Lawnmower Boy

Well, I've only heard of two of them, which is not a good sign that this isn't a payola list. To add to that, they're also fine dining establishments geographically concentrated in the core downtown area and into East Vancouver and up Commercial a bit, a rough neighbourhood tending towards a certain kind of counterculture for people with connections to the racialised and marginalised. (That's a fancy way of saying First Nations and LGBTQ+ communities.) And there's two restaurants in the Fairmont Pacific. Who even eats at hotels? I can totally see some frequent business traveller with a generous expense account and entertainment deduction compiling this list by eating dinner with clients within walking distance of the hotel, with occasional ventures out for sex and drugs. It is very unadventurous in terms of the neighbourhoods it visits, with only one restaurant in Richmond (destination for Chinese) and none in Surrey (Indian, mostly Punjabi), Steveston (docks; fresh seafood) or Burnaby (Korean) listed. There's basically just a gesture to the Granville Island, and no mention of the Richmond Night Market (admittedly not open during the winter) or Londsdale Quay. And my imaginary businessperson evidently doesn't waste much time with breakfast or lunch. (For the latter, you need to track down the Javadog cart.) I'd say that if you're staying downtown and looking for good eats within walking distance of the hotel, you are probably going to be happy with the places on this list, although they're not going to be, err, economical. If you're looking for the "authentic" Greater Vancouver food experience, the only Vancouver institution on the list is Vij's, which you should probably check out. If you're looking for the latest thing locally, I think we're currently on to bannock (First Nations) and Mexican. I have no concrete recommendations, but that's what to look for. This is certainly not the list for the quintessential "hole in the wall with great food" destinations serving comfort food the way that Mommy used to make it, you want to look up Japanese (not sushi, which is pretty domesticated these days), Greek, "Italian," Persian, barbecue, "Canadian Chinese," Indian places with words like "Samosa" and "Tandoori" in the name, Thai, pho, Malaysian/Indonesian, Middle Eastern, and Mexican. And, of course, the White Spot. Kidding! Not the White Spot. Okay, that's enough. Off for the set breakfast at the Artistry Cafe!

Pardon my long delay in replying. I have a really good excuse, but it's at the other end of my apartment under a pile of papers that need sorting out. I'll get to it one of these days. --Vancouver has a primarily elevated-train mass transit system. Take an opportunity to ride it from the Lynn Canyon down to the North Vancovuer seashore, and by Seabus (a big pile of sulfur along the harbour is one of Vancouver's landmark sights, I know, I know . . .) to the Vancouver terminal, and west and around to Surrey and up to Coquitlam and back to enjoy sweeping views of the city and surroundings south across the Fraser River and down into assorted backyards. Just don't do it at a rush hour-adjacent time! The newer train route down to the airport and central Richmond is a nicer ride, but doesn't offer much in the way of views, except when it crosses the river. Along the way, ditch the train long enough to take in the Hudson's Bay Company flagship store in downtown, perfect for all your "My cool aunt went to Vancouver and all she got me was this bottle of maple syrup" related needs. --Don't sleep on, as the young folks say, the older parks. Queen Elizabeth Park, at the summit of the city, as opposed to all the mountains around it, should definitely be on the list. And if you're into that sort of thing, the spooky, abandoned Heather Street Lands are just a few blocks along on the way to the Van Dusen Gardens, a beloved tourist trap which I have bicycled by many times, but never entered. (The cafe there is probably a foodie mecca. Probably!) Trout Lake is a bit of rural wilderness in the heart of the city, whereas Pacific Spirit Park is a bit of rural wilderness at the edge of the city. It's also adjacent to the climb down to Wreck Beach, our much-overhyped nudie beach, if you like that sort of stuff. I believe that the Museum of Anthropology, which is in this neighbourhood, is currently closed for embiggening, but the rest of campus is nice, even if they keep removing the old books from the library and sending them off to automatic book-retrieval facilities. Grr. --Foodies will probably want to make excursions to the suburbs in search of authentically-fake Vancouver fusion ethnic food. The Richmond Night Market opens 28 April this year, and you should definitely check it out if you're in town. I have a suspicion that Koreatown, way out east in the Burnaby-Lougheed neighbourhood, is overlooked, and the Banana Leaf, right here in Kitsilano, is the go-to place for Malaysian food, although I have never been in there, having been turned on to the national cuisine by the late, lamented Spoon Kitchen. Another drag to check out in Kits is from the top of 4th Avenue down to Granville Island, (Another touristy-trap area to check out, with fun ferries across the formerly industrial False Creek to the heart of the city). I probably better stop now before I start talking about dyke walks (and dyke walks, but that's way out on Commercial) and the joys of biking through the laneways and tiny little parks that are right next to bigger parks, only nicer.

