Flash Gordon and the Bat Sandwich

 Who could have guessed that the greatest enemy of cinema would be;

1 BAT SANDWICH 

In an attempt to lure people back iin, local cinemas have been putting on old favourites at rescued prices. I went to see Flash Gordon, and then bought the first volume of the collected newspaper strips by Alex Raymond.

I enjoyed every minute of the film, the insane pace is accurate to comic, as is a whole lot of everything else; Hawkmen diving, cities riding on ray-beams, baroque rocketships.

In the comic, the whole start with Mongo somehow threatening earth, Flash and Dale in a plane which crashes right next to Zarkovs lab, who then forces them into his counter-attack rocket with a gun for.. reasons? Then a crash-landing on Mongo, all takes place over one page. 

(Flash was a famous *Polo Player* in the original...)

Princess Aura is the best character in the film just as she is in the comic. 

There are loads of mildly-honky effects in the film but no bad shots, lots of very broad performances but no actual bad performances. Maybe the guy playing flash maybe, but he plays a good-natured monodirectional athletic lunkhead pretty well.

The designs in the film, especially the costume designs for Mings Court, are fucking insanely good,  decadence, lushness and questionable transformed Orientalism (the exotic Other!) seen through a lens probably slathered with whatever they used to use in softcore porn shoots.

Check out the costumes

Not really a surprise that this film did poorly in the U.S. as it’s an extremely, relentlessly, unamerican film in its aesthetic.

In the comic collection the art is lovely, the invention wonderful and the development of Raymonds comic-booking skills charming but even for someone who likes all of that the story is brutally, even oppressively, repetitive.

Flash has gladiatorial duels, fights strange animals, escapes from castles, sneaks into castles, someone has abducted Dale, someone has abducted Flash, friends must battle, enemies learn a new respect for each other, Ming sends out his feudal-tech fleet of ships, a new biome is discovered ruled by a new people with origins in a questionable early 20th century ethnic stereotype.....

Just keep reloading that page basically.

WTF IS MONGO

Presumably this has been explained at some point in the long-running comics, or some fan has build a web.. nope I looked it up and apparently it’s just a planet, which I find quite dull, so will be ignoring that I think.

There seem to be a whole lot of moons and planet-fragments bounding and rolling around each other in some kind of aetheric atmosphere. Is it all happening within the envelope of some attenuated gas giant? Or in some solar bubble, maybe a fractured dyson sphere binding the energies of a dying star?
That would probably make more sense for me, it explains the feudal toybox technology in a way familiar to anyone into D&D. A dying red sun at the centre of a fractured sphere the size of a solar system, with wounds and rents the size of worlds, red light leaking out as if from a hooded lantern.
But still holding enough energy that within its both liveable but also fucking HUGE; why it can reasonably call itself the ruler of the Galaxy.

Also explains where all the post-singularity tech and different quasi-human subspecies came from. Remnants of the fall. Also explains Mings super-intelligence.

THE FEUDAL FUTURE FAMILY TREE

Flash Gordon also feels like a kind of missing link between the 19th Century Theatre-inspired Walter-Scott Expanded Universe and the post-60's pseudo-feudal Deep Future paracosms.

My timeline would be something like this;

17th to 19th Centuries

Printing and mass literacy begin to create the market and mind-state.

Sir Walter Scott (and others) "pulls a Shakespeare" and jams together historical sources and popular storytelling in a manner exciting to the Audience but also informing and reinforcing their cultural identity.

At the same time the orientalist craze ebbs and flows as the industrialising western empires come into deeper contact with a wide variety of non-Western polities.

Many are, or were, richer than the West. The Other who has more money than you is a *decadent empire*. If they have less money than you they are either *savages*, or possibly *noble savages*, indicating that *you* might be the Decadent Empire. (Tacitus there writing a proto TNG episode).
All of this combines with the "hey we discovered ANOTHER strange island" culture, which dates back to the Tempest and Moores Utopia. Utopia being a combination of proto speculative fiction and the recently discovered island culture being a real-life "what if" story.

So the Wests/Anglospheres imaginative landscape of *The Other* is made up of these fancy decadent eastern potentates and mysterious islands with monocultures.

