Roadside Picnic

House of One

2026-05-25T16:03:21Z

I must have needed the long weekend as much as I wanted it. I slept most of Saturday, probably 15 hours over the course of the day, and today looks to be similarly restful. This extra day is a delight.

Got back in the GM's seat for Slur Your Role last night with a DCC Lankhmar adventure. Had a full table, and it was a great mix. One player with some DCC experience, and my game was the first RPG experience for the other four! Plenty of breaks to explain rules, so much enthusiasm on their part, and we all had a great time. I love having new players. They don't know what they can't do and the "I want to try" energy is exhilarating.

The Midnight are coming to Old Forester's Paristown in October. The last live concert I went to before COVID was their show at Headliners and what the heck it's only been seven years so why not.

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Nemesis

2023-06-22T01:59:50Z

It's the first day of summer. Not all that hot, and driving home this evening was pleasant, really. The rain we've enjoyed for the last few days has gone away (darnit) and good ol' Sol was seen as a dull disc through a thick cloud cover. Proper cyberpunk skies.

I finally got over to a theater and saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It is good. Really truly very good. Maybe more visually striking as Into, and every bit as bonkers. Roughly three hojillion Spider-People and so very very many of them in their own animation style. Lots to do with family and identity. Indian Spider-Man pointing out the giant museum in his city of Mumbattan and describing it as something like "that's where the British put all of our stuff" got a big laugh from me.

Hey, do you know why the pyramids are in Egypt? They were too heavy to haul back to London.

Anyway, heck of a movie, and I'd like to give it another viewing just to look for all the little things tucked into the animation. So good.

In other media news, YouTube just served up the video for The Midnight's "Vampires," and it is assembled from clips from Wicked City, and boy that was porny as anything. Whole movie is on Tubi, if you're interested. Not really recommended.

Got a couple of quiet days coming up, then Saturday ... it's going to be a good mental health day, starting with running trains in Jeffersonville, then Free RPG Day at Miso's, then a L5R game at Bryan J's. I know I'll be tired as anything when I finally get home, but it should be that good tired.

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In God's Country

2022-04-16T16:13:05Z

Elton John is playing here in Louisville tonight - something like a year after the concert's original date. Yay pandemic. Tickets are available, and for a few minutes I thought about going, but a seat starts at $70 plus fees, so, no.

I do miss live shows. I think the last big arena show I saw was, in fact, Elton John and Billy Joel on some incarnation of their Face to Face tours - I know I saw them twice, and Billy Joel solo a couple of times. Smaller shows and venues got my money in the years after arena show costs went through the roof - Lucinda Williams at the Lexington Opera House and The Midnight (swoon) at Headliners, the last show I saw before Covid-19 did its thing.

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More Pressure

2022-03-03T02:58:25Z

I gave Cowboy Bebop three episodes and gave up on it. Was going to watch something on Disney+ tonight, but when I launched YouTube while making dinner, Gunship's "Woken Furies" was the second song to play, and that was as good a sign as any to watch Altered Carbon instead. So, here I am, going back through the first season before finally getting around to the second.

I finished reading American Injustice before bed last night. Stellar read, but frustrating and often infuriating. So many cases of railroaded suspects, indifferent (at best) investigators, and victims denied anything like justice. Again, the United States doesn't have a justice system, it has a legal system. And there is no equality, even acknowledging that.

Moving on, I'm starting Roadside Picnic tonight, filling in one of the gaps in my SF reading. I want to get back to the Appendix N Book Club reading list soon - the new illustrated Elric of Melnibone editions look so good.

After a week of missteps, Russia seems to have had some success in its invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops have entered and held part of Khersen. Russia's paying for it, though - near-universal economic and social sanctions, supply problems, and growing dissent among the Russian population. Ukraine is winning the propaganda war coming and going. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy - a former comedian - has turned into some kind of rallying figure, responding to an offer of transit out of the country with "I don't need a ride, I need bullets." Greek Orthodox inspired artwork of Mary Magdalene holding an anti-tank missile tube has become Saint Javelin of Ukraine. Smartphone videos of citizens driving alongside Russian military vehicles and lobbing Molotov cocktails. An old woman telling a Russian soldier to put sunflower seeds in his pockets so that something good will come when he dies on Ukrainian soil. It's amazing.

