The Shocking Endeavors of Brennan & Smythe

I've been having a hard time coming up with anything to write about lately, as you may have noticed. So instead of trolling news posts to pretend I'm relevant for five minutes I'd rather practice technique. With this in mind I've decided to write about the adventures of our Trails of Cthulhu group. None of the stories here will be official campaigns, so I wont spoil anything and the characters are original creations of Brian and I. Without further ado; I present the Shocking Endeavors of Brennan & Smythe.


From the Desk of Prof. Alfred Smythe, Arkham Univeristy:

I had only been to Thailand once before my good friend Patrick brought the Newberg case to my attention. Needless to say, a drunken spring holiday spent in unwholesome company did not leave me well prepared to investigate the possibility of an indigenous Cult. According to Mr. Newberg (via Patrick) a Mr. Silas Portfeld, Newberg's local liaison, had failed to make a monthly check in some four months hence. There had yet to be any word from him and, given how much of Mr. Portfeld's work apparently involved wandering the Siamese countryside, this was cause for concern.

Our client was interested in breaking into the rubber industry and had decided that exploiting the rural Siamese population was just the thing for it. Mr. Portfeld had been scouting communities and laying the groundwork for future relations. Much of this revolved around mesmerizing local rubes with meaningless jargon and convincing them to negotiate with the local authorities on his behalf. I've no love lost for such degrading interference, so I was heartened to learn that Portfeld had all but struck out. He seemed to be having some measure of success, however, with a small village on the island of Ko Surin, in the Phang Nga province. The locals seemed quite interested in establishing not just a broader dialog with Newberg's organization, but also with breaking ground for a factory. The correspondences we'd been given in regards to the case immediately made clear why we'd been contacted.

It seemed the villagers were rather preoccupied with what they called "The All-Embracing Sea", the expanse of water surrounding the island. In fact, the reports provided described a rather vibrant and bizarre religious life centered on this Sea. Portfeld had in his writings described men industriously carving great beasts of unnerving design into the living wood of trees surrounding the village. A description made all the more disturbing by the phrase "wood of a pale red color, with a thin black pitch that pooled at strange angles to the earth." I will never understand Man's willingness to overlook concerning details when there is gain to be had. For; like a sailor recently ashore, good Silas had been more concerned with bending the locals over a barrel than with what he'd end up paying.

Fuck You, You'll Read It

When I was a kid the only thing I ever really wanted was to have real, true love. I know its kinda weird to have a guy admit that but its true, and that goal has played a massive role in my life. I've always prioritized meaningful, intimate personal relationships over everything else; friends should be absolute confidants and partners should be nurtured and embraced as though they are part of the self. This makes me a support character in my own life, and I like it that way. I met the woman who was to be my wife when I was nineteen years old and once it became clear that that was how things were going down I wanted nothing more than to give my life supporting her in her pursuits. I love being a husband, being the support network for my wife, who I met when I was nineteen.

Complete and unconditional love is the only thing I've ever wanted and I got it before I was old enough to drink. How the fuck do you find a new ambition after that? What would be the point? I can (and have) make more friends, but the pressure to socialize is diminished in the face of the ongoing intergalactic genital high-five that is my wife. I could get really into a career if I really wanted to alienate my wife and betray every principle to which I've given myself. I know I sound like I'm bitching but I'm really not, its just struck me lately how awkward it is in our society to not really respect self-sufficiency or independence, which made me think about how I came to that place.

I don't value being independent because none of us really are, and the insidious lie that we are is the source of some very deep-seated issues. Self-sufficiency is just laughable as soon as you aren't completely alone, why work hard just to keep yourself going when a group cooperating provides for more people with less individual effort. The problem here arises from the fact that since I don't value those things I also don't understand a lot of the barriers people put up around themselves.

If there is a bullet point to take away from this its that I'm socially retarded and I don't fucking understand why you aren't, but I don't know. Fuck you, you read it.

Citation Needed

I wanted to try something new this week, so I decided to share some of the random trivia I've picked up over the years, combined with some random shit I made up. See if you can figure out which is which without googleing it.

*A woman once caused a two car pile up because she was shaving her pussy.

*Roald Amundsen, the first explorer to reach the south pole, wrote his name on the pole with his piss. Thanks to Antarctica's low annual rainfall it can still be seen today.

*The phrase "A dingo ate my baby" originated as a punchline in the Australian comedy skit show "Crikey". Unfortunately, the prop baby used in the scene was eaten by a dingo.

*A pregnant female goldfish is known as a twit.

*Moray eel's are the only non-mammalian vertebrate to lactate. They use it as a way to blind prey before killing them.

*Female ferrets die via overheating if the don't have sex while in heat.

*Bats always turn left after exiting caves.

*The reason the French call orgasms "le petit mort" is because they take 3.8 hours off of your life ever time you have one.

*There was an octopus in Germany named Otto who juggled his tank-mates, used rocks to try to break the glass in his tank, and shot water at lamps to turn them off because he didn't like being out in the light.

*The stat that every year the average person eats 5 spiders in their sleep is skewed by a group of spider farming Appalachian hill folk who have a very rare form of parasomnia which forces them to eat spiders while sleep walking. Accounting for this group the actual number is .0000000001 spiders per year.

