Lawnmower Boy

I) The weather this spring in the Lower Mainland has managed to break some records on the downside, with the result that there's a possibility of serious flooding this month, but overall we're actually having a pretty normal year. So far. Nice change after last year, and no consolation to those undergoing mega-droughts, early heat waves, and a potential record hurricane season elsewhere. II) Literal translation is almost never a good idea, but sometimes it helps get at what's on people's mind, and "Heilige Roemische Reich Deutsches Nation" might be translated as "Sacred Romelike Realm of the German People" as easily as "Holy Roman Empire." Even the (later) Emperors were "Emperors Elect." It is not the Roman Empire, and the emperor is not a Roman Kaiser. I'm also, personally, super-duper tired of analogies between the "fall of the Roman Empire" and the "fall of [your country's name here]." III) I am entirely persuaded by the claim that Marjorie Taylor Greene is mentally ill, and vote that we stop making fun of her, and start ostracising and isolating her, like we do with real mentally ill people. "Here's your disability pension, Gameboy and one-room bedsit in the attic, Marjorie. Have a nice life!"

I attack the negotiations with my double-wielded vorpal guisarme-volage and Holy Kopesh! (What? My last DM approved the build.)

'My property values might fall." Print, clip and save the only explanation for the 21st Century you'll ever need!

It was like that when I got there!

with all due respect to the world-historical genius of the GOP's electoral strategists, that's how you turn partisan polarisation into party collapse. William Jennings Bryant for President! (Because we can't nominate anyone else no matter how often he loses.)

I'd like to say that I've been watching Severance, but I have no memory of it.

I don't see: i) Exploring the Mysterious Place (island that's actually a whale; lost temple of forgotten god; plateau/valley where the dinosaurs survived; lost kingdom; Forbidding Wilderness That Is Actually A Laboured Allegory, etc.) ii) Hunting the Thing (Orc raiders that captured your bestie; the Questing Beast; Your Daddy; Bling That Is Actually A Laboured Allegory, etc.)

Who was that masked man?

Super wedding! Super wedding!

I'm going to guess that the "technicals" are intended as anti-drone escort. Modern drone warfare seems to present serious challenges in the screening and security role. It is going to be interesting to see how a real armed forces goes about it.

I cannot say that I knew Scott well, or over a lifetime, but we were members of the University of British Columbia Wargamers Society together in our youth, and I was introduced to Champions by playing in his campaign. He graduated in timely fashion well before me in 1986, and I never saw him in the flesh again after leaving town for graduate studies. Let's talk about flesh. Scott suffered from some kind of congenital physical condition, about the specifics of which he was very private then, and, evidently, throughout his life. His symptoms, when I knew him, were for the most part not so obviously abnormal that one could not convince oneself that he was simply the victim of outrageously bad lifestyle or grooming choices. Because he did not advertise his condition, I am sure that he suffered ridicule and abuse during his earlier life. In later years, I suspect that they progressed to mobility impairments and other isolating lifestyle challenges, although I cannot speak to that from personal acquaintance. We have, as a society, persuaded ourselves that because caring about appearances is superficial, we should resolve never to do it consciously. I think that is a mistake, that we are human, and have a right to own the loss of simple physical attractiveness as a legitimate injury done by disease. It is okay to be bitter, to be conflicted, to be hurt, when illness makes us ugly, and victims have a claim on medical help! I say that in the light of world events yesterday, but also as a reflection on Scott's life. Scott suffered, and yet, and unlike many victims, sought a public life in teaching, and, later in life, preaching. (He was no proselytiser when I knew him.) He also was a creative game designer with a particular interest in the superhero genre, taking a puckish pleasure in writing about the adventures of his alter-ego, Thundrax. I cannot offer a eulogy of Scott Bennie here, but I can offer one for Thundrax. Like all superhuman alter-egos, Thundrax represented the person that Scott fantasised about being. Scott was a good man, a patriot, a religious man, and a fan of the Champions system. So was Thundrax. But there is one more thing about Thundrax that is important here. Thundrax was a bit of a himbo. From which I take away that this was part of Scott's fantasy. Having known Scott, as I said, as a teacher, a creator, and a man of genuine insight into the human condition, I want to take this as Scott's last lesson. That kind of fantasy is okay. It is okay, acceptable --no, more than acceptable, normal-- to have fantasies about being more physically attractive! Elsewhere, we can talk about body dysphoria. Here, the issue is a particular kind of illness, the kind that deforms us physically just enough to limit our lives, and not quite enough to make us acceptable victims. We need to accept that this kind of Illness is real, and acknowledge that the longing to be Thundrax is legitimate. RIP, Scott

