The National Obsession as Observed by Outsiders

From John Maus - Touchdown - Directed by Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Is it good or bad that what I want to write about just now has nothing to do with RPGs, except maybe Blood Bowl?  Thus decays thematic unity.  Blog entropy ensues.

Making excuses for not posting in a long time is a venerable cliche.  The second most common excuses (behind "I've been swamped at work") are health-related.  Sometimes they are written up in a humorous way, but more often they are serious and the reader who comes to the blog for entertainment comes away that day with a sincere (and not-entertaining) pang of sympathy.

There is a lot of potential humor in the cruddy condition I have not borne with very good humor since Christmas, but instead I'll just go into what I would have written about earlier if I hadn't been afflicted with this dumb thing.

My hometown has been hosting the Superbowl.  We're mopping up from it now.

Later today I'll call my friend to see how her significant other's idea to rent out his downtown condo to out-of-town strangers and football fans worked out.  They shacked up and hid out together in a distant neighborhood far away from the action for a week.  Worst case scenario: he has to replace all the broken or missing stuff and scrape up dried vomit from the remains of their partying. Best case scenario: they were genteel middle-aged Patriots fans and not prone to self-medicating.  In any case, this was a clever way to make money.

So, below is a take on America's national obsession from John Maus a college philosophy professor, composer, lo-fi musician, singer, and friend of Ariel Pink.  Even though he is from Austin, MN, he channels a really alien, outsider point of view. Director Jennifer Juniper Stratford adds her own icy weird elements to the Gesamtkunstwerk of the video. 

As astute commenter ThrashingMadPL on Youtube put it:
"It's like in circa 1981 some West German experimental artist came to the US, and got inspired by the culture of the natives." 

KLICKEN SIE bitte hier unten!

John Maus - Touchdown

This is just some of his latest work.  I really like his 2011 album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves.  Here are some of the rest of my favorites, which completely garden-path-divert away from any tenuous unifying Superbowl theme I was trying to set up with this post.

John Maus - Navy Seals

Like a lost Joy Division song, but with newer synthesizers- Dig that bass and the reverb-ed low singing!

John Maus - Quantum Leap

Would pair well with a chilled white wine and a chaser of the Flamin' Groovies' "Shake Some Action":

John Maus - No Title (Molly)

Just a pretty, echo-ey, hypnagogic tune:

John Maus - Do Your Best

The Rye Of Sauron

The Eye of Sauron:

koltergeist - Imgur - 9-27-2015

The Rye of Sauron:

Photo by Max Blachman-Gentile of some of the bread he bakes for Torst, Brooklyn, NY, swiped from a Bloomberg article his bread is featured in, which makes ZERO mentions of the Dark Lord of Mordor. 

Spells dreamed by machines

The last time on this desolate, near-endless path you saw a face without a muzzle or a snout or a beak was three nights back.  Cold mist alternates with chilling drizzle. The terrain has become very rough, but there still is a trace of a beaten trail to follow up the mountain.

The weathered wooden door of an unmortared fieldstone hut built against the cliff face creaks open and the priests emerge.  They are dour and unsmiling, but they offer you a dry sheepskin to throw over your shivering shoulders.  They remind you of the necessary preparations before consulting the oracle:


Fast for 3 days, perform the ritual ablutions in the mountain stream each day at sunrise, whisper the sacred palindromes in nine sets of nine repetitions into the darkness after nightfall.

There is a narrow cleft in the side of the mountain; the stream trickles forth from the bottom of the cleft and down the mountain.  At the top of the cleft, between boulders slimy with lichen, a hole only as big as a man's shoulders leads into the mountain.  Water rushes and echoes somewhere inside.

Are eldritch whispered words and phrases tangled in the echoes?

After three days of shivering, cold washing, and palindromes in the dark, you are ready for the oracle. The priests cense you with poppy and sulfur, and slide you, feet first, on your back, across the slick boulders toward the small dark hole. You stretch your feet just inside, feel them dangle over a wide void.  The moving water sounds and scraps of voices are loud as you lie on the stone so close to the hole.

