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Two big additions to the DriveThruComics Holiday Sale!
Heroic Publishing - Champions, Flare, Liberty Girl.
Airship Entertainment - Girl Genius
Both of these publishers are now offering an extra 10% Off their comics as part of the sale.
For the complete list of sale items check out DriveThruComics.com today!
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Birthday post later this evening. Just something I woke up with on the edge of my mind. A dream where I was on a stage talking and said...
"Religion is like that girl in high school who promised boys mind-blowing sex and got all kinds of gifts and prestige because of her promises, knowing she'd never have to deliver on anything because high school boys will do anything if they think it gets them closer to getting laid. Delivering an invisible promise. That's religion. Yes, I'm saying it. Religion is a cock tease."
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Jerôme, who so splendidly illustrates the GUMSHOE line of products (as well as several French rpg products), was so kind to allow us to convert one of his maps into a mapping style for next year's Cartographer's Annual.
It's been great fun working with both Photoshop and CC3 to make his artwork into a CC3 style. The process was similar to what I've done with Pär Lindström's work, but the outcome is of course very different:
Click on the image for a larger version.
You can see the original artwork the style is based on in 7eme Cercle's Devastra publication. Jerome has also created the map (and other illustrations) for their new Yggdrasil book.
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Had a day of seriously awful vibes near the end of last week. A distressing dream jolted me awake. Still recovering from post-trip food poisoning, I stumbled from bed headachey and wobble-legged. Bad news, from the grave to the serious to the worrying to the weird, poured into my inbox. Were I prone to a Robinocentric view of the universe, the peculiar timing of one particular crummy news nugget would have felt like I’d put the jinx in personally.
That night, as I ate a dinner of suitably bland takeaway items, I saw it staring me in the face, right on the dinner table.
A Kleenex demon.
Now, I’m not actually superstitious. I don’t think he caused the various sad and unpleasant events I learned about that day. Maybe he just reflected them.
Still, I freakin’ hate these guys.
Edit: The above funny picture of a Kleenex box was not intended to evoke real concern. Nothing to worry about, folks.
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Not pagan calendrical feasts nor dubious nativities. Not the slaughter of turkeys and trees, nor even rampant materialism.
Just wobbly-headed elfin women dripping with ankhs and wearing black contact lenses that make them look like a gerbil hosting a seance.
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2GB of memory later and all is considerably speedier. Yay!
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http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/product.php?productid=17085 
A Magical Medley
How to create your own magic systems for the Fudge roleplaying game, with sample systems and other miscellaneous magic.
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Well...winter finally arrived here in Madison. We had quite a bit of snow over night and they are saying 2 to 4 inches more of it today. We managed to help get a few of the neighbors out of the lot and cleared off the steps/sidewalks so far.
From: Madison.com - Winter storm photo gallery
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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. This is my Gamer Chili recipe — a modified version of one that Rob Donoghue (there he is again!) threw at me earlier this decade. It got the “Gamer Chili” moniker for being very easy to throw together the morning before a game, and with a big enough crock pot (I usually do a double batch, but my slow-cooker is pretty high capacity), it can easily feed a table of 6-8 hungry gamers. I may have posted it somewhere before, but it’s always good to get out there.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Whenever you find yourself lf stuck in a place running a continual news-loop with inescapably loud audio, the Esoterrorists put it it there, as an emitter of low-grade cognitive dissonance. They particularly target airports, where their installations play to a captive audience of the already anxious. Their client entities derive particular nourishment from those involuntarily exposed to the stock market segment. The mix of fear—of lost opportunities, of nosediving portfolios—combined with greed is greasy with psychic resonance. Since the economic downturn the yields have grown even stronger. Even those most knowledgeable about the financial world, once inured to this material by familiarity, are now prone to radiate rich waves of subconscious distress.
Airports in general provide a wider a playground for certain discreet entities of the Outer Dark. Old fashioned fear of flying admixes with new-century terrorism dread. Though not as strong as it was earlier in the decade, the latter still exerts a nourishing pull. Xenophobia provides its own heady psychic outflow. In airports people are forced to travel with others whose clothing, speech and appearance marks them as other.
Disguised Outer Dark Entities sometimes board planes, but the limited range of action while on an airliner proves isn't always an ultrademon's cup of tea. They prefer to lurk in the terminals themselves. Some of them mill about as eternal travelers who never depart. Others assume the forms of ticket agents, baggage handlers, and duty-free clerks. Where most airport employees adopt the glassy-eyed affect of the travel-weary patrons they service, ODEs can be recognized by the hunger in their eyes.
They must act with caution, as the Ordo Veritatis uses the international air system to shuttle its agents from case to case. The loosely affiliated bands of supernatural predators haunting the world's airports attend to the security flags that precede the arrival of OV agents. They spread the word, and know where to hide.
