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kagoule,
A cagoule (French: [kaɡul], also spelled cagoul, kagoule or kagool), is the British English term for a lightweight weatherproof raincoat or anorak with a hood (usually without lining), which often comes in knee-length form.
PBMs?”
“Play by mail?”
APA,
Don't know this one, (except that it is not American Psychological Association).
Linda disappeared, leaving Derek face-to-face with a skinny, long-haired bloke in double denim whose face vaguely resembled a mustelid with constipation.
mustelid = weasel
(He’d thought the Black Pharaoh was just a myth until a couple of new inmates arrived and he rolled the bones to check whether to offer them seats at the sandbox. He’d rolled triple-ones eight times in a row, then an unscheduled storm blew in over the mountain and sent three lightning strikes in quick succession through the admin block’s switchboard. Which he’d taken as a sign.)
grognard
From Wikitonary:
1. An old soldier.
2. (historical) A soldier of the original imperial guard that was created by Napoleon I in 1804 and that made the final French charge at Waterloo.
3. (games, slang) Someone who enjoys playing older war games or roleplaying games, or older versions of such games, when newer ones are available.
Ex. James is such a grognard: he only plays the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
He had dice for all the platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, teapotahedron (the latter a manifold that could exhibit symmetry in a non-Euclidean space with a sanity-warping fractional dimensionality).
Curious why the icosahedron was not mentioned, especially since Derek frequently uses d20s.
Caedite eos: Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius?”
"Kill them, for the Lord knows those that are His"
For work-related reasons he’d been reading William Burroughs,
“What are we going to do?” “We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “I am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit. You”—he takes a deep gulp of smoke—“get to play at Night Duty Officer, patrolling the twilit corridors to protect our workplace from the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts every Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery. Try not to let it get to you—and have a nice holiday while you’re at it.”
Overtime.
Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn’t a C++ programmer.)
Tonight, hundreds of millions of innocent children are calling Santa. Who’s really coming down your chimney tonight?
Derek Reilly is the unanticipated. Aged fourteen when he is first drawn to their attention, he’s over the minimum age of criminal responsibility in English law but equally clearly he’s not an adult: he shouldn’t be interned in an adult detention center, but in the middle of a moral panic or a terrorist alert normal rules fall by the wayside in the name of institutional convenience (as we saw with the child detainees in the terrorism detention camps at Guantanamo Bay). Derek hadn’t actually done anything wrong—but, again, being innocent is no protection against anonymous denunciations, which
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Afterword.
Thus we finally come full circle. If belief gets magical results, then if you can trick people into believing something, perhaps you can create a new god—an egregore, in western esoteric terms. The Santa-thing in “Overtime” is one such egregore, inadvertently created by the sustained belief of millions of children. Xōchipilli, a mostly forgotten Nahua god appropriated by Spanish invaders in Mesoamerica, is adapted by the cultist owners of the Omphalos Corporation and boosted into existence by adding the shared belief of many tens of thousands of role-playing gamers. And of such matters are
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