Dan Rubenfield Rules

*standing ovation*

Man I was all getting bored with everybody being nice and charming and pitiful and weak (and all that for no good reason, since nothing they're mumbling about all nicey nicey is ever gonna amount to anything interesting anyways) and my eyes were glazing over and then I stumbled on Dan Rubenfield's thing and now I'm all like "oh fuck yeah man! shit yeah! fuck yeah!"

And then I get halfway down the page and it turns out he likes Dundee and Sun and shit on top of it and I was all like, "ohhhkies this is getting a little creepy now!"

But creepy in a good way, y'know, like when I thought Evil Dead 2 was gonna be a stupid slasher movie (which woulda been fine with me, as long as there was some boobs-n-gore innit), from the "skull with eyeballs" cover of the tape in the Video store when I was a kid, and it turned out to be a fucking masterpiece (even though it didn't have any boobage innit).

Not creepy like "oh god I ain't gonna be stuck in this hellhole full of barely sentient and joyless brainiacs until the sweet and merciful release of death am I?" creepy heh.

And then I got to the thing he said about consoles being the defacto-standard for Triple A Gaming and I was like, "meh, well, two out of three ain't bad" ahaha.

The kids of gen X are too small for computers still right now, y'know?

But won't be all that long before they want something a little more complex than paddles, and computers are the most adaptive systems (unless you add a bunch of shit to a console, which would basically make it into a computer).

If I was gonna pick a platform to shoot for, to capture the biggest audience of the future right now, I'd have to put my money on "it better run on shitty laptops, including those crappy-ass applemacks that everybody uses in the movies" heh.

Oh holy shit man he's working on some kinda Apocalypse game too.

Ah goddam I should listen to Dundee more huh ahaha.

I Seen Em First

The Adventurer's Supply Shop

"First off, you need to carry this piece of cheese in your pocket, in case you run into a troll and you need to do the old bet-you-can't-squeeze-water-from-a-stone trick to scare 'em off."

"Okay."

"But don't let the knowledge of that cheese in your pocket make you get all slack and over-confident, you can't drop your guard, you gotta stay frosty, y'know, there's plenty of trolls out there that ain't gonna fall for that trick anymore, and trolls tell each other stories, too, and some of them stories even got tricks for dealing with adventurers like us."

"Right."

"So you gotta keep your eyes open for funny business."

"Right."

"But not too open, see, 'cause there's all sorts of critters like cockatrices and basilisks and gorgons that'll turn you to stone if you ain't careful where you are putting your eyes."

"Right."

"That's what you need this here mirror for, see, 'cause its safe to look at their reflection in a mirror."

"Or you could use the mirror to make them look at themselves and turn themselves into stone too, right?

"No that don't work."

"Oh okay."

"Its got to do with the way the eyeball magicks works, see, if they could turn themselves into stone by looking at themselves in a mirror, then you wouldn't be safe looking at 'em in a mirror either."

"Ah alright."

"See, its like, one way or the other, y'know. You just gotta use the mirror to get up close and give 'em a chop with your axe. One good chop will do the trick just fine."

"Yah, I get it. What about wolves?"

"Oh don't you worry about wolves none, its all the Little Red Riding Hoods wanting to get married out there that are gonna get you in the end of those stories, trust me, just lookit the way my hands shake now, I couldn't shoot an arrow straight to save my life."

"Ah okies."

"You don't wanna end your days selling shite to adventurers in a shop like this, do ye?"

"Haha no!"

"Yah don't you be a fool and settle for anything like that when there's plenty of virgin princesses out there with huge tracts of land in need of rescue from hungry dragons and witches and whatnot."

"Ah, right right."

"And I know this is heavy, but you need this special helmet I made, with these breathing-pipes sticking out the top, see?"

"Aye."

"That's to keep you from drowning if you find any ponds full of nymphs."

"Ah sweet."

The Cold

Its cold, that's what this apocalypse is supposed to be all about, the cold killing everybody.

Snow everywhere.

Ice everywhere.

Its especially cold up on the goddam roofs where the wind is free to beat away at you and make your eyes water.

And the cold makes you tired.

And the climbing makes you tired.

Climbing around on the roofs makes you tired.

Especially when you're way too fucking old to be climbing around on the roofs of buildings in fifty pounds of clothes and heavy boots.

Dragging your ass up and down drainpipes and fire escapes, crawling around through the snow on your belly.

I don't snap back from that shit like I used to, I can hear lots of little cables and springs and shit cracking and snapping inside my legs for the last time whenever I gotta crawl around on my knees.

And starving.

Starving makes you tired, too.

There ain't no goddam food anywhere.

There ain't been any goddam food anywhere in a very, very long time.

Once everything went to hell, the food that couldn't defend itself was the very first thing to go.

But I don't like to think about all the starving.

I try to keep from thinking about it, if you think about it for too long, you'll start to feel it.

It stays turned off unless you start thinking about it too much.

And its easy to fall asleep when you are starving.

Just like its easy to fall asleep when you finally get to eat something and you get groggy 'cause your body ain't used to eating anything anymore, takes a lot of energy for your digestive system to warm itself back up and get all its machinery going again.

'Cept its different, you ain't all heavy like when you're full, you don't sink into sleep when yer starving, you're light, you're too light, and its easy to just sorta slip out of focus and wisk off to some grainy place where you don't gotta feel the ache of it anymore.

