Update

Well, the Pbp (as well as any other recreational pursuit, really) has slowed down considerably as my industry goes into further tailspin. I really need to spend more time finding a way out, and into something else. Presumably the public sector has purchasing people too, right? You have no idea how attractive that sounds right now. If my kids' school district were to hire a Procurement Manager for about the same salary I make now, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat. Or a university nearby. Or pretty much any public sector job, where I wouldn't have to stress constantly about what's going on in the external environment.

Plus, frankly, I'm not all that interested in the business of making cars. The fact that I've been in this job for almost nine years now is a strong testimony to the power of inertia and complacency.

Demons in the Mist

I'm really pleased with my game. Over the course of just a few weeks, it's generated over 1300 game posts and another over 1200 out of game posts. That's massive in case you don't know. I've been watching another game that started just a week or two before mine and features a lot of similar themes and even one or two of the same players, and its just over 300 posts in game. I don't mean to demean that game, because by all accounts it's brilliant, and probably quite a bit better than mine anyway. So why is mine generating so much traction?

I sure wish I knew. I've never had one that I've tried to run before that's been as successful as this one was been. I really, really, wish I knew what the secret to the success of this game was, so I could replicate it.

But I don't.

Miracinonyx

Just for fun, here's some artwork I found with a GIS for Miracinonyx, the American "cheetah." The artist decided here to give the animal a very cheetah-like coat.

Update

Well, it's been a little while since I've made an update. We had relatives in town for Thanksgiving, and frankly, also, my blog's kinda a frivolous thing. It's hard to spend mental effort and energy on frivolous things when you're worried about things like your job, your company and even your whole industry going up in smoke.

But I've managed to do a little bit, at least. I checked out BBC's Prehistoric America on DVD from my public library. I've actually had that title before, but for some reason only watched the four episodes on the first disk and didn't see the other two on the second disk. The first episode that I hadn't seen, "American Serengeti" was probably my favorite. I'm a big fan of the almost Africa-like North American Pleistocene megafauna, which I think I've mentioned here before. Frankly, I feel kinda gypped about the animals that have lived historically (and currently) in North America when we had several varieties of elephant, lions, saber-tooths, five kinds of wild horse, two kinds of wild bison, four or five kinds of pronghorn, cheetah-like cats and more just a few thousand years ago. The show was kinda cheap about it: they intercut scenes of an actual cheetah running in Africa with scenes of pronghorns running in North America, and didn't say that the American "cheetah" wasn't actually a true cheetah at all, even though it would have been built very similarly. One of the two species of Miracinonyx was very similar morphologically to the cheetah (Acinonyx) but the other species was midway between a cheetah and a puma. And neither were all that closely related to an actual cheetah, they'd be obviously a different animal if we saw them side by side. The American "cheetah" was less closely related to the actual cheetah than a tiger is to a leopard, and those are easy enough to tell apart.

My favorite animal from the Pleistocene megafauna of North America is the American elephant, though. Better known as the Columbian mammoth, the Imperial mammoth and sometimes even the Jeffersonian mammoth, I believe that's its only a historical accident that we call them mammoths. If mammoth bones hadn't been discovered and identified in Europe first (they were one of the key points Baron Georges Cuvier used to outline and defend the theory of extinction) things might have gone very differently. Mammoths are as closely related to African and Asian elephants as African and Asian elephants are to each other. Maybe even closer to Asian elephants, actually. The non-wooly variety, the Columbian, Imperial or Jeffersonian elephant, would probably also be relatively hairless and gray-skinned, like extant elephants. It's not hard to make the case that if it had survived long enough to have been seen by Europeans, it certainly would simply have been called the American elephant. The wooly mammoth might also be the wooly elephant.

There's a curious passage in the Book of Mormon about them, actually. I know, I know, plenty of my (one or two) readers don't think the Book of Mormon is important or anything, but I think this passage is curious no matter what you believe about it. The Book of Mormon purports to be, regardless of what you believe, the record of ancient people in North America that was found and translated by Joseph Smith in the early 1800s. One such nation, the Jaredites as they were known to later people, kinda existed independently of the rest of the narrative, and their records were in turn found by the Nephites (the main "protagonist" culture of the Book of Mormon narrative) when their last king was found wandering all alone in the "land northwards." They had apparently engaged in a genocidal civil war so epic in scale that their entire civilization collapsed. Some Book of Mormon scholars point to trace evidence of lingering Jaredite linguistic influence in one branch of the Nephite people, which frankly makes more sense than actual complete and total military annihilation of the entire populace, but that's neither here nor there. The Jaredite history, which is summarized very quickly near the end of the Book of Mormon and recast by the Book of Mormon compilers as more of a cautionary morality tale than an actual detailed history lesson, has a rough date of 3100-580 B.C. give or take a couple of centuries on the beginning date. The passage in question is fairly simple: "And they [the Jaredites] also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms." Nobody's sure what is meant by cureloms and cumoms, although there are plenty of candidates for North American megafauna that we know of that Joseph Smith wouldn't have, but the horses, asses and elephants are problematic, since in Joseph Smith's time, it was well known that none of those three were native to North America, and horses only came with the Spanish. However, during the Pleistocene, there were five varieties of "horse" including animals that would be very horse-like, animals that would be fairly zebra like (no comment on the stripes or not; these are known from skeletons) and animals very like wild ass and/or onager. And the Columbian mammoth is a good candidate for the elephant.

