pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity

I'll just brush off a year and a half of dust from this, and note that I'm alive and well for that small number of readers who don't already know that in person.

I'll also point out that this week, the management over at the gaming community Quarter to Three has been kind enough to host some cheerful babbling I've done about the relatively-unknown video game "Clutch." Monday's entry is here and the rest will release scattered about each day after that.
posted by Gar @ 9:33 AM

In no particular order. I'm pretty sure I'm running a mild fever, but don't know if that's anything more than correlated to these.

-- Cloverfield is a decent giant monster movie. Generation Kill was a more-than-decent dramatized mini-series on soldiers in the field. Every single one of them was a more compelling character than the useless whining shrieking yuppie idiots that Cloverfield was saddled down by. I want a giant monster movie focusing on a particular company of soldiers trying to contain the entire situation as INSERT MAJOR METROPOLITAN AREA HERE gets trashed.

-- I had a dream this morning of having something or other to do at a generic-university's science building, said building not patterned after any actual location that I could tell. Whatever the original task, it was rapidly obsoleted by the realization that there was a rhino in it; this required moving slowly to get around it lest it get spooked and/or angry and charge, because even in this particular dream logic, in a contest between charging rhino and me, charging rhino is going to win. This was further complicated by the building next door suddenly getting pummeled by airstrikes--jets zooming by and unloading (apparently very wimpy) missiles into it.

I like to think that a giant monster was going to erupt through that building next, and I would've rejoined my unit after dealing with the rhino mission, but I woke up at that point.
posted by Gar @ 11:34 AM

This is my idea, which I invented myself, it is my creation. I should really file a frivolous patent posthaste, but won't, so when the antigames start up in 2010 or 2014, I'll be the bitter drunk guy ranting again about how they stole my idea while all the friends and acquaintances who put up with my nonsense sigh and wait for it to pass again.

So, I was watching a bit of the Olympics, and it occurred to me that the main problem with them is that all the competitions are between people who are similarly massively skilled at whatever the event happens to be. (I'm aware that many people consider this a feature. I am not my brother's keeper.) Then it came to me, in an inspirational flash.

Every even-numbered off-Olympics year--so alternating 4 years sandwiched between the regular ones--there should be the other games. I haven't chosen what to call them yet, and should really just start trademarking every possiblity as it occurs to me. But, again, won't. (See above re: drunken complaining, too late.) These games will likewise involve particpants from all nations. But here's the important twist: whereas the regular Olympics all involve your standard qualifying competitions to winnow out the athletes, the alternate games will be filled by lotto, by pure random pick. It'll be brilliant. The stands will explode in excitement when the pasty stereotypical full-time internet cafe Starcraft-tournament playing Korean actually struggles across the entire length of the 100 meter pool, as opposed to cramping up and sinking to the bottom after floundering ten feet like the 300-pound trucker just did, and who knew that 70 year old grandmother could shoot skeet so well? Except for that one little misfire accident, but judges can be replaced.

I predict with full confidence that the viewership numbers would put the actual Olympics to shame.
posted by Gar @ 1:53 PM

So this will probably the most horrible thing I learn about today. The bit where in the linked pdf article that made me physically cringe is the mention of one person with the syndrome having, over time, ripped out the bones of his hard palate. So, that's a fun read that should be shared.
posted by Gar @ 8:35 AM

...it ain't got NO FACE YYEEEARGH!

Labels: .

posted by Gar @ 7:47 AM

I'm a big believer in having piles of neglected things gathering dust. Therefore, I'm nominally signed up on that Twitter thing. In practice, it'll get updated perhaps slightly more often than the blog, which is sort of like saying one midget is slightly taller than another.

I figure it'll still be handy to note things to follow up on later, and also to send coded messages using the agreed-upon ciphers, as I'll be able to update it via phone texting. For instance, if I find myself in a certain situation, I'll be able to thumb in "spleen" as an update, and certain parties--who know they are but not necessarily others who know who they themselves are, and vice versa--will know that it's a call to immediately activate their roles in the Omega Contingency Plan, with said order unable to be countermanded. And so on.

