Almost Perfect

I adore everything about this sign...

except for that Oxford comma at the end, or, as it will be known going forward, the Cthulhu Comma!

"We need to stop Cthulhu - right meow!"

As hard as it is to believe now, Dungeons & Dragons was once a mainstream activity. It’s what the kids were playing in E.T. and I’m old enough to remember D&D clubs in my grade school. Someone once remarked that President Obama probably tried it at least once as an undergrad. Its ascendance was due to a confluence of circumstances that are never going to be repeated, but for a while it was HUGE.

D&D’s Golden Age is over, but role-playing still persists. The internet has been the perfect medium for Indie RPG projects and while none of them have a fraction of the market penetration that early Dungeons & Dragons did, the variety of games out there is mind-bogglingly staggeringly bonkers, and I for one am pleased beyond words that I live in a world where I can choose from several independently developed games where I can play as a cat fighting the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Doctor Who:Night of the Jackal

I had planned to run a Doctor Who RPG session at my birthday party last year, but that never came to pass. However, we managed to do it this year and it was a lot of fun.

Our characters were:

Bob Ross: Soft-spoken be-afroed painter of public television fame. In this universe, he has some kind of a Dorian Gray kind of immortality (he keeps meaning to complete that self-portrait, but always gets distracted by all those happy little accidents)

A time-displaced Anne Boleyn: Rescued the day before her execution. She is not sure what to make of the futuristic world of Victorian London, but she is determined to live her life to its fullets.

Coraline Magnus: Apprentice Time Lady working who had heard from her friend Romana that earth was a pretty great place. She’s working at the Red Tavern.

We also had two characters who dropped out of the game after an hour. Both players were kids, and they were expecting something different than what they got.

Chrysanthemum “Chrissie”  Íroas: A gallfreyan Time Tot who was enrolled in Hogwarts and sorted into Ravenclaw. She graduated at fifteen, but was unable to go home, because the Time Lords weren’t scheduled to pick her up for three more years and there were no protocols in place to bring her back early. Her player decided that her parents had sent her to earth because Gallifrey was going to be destroyed, which was news to Coraline.

Reaper from Overwatch: Hilariously violent and inappropriate. The party was attending a funeral as part of their investigation. When asked by the dead man’s sister how he knew the deceased, Reaper(falsely) claimed, “I killed him.”

Also of note was the Terminator trying to pass (unsuccessfully) as Sherlock Holmes. He overshot his mark by about a hundred years and he's just killing time solving mysteries while he waits for Sarah Connor to be born.
                     
I modified a published adventure, Night of the Jackals, from Cthulhu by Gaslight.  My original intent had been to run A Night in the Lonesome October game, but that idea fell by the wayside and the only vestige of it was that the two games happened to share the same Victorian London setting.

Of our three adult players, only one had ever played in a tabletop RPG, but they really took to it extremely well. Most people with whom I played began in adolescence.  They were great for first time role-players. They even came in costume!

We opened with Coraline receiving a message on her space-time telegraph.

Just then, Alan Paice, the owner of the Red Tavern (in this continuity) showed up and apologized to Coraline. He’d have to miss their weekly lunch because he had to attend the funeral of an old army buddy.

The party tagged along to the funeral and began investigating.  The kids disappeared at this point, and we all agreed that their characters were keeping an eye on Alan.

The other characters unraveled the mystery and the whole thing went very smoothly. I’m of the school of thought that players should never miss a vital clue due to a bad roll.  The trick shouldn’t be getting the information; the trick is putting it together correctly to reach the proper conclusion.

I think the biggest failure of the night was on me. I introduced the baddie later than I should have, and the scenario is set up to establish another character as a red herring. I didn’t want to lead them to the wrong conclusion by not giving them enough information. That’s not fair to do to new players and it’s a good way to sour them on the game. Unfortunately, I think I laid it on a little too thick. As soon as he showed up they called a sidebar and basically said, “This guy is obviously the villain.”

(In my defense, we were four hours by that point, and I think hurrying things along was probably the best choice, but it certainly could have been handled with a bit more finesse.)

We had some memorable moments, like the women putting on pants in order to pass as men to sneak into a gentleman’s club and the climax of the adventure came when Anne Boleyn chopped the head off the jackal-headed monster. Everybody was good, but Anne’s character was simply born to play that role.

It was all delightfully silly and everyone had a lot of fun.

Five things that will not actually make your movie better

Wow, this sounds like the title of a Cracked article.  This is my humble list of concepts that pop culture believes merge flawlessly like peanut butter into chocolate with any other property, but in fact, do not.

It's not a list of things that are bad. It's not a list of things I don't like because they're popular. Disliking something because it's popular is a particular trait of geek culture, and it's just as ridiculous as liking something because it's popular.

This is a list of things that I can enjoy in moderation, but they've all become so ubiquitous that they really hold no surprises anymore, and I'm less interested when I learn that one of these things will be present in a story.

Usually Bad 

1.) Zombies: Sorry, Jeremy, but oh, boy.

 Let's do an image search for "Sexy Zombie".

100 + more. Sweet, merciful Romero.

I've argued in this post about zombies and in this one about Berserkers that zombies work best as an environmental threat, something that's only dangerous if you're careless or screwed by your fellow humans. I like zombie movies, but I think zombies are only scary in the absence of a functioning society. Even the granddaddy of them all, Night of the Living Dead, recognizes this. The dead were spontaneously reanimating, and a couple people in close proximity to a cemetery had a really bad night, but by the end of it, a bunch of rednecks were making a game of killing the zombies.

Also, if all else fails, use bears.

The exception to the zombie rule is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book shamelessly plagiarized by that hack, Jane Austen.


2.) Tesla: Not the band.

(Well, okay, the band. They suck, but they're not awkwardly shoehorned into every property imaginable.)

Need 22nd century technology in the late 19th century? Nikola Tesla did it!

He's the patron saint of geeks. He was unquestionably a brilliant scientist. Like the other items on the list, he's not good or bad on his own, but he's ridiculously overexposed. I blame Elon Musk and the Oatmeal.

