Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Kenneth Hite's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
4:27 pm	The Two Presidencies of Benjamin Franklin Butler At Pacificon/ConQuest, I had the great fun of listening to John Hill lecture on the underrated Union General Benjamin F. Butler. Before that, I only knew him by his New Orleans "Beast" reputation, although I had also known that he rid the city of yellow fever, and was an early advocate of emancipation and of recruiting black troops. (Butler even commissioned black officers of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard while commanding in New Orleans -- perhaps we see why the Crescent City got its nose so far out of joint, hmmm?) But since the South produced as many great writers after the war as it did great generals during it (in some cases, the same guys), Butler has come down to us, greatly defamed, as a villain. And as an incompetent; if anyone knows anything else about Butler, they know Grant's famous line that Butler had gotten his army "as completely shut off from further operations directly against Richmond as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." (Grant, bless him, tried to set the record straight in his memoirs, but the power of the soundbite was as overwhelming in 1864 as it is now.) But as an administrator, he was easily McClellan's equal -- his men never lacked for provisions, ammunition, or mail, and his medical corps was the best of the War. (He was by far the favorite speaker at Union veterans' groups after the War.) He was a great believer in combined arms, and a fanatical builder of bridges to expand his tactical options (again, in spite of his great soundbite at Waltham Junction that he had "no intention of building a bridge for West Pointers to retreat across"), and unlike McClellan, he was willing to take action against the enemy where he could. But a gift for snotty comments does not endear one to one's nominal subordinates, especially if one is a fat, pop-eyed Massachusetts Democratic Senator appointed to command to keep Lincoln sweet with War Democrats. So his junior generals dragged their feet and blamed him and each other for their fairly dismal performance in the Bermuda Hundred Campaign. Anyhow, while John was talking, I noticed two places where Benjamin Butler held the Oval Office in his pudgy, spoon-lifting fingers. The first is the Petersburg campaign, anent which Wikipedia slanders Butler by saying "Rather than striking immediately at Petersburg as ordered, Butler's offensive bogged down." Grant had ordered Butler explicitly to strike not at Petersburg, but at Richmond, in the other direction. But Butler kept sneaking off to try and attack Petersburg, which was essentially defenseless. Any of his three major assaults on Petersburg might have been successful: * If he'd kept his smart mouth shut at Waltham Junction and thrown a bridge across the Appomattox, he could have forced Swift Creek and likely taken Petersburg over the next week, before Grant could countermand him. * If he hadn't agreed (against his better judgement) to let Gillmore command at the First Battle of Petersburg on June 9, the far more aggressive Hincks would have brought his black infantry up to smash the "Old Men and Young Boys" when Kautz pierced the Petersburg defenses. * We know that because Hincks' men were the only ones who took any part of Petersburg the next week at the Second Battle of Petersburg while Baldy Smith and W.S. Hancock dithered around like ... well, in fairness, like people who'd been at Cold Harbor and Gettysburg, and seen what happened to infantry charges. But still, they could have done it if everyone involved had just run at Petersburg like the proverbial bull at a gate. (And again, in fairness, it was Butler's concern for Hancock's supply situation that made Hancock five hours late to the battlefield.) So let's assume that any one of these assaults works, and that Ben Butler rides into Petersburg in glory; Richmond falls, Grant closes the ring, and Lee is captured ... And for our purposes, the "Union Party" nominates Ben Butler instead of the other War Democrat, Andrew Johnson, to be Lincoln's running mate. If Booth still shoots Lincoln (a big if, but Booth wasn't going to be happy with Lincoln no matter what), then Benjamin F. Butler becomes the 17th President. And he's not impeached, because the guy who commissioned black officers, and got a price put on his head by Jeff Davis for refusing to return runaway slaves to the South, would have backed the Radical Reconstructionists to the hilt. Press play from there, with forty acres and a mule for all the ex-slaves... The second possibility is a little more indirect, so stay with me. Butler, being a rich lawyer who hated West Pointers but wanted to be a general, was immediately interested in a wild contraption that the Army had rejected: the Gatling gun. He bought six Gatlings with his own money and deployed them (the first general ever to deploy machine guns, and take that, verdict of history) at Proctor's Creek (or the Second Battle of Drewry's Bluff) on May 16 1864, on the far right of the Union line. Unfortunately, the Confederate General Ransom attacked on the far left, and between a convenient fog bank and a great deal of personal pettiness on everyone's part, the Union got muscled out of position. But at that battle (approximately in the middle) was General Alfred Terry, who would go on to the no-doubt enviable job of being George Armstrong Custer's superior officer in 1876. Now, let's say that the Gatlings are deployed on the left, and so is Terry. Ransom charges up, six Gatling guns open fire, and the Battle of Proctor's Creek becomes a bloody shambles of a draw. (The fog still comes in.) Now fast-forward 12 years, when Custer tries to tell Terry he doesn't want to take the Gatling guns with him into the Little Bighorn valley. Terry orders him to bring the guns -- he can't get the image out of his mind -- and Gall's amazing charge melts down in a hail of lead. Custer is the great hero of the day, and although his victory comes too late to get him the Democratic nomination in 1876, he easily defeats James Garfield in 1880. What kind of President would Custer have been? My wild guess is "disastrous," but if there was ever a safe time in American history to have a vainglorious incompetent as President, 1881-1885 was it. Would he have lost to James G. Blaine in 1884? It's probably the way to bet, but it's not a sure thing. What would be really annoying is if Custer's Presidency upsets the political applecart sufficiently that Grover Cleveland doesn't become President -- he was a decent guy and a pretty good President, considering the economic cataclysm visited upon him through no fault of his own. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 29th, 2008
10:45 am	Whatever I Go For the interested (and who wouldn't be?) scalzi has posted my "Big Idea" anent the Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales on his wildly successful and entertaining blog "Whatever." And because no Big Idea is possible without a Small Screwup, I should note that yes, I know Sprague de Camp's biography was published in 1975, not 1976. Slip of the cursor. I assure you that I get it right in the book, which (did I mention?) is available now from the publisher, has been available at The Source in Minneapolis since August, and will be available later this fall in fine bookstores everywhere. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
12:10 am	Six Recipes Enter, One Soup Leaves I love eating Mexican food. Since I live in Chicago, but not in walking distance from Pilsen, that means I need to cook Mexican food. This is not a particularly onerous burden, except for the burden of finding the right peppers, which is harder than it should be considering that I have a produce store about 100 yards from my front door. But you didn't come here for my whining; you came here for the: ( Chicken Corn Tortilla Soup Recipe ) Because it's me, and because this is what I love to do, I built the recipe out of six other recipes, from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World all the way down to Rachael Ray. No stone unturned, I mean to say. Although everybody already no doubt knows Rick Bayless (I bought his Mexican Everyday, just to have a Bayless book -- and it's a pretty good one to have) and Diana Kennedy (whose The Art of Mexican Cooking I scored off Amazon Z-shops for THREE LOUSY BUCKS!), let me give a big shout-out to Jim Peyton's New Cooking from Old Mexico. This was a sheerly serendipitous find, used on the Cookbooks table at Brandeis-Booksale-That-Was a couple years back, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of its magnificent potential. (Nor will I ever -- it has a day-and-a-half mole recipe adopted from the original convent in Puebla from whence mole sprang.) For example, I still owe kaynorr and gracefuleigh Peyton's Pork Loin Vampiro. Maybe closer to Halloween. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
3:37 am	Smatterings and Sequels * I'm back from Omaha, where I drove for my niece's wedding. Hence the dissociation, no doubt; a man doesn't just come out of an Omaha wedding the same kind of man he was going into it. Sure, we've all heard the words, seen the movies, read the comics, until "Omaha wedding" has become just another cliched genre trope, like "alien invasion" or "giant robot." Well, the real thing puts all that in the shade. * So what cheer? (The name of a town in Iowa. No kidding.) Well, first off, my Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales is now available for purchase direct from Atomic Overmind in either PDF or printed copy form! Far be it from me to urge anyone to go the spendier route, but seriously, righteousfist has produced a fricking gorgeous book. * And as if an occult hand had orchestrated it, rdansky graciously interviews me on the topic of Lovecraft and the book in the latest Five For Writing segment on his blog. * While you read me plugging my work, you can also listen to me plug my work, on the latest episode of Brian Isikoff's 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction podcast. This one blasts straight outta ConQuest (aka Pacificon), with special guest star Sean Nittner, who just kills with his description of "My Life With Joker," a My Life With Master event he ran at said con. Plus, I was drinking just a wee bit of absinthe. * I've recently read two sequels to books I've reviewed in this space: Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora by scott_lynch, and Ha'penny, the sequel to Farthing, by papersky. Rapidly, then: * Scott Lynch's book is even Ocean's 11-ier than his first "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, only confidence men" novel, since Red Sails Under Red Skies involves a casino heist. And oceans, come to think of it. The voice I loved last time is still there; as is the sense of place and the salutary willingness to push the "plot" handle firmly. That said, the novel is a little more concerned with the relationship between Locke and Jean than it needs to be -- dialing things down to the Leiber level may never happen, but for example, Patrick O'Brian (speaking of oceans) managed to crank out a nice long series featuring two realistic characters without banging them off each other's psyches every five chapters -- and the prologue is just a big cheaty cheaterson. But I'm liking Lynch's world better and better, and speaking of that plot handle, there are some really nice touches in this caper flick considered as a pirate story or vice versa. * Jo Walton's Ha'penny changes out the roman a clef Cliveden Set of her first book for an even more transparent fictionalization of the infamous Mitford sisters. The novel, a capable Frederick Forsyth-style thriller about an attempt to bomb Hitler at a performance of Hamlet in increasingly-fascist London, moves along at a steady clip, and Walton manages to vary her narrator's voice believably and interestingly: Viola Larkin is not Lucy Kahn from Farthing. (She's not Nancy Mitford, either, which is kind of a relief, actually.) Sadly, this is the installment in which poor, long-suffering Inspector Carmichael (who returns from the first novel) gets his solid gold Idiot Plot with Oak Leaf Cluster moment. It doesn't particularly help that he realizes that he was an idiot; the end result is a rather catastrophic loss of sympathy for Carmichael and of belief in Walton's world. The first is no great wound, but Walton's excellent AH worldbuilding chops deserve better. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
