hilarious) are running through my head. But if it annoys any hyperzealous anti-humanistic feminist gender bigots out there, well, that’s all good, too. The world doesn’t exactly lack people to hate, but still, there are those out there who never seem to get enough of them, and that’s a need I can supply.

There really isn’t any news, but I wanted to put up another cartoon. The one above is one of my personal favorites and I think it’s just hilarious, but of course other’s mileage may vary. It is, naturally, very geek oriented, but, well, consider the source.

Scott Shepherd sent me a nice, long rambling email yesterday, which I appreciated. I’ve responded to it since, though, so now that’s over and done with.

Let’s see. Scott (Paul’s buddy Scott) came over to roleplay yesterday at around 3 in the afternoon, and Paul was still in bed. Paul tends to like staying up until 5 or 6 a.m. and then sleeping until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. I got into that habit too and was sleeping really well for the first time since I was, I don’t know, 35. But sleeping until 3 or 4 in the afternoon doesn’t work well when your local football team is annoyingly insistent on playing at 1 p.m. on Sundays, so I had to try shifting my sleep schedule back around to something more normal, and once again, I’m on short sleep rations… but it’s slowly improving. Yesterday, for example, I went to bed around 9 (couldn’t stay up any longer) slept until around 3, got back up, hung out with Paul for a while, went back to bed around 7 and slept through until 12. You’d think that would be plenty of sleep but noooooo, I started to get tired around 8, managed to keep my head up through Smallville and Angel (neither of which really rewarded the effort, although it’s always nice to see Sarah Thompson again) and then crashed again. I slept through until 6 this morning or so, which is good.

Mind you, when I say ‘slept through’, I in no way mean I attained that mythically blissful state not seen by any grownup since early adolescence at the latest where I simply collapsed unconscious and remained that way, in the depths of restful euphoric slumber, for seven or eight hours straight. Oh no. I mean I tossed and turned, slept for 90 minutes or two hours at a time, briefly resurfaced into a state of fitful bleary soupy semi-consciousness, then eventually fell back down the well into more intermittent, never quite as deep or as restful as I’d have really liked, slumber. During various of those brief surfacings I became aware that Scott had come back over again (he’d left after roleplaying for a while) and was annoyed with him, because he was supposed to be bringing over a packet of gravy so we could make chicken and biscuits and then he shows up after I’ve crashed for the night, the bastard. And then he was also supposed to be bringing back my copy of Dawn of the Dead which I wanted to watch with Paul, because Paul has never seen it and I wanted that experience of seeing something you really love through the eyes of someone else for the first time, so I called him a bastard again and went back to sleep.

Anyway, roleplaying yesterday was enjoyable, although I still don’t think Scott and Paul know quite what to make of my roleplaying campaign. It was one of the rather frequent occasions when there was pretty much no action at all… my roleplaying campaign is far more about, well, roleplaying, than it is about violence… and pretty much all Scott and Paul’s characters did was leave the place they’d been staying and get a room somewhere else, because Paul’s character Vjorn was badly injured from the last session and needed time to heal before they set out on their next adventure.

Most of the session was simply taken up with very mundane interactions… I described the new inn they were staying at in detail to give them a feel for it, and that included detailed descriptions of the room they were staying in, and especially the meals they were eating (since the inn, Token’s, is the finest on the River, and I wanted to give them a real sense of what it was like to be there, so they could contrast that with what it would be like when they hit the road of adventure again and were sleeping on the ground rolled up in a mangy old fur eating stale ration-bread).

I also introduced a new NPC to the party, who is bringing his own complications (there is, apparently, a group of hardened veteran mercenaries looking for him, and at the end of the session, Paul’s character discovered the new NPC, ‘Kendo of the House of Kor’, was wearing some sort of magical disguise, so all is not well). But, for the most part, it was all just yak yak yak yak yak and nobody so much as reached for a weapon once.

Scott asked some intelligent questions about the local political set up, which allowed me to give a long lecture on recent history and how the various different political factions and cultures interacted in the current ruling court, which was all stuff his character would have known, and he and Paul seemed genuinely interested… but I kept catching them giving each other these ‘jesus we’ve never had anything like this in any other roleplaying campaign’ looks a lot, too. Which I find flattering, and they did seem to enjoy it, but… well… it’s just a reminder that most people who play RPGs don’t play anything like the way I do.

