Got poor, old etc. Been workin'**

Sorry for the lack of posts. Things have been CHALLENGING recently. Anyway, call me if you need advice on being middle aged and the least successful member of your peer group by far**.

I just finished reading a few books on WAR; 'The Guns of August', 'Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths' by Shigeru Mizuki, 'The Poetry of Jessie Pope' and 'Rough Rhymes of a Padre' by 'Woodbine Willie'. I will try to put together some kind of review in the next few days. I usually put these on the Substack first but everything over there ends up over here eventually.

Speak, False Machine is taking its time but hopefully some news on that soonish.

In the brief meantime, my friend Dan is running a micro-kickstarter for a picture book based on a legend in which Merlin and King Arthur battle a giant Kitten.

I have backed and they only need about 20 people to actually make the thing.

The question is will this one be on the shelf or eventually sent to my niece. There is only one way to find out!

The Technique of Mughal Miniature Painting

Curiously, just before reading this I had finished a Clark Ashton Smith collection into which the enormous and specific work and attention paid to every aspect of a pure luxury good, as well as the almost magical-alchemical assembly of these wonderous, varied and specific materials - the fur of a young kitten, Lapuz Lazuli ground with rough salt and separated by grain, soft repetitive polishing with crystal or malachite, would seem to slot almost perfectly. 

While transformed-orientalism western idea of Luxurious Otherness has a pedigree which seems to flow all the way from 'Othello' to Jabbas Palace, the particulars of the creation and social milieu seem to cry out for some boutique D&D adventure - the Emperor calls for a painting and his artist, the 'Wonder of the Age', needs *this* specific kind of malachite, grains of gold and Lapis Lazuli and the tail fur of this specific kind of kitten, and you only have 50 days to finish the painting, and the artist has enemies who wish to sabotage him, and the Emperor might be about to be assassinated.. "Vorsprung durch Luxus"..

"The Technique of Mughal Miniature Painting

Miniature painters sat on the ground while working with one leg flexed to support a drawing board. (Plate 19). Their technique was deceptively simple: opaque watercolour on paper or occasionally on cotton cloth. Artists learned the trade secrets of their ateliers as apprentices, often from fathers or uncles, as this craft was frequently a family occupation. As children, they were taught how to make balanced, finger-fitting paintbrushes of bird quills set with fine hairs plucked from kittens or baby squirrels. They also learned how to grind mineral pigments, such as malachite (green) and lapis lazuli (blue), in a mortar; how to sort them grain by grain according to purity and brilliance; and how to prepare the aqueous binding medium of gum arabic or glue. Other pigments were made from earths, insect and animal matters, and metals.

(Plate 19)

To make metallic pigments, gold, silver and copper were pounded into foil between sheets of leather, after which the foil was ground with rough salt in a mortar. The salt was then washed out with water, leaving behind the pure metal powder. For a cool yellow cold, silver was mixed with it; for a warmer hue, copper was added. Because such pigments as copper oxide were corrosive, the paper was protected from them by a special coating. Some artists, such as Basawan (Plates 6, 8, 12, 13) were particularly admired for their manipulation of gold  which they pricked with a stylus to make it glitter - burnished or modelled by tinted washes.

Although artists did not make paper, they were connoisseurs of its qualities. Composed of cloth fibres, it varied greatly in thickness, smoothness and fineness. Akbar' painters of the late sixteenth century preferred highly polished, hard and creamy papers, while Shah Jahan's artists employed thin, extremely luxurious sorts, possibly made from silk fibres.

A complex, very costly series of steps involving many people was required to make a Mughal painting. Pictorial ideas usually began with the patron, who summoned the appropriate artist (or artists) to carry them out. Several of the most renowned Mughal aritsts were specialists, such as Govardhan, who was noted for portraits of saints, musicians, and holy men (Plate 24), or Mansur, famed for birds and animals (Plates 26-27). 

(Plate 26)

After the painter and patron had conferred, sketches, such as Figure V, were prepared. In this instance, the artist drew from life, which lent his sketch disturbing immediacy. Like others of the sort, it was intended not for the patron but for the workshop, as a model from which to paint, and it did not have to be formal and tidy. Mistakes were scumbled over in white pigment and redrawn.

(Figure V)

Later, in the artists studio, the drawing would either be copied or pounced (traced) onto the thicker paper or cardboard of the finished work (Figure V, Plate 23). 

(Plate 23)

Tracing was done with a piece of transparent gazelle skin, placed on top of the drawing, the contours of which were then pricked. It was then placed on fresh paper, and black pigment was forced through the pinholes, leaving soft, dark outlines to be reinforced by brush drawing. Sometimes the original drawing included notations of colours, in words or washes of pigment.

Unfinished paintings reveal the progress from bare paper to thin outlining in black or reddish brown ink and to the many stages of colouring, which were built up layer by layer to enamel-like thickness. Usually, gold highlights were the last step before burnishing. Burnishing was done by laying the miniature upside down on a hard smooth surface and gently but firmly stroking it with polished agate or crystal, a process comparable to varnishing an oil painting, which provided protective hardening and gave an overall unity of texture.

