Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e1)

EDIT: I think I should state more clearly (I explain this in my comment Kyana): This is supposed to be like a TTRPG in itself, where the medium is the blog and the RPG is a Variety Show themed around blogosphere stuff. I, the blog writer / GM am the Host, and the readers / commenters / players are the Audience. So you can "heckle", or make a mech character who may get brought up on stage next episode, or you can take this idea and run with it yourself on your own blog and make your own pirate broadcast of Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths. It's sort of a... I dunno, maybe it's pretentious to say performance art, but it's like the blogosphere TTRPG equivalent of performance art.

Hello, ladies & gentlemen & all other folks, welcome to Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths, the one, and only tabletop RPG Variety Show. The original footage has sadly been lost to the dark depths of the multiverse (that's a storyline for another time), so here we'll be transcribing an approximate reconstruction of the show using our trademarked, patented, and copywritten quantum golem learning algorithm (TM, C, etc.)*
*This is an experimental technology, there is a 1% chance this episode induces nirvana, Weird & Wonderful Worlds cannot be held liable for damages.

This is an all-new venture, something a bit experimental. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but what would be the point of the Weird & Wonderful brand if we didn't try to do new things now and then amiright? We'll see where it goes, I'm open to suggestions and hecklers in the audience. Maybe next episode we'll even bring some people on stage! Anyway, please keep in mind this is just a pilot, but I hope you all enjoy the show!

We're going to be starting off with a musical number by my old friends, Junior Senior:

EDIT: it appears that the video embeddings don't work in mobile mode. Cool! I'll just include links I guess...

Junior Senior Move Your Feet

What a wonderful performance. I hope you're all getting excited now for what's to come. Let's move those feet towards our first act.

We're going to build a character for Batteries Not Included!

Yesterday you were in a warehouse, processing angry customer complaints. This morning you were on a plane. Five minutes ago, you were falling from the sky. One minute ago, you found a wheel, a taser and a claw amongst the wreckage. Right now, a metal monstrosity with tank treads and a chainsaw is yelling at you: "YOUR LIMBS. GIVE THEM TO ME."

What a dramatic start! I'm really looking forward to seeing how this plays out. This is Mechs and Battle Royale and Tabletop RPGs, and something I've been interested in for some time now.

Core (+P / [H] / +5 modules / cannot be tapped)

Tactical Simulator (TP: "undo" an action you just took, it was a simulation)

Turbine (while in fast flowing water or gas, +PP)

Minigun (A: D / fast)

We start with a default Core, capable of holding up to 5 modules, with +1 Power and a Heat Capacity of 1. Because Minigun is a starting module that requires ammo (A), we start off with two units of ammo. Given the Turbine, which gives us an additional +2 Power in water (if I understand correctly myself) our Mech will likely prefer to operate near water, but since our only module so far that uses Power is the Tactical Simulator (which costs 1 Power and must be Tapped to use), maybe we should focus on gunning down enemies and stealing their modules first!

And that's it, folks! Meet our new Mech: Hydro-Max Platypus! Tune in for the next episode and we'll see how our new Mech fares!

Are there any other Mech pilots in the audience? If there are any pilots, raise your hand! One lucky audience member will be brought up to the stage next episode to face off against the RapidFire Dynamo: Hydro-Max Platypus!

For our next act, we're going to raise the intellectual level of this show, for a discussion on applied machine learning. I know this is a little different than what we usually discuss here, but I think you'll find this interesting. Anyway, I happen to think the first speaker is quite charismatic ;).

Scaling Production Machine Learning Pipelines with Databricks

Let's return to tabletop RPGs, shall we? Your "humble" host here has been working for quite some time on a little game with a little title: Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing.

The majority of the content of this game is finalized at this point, but I've got far more ideas than what fits into this first issue. I've made some dedicated blog posts for additional content, but sometimes I have some ideas that haven't fully formed yet, so we'll be discussing one of these ideas today. If this makes it into the game at all, it may take a wildly different form, so this is a real peek behind the curtains. Everyone always talks about breaking the fourth wall, but we'll start easy and break the third wall, heading behind the stage itself (tune in next episode for when we break the fifth wall!).

