The Gaming Den

On that note, "Columbian drug bosses" in the Wet Work section should be "Colombian drug bosses". Narcos or narcotraficantes might be even better.

I get most of my news from Lenin's Tomb (British SWP blogger) and Immanuel Wallerstein (post-marxist sociologist). The BBC and NYT are IMHO very right-wing, but I accept their versions of the facts unless they're talking about, e.g., Haiti, Hugo Chavez, or street demonstrations; I also can't read th...

Floaters (All due credit to Lucius Shepard 1 , 2 ) Maybe you've never had the unnerving experience of something approaching you from your blind spot, until it suddenly occupies a third of your field of vision. Probably you know what it's like when you get something in your eye and you lower your he...

Waiting Rooms Readers' Digest, Highlights for Kids, a Williams-Sonoma catalog, and ancient back issues of US Weekly. The fluorescent lighting is too blue or too yellow and hums in two different pitches. An inner room in a suburban office complex, no windows and no bars on your phone. It feels like ...

See what their friends are planning - probably. See what their enemies are planning? Well, maybe for someone swinging back a giant club, or a mage charging his hands with thunder, but what about the sneaky ones, eh? The whole point of most "sneaky guy" maneuvers is that the target doesn't...

Taoism was invented to keep chinese peasants in a subservient position. Everything else is flavor text. I reject any philosophy that tells me I should stay in the place I was born. Whether or not that concept is correct is irrelevant, if the universe really does rely on my being lowly then that onl...

"lek" is medicine. Same root as "liquor".

If we go the Narnia route of having separate mundane and magical worlds, then those from the Narnia side should have true names, and those from Edwardian England shouldn't. But IMO that takes the setting too far from the Brothers Grimm, which I vastly prefer. I'd rather map the named/unnamed dichoto...

Yeah, again, I read that about the internists in the Guatemala City paper, so don't assume it's true. 159 suspected deaths, with only seven confirmed, in a city of 20 million is not a big deal.

I've been following this fairly closely since I'm living in Guatemala right now. Standard flu vaccinations don't do anything, but they'll have a vaccine for this strain in a couple months apparently. The newspaper here reported that two internists in a Mexico City hospital died despite having been v...

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If the US and Mexico had a government-run universal health care plan, how much of the effects of swine flu would have been mitigated?

Mexico's got universal health care, sort of.

I remember being really impressed seven or eight years ago by the miniatures, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the rules. They had an incredible painter working for them who used no metallic paints and just shaded anything metal an appropriate color. Kind of sad to see that they've gone back to...

Everyone should just let their freak flags fly. I'm a straight white american, but at this point I think the biggest influences on my ideas about sex and relationships have been the novels of Samuel Delany, so I think I could be in a polyandrous relationship. As long as I got along with the other gu...

I think this kid has a bad case of imagining scenes he thinks would be cool in a movie, then writing them down. That's my immediate reaction to crap like they were in the dark, and then using hand signals--in a movie scene in the dark, you can of course still see everything relevant. Also, his assum...

Schwarzenegger probably believes in McCain, but I doubt he worships him. Stupid Schwarzenegger, going to the wall of souls when he dies! All he had to do was kneel.

It's totally possible to deny the existence of the gods even with plenty of evidence for them right in front of you. David Brin does a really great job with this idea in Thor Meets Captain America (nothing to do with comic books). "Loki's dwarf rolled its eyes and moaned pitifully as the sub le...

I think, rather than magic, we need a general phlebetonium layout, with clearly defined domains of what's magical, whats qi-based, and whatever else is inherent in the metaphysics of the system--Frank's metaphysics post in the Wuvu-au-lua thread, for example, implies at least one type of phlebetoniu...

I'm basically a better-groomed Charles Manson in the crazy eyes department, but no way would I creep into your nightmares. I prefer dreams about cupcakes/dolphins. I was hanging out with Australian identical twins last month and I didn't even realize they were related. They looked similar but I just...

I strongly recommend Steve Erickson's (not the Malazan author) novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, Arc d'X, if you can deal with some heavily surrealistic parts. Last time I checked (2004) copies were one cent on Amazon.

Here I am on Halloween right before I went to sleep.

So if there are more rage zombies because there's more ghost, and the rage zombies feed on ghost to get bigger, what stops the swamp from becoming one huge ghost storm filled with rage zombies? There needs to be a negative feedback mechanism somewhere. Which hopefully won't be "the Wuvu keep th...

I was in Buenos Aires last week. Argentinians are the coolest and most beautiful people in the world. They even beat the French. It's not incredibly cheap (the midwestern US is probably a little cheaper) but I get why the bankers would go there, though if they spoke Spanish I'm sure they'd find that...

How would you feel about not really having a distinct kind of skellingtons and restricting types to spirits and 28 Days Later style zombies? They're scarier, they make better top predators, and they give Wuvu-lu-aua sound reasons to master puppeteering others - when one of those suckers breaks the ...

5-day hippie river rafting thing You said the H word. There are spades of vegan hippies living around here. They smell foul. To the point where I see dreadlocks, and I cross the street. The ex-girlfriend from whom I acquired my veganism is vegan because she was a punk when she was a teenager, so ge...