Random – MRAAKTAGON

Welcome to 2023 and a look back at ’22

Time marches on my friends. Holy cow, it’s 2023. I am shocked at how quickly the years fly by since about 2008 or so… while I like to think this is due to having unprotected sex and the output of such things, it’s probably just about getting old and so little in each year MATTERS. In 1989, every week was some major life event it seemed like, but now, eh…

That said let’s look at 2022: the YEARS BEST SHIT.

Board Games

Lots of stuff came out that I have been waiting for, but the big one by Matt Ecklund didn’t get here in time for 2022. I haven’t gotten John Company 2, Bios Mesofauna to the table, so I can’t include them in a best of (yet).

The game of the year for me, despite the fact that the first version of it came out in 2019, is WARCRY. I’ve gotten 10+ games of this over the year and I will call it now as the greatest beer and pretzel miniatures game there is. Most games are 3-4 turns and take about 40 minutes from set up to tear down (or to the next game). I’ve now painted the majority of my terrain and I’m just about to start in on the next box set (Red Harvest) and paint some more Warbands. I’m going to do a big ass review of it and why would people play it vs the also excellent Frostgrave or Necromunda. Warcry has some constraints you have to learn to live with, but once you do, it is just superb and most of all, it makes me laugh when I get my ass kicked most of the time as it’s some crazy ass move or ridiculous roll.

Looking fine despite the unpainted terrain!

A mosh with NPC creatures and the Corvus Cabal.

The other game we played a lot of was Spartacus, which was originally released in 2012 (a great year for board games!) and has an updated, non-show-related version. I wish I had known this was THAT good back when it was sitting on shelves, we would have played the crap out of it by now. When you see that tons of people have built custom stadiums for the game, you can probably make some assumptions about the quality of the game.

BOOKS

I read a bunch but I can’t keep up with yearly releases of books, my favorites that I read this year (new, I read books I’ve read over again fairly often), all highly recommended are:

River of Earth – James Still. This is about a poor kid who follows his family around to different mining camps and towns. Doesn’t force the reader to dwell on what the character or author is thinking about situations, it just has the situations. It reminded me a lot of John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, but not a slog which Nickel Mountain was, a pleasure to read.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Brilliant, short spy novel by Le Carre. He has an intro where he spells out that ALL of this is fiction and it’s just slightly influenced by his work in the secret service. People accused him of using real situations which he denies, saying his work as a spy was incredibly boring and stupid in contrast. I wanted to start on the George Smiley novels (Tinker Tailor, etc.) and this is the one to get that rolling.

The Passenger/Stella Maris. Feel like thinking about existence and getting sort of depressed but amazed at the same time? Read these. Ostensibly about some mysterious passenger missing on a plane that “crashed” into the ocean, it’s really about the conditions of existence that would allow that to happen or as McCarthy puts it in another novel: the joinery.

Movies

I didn’t see much in the theaters in 22. 2022 and this year is really just waiting for DUNE 2 since most of the time instead of going to a movie, I would just watch DUNE again The film of the year is the NORTHMAN, but we all knew that. Viking anti-hero revenge film? Oh yeah.

I liked the Terrifier 2, but it was too long and a couple parts took it too far to really love (which is why the fans love the movies, so I get it).

The Video Games

Elden Ring just blew everything out of the water this year, but there were some incredible games and a few disappointments.

What can I say about Elden Ring that hasn’t been said– it’s Dark Souls writ wide, with all the good and bad that comes with open world. I still haven’t finished the game, but I have played hundreds of hours, played dozens of them with friends and the PVP that comes with it. Overall I think the game is too long and probably should have ended at (spoiler) Margott v2. However, there are some fantastic bosses after that– and the Fire Giant is just incredible (and very hard). One of these weeks I’m going to put a fork in the game, but I just keep playing with my low level characters multiplayer and love it. There are so many builds, so many ridiculous weapons and spells, and with the multiplayer it’s a game we will be playing together for years. Is it as good as Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne? No, but it doesn’t have to be in order to be an absolutely legendary game. Elden Ring has become the game that everything else will be defined against for a long time.

Vampire Survivors

I only have 12 hours or so into the game at this point, but for me it represents exactly what I love about indy video games– a very simple premise taken to the next level. Vampire Survivors is an anti-bullet hell game, in that you run around and shoot things that come at you (rather than dodging stuff that shoots at you). Running around with the whip on a grassy field at first is very boring, but just give it a chance and you will realize that it becomes like modern art at the end of a level with sprites filling the entire screen and you nailbiting that you’ll survive. This is a 2022 gem and everyone should play it. If you love this, check out RIFT WIZARD that came out in 2021– instant classic and takes the crown of SWORD OF FARGOAL for me.

