hipster girl fashion

Eadweard J. Muybridge

antonio mingote

jar jar binks

We were beginning to wonder what exactly started one of the strangest Star Wars Related massive trending topics on Twitter.com Jar Jar Binks, yes folks JAR JAR BINKS was one of the top trending topics to end Sunday night and start the discussions on Monday Morning. So we pondered what could possibly have started this. First thoughts, did he pass away? OK checked around, and no to our relief he is still alive and well. Whether you liked Jar Jar or not there is a human being behind that character and he is a very nice human being by the name of Ahmed Best who's twin brother Rapper Khalid Best who apparently (according to another article) went to prom with Lauryn Hill.

Many people did not like the character of Jar Jar Binks if only because he stole away too many scenes with too many antics, forgetting that when they were younger it was R2D2, Chewbacca and later the Ewoks that were a chunk of comical characters for the kids to enjoy. Jar Jar just had too many antics for the taste of a now grown up movie base that forgets the movies are also for the next generations as well. And kids loved Jar jar (the young ones) The actor that portrays Jar Jar Binks is actually a very talented young man by the name of Ahmed Best who also starred in Stomp the musical. If you play close attention you can see him playing other roles in Episode 2 as one of the council members disembarking from a transport with Obi Wan Kenobi (Played in the prequels by Ewan McGregor) and later on also featured in the bar scene having a drink in the background.

Well it's quite possible that the twitter trending topic was started because of either the new app that allows you to translate regular sentences into Jar Jar Binks speak or because of the following story about the life sized dolls being used as sex toys. The story came out in 1999 but was more recently reposted again ten years after it first came out as a Ten Year Anniversary series of articles written by the church. In this case they were basically calling the Life Sized Jar Jar Binks dolls a TOOL of THE DEVIL and a sexual play toy for both male and female Younglings.

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Hey Have You Guys Seen Blogspot's New "Batmanalytic" Feature?

...it's pretty cool.

You plug it in and blogger analyzes your blog's readership in Batmanological terms:

A Vital D&DoLogical Question

Oh I am wearied by this malcontent and warmongering.

Let us now discuss a more important issue, and one which doth affect us all, here in lands where D&D is played.

Jake or Finn?

Leave your vote and (vitally) the reasons for it in the comments.

As usual, rigor is requested and error will be destroyed without prejudice or mercy.

No, Seriously, WOTC Totally Did Hire Me To Work On 5E

So you know how yesterday I posted that April Fool's joke about how WOTC hired me to work on Type V D&D?

It wasn't a joke.

They really did.

All the stuff I said yesterday is completely true--including the bit about how the nerdrage-provoking sucknesses the web keeps telling me are in 5e doesn't seem to be in any of the stuff they've sent.

I hasten to add that nothing in my contract obliges them to listen to me so, y'know, don't blame me if it turns out the resolution's all done on a d9 and the only viable class/race combo is owlbear monk.

Anyway, should be a pip.

Now back to work.

So WOTC's Hired Me To Work On 5th Edition

Yep.

Monte Cook reads the blog, Mike Mearls reads the blog, I suppose it was only a matter of time.

So they send me things and I make my computer read them to me while I paint and then I write an email back telling them what I think and how I would've done it and they make me sign stuff and I then I get a check.

Obviously there's this nondisclosure agreement but I can probably say this: half the stuff The Internet thinks is in 5E is stuff the Internet made up. But, y'know, to be expected.

Hellllo Marilith.

___

EDIT: Yes, this was posted April 1st. Still not a joke though.

Shiny Shiny Boots

So it was a 3 anna half hour flight from Chicago to LAX and they put me next to a 19 year old girl who starts the conversation with "I like your tattoos Are you from California? I'm from Texas I never flew on a plane this big before I'm in the Navy Who does this bitch think she is?".

So, yeah, I knew immediately I was about to have a 3 anna half hour conversation. Or at least hear a 3 anna half hour monologue.