3.) Steampunk: Close cousin to number 2. Sometime a steampunk aesthetic can work. The Legend of Korra is outstanding example of building a steampunk look organically. It's mixed with a 1920's Shanghai vibe that gives the series a very cool look and feel. Unfortunately, for every cool Korra mecha tank (see below),













we have three Abe Lincolns with minigun arms.

"Looks like you brought a derringer to a minigun fight, Booth."
From the awesome site, Unnecessary Steampunk.

4.) Knight Templar: Ugh, these guy. I think that each of the above properties work well in their own milieu, but I can't say the same for the Knights Templar. They never work, and they're fucking EVERYWHERE,

We still use swords in the 21st Century. 

5.) Benedict Cumberbatch: The Mary Sue used to be an absolutely outstanding site until they abruptly merged with Geekosystem. Quality fell off a cliff, and now every other article is a warbled squee of "Maisie Williams/Joss Whedon/Benedict Cumberbatch did something!!!!!"

The Internet seems to want to cast him as everyone from Luke Cage to Sharon Carter, and while TMS is hardly the only offender, they are certainly among the most egregious.

Borderline

Bill Murray: A friend sent me a link with this message: "Did either of you see that Bill Murray has a movie out in which it looks like he just plays Bill Murray?"

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/stvincent/

I replied: I think we're nearing peak Murray. I love the guy, but dang, is he everywhere! I would hate to see the day when I see a headline about him and think, "Ugh, him again?", but, unfortunately, such a future is no longer inconceivable.

Usually Good

Cthulhu: The Cthulhu Mythos  is something that gets mashed up with a lot of stuff. An old acquaintance from my time at the comic store (and Jen's time at her church. You thought I was joking about Unitarians worshiping Cthulhu) wrote the 463 page Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance. It was published in 1999, and, due to the explosion of online publishing, I'd bet that it would be twice that size if it were written today.

Opinions will differ, but I think the reason that the Mythos meshes with other properties better than the other things I mentioned is because it's not just one thing. Read the Lovecraft eZine's submission guidelines to get an idea, or Wikipedia's piece on the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. It's more than just monsters with unpronounceable names and lots of tentacles; it's broad enough to encompass a number of interpretation, and that's why it's not a red flag like so many of the things listed. Are there terrible Mythos stories? Of course there are, but in general, it's not the Mythos elements that make them bad.

Call of Cthulhu: Cult of the Bloody Tongue Sandwich

We resumed our Call of Cthulhu game after several months. We're stumbling our way through Masks of Nyarlathotep. If you're not familiar, it's one of the most highly regarded campaigns for Call of Cthulhu (and, in fact, pops up on a number of lists for all-time best campaign, regardless of system). It's a huge, globe-trotting adventure, and we began this week's session by trying to decide where we'd like to have our TPK.

We opened with some guys in traction.  I missed an adventure, so I guess they got into trouble without me. Our GM pulled Dr. Bob away from the table. From later conversation, I learned that an enemy from before I joined the campaign had paid him a visit, and proposed a nonaggression pact offer we couldn't refuse. We would stay out of New York, and he wouldn't kill us.

So, the first thing we did was go directly into New York. There was an auction for some Mythos Tomes. Bob called Mogens (sp?), our warlock adversary to tell him that we'd be in Westchester for the auction, we wouldn't intrude on his business, and we'd be right out. And when we arrived, we learned that there had been a burglary attempt at the estate, and the auction had been moved to Manhattan. Wah wah wah. Before you could say "Can I use your phone?" our band was on their way.

We outbid the cultists calling in their bids on the phone and went home with their spoils. That night, half of the team fell asleep studying forbidden tomes. The rest of us drunk ourselves into a stupor and passed out, as per usual.

We each had a dream of drowning, ending with a yellow eye opening. Those of us who made our listen roll woke up and heard the home invaders. Those who didn't, didn't.

Oh, good lord. As I get older, I tend to like competent PCs, of whom the question is asked, "Should I do this?", rather than "Can I do this?" However, our collection of fuckups do lead interesting lives.

I woke up to the cultists breaking into the house. Like the action hero of your choice, I charged them. It was about then that I remembered my stats.

This is a semi-avatar game. We're playing 1920s versions of ourselves, with skills allocated based on our education and experience, and the player filling in the rest. My character has skills in chemistry, because that's what my degree is in, but I've never used it in the real world. I spent the rest pumping Library Use, Shotgun, Spot Hidden and Dodge, because it's fucking Call of Cthulhu and those are the only skills you need.

However...

HOWEVER...

They're not so useful if you don't have a shotgun.

I'm not a huge fan of BRP, the system that powers CoC. Eric does a great job with it, but I don't think it's all that suited for emulating Lovecraft's stories.

What it is great at is emulating a fight featuring a bunch of flabby thirty and forty-somethings. One of our members popped his stitches trying to escape. Another slept through five minutes of combat. Those of us who were fighting couldn't hit a damn thing. An overstuffed chair in the middle of the room was more dangerous than the rest of us.

I eventually grappled a cultist. I didn't realize how low my strength was until Eric requested it so the cultist could roll against it. That cultist repeatedly, and catastrophically failed his rolls to escape (after the game, Eric mentioned that he needed an 85 or lower to escape. Fortunately, the cultists are as bad at their jobs as we are.)

The sad part is, I was performing better than most of the rest of the team. We had someone pass out after a succession of failed rolls trying to cross the room. (He eventually woke up in time to turn off the gas stove before it killed us all.) A graduate student was almost killed by a lucky impale by one of the cultists.

We finally fought them off/got them to give up in disgust. Our next step was to book passage to England. Bob took out a second mortgage to pay for it. While on the ship, one of our party members souped up the engines, another wrote The Hardy boys meets Cthulhu, and I got beaten up attempting to improve my lockpicking skills.

We followed up a couple of leads in England. We failed catastrophically when pumping a contact information. We kept asking about the Carlyle expedition, when he was actually acquainted with our other avenue, Jackson Elias. I think the best thing that can happen to this group would be that everyone dies, so that we can all reroll characters who don't suck all the time.

On Marriage and Marriage Equality

I like the idea of weddings more than I like actual weddings. I like the optimism and the chance for new beginnings and better tomorrows that go with weddings.

