Book update: Candy Girl by Diablo Cody (the writer of Juno). The life and times of an unlikely stripper. It's quite funny and informative for those of us who have never had the guts/desire to actually step foot in a strip club. It contrasts the sleazy side of the entertainment industry with the lives of "average" women. Some of the rules that the dancers are required to follow (depending on the club) are hilarious. Parts of the story are also quite sad though Cody is such a smart-ass in her writing you can't help but feel some sense of contempt. It's a quick read and I knocked out about 1/5th of the book in a night so I'd recommend it if you're stuck for street-level Shadowrun inspiration.

Movie Update: Saw Watchmen on Saturday. I highly recommend it if you were on the fence about seeing it. It was extremely faithful to the graphic novel which is the highest praise I can offer to any movie based on a comic book. I threw up the devil horns when Ozymandias tossed out his "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" line. The ultra-slow motion opening montage of how the superheroes in this parallel timeline had affected popular culture, such as a Nite Owl painting at an Andy Warhol party and Ozy hanging out at Studio 54, was very cool.

Just watched last night a 2006 French movie, Tell No One. A mystery that leaves you scratching your head sometimes, but it has a shadow team working for the main villain, and the hero survives because of a HIGH loyalty, gang-leader contact.

Reading:

- Recently finished The Night Angel trilogy (Brent Weeks) and it was actually pretty good. It stayed interesting through all three books.
- Recently finished four of the recent MYTH books. The Robert Asprin books are still great reading. The newer two not so much. There's just some spark missing.
- Recently finished The Gladiator by Harry Turtledove. While it's a Teen oriented book, it's still a great story. Crosstime Traffic novel about a timeline where the USSR won the cold war.
- Currently reading The Watchmen graphic novel.
- Currently reading Deadlands Reloaded.

Watching:

- The Sopranos from the first show. I have them ripped so while I'm mucking about with programming, it's playing on my Mac.

Playing:

- Just had to shut down a Shadowrun 4th game. Only two people were coming out and they're playing in my Sunday game.
- GMing a Shadowrun 4th game on alternate Sundays.
- Organizing a Wings of War at work game twice a week.
- Investigating a Wings of War game at a FLGS that I discovered last week.
- Starcraft Broodwar. I thought I'd finished it but now I'm seeing that I only finished the Protoss missions. So I'm at the tail end of the Terran ones and getting ready to run the Zerg side.
- Bioshock. Only when I'm stuck in Starcraft though.

Carl

I did this and had to stop because James Gandolfini was showing up in my dreams and scaring me!

Book Update: Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Fascism by Stephen Dorril. It's a history on the British Union of Fascists and the crackpots who supported Mosley in his rise to power. In a similar vein, I'm also working through Among the Thugs by Bill Buford, a book on modern British street thugs. I want to make London a cool Shadowrun campaign setting again (I mean, come on, it was the second SR setting released but it was never used in any published adventures!) so I'm doing some research on its recent, seedy history.

Playing: Gears of War... the first one. I've never played it before and I typically only buy used games. Anyway, fairly enjoyable. Can be frustrating at first but once you get the hang of using cover, blind fire, and conserving ammo its great fun. The Akira-esque Hammer of Dawn satellite laser system is a hoot to use on "grubs."

Agreed. I didn't care much for the book (yes, I'm a heretic, I know), but I think it works as a movie. I went with two fan boys and a girl who'd never read the book and we all agreed it was very good. Probably the least kid-friendly movie I've seen in a few years though.

-paws

Is that referring to the Deadlands RPG? And what's Wings of War?

Wings of War.

Yes. I'm a fan of western themed RPGs and horror in addition to Cyberpunk. I've seen several good reviews of it over on RPG.net so when I saw it in the local Black and Read (big used book store in the area), I looked it over and picked it up. It does look interesting so now I'm trying to figure out which Savage Worlds core book I need.

I started out back in the 70's as a war gamer, playing Wooden Ships & Iron Men and Richthofen's War among others. So when I spotted Wings of War in my FLGS, I picked up one.