I'll follow up on one important note right now. I got pointed at the Muxtape site awhile back, which is probably one of those things the RIAA has some junior attack lawyers currently being starved in cages while being poked with sticks while effigies of it are waved just out of reach, in order to give them the proper motivation. It's a neat little thing, vaguely akin to something like Pandora or last.fm, only with a complete random walk model instead of any sort of recommendation engine. My piece of the effigy, which is an unsurprising random grab of metal and bulldada (if "Banging in the Nails" doesn't put a smile on your face, well, I'll miss you when I'm in Hell later, but not terribly because SubGenius Hell is that sort of place).

But what caught my attention about the place is in the Terms section. You have your usage restrictions--you shouldn't be able to put multiple songs from an artist or single album up on your mix--and "not in the face, not in the face!" CYA fictions like users agreeing to obtain permission to let muxtape use anything they upload. That's all expected and not noteworthy.

But the very last sentence of the terms is, "Muxtape is alive."

And I'm creeped out by this. It's not really the sentiment itself. I mean, sure, it's allegedly just your standard Web 2.0 The Machine Is Us/ing Us buzzwordy bullshit, which will look pretty quaint and staid right about...well, right about now, but also in a few years when that'll be the majority realization too, just like the belated realization that dotcoms weren't actually ushering in a totally different new kind of economy that's rewriting all the rules. (The attentive student of history will realize, from these kinds of belated realizations, that the popular portrayal of mankind as a sentient species is actually just a marketing lie.) That doesn't worry me. I expect to see such statements in "about us" sections and vision statements and whatnot.

But it's in the Terms. It's in there as a mandate. As a base given. It's like a EULA, that by reading you automatically accept, an oral contract. You agree that Muxtape is alive. But what kind of life is it? Have you seen the internet? Have you psmelled it?

Worrying.
posted by Gar @ 11:21 AM

The original Shawshank Redemption scene, before it was altered due to usual Hollywood test audience lowest common denominator effect. Transcendent, moving, powerful.

Gilbert and Sullivan once covered the Earl of Mixalot's family anthem. The booty ripples backwards in time even unto the age of pirates.

Nerd music superstar Jonathon Coulton's heartfelt acoustic cover. Performance somewhat marred by the sort of thoughtless crass buffoons in the audience who insist on laughing at anything serious and beautiful.
posted by Gar @ 9:47 AM

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

While that may seem to be laying it on a little thick, I've gotta say--it's really onto something.
posted by Gar @ 1:57 PM

Dwarf Fortress is one of those games I periodically mean to actually sit down and dedicate the time to learn to play. It has the benefit of being free, so that's less embarassing than being one of the games I've actually paid money for and haven't learned. It's absurdly, ambitiously complex, to the point where it's probably one of the few games which can use the term "emergent" as something other than an idiot marketing buzzword. (Sidenote: Saint Bill Hicks on marketing. He will rise again, one thousand feet tall and clothed in holy radioactive fire.)

Also, it led to the epic saga of "Boatmurdered", the grand story of a dwarven stronghold besieged by demonic elephants, miasmic rotting clouds, total all-consuming insanity, and engraved images of cheese. It's a lengthy read, a bit slow to start, uneven due to the authorship switching that's part of such things--but well worth it.
posted by Gar @ 1:47 PM

As previously mentioned, some time ago I spat out a short piece of warnography bulldada involving the grown-up Peanuts gang involved in a zombie apocalypse and time travel brought on by the Great Pumpkin (an otherworldy demonic horror, you see) with Linus as the corrupted evil sorcerous mastermind. It amused some people, and somewhere an angel got its wings.

I still think that was a fair characterization of a believable Linus path. Here's part of the reason why:

I've been buying the collected chronological sets of the strips as they've come out and as I remember (I imagine I'll stop when I find the point where they lost the undeniable edge it had in its earlier years; I'm curious as to when that may be. My suspicion is it's somewhere around the late 70s or very early 80s; it'll be awhile before the compilations reach that point), and just finished the '61-'62 compilation. One of the strips went like this:

Linus is standing out looking at a starry sky. He is silent for a few frames. One of the frames has the streak of a falling star in it. He goes back into the house. Lucy is sitting in a beanbag, watching television. "Guess what?" he says. "What?" she asks, one presumes, crabbily.

