Rat Madness, Gaming Events

Earlier in the week I noted that the coming Lunar new year would be the Year of the Rat; specifically a metal rat. Because 2020 is also famous for being a cyberpunk year, this obviously meant it would be the Year of the Stainless Steel Rat. Which means I've started plans for an appropriately named cyberpunk convention. This was the beginning of a descent into a madness. January 17 was the first anniversary of the death of author Sam Savage; in his honour I decided to add over a thousand words to my previous entry on Wikipedia for his most famous novel, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan_Lowlife, the story of a highly literate rat that acquires sapience through eating Finnegans Wake, obviously rereading it in the process. As my review from 2008 argued, this is a terribly morose story, indeed "This is the saddest story I have ever heard", to use the appropriate quote and I have bought multiple copies to literary friends. Then the following day was the anniversary of the death of Bishop Hatto, who has a cruel legend of burning peasants alive, and then being attacked himself by an army of rats which, through the Victorian Secular Lobby, has become a day of reminder to religious organisations and their unfair tax benefits and public subsidies etc. Further, I have started what will become a public environmental campaign with a citoyen in Canberra for the establishment a memorial to extinct Australian species - it begins on February 18, a day already announced in memory for the extinction of the first mammal due to climate day, the Bramble Cay melomys. I have this mental image of erecting a giant stainless steel rat in Canberra, which has multiple levels of appropriateness. I haven't even had pet rats for years, but I think I might some weird mental version of rat-bite fever.

There has also been a number of gaming events in the past few days as well. I am currently composing this at Arcanacon, which at least has a few hundred people in attendance. It's a diverse and accepting event, of various nerdy ventures and makes for a good opportunity to catch up with a number of people from the community, many of whom I only see at such conventions. The RPG Review Cooperative has a second-hand games stall for members, which has seen a lot of interest from member-vendors and the conference attendees. The day previous was lunch and gaming with Jacobin B., and Damien B., where it was a bit of dual birthday lunch for myself and Damien. Gifts were exchanged and I made various dips, a vegan version of chakhchoukha, and a cherry cake, and then run a session of Dungeons & Dragons for our irregular Charlemagne's Paladins story, where we continue with a third session of the The Lost City of Cyrenaica. Further, on Thursday night was our regular session of Megatraveller, where we played the "lawful" side of a space-pirates game, which hurtles towards a character and profession admixture like Burroughs' Nova Express. Pretty impressive work by our GM to run two sets of characters in the same setting in different sessions towards the same end-point. In addition to all this I have been making progress on Imagined Worlds, my pending book on geography and astronomy for speculative fiction and RPGs in particular, making use of a famous essay Crimes Against Mimesis, but now applied to geography, and also for RPG Review 45, which was technically due at the end of December; the last issue of the year is always late.