Wings of War is a simple World War I air combat game. Each plane has three attributes; maneuver deck (A-P), damage deck (A and/or B), and damage points. The maneuver deck is used to, well maneuver your plane. You select a card and everyone places theirs in front of the plane then move the plane to the arrow on the card. Some planes like the Fokker Dr.1 take advantage of engine torque so you can turn sharper. The A damage deck is for planes with dual machine guns and B is for single, generally older planes. When you are close enough, your opponent draws from the damage deck associated with your plane.

There are three boxed sets plus one for WWII and four additional card decks (plus two for WWII). There are also 36 pre-painted miniature planes. One set of 12 that represent planes in each of the boxed sets. Each plane comes with four posts (for altitude), a plastic base with the same markings as the card, and a maneuver deck for the plane. I currently have 9 of the miniatures. We're playing it at work. It takes about 45 minutes to play a game so it works well for a quick lunch time Team Building exercise

Well, you did ask

Carl

Currently Reading - Altered Carbon [Richard Morgan]. The 1st part of the Takeshi Kovachs trilogy is a violent, noir, cyberpunk set in the 26th century. Highly recommended !!

The first sequel novel is nothing like it. Broken Angels is good (as I'm reading it right now) but the Blade Runner riffs are gone and have been replaced with Soldier/Starship Trooper homages.

Also Reading/Just Read

- Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh
- Yakuza Diary: Doing Time in the Japanese Underworld by Christopher Seymour

Playing/Just Played

- finally completed the first Gears of War
- currently playing Ninja Gaiden II on Warrior Mode. Hard as hell!
- Waiting for my measly $100 federal refund so I can purchase Twilight Imperium, Third Edition and the Expansion Pack.

Watching

- History of Britain - the Simon Schama documentary from the early '00s. Just finished his American Future series and enjoyed it.
- Will probably start watching The Tudors on DVD with the fiancee.

I enjoyed the first novel. I just couldn't get very far into the second one.

Reading

- I'm still working my way through Broken Angels. I've got a lot of other books on my plate and this one has been on the back burner. Anyway, at first I thought it wasn't (post)cyberpunk-y, like Altered Carbon because it wasn't a Blade Runner knock-off, but the further I get into it the more I realize it absolutely is. I loved the Soul Market scene where the protagonist and his corporate backer bargain shop for cortical stacks of deceased soldiers. Big piles of computer chips containing the memories and the personalities of the recently-deceased... being tossed into buckets with snow shovels.
- If Kenichi Sonoda is wrong, I don't want to be right. Dark Horse's Revised Gunsmith Cats editions offer up a lot of great comics for your buck. GC is manga done right: hyper-detailed settings and objects with simplified but memorable characters. A lot of the newer manga I've seen looks like it was cranked out over a weekend. Most of the panels don't even have backgrounds! Japanese people aren't supposed to be lazy! That's Rob Liefeld and Pat Lee's job!
- I picked up PDFs of WH40K: Dark Heresey, D20 Modern, and Twilight 2013. Reading them. Interesting. D20 Modern has some gorgeous artwork. But I don't want to play it.

Playing

- I test-drove Twilight Imperium 3rd ed. for the first time last Friday. It took a long time to set up but I eventually got the hang of it. It's not a terribly easy game to grasp but it's easy to get the generalities after you've played a few rounds.
- I'm about 90% through Mercenaries 2. This game engine is glitchy as fuck, I think there's too much going on in the game for the XBox 360 processor. I don't think I would recommend it to a casual gamer but it's been relatively fun to play.
- Mirror's Edge and Ninja Gaiden 2... arrrgh, I hate you SO MUCH right now! You don't even return my calls.

Watching

- saw Star Trek. As a long-time Trekkie I have to say I loooooved it.
- watched City of Men on DVD. Sort of a sequel to the Brazilian film City of God. If you want a good representation of what life in the Seattle Barrens is like, check out anything to do with the Rio favelas. Dangerous, heart-breaking and gorgeous. Also recommend BOPE and it's exploration of the corrupt and violent world of the Brazilian national police.

If you like that kinda thing, have a read of Peter F Hamilton's Mindstar trilogy or Neil Asher's Polity books.

Market Forces by Richard Morgan is interesting - British cyberpunk from the Corporate viewpoint.

