I found out last night that Randy “Biscuit” Turner died last week. This makes me sad.

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/statesman/2005/08/19biscuit.html

Biscuit was the frontman for one of the all time great punk bands, the Big Boys. They were a Texas band that put some funk into punk in the late 70s and early 80s. Absolutely amazing band and of course little known outside of punk circles. If you can imagine what it would have been like to be punk and gay in Texas in 1980, you have an idea of what Biscuit had to deal with. Nonetheless, the Big Boys anthem was the song “Fun, Fun, Fun”. The article says nothing about cause of death. I wonder if there was foul play. Looks like the fun has come to an end.

Man, nearly all the Ramones are dead and in the past couple of years we’ve also lost Robert Quine, Joe Strummer, and now Randy Turner, yet the Rolling Stones are still touring. What the hell?

We had a Green Ronin summit over this past weekend. It was the first time we’ve actually gotten all seven of us in one room. Oh, we’ve gotten close during cons, but Evan usually doesn’t come out for those so it took until now for the Magnificent Seven to come together. We had a very fruitful weekend of meetings, punctuated by meals, libations, and demented humor. I don’t have anything to say about the business end of things; you’ll see the results of that over the next couple of years. I do want to say, however, that I absolutely adore my staff. Not only are they each a huge asset to the company, but they are great people as well. It’s so rare to have a group of people working together who all click, and who can bring out the best in each other. I’m lucky to have them, especially considering the challenges of 2005 to date. Everyone has stayed with us and done great work under enormous pressure. It’s hard to communicate the scope of their loyalty, industry, and ingenuity, but I thought a public shout out was due. So mondo thanks to Nicole, Hal, Rob, Steve, Evan, and Sparky. You kick ass.

While America declines day by day, at least there is one silver lining: our modern dystopia is great for comedy. Just think about the Daily Show. Would it be half as funny if Al Gore were in his second term? No sir. And since so much of the media is so useless at actual journalism, we should be thankful we have the comedians too. Bill Maher’s show and the Daily Show have more actual insight into what’s going on in the world than most news programs. Plus, dick jokes.

Let’s look at the events of the last month. First a big natural disaster shines a bright light on the dark corners of cronyism in the Bush administration (“You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie!”). And yet, scant weeks later what do we see with a nomination to the Supreme Court no less? A Bush loyalist with no actual judicial experience sucking on the sweet teet of Queen Crony. You can’t make shit like this up. It is pure comedy gold.

I was hoping it’d be great, but I think I’d give it a solid B. Some cool stuff, some witty dialogue, and I liked the revelation about the Reavers, but the film ended on such a false note that it draggeed it down in my opinion. I also pity anyone in the audience who hadn’t see the tv show, as the film doesn’t explain fundamental things about some the characters. What a companion is, for example. “Well, she’s hot and she used to do something in a shuttle, but now lives in a monastery and prays to Buddha. Hmmmm.” I think Whedon has some work to do before he can make his magic on the big screen as effectively as the small.

I got sick two weeks ago and spent a couple of days incapacitated in bed. The worst of it was over in three days, but symptoms lingered until just yesterday. I continued to sneeze and cough and had a bit of a rattle in my chest. Nothing debilitating, but it was quite annoying. I went back to work and even did some socializing but it just keep dragging on. Now I am finally feeling like I kicked it. It’s about damn time. No health insurance is just another great “perk” of running your own game company.

I don’t have a lot to report right now. There’s plenty going on but little of it I can talk about in public. I will say that Mutants & Masterminds is finally shipping out of our warehouse this week, after a seemingly interminable transit from the printer. It’s a good thing too. I think fans were getting ready to form a mob and come to our offices. It’s a kickass book too, especially when you consider the circumstances under which it was completed. Soon now it’ll be in a store near you.

