Metal Monday

Do or die.

Holy shit cute

Awwwwwwwwwww.

THE RIDE

Claim the Crown of Command!

Every eighteen months or so the old fever comes back into simmer, triggered by a book rediscovered in clutter-clearing, a casually nostalgic conversation, a heavy-metal album cover. This time, it’s sixty-odd-dollar lunch-hour impulse purchase that’s relit the fire under my affection for tabletop fantasy role-playing in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular; the gently-used hardback Monster Manual sitting casually on the toilet tank, the Player’s Handbook seductively arranged on the coffee table, the mysterious Dungeon Master’s Guide perched on the lectern of my bedside box.

Mind filled with the old familiar magic words and names of power--saving throw; displacer beast; prismatic wall; gelatinous cube--I spend my days in a state of wild fantasy, of dreams beyond possibility. Not dreaming of stalking bloody-bladed through corridors of death, or of charming a Duchess of the Realm with a preternaturally glib tongue, but of something more fantastic: of sitting around a table in the late afternoon, prepared and confident, with a group of relatively sober and attentive friends and colleagues, getting down to playing some rewarding D&D. It’s a vision almost too lovely to bear.

Word’s got out that I’ve been thinking subterranean thoughts again and the usual suspects have expressed their usual interest, most of them knowing not to get their hopes up. The old student days of spacious days and bachelor nights are gone, and the leisure-time-consuming work of building a campaign–just say ‘No’ to boxed adventures and off-the shelf settings!–and then reconciling the nine-dimensional schedule of a five-player group seems daunting to the point of tears. I do feel sorry for my oilpatch engineer buddy, the one bright-eyed hopeful; he’s gone both-feet with this one, spending his endless hours of Haliburton-hotel downtime swimming in the numbers and charts and modifiers of D&D’s internal kabbalah. I doubt his meticulously spreadsheeted custom Ranger class will ever see the roll of a die.

Of course, even back in the carefree college years of skipped/dropped classes and not much better to do there were times when we needed a relatively quick fantasy fix and the commitment of a full game was out of the question. It’s in these occasions that the fantasy board-game genre found its market, and might just find it again. From the simplistic plodding of the old TSR-produced Dungeon!–an elementary-school favorite–through a massive modern abominations like the World of Warcraft tabletop game, these boxed wonders supplythe animal pleasures of a role-playing game–constant combat dice-rolling, avaricious gathering of imaginary riches–without the argument-resolving hours of leafing through Bible-thick rulebooks and the frustrating cat-herding inherent in collaborative storytelling with a bunch of narcissistic nerds. And of these games, the undisputed champ is Games Workshop’s Talisman.

The Talisman high concept for the non-nerd layman: Dungeons & Dragons meets Monopoly. As in Monopoly, players roll dice to circle a board, facing fickle fate as random cards are drawn, until one player has become heavy enough to crush the rest… except instead of a boot or a flatiron or whatever, you’re a Barbarian or Wizard or one of countless other fantasy weirdoes, each with their own especially fantastic way of bending the rules. It can’t be said that Talisman was a really good game–it was too random, too unbalanced and usually too long–but it was fun. We played it for hours upon hours, bloated it up with countless expansion sets, took it up to the barroom of RATT and played a liver-wrecking drinking-game version until we couldn’t see the board. The last edition of Talisman was released 13 years ago; quality copies of this geek touchstone auction for hundreds of dollars, a price I could never justify.

This week, though, just as my D&D despair was at its darkest, Talisman reappeared to me in all its shining, pointless glory. First, it was announced that videogame developer Capcom was preparing a multiplayer, online version of the game for release on XBox Live Arcade later this year, and via that announcement I heard that a new tabletop edition was being readied for October. The importance of this news to a certain type of gamer of a certain age can’t be overstated–imagine, I don’t know… a Fleetwood Mac reunion? A new Dallas series? A Beastmaster sequel? It’s going to be awesome.

