The After Lives of Dobie Gillis

Back relatively early from GC-in-E. Only played one game: Timeline, the new Hip Pocket game from Cheapass. (So new it’s not even listed on the website!) Pretty decent game, not as much fun as Light Speed, more fun than Steam Tunnels. Takes a bit of brainpower, moreso the more people are playing. The game ended when Julian made a move without figuring out all the ramifications, giving mnemex a big point-scoring opportunity, which he was so distracted by that he neglected to notice that it had also set me up with a game-winning move, hah!

I read drcpunk’s copy of My Life With Master, an interesting Narrativist RPG from Paul Czege’s Half Meme Press. The players take on the roles of minions of a common mad scientist or other traditionally megalomaniacal Master. The basic arc of the plot is predetermined — Master will order the minions around until one of them gets pissed off enough to kill him — and the rules exist to generate frameworks for the GM and players to narrate around. The writeups I’ve read make it sound pretty damn cool. We were hoping to play it, but it didn’t work out that way. I may pick up a copy and try to inflict it on ladymondegreen, akawil, and maybe cadhla if the timing works out.

We took off fairly early (around half past midnight). Waling home from the PATH we got to discussing how pictures work in the Harry Potter books (If someone from a newspaper photo walks into a painting, are they grayscale and grainy in the painting? If you make multiple paintings of someone, can they all meet, say walking into the same painting? If you paint someone in a particular mood, does the painting stay in that mood? How much of what the subject knew does a painting know? Doesn’t having a big collection of paintings of long-dead people mean you can essentially ask the long-dead for their opinions about modern developments? Can you imagine if the Supreme Court could ask paintings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their opinions on matter of Constitutional law? What if different paintings of the same person gave different answers? Actually I’m drifting into new territory that didn’t come up.).

We also discussed Scooby Doo, and I came up with the theory that the Scooby Doo characters are actually the Dobie Gillis characters dead and in the afterlife (with some degree of amnesia and dissociation from their worldly identities), only they don’t know it. The afterlife keeps trying to push them into realizing that they’re dead by presenting them with morbid supernatural scenarios, which they keep resisting with rational, materialist explanations. Scooby himself is their spirit guide, and they never question or even remark upon the presence of a talking dog because doing so would force them to confront the situation they’re in and realize that they’re dead.

LadyM countered with the suggestion that they’re actually in the Matrix, tasked with coming up with cover stories for the various leftover old-generation AIs that manifest there as ghosts, werewolves, and such.

(Yeah, it’s just a cool coincidence that a band called “Icehouse” came on Radio Paradise as I was writing up a Games Club night.)

Fritz Katzenjammer is sleeping with your wife!

Cory Doctorow is raving about Warren Ellis’s spacewar comic Switchblade Honey:

[...] a savage and fast-moving space-opera that wins the prize just for having alien propagandists broadcasting messages like "WHILE YOU ARE OUT HERE FIGHTING IN VAIN YOUR CHILDREN ARE BEING ABUSED BY FAMOUS EARTH ACTORS LIKE BART SIMPSON" through the Terran fleet's warships.

I’d find that a lot funnier if I didn’t know exactly which urban legend from the first Gulf War Ellis was ripping off without so much as even bothering to update the cartoon character for the futuristic setting:

Baghdad Betty, a 1990's version of Tokyo Rose, is a product of the Iraqi propaganda machine and her radio broadcasts are supposed to demoralize the U.S. forces in the Saudi desert. In a recent broadcast, she reportedly said: "Why are you Americans here? Don't you know you will die in the desert? While you are here your wives and girlfriends are dating American movie stars . . . like Tom Selleck, Paul Newman and Bart Simpson."

Brushpens

mamishka asked me to recommend a brand of brushpen. I’ve been meaning to start concentrating on brushpens, inspired, as so many other are, by Craig Thompson’s gorgeous brush work in Blankets. I got out four black brushpens I had sitting around, and tried ’em all out to compare the marks they can make.

( Brushpen squiggles, and commentary )