"Falling stars don't scream," he says.

In another strip, originally from December of 1962, he's bringing his own translation of bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls to show and tell.

I'm telling you: budding evil sorcerer.

EDIT: I knew I'd presented other evidence from earlier still, and found the relevant entry. These two posts really contain just a small representative sample, and are not exhaustive by any means. The picture they paint is truly damning.
posted by Gar @ 10:49 AM

I do not claim that this makes any rational sense. As an eggheaded intellectual who, spiritually speaking, is close to dead inside, I have a difficult time giving it credence. You can, if you also fall into that taxonomy, probably explain it away as a minor sort of temporal lobe seizure that spread a bit to hit some random memory circuits.

All I know is, the vision came to me entire and whole, in a single flash, as in a flash of lightning in the night as the Dalai Lama said of a major mahayana Buddhist sutra put it. (Or possibly some apocryphal gnostic bit; I may have that phrase indexed wrong.) It came to me while visiting family recently over the holidays, and a commercial promo for something godawfully trite involving dance troupes battling out for AMERICA TO DECIDE who the best was. DanceWar or DanceFight, something like that. Sort of like the end of Blazing Saddles where the cast crashes through into another set, and the angry choreographer leads his troupes into battle, only instead of Slim Pickens it's just another bunch of dancers. On its lonesome, just one of those little byblows of the scorched-earth response to the WGA strike, I imagine--if they're not writing a fresh stream of godawful shit, well, the networks can make even more godawful shit without them. (I also hear American Gladiators is coming back. Mark my words; when the WGA strikes a third time, it will also return then. As it will for the fourth.)

But that's just me being uncharitable. I can trace the causes and conditions of all that. But it was then I saw what was to come. Flash of lightning, yo.

There will be the distant sound of a scream of rage, a voice pushed past all endurance. A burial plot in Mississippi will shudder--and the reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will explode out of the ground. Swelling with righteous holy fury channeled from beyond the grave, where his spirit was denied rest until his work could truly be done, bones and remnants of flesh and burial clothing will sublimate into a searing white light of holy fire; no longer truly a "body," his zombie will grow to well over a thousand feet tall. The thousand foot tall reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will stride across the nation, leaving burning footprints in his wake, and tear the network headquarters into something that cannot even be rightly called rubble; no stone will remain atop the other, and indeed there shall be no stones, nor even dust. There will only be craters, which will smolder for centuries to come like the Centralia coal mine fire.

Labels: bill hicks, prophecy

posted by Gar @ 11:19 AM

Dear old gray lady at the local Post Office's automated post center thingie: using it to bill up and ship packages is certainly a nice feature. I would humbly suggest, however, that using it to do so for a stack of a dozen such packages when you are averaging approximately five minutes for each package's transaction from weigh, pay, label print, and bin placement is, perhaps, not particularly indicated.

Engaging in such activity may, in fact, indicate that it is time to begin consideration of allowing yourself to drift away on an ice floe.

Sincerely,
Gar Drastic

P.S.: to the staff's credit, they processed the lines with unexpected efficiency. I noticed you still had approximately two-thirds of your package stack left when I exited the building. Again, I urge you to consider ice floe.

P.P.S.: "ice floe" can be construed to be metaphorical. There are other options.

P.P.P.S.: Merry Christmas!
posted by Gar @ 10:25 AM

Movies:

Holy Mountain - A minibus full of hippie Rosicrucians tripping out of their collective gourd smashes headlong into a Road Warrior-esque jerryrigged armored dune buggy with spiky bits being driven by Carlos Castaneda on PCP, low blood sugar, and a high fever. They begin to exchange insurance information, but end up making a movie together instead. This is that movie.