I find the Four Symbols (even though there are five, kind of...) and the corresponding mythical beings from Chinese mythology fascinating. Black Tortoise (with a snake tail!) of the North; Azure Dragon of the East; Vermillion Bird (Phoenix- sort of) of the South; White Tiger of the West; Yellow Dragon of the Center. There's something very elemental about them, and not just because they correspond to the elements of Taoist Alchemy. The interplay of mythic creatures with all of these levels of symbolism, the aforementioned elements, but also color, and spatial orientation, and more. I've played with the idea of symbolic mythic beings with my Ordinal Beasts of Phantasmos (featuring art by Scrap Princess!), with ordinality being the inverse of the cardinality of the Guardians. I've also played with elements (with a fancy generator!), and missing elements (this one is especially popular), and elemental planes (this one is "smart"), and elements as key concepts of a setting (this one is old and probably confusing!), so in some ways, this is almost like going back to basics for me.

So with all of that out of the way, here I introduce my (dear lord I hope not offensive) sixth element / sixth Guardian Beast to Chinese mythology (if Marvel can add a Tenth Realm to the Nine Realms of Norse mythology, maybe I'm in the clear here...). Please remember, this is very much a WIP idea, so keep this in mind and heckle accordingly. Also I reference a bunch of stuff without citations believe me or don't.

Indigo Cyclops of the Outside, Elemental Lord of Meat

Elephantine body with a monstrous humanoid face, one giant karmic "third" eye, elephant tusks, a long prehensile tongue, one hundred humanoid arms thrashing outwards from its stomach.

Color: Why Indigo? I'm not sure yet if it relates at all to The Indigo Saint's Cathedral, I just think Indigo is an interesting and underutilized color. It's a canonical part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and yet other than one weird Lantern Corps in DC Comics, nobody does anything with it. There's probably some interesting stuff I could say here about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the linguistic anthropology of color, but...

Directionality: Why External? Well, the other Guardian beasts cover North, South, East, West, and "Center" (China- which is I think why it sometimes gets dropped in other interpretations), so there's not much left. I had considered Time, but that seemed too "me". So I went with External. If Center means China, then External means Foreign relative to China. So then I started thinking about things like the Silk Road, and the Buddhist-Hellenistic connections, and that led to...

Beast: Why Cyclops? Why Elephants? I went with Cyclops to reinforce the idea that this is something External; it's a creature from Greek mythology brought into Chinese mythology. One could imagine how this actually could have happened, even though it didn't, I'm making this up. 

One theory on the origin of the Cyclopes (apparently the plural of Cyclops) is that they were actually elephant skulls, with the trunk cavity mistakenly believed to be an eye socket. But also, apparently, there are multiple conflicting kinds of Cyclopes in Greek mythology, and this is where it gets interesting! Most people think of the kind from The Odyssey, which were basically dumb giants, but before that, there was a group of Cyclopes which were the children of Gaia and Uranus, who were like the grandparent-gods of Greek mythology. Why were The Cyclopes and The Hecatoncheires ("The Hundred-Handed Ones") separated from the other children, the Titans, who went on to birth the Gods? I dunno, but isn't that interesting!?

So I have only at this point done a small amount of reading into this, but I did not find any substantive description of these original Cyclopes except for the implication of one eye due to the etymology of their name, so I figured, let's use that as leverage to do our own thing with it, and make them more monstrous and interesting. I decided to make them more overtly elephantine, but with the long tongue replacing the trunk since the trunk is the eye socket, and kind of lean into them being these eldritch proto-gods, and then let's fold in the arms from The Hecatoncheires as well because it seems reasonable in this pseudo-history that that could have happened and you could imagine some interesting psychedelic imagery off of this.

Element: Why Meat? I say, why not Meat? It seems odd to me if we're thinking about the fundamental "stuff" of the universe, from a pre-scientific era, that no culture I'm aware of considers Meat as an element. The Western Alchemical elements are Fire, Water, Earth, and Air, and then kind of also Aether, which is basically the cosmos but also maybe gravity; the Taoist Alchemical elements are Fire, Water, Metal, Earth, Wood, and then kind of also Qi, which is basically life force but kind of also air. And then apparently the Japanese version of the elements adds Void and I think drops one of those other ones but I no longer remember offhand, but probably drops Wood. 