When I get there, I remember that the ceremonies are often really, really boring and brevity is the greatest virtue to which they can aspire.

We attended our first same-sex wedding in April. I wasn't sure what Lily would think when we first asked at the dinner table, "Miss X and Miss Y are getting married. What do you think of that?"

She thought about it. One of her friend's parents is in a same-sex relationship, but I don't think she personally knows any other out gay or lesbian people. (Or more specifically, she's seven, and doesn't tend to think about that aspect of people's lives) When we mentioned that so-and-so had two moms, she initially didn't believe us. ("That doesn't make any sense! That would mean that she was born twice!")

She answer she gave after she thought about it for a little bit was, "I guess it's okay, as long as they love each other." And that's a pretty good answer. She's seven. She doesn't have much experience with same-sex relationships. Mommy and Daddy tell her that we believe people should be allowed to marry anyone they love, and that things weren't like that when we were little. This parallels conversations I've had with my parents, about how black people were denied certain rights by the majority when they were little.

I think that any uncertainty she has is the skittishness anyone has, when faced with something outside of her realm of experience. She just doesn't know what to think of it.

The African environmentalist Baba Dioum said, “In the end, we will only conserve what we love. We will only love what we understand. We will only understand what we are taught.”

I think our children should be taught that being gay is as normal and healthy as being anywhere else on the spectrum. That gay people exist, that they are human beings, that they are entitled the same worth and dignity that every human being deserves.

(And I'm sure I could find some conservative talking head saying "Parents like JOSH want to indoctrinate our children into homosexuality!", but no point in giving those guys a bigger soapbox.)

Jen's a Unitarian Universalist, and I'm not, but I've attended enough services to know their principles. The first is "The Inherent Worth and Dignity of Every Person", and that's a pretty good thing to believe in, in my opinion.

Do you want to summon shoggoths?

Maybe about six months ago, Lily was looking through my collection of Munchkin cards, because the art is a combination of creepy and cute that really appeals to her. She would occasionally ask questions if she didn't understand what was going on with a card.

She asked what an Elder Sign was. She understood that there was a joke here, but she didn't quite get what it was. I explained an Elder Sign as a kind of a symbol that keeps certain monsters away. In the absence of such a rune, the guy was just using a sign with "Elder" written on it to smack some monsters.

She thought that this was just about the funniest thing she had ever seen. She wants to share this joke with everyone, because she's certain that they'll find it just as funny as she does.

She was talking to my stepmother, and began the conversation with "You know what an Elder Sign is, right?", because she just assumed that adults all sit around discussing this kind of thing when kids aren't around.

I recounted this all on Facebook, and my friend/Cthulhu GM Eric offered "Do you want to summon shoggoths" (sung to the tune of "Do you want to build a snowman?" from Frozen) in the comments. He later expanded it to a post in his own blog, and I'm linking to it, because, like Cthulhu Munchkin and Eric himself, it's the perfect combination of creepy and cute.

Sumdog Millionaire

Yeah, yeah, predictable title. I know.

Sumdog is a site Lily's school uses to practice math at school. With her login, she can use the site at home as well. By solving math problems, kids earn coins to spend on their avatars. Every so often, they go up a rank. Everyone starts as a brown rat, and they go up through the ranks, they level up to the next animal, going  through common chimpanzee to blue whale to dhole to harpy eagle, or however the progression goes.

That was my first surprise. Apparently the dhole is a real animal. It's some kind of wild dog from Asia. It's kind of cute.

Awwwww....Cute!

The only dhole with which I was familiar was the one from the Cthulhu Mythos, the miles-long nightmare worm monsters, which I had to admit, would have been an unusual choice for an intermediate rank in a children's math game.

Ahhh!!!...Not Cute!

It's nice. Lily enjoys math and she enjoys the games and dressing up her avatar. I'm surprised to see problems that amount to elementary algebra at her level.

Solve for paw

Overall, it's a decent tool for a parent, and I like to be able to track her progress.

On our way to Swan Point to visit H.P. Minecraft

One of the big reasons that we were so excited about attending the Rhode Island Comic Con is because it put us close to Swan Point Cemetery. This was especially cool for me, because this trip was funded, in part, by a story I had sold to the Lovecraft Zine.

I love cemeteries. I always have. Every time I see one, I think of a line from Robyn Hitchcock's Airscape.

The tide recedes upon the bones of something beautiful and drowned.

Locally, we have Laurel Hill and West Laurel Hill. Should I ever make it to France, I'd really like to see the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial. My great-grandfather was involved in that offensive, but that's not the reason I'd like to attend. It just looks like a really beautiful place.

Kenobi Jen and Frederick also like cemeteries. They recently vandalized the grave where an orangutan is buried in the place of Edgar Allen Poe, and they wished to continue their reign of terror against HP Lovecraft's final resting place.

We drove around a bit, stopping every so often if there was a particularly picturesque monument to see, and we found the site. The leaves were turning and it was beautiful weather for a cemetery visit, chilly and overcast. It was a bit windy, too, however, and that made the act of getting the rubbing a little more difficult than it had to be.

Lovecraft's grave had a number of offerings near it.

Sorry, supplicants. Your offerings of pumpkin spice candles and escort service business cards aren't going to save you when the Old Ones rise.

 I'm familiar with the tradition of placing a stone on a grave to show it's been visited, and I guess this was a variation on the gesture. Either that, or someone was making it slightly more convenient for zombie Lovecraft to enter their house to eat their brains.

Jen Classic was sick and stayed in the car for most of it, though she popped out to take some pictures at my request.  Lily ran around and had a ball. My friends are very nice people. "Nice" is such a flabby word, but I think it fits here, because Jen and Jen and Frederick are all really decent,  thoughtful and considerate, taking the the time and putting in the effort to be good friends to people they like. Being both smart and kind is unfortunately a very rare combination, but these three folks have it in abundance, which is probably why Lily and I both like them so much.

I had this thought when Frederick let Lily perform a rubbing, while Kenobi Jen held the paper steady in the wind.

Lily knows the name Cthulhu, and can recognize a representation, but doesn't really have much of an idea of the whole Cthulhu, Mythos.(And I think I would be rather disturbed if she did, at seven years old.) There was a miscommunication and she thought we were visiting the grave of the guy who invented Minecraft. I thought that was pretty funny.