Although much of the Pleistocene megafauna's notional extinction date is roughly 8,000 B.C. although a few samples suggest that they may have hung on longer than previously believed. In Tennessee, one specimen of a Columbian mammoth was fairly reliably dated to about 5,800 B.C. That certainly puts it within spitting range of the Jaredites, especially if you assume that the scanty nature of fossil finds makes reliable end-dates very difficult to pin down. One find can push it into younger territory by fairly large margins.

Mostly, though, I don't bring this up for any reason other than I think it'd be really cool to have complex, metropolitan civilizations that lived in Pleistocene North America, domesticated mammoths (and probably other animals as well) and were generally a visual treat to look at. How cool is that? The passage referenced above just got me going on that. The sword & sorcery setting that I've been kicking around for a few weeks is also based on pretty much that exact same premise, and I like it more and more as I dig around to refresh my memory of the North American pleistocene megafauna.

Update

My reading has stumbled a bit. All these books, and I'm not as excited as I used to be to read them. I think it's because I've read a series of them that are fairly mediocre. I haven't yet figured out exactly what I am currently excited about doing, so it's been a few weeks that I've been kinda drifting relatively purposeless. I'll eventually finish The Prisoner of the Horned Helmet but I'm not in a big hurry to do so. I watched Quantum of Solace which I quite liked and Twilight which I didn't mind, but didn't really like. The 007 film was better, in my opinion, than Casino Royale although apparently I'm in the minority for thinking so. I preferred the plot structure, if nothing else, and I even liked the villain better. I liked the development of the Quantum mythos; it's been a long time that Bond has needed a non-silly equivalent to SPECTRE to rear its ugly head, after all. But maybe I was alone-ish in thinking that Casino had a rough go with the pace-dragging recuperation scenes and the tacked on longish epilogue. I did, however, think that Quantum suffered from lack of exposition. I hadn't seen Casino recently, and Julie and I kept turning to each other and going "who was that again that they're talking about?" "what was this all about again?" I suspect that Casino and Quantum will stand together very well; they're quite tightly intertwined.

Twilight's target audience is teenage girls, so it's not terribly surprising that I was mostly unenthused by it. Not being a teenager anymore and never having been a girl, that is. I thought it was a bit slow and occasionally emotionally over-wrought, but not exactly terrible.

Mostly repaired

Well, I've mostly repaired my blog. I still can't figure out exactly why I have that weird little dark rectangle up in the top right hand corner. However, since I also don't have that weird scrunching up that I used to have, maybe I'll live with it for now.

If anyone is an expert on the CSS used to create these blog templates and can figure out what's wrong up there, let me know! I'd love to get rid of that little unsightly formatting gaffe.

EDIT: Hey, a little playing around and it's gone. Suh-weet!

Whoops!

I deleted some files from my Photobucket account without realizing that they actually were an hotlinked in my blog rather than having been uploaded to blogger. Whoops! Shoulda known; I mucked with the code myself, I'd just forgotten.

Anyway, over the next few days, I may play around with the look and feel of the blog a bit, since I don't really remember the formatting html I used, and I don't actually have those images anymore. It'll take a little work to settle on a look and file that I like. I'd like to return to the dark text on ivory/parchment look eventually, though.

S&S Setting

Although it's hardly a new idea, I've been (off and on) fascinated with the concept of a prehistoric sword & sorcery setting. This isn't terribly different than the idea behind the iconic Sword & Sorcery setting, Howard's Hyborian Age or his earlier Pre-Cataclysmic Age of Kull of Atlantis. Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle of prehistoric, temperate Greenland also fit into this mold, as do L. Sprague de Camp's Conan ripoff stories of the Pusadian Cycle. However, the primary source that really kicked off this idea in me several months ago was the mediocre movie 10,000 B.C. which takes an excellent idea, and then fails to do anything really dramatic with it.