19th Century

That sets the scene for Walter Scott and the Victorian popular novel.

That feeds into Victorian theatre, music hall etc.

Cinema eats the theatre.

1930s

Here comes Alex Raymond with a world based on theatre costumes, circus wear, multicoloured fireworks, rockets, rays, sword fights from theatre and cinema, endless castle escapes and infiltrations from gothic novels and Walter Scott, an evil version of the Chinese Emperor being vaguely but generally ethnically evil, decadence and wealth from a blizzard or orientalist fantasies, single-biome 'worlds' or stage sets like islands in the sea, "primitive" tribes and peoples with Witch-Queens like something from 1000 colonial fantasies and dream versions of real encounters, and, less interesting to Raymond, but more to us, a Feudal social structure combined with super sci-fi Future tech.

Late 1950s/60s

Here comes "proper" Sci Fi, including Asimovs "Foundation", basically "The Fall of the Roman Empire.. in spaaaace". Includes Tech-Priests, predictions of the future, a golden path, and lots of Feudal Empires in space.


1965

Frank Herberts "Dune"

"Dune" is basically a darker-n-edgier Flash Gordon, or an "Alan Moore Does Flash Gordon"
Hey guys guys guys, what if we had an orientalist  19thC lost-desert-prince-returns-to-the-tribes plot _but the tribes were actually the goodies_.

What if we did Asimovs "Evil Psychic Mohammed" plot from the Foundation books, but psychic Mohammed was actually the good guy?

God Emperors, more future visions and crucially, Feudal Space Empires.

And a more clear confabulation of *why* exactly technology and culture produces human-centred Feudal Space Empires and *why* being really good with a knife or sword is more important than having a tank.

Deeper world creation but Walter Scott could have told you why; modern war tech is distant, impersonal, reduces individuality, either annihilates or fails, and broadly, is a fucking nightmare to tell a human-centred story about. Really you need heroes in big families and comprehensible hierarchies fighting with swords over dead fathers and threatened lovers and marriages and crowns and shit, THATS a story buddy!


1977

Star Wars. Lucas does his own Flash Gordon inspired thing. Has some success. Shamefully he takes out the feudal identity structures and swaps 1930s luxury futurism for decayed-new-york worn technology. He does manage to keep the sword fights and the stripe down Hans trouser leg though.

1987

Warhammer. Dune plus Foundation plus Medieval Europe.

JOY

Joy is a valid production of art and very few works of art produce joy. pleasure is an emotion as complex as any, though its engines may be atavistic. A pure response, without much alienation or inner "turning about" is more difficult to consider than a dissonant or multi-tone response, but is just as difficult to produce, (seeing that it is produced well so rarely), and has the same 'depth' as a more-apparently complex response.

Imagine emotion as a light, or as a kind of sonar signal pinging out and echoing back from the hidden trenches of the psyche. A piece of art that produces a complex interplay of signals; a deep corrugated terrain of emotion, memory, experience and intuition, that can be thought of as a deeply textured signal, or a jangly dissonant one, but there is also a response, simple and almost surprising in its lightness, like the sense of locating an unexpected object, finding a whale on your sonar perhaps. 

A chime that comes back, largely unaltered, but not without illuminating the depths of memory and experience and emotion first, only that what it illuminates is harmony, oneness, cohesion, "rightness", maybe even playfulness.

Maybe a metaphor I’m looking for is, that while some art is a sonar ping that echoes back as an image of a murky dark, invisible terrain, other art is like a chime or a bell, that echoes back from a house, or a home or a hidden cavern previously unsuspected or ignored, or forgotten and put aside, but returns as a polyphony, its echoes and responses combining into a return signal more complex than the one put out, but coherent, whole within itself, harmonious , and which could not have produced those effects without being, in some sense, emotionally simple to begin with.

CLOSETCASES

I made a book out of what I thought to be the best posts on False Machine and put it on Lulu .

I think other people who run interesting blogs should do the same thing.

This is my argument for that.

Firstly the negatives.

1. Blogging is free, that’s the point of blogs.

Firstly, you can still set the profit margin for a print copy of your book on Lulu to Zero, or near-zero if you like. Secondly, don't worry, it doesn't make any money anyway.