She alternated explaining (how to properly attach bombs to the bottom of an F-18 Hornet, how to treat your dress uniform if you're not a fucking dirtbag, how to salute a superior officer if you're not a fucking shithead, how great her all-marine corps family was even though they didn't let her join the marines, and what all her favorite (completely emopop damaged) hardcore bands were) with complaining (about: her ex-fiancee, "all authority", not having had a drink in 5 hours, how hard it is to get in to see bands on the weekends from the base, the inability of her stupid slutty drunk lazy bomb-attaching dirtbag subordinates to follow her Friday quitting time speech re: keeping their shit together on the weekends, her all-marine corps family, how hard it was to get a fake ID). So, basically: the kind of fantasmagoric museum of articulate cognitive dissonance you only ever get in 19 year olds and very inebriated senior citizens.

In addition to the terrifying information that this young woman was in charge of making sure explosive ordinance did not accidentally fall out of the sky onto parts of the state in which I currently reside and type and that she was actually in charge of other people, it occurred to me that this is the kind of individual they are talking about who really needs the whole brassy shindig of the US military to protect her--not from Osama Bin Laden, but from herself.

On the other hand, I once had a drink with Alex Macris--who you may know as the author of the most aggressively researched econocore parts of the Adventurer Conqueror King RPG--and he explained the brevity of his tenure with our esteemed armed forces at West Point on the following grounds:

So, f'r'example: we had to polish our boots all the time. But--well you used to have to polish your boots to waterproof them. That was the point. But now the boots are made of completely waterproof material. There's no point, it's just busywork. I could have been doing--anything. That stuff just drove me crazy. I left.

One could make a decent argument that our military could very well use Alex Macris. But he did not need it.

(I ran Alex's waterproofing parable past the 19-year-old. Her only response was: "Yeah, you gotta keep your boots spitshine. Hey, d'you know Jimmy Eat World?")

_

Now me myself personally I didn't ever understand about the army and its rules-obsession until I read about the Civil War. And then I got it: Oh, you have these rules and chains of commands and these lines and orders because 5 minutes into genuine combat you are going to have to rebuild all the wagons out of chicken wire because they've been torched, and make new gunpowder out of bacon grease and horse spit, and then eat the horse, and then replace a now-decapitated commanding officer with the closest native english speaker in the next 8 seconds. Because war.

So yes, there are sometimes good reasons for rules--or, as PJFalsemachine says here:

Warfare is very difficult and produces enormous stress in the people who undertake it. As a consequence, the organisations that are directed to warfare develop rituals, manners and structures that are designed to control, displace, channel, and otherwise deal with stress. Because these organisations develop such qualities they then attract individuals who find themselves in personal need of these qualities in normal life. (Italics mine.)((That is, anti-italics representing PJ's italics . -Z))

In Dixon's own words “..those very characteristics which are demanded by war – the ability to tolerate uncertainty, spontaneity of thought and action, having a mind open to the receipt of novel, and perhaps threatening, information – are the antitheses of those possessed by people attracted to the controls, and orderliness of militarism. Here is the germ of a terrible paradox.”

And then he goes on to draw the parallel you are probably already expecting to GMing which I'll try not to repeat too much of.

The most strenuous and obstinate arguments against the games I want to play always end up going "I've been playing RPGs for 300 years and the way you want to do it always ends in horrible badness because (someone at the tale who is an idiot or 12 does something only an idiot or 12 year old would do) and the game crashes and burns and everyone is sad and scarred with napalm and cries. The rules need to be like (some whole other boring endless thing about sucking and extra new rules that suck)" and you wonder Where are you that you know anyone who does that and needs to be told not to and why do you play games with them?

Rules. Rules are ok. The kinds of rules shape the game, as the kind of armies shape the war. But there are many other factors at work in a war: the terrain upon which it is fought, the politics that started it and surround it, the objectives of the war, and, naturally, the kinds of people fighting.

Comic Book Villains Ripe For D&Dification

Dr DoomVictor Von Doom of Latveria is periodically made medieval in actual Marvel comics. Evil knight behind perforated mask with a few magic-user levels. And he already has a castle with a map. Go nuts.


