Pastoral Photocopier 1 I look at that picture of Gary Snyder Bent down on some trail, in some forest, in some outdoors And I think I wonder if Gary Snyder worried about health insurance Had it Or if the words were even part of his vocabulary 2 JAM Worried about death JAM Worried about injuries JAM Worried about babies JAM Worried about a clean house JAM Worried about getting a job JAM Worried about all the junk JAM Worried about what to be worried about 3 This is a meta-wasteland without faith Numbers chart and shift Meaningless Meaning Practically Zen A fractal of calm Up the down the over Eating pie That sure tastes nice. 4 The man in the sweat pants Chants they’ll need a committee Lest the great institution crumbles. 5 Faith in photocopiers That none can fathom Yet everyone uses From the bourgeois staff To the great men of books All babble at its mystery and bottomless depths The chairs flounder when they discover charges Of $16.80 for 112 copies (The price of pride of all great men) Call the committee Bring in the man in sweat pants. 6 I spend 5 days, send various memos back and forth $16.80 is less than 2 hours wages for me For picking up a phone Stamping paper and Shepherding the oracle 7 It amazes me to think that Kerouac’s Japhy Ryde Uses email. I wrote him. He said he was busy, but he was very polite. Westminster Choir College Wednesday, 10/3/07
Drizzt Do’Urden
I was walking by the bookstore yesterday and I saw a display set up for R. A. Salvatore’s new novel, The Orc King, which follows the adventures of Salvatore’s character Drizzt Do’Urden, the drow elf. What caught my eye was the sticker at the bottom of the book. I don’t know how well you can see it in this JPG, but take a gander.
Do you see it? Well, if not then read this blurb about the book taken from Salvatore’s website.
RENTON, Wash.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–For millions of readers, Drizzt Do’Urden has become a lifelong hero and companion. The iconic character, a drow with jet black skin and striking, long white hair, has been revered since his debut 20 years ago in R.A. Salvatore’s classic first novel, The Crystal Shard. Over the course of these years and 16 novels, all of which were New York Times bestsellers, readers have practically grown up with Drizzt as they’ve watched him mature.
That’s right. Drizzt has been around for 20 years. I still can’t believe it.
Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 2 of 3
So, I have been drumming up ideas for a tabletop RPG combat system, mainly as mental-masturbation, but I think I might have found something I can use for Emporium (the combat system is the largest design hole that I currently have for Emporium). The real goal is for a combat system that is intuitive, not too complicated, yet still interesting and dynamic from round to combat round.
One way to do this is to account for proximity (think Warhammer 40k or Battletech). While that can make combat interesting, it also can turn your RPG into more of a strategic simulation.
Then, two combat systems converged in my mind as the two most interesting combat systems I have witnessed. Unfortunately, both of them are action systems, not turn-based.
Continue reading Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 2 of 3
Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 1 of 3
I have always disliked how AD&D handles combat, especially the damage system.
Compare a level 4 fighter, who has 40 hit points, and a level 1 mage, who has a whopping 4 hit points. The two are fighting side by side versus some castle guards. During the skirmish, the fighter gets hit with long sword which, for this example, does its maximum damage of 10 hit points and then gets nicked a few times at values of 3, 4 and 5; the mage gets stabbed with a dagger and gets completely knocked out with the max damage of 4 (some systems would have just killed him, but we always played that you get knocked out at 0 hit points and start to bleed to death until stabilized at -1 hit points).
The obvious problem with this is the disparity of damage between both characters, who are, after all, 2 humans. How can a small stab mean death to one character but hardly anything to another?
Continue reading Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 1 of 3
Mineral Rights – A short story idea.
In the very near future aliens show up near the Earth. After winning the trust of most right-thinking people they exchange some knowledge and goods.
Among the trades the aliens offer a reasonable amount of some other commodity in exchange for the mineral rights to a 1 km x 1 km stretch of land out in a desert somewhere. The land has a few trace amounts of minerals with some value, but nothing humans have the technology to extract in a profitable way at the moment. Agreements are signed and the aliens get the mineral rights.
The aliens create a cylindrical force field about a kilometer in diameter and start extracting the entire volume of earth as one huge core which is slowly and constantly streamed up through the atmosphere to where a giant mothership waits in geosynchronous orbit to collect it. The mothership never seems to increase in size or actually store this tremendous volume of rock anywhere so it’s speculated that there must be a wormhole on board which is transporting the rock elsewhere for processing.
Guten Tag – The Infinite Forum
I had this idea the other day for a new style of forum software. And maybe this has been done, but I haven’t seen it anywhere:
The Infinite Forum (or The Freeforall or Guten Tag )
The specifics of the forum structure would be these:
- There would be no mandatory “forum categories” per se. Or, if there were they would only be organized according to some politeness schema (like age appropriateness, potential offensiveness level) or maybe along lines of preferred language spoken.
-
In place of standard topical categories each post would be defined by a unique identifier and a set of tags. These tags would take the place of standard forum categories. This is the centerpiece of this system, the cornerstone around which the rest of the forum software is generally organized.
Clockcleaner – 9.13.07, Philadelphia, PA, First Unitarian Church
Clockcleaner – 9.13.07, Philadelphia, PA, First Unitarian Church
Though Clockcleaner’s Myspace page features a photograph of Philip K. Dick, if the band were to have a science fiction doppelgänger, it would more likely be Harlan Ellison than Dick. Like Ellison, who is more known for his persona, editorial rants before his stories and general outspoken views, Clockcleaner is likewise known (and celebrated across the web) for their caustic antics and disdaining opinions of the Philadelphia music scene. Clockcleaner legend has garnered the band press everywhere from Vice Magazine (check out the Vice Web-isode on VBS.tv Practice Space) to the Philadelphia Weekly, which most recently declared Clockcleaner “Philly’s most hated band”.