2. Information on a blog is accessible to anyone at any time, they can look at it whenever they want and share it with whoever they want. A book does not do this.

My counter-argument here is not a logical one.

A book lodges in the mind and in the world in a different way to a blog. Blogs are part of the daily flow of information that surrounds us at all times. They kind of have to be part of that flow to remain what they are.

There is a lot of cognitive variety possible here and I expect many, or some, would say that they read a blog post with all the seriousness, contemplation, attention and consideration that they dedicate to a book. These are qualities they possess inwardly and they simply apply them to information in the world as they become aware of it. This being the case, a blog, with its accessibility and ease of navigation, is always superior to a book.

Now some of these people will be knobends with shallow minds who do not know what it means to really deeply attend to anything and so believe they attend to everything. But some will not and that must be considered also.

I will say that I consider a book, especially a physical book, differently to a blog. I attend to it more deeply. I keep it with me physically. I return to it at greater intervals.

(I am a proponent of magical thinking about books. I do not have airtight arguments in their favour, but they are embedded in my personality, in my history and my perception of the world. Through years of poverty and movement from terrible place to terrible place, the one constant has been my books. They define me more than any other owned object. It's almost true that apart from clothes and this computer, I own no other objects.)

3. This will take me valuable time which (being a fully optimised human being (as I know all of you are)) I cannot afford to lose. Great works and mighty entrails press upon me constantly and if this be done, who knows what legend shall go unfulfilled by my hand?

It took me about a day and a half of real (ie constant, effective, non-rambling, non-distracted) work to put the book together. Maybe two.

Now I am an inefficient flake so if one of you (fully optimised) humans tried to do the same thing then it would probably take you less time and effort. That is still time out of your schedule but the more valuable your time is then probably the more well-read your blog is and the more likely that the (small) profits of the book sales will pay for your time. So maybe it evens out?

The Second Part

I will now move onto the positive arguments in favour of this idea.

I’m not sure if my blog is an ‘OSR’ blog. It’s certainly connected but it’s kind of its own strange thing off on the margins. They say that if you can’t see the clique then you are in the clique, therefore I think of my blog as being in the;

Clique Of Self Absorbed Knobends Who Cluster Around Zak Smith

Which I capitalise as;

ClOSAKWCAZS

Then shorten and simplify to;

ClOSEKCAZS

or just

CLOSETCASES

It seems that the CLOSETCASES are approaching the end of a big cycle of thinking

Blogs appear and grow in strength from strange gaps in people’s lives.  The golden age of Noisms was when he was trapped in a Japanese office all day with nothing useful to do. Jeff got a job, James M disappeared. When the life changes the blog changes and as people move into new phases the blog either disappears or becomes much less regular or less intensely imagined. And blogs need to be regular and vibrant in order to really fulfil their potential as blogs. A blog that liveth not, is not a blog.

In addition, the current crop of OSR blogs seemed to draw strength and impetus from the Living Disaster of 4^th, combined with the OGL. Yet soon, 4^th shall be but a hungry ghost, flitting around the edges of the feast, and its inheritor, 5^th, is thought by all to be “a bit old-school really” and “really more than we might have expected”. What fierce beings shall possesses this re-made world? Who can tell?

Ideas have a kind of life inside them. They only work through human minds, and through transmission between minds they must change, ever so slightly, or die. They must also change the world in which they act. But ideas are rarely suited to survive in a word shaped by their own success. In this changed environment they must change again, or die. In either case the original is lost. So an active living idea is also an idea with a clock ticking inside it. It will not last. We CLOSETCASES have sustained this idea for some time.

Therefore, in the same way that the Necrontyr were clad in immortal bodies of living metal by the C’tan star gods, let us transmute this great age of self-absorbed intellectual titting around into a different form, that it might better suffer the long reaches of the interstellar night that must surely fall when Zak can’t be bothered any more. For lo, the CLOSETCASES will all ultimately either sort their lives out, or just fall the fuck apart and in either cases their blogs shall go untenanted, standing as dark cyclopean monuments in the dusty netherverse of the world wide web.

