Modern Nights Mush

 This is a review about a text based world of darkness game.  So this mush has a lot going for it; specifically a doom clock that is actually enforced, this is important to a game like World of Darkness, because it means that there are real story consequences for the game like breaching the Masquerade.  It's a curious mix of Mage and Vampire, mostly vampire with Mage at about half the population of Vampire at the time of writing the review.  The game is described as Street level, and it is set in San Francisco.  It also has a somewhat engaged staff, and they adapt based on player feedback.  Finally, it is the first mush I've seen to use M20 and V20 rules.

That's where the positive ends.

The real problem with the mush is the head wizard, Batty.  And it isnt going to change.  Basically, once Batty gets it into her head that you dont fit in the game, she is not going to give you a fair shake.  I went through three total rewrites for a minor sorcerer character and a mortal and kept being told no. On the surface, this is what a mush should do, but its more complicated than that.  The initial reason I was told no was because a vigilante and 'powerful' technosorcerer were not thought good fits for the game.  I was originally transferred to Cylon because the mortal mage, Google, was idle for a while.  Batty was distant but nice.

All of that changed when Batty thought I was trying to make a technomancer.  I tried to clarify that I wasnt, and she accepted it, but it was obvious that she was on edge after that.  The response I got to my character the last iteratoin was THREE PAGES, and she took it over directly from Cylon.  Suffice to say, I politely replied, "I think we have incompatible views on your game" NOT because her game was badly run but because I've dealt with mush staff for over 30 years, and I know when a battle is lost.  If you can get on the good side of staff, have at it, but if you feel that they are against you, they probably are and you should stop wasting your time.

[Book] If you give a Pig the White House

3 of 5 stars.

I bought this book because I was curious why it was getting so many bad reviews that contained absolutely no details on it.  As it is, I waited a few days for it to arrive and it is adorable.

Short: This book is basically a parody of children's books like "Go the F*ck to sleep" with adorable art and an excellent summary of all the things that are wrong with putting a pig in the white house.

Medium: It covers an excellent highlight of all the things that Donald Trump (the subject clearly being parodied here) has done wrong while at the same time offering tons of Easter eggs for anyone who follows the white house.  I think the biggest problem with the book is the fact that so many of its best jokes require an extremely high amount of political education for the reader; now granted, who else do you expect to be buying a book like this? Its definitely not for children, but a casual non trump fan will see a pig doing pig like things and immediately reference some of the awful things we all know Trump has done like hang out with dictators but some others are really quite obscure.

Verbose: When you factor in the sheer amount of CRAP there is to make this book from, you can easily appreciate the fact that choosing what makes the best images and the best choice of words would be a challenge, but the fact is, the image of a pig in the white house is indeed apropos but the book barely chooses to go in that direction.  The pig only acts like a pig in 3 of the pages of this excellent 32 page book.  There really are a lot more 'pig' references that they could do but instead its basically Donald Trump being ....Donald Trump.  The language also breaks up the excellent possibility of parody in the sense that while 'go the f*ck to sleep' is clearly targeted for adults, it keeps its reading level designed for an 6 year old, whereas this has more of a 9th grade reading level but much more advanced illustrations.

If the book was simply constructed to piss off opponents of President Trump it does that singularly well, and definitely covers it in a way that exposes their rampant hypocrisy and lies as well as the total moral vacuum by the current occupant of the white house. Some of my favorite pages includes a simple image of him hanging out with "I Like Beer" Kavanagh (without ever naming names) and simply says "Sometimes Pigs like Locker Room Talk" or something along those lines but is obviously powerful imagery and invokes quite well what was wrong with the administration.  The most pig like of images is when he wants more for his meal than everyone else and shows the other two people with him getting absolutely nothing comparatively speaking.

It also does an excellent job of showing how randomly distracted he is, and how utterly unfocused the actual individual it is based on is; randomly tweeting or not paying attention to utterly important things but is a little bit guilty of the things that it is criticizing him of, not showing any disastrous consequences for tweeting while the world is one fire.   It does some gray areas that make sense like him staring right into a solar eclipse but doesn't take the natural bit where the gag could have gone which is making the pig blind for half the book or having whole countries on fire; sure some of that didn't actually happen but this is parody which makes it half the fun for the genre.

The best page of the book is the last one, which does an excellent job of conveying the feelings of anyone who buys it by showing a large rainbow with said pig out on his ass with all his garbage IN the garbage clearly indicating that the pig in the white house will be removed from the white house, but the book could have gone into much greater detail about how the pig got into the white house in the first place or the dangers there of.

There is only so much you can do with 32 illustrated pages, but I think this book wasn't entirely sure what it wanted to be.  I am glad I bought it but am not immediately sure who I am going to recommend it to.  I think finally, the timing of the book failed to wait for the inevitable downfall of the pig and doesn't (obviously) show the Ukraine nonsense that gets him thrown out.

