(no subject)
If you comment on this post, I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
jrfrench
asked about
Deadlands: a pen and paper rpg set in the Old West consisting of wandering gunslingers, riverboat gamblers who happen to steal magic from the devil by beating him in poker, Native American shamans, fire and brimstone preachers, mad scientists, zombies (lots and lots of them, including player characer zombies and a zombie Abraham Lincoln), men-in-black, pirates, kung fu masters and various other forms of weirdness. It was the first pen and paper I ever played and it still has a soft place in my heart.
Anti-Tolkien: an idea that maybe, just maybe, Tolkien was a bad writer from a technical standpoint. In addition, his books are terribly technophobic (and admittedly he lived in the worst time for someone to be endeared to industrialization, and dripping with the Merrie Olde Englad myth (i.e. before the horrors of the modern world, there was a time in England where everyone was happy and frolliced in the pastures and wore flowers in their hair and sat around all day eating pies. This included the working class, who were not down trodden and freely froliced and ate pies with the rest of the populace.) I don't like Tolkien all that much I guess.
Hypertime: This is High Weirdness so I'm going to let the wikipedia explain. "The basic premise of the idea was summed up by writer Mark Waid as, "It's all true." It presumes that all of the stories ever told about (for example) Superman are equally valid stories. Despite overt contradictions between the versions of the character (and his adventures, supporting characters, and setting) that appeared in the late 1930s and 1940s comics by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, portrayed by George Reeves in the 1950s TV series, depicted in 1960s and 1970s comics drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger or Curt Swan, portrayed by Christopher Reeve in the 1978 movie and its sequels, written and illustrated by John Byrne in the late 1980s, portrayed by Dean Cain in the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark, portrayed by Tom Welling in the 2000s TV series Smallville, or portrayed by Brandon Routh in the 2006 movie, no one of these versions supersedes any other as canon. This was a repudiation of the prevailing approach to continuity in superhero comics, in which only the currently-used version is considered valid, rendering prior stories which are inconsistent with this continuity officially apocryphal.
As it appears within comics stories themselves, Hypertime is a superdimensional construct which-under very limited circumstances (prescribed by editors in the real world, and by various in-story rules within the DC Universe itself)- can allow versions of characters from one continuity to interact with versions from another. For example, in The Kingdom, a version of Superman extrapolated into the future briefly encounters the Siegel/Shuster version.
Hypertime works like this: the main, or "official" timeline is like a river, with a nearly infinite number of distributaries-alternate timelines- branching off. Most of the time, these alternate timelines go off on their own and never intersect with the main timeline. On occasion, the branches return, feeding back into the main timeline - sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Thus, history can sometimes change momentarily and then change back (or not). If characters from a very different Hypertimeline move into our own, this accelerates the process, causing more noticeable (but shorter) changes to the timeline (for example when the Titans were visited by their counterparts from The Kingdom, Jesse Quick was briefly replaced by a version who had taken her mother's Liberty Belle identity)"
This is so silly and fanboyish that I must love it. I must.
The Great Sun Jester: Either a song Michael Moorcock wrote about his friend who died of a drug overdose, which was then recorded by Blue Oyster Cult, or one of my Discordian aliases. It's a good song and a good alias so there you go.
Attila the Stockbroker: A 50 year old mandolin player who opened at punk shows in 1980s England by reading poetry and now performs either on his own or with his band Barnstormer. I find the stuff he comes out with to be stellar.
Svejk: Svejk, first name Josef, is the protagonist of a Czech novel from the early 20th century, the Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the World War, about how to dismantle the army from the inside. During the course of the novel, Svejk joins the Hungarian forces in World War I, and while proclaiming his deep love for the empire and its Emperor, causes so much discord amongst his own forces that he would be court-martialed were he not obviously meaning well. The term svejking has become part of Czech parlance and refers to someone playing dumb, with politicians frequently accusing eachother of svejking around. In addition, along the way he's become the national hero of the Czech Republic and you cannot throw a rock there without hitting some sort of Zvejk restaurant, bust, marionette, etc. Josef Svejk is one of the best agents of chaos and discord from the 20th century, or any century, and it's a shame most English speakers have never even heard of him.
