Through a Scanner

I went to see the film adaptation of PKD’s novel A Scanner Darkly. The original work, written a decade after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is a semi-autobiographical work and apparently a tortuous one to write. Tessa Dick, his wife, recounts how he would be found, the morning-after a night’s writing, weeping. It is also one of the few works of PKD that took a long time to write, though Tessa claim it was written in a fortnight and re-written over three years.

The book deals with the early 1970s (though it purports to be set in the future) when PKD, himself a legendary speed-freak, had a coterie of drug-fiends living with him. Heavy drug use took tolls on his friends, and himself, and so they do in the book. In the work the protagonist is a drug-user and an undercover narcotics-cop, surely the role PKD held as both community-member and community-observer, albeit as a novelist not a policeman.

The film is a rotoscope animation, that is it is filmed in the traditional way and then computers and artists turn it into what appears drawn animation. The effect is superb, capturing an indistinct caricaturing someone experienced in LSD usage might recognise. It features a near-perfect cast, Hollywood drug-fiends Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., and Woody Harrelson fill the cast, and even the much-maligned Keanu Reeves brings touches of both a failed Neo and a burnt-out Ted Hogan to the part.

I enjoyed it thoroughly, it’s worth watching if you care in the least about PDK, or the drug-taking days of early 70s America.

Looks very much like Johnny Depp, doesn’t he?

Scorpio Rising

I’m a rationalist, I hold no faith or belief in any religious cult or terminology, including the four main branches of Judaism (orthodox, reform, Christian, Islam), or Orientalism like Buddhism or Hinduism, or any of the New Age rites and rituals, or even the various enticing entities worth worship in the Cthuonic Mythos.

I’m not into astrology, but even so, as a Scorpio I feel cheated. They just removed my planet, Pluto, from the roster! Actually it used to be Mars that governed Scorpio, but that was moved to Pluto upon discovery of that sub-planet in 1931.

There’s a bunch of stuff about the Scorpio star-sign I just have to love. For example my “bodypart” is the genitals. I’m a pervert by birth-month, it seems, and how true that is. Take this from Astrology Online:

Scorpio is the symbol of sex and Scorpios are passionate lovers, the most sensually energetic of all the signs. For them, union with the beloved is a sacrament, an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

Their overriding urge in loving is to use their power to penetrate beyond themselves and to lose themselves sexually in their partners in an almost mystical ecstasy, thus discovering the meaning of that union which is greater than individuality, and is a marriage of the spirit as well as of flesh.

They are thus capable of the greatest heights of passionate transport, but debauchery and perversion are always dangers, and Scorpios can become sadistic monsters of sensuality and eroticism.

They KNOW me! How about some more?

They are fortunate in that their strong reasoning powers are tempered with imagination and intuition, and these gifts, together with critical perception and analytical capacity, can enable the Scorpions to penetrate to profundities beyond the average. They have a better chance of becoming geniuses than the natives of any other sign.But charismatic “twice-born” characters such as they can sink into the extremes of depravity if they take the wrong path, and the intensity of their nature exaggerates their harmful tendencies into vices far greater than the normal.

Rebelliousness against all conventions, political extremism to the point where hatred of the Establishment makes them utterly unscrupulous terrorists. Brooding resentment, aggressive and sadistic brutality, total arrogance, morbid jealousy, extreme volatility of temperament, these are some of their vices.

Bonkers, but I love it.

Did you know the constellation Scorpius has a star system called Nu Scorpii, traditionally known as Jabbah? I like that, Star Wars fan that I am.

Free Fringe

I saw a number of shows during the various Edinburgh festivals, but by far the most impressive was the Free Fringe. A typical one-man comedy show during the Edinburgh Festival costs £10, the performer having already paid anywhere from £3,000 to £10,000 to a venue to perform there (for an hour) then gives 40% of their ticket price to the same venue, and the venue then makes a further fortune on selling incredibly expensive drinks. They provide zero publicity for performers. In short the venues rip-off performers and public alike.

The Free Fringe is a stand against this situation. Performers are given a venue that costs them nothing, there is no charge to see them, and the venues involved serve some of the cheapest drinks in town. It’s a win-win situation now in the second year, and one I hope grows and grows. I saw a number of performances and the lack of financial contribution in no way was a quality indicator, far from it, the comics were as good as many I’ve previously paid to see. With luck and hard-work the Free Fringe will start to erode the ‘other’ Fringe.

Among the gigs I managed worth mentioning is comic-book geek/hero Rob Deb, I won a Batman t-shirt from him for a question about The Invisibles; Heresy, a trio of edgy acts; and Asian comic Jay Sodagar, I say he’s an Asian comic (as if it’s relevant) because it is, he talked about meeting racist audiences and is collecting 1001 anti-Racist jokes. You can add yours at his site. The idea is you take a known racist joke and make a racist the target of it, so the ancient joke “How do you stop a Pakistani from drowning? Take your foot off his head.” becomes “How do you stop a racist from drowning…”. I’ve submitted one of my own, not sure if it’ll be accepted but we’ll see:

What do you call a gay racist?

A racist, you homophobe.

Arf arf, I am comedy gold. The Free Fringe is getting ever-better and will soon me a major threat to the traditional Edinburgh festival economic model.

MERCENARIES: Playground of Destruction

MERCENARIES: Playground of Destruction (IMDB) came out in 1995 to excellent reviews. I got a copy from the second-hand bin recently, and it’s the most fun in video gaming I’ve had in a long time.

The background is the occupation of North Korea by the United Nations, searching for weapons of mass destruction, with subsequent occupations by the Chinese military, South Korean military (under command of the CIA), and the Russian MAFIA. You’re a solder-of-fortune on missions for each faction, hunting a number of North Korean military personnel, and doing a number of side-missions and optional missions.

