Relationship Advice from a Fuckup, Part I

This one is going to be more fucked up than most of them, folks. Please sign this waiver to indicate you have been warned. Mom, uh, you might want to skip this one. You know this stuff about your son anyway, but the discussion itself might bother you.

So recently I learned that our friends were poking fun at Amanda's and my verbage when we are together, specifically saying "love" to address each other. Nothing unusual about the mockery; in this group nothing is sacred when it comes to mockery, from race to childhood sexual trauma. It is part of how we interact, and harmless.

People who do not know me are often surprised by how demonstrative and affectionate I am with those that I love in general and to my wife in particular, especially given that our relationship sometimes involves a gag made of damp panties or an orgy under a sheet fort. I am not shy with my physical affection for anyone, partially because my family, fucked up though they are, never made me feel ashamed about it, and partially because of some very sage advice on the part of my grandfather. He told me there are two ways to keep a woman happy-affection, and jewelry-but affection is free.

It is more than that though, and part of it has to do with how amazing my wife is-it is easy to love her, because she is insanely grateful to have it. She is witty, practical, a perfect comedic foil and (not a minor issue) motherfucking brilliant in the sack, with a capacity for enjoying pain and humiliation that is just exquisite. So in my (twisted) thinking, let me update that saying to my particular situation here, and make it "If you fall for a woman who will happily eat your cum off her girlfriend's face, you call her whatever the fuck makes her happy, and you shout 'Snoogie Woogie Lumpkins' from the muthafuckin' rooftops, because she deserves all the happiness she is willing to give you."

I'm glad she is content with "Love" though. "Snoogie Woogie Lumpkins" kind of makes me nauseous.

Campaign Craziness: WoD Achievements

So my campaign has been favorably compared to GTA at times, and with good reason-we don't do the whole World of Darkness glimmering angst crap, we are too busy blowing shit up, seducing strippers and shooting each other in the dick. I'm sure that we wouldn't last a day with the campaign diary on the official White Wolf forums, but it doesn't bother me much, because we have fun every time. In the end, that and nothing else is the point, so if my PC's don't want to press their hands to the back of their foreheads and moan about the nihilistic absurdity of the cosmos, I don't make them-I hand them the chainsaw and some really nasty unlikeable foes and let them go to town.

Our next campaign is going to be a marvelous case study of this kind of gaming-I have a cheap mechanism to avoid player death and to encourage torture, sodomy and two fisted diplomacy. Our characters are going to be shallow, violent, amoral parodies of ourselves...with bad ass superpowers. The Pc's will be attending a sort of evil version of the X-Men academy, a Wyrm driven, Pentex funded school for promising supervillains. There is a satanic daycare, a Basic Torture class, a Malfean Fraternity and now, Achievements.

The concept is similar to what you see on Xbox live, where doing certain things rewards the player with one of the Achievement cards I am working up, with the added bonus of giving the player the ability to use the card for some small (or large) game related ability. I'll be handing the cards out every session, whenever someone fulfills the conditions of the card. In addition, there are Negative Achievements-these are cards for when the players fuck up and they go into effect immediately. Finally, there are Wild or Gag achievements, which may be negative or positive but usually relate to inside jokes from previous games or our greater nerd culture. I'm going to write them out by hand on various colored pieces of construction paper and keep them mostly secret until the players discover them, but here are a few examples.

The Ogg Iran Memorial Overkill Award (Wild) - Do at least five health levels of damage on an enemy that is already Crippled or worse . Play this card for three extra successes on any damage roll.

It's Necrophilia, Jim (Positive) - Have sex with a vampire and survive. Play this card to render your character immune to Presence and Dominate for a scene.

Team Killing Fucktard (Negative) - Incapacitate another player character. This card adds an automatic three 1's to your next die roll.

Ho Hum, Get the Woodchipper (Negative) - Act too blase at scenes of extreme torture or murder. Lose 1 Willpower.

Piggy Pie (Positive) - Kill 10 cops. Play this card for an automatic 2 successes on any die roll.

Balls to the Wall (Positive) - Do at least 5 damage (after soak) to an enemy's groin. Play this card to nullify all wound penalties for a scene.

Oh yeah, there are more too, including a favorite of mine called Table for Three, and a really nasty unpleasant secret achievement called Fly Like A Rock. It doesn't exactly mesh with your vanilla WoD, but I think it is going to spice up our game better than a hot teenage babysitter.

I'll let you know how it goes.

A Year in Babylon

So I started this blog a year ago.

Frankly I'm amazed anyone still reads this shit.

It has been a source of tremendous amusement to me, anyway, and I treasure each little comment or hit or weird search term that says somewhere out there it made sense to someone else. That shit means a lot to us crazy people, the knowledge that somewhere out there are more people on the same wavelength. So thanks all you freaks and faggots, you firebugs and furries, you drunks and you junkies.

So, 73 posts, one failed novel, two practice bugouts, a promotion and a growing girl, and no sign of society on the up-and-up any time soon. It has been an interesting year.

I can't wait to see what comes next. Some people take life by the horns, but I'm going to gouge it's fucking eyes out and skull fuck that shit.

Stick around. It might be funny.