Altered - Pissed-off crazy rednecks traumatized by being fucked with by aliens aim to get some payback, but don't really have a very well thought-out plan. This is one of the few movies to paint an accurate picture of the Grays, namely that they're vicious little fucked-up bastards with mouthfuls of flesh-eating bacteria and a penchant for playing with the lower GI tract.

Good movies both, in their own ways.
posted by Gar @ 9:02 AM

So I'm listening to Manowar's "Hail to England," specifically the 8 minute "Bridge of Death" metal epic that caps it at the end, and let me back up a bit.

Manowar is the kind of band that...no, wait, I'll try again.

Manowar's album covers all feature some sort of variant of berserker Conan knockoffs, all glistening and oiled rippling electrolyzed thews and more than a little homoerotic of the "FUCK YOU I'M NOT GAY!" overcompensating variety. These mesomorph warriors are howling their straight-as-Ted-Haggard at the sky, which is generally excitingly busy with lightning, while shaking various weapons at the sky ("I WAS JUST EXPERIMENTING!" they're berserker-raging), while various extremely top-heavy topless women fawn at their feet in a fruitless effort to gain their attention. But they're failing to gain the warriors' attention because, you know, they're tired and dammit woman, they already said they were at a late meeting at the office and no they didn't stop at the bathhouse again HAIL ODIN BLOOD AND WAR!

They also at one point held the record for the world's loudest band. Also for a drum solo with the highest sustained beats-per-minute sustained by a human drummer. And if that's not actually true, it should be.

Anyway, as I was saying. I was listening to this song, freshly downloaded from yonder emusic.com. Most of it is blending well into the established background. A lot of words about the fighting to die in the sky and why as eagles fly in the sky to fight and die (Manowar's book of rhymes has always been fairly limited), when this absolutely brilliant piece of lyrics catches my ear:

"ride out on Hell's hot wings!"

Which is awesome. Just think about it:
Ride Out on Hell's Hot Wings(tm)!

Now I ask you: is that a great ad slogan for a brand of hot wings, or is that the greatest ad slogan for a brand of hot wings? I'll just put you down for "greatest."

Ride out on Hell's Hot Wings!
posted by Gar @ 6:08 PM

I don't watch much television. I'm not one of the teeveetotalers who get smug about that fact and believe that it gives them mental superpowers, because I'd have mental superpowers no matter how I spent my free time, on account of the yeti blood. Or more properly, nental superpowers. But another reason I don't believe that is that it definitely leads to missing some good stuff when it's new.

For instance, I hadn't known of the awesome brutality, blacker than the blackest black times infinity, of DETHKLOK, whose adventures are featured in the documentary series Metalocalypse.

I was aware of some kind of emptiness where the sound of brutality should echo. I was aware that, as my blood flowed through my veins that I was not being aurally bloodtrocuted. I knew that my ears were starving, but I didn't quite know how.

But now I do know, and it's a better world.
posted by Gar @ 8:32 AM

Good collection of mp3s of classic old radio dramas. The Shadow, Lights Out, etc.--all kinds of good stuff there.

Related, the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, who did what is probably the only actually good Lovecraft movie (a period piece, silent movie adaptation of "The Call of Cthulhu" short story), also did the same schtick in an adaptation of "At the Mountains of Madness". That latter, of course, done as a period piece radio drama.

It's a genre I think is probably due for a niche comeback, what with the popularity of podcasts.
posted by Gar @ 7:34 AM

Baby sea turtles.
posted by Gar @ 12:51 PM

Movies:

Hot Fuzz: It's by the same folks who did Shaun of the Dead, and it shows, and in a good way. Slow-burn opening that's primarily to set up a machinegun series of joke moments later; tongue-in-cheek dry humor building to general insanity. Basically, what Shaun does for zombie flicks--being simultaneously a comedy version of them, and a damn fine zombie film in its own right--Hot Fuzz does for action cop movies.

Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon: This was one of those great occasional discoveries that justifies my netflix subscription above and beyond all the other justifications. Some hapless film school types are shooting a documentary on our hero Leslie Vernon, who's aiming to be the next big name in unstoppable supernatural slashers. His dream is to be referred to in the same breath as the greats like Voorhees and Myers and Krueger once were.

