NEW
Comic Reviews 9/1
Book Reviews 3/8
New RPG Links 3/16
MUSIC BITS
Notes in Music 3/8
Concert Review 3/8

I took the above image from the Litigants web page. Litigants is a really cool zine I ran across on the web.


This page contains links to things I find interesting or useful. Sometimes I'll have quite extensive annotations to links; musings poured out onto the keyboard late at night or when I'm, wired on caffeine and the mood strikes me. It's pity I can't post up stuff while driving fast, listening to loud music; that's when I seem to get most of my best ideas. The last job I worked at was pretty good that way; 70 miles an hour for about half an hour. Came up with some cool shit that way.
Things I'm interested in or find useful: comic books, techno, knowledge sources on the web. Have fun; I hope I can show you something you didn't know before; email me with cool stuff, neat sites.
Thanks for dropping by. Come again and leave something of the joy you bring with you.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
MUSIC
BOOK REVIEWS
LINKS
Role Playing Games

Music Links

AUM
Hyperreal
The Place For Techno Info


A great site and distributor of death, black, viking, and heavy metal. Because I can't figure out why the image isn't a link to the site, the link is www.centurymedia.com

An absolutely wonderful record label and distributor! They carry everything to fufill satanic, speed thrash, Japanese noise, droning electronic needs. Bands like Bongzilla "sludgy hate-filled groovecore featuring three kind tracks that will send you spiralling into stony oblivion! Smoke up, Johnny!" or Instant Cold Commando "Horrific noise rumblings from Sweden". It's worth going to the site just to read the music descriptions. You can buy their catalog online and they take all credit cards. And they have the best Hold music anywhere. Check it out and spend lots of money and become twisted and deformed by the hideous noises.


PURE ACID MIX TAPES
A great source for DJ mix tapes. Everything from deep house, terrorcore gabber(PRAISE JESUS!),Goa, slammin' hardtrance, and everything in between. No online orders yet but a wonderful selection.


NOTES Cold Meat Industries is an interesting label that only publishes Swedish, and a little bit of Norwegian, goth, quasi industrial stuff. Just got a 2 disc sampler from them via Relapse. Puissance is what happens when really depressed kids live in a country with really strict gun laws. "Some day the earth will burn...in the luscious flames of armageddon." all done to a sorta thrash/classical sound. REALLY GOOFY!

I've been getting into industrial again and have run across a couple of really good sites.
This is a really good starting point for industrial music links. They'll have streaming MP3s up soon.

A kick ass 4 hour weekly radio show playing nothing but serious indie industrial. The shows are archived in Real Media and there's a playlist for each show. I've been listening to it a lot. Very, very fine.

CONCERT REVIEW
Kevorkian Death Cycle, Spahn Ranch, Switchblade Symphony, Front Line Assembly: Nov1, The Palace, Los Angeles
    Arrived during the last part of Kevorkian's set; not a bad industrial band; guttural howlings over synths and drums. Spahn Ranch was pretty good; the lead singer was definitely from the Ministry of Silly Walks School of dancing. That's something that going to raves have spoiled me for: white people who can dance. This dude was practically epileptic.
    Then Fire Marshall came in and invoked the Federal statute the requires at least one opening band to suck. In other words, Switchblade Symphony started to play. It really wasn't that they were a so-so Goth band playing at a pretty heavy industrial event, it was mainly the lead singer's in-between song patter. BEWARE THE PERKY GOTH, MY SON! Her incessant cheerleading was really, really annoying. However, I became a little more sympathetic as their set went on and cries from the audience of "Fuck you, Bitch!", etc got louder and more frequent. What must it be like to face that kind of shit night after night and still be professional and get through the set? Her singing was pretty bad, though. I wanted to give her a bucket to see if she could carry a tune in it.
    Then Front Line Assembly took the stage. Great opening; very sci-fi. Low droning filled the air and blue lights slowly swept the air. Then the music kicked in. Very good, very harsh industrial. They've added a guitarist who looked like he just stepped off the cover of Cock Rock Guitar Player Magazine; long hair, cowboy boots, flying vee guitar. Very out of place given that the other members of FLA were very much in the industrial/shaved heads/combat boots mode. It was a good gig.
    An interesting thing was the music that the DJ played between the sets. Really good industrial music. I have no idea if the cuts were new industrial music or old. If they were new cuts, industrial music has really improved in the past years. I'm going to have to check some stuff out; maybe pick up a few comps at Vinyl Fetish. Drop me an email if any of you have recommendations.



