Survival Lesson from Watership Down

"All the world will be your enemy, Prince With A Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."

Digger. Deep warrens, deep bunkers, buried caches, hidden tunnels. A survivalist with some property can become about half mole pretty quickly.

Listener. Talk radio, news blogs, backyard telegraph, shortwave receivers. A survivalist always has his ear to the wind for the warning that could save his life.

Runner. BOV's, BOL's, maps, contingency routes, fuel cans, route marches. A survivalist is always prepared to travel long distances at a moment's notice. If you've read Watership Down, remember that about half of that book is a desperate bugout across hostile territory. (The rest is covert warfare with combined arms against a tyrannical dictator, FYI.)

Swift Warning. Phone trees, ham radios, field telephones, code phrases, signal flares. A survivalist has multiple redundant levels of communication to spread actionable intelligence throughout the tribe.

Working on Codex Kalachnikova, America's Number One pulp novel about Conan with an AK, has refined this concept in my head, to the point where these phrases are actually religious commandments. The more I read Watership Down, the more I'm convinced that it contains lessons that we are no longer heeding. But I like to apply them to my own life, as well as my attempts at fiction, so what exactly does that make me? A bona fide subversive? Some degenerate pagan furry? Or the most pitifully brilliant genius of our flaccid, spoon fed generation?

I think I'm gonna go with the latter. I never did get the fur thing.

Suddenly, Our Hero realized...

..that there is no music on his front page.

No. This shall not be, niggas.



If you've never checked out Hopsin, you should do so-it is amazing what a rapper with an actual vocabulary can do.

The Perils of Pathfinder: Meet the PC's

Character concepts are nebulous at this point and character generation is going slow. Every time I pick up the book to work on someone's character with them I get blindsided with something that changed but I didn't account for; damned if the market is not screaming for a full feature Character Generator.

Anyway, my PC's are starting out at 4th level for most and 5th level for those who earn it via a stellar character background so they are competing to come up with backgrounds worthy of a little sumpin' sumpin' in the XP front. I thought I'd run these character backgrounds by you folks for posterity so when I talk about the campaign later it will be comprehensible instead of the usual Scumfuck adderall fueled babble. I'll edit this post and add them as I recieve them and maybe post a poll to see who T3h Internetz thinks should take the prize.

Dungeon Master's Note: The setting is generic fantasy, low magic. None of the characters have names yet but a few have gimmicks. I will refer to the player name during this post until I get character names.

1. Amanda's Character, a CG Centaur Bard. Kicked out of her tribe for her lesbian tryst with an elf trader (who was subsequently trampled to death by the tribe) she makes a living singing for her supper and doing some treasure hunting on the side.
2. Jared's Character, a CN Human Barbarian. A survivor of the massacre of his coastal village, wielding a family heirloom shield as both weapon and defense. From distant lands and therefore rather awkward but not stupid. Currently tenously paired up with Eric's rogue in a sort of Fritz Leiber kind of duo.
3. Dustin's Character, a NG Human Wizard. For some reason he rolled a really good strength score, so what we have here is your basic bodybuilding wizard with a greatmace. I haven't gotten a background from Dustin yet but just from what I know already, it's gonna be a whopper.
4. Eric's Character, a TN Half Elven Rogue. Eric always plays the sneaky character but he is kind of branching out into the swashbuckler role with this rogue, with minimal stealth abilities and lots of acrobatic type shit. No background submitted yet.
5. Lindsey's Character, a CG Half Elven Sorceress. No background or details submitted yet.
6. Alex's Character, a Human Ranger I think. No background or details submitted yet.
7. Paula's Character, a N Gnome Druid. No background submitted yet but it has come up in conversation that her animal companion is a Monty Python Rabbit.
8. Austin's Character, a CN Human Fighter. No background or details available yet.

If this seems like a large, redundant group, well, that's because it is. Attendance usually runs at about 60% for each session so we are going to have characters swapping in and out a lot. It's cool; we are all adults who have lives and jobs and drug habits and shit, so I don't make a big deal out of it and this is almost the ideal campaign for it as it is a simple dungeon crawl with minimal storyline continuity. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with; again, a lot of them are getting their first exposure to D&D without much indoctrination into the culture, so it will be cool to see their fresh perspective on the genre.

Celebrate Diversity

Caught this piece over at American Mercenary and it got me thinking, particularly this portion.

"Other cultures that "celebrate freedom" are really nothing more than groups that celebrate homogeneity, from motorcycle clubs to drum circles, it is the same BS from everyone in the group. Not so with gunnies. We have gays, goths, The Queen of Snark, an Engineer who hosts Boomershoot for fun, Active/Reserve/Retired Military, Moms, college kids, Ph.D's, Mensa members, machinists, artists, political activists, preppers, threepers, pacifists (yup, Ghandi was one of us), we are truly "diverse" and connected only by our mutual desire for the freedom to be left alone to do what we want to do."

"Messianic Stoners" was missing from the list, but I'll take it in the spirit it was intended.

It is a sociological truism that closed groups tend towards homogeneity over a long enough timeline-look at how punk rock splintered into a thousand tiny identity factions from sXe vegan hardcore to east coast splattercore. Self identification as part of a larger whole can be empowering but it is also the most subtle of traps because you are surrounded by people that are just like you right down to choice of music and dress.