More recently, I started reading James Silke's Death Dealer novels (I found the first three of four in a used book store for $2 each a month or so ago) which are set in the Mediterranean Basin during the Ice Age, a time which he assumes the basin was not flooded. As near as I can tell, this view is not supported by anyone anymore, and the closest thing is the Messinian Salinity Crisis some 5 odd million years ago in the late Miocene when the Mediterreanean partially (or maybe completely) dried up. Of course, this was twice as long ago as the best estimate for the appearance of Homo sapiens so naturally it doesn't work. Still; the idea of a Pleistocene high civilization that has since vanished without a trace is not a new one, and some archeological suspect, yet entertaining nonetheless books about the subject do appear from time to time. Heck; Graham Hancock seems to have built an entire career in trying to prove the existence of global high civilization that existed some 10,000 years or so ago and which subsequently disappeared and set humanity back eons to claw its way back up to where it had previously been only after thousands of years of suffering through the most prolonged dark age known to man.

I don't believe this kind of stuff for a minute, but... what if it's true? What if high civilization existed during the Pleistocene, perhaps in North America even? I started looking around for some geologically interesting places where I could construct such a setting, and came up with the idea of Lake Agassiz. This gigantic lake was once situation right in the heart of North America, and it took up more real estate than all of the Great Lakes today do combined. During the Younger Dryas, the last glacial maximum and cooling period of the Ice Age, Lake Agassiz was drained into the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, some scientists claim that it's feasible that the rapid draining of Lake Agassiz in fact caused the Younger Dryas, by putting all that cooler fresh water into the ocean and disrupting current flow. In any case, Lake Agassiz is a candidate for catastrophic, rapid draining; walls of water racing across the continental face in an event that would have been a suitable candidate for the elimination of the civilization that dwelt on its shores.

In addition to Lake Agassiz, Lake Bonneville is another good candidate; a gigantic lake that covered pretty much the entirety of what is now the state of Utah. This is another one that's believed to have flooded catastrophically about 14,500 years ago. See, this would be the difference between my setting and some of the others I've read; the utilization of real life geography as much as possible as the building blocks of the setting.

I know, I know, for anyone besides me, who cares? But I think it's an interesting challenge to try and build a setting, set around the shores of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, featuring the Pleistocene megafauna, and conforming to sword & sorcery conventions for wildness and fun.

Anyway, I'm excited. I've started making notes and playing around with maps already, and I'm eager to see what I can come up with here.

Atronomy pic of the day

If you haven't ever checked out the Atronomy pic of the day link, you should.

Here's a slightly older one of some bright, blue stars in a star-forming nebula in the Small Magellanic cloud. Get the full-sized version to check out all the background galaxies you can see. Wild stuff.

Predator

For some reason, I've been on a bit of a Predator kick. I've watched both the movies, and read the Concrete Jungle novel and am now reading the Cold War novel. They're not brilliant, by any means: both are by Nathan Archer, who was a newcomer to the writing gig at the time, and both are adaptations of prior Dark Horse comic book runs. Both of those original source materials were (apparently) written in the interlude between the first Predator movie and the second, since they completely fail to allude to anything in the second Predator movie, which honestly doesn't make sense unless they were simply written first.

Not brilliant... but fun enough and easy to read. Disposible fiction (probably why I bought them at used book stores) and frankly kinda mindless in a way; retreading the movies significantly, yet... after slogging through Gardens of the Moon that really kinda hit the spot. I'll read the rest of the Aliens and Predator and Aliens vs. Predator books that I picked up before I attempt anything a bit more serious.

Gardens of the Moon

Precision with terminology is a pet peeve of mine. In particular, I'm thinking about labels for subdivisions of fantasy fiction. At least at the moment. I've heard plenty of really sloppy labeling, like calling the Lord of the Rings movies Sword & Sorcery for example. One example that's not quite as blatant, yet is nuanced and significant nonetheless is the mislabeling of any fantasy that is highly fantastical as High Fantasy. High Fantasy as a subgenre is many things; ironically, having a high level of wahoo fantasy is not necessarily one of them, and in fact is probably a good indication that the work in question is not High Fantasy at all. High Fantasy tends to take place in fairly realistic worlds that closely resemble some real world society on many levels, usually a medieval one.

The reason I bring this up is because I finally finished reading Gardens of the Moon last night. And frankly, I don't think it's High Fantasy at all, although it is highly fantastic. You've got flying giant bugs, for example, that serve as mounts for army couriers. You've got gods and godlike beings that play around in the mortal worlds as a matter of course, and in fact the clash between several such beings is the pivotal climax at the end of Gardens. But the book is not High Fantasy. It's fairly dark in many ways, it's gritty, it's got tons of intrigue and espionage, it's got strong military themes: it does a lot of things, but adhering closely to standard High Fantasy plot points, setting points and other familiar themes is not one of the things that it does at all.