The length of time it took to accomplish all this varied according to the painting and period when it was done. Robert Skelton and Ellen Smart discovered a small marginal inscription on an illustration to the Babur-Nameh stating that Ram Das worked on it for fifty days (see Figure II). Other paintings published here must have taken considerably longer. After the artist had finished his picture and shown it to the patron, who had probably overseen its progress step by step, it was turned over to other specialists to be trimmed, mounted on splendidly illuminated borders, and bound into a book or album, according to imperial wishes. Occasionally, pictures were mounted on walls (Plate 17).

(Plate 17)

The social position of artists varied greatly. Akbar himself learned to paint as a child; and some of the artists were aristocratic courtiers who also served in diplomatic or other governmental capacities. Most court painters, however, were revered but humble craftsmen, whose talents had earned them privileged positions near the throne. A  few, such as Jahangir's favourite artist, Abu'l Hasan, who was honoured with the title "Wonder of the Age," grew up in the royal household.

Paradoxically, the lot of artists was often more secure, and probably happier, than that of princes. Arists painted on and on, from one reign to the next, while royalty rose to dizzy pinnacles of wealth and power, too often only to be imprisoned or murdered. Since all but a few Mughal rulers were keenly interested in painting, artists were generously rewarded. Salaries must have been ample, and when a patron was especially pleased, presents were lavish. Bichir painted himself in the foreground of a picture (Plate 22) holding a miniature of an elephant and a horse, gifts no doubt from Jahangir."

(Plate 22)

("Prithee allow me in thine painting sirrah".

Closeup of Bichir getting photobombed by some European dude..)

From "Imperial Mughal Painting" by Stuart Cary Welch

My Beastman/Dryad slash fic should be CANON!

I can't get this out of my head..


So;  Games Workshops Age of Sigmar Wargame has its little army men split into four factions.

Order - normies. Humans, elves, dryads, dwarves, magic aztek lizard dudes etc.

Chaos - evil dudes. The four main gods plus the generally-evil Slaves to Darkness and the Skaven. And Beasts of chaos which is "Beast-Men and Friends"

Death - Death. Skellies, super-skellies, Vampires, ghoooooosts etc.

Destruction - Orcs, Giants, Goblins.

SO WHO IS DESTORYING YOUR CITY AND WHY?

Teclis - to burn a giant anti-chaos sigil into it. Sorry, kind of a zoning screwup there.

Nagash - not really destroying it, just killing everone in it, the city should be fine.

Main Chaos Dudes - they might destroy your city a bit but they are largely interested in perverting the souls inside it, and they quite like cities overall, so long as they are full of chaos stuff. They just smash a lot because they are snorting those souls!

Orcs, Goblins, Ogres, Giants - SMASH SMASH SMASH HE HE HEEE

Skaven - no idea. Presumably they will eat or enslave everyone inside and make what use of the ruins they can.

Arielle the Tree Queen - now she isn't really meant to smash your city and replace it with TREEEEEES without at least writing a strongly-worded letter to Sigmar first but she does have, or to be more precise, she has no direct coNfirmed control over, Tree ISIS which is essentially this bitch, 

Drychia Hamadreth, who will absolutely smash your city and replace it with TREEEEEEES.

And the Beastmen, who will now also be destroying your city and will replace it with.. well Chaos but not god-specific chaos , more of a general spiritual thing. 

In Age of Sigmar the Beastmen are something like Chaos-Daoists? They believe in chaos but are generally not into any of the specific gods, (except for a few of them), they are more just.... generally chaosy?

So the burning issue that prompted this post;  even do for the Chaos factions? What is their place? Skaven have numbers plus technology, plus they have an actual God while Beastmen make a point of not having any.

BUT WAIT!!! I hear you cry..

Aren't GW constantly bringing out new boxed games and stuff with special models and don't they give rules for using them in your warhammer armies??

Like how about the 

MINDSTEALING SPHYRANX

  - thats like a beast right

no

nope

HOW ABOUT THE formaroid crusher??

no

But surely the Ogroid myrmidron?????

LOOK HOW BEASTLY HE IS THEY ALREADY HAVE SRAGON OGRES IN THE BEASTMAN ARMY!!!

COULD IT BE?????

no
.....

no it could not

AH HA! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

BECAUSE GUESS WHO'S BACK WITH A NEW DANG MODEL!

Its Billy Belkor baybe! The Demon Prince of Chaos Undivided! And guess what, just like AoS Beastmen he ALSO gives no fucks about worshipping the Chaos Gods, in fact they hate each other! A match made in heaven right???

right????

IN fact no.

So walk the lonely beastmen, with an ancient and limited model range and seemingly no interest from GW at all apart from some endless spells. Imagine being cucked by Skaven, could it get worse?

Until, I, in my lonely and ever-vigilant genius, come forth to save thee beastmen, with the following hot and spicy concept!

GOAT/TREE SLASH FIC

Based on my reading of the Mahabharata, and vague memories of the other Indo-European core myths, my idea is this;

Drychia Hamadreth and '[NAMED BEASTMAN CHARACTER] (model yet to be designed)... 

Maybe moonclaw??

.....FALL IN LOVE!!!!

Basic concept here is the hierarchal cosmic layering effect which works as a story-enervator for the Indo-Euopean myths; two gods get angry with each other, or some sort of contest breaks out, or they have a relationship drama, and all the forces and groups aligned to each of them fall into different relationships.

