Year: 2019

Open Cthulhu

And Chaosium's reaction to the threat to their cash cow:

"That is correct. We are releasing a BRP Open Game License and a BRP SRD. The SRD is a core BRP rules document that people are authorized to create derivative works from, including rules expansions, etc. But certain things are going to be off limits - you can't use the BRP rules to create your own game using the Cthulhu Mythos. Or your own version of Pendragon. Etc."
—Jeff at Chaosium

So, a little context. After H.P. Lovecraft's death, his friend and executor Professor Robert H. Barlow was cut out of control of the publishing estate by con man and hack writer August Derleth, who founded Arkham House to exploit Lovecraft's work. In the '70s, Sandy Petersen wrote RuneQuest for Greg Stafford's Glorantha setting, and founded Chaosium. In the early '80s, Sandy got a license from Arkham House (upstaging TSR which had a… looser arrangement… and had to remove Lovecraftiana from their books) and wrote Call of Cthulhu. And while everyone loves classic CoC, it never lent itself well to fan publishing or 3rd-party publishing because you had to deal with Chaosium for a license.

Chaosium has for 40 years asserted that they own Lovecraft, works, body, and soul. Well, with copyright expiration and his work being clearly in the public domain now, nobody really cares what Chaosium or Arkham House think about that anymore. It certainly doesn't help that the "7th Edition" Call of Cthulhu is incompatible with the 1st-6th Editions, so there's those of us with 40 years of playing this game, and the "official" game which nobody plays.

Mongoose Publishing had a license for RuneQuest in the 2000s, and then released a clean-room OGL book Legend, which is an excellent RuneQuest-minus-Glorantha system, cheap, and unambiguously clear of Chaosium's ownership.

There's a couple of other Lovecraftian RPGs:

  • De Profundis: Epistolary solo or play-by-mail… I'm not sure it's an RPG, so much as a psychedelic drug in paper form. Highly recommended.
  • Trail of Cthulhu: Very rules-light investigation game, but I find the GUMSHOE games dull and predictable, too obviously railroaded by the GM.

Open Cthulhu: Because Cthulhu Wants to be Free

The current PDF is a pre-layout beta, no art, so I can only evaluate the rules.

Mechanically, it's CoC 6E, more or less, classic stats. Combat's streamlined quite a bit from the case-point mess of 6E, and you are directly instructed to inflict SAN rolls for committing violence, murder, and such, as well as the supernatural.

The implied setting is the 1920s-30s, but there's a decent chapter on customizing the setting, including a fairly extensive treatment of the Dreamlands, and rules for entering, leaving, and manipulating the Dreamlands! The Mythos tomes are limited to 5 translations of the Necronomicon, the Book of Dyzan, and The King in Yellow; most others have licensing entanglements.

Unlike Chaosium's "I shoot Cthulhu with a rocket launcher!" stats, Open Cthulhu doesn't give the Great Old Ones normal stats or limit their abilities; the Keeper is the author of the story and can do as they please. I like these guidelines:

  • Hint rather than show outright
  • Mythos Powers shouldn’t be “boss monsters”
  • Focus attention on human worshippers
  • Mental contact is dangerous; physical contact is virtually guaranteed deadly
  • Powers are never consistent; never predictable

Other monsters are almost entirely those from Lovecraft, not Derleth and such. The "Byakhee" are here called "Winged Servants" because Lovecraft didn't name them in "The Festival". The rather ludicrous presence of Mummies, Werewolves, Vampires, and such that would've made good old H.P. sigh with disdain is carried along from Chaosium's kitchen-sink approach; and yet they don't have Frankenstein's Monster, one of the few that H.P. liked! Stats are given for many of his characters, presumably prior to the events of their stories.

A compact but useful library of Mythos spells and artifacts adapted from the books finishes up.