So am I a gunnie? There are plenty of gunnies that would say no. I'm short on guns-I only have one pistol, one rifle and one shotgun, with a smattering of tactical nylon. I flout the law on a daily basis-not just 3 felonies a day bullshit, but laws that people actually get killed for. I have a low opinion of "traditional" (i.e. government sanctioned) marriage and have a lot of deviant sex with multiple partners that would make conservative pundits tuck their testicles back up in their bodies and swear off the Vile Internetz. A lot of these things are not popular on the gunblogging circuit. Yet I have never gotten anything but respect from my fellow gunbloggers.

An armed society is a polite society, perhaps? But that isn't the case really; gun owners get all butthurt about the minutae of their hobby in every gun forum, as any argument over the best charging handle on an AR will demonstrate. We aren't really obliged to "back up his words with his life" on the internetz; no matter how much the market is dying for an iphone app to castrate people through the internet, you remain safe no matter what nonsense or venom you spew online. No one ignores my unpleasant characteristics because they are afraid I'm going to fill them full of 7.62x39s. They do so because these are people who genuinely want to be left the fuck alone and are willing to extend me the same courtesy.

Now for the big question-how far have we fallen as a civillization that this behavior is a novel concept?

Warren Psychology

Hey, ya'll come here to hear about my personal life right? You can't get enough of that shit, you sick little bastards.

Today's lesson is Warren Psychology.

We are in the process of clearing out our storage unit after 8 months of living minimalist in a crappy apartment. The crappy apartment is still the same but now we have more furniture. We are waiting on one roomate to move out tomorrow so we can pile shit up in his room, but for now we just have boxes and shit to the ceiling in the living room with a couple of narrow paths to the TV and weed tray.

This is not an unusual situation for me; back in the day a couple of my homies lived the same way by hoarding hobo chic style mounds of salvageable trash. I learned a little bit about the way humans think when they no longer have the space to turn around. Short answer: it makes them crazier than shithouse rats.

You don't have a place to sit down. You can't find any of your shit. The air has a constant musty smell and every movement kicks up a god awful Grapes of Wrath dust storm around you. You wake up buried in the occasional dirty clothes landslide. All of your towels develop boot prints. Your computer intake fan becomes encrusted with the skin cells of your homies. Just finding a quiet place to jerk off is a quest of Arthurian proportions.

Through all this, we didn't go crazy and our friendships didn't break, so I have high hopes for this occasion. Having Amanda makes a big difference; that girl is a wellspring of practicality and sense in an organization that is, never forget, primarily devoted to building my post TEOTWAWKI empire of madmen and degenerates. She is organized, detail oriented and devoted, so we are making much more progress than I was expecting.

And it feels nice to have most of my books back.

Femslash Friday - Ozma x Dorothy

Today for Femslash Friday, we are going to be dropping science on L. Frank Baum's Oz series. Specifically, sexy femslash science.

You have to dig deep for the canon references, or at least dig up Princess Ozma's Wikipedia Page in order to find this relationship. And I recognize that it is a lot to infer from a throwaway line in one of the later Oz books.

I was delighted to find a long list of Oz Apocrypha during my wikiwander today as well. Apparently some god awful pervert named March Laumer brought it up more explicitly in one of his books; none of the materials I could find detailed which one. Otherwise I'd be on Amazon right now instead of talking to you scum.

Anyway, I can see this one easily. A lonely empress with no peer group in a childless society and an starry eyed young adventurer girl from a Midwest state? Notably, Ozma had already spent her time as a boy during the wizard's puppet regime; her sexual instincts have already been muddled with. I mean, Baum never comes out and addresses the issue; The Magical Land of Oz didn't have Tipperarius wolf whistling at the barmaids or anything like that. But magical gender bending is gonna leave it's mark on the girl by default and it is noteworthy that she never attempts to bring an Emperor in the picture.

And then you have Dorothy. Lost in a strange land, with dreams of a place in Technicolor. I'm not saying she is sexploitation bait but I bet she has the same look in her eye that a lot of hollow eyed girls picked up by pimps at bus stops do. Vulnerable by default, she forges her close bond with Ozma during Ozma of Oz, one of the few Oz books that does not take place in Oz, but rather in the neighboring kingdom of Ev. That was where we established the precedent of Ozma

watching Dorothy back in Kansas using a magic mirror.

Wait, wait, wait, wait....wait. Ozma watching Dorothy through a magic mirror? Sounds a little like voyeurism, doesn't it? Anyway, from the original illustrations, it looks like the hot Blonde Dorothy from Ozma of Oz had a few years to grow up from the chunky lil' thing in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and more to the good, Christ knows I don't need another article I have to tag 'Pedobear'-so I can see how there is definitely something to spy on for Ozma, sitting alone on her gem throne wishing for a similarly aged companion. Sitting alone and burning.

Sometimes it all just comes together for me, y'know? Anyway, pervs, here's some image content for you.

Attention America: #EFAD

You are weapons free (c wot i did thar? FREEEEE) on Operation #EFAD.

Even if we don't see eye to eye politically, we all have the same opinion of free books.

Download Link

Every motherfucker needs to read this book.

Edited to Add: Kindle Reader Apps if you don't have a kindle.