Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

In other news, in other places, rowangolightly is coordinating an auction of goods and services to benefit apocalypticbob, who has recently had a run of bad luck, including the expensive car-fail kind. You can find it here.

There's lots of good stuff up for bid here, including that I WILL BAKE YOU COOKIES. You know you want some of that. Go click.

What I've been doing lately (now that I finally bothered to upload pics from the last few months):

From triadruid's journal, re-posted here for your righteous fury and motivational pleasure. :)

June 7th, 2008 marks the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. The American Life League/STOPP International is planning "Protest the Pill Day '08" as a response, mostly centered around Planned Parenthood clinics that provide the pill (I guess organizing enough people to block all the CVS/Osco/whatever would have been too tough).

Anybody feel like mounting a counter-protest? The only nearby clinic that has a registered protest so far is the Overland Park location (supposedly starting at 6:45AM), but keep an eye on Missouri or whatever state you happen to live in, if you're reading from farther afield. Look for the locations with a black dot in the map marker.

For the record, I'm way more pissed about these assholes than I am about the Scientologists. The Scientologists, yes, creepy and weird, and they seem to like to off their own people, but they also seem to be sort of... contained. These assholes want to force everybody with a uterus into a life of slavery, making billions of intelligent human beings into nothing more than incubators with legs. I hate that.

So, come along to support the right of women to have real lives as human beings while still enjoying sex (wait. Isn't that part of having a real life as a human being?), come along to screw with some extremely fucked-up and dangerous people, or come along to help keep me from getting into fistfights. It's all good.

Today is brought to you by the Tibetan Mastiff. They're going to be in Westminster for the first time this year! I have no way to watch Westminster, of course. But no matter. I'm still cheering for the Tibetan Mastiff. When I read The Dresden Files, and he talks about Harry's dog Mouse, I always think of these guys. I know Mouse is supposed to be some sort of fictional temple dog, but this is where my brain goes.

Today is also brought to you by Aaron Fotheringham, who is my hero of the day. I was waiting to pick up lunch in the sports bar across the street, and the TV over the bar was showing mid-day ESPN (snooze), when they start talking about this kid. He's 14 years old. He has spina bifida, which prevents him from walking. The video at the other end of the link up there is him at the skate park. He does BMX-style tricks in his wheelchair. Kid can do a backflip in a wheelchair. I don't care who you are, that's pretty damned impressive. He calls this "Extreme Sitting". :)

And now, with all that good stuff out of the way, it's time for my Two Minutes Hate.
We have a new radio station in Kansas City called "The Boulevard". It's not a bad station, particularly. It's allegedly a rock station, but seems to keep to the lighter side of the old rock-n-roll business: Elton John, REM, U2, Jackson Browne, and so on. So the station is not bad, just dull. The advertising, however, is abomination. They run this ad that goes something like "Do you ever wonder why you never hear Peter Gabriel or Van Morrison or U2 on the radio? We do too. Now you can. The Boulevard. Quality rock."

Kids, if you live in Kansas City, you will immediately recognize the problem. If you don't, let me put it this way for you: It's like seeing a commercial on television that asks you, "Do you ever wonder why you don't see Law and Order or CSI on television?". Yeah. Every damned station in Kansas City that isn't country or sports talk pretty much already plays all this stuff all the time. Would it fucking kill someone to get us a radio station that offered something *different* from what we already have? Maybe so. Maybe I'm just spoiled from my brief exposure to XM radio. But seriously, could we get a Fungus 53 over here?

Friday night, we ran another session of the Amnesia game. In this session, the PCs beat up on each other at random, nearly killed each other trying to see if they could dodge arrows like a monk, had some issues with discretion, and finally made it to a civilized part of the world, which only means that they are now poised for some *real* trouble. triadruid is a much more adept DM than he gives himself credit for, and invented a number of things on the fly this time. Part of what is making this game interesting for me is having to react to what he throws out as if it was all totally planned and we both completely know what the other is thinking. I'm sure it's equally challenging for him. Luckily, we work well together as a rule.
Next month: Shocking Secrets about a PC's Past Will Be Revealed. Stay Tuned.

Saturday, we did Blue River Rescue, which, for non-natives, is a vast annual effort to clean trash off of the riverbanks. Following last year's discovery of a body on the banks, this year's event was pretty subdued, both in number of participants and in quality of discoveries. I think the most alarming thing we found was a pair of busted brake shoes and a couple of hypos. Some of the other folks on our site were talking about finding guns in the river in previous years, but our site was pretty quiet. We did recover a veritable mountain of styrofoam, gatorade bottles, and catfood cans, though.

