In Praise of Marvel’s Flops: Inhumans

So Marvel just finished airing the safe-to-say series finale of Inhumans, their most panned production to date, and it got me feeling like, hey, somebody oughtta stick up for anyone that is getting crapped on that hard. So. Marvel’s Inhumans.

In a moment of perfect timing during the last episode, the words “Created by Scott Buck” appeared on the screen just as the villain of the show was saying, “You realize this is all your fault.” But was it? Must we assign blame? Can we accept this moment, this thing as it is, and move on without recriminations? I dunno. Just sayin’.

Inhumanoids is the story of the inhumans, who are a race of superheroes resulting from the work of Ancient AliensTM. They live on the moon. A lot of them have short foreheads, which makes me think the casting director has a short forehead, and just thought, hey, these people look good and normal. And they do, I mean, my head looks like the comic version of Karnak, so maybe it’s a matter of perspective. Even so, it gets a song in my head.

The faces of Anson Mount, Serinda Swan, and Iwan Rheon crudely photoshopped onto monchichis.
Mon chi-Chi! Mon, chi-chi.

Stop: Spoiler time.

The title of this post isn’t a lie. But I have to mention the bad before I can get to the promised praise…
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Legal Advice on a Novel

I’m trying NaNoWriMo again, for what that’s worth. My concept involves the events of Revelations and some real life politicians. Question: To what extent is it kosher for me include public figures in a work of fiction? Could they sue for defamation, when the intent is clearly absurd parody?

It may not be as simple as the “fair use” a lot of youtube heads hang onto. Different forms of media have different laws governing them. Any lawyers know off the tops of your heads collective?

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Thinking on a Mage Game

Self care is retreating into worlds of imagination and letting the world burn. OK, no, we have to try to fight the good fight forever, I’ll be back to it, but for now I’m letting entertainment take me away. That means RPGs in this household, and the month of Halloween means spooky themes.

So I’m trying to run a short term game in Mage: The Ascension, with the aim of spookiness, and I’m not even using the Nephandi. Using the theme of Bad Religion, I’m making a story that’s Celestial Chorus cultists vs. Technocracy authorities. Waco in Oregon, with my player running a child in a bad situation.

I’m confident the player won’t read this, so I’m using this space to make my notes. Some of y’all nerds may find this interesting, if only to quibble and deride, or as a launching point to describing your own experiences with the RPG in question, or whatever. The rest of you can skip it.

>>PC is older brother in small family of four. Ma and Pa have been taken into a semi-rural cult of heretical catholics, under the guidance of a rogue Celestial Chorister.

>>The mage in question has found and cultivated an unusually large group of people with minor occult abilities, and taken his successes as a sign that global ascension can be achieved.

>>The ATF is interested in the cult, having been tipped off about them doing culty things, and wanting to know if that included a weapons stockpile. Through the ATF, the Technocracy gets a notion it could be reality deviants and sends in some agents.

>>PC is disturbed by his parents bringing them into a cult, and further when they actually start to get powers. They’re trained as weak hedge wizards, the power that grants them enforces faith and turns them into zealots.

>>Mage cult leader recognizes a true mage’s avatar is bound to PC’s younger brother, and tells the family the child is special, could be a saint if raised in the light, and they get weirder.

>>PC should get idea of escape, maybe is approached by agents during a supply run in the nearest suburb. May possibly betray fam.

>>I was thinking of having the technomancers offer to turn the PC into a cyborg that can mow down the whole cult from the inside, get some body horror in that way. Not sure tho, and probly the kid won’t go for it.

>>I should have alternate plans for each path the player can take. Not sure what to expect yet. But I’m starting tonight anyway, and winging it. Will add edits to this post as things become more clear.

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EDIT ONE:
>>Just remembered I was thinking the kid could try to contact the catholic church for help with the heretics scaring him, and have the Celestial Chorus send in someone to try to rein in the rogue mage.