It's all very self-aware of its genre, poking fun of and fond of at the same time. It reminded me somewhat of Scream, only I liked it much, much more--"Scream" was, in effect, mugging at the camera and oh-so-very pleased with itself; "Behind the Mask" pretty much plays it poker-faced straight.

Game:

Bioshock: A good game, but somewhat overrated--not really worth the thundering praise it's getting elsewhere. Where it shines is its lovingly polished art direction, and narrative that's competently executed with decent voice-acting throughout--which of course puts it lightyears ahead of most videogames. It's no spoiler to note that the plot has its twists, and most of the weaknesses of it come about as a direct result of that, as pretty much all plots that get twisty don't bear too much scrutiny around them.
posted by Gar @ 8:41 PM

I grew up in a drafty oldish farmhouse. The sharp snap of the classic mousetrap design doing its thing was a common thing. Throwing out the bodies was one of the not-really-chores from time to time.

People are shaped by their experiences. To put it poetically, we are all the echoes of the ringing bells of our past. Splash. So, I'm fairly inured to things rodent, especially when said rodents are dead. This is an important thing to note.

I will change the names here, in order to protect the innocent. I will rename them according to the standards as established in many epic-fantasy writings, in order to add the appropriately mythic tone to this tale.

About a week back, I'm visiting with my friends. We'll call them F'fje, and D'ren'ak. I hear tell they recently had an adventure ridding themselves of a mouse. That's mouse, singular. Having disposed of likely a thousand-plus mice over the years of boyhood and adolescence back home, I'm thinking something like, how quaint. Especially when no-kill traps are mentioned. These no-kill traps, of course, did not have a very good success rate. Eventually, they achieved a mousefree home again. All is well.

It's early afternoon. Their youngest, L'ael, has been convinced to nap, and has--after suitable complaints and raging against the descent of the Big Darkness, the swallowing void that is sleep--surrendered to that void. Exhausted by the potent struggle of this phenom, F'fje collapses, as if felled.

I'm entertaining the other two, R'rta'teg and Ws'eyra in the basement playroom. As all such rooms should look at that age, it's mosly a space where the contents of various toy bins has exploded, and coated every available surface. The distribution of the plastic, fabric, and books is a microcosm of the universe's distribution of matter as a whole--overall, evenly distributed, but with just enough variation to cause localized clumps. The boys are entropic vectors who redistribute the overall structure. Like the universe, it would expand forever were it not bounded. The walls create an artificial omega > 1, for the cosmology fans out there.

"Uncle Drastic! What's this?" R'rta'teg queries, thrusting his find out at me.

The answer is pretty obvious as I take it from him. "Huh. Sure looks like a mouse to me." I do a quick bit of necessary taxonomy, though--it could well be fake.

"Is it a toy or real?" The kid's sharp. (Truly is. A couple years earlier, when he was barely older than three, he and I had, at his blindsiding initiation, a fairly in-depth conversation about death and potential causes of it. Which rocked.) Once in my hand I discard that hypothesis. It's been dead for awhile, and is fairly small. Young, or just not very well fed. It was just laying out in the open, the boy explains.

"Nope, this is real. You guys aren't as mousefree as you thought. I'm going to go throw this out and let your mom and dad know." Up the stairs I go to the ground floor. On the second, F'fje remains, like L'ael, gripped in the twilit little doom that is sleep. D'ren'ak is quietly eating lunch, basking in rare solitude. "Hey!" I announce cheerfully. "Check out what your son just found!" I'm holding out the find, dangling stiffly via its tail, without a second thought.

She turns, and the reflex obviously comes right from the brain stem. She shrieks, and doesn't so much leap as teleport about a yard straight back and ends up bolt upright on her feet. The chair, luckily, is wheeled, so it just skids away harmlessly.

It was awesome. It could only have been more awesome if she'd actually ended up standing on the table, on tiptoe.

In my defense, this was completely unintentional and unexpected. For a split second, as it was going on, I thought maybe she'd seen something behind me. Maybe I'm about to be stabbed from behind by some guy in a hockey mask, I think. (I actually think this a lot. Be prepared, is my motto.) But, no, it was the mouse.

