My friend (and some of yours) Noah -- his dad has gone missing. There is a poster here with information: http://www.batsday.net/missingrobertkordaposter.pdf

This is serious. If you can help in any way, please do. If you can repost the above link, please do.

I knew it would happen one day.

There's just no way it could be avoided.

I now have another Richard Becker following me on Twitter.

Damn it.

Along with throwing spilled pepper over your right shoulder to keep the Gods away, it's pretty clear and obvious that having any kind of cat cross your path is good luck -- or, if you prefer, habing enny type ov kitteh cross ur path iz good luk -- but coming home from an errand to find a black cat in "I was just leaving mode" from my front doorstep is unusually fine luck.

Now if I can just get one brochure and a set of test questions written, along with completing the sculpt on a very large item for business, I'll be good...

I just wanted to say that if you like Tennessee Williams or Ginsburg, you can't ever criticize Lovecraft for using florid, overwrought language.

1) I need somebody who has an extra Professional Guest Pass who'd be willing to sell it to me for a reasonable price.

2) I need somebody who's already going to SDCC who has (or has access to) a plain white van, preferably with a rolling side door (but that's not 100% vital).

If you, or someone you know, has access to these things, lemme know, willya? Thanks!

I'm so sad that the self-mutilated King of Kiddie-Groping is dead, I did a little moonwalk of despair upon hearing of it.

No really... it's *so sad.* I'd feel like a little piece of my childhood was dead, if I'd been a child when he was at his height of popularity.

Instead, I take comfort in knowing that there are a lot of little boys out there with memories of *their* childhoods that they can cherish always.

Jesus juice, anyone?

(But then... most things are...)

A highly intellectual, well-educated, experienced and creative friend of mine is spot-on with information 99% of the time. But he's got limitations, like anybody else does. (Especially me.)

We watched the second HAROLD AND KUMAR film tonight, and Neil Patrick Harris' performance involves him eating dozens and dozens of psilocybin mushrooms. Now, I don't claim to be the most experienced guy in the room, but I know that nobody human can really do that. That's the joke.

But my friend later claims that he knows people who've done it in real life without any very serious repercussions beyond, perhaps, a bad trip. I'm pretty stunned at this, and restrain myself from saying, "You know people who SAY they've done it..." I actually have known people in the past who've done themselves some pretty serious mischief by eating more of such things than they should, and they sure as hell weren't gulping 'shrooms by the fistful.

It's customary in such blog entries to recommend a prescribed course of action other than that of the person complained about, or to explain the lesson one's learned from such behavior, or at least have a coherent point to conclude with. But I don't really have any of those things. I just want to say for the record that I don't think a human being can really devour a whole ziploc bag full of magic mushrooms without causing themselves some very serious gastrointestinal problems at the very least. (I can't imagine anyone keeping them all down long enough for the massive dosage of s

And if they can... well, fuck, I didn't think that was possible.

When you play Call of Cthulhu, Arkham Horror, or watch episodes of BUFFY (or, for that matter, old '80s fantasy films like MY SCIENCE PROJECT or THE MONSTER SQUAD) -- if your characters end up facing a gateway to a horrible otherworld and must do battle with tentacled horrors to save the Earth...




...YOU ARE *NOT* PLAYING IN AN H.P. LOVECRAFT SCENARIO.



You're playing in a *Robert E. Howard* scenario.



You don't really think Lovecraft would ever give you a fucking *chance* to do any of that in one of *his* stories, do you?

(A *real* traditional Call of Cthulhu story would have your main character spend a lot of time either dreaming or swooning at the sight of an eldritch horror. They sure as hell aren't going to go around "doing battle" with anything, much less forming some kind of 1920s MOD SQUAD to do a drive-by on Kiwanis in black robes. Okay, your *male* main character. Women might be more effective -- I don't know, there aren't very many women in Lovecraft, okay?)

Crom!