Despite the initial blunders, though, I can't see Russia not eventually taking Ukraine. Holding it, though - another story. There is going to be an insurgency like no other.

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Are Friends Electric?

2021-05-04T02:24:59Z

A few nights ago, YouTube's algorithm served up "My Name is Ruin," by Gary Numan. Heck of a track, with all of Numan's heavy sound, and the video is stark and beautiful. Numan's oldest daughter, Persia, sings backing vocals and appears throughout the video, and I gotta tell you, I've heard people described as "angelic," but Persia Numan is the first that I think I could truly apply it to.

Yesterday was a much lazier day than I had planned for, but I managed to get a couple of resumes out. Lake Cumberland District HD has an incredible opening that I'm in no way qualified for, and the posting almost reads like they already have an internal candidate, but what the hell. If there is a vacancy coming up, maybe I'll be a better fit there.

SpaceX got the first Dragon-flown ISS crew back home safely. Nighttime water landing, this time with the Coast Guard keeping gawkers at bay. China put up the first module for their Tiangong space station.

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Do You Wanna Touch Me

2020-11-26T23:36:49Z

Gods, I hope not. I lean more towards Brak's take.

It's been a good week. I've been in the best sustained mood in quite a while, just straight-up happy for a few days. I can't (and won't try to) put my fingers on anything in particular; I'm just going to enjoy things and ride them for as long as this lasts.

I mean, right now, I am just ... happy. There's a decent NFL game on, both teams are bad, but they're playing hard and it's entertaining. There was going to be an evening game, but COVID hit one of the teams hard, so instead NBC is broadcasting the National Dog Show and I am going to watch the hell out of that because dogs are just great. I have a boneless turkey breast in the oven, and will mash some potatoes and steam some peas in a bit. Right now, this is just a happy evening.

Cyberpunk Red hasn't made it to my FLGS of choice yet, so I'm going to pull it from the running for my next game. I'm a tiny bit frustrated with said FLGS over the ordering and prepayment process, but it's so minor and it's the firstest of First World problems. All will be well.

Sweet Christmas, I have no idea who performed the pre-recorded halftime show for this game, but man, they were just aggressively mediocre. [Edit: someone named Kane Brown. Gods, I hate bro-country.]

Tomorrow looks pretty good. I think there is some wargaming in the offing, and that would be a fine way to spend a few hours in the evening. If not, no big deal - I'll have the Mariner loaded up later tonight and I'll just launch for Liberty as soon as the workday's over. Already have the PS4 broken down and boxed for the trip, and I'll have my duffel and laptop bags packed in the morning.

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The Ghost of Tom Joad

2020-09-23T23:09:12Z

It's somehow fitting that, on his 71st birthday, something happened that Bruce Springsteen would write a song about. The grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case returned its indictments. Three counts of wanton endangerment against the now-fired cop. And that's it. The charges are for shots fired into neighboring apartments. It's an insult and an embarrassment, and yet it's more than I expected to see. I would not have been surprised if no indictment at all had been handed down.

There are demonstrations going on tonight, of course, and they've gotten ... vigorous. KSP and KYNG are deployed; last time that happened, a man was shot and killed by a KYNG soldier out in front of his barbecue shack out in the West End. There was an altercation somewhere on or around Bardstown Road. I don't know exactly where, and in later years I may wish that I looked it up, but tonight, I'm just not doing it.

Steve shut down Heroes about an hour after the indictments were announced. Didn't see or hear anything from Colin at TLGS. It seems like the action is mostly contained to the area bounded by 2nd to 9th and Market to Broadway. TARC shut down completely at 6PM, and Mayor Fischer declared a 9:00PM-6:30AM curfew for tonight through Friday. I heard both of those damned helicopters - KSP's Huey and LMPD's 520 - for a few hours this afternoon; if I never hear the former's thud and the latter's whine ever again, I'll be happy.

