oh hey great!

They're remaking Capricorn One as a "reality show"! As the snake reaches back to bite its tail, the antigovernment paranoia of the 1970s becomes the freak-show humiliation theatre of the 2000s, just as we need 70s paranoia more than ever.

I wish they'd at least go dig up O.J. for this one.

IT'S FROM BEES OF COURSE

WHERE DO THEY GET CHEESE WELL I'LL TELL YOU

gautama glitter

NO!

genericus has found what may be the worst insult to jazz music yet from the blush wine smooth jazz crowd: Take... Four?.

Attacking the darkness.

So here's the plan. I'm going to sell Dungeons & Dragons, specifically I think "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", as a cult. The idea is that the D&D books, while masquerading as a game, are actually the keys to an ancient and powerful spiritual tradition. And I alone am the chosen one who has been given the burden of showing Mankind the Way. The adventures, and monsters, and character types, and spells, and all of it are Tarot-like symbols that point inward to a hermeneutic tradition that has been suppressed for five thousand years.

The (expensive) services will be of course D&D games. As the supplicant's character increases in level, more bits of the inner truth will become apparent, or be revealed by the treasures and monsters that are encountered. Higher level characters will be given the ability to buy magic items, spells, weapons etc. The opportunities for religious consumerism will be endless here: dice, dice bags, books, etc. At a certain level, the supplicant may be invited to become a game master at a low level. And after years and years, the top level (probably 33rd as in Masonry) could be achieved, after about $150,000 and a lot of work. The mysteries of character generation, character types, alignments, and the existence of "dungeons" could be explained in stages of symbolic meaning tuned to the supplicant's level.

So I could fuse pop culture, childhood nostalgia, Scientology, the New Age, shopping mall "wiccan" distaste for Christianity, the will to power, consumerism, multilevel marketing, geek culture, the current Tolkien mania, and every mythic tradition that D&D itself grave-robbed.

And if there's girls there, I'm going to do them.

my animal magic

1. New hope and new worries about malaria from the Aetiology blog. If you're interested in the fate of humanity, you're interested in malaria. Keep up on it.
   
   
2. For friendly_bandit and other BNL fans: The Barenaked Ladies on a memory stick!
   
   
3. The Numenware guy reminds us that translation is hard. Especially of poetry. About religion. From radically different cultures.
   
   
4. Watch out for that new Internet squeeze. You may be fucking a sock puppet. When I worked at the newspaper we used to run fake classifieds to fill out a short column, but we never went out with our prank victims!
   
   
5. PUMPKIN GUNS.
   
   
6. Hey gcrumb: THE MESSIAH IS COMING TO VANUATU! Well actually it's just Sun-Myung Moon.