I can't say that I really liked it. I thought it was poorly structured. For hundreds of pages, I really didn't have any idea what was going on, who the characters being described were, and why I should care about the bizarre, inexplicable and unexplained things that were happening to them. That changed a bit as the book got on and I started to be able to follow plot threads, even though they still bounced around like the literary version of ADD without any explanation of what was going on. As the book wound up to its climax, though, I found that I was underwhelmed by the entire thing. There were some cool ideas in it, but I just never really bought into the characters or their plights, and the subplot resolutions felt empty to me. Not only did I not really like most of the characters, some of them very actively annoyed me (Kruppe being the biggest offender here, but Lorn, Rake and a few others count as well.) The characters all felt very flat and poorly conceived, and their cardboard motivations, or sometimes lack thereof, made them unsympathetic and boring to read about.

Many other things were introduced and then not fully explored, while other things got tons of activity, but it felt like buzzing around in a great deal of rather pointless noise. The plot structure really needed a stronger focus and concentration on accomplishing goals, and the characters (and dialogue) needed a lot of work. The setting was decent, although also not as well explored as perhaps it could have been. It wasn't showcased well enough to make it a real asset.

Do I like the book well enough to go on? Well, frankly, I've already bought Deadhouse Gates so that's a moot point. If I bought it, eventually I'll read it. If I hadn't bought it already, would I now that I've finished Gardens? Honestly: probably not.

Pbp

One problem with a Play-by-post game is that you're stuck according to vagaries that don't plague face-to-face games. One of them is that people aren't necessarily posting at the same time. Games can lag for even simple tasks that could be resolved in seconds in face-to-face.

Another issue, and this has been plagueing me today, is server availability. Circvs Maximvs, where I run the "Demons in the Mist" game, has been flaky today, and quite frequently as I've tried to update it, I've found it unavailable. Grrr... One of the things that has made this game (so far) so successful was the fast pace. I'm concerned long term about losing momentum. These server issues, right on the heels of a long, weird, holiday weekend where folks weren't as available as they had been prior, is worrisome, as it can cause the game to slow down and never pick back up again as well as it had been.

Also; just a minor thing; I changed the settings so comments are now on a pop-up window instead of a new page. Maybe I'll get a few more that way.

Sword & Sorcery

Just for fun, I spent a little bit of time earlier on the Wikipedia article for Sword & Sorcery, and I like what it says about the subgenre in terms of influences. I think what's occasionally forgotten, especially today, is the influence of swashbuckling authors like Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini, and the influence of the classic Arabian Nights style Orientalism that also informed guys like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This is really just a plug, though... Rafael Sabatini. If you haven't read this guy, you should. In my opinion, his best novels are Scaramouche, Captain Blood and The Black Swan. Captain Blood also got a credible film adaptation in the 30s; the movie that made Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland both into superstars. The adaptations of Scaramouche (with Stewart Granger) and The Black Swan (with Tyrone Power) aren't bad, but aren't as good. Don't miss out on the original novels, though... Sabatini's skill with prose is considerable.

Sword & Planet

I really, really applaud Paizo for putting together the Planet Stories imprint to bring a lot of older pulp stories back into print. I've talked about it here and there from time to time, but I'm fairly anti-establishment in terms of literature, and part of that means that I eschew "sophistication" (to some extent) and celebrate the cheap and gratuitous thrills of the pulps. Of course, that's not really anti-establishment, especially since some of the pulp writers have now been dead long enough that its fashionable to like them again.

Be that as it may, I applaud Paizo for publishing the stuff, but I haven't yet become a consumer myself. In part, this is because I already have so many of these works from their earlier published efforts (especially the Leight Brackett and Otis Adelbert Kline.) I realize that in many cases, those earlier DAW or Ace versions or heavily expurgated and badly mauled, but I'm a tightwad by nature and it goes against the flow to buy something that I already have, even if the newer version is better. Other times, they just haven't happened to hit on stuff that I liked (the Michael Moorcock Mars books, for example, are absolutely terrible. I'd never buy those, no matter how fancy the new cover art is.)

That said, there are a few of their imprints that I actually really want to buy, including those by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.

In any case, if you're unfamiliar with Paizo's line, or the whole brand of planetary romance and sword & sorcery pulp fantasy/science fiction in general, then do yourself a favor and browse through their catalog.