Something- not human hands- yanks you swiftly and entirely into the cold, wet void.

Twenty minutes later, some force in the mountain abruptly spits you out of the hole again: wet,  blue, babbling, gasping, sobbing, shivering, shrieking.  The priests have been waiting nearby, and cover you in the warm, warm sheepskin.  They listen intently as your raw, nonsensical ululations gradually resolve into weird sentences, many of them palindromes and rhymes.  They have trained themselves to remember and reproduce verbatim what pilgrims bring back from the oracle.

When you are calm enough, and can finally stop yourself from vomiting words, they will hand you a bowl of broth, and begin to tell you what you said when you emerged from the mountain, and what their interpretations are.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More to read about this ritual (minus my fictional details) is in Tony Perrottet's excellent Route 66 AD, which in turn follows Pausanias's Description of Greece book, which was the 2nd Century Lonely Planet guide for early tourists/pilgrims emboldened by the relatively safe travel conditions of the Pax Romana.

Speaking of oracles and interpreting the results...

A scientist with a great sense of humor is blogging about her experiments with training "neural networks, a type of machine learning alogrithm...to imitate human datasets."  In more of her words: "Letting neural networks be weird."  She inputs human-created data like recipes, My Little Ponies, and D&D spells and the machines twist these things into really weird and off-the-wall humorous results.

I found out about this scientist from reading Swamp of Monsters, whose author Nate L. does an excellently poetic elaboration of spell descriptions and effects from the neural networks' spell names, for example:

"LELENT WARDER

Duration: 8 hours
Area: Up to a 50 foot cube

The lelent warder appears as if lit by moonlight. It generally takes the form of falling dust, though sometimes it will be a cat that stalks the area, and sometimes will be a young boy who watches carefully. The spell is simple and cruel [...]"

For more, visit the Swamp

Bibliophilia and Logophilia: SUPERGEEKED on Books and Words

Thank you Capri23Auto at Pixabay dot com!

I have just crawled out from savoring a short excursion into fun words, and thought others might enjoy it, too.

Jer Thorpe, the current Innovator-in-Residence for the Library of Congress, made a collection of words with beautiful sounds and meanings, and they all have to do with books, which are two of my restrained-with-difficulty obsessions.

I have to admit, I'm not as good or persistent a reader of the contents of books as I could be.  My grandparents gave me bookshelves worth of cloth and leather books, but it's like swimming through oatmeal reading many 1800s books. My fetish instead is for the binding, the covers, the typefaces.

A word game which can make adventure seeds, poetry, doggerel or dungeons out of phrases:
FMOD's Take on Six Word Dungeons

My previous posts gushing about words:
Close to the Longest Day of the Year
Words or Names I Like for their Sound
Raiding Pharmacies for their Names

I wrote the Statues adventure around a city-wide hunt for books (and statues... and treasure).

If I had time and more treasure in real life, I would take letterpress and bookbinding classes and see if I could create a Deluxe edition of Statues with better illustrations and design.  That might appeal to a different customer than somebody who wants a practical, no-frills pdf to run at the table.  (Read this in your skull with a clipped Received Pronunciation Bond villain voice, preferably while sitting in a wing chair, stroking a fluffy purebred cat:) "Certain...wealthy European connoisseurs would pay large sums of money...for the privilege!"  I have no illusions about making more than beer money, but it would be fun to be able to offer some people pdfs, and to offer to other people- bibliophile weirdos like me- solid hardcover books which don't have the same aesthetic as most of the stuff out there. 

OK!  Here, finally, rewarding your patience in reading through my digressions, is the article that I liked so much:

My Sammelband has Frisket-Bite: A Short Glossary of Delightful Library Terms

STATUES review is up at tenfootpole.org!

My facial expression right now is the opposite of this.

Check out the STATUES review at tenfootpole.org!

If other bloggers want free copies to review, email me at machuvmajmn at gmail.