I just watched the new episode of the Batman animated show, the first of a two parter on the origins of Batgirl and Poison Ivy. I haven’t seen this new Batman show at all, but I had to tune in to this episode because an old and dear friend of mine is the voice for Poison Ivy. Piera moved to LA a little before I moved to Seattle to pursue an acting career. She’s had some success over the past couple of years doing voice acting (she was the Night Elf in Warcraft III and is she is “the Darkest Faerie” in Neopets: the Darkest Faerie). It doesn’t get much cooler than getting to portray a classic villain of the Batman though. And she does a great job too, though it is odd to hear my friend’s voice coming out of the TV. So congrats to Piera, long may Poison Ivy reign.

“The German people seemed to be quite happy with the way things had gone early in the war. Even with the invasion of Russia, morale was good when things went well in the beginning. The German population in general saw communism as a social evil because of the reports coming out of Russia prior to the war–reports of mass starvation as government policy, of mass executions of political opponents, and of the brutal forced relocation of millions of peasants. And these things were known in Germany, and of course the Propaganda Ministry emphasized and magnified them. And, of course, the population, perhaps cynically, would not have objected to our acquiring the food-producing Ukraine and the oil-producing Caucasus.

“Since our losses in Russia were becoming more and more severe, however, things were beginning to change. During the quick campaigns in Poland, France, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece, we’d had heavy losses but our losses ended quickly because the campaigns were short. On the Russian front, our per-day losses in the beginning were lighter, but they never stopped–they continued day after day, week after week, month after month. And as time passed, our casualties kept getting heavier. Our losses were never reported at home, but more and more families had sons who had been killed or badly wounded. Slowly, the people began to get the picture, not from the government, but indirectly from talking to one another. Strangers in a store or in a line waiting to buy milk would talk to each other. What had happened to my family was not different from what had happened to many others, and now it was becoming apparent to everyone that things were not going well in Russia. Of course, everyone hoped that with a spring offensive things would go well again. We learned how to interpret the news, because the Propaganda Ministry always used the same language to describe the same situations. For example, the use of “heroes” or “heroic” always meant we had suffered heavy losses. When we read about the “heroes of Tula”, we knew we were losing the battle for Tula.”

From Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936-1949, by Siegfried Knappe

I caught a PBS show called Journey to Planet Earth today. This episode focused on Uzbekistan and the ecological disaster in the Aral Sea. I had no idea what’s been going on over there and it’s a real eye opener, particular when BushCo continue to degrade our own environmental protections.

Uzbekistan was the site of an ambitious Soviet irrigation project in the 60s. One hundred thousand miles of irrigation canals turned desert into cotton-yielding land. It also turned the biggest river in the country into a trickle. Over the years more and more water was sucked into the countryside, drastically reducing the amount of water that dumped into the Aral Sea—once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water. Over the past forty years the Aral Sea has halved in size. This has been an ecological disaster of enormous scale. Uzbekistan’s largest port is now 90 miles from water. A sea that once provided 50,000 tons of fish a year has been devastated and the people that worked on the sea have seen their livelihoods literally dry up. To make matters worse, the exposed seabed is laced with chemical residue that is whipped into the air by passing windstorms. The air is amongst the most polluted in the world. Five percent of the babies born in the area have birth defects; ten percent don’t survive their first year.

You can read more about it here:

http://www.pbs.org/journeytoplanetearth/hope/uzbekistan.html

The page is titled “Stories of Hope”, though I’m not sure why. There doesn’t seem to be much possibility of this situation getting better. The end of the show talked about Palm Springs in CA possibly heading for a similar fate, since it is losing water to San Diego. Maybe the hope is that it won’t happen here. With the state of environmental regulation being what is though, I wouldn’t bet on it.

I spent yesterday at the home of my former WotC co-workers Gwen Kestrel and Andy Collins for their annual “GwenCon” event. This is a weekend long mini-convention (with formal events, registration, and the whole shebang) slanted towards industry folk in the area. It’s a good excuse to see old friends and play lots of games in a relaxed atmosphere. I’d guess at least 50 people came through over the course of the day and there were games going on in every room of the house, including a walk-in closet. Our hosts provided us with drinks, snacks, lunch, and dinner. All in all, a fun affair and I’m glad I had a chance to go. I was there from noon until midnight and in that time got to play:

·Betrayal at the House on the Hill: This is one of the newer Avalone Hill titles, a horror-themed board game with a mid-game twist. The players are characters exploring a supposedly haunted house. You lay tiles as you explore the house, creating its geography while finding items, experiencing omens, and triggering events. At a certain point in the game, the omens overtake you and one of the players is revealed to be a traitor. The fun bit is that there are 50-odd different evil plots and which one you trigger depends on the final omen and where it occurred. This gives the game quite a bit of replay value. The traitor player goes off and reads about his evil plan and resources, while the remaining players get some info and can try to plan counter-strategies. The rest of the game pits the traitor and his minions vs. everyone else. We played two games and the end games of each were quite different. The “good guys” won the first game, but the traitor got us all in the second.

·Live Action Robo Rally: Jennifer Clarke Wilkes pulled out all the stops for this event. She created a Robo Rally board that took up the entire backyard using artificial turf, tape, traffic cones, and paper plates. She had gotten big blow-ups of the robot ID cards done up at WotC on their large format printers and we hung these around our necks. Each had five card sleeves attached down the bottom to slot in our cards each turn as we programmed ourselves. Jennifer even provided a laser pointer for each of us, so we could shoot other players with our laser attacks. She then adjudicated the whole thing, as we “robots” tried to navigate the board in a race to the three traffic cones. I think 8-10 people cycled through by the end of the game and it was a lot of fun.

·Axis & Allies Miniatures: Sparky had the contents of two starter sets for us to work with, so we gave the game a shot when a table opened up. It’s a pretty simple game and it was easy enough to pick up but I was lukewarm on it. Because it’s collectible, you can end up with weirdly random and a-historical forces. My German force, for example, had only one rifleman. The rest was made of specialist troops like machine teams, tanks, and anti-tank guns. I may want to try it out with a better selection of minis, but I suspect it won’t hold much interest for me except as a quickie beer and pretzels type game. If it serves to introduce a bunch of new people into historical minis gaming though, that’ll all be for the good.

·Secret Playtest: After dinner James Ernest taught me a new game he’s working on and we playtested it with Tim Beach and an attendee I didn’t know. Since it’s still under development, I can’t say much about it except it was fun and has potential.

·World of Warcraft RPG: I ended the evening with a roleplaying session GMed by James Wyatt. He was running White Wolf’s World of Warcraft RPG, which is a variant of the D&D; rules. I haven’t played the computer game and I expected I’d be the only one. Amusingly, only one guy besides James had played it though, not that this mattered in the slightest. It was a big dungeon bash and I played a dwarf fighter with some funky war cry abilities. Whacking up on some demons and nagas was a fine way to end the evening.

It was nice to have a chance to just sit around and play some games. Robo Rally I had played before, but everything else was new to me. My only regret is that I didn’t get a chance to talk to many of the folks there because I was jumping from game to game. But hey, that’s what parties are for. This was a con.

Since 1998 the film Blade has been the clear winner for the “Worst Action Movie Tag Line”. At the end of the film, just before he dispatches the baddie, Blade growls, “Some muthafuckas are always trying to iceskate uphill!” It was agonizingly lame and I hadn’t heard anything as bad in an action movie…until today.

I flipped on the TV this afternoon to have some background noise while I was answering e-mail. The film XXX was on and I had never seen it. For good reason too, because man does it suck. Playing D&D; may have taught Vin Diesel something about courage, but it did not teach him anything about acting. Ugh. Anyway, at the end of the flick, while XXX is trying to disable the biological weapon that’s about to blow, he says (to the weapon apparently, since no one else is there), “Welcome to the Danger Zone!” And yes, you can hear the capital letters in Danger Zone. Not only is the tag line lame in and of itself, it’s even worse because it brings to mind “Highway to the Danger Zone,” the execrable Kenny Loggins song featured in the very 80s Top Gun.

I’m not quite ready to make the call yet, but for the first time in years there is a new contender.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that XXX is, in fact, even worse than suspected. The line in question is not “Welcome to the Danger Zone”, but “Welcome to the Xander Zone.” Diesel’s character (such as it is) is named Xander, you see. Oh, it hurts us.