I'm fighting despair, over this and so much else. This is going to be a long night, and I don't just mean the hours until the next sunrise. There is so much loss and hurt and there is so much more to come. I'm again so very that I never had kids, because the world they would inherit is just fucked.

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No Hope State

2019-07-17T00:20:32Z

Thanks to YouTube, I've found another synthwave artist to follow - Lionface. A little heavier than Gunship, and way moreso than The Midnight, so they're a welcome addition to the list.

After too many delays and too much time spent overthinking minutia, I've gotten back on track with the PMC project that's been in my head for a while. Took a step back, rewrote the outline, and started looking at it in smaller chunks instead of one large(ish) whole. I still have no real idea what I'll do with it when its finished. That's maybe a conversation to have in a couple of weeks.

15 days until Indianapolis, and then hopefully a return to Night City.

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We'll get it right in the next life.

2019-04-08T04:17:26Z

Violet Days and The Midnight played at Headliners last night, and I'm a little bit pissed at myself for not going. As some kind of compensation, I'm listening to their stuff on YouTube, letting Google's algorithms do their thing. They're an interesting pairing. Violet Days is a Swedish pop band that sounds a whole heck of a lot like some of the better stuff from my teens, with a little bit more cynicism and self-awareness. The Midnight is a duo riding the synthwave ... wave, and they're pretty darn good.

Synthwave has been my go-to writing music lately, along with youarelistening.to. Cyberpunk vibes, nostalgia for a future that never was. The Imaginary Network Expanded art subreddits are complementing the audio with some fantastic and evocative visual pieces - ImaginaryCyberpunk and ImaginaryCityscapes are just full of good stuff. Sometimes, there's a track or a piece that just hits me the right way and it feels like I'm coming home.

It's been a weekend for going back to old headspaces. Last night's Somewhere in Time was an episode from the mid-90s about Cydonia and the "Face on Mars" and all that, and Jesus that took me back. In those heady early days of the World Wide Web and my access to it via UK's NeXT machines, I was seriously on board with the groundless crazy of photographs "clearly showing" the ruins of a city near that pile of rock on the Red Planet - a couple of pyramids, a kilometers-long wall, and other features that had to have been built by some intelligence. Goofy stuff, and compared to some of the horrible nonsense filling up the 'Net in these recent days, pretty harmless.

I have to wonder, though, if things like Infowars and antivax and all that awfulness can trace a lineage back to those early conspiracy and secret knowledge sites. Conspiracy theories have always been around, and there's never been anything like the Internet to give them traction and an audience.

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In the Name of Love

2019-02-27T01:46:58Z

Black Panther won three Oscars, the first for Marvel Studios. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse deservedly won Best Animated Feature. Green Book won Best Picture, and the comparisons to Crash's win a few years ago came on in a hurry.

Bumblebee was - damning with faint praise here - the best live-action Transformers movie yet. Never insulted the audience, Hailee Steinfeld is amazing, and there are quite a few really excellent moments. Thoroughly enjoyable movie.

SpaceX is taking another big step this weekend. The first flight of a Crew Dragon capsule is scheduled for late Friday night. It's an unmanned shot to the ISS, the first test of the crewed version of the Falcon/Dragon system. If this and next month's launch abort system test are successful, a crewed mission is scheduled to go up in July, and for the first time since Atlantis made her final flight in 2011, Americans will go up in an American craft instead of hitching a ride on a Russian ship.

Listening to The Midnight tonight, synthwave band outta LA. They're playing at Headliners on April 6, and I'm starting to think that maybe I should go see 'em. It's been forever since I've seen live music (a Waterfront Wednesday last summer?) and Headliners is a darn good venue.

I'm glad to see this synthwave trend rise up in the last few years. Lots of good music, quite often exactly what I need or want to hear. Gunship is my current fave - their "Dark All Day" video is just a thing of beauty.

