Politics : Mr. Bush What can I say, except that the big bad Bush is once again pandering to the fanatics of the Religious Right and their desire to pervert this nation from its origins and turn it into a Christian Theocracy with them calling the shots behind the scenes. Worse he does so claiming that his DOMA concepts are accepted by all religions (an extreme LIE when you look at the non-Christian religious groups here and around the world. He's playing it as an attempt to rise hatred in this country, to divide and conquor the population to serve his own re-election.

Nifty Pulp : I've been catching up on some of my reading and viewing at odd times over the past week (while stuck on buses, or having insomnia attacks that ate my creativity). One of the things I've read recentely I'd like to recommend to folks is John Zakour & Lawrence Ganem's book The Doomsday Brunette .

This is the second of the Zachery Nixon Johnson tales. Set in an improbable 2058, when the main character, the last private detective on Earth gets another unusual case. It's a pun-a-page pulp fiction tale of a weird future that combines the hardboiled detective style with high tech and high camp. This one even starts with "It was a dark and stormy night" and pummels you along in a world with hovercars, jump jets, robots, cyborgs, sentient computers, super models, force fields, aliens, psis, and even a Fairy Princess.

The story is decent, the social commentaries humorous, the characters interesting, the puns funny (if you like puns) and the parody is as thick as molasses. It's a fast read, and you don't need to have read the first book to understand anything at all that's going on or about the character. I found it great on the bus for light reading, and the chapters are short so it makes it easy to stop and pick up again.

It's Not Pulp, But It Is Parody Dept. We recently picked up Heliograph Inc.'s latest roleplaying game, not with intent on playing it but purely for an enjoyable read. (Ok we're weird, and we do buy stuff that we don't play).

Diana Warrior Princess is Marcus Rowland and Aaron Williams' nifty little roleplaying book that takes a premise and runs with it in such a way as to make your funny bone tingle every step. It's a 109 pages of content based on the premise of a roleplaying game about a tv series that doesn't exist (yet) but which parodies the style of a couple of popular tv series:

"Imagine our world, as seen by someone as remote from us as we are from the ancient Greeks, and with as many gaps in their knowledge. Then imagine it converted into a tv series by a production company showing the loving attention to historical accuracy we have come to expect from such series."

Examples of weirdness include things like Queen Victoria (of Britannia, England's neighbours) married to Prince Albert Einstein. Diana's ex-husband being Bonny Prince Charlie , and fighting an ongoing war against the evil god of war, Landmines, with the aid of her trusted but bumbling sidekick Fergie.

I can't explain it much more, without giving all the best jokes away, so let's cut to the chase and say it's funny (but probably not playable, except maybe as a convention one-shot kind of game for the shear humor of it).

Now It's Personal : Live Journal Readers can Skip this section, as it is mostly filling in details from the past couple of weeks that I already posted to LJ.
Life has been VERY busy for me, and is about to get even more so. Kiralee and I will be heading out to Seattle shortly after the primary in March to visit relatives, and my internet access will be fairly limited. Our housemate and the other owners of the building will be keeping an eye on things here while we are gone, as will a close family friend, and I'm setting things up to keep the house running mostly smoothly in our absence.

Right now I'm a bit nervous about the trip, as it is my very first experience flying, period. I fear the trip, I fear the security folks (who have a reputation to be way too overzealous about everything), and I usually have trouble adjusting to strange places. My IBS is on the rise, I'm having more nights of insomnia, more days of rushing around to get things in place to keep everything running while I'm gone, backpain that's got me back on my over the counter pain medicines and we're busy going thru zone board stuff once again regarding our basement project in the days leading up to the trip.

If you have written me and haven't heard back, please be patient, I was only sporatically online for a week because the computer got shipped to Chicago for repair, and could only deal with things in a web browser.

While I'm away the website will not be updated, including this column, in all probability. I'll be doing email etc by web client, a clumbsy thing. If I'm doing any updates in regards to the journal, it'll probably be only in the Live Journal version of this column.

I'll try to get a column or two more up before the trip, hopefully with some useful content.

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.....

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Synthesis & Synchronicity is the meanderings of the mind of Joseph Teller and may not reflect the reality of your own personal universe. Contents are Copyright 2004 by Joseph Teller and anyone who wants to reproduce it in any way or fashion must request permission (although linkage to these is granted to any and all websites, mailing lists and newsgroups, their operators, posters and users if so desired). Unless, of course, otherwise noted within the text of the articles involved. Synthesis & Sychronicity is distributed by Naughty Faerie Productions.