From The Morgue

I had a wonderful weekend. (Monday and today: not good. But anyway.) Three big reasons:
48 Hour Film Challenge went really well. I will write more of it at some stage. For now, let me just say that our allotted genre was Monster Movie, and the following image should give you the rest:

(cool poster by the lovely Debz & Matt, I believe)
Good news from Seattle. My buddy Aaron (award-winning chef, fellow West Ham supporter and dodgeball advocate) is coming to NZ in September – his work visa is all arranged. This took me by surprise, the best kind of surprise.
RPG writing goes well. My first sole-credit RPG product, a D&D adventure available in .pdf. was released this weekend. The retro-titled Spawning Pits of the Tomb Bats promptly picked up a 5-star review. This pleases me.
There were some other lesser reasons, too. The 48 was overwhelming and great and there’s more to say on that subject. I’ll get to it.

The 48 Hour Film Challenge begins tonight…
…how was it that I didn’t know until this week that the frontman for the challenge is Ant Timpson, NZ’s own filmic connoisseur of the incredible and incredibly strange?
…how cool is it that we have two professional stuntmen in our team?
…how excellent is it that we have team t-shirts? I love me some team t-shirts.
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This deserves to be widely read: the mayor of Bogota (Colombia) who used mimes, superman costumes and thumbs-up cards to turn around a city on the edge of chaos. It’ll restore your confidence in human beings, and increase your frustration with the ill-built systems that negatively structure so much of our behaviour.
Located by the other moose, unsurprisingly. Go read his blog, it is always interesting. Although, fewer pictures of birds, more pictures of boys tearing their skulls apart.

An’ a fantail!

Happy.

Today’s bird-just-outside-the-window is the kereru, or native wood pigeon. Great big plump thing, too.

I remember encountering a silhouetted kereru in the near-pitch darkness of Central Park when walking up the hill to Brooklyn, and using its presence as an excuse to say something to the mysterious footsteps keeping pace behind me. The footsteps turned out to belong to a scared young woman new to the city who didn’t know that the Central Park shortcut ran out of lighting a third of the way along, and was keeping pace with me because I seemed to know where I was going. We had a nice friendly conversation until the top of the hill, where she went along one path and me along another. I never saw her face; it was completely dark the whole time. The pigeon, for its part, seemed quite happy to sit on a branch arms-length from me even when I stopped to point it out.
Listening right now to the sounds of Aquaboogie, soon to listen to Group Five, both CDs acquired during my fleeting appearance at their joint CD release gig last night. Which looked like it was going to be a lovely night. And I’m sure that it was.

There is a lovely tui hopping around in the tree just outside the open door, about two metres from where I’m sitting. It doesn’t seem too bothered by my presence. I haven’t seen a tui in many years. This living on a hill lark has its benefits!

I love that little white collar ruff they have going on. Very stylish.
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Over on his LJ and Xenodochion, Matt M discusses the Justice Therapy industry:
“This Justice Therapy industry makes it personal, it makes it about “getting the verdict we need”, it makes it about dragging the people who hurt you through court so that you can get some vague sense of closure. It is wrong on so many levels.”
I’m not entirely convinced that it is appropriate to call this an ‘industry’ – my instinct is to locate the cause here in systemic factors and broader cultural trends – but it’s a great piece. Go check it out. A reply is going into the bubbling stew of ‘blog posts I will write real soon now’.
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Also, Buffy fans who don’t read my LJ will really seriously want to check out this link. Not kidding.

This coming weekend is the 48 hour film challenge, in which teams have 48 hours to produce a short film. The genre and some content elements get assigned at the start, then 48 hours later you turn in your finished product. There’re hundreds of teams entered up and down the country, and the top 7 films will end up shown on C4.
I’m part of the writing team for Jenni’s Angels, more or less the same configuration of folks who last year produced the delightful Its A Wonderful Library short, which missed deadline by a matter of minutes. Needless to say, we’re determined that this isn’t going to happen again!
And, I have to say, I’m confident. We have an extremely talented group, with a number of highly experienced people in key roles, and extra motivation from the heartbreaking deadline-missing of last year. Whatever we make is going to be good, because we’re going to make it good.
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Dentist was happy. I crave the approval of my dentist, so, hurrah. Being the only backpacker in Europe carrying floss was worthwhile after all.
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In email today: new baby photos from a friend in Syria; catchup message from friend in Mexico. I am happy with the world.
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Out the window, I see rain come down into the valley in drifting misty sheets. The ferns are shaking in the wind.

I am up a hill. New digs – house-sitting in the hillside suburb of Tirohanga. Have set up to work on the dining table, facing an amazing view of NZ bush (mixture of native and introduced foliage) and, beyond, the middle stretch of the Hutt Valley. It really is a nice view. I get woken in the morning by native birds singing. Lovely.
There is a cat to feed. Judging by this weekend past, I will see the cat precisely twice every day, for morning food and for evening food.
Downside of being on a hill is the total inaccessibility of public transport. Not my preference at all. So I have long-term borrowed the family’s second car, and am blatting around in that when I need to go places. In a sense, it’s been quite liberating – the lack of options means I get to enjoy the driving without my inner tree-hugging hippy scolding me for not taking the train. And I do like driving. Cars are awesomely cool things, and it is damn good fun to race around in your personal race-around device.
Later today I go to the dentist for a checkup. First time since 2001 or so. Yeek.
Gosh, what a content-free blog post. Oh well.

