Typeset Your Transphobia

I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves.  Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables.  Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered).  Let’s take a trip back in time…

Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz.  He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written.  He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games.  The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself.  Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it.  I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.

I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press.  Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house.  Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process.  The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife?  These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.

One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same.  The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press.  I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is.  Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.

So.  Random insanity tables.  These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character.  They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll.  And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia.  I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight.  The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else.  Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.

I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D.  Weird times.  I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.

The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh.  This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin!  Genuinely.  I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool.  Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions.  Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities.  But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever.  Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester?  Hmmm, Kevin?  KEVIN?

If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with.  Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this.  Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh.  Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit.  Game on.

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FtB Vaulderie

I swear I’m gonna stop blogging so often, any day now.  Try not to think I’m dead when that happens.

One of my all-time favorite ttrpg mechanics was “vinculum” in Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a variant on the Blood Bond™ by which sires would wield cruel power over their childer.  Seems I gotta back this thing up and start over from the beginning.  Lessee…

In that rpg, you create vampires not simply by biting a victim and leaving them alive.  You create a vampire by draining all of somebody’s blood and giving them a little of yours at the end.  I get the impression this was how it was done in Interview with the Vampire?  Sexy.  In this rpg, that set you on a path to a kind of mind control.  Once you drink blood from the same vampire three times, you are blood bound to them.  This is something like being hopelessly in love with them, but worse.  It’s dramatic, but pretty heavy to RP.

The core rulebook is about the most populace political organization of vampires, The Camarilla, who have a quasi-feudal system that is sometimes enforced through blood bonds.  The rival organization, The Sabbat, were formed by baby vampires in ancient times who wanted to escape from blood bondage, and did so by inventing the vaulderie.

I don’t know where the honcho at no-homo-styled gay vampire HQ was getting these names for things, but it was probably a badly abused thesaurus.  The meanings of the names of the big seven vampire clans are fuckin’ embarrassing.  Vaulderie itself sounds like nothing more than the chorus of Der fröhliche Wanderer, tho it probably takes its name from a comparatively peaceful christian sect that became associated with protestantism, the waldensians.  This could have been cribbed from some moldy “list of heresies” that an ignorant modern goth was imagining as bad-ass and evil, even tho heresy against medieval catholicism was usually a brave and good thing at its outset, whatever it became (lutheranism por ejemplo quickly becoming quite vile).  This reminds me of when my sixth grade teacher went on a fundie tirade claiming the peace symbol was a broken cross for pagans, and I mashed it up in my mind with the goat-head cultists in that ’80s Dragnet movie to imagine peace symbols were badass and cool.  It’s laughable.

Anyway, ridiculous terminology accepted, the vaulderie is a magic ritual where the members of a pack of Sabbat vampires all pool their blood in a bowl and get their drank on, replacing tyrannical blood bonds to sires with a mutual bond of a weaker nature, shared between all of the pack members.  This bond is called vinculum, a kind of “blood bond lite.”

Where this got interesting and fun was the random intrigue it could produce.  Vinculum scores were randomly determined, meaning the first time you partake in the vaulderie, you could get a score anywhere from one to ten.  One is a vague fondness, ten is not-quite-as-bad blood bondage.  This was enforced with dice in some way, like, if you want to influence someone, you get more or less dice depending on your scores.

This could make characters with mutually high scores natural allies, characters with low scores giving each other a lot of side-eye, and characters with asymmetric scores having a tyrant/subject relationship.  Since you don’t have an innate sense of what score someone has for you, this made for a lot of intrigue.  What if you know you have a high vinculum to another pack member who is the kind of person to exploit it, and you need to keep it secret from them?  Stuff like that.

