Justin Howe's Blog, page 48
October 21, 2012
Mr. Good Morning
Here’s a story.
I used to pass this guy every morning on my way to work at this certain streetlight. He’d be on a bike and I’d be walking.
He was an older Korean guy wearing a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, always casually dressed but super neat like if it were raining he’d be riding the bike one handed holding an umbrella with the other, and the open umbrella would be perfectly parallel to the road, not held sloped or slanted like you or I or any other slob would.
Anyway, he always said “...
October 16, 2012
One Book, Four Covers: Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories
How about that crow cover? That’s pretty nice.
I found a used copy of this at What the Book in Seoul. It was published in the 1980s but the most recent story in it is an Aickman from the 1960s. The majority are from the 1920s, but all are from the 20th century.
In his introduction Dahl talks about the ghost story as a world tradition and the sheer wealth of source material available. This didn’t prevent him from putting together a mostly British table of contents. In fact my biggest complaint a...
October 11, 2012
October 8, 2012
The Korean Word For Alibi
Today’s question: “What did you do last weekend?”
Today’s answer: “I killed a chicken with Minsu.”
Followed by…
Minsu: “No. No. I did nothing, teacher. Nothing!”
Shadows of Lost Rivers
Here’s something.
Back at the beginning of this year Beneath Ceaseless Skies published a story of mine called “Shadows Under Hexmouth Street”. (That’s the link to it. You can read it later.) One of the inspirations for that story was an article I read about subterranean rivers in Greenwich Village. The article included an apocryphal story of someone fishing for blind crayfish through a manhole cover in the basement of their apartment building.
Today I found out about a documentary called Lost R...
October 1, 2012
Fools! Fools!
“Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.”
- Barry Hannah, “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet”
September 30, 2012
The Other Side of McMedieval Feudalism, or The Use of Mythic Distance in Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur”
So that fascinating thing I hinted at about the setting in my last post about Le Morte D’Arthur – it’s totally generic McEurope, but instead of this being a design flaw, it’s a design feature.
Actually calling it McEurope is too specific. It’s more McMedieval Feudalism seen from the top without ever looking down. It’s an aristocracy divorced from all other social classes with an endless supply of weapons and armor to fight with. You have to at least enjoy that stuff as aesthetic trappings with...
September 28, 2012
Your Guide to Le Morte D’Arthur
First thing you need to know is Monty Python totally nailed it. Read the book, then watch the Black Knight “None shall pass!” scene, and you’ll agree. They nail it.
Second thing, all the knights are jackholes especially Gawain. (An arguable exception is Galahad, but he’s basically Jesus. Okay. There’s a few others who aren’t so bad, but it’s like five guys out of a thousand.)
Third thing, Malory didn’t invent any of this stuff. He edited oral traditions, pieced together narratives, and slathere...
September 26, 2012
What We Post About When We Post About Gaming
Here’s my list of what I bring to the table when running the Vaults of Ur.
1. Red Tide.
2. Chronicles of Future Earth
3. Basic Labyrinth Lord
4. Vornheim
5. Moldvay Basic
But pretty much it’s Moldvay Basic.
(The party’s totally up a creek without a paddle right now. It’s great.)
September 23, 2012
Konk!
So I get these awful headaches. I don’t know what causes them. They basically creep up on me and floor me for a day or two. This weekend has been one of those instances. I slept twenty hours on Saturday and hardly moved from the bed today. My doctor (God bless him and his luchador mask) told me not to take any caffeine or alcohol when I get them, so I’ve tried to stick to that.
But, jeez, what a drag.
Anyway, enough of my whining, here’s Lewis Carroll from his pamphlet Feeding the Mind:
“To asce...