This both echoes down the layers of hierarchy from gods to demigods and spirits, to divinely-awesome heroes to normal high status individuals to ordinary people to slaves and helots, and echoes across the power structures as, with this new conflict or relationship in place the balance of power shifts and everyone has to re-adjust with their own relationships, 

So you get to tell a multi-layered story with gods, heroes and normals, where the lower people live inside a context created by a higher power relationship, BUT, actions taken at the lowest level can still echo up the pyramid to affect decisions and perceptions at the highest level, and because the whole thing is about families and relationships tangible to the ordinary listener, it remains entirely comprehensible for the person receiving or hearing the legend or tale

It's also a way of getting interesting and meaningful-feeling drama out of a morally multipolar legendary setting like AoS - which is why I think the hero-tier and above beings in AoS should have more complex relationships and attitudes to each other across all factions, like surprising friendships and dislikes - it creates more structure.

Of course GW can't do that because reflecting it in the actual game would disrupt the careful IP, aesthetic a& marketing protection which the Decision-Squig has decreed.

But I can

GOAT/TREE SLASH FIC - he nibbles her leaves and she's into it, she winds roots about his horns...

its a beautiful thing.

..

And because these two major characters are now working together their armies do too. Anarchist man-hating tree city destroying tree people and daoist/universalist chaos worshipping city destroying goat people are not necessarily incompatible.

So the Beastmen and Anarchist anti-human tree people are just rolling along wrecking shit, and EVERYONE is interested in stopping them, Sigmar because - Cities, Chaos because having these technically-sort-of chaosy beastmen tear off and almost start a whole new faction is not good at all, and Arielle because they are fucking up her Rep

So now a battle is on but its also a soap-opera in which the forces of the Mortal Realms team up to destroy a "budding" (genius Patrick) romance and also to break up a happy couple.

Snake Magee's Rotary Boiler

 From The Life Treasury of American Folklore

(Grammar and spelling as the text, some paragraph breaks added)

....

"I hear it spread around in some fields that the reason a rotary rig uses four boilers while cable tools only use one is because a rotary got so much more work to do, all of which is a fundamental lie. It taken four boilers for a rotary because none of them is any good, as to which no man in the country is in better shape to testify than I am.

I only work with one rotary boiler in my time. It was not a rotary rig otherwise - just good old cable tools - and I would not have working with it if I knew what it was. The first intimation I got that anything was wrong was with the safety valve. You taken a good cable-tool boiler and hang a six-inch bit on the safety valve, and you got a head a steam that pulls a mile of hole right up on top of the ground and pulls the derrick right down where the hole used to be. But this rotary boiler - I didn't know that was what it was - didn't react properly.

I hang a six-inch bit on the safety, and she goes to jumping up and down, like a walking-beam on soft structure. And I hang a Stillson wrench, a sledge hammer, a short piece of 15-inch pipe on the safety, and the results was alarming. The pressure gauge only showed 380 pounds to the square inch, but them boiler plates begin to wiggle and squirm like mustard plasters on a itchy back, and the whole thing to jiggle like a little boy when the teacher can't see his hand.

We only making about 1,400 feet of hole a day, so my tool-dresser been staying in town until I need him. But I work with tricky boilers before and I need no help. I do not even need to put the fire out. It was a secret of mine, but I will tell it to you in case you should need to fix a boiler when the fire is going.

Take and jump into the slush-pit where the mud is fresh. Then, before the mud getting hard, think of something that throws you into a cold sweat. The cold cause your body to contract, and the first thing you know is there is a wall of perspiration between your body and the mud. This keeps the mud pliable and easy to work in, like a big glove, and the sweat keeps you from scorching, when you step into the firebox.

How do you keep from breathing the flame? Wel, I will tell you another secret. Most people taken breath from the outside and breathe in; when you are working in the fire, you taken a breath from the inside and breathe out. You can do this, when you know how, because the body is 99 per cent water, and water is nothing but H2O. Besides, water purifies itself every 15 feet and all you got to do is keep moving and you always get a fresh supply of air.

I leave the rig to run itself because we are not making more than 1,900 feet of hole a day, and there is really not nah-thing to do. Then, I take a Stillson, a bell-peen hammer, a acetylene torch, and a new set of flues and go out and climb into the firebox. Right away I says to myself, "Magee", I says, "this boiler is uncommonly frail. I would almost suspect it of being a rotary boiler. We have only 436 pounds of steam and the heat indicator only shown 1,197 F., but there is every evidence of inferior materials. Something must be done with expediency."

I see there is no use putting new flues in the old can, because the plates have begun to melt and will not hold a flue, so I think rapidly. If I have had my sky-hoooks there, I would have flipped the boiler over so the pressure is against the bottom instead of the top, but I loan them out that very morning. I finally see the boiler will have to be reversed, so that the outside of the plates, which is cool, will be turned in. This is just like turning a coat wrong side out, and I have done it many times. But just as I am pulling the smokestack down through the fireox this rotary boiler explodes.

When I wake up I think I am in jail, like I have sometimes seen pictures of men of, because there is bars all around me. But then there is nah-thing beneath my feet or over my head and I am sailing through the air at terrific speed, and I remember what happen. "Magee," I says, "these are the grates that are wrapped around you, and you are in the air because the boiler blown up." 

I worry somewhat because I am a law-abiding citizen and do not have a license to fly, but then I begin to see that I am slightly hurt. The mud protecting me some, but I have six broken ribs, a fractured back, concussion of the brain, a ruptured appendix, a busted nose, both arms and legs broken in from three to twelve places, and a slight headache.