3:52 pm	We Need A New Kind Of Awesome So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post-apocalyptic, 1970s-era Western, and Harajuku. The movie concerns the war of the Heike (Taira) and Genji (Minamoto) clans, but the characters often refer to it as the War of the Roses, and the head of the Heike clan even renames himself "Henry". It's set in "Nevada," the subtitles explain, as they show the Japanese lettering on the wind-eroded Western sign over the town. The Reds and Whites have two giant Japanese tea-houses as headquarters, in the middle of a Western town straight outta Don Siegel. The movie itself sets you up; almost the first line of dialogue after the credits (there's an extended tribute to the sound-stage Western tradition at the beginning, starring Quentin Tarantino) is something like "Best not get any ideas about playing Yojimbo on us, man." A sloppy, freewheeling remake of Yojimbo (out of Fistful of Dollars) immediately ensues, with occasional thefts from (or nods to) Corbucci's original Django among other movies. But is it actually any good? This is the question posed by really great mashups like this that are, nonetheless, magpie nests or Frankenstein art: for example, the Venture Brothers. Even the crummiest spaghetti-Western knockoff, or cheesiest pop song, or lamest piece of French Academy historical painting, is saying something. Are mashups saying anything, or are they just commenting "I like Sergio Leone and samurai," or "Hey, 'Genie in a Bottle' has the same beat as a Strokes song." And where is the line -- is Kill Bill a mashup, or a reinterpretation? Is Grindhouse a mashup, or a tribute, or just cynical exploitation? And who's to say that cynical exploitation can't be art -- someone out there was moved by Monkees songs, after all, and I can attest to the saving power of the Sex Pistols. On a slightly more elevated note, does anyone really think that Shakespeare cared as much about The Merry Wives of Windsor, a ground-out Falstaff sequel to order, as he did about Henry IV, Part Two, in which Falstaff achieves uttermost heights of drama? Is there a difference between Falstaff and Django? I don't know. I know that I believe that Art comes from somewhere, and can come out in the oddest places. But I think we need (at least) two different kinds of awesome, to differentiate Django from "Django," and Jonny Quest from Venture Brothers, even though (or especially because) Venture Brothers is way more awesome than Jonny Quest. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
12:58 am	The Phrase That Pays so•cial ar•til•ler•y: n. A tactic, reinforcement, or other factor in "social combat" intended to resolve the immediate situation completely and overwhelmingly. "I'm gonna call in a social artillery strike on these guys and get them out of the marina so we can escape." -- "Samuel Vornau," former Swiss bank security-and-surveillance expert played by kaynorr in my current GUMSHOE campaign, 9/9/08 (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 8th, 2008
2:13 pm	Why, This Is The Box, Nor Am I Out of It Or am I? The column that used to be headed, in tones redolent with alarums by night, "Kenneth Hite's Out of the Box!" is now returned, like Napoleon from Elba, to the friendly confines of Indie Press Revolution. For those who prefer to roam the wild steppes of Livejournal for all their Web-columnial needs, it is also syndicated on LJ at: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/outoftheboxipr/ This edition of "Out of the Box" will go forward in the popular blog format of today; each post will be about only one or two games or news items or controversies or what-have-you, while I reserve the long-form columns for topics like The State of the Industry, The Outie Awards, and The GenCon Report. I have already been paid that most contemporary of compliments, a ten-page (and counting!) flamewar on RPG.net carried out by people who haven't read the new column yet. For the free advertising, I thank everyone involved. For those who have risen to the defense of my columnial integrity, I thank you rather moreso. "Out of the Box," he said burying what lede there is, has always been a gleefully biased column of game reviews and industry news. Those gleeful biases are my own. They include, in no specific order, "Westerns should have more games about them," "Game designers matter, game companies rather less so," "Elegance is a virtue," and "Call of Cthulhu is the greatest RPG of all time." I have others, which I'm sure a Straussian close reading of my summa can bring out. hygelakthedread knows (and I suspect that waitingforgo suspects) how hard it can be to get me to write good reviews of games I actually like, sometimes. While the specifics of my business arrangements with IPR are up to IPR to reveal, I can say that I am being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually like. I am not being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually dislike. As there are many more game products I like in any given year than I have slots for game reviews, this has yet to prove problematic. (If it does, I'll write another Tribute to Dice or something.) I know this may not reassure everyone in the world, but I shall bear up somehow. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 5th, 2008