The question is: Is Clockcleaner really chaotic evil? Clockcleaner’s recent gig at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia proved two things, the first being that “No, Clockcleaner is not the anti-Christ”, and the second being that the overall weirdness of a venue can always outdo whatever schtick your band has up its sleeve. Go to Google and type in “First Unitarian Church”. Click the first hit and take a good gander at the church ladies and bingo night. The dimly lit basement where Clockcleaner frontman John Sharkey dry-humped a fan onstage may very well be the same place bingo night is held. But for all of Clockcleaner’s antagonism, the band’s act is just that, an act. From bassist Karen Horner’s opening announcement that she broke her finger “fingering” her boyfriend, fans and band alike seemed in on the joke. Albeit, a lot of the jokes were fairly crude, but they were jokes nonetheless.
In the end it is nice to know that there are bands like Clockcleaner out there who want to do more than just play music by putting on a show and stirring people up in an attempt to shake complacency and mediocrity. Hopefully Clockcleaner will continue to stir the shit and eventually challenge their newly anointed nemesis, the Philly band Man Man, to a rock-off, milk challenge or whatever. That will be a show that no one will want to miss.
Click here to see photos from the show.
Wee Friends
The following article, by James Hookway, was published in the September 17, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Marah – 9.7.07 Philadelphia, PA, Johnny Brenda’s
Marah – 9.7.07 Philadelphia, PA, Johnny Brenda’s
Certainly, songs and showmanship are important to any band when it comes to making it. However, more important is timing, luck and who gets behind your music. It’s unfair but a reality, just as it has never seemed fair how a truly incredible band like Marah barely even makes a blip on the radar. With their forthcoming Angels of Destruction, Marah will have released six proper studio albums, a slew of EPs, a DVD, a live album and a Christmas album in there somewhere. Yet outside Philadelphia, they are virtual unknowns. As Bob Hill recently pointed out in Crawdaddy when writing about Marah’s spiritual cousins, The Hold Steady:
There is no Lester Bangs to saddle-up alongside Lou Reed, no Landau to proclaim the future of rock ‘n’ roll, no William Miller to tell you Russell Hammond isn’t really the golden god he claims to be. There is only a watered-down wasteland of Web logs, anointing bands like the Cold War Kids and the Arcade Fire as the second coming. That type of atmosphere is the bane of great retro acts like the Hold Steady, Marah, and Jesse Malin.
While bands like The Hold Steady are perhaps now on their way to success and do suggest that great music can make it, Marah has been left behind, still playing the local circuit. And as usual, their first of two shows at Johnny Brenda’s found the band in top form. Most excitingly, their live set proved what everyone knew too, that without misdirected production values, songs like “Float Away” are forces to be reckoned with.
In the end though Friday Night, September 7, 2007 came and went at Johnny Brenda’s. And whether anyone ever recognizes them or not, that night Marah were gods and floated away with the best of them.
Click here to see photos from the show.
Quote taken from Bob Hill’s article “The Wild, The Innocent, and The Craig Finn Shuffle”, Crawdaddy, March 16, 2007.
Interview with Steve Barnett, Director of Mindwarp (1990)
Ever so often a B-movie comes along that goes beyond its modest budget and genre trappings to do something more, something unexpected, something prophetic and just sometimes even better than the films it predicts. The virtually unknown Mindwarp (1990), directed by Steve Barnett, is one of these movies. Showing a debt to author William Gibson and pre-dating films like *The Matrix* (1999), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, unlike the *The Matrix*, *Mindwarp* does not fall prey to romantic triteness. Whereas *The Matrix* naively suggests that the global-everyman (or nondescript-mannequin as played by Keanu Reeves), could fight and change the system, *Mindwarp* realistically posits that ideals put into practice are more apt to fail than they are to succeed. *The Matrix* remains at its best, like *Star Wars* before it, a cultural event, and at worst, a hackneyed intellectual hodgepodge told and sold with martial arts and leather trench coat cool. *Mindwarp* conversely is never easy to swallow. Hiding its compelling story in high-concept gore, the film features the legendary talents of both Angus Scrimm and Bruce Campbell. With its supergroup cast, you would expect that the film would be as well known as Scrimm’s and Campbell’s respective calling cards, *Phantasm* (1979), directed by Don Coscarelli, and *The Evil Dead* (1981), directed by Sam Raimi. Yet the film has yet to even see a proper DVD release. And it needs one desperately along with a commentary from its director Steve Barnett. For now Mr. Barnett, who is no longer directing but is working as a vice-president of post production at 20th Century Fox, has kindly answered a couple questions here.
Interview follows:
How did your involvement with *Mindwarp* come about?
After editing trailers and features for Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, I directed BACK TO HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD for him in 13 days. Rodman Flender, the executive on that film, recommended me to the producers of MINDWARP. This was the first movie for Fangoira Films and they needed someone who could bring it in on time and looking like a real movie. I had a pretty good take on the material, and I took a chance in telling them that the script was a terrific yarn that fell apart in the second half. I guess they agreed, since they hired me. I worked with writers Mike Ferris and John Brancato (aka Henry Domonick) and the producers to get the story working better in the second half and then beating it to within the confines of the very limited budget. My wife had turned me on to William Gibson cyber-punk, and this show fit into that world very neatly. Ferris and Brancato created a wonderfully twisted world (five different worlds actually) filled with bizarre and memorable characters. I managed not to screw it up too badly.
Continue reading Interview with Steve Barnett, Director of Mindwarp (1990)