DShomshak

I recently saw Season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (Came in at the library. Season 2 is on order but already has so many holds I probably can't see it for another year.) A "prequel" to TOS, following the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike and his crew. Decent Trek, nothing too bad, with some nice development of some characters before their appearance in TOS. The Gorn are a significant menace, which sort of retcons their appearance in TOS episode "Arena," in which nobody seems to have heard of them, but not to such an extent that I can't justify. My chief criticism would be that the acting seems a bit low-key compared to the animation all the TOS actors brought to their roles. Best episode IMO was the wackiest, in which Doctor Mbenge finds himself caught in a version of a children's fantasy story, with Enterprise crew drafted into the other roles. Anson Mount does a delightful turn as the treacherous poltroon Chamberlain, in marked contraswt to his rather subdued Captain Pike. But everyone does pretty well: mmm, delicious scenery! Dean Shomshak

I enjoyed the "Lord Darcy" stories and am glad to learn that another author continued them -- and did it well, which is flipping amazing. Yeah, I know Dunsany influenced Smith and Lovecraft; I've been fans of theirs for ages. But somehow I'd never gotten around to reading much Dunsany even though I knew perfectly well he was a majpor influence. I've never seen Lords of Creation, but Pegana somewhat influenced early development of White Wolf's Exalted in some of its treatment of gods and demons. Its model for gods shifted to be more Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy, but I think a few stylistic aspects remained. (And Games of Divinity owe their origin to Dunsany as a phrase, if not what they actually were.) The most persistent influence probably came with Exalted's demons and their world of Malfeas -- likely because that was mostly the creation of R. Sean Borgstrom, a.k.a. Jenna Moran, who is one of the very few game writers I can think of with the mental and stylistic chops to achieve a Dunsanian style. Dean Shomshak

Listened to Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods as Librivox audiobooks. These are seminal works so I'm glad I finally got to them. Pegana is a book of myths that also are sometimes stories, but more often prose poems, describing the gods, their prophets, and miscellaneous doings -- a view into another world's mythology, from igts beginning to its foretold end. Language and imagery are amazing, though the style is florid and deliberately archaic. Time and the Gods is more miscellaneous, a series of stories and vignettes involving, in one way or another, time and "the gods of old." Only some constitute actual stories; more are just vignettes, Dunsany playing around with language and image but having no actual plot. I think that some of the stories that were actual stories, however, did give an authentic feel of myth, however. Recommended, but don't expect a lot of plot, characterization, or action. That's not what Dunsany's doing. EDIT: From a gamer's perspective, these are worthless as potential adventure scenarios. However, they could be great examples of the myths and fables told by people within a Fantasy world -- or the actual supernatural background of the world. Dean Shomshak

I just heard the story about this on All Things Considered: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220504444/colorado-supreme-court-bars-trump-from-the-states-primary-ballot Related: ATC has a weekly discussion of Trump's legal issues, campaign, and (this week) the escalating violence and authoritarianism of his rhetoric, not that this is a new subject for most of us here... https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220443867/trump-s-rhetoric-is-drawing-alarming-comparisons-to-autocratic-leaders-and-dicta Dean Shomshak

Actually... In this case Jimmy Kimmel and Mr Farron are wrong. I remember that press conference. Donald Trump did not say "Drink bleach!" or "Inject bleach or Lysal!" When the medical/scientific people said Lysol, bleach and sunlight destroyed the Covid virus, he asked if they could be injected to destroy the virus inside peoples' bodies. The experts quickly responded, "NO!!!" Not the brightest question, but it was a question, not a recommendation. In this case, I am willing to grant Donald Trump some extremely dubious credit as genuinely channeling the voice of ignorant and bewildered Americans. OTOH Trump has this rhetorical trick of saying outrageous things in the form of asking a question. So it could be easy for people to get confused. And politically, framing Trump as "The deranged idiot who told you to drink bleach" may be useful. It's no worse a slander than Trump and his admirers spout daily, so I'm okay with it in the public arena. Sauce for the goose, and all that. Dean Shomshak

Kudos for postulating a Mastermind Villain who might be Chinese (though not necessarily), and not having "Dragon" referred to anywhere. Dean Shomshak

"Have a Snickers bar, Rep. Foxx." Dean Shomshak

It's been quite a while, so I checked Wikipedia. Steal water, eat us, and use us as slave soldiers -- a trifecta of idiocy! And all on Arthur's list. Well, maybe he thought it was so bad that nobody would remember it... or he suppressed the memory as too traumatic. Hey, I hadn't thought of this excrementitious piece of sci-fi in decades. Dean Shomshak

Isaac Arther devotes an episode to "Dumbest Alien Invasions," on why the standard excuses for heroic Earthlings battling nasty conquering aliens don't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. (I'm surprised that in the "Steal Our Water" segment he doesn't mention V. Ye gods, more than one writer thought this made sense?) I enjoyed the running joke of how the rules of warfare are numbered. (Incidentally, some earlier episodes explain Mr Arthur's voice. It's a speech impediment, not an accent. As he says once in onscreen text, if you've never heard of rhotacism -- difficulty pronouncing the letter R -- it's because people who have it can't say it.) Dean Shomshak