EDIT TWO:
>>First sesh. PC (age 16) is named James, his little brother (age 7) is named Peter, Mom and Dad are still Mom and Dad, the rogue Chorister is Father Tony, and four years of background were passed mostly in summary mode. Parents have magic ability to summon a light, may require killing a bird, or they just did that for fun.

EDIT THREE:
>>We were hoping to do a lot more RP this Halloween than ended up being possible, and I came to realize what I ultimately wanted out of this game required too much groundwork to function as a spooky good time thing. Live and learn. I wish that wasn’t so often the case with RPGs. 😛 Anyhow, might finish it some day but life is so hectic and there’s so many things ahead of it, it’s not seeming too likely.

Rick & Morty Fandom Does Monty Python

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is an important cultural artifact, I think, whether or not one is capable of really loving it years after the fact. The comedy troupe’s second most quoted movie’s most quoted scene has Brian, who has been mistaken for the messiah, attempting to reject the role of demagogue. He addresses a massive crowd saying, “You are all individuals.” The crowd chants back in unison, “We are all individuals.” One contrarian says, “I’m not!”

I don’t think we’ll ever see a better recreation of this scene in real life than this weird Rick & Morty sauce fiasco. I don’t know from the show, except that it seems very nihilistic (right up my alley) and overly elaborate (less so). But clearly it’s trying to be chaotic and unconventional. Meanwhile, the fans decided to march in lockstep to do something very odd and shitty. Then the contrarian pens an article (the one I linked) where he claims (perhaps rightly) to understand the show more than the others, and demonstrate his difference from the crowd.

End scene.

The mobilization of an unfortunately politically important group of people makes one long for different circumstances. Says Dan Sheehan on Twitter,

“Rick & Morty should do an episode about how Rick’s second favorite sauce is Universal Healthcare”

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Worried About My Circuses

Bread and circuses. I can eat – housing costs have been the real enemy of well-being in the USA – so I got bread covered. And circuses are OK, but the economy has hurt my ability to get out to every one of them. I missed Wonder Woman this summer, only got to see Spiderman once, as much as I liked it. But Hollyweird is losing money, and that means it’s about to get crappy.

It’s gonna get crappy because detached billionaire corporate fuckos always take the wrong lesson from travail, change the wrong things. I don’t mind them working smarter with the budget, reducing the level of detail in the spectacle some. I’m betting they could be less shit with how they advertise too. We don’t need saturation advertising to remember to watch something like Guardians 2, come on.

No, they won’t get smarter. They’ll just panic and pander to China harder. Maybe make Chris Pratt a personal slave to Xi Jinping for a week, suck off some party officials, include giant subplots about how the sino-socialist wage slave system makes Stark tech awesome. Nobody committing suicide at the iron man suit factory, pay no mind to the giant nets.

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Climate Change Denialists, Cover This

I knew when they were talking about how hot this summer was going to be, when the temperatures were spiking in spring, that there were going to be days that were both hot and hazy. I could feel it coming. They don’t happen often here so a few times in my past have been memorable.

Anyhow, I knew there were going to be days that were both overcast and over 80 degrees, but I had no idea it was going to be from the fucking Pacific Northwest being on fire. Earlier this month Vancouver BC had a bunch of wildfires that sent smoke south of Seattle to where I live. Then there’s yesterday, when Eastern Washington caught fire so badly that ash was raining on cars reminiscent of the explosion of Mt. St. Helens.

So, climate change denialists, if you wanna keep up the bluster, you’re gonna have to put in some extra legwork. Vacuum the haze out of the sky. Clean all our cars. Blow little fans on us, install AC for us everywhere we are, everywhere we’re burning up, and tell us “haha, sure is reasonable out today! Nothing of note here.”

Get a move on, boys. Half the world’s on fire and the other half is drowning.

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You’re the Terrorists, DHS

So the nationalistically named Department of Homeland Security has decided that my peoples in antifascism are terrorists. Even that fucking centrist crapsack Trevor Noah has decided to go out of his way to shit on the movement. I’d actually like to thank the DHS for reinforcing the dogshit coming from moderates right now, because if there’s anything that might give the more clever of them pause, it’s the Orange Regime agreeing with them.