Back to Table of Contents
I'm going to start posting book reviews of books that I've read recently.
Comic Books
I'm also going to start posting comic book reviews

Unicorn's Blood by Patricia Finney
A really good Elizabethan spy thriller. Prods and Papists looking for Elizabeth's diary that she wrote when she was 14 and near death and might contain certain dangerous details. So Bess sets her midget tumbler and a Jewish inquistor on its trail. Lots of great color including details of Elizabeth's morning toilet. You can buy it at amazon.com So go buy it!

An Exchange Of Hostages by Susan Matthews
A science fiction novel where the Chief Medical Officer on a warship is also the Inquisitor. Andrej Kosciusko arrives at the Inquisitor Training Station after having completed 8 years of residency at a prestigious medical school. Family honor requires him to enter the military and his medical background places him as a medical officer. He hates the thought of torturing people but as his training progresses he hates more the realization that he enjoys, and is very skilled at torture. He takes great pleasure in skillfully, thoroughly, physically, destroying his subjects(?), prisoners(?). This is a very disturbing, very good book. You can buy it at amazon.com So go buy it!

The Club Dumasby Arturo Perez-Reverte
A detective novel about the authentication search for a book on black magic from 17th century Venice. One of the characters is also trying to trace the authenticity of a couple of, what look like, original chapters of The Three Musketeers. Nobody is what they seem to be and the bodies begin to pile up in Spain, Portugal, and France. And at a shadowy party at a chateau in France, a bearded semiotican from Bologna makes a cameo appearance. It's a good book. You can buy it at amazon.com So go buy it!

The Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series by Laurell K. Hamilton
The series starts out gory and ends up(I've read 6 books of the series, the Science Fiction Book Club has put out 2 compilations of 3 books apiece) gory and bent. Bonus! The author talks of the series as alternate history but the only thing I've seen is preternatural species: vamps, weres, sidhe, nagas, etc. No mention of historical changes.
Anita has the ability to raise the dead and works for a company in St. Louis that does that for law firms, cops, etc. She also works as a consultant on preternatural species for the cops. She's hired by the vampire Master of the City(St. Louis) to find out who's killing vampires. She's called in to investigated really brutal killings that involved humans being eaten. Things like that.
Just (end of October) got done with reading the latest book in the series, Blue Moon and I've started to have a problem with Hamilton's universe. OK, magic, vampires, werewolves, trolls, zombies, etc. No porblem with these. However, there are some internal consistency issues that I think she needs to address. A major plot point of the book revolves around werewolf behavior and how ingrained and instinctual it is. I'd buy that if the werewolves were born lycanthorpes but they're not. They're humans who have been infected by a magical disease and turn into animals. All it would take is a mention that lycanthorpy also changes behavior patterns but there isn't and it sorta detracts from the series.

Let's talk about the novels of Richard Calder. Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things (spot a pattern?), and Cythera. Very decadent. Dead Girls starts off cyberpunk, then heads into quantum nanofash. Calder was living the expat life in Nongkai, a Thai town on the Laotian border, when he wrote the Dead series. It shows. The entire series is permeated with lush eroticism, scenes of squalor, and violence.
Iggy is a Brit living in post millenium Thailand. His girlfriend works as an assassin for Mama Kitano, a pornocrat ganglord in Bangkok. Europe mainly exports luxury goods, the most luxurious being Cartier automata, living dolls, female, of course, gynoids.
Dr. Toxicopholus has infected the Cartier gynoids with a virus, an STD, which passes from men who fuck gynoids to human women who give birth to girls who turn into robots, gynoids, slowly starting at puberty.
Iggy's girlfriend is a gynoid who was human.
The book starts our normally enough, cyberpunk like I said. Then the quantum reworking of history by a meta-virus is introduced and the book and series gets really weird.
I don't like to do the "sounds like Nirvana crossed with Bestial Warlust" review thing but if you like Moorcock's Cornelious Chronicles, try Calder.
more histrionic.


The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnet
A really good series of historical novels. The six books in the series are The Game Of Kings, Queen's Play, Disorderly Knights, Pawn In Frankencense, The Ringed Castle, and Checkmate.
This series takes place in Europe during the middle of the 16th century when Mary Tudor was on the English throne. The main character is Francis Lymond, a Scottish laird/mercenary. The historical detail in these novels is great and the battles and fight scenes are really exciting.


I like Jhonen Vazquez's work a lot. SQUEEE! Johnny the Homicidal Maniac



Invisibles rock! Grant Morrison brings the millenium to you! A comic book series that involves all the fin de millenium conspiracies of our time.