IIRC somebody said they'd like to see one of the Great Beast's experimental victims. Yesterday I wrote one up. I think it's best treated as a monster rather than a character, since it's so badly damaged in mind and body. Here's the physical description: Just an update to show that work continues. Dean Shomshak

https://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/ Analysis rather than news, but I had not heard before that Trump's legal team wants his D. C. trial televised. As observed, Trump is a creature of Reality TV and no doubt expects this would be a great way to play to his base; the legal outcome would be irrelevant. But oops, Federal codes prohibit televising Federal trials. That isn't stopping major media outlets from pleading to televise the trial. It's so important! To, um, the voters, yeah, the voters need to see this. Perhaps I am cynical for thinking their real interest is more interest in viewership and ad revenues than civic service. Dean Shomshak

As I've posted before: At least according to one scholar I've read, Fundamentalists/Evangelicals have a somewhat peculiar way of reading the Bible. Fundamentalism was born from reaction against the social and intellectual changes of the 19th century. Part of that reaction was to insist that the Bible was self-evidently true -- that you didn't need to spend years studying a complex text, comparing passages, parsing out meanings and considering historical contexts. Just zip through and the Truth would be irresistibly revealed... if you had the Holy Spirit in your heart. Which meant that if two people read the Bible and derived different messages and meanings, at least one did not have the Holy Spirit and was instead deceived by the Devil. One result being that deriving doctrine from the Bible became an exercise in political skill and charisma in which the text itself is no longer that important. So this person claimed, anyway. I'm afraid I don't remember the author's name as this was a case of Things Found While Looking Up Other Things, and not my primary interest at the time. (IIRC I was researching Gnosticism and, yeah, this approach to the Bible is rather Gnostic -- a mystical revelation that cannot be captured and explained by reason.) Dean Shomshak

As I have said before, there can be no hypocrisy if one's only principle is power. Okay, that's not fair. As a report on today's All Things Considered discusses, Mr. Johnson does have principles, in that he is a group with explicitly totalitarian goals that can only be achieved through the acquisition of absolute power. Say hello (again) to Dominion Theology: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1217452058/speaker-mike-johnson-draws-scrutiny-for-ties-to-far-right-christian-movements Dean Shomshak

And allege insults to your country's "dignity" to distract people from your government's brutality, corruption and incompetence at providing basic services. All the years of crisis and shortage the presenter mentions? All the result of Maduro's own policies. Dean Shomshak

Every cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kg, so a 2m x 2m x 2m cube (the base volume for AoE (Any Area) is 8000 kg, which requires 42 STR. However, the 6e text of Telekinesis seems to forbid applying that STR per unit volume of a larger AoE. Page 296: CC leaves out that text, but once again I am hesitant to consider that a "rule change" that tacitly endorses mass per area rather than mass distributed over an area. It may be moot. 42 STR per 2m cube doesn't allow a very large Area Of Effect Advantage. I actually get a larger volume of water just using 67 STR TK. EDIT: If the calculation is per cubic meter instead of per 2m cube (27 STR TK, or 40 base points) I get +1 1/2 Advantage. Uisng Any Area but Fixed Shape, I can have a passage through the water that's 2m wide, 4m tall (give some head room) and 64 m long. 208 feet is a little more impressive, though it's still not enough to let Brother Bone open a passage across, say, the Hudson River. Dean Shomshak

Hm. 5th and 6th editions explicitly say that Tunneling does not work through air or liquids.: it "only works on solid substances, such as soil." CC, with its abbreviated descriptions, does not include that specification. But I'm leery of taking that as a "rules change." Sigh. A disadvantage of knowing multiple iterations of the system. (Or a Complication, if you prefer. ) Dean Shomshak

Checking the nvironmental Conditions Table (p. 379 od 5e, which is what I have handy at the moment), being in water results in -2 DC and, if underwater, -2 DC to all attacks unless you wear SCUBA gear or make a suitable (undefined here) Skill Roll. You're also holding your breath or drowning. Change Environment is sufficiently broad to cover that, I think -- though Doc persuades me Barrier could work in 6th/CC. Currently I'm puzzling over the reverse of this: opening a gap in a body of water, a la Moses parting the Red Sea. Telekinesis to force the water apart is the simplest, but water is so heavy that even spending 100 points (the limit here -- the Power is a Multipower slot) only moves a fairly unimpressive volume of water. Say, 67 STR TK moves 270 tons of water, which could correspond to a passage 2 meters wide, 3 meters high, and 45 meters long, which is only twice the length of my house. Not very impressive, considering what else one can do with 100 Active Points. I've thought of Change Environment, which can sometimes be allowed to *remove* the same penalties it creates. In this case, a CE to counter the -2 DCV penalty, the -2 DC penalty (stretching things here, guessing that a 5-point CE effect such as TK STR or points of damage will work for countering 5-point DCs), and the damage of drowning (same, and perhaps stretching things even more). CE can also be MegaScaled. But a nitpicker might say that such a CE wouldn't force one to walk instead of swim. I am not a nitpicker for my own games, but this is to update Brother Bone (from Creatures of the Night: Horror Enemies) for new publication. I would prefer not to handwave such details. But Doc D makes me wonder if Barrier could do the job: create a Barrier that *only blocks passage of water* and is fully permeable to everything else. Reading through Barrier, I'm... not sure this can work. The best I might be able to do is a Barrier that expands outward in the shape of a rectangular tube to push aside the water, leaving an air gap in which people may walk but cannot swim. Even this feels kind of handwavy, though. Does anyone have any better ideas? Dean Shomshak