Disappointment – Victoria 3

I was really looking forward to this game all year, especially after the horrible addiction that I had to Crusader Kings 3 and my love of Machiavelli the Prince, Port Royale and similar economic games. Victory 3 was just very strange to play and figure out, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or what effects my actions actually had. Maybe there’s just too much going on, but one thing I will tell you in the hours I played: I was bored. CK3 set a high bar for strategy games (as well as Stellaris). I will give this another go at some point, but there’s been the call to Crusader Kings 3 again that has made it impossible. Why mange budgets when you can get cheated on by your spouse with your own bastard son of her mother’s!

There’s some great games that I got to play over break, but that’s going to be a separate post.

Music

My record of the year is CYGNI 61 by RTR. I didn’t listen to much else that was new. A new LORN just dropped recently so that will be on the list for 2023.

Hottest chick on the planet (2022 edition)

Rebecca Bagnol

Stable Diffusion craziness

AI image generation is a fantastic new time waster, and I’ve been very guilty of it recently! I messed around with Stable Diffusion in online generators, but after awhile got sick of the wait, the censored images and the fact that you can only do a few at a time and bit the bullet for a local install with a GUI over the top. It was easy to set up (mostly just had issues with the python/torch install), and I was off to the races.

While stable diffusion has massive limitations on what it can generate successfully, it is simply amazing at what it does well: Single subject images and landscapes. Combine these together and you can get some awesome pictures– try anything compositional and you will get total crap every single time.

Syntax wise I did a bit of searching and found this below, which has worked very well. You can put in anything you want, but fine-tuning your prompts is very important to the output.

“A [type of picture] of a [main subject, mostly composed of adjectives and nouns -avoid verbs-], [style cues]”

Use of parenthesis apparently increases the weight of the item in the list, such as:

A painting of an alluring young woman wearing a (((translucent dress))) wading under a waterfall. Chiaroscuro. Volumetric lighting. Highly detailed. Realistic. Sensual. (Silky straight long hair). By Luis Royo, William Adolphe Bouguereau, John William Waterhouse, Terry Moore, Daniel F Gerhartz, Thomas Kinkade.

You are going to get those ((two things)) almost every time.

Running Prompts

You may get good results with a couple tries, but usually when I have a solid prompt, I run a few hundred or more images and then delete all but 4-5 of them that are good. SD cannot do HANDS and cannot do EYES well, or we are very good at picking out the fact that those are messed up compared to other parts of a person. Just remember when you run prompts– most of the results will be just OK but not perfect. When you find stuff you like, that’s when it is time to upscale the image.

The easiest ones are just: [Subject], [Artist name]. James Jean, Ashley Wood, William Waterhouse and Peter Paul Rubens are some of my favorites to add. For example:

Grace Kelly by Peter Paul Rubens.

great composition, good background, excellent face, terrible hands.

Favorite Prompts

Here are some of my favorite prompts so far:

(Monstress), centered, award winning line art illustration, detailed, isometric illustration, drawing, by [Any artist you want]

adriana lima [wearing something] in world war one painted by Jan Steen

The above are all paintings for the most part, when you get to photography, you can select the type of camera, the mm and the focus. Since these are all TAGS on the internet that millions of pictures have, the engine will know what to do with them.

Below is my absolute favorite prompt. It generates some silly stuff. I usually use Barbara Palvin/Kate Upton or some other very famous actress/ model that has thousands of pictures tagged online. You could put in any superhero/villain but I would say roam on the more obscure level so not every picture is exactly like your chosen hero. The Tilt Shift with 34mm just makes something special every time. If you put in “superhero” every picture is basically Superman.

Kate Upton as Big Barda, 35mm, Tilt Shift

You can go to town with the photo details as below. Remember, images are created via tags online, so if a tag has tons of images, it should generate something close to your intention.

Eartha Kitt with wavy blonde hair wearing a tuxedo, athletic, wide shot, award winning photo, sharp focus, detailed, photography, 50mm

Any ‘composition’ will turn out shit, but will be pretty silly.

A painting of a Redneck Rampage by William Waterhouse.

Nothing makes any sense.