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Boy, oh boy, do I not have time to run this to ground right now: As an example, [Senator Stuart] Symington once formally requested a report from military sources regarding the possible existence of subterranean superhumans, which one of his constituents had become concerned about after reading a fiction book and mistaking it for non-fiction. [Or so THEY say. -- kah] This and Symington's other senatorial correspondence and papers were donated to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection (on the University of Missouri campus) in 2002 and are now available to the general public. But if any of you good people have access to the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, or any idea how to Google up that report, I'm pretty sure I can use it Forever. You'll be relieved to know that although often bruited as a Majestic-12 member, Symington's name is not on the orthodox list of directors. That said, Stuart Symington (then Air Force Secretary) rode with (MJ-12 member) Forrestal alone in a closed car right before ... But Forrestal, not Truman, was the doomed man. His relationship with Symington went from bad to worse. For reasons still unclear, Symington embarked, in the words of one author, "upon a kind of personal guerilla warfare" against the Secretary of Defense. ... Friends commented on [Forrestal's] growing paranoia. He was convinced that "foreign-looking men" were following him, and that Symington was spying on him. ... Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance.
What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. "There is something I would like to talk to you about," Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that "shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses." When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, "you are a loyal fellow," for several hours. Right. I don't have time to run this to ground. Right. Oh, why am I looking up Stuart Symington in the first place? He's President of the United States on Reality Taft-1, 1 coming soon to Steve Jackson Games, and thence to you good people. In a project I'm not sure I can name, because you just saw what happens to people who cross Stuart Symington. 1. Harry Truman (D; dies in office 1947); Joseph Martin (R; Speaker of the House, succeeds to office and does not run in 1948); Robert A. Taft (R; defeats Alben Barkley in 1948, dies in office 1953); Harold Stassen (R; elected V.P. in 1948, succeeds Taft in 1953; defeats Adlai Stevenson in 1956); Stuart Symington (D; narrowly defeats Vice-President Henry Cabot Lodge in 1960).
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That's what I'm calling them. All these "programs" that teach you, the gay man or lesbian woman, how to cure your homosexuality.
You pay them and they teach you how to be straight.
Rachel Maddow, a lesbian, has an interview with one such individual and demonstrates just how full of shit this conman really is.
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TO: ABC
FROM: Leon Lynn
RE: Desecration of "A Charlie Brown Christmas"
12/8/09
Dear ABC,
How could you?
For years and years I have awaited the network broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as the true herald of the holiday season. I brought my kids up with the same tradition -- one which has been made no less special for us by the fact that they happen to be Jewish.
Tonight we sat in horror and watched what you have done to the single greatest cartoon ever made.
How many minutes did you cut out of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" so you could run more commercials?
Gone was Sally's materialistic letter to Santa, which finally sends Charlie screaming from the room when she says she will settle for 10s and 20s.
Gone was Schroeder's miraculous multiple renditions of "Jingle Bells" from a toy piano, including the one that sounds distinctly like a church organ.
Gone was Linus using his blanket as an improvised slingshot to knock a can off the fence no one else can hit, complete with ricochet sound effect.
Gone were the kids catching snowflakes on their tongues and commenting on their flavor.
Gone even was poor Shermy's only line. He thought he had it bad because he was always tasked to play a shepherd. He had no idea.
And why were all these classic scenes cut? To plug more ads into the show, of course. To sell burgers and greeting cards -- and to relentlessly plug the insipid-looking new Disney "soon to be a classic" show immediately following. (I didn't watch the new show, by the way. I was laid far too low by what had just happened.)
Cramming all of these ads into the 30-minute broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" required major edits to a cartoon that has spent 44 years now trying to remind us that Christmas is supposed to transcend crass commercialism.
Do you have no sense of irony?
A couple of weeks ago I noted that you can now buy a plastic replica of the pathetic little real-wood Christmas tree Charlie Brown brings home from the tree lot otherwise monopolized by shiny fake trees. I thought we had sunk as low as we could.
Obviously I was wrong.
Oh, and by the way: The sound was half a second behind the picture: They were not synched properly. I thought this was pretty sloppy for a major TV network, but I was willing to look past it.
What I cannot look past is the chopping to bits of a genuine classic, not just to pump more ads at us, but in direct conflict with the message that has made it a classic.
When I was a kid, the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was a holiday unto itself. It was the only time we ever saw ads for Dolly Madison snack cakes, for one thing. But more importantly, it actually framed the coming holiday for me in a meaningful way.
The shepherds in their fields had no corporate sponsors. Nobody had bought the naming rights for the manger. The infant Jesus did not have an endorsement deal lined up with a particular line of swaddling clothes.
Instead he came, the story goes, to preach universal love, and the abandonment of false ideals like the acquisition of gross material wealth in favor of something far more valuable.
You have not just lost sight of this, or turned your backs on it. You have stomped it into the mud.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
But I bet you aren't. I bet you're way past that.
Count my family out for next year.
Sincerely,
Leon Lynn
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Last week, I had the great fun of talking to San Antonio Express-News reporter René Guzman about Cthulhu, as an expert source for a piece he was doing on the lighter side of Cthulhu in pop culture.
The result of our chat/interview is up now: "Cult of Cthulhu Crowns Its Icon." I assume the piece is in print somewhere in the greater San Antonio area, too.
Should you be interested further in René Guzman, check out his newsy, chatty blog Geek Speak.
Should you be interested further in the lighter side of Cthulhu in pop culture, well, you know where to go.
And speaking of Cthulhu 101, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) billzilla wrote a fine and generous review of it for Flames Rising. I always respond with consternation when people thank me for reviewing their game, but in case Bill is more together than I (seems likely), thanks, Bill!
Oh, and Cthulhu 101 made the prestigious OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide ("A Dozen Game Gifts Under $25") for 2009, which is something else nice.
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