I'd make an Elon Musk joke, but it turns out that Musk is over. It's all Biden now and I don't want to make Simon cross.

Now that I'm done making fun of Tennessee (it's no fun when everyone is doing it!), and seeing that Hermit's serial characters are making an appearance; and also seeing that we need more content around here, I'm going to play, too! Demigoblin knows what's happening, and has a contingency plan. Meanwhile, he's going to brood myster-- Hey, cut it out, Charlotte! Okay, okay, he's upset that he can't watch all his pop culture reviews and critiques. Implicitly Pretentious is on a total DCAU kick right now! Maid of Gold is super-pissed off that this happened right after she posted her first ever thirst trap on TikTok so no-one could see it. No-one. Twelve is going to miss social media because of its potential for organising. Amazon has a union! 2023 is right around the corner! Let's get out into the community and register, enroll, and inform! Oh, and maybe also he was going to look at some prof--! Hey!! This thought will be continued at some future date when Twelve catches Maid of Gold and makes her give him his phone back. Carnadine doesn't care about stupid social media. It's so slow and boring! What she cares about is all the article and thesis sharing sites somehow counting as social media. She can't even get on Academia.edu! And she has 2 TB of data from a statistical study of genetic anomalies on 23andMe buffered! And her hard drive is full somehow! Wait, there's an external drive they're taking apart at school got to go get it Bye! HiitsRoseI'mbackdownloadinganalysingWheemathfun! Fairchilde doesn't care because he certainly doesn't have a completely-contrary-to-terms-of-service underage Tindr account that he would be using appropriately if he had it which he doesn't. Queensfist is still a child of the Seventies. For her, social media is a party line and, okay, okay. She's already punched Bruce in the shoulder for pulling that stuff. It didn't really hurt, did it? Still getting used to the wuxia stuff, honest, okay, I'm sorry, you're coming to lunch, right? So, anyway, her first main point is that she's scared out of her pants of Facebook because it's like this invisible world where she might run into her old classmates, and, first, school drama, second, they're all old now what with the time travel and everything and it makes her think about death. Her second main point is that someone let Rose order her own coffee even though there are rules, and someone knows that she's going to be impossible until the caffeine wears off. Dora.

What? Is there some kind of weird filter that puts Tennessee-slagging in moderation?

Are we talking about Vancouver, B.C., or Vancouver, Washington?

Hey! Black Adam would have been a great movie if they hadn't left the original script in the bathroom during a shower so all the Post-It Notes reading, "Write better dialogue here," fell out. I mean, you'd think the industry would have learned after Ghost in the Shell, but whatever.