I wouldn't classify this as more than halfway done; OpenCthulhu calls it 1.0a, which only makes sense if they're thinking it'll be done at 6.0. There's one skill for all "special gear" by which they mean photocopiers, computers, DNA sequencers, rockets, and any other tech which isn't a car or firearm; fine for 1920, incredibly stupid for modern games. There's no equipment lists, and while you can find online scans of Sears catalogs from the 1920s-1980s, things get more difficult after that. The weapons and armor system is greatly inadequate for modern games, and I hate low-fixed-value armor like CoC has used in most versions; the RuneQuest/Stormbringer-style random-roll armor is better. The bestiary could use work. Magic spells outside of just the Mythos aren't addressed, and for many games those are important.

But what is here, is a better Call of Cthulhu (almost but not yet a better universal Basic Role-Playing) than Chaosium has, and it's under the OGL so you can make your own, and write materials for it without arguing with anyone. I'm thinking I'll write up some adventures, maybe go back and re-adapt "Nightmare Eve" and my "Shotguns & Strip Malls" games into Open Cthulhu.

What I'm Watching: Assimilate

Two interchangeable, incredibly dull, incredibly white teenage boys with hidden cameras try to Youtube star their way out of an incredibly dull, incredibly white small town, and then an Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) ripoff starts, but with rather stupid children instead of competent adults.

Slightly creepy stalker vibe, which could've been a good variation on the theme, then the pod people start being obvious. As usual, the cops are useless until it's too late. The girl who joins the party in the second act is more liability than help. Her little brother Joey needs rescuing, but mostly takes care of himself, like Newt in Aliens. A film about him would've been far more interesting.

The pod people are strong, fast, hard to kill, organize wordlessly, imitate people tolerably well up close, and yet so stupid they fall for obvious tricks and can't tell their kind apart from Humans who walk slow and show no emotions. There's no way they should be able to replace more than a couple people before being noticed and shot by angry townsfolk. They do the open-mouth scream from 1978 with an extra CGI mouth expansion. They don't get you when you're sleeping, they just have your naked clone chase you down and hold your head; probably the filmmakers were scared to promote amphetamines. The mass body burnings are grim but a little obvious, unlike the dump trucks collecting bodies in 1978.

There's very little originality to this, it's as blunt and linear a ripoff as it's possible to get, with a little Youtuber narcissism as the only spice. It's as toothless and non-scary of a "horror" movie as I've ever seen. But I'm not bored by it. Certainly it's better than the military base remake (how are pod people soldiers different from regular soldiers?!), or the incredibly awful Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig remake with the happy ending. Fuck Hollywood.

This movie's "not rated", but at most, it has moments of nude clones with their nipples and genitalia taped over/CGI airbrushed out/blocked by convenient furniture. The most the lead couple manage is a hug and kiss. There's no real blood, some ketchup stains for bug bites; hitting someone with a rock or pipe, or strangling them, is presented as cartoony, no physical injury shown. The few fights have no choreography, but they're just mobs grabbing or pushing. Even the one gunfight just has victims fall down, or a little ketchup on the head. It's basically G-rated. The 1978 film was PG (it's barely not R, and PG-13 wasn't added until 1984), and still had more nudity, sex, drugs, and violence.

The ending scene is silly, who is broadcasting that? How are they getting satellite feeds from around the world? Also most Internet services won't stay up long without Human maintenance. Organizing survivors in Youtube comments is not sustainable.

★★½☆☆

What I'm Watching: Ad Vitam

A French 6-episode series on the 'flix.

Very brief warning at the start of the episode, that there's suicide themes and discretion etc., which vastly understates it: This is a meditation on death.

On the 137th birthday of the oldest person alive, long after emortality/regeneration is developed, a number of suicides/murders wash up on a beach, and a cop and a girl, a former suicidal cultist, investigate.

The show is French, and as I've previously noted they seem to be more casual about casting normal, even ugly people in their shows. The girl especially has the ugliest skull and bad hair I've ever seen in a character not meant to be a freak. The cop has a broken (or just naturally ugly?) nose and is a little worn down and sad looking for an emortal, but he has reasons to get less regeneration than he needs.

The blue jellyfish, which presumably (later in the show confirmed) provided the drug or gene which gave them regeneration, is all over as mascots, pets, color theming.