"Magee," I says, "you have excellent grounds for a damage suit against the rotary manufacturing company. When you are through there will be no more rotaries and wells will be drilt with cable tools as God originally intended."

I do not think anything very long, of course, because I am travelling faster than light which is 42,000 foot-pounds per second, and before I know it I am back in town 16 miles away and dropping down in front of our boardinghouse.

I holler for my tool-dresser Haywire Haynes, who is still sleeping, to come out.

"Are you hurt, Magee?" he asks.

"Only slightly," I says. "I doubt I will be incapacitated for more than 30 or 40 years. But I am going to sue the rotary manufacturing company for every cent they are worth. When I am through there will not be a rotary left on the face of the earth."

He shaken his head. "You can't do that Magee. You been blown back here so fast you arrived before you got started. You can't sue because you ain't been to work yet this morning."

I thought a moment and seen he was right. "If that's the case," I says, "I might as well make up my mind to get well, right now.""

......

From the text; Snake and his fourth-dimensional adventure with the rotary boiler illustrates how a mans infatuation with a highly-technical job and its equipment can spawn bizzare stories. Drillers in West Virginia oil fields were commonly called "snakes" because the rock formations there are so hard and complex that, it was said, only a snake could wiggle through. The rotary drill was a replacement for the older cable drill, and each required its own kind of boiler. Men who had worked all their lives with the cable drill were deeply loyal to it and despised the new invention, which explains Magee's belligerant attitude towards a rotary rig and any driller who would use it. An average boiler could take only about 100 pounds of pressure, and a good days work, with both driller and tool-dresser going hard at it, was about 100 feet of drilling.

Originally from 'A Treasury of American Folklore. By Jim Thompson. Edited by B.A. Botkin.

Descent into Weebery

 Media review. 

Behold, the long dark reaches ever-on, the deep moans round with many voices. Made numb by the closing trap of day I have done fuck all work but at least I can still consume media. And lo, media has been consumed, and I shall tell thee of it.....

LONESOME DOVE

The book not the series.

ITS A TRICK - it looked like it was going to be an adventure and turned out to be a fretwork of tragic romances. A titanic yet silent collision of irresolvable and unwise desires, overwhelming need, fear and invisible savagery. (And also the more-visible kind).

Holy Christ this is a sad book. Just a long, deep tragedy. A love story in which people don't know they are in love, or are in love with the wrong person, or were in love with the right person but they died.

Oh my god everyone is so lonely in this.

(Its still mildly trippy to me that cowboy times are also Sherlock Holmes times.)

McMurty manages a remarkable kaleidoscope of internal states; p.o.v flowing from mind to mind inhabiting each one as smoothly as pulling on jeans. Then we get our radiating perspective trick of character actions and central events being perceived through fractured time from different eyes. 

He does have a particular genius for drawing one into sympathy with almost every possible character.

He cannot handle evil, not really I think, which is not really a bug, but a flaw common to humanist writers. In Lonesome Dove, harm is usually propagated by people who act poorly because they can see and feel less, and in McMurtys world, the damage from trauma, poverty, isolation and sometimes individual failure largely shows up in how poorly people perceive and understand each other.

So, paradox; in order to tell a story in which a main driver of tragedy is peoples failure to understand each other you need a creator who is really good at understanding people, to create a social world subtle and complex enough so that its failures can be perceived.

He pulls off a slightly high-level literary trick in which we almost always know more about the object of someone’s attention than we do about their own internal state and deep character. We are always finding out about people from the outside, seeing people though each others eyes, and this goes well with a story about the relationships between men in which the greatest emotions and attachments are almost always tacit and built upon shared action, at which they can often work well despite differences in viewpoint and personality, or work poorly despite apparent similarities.

Escape, or 'winning' in Lonesome Dove, (which no-one actually does but they might reach it for a while), is some combination of material safety, emotional and personal recognition and a shared future, all of these being compromised. The material safety by the fact that everything is built on blood spilt so recently the walls haven't solidified, the recognition by pure fear and grief and the shared future by the fact anyone can just get snakebit or fall off their horse at any time.

The loneliness of these people facing such fundamental instability and endless movement is a very strange distant mirror of the loneliness of modernity. We have all the stuff and safety they might want but the engines we use to create it have teased us apart and frozen us in shifting glass, we see each other moving past on different tracks, as if on  night trains.

FARSCAPE

Peaks in the middle. (A rule for sci fi shows), still remains pleasingly weird though and holy fuck is there a lot of mindfucking in this series.

Probably the most interesting parts were the early to mid episodes, before the bonds of loyalty between the crew had yet to fully cohere and it was still possible that one or move of them might just leave, or stab someone in the back.

Feel like I could have more to say about this but its been a while since I finished it and though it remains watchable, the final parts did drain a little energy.

MUPPETS ARE FUCKING GREAT

Thanks for the aliens dudes.

DESCENT INTO WEEBERY

Since watching Vinland Saga and being generally disappointed and uninterested in whatever television has currently decayed into, I have been investigating the Anime available through Amazon Prime, of which, I have only finished a handful, but they were pretty good

DORORO

Basically Camus's 'The Plague' if it was actually fun to watch.