Saturday night was the capstone to my FIREFLY/SERENITY chronicle, begun a couple of years earlier with a couple of sitdown roleplaying games, kicked off in full earnest with the BIG DAMN HEROES live-action RPG, continued in a slew of sitdown games, then concluded with the THRILLING HEROICS live-action RPG. A bunch of great roleplayers brought it all to life, including (sorry for no HTML links) Doctorray, Gotham_Bound, Karteblanche, Casket_girl, Castle_Kevorah, Shad0, Ladyeuthanasia and Ian_Tiberius. I can't thank the players enough, nor site hosts Mr. Retsej, Big Al and Corporatescum, and I wish I could've been a fly on the wall for all the great exchanges and interactions that happened.

The entire series of games gave me a chance to indulge my usual silly in-jokes (basing plotlines on THE BARON OF ARIZONA, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, FORT APACHE, THE SEARCHERS and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, among others -- as well as creating the horrific manga-style idoru called Howdy Monkey) and awful vocal impressions (including NPCs with voices modeled on Ricardo Montalban, James Stewart as a drunk and slightly deranged commander of a garrison hopelessly surrounded by Reavers, Sean Connery, Christopher Walken expounding on the dangers of a frightened marmot in Simon's trousers, and George Takei as an unctuous frontier pimp). Naturally, I also got to do some crazy esoteric shit, like creating the Triad plotline with overtones of Carlos Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Sergio Leone, Mexican superstitions, Theodore Roszak, early Gothic Horror stories, and especially David Cronenberg-meets-Sam Peckinpah.

I also got to expound on such Browncoat-specific subjects as:

- Why creating River for her alleged purpose makes no sense, except to satisfy the Whedon formula of kickass teenage girl (I still made sense of her in the end, though)

- Why nobody ever considered going back to terraform Earth That Was, if you can take a bunch of lifeless moons and planets and fix them up into a 'Verse ("We just *got* here...")

- How the Alliance isn't necessarily all bad, and the Browncoats aren't necessarily all good

- How Malcolm Reynolds and his crew could continue to operate as usual, even after the climax of SERENITY

- What the point of Blue Sun was, why they wanted River back even if the Alliance no longer did, and what they were trying to do

- How Reavers could even begin to function well enough to operate ships and even increase their own number (and no, it's not "when a Reaver loves a Reaver very much...")

And I got to kill off Niska, The Operative and Jubal Early -- though I kind of left Badger in limbo.

Due to player cancellations and one outright flake-off, the participants in THRILLING HEROICS missed out on a couple of characters I really wanted to see performed:

- Sable, Badger's highly competitive kid sister

- Professor Laszlo Kurtz, slick frontier impresario who's actually a lethal agent of the Alliance-within-the-Alliance (it's a long story)

Of course, the players gave me tons of surprises and delights, not least of which being the resolution of the Mal/Inara tensions, taking the Simon/Kaylee relationship to its next level (and resolving forever the possibility of Jayne/Kaylee), showing how Zoe survives her emotions after the death of Wash at the end of SERENITY, and much more.

Though I did have Shepherd Book (arguably my favorite character) make a cameo appearance in a hallucination(?) during a sequence when Simon suffered a brain injury, I never dared to attempt any (flashback, dream, etc.) appearance for Wash. He's just too damn good. I opted to leave that one to Whedon, forever. I couldn't top that, and didn't want to embarrass myself trying.

I got to roleplay being Joss Whedon, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Of course, I got to experience more FIREFLY/SERENITY than he did (damn the network), so I'm spoiled.

All in all, it was a terrific creative exercise, a great opportunity to socialize with some really marvelous people (and to often be awestruck with their creativity), and to just wave my hands in the air and make shit up. (Essentialsaltes should start charging me for using that phrase.) So I'd like to finish this ramble with a few pertinent quotations I used for the closing email of the LARP thread...

========
MALCOLM REYNOLDS: There's just an acre of you fellas, ain't there? (TO ZOE) This is why we lost, you know. Superior numbers.
ZOE WASHBURNE: Thanks for the reenactment, sir.
========

"The two things that matter the most to me: Emotional resonance and rocket launchers. PARTY OF FIVE, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers."
-- Joss Whedon

"It's about how much freedom you can take away from somebody before they either fold or fight, ... It's about the right to be wrong and the nature of human beings, that they need the freedom to be wrong. That they cannot be made to be better or perfect."
-- Joss Whedon

"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck."
-- Joss Whedon