Rat Bastard vs. Cuddly Puppydog Love-a-thon

I've found myself somewhat subconsciously pulling my punches a bit in this Pbp, in part because I'm enjoying the character interactions too much to bring them to a premature end this early. That ever happen to you? Shautha really probably should've died this weekend, but she pulled through. Just barely. I didn't "cheat" per se, but I also didn't really give her the full treatment that I would have otherwise.

Meet the characters

I know I've been babbling on about my Play-by-post D&D game more than most of you are probably interested in, but hey, I'm still on the honeymoon with it, so you'll have to indulge.

Here's the PCs I've got, in alphabetical order:

1) Lash: a hobgoblin fighter/rogue, whip specialist. A down-on his luck hobgoblin version of Indiana Jones. Fairly steady, except when a get-rich scheme comes to mind, with a brash exterior and control issues. A natural leader.

2) Nixzaliz: human rogue. A young orphan woman who grew up on the mean streets of Zin and is out trying to make her fortune. She's got a bit of a cynical bite and has occasional bouts of extreme luck... both good and bad.

3) Ricardo Murciélago: human swashbuckler. All smooth, all the time. Ricardo can't ever seem to see past the nearest feminine face, and his sowing of wild oats reaches epic proportions. And causes him most of his trouble as well.

4) Scritch: shifter ninja. Rat-like savage assassin and quiet guy; keeps his thoughts to himself.

5) Shautha Voksdottir: Half-orc lady who thinks that maybe she's beautiful (she's not) but is constantly searching for male companionship.

6) Vuukran: Hobgoblin soulknife who served in Xoth-Sarnath's legions and who may have been hit in the head one too many times during combat training.

You can get the full picture of everyone right here.

AWOL Player back

My AWOL player is no longer AWOL, and it looks like we're in business. I've got her character introduced to the rest of the group, Ricardo's already flirting with her like mad, and I've sent some really creepy critters coming up out of the Mist to screw with them.

Fun times!

I actually re-read the entire game thread last night; it's surprisingly a really good read. These characters and their interactions really make it good, though. It's like the perfect storm of gaming awesome.

Demons in the Mist 3

Well, the first "scene" of my Pbp is over. It was a meeting with the patroness of their little adventure, that turned into a wild and crazy chase scene as they found a spy eavesdropping on their meeting. The players all rolled really terribly, which made for a lot of unintentional comedy. One player said that the game resembled every single Robin Hood and Three Musketeers movie ever made; in some ways it seemed to more resemble Robin Hood: Men in Tights. All in all, a highly entertaining kick-off.

I'm one player short; one of them never posted her character and has been AWOL for a few days. I sent her a private message and if I don't hear from her in a day or two, I'll go tap the first alternate to see if he's interested in taking over.

Gardens of the Moon

For what it's worth, I'm finally starting to really get into Gardens of the Moon, the first book in the "Malazan Book of the Fallen" by Steven Erikson. Who may be spelled Stephen or Steven or Erikson or Ericson, but I'm not going to the trouble of checking right now.

I checked it out from the library a long time ago, and about 100 pages in I turned it back in (because it was due) and I was really struggling to get into it. I had had the series recommended to me too many times to give up that easily, though, so I bought a copy and figgered that way I could take my time reading it. Why would I want to read a book that I was struggling so much with in the first place, you might ask. Good question.

I've actually been told by many that it's the weakest book in the series (ironic for a series opener, and unfortunate) and that it improves as it goes on. I'd even been told that Gardens itself improves as you get into it. So I decided that I needed to swallow it like a really big pill and trust that it would improve. Seems like maybe it finally is. I'll write a full review of the book here when I'm completely done. With any luck, that'll be sometime this coming week still.

New logo

You like it? I do!

I started (officially) my Pbp today. I mean, just a few minutes ago, really, so not much to report yet. I do really like the Spirit of the Century rule for chargen that I borrowed; each player writes for his character a small vignette that represents a novel or story that happened in the past; his own pulp adventure novel, if you like. It's not supposed to be long; a couple of paragraphs tops. Kinda like the dust jacket or back cover blurb on a real book.

Then, when everyone's done that, you randomly assign that character to two other players, so that everyone has two players and everyone was picked twice. They in turn write a couple of sentences emeshing their character in a supporting role in the backstory vignette of another character.

This way, every character has a connection to, at a barest minimum if the randomized picking comes up bad, two other characters in the group, more likely three and possibly four. This 1) gives them a reason to work together, because hey! they have in the past and know each other, and 2) have some instant roleplaying hooks to latch onto within the group.

So far, I'm not 100% sure how it's working out, but it was fun to try anyway. I like the process and will probably use it from now on.