Fighty-time-era Japan; war, plague and famine everywhere.

Somewhat evil Lord goes to a temple called 'The House of Hell', (and why the fuck is there a temple solely to super-evil demons just hanging around locally, is this a Japanese thing I didn't know about or a genre thing?).

Lord makes a deal with the demons, he wants the safety of his people AND (side request) the power to conquer Japan, in exchange the demons can have 'whatever they ask', (there is a reason why the unwise bequest is a motif of dingbats), anyway;

His sons about to be born and just after the kid _is_ born EVIL LIGHTNING strikes and takes all the kids body-parts, his corpus, except, one bit of evil lightning is deflected by a combination of mothers love and a handy goddess of mercy - so instead of just being.. nothing the kid is left an utterly horrific nubbin of flesh, no arms, legs, eyes or ears or spine, but with a fierce will to live nonetheless.

In the second unwise motif, the Lord tells an old woman to dump the kid in the river, in fact she leaves the nubbin on a leaky boat and punts it into the stream.

And then we cut to maybe 17 years later, turns out the kid bumped into a creator of prosthetics with basically near-magical alchemic powers, who raised the child and progressively built him prosthetic legs, arms, eyes (they can't see), a prosthetic mask-face .

Kid keeps getting attacked by minor demons who follow him about, (they want the last bit of flesh), so the guy teaches the kid to fight and gives him weapons to defend himself. Kid manages this via magical strength and speed imbued by a combination of demon contact earlier and his prosthetics, and though he cannot see normally, he can see 'souls'.

What is this about?

about Fascism in Japan - I THINK.

And trauma. The interlacement of good and evil. The human response to despair and overwhelming power. Why not join the sharks after all? Or feed the demons?

Common thread is mutual humanity, and mixed motives. Everyone does things for comprehensible reasons, considering their circumstances.

(Interesting that a lot of media I like seem to be really into shares this obsession with 'tragic choice' morality and the impossibility of doing anything purely good in a damaged world. Genetic Catholicism I suppose.)

The demons are basically going about doing evil stuff, but you can sometimes talk to them and depending on what they are like, even form relationships with them. And there are very good reasons to form relationships with them.

Nothing is stable or safe. Nothing can be built or maintained - every small kingdom suffers unless it makes war against its neighbours and takes their resources, making them suffer in turn.

The only real route to safety or peace seems to me, one way or another, through the Demons. Though overwhelming, destructive, amoral, really actually, evil and corruptive power.

These develop as the series goes on, from standard monster-fic 'bear' type monsters to creatures with some kind of parasitic or symbiotic relationship with those humans or human cultures near them, and when people form useful relationships with the demons, there can be peace.

The demons still predate and take their toll, but in a controlled fashion (somewhat, but how long can that go on?).

One thing the story gets very right is the kind of inner despair and vacancy on the part of people who have suffered and the willingness, even the joy, taken in aligning themselves with savage and amoral power, simply because it is power, and is victorious. One man imagines himself a hero, but freezes when encountering the Demon and watches his mother be consumed. So he ends up deliberately luring others to the Demon so they can face their own weakness the same way he did. Another is ostracised and grows up wild and alone, but forms a bond with some supernatural sharks, as separate as he is, but powerful, and ultimately ends up feeding people to them, even loves them.

Hyakkimaru

When the Son meets those Demons who took part of his body, he fights them, and usually wins, and each time he wins he gets a bit of his body back. It grows back magically, and the prosthetics pop out.

There are two large problems with this.

Every time a body element comes back, Hyakkimaru  becomes more human, in some ways flawed, more sensitive. To begin with, he can't feel at all, and so has no pain, his prosthetic limbs can be replaced or repaired, so it doesn't matter that much if he loses one in a fight, he can't 'hear', so when he gets that sense back, the world deafens him and he becomes vulnerable. When his sense of pain comes back, he is no longer as invulnerable as he was, and these changes connect him more and more to the world around him, and he gets angrier, and more vulnerable to corruption. More demon-like.

To begin with, he barely knows what he has lost, proceeding largely on instinct, without pain, flesh, language, hearing or sight, the world has almost no purchase on him, but as these things return, the depth of his suffering can actually grow, rather than fade, at least for a while, for he gains the senses, experience and contextual understanding to actually grasp how much he has been hurt.

So each victory requires difficult moral growth alongside physical restoration, and risks dangerous moral decay.

Second problem

As well as that, the deal his father made with the Demons is still in effect. The realm of the Father is safe, healthy and prosperous, its home to many, many people who live in safety and without the chaos engulfing much of the rest of Japan.

So every demon the defeats and every part of his own body he gets back,, the more the deal fractures and that Realm becomes vulnerable to sickness, famine and invasion. By fighting the demons and getting his body back he is retarding the ambitions of his father but also plunging many people into doom, chaos and death, which they only escaped due to an evil deal.
So what do you do? what is right to do?

DORORO

The actual main character is the cheeky ragamiffin scamp that the Son runs into in the first episode, a Dickensian orphan thief called 'Dororo'.

Dororo is basically humanity. 

The most human of the characters, maybe the most human of all the characters in all the meeja I'm talking about here. (Lonesome Dove would give him a run for his money). He teams up with Hyakkimaru and becomes his guide, at first literally, and then as Hyakkimaru faces more and more complex challenges, in a wider sense. He's surprisingly anti-Samurai, very much a child of the lower classes.