But Meat is something most cultures eat (I should say actually that I'm a vegetarian and have been for most of my life), and it's the fundamental, physical nature of animals, and humans have been wearing or using animal hides and skins presumably since prehistory. Maybe it gets avoided because humans don't want to think of themselves as just a sack of meat. That's why we have souls and spirits and qi, but not Meat.

But Meat isn't just a physical vessel, it's also vital, it pulses with blood or lymph, in many cases (including our own) it metabolizes and oxidizes. It is the means by which we build things. Apparently, part of the myth of Cyclopes, the proto-god ones, is that they were "hand-to-mouth", they were "workers". This is part of what inspired the Meat element, and also part of why I folded the hands of the Hecatoncheires into the Indigo Cyclops's stomach.

So I don't have any specific plans for what to do with this or the other Guardian beasts in MRD yet. For now, it's just a thing that exists in the mythology of the setting as a "real world" pseudo-mythology, not unlike the deviations from canonical mythologies represented in modern superhero comics. Maybe the Guardian beasts show up, or incarnations of them, or maybe a corporation co-opts the Indigo Cyclops for a mascot, or a military names their new fancy mech or power armor after it, or there's a superhero themed off of it, or any number of other possibilities... 

So that got a little long-winded, I hope you're all still with me. 

How about some <creepy> art? I found u/c_o_n_a_r_t on Reddit a while back and was really impressed with their work. There's something very modern about it, in terms of its horrific sensibilities. It feels very 21st century. It's weird, gross, absurd, seemingly full of subtext, and he does some mini-comics and other forms of narrative as well. I'd actually love to get him for one or two pieces on a future issue of MRD, he expressed interest in doing so at one point but we didn't make any hard commitments. Here's Myself:

Moving On.

It's been a while since I've posted a micro-setting. This one has technically been featured before, but it got buried in a dump so I thought I'd feature it again.

(Heckler in the Audience) Why dredge it out of one dump just to toss it into another? *badum dum tss*

Heheh that's real funny, I didn't realize we had a joker in the crowd tonight. Well, all the same, let's take a look at the exotic Gasoline Swamp!

Gasoline Swamp

The Primordial Soup from whence hyperlife evolved. A species reminiscent of fungus covers the Earth, a constant hazy explosion of spores and heavy diesel energy. Animal life in this swamp, if it could be called that, take the adult form of tiny "pixies", full of manic energy. They have no mouths and other than the absorption of some transient energy, they have only the energy they absorbed in their tadpole state. The dominant lifeforms are hyperplants, tesselating undulating monsters that branch, root, fruit, and leaf in real-time. They are not photosynthetic and instead are mainly carnivores (fungi and animal eaters) or predators (herbivores), or some are omnivorous. Their biology is inextricably linked with plastics and microplastics, like if humans wore their microbiome on the outside. Their blood is diesel and most consumption is vampiric; diesel being the most nutritious substance for all hyperlife.

Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed this first episode. We had some fun, we had some laughs, we had some deep thoughts, but we haven't cried yet, or at least hopefully not, but this is a pilot so anything's possible I suppose. I figure, let's give our new psycho-spacetime machine a whirl, and head to another time and place and feeling within the emotional matrix, for our final act of the night, the lovely Julie London. Julie and I had a long talk about this, I practically had to beg her to bridge psycho-spacetime so that you all could enjoy this performance tonight (note that it's always Tonight on the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength). I know it seems weird to end on such a melancholy note, but such is life. So with all that said, may I present to you, Julie London: Cry Me a River.

Julie London Cry Me a River

Did you like tonight's performance? If this pilot gets picked up, the producers say they'd like to have more guests, more games, and more audience participation! They'll even accept heckles, so heckle away in the comments below. And if your station is interested in licensing this show for syndication, all you need to do is hyperlink this episode onto your own frequency; there's no streaming exclusivity here and all episodes are anti-canon including this one!