Reading.
Legend [David Gemmel] - axe wielding fantasy hero Druss inspires his men and stands for his beliefs like a stubborn rock, while they defend a castle against overwhelming odds. Gotta love it !!

Watching.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex - heard much about it, and finally wading through. Well realised future world, viable for cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, tech noir or just anything set in the future. Some great ideas.

That's on my "to read" list.

Reading
Currently... Sustainability and Design. College man, it can be tough.
For fun I've been reading World War Z, Jennifer Government (fun read) and re-reading 1984.

Watching
Watched "Leon The Professional" for the first time recently. Great movie... also, check out "Eastern Promises" for some incite into the Russian Mob.

Playing
Saints Row 2 (X-Box 360) good ol' fashioned violent fun. Blitz The League II also falls into this catagory. On the PC I've been playing NWN I. Haven't played it before (I know... I know...I'm behind the times a little, what can I say).

Reading

I'm currently reading A Clash of Kings, the second book in the Song of Fire and Ice series by George R.R. Martin. Now that HBO is working on a television series based on these books, I figured I should read them. And I'm really liking them.

Watching

I'm burning through the entire five-season run of The Wire right now on DVD. I'm on Season Four now. What a great show for demonstrating the depth of crime and corruption in a modern city.

If you can find it, check out The Corner. It's sort of an unofficial prequel to The Wire but it's also based on David Simon's non-fiction book with the same title.

And just for giggles, The Wire with a laugh track.

Reading: A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It is essentially an incredibly in-depth dark read chronicling American labor uprisings, women's rights, wars, slavery, and anything else most textbooks gloss over. I am halfway through and want to die, but I have definitely learned a thing or two.

Will be reading: In September (hopefully since the new RPG just came out) I will be glued to Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin. Yes I am aware they put the book on pre-order every year and then fail to release it, but I have to believe in it.

Watching: BASEketball by Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Playing:
-FIFA 07
-F-Zero-X
-Mount & Blade

-Finished a 6 month long Star Wars d20 game last Friday
-Starting a Calradia game using the SIFRP game by Green Ronin Publishing

Reading: Currently re-reading Bad Voltage. Its been several years since I really sat down with this book and I'm flipping out about the little references I missed in previous readings. At one point, a character mentions he bought some data from "an old jockey named Case."

Watching: Animaniacs. My 6 year old discovered this show and has been mildly obsessed with it for the past couple of weeks. I'd forgotten how... bold it was. There's definitely some adult-level humor in there. Its amazing what slips past censors...

Playing:

• Team Fortress 2, when the mood strikes (been doing a lot of Arena matches lately). Kind of jazzed about the Sniper and Spy update, though I'm terrible with both of those classes. The concept of a Payload Race seems cool.
• GMing Shadowrun
• Doing a PBEM play test of a Beyond The Supernatural adventure.
• Hoping to get to play in a face-to-face PnP RPG someday.

Reading 2XS - Nigel Findley. Recently went to a Barnes and Noble which had a sales annex and picked up about 15 classic Shadowrun novels. Never Trust an Elf, House of the Sun, Nosferatu, Streets of Blood, 2xs, etc and hope to knock them out. Reading books. Why spend money on entertainment when you can pick up a used book for 3.00 and get hours of entertainment from it?

Watching Despie hating Star Trek, I saw the movie this weekend and have to admit the movie sold me on the franchise. JJ Abrams did a masterful job with the cast, script, plot, and action. Highly recommending this movie.

Hey, on what platform do you play?
I mainly play on the pc version, so any of y'all on forums play, my username is vallaugh. More of a fan of the control points and the payload maps. Mainly on the Doorman is God, Trashed Gamers, and No Heroes servers.

I'm a PC guy. I jump around a lot, don't have a particular favorite clan or server. Anything with <100 latency. Tend to avoid custom maps.

-paws

current screen name: Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
(Its a running joke with a couple of my buddies. We all have Ghostbuster themed names right now... )

Reading - The Crazed by Ha Jin, for lovers of The Plague. Inversions by Iain M Banks, which was brilliant. I've started The Posionwood Bible by Kingsolver, and I'll probably read the copy of Inez by Carlos Fuentes we have laying around.

Playing - Boom Blox, um yeah, it's an amazing family game.

