The Black Campbell

I’ve been trying to find a way to make this funny…but I’m just too damned gobsmacked to pull it off…

After three and a half years with no issues of any kind, my 2007 Triumph Speed Triple has been in the shop three times in two weeks.  The electrical system has been burning out in slow motion — first the battery went as was replaced… then the rectifier blew out a few days later, but the stator was testing okay.  Three days later, it was back in the shop with the stator dead.  The total butcher’s bill is going to be in the $800-900 range.

I’m finding I’m not so trusting of the Triple now — my mechanic has been seeing this with the new 1050 motors, which are just getting old enough to show a planned obsolescence of  three or so years.  It’s been my daily commuter, and I just can’t have a bike I don’t know will be working.  I’m going to give it a few months after this repair.  If it craps out, I’m getting rid of it.

But now I’m starting to think about selling it anyway, and leaning towards something a bit more retro and laid-back, like a Triumph Bonneville or the Moto-Guzzi V7 Cafe

A friend of mine did a post today on his current reading that led me to write a wee missive on what I’ve been reading of late:

Right now, I’m making my way through Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House , a novel set in a near-future Istanbul. the book revolves around a few themes: nanotechnology start-ups, terrorism, and the search for a Mellified Man. It combines the beautiful prose and ability to bring to life some of the world’s different cultures, while combining science-fiction sensibilities. I can also recommend his River of Gods and Cyberabad Days , set in a 2048 India. His Brasyl is decent, but suffers from being disjointed and ultimately unfulfilling. His Mars-based Desolation Road and Ares Express have a strange, mythic quality to them that reminded me heavily of Faulkner or Steinbeck in their quality. One thing about McDonald, however, all of his books feel about 50-60 pages too long.

A few other authors I can heartily recommend are Jonathan Letham and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Letham has a wide variety of genres he works in, but always with a strange twist to them. His Gun, With Occasional Music is a science-fiction detective novel, a Raymond Chandler hardboiled detective meets anthropomorphic animals mash-up that evokes Who Killed Roger Rabbit? or Cool World, without the cartoons. His two best, however, are Fortress of Solitude, a coming-of-age story set in Brooklyn of the 1970s/1908s, wrapping comic books, the music scene, and childhood angst together; and the other is Motherless Brooklyn, a detective novel where the protagonist has Tourettes Syndrome. It’s a fascinating look at the disease, and it’s probably his best novel.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s catalogue is so good it’s hard to go wrong. I would suggest Queen of the South , a novel about a Mexican drug moll that becomes a successful smuggler in Spain, as a good starting point. Also his exceptional The Club Dumas, about a book hunter that searches for rare volumes for his customers. He is hired to find a sorcerous tome, and the danger begins. It was made into a movie that was nowhere as good. I’d steer clear of his “I want to be the next Alexandre Dumas” series (Captain Alastride), but that’s just me.

In Firefly, the reavers were this ever-present bogeyman, lurking in the darkness of space.   In essence, they were the zombies for the universe — people who had gone mad on the edge of space.  There was no telling how many were out there, why people would be attracted to their lifestyle, and what you could expect from them…

Serenity gave us a tidy backstory to the reavers that, ultimately, cut the mystery and danger out of them.  Turned insane by the PAX, these movie reavers were de facto zombies — lots of them, never stopping, senseless.  And ultimately, not as frightening as the TV show version.  By linking them with Alliance malfeasance, the reavers become victims and that removes the awe and fear they should inspire in an RPG campaign.  Moreover, the driven violent and mad meme of Serenity reavers would seem to preclude the notion that they would work in concert.  Zombie-like, the reavers prey on “the living” (just to keep the metaphors straight.)  And for me, this is where we run into problems.  As with other “zombie” antagonists, they work together to plan and execute raids, they work in tandem at time, yet they fly around in their dilapidated spacecraft with no concern for the efficiency of the craft.

They act in mindless, violent abandon in the movie, driven that way by the PAX…yet paradoxically, they’ll all work in concert during the fight with the Alliance.  You couuld make an argument that in a target-rich environment, the reavers would naturally attack whatever they could, and the Alliance ships were simply temptations.  I don’t agree.  We’ve seen on-screen how tough it is to keep a ship running:  why would the PAX reavers fix things enough to keep the ships moving?  How would they decide who fixes what?  Like zombies…why aren’t they attacking each other, if they’re so crazed from the PAX?

Lastly, there was a small percentage of the Miranda residents that became reavers.  There’s a limited number.  The nature of their affliction would seem to preclude breeding (even by rape, if they kill their victims anyway.)  That means it’s a game of attrition.  Eventually, they’ll die out, or be hunted down by the Alliance.  Not scary.

In short, the Serenity reavers stink on ice.  Even as a convenient wrap up for the movie, they offend the storytelling sensibilities.

Returning to the Firefly reavers:  there’s very little we know about them.  We’ve heard they might be cannibals (always terrifying), we know they allegedly rape and kill.  Yet in Bushwacked, the reavers raid a cargo vessel and leave a lone man alive, and that last man slowly “goes reaver.”  In the same episode, Shepherd Book remarks that reavers are “just men” that got to the edge of space and went mad.  These points leave open a much more exciting and frightening door:  reavers “breed” virally, mimetically.  Being a reaver is an idea.  It’s a lifestyle, not a drug-induced disease.

