So, you like drawing and you want to do it for a living? Here’s two simple pieces of advice:

1. Stop drawing Manga and Anthro, especially crude Manga and Anthro porn. No, really. It’s embarassing and no one wants to see MASSIVE SKUNK TITS. What were you thinking? Skunkina?
2. Read this and beware of twunts like him: http://kaitol.com/how-to-hire-an-artist/. By helping the race to the bottom, you’re fucking up your future. Don’t do that.

Follow those two simple rules and you’ll stop holding yourself back. Go take up life drawing if you want to draw boobies; it’s worth it.

There’s a lot of talk about Primark’s padded bikini and how it was aiming for the Paedophile Pound, a mythical nonce currency coined by child protection bandwagoneer Shy Keenan. It’s obviously outrageous and disgusting, won’t somebody think of the children, decay of society, etc., but it’s missing one major point about paedophiles: They are sexually aroused by children. Think about it. Can you see the fallacy?

Beware the beach, there may be paedos hiding there!

Yes, that’s right, paedophiles like pre-pubescent girls and lose interest in pubescent ones, by definition, so giving young girls secondary sexual characteristics should them less attractive to the majority of kiddie fiddlers. I’m not commenting on the unhealthy sexualisation of young girls here, as that goes without needing my scorn and better writers than I have taken those issues to task, but this is yet another example of political parties and interests running to beat up the latest bugbear in the run up to a general election. This isn’t paedophilia as a market force; it’s little girls playing dress-up.

Every penny spent, every minute invested in this outrage against paedophiles spending their hard-earned dosh on stupid children’s dress-up clothes is time and money that could have gone to solving real political and social issues that might effect real change.

Grow the fuck up, the lot of you.

He’s back. RedLetterMedia reviews Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones.

Yes, there’s a new Predator movie coming out. That’s not what I’ve got to show you today, though.

Vot der matter, Dutch, der CIA got dich pushink too many der pencillinks, ja?

Dava and I were discussing websites recently, and we decided to share a few sites we read that have little or nothing to do with writing or gaming. The first would be one of my favourites, Ned Hepburn’s Boner Party. While on the surface, it’s a sexist objectification (and therefore NSFW sometimes) of women, the comedy inherent in the writing will lift it above the base sexism and you’ll soon realise that it’s both sexist and genius. He’s lecherous because he cares.

"Christina Fucking Hendricks" on Boner Party

It’s the Star Wars Holiday Special! Things to look out for: Carrie Fisher is far from sober, and it’s a little depressing. Harrison Ford doesn’t want to be there. Mark Hamill talks like a kid’s TV presenter. Chewie’s son is called Lumpy. Oh, and it’s so bad even George Lucas, who had little to do with it, disowns it. This is why he became such a control freak and why we ended up with Episode One (review).

So, get some Wookiee-ookies from the cookie jar, pour yourself a drink the size Carrie Fisher would and enjoy. Happy Life Day!

Rather than assume you’ve seen this video, I’ll just embed it without comment.

Contrary to popular opinion, the soundtrack isn’t East Hastings by Godspeed; it’s In the House – In a Heartbeat by John Murphy.

All this could have been avoided if he’d just remembered his pee bottles.

A beautifully illustrated tale of woe, told in words, MS Paint and piss.

You know the weird song Diva Dance in The Fifth Element? Sure you do, it was the one that they needed to use samplers to make it work. Yeah, that one. Someone should have told this young lady that it’s physically impossible to sing.

Or not. Wow, Mooltipass to you, young lady. Mooltipass.

Yes, that’s right. If you follow @themonsterbook, you will get notified as soon as a new post is … um, posted.

Update: 2010-03-25. Since I wrote this diatribe, further documented scandals have been revealed in Germany, South America, Holland, Austria and again in the United States. How this can be anything but sanctioned institutional behaviour is beyond me. It’s past time. Stop treating these institutions as moral arbiters or as having any more right to tell us what to do than secular institutions. They don’t believe in punishment for sins; why should you?

