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Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there. New Mexico: It’s The Newer Mexico
Do you think they ever get tired of jokes like that in New Mexico?
 <--The picture they don't want you to see: me witnessing an alien autopsy, or Jonathan Frakes hosting a crappy special on Fox? You be the judge…
(Don’t Go Back to) Roswell
You may not consider it anything to brag about, but I was a UFO geek long before a certain alphabetically named television program brought the wonderful wide world of ETs, MIBs, and EBEs into America’s living rooms. And–with the possible exception of Nevada’s Area 51, which is in the middle of a missile testing range and not real hospitable to roadtrippers–Roswell, New Mexico is the Mecca of UFO geekdom.
Here’s the facts, sort of. In July 1947, something crashed in the desert northwest of Roswell. A U.S. Army press release said that the army had recovered pieces of some form of “flying saucer.” The next day a second press release declared that the object was in fact a weather balloon, and that’s been the official story ever since.
Now, maybe “flying saucer” was just a poor choice of words by some dumb Army Press Department hack who has been peeling potatoes for his screw-up ever since. Or, just maybe, the Roswell Crash is one lone crack in the facade of a fifty-year coverup engineered by a massive and ruthless conspiracy stretching to the highest level of government, if not the very stars!
Now, which explanation do you think brings more tourists to Roswell?
( Read the rest of this entry » )Tags: best of, in which somebody steals somebody's bit, old weird america, route 96, ufos
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Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there. Enterprise Square, USA, on the campus of the Oklahoma Christian Bible College, is a Disney-esque (that’s being charitable) theme park dedicated to the glorification of free enterprise and the excoriation of government control. Visiting this spawn of big business and the religious right, built in 1982 and apparently not remodeled since then, was like taking a time machine back to our childhoods under Reagan’s first term: that sunny, unapologetic Cold War jingoism, that pre-Japan confidence in the American Way, and all the high-tech wizardry that 1982 had to offer. Audio cassettes! Games with paddles instead of joysticks! Beta!
 Our little tour group was greeted in the lobby by a videotape of Bob Hope. Bob, who apparently owed some of his chums in the military-industrial complex a favor, started to read some platitudes about Enterprise Square off his cue cards, when suddenly he was interrupted by a “news flash” from that well known journalist, Ed McMahon.
Had Bob won the Publishers’ Clearing House Sweepstakes? Was he a contestant on Star Search? No! Aliens from the planet “Flabjab” had crash-landed right on the campus of the Oklahoma Christian Bible College! And before Ed could say “heeeeere’s Zazzie!” the aliens themselves–Bubbin, Zazzie, and their long-suffering robot yes-man, Quonk–came down through the ceiling.
Here the plot took a bizarre postmodern turn. It seems our aliens–in truth they looked more like low-rent Muppets–needed replacement parts for the spaceship they’d just totalled. But how to pay for them? Nobody on this planet would accept their “Flabjabbian Blaffle” as legal currency, and the aliens, who obviously come from some weird Muppet culture with high taxes, gun control, and socialized medicince, didn’t have a clue about how to make any Earth dough. “I know!” said our teenage tour guide, the poor dumb “Worth the Wait”-pledging bastard gamely playing out the same script he’s probably done a thousand times. “Why don’t you, uh, Flabjabbians join our tour group, learn the wonders of capitalism, get respectable jobs, and save up enough Blaffle to get home?” And here I was thinking they’d just enslave our race by laying eggs in our brains. But the capitalism thing works, too.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Tags: best of, route 96
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Not a Route 96 post. Much much geekier. Mostly for ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mgrasso and head58, though gammafodder1 and sneech515 may be amused in spite of themselves. So ever since Mike linked to that Star Trek reboot, and then started talking about running the old Dragonlance modules, and then news came out of the Dragonlance movie (Lex Luthor as Tanis! Jack Bauer as Raistlin! Xena as Goldmoon!), I've been threatening to write a big post on how one might revamp or reboot the Dragonlance series, scraping off some of the fromage and finding new hotness within. Battlestar Galactica is obviously the touchstone here, Exhibit A in how to resurrect, retool, and reimagine even the mustiest of old geek loves. (But see also many of Grant Morrison's superhero comics, and, if I may be immodest, my Starchildren game in a way). But then Andy and the Story Games kids came along and stole this terrible, terrible idea right out of my head and made a thread of it, forcing my hand! (And probably saving me from mulling this over for another six months.) So I banged out my ideas in the thread. Here's my contribution (behind the LJ-cut) though if you're nerd enough to have made it this far, the whole thing is worth checking out: Dragonlance Gets Awesome-O-fied. ( Read more... )(No, I'm not going to link to the Hotties of Dragonlance Gone Wild '05 thread.) Tags: best of, gaming, gilts, nostalgia
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Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there. The Trip came about, basically, because for the first time in my life, I acquired a car that didn’t have to be home by midnight.