The Z Word

I've been playing a great deal of Dying Light lately, and its brought to mind some issues I have with the whole zombie genre. First, let me say that I'm not one of the hipster/geeks that hates zombies because they're all mainstream now. I will gladly agree that zombie fiction has gotten entirely too pervasive and easily exploited. Do we need zombie romance movies? No, that's fucking gross. Does almost every threat to mankind need to be zombies? Fuck no, try harder Hollywood. I love zombie fiction, largely because of the fact that the zombies are the least interesting part of it. Its a rich, effective device that allows all sorts of commentary and satire to thrive when used well.

My concern rises from the habit in zombie fiction to over value the zombies themselves. Now, I don't mean that the hungry dead shouldn't be a pressing and inevitable threat, but zombies (real, shambling, moaning corpses; if your zombies still have any chance of being "cured" i.e. victims of a communicable anger problem, you're just being dishonest) are scary enough on their own. Zombies are a pervasive, constant and yet still surprising concern. They can and will be everywhere, you will never really be safe from them and they can and do just come out of nowhere. This makes for an amazing threat... so stop fucking giving them superpowers. Considering how often the basic premise of so many zombie movies is that man is the real monster (all of which after 1970 are lazy and derivative), the zombies themselves ought not be magic superbeings.

In games like Dying Light the whole idea is that mankind is fucking terrible given even the slightest provocation. The high number of heavily mutated undead is unnecessary because the normal undead often come out of nowhere. Really, the greatest threats are being surprised by zombies (the primary fear of which comes from a problem the game resolves in the first 5 minutes of cut scene), the consumptive evil of other survivors, or just the straight up vile asscovering of the political forces deciding the fate of the survivors. I could be okay with them saying that the fresh dead are still limber enough to be runners, sure, scary and understandable. However, some zombies being nine feet tall and built like the Goddamn Mountain puts a look on my face like a disappointed sibling. Pretty much all of the enemies in the game stop being particularly difficult to kill about half way through so making special monsters that are marginally more difficult kinda cheapens the narrative.

This is, admittedly a very niche argument. I realize that me bitching about the narrative and design weaknesses of a genre predicated upon the wakening of the dead, hungry and mindless, to murder and consume the living is yelling in the dark at best. However, as we've discussed previously, our fiction both shapes and represents us, so allowing and encouraging shitty fiction is a disservice to all of us. Also, I'm a huge geek, this is what I do.

The Path to Agoraphobia is Paved with Good Intentions, Poorly Executed.

Over the course of the last several years I've pretty much completely lost the ability to functionally interact with people. I'm not completely sure when it started but it probably had something to do with the fact that I stopped leaving the house. There was a period in which I could only afford to leave the house if I was looking for or going to work and even then bus fare was a prohibitive expense. Preexisting antisocial traits started to assert themselves more aggressively as my whole interaction with society was relegated to news-bites and poorly contextualized academia (thanks higher education!). Over time habits were established in such a way that I could no longer come up with reasons to go out. After I was told outright not to get a fucking job the idea of leaving the house fell even farther from a necessary evil to make ends meet to the least interesting or meaningful way to waste my wife's money, so I just stopped.

I've come to understand, with some work, what a bad idea this was. Justification became rule, rule became habit and habit became neurosis. Now the thought of doing anything at all, much less anything out of the house is accompanied by a combination of panic, apathy, and rationalizing my inaction. Now I can't even trust myself to be able to break the habit without outsourcing my motivation to someone else. I will get better, I have to.

Thanks for playing therapist, beloved internet. Now I'm going to go psyche myself up so I might be able to do something today.

Won't Somebody Think of the Children

I hate children. I hate children for a very specific reason; their fucking parents. Now, naturally I'm making a hyperbolic statement. I am pretty sure I don't hate all children, not all parents are horrible fucking cunts intent on inflicting their idiotic, cunt children on the world. But most parents, and by extension most children, I feel are unfit for public exhibition.

I should say, I'm not a parent, I wont be a parent and I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for parents. That lack of sympathy arises from a pretty logical, if unpopular, place. It's their fault. We know what causes it, we know how to prevent it (in any number of simple, effective ways), and we have methods to remove the problem if a child pops up before people are ready to be parents. Ignorance is no excuse, beliefs are no excuse, culture is no fucking excuse. I understand that some of the options above are unpleasant or somewhat unacceptable to some folk. Those people are fucking wrong. I don't really (honestly, I swear) like to be that dogged under most circumstances, but I'm pretty justified here for one simple reason. If you aren't ready (emotionally, physically, financially, socially etc. etc. ad infinitum) for a child, you are creating a person and starting them at a deficit. Raising a kid well is hard enough without playing with a handicap.