Because part of me is made up of a good man, I do apologize. I hadn't actually meant to have taken a couple years off her life, and had I known this was going to be the reaction, I like to think I would have proceeded more carefully with breaking the news.

But I also recognize the existence of darkness in me. We all carry the potential forms of monsters in us, after all. And so I was also somewhat disappointed that I hadn't known this was going to happen.

If I had, I would've been powerfully tempted to arrange to have filmed it. And now, I'll never have the chance to.

A peaceful life is all about learning to live with such lost opportunities.
posted by Gar @ 6:50 PM

I was going to do this in-character, but that's a lot of work and I'm very lazy, even in the face of bonus XP and phat lewtz. But yet, by writing this in a way that maximizes my personal slack, aren't I even more in-character than being in-character? Think about it.



This is based off of my infallible memory, and is both wholly and holy accurate. In the places where your own memory and records, up to and including the in-game journal, disagree, it is you who are wrong. So it is written, in the Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2. This citation will prove it: "So it is written, in the Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2." – Book of Gar's Recap, Chapter 1, Paragraph 2.



Our heroes of the yet-unnamed party were sleeping it off after a month-long drunken (to put it legally) celebration of renovating the Caves of Chaos, slaughtering all the evil inhabitants, using their blood as primer, and repainting them and making them much more homey. The property value is increasing dramatically already, and the party's investments—shrewdly rolled over from initial nest eggs invested in grain and flour futures—promise to make them hundreds.



After everyone emerged from their blackouts and fugue states (except Stram, who could not be roused; everyone drew on him with markers, left his hand dipped into a bowl of warm water, and left him to catch up later), they found themselves in a well-irrigated field. Bob the Barkeep was there, selling various hangover cures and equipment upgrades for suspiciously fair profits. After everyone got some coffee in them, attention was turned to how to get Bob's galleon out of the irrigation ditch it was somehow parked in and out to open sea.



No one really remembers how they solved that problem, or much of the ocean voyage, again due to being drunk. To put it legally. But they finally came to their destination, some town which the citizens claimed was called Ulik, yet had some other name over the gates. It's hard to say who was right. The citizens were all fucked up, whining about having barely escaped slavers who were stampeding women and raping cattle up and down the coastlines and generally being evil dicks about it all.



The guy who nominally ran the place told them that it was unknown where the slavers were based, but there was a burnt-out temple up in the hills that sure had a lot of suspicious foot traffic in and out of. So the party headed up that way. Various half-orc normals kept shooting arrows into the party. The party calmly countered this argument by explaining that the half-orcs would be happier with swords stuck through them instead. In the end, the party won the argument. In the afterlife, the half-orc slavers agreed that they had been wrong, and asked if they could please repent, but it was too late for their sorry asses.



Also, quite a few of the party died, and had to be brought back to life by the Space Bankers, who had returned their business to the more accepted industry standard of streamlined service fees since the party's last outing. Upon discussion, everyone agreed that maybe next time they wouldn't react to combat by everyone running in separate directions.



The adventure nearly came to a halt when it was discovered the front door of the temple was locked. But then they found the slavers had left the back door unlocked. It was promptly kicked in on principle, and they descended into the basement, which had a serious ant infestation. An extermination bill was left, and the party pressed on, deeper, harder, yes, YES! No one had ever satisfied the evil temple like the party did. It had never been like that before. The slavers didn't treat it right, not like Orson and "Bob" could, baby. Sure, they had to slap the temple around some, especially when it got all lippy and let its mouth get smart like that, but it was for its own good.



The sub-sub-basement led into an underground complex which was infested with slavers who were very confused. They hadn't heard that they were supposed to be dead, so the party explained their error to them by killing them, and collected fees in XP and gold. The new plan of not running in different directions when fighting immediately paid dividends for everyone except Maximvs Vrsvs, who visited the Space Bankers of Resurrection several times, mostly because of the candy bowl in the lobby. The candy was worth the xp penalty, he later explained.