1:34 am	Piper At The Gates Of Doom I recently (two months ago, which is how far behind I am in usefully posting here) finished reading every work of science fiction by H. Beam Piper, with two relatively marginal exceptions (Crisis in 2140 and Fuzzies And Other People). This was as close as I can get to a sheer cultural lark these days -- nobody is breathing down my neck for an H. Beam Piper RPG1, I'm not forced to keep up with the vast panoply of H. Beam Piper fandom, there isn't an upcoming Paratime movie starring Natalie Portman as Dalla Hadron that I need to get up to speed on. I just did it to do it. Although I'd read a decent chunk of Piper before -- the Paratime series, Little Fuzzy, and "Omnilingual" being the only ones I'm sure of -- reading the whole stretch of it as a (relatively) educated adult instead of an omnivorous 14-year-old made an interesting comparison, not just with other SF authors, but with other acts of reading. My recent memories of re-reading all of HPL last year came back in force; I was seeing things that I'm fairly certain I simply couldn't have noticed as a teenager, or before marrying a contentious English major with an ill-concealed impatience with genre SF, or before reading a whole lot of other stuff besides. To begin with (although this observation isn't original to me by any means) Piper seems to be doing something more interesting with his future history than Asimov or Heinlein. Asimov's Foundation tells the stories of great men who meet and survive -- even overcome -- historical crises. Heinlein mostly wrote slice-of-life stories set in various future milieux. (Although "If This Goes On..." is crisis fiction to beat the band, and I'm sure other exceptions exist.) Piper, by contrast, told stories that while set at historical crisis moments almost always openly admit, well, failure. In Space Viking, Lucas can't save the Sword Worlds from becoming hollowed-out caudillo states. The ambassador in Lone Star Planet can't continue representing the Federation. In Uller Uprising, the close patterning of Uller on the Indian Raj tells us that the company's rule (maintained by nuclear genocide) is evanescent, and the solution clearly prefigures the company's eventual fall. "Day of the Moron" is actually a story about inevitable failure. (Outside the future history, nobody ever figures out the answer in "He Walked Around the Horses.") Even the triumphant stories aren't so clear: In "Graveyard of Dreams," the original version of Cosmic Computer, there is no Merlin; in "When in the Course --", the original version of "Gunpowder God" (set in the Federation future history) the planet Freya may have thrown off Styphon, but it gets Terra instead. All future histories, by writing series stories set during different milieux, are at bottom meta-stories about the ineluctable failure of human effort. Piper just foregrounds it, in a way that only Stapledon really did before him, but far more accessibly in the mainstream SF tradition. This will put many people in the mind of Poul Anderson, especially the Technic/Flandry series, and Anderson's Psychotechnic League stories, though based on a rather different set of political postulates from Flandry, still have a very Piperish feel. Anderson and Piper are a lot alike; both strongly autodidactic historiphiles with that odd American mid-century suspicion of democracy, both fans of the Competent Man, both with medieval streaks miles wide through them. (Both also write compelling, believably motivated villains on occasion; the bad guy in Little Fuzzy even becomes the good guy in Fuzzy Sapiens.) Anderson and Piper go in tandem: Anderson's "Time Patrol" comes 7 years after Piper's "Police Operation"; Space Viking comes 10 years after Anderson's "The Star Plunderer." What Piper has that Anderson doesn't is a fascination, even an obsession, with escape. "Omnilingual" is about escaping the trap of single-planet culture; Fuzzy Sapiens is about escaping a genetic trap; Kalvan of Otherwhen is about escaping the mundane present into the glorious pseudo-medieval past; Cosmic Computer is about escaping planetary bankruptcy; "Time and Time Again" and "The Edge of the Knife" are both about escaping from history itself. Escape and failure, then, are the two counterweights in Piper's fiction. The rest is merely postwar American SF at close to its finest. [1] Although... (59 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
3:11 am	In My Day, We Used To Call This A Smattering * I know it's been forever and long since we've had a single substantive post here, but post-GenCon creates almost as much rush-and-bustle as pre-GenCon does. * Especially because this is also pre-ConQuest; I'll be a guest at ConQuest SF (which will be in San Jose, or rather Santa Clara, this year) next weekend. The Guest of Honor will be John Hill, the designer of Squad Leader, which will impose a mandatory -1 penalty to my rally rolls. Other guests include Dana Lombardy, James Ernest, and (according to the website) Dave Arneson. I don't know my schedule, but I imagine we'll get up to some sort of seminars, plus the usual pickup games and goofing around. * While we were all at GenCon, I apparently published a new product: GURPS Infinite Worlds: Lost Worlds. This book covers six worlds (in standard IW format) cut for space from the GURPS Infinite Worlds manuscript, some of them somewhat familiar ("Etheria," "The Nine Worlds," and "Steel") from other GURPS books. However, it has more details on Reality Cyrano and Reality Iskander-2, from the GURPS 4e iconic character writeups, and one entirely new world, the Indian-dominant Siva-5, which was my attempt to explicate the tossed-off reference to "the Siva worlds" from GURPS Time Travel. * Sadly, it