Noted, Duke. I'm sure we'll all miss the good sense you occasionally slip into your long, wandering anecdotes! (Actually, I do find them interesting.) Dean Shomshak

The ATC story said two representatives voted "Present," rather than yea or nay, but didn't specify whether than yea or nay, but I didn't catch if the report specified they were Democrats. I could look it up, I suppose, but I'm busy with other things. I'm not sure how to interpret "Present." Dean Shomshak Ow, ow, mixed metaphors! Dean Shomshak

A remarkable system of exoplanets: ‘Shocked and delighted': Astronomers find six planets orbiting in resonance (msn.com) (The BBC story was cringe-inducing. The presenter interviewing the scientist kept calling it a "universe" instead of a "solar system." Aargh!) Dean Shomshak I was reading about making pharmaceuticals in space back in the 1980s, in books like Stine's The Space Enterprise. Now it's happening for real. https://www.marketplace.org/2023/11/29/low-earth-orbit-open-for-business-varda-space-industries/ Dean Shopmshak

One of the last story arcs in Kurt Busiek's Astro City was the saga of G-Dog, a hero who was a man mystically merged with his pet corgi. In one of those one-panel toss-offs Busiek does so well, at one point G-Dog led a team of super-powered animals... one of which, a cat with Desolidification IIRC, had appeared in an earlier story as the pet of two superheroines -- who didn't know their kitty had powers and was assisting them. Dean Shomshak

Oh, hey, and how could we forget Zelazny's Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness? In the former, another case of humans posing as gods using advanced technology and possibly artificial psionics. (It's been a while since I read it, but I remember one of the quasi-Hindu god-men saying that the new Agni [fire god] still has to use a flamethrower.) Plus demons who are actually the conquered energy-being indigenous inhabitants of the planet in question. Lord of Light was a big inspiration to me in designing the rival psionic aristocracies of planet Sard, mentioned upthread. Creatures of Light and Darkness is harder to gauge. Some of the characters might be god-men enhanced/ascended through indistinguishable-from-magic technology. The Steel General is called out as once having been mortal. (And likewise his steed, which was once a horse.) But others...? They may, indeed, be gods. Dean Shomshak

For instance, the psionic aristocracy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" series objectively has power that other Darkovans lack, which they maintain and strengthen through selective breeding. (With, in the planet's past, catastrophic results when the powers became too strong.) Though the distinction is not as clear-cut as the aristocrats like to believe: The lords and ladies of the Seven Domains are still all too human, which means there are by-blows and their further descendants -- an important plot point in at least one of the novels. The psionic technology of Darkover also resulted in at least one relic from that catastrophic past that could evoke the psionic construct of a god that was worshiped by one of the planet's subcultures. An extremely dangerous divine/psionic construct, especially when being evoked by a group of people with, IIRC, pretty serious hang-ups of their own. Dean Shomshak

To the roster of god-emperors I'll ad Ptath, god-emperor of a far-future Earth(?) in A. E. Van Vogt's Book of Ptath. We've discussed before the tendency of alleged future SF settings to emulate past forms such as empires with feudal nobility. I don't find this implausible. Humans had monarchies and empires, including god-emperors, a lot longer than we've had liberal democratic republics. If one does *not* assume an irreversible force of social progress, it seems plausible that the social forms that were most common in the past would be more likely in the future, too. Just regression to the mean. (Though by that argument, the overwhelming majority of future societies should be hunter-gatherer bands. OK, I'll grant a compelling force of technology that might limit high-tech future societies to forms that developed post-agriculture, with larger and denser populations.) God-emperors especially. Humans invented god-emperors at the dawn of recorded history, and they never went out of style. See Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and other recent despots to whom people ascribed more-than-human status. Something in humans wants to grovel in awe before an incarnate god. We will continue to see god-emperors as long as humans stay human. Dean Shomshak

I would be very surprised if any comics creator follows fora for obscure roleplaying games. We may amuse ourselves, but I estimate the chance of affecting any existing title is approximately zero. As for PCs having pets, in my Avant Guard campaign the hero Huntsman can summon a demon horse named Brimstone that carries him through the air. Written up as a Power, Huntsman is sure it's just a construct of magical energy... but wow, Brimstone, sure manages to look smug when women coo over him, pet him and try to feed him. Maybe Huntsman is projecting. Dean Shomshak