With respect to both Barker's ethnicity and his likely imposter syndrome, I will note that he was born in Spokane relatively early in the settlement history of the Pacific Northwest to a family that "claimed to have come over on the Mayflower," always a red flag about family origins, Boston Brahmins apart, and that he did a PhD in linguistics studying a Northwest First Nations language. Which is probably enough insinuation for one post. Of more importance was his lifetime role as a professor of South Asian Studies. Area studies in North American universities have always been pretty dodgy, in part because they draw students from a linguistics background, a field which does not always carry the highest of academic credibility, but much more importantly because they have extra-academic links that raise questions about funding. Your Russian and East European Studies Centre is rolling in CIA money, that kind of thing. South Asian Studies became a cause celebre in the 1990s when it was revealed that departments like that of my own alma mater and Barker's Minnesota were skating very close to the edge of being diploma mills. That's how they came to lose departmental status. Barker, I suggest, was lashing out at a world that, as he saw it, had pulled the rug out from under him when he went all in as a Holocaust denier. No doubt Jewish academics were involved in the decision to close his department. I don't know if that makes for a particularly sympathetic defence, but it does serve to draw a line between the Empire of the Petal Throne and his later Neo-Nazi outbursts. Also, jeez but Tekumel was pretentious. Give me Gamma World any day.

The good news is that there's an excellent chance we can have the Dirty Thirties again!

So, enough go blow up the Earth, but not quite enough to get through an M-1's rPD.

https://www.bananaleaf-vancouver.com/kitsilano

Nice try, fake news guy. No-one uses the grappling rules.

Shhhh. We're having the Starship Troopers argument again.