Anyways that's why I drifted off, the cold, the climbing, the crawling, being beat to shit off my ass, and the starving.

And all the nothing happening.

All the nothing happening makes it hard to keep focused.

Easy to slip.

So I slipped, and somebody nailed the kid I had been tailing through the streets of this frozen necropolis for the last few days.

When I was younger, I woulda known where all the other guys like me were, out there on the roofs, how many of 'em there were, I woulda been able to choose who got to live and who got to go off to the better place ahead of time, and work it all to my advantage somehow.

But now I just had to make the best of whatever scraps fell on to my plate.

And now it was time to wait and see who came out of hiding to claim the kill.

They might not be working alone.

I used to have a partner.

And there's no way to know how many people were trailing this kid, or how long they were trailing him, or how many of 'em knew where I was at this very moment, looking at me through the scopes on their high powered rifles, folks that would be more than happy to send me off to a happier place if they didn't have to give away their position to do it.

And so we wait.

All of us.

For the next kid to show himself.

The next kid that we'll all be following.

Ah, here he is.

Goddam I'm getting hungry.

I can't watch this next part.

Mister Fantastic

I saw this commercial.

It was one of those "hair-care" products that Old Guys use to color their hair so they'll look younger.

And the thing that is really bugging me about it is that it was designed to "leave a little gray in there."

I can't even begin to tell you why that makes it so fucked up to me, I mean, I got stuff lighting up all over the board from beginning to end man let's just say that there doesn't seem to be anything about it that isn't fucked up heh.

Some kinda Arms Race with swirly old mummy alchemists trying to out-stealth each other's hair coloring tricks with the Latest In Hair Coloring Technology for totally implausible sexual advantages or some shit like that I mean c'mon seriously which part of that is "okay" for you?

And that's only the first of many many many levels where its all totally fucked up, I mean, I'm pretty sure that the dudes in these commericals are the same guys that were getting their ass-hair implanted into their craniums a couple years ago ahaha.

What's next y'know?

Feasting on the livers of children every seven years and sleeping in regenerative cocoons made out of their own saliva, right?

Anyways I think the thing that's really bugging me about it the most is that I got a little gray now.

Yah yah I ain't really a bald dude, I'm a long-haired blond guy, and I got all my hair, 'cept I'm starting to get that Reed Richards thing going on, y'know, with silver in the sideburns and shit.

But a little bit of gray is like, supposed to be good, according to these guys.

That's the cool new shit, that's what you want, y'know heh.

So mebbe those liver-munching plastic-vampire freaks ain't so bad after all ahaha.

Hitchhiker Physics

The Enchanter

I lived in the days where everything was made out of wood and you could only communicate as far as you could shout and throw rocks and mail letters.

Them was like the ancient times when books were treasure that the more expendable relatives of rich people dug up in faraway lands and it was pretty easy to be the best Enchanter that the Swamp People had ever seen.

My mom actually had to use one of those feather-pens in school where you dip it into the ink like a sorceress or something.

Yah well she was lucky that they even let a woman learn how to read and write back in her day that's why women still get turned on by that genetic memory forbidden fruit shit, that was like something that even the nobles who paid for all the superexpensive-ass books didn't know how to do, they just looked at all the pretty colors and pictures in 'em as if it was a collection of lacey things and supernatural nonsense heh.

Yah man those were the days when being able to Read and Write gave you access to romantic phrases that you could use on the village maidens to just totally melt their minds like butter and have your way with their bodies like a dog playing tug of war with a sock.

It was like being able to cast magic spells directly from scrolls man it was like some magic words that blew all the magic doors off their hinges in a brainshattering blast of ecstasy.

It was only the women that could Read and Write that you had to look out for, those foul sorceresses.

And there was this underground punk rock scene among the villagers where you could get paid to teach 'em to read and write and then they could teach their kids how to read and write and then their kids taught their grandkids and so on and so on and the whole thing was very serious and no one ever laughed about it.

And they learned how to make their own paper and ink and stuff and it was like the first time letters were used for things that weren't magical.

'Cause any time you found a scroll with writings on it before that you had to find a wizard to read it.

But those damn serious villager people didn't really get what it was all about, man, and they totally ruined it.

Up until they ruined the magic of it all, people who couldn't read and write could pretend to be able to read and write and get away with it.

Y'know, back in them days when nobody in the village really knew how to do it.

And when one person really did know how to read and write in a village full of people that were only pretending to know how to read and write you didn't really know which one of 'em to trust y'know you had to either test them in some clever cannibals-n-explorers brain puzzle way or just give up and trust the one that sounded the best or whatever heh.

The king's messenger always had to find somebody in town that could read, there was showdowns where two guys that were pretending to be able to read had to make it seem like the other one didn't know what he was talking about.

Yah, them was totally awesome and hilarious times, man.

We totally screwed it up for ourselves when we taught the villagers how to do it.

All the sudden there were these slobs standing next to you saying "that's not what it says!"

And we have nobody to blame but ourselves for the way we let our magic get all dilluted like that.

And look at all the money the Illusionists are making now, with all that CGI shit and everything.

See, I told you we shoulda been Illusionists, that shit mighta been harder to learn but those fuckers ended up kicking our asses in the long run.

Even that School of Divination dweebery lasted longer than this shit.