She used a couple different colors, and wound up with a very festive rubbing.

Sukie was the kid, she liked to hangout in the graveyard/She did brass rubbings, she learned you never had to press hard

PSA: Lovecraft eZine fundraiser

I'm fond of the Lovecraft eZine, in part because that's where my first story was published.

The Zine is a labor of love for Mike, and he actually puts more money into publishing it than he gets out of it. They're holding a little micro fundraiser, and if you like the fiction, the blog, the interviews, their Lovecraft news or the videos, please consider either donating or buying some of their stuff.

If, by some chance, you're not familiar with the Zine, cruise on over and check them out, and then consider doing the above.

A tale of Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

I was going to post about our weekend, but Jen went ahead and wrote the post that I was going to write. (There are two Jens in this story. The Jen I am married to is Jen Classic and the one who came to visit us is Kenobi Jen.)

The weekend started on a bleak note. The services for Nick, my friend and old boss, were on Friday night, and I headed over to the funeral home right after work. It was tougher than I had been expecting. Funerals are never easy, but the thing that really chokes me up is when the departed is surrounded by the things they loved in life. For Lily's grandfather, it was a picture of her. For Nick, it was Halloween napkins and comic book stuff. I don't know why that saddens me like it does. Maybe it's the juxtaposition, or the knowledge that they will never be around to enjoy the things they loved. I don't know.

I always think of a line from Slaughterhouse-Five that reminds me that we'll always have the memories of the people who are gone.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

So I said my goodbyes to Nick.

After that, the happy part of our weekend began. As the title suggests, it included Wiener dog racing, Cemetery walking, Cthulhu Worshiping, Animal Blessing, Oktoberfest, Temper Tantrums, Gravity Falls, Freaks & Geeks and protecting the world from the six-fingered hand of alien domination.

Our original plan was to head to the PA Ren Faire, but it turned out to be a bit further away than we had thought, and it was pricey to boot. So we settled on something almost as fun, but much less expensive.

Jen Classic, Kenobi Jen and I all went out for Indian at the place that had catered Lily's culture night. They were pretty decent. To hear Kenobi Jen tell it, she lives in some kind of post apocalyptic wasteland and subsists on gruel and and whatever roots she can forage. We all enjoyed the meal. Oma came to drop off Lily halfway through and we had an impromptu round of My Little Pony trivia. Kenobi Jen claims, over at her blog, that Lily won the contest, but that's just bullshit. Only Bill Clinton and Batman know more about My Little Pony than I do. I happen to know that she was hopped up on goofballs when she wrote that post anyway.

We returned home and watched some Gravity Falls. I stayed up a little later to play some of the new XCOM game. I loved the old one and while the new one didn't retain everything I loved about the old one, I don't think it has a single element that I don't enjoy tremendously.

Then we woke up in time to go the local Farmer's Market. Lily was moaning about going, but I don't know why. There are always a million dogs there and she gets to pet every single one.

After that, we headed to SteelStacks for their Oktoberfest and Wiener Dog Races. Jen Classic noticed that there were some people watching the races from a sparsely populated gallery, so we made our way up there.

Here's a picture if you think this was some elaborate troll about wiener dog races.

Apparently, too, wiener dogs are known by some other name sometimes, but I'm not one of your highfalutin' professors of dog-ology, so I couldn't tell you.

Then we went home and had some falafel and couscous and watched a little Avatar. Lily had a bit of tantrum, and while that's always embarassing, I'm sometimes kind of of grateful for it too, so my friends don't think we have this perfect little child.

Kenobi Jen was supposed to show me a good Matt Smith episode, but she was unable to find one, so we skipped it for now. Lily went to bed and got a bedtime story from all three grownups. Jen and Jen and I played a little Taboo, which was fun, (We didn't have the buzzer, so we just took turns reading off the cards) and we watched some Freaks and Geeks and I remembered why I fell in love with the show.

On Sunday, we went to Jen's church. She had a meeting before the service started, so Kenobi Jen and Lily and I walked around a local cemetery. Lily read three paragraphs of rules off the sign before losing interest, which is about two paragraphs more than most people.

We were at this particular service because it was their annual blessing of the animals. Because this was a Unitarian Church, in addition to the usual cats and dogs and birds, parishioners brought shoggoths and byakhee and mi-go. Somebody even brought Ghroth, but he had to stay out in the foyer.

It was a pretty fun visit. I'm glad that Jen was able to make it to see us.

Another post about Josh's weekend!

We had another in our series of good weekends. On Saturday, we got together with my friend Amy and her family and we all went to a local event with scarecrow building and pony rides. Jen built a new boyfriend

If he only had a brain

and the little kids had a great time burying me in straw.

A rare picture of me for your collection

Lily was positively euphoric for the pony ride. She was so excited for the whole thing. She went on five times and we gave the guy a good tip.

We went out for pizza afterward. You can tell that we're all parents because when Amy was moving one of the kids around, three pairs of hands reached for her ice tea to make sure it wasn't knocked over.

As we were leaving, Lily had seen some face painting. Amy's family had already taken off, and Jen thought that the other kids would be upset if Lily showed up looking like a little kitty. So on our way home, we stopped at the store and Jen picked up some face painting supplies and made all three of us into a family of puppy dogs. Best mom EVER!

In other news, I'm very proud of Lily. Her dolls are playing more nicely with each other. Princess Daisy is in the hospital with a broken arm and a leg. The other dolls are visiting her to wish her well.

She was watching a scary Scooby Doo movie and Scott Pilgrim was watching it in the other room. She heard him screaming and at first he denied it and said maybe an invisible person in another room was screaming.

Lily as Daisy: I went to every room and touched everywhere and didn't feel any invisible people.

Scott: How did you do that if you have a broken arm and leg?

Daisy: (After a very brief pause) Someone carried me and I used my good arm to touch things.

I thought that was some good reasoning on the spur of the moment.

After that she said, "If you were scared, that's okay. You're my best friend and you never need to be embarrassed around me."