doesn't include Reality Mameluke, my alien-invasion AH tribute to Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series (and to Poul Anderson's "Soldier From the Stars"). The breakpoint comes in 1965, when President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam hires a dreadnought full of Gormelite warriors to win the war for him. Maybe SJG will publish it in another collection. * Speaking of my e-retail presence, Atomic Overmind has brought Dubious Shards and Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana to DriveThruRPG, should you be interested in purchasing either fine item from that purveyor. And who could blame you if you were? Not I. * My attempt to make chicken corn tortilla soup last week was deflected by the covert metamorphosis of my dried pasilla peppers into something truly unappetizing; I was forced to make do with two ancho peppers and a cinnamon stick. The result was still pretty darn good, but I'm waiting to post the recipe until after I try it with the correct peppers. Which cannot be had for love or money in Hyde Park, apparently. Or in the Oak Park Whole Foods, which carries ancho peppers helpfully labeled "Ancho Pasilla Peppers," because somebody or other also calls poblano peppers "pasillas." Gah. * In other news, robin_d_laws has descended so far as to blog my unfamiliarity with the legendary Black Hand killer "Shotgun Man." Having noodled around on the topic since, I can assure Robin that the Wikipedia entry holds every datum available on the topic. Or perhaps more data than are, strictu sensu, available: the source of the tale is Herbert Asbury's Gem of the Prairie, (republished in 2002 as The Gangs of Chicago to take advantage of the nascent Scorsese-induced mania for all things Asburian) which shares with Asbury's other works a charming preference for lurid effect above grim historicity. (That said, Asbury is more reliable than Wikipedia; he gives the span of killings as January 1910 to March 1911, contra Wikipedia's still-sloppier source, Sifakis' Mafia Encyclopedia.) A check, for example, of the Northwestern University 1870-1930 Chicago Homicide Database indicates only three firearm murders that fit the pattern in early 1911, one of which was in a tavern, not on "Death Corner" (now part of the former Cabrini-Green). Should anyone be interested in that or any of Chicago's other death corners, I can heartily recommend Richard Lindberg's Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago, which manages to combine lurid effect with more historicity than otherwise. * Further to the Ongoing Interrupted Conversations File, on Sunday lhn and I were wondering just when the "mean old Normans vs. doughty stout Saxons" meme got started, the one we all recognize from reading Ivanhoe, or rather from watching Robin Hood movies made back when anybody read Ivanhoe. It sounded suspiciously like the kind of thing Hanoverians would make up to remind people that Germans were good and the French (and by extension the Stuarts) were bad, and that furthermore it had a kind of Tudor "black legend" feel to it (which was, of course, right around when all the Robin Hood gestes were being printed, along with everything else), but neither of us could remember anything relevant from Shakespeare's King John, and I resolved to look in my Robin Hood books once I got a chance. Well, I still haven't, but I did wind up looking in Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe, which indicates that I'm almost exactly right. He cites the future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, fulminating in 1558 against the "lousye law brought in by the Normanes" compared to the "Saxonysche" language and customs of the people. And again, the aim is to contrast (Protestant) Germany and England with (Catholic) France. That said, neither the word "Norman" nor "Saxon" appears in King John, so it probably doesn't achieve takeoff until Cromwell (combining Protestantism with anti-aristocratic populism) and then the Hanoverians. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
1:15 pm	Gotta Write About GenCon ... ... before I can write anything else, including the many projects I brainstormed with various publishers at GenCon. Among them, my first Savage Worlds setting book, another Trail of Cthulhu sourcebook, two more GUMSHOE games, a third "Mini Mythos" book to follow the already-written second "Mini Mythos" book to follow Where the Deep Ones Are, and maybe a Traveller supplement if the licensing issues work out. Plus Casey Jones Is Dead, which I have now described to enough fellow game designers that I kind of have to finish it this fall. Plus other stuff, To Be Named Later. * So, GenCon. Trail of Cthulhu won two Silver ENnies! Hobby Games: The 100 Best won one Silver ENnie! And it's all thanks to you good people! All those map links must have worked, eh? * In other grand news, I'm going to be a guest at Dragonmeet in London on the Saturday right after Thanksgiving (Saturday, November 29 to non-Americans). I shall hope to see everyone there! * Or, if you can't make that, how about GenCon France? I'll be GoH-ing it up in Paris in spring 2009; more details when I know them. * Moving down the Excitement List, Where the Deep Ones Are sold over 200 copies at the show, emptying the tables at Atlas Games! This pretty much ensures that my next one is greenlit; details when I'm allowed to announce titles. * Also, Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales dropped in print at the show! I knew it would look fabulous, as righteousfist had kept me apprised of things via PDF, but holding it in my hand was a thrill all its own. It looks so good, and so professional. (Our design document: "Make it look like a real book by grownups.") Toren Atkinson's spot art is perfect, too. One only hopes the words don't let the team down. * And "Out of the Box" is (imminently) back! Sooner than any of us can believe it, my