The Black Campbell

Last night was a fantastic concert at Santa Ana Casino — the Bare Naked Ladies were playing, and while I missed Steven Page with them, it was a superb show!

Attended a birthday party cum Halloween party this afternoon/evening.  A good time was had by all…

This was followed by my rectifying some deficiencies in the girlfriend’s cultural education: I showed her Alien this evening.  It still works…even when they kinda know what’s coming.

Well — we’re into the new house in the foothills of Albuquerque’s Sandia Mountains. Lovely, airy place with a hot tub I desperately need to clean and get Ph balanced so I can use it. We got movers for this time around, but after two weeks of working on the place, and moving a fair amount prior to the movers this week, I woke up this morning barely able to bend over from back pain.

I guess I’m not that young, anymore…

Fired up a new Serenity campaign with the new girlfriend and a brand-new player out of Santa Fe (hi, Paul!)  The basic premise is a sort of A-Team/Burn Notice/Leverage meets the ‘Verse mash-up, with the characters taking on weekly jobs/helping the unfortunate while steering clear of the Alliance and finding out why the McGuffin (in this case played by the GF) was scrubbed from the Cortex records and has mysterious villains chasing her.

It all starts in a trash dump on Beaumonde, where CAROLE MCKENNA waves up, battered, bruised, dressed only in combat fatigue pants a black tank top, boots with a knife, and possessing a few hundred in Alliance script and a bottle of meds for what she doesn’t know.  She doesn’t know much actually — she’s suffering from amnesia.

What she learns — her father is a research manager for the Osiris Information Management Corporation — a software/hardware company contracted with Alliance military, and her mother is Dr. Miranda Tien, is a doctor working at the Advanced Evolutions Laboratory in a restricted island archipelago on Osiris.  Her birth records, however, gone.  Her military records, gone (she finds out she worked a special forces group doing psyops during the war and was a major), her life after she was critically injured in the final days of the war, gone.

She also, it seems, “hears” machines — she has a Cortex connection in her head that lets her access computers wirelessly.  She also seems to heal quickly (not supernaturally so, but fast!)

CAROLE MCKENNA

Ht: 5’6″  Wt: 125 lbs.   Hair: Auburn   Eyes: Blue  Distinguishing marks:  Very faint scar from pubis to sternum (someone opened her up.)

ATTRIBUTES:  Agility d8, Strength d8, Vitality d8, Alertness d10, Intelligence d8, Willpower d8

Secondary Attributes: Life Points 16, Initiative d8+d10, Endurance 2d8, Resistance 2d8

SKILLS:  Athletics d6, Discipline d6, Guns d6, Heavy Weapons d4, Influence d4, Knowledge d4, Linguist d2, Melee Combat d6, Perception d6, Planetary Vehicles d4, Survival d6, Tech Engineering d6, Unarmed Combat d6 (Capoeira d8)

ASSETS:  Allure d4, Athlete d4, Blastomere Implants d8 (doubles healing rate and gives a 1S armor), Cybernetic Implants d8 (gives +1 step to alertness, Total Recall asset, and +d4 to Tech Engineering tests involving computers), Highly Educated d4

COMPLICATIONS: Amnesia d8, Branded d8, Deadly Enemy d4, Illness, NIRS d6 (causes palsy if she doesn’t take myocephrin once/day), Traumatic Flashbacks d4 (flashes of memory, more than nightmares; due to malfunctions in her cybercortex.)

Playing her “Sam Axe in Space” (mixed with a bit of Treat Williams’ character from Deep Rising is Daniel Finnegan, former Alliance specops pilot and general layabout since the war.  He’s from Paquin — in our ‘Verse a sort of space Ireland with lots of travelers/pikers.  He was a cop, a contract pilot, then a conscripted officer in the war.  He’s been hanging out on Persephone where he makes a bit of cash off of his fast-courier boat Tough Luck and romancing war widows.

MAJOR DANIEL FINNEGAN (AFM, ret.)

Ht: 6’2″   Wt: 210 lbs.  Hair: Black (graying)   Eyes: Blue

ATTRIBUTES:  Agility d6, Strength d8, Vitality d8, Alertness d10, Intelligence d8, Willpower d10

Secondary Attributes: Life Points 20, Initiative d6+d10, Endurance: d8+d10, Resistance 2d8

SKILLS: Animal Handling d4, Athletics d6, Covert d6, Craft d4, Discipline d4, Guns d6, Heavy Weapons d6, Influence d6 (Seduction d8), Linguist d2, Mechanical Engineering d4, Melee Combat d4, Perception d6, Pilot d6 (Gunship d8), Planetary Vehicles d6, Survival d4, Technical Engineering d6, Unarmed Combat d6

ASSETS: Friends in Low Places d4, Friends in High Places d4, Military Rank d4, Smooth Talker d4, Tough d4

COMPLICATIONS:  Credo d4, Hooked (Alcohol) d4, Loyal d4, Wiseass d4

I just finished reading William Gibson’s Zero History. It’s the third in his latest series.  Like the last two — Pattern Recognition and Spook Country — it’s modern day in setting, but with a sci-fi style and sensibility…Elmore Leonard with a tech fetish.

This novel revolves around Hollis Henry, heroine from Spook Country, who is once again hired by marketing mogul Hubertus Bigend to ferret out a designer of a non-brand of stealth marketed clothing so he can use their branding techniques.  Along the way, she is paired up by Bigend with Milgrim, a recovering drug addict also from Spook Country, who has been doing corporate espionage for Bigend.  Bigend’s Blue Ant company is looking to get into military clothing contracts and are studying their competition.

The military clothing competitors take this amiss and start messing with Milgrim and Henry, assuming that they are trying to cut into their business and through a series of mistaken intentions, the two sides wind up involved in kidnapping and half-assed prisoner exchange operations.  It’s farcical and entirely believable.  Like the first two books, the action revolves around something, that on the face of it, is ludicrously lacking in value (but think it through on the military clothing contracts worldwide… that’s potentially billions of dollars!)

It’s a well-constructed novel that, when you think back on it, has very little happen.  The interest in the book is generated by the way Gibson looks at culture, branding and merchandising, and pop trends with the same eye he brought to giving us believable cyberpunk worlds.

Of the three, Spook Country is probably the best of the bunch, but all three are worth a read.

Which species are you?

I show elements of the Academic, D&D, and Tech Geeks.  I probably best fit the Geek Chic.

Up near the foothills in Albuquerque…

As I’m busily working on prepping the new house to move in, I leave you with this…

Woof!

The HRP-4C gynoid…dancing.