The Sock-Monkey As Alone

  Panzer Strider:  or, We're all wayward bound By, Drew Freak. Thomas Roberts is being court marshaled. The man is in a cell and his Panzer Strider (a biomechanical clone that has been genetically modified to be used as a psychically controlled bipedal tank) is going to be broken down to be used as raw materials in a printer. Thomas stopped his unit from massacering a village on a small moon of Toi-715. They had their orders and he had a conscience.  However when the Yama Yama man enters his life... Things get Phawking weird. The Yama Yama man is a near-omnipotent ambiguous force of nature and he looks like Koko the clown from the Max and Dave Fleischer cartoons. He gives Thomas Roberts a ten-can of spun sugar (looks and tastes like cotton candy and this stuff gives the user psychic powers [though it can trigger psychosis and addiction.]) Then the clown disappeared. thomas used his psychic powers to fight his way to his panzer strider and flew off to freedom. But, Thomas ...

  I have been thinking about empathy and Pynchon . How  the man can find a way to dramatize strange outright strange and or scary sexual situations. To know the depravity we are all capable of. The internal monolog of a death drive. Of running toward oblivion with arms open with joyful tears at the very thought of certain doom. Yet still, those silly cornball songs lift the spirit ...  follow that bouncing ball and sing along (and all that). Yet some people think the bad puns are not enough... I remember distinctly a critic who said something along the lines of "The novel's inventiveness is not enough, it collapses under its  own  weight of ideas till the puns no longer transcend" (I am paraphrasing the critic tried to find the quote but am too tired to look it up right now). The central idea of Gravity's Rainbow is the joy of suffering. That it is possible hope is an act of masochism the universe can not accommodate and it is outright losing patience with the v...

 I am working on panzer strider again. experimenting with a much more complex activation mechanism for the combat. Will start writing on the rule book within the month. though no promises on when it will be finished. I have ambitions to make it more of a table top mecha pilot simulator then a straightforward skirmish game. Think of front mission meets Gundam wing as far as the vibe. where each person controls one mecha and it maxes out at four players. it makes sense to allow players to control more then one mech in some circumstances but like battletech the system I am experimenting with snowballs in complexity exponentially. I am playing with a more real robot vibe then the psychedelic phantasy star influenced early build that is up on the blog. I was originally planning on sharing some of the mechanisms... I did that way to early last time. I have been thinking about the game a lot over the last few years. experimenting and developing concepts. though most are still very rough. ...