Feelings

You can add FEELINGS to prompts and the engine will try to render them. Anguish, rage, happiness, love, sensual all work well and will show up in subject’s faces.

multicolor drawing made of smoke texture of Richard Prior warrior with a giant hammer crushing a horse skull by william waterhouse in 4k ultra high resolution, with feeling of love

The key thing is to make a hottie, you have to select a man/woman that has many, many many pictures of them on the internet. This is why I think Chris Evans, Sylvester Stallone, Arnie, Brad Pitt, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly, Kate Upton and Adriana Lima worked so well paired with basically any artist in any era/genre. If you pick, say, Pricilla Huggins Ortiz, you won’t get as consistent results because there aren’t many images of her tagged in them in comparison. or she is confused with 1000s of other people with a similar name. I suspect highly the models were trained on Adriana Lima based on the output I’ve seen because how could they not be?

More monstrosities!

Your Mom Has a Tank Ass – Albrecht Durer.

Farah Fawcette as Big Barda. excellent hair.

Masters of the Universe— except a KEN DOLL.

I won’t put any nudes up, but I don’t see how SD can do boobs so well, but hands so terribly bad!

Casmir Pulaski

With the juxtaposition of the current frenzy of historical revisionism, iconoclasm, iconoclast trolling and let’s not forget base traitors who deface statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, along with July 4th, the date we chose to celebrate throwing off the yoke of Feudalism (the final signatures weren’t there until October though), I feel compelled to do a bit on a lesser known, but critical figure in American history: Casmir Pulaski.

Casmir Pulaski was a disposed, banished second-son Polish noble who joined the American Revolution and died via GRAPESHOT in the battle of Savannah. This alone would be enough to have statues and revere the guy, but this is overshadowed by some of the other things he accomplished.

First off, he joined anti-Russian confederation in Poland and actively campaigned, mostly defending fortresses and getting his ass kicked, getting captured, and almost court-martial-ed. It was said that the only thing he was interested in was fighting the Russians, and was wholly reckless and didn’t obey orders. Pulaski even went on to join the war with the Ottomans vs the Russians a few years later, which ended poorly for him and he ended up in France in debtor’s prison. He was found by Benjamin Franklin who recommended him to Washington as an asset to the Revolution. He started as a cavalry officer and then a General of the Continental army’s tiny and wholly shitty cavalry–which he attempted to bring up to Polish standards of training and discipline. He’s called the Father of American Cavalry and man, at that time, we needed one.

Under Washington, he performed a successful rearguard action that likely saved Washington and his army from capture and destruction, and possibly saved Washington’s life. Washington was an expert-retreater (hey, don’t knock it, it’s how Fabius defeated Hannibal after all) so this was a critical event.

Later in the war he was leading a cavalry charge that was beaten off, and he was hit by grapeshot, which, like slivers of the true cross, seems to be in quite a few different museums around the South!

Pulaski is one of only eight people who have been granted honorary citizenship. The Freemasons have claimed him and there seems no doubt, despite the lack of paperwork, that Pulaski was a Mason based on the fact that Franklin and Washington were, of course, Masons as well.

Lastly, and I am not sure about all this, is the conjecture that he was actually a woman based on a skeleton that was found that might be his. He didn’t drink and had no interest in women, which is likely explained by something much more common if you catch my drift, than a man pretending to a be a woman or having some odd chromosome condition.

While Pulaski died in Georgia, many statues of him are in the Midwest in Chicago, hopefully people actually look up who he was before tearing them down or realize that coming out of over a thousand years under the grip of iron fisted feudal lords, the framers of the Constitution and the people that fought to get us STARTED on our path to Liberty and Freedom are to be revered, and not held to the modern standards of ethics and conduct, modern ethics that their lives and dedication allowed to evolve. Of course, in DC, the people have already proven that they are fucking imbeciles.

Behind the Green Door – oh boy

This will be a rare post about a pornographic movie. Don’t really watch porn and if I did, well, read on.

Cannonball Run did this to me. There’s a scene where the Asian Team is driving through a boring area, one of them falls asleep and the other (played by none other than Jackie Chan!) throws a video tape into the dashboard VCR (remember, this was 1981 or so, this would be seen as amazing at the time). While it could have just showed scenes from any type of fuck film, it clearly shows the film’s title before getting to the almost nude part. The name of that film: Behind the Green Door.