Whereas I am deeply attached to the analogy and burn to explain it again and again until everyone who disagrees with me surrenders and . . What's that, little inside voice? That's not how the Internet works? Or how people work? Dang. So here's a question: Can we salvage the trope so that everyone can enjoy it and buy multiple copies of the IHA sourcebook and get it on the Amazon bestseller lists? I think we can! Okay, maybe not the bestseller lists. Here's a "realistic" take on mutants that we can fit into the Champions Universe (with some difficulty) and use to smooth off the rough edges. i) What are mutants? How Did They Come to Be? "Mutant" is a label for one of a number of groups of individuals born with gene complexes giving them superpowers. Beginning with Nazi mad scientists in the death camps, "mutants" have been identified with a particular such gene complex. "Mutants" are in some cases descendants of persons who manifest the complex by spontaneous genetic mutation; and in other cases acquire the complex by spontaneous genetic mutation. The inheritability of this particular complex is much more marked than that of other persons born superhuman due to possessing other gene complexes. Some Nazi mad scientists labelled this group "Homo superior." Other Nazi mad scientists developed an (unreliable) way of cloning these individuals such that the clones would possess these superpowers. The spontaneous mutation that brings about "mutants" is extremely rare. The Gestapo developed a protocol for arresting (Aryan) "mutants," involving their proactive suppression, neutralisation, extraction from home environment, and retraining in responsible use of their powers. Some cynics point out that most of the "mutants" the Gestapo arrested, ended up dead and genetically sampled, and not "arrested" at all. It has been suggested by those cynics that the "Homo superior" guy was just fine with that. ii) What are mutants today? Allied scientists recovered much, but not all, of the Nazi work. Some Nazi mad scientists, including the "Homo superior" guy, went to work for the Americans postwar, ending up as Chief Scientific Advisor for Human Projects at DARPA. Some, although not all, people at DARPA have bought into this mindset, and believe that the small number of "mutants" in the world today are the vanguard of a coming wave of "Homo superior," etc, etc. However, they know better than to articulate this Nazi tommyrot in public. However, DARPA field agents continue to use the Gestapo-derived arrest protocol for dealing with mutants in the wild, as it were. It's not that it's a good protocol, they admit. It's just that it's the best one available. Numerically, the population of mutants is, again, very small. There are between 2 and 4 spontaneous mutations in the United States each year, and about twenty times that in the world as a whole. Without troubling the reader with my back-of-envelope calculations, there are 250 active, living mutants in the United States in 2023, and about 5000 in the world as a whole. Fifty American mutants are "superheroes," another hundred are supervillains. It is not clear what the remainder are doing, and some at DARPA are afraid that they're hiding in a commune somewhere and breeding like rabbits. However, combing police records it does not appear reasonable that there are more than 2-3 mutants being born to "mutant families" in the United States each year. iii) How do Mutants Interact with the Authorities and also Shadowy International Agencies? Mutants aren't really a jurisdiction for anyone, because most people don't believe that they exist as a discrete group, any more than they believe that people who can roll their tongues are members of a secret race of Homo tongue-rollers who are going to take over the world some day. "Mutants" aren't even the only people born with superpowers! For example, superheroes created by mad science (mad magic?) frequently have super-powered children, for perfectly good (insert mad science exposition here) reasons. DARPA, as a minor aspect of its larger job within government, takes charge in the rare case of an emergent mutant causing public disorder. There are cynics who suggest that the frequent fatal outcome of these interventions is more deliberate than is let on, as I've already suggested; but apprehensions do occur, and the detained mutants are successfully retrained and work as government agents if they have the appropriate power sets. Some people within DARPA privately agree with the cynics, and not in a good way, because they have bought into the whole "Homo superior" thing. That is, maybe the deaths-in-apprehension are more common than they could be. iv) Anti-Mutant Hysteria Predictably, all it takes is one government-employed mutant superhero to send the usual group of borderline paranoid schizophrenics off their rocker. There's a good chance that if you seriously believe the Earth is flat, you believe that the government has been taken over by a shadowy Homo superior agenda, and that secret mutant breeding camps are preparing a generation of super soldiers to etc, etc. I heard it on the Alex Jones show! Though even Alex found it to be a bit much and shut the guy down. Again, most people think that this is all made-up crazy stuff. v) Behind the Anti-Mutant Hysteria It's a secret government conspiracy to take over the world. The crazies and the DARPA goons are being manipulated. Duh. I mean, this is a comic-book universe. Or, if you prefer, the government is being manipulated by that Nazi "Homo superior" guy, who faked his death as part of his mad science agenda to take over the world with an army of mutant "hounds." The giant death robots and the IHA are him, but that's a secret.