The Time Trapper.
Who is the Time Trapper? Click to enlarge...
"It is known that the Time Trapper dominates the wasteland of Earth in its dying millennia....He possesses great armies and weapons of power, the source of which are unknown"

And he looks like that. So you don't even need to change his costume.

He can age you or de-age you or send you through time or whatever.

Just don't remind him how things used to go back in the day.


Dr Fate When He's Bad
Dr Fate is what DC comics has instead of Dr Strange. He gets his powers from an ancient Egyptian helmet so naturally there are lots of stories where someone bad gets the helmet.
In a Keith Giffen miniseries he makes a demon mouth appear in mid air and projectile vomit raw eldritch plasm on Batman fucking killing him.In a Neil Gaiman future story the Fate helmet becomes all corrupt and old and vampiric and suchlike. It sits in a neoEgyptian temple being all...
...and then some idiot does and then Fate uses the poor bastard's mouth to deliver the following critique of Gygaxian cosmology: "Order. It's offal. Chaos. It's garbage. They were just different names for the same thing: The gurgle, ooze, purl and spurt of protoplasm, deluding itself that there's meaning. There is no meaning. Just the flesh. And death. And..." then the helmet sucks the life out of the guy wearing it falls to the floor and it lays there being gross.

Artifact or relic? Hmmm...

The Demon Bear that fought the New Mutants...

It's a demon. It's a bear. Need me to draw a map?

Shuma Gorath
Maybe Shuma-Gorath is cheating--the name is from RE Howard and the rest is pure Lovecraft, but there's something about the platonic tentacle-eyeball-nothing-else simplicity of old S-G that's terribly appealing. And why not give Gorath the same schtick as...

Starro The ConquerorNow, of all the possible individuals who might try to take over the world by having small duplicates of themselves climb onto everyone's face, Starro is maybe less my first choice than, say, Scarlet Johannsen, still, Starro is pretty cool.So cool I had a Starro attack the PCs at sea a couple weeks ago...

Marvel's Merlyn
In the case of Alan Moore's take on a manipulative, time-travelling, dimension-hopping Merlyn, a picture is worth a thousand words...
'

The Mindless Ones
They're big and tough and zap you and are from another dimension. Also they have no minds. Their "No. Appearing" figure is pretty grim.

Malekith The Accursed
What If... Robert Plant was a dark elf sorcerer in crazy warpaint who unleashed the Cask of Winters? Then you would be playing some excellent D&D is what. So enjoy that.

The Beast

Not not the blue guy who goes "Oh my stars and garters"--the creature from the Elektra: Assassin miniseries that's worshipped by ninjas and possesses people via evil milk. Also possessed of a fairly impressive traditional claw claw bite routine.

Mordru
There isn't that much that's special about Mordru per se--he's just another in a long line of beardy wizards--but that issue of Legion of Superheroes (the "Mordru-verse" issue) where he establishes complete Orwellian dominion over Earth using technomagical surveillance and controls all the other villains is pretty sweet.

Earth X Uatu
The gorgeous dysversal Earth X miniseries used Machine Man's origins in the old 2001:A Space Odyssey comic series as a backdoor to bring in a lot of visual references to Kubrick's film, but none more memorable than John Paul Leon's image of Marvel Comics omniscient, objective Watcher as a crippled, corrupt version of the 2001 Starchild collapsing under the weight of his own big smug overevolved head.

Ego, the Living Planet

Speaking of big heads. Got the All-My-PCs-Are-Level-20 blues? Have them fight a planet.

Klarion the Witch Boy
He's disturbing and so is his cat.


Etrigan The Demon + The Gargoyle

He's a duke of Hell, he speaks in rhyme and his soul is wedded eternally to an unfortunate scholar named Jason Blood. The only thing not totally D&D about Etrigan is his technicolor outfit...But that's easily fixed by saying he dresses like Marvel's similar-looking-but-less-cool-acting Gargoyle...