Watching: The original Battlestar Galactica. Other than bits and pieces of episodes here and there, I've never watched this show (I've never seen the new one either, but that's beside the point). I rcently discovered it on NBC.com and I have to say, I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

-paws

Reading - Just finished Walter Jon William's 1996 cyberpunk classic, Hardwired.

Along with Neuromancer, Bladerunner, Terminator, RoboCop and Bubblegum Crisis, it really defined cyberpunk for me...
...And it's even better if you have a copy of the CP2020 supplement, Hardwired.

I read it about once a year, and am always blown away the story, the characters, the setting, the atmosphere.

So many of the things we've come to expect from cyberpunk are there.

Totally recommended.

Amen. Hardwired has been one of my favorite books for a long, long, time. It was one of the first novels I ever read, and every time I pick it back up it reminds me of just how much it shaped what I expect a book -- cyberpunk or otherwise -- to deliver.

Reading: Most of these I've finished or continue to read, but they're worth noting =)

Fiction:
Alien Shores, Feast of Souls, The Coldfire Trilogy (all by CS Friedman)... the first is sci-fi (reminds me a lot of shadow run, but with aliens) and the latter are fantasy (though the Coldfire books manage to merge both seamlessly).

Anything by Terry Pratchet, from Good Omens to his Discworld series.

Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. The imagination and scope of his novels is astounding, especially if you consider how long ago he wrote them.

Non-Fiction:
Three Cups of Tea (phenomenal book that while presenting one man's extreme journey from Mountain Climber to a builder of schools in Pakistan also manages to shed light on the Taliban and current events in Afghanistan). Truly inspirational.

Webcomics: The Order of the Stick, Girl Genius, Erfworld and User Friendly

Watching: Nothing right now unfortunately. I'm stuck on a ship with no cable access for half a year lol. That said...

Trigun Anime(starts a little slow with a horrid recap episode half way through that gets much better around episode 12 or so when the plot starts to really reveal itself)

Dexter... what can I say? A serial killer that kills serial killers, and works for the cops? Two seasons watched and still hooked.

Equilibrium: The gun kata... with great plot and action... nuff said.

Playing: my first SR game (hopefully) and World of Warcraft (yes... I'm one of them).

On my Amazon to-buy list now, thanks guys.

Reading:
books:
Finally completed all Chandler's novel. Great inspiration for Shadowrun (Noir mixes so well with cyberpunk) and wise-cracks and descriptions that are just too good to pass. Currently reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Well written, amazing how it can keep me interested despite the lack of actual content.

comics:
Dungeon: a fun but sometimes deep parody of sword and sorcery worlds. Looks like it has been translated in English.
Corto Maltese: A great series with some of the best characters ever (Corto Maltese and Rasputin) that could be great inspiration for Shadowrun games, even if it's set in the early 20th century.
Canardo : A series following the Noir adventures of a depressive alchoholic anthropomorphic duck. Gritty and funny at the same time.

Watching: Nothing much right now. Recently seen Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill and trying to get hold of Russ Meyer's other movies.

Playing:
RPGs:
GMing a Shadowrun campaign in Hamburg that's getting grittier and gritter as time goes on.
GMing an insane pink-mohawk Shadowrun campaign where the PC are trying to save the true spirit of true punk and prevent it from being used and abused by the corps.
Playing a short Dark Heresy campaign. Fun.
Playing other games from time to times (a "gangsta-style" Shadowrun campaign, a cyberpunk-in-space hard sci-fi homegame and some Dying Earth RPG).

Video Games:
Finished Dreamfall. Not game-y enough to truely deserve the name of "game" but such an amazing and deep story... And an ending that really shook me (and not just because it's a huge cliffhanger).
Started playing Capitalism 2 and trying to get Aztechnology to the top of the corporate world.
Lots of various free indie games.

Video Games: Just completed Call of Duty 4. A bit short but one of the best FPSes I've ever played. I hope Modern Warfare is brought back further down the line because I find WW2 to be tremendously boring outside of flight sims and strategy games. I've put about an hour into Dead Space on Hard mode and I've got the hang of it now.

Comics: I read a crap-ton of comic books but I wanted to bring City of Dust to everyone's attention. One part Blade Runner, one part Equilibrium, one part monster movie.

