...but I've got nothing seasonal on the mind. I have been watching movies though. Check out the Soska Sisters. They are criminally underrated. We're in the Golden Age of Tubi. Murdoch owns them but they're free so get in while the getting's good, let's bleed that old fucking vampire dry before he figures out how to monetize it.
I am a Cronenberg fan but the Soskas' Rabid is better.
Oh ya I had this one-liner, don't think I've shared this in a post before:
King in Giallo: A Giallo-inspired setting except with Hastur.
The Nuclear Man
Through means unknown, a nuclear missile explodes backwards through time. Probability crackles as atoms and the bounds of spacetime smash against each other, procreative energy seeding life in all it's magic, and madness.
A retrofuturistic examination of the effects of nuclear power on culture through a modern lens. The promise of what nuclear energy can be, against the dangers it poses.
A being born as a side effect of the orgodynamic nuclear time explosion referenced above.
An extremely powerful but unstable being, one with near unlimited potential, equally for better or worse.
One with a chip on its shoulders, with a streak of both exceptionalism and rebellion.
When too many ideas collide
A world in which some weird entities like bugs or autonomous machines or whatever are constantly building, and so most of the world is tight, labyrinthine corridors, and cities and wealth and property is symbolized by the ability to create and maintain large open spaces.
The universe actually is a simulation, where the first universe fucks things up so badly that they create a simulation as a way to preserve themselves through recreation, but each time it keeps getting fucked up and they keep trying to salvage it.
Each level of the simulation, the underlying algorithm is slightly different either for creative reasons or due to the constraints of the universe in which it was constructed, so each one is a little different.
And even though each universe is constructed as a consequence of the actions in the preceding universe, the algorithms are (mostly) deterministic, so "time travel" is just a calculation.
So there are people or factions that can propagate to "lower" or even "higher" levels of simulation, so it's like a Doctor Who-ian level of timey-whimeyness except in a universe more like that of cyclical mythologies with their ages and cycles, and the interactions between the simulations can become like a teleology.
And so that world where bugs or automatons are constantly building such that indoors are like outdoors and outdoors are like indoors would be one level of simulation in this setting.
Festival of the Living Dead. Soska Sisters. On Tubi. The last good zombie movie (probably).
A few more ideas while you wait for your train because they're trying to force us back into offices despite the comprehensive natural experiment known as covid demonstrating statistically that it is not necessary, it is solely a means for them to control us and our time and our bodies...
A bard with a magic box. They wave their fingers over the box and it makes magical vibrations and music.
A cyborg with a tachyonic hand. Solves mysteries of time by transmitting information between the cyborg's past, present, and future. The hand can only exist in one time and must find the cyborg whenever it transmits to a different time.
A cohort of cetaceans reached superhuman intelligence. Selling out the seas to humans for profit and power, they have systematically kept the rest of the cetacean population in an intellectually impoverished state. With their intelligence and extraordinary wealth, this small cohort, <1% of the cetacean population, live lavish lives in a secret underwater "city" far more advanced than anything humans have accomplished.
A mathematically advanced species whose language and cognition operates like music.
"Natural Farces", a magical/science phenomena like the opposite of Natural Forces.
I haven't posted in a while, so this is just a collection of random slush pile stuff.
Heaven is here (and it has a waitlist)
I will come back to this idea after I've read TechGnosis and/or some of Erik Davis' other stuff.
A kaiju born from the insemination of a planet by tungsten rod kinetic bombardment.
If history recorded myriad Mandela Effects, generation over generation, how would we ever know? Collectively, the world is waking up to the hyperreality of its own creation, history and the present reality rewriting itself in real time.
The gods of this world are created every time someone says "I wish I had someone to talk to about this".
Under what conditions would ants or other insect-life "go to war" against humanity? What would that look like?
How can an "intelligent" carnivorous plant compete against animals? Plant as trap as dungeon as system. Something like a literal or symbolic pitcher plant?
Noah's ark did not succeed, the world starts over with new animals. The old animals in cryogenic slumber in the deep ocean.
Alien and monstrous things?
God's Breath as a Hilbert Space wave medium as a means of travelling at faster than light speeds, outside spacetime as we know it, powered by an engine of Oneness and Love.
Some ghosts are not of people, but dead ideas, emotions, memories, and dreams.
