The Thing Itself

2002-08-21T01:07:00.000+10:00

Franklin Castle is a very interesting person.

He was born in the largest and most important city in the world. His parents were very devout lay brethren in a powerful church. Franklin himself was never particularly interested in the tenets of his parents' religion, but he paid their God lip service because it wasn't too hard a thing to do.

Franklin became aware, when he entered adolescence, that he was different from his few friends, and even from his parents. He often woke in the night sweating from some strange dream, wherein his mind reached out to strange realms beyond the world he knew and was touched by its inhabitants in return.

The glimmerings of insight this contact imparted to Franklin changed his life forever. He was already capable of things none of the people around him could do. Now, finding out more about the place he visited in his dreams became the sole purpose of his life. He travelled far and wide in search of answers to the questions that burned inside him. His parents' church couldn't help him very much. Nor could the wisest and most learned people he could find. They could teach him a little but never exactly what he needed to know. So his search continued.

It took Franklin many years, but eventually he found some answers. He found a group of people not unlike himself who, recognising his inner kinship with them, initiated him into their mysteries, answering all of the questions he had asked in his heart and in his dreams since he was a boy. He found a kind of closure there, a kind of completion, that he treasured dearly.

Such peace was not Franklin's ultimate destiny, unfortunately. Eventually, new questions and ideas and desires bubbled up inside. He needed to learn more, to see more, to do more than he could with his mentors and friends. He felt he had to leave and continue his search, and so he did.

It took many more years of travelling, but finally Franklin was able to achieve his heart's greatest desire. After careful preparation, Franklin managed to transport himself - for the briefest moment only - to the realm where he had hitherto only walked in his dreams. Although he stood there for only an instant, he underwent a profound and remarkable change, even greater than that which he had experienced as a child when dreaming of this place for the first time.

The alien nature of this other realm impressed itself upon his very psyche, and it effected an irreversible change in the way Franklin viewed the world around him. Now he saw it as a thing of impermanence, an island of stability and sanity in a universe which made so very little sense when viewed from the perspective of the realm Outside. Even the roiling forces of chaos and randomness only existed within this world in opposition to the principles of order and rationality. Without this world concepts such as chaos and order had no meaning, no relevance. This other realm was a place of which the mind could not possibly conceive. This was the place which Franklin carried within his skull, now.

Naturally, to others Franklin now seemed mad. Alternately frighteningly rational and disturbingly random, and accompanied everywhere by a faithful companion - the raven, Munoth, which like Franklin itself seemed to the casual observer somehow touched with the senseless lack of meaning of the universe - Franklin continued his journeys now, seeking out new experiences and even more arcane and occult lore than before. He made friends of a sort - the ambitious performer, the devout but wicked priestess, the obessive and hateful hunter - but while they were his companions they knew not the secret desires and passions of his soul.

Franklin experienced something very like death in a torrent of fire; Munoth was lost but returned a part of him forever. Alliances were forged, affording him the semblance of interaction with those around him, but all was to an inscrutable goal that, perhaps, not even Franklin understands. What the future holds now, as Franklin's path leads him in pursuit of a "holy" charlatan accused of mocking the noble principles which he is supposed to embody, no one in the world can say.

But perhaps those Outside can.

2002-08-19T02:39:00.000+10:00

Battlefield:1942 is an excellent game.

Tonight I spent around five hours in a net-cafe in Glebe defending Wake Island from the Japanese incursion. My fellow soldiers and I had at our disposal tanks, jeeps, anti-aircraft emplacements, batteries of cannon, machine guns, explosives, planes, and a good deal of personal weaponry.

The Japanese (as I discovered once I switched sides to the Axis) had themselves a destroyer and an aircraft carrier, the latter loaded with Zero fighters, and a half-dozen landing craft armed with machine guns.

The point of this demonstration mission was to capture and hold five encampments on Wake Island. The Allies held all five at the beginning of the game but didn't have the men to hold them all (especially considering the best players in the place usually played the Japanese). The Axis players obstinately refused to make landings anywhere near our shore cannon, instead preferring to dive-bomb our own airstrip or parachute soldiers into our undefended bases to capture them.

Bastards.

In any case, Battlefield: 1942 is produced by the same company that makes another favourite game of mine, Codename: Eagle, and their speciality is first-person-shooter wargames with vehicles. Codename, for example, has fighters and bombers, helicopters and boats, tanks and jeeps, and motorbikes with sidecars, as well as cannon and machine guns. There's even a Zeppelin in one of the multiplayer levels. Add to that the fact that a player also has the option to just run around with the standard array of weaponry - a rocket launcher, grenades, rifle, pistol, machine gun - and you have a very enjoyable multiplayer experience.

Battlefield: 1942 takes things a little further. The vehicles are approximate representations of actual vehicles from World War II, and the full version of the game apparently has over thirty different vehicles and covers every theater of the war. Each vehicle has several positions that can be occupied by different players - the half-track APC, for example, can hold a driver in the cabin, a gunner on top with the machine gun, and up to five other players in the armoured rear half. In the full version there will apparently be a B52 bomber with room for pilot, navigator, and gunner.