On Sunday I went to church with Jen and Lily. Jen wound up teaching a Sunday school class, and I'm not into the whole Cthulhu-worship aspect of Unitarian Churches, so after they went to the classroom, I quietly slipped out of the church. Afterwards, I heard they put on a performance of The King in Yellow, and it was "mind-blowing".

I, of course, went to a local cemetery and walked around there. It was nice. Peaceful. They always are.

A friend recently asked me "What's the deal with you and cemeteries?" I'm not sure what it is. They say that in Europe they think 100 miles is a long distance and in America they think 100 years is a long time. I guess that's the reason. I think it's because they're one of those places in any town where time seems to run deep.

I said before that Lily seems to be recovering well from her burns. I guess she's carrying a little baggage with her though. I came back to the church as Sunday school was wrapping up and picked up Lily. We went down to the coffee room, but all the good snacks were already gone (the only thing was chicken in white ganglia sauce) so we went outside. I was wearing short sleeves, so Lily started asking about the scar on my arm. (I was burned by sulfuric acid in high school chemistry)

"Is that a first level burn or a second level burn?"

We talked about second degree burns in front of her, but not really to her. I'm surprised by how much she's internalized.

After that, it was on to a local Celtic Festival. Lily had another good time here too. She especially enjoyed the girls performing the step dancing. While it was going on, she said to Jen, "I might cry because this is so beautiful!" We ran into my friend Eric and his family and that added further to Lily's enjoyment.

That night she asked me, "Did you know that only men used to be allowed to vote?" I told her that I did, and I asked her where she learned that. She said it was at Sunday School. I knew the answer when I asked the question, but for all my teasing about Unitarians, I'm happy that my daughter is learning about Susan B. Anthony in Sunday school.

You mean to tell me it's the 30th century and they haven't cured Legionnaires' disease?

I don't know if I'd call myself a "fan" of the Legion of Superheroes*, but I've always had a soft spot for the the group. If I remember correctly, the very first comic book I ever read on my own was a Legion story. We were on a family vacation and I was probably being a pest, so my father bought me some comics to shut me up.

It was one of those digest editions you find at supermarket checkout lines, and it had the retelling of the origin stories of various Legionnaires. The one I remember most clearly is that of Ultra Boy. He was a teenager named Jo Nah who was swallowed by a space whale ** and gained super powers as part of the ordeal. I was probably around eight and I was thinking "Yes, that seems reasonable."

The series has been going on in one form or since 1958, with the occasional reboot every decade or so. As a result, its continuity even more snarled than usual for comic books. (Though I happen to like the mythology that comes with a long running series like this, like the concept of the flight ring and its distinctive design.)

The gist of the Legion of Super Heroes, in very basic terms, is that it's a large *** group of teenage superheroes in the 30th century whose members each have one kind of cruddy superpower. For instance, Triplicate Girl is a normal person with the power to turn into three normal people, Karate Kid works out a lot and Bouncing Boy turns into a ball.

And then there's the ringer. Sometimes Superman is on the team too, with his entire panoply of awesome superpowers. I was talking about this with a friend. She says Superman makes the other legionaries irrelevant. Well, yes, I suppose, but when I show up with two of my friends I make Triplicate Girl irrelevant too.

Like any long running series, the theme and quality of the work varies over time. It's usually more light-hearted in tone than most comics, though my favorite Legion story (and one of my favorite all time comic stories ever) comes from the gritty Legion period. It's called The Great Darkness Saga, and here's the gist of it.

Darkseid survived into the 30th century. Having been forgotten by almost everyone, he defeated the era's two most powerful villains (Mordru and the Time Trapper) and absorbs their powers, subsequently using those abilities to enslave the entire population of the planet Daxam, who have Superman level powers when away from their home planet (except they're vulnerable to lead instead of Kryptonite). Darkseid moves the planet to a yellow sun and then sends his legions outward. One of the first places they hit is an outpost manned by a couple rookie Legion members. They were Karate Kid, Element Lad and some other guy who I forget.

Darkseid "only" sent about ten thousand Daxamites against these three guys, but they were barely superheroes at all,so that was overkill by a factor of about ten thousand. In desperation, Element Lad turns the atmosphere of the planet to ten parts per million lead  and I was like, "Woah, hardcore."

The cartoon series is distinctly lighter, but no less enjoyable. We picked it up from from Netflix, and Lily really liked it (despite not really liking Superman). I like it too. I'm rather amazed that such a niche property got made into a cartoon. It's unabashedly a kid's show, but there are some things aimed at an older audience, like a robot butler named Wodehouse, or Superman flying out to the Oort cloud, or him being chastised by his teammates who think he's spending too much time with his girlfriend. (They tell him "There's no 'Alexis' in 'team'.") Also, Lobo gets a cameo and a 15-year-old girl steals his bike. (The Main Man, my ass.)

I liked the Justice League series, but there seemed too much effort to find parity between the various members of the team, which resulted in too many scenes of Superman being barely stronger than Batman or Hawkgirl reacting faster than the Flash. I'm really pleased to say there is no such balancing here. There have already been several scenes where Superman shows up, kind of shrugs and then demolishes all the supervillains that had been smacking around the rest of the Legion.

When talking about the scene below later Lily described them as "A pink lady, a fat kid, and a green girl."

A pink lady, a fat kid, and a green girl walk into a bar...

That's no green girl! That's Brainiac 5! He's a robot! With hair!

Also, I dig all the character designs, but especially those for Saturn Girl (whom Lily refers to as "Planet Girl") and Lightning Lad. I like her little freefloating Saturn earrings, and I like the fact that his eyes light up when he uses his power and so does his scar. They're both trivial details, but they serve to make the characters memorable.

Lily especially likes Phantom Girl, and she happened to be wearing a black and white dress the same day we watched the show.

Me: Hey, you're wearing a black and white dress! Are you Phantom Girl?
Lily: No, I can't pass through things.
Me: Okay.
Lily: And I don't have that symbol on my chest.
Me: Okay, I-
Lily: And my skin is pink, not white.
Me: Relax, dude. I was just making conversation.

I think there's a definite resemblance though.

I don't know about you, but I certainly can't tell them apart.



* Though others might disagree, as I have a ready answer in the unlikely event that I'm ever asked "Who's your favorite Legionnaire?" (Duh, Cosmic Boy. He's got cool magnetic powers.)

