You looked unusually lovely with your dark, dark hair

[sovay]

1. My poem "For Saint Valentine, on the Occasion of His Martyrdom" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit. It was written the day after last Valentine's Day. There are classical deaths in it.

2. Trawling the internet with derspatchel way too late last night, we came across the trailer for Empires of the Deep. And, yes, it looks like a dysfunctional big-budget cliché of epic proportions with inexplicably non-underwater mermaids and way too much obvious CGI. It also looks a great deal like some of the not-quite-fic I was writing in early high school, obsessed with inspired by the illustrations and the flavor text on the blue cards of Magic: The Gathering: Fallen Empires (1994).* Gigantic war-sturgeons carrying crews of shell-armed mer-soldiers? Sign me up. Enormous lobsters smashing everything within reach? Deep Spawn, I've missed you! Drowned underwater temples? Twist my arm. I don't know why the tank-sized anglerfish has legs, and I still can't tell whether the opposing army is riding giant crabs or whether they're actually half-crustacean, but I'm not sure this is the kind of movie where you're supposed to care. I would almost certainly watch it, is what I'm saying, even if the story has all the depth and mystery of wet tissues. There are too many images in that bombastic trailer that thirteen-year-old me would recognize.

(Comments on that article also contain the best worst Court Jester pastiche I have seen on the internet. You are warned.)

* Ditto the green, although only the elvish half. The Thallids freaked me out sufficiently that I didn't even like to keep the cards. I was pretty much indifferent toward the other colors in that expansion, although the artifacts were good and I collected all the lands. The sunlit, bone-hung emptiness of Havenwood Battleground, I still find haunting.

3. I must write more later; I have a dentist's appointment to get to. First braces-tightening. Store of carrot-ginger soup already laid in against my return.

Comments

[sovay]

Congrats!

Thank you!

(I played an alternate red/white control in a computer game version of the game, although due to the computer game mechanics the pure white creature deck was usually better.)

I played mostly blue and green (and some black) out of liking for the associated mythoi. Red appealed to me when it meant dragons.

[yhlee]

I'm not surprised. :) I liked red/white control because you blasted/killed/genocided creatures (Wrath of God, Lightning Bolt, Fireball, Disintegrate, Mana Flare, etc.--uh, the pixel versions of most of these in the computer game, although Joe may own an actual Mana Flare; apparently he traded away a Fork for it as a naive young Joe, whoops).

(Also in the realm of early poor M:TG card trades/sales, I knew someone once who sold his Black Lotus for $50. Whoops.)

[sovay]

I liked red/white control because you blasted/killed/genocided creatures (Wrath of God, Lightning Bolt, Fireball, Disintegrate, Mana Flare, etc.

Pyrokinesis.

(I liked Alliances; it reminded me of Fallen Empires, only cautiously hopeful. Plus a healthy dose of the numinous/creepy, which in hindsight I realize was kind of what I went to the game for. I don't care if The Dark was one of the expansions nobody liked to play, it was incredibly evocative. Everything in it was the mirror-universe version.)

(Also in the realm of early poor M:TG card trades/sales, I knew someone once who sold his Black Lotus for $50. Whoops.)

One of the saddest moments of 2012 was cleaning out the basement at derspatchel's old house and discovering his Mox Emerald and other rarities in a wodge of mildewed cardstock thanks to an especially nasty flood a few years previous. His less expensive decks had been kicking around the upstairs of the house, occasionally used for play; the fancy stuff was in storage and, well, it was sad.

[yhlee]

I admit my exposure to the game was extremely scattershot; I learned of it when I was a high schooler in Korea by reading a Time magazine article on it. :p We bought a random assorted bag of commons of all colors from some kid on our bus and tried, unsuccessfully, to make decks from them.

The computer game version--Shandalar something--was fun because it allowed me to play with all the super-rare stuff that I'd never have seen. It also had this thing where you "captured" cities and they represented your life points, so you started out with suck life but as you formed life-links you got more life. (Monsters would occasionally attack your cities and you'd have to fight them, etc.) It also had some "random" cards that were computer-game-only because they'd have been a sweet pain in the ass to instantiate as real game cards--anything that involved random number generator stuff for results. You could save multiple decks so long as you had cards for them and swap them in/out between battles (or maybe only while in town, I forget). It was dorky but fun? ^_^