Month: May 2016

Going through the new 7th Sea rules now…

…and my wife – who lives and breathes 7th Sea in a way that I can appreciate, but not duplicate – keeps chuckling over my shoulder at the way that certain broken rules have been repaired. Alas, one of those broken rules is probably going to be the entire Finnegan pugilism school from Inismore. I loved Finnegan; but I loved it because it was gloriously broken and allowed me to play a Drunken Irish Kung Fu Fighter at insane levels of Cheese-Monkey.  I can’t blame John Wick for nerfing all of that. I would have done the same thing.

An entertaining Laundry competition that I can’t participate in.

Well, I can participate in it, only it won’t do me any good: the prizes are for UK/EU/Australasians only.  Which is cool. I imagine that there’s any number of American-based contests that are just for Americans, only I haven’t noticed because I’m an American so why would it register?

It’s still a fun idea, though. Basically, Charlie Stross’s British publisher (Orbit) is running a contest where people send in occult gear that’s suitable for the Laundry, which is of course the UK’s bureaucratic institution dedicated to fighting the Mythos and preparing England for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (a cosmic horror apocalypse coming soon to a reality near you!). Anyway: just because I can’t win it doesn’t mean that I can’t write something up anyway. If only because it amuses me to do so. Continue reading An entertaining Laundry competition that I can’t participate in.

I’m kind of conflicted on the Angry Birds movie.

I mean, I know that I will become intimately familiar with this movie. My children are fiends for Angry Birds; if we don’t see in the theaters it’ll be playing on heavy rotation the second it hits DVD. So I’m already kind of weary of it. And yet… Howard Tayler saw Angry Birds, and he liked it better than Civil War. Which is pretty interesting.

Of course, I might just decide to hold off on it because the kids are too young for it anyway. Anybody seen this movie yet? I want to know if I can safely take a couple of grammar school kids to it.

…Guess it’s time to start subscribing to Pyramid again.

I am so, so rusty when it comes to GURPS [4]e, but what are you gonna do? I can still think in [3rd] edition, I know the way Steve Jackson Games thinks, and I have all the in-print GURPS books.  …And that’s only the absolutely mildest of exaggerations. I even have a copy of GURPS Bili The Axe: Up Harzburk!, and that was the one that the company recalled (and then no doubt ritually burned) because of all the path errors.

[UPDATE: Sorry. Was looking over some stuff in D&D today, and embarrassingly I didn’t reset the edition count clock when I wrote this post. Good catch by Constant Reader Luke in comments.]

No, Captain America is not going to stay a deep-cover HYDRA agent.

…Fine, Marvel can get what it wants: people talking about their latest Captain America plot twist. But let me be blunt; this is the creative equivalent of running twenty thousand volts through a dead frog’s leg in order to get a galvanic jump. It works, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem and it burns out the frog a little every time you do it. Continue reading No, Captain America is not going to stay a deep-cover HYDRA agent.