Based on the slim amount of information concerning the reavers in the TV show, I will endeavor to cast a newer — and I hope, from a gaming perspective — better version that is closer to the original concept.

Like the 15th/16th Century family gang in Scotland led by Sawney Bean, being a reaver is a choice (or madness, your choice.)  These are people who were already outcasts, layabouts, madmen — people who had or would eventually slip through the cracks.  Out on the edge of the ‘Verse, these people were outside the law, outside moral structure, and soon began to comport themselves that way.  The ritualistic body modification is a feature, probably the result of someone being into tattooing, self-mortification; that notion of damaging yourself to show strength, individuality, or to just make yourself more terrifying and hence a more efficient hunter, spread.  In this way, the reaver style is something that literally gets under your skin.

(If you know people into the tattoo/piercing/body mod subculture, you might note the almost addictive quality of the practice.  People don’t usually get one tattoo, or piercing, anymore.  And often, others who know people into the practice will buy in, as well.)

Assuming these people are insane, but not zombie-crazy, they are much more likely to work — like gangs — in concert with each other.  There’s a hierarchy, even if it’s more democratic, like many pirate ships were.  Many might be family based, with a patriarch/matriarch (like the Bean gang.)  They care about each other, and occasionally, they fight among their clans. They breed and raise up new generations of psychopathic hunters like themselves.  They leave people that could become like them alive (as in Bushwacked) knowing that, eventually, their victim will find and join them.

Worse, this means that not all reavers will behave the same.  You’ll never know if they’re going to chase you down, as in the Serenity pilot episode, let you live as with the man in Bushwacked, or if they’ll lay a clever trap.  Or clean themselves up and look like normal folk on the street…until they attack.  This past element adds another layer of paranoia:  not all reavers are the campfire bogeyman.  They could be aboard your vessel and you’d not know until it was too late.

And who knows..?  If you’re too much of an antisocial renegade, you might find the life appealing.  Anyone, pushed too far, could go reaver.

With this new take, you wouldn’t always know the ship bearing down on you might be reavers.  Not all their ships are going to be junked up wrecks with nihilists inside hoping to get cooked by their reactor.  They might be lazy and not maintain their vessels, leading to some of the tell-tale signs, but even these reavers will eventually do routine maintenance when they have to. Some might modify and hotrod their rides; the lack of radiation shielding on a ship might be because they get more efficiency and speed without the containment.  Some might paint their ships and adorn them with their victims, as in the movie, to intimidate their prey.

Reavers as subculture, to me, is much more intimidating, and much more useful as a roleplaying hook, than the Serenity version.  Here you have plot hooks galore:  what if someone comes back to their senses and wants out of being a reaver?  What if some rich man’s daughter runs away to join them and he wants her rescued?  What if you can actually make a deal with them, and what would they want in return?

Max Fleischer gives us his cartoon tour of the 1938 World’s Fair:

Back in 1999, I bought one of the original Walther P99 9mm handguns.  I had a few different pistols, including the Heckler & Koch USP .45 Compact, and was tending to carry the latter at the time.  The P99 had one of the best grips on the market at the time — ergonomically designed to give the user an incredible hold on the weapon, three different backstraps to resize the weapon for the hand, and adjustable rear sights with different front sight heights to make the weapon customizable for the user.  These are all common on polymer guns now, but most forget how revolutionary this was in 1999.  It had the downside of being during the Clinton gun ban when you could only have 10 rounds, instead of 15…so it really didn’t offer much over the 8-shot USP.

It shot incredibly accurately, with mild recoil, but had a break in period that I found made me question the weapon’s reliability.  (After about 200 rounds, the P99 started running flawlessly.)  I know a lot of handgunners hear this “break it in” crap, but to me that means the factory didn’t bother to finish their product.  If I need the gun that night after I’ve bought it, “break in” just isn’t going to cut it, should it malfunction.  I didn’t have to break in my H&Ks, or my CZ-85 (flawless out of the box), nor my FN57.

I wound up needing money for a move from Austin to Albuquerque in 2000 and sold the weapon.  I regretted it almost immediately, and bought a P99 in .40S&W.  Unlike the 9mm, I found the .40 version functioned very well, but found the accuracy spotty past 10 yards.  I got rid of it and was on the look out for a 9mm P99 with the original trigger set up (now called “anti stress”).  At that ever turned up was the idiotic double action version.

Today, I found a P99AS in 9mm in near pristine shape but with enough rounds through it to be “broken in.”

So — the P99AS.  The benefit of the anti-stress trigger is that it is a stepped trigger:  with the striker cocked, the trigger has a step that allows the user to not accidentally pop a round off, and shortens the trigger pull.  A decocking button on the left side of the slide drops the striker for a long, heavy pull on the first shot, then drops to the AS trigger for the rest of the magazine.  The P99s now come with a 15-round magazine, making them an excellent, light, and super-accurate (to about 25 yards) self-defense weapon.  It is light enough I might occasionally take it on walks, instead of the CZ-85 (but the CZ configuration remains my favorite, to date.)

If you can find one of these gems used, a good price is between $450-600.  They’re one of the better handguns on the market — as good as the S&W built PPKs are bad.

This has been Vishnu the last few days…