Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Sex Argentina

In the latest episode of our ENnie-winning podcast, Ken and I talk NPC writing, player feedback, George Gurdjieff and Salvador Dali.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Okay, I’ll Go Get Your Leg

In the latest episode of their ENnie-winning podcast, Ken and Robin talk Richard Sorge, NPCs as foils, Charles Richet and surrealism 101.

With New Hero 2 Cover, Gene Ha Out-Awesomes Himself

For the fiction writer, the process of having one’s work illustrated serves up anxiety by the bucket load. You are not only at at a remove from the art direction process, but often out of the loop altogether. Instances of character images being shaped more by inattentive illustrators than the text abound in genre literature. And that’s for novels. The idea that you’d have significant input into a short story cover lies beyond the silver veil of authorial dreams.

That an artist would take it on himself to communicate with the writers of a short story collection, taking heed of their input and making adjustments accordingly—why, that’s got to be a crazy myth, on the order of the unicorn. That the artist would then labor to include every single lead character in a collection of fourteen—often with sidekick? Why, that’s a chocolate unicorn riding a platinum unicorn atop a prompt cable installer.

Unless we’re talking Gene Ha, in which case it is just Gene being Gene. Here’s his cover for Stone Skin Press’ The New Hero 2.

As part of our deal when I agreed to sign on as Stone Skin’s Creative Director, Simon Rogers required that I occasionally include my own stories in these anthologies, no matter how unCanadian that might make me feel. The yellow dude with the German shepherd is Longthought, my mutant hero of the semiotic apocalypse, from the story “Among the Montags.”

When Laws Collide

When adding a new rule to a game, the designer must consider how it interacts with the game’s other systems. One major task of playtesting is to find the surprise interactions between seemingly unrelated rules, and eliminate them.

Legislators, and the bureaucrats who interpret the various laws they pass, suffer no such limitations. Here's a bizarre example of a collision between two unrelated statutes that suggests that Congress ought to playtest more efficiently before succumbing to rules bloat.

The estate of art dealer Ileana Sonnenbend is suing the IRS to reverse a ruling valuing a famous Robert Rauschenberg collage/painting, “Canyon”, at $65 million for inheritance tax purposes. The problem? “Canyon” famously features the taxidermied wings of a bald eagle, rendering its sale illegal under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. This law predates the creation of the piece; Rauschenberg was breaking it when he made the work. It can’t even be exhibited without a special permit.

Sonnenbend valued it at $0. The IRS argued otherwise. They regularly levy taxes on illegal items, including stolen goods. In this case, they’re telling the estate that it could sell “Canyon” on the black market, perhaps to a “reclusive billionaire in China,” and thus owes them a masterpiece-based rate. The taxman is all but telling executors to go ahead and break that pesky, non-remunerative other law. Hey, it’s only enforced by those wussies at the Fish and Wildlife Service.

With no GM to decide which rule takes precedence, estate lawyers have made an appointment with the next best thing—a US tax court judge.

The Hearing Trumpet

As devoted as they were to the triumph of the irrational over the conventional, of the anarchic and revolutionary over conventional authority, the fractious assemblage of artists who called themselves surrealists were notoriously a boy’s club. The artist Leonora Carrington, who died this year at the age of 93, elbowed her way into their movement, deflated their chauvinism, and outlived them all.

Her 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet (which appeared first in French, in 1974, and was subsequently self-translated) has yet to find the full readership it warrants. No doubt this is because Carrington was reaching out of her visual arts box.

The book opens as a kooky first-person account of the admittedly ancient and eccentric Marian Leatherby. When a friend gifts her with a prodigiously effective hearing trumpet, she learns that her family intends to send her to a home. The institution, run by a pair of parsimonious, judgmental Christian mystics, houses its inmates in bizarre structures in such shapes as a lighthouse, an igloo, and a circus tent. Marian’s fascination with the dining hall’s portrait of a leering, winking nun leads her to a mysterious medieval text of sorcery, corruption, Templars and a Holy Grail that serves as a font of suppressed women’s magic. And that's where it gets crazy.

Experimental in content but clear in its narrative presentation, The Hearing Trumpet is not just daffy but genuinely playful and funny. At the risk of spoilerage, its final cataclysm earns its expatriate author a uniquely feminist (not to mention lycanthropic) spot in the literature of cozy British apocalypse. A neglected classic that deserves sit on any shelf where the literary and the fantastical collide, alongside Borges, Calvino, and Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars.

Link Round-Up: Alien Big Rodent, Videodrome Weaponry

‎"The capybara is not a threat, just weird-looking."

MEAT GUNS!!

Link Round-Up: Skull Dice, Gallery Pee Wee

It's a good thing Lou Zocchi is still with us, or he'd be rolling in his grave.

Gallery of creepy/groovy Pee Wee Herman tribute art from L.A. group show.