Whistling in the Dark

So I’m petting the cat. She’s sitting on the back of the couch. And she reaches the point of having had ‘enough petting.’

She demonstrates this by suddenly ducking her head under my hand, rearing slightly back, and opening her mouth. She then very slowly, very carefully places her mouth around my hand, so that I feel there are teeth on my hand. She sits there for a moment, then lets go and sits back up. It’s certainly not painful. It hardly counts as ‘biting.’

She is saying ‘remember. I have teeth, and your hand is fleshy and weak. Desist.’

Failure to desist results in her doing it again. However, this time she touches teeth, pauses, applies a slight amount of pressure, and releases. As if to say ‘I mean it, soft boy.’

Failure to desist a third time (if you can’t be a bastard petting your cat, when can you be a bastard?) causes her to slowly back up out of reach. Literally while still sitting. Her whole body ripples, her tail thrashes at full ‘pissed’ alert, and she shuffles backwards until I can’t reach her.

She’s so cute when she’s furious.

This post from blogdriverwaltz (what a great name for a Blog -- well, if you know Canadian music at all) makes clear what we’ve suspected all along. The Bush Administration is great at blowing apart a country and destroying a government, but they’re just not good at creating a new, stable government to replace it.

Al Quada or whatever comes after it will breed in the seething mass of disappointment, horror and poverty left in Afganistan. Someday, we’ll pay another price for it, and then the hours of exhaustive, overly dramatic and exploitive news coverage will point to how this administration took out the Taliban, but left the job undone because they left the government to collapse into corruption and the people to starve.

Next year at this time, this story will be repeated in Iraq. Unless Halliburton completely takes it over, of course.

I’m so ashamed.

Villains fear me. Heroes envy me. Demiurgent is... The Amber ThunderFox

So last night I start thinking about Shadowrun. Shadowrun was one of those cool games from the early 90’s -- the ones that defied easy description during a flurry of experimentation and progress in the Role Playing form. Was it Cyberpunk? Fantasypunk? Just an excuse for Elves to jack into the net while Dwarves shot sawed off shotguns at killer Insect Shamans? Who cared? It was a blast!

It’s been a long while, and Shadowrun’s in a new, revised edition. I’m friends with one of the current writers, in fact (ladyjestyr, take a bow and load your Roomsweeper). And I started thinking about it yesterday... thinking about 2011, when the big changes were supposed to come, and suddenly waking up an Elf. (Which isn’t actually how it worked for Elves and Dwarves, if I recall correctly. People spontaneously became Orks and Trolls, but babies were just suddenly born Elves and Dwarves. But damn it, this was idle fantasy so what the Hell.) Quickly, that evolved into an Elvish Cat Shaman, which would suit me. In that fantasy, I pegged some other friends and their changes as well, ultimately pondering rabbi_thor as a Troll who’s either a Bear or Wolf Shaman. We’d make a good pair of Shamans, me all ponsy and Elfish, he burly, making fangs look good, both of us with swords and calling down our lightning on the pig ignorant norms who get in our way....

Anyhow, I figured it was time to renew my acquaintance with Shadowrun, so I drove down to the Friendly Local Game Store (this was the same run I used to grab Sushi -- which actually turned out to be sashimi, when I proved incapable of convincing them I wanted the little blobs of rice that went with, but was still excellent). Now, I like my Friendly Local Game Store. I like the counter people. I like the attitude. It’s a nice place. But one thing I’ve always noticed is that the local gamers who use the tables and otherwise hang don’t exactly chat up visitors or customers. I’ve bought everything from In Nomine stuff to GURPS stuff to D&D3ed to Nobilis to Deadlands there, plus comics galore, and other than chatting with the guy behind the counter I’ve never had much of an impact on the people there.

Picking up Shadowrun 3rd, plus the revised Shadowrun Companion and the Magic in the Shadows supplement, I made my way to the front counter. On my way, one of the regulars at least seventeen years my junior, chatting with a friend and wearing... well, a modern cut Revolutionary War jacket, more or less, glanced and said “Shadowrun?”

I said “yeah. It’s been too long for me.”

He nodded, understandingly. “Cool,” he said.

At the counter, I got into another animated discussion of Shadowrun, which turned into the guy discussing his latest Battletech mechs (FASA, the late, lamented company that originally produced Shadowrun, also created and produced Battletech, among many other excellent games.)

That’s always been Shadowrun’s power. It crosses divides no other game crosses. Runners just accept each other on site. Hell, back in the early nineties, when I was into it the first time around, there was a day I was walking on the Ithaca Commons, trying to remember something out of the Street Samurai Catalog. In those days (and as far as I know even today) there’s generally a pack of disaffected youth on the Commons, hanging out and generally making the Man nervous.

Now, even then I didn’t look like I’d fit in with Disaffected Youth. I’m just too damn whitebread. But walking along the Commons, I noticed they were passing around Shadowrun books. And I just couldn’t remember... well, whatever it was I couldn’t remember. So I shrugged and walked over. Which startled them to no end.

“What?” their leader (I suppose) asked, belligerently.

“You got the Street Samurai Catalog here?” I asked. “There’s something I just can’t remember.”

He paused. “Shadowrun?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

He nodded, understandingly. “Cool.”

From Achewood:

( See the sight behind the happy Cut! )

As always, The Onion understands.