I ought to feel bad about feeling sort of OK about the possibility of once again setting aside my plans for a politically charged northern-wilderness indigenous-elves-versus-human-developers Dungeons & Dragons campaign, for once again faking out my sphere of fantasy-friendly hosers. But now that Talisman’s coming back, I know that just around the corner of the year lies an afternoon or two of tabletop fantasy. It won’t be the full role-playing experience I crave and will never stop craving, but it’ll be what Talisman always was: an evocative facsimile that dulls the pangs, magical methadone.

"No amount of piling up skulls thrills any more"

I breathe in still. The music grows calm. I breathe out.

Ragbag Buntara creeps towards me from her bed in the dirt of Imperial City. My will wobbles a tightrope of death. Yet like her, I stare up breathlessly through my whiskers at the fuming ruins, the shattered shell of the Church of the One. Smoking in its crumbled midst, an enormous stone dragon: moments ago paralyzing and golden and alive, a righteousness-spewing manifestation of Akatosh himself! Need I stress he’s one of the great Nine Divines, the very gods who cement this world of unmatched beauty and evil, our teeming Cyrodill? Without winged Akatosh’s summoning, all on it would have been smothered methodically from above by the four hands of the axe-wielding titan, Mehrunes Dagon. For the last 357 sunsets, the Daedric Prince has hatefully stabbed holes into the stretched skin of the land, mountains to deserts to oceans, pushing through his gates of blood and bone countless abominations! Thousands have died in his name, from penned horses to an entire city: that infamous pile of rubble, Kvatch. Today, Sun’s Height 13, he materialized in the great city and was exiled by Akatosh in a storm of flame. Perhaps he’s even dead. Or both are dead.

Yet even now, Buntara begs me for a coin, my smashed and enchanted weapons still vibrating from the battle moments ago that would end the world. There is a Daedric arrow shafted through my groin, one of several souvenirs of erupted demon war. She looks directly at me, an armoured Khajit catman named Grandpa, my fur as bright as the sun. Then asks, “Tell me again how you and Martin defeated Mehrunes Dagon.”

To be honest, it’s a long fucking story. Thanks to Emperor Martin summoning Akatosh at the cost of his existence, the Line of Kings is broken, the world without a leader. But I soon learn walking the lonely land - now free of Dagon’s prehistoric fiends and buxom spider queens - that’s all anyone wants to talk about any more, from the Black Horse Courier office outward. The battle legend pours even to the extradimensional Shivering Isles, once domain of Mehrunes’ cousin Sheogorath, another Daedric Prince, Lord of Madness instead of hate. Sheogorath has a special place in my grit teeth. After his queer gate showed up on the lake outside of Bravil it took an extensive penance.

There I was trapped for weeks, kept from my artistic heart: my hand-decorated wizard’s tower Frostcrag Spire, where so much of my passion lies in this life of mindless killing and errand-running. There: every skull I’ve ever liberated is piled. It’s home to my massive library and sycophant servant boy, cruelly commanded to remain in the bedroom conservatory, a little herb-garden gnome. Though I have no taste for his praise, he reminds of me the price of engaging the corrupt cities of men. In the tower’s rooms below, an unmatched collection of weapons and armour, trinkets; but also an easel-framed painting traded for keeping quiet about a certain royal infidelity; also, the head of a sick wizard’s mother; best of all, a handmade spiral staircase made of inexplicably floating paintbrushes carefully arranged upward, hanging there as if life were some mere game with cool graphic glitches.

But with both Daedra regals snuffed, I admit I’m not quite sure what to do with my life any more. To circumvent their disruptive ambitions, I’ve thrown myself into Felldew addiction, salivating and scrambling desperately through the hollows of a giant tree for the right kind of man-sized bug to juice – soon after, a battle with a dark mirror of myself; I’ve ripped the keystone hearts out of 15 Oblivion planes – hewing others’ reality; I’ve even leaped into a book, the secret Paradise of Mankar Camoran, destroying yet another dreamworld.

So now, the idea of lackey-fetching singing Ninroot for a wine-burping chemist or finding some fool woman’s debt-ridden husband in an orc dungeon seems positively … janitorial.

I’ve said it then. I believe I’m suffering post-Oblivion depression, healer. The mountains have been claimed and flattened. And no amount of piling up skulls or climbing floating paintbrushes over walls I’m not physically supposed to thrills any more. And I’m thinking about Ragbag Buntara. I’m thinking the next time she asks me for a coin … I’m going to have to hurt her. You know. Just for something to do as the guards rush to their deaths.