Books: Street Kingdom: Five Years Inside the Franklin Avenue Posse. Yet another book about life as a gang-banger in the early 90s. Lots of choice and interesting bits about the lifestyle. I picked up a book on Pablo Escobar at a $1 hardback book sale.

Watching: The Tudors, which desperately makes me want to pitch a "rise of the aristocrats" Shadowrun storyline. Or at least write a new London sourcebook.

Reading - Just finished Burning Chrome.
Wow !! A long time since I've read it, and I'd forgotten so much about how good it was [though I do try and get people to read it as the 1st part of the Sprawl set].

Since it's William G's early stuff [some of it's from 1977 !!], it's really raw and unpolished, compare to Neuromancer.

Really reminds me why I got into cyberpunk as a genre, and shows the gulf between what people wrote and envisioned, and what games ended up with - Very sad, really.

Try Terry's early SciFi stuff [Strata, Dark Side of the Sun], and see the ideas that grew into the Discworld.


Heard good things about it, and even have a copy, butI just haven't got around to watching it yet.

Watching: Just watched Blade Runner Final Cut a couple nights ago. I've owned it for a while, but never made time to sit down with it. Overall, it was Blade Runner. I really miss the voice over narration. The video is so much cleaner than any version I've seen though; it really looks sharp.

-paws

Reading: The Electric Church as per another DSFer's recommendation. A bit cliché but some serious old school cyberpunk. Enjoyable so far for its undiluted cyberpunkness.

Movies/TV: Watching True Blood on HBO. A mix of Buffy and Anne Rice novels. Lots of titties and sex. Love Sookie, she has such a sweet innocence that contrasts well with the Louisiana background. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm REEEAALLY enjoying it. Like, I look forward to getting home to watch it sort of thing. Season 2 starts soon, though the 3 episode a night thing HBO was running was part of the pleasure.

Gaming: Playing Gears 2. Suprisingly short game, I'm almost done. It was ok, didn't think it quite deserves its hype though. As I've posted seperatly, Dead Space which I finished a few weeks ago, was totally awesome.

Watching: Just finished Sky Crawlers, an alternate universe air-war anime by Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame. Beautifully shot and some of the best air battle scenes I've seen in any film, live action or animated. Filled with typical Oshii trademarks: long periods of quiet, sprinkled with fish-eye lens shots and emotionless, haunted stares of the film's protagonists, Kenji Kawaii music score, rain, the repetition of day-to-day life and a basset hound.

Let the Right One In, a Scandinavian vampire film about a bullied 12-year old boy named Oskar who falls in love with his new neighbor, a cute, haunted looking girl who teaches him to stand up for himself. The girl, Ellie, also struggles to not drain his blood. There were parts about this film that I really liked, especially the genuine awkwardness portrayed by a tweenager trying to find his place in the world that seems against him and that it chucks the shitty Twilight effete male vampire/Mary Sue teen wangst on its ass. Ellie began to smell bad when she was hungry for blood and couldn't eat real food. There were some very genuinely tender moments that you can only pull off with characters who barely understand the concept of adult sexuality. It's a little slow though, for, what is supposed to be a horror film. It's more Ingmar Bergman by way of John Hughes than Wes Craven.

Reading: I picked up Exposure by Kurt Wenzel at a $1 book sale and tell me this blurb doesn't sound like an excellent idea for a SR plot: "Los Angeles, a few years from now. Technology has digitally resurrected the long-dead stars of Hollywood's golden era. Electronic billboards cover every available surface in the city, beaming out a constant flood of commercials featuring the likes of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and - the great exception, the last "real" movie star - Colt Reston.

Not everyone is thrilled. A group of anti-tech rebels have begun to deface and destroy the billboards that flash above the palm tree-lined boulevards. Their inspiration is the Black Book, a mysterious manifesto warning against the evils of "media saturation" that has caused a sensation around town. No one knows who the author is but there are plenty of people who want to find out."

Everyone needs to watch Fanboys. Not necessarily for any tie-in to gaming (though there is a grappling hook!), but just because most of us are soundly in their target audience bracket, and it's a great film to make you feel good about Star Wars.