It's good to see Chris responding since I posted because of his own earlier contributions to his thread. So I want to talk a bit more about that and also respond to Clonus and Csyphrett about what I think are some key issues distinguishing a "realistic" scenario and a "hyperrealistic" comic book scenario. To start with, I get the sense that Chris is seeing the "Mutant idea" through a political lens, which I am not going to criticise, because it is what I do, and I'm awesome, if I don't say so myself. Chris is a creator I respect enormously with politics that are quite different from mine. Without making the politics the point I wanted to respond to him by presenting a non"woke," if not anti-woke "oppressed mutants" scenario. As presents go, this is like when your cat leaves a meadow vole at the doorstep in the morning. I brought Chris the kind of present that I like to catch, which might not be as generous as I think it is. So I'm going to start by talking about three cases of the "mutant idea" as a story of the oppressed and the oppressor which have been pretty strongly present since the creation of the franchise and which might help inform the discussion. -The first and most obvious is one that was already well established in science fiction/comic books fandom, which is the mutant as nerd. Adolescence is an alienating time for all, and some respond to it by forming found families around fandom. This can be great, and the X-Men present us with the ideal case of a basically wholesome group forming around a benevolent mentor. However, it can also be dysfunctional. Long before Gamergate, Lee and Kirby give us the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Their leader is an arrogant bully who enables the worst behaviours of the group. They include creepy and inappropriate Mastermind, obsequious Toad, anger-management issues Quicksilver, hanging-around-with-loser-boys-because-she's-too-unassertive-for-real-friends Wanda, and eating-disordered Blob. (So not all of these things are like the others, but it was the 1960s, when no-one had much patience for "fatso.") Lee and Kirby thus carefully balance between fandom's need for a found family and the way in which these found families can impede socialisation. --The second is homosexuality, exemplified by Warren Worthington being suave, charming, successful with the girls and rich, but having to hide his wings in a nightmarish bondage harness and deny his true self, which he can only manifest, as a unique solo outing as "the Avenging Angel" demonstrates, when flying, masked, in a cruise against crime. This is not a story that is overtly about homosexuality, but homosexual readers were used to heavily coded representations in popular fiction, and may even project where it was not the original authorial intent. --The third is Jewishness. Marvel Comics, particularly in the early days, was something of a ghetto environment, and I suspect that its creators had the sense that they might have had much more successful and remunerative careers in more serious addresses along Madison Avenue had they not been Jewish. Whether or not that is the case, the fundamental fact of Jewish life is that the Cossacks are always out there. Oppression doesn't get old. It might be in abeyance now, but it might, indeed, inevitably will, come back at some point in the future. When that happens, chances are that fair weather friends will melt away and the community will face its oppressors alone. This "eternal Jewishness," to borrow an anti-Semitic trope, is also my answer to Clonus and Cysphrett, who posit that some much larger number of mutants makes for a different story than the starkly small community that I posited in my vignette. It doesn't, and that's why I turned to these very small numbers. Because whether there are hundreds of mutants or hundreds of thousands, human demographics still change over generational timeframes. The demographics, whether it be the number of mutant voters or soldiers, are fixed in a timeframe that spans multiple human lives. Women have kept voting rights, and gay people people will probably keep marriage rights, because there were and are a lot of them and always will be. Once the barriers in the way of effective political action fell, there was no way to restore them. In contrast, the basic premise behind the "mutant idea" is that there aren't many mutants. In the hyperrealistic world of comics, that can change overnight. In the real world, it will only happen over a millennial timescale. If you couldn't fight the Cossacks last week, you won't be able to fight them in your grandchildren's time. That is five hundred years out, and meanwhile you can only come out once. In recent times we have been telling gay people that they can come out and express themselves because "things are getting better." Can we say that to John Proudstar and Clarice Ferguson. I don't think we can. Clarice and John's experience with "the Cossacks" is very limited. They were arrested by a group of agents on a surveillance shakeout, and instead of being taken in to be booked (which DARPA agents can't actually do, because they don't have police powers), they're driven out to the dump, where the agents try to execute them. Does this mean that all DARPA agents would make the same choice? By no