Money well spent but not something I am recommending to anyone but the patriot with a large budget to support artists and authors who had the right  idea even if their execution was a little lacking.

[Book] In the Wind, by Devin Asante

[Spoilers, Do Not Read if you do not want to know things from the book]

Short Version: "Rocks fall, everyone dies."

Medium Version: This book ends with aliens depositing the family of the intelligent scientist in Iraq/Babylon in a place called the Garden of Eden after killing all humans on Earth because we suck (and we do.)

Maximum Verbosity:  I felt the need to start with how the book ends because the beginning and endings of the novella are the worst part.  The book has a lot going for it for the right genre lover but I want to briefly recall an anecdote by my 9th grade English teacher describing how Jaws was basically just like the movie but an exact, badly done replica of Moby Dick and he was so disgusted by it that he literally threw the book out the window and cared not a whit what happened to it.

This book ended that way for me but was a kindle and I'm not throwing my kindle out the window.

Who Will Like It: This book is very much a call to an earlier era of "Forbidden Planet" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" written in a 3rd person omni present style that, unlike works of fiction from that time, has the courage to go to the natural conclusion of where it should with a story like this. 

Who Won't Like It: If you don't like God or Nationalism in your fiction, this book isn't for you.  Also there are essentially no named female characters and most definitely does NOT pass the Bectel test.

What Works Best: The aliens are alien.  It is a deliberate and compelling choice by the writer to create the aliens as 'aliens' and are not named until they are encountered by the humans.  They're believable and while they are often narrated, rather than SHOWN doing things that define their character, they are by far the most interesting part of this novella.  Culture is all that matters in a society, and a society of almost immortal beings deciding to help dying planets is a VERY smart premise.  Moreover, the fact is that the aliens come to help Earth not out of altruism, not out of rage at what we do to the other sapient creatures of the planet but because of petty extremely believable politics.  In other words, we are a means to an end for creatures larger and more intelligent than ourselves.  The aliens are higher life forms than us and this book treats them exactly as they should.

I feel that the alien society is so interesting that, despite the fact that I feel the author is still learning their craft, that at some point I would love to revisit them in another work.  They are definitely the strongest part of the book and could easily be a whole series of events as Ship 422 moves from dying world to dying world and solves problems in  entirely new and exotic ways.

Fly to exotic alien worlds, meet all kinds of interesting natives, and kill most of them.

What Works Least: Aside from the author avatar character, the humans are not really more than cardboard cutouts.  But, they are very high definition and well done cardboard cutouts and we have a realistic cast of them.  We have the sniveling politician, we have the faceless G-men doing the bidding of the world (yes world) government, and we have the idiotic fruitloop for the US that "Won" world war 3 planning to 'defend' the earth from the aliens as if somehow stand a chance against beings that can cross the cosmos like it was Saturday.

Things That Made Me Go Huh? At one point one of the humans briefs all of humanity that aliens visited the Earth, and it crashed, and that the visiting aliens might be them.  They aren't, and while the aliens (Polonians) mention that there are other aliens out there, Earth is supposed to be from a mostly dead section of the universe and decidedly are NOT Greys, so while it is implied that the Polonians have been monitoring Earth for a long time this was a bit of a disconnect.

There is also a bit of a disconnect from the alien's perspective and the time they gave Earth but I can easily chalk that up to Time Dialation and different language used by the aliens. 

Broadly speaking, if you like Baen books, I think that this is a good read.  I still enjoyed it despite the ending but cannot in good conscience recommend this book WITHOUT mentioning the ending to anyone who might read it.  The aliens, justifiably, from their perspective, use what they consider to be Mankind's superstition to help create the mythology.  You as reader can determine if it is the Irony of God acting in creation that causes them to literally recreate the bible or if it is actually God acting through higher beings; and the author wisely leaves that up to interpretation despite the personal healing of the wife of the author avatar character.

Oh, and as a side note, the pro-log would have made an entire novella unto itself, potentially with flash backs between the existing chapters, but if you don't mind the equivalent of 6 minutes of Star Wars "pro-log" style prose, then it works just fine.  You can skip it and still get most of the story if you simply understand that the Earth is screwed because we (humans) are morons and we put a world Federation together to try and NOT be screwed.

[Book] The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

This book is amazing. I listened to the audio book and I'm glad I did because I doubt it would have captured things the same way. I think it is a very needed response from the sheer vigilante mob style justice that very often occurs on the internet from people who don't know what they're doing, don't bother to investigate the nuances of a situation and pile on in a way to make things even worse.