STATUES pdf available now at RPGNow and DriveThruRPG

Part of the gorgeous map/book combos characters are hunting for in STATUES.  Any resemblance to Braun and Hogenbeck's view of Constantinople is entirely because I MS Paint-ed all over their beautiful map

Instead of my usual grumbling, I have finally published my own adventure, composed my way, on RPG Now and DriveThruRPG.  

Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole.org emailed me some great advice and directed me to look at the formatting tips on ChaoticHenchmen.com (not all of which I followed, but at least now I know what I should be doing for my next project).

Please check it out.  I hope you buy it and use it and have fun.

Click below

STATUES at RPGNow

or copy-and-paste:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/225559/Statues

Czech Early 20th Century Artists as DMs - Inspired by Against the Wicked City

People often rip on "Lazy Gaming Inspiration-through-Art" posts, but in general, I really enjoy them.  Sometimes I'll see a tribute to David A. Trampier, or more often, Erol Otus, (but TOO often, Larry Elmore - here is where I can join in with chorus slagging an art post).

Tumblr blogs can be fun: Archaelogical objects from ancient times which are begging to be magical treasure or Lovingly pre-masticated begging-to-be-in-a-game images  or The one with the great tagline: "Pick pictures at random, that's your dungeon and/or wilderness adventure"


Best are picture posts which showcase art which wasn't intended for role-playing games, tied, in my estimation, with posts featuring photos from the real world (such as just about any random shot of something in Iceland) which could inspire gaming settings, plots, items, characters, and monsters.  It's like your substitute teacher eliciting from the class nouns and adjectives and phrases which have to do with plumbing, and then revealing that these are all part of a Mad Lib which somehow fits alarmingly well into a love letter or personals ad (and then that particular sub NEVER being allowed to teach again in your district once parents heard about it).

So anyway, Joseph Manola, on his often-awesome Against the Wicked City blog, apologizes even in the title of his art post, but writes some really funny stuff: If Romantic-Era Artists Ran D&D Campaigns (AKA 'a thin excuse for an image dump')

Here goes a ripped-off riff from that - hope you like...

IF CZECH EARLY 20th CENTURY ARTISTS WERE DMs

Josef Váchal (1884-1969) - Disturbingly vivid improvisor.  Always takes PCs through Astral Plane, Ethereal Plane, Negative Material Plane.  Spirits, non-corporeal undead, and spirit giants storm center stage often.  After particularly terrifying gaming sessions, he won't host again for a month; tells players he has to clean their "psychic residue" out of his apartment due to their "magical experiments."

His gaming group's visit to the "Elemental Plane of Passions and Instincts":

The party lost a valuable artifact during escape from the Astral Plane, had to bargain with one of its denizens to retrieve it...

The next night, the party's magic user had to repay this debt with punishing interest...

 Searching for their missing wizard, the party found their way blocked by the gargantuan, hostile spirit of the Whispering-Wind-in-the-Trees swamps.

Jan Zrzavý (1890-1977) grumblingly broke off from the Váchal-dominated "Sursum" gaming group, swore he would run a kinder, gentler game for his new group:

Still gets mondo-gonzo freaky when Zrzavý lets science fiction chocolate drip into his fantasy peanut butter...

Josef Lada (1887-1957)- Never invited into Váchal and Zrzavý's groups.  Is OK with that because, just from reputation, they freak him out.  Recruited his own group of gamers from local villages to play at the house he shares with his parents and grandma.  Rolling rough-hewn polyhedral wooden dice around his family's antique Czech farm table, the players say his adventures start out sunny and somewhat vanilla, but then quickly turn their folklore vibe up to 11 and get excellently eerie.

When the folklore starts to flow and things get eerie...

Players are often distracted during games at Lada's house by the scent of Lada's babička baking; she interrupts the action at intervals to give players traditional bread and pastries.

His players give him props because Lada isn't afraid to describe, in front of his grandma, the beautiful and deadly rusalka emerging onto the lakeshore to have topless moonlight confabs with the green-skinned vodnik, who collects human souls to seal in his jars underwater.