much-beloved review column will return in the virtual pages of Indie Press Revolution, in an Exciting New Format. I can hardly wait. * I got interviewed for three podcasts and was a guest on the Friday 5pm installment of This Just In From GenCon, hosted by Master Plan podcaster macklinr and podcaster emeritus ptevis. I'll post links to the other podcasts when I get them, but you can hear breaking news from the floor of GenCon as if it were last Friday today. * Speaking of ptevis, he and I were the fortunate beneficiaries of Jim Cambias' wrath at the pathetic restaurant offerings in downtown Indianapolis. Insisting that he could, and more importantly, would eat "an exquisite meal" in Indianapolis, he took the lead in finding, and driving the hellangone out to, Huachinango, a Mexican seafood place. We had the whole red snapper stuffed with shrimp, octopus, peppers, cheese, and maybe achiote among other things; the orange roughy "al ajillo," meaning in a reduction of guajillo chiles, garlic, orange juice, and brandy; and three ceviche tostadas. And bottomless glasses of sangria, all for a ludicrously small $27 each, including tax and tip. Some would call it exquisite. * The rest of the show is a haze of walking the floor when I could, talking with friends and colleagues and friendly colleagues, parties and bars (including Ike & Jonesey's, the gayest straight bar in Indiana), and just glorying in perfect summer weather and full-immersion game fun with 40,000 members of My Tribe. * I also talked with Diana-Jones-Award-winner the_monkey_king and Greg Stolze about alternative ways to finance game design (though sadly, my plan to be a fly on the wall during a convo with both of them failed of execution, just like half of all GenCon schedule plans do). Maybe we'll all talk about that question here in a bit. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
3:32 pm	On My Way To GenCon Tomorrow I ride down to Indianapolis with the delightful and talented Greg Stolze, to be hurled once more into the maelstrom that is GenCon. I've got nothing scheduled except two dinners (Wednesday and Sunday), the Diana Jones Awards party on Wednesday night, and the ENnies whenever they are. Otherwise, I shall be flitting about like the proverbial starling, with the Pelgrane booth the best place to look for me if you're looking. But you should also look for Where the Deep Ones Are, my H.P. Lovecraft-Maurice Sendak mashup, available at the Atlas Games booth! I've gotten my author's copies, and boy does it look great. (I say this, of course, because the artist, Andy Hopp, is a mad genius.) And also, Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales will debut *in print* at GenCon! (Should you be a fan of press releases, the press release to this effect is here.) Expanded and tidied up from the virtual pages of this very blog, with a Foreword by John Tynes, some all-new stuff by yours truly, and an astonishingly good look by righteousfist, it's available for a mere $14.95 at the "Cthuliana Corner" section of the Adventure Retail (SJG/Atlas/Etc.) booth, and at the Green Ronin booth. And not to toot my own horn or anything, check out that top cover blurb. But Ken, I hear you cry, how can we survive the wait until we get to GenCon to see you and buy your products? Well, feel free to listen to me in the car on the way down: my interview by Don Dehm of The Pulp Gamer podcast is posted now! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 8th, 2008
1:40 am	You Can't Spell "HOLLYWOOD" Without The WTF So I see by the Internet that Natalie Portman's film company Handsome Charlie is supposedly producing a remake of Dario Argento's bizarre horror masterpiece Suspiria. More intriguingly, Natalie has been tipped as the star of said remake, which has brought a denial from her publicist: "Natalie has signed nothing and confirmed nothing regarding a role in any Suspiria remake, as she has already played her part in retroactively wrecking wonderful genre films made in 1977." [Quote may contain additives and cereal fillers.] So this is probably a crazy-making rumor of the "Priyanka Chopra is being cast as Wonder Woman" sort that exists solely to bedevil my life while fueling my Improved Alternate-Historical Netflix. Although The Dark Knight comes very close to being my (or, as it turned out, Mark Millar's, in the best writing he's ever done) "Orson Welles' The Bat-Man," so never say never, I guess. But anyhow, and more intriguingly still, indie darling David Gordon Green, who wrote and directed the extraordinary film George Washington, is honest and for true attached to the Suspiria remake as director. When first I heard the news, I was hard-pressed to think of any movie less like the wildly melodramatic, color-drenched, Symbolist gorefest Suspiria than the careful, muted, pointillist character piece George Washington. But both films deliberately privilege incident over plot, and mood over beat; both nonetheless build compelling story from seemingly broken narratives. Green has acknowledged the influence of Terence Malick, who may be something of the missing link here; I had a splendid 15 minutes or so on my walk home from Philly's Best yesterday reconsidering Malick's Badlands as a Midwestern giallo. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