Moreover, the thing she is advocating, a way to let artists be artists, is a necessary paradigm shift for our society especially as we approach a post scarcity economy or "singularity" as tech folks like to say it. What do you DO when the robots handle most everything? The sacred subjective, the personal experience of the artist is how we could, among other things, spend our days, but true art and true creativity works at its best when folks come together and collaborate. Artists should be paid, and those repeated gifs and things you see spreading around the internet are true but SO IS THIS BOOK.

I have seen the results of collaboration once money is not considered the only thing in an equation; I have seen and struggled with creatives, trying to help them raise funds when they simply did not UNDERSTAND how money works and how much benefit it would make happen in society. The most important thing about this book is that we simply need to accept help when it is given. There is NOTHING WRONG with "Taking the Doughnuts." Sometimes our pride, or elements of puritan culture are disgusting and the way we treat artists is one of them.

If you are at all involved with creative endeavors, I cannot recommend this book enough.

[Tech]Fire 7 Tablet with Alexa, 7" Display, 8 GB, Black - with Special Offers

This rancid little piece of trash refuses to let me load non amazon applications even when the "non amazon sources" setting is turned off. My chrome book broke down a while ago, and I decided to replace it with this. The used chromebook cost $100 but this only cost $70, seemed a steal. I could get comics etc. Look, as a Tablet this thing is a solid three stars but even a lot of apps in the amazon app store don't seem compatible with it and I shouldn't have to root my device just to put what I want on my own machine. TOTAL WASTE OF MONEY.

[Book] Shadow of Victory by David Weber

I am a serious Weber fan. I have put up with a few other mediocre titles in some of his minor works because his name was on it...no more. I will never pay full hard cover price for another one of his books again. If his name is on it, I am going to be reading reviews on anything that he writes to make sure he doesn't use another ghost writer since I simply cannot believe her wrote this. HOW could he have made such an insult to his readers? I loved the first two books of the Talbot series that, even though it was mainly B list characters, I loved the set up, then suddenly he writes trash about a bunch of people I don't care about revolting a bunch of other people I don't care about. I tried skipping from page 100 to page 300 and still didn't care.

I LITERALLY THREW THIS BOOK IN THE TRASH. It has been fifteen years since I threw a book away that I didnt have to due to moving; at least a used book store or library could help find a good book a good home. I used to like Tom Clancy, but Tom Clancy took advantage of my good will by slapping his name on whatever CRAP hack writers could produce. The thing is, at least Clancy had the decency that he was farming it out to a ghost or minor writer and just exploiting his brand name. This is some junior intern that showed a thorough understanding of Weber's notes and began to churn out the crap and Weber didn't even READ it since he's having too much fun with his former peers writing the Manticore prequels. I say former peers because Weber has given up the right to call himself their peer; not because he doesn't have the talent but because he simply stopped giving a damn and either by himself or by abrogation to a ghost writer of writing fan fiction to himself. Every writer indulges in a little vanity. to himself, and this is a fine thing, hell Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings because he wanted to have something to do with the language he invented, so writing entire characters based on a world so you could have it rescued; sure why the hell not? And if you knock it out of the park again and again you can screw your fans once and still make buckage.

Yes, he's right. But the thing is...this is not a cheap money grab...this is neglect. I would rather he HAVE contempt for me rather than neglect, for you see the one thing that made Tolkien and Martin and Weber's betters at Baen SHINE is attention to detail. And I simply no longer trust that Weber will have it. This book was SLOPPY. I did not keep the book to measure; perhaps it was merely in my own mind, but I swear I felt that the very pages themselves were set wrong and that the image in the software made it so that the test at the top was at an angle compared to the bottom. Optical illusion? I don't know.

But after reading the pig slop that this was...I simply don't trust. Every writer makes mistakes, but King only gets better over time. Martin made mistakes but while he masturbated in his books it is obvious he still CARES. Weber's affections are with Safehold. His passion for Honor is nothing but a whore to make him money for whatever it is that he spends his money on.

And will I read his books still? Sure. Likely. If others approve of his works. But I will never trust him again. I will never buy another book blindly again. He will never get another $21 of my money again because his name is on it.

[Book] Shadow Path by William Maxwell

The thing I like the most about this book is its esoteric understanding of the occult. The author has clearly done his research from the obscure but accurate representations of Christianist philosophies to the interesting references of Enochian. The two lead characters are human, dynamic and have a believable character arc and the villain leaves just enough intrigue that you can see what would make him a monster.

In his authors note, William explains this is his first novel and it shows. The novel is technically perfect without spelling or grammar errors but does drag a bit between the first third and midpoint of the book but it picks up once you finally understand what the stakes really are and that this is not some "oh they are really in an asylum" style work.

I recommend reading this if you are a fan of murder and the occult and apparently this book is on the hit lists of White Supremacists which is a bonus. Given how Nazis are portrayed in the book I can see why they don't like it. A very solid read and very glad I purchased it.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NK7RL98/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1#customerReviews