** When I related this to a friend, she replied "Oh, boy.  Jo Nah, huh?  Maybe he should have been swallowed by Cthulhu and become a Unitarian" which is the greatest comment anyone has ever made about anything. Because Unitarians worship Cthulhu.

*** Regarding the large roster: In New Year's Evil: Mr. Mxyzptlk #1, Mxyzptlk attempts to recruit a parody of the Legion, called the Logjam of Super-Heroes, from his comic book collection. Despite its many members, the only ones who were properly identified were Batter-Eater Lad, Beachball Boy, Butler-Eater Lad, Butter-Eater Lad, Button-Eater Lad, Kid Kid, Kid Lass, Lightning Lice, Loud Kid, Mutton-Eater Lad, and Negative Lass.

Where the sidewalk ends

Quite a bit happened over this weekend, both good and bad, but before that, giraffes!

My friend Karen reads this blog, but only because I sometimes mention giraffes. So rather than bury the giraffe portion in the middle, I thought I'd just put it right up front so she wouldn't have to search around for it.

I found this website, where a Russian family raises and sells petite lap giraffes. Have you ever seen anything cuter? I'm sure Karen will have some choice words about it, that's for sure.

When we were eating on Saturday, Lily said "I'm concerned about going to church," and I said "You're concerned?", because it was such a strange choice of words for a little kid and she looked at me and said, "I believe you know what concerned means?", which was of course, even stranger.

She went to sleep early on Saturday and woke up in a bad mood on Sunday. The mother of all bad moods. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood. I don't know what set her off.

As she was getting undressed for her bath, she hit me with the dress she had just taken off. I picked her up and told her not to do that, whereupon she blew a raspberry right in my face. I put her on time-out, which upset her even more. And the next hour and a half was pretty bad. Lily was saying, "I don't want a mommy or daddy any more! I don't want to live here!" and stuff like that, on and on.

She eventually calmed down in spite of everything and we took off for church in the nick of time.

We were looking forward to this for a while, because I rarely attend church with Jen and Lily, but I was going this week because Lily would be singing a couple songs as part of their program. It's fairly well known that Unitarian Universalists worship Cthulhu, and I'm somewhat uneasy with that.

Somehow he got left off this list of famous unitarians

(I can hear the complaints now. "I don't really like giraffes!" "We don't worship Cthulhu!")

Lily was pretty cute. Her age level perfomed two songs,  Love Grows in both spoken word and sign language, and a short ditty of the UU Principles set to the tune of one of her favorites, "Do, Re, Mi". ("One: Each person is worthwhile, Two: Be kind in all you do..." etc.)


I'd put a video up here, but blogger degrades the quality of hosted videos so much that it's not worth it. Since people mostly read my Lily posts when they feed into Facebook, I might as well just put the video up there.

We stopped in at a place Jen had read about in a local magazine, Hello Burrito. I liked the food. I loved the fact that the Yelp review to which I linked ranks the restaurant's ambiance as "Hipster".

We weren't done yet, because we took off to a local playground to play around for a while, even though the temps were still in the 30s.  We ran around for a bit until we were able to lure Lily away with promises of a brownie tasting at Terra Cafe. I read about it on a local blog that I happen to enjoy and it was really quite neat. They had live music and brownie samples in all the colors of the rainbow. The hazelnut and sea salt were nifty, but my heart belonged to the caramel bacon brownies.

This is what you eat in heaven. Unless you're a Unitarian. In their heaven, Cthulhu eats YOU!

When it came to buying some to take home, we were considerably more conservative, and got one each of the pineapple and the peanut butter.

As we were walking back to the car at the end of our very busy day, Lily looked at piece of broken sidewalk and very matter-of-factly declared, "Oh. This must be where the sidewalk ends."

I'm pleased we managed to reclaim as much of the day as we did. 

Very busy, very full weekend

Once again, my weekend comes too slowly and leaves too quickly.

Ancker came over on Friday night and and we ate pizza and watched Scott Pilgrim. Lily came home halfway through and we paused the movie, but she had seen enough of it to want to see "the movie with the knives in it!"

She didn't see that one, but she did watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on Saturday morning. She loved it. She's starting to like "scary stuff".  When we got together last week, the Lord told her that the Last Unicorn movie was scary and the next day at the breakfast table she was grilling us about why it was scary and telling us that she wanted to see it.

Her interests occasionally seem macabre, for instance, she shares my interest in walking around cemeteries (she learned her letters by reading tombstones) and one time when she was a baby she took out her pacifier and offered it to a skull with flashing LED eyes. Until recently she was consistently claiming that grey was her favorite color. However, those just happen to be things she likes and she doesn't like them because she thinks they're "scary", so this active pursuit of scary things is a new trait. I wounder how it will mesh with her interest in princess activities.

She is large, she contains multitudes.

I saw Nightmare in the theaters, before I met Jen. It was one of the few movies I wound up loving as much as I expected I would. It's a technical achievement, sure, impressive more than fifteen years later, but more than that, I like the story it tells. If you're not familiar with the movie, it's the story of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween town. He's grown bored with doing Halloween every year, and he's looking for something new. He happens across Christmas and decides he wants to do that instead.

So he goes back to the Halloween Town and tries to explain Christmas to the villagers, but they just don't get it until he starts explaining it in terms of Halloween. "Well...I may as well give them what they want..."

I don't know why I like it as much as I do. I think it's because they're so earnest. They love Halloween and it's the only thing they know and they have this new thing to celebrate and they love it too, but they don't understand it even though they're trying their hardest. So they try to make Christmas just like Halloween, because they don't know any better.

That's how I tried to explain it to Lily as we were sitting together. I really enjoyed watching it with her. For the first time, I felt like she was appreciating something in a really sophisticated fashion. She has a lot of interests in common with Jen, but watching this with her makes me think that she'll share more of my interests and I look forward to that as she gets older.

Though long-time readers of this blog will know that I sprung forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus, I do have relatives. In the early afternoon, we went to my Grammy's house to have our annual holiday visit with my cousins. They're actually my second cousins, my father being first cousins with their mom. We were pretty close when we were kids, but as our extended family dwindled, we saw less and less of each other, generally meeting only at these holiday get-togethers and the more frequently and less happily, at family funerals.

