Origin of the Blink Dog?

I can't believe nobody's written on this before, but it just hit me that the blink dog is a dead ringer for Eugene the Jeep from the old Popeye cartoons. Of course, the yellow pelt of the blink dog may have had its immediate inspiration elsewhere, but the Jeep shares this coloration:





It must also be said that the Jeep was able to use a limited form of teleportation (among other powers):





Of course, the inspiration may have been subconscious, but I'd have to say that the blink dog is a dead ringer for the Jeep. I don't know the inspiration for the blink dog/displacer beast animosity (besides the stereotypical cats and dogs rivalry), but I'll be on the lookout for Popeye the Sailor/Voyage of the Space Beagle crossover fanfic.

Irene Done Kicked My Ass

While my home suffered no damage due to Hurricane Irene, I was stuck at work for thirty hours because of the storm and the resultant flooding. If I had been asked about Irene's severity at four in the morning, I would have opined that Irene was really no worse than a typical Nor'easter (granted, a Nor'easter is certainly no picnic). By five-thirty, the rain began to pick up, and things got interesting. The major task I had to perform throughout the night was monitoring a pump that our head of maintenance had set up to prevent our (sandbagged) basement from flooding. Every half-hour or so, I had to venture out in the night and wind to check up on the damn pump, and (if necessary) get it started again. Luckily, I had packed as if I were on a camping trip- I ended up changing clothes more often than Lady Gaga does in the course of a concert.

In the light of day, things didn't look so bad, water not too high, pump working on the main building. The rain stopped around eight AM, and I figured I was out of the soup, but (Irene being a huge, slow moving storm) the accumulated floodwaters dumped in the region caused a local waterway to crest For a while, I and the skeleton crew that had showed up in the morning, thought "we're gonna make it, we're gonna make it" but then the stream overtopped the bank, flooding another building on site to a depth of a foot and a half. I was standing calf-deep in dirty, rushing water as this dimwit was characterizing Irene as a bunch of hype. It must be nice to live in a bubble. Of course, with local roads being flooded, I wasn't getting home, and my relief wasn't coming in. I hunkered down until nine PM, when the guy working the Monday graveyard shift came in to relieve me, three hours early. He's not my type, but I could have kissed him.

I got my ass kicked, but, besides being dirty, fatigued, and sore, I skated out of things pretty well. Others, of course, weren't so fortunate.

Enough of my yapping, think I'll post a video- here's The Storm by Scotland's Big Country, with an intro that beautifully showcases the late, great Stuart Adamson's use of the E-Bow, which gave the band its characteristic sound:

Wonder If The Good People of Lake Geneva Had This In Mind

One of the most gloriously cheesy "SF/horror" films ever to grace celluloid was The Green Slime. One has to wonder if the movie inspired the eponymous dungeon hazard:





The movie is clearly an inspiration for Tom Wham's The Awful Green Things From Outer Space. Besides that, the movie's claim to fame is its groovy, psychedelic theme song:

Loss of Initiative

It's been ages since last I posted- between vacation (followed by the typical post-vacation madness at work), family visiting from Europe, and friends visiting from British Columbia, things have been hectic. Of course, that's a good thing, even if it leaves little time for escapism.

Peryton Sighting?

Ruh-Roh, there's been a peryton sighting in Montana. Was this a migratory peryton which got snagged in the wires, or was it a more sinister event, an initial foray to do to Missoula what was done to Rome?





Hopefully, the good people of western Montana have some enchanted weapons on hand...

Wuthering Heights RPG?

So, while checking out the Groovy Age of Horror blog (the place to go for all your giallo needs), I saw the link to the Wuthering Heights RPG, adapted from a French original (links are broken). I don't know how to approach the game... is it a parody, or is it workable? I love the "Oldness" characteristic- why wasn't it translated as "Age"? Is "Oldness" a physical characteristic, or a spiritual/psychological one? Could a young character afflicted with a crippling ennui have a high "Oldness" characteristic?

RPG net has a quick review, and The Forge has a more elaborate one.

Maybe it's high time to brew a pot of tea, put out a platter of petits fours, and invite the members of the Ladies' Auxiliary over for an evening of some ferocioius Wuthering Heights roleplay.

Monster Makeover: Repurposing the Norker

Reading Mr. Easterly's post on bland Fiend Folio humanoids reminded me of some work I did "repurposing" uninspiring monsters to give them new potential.

Pity the poor norker, a monster which has a description which differs in many particulars from that of a hobgoblin, followed by the sentence:

In all other respects they are similar to hobgoblins.

It would seem that the norker is a spoof monster, a riff on a Douglas Adams' joke:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Yeah, the norker is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a hobgoblin. What can be done to rehabilitate this uninspiring beastie? We have a squat, goblinish goon wielding a blunt weapon, and possessing three-inch canine teeth... wielding a blunt weapon, and possessing three-inch canine teeth... I think we can work with this, and transform the silly norker into the dreaded haemogoblin!!! No need to change the basic characteristics- keep the hit dice, armor class, and attacks, but add a stirge-like blood drain (maybe 1-4 h.p. per round) to a successful bite attack. The fondness for blunt weapons can be explained by a sanguivore's need to conserve the delicious blood in a victim for alimentary purposes. The high armor class is due to a combination of a thick hide (uh, if it doesn't have muscle attachments, it's not an "exoskeleton", just a very thick integument) and the use of armor (typically thick hide... "epidermis all the way down, baby") due to the hazards of a harsh environment which they share with other sanguivorous horrors.

Perhaps the haemogoblins are the victims of a curse, or the recipients of divine favor from a bloodthirsty demon or god. Their leadership structure is similar to that of their hobgoblin relatives, their leaders typically wield more puissant blunt weapons such as maces and flails.

A little flavor text, a simple tweak, and a jokey monster gains some potential as a decent baddie.