Are you a middle-aged caregiver, your body ruined by drugs and implants, with a daughter you don't know about and constant suicidal ideation? You could qualify, Make your way to the majestic mountains of North Dakota to find out!

Fun? That's what we're calling "anxiety of influence" now? 1) Author C. J. Cherryh 2) Novel Downbelow Station 3) Comic Guardians of the Galaxy (modern) 4) Movie Logan 6) TV Series Andor 7) Artist Steve Ditko 5)

Leave me alone!

Crazy talk!

The Amazon entry does not appear to support shipping to us pallid, frozen foreigners. Be sure I will enact my revenge as soon as I figure out this "ice wall" thing. .....if I want to. You guys be crazy fine there.

My condolences. Seeing this impact an online friend brings the RSV crisis a bit closer to home.

That's crazy talk. I just looked at a map. It's a bunch of smidgy little islands down near Australia with names like Celebes and Borneo, like that's a real word. Now, about the race for the GOP vice-presidential nomination: MTG or Tulsi?

They had to make some concessions to realism

The site operator suddenly looked very nervous as he stared at the phone being held out to him. Morning Glory could have that effect on people when she turned serious. "So the fisheye camera at the end of the hall picked up them up when they left the elevator. As you see, they walk down to their storage unit, key the door, and enter. I understand that you have no coverage of the unit itself, but we should see them leave, because they're not there now. Now, here. See this black line in the middle of the image?' "The system can be a bit tricky to use." the manager started. "I've never seen anything like that, though." On the one hand, Sapper thought, he might be lying. On the other, he'd better not. Mundane people did not get away with lying to Morning Glory. "Oh, I completely understand. I'm so grateful that you took the time to download this record and send it to us. But if you'll look at the timestamp, it changes on either side of the line. That's an edit of--" Morning Glory paused, brought the phone to her face to theatrically peer at it for a moment-- "Twenty minutes. And that's it. A single mother and two kids. Missing, according to our information. I'm sure that Locke and Keyes corporate is eager to resolve this." The site manager blanched, and didn't say anything. "If you know who might have tampered with this recording while extracting it," Morning Glory prompted, "This would be a good time to clear the air." But no air was going to be cleared, it seemed. His boss, Sapper thought to himself. It was his boss that faked the tape. Tag, meanwhile, continued to rifle through the typical household furnishings and assorted random boxes that filled the storage unit less than a quarter of the way. It was a bit sad, thought Sapper. Hey, Candyland. I used to play that with my niece! "Toilet," Tag announced. "I'm sorry, Tagline?" Morning Glory was one hundred percent doing her team leader thing, now. "My . . . informants said that there was supposed to be a toilet in here. Looks like it was removed for some reason, and someone forgot to put it back. They went looking for a washroom." Sapper was in charge of the team's big dumb muscle, not deep thought and twelve-dimensional chess, but he wasn't so dumb that he hadn't noticed Tag referring to his ex and two kids, or how tight money was for them in this rental