It was really pretty nice.  We spent some time playing genealogy Tetris figuring out how Lily is related to my cousins, (second cousins, once removed) but since I had looked this up last time we didn't have to spend a lot of time figuring out the rules and we had one less thing to talk about.

We skipped out kind of early to go to our second holiday party, up at Eric's house. The kids made little Christmas trees with ice cream cones and green frosting. Lily told Frederick and Eric about "Halloweentown", which is her name for Nightmare. It's also her favorite song. Every time it ended, she asked me to go back to the beginning of the song and she was singing right along with it with a big smile on her face, "I am the shadow on the moon at night/filling your dream to the brim with fright!"

We came home to a very cold house. At the time, we thought that we had run out of fuel and Jen was on the phone with the company trying to get an emergency shipment delivered, but they wanted $300 to come out on the weekend, so we walled off the living room and camped out there with the space heater. It dropped to 46 degrees in Lily's room! I was thinking that it was probably warmer outside my mom's house in Florida than it was in my house in NJ.

I don't usually attend church with Jen and Lily, opting instead to spend my time playing video games, but Lily had her little concert on Sunday and I wanted to attend that. My Grammy came along too. Lily was up in the front row and when the worship leader mentioned that they'd be passing around the microphone for the benefit of new visitors, she started bobbing up and down and said "My Grammy's a new visitor!" Grammy was a good sport and called for the microphone and introduced herself.

The service was nice enough. Each of the different age groups of kids had something to do. Lily's group did carols, older kids put on a play about what things would be like for Jesus if he were born in modern day Bethlehem, PA with a real baby as the baby, another group of kids staged a scene of the war of the Maccabees using light sabers (while the pianist played the Star Wars theme music) followed by a scene where the light sabers became the menorah candles. I imagine your church has done something similar for their Christmas pageant.

Oh, they're Unitarians!

(Currently, my blog is the number one result for arroyo Zelazny on Google. My new goal is to the number one hit be for the phrase Unitarians worship Cthulhu.)

Jen's mom showed up at the service, so we went down to coffee hour. I was holding Lily. Her new thing is to ask if I want a kiss. If I say yes, she says "Not gonna do it!" and if I say no then she kisses me while I say "Yuck! Gross! Kisses are icky!" We did that and then we all took off for brunch at Perkins. I had the N'awlins Benedict, with "Cajun grilled chicken, marinated shrimp, smoked sausage, diced tomatoes, topped with two basted eggs and chipotle hollandaise sauce". It was terrible for me, but super delicious.

We usually rendezvous at a local market to hand Lily over to Jen's mom, but since she was already there, we just did the exchange early. Then we checked Jen's phone and learned that the oil company had been trying to reach her. They figured out that we were on the prepayment plan, so they'd be delighted to come out and give us some oil. So they did, and it turned out we had a bunch of oil, but a nozzle was clogged, and that's why we didn't have any heat. So the guy fixed that and we were warm again!

Jen and I watched (500) Days of Summer, and we're 0 for 2 for Sunday night movies. Little Miss Sunshine was just cynical and manipulative and so was Summer. It had everything I hated about Garden State. Not even the adorable Zooey Deschanel or my hetero-crush Joseph Gordon-Levitt could make this movie watchable. It made me think about the movie Pi, which I watched up in New Hamster with Tim and his then-roommate Tom. Tom walked in as the movie was wrapping up and the tortured mathematician is looking at himself in the bathroom mirror before he picks up a power drill and drills a hole in his head. Tom matter-of-factly observed, "Huh. I thought I knew all the drilling-a-hole-in-your-own-head movies out there." I was fighting down the urge to pull a Pi through every excruciating minute of this movie.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: The Changing Land

I liked the original collection of Dilvish stories, but I figured that's all I was going to see of him. It wasn't my favorite of Zelazny's worlds, but I didn't hate it like I did  Lord Demon or  A Farce to be Reckoned With. I gave it a B- on the page with all my rankings.

I've mentioned in the past that I would buy Zelazny books without even reading the cover, on the strength of his name alone. Consequently, when I started the Changing Land, I didn't know I was reading the follow up to the Dilvish anthology until I was underway.

In my earlier review, I had likened Dilvish to the pulp sword & sorcery characters. I had a vague recollection of there being some cross-pollination between Robert E. Howard's work and H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos stories. I checked with my friend Tim, who is something of an authority on Robert E. Howard and he got back to me with this helpful link and the information that Howard's non-Conan stuff has way more Cthulhu/Mythos-related stuff.  So that's cool.

I bring this up because but the plot centers around Tualua, ("...one of the Old Ones—the ancient, tentacled kin of the Elder Gods...") who is an expy of  Cthulhu (he's identified as Cthulhu in the A Cthulhu Mythos Bibliography & Concordance, which was written by a guy from my wife's church. No lie.) (They're Unitarians, so they worship Cthulhu already) I would assume the slight change is not due to copyright issues but just because the name Cthulhu is so overused that it's distracting.

The story seems to take place not all that long after the last of the short stories in the previous collection. Jelerak is still weak from his earlier confrontation.  The Society (they used to be called the Brotherhood, but the Circle of Sorceresses, Enchantresses, and Wizardresses raised a fuss, and finally got it changed) believes that Jelerak might flee to Castle Timeless, so they have stationed wardens to dissuade visitors from intruding. The warden speaks to those who arrive on the day the story begins and we discover that Arlata of Marinta, Weleand of Murcave and Dilvish all seek to enter Castle Timeless, each for his or her own reason. I though this was a cool way to get a lot of information in a hurry. (It certainly worked better than the infodump about each of the psychics in Eye of Cat.)

It had a nice supporting cast. Semirama was an interesting character. Arlata was neat too, and so was Baran of the Extra Hand. I liked most of minor characters, with the exception of the bunch of sorcerers chained up in the dungeon. They were boring and I found myself skimming their interludes.

