A couple of years ago, the blognardosphere was all abuzz about the "hobbit" remains found in Indonesia. Now there's more evidence leading to the conclusion that the Indonesian "Bagginses" were actually a separate race, not modern pygmies.
According to Reuters, the Swiss Guard, a crack unit of Swiss soldiers entrusted with the life of the Pope whose history dates back to the 16th century, may open its doors to women. Hell, they may as well open up the ranks to out-of-shape, middle-aged, married, Protestant Americans.
The cliffhanger has risen from the grave, and its latest incarnation can be found at www.mercuryseries.com. The Mercury Men Director Christopher Preksta points out that “the web video format seemed the perfect opportunity to reintroduce the old serial style of storytelling." Available this fall on both the internet and via iTunes, The Mercury Men is the story of a middle-aged civil servant who finds himself trapped in his office building by otherworldly invaders and pressed into service by a pulpy pistol-packin' aerospace engineer from a mysterious organization. Their mission: to stop the Mercury Men and their doomsday device.
During my C-SPAN2 binge, I also caught David Grann, the author of The Lost City of Z, which is the story of the mysterious disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett while searching for a lost city in the Amazon. Fawcett's expeditions were like something straight out of the adventure pulps. He claimed to have encountered all kinds of cryptozoological treats: giant anacondas, small cat-like dogs, and double-nosed Andean tiger hounds. It has been alleged that Fawcett was the inspiration for everything from Indiana Jones, to Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost Word, to Kent Allard.
Apparently, John Grisham has discovered The Lost City of Z as well. Maybe it will inspire him to write something other than courtroom drivel.
And while Fawcett may have ended up as an entree, his spirit lives on. Seventy-year-old Colonel John Blashford-Snell, late of the Royal Engineers, has taken up his mantle. The Times lists the following as his acts of "derring-do":
—Colonel John Blashford-Snell is a former officer in the Royal Engineers who helped to found Operation Raleigh. He will lead the 20-person team on the two-month trip on June 21
—He has twice been shot at by Ethiopian bandits, bitten by a vampire bat and ate a Panamanian spider monkey
—Blashford-Snell is the founder of the Scientific Exploration Society
—He led the first descent of the Ethiopian Blue Nile in 1968 and the first vehicle crossing of the Darien Gap in Panama in 1972
—He invented a jungle hat that is mosquito-repellent, Teflon-coated and has a refrigerated headband
—He said recently: “I often say at 6am as I climb out of a soaking wet hammock, ‘God, I must be mad. Why am I doing this?’ ”
C-SPAN2's Book TV had an excellent interview with Christopher Buckley. Usually, I can't suffer through In Depth's full three hours, but Buckley's three hour block was so interest, touching on so many different subjects, it was over before I knew it.
Among other things of interest, I found out that Buckley dispatched his father to the Great Hereafter with a jar of peanut butter, the t.v. remote, and the deceased's favorite rosary. He touched on his endorsement of Barack Obama, praising him as "a very fine guy possessed of a first class temperament" while predicting that Obama's deficit-doubling economic policies will "bring this country to its knees." He also spoke of Dubya's ruinous deficit spending, his love of Dubya's dad, his time in the merchant marine, the war between his dad and Gore Vidal, and, of course, his works -- especially his latest, a memoir, Losing Mom and Pup.
Whether he intended to or not, one of my favorite bloggers Berin Kinsman started something. He takes a writing exercise from Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem! and applies it to fantasy RPG world-building:
In the book No Plot? No Problem? author Chris Baty discusses creating two “Magna Cartas” before tackling a fiction project. One is a list of things you like about the genre, what makes you want to read it (or, in the case of a roleplaying game, play it or run it), the things you’ll want to include. The object is to keep you focused on the things that will make it fun to work on. The other Magna Carta is for things you dislike and want to avoid. You make this list to remind you where you don’t want to go, cliches to resist and paths of least resistance to avoid traveling. It’s a process I apply to worldbuilding and campaign building, and a topic I cover at length in the forthcoming Worldbuilding 101 book. Because I’m currently working on a 4th Edition D&D campaign, partly as a practical lab to test my Worldbuilding 101 principles, I created a Magna Carta. Here’s what I came up with. Note that there are some system-related things in there, because I will avoid creating encounters that I dislike or find hard to run, and do more of the things I think are fun. Magna Carta: Fantasy RPG Likes
Heroic PCs with a purpose other than kill and loot
PCs with back stories and NPC connections
Villains with actual goals and motivations
Political intrigue and conflict between like-aligned powers
Setting-based consequences to PC actions
Skill challenges
Monsters as PCs and NPCs
Scary monsters that are actually scary
Magic affecting the economy and ecology
Period-appropriate technology — stuff that actually existed
Conflict between faiths and ideologies Magna Carta: Fantasy RPG Dislikes
Yet another Lord of the Rings knockoff
All-combat adventures
Illogical treasure (how’d the monster get that? Why didn’t they use that magic item against the party?)