For an example, let’s say all the active bloggers in the sidebar at the time I composed this were recruited into the Sabbat, and had to share our blood bondage through vaulderie.  What scores would we have for each other?  Top names show the power you have over the person in the side names.  (built the chart to look good in preview, lotsa variables will make it into gibberish, don’t vex yourself trying to parse it)

__________Mano__William_.__PZ___Adam___Bébé___Charly__/_HJ_._Yemisi
Mano__+____X__/___10______1______3______.6______-.7_____.8_____5
William_++___8______X______10__..__2___.___7_______1_____..6_____6
PZ_______.__5______2_______X_____6__.____2_______.6_____.5_____5
Adam__._.___8______9_______6_____.X__.___.8_______.9_____10__.__6
Bébé___.____8______9_______4_____.1______X_______.6_____.2_____2
Charly___;___6______5_______5____._5_____.10___.___.X_____.4_____6
HJ________._6______6_______4_____.4______1_______.4______X____.3
Yemisi___.___5___/__10_____._2___.__2______5____.___1______1_____X

William would be a shoo-in for pack priest, with so many people so powerfully devoted to him.  Makes sense, he actually wrote for the publishers of Vampire: The Masquerade briefly at some point in the past.  Of the lot of us, PZ is the most resistant to his charms – and William is a powerless thrall to PZ, so he could be the secret power behind William’s font of supernatural charisma.

Aside from William, Yemmy doesn’t like most of us as much as we like her.  I am also not very loyal, except to William and Mano.  Conversely Adam is very fond of most of the pack, no scores lower than 6.  Charly is my biggest fan and HJ has little love for me.  You see how it works.  Marcus escaped this orgy of soul bondage by getting embraced into The Camarilla.

I love random mechanics that produce results that are meaningful in game terms, and The Sabbat Sourcebook had another ace up its sleeve.  Not every pack would do this, but a common way for nomadic Sabbat packs to recruit people was at random – meaning you didn’t get to choose your clan, if your gm enforced this!  Your vampire clan influences your powers and weaknesses, possibly even your appearance.

The time I played this with some homies and self-insert characters, I ended up in the shadowy Lasombra clan.  Feel my inky black tentacles.  Muhahaha!  Wait.  Lemme hit these other guys up…  Wild, I just rolled Lasombra for myself again.  Guess it was meant to be.  Nobody ended up rolling Ventrue, Brujah, Gangrel, or Caitiff.  Keep in mind the Sabbat is the edgelord versions of the usual clans…

Our pack priest William is the dreaded homicidal artist Toreador clan, while his secret master PZ is of the sinister Serpents of Light.  Mano has magical powers of the sorcerous Tremere, Adam is a horrific cenobite-like Tzimisce, and HJ is the hideous monstrosity of the Nosferatu.  Charly is of the deeply ableist Malkavian clan, known for being twice as insane™ as their Camarilla counterparts, and having the power to infect others with MADNESSSSsss..™  Lastly, Yemmy is of the horribly racist Ravnos clan, which are stereotypes of Romani people, with illusion powers and inherent larceny.  I cannot believe that shit was ever acceptable.

Just on the back of these two mechanics -random vinculum and random clan- the Sabbat sourcebooks were my fave ever.  I also liked the paths of Dark Thaumaturgy and other corny edgelord shit.  It was a very good time.  If problematic as balls.

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Don’t Harue Out on Me

Horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa seems to like the name Harue.  Prominent characters in at least two of his movies have that name.  In Sakebi (叫, aka Retribution, 2006) she was the girlfriend of the main character, trying to pull him back from spooky ghostland.  There were reasons that was ultimately futile for her, but I shan’t spoil that.  In Kairo (回路, meaning “circuit,” aka Pulse in English releases, 2001), Harue was the kind of person who takes you to spooky ghostland instead.  Beware.

Both of these Harues are lovable, for those of us sad souls what are into goths.  I imagine for other people they’d be infuriating, one way or another.  But that rage you feel is your own rage against the dying of the light, against mementoing even the tiniest bit of mori, and you should have the dignity to stow it for a moment, when you find yourself in the presence of such a creature.

I feel like as atheists most of us are very resistant to dark truths.  I myself despise death and hope in vain to live forever, somehow.  I haven’t been able to buy any fool’s gold on that topic, unlike certain silicon valley tools, but it’s there, in my feelings.  That’s all I have to argue with, when someone is feeling the darkness, is feeling like, “Why bother?”  All I can say is, “Please don’t talk like that.”  This is why I shouldn’t be a therapist.  Like the character in Kairo, Kawashima, I’ll just look like a damn fool.

