Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Science Fiction
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The Druid is on the run and out of work, but in the towering ocean megacity of New Horizon, life without money gets real dangerous real fast. Even the desperate people who flee to the lowest deck to hide amongst the sewage and the storm swells still need money to smooth their way through the…
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Today’s Guardian reports possibly the most pathetic and desultory news in the history of war: two British Tornado aircraft destroyed an ISIS pick-up truck. Two jets that cost $27 million each managed, between them, to blow up a battered Toyota pick-up truck, that ISIS probably scored for free but will probably cost a maximum of…
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I don’t know what you’re doing here When there’s murder on the street I appreciate your concern But don’t waste your time on me I’m ashes on the water now Somewhere far away Dedicated Retribution Unit 471 (Involuntarily Demobilized), known colloquially as the Druid, is my character for an upcoming cyberpunk campaign. The Druid (who…
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The most well-respected methods for reducing carbon emissions seem to be carbon taxes and carbon price mechanisms. I have written before about how I think they will not work to achieve a zero carbon state, based on lessons from the field of public health. Here I want to explore in a little more detail just…
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John Micksen is a washed-up eco-activist, a hippy and an anarcho-syndicalist who spent too long submerged in the circles of alternative politics long after the world around him had slid into a far darker, nastier place than mere authoritarianism. He committed all of his twenties and half of this thirties to a series of movements,…
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A few months ago I participated in a short World of Darkness campaign. This campaign went pear-shaped from the very beginning, when we failed to stop some kind of evil spirit from exterminating a native American tribe so completely that they were wiped from history as well as existence. We ended up in a battle…
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The 2013 Booker prize shortlist was released recently, and to my surprise I saw a book on the list that looked appealing: Jim Crace’s Harvest. I’ve never read a Booker prize winner and only read two books ever nominated – both by Margaret Atwood – so I thought it would be interesting to see if…
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This is a summary of three sessions of World of Darkness which I recently played. Since describing three sessions of gaming in one go is a Herculean task to write and mythically impossible to read, I’m presenting it in the form of a post-mission chat-room debrief between the PCs. This WoD campaign is set in…
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Since I began reading Antony Beevor’s The Second World War I have returned to my old Hearts of Iron 2 campaign. When last I played I had just defeat the perfidious USA, establishing am empire stretching from the east coast of the USA to Yemen, stretching as far North as the Canadian arctic and as…
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Today’s Guardian has a front-page article bemoaning the lack of imagination in science fiction cinema, with examples from Bladerunner, Elysium and the Fifth Element, among others. The basic claim is that SF cinema doesn’t try very hard to go outside of the context in which its writers live, and so fails to provide any really…
Compromise and Conceit 