Treasure Island, oh my!
A friend found this poster for a showing of Treasure Island at his university. It is amazing and likely swiped from somewhere. But oh my god look at this thing!
From Swedish Royalty to Pulp Trash
So maybe you’ve already heard about that creeptacular painting of the Danish Royal family. The one by Thomas Kluge pictured above. If not you can read about it here. Isn’t it something? It’s like every VC Andrews book cover I remember from when I was a kid.
When I posted this to Facebook and made the Andrews comparison I asked what was the appeal of her books, and what people told me was that she was basically “like Lovecraft for girls”. Here’s a blog post by the writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia on the subject. Which makes sense, as did my wife’s comment that when you’re 12, you seek out the trashiest stuff you can just because reading those books is like a badge of honor. Other folks talked about how those books addressed the fascination/revulsion teens had about sex or offered some catharsis for teens whose home lives were fucked up, but not that fucked up. So maybe there is a value to trash, especially when painted up as Gothic literature. Or maybe the shit was just fun to read. I never read them, as my trash interests were elsewhere.
But as far as royal portraits go, I think Kluge should do more of them.
An Ur Post
The party started out on the banks of a forgotten subterranean river having come across by rope-pull after their boat sunk. They wandered through many caverns and encountered many strange things. Some of these things tried to kill them, others made them try to kill each other, and a few just gave them the willies so bad they turned tail and ran in the opposite direction. But when the night’s over, where’s the party? Back on the same riverbank. . . doing their laundry. All except the one guy who died trying to wrestle a REDACTED.
What cracks me up is when I make the adventure the day of the game, and it’s just a broad-stroke scribble-map of “Room 4: 3 Ghouls — 50GP in gems hidden under rock” – and then the players end in the dungeon, giving me another week to add stuff so that when we game again it’s “Room 4: 3 ghoul outcasts from the undercity. If the ghouls hear the party approach they move to the opposite side of the pit in Room 5 and leave a trail of gold coins to the trapped sarcophagi in Room 6.”
So players – if the DM says the adventure got made that day, then that’s the time to be bold. Otherwise those wheels within wheels start turning. . .
Artwork by one of my 3rd grade students.
Stuff My PCs Draw
Drawn by Dean AKA Very Elder Karl and depicting recent events in the Vaults of Ur.
Heads. I Win.
Mr. Bowes, I suspect this frightening tableaux originated with you, yes?
Images. Millions of Images. That’s What I Need.
Like most people I have folders and folders full of pictures glommed from all over the Internet. Lately I’ve been making crude collages with them on power point. The above is for a short story about a junky ghost hunter and the codependent relationship he has with his assistants. I made it after the story was written, which is a bit different than using it to brainstorm.
That’s one for a story in process. It hasn’t come together yet like the first one, but that’s likely because the story’s not done. Evocation’s my goal, and there’s a tendency to be prejudiced towards the chosen images and using them to illustrate the story, as opposed to finding the pictures that evoke the story best.
My New Fighting Style Is Unbeatable
From the Strangest Thrill-Drama in All History! “Delinquent in Outer Space” at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blog.
Last night was the first session of the Vaults of Ur. It went pretty well. A wee party of three set off into the ruins: Aditi the Thief, Kris the Fighter, and Meya the Outlander. They reacted to the weird with appropriate paranoia and killed things. Loot was light, molotov cocktails were fumbled, but they all came back alive even if Aditi had to be carried out.
Fun times.
Yesterweird 