I haven’t checked in on the nastier right-wing blogs since getting back to NZ, and something at This Modern World prompted me to take a look and see what they’re yammering about.
Three big themes on the front pages today. The first is crowing about the possibility of civil war in Palestine (which pretty much tells you all you need to know).
The second is championing the cause of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who used fraud to enter and gain citizenship in the Netherlands; and mocking and ridiculing the cause of Mexican illegal immigrants in the US who are looking for more rights and legitimacy.
Yeah. Huh. So they’re still not that good at joining the dots.
Actually, that’s too glib. That whole scene is not driven by any kind of coherent ideology. Its responses to any given situation are driven entirely by whether the rhetoric espoused furthers or diminishes their self-justifying and self-righteous paranoia.
This, I note, is not irrelevant to NZ – the Kiwi online community takes many of its cues from what’s happening in the US version, both on left and right. It’s just a shame that the right-wing sites of choice are basically paranoid, semi-fascist incoherent racist hatemongers. The long-running stream of anti-Islam letters to the editor in the local rag are, I’m convinced, built on “talking points” that are directly sourced from right-wing US blog sites.
Anyway, it’s a waste of energy thinking too hard about this stuff. There will always be nasty populists exploiting our base fears. Lets keep on with our own project of building and promoting a different world.

We know because a Dominion Post headline tells us so. It headlined an article about the EU offering to support Iran if it agrees to an oversight program EU Calls Iran’s Bluff.
Now, sure, Iran may indeed be bluffing, or stalling for time, or engaging in other such normal and expected political behaviours. But I don’t think it’s the subeditor’s job to make that call, know what I mean?
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In other news, over on RPG.net, one chap is watching his way through Freaks and Geeks, and Stephen Lea Sheppard (who played Harris) is commenting. Nothing terribly interesting, but if you love that show as much as I do you’ll find it worth the click-through.
(Some geeks may be interested to know that Stephen wrote the free promo adventure for hit RPG Exalted 2nd ed, Return to the Tomb of Five Corners.)

(Before I begin: Matt has put in the final word on The Whisky. Includes good descriptions of the whiskies what was drunk, if you have an interest in that.)
After a most welcome breakfast of sweet, sweet crepes prepared by dutiful and beloved Jarratt, I proceeded back to Damon’s, and got stuck into final Rumpus 06 preparations. There was a lot of stuff to do, we were being quite unashamedly ambitious and the day had come. We were still putting things in place as the first guests were arriving – in fact, Leon and I went home to change and get ready when there were already a dozen people arrived, and by the time we got back the place was packed. So we kinda missed the start of our own party. Very classy 🙂
THE RUMPLETRON REVEALED!
We wanted the Rumpus to get people dancing and get people mingling. Key to this whole process was the Rumpletron, our 1980 ex-military party computer. The Rumpletron sat in a side room, waiting for input. It asked for your name, then it asked you three questions. Based on your answers, it would guess whether you were a boy or girl, then assign you a tribe and give you a party name. You scribble the name on a nametag sticker and you’re ready to rumpus!
Everyone was into it. People loved the Rumpletron. New arrivals were dragged into the room pretty fast. Some people got extra Rumpletron names for their shoes, their shoulders or their breasts. Everyone wanted to know what tribe people were in and what questions people had been asked.
This was cool. So we ended up with lots of people wandering around with silly nametags. In its ineffable electronic wisdom, the Rumpletron put almost everyone into Tribe Voltron, so the two or three people in Tribe Miami Vice had extra talking point status all night. It broke down a lot of barriers, and there was plenty of mingling. Everyone had a name to call other people by, and everyone had a conversation opener, and it was so stupid it wrapped all the way around to awesome again.
Good job, Rumpletron. (Shout outs to Toby and Damon for the hard yards in getting the Rumpletron 2006-compliant!)
THE DANCEFLOOR!
Apa (aided and abetted by his lovely partner Gemma) and Brent were our two DJs, and they got a dancefloor going sure enough. I saw healthy crowds dancing for both of them, even though they were playing quite different stuff. I didn’t spend much time in the dance room, but it seemed there was a good vibe coming from there all night, which is great. A dancefloor with people dancing is the heart of a party.
The smoke machine helped.
OTHER STUFF
Other things the Rumpus had:
* a graffiti wall with coloured felt-tip pens, which became covered with all sorts of scribble and nonsense as the night went on
* a freaky blacklight bulb in the toilet, and other coloured bulbs in every other room
* a make-out room, mostly taken over by chill-out people
* a chapel, complete with patron saint, at the bottom of the garden, but still linked into the soundsystem
* an outdoorsy bit that people actually used
* only two cases of overindulgence
* mannequins
Oh, and last but not least,
* free beer
IT WAS GOOD
It may, in fact, have been the best party I’ve ever helped throw. It’s up there. People liked it. There were disappointments assuaged. There were amusing pirates (one , two). There was a glowstick thief. There was a terrifying extrovert-to-extrovert positive feedback loop. There was microwave Jesus and the surprising truth about President Reagan. There were random kisses. There was at least one instance of crowd-surfing.
It was fantastic, and I was sad when it ended.
So. A mighty thank you to Damon, who volunteered to provide a venue for my long-mooted party, didn’t freak out when I said I wanted to invite ‘everyone’, and then not only became full and righteous co-host but became way more ambitious than I could ever have dreamed. You are the awesome, my friend.
(Read his writeup of the Rumpus here.)
And a second one to Leon, who was really the third host of the party, and who rocked my personal kasbah with his excellent handiwork and smart ideas about making things happen. Not to mention his fearsome hard work at the eleventh hour. Thanks bro. (All y’all should go and worship him a bit on the ‘Leon is a God’ website, here.)
And a third one to all the others who stepped in and stepped up, making contributions large or small – Toby, Apa, Gemma, Brent, Karlene, Clare, Anton, Nick, Lucas, Dave Stewart… umm… I must have forgotten someone.
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Rumpus 07, anyone?