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Tomorrow
Do the thing that used to make you happy
like a robot
A mechanical parody of once organic
Crush the delicate thing with your servo-pincers
Like a slime mold
Ooze across the clean surface
Pollute it with your touch
Like a crane
Lumber in awkwardness
Overcontrol swinging crash it down
Like a swamp monster
Seize the beloved drown it with you
Be ( Read more... ) -
My eulogy at Jo's funeral
I've been asked to share the eulogy speech I gave at Jo's funeral. Here it is.
Thanks Ruanne,
I’d like to talk about what Jo meant to her roleplaying community, especially when, as a young woman in Melbourne, she played a leading role in it. I’d like to thank everyone who has shared stories with me about that time.
Because for Jo, and me, and for ( Read more... ) -
Interregnum; The Beggar's Daughters, Part I
Standing over the cooling corpse of the late “Carla Dreadstone” aka Doris Bidwell in the back row of the Charing Cross Odeon cinema, the Bookhounds realise an opportunity for profit. Slipping back to the shop, Dalton, Machen, Seraphina and Charlotte find Bidwell's address in the shop registry and hurry to the dear departed's residence.
Alas, no one ( Read more... ) -
The Room Beyond, Second Session, Part I
While Mr Machen and Miss Seraphina Browne are dredging up antique gossip and antiquities, Mr Gold is occupied by a valued and only slightly unwelcome customer making a call. Mr Hauxley Trevanian was last seen by the Bookhounds when he purchased a very nearly genuine copy of Von Juntz' Nameless Cults, in the lasciviously illustrated Golden Goblin ( Read more... ) -
The Room Beyond, First Session
[In the intervening months Ziska has launched and flopped. Reviewers complained of Olga Baclanova's nervous performance: seeming to shy at shadows, she came across as far from the confident villainess she was supposed to portray.]
The Room Beyond by John Scott Tynes
The Bookhounds have been invited to pay a rather unusual house call at the house of ( Read more... ) -
Ghost Writer Kill, Third session and coda
The Bookhounds gather upon the morrow. It is clear that there are two potential threats by which the mysterious incantation, and whatever dreadful force it invokes, might be circulated: the story in Thrilling Crime! Magazine and the forthcoming film Ziska. The Bookhounds agree that rather than stop either production entirely, which would be ( Read more... ) -
Ghost Writer Kill, second session
Mr Tobias Gold has returned from his weekend, as have two other associates of the shop, Mr Arthur Machen ("rhymes with Bracken"), a journalist and cataloguer of books, occult tomes a speciality, and Seraphina, a university chum and fellow archaeologist of Charlotte's. Together with Dalton Hodge, Owen Williams and Charlotte Winstonthorpe, they ( Read more... ) -
Ghost Writer Kill, First Session
Adapted from a scenario by Graeme Davis
It is a quiet day in Gold’s Books and Antiquities. Owen Williams, shop assistant and amateur publisher, and Dalton Hodge, catalogue agent, are minding the store while Toby Gold attends to something no doubt very important.
The bell jingles and a regular client enters. Paul Collins is a fixture of the London ( Read more... ) -
In a post-election dystopia, veteran Kerry O'Brien hunts NXT-16 crossbenchers
MARGINAL RUNNERI was eating Pho at the Hong Hau Vietnamese Restaurant in Kingston when Antony Green tapped me on the shoulder. “O’Brien. Malcolm.” he stated, gesturing to the waiting Comcar. As we rode the government’s public-private very fast bullet train from Canberra to Point Piper, Antony folded a how-to-vote card into an origami fox. I kept ( Read more... )