This is the cover to The Spider Garden by Michael Manning. This is a graphic novel of tremendous erotica. Very bondage. I'm not usually into bondage but the sleekness and wild permutations and the SF elements of this I found arousing. Beardsley meets the Pander Bros. in the Garden of Shaalis, the Sacred Androgyne. Heavily influenced by the Shunga style of Japanese eroticism. I bought it from NBM a publishing house for European and American graphic novels. Very good site. You can buy online. Go NOW!


TRANSMETROPOLITAN

Transmetropolitan(published by DC under the Vertigo imprint) is some of the best science fiction I've ever read. And I've read a lot of science fiction.
Spider Jerusalem is a journalist who is coaxed back to the CITY(an unnamed megapolis)by the legal threats regarding unwritten books. Spider has spent the last years living as a hermit in the mountains after being hounded out of the CITY by fame and idolization.
Spider returns to the CITY and immediately starts working as journalist at the WORD. The series follows his life as he covers different stories and is involved in different aspects of life in the CITY.
Some of those aspects? People who graft alien DNA onto their own DNA and change shape as a fashion statement. TV(lots and lots of TV). Politics and the presidential election. Drugs(lots of drugs).People who have transformed themselves into clouds of nanobots. Culture shocked suffered by people who are woken out of cryo-freeze into the future of the CITY.
Warren Ellis writes it and Darick Robertson is the artist. Warrens's writing is superb as is his imagination. Spider Jerusalem is vicious, hate filled muckraker, and I mean that in a good way. He is all of the above but Ellis makes him an admirable person as well. Spider's a fanatic, a fanatic for the truth.

Invisibles - The Bomb
Primo Invisibles Site

A Killer List of Invisibles Links

Warren Ellis' Homepage
Warren Ellis is a comic book writer. He's done such books as Hellstorm, Druid, Doom 2099, DV8. His current books are StormWatch and Transmetropolitan. He's one of the best SF writers working in any medium today. He deals in hardcore weirdness and mindbending. Buy anything he's written! (although I can't recommend his run on Excalibur as I haven't read it and am afraid to, 'cuz I'm not into the X books).

I did my little "I'm off to buy comics" skipping dance down to the comic book store recently. Actually I sat in stop and go traffic on Sunset to the comic book store. Meltdown Comics on Sunset just east of Fairfax, on the same block as Toi, which is an ok Thai place with killer décor and it's(Toi) open really late (3 a.m. I think) so it makes for a nice change from rock and roll Denny's to go to after a gig at a club. And that's what they call a major run on sentence folks. Oh, yeah, almost forgot. I read about Meltdown on Sequential Tart, a very fine web site about comics.
Bought two or three weeks worth of books. Herein follow the reviews, the reviews that are on this page, and the books that are reviewed shall be on this page. (like Jello, there's always room for Monty Python).

The Authority #6(Wildstorm): Brief aside; I really enjoyed Lou Perez's, Da Stinky Peon, column at wildstorm.com. Warren Ellis is god. Period. "Hello." "Welcome to Los Angeles." "We're here to hit you." Superhero book dealing with large scale, planetary wide conflicts. Sliding Albion continues its invasion of LA from an Earth sideways to our own. I was slightly irritated by the first few pages as they were just repeats, seen from different angle, of the Stormwatch issue where Jenny Sparks talks about her background. The rest of the issue is a really good battle scene and some background on Jenny leading into the next issue where we meet Jenny's first husband. Who's blue. And part alien. I have a question about the series: How does Angie the Engineer fly? She doesn't have any visble means of propulsion. One of the things that I like about this series is that it takes place on a real Earth. What I mean by that is that real cities are getting thrashed in this series, Moscow, London, and LA (twice). It's not Keystone City, Opal, Metropolis, or Gotham. I live in LA and I was sort of affected by seeing it get demolished; made the book a little more real. Pay alliegance to The Authority. Or get your head kicked in.

Transmetropolitan #26 (DC/Vertigo): Journalist Spider Jerusalem in a future city that he hates and can't write without, chronicling the life that goes on around him. I don't know if I've mentioned this but I really like Warren Ellis' writing. No, really, I'm serious. I think that Transmetropolitan is some of the best science fiction that I've ever read either in novel or comic book form. That being said, I don't think that this is one of the stronger issues of the series. It's comprised of single splash pages accompanied by excerpts of Spider's columns, "I Hate It Here".