Oh, color theming. Like every damned thing from Hollywood, half the show is cyan/orange duochrome. They have other gels or color filters and use them in a few scenes, but don't use them for anything else. If you're not in Hollywood, you're free to use actual colors! You don't have to imitate their worst feature! But it does, often making it very hard to see people and details because it's all a muddy blue blur.

There's minimal effort made on sets and props. They filmed in industrial, brutalist, or Scandinavian spartan architecture, but the cars, shitty cell phones, and iPhones, iPads, & MacBooks are unmodified other than black tape on the Apple logo. Other than some people in tracksuits, who may just be Slavic, fashion is modern. Magazines are in print, instead of just being on their shitty phones. Dance scenes at parties with bad modern house music are spazzy fishstick wobbling, exactly like the present. You'd forget it's set in the future, until a wall-sized screen advertises at you, or some other visual prop like the "source gas" (stolen directly from Transmetropolitan) which is a nanotech camera/sound wire, or a "true mirror" which shows an actual-age image of everyone in the mirror, useful when surrounded by centuries-old people.

The oddest parts are when they try to be futuristic, with the grief counsellor and his glowing ball ("they used to use puppies"), or the half-wit intern who rides around on a beeping wheeled hoverboard, or the dumbest "weapon" in the history of dumb BDSM-inspired weapons.

"It must be comfortable. Having that attitude. Thinking everything is absurd and pointless." —Cop Darius
"So what we're doing has a point?" —Young punk Christa

Of course, everything is absurd and pointless. Darius is wrong but is so ingrained in his rut of life, 99 years as le flic, he can only see things as crimes or victims, not as transformations which may be necessary.

The scientist who invented regeneration says children are no longer necessary, and there's a breeding control bill supporting him. Christa isn't quite aware enough to be a nihilist yet, but she rides along passively thru most events, only taking initiative when her hallucinations push her forward.

The suicides turn out to be something more interesting. I'd been hoping for a Charles Sheffield's Proteus inspired plot, something really changing the way mortality and form shaped Humanity, but they half-assed the plot in the end, turns into a very pedestrian conspiracy, rich old people getting their kicks. All the hints of a new world, or of protecting youth to get new blood, totally dumped in E6.

★★★★☆ for initial premise and being actual Science Fiction, ★★☆☆☆ for execution and ending.

Coal in Infogrames/Not-Atari's Stockings

  • Atari VCS Chief Operating Officer Michael Arzt: interviews himself with a sock-puppet:
    • Sock-Puppet: "You are very handsome and are shipping on time!"
    • COO: "These are both true, and you are entirely alive and questioning me, not just a filthy sock on my left hand."
    • Sock-Puppet: "Please don't put me on your cock again I don't want to get pregnant/sticky."
    • COO: "No promises."
  • Previously in Not-Atari News

Takeaway is that the new VCS box is delayed until Spring 2020, maybe later, with a number of excuses, and some more case photos but no working demos anywhere. The cases do have connectors inside now, which is very exciting if you're completely gullible, but there's zero evidence from Infogrames that anything can be powered on and do something.

There's a bunch more lies, such as that most Unity games will work on it; while it's true you can recompile many Unity games for Linux, it often requires specific hardware and software configs, like the SteamOS, and the odds that Infogrames' contractors who are building this have matched those configs is vanishingly small.

The "original software" they tout is a $100/year subscription to play classic Atari games, which you can get a bundle of for far less, existing consoles for $20-40, or "free" (pirated, but it's been 40 years; meh) with MAME.

The actual reason they used IndieGogo is that IndieGogo doesn't require shipping a product, you're throwing money into someone's pockets with no guarantees. I've been waiting since 2013-10-17 for the LotFP Hardcover Referee Book, Raggi says (posting a weekly update a month ago…) he's still working on it, and I believe him because he's an honest 6-years-late fuckup. I wouldn't believe the Infogrames people if they said "le ciel est bleu".

