Blackmoor Vituperative

Even Lovecraftian cultists love Christmas!

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.

— “The Festival” (Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1925)

On this day in 1997, the world learned about Festivus, the Seinfeld Christmas alternative. Let the airing of grievances begin!

I use a lot of found images in my online RPGs, to help set the scene. Sometimes, the image is almost, but not quite, what I want. Cropping, healing brush, and clone stamp solve most of those problems, but once in a while I find the perfect image… but it needs something more complex to make it what I want.

In this case, I found this illustration of a Pathfinder alchemist goblin, but I wanted the background to be black instead of white. So I looked for a tutorial on changing this in Photoshop, and found this one on StackExchange. The basic technique is to use the original image as its own layer mask. I’ll create a duplicate of the layer, desaturate and invert it, pasting the greyscale result into the original layer’s layer mask.

I start with my flattened image.

I then Desaturate the image.

I then duplicate this layer, Invert it, then select and fill white areas until everything I’d like to be opaque is white, and everything I want fully transparent is black. This was tricky, because I want the smoke translucent, but the goblin itself to be opaque.

Now I press CTRL+A to select the entire image, and CTRL+C to copy the combined greyscale result.

I then selected the layer with my original image, made sure nothing was selected in my image, and selected Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All to create a layer mask on my original layer.

I then ALT+Clicked in the layer mask icon to enter direct edit mode, then pasted the greyscale image I had just copied into there.

I then clicked on my original layer to exit the layer mask direct edit, and tada, I have my semi-transparent goblin.

Now I just add a black background layer, and I am done. It’s not perfect, but it will do for my purposes.

It irks me that people so consistently misunderstand the world “soul“. A whole psuedo-religion has grown up around this misunderstanding.

Finally sat down to watch “Henchman: The Al Leong Story“. I really wanted to pay attention to this, so I didn’t just play it while I work (which is usually what I do). That’s why it has taken me so long to view it.

I really enjoyed this documentary. It gave a good overview of his career, and I learned some things that even I, the founder of (as far as I know) the first and only Al Leong Fan Club, The Golden Horde, did not know.

I wish the background music were not so loud during the interviews, though. More than once, I wanted to shout at the screen, “TURN THE MUSIC DOWN!”

Even so, I suspect that I will watch this DVD again. 🙂

Also, I really should start updating the fan club web site again.

Just finished watching the final episode of “Z Nation” on Netflix (5 seasons total). Considering how many shows I haven’t even bothered to watch the entire first season of (Cloak & Dagger, Evil Sabrina, Star Trek Discovery, Game Of Thrones, etc.), that’s pretty high praise. “Z Nation” combines humour, action, tragedy, gruesome effects, and an appealing cast. It’s a damned good show.

What’s most surprising is that it was made by Asylum. Asylum making a show worth watching is like finding great sushi in a gas station bathroom.

Just finished “The Boys” on Amazon Prime. Great cast, great production values, pretty good cinematography when they could hold the camera still (the sooner “drunken monkey cam” dies a horrible painful death, the better). If only they had used those resources to tell a story that wasn’t an awful piece of garbage. WOW. Eight hours of my life, wasted.

I kept watching because the cast was great and the production values were great. With those, you would have to actively try to make a horrible a piece of crap to keep from making at least a halfway decent show. Which is apparently what they did, because it was a horrible piece of crap right up to the very end. Just a beautifully made, well acted pile of garbage. I kept thinking, “It has to get better…” Nope.

This may well be the worst superhero show I have ever seen. Worse than the recent “Titans” TV show. Worse than “Mutant X”. Worse than “Street Hawk”. Worse than “Black Scorpion”.

If you want to see a show with the premise, “What if nearly everyone in the world were sociopaths?”, watch Fox News. Skip “The Boys”.

People say we are in a gilded age of this or that. Fantasy TV. Superhero movies. Whatever.

I am not sure I agree.

How many Batmen have we seen? How many Spider-Men? How many Avengers movies? Can you recall what happened in which movie? In which one did Quicksilver die? In which one did Quicksilver rescue people from a house? The colors blur in my memory until it is a mottled brown expanse.