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Christmas 2018

2018-12-26T05:01:40Z

I expected that I'd lose my shit last night - first Christmas Eve I've spent complete alone in a decade or more. This hasn't been good year, and the last few weeks have really weighed on me. But, I was okay, and that okayness came from a surprising source - before going to bed, I queued up a Christmas hymn playlist on YouTube. The good stuff - old songs and carols and hymns. Stuff from my childhood. Beautiful music. And it brought such peace to me. Not going to chalk it up to any kind of divine influence, but it was more helpful than I would have imagined. I slept so well.

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You Spin Me Around

2018-09-19T04:20:31Z

Dead or Alive. The band, I mean. Gender-bending Pete Burns, driving beats, eminently danceable tunes. Sometimes lumped into the array of 1980s one-hit-wonders, definitely part of the era's early alternative groups.

I owe this band my life.

Waking up one morning and turning on the radio and hearing "Brand New Lover" was the final push to get out of the longest relationship of my life, one that had, from the perspective of many years later, choked the life out of me. There were other factors - another woman, first on that list - and years later, a friend pointed out just how toxic and unequal things were. But I stuck with things way too long, until I just couldn't any more. And one fine morning, there's that song, and in that moment it was perfect.

Jesus. I remember Burns dying a few years ago. The Great Sage Wikipedia mentions his numerous and often severe changes in appearance; a Google image search reveals some serious plastic surgery. It's ... it's terrible. The '80s-era Burns was handsome, with the androgynous look that enjoyed early popularity in a time and subculture. Later years, though ... wow. He looked inhuman. Cartoonish, even. I'm all for body autonomy and an individual's right to look and be who they want, but what Burns did to himself flat killed him. Pulmonary embolisms and blood clots resulting from the constant surgeries. He died after a heart attack, probably the end result of being partially reassembled so damned often.

I wonder what Burns was looking for, if there was something he was trying to ultimately become. I've never felt any kind of gender dysphoria, but there have been times I would have readily been rebuilt into another chassis.

There's plenty of science fiction and fantasy out there - and no shortage of scholarly work - that takes a look at wholesale body-changing. Transhumanism. Cyberpunk. In their adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, Netflix is going all-in on the theme of a replaceable body - the lead character was played by a white man, Joel Kinnaman, in the first season, and the second season will see Anthony Mackie take over the role. If I remember correctly, at some point in the novels, the character, Takashi Kovacs, finds himself in a woman's body, and that would be a heck of a thing to put on the screen.

Depending on your take, Kinnaman's played a transhuman character already, taking on the role of Alex Murphy in the 2014 remake of RoboCop. More than being placed into a new human body or having a new one grown or even having consciousness moved or installed into a non-humanoid body, old-school bionics and cybernetics still are my mental go-tos when it comes to large-scale body modifications. A long time ago, I had dreams that sometime in my adult life, I would have my badly-nearsighted eyes replaced with mechanical improvements. Instead, I wear glasses and contacts, and reject getting Lasik surgery because the specs and contacts are such a part of my identity. Humans, man. We are not always anything like rational.

Driving home home from tonight's D&D game, I had a thought about how fucked up magical healing has to be in a conventional D&D-type fantasy world. So, magical healing from clerics and potions and whatnot are commonplace. Say some magic words, down some colorful fluid, and your injuries are gone. But outside of the numbers of hit points, that has to be traumatic as anything to the character and those around him. After a fight, he's got deep wounds, broken bones, burns from chemicals or acid or fire, and who knows what kind of other injuries. His partner says some words or he drinks a few ounces of something, and all of a sudden, he's watching things stitch back together, skin rebuild itself, punctured organs repair themselves ... you get it, right?

The gods of these worlds have to be either utterly monstrous or incredibly good at healing the mind, because that would cause some serious PTSD for starters. Also, at the prices listed for healing spells and potions, for-profit healthcare is utter bullshit, no matter what reality you exist in.

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