market. Informants, right. He could also hear the guilt in Tag's voice. This probably explained why there'd been a portable toilet in the garden shed back at base for the last year. And if Sapper hadn't taken charge of landscaping, Tag might have noticed by now. Guilt for everybody! "Nothing in the building," Groundstar announced. "My drones see a Wendy's just down the street on Terminal, closest public facility. But I'm accessing payment records and cams, no sign of the party from last night. If they left the building, they didn't make it to the restaurant." "They didn't have a key!" the manager blurted. "I'm sorry," Morning Glory said. "I don't understand." "With just an access card, visitors can't stop the elevator at ground level. They have to go in and out via the parkade. It's for security. But if you wanted to go to the Wendy's it would be easier to exit the building on the ground level, which is down the stairs, which are right over here." As he spoke, the manager backed out of the storage room and walked a few paces down the hall towards the big, brightly lit sign that said "Stairs," edging noticeably aside as he went past the door marked "Premium Unit." Only Sapper's Horse Sense(tm) was screaming at him that something was very, very wrong with that door. Sapper wasn't born yesterday. (In fact, Sapper was born on February 29th, 1992. It was a thing.) So he formed a billhook out of his Shaping Force and got ready to drag the manager out of the way of whatever tentacle or tendril (after hanging around with Morning Glory for three years, Sapper was always up for a tendril) was about to jump out of the "Premium" storage area. Speaking of things Sapper had learned through his colleagues, Groundstar loved jump scares. It wasn't a tentacle, though, but rather a . . . towel? A long, flowing, slightly raggy piece of cloth, anyway. Sapper was not, however, quite fast enough to do the rescuing, as Morning Glory blazed past him and dragged the manager out of the way. Great. She'd be hell coming down in the morning. Sapper reshaped his billhook into a halberd, his favourite solution to all of life's difficulties, and also opportunities, and moved towards the door, slashing the towel as he did so. A stinking, dirty, smelly, cloud of dust filled the hallway as he came even with the door, which had stopped being a door, and was suddenly a blank slab of darkness in which an ancient castle, lit by stars and a gibbous moon, loomed across a lifeless, dark landscape. And an army of animated skeletons, flashes of ivory bone showing through the tears and tatters of what had once been richly embroidered robes, heavy with dust that sat strangely on the rags, which, come to think of it, sat strangely on the skeletal frames of their wearers. Was there even air on the other side of the door? And, if there wasn't, what was keeping the vacuum from pulling them in? And, more to the point, what kind of things would anyone want to store in a "Premium Unit" like that? As if in telepathic response to Sapper's thoughts, the head of an honest-to-gosh dragon poked above the parapets of the castle. "Ghostbusters, Sapper muttered." "What?" asked Geostar. "Staypuft," Tag answered, obviously following Sapper's chain of thought a bit more closely. "Don't think about the Staypuft Man. Distract yourself by doing something. Like beating up a dragon until it gives my ..the kids back."

