Wings Over the Pyre - February 29th, 2004

04:54 am - The Totemic Lord Slug

When Ursula set the challenge of creating the Slug Spirit stats, I had to take a moment to consider the best venue for it ... and then it hit me.

Sorcerer. So terribly obvious.

Without further ado, I give you, the stat sheet for Slug.

• Appearance

  Normally, Slug is simply invisible, present only as a mystical potentiality. When manifest, Slug lives up to its name – an eight foot long gelatinous mass, twin eyeballs on wavy stalks lifted above, capable of leaving a particularly loathsome mucus-like ooze in its path.



• Behaviour

  Slug is one of the more subtle of the Demonic entities at large in the world. Preferring to pass itself off as a particularly obscure Spirit Totem, Slug has spread its slimy influence rather more widely than many might suspect. There are many Slug, but all have a strange ability to know exactly what the others know. Perhaps there is only one Slug after all.

  Slug prefers to patronize one “Shaman,” granting him visions of the forces of entropy at work in the environment around them. It may also provide tutelage in a wide variety of skills, both mundane and occult, but always with an eye toward giving the Shaman the tools (and inspiration) to dominate his “lessers.”

  Slug really wants to spend several hours a day in communion with his bound Shaman every day, but will settle for a few a week in extremis – but he's not happy about it. And an unhappy Slug is a Slug that leaves mucus smeared all over your closet contents.

Current Mood: creative

05:02 am - "Desire it, I do."

This game, InSpectres, looks really rather intriguing. point5b turned me on to a blurb about a guy's game in which the psychotic fun starred even before the character generation was complete.

InSpectres centers around a startup franchise that explores and deals with the supernatural. (Think two years after the first Ghostbusters movie, if they'd decided to incorporate and start licensing franchises, but with all the funnier legal bits of the Anita Blake novels thrown in (Vampires as 'undead American' citizens, et cetera).

Players create normal (but a bit strange) employees of this company. Said employees face a variety of challenges, and the franchise (and challenges) grow. It's Ghostbusters, MIB, The Real World and internet startups all rolled into one game, with a great investigation/mystery-solving mechanic.

Supernatural events are usually more annoying or just plain embarrassing occurrences (they *can* be morbid and creepifying, but they aren't always that way).

Current Mood: amused

08:18 am - Macro-Randomness

• There's nothing quite as annoying as dealing with the imbeciles that I work with. Apparently, I'm the only one that can do anything like work or take initiative. I've got to do something about that.

  It makes me stand out.



• Why don't the console manufacturers/Konami remake Gyruss? Or at least tell me where I could find the music for it.


• Mornings take forever to get through, even if you're listening to cool music.


• My co-workers are stone assholes sometimes.

Current Mood: annoyed

02:19 pm - The Man Gets His Due

It was a jump too far to the left for two city councillors, but Hamilton's plans for a statue celebrating the Rocky Horror Picture Show have been approved.

Councillors voted 12-2 to back a Weta Workshop-designed tribute to former Hamiltonian and show creator Richard O'Brien for the city's main street.

Ratepayers will contribute $25,000 toward the $125,000 statue of Riff Raff, to be erected on the former Embassy Theatre site, possibly by November.

The Perry Foundation has pledged $100,000 and it is hoped that O'Brien can attend the unveiling.

O'Brien says he is "exceptionally flattered" by the statue plan.

02:54 pm - Sales, Sales, Sales!

Well, actually just one sale, on Donjon. Marked down from $10 to $6.75. Buy in now and get a lovely Westerbury Tales online RPG along with it!

Oh, and if anyone felt like buying stuff off my Wish List for RPGNow, I wouldn't fight you. ;)

Current Mood: cranky

05:31 pm - Epiphanus Christianus

I suffered an epiphany today. I say "suffered" because it was due to exposure to a neighboring table full of self-important self-congratulatory masturbatory Christians that it occurred to me.

To wit, Christians were the Roman equivalent of the G-homie teenage whiteboy gangsta-rappa of their day. Yes, the Eminem of Ancient Judea. Consider: The Jews were edgy, they had their own mode of dress and style, their own mysterious cultural "insider" knowledge, were socially excluded in much of the world, their own insider language, even, that sounded like a mix of slang and alien cool construction. So the Romans and other locals started wearing their caps backwards, putting on tacky caftans, growing beards, hanging gang signs, and said, "Yeah, we can do dat Jew thang, yo."

Of course, they completely fucked it up and dumbed it down, and the Jews weren't too keen on it -- just as the black community looks on the low-rider white trash with a certain amount of disdain, and justly so. But, hey, it was homogenized for your protection, and mainstream culture ate it up like honey over snow, until it eclipsed the original inspirations and even started touting itself as better. (Certainly more marketable; see Eminem vs hardcore hip-hop artists.)

And there you go. Two-thousand years later and we're dealing with the religious deitrus of the RIAA going Godhead.

While we're on the subject, let me bitch about something that very well may be a local, even Baptist, phenomena, but never fails to really get up my ass: The tendency for Christians to say about anything that's related to their Church or just on Sunday, "The Spirit moved me to ..." or "God told me ..." or "I had a revelation that I should ..."

Let's be honest, if I were God, I'd be a little more than mildly pissed that these monkey-brained homids I created to see to it that my Will was done on Earth were so pathetically wretched that I had to keep sending them explicit instructions all the time. Its never, "Well I decided to ..." or "I figured it made sense ..." or "Personally, I thought ..." These folks deny they have brain-one in their noodles, and I'm a bit offended on behalf of the non-extant Deity at their insipid incompetence.

From where I sit, the human Will, the I Am of our existence, should be seen as our most vital and powerful feature, whether you're religious or not. The ability to say "No," from the Luciferian perspective, is our most powerful and leveragable commodity. To explicitly, and constantly, deny that may be the only sin I could ever number amongst my observations. Its a denial of your essential humanity, a derriliction of duty to yourself and those around you, a perversion of the possibility of the Order you can make, and it flies in the face of everyone that's bled and sweated and died to change the world you've inherited. You, explicitly, announce, "I do not matter, and if you think you do, you're wrong."

In that sense, Christianity is more explicitly nihilist than even I am in my darkest moods.

As I said, it may be a local thing, as I'm aware there are certainly variants of Christianity that don't hold up an insulting quest for personal dissolution, a twisted satori, as their epitome of human perfection.

But it still bugs me.

Current Mood: infuriated