You may say it will never happen, but it has happened to every other clique of self absorbed knobends in human history, and it will happen to us.

Books = Good

A book can be given as a gift to a strange yet interesting person and count well with them. Saying ‘hey, read this blog’ does not work as well, despite its ease of access.

You can probably punch a book through a class or culture divide more easily than you can a blog. A blog comes with a ‘I am this kind of person’ feel to it, yet anyone may receive a book, even a doctor, or a lawyer, or you know, real people.

The self-curation of a person reading their own blog and selecting only the best or most original means that you end up with a purified and intensified version of that person. Or, at least, how that person would like to think of themselves.

You can put them on your shelf and thus display your ‘Nerd-but-actually-slightly-better-than-those-mediocre-nerds-that-like-worse-stuff-not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-them’ identity.

It is a physical and real thing to show for what was, for many, quite a lot of relatively serious effort over a long period of time. It is a talisman.

You can tell normal people who ask what the fuck you have been doing with your time ‘I wrote a book’ instead of ‘I have a blog’ which is code for ‘I masturbate a lot’. You can then show them the book. And prove you have not just been masturbating.

There could be a small library of nerds and if one of them got mysteriously popular then people would probably check out the rest.

Silly Fashion Post

40k has, or had, an interesting save system, depending on the power of the weapon shooting at you, you either do, or do not roll a save for your armour.

So heavy guns just shoot right through poor armour.

So if a normal dude wearing a flack jacket gets shot by another normal dude with his normal gun, he gets a 5+ save.

If a normal dude gets shot by a Space Marine with a bolter, he gets fuck all.

If a Space Marine is shot at by a normal dude, or another Space Marine, he gets his excellent 3+ save.

If a Space Marine is shot at by a Las cannon, behold, he recieveth not one fuck.

 

In the same way, when the strength of the weapon pointed at you is double your toughness or more, you don’t lose wounds, you just die. I’m pretty sure a few races have mega-weapons that don’t even roll to wound. The last time I looked, template weapons don’t roll to hit.

The problem with clothing systems so far is that they are too mild and they almost make sense*. Instead, they should be really intense and barely make sense.

Fashion in D&D should be like shooting in 40k, it should just blast right through poor defences. Like a crazy plasma weapon that might blow up at any time. It should encourage people to spend loot on ridiculous clothes instead of sensible things, and to obsess over how they look, just like real people.

What did you spend?	CHA bonus	With
1000	+1	Peasants
10,000	+2	and middle class
100,000	+3	and Nobility
1000,000	+4	and Kings

Plus; you get to use your insanely valuable and beautiful clothes to cause an effect that is the equivalent of a temporary Charm spell on one of the groups you can effect.

Every time you use the Charm effect there is a 50% chance that thieves with levels equal to your entire party have taken note of your insane wealth. The DM rolls secretly.

The ‘logic’ is that if someone walks in so insanely blinged out that you just can’t believe it, then they must be someone important. I mean if someone can spend enough to build a castle on their clothes then they have to be worth taking notice of, right?

People of different classes are logarithmically more difficult to impress. It's 10 times harder to impress a burgher than a peasant and 10 times harder to impress an emperor than an aristocrat.

The CHA bonus doesn’t go up or down or get modified. You either wow the hell out of someone like a gunshot or you don't. If you don't it doesn’t hurt you, you are just thrown back on your own personality.

It works on humanoids and people part of a hierarchal culture, it might not work on others.

The level of detail you need to describe goes up with effect as well. At least as many adjectives as the bonus in effect. Preferably more. Try this for a set of requirements;

+1	+2	+3	+4
Named merchant	Named Tailor	Named designer	Personal designer
Named cloth type	Fit described	Named style	Style named after you
Knows the rules of style.	Bit of flair	Does things their own way	SHOCKS EVERYONE, YOU CAN’T DO THAT (or can you?)
Named colours & body type.	But you added something. What was it.	Describe how you put your own twist on it	Name all the rules you are breaking, and, for each one, how you are remaking it.
Visible gem	Weapons gilded at least	Jewels everywhere	No jewels as now too important for that, but one legendary named gem with its own story, and you wear it all the time.