Dororo felt the most to me as if he represented Teuzkas own viewpoint.

Re:CREATORS

Damn this is a better-than-average written piece of media.

A villain arises with the power to collapse the boundaries between our world and the fictional worlds created by us, like comics etc. In particular this villain brings through into our reality, a bunch of heroes and villains from various manga and anime.

These people, realising that our world created theirs and that we essentially created their suffering, which is often titanic, divide on what to do, with some deciding to try to take control of their creators and force them to remake their worlds, and others opposing them.

To them our reality is the 'world of the gods' and there is a lot of fascinating tacit theology in this series, it it’s never mentioned out loud but the questions it brings up are only ever a single leap of thought away from the depicted action. Lots of arguments between created and creator. 

Its also a nice 'insider' look at the personalities, structures and economics of manga, anime and media creation.

SHUT UP THIS IS BETTER THAN IT SOUNDS

also has my favourite villain from this whole group of meeja

And it has a likeable 'clips episode' in the middle where the narrating character goes completely metatextual.

INUYASHIKI LAST HERO

Basically the opposite/partial counter to 'Chronicle'. 

About power, alienation, with a classic power corrupts/power reveals investigation to it.

This is just a really nice story tbh. Main character is an older salaryman, totally overlooked everywhere, irrelevant at work, almost totally silent and ignored by wife and kids, gets a dog, feels slightly happy for the first time in years. Takes dog to park.

Interdimensional aliens accidentally smash into the park and kill him. They quickly reverse the truck while doing the legal minimum which in his case means transporting (or re-creating?) his memories and consciousness in a new body, made as much as possible to be as much like the old body as they can do.

But the only spares they have are from some weapons trading they’ve just been doing, so now this old man has what seems like a normal human form but is actually a near-indestructible robot which can fold out to reveal a plethora of insane weapons and a jet pack, also he learns he can do other stuff, like repairing tissue and healing diseases.

So now this old fellow is a terminator/iron man hybrid and all he wants to do is help people, because for the first time in his life he gets to do something meaningful for others, so he sets about being like an old fella superman.

BUT - there was someone else in the park that day, and that person is not nearly as nice as our boy. Instead he, well he turns out a lot more like Chronicle.

Look you will probably have a cry where he jetpacks for the first time while singing the theme to Astroboy. And I don't even know shit about Astroboy. 

Queen Mab

> Confirm. Transponder I.D. is shift-ship "Queen Mab"

> Last ident, hijacked by Some time ago, a group of genius-level transhumanist radicals.

> Skill-set - genetics, cybernetics, direct AI-HUman integration, bleeding edge dimensional technology. > > Transhumanist Views -  Hyper-aesthetic 'new humans'. Something they consider Optimal Beings.

> Be aware, possible development of, extremely dangerous dimensional tech, and access to "True" non-relativistic time-travel. Queen Mab appears and disappears in wildly different volumes. Sometimes seems to dash back and forth across the Galaxy, at other times hovering like a fly around a handful of Suns. 

> Queen Mab itself exists in an variety of states. Sometimes seeming no bigger than a paperclip lost in space, its nature revealed only by its enormous energy emissions and dangerous 'siren song' EM emission sphere. At other times it looms like a moon-sized battle station, blotting out suns in orbit.

> Interior scans ineffective but suggest mycelium web of parasitical, unstable, dimensional conduits to various different realities and paracosms.

> Numerous abductions reported. 

> Mindcrime - Many who encounter the ships EM emission sphere obsessively track it.

> Piracy - stole every perfect circle on the surface of a Omicron III.

> Status and capabilities of the Queen Mab, whether they are developing sequentially or not, may be entering an even more potent and developed phase.

> Suns have gone missing.

> It is feared the Queen Mab may become a Pirate of Worlds.

> Now, by chance, You have encountered the Queen Mab in orbit around a pale and silent moon. 

> Ship is both accessible (at a normal size) and apparently, quiescent. 

> As if it were sleeping.

> Bounty on ships confirmed destruction.

> Bounty on high-status individuals recovered from within (if still living and effectively still coherent individuals.

> Bounty on any post-singularity tech recovered from the Queen Mab includes full pardons, personal A.I.-run paracosm and, through negotiation and dependant upon confirmed results, your own planetary-scale Biosphere.

> Incursion????

"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;

The subject, not the citizen: for kings

And subjects, mutual foes, forever play

A losing game into each others hands,

Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

"Oh lord oh lord, the Fae Knights of the Faerie Queen came not three dawns past.

Through a magic door to the otherworld!

They have ensorcelled your beloved, taken them to Queen Mabs palace!

Yet the door remains, yes it does. And if the tales are true, not for long.

Take this horse-shoe of cold iron (hide it well).

Remember, the Fae are beautiful, strange, terrible and capricious (really they are bonkers but you should never say that out loud). 

They love beauty and music, and they like to be praised.

Be polite and deferential, yet, never give nothing all away, not even your name.

And you must accept no gifts, make no promises, and *never eat anything*. 

And beware the Faeries charms, for they can be seductive.

And remember that time in the Otherworld is not like time here. You might come back a moment after you left, or a century.

No matter to that. Be quick! The Faerie door awaits!"