means! I recommend that fine recent documentary, Logan, to get some insight into the particular DARPA agents who were surveilling Laura Kinney. They are associated with a project to clone new genetic individuals from the genetic material of superpowered mutants. They believed that "uncontrolled mutancy" is obsolete, and that it is dangerous. A mutant that simply comes into their powers, unsupervised, out in the wild, is probably going to leave a trail of bodies behind them until they are run down by the law. They might even assuage their conscience by telling themselves that the clones of John and Clarice that they will create will be John and Clarice, only better brought up and benevolently supervised so that they can actualise themselves as people whilst all the while punching the faces of America's enemies. Other DARPA agents probably don't believe that, but they're not the ones that John and Clarice ran into. Who knows, over five hundred years, what kind of people that their descendants will run into? Remember that the basic idea here is that science is vaguely aware that there are a variety of genes out there that lead to children being born Inhumans, "X-people," Eternals, Deviants, and who knows what else besides? The only people who talk about "species" and "Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon" are Nazis and people with a soft spot for Nazi ideas. You could easily come to the conclusion that the very idea of "X-people" self-identifying as a community is a mistake, that they should be "assimilated." The kill-them-and-clone-them model of assimilation is just one way that could go wrong. How do you, as a young mutant parent, presume to make the choice to abandon the protection of secrecy and denial, knowing that you are making that choice for five centuries of descendants and exposing them to the threat of that? To check in with my vignette, in the fifteen years since John Proudstar and Clarice Ferguson found the X-Men, they have married, got community college educations, and have had four children. They live in a small house in a rapidly-depopulating inner suburb of a rapidly-depopulating west New York former industrial town, surrounded by former plant workers, trapped in homes steadily losing value and living on disability; and "people with issues." No-one around them is surprised, if they have the energy to even notice, that the family keeps to itself and its weird little church community. Probably if anyone did notice, they'd wonder why John and Clarice weren't more worried by "urban crime." John and Clarice live there, they tell anyone who does ask, because their church doesn't believe in mortgages. In much the same way, John is an independent contractor while Clarice prefers the evening and night shifts, after hospital admin has gone home. Their two youngest children are still at the unlicensed church-run daycare, notwithstanding that it is a sixty mile drive to drop them off. The eldest is in public school and very rapidly approaching graduation from Grade 7, which is when, according to church tenets, believers become adults and "put away childish things" by going into homeschooling. The second eldest is in Grade 4 and has few school friends due to the way that the church forbids participation in gentile holidays like Christmas and Halloween, and the fact that church children are removed from school for weeks at time for church festivals, and then sent to summer school together to make up for it. (Not that there are many church children, and in particular many church children in the same school district, never mind school.) The church also doesn't believe in student loans. Or credit cards, car loans, Mexican vacations. Or iTune accounts, for that matter. Members will tell you, "At least we're fine with coffee," but it is hard to tell if that's a joke, especially when so many of the older member of the church are downright scary to be around. If you were to somehow break through little James Proudstar's peer-ridicule-fed reserve about his religion, he'd tell you a bizarre story about how the head of their cult is a living Jesus who is actually the clone of humanity's saviour against the Antichrist, created in an alternate dimension. Teachers who have broken through are only really impressed by the fact that the church is headed by a living Jesus, the third generation of living Saviour from the founder of the cult, the independently-wealthy founder and director of a successful private psychiatric hospital in Lake Placid. This just goes to show about how psychologists are crazier than their patients. (Push "Laugh" button on soundtrack machine.) It's possible that the original family fortune is still being spent to subsidise church activities, although this is not obvious from his "hippie Jesus" lifestyle, which consists of wandering around Lake Placid in a Nehru jacket when taking a very occasional break from running a successful organic apple orchard on the family estate. However, sales of "cold pressed apple cider" aside, it is possible that the church is just a scheme to extract the heavy tithes that members like Clarice and John claim to pay. Say the two or three teachers who care. It's not like anyone else is paying attention, after all, except to ridicule this unusual lot of "Jesus freaks."