Better a debauched canary than a pious housecat, after all.

More sciencey awesomeness

The super-rad Kaye Effect in action

[drooldrooldrool]

RIGHT FUCKIN' ON

ESH: A Palpable Loss

04-09-2007 – Yoga for Beginners

“Be aware of your breath as you relax… relaxing your thighs, your hips… your abdominal muscles…”

Oh no, lady. No. We don’t want that. This may be Hatha Yoga for Beginners, and we’re here to get to know our bodies, and it’s not a performance, and nobody’s judging us, but I guarantee there’s be an awful lot of judging – and an unwelcome degree of body-knowledge – if the stern fist of abdominal discipline were to unclench and this caucus of dissident sashimi allowed to voice its opinions. Now is not the time for a policy of openness; I’ll relax everything else, hang like a simple natural-fibre robe from the iron hook in my guts, but I can’t relax my abdominals.

What was I doing, scarfing down twenty dollars’ worth of raw fish half an hour before my first-ever yoga class? Acting from desperation, blood-sugar necessity. See, I’m knocking two items off the Hippie Checklist this week: my first yoga, and my first herbal cleanse. No bread/flour products, no sugars or sweeteners, no dairy, no fermented products (vinegar, soy sauce, beer [sniff], wine [sob]), no tropical fruits… plus, my girl and I decided we’d go fishitarian for this one. The theoretical meal options are endless and wonderful; our practical reality has been salmon and rice.

It’s actually quite an easy and rewarding diet to more-or-less stick to, especially once you manage to will your head and body out of the fat-sugar-salt-starch lever-pushing of the instant-food reflex and start thinking of meals earlier than 30 seconds before hypoglycemic coma sets in, but today I’d neglected to restock my cubicle’s larder with almonds, cashew butter and the brown-rice cakes I’d once been so enthusiastic about (I’d actually exclaimed “Ooh!” and “Yum!” when I found them in the organic aisle). And so, when those big, beautiful menus presenting all that fresh, tasty fishflesh were put in my shaking hands, all the yogic dietary advice I’d dilligently wikied was forgotten as easily as it’d been gained.

I wish I’d been smarter on the food angle, because some of these poses feel really great underneath the agony; you can almost hear the office demons being driven out of my hunch-crunched lower back, evicted from my gnarled slacker shoulders. It’d be great to really relax and lean into them; unfortunately, many of them involve pointing my ass directly at a roomful of kindly strangers. I’d hoped the fish wouldn't disagree with me so violently, but underestimated the magnitude of combat involved in Operation: Intestinal Freedom. A few little cheats on the weekend – celebrating Christ’s victory over death and my fiancee’s victory over the living death of not having your awesomeness acknowledged – had set the purification program back, and my twelve daily tablets of cleansing herbs were on the counteroffensive.

There’s regret, there, even after all the perfectly reasonable justifications for blowing the cleanse in half with a double-shot of heavy food and liquor. I feel weak and gross and foolish, yeah, but worse is my frustrated curiosity; we were on Day Five of a 12-day program when we stepped outside the dietary guidelines, and just that afternoon I’d rushed urgently to the can at IKEA – a traditional part of the IKEA experience, with or without a gutful of loose-change hotdogs – and my business smelled like flowers. I actually courtesy-flushed out of embarrassment at smelling too good. What would have happened in seven days had I not joyfully smothered that gastrointestinal garden with a herbicidal compost of Panago and Carlo Rossi? Would I have gained… superpowers?

Anyway… yeah. Here we see in action the key pitfall of a healthy, conscious, engaged, aware lifestyle: you can’t shut up about your hippie shit, because it’s all you can think about. This past week, if my mind wasn’t on what was going into my body, it was gleefully analyzing what was going out. Sorry, everybody; I’m just going to listen to this friendly contortionist with the perfect skin and focus on my breath, on what’s going on with my body in this moment.

Oh, right. That. Well, I understand now what my girl was talking about when she said yoga practice can actually add hours to your day, because it feels like I’ve been here for a million years.

Undead Losers