Rorschach Not-Review

I finally read Tom King's Rorschach and it's really good. I especially like the way he juxtaposed Rorschach's Rorschach with the smiley-face of The Comedian; or Frank Miller's "Dark" with the Silver Age's simplicity, of meaning vs. nothingness but also clarity vs. obfuscation.

I've talked a lot before about the idea of pareidolia, and of how the way perception imposes anthropomorphism onto things could be like a kind of animism, or a control mechanism, a cybernetic interface to the noosphere.

It would be interesting to have something like a pulp hero, a Rorschach type, with a pareidolic mask. A living symbol like Batman claims to be, a force churning through the system of human minds via human bodies like Frankenstein's monster.

Willed into being, something connected to the human experience, a reflection on meaning lacking any of its own.

The Chattering Class: A Poltergeist Form for Maximum Recursion Depth

I ran a game jam for Maximum Recursion Depth (Exalted Funeral Print+PDF, Itch, Drivethrurpg) a while back, where I and a small panel selected one participant to have art and layout commissioned for their Poltergeist Form. Klintron of Sewer Mutant and Kid Minotaur won the jam with his entry The Chattering Class, which we have just released!

Also thank you Sarah Carapace and Roque Romero for the art and layout!

Designer Personalities

A world of designer drugs of viruses, bacteria, gut microflora, hormones and pheromones and neurotransmitters; leveraging the interaction of mind and body, the idea of a static personality becomes obsolete, identity itself re-constructable. Influencer personalities spread like memes. "The self" as a choice which most reject.

Worlds out of Phase: There is Only Forward Here

Worlds out of phase, passing through moments like walking between the raindrops. Each step a rotation through spacetime, winding forward and backwards like magnetic tape. A wrong step into another dimension, another universe, seamless and a-logical like a dream. Reality as we know it as thin and sharp as a razor's edge, or the needle of a drawing compass.

Imagine like Kokkoku except instead of being stuck in a single moment in time, they slide through moments in time or even other dimensions or universes, out of phase with the rest of reality as we know it.

Always right beside us, yet out of reach. Knock-on effects bottlenecked by three dimensions. A disturbed nexus, an interface, reverberations from unknowable origins.

Splicing frames of reality with each step, a wrong right turn intractably alters the source- there is only forward here.

The Earth's Core is a Mineral Intelligence

The Earth's core is a mineral intelligence, vibrations of sounds and lights and gravity curves rending warbles in time, oozing through geothermal vents in deep ocean, gluttonously exploiting their uncontested ecological niche, blissful, yet prepared, in the deep and dark places, waiting.

Encoded messages, names, written in quantums carved by the pressures of gravity. Glassy glittery splinters, undulations like a whining accordion, splines of spacetime, animations between frames of film, life subliminally.

Disproportioned, stretched grotesquery, funhouse mirror reflection, closer than it appears. It can't be helped.

Non-Euclidean curvatures fold the real and imaginary planes, the creatures kaleidoscope in patterns of impossible colors.

Anomalies abound, snaking wyrms and phosphenes. Anti-patterns, violent vectors, infection, a perverse microverse, magnified in gravity's shadow, a spotlight on the puppet performance.

Mineral bodies fighting holographic infection. Entropic draconic breath crackling, bacterial blue veins, cracked rainbows coated in droplets of regret. We sense the contrast like sharp edges, our shared language of panic and pain, and also pleasure.

RPG Scenarios and Puzzles based on Logic, Behavior, and Algorithms

As part of my interest in Non-Violent Encounter Design, these are RPG adventure seeds or encounters rooted in logic, behavioral phenomena or algorithmic thinking. They don't necessarily eschew violence altogether, but clever ideas will far outperform violent or linear ones.

I had intended to write more of these but it's been over a week since I've posted anything and I'm doubtful I'd have come back to this draft otherwise so here ya go, two good ones, one that I only picked the phenomena but never actually wrote, and one that's probably too complicated and also probably needs to be couched in more RPG terms so it doesn't look like a grade school math problem.

1. A seer proclaims that among three caves, one contains treasure and two contain aggressive dragons. There is no reason to prefer any one cave over any other, however, after the party decide to investigate one of them presumably at random, the seer provides another message just before they head out, that one of the two caves that they did not pick certainly contains a dragon. Each cave involves a laborious and dangerous Crawl, and if a dragon is provoked, it will cause havoc and likely destroy the opening to the treasure bearing cave, so they only get one chance to find the treasure. Which cave should they investigate?
   Monty Hall Problem: If the party sticks to their original decision, there is a 33% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among 3 caves. However, if they switch to the other cave after the seer eliminated one of them, there is now a 50% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among only 2 caves, so they are better off switching. This one may look familiar...
   
   
2. There has been an outbreak of monstrous wild boars eating crops, livestock, and causing destruction and mayhem. The wild boars are too numerous and too crafty to be wiped out by brute force alone, not even the entire army could do so without burning down the whole countryside. The king has established a high bounty on the wild boars, where hunters can return the tails of boars to collection centers for reward. However, in the time since the bounty began, many tails have been collected for reward, yet the boar problem is as bad as it's ever been. The party have been sent to investigate how the boars are reproducing so quickly.
   Perverse Incentives: Some unscrupulous "hunters" have begun to breed the boars in order to farm the tails for profit- not only obfuscating and failing to solve the underlying problem, but actively exacerbating it when inevitably some bred boars escape. Getting to the bottom of this will not solve the wild boar problem, but at least it will reveal that the bounty policy is broken.
   