Like many children of my era, the late Seventies revival of the mutant franchise came as a powerful influence. And while it was not always to the good, as I've come around to seeing the whole "Fans are Slan" thing as not psychologically helpful, the mutant idea addressed prejudice with a polymorphic face that offered something for everyone and that reified "prejudice" as an operator with no object. In other words, prejudice was always and only an angry reaction to self, projected on others. This was, and is, something that anyone can learn at any point in their life, and the mutant/X-Men thing was always there, available, as great literature always is. The particular criticism here strikes me as a categorical error, conflating the hyper-realism of a comics world with the lived reality of our own. The classic example of this is "Batman letting the Joker get away to murder thousands more people." That Batman would do this is, in my mind, more realistic than the premise we have already bought into, which is an eternal Joker who keeps coming back dozens of times in the first place. Professional American football players play twelve games a season for six seasons. They don't go on fighting/committing crime at a rate of six-to-ten-capers-a-month for going on a century! "Real" Batman lets "real" Joker live because "real" Batman runs into "real" Joker all of four times in his "real" career. In much the same way, a great deal of the ridiculousness in our treatment of "the X-Men only they're real" derives from what parameters we choose to relax to get to our "real world." ___________ John was tying his boots when he caught the familiar smell of sentinel robots in the draft from windows both ends of the motel single. A lot of them. Way too many to fight. Clarice was snoring. She's not going to like this, John thought as he stepped over to her bed and shook her shoulders, putting his finger to her lips. Her eyes opened. "I was trying--" Long pause. Her head came out of the pillow, eyes focussed on the paper-thin wall. They'd talked about this. If DARPA had mikes on the bungalow, they would rush it the moment they heard John and Clarice on the move, to heck with causing a scene. A portal opened where Clarice was staring. Not even bothering to look where he was going, John picked Clarice up and jumped through the teleportation gate, coverlet fluttering behind them. "Crap." Now it was his turn. "Here?" They were in the hospital. "You didn't give me a lot of time to wake up!" "DARPA didn't," he muttered. "But what about--" "Do you see a bunch of X-Men going down the X-pole? You told me after you broke in last night. It's not a secret base for a renegade supergroup. It's what it says on the sign. A hospital. For eating disorders, which is why it's locked up. The only thing we have to worry about in here is running into a white girl sneaking out of her room to throw up and making fun of my pyjamas. Meanwhile, out there, there's DARPA drones in the air and it's not like I have a lot of indoor teleport points around here. Or shoes." She lifted her bare, right, foot and stretched her toes. Cute, somehow. "Maybe we can somewhere to portal from the top floor windows," John said. "Stair's over here. Now we better get moving, because my Agent-in-Charge says if DARPA kills us, I should walk it off and remember to file with HR before my internship expires." "I still can't believe the FBI sent an intern to check a lead on the X-Men," Clarice said. "Me either," John said as he punched through the wall to knock out the alarmed lock on the stairwell. It was easy, like a dream. Why did he think that? Not important right now. Why did he think that? Get your head in the game, John! "I guess they figured it was a crap lead. Anyway, if they hadn't I wouldn't have met up with you." "Rez kid and aged out foster, together against the Man. Story of every cellblock ever." "Eh, at least we're co-ed." Clarice gave him a smile and John got butterflies. Why did he feel like someone was smiling at him who wasn't Clarice? Weird. Top floor. Also deserted. Funny. He couldn't smell anyone or hear anyone in the entire hospital. People made smells. Clarice poked at the basket under one of those thingies nurses wheeled around, probably looking for slippers. "Why do I feel like we're being watched?" "Yeah, no," John said. "I usually don't get that feeling because I know when I'm being watched. But yeah." "Crap," Clarice said. "You've got to have more faith in your Faithful Indian Scout-fu, John. It's OP. Do you see any cameras?" "Probably as good a time as any to make my entrance," said a strange voice in the silence. John practically had to peel himself off the ceiling. Like he just said, he wasn't used to being surprised out of video games. A middle aged man with a Jesus beard and long, curly brown hair, wearing one of those collarless hippie jackets that usually only that kind of girl could pull off, was talking. A man standing right there in the corridor where there hadn't been anyone to see, hear, or smell second ago. "So." the middle-aged man said, "I've been reading your minds and projecting mental images. Creepy as hell, I grant you. On the other hand, like the song says, I was born this way. I hope we don't have to prove that you've been detained for questioning." Five more people appeared out of nowhere, like hippie Jesus. An old woman with a definite family resemblance to both the man and Laura's little friend, Hope, the wide-shouldered, equally old current Director of the Hospital, Dr. McCoy, a pair of twins in their twenties that John didn't know from Adam, and Laura's dad, Mr. Howlett. The one that his Marine buddies said was some kind of Special Ops angel of death. "I can't make a portal, John," Clarice whispered, as she said it, John noticed that one of the twins' hands was glowing red. Okay, take him out first if this turns into a fight, John thought. Mr. Howlett slid three long, metal claws popped out of his right hand. Yeah. As if. "So