The storage unit was a blast from the past. To her left, Abbie could see their old Candyland game, perched on the top of a crammed, opened packing box. Ahead against the metal wall, behind the old treadmill, was that big painting of Gramps and Gram that they were going to have in the living room when they had a real house again. It was like a nostalgia blast, but that didn't change the fact that Abbie couldn't see the chemical toilet from their old camper that Dad positively swore he'd left from when he was living in the unit during the pandemic. That was Dad. Abbie looked at Mom, who bit her lip. "Looks like we're going to have to go down to the Wendy's at the corner." Connor picked right up at that. "Can I get a flurry?" "Don't be dumb, Connor," Abbie said. "Abbie, Connor . . . We have a budget. We'll have breakfast at the apartment after we pick up the keys tomorrow morning." She paused. "Tell you what. I'll text Mr. Mueller and remind him he still owes us the deposit for the old place. If he puts the money in my account, we can all have something at Wendy's." Yeah, Abbie thought. That's not in the budget 'cuz, like, no-one thought Mr. Mueller was going to pay the deposit back. "Let's go," Abbie said. "I need to pee." Which she didn't, but Connor probably did, and they needed to get on with it. A minute later, they were staring at a blank wall where there was supposed to be a door out of the storage unit building at the bottom of the stairwell outside their unit. Weird. It's not like it was a complicated building, just a big old stack of a building laid out like a big "B," just like the Projects their cousin, Bessie, lived in. Connor, who had gone down the stairs two flights ahead of them and was already back on the floor with the unit, above them, "scouting," shouted down. "This is the wrong stairwell. There's another one right after it." This doesn't make sense, Abbie thought to herself, as she walked down the second stairwell, right after the first. But whether or not it made sense, there was a street level door, and so they walked out of it. Into a night that was a lot colder than they remembered. And different. Across the narrow parking lot, through a chain link fence and up a slight slope, traffic whizzed through the drizzly night on an eight lane Interstate that Abbie didn't remember from when they drove to the unit. There was no Interstate a block over from Terminal! Was there? Not the kind of thing you'd forget, and, more importantly, now she did need to pee, and there was no Wendy's in sight. "We must be turned around," Mom said, sounding very sure of herself the way grown-ups got when you just knew they were wrong. But that didn't change the fact that they needed to walk around the building so that they could see where they'd come in off Terminal Avenue and get to the Wendy's. Except when they cleared the corner of the building, there was no exit onto Terminal, no Wendy's at the corner. What there was, was a bigger parking lot fronting a lot of other storage buildings that definitely hadn't been there when the Uber dropped them off. And beyond that there was a skiff of trees and a fence, and in front of them an elevated roadway above eight tracks of railroad that definitely hadn't been there before. Mom went into the front office to talk to the super-creepy security guard, but he made her buzz in alone, leaving Abbie and Connor to huddle against the cold. "What's the Chronopolis and Erewhon Road?" Connor asked. It sounded like a railroad, and a train was just starting up below them. Squinting, Abbie read the words off the livery on a container unit. The next one said "Piper & Norton," and that didn't ring a bell, either. Mom came out of the office. "The guard says that there's a 7-11 just across the bridge. And he says to make sure that we go back into the right unit when we get back, and block the storage unit door from the inside. And that maybe the stairwell will work in the morning." Abbie looked back through the window into the security kiosk. The guard looked back at her. Did he have fangs? "Isn't he supposed to stop people from staying in the units? That's what Dad says." "I don't want to stay here overnight," Connor yelled. Her Mom sighed. "Maybe the 7-11 will have the number for a shelter or something. There's got to be something in this city."