A world of intelligent birds. The PCs are humans isekaid into this world that was not designed for them, that they barely understand, and with limited means of communication. They exist on the fringe of this alien avian world, in its seedy underbelly. Elements of cyberpunk, and a more modern kind of existential and/or cosmic horror.
In Jewish mysticism, the things a mother sees or imagines before conception influence the nature of the child. A species or magic of resonance, a genetic encoding or universal consciousness driven by imagination.
Gold or some other metal or material that's a piece of the sun.
Magic pinocchio / scarface dummy carved from "the world tree", yggdrasil, etc.
Undeath as an absolute ignorance towards one's own non-existence.
Roving gangs of raptor-like salarymen.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil and the forbidden fruit were not plant life at all, but skeleton and heart, the conscious awareness that to live is to end many lives while only living one, to mutilate and destroy bodies not unlike one's own.
Weird Seasons
"Seasons" caused not by change in energy, but other cyclical processes with different effects (or epiphenomenon of regular seasons). See Weird Colors.
Different chemical composition of the air.
Bacteria or Fungal blooms that dye surfaces or the atmosphere different colors. Change the "taste" of the air and other things.
Major biome changes.
Soft Math
Let's take a quick break from all this heavy stuff. Sit back, relax, enjoy the smooth dulcet tones of soft math.
If you actually are interested in what Uncertainty is about, without all the baggage and preconceived notions and nonsense that comes with a pop sci understandings of quantum physics.
Game Stuff
Setting or mechanics meant to explain and explore complectity, the complexity of stateful systems.
Our universe is colonized by the USA (United Spacetimes of America), who have used bribery of world leaders and propaganda to enact a soft power takeover. FIST and CYCLOPS must work together, in secret, and with limited outside support, to take down USA.
MC Bradley Buzch: Appropriative skater-punk / graffiti artist (JSRF-style) sponsored by Anheuser-Busch-Americorp NLC (non-liable company).
Amerikarate™ Master: From the Mars colony on America XXX, an assimilated alien and master of the ancient authentic martial art Amerikarate™.
Somewhere between the blink of an eye and a dissociative episode, the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength oscillates backwards in time. Transposed along the imaginary plane, playing imaginary, we find ourselves in a peculiar black and green room. The striking contrast, jarring sometimes, the pain compels like poking a blister. A mild irritant, a bulging wallet in the back pocket as the waiter lights the absinthe and the green fire and black-burnt sugar drips into the glass. A pyrite spiral, a heckler aggressively ignored, a mild imperfection steals a degree of freedom from an otherwise perfectly composed show. A mildly amusing non-sequitur.
A not even quite not-review of Russian Doll Season 2 in all of its amazingness.
Just finished Russian Doll season 2 <Editors Note: This was a while ago! Fortunately we have Spacetime Breaching Technology (TM)>, damn this was incredible. I can't believe more people aren't talking about how good this is. It's kind of uncanny how much it is my jam lol. Like without spoilers, it's got the unfinished corner, metro as metaphor and setting, exploration of self, magical realism, weird high concept scifi. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia is also just like the biggest fucking badass of all time. Like she just does not give a fuck in all the right ways, but also is unafraid to challenge herself. She's just the right amount of deranged, but also no matter how badly she fucks up or delusional she seems, she actually has her shit together and wins at life. And Allan is also this really healthy version of feminine masculinity not played as a joke. He's vulnerable and expressive and even though he's a neurotic wreck he ultimately knows how to take responsibility for himself, however he defines it. I'm not claiming it's as good as Season 1, but it was good in its own right.
Philosophical Soapbox
I was thinking about the nature of "evil", and Boltzmann Brains, and one possibility is that it's kind of like that. There are various evolutionary pressures both ways, and mostly they balance out to a degree of functionality. But given enough complexity i.e. time, improbable events occur and we behave in ways that are not truly rational, even if they maybe work in that myopic moment. That's a way of thinking about the nature of evil that's almost independent of any prescribed ethic.
P^3 (P-cube): Perpetual Psionic Process: A psionic process is of the mind. Mental processes are multiplicative; the activation of one memory coactivates related memories which reinforce each other; reliving the memory of a psionic process is itself an instantiation of a psionic process, and every other psionic process in memory; a lifetime of psionic processes coactivate as a product across consciousness*spacetime.
More plainly, the idea is that if a psionic process is, by definition, mental in nature, then there is not a meaningful distinction between physical reality and simulated reality- a memory- except that memories can be wrong, can change, and can violate physical assumptions.