Jaroslav Hasek: The young anarchist who wrote the Good Solider Svejk. Enough said.
jrfrench
asked about
Deadlands: a pen and paper rpg set in the Old West consisting of wandering gunslingers, riverboat gamblers who happen to steal magic from the devil by beating him in poker, Native American shamans, fire and brimstone preachers, mad scientists, zombies (lots and lots of them, including player characer zombies and a zombie Abraham Lincoln), men-in-black, pirates, kung fu masters and various other forms of weirdness. It was the first pen and paper I ever played and it still has a soft place in my heart.
Anti-Tolkien: an idea that maybe, just maybe, Tolkien was a bad writer from a technical standpoint. In addition, his books are terribly technophobic (and admittedly he lived in the worst time for someone to be endeared to industrialization, and dripping with the Merrie Olde Englad myth (i.e. before the horrors of the modern world, there was a time in England where everyone was happy and frolliced in the pastures and wore flowers in their hair and sat around all day eating pies. This included the working class, who were not down trodden and freely froliced and ate pies with the rest of the populace.) I don't like Tolkien all that much I guess.
Hypertime: This is High Weirdness so I'm going to let the wikipedia explain. "The basic premise of the idea was summed up by writer Mark Waid as, "It's all true." It presumes that all of the stories ever told about (for example) Superman are equally valid stories. Despite overt contradictions between the versions of the character (and his adventures, supporting characters, and setting) that appeared in the late 1930s and 1940s comics by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, portrayed by George Reeves in the 1950s TV series, depicted in 1960s and 1970s comics drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger or Curt Swan, portrayed by Christopher Reeve in the 1978 movie and its sequels, written and illustrated by John Byrne in the late 1980s, portrayed by Dean Cain in the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark, portrayed by Tom Welling in the 2000s TV series Smallville, or portrayed by Brandon Routh in the 2006 movie, no one of these versions supersedes any other as canon. This was a repudiation of the prevailing approach to continuity in superhero comics, in which only the currently-used version is considered valid, rendering prior stories which are inconsistent with this continuity officially apocryphal.
As it appears within comics stories themselves, Hypertime is a superdimensional construct which-under very limited circumstances (prescribed by editors in the real world, and by various in-story rules within the DC Universe itself)- can allow versions of characters from one continuity to interact with versions from another. For example, in The Kingdom, a version of Superman extrapolated into the future briefly encounters the Siegel/Shuster version.
Hypertime works like this: the main, or "official" timeline is like a river, with a nearly infinite number of distributaries-alternate timelines- branching off. Most of the time, these alternate timelines go off on their own and never intersect with the main timeline. On occasion, the branches return, feeding back into the main timeline - sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Thus, history can sometimes change momentarily and then change back (or not). If characters from a very different Hypertimeline move into our own, this accelerates the process, causing more noticeable (but shorter) changes to the timeline (for example when the Titans were visited by their counterparts from The Kingdom, Jesse Quick was briefly replaced by a version who had taken her mother's Liberty Belle identity)"
This is so silly and fanboyish that I must love it. I must.
The Great Sun Jester: Either a song Michael Moorcock wrote about his friend who died of a drug overdose, which was then recorded by Blue Oyster Cult, or one of my Discordian aliases. It's a good song and a good alias so there you go.
Attila the Stockbroker: A 50 year old mandolin player who opened at punk shows in 1980s England by reading poetry and now performs either on his own or with his band Barnstormer. I find the stuff he comes out with to be stellar.
Svejk: Svejk, first name Josef, is the protagonist of a Czech novel from the early 20th century, the Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes in the World War, about how to dismantle the army from the inside. During the course of the novel, Svejk joins the Hungarian forces in World War I, and while proclaiming his deep love for the empire and its Emperor, causes so much discord amongst his own forces that he would be court-martialed were he not obviously meaning well. The term svejking has become part of Czech parlance and refers to someone playing dumb, with politicians frequently accusing eachother of svejking around. In addition, along the way he's become the national hero of the Czech Republic and you cannot throw a rock there without hitting some sort of Zvejk restaurant, bust, marionette, etc. Josef Svejk is one of the best agents of chaos and discord from the 20th century, or any century, and it's a shame most English speakers have never even heard of him.
Jaroslav Hasek: The young anarchist who wrote the Good Solider Svejk. Enough said.