Kitchen-sink ecologies and economies - everything and anything exists without consequence
Too much anachronistic tech
Absentee gods that grant powers without reward or consequence All of this is written in my purple drakeskin journal, of course, to be referenced and amended as I go along.
Characters who kick ass all the time or who are overly awesome
Magic item economies
Gods who dispense quests
Giving new names to traditional fantasy races to try to appear innovative. If it's an orc, call it an orc, for God's sake!
Not to be outdone, I came up with my own: Magna Carta: Fantasy RPG Likes
Dying Earth
Intrigue and conspiracies.
Episodic sword & sorcery REH stuff.
Vancian magic
Religions that have differences other than which deity they worship.
Non-European influences (yeah, I stole that one) and semi-European influences -- especially Aztec, Mayan, Timurid, Khazar, etc.
Making the cryptozoological (i.e. Cameroon Flashlight Frog), Yeti, etc.) and extinct live (i.e. aurochs, mastodons, etc.) and making the living (i.e. horses and their ilk) extinct.
Golems
Telmarines
Magna Carta: Fantasy RPG Dislikes
Middle Earth. Don't get me wrong. I loved JRRT. But I loathe his imitators.
Dragons. Maybe it was Dragonlance overkill. Maybe it was having to wade through too many Pern MUSHes when trying to find a good MU* back in the day. But I prefer my Dungeons sans Dragons.
Anarchronisms. I'm not talking about a flintlock or a pocket watch in an otherwise medieval world. I'm talking laser guns and tricorders. I hated Expedition to The Barrier Peaks.
Epic quests. I don't mind quests so much, but there's life outside of "The Quest Is The Quest." Right?
Idyllic Celtic/Proto-Wiccan cultures
Elves and those like elves.
Japanese stuff. There is an excellent game called Legend of the Five Rings. If you have a yen for Japanese stuff, go play that.
Jack Webb. Gene Roddenberry. True: The Man's Adventure Magazine. The trifecta of men's adventure entertainment if ever there was one. Well, apparently these three greats came together thanks to their good sponsors at G.E. to give early sixties television viewers G.E. True, an anthology series based upon the stories in True.
Even Jack ("dum-de-dum-dum") Webb is back. This time he is retelling stories from the files of True Magazine. The first one was set on a hospital ship off Okinawa, where a doctor operated on a marine who had a live and sensitive shell in his body capable of blowing a six-foot hole in a steel deck. It was a hell of a moment, but Webb sank it. "At 1830 hours exactly," he intoned, "the operation began on a human bomb dead center in the circle of death." He hosts the program in an echo-chambered voice, while he stands beside the word TRUE, spelled out in block letters 22 feet high, or roughly ten times as tall as Jack Webb.
The cast included such "guy show" luminaries as James "Scotty" Doohan and Werner "Col. Klink" Klemperer.
I don't get it. G.E. gave my dad's generation this, and all they give me are those crappy Al Gore light bulbs. Go figure.
I've been following the Zetas for quite some time now. For those who haven't, they are a Mexican narco-gang who started out as a special drug interdiction unit trained and armed by the U.S. government, then realizing the money to be had playing for the other team. B'rer Jundi reports that Mexican authorities have nabbed one of the Zeta leaders. Hats off to the Men-in-Black. Whew, I made it through a post about federales without mentioning "steekin' badges." Doh! Note the anti-Swine Flu masks.
In the April 2, 2009 New Statesman, A N Wilson recounts his conversion experience ... to atheism and his "slow and doubting" return to faith.
By nature a doubting Thomas, I should have distrusted the symptoms when I underwent a “conversion experience” 20 years ago. Something was happening which was out of character – the inner glow of complete certainty, the heady sense of being at one with the great tide of fellow non-believers. For my conversion experience was to atheism. There were several moments of epiphany, actually, but one of the most dramatic occurred in the pulpit of a church.
A couple of years ago, the blognardosphere was all abuzz about the "hobbit" remains found in Indonesia. Now there's more evidence leading to the conclusion that the Indonesian "Bagginses" were actually a separate race, not modern pygmies.
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