Finally Figured Out My Current Job

For those gentle readers who are not aware, my current job is a cashier/counter person at the local game store. And I'm coming to realize that part of my job is being a bartender to geeks.

When there's no one else to talk to, there's always the bartender. If you want to talk about Naruto, your Magic: The Gathering deck, Warmachine, Warhammer, or your D&D character, the bartender is always there. He'll listen, and on occasion give encouragement, because there are few enough places to talk about these things with people who understand, or at least sympathize.

There will be the occasional story told here, generally with the names changed, which will be placed under the "Bartender to geeks" label.

Wargods of Egypt: Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War

Well, the Egypt thing just isn't going away. Over the last couple of months, I've picked up a couple of computer games that allow you to command the forces of Ancient Egypt.

Rise and Fall, Civilizations at War is a colorful game about raising armies and then throwing them at your opponent. It is also a firm believer in the heroic leader concept: your general is the stompiest badass on the field. In addition to the usual resources of gold and wood, Rise and Fall also uses the concept of glory. Glory can be used to increase to upgrade your hero's level, or to level up units. In Egyptian fashion, the more prestigious your units are, the more clothing they tend to wear. And the more graphically pretty they are.

Gameplay is otherwise bog-standard real-time strategy. Build structures that allow you to recruit forces. Some troops work better against other sorts of troops (spear-carriers do well against cavalry, for example). As an archery fan, I am sad that I can't get the sun covered by arrows effect of massive arrows in the air, but the Egyptian chariot archers that use fire-arrows satisfy me well enough. I tend to avoid the camel-mounted units, since the Egyptians did not use domesticated camels.

Rise and Fall is a good game to play I want to spend an hour beating down Romans or Persians. Once the rather short campaigns are done, all that's left is to play skirmishes against the computer on the various provided maps. Which is too bad, because the on-line community hasn't created a lot of them.

Still, the gameplay is engaging, the graphics are solid. Here's a pic of the Egyptian Ramses among his elite khepesh-wielding troopers:

Unbound Unleashed

I have copies of the first volume of Cthulhu Unbound in my hands. It should be available at your local bookstore on March 30^th, but if you want copies early, there's a book party tomorrow, Saturday the 21^st at Bennington's South Street Cafe, 5-7PM.



Contents are as follows:
"Noir-Lathotep" by Linda Donahue
"The Invasion Out of Time" by Trent Roman
"James and the Dark Grimoire" by Kevin Lauderdale
"Hellstone and Brimfire" by Doug Goodman
"Star-Crossed" by Bennet Reilly
"The Convenant" by Kim Paffenroth
"The Hindenburg Manifesto" by Lee Clarke Zumpe
"In Our Darkest Hour" by Steven Michael Graham
"Blood Bags and Tentacles" by D.L. Snell
"Bubba Cthulhu's Last Stand" by Lisa Hilton
"Turf" by Rick Moore
"The Menagerie" by Ben Thomas
"The Patriot" by John Goodrich
"The Shadow over Las Vegas" by John Claude Smith
"Locked Room" by CJ Henderson

"The Patriot" is about a man who gets a macabre history lesson while dying in the muddy No Man's Land of World War One. I think it's got the best ending of anything I've written.

For a quick preview, I present you with another Wordle of the story. I like this the composition and atmosphere of this one better. Click on it to see a larger version.



My next project is to make up some "Signed by local author" tags to stick in the books I put on the counter of the Gamers Grotto.

What did You Do This Weekend?

I was incredibly geeky. My brother came up, and recorded a battle report for a Warmachine fight against the Master Painter and his mercs. Here's the first part of the battle report, which look to be more interesting that the battle itself.



Thanks, Iren Bear. This looks awesome.

Most Eldritch

This awesome lady and her sign were seen at a Chicago counter-protest of the Westboro Baptist Church:



Today is full of win.

The Problems with Pundits

I try not to blog my politics. There's a hundred better-informed political blogs out there. However, the pundit problem is starting to piss me off. I see a lot of people blindly accepting their conclusions, then repeating those views on message boards and in conversations.

There are several problems with this.

1) First and foremost, no one should take what anyone says without thinking about it. This is so basic that it should be obvious.

2) No pundit has ever had to compromise with another lawmaking body. Democratic laws are made by compromise. A pundit never has to worry about what the members of other branches of the government have to say about it. The majority of their proclamations are unusable for this reason.

3) Hypothetical enactments never run into unintended consequences. When Idi Amin Dada (yes, I'm comparing the average ego-bloated pundit with a mass-murdering dictator with a massively overinflated ego. Often, I feel the difference between the two is opportunity) threw all the Asians out of Uganda, it seemed like a great idea to him. However, he didn't realize he'd gotten rid of his country's middle class, which was disastrous for the economy. Ooops. Since pundit proclamations never have to deal with reality, their hypothetical solutions never have unforeseen consequences.

Free Fiction

So I've been updating my website, a nip here a tuck there, changing the title of the anthology that was renamed six months ago. And while checking for webrot, I discovered that the 2007 Horror World gross-out contest I placed in has gone away.

So I now offer you the chance to read my gross-out story "Champagne" free on my website. And yes, it really is pretty gross.

Still Don't Get It...

As I'm shoveling four inches off the driveway, I still can't understand my obsession with Ancient Egypt. A hot desert land that worshiped the burning sun. What's up with that? Well, back to shoveling...

Semiotics First Thing in the Morning

Semiotics is awesome because it allows me to break stuff down and gives me a vocabulary to express my thoughts. After taking another bite of Basic Semiotics last night, I woke up this morning with this in my head: “Diablo and World of Warcraft are unappealing to me partially because they present truncated and broken mythemes. There is never any resolution to the plot, only the dispatcher endlessly dispatching, the hero endlessly slaying and gaining a reward. But the acquisition of the object is not the conclusion of the plot, it is a tool to solve the problem.”

Inappropriate Appropriation

When an artist or a writer borrows, it's usually a good idea to put a twist on when they've 'homaged,' lest they be seen as derivative, or get landed in a lawsuit. This came home to me when this showed up in my mail:



This is a depiction of the famous for horsemen of the Apocalypse, War, Famine Plague, and Death. But the picture really looks a lot more like War, Famine, Plague, and a Nazgul. Look at the guy on the left. His buddies are all in Roman costume, with the crown of olive leaves around Plague's head, and the Roman blade in War's hand. But Death? Pure frikkin' Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

 

Nice way to hide your inspiration, Mr. Anonymous artist.