   
3. Four Card Problem
   
   
4. The Dark Lord is building an army, where the devil summoners' invocation requires that they count the sum of all numbers between 1 and the total number of devils they intend to summon. The grand council of war wizards are trying to summon a counter-army of valkyries with the same invocation, but there are more devil summoners than war wizards and so as it stands, they will inevitably lose the war. However, there are ancient legends of war wizards capable of summoning far greater numbers of valkyries, suggesting there must be some non-linear invocation spell.
   Gauss Sum (an easier explanation): With the current invocation spell, to summon 100 valkyries, one would have to count the sum of all numbers between 1 and 100, or 5050. However, the sum of each symmetrical pair will be the same i.e. 1+100=101, 2+99=101, so actually, the invocation can be much simpler. Just take the number of pairs, or in other words, the total number divided by 2, multiplied by the sum of the first and last number, i.e. (n/2)*(first number + last number). With this new spell, a single war wizard can summon hundreds of valkyries in seconds, while it continues to take devil summoners hundreds of seconds to summon only 100 devils.

Stop!! Hibari-Kun! Not-Review

 

I saw this anime (originally a manga but I watched the anime) recommended on a tiktok (unfortunately can't remember where specifically anymore). I'm not gonna lie, I went in with low expectations, expecting it to be a slog to get through at the very least, or extremely offensive at the worst, but I was actually pleasantly surprised on both counts. It certainly is of a time and place, but all things considered I thought it handled the issues surprisingly well (obviously I am hardly an authority on the matter though so take what I say with a grain of salt), but more importantly, it was just a really fun and enjoyable show, I liked it so much I ended up practically binging it.

So I've buried the lede, but Stop!! Hibari-Kun! is a 1980's animated sitcom about a "cross-dressing boy" (although in most regard she really seems to be transgender and I will use she/her pronouns), her yakuza family, and a boy, a friend of the family, who is living with them.

While many episodes do involve Hibari's gender at least in some way (much less so as the show goes on), Hibari herself is basically always in control of the situation, never in any real danger, always comes out on top, and it always feels like the audience is expected to be on her side- to the point that she will often wink and stick her tongue out to the audience in fourth wall breaking assurance. It has almost a Looney Tunes / Bugs Bunny kind of logic to it.

Her family largely doesn't understand her identity in critical ways and I can very much imagine that would be triggering for people, yet at the same time, despite being this traditionalist yakuza family obsessed with conventional masculinity, they ultimately are mostly accepting of her when it counts, on the occasions where they're kinda shitty to her it's usually about something else, and her grace in the matters feels more like a strength of her character than an implicit acceptance of those characters. There are subtle things, like how her youngest sister and one of the yakuza underbosses will refer to her with she/her pronouns and call her Hibari-chan instead of -kun. There is one episode where Hibari has a really sweet moment with her dad where he is more explicitly accepting of her and they bond; little nice things like that. Similarly, whenever characters treat Hibari poorly due to her gender identity, they are always painted as the butt of the joke or being in the wrong in the situation. Also, there are plenty of episodes, especially as it goes on, that have little to nothing to do with Hibari or her gender and are good on their own terms.

As for the situation of the sitcom; there's Hibari, her yakuza father, her three sisters (two older, one younger), and Kosaku who is Hibari's age, the friend of the family who is living with them because his mom died, and then various ancillary characters like school friends, bullies/rivals, yakuza henchmen, etc. Only her family, Kosaku, and the yakuza know that she is a "cross-dresser", at school she identifies as a girl and in fact she's the most popular girl in school. There are sometimes plotlines where her identity is threatened to be exposed, and I think it's handled about as well as could be hoped for what is not an ideal plot pivot point from a modern perspective, but ya at least imo it seemed to be mostly handled well. Also, that becomes much less focal as the show goes on.

Episodes often involve episodic or slightly-serialized romcom triangles or quadrangles, typical teen sitcom type stuff. There's a bit of a will they / won't they with Hibari and Kosaku. His inability to confront his own ideas about gender and sexuality, again, could be triggering, but I think the show does a good job of framing things in such a way that the audience is not meant to sympathize with his "struggle".

The later episodes are not quite as good, at a certain point they kinda jump the shark, and over time it becomes less focused on interesting character drama and more on wacky hijinks alone which fell a little flat for me. I do appreciate though that many episodes are focused more on the side characters than Hibari or Kosaku, and some of the best episodes are not really about them.

In typical not-review fashion I'm not explaining this show well, but I just find it really fun and delightful. Hibari is a strong character, she's funny, she has that larger than life cartoon logic to her; even the situation aside it's genuinely a fun show, and I also hope people find the character to be a powerful and suitable symbol and don't find it offensive or hurtful, or can enjoy it independent of that, just for what it is, a fun show.