1:29 pm	He Who Votes Last Votes Loudest * Which is a spectacularly inane way of saying it's the last day for ENnie Awards voting! I know you good people have all voted, but what about your buddy at the next desk over, or your pal at the coffee shop, or your mom? What are you saying, your mom isn't good enough to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for Best Writing and Best Rules, or for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia"? Man, that's cold. The woman gave you life, after all ... the least you could do is let her vote for me. * But not just filial piety is available online! You can also get the Full Kenneth Hite Audio experience through the magic of clicking on things like the episode of The Game's The Thing podcast featuring not just an interview with my humble self, but a review by the estimable podcasters of Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game by Jason Hill. * And in my tradition of offering Awesome Maps as sweet lagniappes to such disgusting exercises in self-promotion, I offer this 1882 map of Transylvania. Perfect for the vampire-hunting Victorian tourist! Or, for the vampire-hunting Elizabethan tourist, this 1566 map of Transylvania. Remember ... we all have a stake in this. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
1:13 pm	Vote Early, Vote Twice * Since I know all you excellent people hurried off to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia" in the ENnie Awards, you can imagine the joy it gives me to say that all votes cast on Monday (and Tuesday until about 8 a.m.) were entirely wasted! Hurrah! So if you were nice enough to vote for me once, imagine the fun you'll have by voting for me again! And remind all your coworkers, family members, spouses, or dogs whom nobody knows on the Internet to do the same, if you'd be so kind. * And once you've done that, you can go look at this awesome Map Of Venus With Oceans. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 28th, 2008
4:14 pm	Things For You To Click On * If you're a fan of chadu's sweet supers RPG, Truth & Justice, now's your chance to dig up the horrific past of your campaign -- or to start a new one in the badly color-registered 1940s! Yes, Adventures Into Darkness, the definitive guide to Lovecraftian Golden Age superheroism, is finally available in Truth & Justice format on DriveThruRPG. It's the only place you can see the Fighting Yank engulfed by a shoggoth -- with full T&J stats for both! (And for 32 other heroes, villains, and monsters from Nedor Comics and/or H.P. Lovecraft.) * But Ken, I hear you say, I've already clicked there! What now? Well, now, you can go vote in the ENnie Awards! While I'm sure you good people were already intending to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia," don't forget to remind your less-savvy friends, co-workers, family members, and passersby that those are clearly the kinds of audacious, hopeful choices for change that we have been waiting for. Vote early, but don't even joke about voting often, because if we break this award, our parents aren't going to buy us a new one, young man. * What? You want to click on something that won't benefit me in any way whatsoever? What is wrong with you people? Oh, well, I live to serve. This link is a year old, but it's still just fourteen kinds of awesome: Middle-Earth Mapped Onto Ice Age Europe. You're welcome. Now vote for me. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
3:31 am	That Film Well, I saw it today and it's just as good as you've heard; possibly better than that, even. The greatest actor of their generation, forcing an emotional impact straight through all the artifice and melodrama that go (perhaps rightfully) with the role. The explosion of passion and emotion seen both as power and as terror. The deft repetition of the three-characters story element, and (in a way) of the love triangle motif; the simultaneous rescue and celebration of source material too often relegated to marginal demographics or worse yet associated purely with camp. The classic, even Shakespearean, architecture of the plot arc. What else? The music, of course; the timeless set design; the gorgeous location; the grace notes for hard-core fans; the costumes at once believable and iconic. Are there flaws? Sure; the choreography isn't up to the Asian best-of-breed work, and the director doesn't always know how to shoot that choreography reliably, depending more on establishing shots and (justifiably) on solid acting and character development work instead. Oh, and Pierce Brosnan really can't sing. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
11:32 am	19th Century Nervous Breakdown While I'm plugging things, I should plug this. Awhile back, yojimbouk asked me: "What do you know about the Empress Eugénie of France?" I said something like "Not much more than the average Castle Falkenstein player, but I have a biography of Napoleon III and Otto Friedrich's book Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet." "That's two more than anyone else I know. You're hired." What he hired me to do was edit a manuscript by Joyce Cartlidge, which became in due course the book Empress Eugénie: Her Secret Revealed, which was published last month by Magnum Opus Press. The book's thesis is that the future Empress bore an illegitimate daughter, and had her spirited off to Lancashire, where she eventually married into the Cartlidge family. A few decades of family sleuthing later: ta da! Having become, at one time, intimately familiar with the details, I can say that the book is not implausible on the surface of it -- the dates (including the dates of missing diary entries or letters) fit, and Lord knows illegitimate children (and the convenient export of the inconvenient ones) were not uncommon in the era. Eugénie was exactly the sort of person who would have a potentially life-wrecking affair with an older man, and her mother was exactly the sort of person who would orchestrate any number of baby shipments to keep her daughter in the marriage market. Beyond that, the historical record is pretty much silent, although Joyce managed to fill a pretty good book with what she could dig up. My contribution, as I mentioned, was the editing; people looking for my prose won't find it here. But people looking for a nice little historical hugger-mugger, with arriviste royalty and Victorian train schedules aplenty, will have a pleasant evening with it, I daresay. And you can always use it as Castle Falkenstein source material. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