"Then grave and hoary-headed hypocrites,

Without a hope, a passion, or a love,

Who, through a life of luxury and lies,

Have crept by flattery to the seats of power,

Support the system whence their honours flow..

They have three words:- well tyrants know their use,

Well pay them for the loan, with usury

Torn from a bleeding world! - God, Hell and Heaven."

"Dreams. I have such dreams. Do you know that if I dream of a place I will go there? And I dreamed that I learned that time is a place, and so I could go there too, and did, the moment I dreamed it could be, what was all moments.

But if one can dream, and awake in the time and the place of the dreaming, weaving in my sleep, if one weaves a man and meets a man or dreams of him, and weaves a dream, and remembers that one will remember.. Well then, what is a dream at all?

It is a sleep. All dreaming.

Did I make you? Did I weave you and seed you and set you to sprout in that river-realm from which you came with a memory in your mind, a dream of loss to bring you to me?

That is why I made these. The butterflies. Lao Tze no? He was a butterfly, a very nice butterfly, but he woke a man."

"The sensitive extension of the world.

That wondrous and eternal fane,

Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join,

To do the will of strong necessity,

And life, in multitudinous shapes,

Still pressing forward where no term can be,

Like hungry and unresting flame

Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

> Confirm that object is a miniature warp nacelle.

> Not a remote. Repeat, not a remote.

> That is an active, I say again, active interstellar-capable warp engine drive element that she is waving.

> Configuration unknown. Albedo high. Its bright. Hard to see.

> Materials unknown.

> DO NOT LET IT TOUCH YOU.

"The restless wheels of being on their way,

Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,

Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:"

> Seeping entropic loss around the prime biform. Query, is it warm?

> Right eye registers darkness, gloom, cold space.

> Left eye, bright area..

> Check your six, check your feet.

> The floor is Her, the walls are Her.

> Reaffirm Transponders on contact, check H.U.D. for E.M. Manipulation. Eyeballs only, don't trust your screen.

> Crypto is good.

> Confirm, six transponders.

> Query, team is five strong.

> Repeat, we are a five strong team.

> Identify.

> Identify.

[fading]

> identify

"My left eye is a hive of bees..

Would you like to see? See. Little bees, all looking out. A hundred million eyes. Eyes within an eye.

They were not born bees, I made them so, and they may not be bees now.

Be bees. be be be be-be bees. [laughter]

They said a word that pleased me not.

And I made that realm as pale as air and as light as ash, and it blew away in a golden wind from a summer-ripe sun. And.. pop!

Do you know how not to become bees?

No?

You must. Say. PLEASE."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Queen Mab!

A book, that may one day hopefully exist!

A strange new thing in this world.

Made by me and......              AlcopopStar!

Instagram

Twitter

https://ramheadedgirl.com/

(not entirely SFW)

Will it happen? Hopefully! Early days yet, still just brainstorming development.

The Top Ten Emblematic D&D Monsters

In the cause of 'Gygaxian Populism' (its like 'Gygaxian Democracy' except I didn't really think it through), I ventured onto my socials to ask the following simple question;

"What Ten monsters would you say are emblematic of 'classic' D&D?"

After literally minutes of stumbling through your replies and dicking about with an excel sheet, I have synthesised the following cutting-edge breakdown and penetrating commentary;

First....

THE TOP TEN

(In reverse order for greater drama)

10. Skeletons!

9. Kobolds!

8. Orc!

7. Owlbear!

6. Mind Flayers!

5. Rust Monster!

4. Dragons (non-specific)

, but if you add all dragon mentions they come it at number one..)

3. Gelly Cube!

2. Gobbos!

1. Beholders!

Quite a surprising list as its a strange mix of VERY D&D cretures like Beholders, Gelly Cube, Rust Monster, Mind Flayer, Owlbear, all of which you only ever see with WotC product.

And GOBLINS at number TWO? Dragons, Orcs, Kobolds (what the fuck even are Kobolds they change every edition and just do what goblins do?, and Skeletons.

Ok, Orcs, Goblins and Skeletons all need no excuse for placing this high (though I am surprised that Goblins beat out the rest so hard). BUT what the fuck do you all like about Kobolds so much?

The Gelly Cube feels like the MVP here as, for being essentially a cube of corrosive jelly, it has rated very highly indeed.

The question as to who truly deserves top spot, Beholder or 'Dragons' will occupy sages for times immemorial to come. Should all mentions of Dragons be combined into one thing? What about the three people who voted specifically for the 'Red Dragon'?

THOSE WHO NEARLY BUT DIDN'T MAKE IT IN

11. Liches
12. Mimics
13. Carrion Crawlers
14. Slime (green, though many mentions of slime generally)
15. Gnoll
16. Stirges - amazed they rated this high
17. Troll - very sad performance
18. Bugbears - what the fuck even are they
19. Bulette


Clearly the slime/jelly vote was split by the enormous range of possible slimes.

Votes ranged from "Slimes (all)" 2 votes, "Slimes" 1 vote, "Slime (green)" 7 votes. "Fungus/Mold" 1 vote and "Ochre Jelly" 1 vote. This is what happens with proportional voting people.

Absolutely crushed for the Liche here, and the Mimic. They did well and we expected them to do well, just not well enough in a packed field.

Likewise with the Troll, another under-loved classic,

Gnolls - about where I would expect them to be, and while I am a fan, honestly they did well to get even this far.