One thing is clear in the latest scandals involving the Catholic Church and its stance of tolerance towards paedophilia: They believe there is no god. There is no way that an organisation can support the rape of children in its care with such nonchalance and still uphold a belief in hell or purgatory. No-one fearing an afterlife of torment, fire and brimstone would threaten parents of abused children into silence or would simply move a child-rapist from one hunting ground to another, over and over.

Sanctuary?

Now don’t get me wrong, I agree with the Church that god is a fictional construct, but there’s no way I’d rape little boys because of it. The religions of the world will tell us we need an almighty being watching over us to ensure we were morally just and honest, but given this recent proof of the Catholic Church’s complicity in covering up institutional child abuse, and its underground railway of pedophile priests, it’s come to the point where the moral high road has well and truly been conceded to the secular. In a country where it’s illegal to say nasty things about god, it’s perfectly acceptable to rape children in his name.

Apologies for the lack of documentation and analysis of the facts and figures, but this one was a little too ugly to be kind with. Read The BBC for proper journalistic reporting.

“The Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with clerical child sexual abuse. This was in spite of the fact that a number of them were qualified canon and civil lawyers.”

Hey, Pope, it’s time. Just admit you’re wrong and that, like with the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church is sometimes the largest force for evil in the world. Terrorists? Yeah, they’re bad, but they just kill you; they don’t rape your children. And Ireland, how’s those blasphemy laws looking now? You really want to be seen to be protecting these fucktards?

In July 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened. 4 months later, it collapsed.

Read all about it on Wikipedia.

Galloping Gertie collapsed

Found here. A diatribe on a satellite.

Object of beauty

Yes, it’s got to be a hoax. The website is at Mass: We Pray. Clever stuff.

In the 70s, in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland, there lived a bearded shopkeeper called Malcolm McDonald. He ran a games shop called Mac’s Games that sold old lead Napoleonic miniatures and wargames rules until the D&D explosion of ‘78. Suddenly, and briefly, Mac’s dusty, dry-rot infested games shop became a hub of activity for the local gamers. Funny-shaped dice sales funded a refit and a new sign, and bought him a Lochaber Axe he displayed on the back wall behind the till, replacing the faded poster of the one-legged flautist.

Ogre's Lunch logo

Mac, as he was known, was a mumbling shambling mound of a man who frequently didn’t open the shop until 11am, and on some days, he didn’t even turn up. Those days were notable for small crowds of gamers hanging about his shop, waiting for him to open up. He was a larger-than-life personality, quiet yet holding a commanding presence to impressionable young gamers who considered him a role-playing-model, asking his advice on dealing with troublesome Dwarves and destructive Orcs and the younger ones believed him to be a character from their imaginary worlds, grounded in this plane to provide them with sanctuary and friendship, a friendly and sympathetic ear in a world where that was a precious commodity.

A friendly balance was maintained, until one day when the Megastore opened in the town centre. An all-you-can-eat buffet was suddenly spread in front of the previously starved gamers and business started to fade at Mac’s Games.

One day, no-one knows when, Mac shut up shop. This wasn’t noticed for a while, with the industry being as relaxed as it was in the 80s, and everyone assumed the shop was still going. When ever anyone walked past the shop, they assumed Mac was late that day and his distributors assumed he had forgotten to pay the phone bill again when his phone went dead. Decades passed until, one day, a large distributor turned up on his doorstep to claim an unpaid bill. After waiting outside for a while, making local enquiries and frequenting the local trading card games, it became clear that Mac’s Games was closed for business.

