I’m finally almost done reading The New Weird, a collection of stories by people like China Mieville, Kathe Koja, Jay Lake, and so on. I received it a few weeks ago, and would’ve set it aside for months as I have a lot of other reading to do, but Joe found out I had it and asked me to "whomp up" a review. I would’ve done so a lot sooner, but man, a lot of these stories are dense reading, and they are intense–I just can’t curl up with the book and devour it. I have to take breaks. Plus, I have to read a bunch of stuff to prep for classes that start soon, and I’m working on a couple of papers for conferences.

Anyway, good stuff, and I’ll try to have the review up soon.

I’ve just started watching the 6-episode cable-TV version of This American Life from Showtime. Episode 2 has a great segment…well, most of them are great, but this one, "Joe No Love," is particularly great for RevSF fans. It’s about Joe, a 14-year-old boy who is just opting out of the whole love game. He just thinks all his friends are nuts for thinking about girls and all that. They show him playing D&D with his buds, and even LARPing. Basically, he aspires to be a future 40-Year-Old Virgin.

There’s this moment where he’s asked about what it would take to get him to reconsider, and he says something along the lines of, "Well, if I could go through a door into another world, and I could meet, like, an archer, someone good with ranged weapons, and I’d be like a barbarian, and we’d have a relationship based on hunting monsters. That would almost be worth it."

Needless to say, I adore this kid. I assume that, since the interviews were recorded, at least a year has passed and his hormones have probably kicked in, and he’s probably regretting a lot of what he said. I was probably a lot more like him than I can remember now, and I can only be thankful nobody had a camera around. But I’d like to give him a hug and say, "Dude, don’t worry about it. That’s life."

Oh, there’s a clip of the segment available–Joe is the kid with glasses near the end, jokingly begging a friend to help him escape from some danger during the D&D segment.

Junko reads a weekly English-learning newspaper put out by the Japan Times called Shukan ST, that does a sort of news round-up with Japanese definitions of the more difficult vocabulary words at the bottom of each page. She showed me a story about Dr. Ryuuta Kawashima, the guy who developed the Brain Age/Brain Training games for the DS. He’s a professor at Tohoku University, studying brain mapping and neurophysiology. He says he wants to upload his brain after he dies and live on as an AI personality–which he kind of already is, in the games.

By university rules, he’s entitled to half of all royalties from products resulting from his university research–which sounds like a great incentive for researchers, while still letting the school get its share for providing facilities and the like. Well, it turns out that he has refused to take any of the money for himself. He says thanks, but the university pays him enough. Instead, he’s donated all that money to the university to build labs.

Awesome.

Last Sunday, I ran a one-shot RPG adventure set in the Old West. It’s between semesters now, and while I certainly don’t have a great deal of free time (see yesterday’s entry about grading), I thought I could go ahead and do something I’ve wanted to for awhile. I’m playing in two D&D campaigns, and running a Mage campaign, so a one-shot is all I can manage in addition to all that.

Also, I’ve recently come into email contact with a couple more gamers in the area, so I wanted to meet them and get them to meet some of the gamers I know. Sadly, one of them had to cancel at the last minute, but we did meet the other guy, Aaron, and tonight he’s joining one of the D&D campaigns which recently lost a player.

I worked myself half to death preparing, especially making the gang to which the players belonged. The idea was that each player would be able to choose one of the gang members as their character, and then if they died, they could take a replacement character from the remainder. So I made twice as many characters as there were players. Ten fully fleshed out characters is a lot. I also went online and found pictures for each of the characters.

The Sherman Gang was led by Bob Sherman (name taken from Robin of Sherwood–I based most of the gang very loosely on Robin Hood’s Merry Men), until 3 days ago, when another gang they’d teamed up with for a train robbery betrayed them and killed Sherman. That gang was led by Guy "King" Castaigne, a dandy who dresses all in yellow. They don’t know it, but he’s actually a sorcerer who believes he is fated to become King of America and rule the world.

As a big Brisco County, Jr. fan, Castaigne was naturally played by Billy Drago:

Kate elected to play Maria Villanueva, who is one of my recurring-in-alternate universes characters. Originally she was my character for a Call of Cthulhu game; later, she starred in my online novella, Angel (HTML / PDF / MP3). In this incarnation, she was the daughter of an aristocratic Texas-border family that had been wiped out by a corrupt Texas Ranger. She joined the Sherman Gang for revenge, later fell in love with Bob Sherman, and married him only a week before he was betrayed and killed. Her secret is that she is pregnant with his child. She’s an expert fencer and carries Sherman’s Civil War cavalry saber, which she plans to kill Castaigne with.