3:02 pm	This Has Officially Gone Too Far So last night I dreamed a roleplaying game. It was called Splitting Bullets, and it was a gorgeous hardback designed in the coolest possible sort of retro font, layout, and color (for which I blame the Mad Men marathon), and it was about some sort of parallel-history assassin outfit. The designer (at whose apartment I was crashing for some reason, and who remains nameless in my memory) had released it as the rules beta for a much more complete version of the game he was working on, which had a different title. The worst of it is that I remember having read a really terrific mechanic for "reality fishing" in the game, although it was called something else that I can't remember upon waking. In my dream, I was explaining it in some detail to Steve Long, so imagine my chagrin at being unable to recall it now; this is even worse than the usual "research dream," from which I awaken with a sense of highly useful information read and gone. This is all probably a result of my subconscious busily developing GUMSHOE variations for the upcoming Nosferatu Gambit game, but it is still very, very irksome, because I really liked that reality fishing mechanic. So did Steve Long, so I know it must have been good. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 21st, 2008
3:46 pm	Lessons Learned: Mad Men Marathon Edition 1. Thirteen straight hours of TV is too much TV. That said, the show (like many victims of the Dire Bochco-ization) likely suffers severely from pure episodic viewing. 1a. So we're probably going to watch Season 2 on Netflix when it comes out. 1b. his_regard, gnosticpi, and lhn are totally invited back for those sessions if they like. They were awesome guests. Maybe for one of those sessions, I'll actually make chicken a la king -- this time, we just ate (historically accurate) Kentucky Fried Chicken. 2. An Old Fashioned is even better with applejack than it is with bourbon, and with Basil Hayden's Bourbon, it's already pretty damn good. 2a. Note for purists: Our Old Fashioneds swapped out a splash of Cointreau for the orange bitters. This version documentably goes back to 1908, and is very much in period for Old Fashioneds in the late 1950s, although they probably would have used curacao rather than Cointreau specifically. So get off my back. 2b. I would have made Manhattans if anyone in the show ever drank one. 3. The show is actually pretty good, by the standards of the Dire Bochco-ization Era; its virtues include not actually being an ensemble show (it's a show about Don Draper), having a compelling if not particularly original protagonist (Don Draper), and of course the look and feel of a show about look and feel. 3a. That said, we caught some production-design errors, such as the font on the commuter train station at Ossining and what I'm willing to bet is an out-of-era Smirnoff bottle in one scene. A later scene shows a more-likely Smirnoff design. Also, the Selectric is debuted too early, and Xerox copiers are referenced as unbelievable a year after their debut. No doubt there are others. 3a.1. The whole World Almanac school of dialogue, full of Current Events, is not as badly done as it might be, but individual instances still stick out on occasion. Can we have some day a Nixon-Kennedy story line that doesn't mention makeup? Hmmm? But most of the dialogue was good to great; some of it was simply pitch-perfect. ("I know your generation chose college instead of service, so I'll spell it out for you...") Including one or two of the pitches -- it's nice to see the reasons that Don Draper is the big deal that the script keeps reminding us he is. 3b. That also said, we were simultaneously completely unsurprised by, and thoroughly disbelieved, the big reveal about Peggy. It's quite a feat to make something both predictable and unbelievable. Jokes about "the Bay Ridge Amish" came fast and furious. 3c. I would also note that Don's Secret Origin could have been far more believable and elegant, though again, this thing was so telegraphed that I was surprised not to see a writing credit for Samuel F.B. Morse. 4. Part of the enjoyment of this show, like that of Life on Mars (which, being much better written, earns its transgression more), comes from its great and eager willingness to transgress social norms: in this case, primarily gender relations. (Though the sheer contempt the show has for beatniks and Kennedys is interesting, too.) This insight is neither new nor startling, but it's historically interesting to see transgression-as-enjoyment applied to the mores of today's Hollywood instead of those of the Bible Belt. (Though rampant misogyny is not really that remote from today's Hollywood, so perhaps I'm wrong. Still, the pieties are very definitely violated.) 4a. This is probably related, in a lot of ways, to my previous post about the lacuna in modern theatre. Like graphic violence, there's a point at which something stops being "indict the audience for their secret joy in this misogyny" and becomes "we love misogyny." 4a.1. I say this with some degree of self-knowledge, as watching this show without mollpeartree (who enjoyed it, I should note) would probably have increased the already high locker-room component (between the televised sexism and the free-flowing bourbon) to discomforting levels. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
3:02 pm	And Speaking Of PDF Sales My "Golden Age Mutants & Masterminds sourcebook from the alternate history in which H.P. Lovecraft wrote comics for Nedor," Adventures Into Darkness, is now available from DriveThru RPG in the Atomic Overmind section! This version features handy 8.5"x11" sizing, and white page backgrounds to save your yellow toner cartridge! Adventures Into Darkness is also always available at the Ronin Arts store, as well as e23, Your Games Now, and many other fine outlets. (9 Comments |Comment on this)