Arlata is an elf maiden. It's worth noting that the elves in the Dilvish series are mostly human in appearance, i.e. they don't have pointy ears. (Though, if I recall  Tolkien's elves, the progenitor of the archetype, are described as having leaf-shaped ears only once, and that's ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation.) Arlata is a dead ringer for her grandmother—Fevera of Mirata, whom Dilvish loved. Dilvish, we learn resembles his illustrious forebear Selar very strongly. Semirama, the queen resurrected by Jelerak in order to speak with Tualua, once loved Selar. I don't think this is all that realistic, (whatever that means in this context), but it's a trope of the pulp genre, so I'll go with it.

We get some memorable passages.

Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfeltselior had seldom been exploited by terrestrial adepts, inasmuch as the use of a demon's name was necessary in those rites binding him to servitude. One missed syllable and the conjurer would step from the circle smiling, to discover that the demon was smiling also.

Then, leaving the remains artistically disposed about the conjuring area, the demon would return to the infernal regions, perhaps bearing with him some small souvenir of an amusing interlude.

It was Melbriniononsadsazzersteldregandishfeltselior's misfortune, however, that Baran of the Extra Hand hailed from Blackwold, where a complex, agglutinative language was spoken.

Could anyone in the world but Roger Zelazny have written that?

A sorcerer named Holrun examines the spell blocking the transport mirror:

One line was thinner than the other, indicating a high pitch to the sorcerer's voice as he had uttered that sound. Normally, a spell commenced on a lower note than it ended, though this was not always the case. Either line, for that matter, could also represent a preliminary gesture. He moved nearer and made momentary contact with the heavier line. The blue coil flashed toward him, but he had already withdrawn by the time it arrived, bearing one piece of information away with him: the line echoed on contact! Therefore, it was a word, not a gesture... The seventh term ended with a hard consonant and the eighth began with one. The same applied to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth words. He ran by them again. The caesura between the seven-eight pair was slightly longer.

I commented in the earlier Dilvish review that I like that we get bits and pieces of how magic is put together in this world and I'm glad that this practice continues in this book. This in particular reminds me of logic puzzles I did as a kid. "If Sue is two thirds as old as Steve will be in three years, and Jim is the oldest and Jane is half as old as Sue was two years ago..."

Another very Zelazny passage:

Monstrously ancient structures of an imposing nature are not in the habit of having been constructed by men. Nor was the Castle Timeless an exception, as most venerable cities trace their origins to the architectural enterprise of gods and demigods, so the heavy structure in the Kannais which predated them all, and which had over the ages served every conceivable function from royal palace to prison, brothel to university, monastery to abandoned haunt of ghouls—changing even its shape, it was said, to accommodate its users' needs —so it informed with the echoes of all the ages, was muttered by some (with averted eyes and evil-forfending gesture) to be a relic of the days when the Elder Gods walked the earth, a point of their contact with it, a toy, a machine, or perhaps even a strangely living entity, fashioned by those higher powers whose vision transcended that of mankind—whom they had blessed or cursed with the spark of selfconsciousness and the ache of curiosity that was the beginning of soul—as mankind's surpassed that of the hairy tree-dwellers counted by some as his kin, for purposes best known only to those shining folk whom it at least served somewhere, somehow as an interdimensional clubhouse before those beings absented themselves to felicity of a higher order, leaving behind the unripened fruits of their meddling in the affairs of otherwise satisfied simians; fashioned, in the opinion of some metaphysicians, on a timeless plane out of spiritual substances and, hence, not truly a part of this grosser world to which it had been transported, consisting as it did of equal measures of good and evil and their more interesting counterparts, love and hate, compounded with a beauty, therefore, that was both sinister and beatific, possessed of an aura as absorbent as a psychic sponge and as discriminating, alive in the sense that a man with only a functioning portion of his right hemisphere might be said to live, and anchored in space and time by an act of will imperfect because divided, yet superior to normal earthly vicissitudes for all the unearthly reasons the metaphysician would not care to recite a second time

The book gets a bit silly near the end, but I don't mind, because a little silliness is in keeping with the genre:

"Oh, it's going to take a tedious human sacrifice to straighten out our Old One. It wouldn't if I were in better form, but that's the way it is just now. Don't worry, I've a virgin locater spell I can use."

Of course you do.

"There you are, Jelerak, as I should have guessed I'd find you—surrounded by toads, bats, snakes, spiders, rats and noxious fumes, next to a big pool of shit, about to tear out a girl's heart!"

Jelerak lowered the blade.

"These are a few of my favorite things," he said, smiling,

We learn that Black is not quite a demon. Tualua to Black:

The man thinks you a demon, little brother.

Let him. We've other problems.

That reminds me of one of the (very few) cool things from the Merlin books, the hints that Greyswandir was "something else" before it was a sword.

Dilvish is captured and thrown in with the boring captured sorcerers. They escape and there is a bit of wandering around in the castle. Eventually the maintenance spell is disrupted and the castle becomes unmoored in time.

"It has decided upon a smaller scale this time around. But the main reason is that the Great Flash will soon occur, for we left at a very fast pace, as the house requested—"

"Excuse me, Dark One," Hodgson shouted as they passed through the alcove and started down upon the stair, "but this Great Flash—are you referring to… ?"

"The creation of the universe," Black finished. "Yes. We are going all the way around. At any rate, after the flash we will be passing through a dangerous belt inhabited by beings which would do us the worst sort of harm."

Squee! It's the Hounds of Tindalos, all lean and athirst!  (The book calls them the Hounds of Thandolos, and I don't know if Zelazny felt obligated to change the name slightly or if he just got it wrong)

Black references the Garden of Blood from the first book. I'm a sucker for continuity porn.

The Bells of Shoredan story in the Dilvish, the Damned collection has two references to black doves:

In the sky then he saw the shapes of the nine black doves that must circle the world forever, never to land, seeing all things on the earth and on the sea, and passing all things by.

and

"There!" [Dilvish] said, gesturing. "There is your sign of his goodness and light!"

Nine black doves circled in the heavens.

The Changing Land concludes with this quote:  Somewhere in the world the black doves were singing as they headed for their landing and their rest.

It was neat to get some resolution, though, all things considered,  I'd have preferred a sequel to Roadmarks or A Night in the Lonesome October, but it was nice to see Dilvish one last time.