Take Spider-Man. Some people like Tom Holland in the role. Some don’t. I don’t think I have an opinion. It’s like trying to have an opinion about one squawk in a cacophony of geese. It’s all just noise to me now. A Spider-Gwen movie might rise above that noise like a black and pink bouy in a sea of diluted mud, but it might not.

The stories told by Uncle Remus in “Song Of The South” are the stories of African-Americans. “Song Of The South” was based on stories compiled by Joel Chandler Harris — a white man, yes, but they were the stories of African-Americans, and Harris tried his best to tell them faithfully. Joel Chandler Harris was a journalist who actually cared about the people whose stories he was sharing. It’s easy to say, “Oh, those should have been shared by African-Americans,” but at the time, that wasn’t an option. If he hadn’t collected them, those stories might be lost now.

As for the movie, it is not the racist propaganda that people who have never seen it assume it to be. If anything, it’s the opposite. For example, it shows a world where black and white children play together — in a movie made at the height of the Jim Crow era. The songs won awards, and the wonderfully talented James Baskett won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Uncle Remus — the first African American to win one (he wasn’t allowed to accept it at the main ceremony, due to idiotic 20th century racism). The worst thing that can be said about the movie is that the live action parts are dull, aside from when James Baskett is singing.

I know it’s just a dumb Disney movie, but I wish people recognized that “Song Of The South” was a small step forward for our society, at a time we really needed it. As a work of art and a cultural milestone, it and the people who made it deserve far more respect than they get.

I made some notes during “Avengers Endgame” (2019). Sadly, the condensation from my icewater rendered my nearly incomprehensible handwriting completely incomprehensible.

But I’ll try to decipher it. There are, as you might reasonably expect, “spoilers” below. (If you care about that. Personally, I think the movie is entirely predictable and that “spoilers” don’t apply. But you do you.)

• 20 minutes – Get on with it
• 40 minutes – Finally, some action… briefly
• 75 minutes – Thor is … The Dude
• 80 minutes – Is the movie going to start, finally?
• 105 minutes – Nebula is hard core
• 115 minutes – I know what this reminds me of: the extended edition of “Lord Of The Rings”, where they included all of the extra scenes which were interesting in a “DVD extras” kind of way, but which weren’t included in the theatrical release because they would have slowed it down and had people checking the time. All of these “Ant Man irons his pants” type scenes would be great in an extended director’s cut, to watch after one has seen the two-hour theatrical release. On the other hand, one of these scenes made me tear up a little bit. (I do not remember which one.)
• 150 minutes – Blah blah blah. Thanos loves to hear himself talk. Why does every wanna-be mass-murdering fanatic want to bore people to death listening to his manifesto?
• 170 – Can’t make it to the funeral on the day your dear friend is being interred? No problem! It’s a green screen funeral!

Final thoughts…

I thought it was an okay movie. It was entirely what I expected, which is what it is. It was a little more predictable than most of the movies that led up to it, but that’s a given, really. I mean, did anyone not say to themselves, “This is where Captain Marvel shows up,” about thirty seconds before everyone looks up and notices the big space ship isn’t shooting at them anymore? But you can’t really blame the movie for that. They set up the story arc and the characters in the previous few movies, and at this point it’s just dominos falling. But aside from all that, I enjoyed it, once it got going (which was a little over an hour after it started).

However, I do have some problems with the plot. As I have mentioned before, Thanos’ plan to cut the universe’s population would put us back to 1971 population levels. Not even 50 years. Whoop-de-doo (in the big scheme of things). On the other hand, what do you suppose would happen if the Earth’s population were to double suddenly? Like say, five years after everyone has adapted to those people being gone? All of the jobs have been filled or eliminated. Food supplies have been reduced to what’s needed. People who lost loved ones have mourned and moved on, and in many cases have remarried.

Imagine the chaos, the misery, the starvation and death that would follow when the population doubles in an instant. This is not a happy ending.