Soon, the party found trapped slaves, and freed them. "Holy shit," the imprisoned slaves said. "You guys are awesome!" "Yes," the party agreed. "Yes, we are awesome. Except for Stram, who didn't come with. He said you guys suck, and weren't worth saving. Are you going to let him say things like that about you? If you see him in town, you should totally fight him. You probably will, being 0th level commoners. Go back home and try to get better shops up and running."



They also found the slaver who ran the place. He was going to deliver this big evil monologue and introduce himself, but the party killed his ass before he could say his name. Saint Doktor Bastard was divinely inspired to cut out his eyeball and keep it. He spent some time waving the severed eyeball around over the corpse and saying "Hey, what do you see there? Oh, your body? Your DEAD BODY?! That must be because we KILLED YOU! You never paid "Bob" his tithes, and now you're BURNING IN HELL! HA HA!"



Back in town, everyone was suitably impressed. The eye was getting a little stinky and drippy, so Bastard let the mayor keep it. He also decreed that henceforth, the town should have an annual celebration, held monthly, in which they would tithe their profits to the Church, and thus avoid burning in Hell for failure to do so. Many souls were saved there, that day.



Back into the hills went the party, and found a garrison. Everyone climbed up a rope into an unsecured window, except Saint Doktor Bastard, who was deep into meditation and communion with the Space Bankers' Level Up Department. Finally, he rejoined them.



Things went well, until a serious bug was uncovered in the Saint Doktor's foul stinking zombie upgrade. Suddenly it threw an exception in memory address 00xx0000 and started slaughtering slaves just freed from cells. Previously, it had done the same to some oxen, but Bastard just assumed they were evil and unrighteous oxen. This warning sign was ignored at cost, and brought about a hard lockup and crash of his Paladin plugin. Fortunately, a reboot into safe mode and then system restore from a recent partial backup restored full functionality. The zombie won't be seeing use again until a service pack, which the Church currently has no ETA on.



Later, another slaver executive was discovered, this being some slut named Markessa. This was a pathetic figure, obviously trying to sound French, but then secondguessing the name and trying to spell it in some way that could give plausible deniability to being accused of sounding French. Whatever, she died like a dog, if a dog dies by getting shot full of crossbow bolts and stabbed with swords a lot. Bastard collected her hand and said, "Hey, Zen riddle for you. What's the sound of one hand dying? The answer is YOU!" Later still, St. Doktor and Maximvs got separated from the party, and found this perfect double of Markessa. While Max testified that they killed her normally, Saint Doktor insists that they beat her to death with the severed hand of the real one.



Also, someone found a letter to Icar, which might have said something important or not.



They also found a locked door leading even further underground, which had ominous subtle foreshadowing of leading to the next adventure, such as the signs glued to it that said "This door is currently out of order, but will work in the next adventure!"



"I wonder what that door's all about," wondered Dam Fackoo.



The victorious heroes returned town to much celebration and more XP. There commenced a shopping orgy which resulted in several major upgrades. In a fit of generosity, Saint Doktor Bastard offered the short sword taken from one of the slaver captains to Jackie "Ten Wolves of Multiple Characters All Named Jackie Chanette But With Quotations in the Middle" Chanette, since it looked light and speedy enough for even a woman to use. She declined the sword and insisted that Bastard sell it, but only if he gave her some love. After some wacky Three's Company hijinx from that misunderstanding was resolved, Doktor is even Saintlier, what with a new tool, the Holy "Some call it…The Avenger" sword, all glowy and big red straps and all. He then gave Jackie a golden shower with the remainder of the sale. "Oh no, not so much! That's too much of a golden shower, tee hee!" she said, and Mr. Furley gaped wide eyed at the camera, but it turned out they were only hanging a shower curtain or something like that.



"You guys are awesome! You're so cool! I wish we could be you!" said the town. "But what do we call you?"



"We are…the Party of Orson!"



And forever after in that town, whatever it's called, the Legend of POO will never die, amen.



Then monsters kept attacking the town, but it was only a dream. OR WAS IT?!
posted by Gar @ 11:58 AM