There is a recurring theme which has far too much relevance to the world we are now experiencing.  Loneliness.  I believe that we are all alone within ourselves, no matter how close we may be to the people who are closest to us.  There’s no such thing as telepathy, empathy – at least, not the psychic or spiritual phenomena – thus it is impossible for us to be fully understood.  Self-esteem exists in part, I think, to fulfill this need.  As verbal animals, we feel a powerful desire to be understood.  In the face of this impossibility of understanding, self-esteem provides a useful illusion that we are part of society, understood and valued.

In the lack of self-esteem, that loneliness becomes stark.  To be clear, we are all equally alone, but those without useful illusions feel the effect much more keenly.  And so Harue (2001 version) connects loneliness with death itself, and is both drawn to and in absolute terror of the end.  Kawashima can’t handle it, try as he may.

Anyway, if you’re a goth and you’re reading this, you know what’s up.  I wish you well, and I wish that you do well enough to not feel the need to bring your darkness to me, because I will just flop like a fish.  You’re used to this.  You feel the loneliness, you feel the void.  You know the rest of us can’t handle it.

But despite our uselessness in the face of your inner darkness, we would prefer that you do not disintegrate.  Don’t Harue (2001) out on us.  If you do, I’ll probably be crying like Harue (2006) as I watch you leave.  I love you.

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mind control music in cartoons

in honor of the newest moral panic about a thing that is being blamed for suicides, a look back at when people claimed heavy metal would have that effect.

fundies moved from the tent show to the talk show, popularizing the idea of hidden messages in music.  that idea turned up in a few cartoons, tho not always in the genre of metal…

remember when gi joe’s enemy organization cobra started a band, for mind control purposes?  pepperidge farm remembers.

that was a pretty catchy one, but the brain of “pinky and” fame had better lyrics.  “ain’t you a tall drink of water?”  “actually, madam, i am a laboratory mouse on stilts.”

let me know of any others i should add to the post.

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Nightlife or Night Life?

I was trying to track down this movie I remembered watching on TV in the late eighties.  I did find it, and even watched it.  A good time.  But there were some challenges in my quest, chiefly that there were two cheap-ass vampire movies made in the same year with the same name: Night Life (1989) and Nightlife (1989).  I was able to work out that the one I sought featured Maryam d’Abo, but amusingly it was the one red link in her filmography on wikipedia.  It wasn’t even on the male lead’s wiki.

Both movies are on yewchoob in their entirety.  I’m just going to link to the right one, baybeh (won’t play as embed).  This video is a trip.  The channel that uploaded it has only three videos, all from eleven years ago.  For all I know, the guy who runs the channel died ten years ago.  One of his videos is some kind of public embarrassment thing I’m not clicking, another one is underwear model / 2fastman Tyrese Gibson’s make money seminar, and the last is this.  A TV vampire movie from 1989, ripped from VHS, stabilized with tech that unintentionally transforms it into Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream-cam.

Nightlife (1989) (not Night Life {1989}, fuck that shit) made the most of its budget by shooting in Mexico City, where the locals speak English with a TV Mexican accent.  At least the city got to play itself, instead of pretending to be somewhere else.  Maryam d’Abo had been in a middling James Bond film a few years prior and was the biggest star.

You can see why she’s a star.  She plays a blood junkie very sympathetically.  This is why the movie was so memorable to me as a thirteen year old.  I’m not really attracted to skinny ladies, but actors are professional charisma havers, and she had the most here.  When she found out about blood transfusions, she didn’t want to kill people anymore, and I really felt that.  I was rooting for her.  Like, genuinely emotionally affected.  As a thirteen year old.

The other thing that I found memorable as a thirteen year old was a fucking horrible pop culture reference to beer commercials of the time.  Ho ho, we do enjoy our pop culture references, don’t we?

The male lead is made-for-TV version of Kevin Bacon, in unflattering blue jeans that don’t delineate his ass cheeks enough.  Maybe it was an acceptable butt shape at the time, but it makes him look a lil like he’s wearing bladder control underwear.  I would do a guy who has to wear bladder control underwear, ok, but I’m not gonna be admiring his form while they’re still on.  Get better pants next time.  He has since become very successful as a character and voice actor, particularly for video games.  Pants are not a factor in those roles.