A short and too boring to recall here legal case later, entrance to the shop was given and Mac’s dusty corpse was found, sitting on the toilet in the back, the door swinging on its hinges. His one large frame was stretched and gaunt, resembling the poster of an albino swordsman he hung over the gaming table. The distributor claimed all the shop’s assets and that leads us to the amazing find of gaming folklore thought forgotten or non-existant. There, in a shelf at the back, was a box of lost treasure containing the fabled “Monster Book” by Ogre’s Lunch, with forgotten monsters like the Yonagg, the Grabzebo and the Gruntling. One copy escaped recall after the tumultuous court case of 1982. Ogre’s Lunch was sued into the ground for misuse of trademarks in a pre-opengaming world, and, after the suicide of its creator, Jorge Rosencrantz, it was believed none of the original copies remained in the wild.

The treasure trove housed in the distributor’s Swindon warehouse was recently passed on to us as payment for an old debt and we are discussing publishing rights of Monster Book with the Rosencrantz family; hopefully, we can finally bring some of Jorge’s amazing creatures back to life on these very pages. A lost treasure in a dusty old cardboard box, traded over debts, finally coming to light would be a remarkable ending to the tale of Mac’s legacy. Once-young gamers can rejoice in what should have been a classic sourcebook from the oft-forgotten Ogre’s Lunch.

You know, some childish activities are best done as an adult.

Gaze upon with wonder

As a child, I got to play Poohsticks in the Ashdown Forest; the actual bridge mentioned in the book, the bridge where A. A. Milne and Christopher Robin first played. Only looking back can I truly appreciate how special that was. Other activities, like going to museums and galleries can only really be appreciated once you understand what it is you’re looking at, and in that wide-eyed vein, the missus, Dava and I took a field trip to an aquarium.

One fish, two fish, red fish ...

I treated it as a day out with my camera, but it was really a day out doing what I did as a kid as an adult. I don’t have kids of my own, so it’s a very selfish thing to do, but in a positive way. As long as you can turn off your adult sensibilities and see the world with as much beauty as it actually has, it’s an uplifting experience.

While the aquarium we went to, The Loch Lomond Sealife, wasn’t as good as the immense one I went to in Lisbon a few years ago, it was still a pleasure to just take in the wonder that is life. I will contrast it to another day out we took in a later post, but in the meantime, here’s more fish.

Salmon days?

Oh, and if you like my photos, check out my Flickr page.

Here’s a great article on the origin of the word meep by our old friend Tim Dedopulos. Check out his blog; he’s rather good, you know.

http://www.ghostwoods.com/2009/11/know-your-memes-meeping-793/

For the record, my cats are known as the meeps as meeping was one of their hobbies.

After reading Dava’s post on Owlbears, many-fingered readings and growing up, a link showed up on a popular website. It was all about the many readings of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Go have a read; it’s entertaining, geeky and well-presented.

There was a time when I was a gamer. A proper, full-on, buckets of polyhedral dice, stacks of books gamer. I knew how 1st ed AD&D overbearing, grappling and pummelling rules worked and I had a 216:1 bell-curve mapped in my head. It was Owlbears and Rust Monsters all the way down. Then, for a while it was more than a hobby; it was my living. Travelling the world, meeting gamers, showing my face, yet I was still a gamer myself. Those days are in my past, but every so often, I get reminded of how much fun it was to gaze upon a random table of Artifacts and Relics or to wonder at what a Bohemian Earspoon looked like. Remembering an old Paladin or Thief, cleaning Citadel Acrylics off a sable brush, rolling for initiative.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug and I hope the mere mention of a Bohemian Earspoon triggered something in your brain like it did mine. If not, imagine Sahuagin, clambering over algae-covered rocks at Saltmarsh or a party of adventurers, quartermastering supplies and packing mules in preparation for a descent into the depths of the earth. If none of these images awaken memories of simpler times, you missed out on the early days of gaming; the roots of what the computer guys are doing today.

What are the memories that have stuck with you through the history of gaming? Nostalgia it up, give us some of those Proustian Madeleines of gamer gold, transport us back to days of trying to understand how hit points worked in Traveller. For my part, I’ll leave you with one that has stuck with me since the Basic Set: Bree Yark, bitches. Bree Yark.