Y'know, call me crazy, call me dumb, call me late for supper, but I am not 100% convinced that turning political polarisation into a sector of the for-profit social media/news/entertainment sector is the wisest course of action. I mean, maybe nine billion dollars turns out to be the peak of an unsustainable financial bubble, but even so . . . .

So this was a bit of a (recent) surprise for me. In the long ago, the first RPG I ever bought wasn't D&D or even Traveller, but rather the original boxed-set of Gamma World (complete with a badly cast set of polyhedra die. Good quality control, there, Gary). I was blown away by the wild imagination behind the product, and, when I compared the ruleset with AD&D when I bought it a year or so later, I could see that the game design actually had its virtues. Of course, like every other science fiction RPG, Gamma World was doomed to limp on in the shadows of the more successful traditional fantasy RPG. We can talk about what gives the default D&D setting its secret sauce, but it's kinda beside the point. There've been as many editions of Gamma World as of D&D at this point, and if it were ever going to approach the parent game in popularity, it would have happened by now. One way that Gamma World imitated D&D games without really coming out of the shadow, as it were, was in giving us a progressive table of weapon and armour improvement, highlighting one of the problems that all SF settings suffer from compared with fantasy settings. +5 Ethereal Plate Armour is good stuff, but you still have to walk into the dungeon and whack the dragon with your sharpened metal stick. In an SF setting, this makes no sense. The good weapons are guns, and the good armour stops bullets. Combat may still have the resource management/attritional feel that makes for a good RPG combat system, but well-armed high end parties to turn into fire teams, and if the phat loot keeps dropping, eventually the boss battle turns into a time-on-target artillery salvo. The talking, ambulatory rosebush PC who had so much fun lashing out with thorny vines in the early game is a spectator in the end game, which admittedly is a problem in D&D, too, but to a much more significant extent. I mean, this is just one complaint against SF and Science Fantasy (since Gamma World is the ideal rules set for a licensed Witches of Karres RPG setting), but it is one that leads into the next paragraph, so I thought I'd highlight it. A few years later, I was witness to the explosion of a game product that showed how you could make a science fiction RPG a marketing juggernaut. Battletech, launched in 1984, took a combat system more-or-less appropriate to an RPG, ripped out the actual roleplaying elements, tore them into confetti, and sprinkled them on top of a tabletop combat system based on tailorable units (giant mecha, mostly), in a format familiar from everything from historical naval miniatures to Star Fleet Battles, to the, in retrospect obvious, precursors like Car Wars and Sky Galleons of Mars, to, significantly enough, the minor SPI/TSR marketing success, The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. In Battletech, as with most of these games, artillery isn't actually that effective (because that would be boring), but fire and movement is unapologetically and realistically the crux of the combat system. No-one cares about fighting monsters in locked rooms in Battletech, and the rules assume that fire combat across a tactical map is normal. A few years after seeing my club go crazy for Battletech, there was a brief craze for a tabletop kaiju fighting game, a late-era TSR product somewhat loosely tied to the Gamma World setting, Gammarauders. Gammarauders are big and strong and resistant, but fire combat is important to the system, no apologies. My attention to gaming stuff lapsed after that for a few years, but I am back to recreational gaming now, and one day a few months ago I was ribbing a real-estate-retiree acquaintance of mine about the vast amount of gaming and collecting with which he fills up his time and his house in West Point Grey. (KACHING!) I pointed out that there was no end to miniatures collecting, because there was no end to miniatures rules sets. Reaching for something ridiculous but plausible, I settled on Gamma World. (It's in the description!) "Why, there's even a Gamma World miniatures rules set," I said, knowing nothing of the sort. So then i had to look around to see if there actually was one. And there was: 1992's Gamma Knights. The one review at Boardgame Geek compares it to Star Fleet Battles in terms of mechanical elegance hampered by a certain inconsistency in rules. Which sounds great to me, because frankly one of the joys of the SFB set is those broken rules interactions that allows that one race from the other side of the galaxy that is (supposedly) balanced against its neighbours, to curbstomp the races on this side. It's fun for everyone who doesn't get curbstomped! Which is to say, the person who devotes the most obsessive attention to the complexities of a sprawling game setting. So here's Gamma Knights. Those power-armour characters from the old RPG have been turned into the mecha-knights of Battletech, sparring across a post-apocalyptic world, sometimes interacting with and fighting the giant kaiju of Gammarauders. Various mechanics involving sensor sweeps and lock-ons and maybe line of sights even give squishy, naked infantry some kind of role. A sentient, ambulatory rosebush could grow a tendril over the crest of the hill, and soak up a mortar round like nobody's business. And there you go: the raw foundations for a wargaming ecosystem to match Battletech, if not D&D. It has a built-in kaiju fighting game, which is something I don't think the market really offers even today, and plenty of room for lots of source books detailing more and more Ancient heavy metal and post-apocalyptic useful mutations. It didn't happen, of course. TSR fumbled the ball, as it so often did in those days, even in some respects in the most obviously toxic way. One of the key points in introducing power armour in the original Gamma World setting was to give "Pure Strain Humans" a balancing factor against "mutants" and "mutates" such as sentient, ambulatory rosebushes. As usual, balancing classes/races with end-game content didn't work, so instead the Gygax clan picked up their copy of The Iron Dream and turned "PSHs" into Aryan supermen. Pardon me, I've got to go yell at 1978. "Just put the freaking power armour in the basic game, guys! Balance it like you balance magic users! 'At first level, you have access to your ancestral power armour, but only one scrounged up D-cell to power it. You can fly and shoot lasers, but not only for a couple of rounds, so make it count.' You'll have a game that's a cross of D&D, Traveller, Car Wars, and The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. It'll be a license to print money!"