Blood junkie is unsealed from the earth and ends up in the ER, where they give her blood transfusion, and she’s introduced to Male Lead Doctorman.  After that she sells her jewels and gets a cool penthouse with dee-luxe coffin and refrigerator full of blood bags.  The maid character veers dangerously close to “she’s funny because she’s Mexican” (actress not Mexican), but far from the worst for that year.  Meanwhile, junkie’s creepy ex-bf Lastnameless-due-to-Universal-Pictures-IP-Fuckshit Vlad is in town, stalking her.

Vampira gets to know the doctor romantishly, and finds out from her ex that if she doesn’t get blood from a person who’s being attacked, it’s less effective for her health – and a Beast she ams lest a Beast she Becomes.  Vlad Not-Necessarily-Not-Dracula literally talks about the Beast inside them, two years before Vampire: The Masquerade‘s first edition came out.  Mark Rein(spot)Hagen, is there something you want to share with the class?  Sorry, there’s no way in fuck most of you get half the humor in this article.  I suck (not-necessarily-vampirically).

All that’s to say, how does she get fear-laden blood without killing people?  I won’t spoil it, tho it ain’t deep.  Oh, and this is another reason this appealed to me at age thirteen.  The doctor treats vampirism as a disease, is skeptical of the supernatural – and although the science in the movie is very bullshitty, the plot supports him in this!  In this world, science can win.  Kinda.

And so they all lived happily ever after.  Except the guy who played Vlad, who is dead IRL.  And Maryam, whose husband died two years ago.  Time is the real monster.  And probably TV Bacon is actually in bladder control underwear by now.  Fuck you, time.  Let all the vampires live forever.

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probably going to stop quick-posting for a while now.  who knows how long?  see you next year?  idk.

I Uncle Hui’d It

In the movie Hard Boiled (辣手神探/Lashou Shentan/Hot-handed God of Cops), there’s a big warehouse fight scene that just keeps going and going.  It’s a pivotal moment or two, so that’s fair.  Early in that scene, when Johnny Wong’s crew are attacking rival mobster Uncle Hui’s property, one of the defenders calls up the boss to let him know what’s going down.

In my head the line was something like “Uncle Hui, Uncle Hui.  At the armory.  There’s a raid going on.”  “Armory” was said more like “ermory.”  Side note, I’m talking about the dub, because I love the early english dub of that movie.  Anyway, the actual line?  Completely different.  I can’t easily find a version to double check at the moment, but going from memory is where I went wrong in the first place, so not sharing it.

Why did such an inconsequential line take real estate in my brain?  The dub voices were so funny to me I couldn’t help repeating lines, sticking on them.  The obvious ones to hit over and over again would be your “Give a guy a gun and he’s superman, give him two and he’s god!” and, oh, practically everything Johnny Wong says.  Maybe I was more likely to get those ones right, so the lesser lines suffered memetic drift in my head.

Again with the dubbed voices, there’s a kung fu movie where Jacky Chan steals a guy’s food.  I always remembered the line as “Hey, goddammit!  Who stole my piece of chicken?”  The actual line was more like, “My piece of chicken, who stole it?”  I get confronted with this, the limitations of memory, far more often than I’d prefer.  I call it “Uncle Hui-ing” in honor of that moment from Hard Boiled.

The original George Romero version of Day of the Dead has a kinda hilarious but heartfelt performance by the late Anthony Dileo Jr, as a guy who is losing his mind under the influence of a zombie apocalypse.  I remembered a number of those lines perfectly, but at least one was a bit off.  Uncle Hui’d!  And perfectly fitting the theme of this post, as I look at the videos I was watching just last fucking night, I can’t remember which line I had wrong or how the wrong version went.  fml.

Off topique, but that dude died from covid early this year.  Keep vaxing, and if you wanna like i do, keep masking.  Don’t take chances with your lives.

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Essential Milks

I made a playlist of what I deemed the best Dead Milkmen songs, following my exhaustive review of their discography, trying to have at least one from most of their albums, to get the range of what’s going on there.  Does it hang together?