Sunday, I spent an hour making rope-and-tape floggers in a public place, which is always exciting. The ritual team wanted them for part of the April Fools' ritual, and kittenpants and I had made a ton of them at some point in the past, but apparently we gave them away. Since I didn't remember that we no longer had them, I felt somewhat obligated to help make more. So there we were, in the Applebee's at lunchtime, working on the upcoming Earth Day ritual and making eleventy billion floggers. I always wonder what people think when we're out doing this stuff in restaurants and coffee shops, but nobody ever asks, so it's hard to tell.

The way it was supposed to happen: Friday, at noon, MS is supposed to come by and pick up kittenpants. They're going to run some errands, and then head out to St. Louis, where on Saturday, we were going to attend an event being held by St. Louis Mysteries. They were going early to set up, and also to deliver a newfie puppy to its new people, who were coincidentally in St. Louis. The puppy had been rescued from the pound, where it was on a 10-day road to being put down -- it had been taken from the pound previously, and bitten the person, who had then returned it to the pound. Apparently, this is always a death sentence for a dog, nevermind the fact that this is a 4 month old puppy. Go figure. So MS is saving this dog by taking it to St. Louis.

The plan from there is that triadruid and I will get off work Friday at 5:30, and then drive to St. Louis and meet kittenpants and MS. We would then stay overnight with one of the folk organizing this thing, get up in the morning, spend the day attending and leading workshops, do a big ritual in the evening, and then drive home Saturday night.
( But here's what really happened... )

Yet another long-arsed weekend full of er... mostly working for us. Friday night, triadruid, kittenpants and I helped brandy22kc move into her new place. This mostly involved clearing out a storage unit, pulling some bizarre and unnecessary stunts, getting lost between Shawnee Mission and Olathe, and generally being cold and tired, but it also involved coffee and some truly funny moments, so all was well. Best wishes to B and family in their new house -- we understand that in 6-9 months, we'll be moving them again, out of program housing to somewhere better (and freer), and that's good too.

Saturday, we had visitors from Texas. The church I think of as The Other Pagan UU Congregation (although it may not be the only other one; there may be one in Florida now too) sent some people up to talk to us about leadership of our congregation and see how we did things in case there was anything they wanted to steal. They stayed through Sunday evening, and left with hopefully a lot of good stuff that will help them. Apparently also, kittenpants and I will be visiting their congregation in May to teach an abbreviated version of Excellence in Ritual, so that will be fun. (Especially since it will be right after we get done teaching the full 8-week version here... yeesh.)

Late last night, in a stunning bout of irresponsibility, triadruid blew off working on Winter Bazaar to go see Casino Royale, which was just stunning. I enjoyed the hell out of the new Bond concept, but I'm thinking that I might not continue to enjoy it as they make more films -- the brutality and hands-on nature of New Bond I am digging, but I can't for the life of me work out why anyone would want to go to bed with New Bond, and that's going to be a problem for me as the franchise continues. Shining moments: a fantastic sequence in the beginning of the film in which Bond chases down a minor bad guy who happens to apparently be proficient in parkour; the most flips ever achieved in a car crash with the help of an air cannon (7) (and by the way, that's the 2007 Aston-Martin DBS); Felix Leiter; M lamenting the end of the Cold War.

For this commercial message: Buy pictures of naked women, help a woman with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Seriously. The lovely and talented ysabel is Miss May. And, you know, who doesn't like cheesecake for charity?

(Also, this icon cracks me up for no good reason every time I use it.)

triadruid has graciously agreed to make me a superhero icon. (Or at least has intimated that he might do such a thing, and I think I can talk him into actually doing it.)

His question, though, was what extant comic-book superhero would be an accurate avatar for me? Anybody got an opinion on that? Supervillains are also acceptable. :)

I'm working on something to do as a little diversion beginning Januaryish, and I'm looking for some input on the process. You see, I've got a vast and mostly unwarranted affection for Palladium's Heroes Unlimited game. Recently (okay, at DragonCon), I acquired a well-loved (i.e. battered and annotated) rulebook for same. And I'm thinking, let's do some hero gaming.
( It is a cunning plan )
The tone of the game is pretty tongue-in-cheek. I'm thinking of something with a near-future feel, with some weirdnesses in the setting to account for all of the different possible hero types the system allows for (which include aliens, robots, mutants, magic users, superspies, and so on). If this sounds like fun to anybody local, drop me a comment and I'll add you to my contact list for when the games start. Also, I'm currently working on building my setting, so if you have thoughts about what sorts of things would be in the ideal genre-bending comic book city, feel free to drop those here too.

Also, I thought I had a superhero icon, but I don't! V is the best I can do, and he's a Discworld joke. If I'm going to run this thing, I'm going to need a new icon.

EDIT: Possibly In:
triadruid, agrnmn, kittenpants, 8elements, capriciouslass