Pirates really did operate over vast spans of distance in the Golden Age of Piracy. But let's not forget that they were operating on the lines of existing maritime commerce. It's less impressive to see a pirate voyaging from New England to the Indian Ocean when Boston merchantmen were doing the same. Now, a fascinating aspect to this, and one that might bear on the OP's vacant coasts, is just how long and how far these lines of maritime commerce stretched, and how long ago. We have an interminable and exhausting debate over whether or not the Basque were in the Newfoundland fisheries before Columbus that I think is pretty much played out, but is also the less interesting with the discovery that people were present on the Azores as early as the sub-Roman period, seven hundred years before they were "discovered" in the days of Henry the Navigator. If that's the case, we have to explain literally centuries of what was almost certainly low-intensity (because it is not frequent enough to be documented, and any permanent population on the islands was too scanty to leave obvious archaeological evidence) fishing-related (I mean, why else?) activity. Why didn't it escalate into "discovery"? The answer, which I take from narratives of expeditions to the Canaries, is that the "fishers" weren't going for fish, but for seals. Marine mammals can be taken in rookeries on the beach, which is much safer than fishing for them offshore; they produce a high value staple (train oil) that is completely fungible and anonymised, and while the yield of an individual rookery can be quite high, it is also inherently limited. You can predict about how many animals you can take on a given beach. It's never going to increase, there's no room for capital investment, and the number of hunters has to be limited somehow for the voyage to be profitable. When you look at the global distribution of pinnipeds, and particularly the so-called Mediterranean monk seal, it maps onto the routes of the early European voyages of discovery pretty well. There was a long pre-Age of Discovery era of faffing around with the North Atlantic islands and the islands of "Macaronesia," which all have seal fisheries; there was a southwards push towards the Guinea coast which is first documented in contemporary histories of the "deeds of Prince Henry" when the explorers arrived in the sealing grounds across from the Canaries and then southwards towards Mauretania's Bay of Arguin; Columbus sailed to the Caribbean, catching up with another large seal population, especially off the Mayan coast of Yucatan; the story of how the Portuguese got to the Cape of Good Hope is very obscure, but Namibia has a huge seal population; and, of course, there's lots of sealing to be done off Newfoundland. So is there a prehistory of low-intensity sealing voyages to the areas later "discovered"? Sometimes. Maybe. Point is, where the sealers go, you're likely to get pirates --subject, and I think this might be the crucial point, to there being fiscal room for them to operate. (There's not much point to going out and stealing hide bags of train oil instead of catching your own seals unless you can sell them for less than the fishers can. Throw in a Prince with a "soap monopoly" like Henry the Navigator in the ports form which the fishers come from, and a rising Meseta to use the soap, and you have a monopoly rent being charged on legitimate edible fats imports which allow the pirates their profit by evading the rent. Now, when I say that there is no possibility of capital investment increasing yields on sealing voyages, this isn't quite true. The Canaries in the immediate pre-Contact era seem to have developed quite a trade in dyed goatskin. So-called "Moroccan kid" dominated (dominates) the industry, and the leatherworking port towns on the Moroccan coast are known to have sourced their hides as far away as northern Nigeria during the caravan days. There also seem to have been Moroccan buyers in the Canaries in the era when the native Canarians were, by some accounts, cave men who couldn't even build boats --perhaps an unfair rap. The point is that you might see a region that, on a map, looks completely deserted, no towns or even cities, but which is actually fairly populous, and is linked into a global trade network by some kind of high-skill specialised export like dyed goatskin.

I don't know how strong the argument is, but Niall Sharples diagnoses a social revolution at the beginning of the Wessex Iron Age by observing an outbreak of circular-home building. Circular buildings, as opposed to rectangular, are sometimes seen as a way in which the various peoples of the British Isles have expressed difference with the predominantly rectangular-building Continental societies on the opposing shore. However, during the Wessex Bronze Age, rectangular buildings were the rule, often erected in landscapes in which archaeologists believe they can discern relatively high levels of social inequality. Meanwhile, Neolithic-era round henges and other monuments were everywhere. The argument, then, is that these putative early Iron Age revolutionaries said, "Look, our ancient ancestors built round buildings, whereas the hated 1% built square buildings. Let's return to the ways of our ancestors, and build round buildings! (Also, let's eat the rich!)" So, yes, it does seem that the ruins played a part in shaping ancient mentalities, just like they still do.

Wait. We have to judge the entries now? ....Open to bribes here. Also, and I'm not saying that I just opened a bag of a nice, artisanal Tennessee coffee here (hand-picked by Joe-Bob Valdez), but I rate Hermit's entry at One Million. And a half.

Now do NEO-OTYUGH.