Stirges - these were really surprisingly popular to me. What the fuck is it about Stirges that makes them, not even "emblematic" but popular at all? Is there a vast Stirge fandom community our there?

Bugbears - get the fuck out, worse than Kobolds. What even are these things. Utter rubbish.

Bullette - yep, harsh to say it but this is pretty much where I would expect it.

And tbh, lucky to be this high.

DEMONS/DEVILS/DRAGONS - A SPLIT-VOTE DISASTER

It seems the key to being memorable and popular is some complex synergy of being part of a strong monster grouping and also specific enough to dominate the concept of that grouping.

So 'Gelatinous Cube' just crushes all the other Slimes, but 'Yellow-Musk Creeper' just isn't strong enough to dominate either the undead or angry plant groups and so gets wiped out.

Many people voted for demons or devils, but unfortunately for the damned ones, they were all seperate votes. Marilith, Pit Fiend & Succubi got one each.

Likewise, a huge number voted for Dragons generally, but a significant chunk was split from that vote by 'Red Dragon' specifically, which got three, making it an important low-level contender just on its own, and by "Dragons (colour coded)" and "Black Dragon" which got one each.

If you put all those together you get the number one spot.

Curious, for the very concept of a 'Red Dragon' implies other-coloured dragons but the specific nature of that particular kind of dragon seems to strike a powerful chord within the mind. I wonder how many voters for 'Dragons (non-specific)' were imagining a Red Dragon?

SURPRISING OMISSIONS

Yuan-Ti - only one vote for the snake-men.

Vampire

- One vote! And it can't purely be because they are generic, Dragons are up there.

Shambling Mound - One vote, Swamp Thing not doing it for you?

Slaadi - Fucking Githyanki got higher than Slaadi? Despite being boring as fuck? Shocking.

Purple Worm - only two votes for the vast one. What a shame.

WHO IS TRULY A LOSER, ONE WHO GOT IN ON ONE VOTE OR ONE WHO UNDER-PERFORMED?

The following all could have been expected to do a lot better than they did in my opinion.



Frost Giants - one one vote.

Blink Dogs, only one,

Otyughs - only two votes! Its a Gygaxian classic!

Githyanki and whatever the other ones were, 3 votes. Boring.

Aboleth 

This is a great image too

3 votes, not bad but hoped for more.

Tarresque -

Only four votes for Wallmart Godzilla. Could have done better.

Umber Hulk 4 votes and Displacer Beast 3 votes. Not shameful but I would have expected them to be higher.

Drow

- ONE VOTE for the Gothic Misandrists. All that fetish gear for nothing. I weep.

THE ONES I DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT

Amber Golem - the only mention of Golems and its these?

Seems they are from Ravenloft? Honestly, this sounds like a pretty good name and 'Amber Golem' has that tasty and unusual specificity which suggests something interesting and magical. Their current rules don't seem that interesting so these might be ripe for a remix of some kind.

Rot Grubs - 

3 votes so surprisingly popular. But 'Spawn of Kyuss' got no mentions despite having a better name?

Decapus - 

ok its that thing from Palace of the Silver Princess, ok not that bad.

War Lords?

 (Still have no idea what these are)

THE "WHAT WERE YOU ON?" CHOICES

All of these got one vote. I'm not sure why but I respect that the community still has some independent minds left in it.


Ear Worms??

Flumphs -

 Someone had to I guess.

Goldbugs.
....

Kuo Toa. 

- If there was anything interesting to say about them I would say it.


Theiflings - 

...

Did you mean 'Tieflings' or did I mis-type? (Actually, if they don't already exist a monster called 'Theiflings' sounds pretty cool.)


Wolf-in-Sheeps Clothing -

ahh the hilariously specific-mimic.



Yellow Zombie Creepers

 - Honestly I agree. These are underrated.


Paralysing Claw - I'm not sure what this is. Like an animated hand or a creature *with* a paralysing claw?

Svirfneblin - really?

Water Weird - you do you man.

Draconians...

Orc Warchief -  and yes specifically the orc warchief

Pyrohydra - HIPSTER CHOICE.

THE "PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER FOR GODS SAKE" CHOICES

Paladins - pfft.

Zagyg the  Sorcerer!

- Stop. My sides.

"I guess the undead in general" - headdesk.

Man (the greatest monster) - SIGH.

"maybe the Demogorgon bc of Stranger Things ??"

TO SUM UP

And there you have it. Dungeons and Dragons, a game, fundamentally, about Goblins, (one of the commonest Fantasy concepts), Beholders, (the mad giant lazer shooting eyeball guys you find nowhere else), and giant cubes of jelly. With Dragons possibly also included.

Does this tell us anything about the complex synthesis of shared paracosms in the corporate-industrial age? How our imaginations are at once united and exploited by corporations and trademarked confabulations which simultaneously give us a shared language of the imagination and allow us to form social groupings far beyond those of our immediate experience while also to some degree making us the subjects of capital to some degree?

Does it tell us anything about the interlacing of the widely-known general powerful and classical idea-structures with the alarmingly-specific, often goofy and bonkers beings we both desire and fear to encounter? How meaning itself is born from the archipelago of our neural networks where the novel and the known combine and contrast?

I do not know, but our course is set; work out better powers for the Amber Golem, work out what 'Theiflings' should be and find out why the fuck people like Kobolds so much.