*Arnolds was OK

I fucking love writing badly

It calms me right down.  


I promised a friend an "achingly portentous, barely comprehensible, sub-tolkien prophecy to motivate you" 

This is a pointless quest, leading nowhere. Is following a deranged made up poem-prophecy more stupid than thieving gold from monsters so you can get points that make you 'better'? Probably.

"Heed FOOL these lips have spaken lines that counselled dying kings

and then spit deeds of starry wisdom in a burning spray of rings.

I have heard the muttered whisper of dementia-riddled gods

I have seen the subtle barking of the Prophets sneaky dogs

I have spoken with the Kraken on his indigo-black throne

I have feasted with the ghoul-god as he cracked an angels bone

In the marrow of the bone there, in the scratchings of the dogs

In the Kraken-limb mandala, in the begging of the gods

A name has made it's knitting like a fish caught in a scarf

A scarf where fish are knitted in an umber-woolen path

A NAME crawled forth from legends in the darkest dreams of man

a name that quakes and bleeds and burns, 'tis yours EUSYRAM!

AYE Eusyram the noble and Eusyram the fool

tis your name hidden in the tale the comet spread from Thule

AYE. Thule!That distant land of men whose sourcerous minds doth scorch

whose sky-craft flips through history's page on destiny's front porch

have named your name as forefront in the wizened wizards scheme

to surf the flame and quench the deep and seek the Crystal Dream!

FIVE SIGNS they have predicted that will speed you on your quest

yet NONE may be related lest its secret free the rest.

So riddles I shall pose thee Euysram the knight

unknot these cryptic weavings and the dream is yours by right!

Decode these lines and know the schemes and sights and tricks and path

evade the gurgling Gnathopod, flee from the Chetchindwrath!

First, seek you out the wormlight where the yellow grasses gleam

then mount the lunar lion, but, beware the horrid Breem!

The Breem The Breem, oh monster swimming from a nightmares jaw

evade the boiling eye of it and break the horrors maw!

Then secondly, make straight for shores where two man walk as one,

where gold gives way to silver and the apple eats the sun.

where earth and water masticate beneath the hoof-struck bridge,

where ravens mock the eagles beak as sunlight strikes the ridge.

Obey these words Eusyram and wisdom you shall find,

and soon the dream of Asteroth that cracked the crystal mind!

Next, waste no time but straight away disrobe the widows wife,

make hobbit stew and dwarf pies too and whet the elf-lords knife

this done, my cryptic riddles shall reveal their subtle form

and rouse the hand of Asteroth beneath the nighted dawn.

Oh Asteroth oh Asteroth, the master of the Breem

the crocheter of mocking time the weaver of the dream!

The Crystal Dream that broke the cycle many moons ago

and lying now in fragments waits for light, it waits for you!

For you Eusyram, for fates entrapping blade

for destiny's sweet midwife who a hundred dawns have greyed.

Fear not Eusyram for your quest is near at hand

where castles clamp the shoreless sea and quell the whispering sand.

Where fools are knighted by the wise, where wizards bow to birds,

where eyebeams from the hero's gaze entrap the poets words!

Look there Eusyram! Within the black encrypted rooms,

the cellular asylum where the dirge of madness booms!

See you now Eusyram? See you now the truth?

The eyes that hear the moaning whale shal twist themselves in ruth.

One clue remains Eusyram to unveil the Crystal Dream,

to bear the path of Asteroth who bore the horrid Breem,

you must battle naked daymares in the dark archival halls

and seduce the one-eyed duchess in the bright ceramic balls

you must travel to the horse-henge when the Pleiades are high

and weave the song of Asteroth to 'ope the Deamons eye!

Within the Deamons iris where the horrid colours twist

is writ the names of Asteroth in winding helix list.

Recite the name Eusyram and Asteroth shall hear

defeat his ghost, then eat some toast, the Crystal Dream is near!

The Dream the Dream, it's hiding place a prophets fevered secret.

If you have read these riddles right, Eusyram, you'll keep it.

And once the Crystal Dream is yours Eusyram the Great,

your destiny's fulfilled my child, not soon, nor far, nor late."