Hellblazer #142 (DC/Vertigo): YAY! More Ellis. John Constantine, occult investigator and professional bastard. A few months before the birth of Yeshua bar Joseph aka Jesus, the mother of the Antichrist miscarried. The living fetus was placed in a box which then became an object of great magical power. The box is now owned by a writer who is doing bad things, very bad things. Don't look in his refrigerator. Art by Tim Bradstreet. Tim Bradstreet is an awesome artist better known for his work on Vampire the Masquerade and other comic book covers. Get his book Maximum Black, it has huge amounts of his art.

Hitman #42 (DC): Hitman Tommy Monaghan and his buddy/rival Ringo Chen, who also whacks people, vs. a building full of killers and a little mutant dwarf. It's pure John Woo bullet ballet. Very, very tasty mass carnage with Garth Ennis' trademark moments of humanity amidst the bloodshed. John Mcrea's art is interesting. It's exaggerated to almost the point of caricture but not in the usual superheroic his-biceps-are-larger-than-his-head sense. His art looks like what Hogarth would have done if Hogarth had done comics books rather than paintings.

Blade of the Immortal #26 (Dark Horse): This is Japanese comic book translated and published in the States by Dark Horse. Manji is an undying assassin who has been told that he can die if he kills 1000 evil people. I generally don't like manga but the art is this is why I buy it. The artist, Hiroaki Samura, throws in slightly anachronistic touches that appeal to me. Also the splash pages that he occasionally does, where Manji cuts someone into huge chunks are really interestingly done.

Deathlok #2 (Marvel): Ok, what's with variant covers for an issue 2?! I can understand (vaguely) variant, chrome, holograph covers for an issue 1 ("must.have.more.sales."). But for an issue 2? For those of you who may have tuned in late, this means I bought 2 copies of issue 2. Bongo stupid. ANYWAY! I bought it because of the Leonardo Manco art; the same reason I bought the D'Arque Angel miniseries from Acclaim. I've been into Manco's art ever since Ellis' Druid miniseries. Digression Alert! We have a digression in Sector 4! I really loved that miniseries. Insane people, weird cults, the homonculus of the New Flesh, people getting nailed to oak trees. Warren Ellis is one of the best writers in comics books today. He just sprays ideas all over the place. End digression. I also picked it up because I read in Mania Magazine, another site I regularly hit for comic book news, that Joe Casey has going to bring back the Elektra Assassin-style SHIELD, with Extechop and all the othert weirdness. It's ok. Manco's art is good, a lot of gritty color tones. In the style of layout, epecially the last splash page, you know who he reminds me of? Nick Manabat. Manabat did the Cybernary back up in the first issues of Deathblow. Lush, baroque oils. Then Manabat got brain cancer and died. Major bummer. Casey's writing is so-so. I'll pick up the next few issues and see how it develops.
ROLE PLAYING GAMES
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Click Here for a random Dungeons and Dragons monster. I just got a scanner and found a javascript that allows a random image to come up. It's pretty neat.

What I'm going to be covering here are non-computer role playing games. What I'm going to be concentrating on currently is Kult, a modern horror RPG.


Kult...You Will Never Be Free
This is a site, the best I've found, for the horror role playing game Kult. Kult's a game that could have only come from outside the US. The basic concept is pretty Gnostic, humanity is lied to and kept from its true potential by all gods. Won't say anything more. But if Jack Chick ever found out about Kult, considering his response to something as harmless as D&D, he'd probably suffer a complete bowel prolapse. This is a great site; new Lores, adventures, a lot of good stuff for players and GMs.

These are compilations from the kult-l mailing list dating from a couple of years back to the beginning of March, 1999. They are in Word doc form. Please feel free to download them.
ADVENTURES
This is a collection of different adventures taken from the list; from Epiphany to various fragments that people have posted.
RULES
This is a collection new rules, lores, and sourcebooks taken from the list.
PHILOSOPHY
These are ideas about the Kult universe; the meaning of time; the nature of the Archons; death in Metropolis, stuff like that.

LINKS
Digital Librarian
An astounding list of links arranged by subject. Not much weird stuff but a lot of useful stuff.

The Principia Discordia
This is a Word doc of the High, Holy text of the Discordians. I'm more into them than the Subgenii because I feel that Bob has become a bit too commodified; mugs, tshirts, etc. And, quite frankly, I find the Principia wackier than Subgenii writings.

The Bruce Sterling Online Index
Rastaman's collection of Bruce Sterling pieces on the web. IMHO, Bruce is one of the best, if not the best, SF writer working today. His book Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, Schismatrix, and others are all very, very good. His article in December's or January's Wired on Russia is fantastic. He a great writer: read his stuff.

Email me with suggestions or comments or whatever.

Satan has visited on this page plagues