The biggest problem with making this kind of thing is often the volume difference from one album to the next, however I think yewchoob might equalize stuff to have a similar noisiness, from one video to the next?  At least, I don’t recall having any radical changes causing issues – unlike burning one’s own cd, where that’s a perennial annoyance.

Another issue is appended intro or outro material on a track, no way to skip without editing.  That’s why I left “Life is Shit” off of this list, tho it’s usually considered essential to tha canon.  Anyway, top 20 Dead Milkmen songs in whatever order seemed the least jarring with minimal effort.  A number of these tracks break my ableism and/or doomerism policies, so beware…

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Rewrite This Fvcking Song Plz

“A teenage dream’s so hard to beat, every time she walks down the street.  Another girl in the neighborhood, wish she was mine, she looks so good.  I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight, get teenage kicks all through the night.”

Behold, some shitty socially acceptable pedophiles.

My problem is that this song is so damn good.  Musically.  Fuck the lyrics a lot.  The music to this song rules ass.

That is not true for “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” or “Young Girl.”  We can file those songs in the hall of shame, never listen to them again, and nothing of value is lost.  “Teenage Kicks,” on the other hand…

Somebody rewrite this song for me, please.  Thank you.

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alright, i dunno how old feargal and the gang were when they performed this, and one could say he’s doing a character, and the treacly-sounding creep in HBSS was just a few years older than the girl, whatever whatever.  the extent to which teenage girl sex appeal has been played up in music, doesn’t leave me feeling very generous about it.  i’ve known more than my share of dudes who are hung up on the sex appeal of teenage children.  one could, in theory, have that hangup and still power through it to be a decent person, in the way you conduct yourself.  reserve it for the life of fantasy, yadda yadda.  in practice, no, you get grown men trying to seduce teenage girls – and succeeding way too often.

letting this kind of messaging be acceptable was a big mistake.  you shouldn’t be able to say “teenage girls are so sexy” without getting looked at like the slime that you are.  certainly you shouldn’t be lauded for it.  fucken hell.

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Ya Talk Too Much

When I was a kid in the ’80s, the children in the halls and on school buses would chant song lyrics, especially raps.  Janet Jackson, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Run DMC all had their time, sometimes with alternative lyrics, like the “batman smells” versions.  This song was especially popular.

The place I heard it the most was in the mouths of other babes four decades ago, and I’m only seeing the video for the first time now.  I love the use of white people in this video.  It’s like these guys are the sensible cool mans in a world of weird posers and art freaks.  They gots my number.

In more ways than one.  In the latest FtB Poddish Sortacast, I spoke way too much.  I had proposed the topic so it was kinda my time to rampage, but still, rude.  Nonetheless, I thought I did a great job elucidating my perception of the world and the shituation we’re in.  This is not a good video to watch if you’re one of the people my doomerism policy is designed to protect, so don’t watch it if you’re one of them.  Anybody else, have at it.

Am I foolin myself, or did I come off like a big ol’ smartypants?  I lost the bead a few times, but when I was on, I was on.

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Pathetic Little Bluesmen

I’ve had a few posts over time that touch on the subject of Dark Sexual Majesty™, which is the thing some blues men do – later co-opted by hard rock and rap – where they claim to have outrageous sexual powers, with overtones of supernatural evil.  See “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I’m the One” (Danzig), “I’m the One” (DJ Khaled et al), “I’m the One” (Van Halen), “I’m the One” (Van Halen covered by 4 Non Blondes), and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” for a few.  There might have been a few jokes in there, watch out.  Point stands, because I say it does, justified only by my own satanic powers of Dark Sexual Majesty™.

But here’s the thing.  We know these boasts are untrue, because they include impossible things.  A little exaggeration to heighten the feeling of exultation?  Or does it undercut the entire theme?  Is it possible the whole thing is meant to be ironic affect, hinting thereby that the singers in question are ineffectual lovers?  Losers who cannot get with tha babes, get sand kicked in their face on the beach?

Of course not, but the idea crossed my mind and I thought it was worth a laugh.  One solitary laugh.

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