More Fun with the Spell-Checker

My spellchecker does not recognize the words "biblio", "arcanus", and "Antiocus".

It does, however, for some reason recognize the word "fuckwit".

I swear I never taught it that.

Happy Christmas!

I prefer that so much more than "merry Christmas". I dunno, it just sounds better.

Well, Christmas continues. We had Czech Christmas last night (Christmas Eve), consisting of veal schnitzel, fried breaded fish, and potato salad. Opened some presents, got the first season of "Hogan's Heroes" and "Madagascar". All's good.

Did further presenting today on actual Christmas. I now apparently have the FULL Transmetropolitan collection...all 11 books of it. 3 of which I already own. Ah well, I can probably give them to a store for trade. Or something. Also got another 3 books of Swamp Thing, which has become sort of an annual thing. I only ever get ST trades at Christmas or my birthday.

Much chocolate. I now have the complete run of current books for the World of Darkness, and got a deluxe, limited edition copy of the "A Game of Thrones" RPG. It has a dust cover, and a bookmark, and silvered-edges. Its purty.

Good haul. And dinner is coming in another 6-7 hours. Turkey, gravy, potatoes, stuffing, veggies, trifle. Damn good stuff.

BNW, update

Just won a copy of "Evil Unlimited" on eBay.

My collection will soon be complete.

Brave New World, 2006

So...I got back on a Brave New World kick. This would be the superhero RPG by Matt Forbeck, not Aldous Huxley's novel.

In the new year I should be receiving (from eBay, Amazon, and a friend):
-BNW: Covenant
-BNW: Delta Prime
-BNW: Defiant: The Defiance Sourcebook
-BNW: Crescent City

Yes. Four books. I'll now only be missing "Evil Unlimited".

For those that aren't familiar with it, BNW is the superhero game infamous for having "power packages". Basically, instead of buying different powers to make a unique hero you tack a "power package" onto your PC. A package is a static set of powers that does not change. Your Speedster with his Pace of +100 (meaning he moves an extra 300 yards per round, or roughly 100 yards per second)? He's not getting any faster.

Now...that's kind of annoying. But the setting itself models a few things well. First, it models...well...the setting. Which is pretty amusing. Its the only dystopian superhero game on the market (I do not count Aberrant as a dystopia). Or at least it was (nothing's been printed in the last 5 years). It also models things like X-Men and "Sky High" VERY well (Sky High models so well with BNW that its kind of scary).

What this also meant was that every book had between 6 and 10 new power packages in it. In total, between the 9 books there were about 56 packages in total. Two of those, "Covenant" and "Bargainers", didn't have any packages. "Bargainers" was basically the BNW magic sourcebook, and my copy of Covenant is in the mail.

Still, its a nifty game, and every book had loads of setting material in it. The Bargainers were one of the coolest parts of the setting, though. Bargainers heard voices. Yes, their power was super-schizophrenia. The voices, however, answered back, and turned out to be demons. Bargainers have a direct telepathic phone line to Hell. This basically turns Bargainers into either John Constantine, Dr. Strange, or Dr. Fate. Which is nifty, becuase it provides a LOT of leeway for how you want to play your PCs.

...unfortunatly the Bargainers really only were cool in the sourcebook. As written by the corebook you were basically stuck with a PC who had a variety of magic items on him (no more than 4 or 5) that could basically fill in for whatever power package-areas your group was missing. The sourcebook, however, let you play John Constantine, hounded by demons, bartering for spells and favors to keep the balance between Heaven and Hell. Nifty stuff.

ANyway, I'll probably write more in the new year when all my books arrive.

My new favourite typo

While talking about Aristotle's Poetics, missed the "shift" key. My new favourite typo is...

iPoetics

New. From Apple.

That is a BIG book

What's 600 pages long, filled with system mechanics, and sitting on my shelf?

It's The HERO System (5th ed. Revised).

I broke down and bought it, since I managed to talk the store into giving me $20 off (long story).

The reaosn I bought it is so I could use it to understand CHAMPIONS, which I actually want to buy some stuff for.

Damn the makers of HERO! Their gateway drug is $66! ($46 for me!)

Christmas Shopping DONE!!!!!

Finished my shopping today.

Everyone has been bought for.

Thank god. I just need to wrap them now.

Romantic Musings 12

I have very little in the way of responses to poetry for this week. Overall this term has been pretty good for this course. I’ve enjoyed it, and I think that I’ve learned a lot. I have my doubts about how the mid-term on Friday is going to go, but I’m hoping that I’ll do well. We shall see.

McGurk!

I can't even spell the episode title. "Mxypltkated" or whatever it is.

I just got my Superman volume 2 and Batman volume 4 (and Sky High) DVDs in on Tuesday. Done already. Some of the episodes were just BRILLIANT.

But there are few things stranger, and funnier, than a cartoon midget in a purple bowler hat walking up to Rodan's "The Thinker" and having it walk off with him while it makes smalltalk.

Also..."The Creeper". Its Freakazoid...for Batman!

...though I could have gone a long time without learning about Harley Quinn's cream pie fetish. Just. Don't. Ask.

Holy...

Holy shit!

Holy fucking shit!

My drapes have been drawn for hours.

There's like 2 inches of snow outside. I never saw it fall. Holy goddamned.

It'll probably be gone by morning. But still!

Just...wow.

Must...kill...Euripides...

4 pages worth of script, 1500+ words...and it only covers about 60-70 lines from "Iphigenia in Aulis".

Now i write academic commentary on my own work to explain myself to my prof.

Would you believe this is NOT for a graphic novel course, and counts as my final assigment for the course?

Romantic Musings 11

Term’s almost over. We’re getting heavily into the early feminist movements now with Wollstonecraft. I really have a hard time believing just how sexist the world was up until the late 20th century (and still is…but I like to think we’ve progressed at least a little ways). The whole movement was really a response to the fact that the status of women hadn’t changed a whole lot since Classical Greece. There were STILL a lot of men who thought that women were animalistic beings who needed to be kept in the house and carefully trained so they wouldn’t succumb to their baser urges. I’m relatively sure that said men wanted to BE in said house to succumb to HIS baser urges. Ahem.

Wollstonecraft has an excellent and fluent style of writing. And she makes her points very well, and very poetically. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” reads well, certainly easier than Coleridge’s “Doctoral Thesis Prelude to Literary Ballads”. The language isn’t quite as formal as Paine’s stuff, but its got that old air of formal structure to it. It is, simply, really good writing. And it makes sense, and I think its complaints are still VERY applicable today.

I’m thinking that I prefer the prose in this course to the poetry. The prose is interesting, but a lot of the poetry seems very dry. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but some of the poems we’ve been reading have just been either very dry or very dense. While the prose is similarly dense, much of it has a wonderful flair to it. Its sometimes more pleasurable to read than the poems.

Tryptophan addiction sated

The campus cafe (The Wymilwood Cafe) was serving chicken fingers tonight before class. So I decided not to get anything to eat and maybe go buy something after class.

Then when I went to cut through, maybe buy a drink, and found that...lo and behold...they were serving turkey. And stuffing. And gravy. Dear god was it good. Not as good as fresh stuff, but I have this addiction with turkey dinners.

I am content.

I also handed in the paper that weighed out, in the end, at just shy of 5200 words, with a works cited page 17 sources long.