I’ve constantly made jokes over the years using this film’s title as it’s much more subtle than The Devil in Miss Jones, etc., for a porno, as most people don’t know what it is and then go look it up on their phones to catch the reference. Someone that knows Cannonball Run well will really have a laugh.

While I saw Cannonball Run when I was a little kid, I watched it again years later when I became a big fan of Jackie Chan. At the time, there was really no normal way to see the Green Door, so I forgot about it. I made the joke to someone a few weeks ago and decided then, if I’m going to joke about it, I better actually watch this fucking thing: and it’s a doozy.

The film begins with some guy going into an all-night diner and meeting an older guy. In the first scene you may be asleep already as it shows a woman fixing up coffee and tinkling dishes for a shocking amount of screen time, fixed camera. Then the chef comes out asks about telling ‘the green door’ story and the guys reluctantly say OK. Then it cuts (fucking finally) to a girl driving a car with the top down while showing the opening credits. It looks like it’s raining as she has the windsheild wiper on. While this is likely a staple in all later porn films, the actress looks and is dressed a bit like Francois Hardy rather than in a bikini or something like that. Next there are these guys from the diner, which must be a flashback, talking at a table outside at a hotel about some nonsense with bananas, it makes no sense and after about 2 minutes I skipped over this part. Then it shows the very young and quite pretty Marilyn Chambers (who starred in David Cronenburg’s Rabid a few years later) in a cool hat sitting nearby drinking a beer. This is the lady from the car. She’s listening to the nonsense story of the guys at the table nearby. Then some music is playing. This goes on and on and on with some focusing in and out on the same shot to the girl and to the guy babbling at a table. fucking glacial.

Then it’s night and the woman is dressed up walking down some stairs outside. She gets grabbed by a couple of guys in a brown station wagon and taken away.

Next is some scene in a bourdois and a guy with a handlebar mustache crushes a football until it pops and then he leads the guys from the diner, now dressed up in tuxes and wearing masks into some theatre. The handle bar mustache man laughs after they walk away and sit down in the theater. This MUST have been the MAIN influence for EYES WIDE SHUT, certainly.

Then there are some mimes on a stage. That’s right, mimes. This is 10 minutes into the film. I’m going to skip to the important parts as there aren’t very many at this point.

The mime goes on for awhile and then they bring out the girl they stole from in front of the hotel, who comes out if, you guessed it, the GREEN DOOR. A bunch of other women strip her down and rub her… then the magic happens. A black guy comes out on stage wearing only some sort of white cotton chaps with a shell necklace and his face is painted up. The music switches to African drums and the guy prances around showing off his half mast-wang. Then there’s a sex scene which consists mostly of close up shots of the actors faces with a few shots from behind where you can mostly see the guys ass in those strange white cotton chaps. This goes on and on and then just stops.

Then they take the lady and put her on a harness swing thing and she jacks off a couple guys, blows another one, and takes a cock from another, all while on some odd swings. This, amazingly, gets the audience all horny (instead of falling asleep…) and they start having an orgy. This is where the film could have gotten mildly interesting, but one of the guys makes the mistake of shooting his load and, I shit you not, the film devolves into what can only be described as a psychedelic sequence constantly showing this one cum shot in different colors with different film effects with funky music playing for a FULL SIX MINUTES. Think about that for a bit– SIX FULL MINUTES. Even stoned off of your ass you would still get up the energy to fast forward this on your VCR– probably all the way to the end or even just rewind to the beginning and give up.

After this sequence, one of the guys from outside the hotel runs up and escapes with the girl, and then they have sex. The end.

I now have suffered through (most) of this and can, with a perfectly clear conscious, make jokes and references to the movie forever anon. Thanks a lot Cannonball Run for queuing me in on this absolute porno masterpiece.

Boob post

This is a post with boobs on it. If you want to put boobs on the internet, don’t use a SERVICE like blogger, tumblr, twitter, G+, facebook or instagram– get your own domain, get blog software (much different than wix or some blog SERVICE) and then boob out all you want. If you don’t want to use blog software, just code your own HTML pages. It’s really not difficult.

Otherwise your content isn’t your own, your followers aren’t your own, you can (and should) be censored based on the whims of the platform service you are on, and your information and your followers information will be sold and used for marketing. If you use a free blogging service, you are their PRODUCT.

Without further adieu….

Happy Xmas 2017!