The actress playing Maria is the lovely Chilean actress Leonor Varela, whom I had just seen in the otherwise-dull Texas Rangers movie as Perdita:

Myles played Big John Little, Sherman’s right-hand man. Myles pointed out something I’ve already noticed: lately he tends to play great big strong characters with little concern for dexterity. He had major boxing skills and enjoyed shooting his pistol-sized double-barreled shotgun. Here’s Big John, played by Julius Carry as Lord Bowler from Brisco County, Jr.:

And of course, this picture caused me to realize that Bob Sherman’s ghost would be played by Bruce Campbell, which makes him even cooler:

Kelly played the Topeka Kid, an angry, traumatized teenager with his Pa’s rifle, which he could use to geld a hummingbird at a hundred yards. Topeka’s secret is that he’s actually a girl, using her brother’s identity after her family was wiped out by Castaigne’s gang. She doesn’t recognize his, but later she recognizes the Yellow Sign and her memories return. She’s played by Rhiana Griffith, who played a similar character in the movie Pitch Black:

Aaron played Shanghai Lee, a wandering Shaolin monk. My idea was that he would be painfully shy, but Aaron was having none of that–Lee ended up being the most take-charge member of the gang. Naturally, his specialty was kung fu, which he used to great affect on many zombies. His image comes from Jet Li, of course:

The other gang members are Doc Rosencreutz, a Rosicrusian mystic alchemist:

Father Tucker, a heretical, defrocked Catholic priest with Gnostic ideas:

Alice Two-for-one, a former prostitute-turned-sheriff-turned-train robber, who knows Topeka’s secret and helps her keep it. Kelly played her for awhile after Topeka was badly wounded and nearly killed in an ambush:

Barbarossa, a wise old gunslinger:

Scarlet Bill, a gay cardsharp and killer:

And Scout, an Apache warrior and tracker, based on the comic-book character by Tim Truman:

Castainge’s gang included Mr. Wilde, the twisted advisor from the Robert Chamber’s short story, "The Repairer of Reputations," which is also where I got Castaigne; Baron Gris-Gris, a voodoo zombie-raising priest played by Rob Zombie; Dagoo, a noble African prince in chains, based on the character from Herman Melville’s novella, "Benito Cereno"; Skinwalker, an evil Hopi witch who can control corrupt spirit animals; Claude LeMat, a New Orleans gunslinger, former lover of Scarlet Bill, named ofter the LeMat revolver; and the Tcho Brothers, three evil little Tcho-Tcho warriors with filed teeth and bad attitudes.

The adventure starts on the trail in West Texas, the Sherman Gang hunting down the Castaigne Gang for revenge, while being pursued by a band of Pinkerton Detectives hired by the train company to kill them. The leader of the Pinkertons is former-sheriff Knottsonn (Sheriff of Nottingham, to continue the Robin Hood theme).

They are attacked at night by one of the Tcho Bros, who is trying to lame their horses. He only maims one before he’s in a fight with the rest of the gang, and he loses. The next day the Shermans come upon a Spanish mission in which everyone, friars and orphans, has been killed. Topeka sees the Yellow Sign and remembers; at the same time, the dead rise as zombies and attack. A dead horse, with iron swords hanging from it, also attacks (this stolen from an Exalted adventure–I just liked the image). This first encounter with the supernatural leaves them shaken.

The trail leads into a canyon which is filled with weird plant and animal life. Saguaro cacti seem to stare at them. In the distance they see flocks of phororhacos, extinct giant flightless birds with heavy, axe-like beaks. Topeka shoots two weird ravens that each have a human eye implanted in their foreheads.

They are attacked by an enormous scorpion spirit, which kills Scout. Simultaneously, the two remaining Tcho Bros ambush them, and Topeka is nearly killed from an axe-blow. (Kelly takes over Alice while Doc sees to saving Topeka.) Alice kills one of the Tcho Bros and (IIRC) Lee kills the other, while Big John gets right up in the scorpion’s grill and fires both barrels into it. I don’t remember who finished it off, but they also take out Skinwalker, who was controlling it, and who is now blind after they killed the ravens that had his eyes.

Then they find a village of Anasazi, lost settlers, and some odd types, like hobbit-sized crimson-skinned people, and peach-skinned Yhtillians. These people have suffered at the hands of Castaigne, and help the Shermans. Their oracle awakens special powers, gifted to them by the Land to help fight the Castaignes, and they set off to battle. Barbarossa insists on staying behind to snipe at the Pinkertons, and indeed does kill them all, but dies of return fire.

The Throne is in a tunneled-out mesa next to an alkaline lake. They get past LeMat, who is sniping at them–newly-healed Topeka takes him out with one shot. Inside, they find Mr. Wilde floating in mid-air, tracing lineages in a library (image stolen from Delta Green: Countdown)–Maria kills him. They discover that only one descended from kings can get past the Guardian to gain the Throne, and that Maria and Big John both have royal blood. So does Castaigne, but he needs the Sword, and he thinks he has to sacrifice another of royal blood.

In the throneroom, they have the final battle. Maria bests Castaigne and beheads him; Lee and Topeka take out Gris-Gris and the zombies; Big John and Dagoo fight one-on-one until Topeka just shoots off one of Dagoo’s hands. Dagoo reveals that he is also of royal blood, but Doc learned from the library that Castaigne was wrong. Maria decides to ascend to the throne; Lee flees, worried that something bad might happen.

Maria is devoured by the dragon, but appears on the Throne, and becomes Queen of the Land. Everyone but Lee lives in the valley, ruling reasonably wisely and learning its secrets. They also establish a quiet level of trade with the outside world, renewing the life of the Land.