Decant Circles

One rapier; two pistols.
Gloomy disposition.
Puritan upbringing.

(Privateering history.)

Animate dead.
Kidnappers.
Wizards.
Godless fiends.
Demonic pacts.
Ghosts.

One staff.

16th century England.
And Europe.
And darkest Africa.

( Sing it to me. )

I was just over on orrin's journal, and it looks like there might be some really good movies in the next couple of years...

I am not, you understand, looking up the other item we discussed. :)

Remote control Daleks.

So. Over the weekend, I've watched three or four Masters of Horror episodes. Generally, I would have to say "meh" (although it does occur to me that "I was married to a crazed survivalist" is an excellent WoD excuse to pick up Brawl, Melee, and Firearms without being a crazed survivalist yourself).

But overall, sadly, "meh". I confess to being especially disappointed with the "Pick Me Up" adaptation; Schow's story was a brutal little stab wound, and the movie was flatter than warm rootbeer.

Then I sat down and watched the "Blink" episode of Doctor Who.

Oh god so pleasantly creepy.

(1) I am in Victoria.

(2) Mom left me a birthday present. I got *married* and she remembered my *birthday*. This is striking me as incredibly touching.

(3) Finished Stand on Zanzibar. I need to own this book. It's horrible and smart and incisive and dense and good bleeding god there must be more like this. It's like the ball got dropped on idea/setting/plot dense scifi in favour of character-driven scifi sometime in the last four decades and I love the character-driven stuff but I think I've read maybe a handful of stuff this dense and I want to know why.

Read it. If you like dystopian fiction, read it. If you liked Transmetropolitan, read it. If you're tired of little expository lumps along the lines of "poppa-momma became the adjective used for p.m. in year which-what-all and was adopted by English Language Relay Satellite Services (commonly called Engrelay Satelserv, or Engrelay) in year other-what-all, ensuring its wide adoption" and are happy with an author who will simply trust you to pick it up, read it.

I think I need another look at his Children of the Thunder, and I've started on Shockwave Rider.

(4) Still married.

(5) Tucker is a *huge* cat. He's not fat, but he is utterly barrel-chested. And he has this tiny little tail and this tiny little voice.

(6) I have my first assignment. We must buy spiced ginger marmalade.

...coming home spacey and out-of-sync, having dinner made for you and getting a foot rub, and curling up (along with cats) to watch two episodes of Deadwood.

I have seen some of my e-mail. I have not checked it in any meaningful fashion.

I will not be in Toronto for the horror convention this weekend, and I can actually live with that, though it pains me slightly.

Life continues. Calls and arrangements must be made.

And there is nothing like watching crows play "whee, I am a kite" and cawing happily as they hover in midair, bouncing up and down in the wind coming in off the sea.

(ObHearstRef: That bastard. How *dare* he beat up everyone's favourite racketeer / pimp / uhm, can you call Swearengen a crime lord? / look, I have *no* idea why he's so likeable. None. It's not even a cheesy sleazy kind of liking the character the way it is with the Grey Mouser.)

Browsing through Websnark.

There are moments when someone else has managed to articulate *exactly* what you'd say if you were going to say it, and there's a weird shock that's more like recognition than revelation. Eric Burns has a great long post mostly about pulp heroes, and stuffed into the middle of a paragraph where he's explaining what's so cool about the Shadow is the line

I need horror turned against evil instead of for evil.

Oh, damn, *yes*. That's it exactly.

========

Miskatonic University seems like it's turning out okay. It starts out with the author addressing a few considerations about running games in the Mythos universe; how strictly you'll adhere to canon, how to handle players who've read the stories, things you want to keep players from doing, how to handle the sacred cows--

--and this is about when it hit me.

This is fanfic. Fanfic in a slightly stretched and weird way, that isn't telling stories in the traditional sense, but is certainly telling stories.

*Anything* with the Mythos is fanfic, or fanfic piled on fanfic. "The Watchers Out of Time." "Cold Print." "A Colder War". "'The King', in Yellow". "A Study in Emerald." Some of Lovecraft's stuff was fanfic to begin with--he didn't invent Carcosa, or The King in Yellow, or Nodens.

Hell, outside of Lovecraft's work, the *Necronomicon* is fanfic.

I must think on this.

Three Rings for the Elven Kings under the Sky,
Seven for the Dwarf Lords in their Halls of Stone,
Nine for Mortal Men Doomed to Die,
One for the Dark Lord on his Dark Throne,
...and one left over for Willow Foxblade, half-elven princess of Gondor with ankle-length auburn hair and a spitfire personality.

The trouble with trying to explain a Mary Sue to someone is that you tend to run across all sorts of interesting links.

And then you end up trying *really really hard* not to laugh so loudly that you're overheard. I think 143(d) is my favourite.

So. Listening to Tom Smith's /Rocket Ride/, and contemplating the differences implied between rocket ships and spaceships.

Spaceships... well, they're kind of impervious. They exist in space. There's an implication that they're designed to cruise between the stars, kind of hanging in the void for however long they need to, and you'll barely have to consider where you can from, just how to keep the ship running. You know, one computer memory malfunction and your descendants will start snickering at the silly ideas of originally coming from some mudball called "urth". That kind of thing.

Rocket ships, on the other hand, took off from somewhere. That's what rockets are *for*. Come from a planet, go to another one, carry maybe a handful of people, stop to refuel... they're more cars than standalone cities. And as such the technology can blend into the background a lot more--when it's a means of transportation, there's more room to pay attention on what you're being transported to and from.

And then you're morally obligated to duke it out with Ming the Merciless.

(I'm purely curious: who knows who Ming is (without Googling)? I mean, I think of it as common knowledge, but then I think of the meaning of an iron ring on the smallest finger of your working hand as common knowledge.)

And part of it is that the term is kind of antiquated. I mean--rocket ships. *Nobody* talks about rocket ships anymore, which means when the phrase does turn up, there's that much more of a grand heroic pulp vibe to it.

Give me technology that we can trust, and give it fins like a Cadillac...

God, I need to draw something with a skyline. And no root system.

Also, I really really want to see /Max Headroom/. My exposure to the character is limited to a vague memory of a TV spot, but the idea that the name comes from the last thing he saw before the car crash has kind of grabbed my attention. And it's not like there's anything that particularly moves me in the theatres right now.

(Okay, except /Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/, which I still want to see.)

Of all the things I did not need to know, the fact that there was an LJ community dedicated to pretending to be a fictional character (insofar as I can tell, not one that you created, let me specify, but one that you have adopted from a published work) and offering advice in response to the queries of passers-by and other fictional characters is fairly high on the list.

I know it's possible to get bored. Especially late at night when you can't sleep. And I have weird hobbies and am in no position to throw stones.

But the concept of, say, stressing over your friend and deciding to cope by going to a place where you can get advice from John Constantine[1], Dana Scully, Reepicheep, Legolas, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon...

...just makes my mind want to pop.

(You're right. I'm not posting a link. I'm still not sure I'm not dreaming.)
---
[1] Doing this as community service, but refuses to say what he did to merit the sentence or what authority handed it down.