What we did last night is nearly unmentionable. We sat through the FULL 1.5 hour Star Wars Xmas Special. It was some sort of disturbing variety show in essence and it made the children nearly cry. I was waiting for Carol Burnette and Don Knots to show up any second! I barely remember it as a kid except for two things: confusion and disappointment. Despite the horrifying Special, the commercials were amazing. Tons off stuff about unions and manufacturing cars and ‘made in America’ things (including and ad for the ladies undergarment workers union). The things these people worried about happened and we’ve of course become a consumer nation and Xmas is the consumer orgasm of the year.

Thursday articles of interest

Here’s some stuff.

Merciful death of the fad controller

That’s the wonderful thing about the game industry. Almost everyone burns out of it by the time they’re 35, so whatever institutional memory they developed disappeared and a new generation of worker bees is brought in to make all the same mistakes again.

80’s warhammer pictures that will give you a huge boner

FZD term 3 projects

Immersion is fake and a menace.

Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

Weekend links and Gloomhaven impressions

This was a busy ass week, but I got a game in of Gloomhaven which is… interesting. It’s definitely not a game I would want to own or try to get people to play (or read the rules) but it was pretty fun. Gloomhaven is a mash up of Kingdom Death and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition with all the cards-as-actions and tons of counters for everything; except instead of an RPG, all adventures are pre-codefied in maps that unlock as you play. Classes unlock as you play as well which is interesting. While I don’t think it’s especially good after the first play, it’s still worth giving a good college try.

Comparing it to another similar, recent game: The Others, it’s the opposite in that the basic Gloomhaven gameplay is clunky and card driven, while the Others is very smooth and streamlined. However, the Others has zero as a campaign mode and is replayable only in that you can play through different missions with different hero teams. The lack of a Campaign mode in The Others really hurts the game, while the campaign mode in Gloomhaven makes a rather lackluster miniatures combat game much more exciting to play.

Anyway, here’s some other interesting stuff from the interweb tubes this week:

New 8th ed 40K FAQ. I love some of the questions (and answers): basically people are asking if they are planning on AOS’ing 40k. Seems not.

Freemium ios games are the worst of the worst trash mobile gaming has to offer, but there are exceptions.

An AWESOME rundown of the launch of the original Warhammer 40K. I read this and then started re-reading it right away.

And another GW-based post about 1989. That was when I was totally into the Warhammer stuff full bore (as full bore as a highschool kid could be) and it lasted until 1993 or so when we started playing too much Jyhad and MTG (and still a lot of talisman).

Summer Vacation 2016

I spent part of the day looking for BLACK PAINT. The GW store was closed, and none of the other gaming stores had it in stock. I’m not even looking for Vallejo game color here and even would have settled for P3 black which I’m sketchy about until I’ve tried it. There was no black paint anywhere at all. I guess there was some new game out and people in the area are painting. A LOT. I should have called first right? Fuck…

I had four Legends of the Old west guys to finish up and I almost did until my Vallejo BUFF exploded (my fault, as I squeezed the tube too hard) across the backs of two of them. No terrible damage, but they had to be rinsed off with water which ruined the sand/PVA glue bases and touched up. It was one of those moments that I’ve had before where you just want to throw in the towel and quit painting for a time, but unfortunately this can last YEARS. I pushed through and the other two are done and the splatted cowboys are all touched up just waiting for the bases to be finished. I dropped a miniature and chipped the paint a few years back and quit painting for a year or so after that. Fixing would have taken about 30 minutes of work, but I was EMOTIONALLY MAIMED from frustration and couldn’t bear to do it. I won’t let that happen again.

Otherwise it’s been a weekend of children birthday party with today the first day I can do stuff. I played a lot of Mount and Blade: Warbands and must say, that is an addicting game. While I like the campaign and collecting guys, I really enjoy riding around with my massive meat cleaver — cleaving. This is why I can’t get into FIRE AND SWORD because it has guns and you just can’t do that… cleaving …any more. I took my first castle with my new guy today, so that’s progress.

I’ve got two more days left of vacation before it’s over (effectively due to a camping trip) so we’ll see what sort of painting I can get done. It sorta sucks to be off when no one else is off, but them’s the breaks.

Otherwise I’ve been working on a design for a miniature focused RPG. Sounds insane? Maybe. It’s something I’ll experiment with probably on Roll20 for a bit before posting about it more. The core thing is it will strip down the stat line compared to all but the most OSR-based games and the fights will be unapologetically for many, many miniatures.

This is worth looking at

Click the picture for more.