WOLF PACK doesn’t look half bad. And frankly: neither does Sarah Michelle Gellar. She’s producing the show as well as being in it, so I figure she’ll get plenty of screen time.
I might decide to pick up the seasons, once they’re available. I just can’t justify another streaming service though, sorry…
Filling in stuff!
We finally were able to properly hear the report that [spoiler] had died in a shuttle crash about twenty minutes after the Anticipant had — I don’t know how she managed to figure out what happened. Maybe it’s really easy for her to decipher static. I mean, if she’s at right angles to the rest of us anyway, every regular form of communication would be garbled half-nonsense to her. Why should static be a special case? At least she didn’t go crazy in the cabin, which is just as much fun for a pilot as it sounds. Instead, the Anticipant just retreated into herself, took a sedative from Oft, and was soon sleeping the sleep of the medicated.
Oft was apologetic about the whole thing. “It’s a side effect of her training,” he explained. “The Anticipant has been taught to come to accurate conclusions, from woefully incomplete data. The techniques work, but they come at a cost of heightened sensitivity. In her case, painfully so.”
I looked over. Asleep, she looked a lot older, but a bit less pained, and I wondered just what those ‘techniques’ involved. “So sudden unexpected news knocks her for a loop?”
“Not exactly,” Oft replied. “It has to be unexpected and malicious. The universe simply randomly being the universe would be another part of the pattern, or so I think I understand. A reaction like this comes from a deliberate attempt to wreck the pattern, for whatever foul purpose.”
“So you don’t think [spoiler] died in an accident.” I didn’t state it as a question, and Oft didn’t take it as one.
“Certainly not, and neither do you.”
Or, heck, In Nomine. The meltdown over the new WotC Open Gaming License is still roiling, with companies promising legal action — and alternatives:
Second, we need to band together to create a non-OGL and non-WOTC version of a System Reference Document (SRD) that can forever be used by anyone. Why, you ask? WOTC has proven itself to be untrustworthy and we all need to wean ourselves off them as soon as we can. We will work with our friends in the industry and have been in conversation with many of them already about doing this.
(Via Anthony Ragan)
To which I say, mostly to Steve Jackson himself: why make something new, when GURPS is right there? It’s a point-based system deliberately designed to work in all types and genres of TT RPG campaigns, it has a plethora of sourcebooks immediately available for purchase (that should not be put under CC), and there is a fanatical cadre of players out there* who can offer advice and counsel. Handing rebellious companies a fully-realized and tested gaming system could end up making some money for SJ Games.
I’m not going to say it’s a no-brainer, because it’s 6:30 AM here and I may have missed something obvious. But I will say that the idea’s at least worth contemplating.
Moe Lane
PS: If SJ Games doesn’t want to CC 4th edition, they could always do 3rd.
*Ahem.
Current title: COVENANTS. Same number of stories, but higher wordcount (about fifty four thousand words). All more or less in the horror genre, including a story set in the same universe as GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND. I expect that I can work on it when I am sick and tired of staring at the novel.
At some point I should consider collecting all of these chapbooks and releasing them in omnibus form. Although it vaguely feels like cheating, when I do it that way…
A BEAR WITH A HAT!
“What in the name of the Four Archangels,” Jack roared down a minute minutes later, “is a bear doing in your boat?”
“It’s hard to explain, Captain!” Robbie yelled back. “Don’t worry! He’s friendly!”
“All bears are friendly, until they’re not! And they don’t warn you first!”
“Fine! He’s civilized! Can’t you see the hat?” Beside him, the bear shifted, and patted the headgear in question. “He’s a refugee! We have to give him succor!”
The bear itself was downright mundane, for cursed Jersey: a black bear, no visible tentacles or bubbling pools for eyes. Its head might have been a little larger than the bears back home; then again, it might have not. True, the bear was covered in mud, scratches, and dried blood, but so was everybody else in the golboats. Nobody seemed to be missing any bits, which was the important thing.
And… “All right,” Jack sighed, and signaled to his crew.. “Hoist up the boat.” Charlie made an interrogative noise, and he shrugged. “If the bear hasn’t eaten anybody’s face yet, it’s probably safe enough. Besides, if the entire crew can’t handle a damned bear, we’re all in the wrong line of work.”
Mostly, I got the book rewired so that the sequence of events are in the right order (I did do about five hundred words). Now I’ll write bridges in key places in the narrative, smush it all together, then go through GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND again to see what I’ve missed. Gonna kill me some secondary characters! Alas, it has to be done. I mean, it’s a science fiction horror novel, right? Somebody’s got to die.
A snippet below the fold.
The flight back wasn’t anything much, for the first twenty minutes. I decided I wasn’t playing any games with the planetary network today. We were all better off just going ahead, and giving us all some time to process what we had seen. Twenty-one minutes in, I turned on the radio, since we were coming within range of what passed for a human communications network on One-Eighteen.
Twenty-two minutes in, the Anticipant gasped.
Even I could tell that wasn’t good, and a look at her face confirmed it. She was in full ‘white-eyed horror’ mode, only her suit wasn’t pulling her out of the state automatically. “Oft,” I carefully did not yell, “she’s gone fay!”
Oft had already detached himself from his seat; he moved to intercept her. “It’s not Fear Reflex Syndrome,” he told me over one shoulder as he grabbed her shaking hands. That seemed to calm her down, so maybe it wasn’t FeRe; people in the middle of one of those episodes hate being touched. “She’s just had some horrible news.”
That threw me for a loop. “From… where?” I gestured around the cabin. “There’s no news here to hear!”
“Except the radio.”
“It’s barely above static.”
“Not to her, Pam.” Oft shrugged, not letting go of the Anticipant’s hands. “Before you ask: I don’t know what she heard, either.” His face fell. “All I know is, it’s something personally traumatic.”
Which did not sound good.
SHOTGUN WEDDING is definitely growing on me. I’m still trying to figure out if Lenny Kravitz is playing the villain, or not. If he is, I hope to God that he decided to just take it all up to eleven, because that’s what you do when you’re at his point on the career arc. Bet big, win big.
Via GeekTyrant.
…He carefully said, after buying one, and confirming the sale. I know that people have issues with Bioware. So do I. The company was dead to me; and as soon as I get my new hoodie, it will be dead to me again.
Counterpoint: my current N7 hoodie has been worn down to the point where tailors and dry cleaners give me pitying looks when I try to get it repaired. I wear it anyway. Those of us with the hoodie will stop each other in the street, just to make conversation. This hoodie has gotten me sales at conventions. So it’s a blessed miracle how Bioware resurrected itself just long enough to sell me a replacement hoodie, isn’t it?