I’ll thank them for that demonstration, but must hector them on accuracy. Antifa are terrorists? What is a terrorist? I could see some individual antifas might meet the criteria, but they’re outnumbered by an order of magnitude by white cops that kill to reinforce mortal terror in the African American population. So. DHS? FBI? DEA? Any other breed or stripe of fucking cop? If antifa as a whole is terrorist because some individuals may have committed some violence for their ideology, then every last cop is a both a terrorist and white supremacist by the same metric.

I don’t have the power to make the terms. The state does. So if the state says it’s terrorist to be me, then I’m a terrorist. Likewise if the state decided to decree people like me to be fifty foot purple nuns with laser vision, then we’d be fifty foot purple nuns with laser vision. It doesn’t make it true anywhere except in this fucked-ass Bizarro world they’re forging.

Anyway, Fuck The Motherfucking Man. Seriously, I’m so goddamn burned out and tired of EVERYTHING in power right now. Able-bodied cishet white men? Fuck all of them, fuck anyone who is any of those things to the extent they fit the description, and to the extent I fit those descriptors (a lot), fuck me too. More than anything I’m tired of LIES, of living in a world run by unchecked lies so bald-faced and outrageous that they make me wanna rip my fucking face off. Fuck you, Trump, fuck your world of lies, and fuck anyone who plays the fife in the goddamn hell parade.

Sincerely, a terrorist.

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Why Do Diseases Hurt Us?

It seems like the ideal way to be a parasite is to allow your host animals to proliferate and be well. The healthier the host, the more nourishment they can provide the parasite. So I have a few questions for those in the know:

Why do virii and bacteria harm us, when they’d be better off if we were healthy?

Are there any truly harmless parasites in the average human? The mites in eyelashes seem pretty chill.

As I think of it, some diseases can only spread if the host coughs, sneezes, or vomits, but is that the reason for all of it? A sexually transmitted disease that negatively affects one’s sexiness seems like it should be very unlikely.

To wax Agent Smith-ish for a moment, humans seem to be demolishing the planet on which we depend for life. It’s an instinctive race to grab the most resources that has produced economic and political systems that remove all guilt and forethought, do nothing but grease the slide into hell.

Are parasites doing the same? Does life clamor its way into these overly-successful dead ends every time? Is the cycle of mass extinctions a natural mirror of our boom-bust economics? I don’t know. But I do know this: Nature sucks. Nothing more to add, today.

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Character Creation Idea

I was thinking on the way players in some of my games have fallen into tropes during character creation that were a bit embarrassing. For example, in one game, there was a space on the character sheet for grade – the characters were in high school. Like, four people initially wrote that their characters had skipped a grade. Much weirder, two separate players came up with an idea of an uncaring father owning an expensive stringed instrument that their character stole during the course of the game. Violin boy ended up breaking the instrument in a teenage rage. Guitar girl just strolled and strummed, as one will. Those players had practically no interaction and came up with that stuff wholly independently. Wild.

So I had a two part idea for how to escape some of these tropes, or at least make characters less baroque and more dramatically resonant: One, come up with everything you think is distinctive about your character without looking at a character sheet at all. Two, when it’s time to fill out the character sheet, intentionally fill in any information you hadn’t thought of (character age, family, eye color, whatever) with something boring and bland.

Your character’s “bastard son of the duke” detail becomes less interesting the more bizarre details you add, and I think character sheets are where people go wrong. This is about RPGs, but the same could be true of fiction writing, if you’re using a questionnaire during character development.

The theory is that no one would have thought to have their character skip a grade if there had not been a question about which grade they were in on the sheet. As soon as you ask a question, there is a temptation to come up with an “interesting” answer. Make a character stand out by having fewer important traits. Hold off on the questionnaire, and round that thing out with bland. That’s the idea.

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