I’m usually uncomfortable with introducing new elements into an ongoing session without having thought them out fully… so many times when I just make shit up as I go along (as I did with the new NPC) it turns out badly, because I haven’t thought things through carefully enough. However, I have to admit, none of my players over the years have cared anything like as much about getting all the details correct and making sure everything makes internal, consistent sense as I do, and Paul and Scott seem especially easy to impress, so I’ve lightened up on that considerably. And, having introduced the whole ‘hunted fellow in magical disguise’ sub plot, I think I have, since then, come up with a pretty good backstory that may or may not turn into an exciting scenario at some point.

However, yesterday was spent staying at an inn, eating, booking passage to an island where they have to kill a lord (which took up some time in and of itself, they had to go to the Vandertar Trading Company and bribe a clerk to tell them exactly which ships were sailing to Dour Island in the near future; they could have just walked around and asked, but they seemed to want to ask someone knowledgeable and get it over with, so they wound up waiting in an outer office while various ship’s captains went in to deal with the Vandertar factor first), then going to the Temple of Silver and Gold where they got their new weapons appraised (their current client paid them to kill his father in advance, with some lovely heirloom weapons his family had) and were baptized as worshippers as well (Scott, huge Star Trek fan that he is, got a kick out of the fact that the Temple of Silver and Gold’s benediction/blessing is “live long and prosper”).

The only looming threat was the various mercenaries with black hand symbols on their sashes that they kept seeing around the city, apparently scouring the place for their new NPC, and like I said, there was no ‘action’ at all. But I enjoy sessions like that, and they seemed to, too.

Having bored you with all that, and since Paul and Scott don’t read this weblog, let me bore you further with my ideas for the new NPC…

He seems to be a Sottle (a particular magic using human sub-race in my campaign area; Sottles are short, fat, gold skinned, and hairless, and look much like oily little butterballs) and claims to be a mage, which all Sottles are. He’s wearing an obviously expensive looking trinket around his neck that looks like a snowflake made of silver, dusted with with minute diamond chips that make it sparkle as if frosted. Now, the mercenary company, known as the Night Stalkers, are looking for an adventurer who hired them quite some time ago to help him recover a specific lost historical artifact, which he was supposed to sell and give them a share of the proceeds from. Instead he kept it and ran off.

What backstory I’ve come up with, while drifting off to sleep last night, is that the artifact is something called Grandio’s Snowflake, an attempt by a long dead sorcerer who is more or less my campaign’s equivalent of Merlin, to create a device that would allow a non-magic user to be a wizard. Grandio’s Snowflake is not silver, basically, it’s solidified essence, and within its different facets are ‘recorded’ every spell Grandio knew, which the wearer can cast pretty much at will, as if they were a very powerful mage. Now, the only problem is, there is no Owner’s Manual; if you want to cast a spell, you have to know what it is first, so this guy, ‘Kendo of the House of Kor’ (his real name is Prador), has to travel around and do research on magic spells in general and Grandio’s specific spells as well, so he can figure out what the Snowflake will let him do. So far he knows about twenty of the spells that are in the Snowflake, including goodies like Illusionary Disguise, of course.

Meanwhile, the Night Stalker Company is after him because he’s betrayed them, of course, and these guys are bad asses. Once known as the Ebon Hand Company, they were an entirely Northark mercenary unit (Northarks are a black skinned race that originate in the Northern jungles of my campaign area), and then… something happened. There are different accounts… some say they were accompanying the child of a powerful lord on a journey when they were ambushed by a Northark tribe led by a powerful, vengeful shaman. Others claim they were on an ill considered expedition into some wasteland when they encountered a strange obsidian monument, like a spike of black rock forty feet high spearing up out of the ground, in the wilderness. Still others claim they deliberately struck a deal with the God of Death for greater earthly prowess in battle. Whatever the case, the stories all have one thing in common… the entire Ebon Hand Company was killed… and somehow, the survivors… well, remnants… of that incident have formed what is now called the Night Stalker Legion. Where the Company was once all Northarks, now they are a mixture of races, but there is still a requirement for membership… one has to be Undead.

Of course, that must all be bullshit, because Vjorn and Zambona (Scott’s character) have clearly seen these guys out in the daytime, and in my campaign, sentient Undead cannot go out in the sunlight without bursting into flames and then burning to ashes at supernatural speed.

Heh heh.

Anyway, I think that could make for a fun scenario at some point in the future. I’m especially interested in considering what Kendo of the House of Kor may decide to do when Vjorn and Zambona try to kill a local Lord of Ona Tengu. He may very well decide it would be better to attach himself to a Lord’s retinue than help these two losers… he is, after all, clearly not a very nice guy…

Okay, I’ve geeked out quite enough for now. There’s nothing much else to write about here, though, so forgive me, enjoy the cartoon, and check back in in a couple of days when, you never know, something cool may have happened.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.