 In the face of our planet’s global ecological crisis, more and more people are coming to realize that our society’s love affair with the automobile is an unaffordable luxury. Let’s face it: nearly all the everyday uses of our cars could be served just as well, if not better, by bicycles, superstitious native porters, and El Caminos. If I were Supreme Ruler of the World (and those of you that don’t think having gills would be cool can thank your lucky stars that I’m not), automobiles would be used for three purposes only:
- High-speed chases.
- Teen makeout sessions.
- Monster cross-country road trips.
Fun as they are, #1 or #2 would make for a very short zine–so road trippin’ it was!
( Read the rest of this entry » )Tags: best of, route 96
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"Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry..."—" Mandelbrot Set" "It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."—"The Colour Out of Space"  Before he started kicking six kinds of Kryptonian ass this week with a series of Superman mythos posts, ezrael wrote something about " The Endless Black," a sci-fi horror game he'd like to run, in which humanity takes its first faltering steps into the endless dark of Lovecraftian outer space. princeofcairo floated a similar idea in an old ST column a few years back (I know ezrael loves it when I lump him together with princeofcairo, but hey, there's worse company to be lumped with): "Ships disappear, pilots go mad, colonies fall into dark worship on distant planets ... As the Earth's ossified systems splinter under madness and anarchy, the human colonies see themselves left alone in the dark." I dug Ken's take from the start, but Matt, who strikes me as just the fellow to GM a game where the universe is cruel and bleak and cold, added the crucial Catch-22: the very tools humankind must use to navigate the extra-cosmic gulfs of space—eldritch mathematics, Dune-like mentats and spice addicts, strange eons of cryogenic sleep—ineluctably corrode our humanity. Yeah, that's the stuff. There's only one thing I need to make this G a G that I would truly LT, and that's comedy. ( Seriously. )Tags: best of, gaming, gilts
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 Modesty shall not prevent me from noting that my game design General Mud, which I whinged for validation on discreetly mentioned back in November, won the coveted "High Ronnie" for the last round of Ron Edwards' eponymous game designing contest. Here is the link to Ron's very flattering feedback. Until about three-quarters through, I figured it was merely a dialogue-based homage to Animal Farm, but it's not. Can the Soviet survive? Is the General's ascendancy a long-term curse to its downfall? Are bourgeois notions, in moderation, compatible with a secure economy? This should be taught and played in history classes.I was especially pleased by that final line. (I'm going to get even more immodest now and assert that there are actually some parallels between General Mud and neelk's terrific-looking Court of the Empress. But Neel being Neel and me being me, his design is elegant, cruel, and sexy, while mine is convoluted, twitchy, and mostly about a pig.) Tags: best of, gaming, general mud, gilts
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Do you know what today is? Of course you do! It's Saint Amnesty to Post About Random Out of Date Stuff's Day! For it was on this very day back in, oh, let's say the 80s, between the day that the eponymous Saint Amnesty to Post About Random Out of Date Stuff, patron saint of unpaid LiveJournal accounts, finished his grading for the term and the day that he went away on holiday, was killed by a car bomb—a holy car bomb, mind you—and the rest, as they say, is history. So it is that on this day every year, people with unpaid LiveJournal accounts honor St. Amnesty by posting about stuff that they meant to post about months ago, and get toffee. ( The thing is, I kind of always knew my brother would grow up to train an army of killer of Asian 4-year-olds... )Tags: best of, boston, clan robotnik, drawerings, nostalgia, toronto
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I don't normally find the webcomic PVP nearly as emotional as I did last week. Which is another way of saying, papersource and I are pregnant. Which is to say, she is. But I'm involved somehow. The due date is late April. We found out in September—in fact, the first ultrasound was the day of my first class. We've had a couple of doctor's appointments and ultrasounds since then, and the Seamonkey (our current nom de fetus, though "Secret Squirrel" is also in contention) apparently has hands and feet and was about 63mm long last time we checked. L is doing very well. I'll let her decide for herself how much or how little she'd like to share with you about alternating nausea, narcolepsy, and craving for deviled eggs, but I can tell you that she is a rock star and a trooper and a machine. I love her so much. Oddly, LJ doesn't seem to have a mood icon for "simultaneously thrilled, elated, scared as hell." Edit: Thanks! for the congratulations and well-wishes that are already pinging in. But don't forget to share the love with papersource too. She told me I could spill the beans, but I'd feel bad if I hogged all the comments. :) Tags: best of, daddyhood, read the comments, real life
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Previous
) is an Animal Farm inspired game of barnyard revolution, which won a High Ronnie award from High Ronnie himself. (See