I'm not saying that people who grow up in non-optimal situations are just unavoidably fucked. I'm not saying that if you grow up rich and well accounted for you'll be well adjusted. I am saying that its irresponsible to the point of fucking disgust to raise a child in a situation where that child is not your absolute priority. I will freely admit that I've been a bit shaded by my experiences on this topic, but this is one of those situations where if you fuck up the consequences range far and wide. A bad parenting situation won't just ruin the kid, it can fuck up everyone that cares about that kid. Its not just hard, its heartbreaking, loving someone who is a victim of neglect or emotional abuse. We make jokes about people who weren't hugged enough as kids, but people who come from homes that weren't really adjusted for them can be really and painfully fucked up.

I hate children. I hate them because our society overvalues parenthood without valuing the skills it takes to be a parent. I hate them because some people's adherence to tradition supersedes their capacity for rational thought. I hate them because people's need for vainglorious validation, their ridiculous, vicarious immortality, overwrites their ability to produce fully-functional people. I hate them because there is a reliable percentage of the population that, on some level, equates their child to a particularly clever pet. I hate what we do to children.

Sea Life Superpowers

We've been talking a lot about some really depressing and upsetting shit lately and we're tired of it. So for today I will just talk about something that I love: Sea Life. So the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. at 3.6 billion years ago we find evidence of life starting up and we get multi-cellular organisms 1.2 million years ago and 530 million years ago we have found the first footprints of land life (though there may have been some before. I bring up this timeline because I want to point out how much time sea life has had to evolve. We get some amazing adaptations and specializations thanks to this, and that is what I want to talk about today. Basically if you wanted to find real life iterations of pokemon, the ocean would be the place to do it.

I have lots of favorites when it comes to animals that live in the ocean, but I am only going to talk to you about 4 of them because otherwise I would be typing all day. 

Ostracod: This one a simple little family of crustacean and is kind of unremarkable and tiny: around .2 - 30 mm long.

But there are two reasons it is one of my favorite sea creatures. Firstly, they have two Dicks which launch spring-loaded sperm that can be up to 6 times longer than the male ostracod, which is funny to me. I don't care if you think that's immature, dicks are fucking hilarious. The second is a defensive mechanism that it uses. Light from the surface doesn't travel very far underwater. There is no light past 1000 meters in the ocean, and rarely any good amount of light lower than 200 meters. This helps sea life hide from predators, which is where the ostracod comes into its own. 

That is an ostracod using bioluminescence to escape a cardinal fish. If a predator swallows an ostracod it releases two chemicals which create light when mixed. This makes the predator very visible, which attracts larger fish that want to eat the original predator. This is a great example of a biological fuck you to predators: "eat me and you get eaten". 

Electric Eel: A couple of quick facts I need to get out of the way: though called an eel they are actually a breed of knife fish. Also, these don't live in the sea, but rather in South American rivers, but I decided to include it anyway because it's got motherfucking lightning powers.

These creatures generate up to 600 volts of electricity to stun prey or predators, and sometimes even kill them. On its own, this isn't enough to kill an adult human, since it only produces 1 amp of current. That being said, depending on the path the current took and duration of the shock it could potentially stop a heart. Oh, and they can strobe their current for up to an hour. The other cool thing an electric eel can do is electrolocate. This is similar to echolocation in base principal. The eel generates an electric field and is able to sense any disturbances in the field. It can do this to avoid predators or hunt prey.

Mantis Shrimp: The Oatmeal has covered this little beauty before in much better detail and with a passion that I can only hope to come close to, but nevertheless, I present the Mantis Shrimp!

And it is not just a pretty face! It can see thousands more variations in color than a Human being. Every color you have ever seen; every sunset, every work of art, has been seen through the interaction of three cones in the eye, mantis shrimp have fucking sixteen (the Oatmeal covers this in pretty great detail but its amazing enough to bear some poetry). Also, those claw like appendages on the front of the shrimp shoot out as fast as a bullet, boiling the water around them (though not for long enough to cause lasting damage by itself). And if the bullet claw misses the target, the pressure wave that the claw creates dismembers its prey instead. This amazing little creature can punch holes in glass aquariums, and it is only 12 inches long at the most! Mantis shrimp are amazing little engines of power!

Mimic Octopus: I have a fondness for cephalopods in general. This class of animal include squids, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and octopuses, and my favorite one of them (and probably of all animals in general) is the mimic octopus, also known as the Ditto of the sea. Watch This video:

Hell yeah! Mimicry isn't unique to this creature; coral snakes have a very deadly venom and a very distinctive pattern, but the Mexican milk snake, which is not at all venomous, mimics the coral snakes pattern with a minor different color order (To tell the difference remember this: Red on black, you're OK Jack, yellow and red, you'll wind up dead). Mimic octopuses not only use mimicry but raise it to an art form. Animals that mimic tend to pick one thing and focus on it. This octopus flips them all off with all 8 of its tentacles and turns into 15 different/distinct other animals. And that's just what we have observed. After all, we have only known about this animal since the 90s. This camouflage is not just for escaping predators either, it hunts with it too. It has been observed mimicking a crab looking for a potential mate then devouring other crabs when they got close enough. This is a fantastic use of an evolved defensive trait!

So there you have it, Just a few of my favorite sea creatures. I thought of a bunch more while writing this, so I might do another one of these soon. We have only explored a tiny amount of the ocean. Just imagine what other kinds of badass life could be hiding out there!