let's get on with this," Hippie Jesus said. "We all have places to be in the morning. Tell me what you think you're doing here, John, Clarice." John looked at Clarice. If either of them could talk their way out of this, it would be her. Clarice said. "So, John's an FBI intern. The FBI figures the X-Men have a base within a hundred miles of New York and that it has some kind of cover. They've been checking out private schools for years, but John got the idea to try hospitals instead. Meanwhile, when I aged out of the system last year. I started looking for Dr. Summers, who used to write to the group home about me sometimes." Clarice paused, because she didn't like that conversation about fosters looking for their birth parents. "Turns out he used to be the director here. And, oh, by the way, DARPA has a surveillance ops running on the street outside, watching your next door neighbour kid, Laura Kinney. We got mixed up in it, and that's our story." "Why surveillance? How did you get involved?" The curly-haired man prompted. "Turns out that Laura and some friends escaped from a Mexican lab that was cloning people with superpowers. DARPA's in charge of American super agent work and is totally stoked with the idea of super clones. Way more reliable than waiting for someone to get bitten by a radioactive bat or whatever. Catch is, it only works with inheritable superpowers, which turns out to be a thing. They have a saliva test that finds people who inherit super powers. Me and John got "A"s! Which turns out to stand for "annihilate." Who knew? Anyway, Laura's living with her clone-daddy, but the other kids are undocumented. For some reason, instead of turning it over to INS, DARPA is watching Laura to see if she contacts the other kids. Oh, also, her Dad is super-scary and they want to keep tabs on him." "And do you know why DARPA decided to try to kill you?" "One of the agents on our private death squad got really explanatory after John broke his buddies. Turns out when people inherit superpowers, a lot of the time they're unstable. He says. A double tap down at the garbage dump is just a mercy killing. He says. Frankly, it sounds like pretty much everybody who starts manifesting superpowers at puberty is either "unstable" or a slave clone from a Mexican lab. Now that's creepy." The Director cleared his throat. "Ever since the Nazis started studying birth supers in the camps for the war effort and found that one strain breeds true and pops up in new lineages, there's been a Nazi thing where they think they've discovered Homo God-damn superior and are on the frontline of the war for human evolution, Neanderthal versus Cro-Magnon, Part II. After the postwar rush to recruit those guys to fight the Cold War, the whole thing went mainstream. So that's you. Homo Superior, or alternatively, "life unworthy of life.' Also, because this is covered by the same "born secret" doctrine as atomic weapons, just knowing that you inherited superpowers puts you in violation of national security, so don't be going to the media." "Homo superior?" Clarice said, sounding calm although John could hear her heart racing at the comment about inheriting. She'd need to talk about her family, after. "That's crazy!" "It's not crazy," the Director said. "It's a rounding error. Forget about the mutants, species, evolution. The genetics of an intelligent species of eight billion is too complicated for molecular genetics or science fiction. Focus on what's real. There's about ten people born with our kind of superpowers in the world every year, and DARPA thinks its half that. The people who run the super powered side of national security don't need to think about Big Ideas. All they have to do is shoot two Americans a decade, all the loose ends are tied up." "We don't want to be loos ends, Director McCoy. In fact, maybe I'm putting words in John's mouth, but we're fine with going on living. That's what you guys seem to be doing." Dr. McCoy smiled. "Hide and Seek doesn't go very well if you let everyone into your hiding spot. But! We can let you in. Just, our house, our rules." Clarice's hand slipped into his, squeezed. Yeah, John thought, not a line to use on a foster kid, but Dr. McCoy noticed her reaction, too. "Here are some home truths for you: Since the war, we have put together a community of 300 people, about half of them in America. There's about as many more of us out there on their own, and a lot of them are out there because they're unstable. That's it, that's all. All the baby daddies, all the single ladies, all the everybody. I don't know if either of you have done population growth equations, but it's going to take five hundred years before there's enough of us to swing a single Congressional District. I have no idea how you keep a secret for five hundred years, but that's basically what we have to do, all the while policing our own." "So now what? We go live in another dimension, or a cloaked asteroid, or something?" "No," the Director said, "This is about staying under the radar. You go live in trailer parks and and raise your kids to be plumbers and nurses, and let your neighbours think you belong to a tiny Jehovah Witness splinter group. And if you don't like it, you can go play with the sentinels."

Merry Christmas! Now go eat all that food you bought. You have no idea how hard it was to get it to you. Guilty! You should feel guilty about all those retail employees working so hard for you! But aside from that, have a good Christmas. See you Boxing Week. (Jeepers.)

It's a schtick playing on the paladin ability to summon their mounts, last seen way back in the battle for Azure City.

Now that my first defence against global warming ("Ain't happening!") and my second ("Meh") are both discredited, I'm going with, "You young kids better not put me out any while you're fixing it."

I see what you did there, bro.

If whales aren't fish, how do they see food?

Expectations much? Look, we can't all get elected to high public office!