Yoast is Toast

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that's supposed to make it easier to cross-promote your pages and analyze how people enter & use a site. It can verge on black-hat, but mostly it's been a positive.

Today they decided to turn on an ad banner inside the WordPress admin, on every page, with an impossibly tiny little (x) that you can't actually hit first time; so they must think they have the best click-thru rate since the spank-the-monkey banners of the '90s.

So I've uninstalled Yoast, gave them a 1-star review like many others. I'll find other, ethical ways to "build engagement" and "brand" and all that. I don't know what kind of data they managed to extract from you in the time I had it, and for that I'm sorry.

I would say I'm shocked a company misread their audience's tolerance for being preyed on, but waves generally at the Internet it's really not that unusual.

MST3K: Keep Circulating the Tapes

I've been watching since slightly before the Centralized Comedy run off VHS tapes of KTMA. My USENET headers listed my location as "The Satellite of Love". My ideal cast is Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo, Trace Beaulieu as Crow T. Robot and Dr. Forrester, Frank Conniff as TV's Frank. I'd have loved for Joel to stay and keep writing, but he's too nice to the films to be the host. I wish Jim Mallon had done more as Gypsy, I don't like the later Gypsy roles much at all. I'm OK with Bill Corbett playing Crow or being a RiffTraxxer, but I'm a bit of a stick in the mud about it. One night in the '90s while watching shitty movies, Carnosaur to be precise because it's seared into my memory, I snapped and cut out a Joel & the bots outline in cardboard, sharpied it black, and taped it to the bottom of my TV screen, where it remained for a decade until I stopped watching live TV.

All of which is to establish that I'm a Mistie before I say: Cancelling this new show is a mercy killing. Jonah's maybe the least funny, blandest mayonnaise-on-white-bread person who has ever appeared in a comedy show in even a bit part, and he's supposed to be the host. I like Felicia Day & Patton Oswalt as much as the next nerd, but they're in like 5-10 minutes of an ep. Very Old Joel Hodgson appearing as not-himself or doing ad bumpers for it, propped up in a chair because like Cameron Mitchell, he drinks on set, is kind of sad. Big expensive sets and special effects that aren't simple squibs or something held in front of a single camera are anti-MST3K; money does nothing for this show.

RiffTrax, MST3K, and ShoutFactoryTV all have Twitch channels with old and new shows. While RedLetterMedia doesn't do entire shows on Best of the Worst, they do enough you can follow along at home. It is a golden age of riffing, with actual funny hosts, but it's just not in the official "MST3K" show.

(It's somewhere between antagonizing and funny—but not too funny—that RiffTrax's outro says unauthorized duplication is illegal, when MST3K's entire existence was due to "make copies, circulate the tapes, we only exist because fans tell each other about us").

Cartoons

BoJack Horseman is a deep, well-written work about self-sabotage and depression. It might be the best show ever made for getting people into some kind of therapy or self-improvement; or at least to stop downing a fifth of Jack every day. But it's miserable, incredibly unpleasant to watch sometimes, and I'll almost certainly never rewatch it, with the exception of a few non-depressing episodes ("Fish Out of Water", for instance).

Rick & Morty is exactly what I want from a cartoon: A bunch of science and fart jokes with parodies of Doc Brown & Marty McFly, with an unhealthy dose of cosmic nihilism, and I can watch it anytime I need a laugh or cry at the futility of life. "Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"

The Simpsons hasn't been funny past season 2 other than some Treehouse eps and guest-artist couch gags, and the characters are the blandest stereotypes possible. It's extruded cartoon product. I have no subscription that would let me watch it, and I don't care, but I do see clips and even complete episodes sometimes on the Youtubes or such. It's Seinfeld without the observational "humor" or asshole New Yorkers, it's every awful sitcom with a whiny family, just flavorless pablum. It'll probably outlive us all. The Terminators will sit around after exterminating Humanity and watch their new Simpsons episodes, chuckle robotically, and complain that earlier seasons were better.