When a psionicist reflects on their own thoughts and memories, or times they used their psionic powers, they aren't just remembering those events, they are recreating them, and possibly altering them. It plays into some ideas around quantum animism or consciousness as a set of dimensions alongside the dimensions of space and time.
Psionicists have to be conscious of their thoughts and memories, and how they perceive them. The less structured their mind, the more powerful they become, but it can recurse and multiply beyond their control. Whereas a psionicist with a very structured way of self reflection, and of how they relate their memories and their internal semantics, will not be as powerful, but much more controlled and precise in how they use their abilities.
Last Call
One more cup of coffee for the road, please. There's a kind of ennui, or horror in the mundane, haunting reminiscences, the tension of an unwitting voyeur catching an embarrassing faux pas.
We interrupt this broadcast of the normally scheduled Weird & Wonderful Worlds blog to traverse the other WWW (the Weird Wonderful Wavelength decomposed like an overzealous cockroach in an empty kitchen from the spectrum of nutrient deficient fluorescent white light that is the World Wide Web). Let us begin with an interactive spacetime courtesy of Leenalchi, from the past, present, future, and sidetime of Korea. But watch out... TIGER IS COMING!
That sure was something folks. Reminds me of my conversation with Gearoong. Horrific psychedelic Scooby-Don't and the Gang hunting Poltergeists in Maximum Recursion Depth (poor Frieda is already an Ashura).
Moving on to RPGs, because that's why you came here... Right? Or maybe not, sound off from the bleachers!
Here's an UNFINISHED Martian Bestiary for TNTwhich I never posted (Tunnels & Trolls for those of you folk not in the know ;)):
Martian Bestiary
If more than one MR is listed, it is intended as Trivial, Serious, and Deadly, similar to the TNT deluxe book. These are relative, of course. Even a "trivial" dragon is a tough monster.
Psychomancer (Acolyte):
Psychomancer (Vancelord):
Thark (Brute): Often slaves or gladiators, fighting for the chance at freedom, or just for the sake of fighting. Usually they fight with their bare fists or gauntlets, although some ride lizard-horses and other beasts and wield spears and shields. MR 30 / 50 / 75
Thark (Myrmeleodon): Gladiator champions, warlords, and berserkers. They utilize traps like a huntsman, preferring to create pit traps to shock and separate enemy forces and overpower them by brute force (like an ant-lion). MR 35 / 75 / 110
Radium Legionnaire (Shocktrooper):
Radium Legionnaire (Zeta-Force):
Orange Agent: These martians manipulate Hyperbolic Orange Light to change their appearance, making them excellent spies. The illusion holds along all senses, and their true form may only be revealed in presence of magic fire. MR 15 / 30 / 50
And now, here's a 5 Minute Challenge I did forever ago and never posted!
The Danger
Tachyons: Particles moving backwards in time. The tachyons were weaponized. Their presence creates butterfly effects, culminating in chaos fields, paradox-like masses of entropy, spacetime violently correcting for itself in a recursive loop that outpaces itself.
Psychofields: Electromagnetic wave transmission, specifically engineered to tamper with human consciousness. The signal is not subtle, but when cognition itself is altered, it doesn't matter one way or another. It is a collective madness, one which cannot be falsified. It may as well be real.
Antiwaves: Inverse frequency waves. The mathematical imaginary plane actualized in physical spacetime. Like realizing you've been seeing in two dimensions your whole life, discovering the third, only to realize you can't perceive the second dimension anymore.
I only came up with three of them, and I feel like they dip into themes I've explored before, and the writing is mediocre at best, but I guess it's something. What can you expect in 5 minutes?
Alright Alright let's wrap this up, the children need to be put to bed and the babysitter's getting antsy. Let's end with an open-mic poem and a song for the road.
so much to think about and do and see
an itch to scratch and tear until it bleeds
and yet its all so stifling to me
to bring in brief relief to unmet needs
to nonetheless deny the way this feels
it would be nice to rid myself of this
to win is not to spin again my wheels
instead of hell to dwell in love and bliss
What utter beauty, I am moved to tears, TO TEARS! Well folks, it's been fun as always. Maybe the next Weird & Wonderful Wavelength will be less than a year away. Anyway, just so we can enjoy these final moments together a little longer (and wipe away those tears), how about a coffee break?
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...
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 ;).
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.
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!