Just based on the demonstration I played tonight, it's going to be a wonderful game. For a straight-up first-person shooter in a World War II setting, I still prefer Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, but adding vehicles to the mix makes Battlefield: 1942 and Codename: Eagle something else again, and well worth playing.

Enough for tonight.

2002-08-15T12:44:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, the sky looked like the gods had Photoshopped the same cloud over and over again. Not that you could really blame them in this day and age, but it did seem a little lazy.

Later on that day, too many cooks must have spoiled the celestial broth, and the resultant grey soup only occasionally parted to reveal the blue.

One of the strange things about Sydney is the way that even the greyest light seems bright and clear.

They still haven't finished World Square, of course. Decades from now it will probably still be possible to pass that comment off as contemporary, I expect. Still, the concrete Multiplex shaft is striking, more interesting at least than the hole it filled.

Then again, if all this city can achieve these days is "more interesting than nothing at all" . . .

Scott, one of my colleagues (if such a term can be applied to retail workers), commented that they'd better bloody finish it, because he owns an apartment there and he wants to sell it for a lot of money.

Things always change. But is faux tan sandstone better than rough charcoal concrete? Is the cinema strip on George Street really that much better off for what looks suspiciously like architectural masturbation?

You can stare down Central Street next to the shop where I work and see the tanstone facade and half the Greater Union logo.

There isn't even a Greater Union cinema there anymore, but they put the logo back on the new facade.

About the only thing that the Olympics seems to have done for this city is make our sidewalks wider - an achievement I appreciate, but again . . .

I suspect that Sydney has become infected with the idea of change for change's sake, camouflaged as "redevelopment" and "beautification". It would be nice, just for once, if things would change to achieve some definite end, even if it's not worthwhile.

2002-08-14T01:20:00.000+10:00

I have one observation to make before I go to bed.

You know you're a role-player when you can be watching a series like "24" and, when Kiefer Sutherland cuts off a dead agent's thumb to identify him later, you don't react in horror but by thinking, "You know, we should have done that to the Russians we shot on Saturday night."

2002-08-14T01:01:00.000+10:00

Well.

I don't make any promises.

I'm 21, male, single, and residing in the slightly-overrated harbourside city of Sydney, Australia. I'm also attending the slightly-underrated University of Sydney, currently scrounging for the last eight credit points' worth of History to finish up my triple-major in Studies in Religion, English, and History for my Bachelor of Arts.

This semester - assuming I pass - won't be my last by a long shot, though, as I intend to continue on to Honours in Studies in Religion next year. My specific areas of interest are new religious movements, especially neo-pagan and occult movements, but my Honours thesis will probably be on representations of Satan in modern, Western, Anglophone cinema.

I'll also be writing on the religious themes of the excellent Garth Ennis-penned graphic novel series Preacher. Read it. Now.

While I'm giving orders, separate yourselves. Those of who you already read and love comics (as if there's a multiplicity of people reading this damn thing anyway) go and read Warren Ellis' superlative series Planetary. Those of you who have yet to acquire the mental crack-habit that is the modern graphic novel, go and read Ellis' equally-accomplished series Transmetropolitan.

Those of you who already have read either of these publications are hereby commended, rather than commanded.

At this point, six months ago, I might have directed you to Ellis' forum at Delphi, but it's closing down now. Go there if you like, witness the death throes of what was once not only a big part of my life (and the only escape from the drudgery of office work that I commanded) but also the biggest Anglophone comics-related discussion venue out there on the Web.

Speaking of work, which I barely was, I no longer work in an office but instead command the exalted position of behind-the-counter guy at about the only worthwhile gaming store in Sydney, Games Paradise. I enjoy it.

I am, in fact, a geek. I belong to SUTEKH, the role-playing, science fiction, fantasy, and pop-culture society at the University of Sydney. I play in three regular role-playing campaigns, and am still technically part of another which seems, at this point in time, defunct. I play, in turns, the completely insane summoner of Things Not Meant To Be called Franklin Castle, the competent cavalryman Taran of Ilian, and the Cockney wheelman Jared "Widowmaker" Rickman from Room 39. I'd like to believe that I'm also still playing the Fastest Man Alive, Richochet, a core member of the Victory League out of Kirby City. But enough of this foolishness, as Cobra Commander would say if Chris Latta weren't dead.

It really sucks that Chris Latta is dead.

None of you bastards even know what I'm talking about, do you?

I chat frequently in the Religion:1 room at Yahoo! It's a good place, which I have been frequenting for well over five years. This weblog is, indeed, entirely the fault of Nissa, known to most as brigantias_fire. Blame her.

I really like Pete Abram's Sluggy Freelance, Tatsuya Ishida's Sinfest, and The Brunching Shuttlecocks. Neither would my life be complete without Dan Savage's column for the Portland Mercury. I also recommend Garth Franklin's Dark Horizons for all your movie rumours and news. They're good sites.

That will have to do for now.