Groening's (well, to the extent he's involved; producer & they imitate his old style?) medieval fantasy cartoon Disenchantment is equally dire, which is ridiculous since they've taken a genre where there's unlimited possibilities, and made it into a Simpsons style sitcom. I'm dis-enchanted.

Archer, man, I miss Archer. Seasons 1-4 were fun but standard Adult Swim-type nonsense. Season 5 Archer Vice was the peak, with the coke smuggling, Smokey & the Bandit, Pam's habit. Season 6 was dull, trying to recapture 1-4 but you can't go backwards. Season 7 Hollywood was great, film noir done by lunatics; it reminds me excessively of every time I've run or played in a modern/espionage RPG. I've only seen the first eps of S8-10 in this "dreamland" saga where Sterling's in a coma fantasizing, and they sure didn't persuade me to find some way to watch it. S11's supposed to be back to "reality"? Dunno.

Is there anything good I'm missing?

What I'm Watching: The Devil Next Door

The '80s-'90s trial of John Demjanjuk, immigrant Cleveland auto worker, claimed by accusers to be Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic guard from Treblinka. There's a lot of footage of the death camps, and the survivors after the war, and mostly very bad flickering VHS transfers of the trial. The period testimonies are the strongest part.

Modern interviews with his defense lawyer Sheftel are charming, if that's a word for this situation. Most of the other modern interviews are so cut up to avoid spoilers of the next episode that they're uninformative, or openly… deceptive? Pushing a point of view, anyway.

I'm horrified by the delusional belief in eyewitness testimony 40 years after the events, especially in a less technical legal system like Israel's (of the '80s; maybe they've modernized since). And the crowds of Jewish people chanting for death for someone, turning completely into their former persecutors. You'd have a more just trial by flipping a coin or studying bird entrails.

Up to episode 3 or so is at least informative and has an interesting narrative. After that the series falls apart badly.

I followed the first part of the case back in the '80s, but got distracted after his first conviction, waiting for the appeal, so was never really aware of the outcome.

The appeal and "happily ever after" are given short shrift, just a recounting of the events and brief glimpses of the exculpatory evidence. Then even shorter shrift, with only the barest video of the start, of the post-Millennial second extradition and German bullshit trial where all evidence was ignored, a 91-year-old man was convicted of maybe—probably, but without hard evidence—being a soldier at a different camp. Before dying of old age in prison, and rendering the whole thing moot.

Then there's some moralizing about war as a criminal act.

The attitude by Representative Holtzman seems to be—never clearly stated but strongly implied—that all soldiers on a losing side should just be charged with murder and executed. If that was wartime law, nobody would ever surrender and wars would rage until half the population was exterminated. There'd be peace on Earth, eventually, when the last two people killed each other.

When WWII ended, the US brought home Wernher Von Braun, one of the worst war criminals in history, who killed maybe a million people with his weapons, used Jewish slave labor hand-picked from the camps. He was made an American citizen, never tried for war crimes because he was useful, got our space program and ICBM global thermonuclear war systems running, constantly lied about his former devotion to the SS, slowly went crazy religious, died at peace. Is that justice? Certainly not. But it was practical and merciful.

We accepted many immigrants after WWII from Germany, Italy, Ukraine, France, and elsewhere who had been enemy soldiers, because war is not subject to peacetime law, and they could put their past behind them and work. If they worked and kept their heads down, they were of value to us. And we'll want the same mercy extended to us if we lose a war again. Demjanjuk's former line supervisor gets this, and the son-in-law gets it.

Holtzman especially doesn't seem to understand the difference between being drafted and fighting for your country, doing the job assigned to you, when they just happen to be Germany or Ukraine or Italy; or modern-day Illinois Nazis who do it because they're assholes and do not have the excuse of wartime service.

The whole series needed a hard editing cut of about half the footage, put the interviews back together to be coherent, rather than the chopped-up mess it is, and show more hard evidence. Maybe get a military lawyer to talk about wartime law, and immigration lawyer and the Open Borders comic author to talk about accepting immigrants of dubious backgrounds. No such effort was made.

★★★★☆ up to E3, declining to ★☆☆☆☆ by the end.