The game is unashamedly a clone of Grand Theft Auto. The originality that exists in this game is simply that given to the environment and the setting, the game could have been made by Rockstar Games. You can hijack any vehicle, fire any gun, there are “hidden packages” scattered over the landscape, there are a number of rival factions any number of which might offer you a mission, there are classic GTA mini-missions like racing and Rampage!

The difference is Mercenaries is much more fun to play. Instead of a few, overly fragile, cars your arsenel includes a staggering wide array of trucks, 4×4s, mounted-gun Jeeps, rocket-mounted APCs, tanks, and helicopters, and a huge choice of firearms, explosives, and airstrikes of all descriptions.

You hurtle about the landscape a singular lord of war. Chaos and destruction follow in your wake, realism this isn’t, arcade enjoyment it is. Gamers have always enjoyed freedom in gaming environments, at one point Elite sold as many copies as machines could run it, but linear “stage” mission games are simpler to produce, and that means cheaper.

Pleasingly, voicing the female character is Jennifer Hale, the sexy-but-stern Bastila Shan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, as a fan of that game I’m getting déjà-vu as I play. By far the five-star star, the star-of-stars, is the actor portraying Colonel Samuel Garrett, Apollo Creed himself, the legend of legends, Carl Weathers. Carl is the man who should have played Lando Calrissian.

Behind this war-fest is Pandemic Studios, they of a chequered moral and product history. They made crappy sequels for games they hadn’t worked on, a publisher, Activision, got them to sequel other people’s games, Battlezone and Dark Reign. Two games works of art got really Pandemic shitty sequels, killing the franchises. More crap came with Army Men RTS and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but did they a better the modestly amusing Destroy All Humans!, the acclaimed Star Wars: Battlefront I and II, and and the US-Army-funded Full Spectrum Warrior.

From hacking out sequels-to-order and generally crappy games, to ripping-off formats and making crude recruitment devices for the US Army, one is surprised and impressed Pandemic manged to make their GTA rip-off as enjoyable as this.

Banned in South Korea!

Magis v Clerics

I’m a fan of the card game Magic The Gathering, it’s a great game. The concept is each player, normally two but there are variants with more, take the role of a wizard. You do battle, via spells, with other wizards until they are dead. You have a deck of cards and each card falls into one of two categories: Spell or Land. Spells are effects to play, for example casting a Fireball, or summoning a creature to defend you, perhaps a Paladin. Land is the mechanism that “funds” the power of spells by generating “mana”. There are five basic lands which each give a colours of mana each corresponding to a theme, and each type of land helps fund one of the many types of spell. So the Swamp gives black mana and is considered evil, where Plains give white mana and is holy, Forests give green mana and governs nature and growth, Mountains (volcanoes) give red mana and is focused on anger and on violence, where Islands give blue mana and is good for divination and affecting the mechanics of magic, for example being able to counter other wizards’s spells. What’s cool about the game is almost every card has a rule that “breaks” the other rules, and cards work well together, often in combinations of two, three, even four cards. With around ten thousand different cards there are billions of combinations to discover.

I haven’t had much (any) opportunity to play though the summer, but I’m very much looking forward to playing again this winter in Glasgow, where there is a vibrant play scene.

Anyway, I was thinking about Magic and searching the web randomly and I found the site of Pastor David L. Brown, Ph.D., who was writing about Magic as far back as 1995. Pastor David “the L stands for Lunatic” Brown is carbon clone of other famous evangelists, like Jim “the box got bigger, the outside, the buildings. And all that we were doing. I had to raise about $1 million every two days just to stay alive” Bakker, Pat “feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” Robertson, or Pastor “I’m gona build a 45 foot tall highly fortified structure in the shape of the most powerful thing on earth, me” Richards. Brown’s thesis is that Magic the Gathering is evil, quite literally, and that in playing it santa exposes himself to you, sorry, you become exposed to satan.

The pastor quotes Deuteronomy 18:10-12, which tells us

There shall not be found among you any… that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD.

Which begs the question, what does the good Pastor make of the notably absent passage, Exodus 22:18, which tells us

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Capital punishment for playing a card game, seems slightly fucking harsh to me. I’ve emailed the pastor:

I looked through the various occult sections of your website, including gaming and witchcraft, and wish to ask your response to the quite explicit and clear instruction in Exodus 22, verse 18, “suffer ye not a witch to live”.

How can that order be taken, other than quite literally a directive for direct action? Is it not the case The LORD has given us quite clear instruction, but instead of carrying out His WORD we skirt around His Order, making websites and writing books but not killing witches, and by doing so directly disobey HIM?

I await his response (or a call from the cops). I know, teasing a bonkers pastor is naughty.

Pastor Brown, and possibly the most effective spell in Magic to kill him with.

Salisbury Crags

A funny thing happened on the way home yesterday, which for me took in Salisbury Crags, part of a volcanic park smack-bang center in Edinburgh. It was on fire. I’d stopped by the area for a read in the blazing sun and was wondering with the increasingly-normal Scottish summer heatwave and the abundant tinder lying around, dry grass, twigs, scrub-land, if there wasn’t a real Fire Risk on the hills, and turning the corner from where I’d done a spot of sunbathing, fire there was. I went up the next hill and watched it burn, watched firemen scramble up, watched people watching the fire, and was home before my even my eyebrows were singed. It burnt for a few hours, but slowly. A few crows hung in the sky, scrawking atmospherically. You don’t get to see bushfires often in Edinburgh.

Thanks to Arthur and Mary for the photo, click it to enlarge.