My wife, who loves Fanboys, has tried to get me to watch it repeatedly. I find it horribly uninteresting though. There's nothign specific I can put my finger on... it just doesn't hold my attention. *shrug*

-paws

Waiting for my turn at the library to pick it up. Just want that email...

Reading - Star Wars: Saga Edition. Also, transgender superhero fiction.

Watching - Kathy Griffin: My Life On the D-List, Burn Notice, the Soup, the Goode Family, Wipeout!

I heart Kathy Griffin. She seems like she was that kid in school that was unafraid of telling the cool kids that they were dumb while at the same time trying "desperately" to get in with them to get into the cool parties. Maybe people will find that weird, but its funny at the same time. I also don't think she's as D-List as she thinks she is, but plays it up big time for laughs.

The Goode Family: You should be watching this if you like Mike Judge because it is Mike Judge. It's the polar opposite of King of the Hill; the Goodes are a "green" family that tries to live their lives the "green" way. They make their own soap, get their food from their garden, and not impose their "western" ways on people. Yet, you can see that they're not entirely devoted to it - the wife definitely falls into the category of, "I originally got into this to piss off my ex-military dad" and parts of that life come out sometimes (like when her son started playing football and she turned into a crazy football mom / hooligan) and the Dad is that sweet, naive, doesn't mean anything kind of guy that always ends up getting himself into trouble for trying to do the right thing.

tl;dr: if you cynically think the Green movement can be a little dumb and overzealous sometimes, watch this show. It's sweet sometimes.

And yeah, I watch a lot of celebrity related things. I blame my significant other.

Playing - Haven't bought anything new in awhile, though I did get in a few good hours with Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core last weekend. Holy schnikies, its like switching from Street Fighter 2 to Street Fighter 2: Turbo. New movesets, new overkills, dust loops fooled around with...still did better than I thought I'd do.

Working On - Finishing the novel I've tried to finish four times before.

Just finished reading Spook Country [by William Gibson].
Quite disappointed, to be honest. If it was another writer, I'd probably not behave bothered to buy it and read it.

It's a story set in the world-of-now, revolving around iPods, a family of career spies and [most interesting] artists creating augmented reality setpieces that can only be viewed by the re;levant hardware - that almost no-one has access to.

Anyone who's read the Sprawl Set will recognise the main elements - drugs, technology used in new ways, detailed people, etc.


Like many people I want a new Sprawl Set, for more stuff about Molly Millions, the Finn and the world they live in >sigh<

Currently partitioning my time between The Mabinogion and Le Morte d'Arthur. I'm a classic kinda guy at heart.

Currently watching the final season of The Shield.

Reading: Matheson's Omega Man (1970's). I found it when I was putting my books away. When it was published in 1954, it was called "I Am Legend"

Last Movie Watched: Forget the name but it was about the Russian Mob in London. They're The Vory and since we're playing in Denver, it really was interesting. Especially "I got my stars!" "A Russian's history in Prison is written in Tattoo's" and the star on the knee "because you don't kneel to anyone".

Should make for an interesting Denver Missions session

Gaming: Preparing for Sunday's game. Missions SRM02-16 - Primal Forces. I'm using a Mac so I have several phrases by the Panda and will use the 'say' program to have it chatting throughout the game I'm also re-reading the original modules starting last week with DNA/DOA.

Physical: Creating my woodshop in the garage on the weekend. Built a sturdy set of shelves for garage storage and now I'm working on a nice work bench. Using Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) for the first time (most of the big pieces), making drawers for the first time, really using a dado set of blades, and using stronger wood (oak) for the first time. Most of my projects have been plywood and pine so I'm moving up into the next tier.

Carl

Reading:Shadows of Europe, and the Fastenal catalog ...more info in the latter,but the plot is pretty thin..

Watching: Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince. and Shoot 'em up.

Playing: Fallout 3 and Prototype.

That would be Eastern Promises by David Cronenberg.

I have... a really strange question.

I'm currently running an Exalted game, and was thinking about classical influnces on exalted. You know, the Odyssey, the Illiad, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, et cetera.

Does anyone know of a decent english translation of The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan, 水滸傳, aka "Suikoden" in Japanese - which inspired the game of the same name)? I'm interested in reading it, but apparently most of the translations are crap, especially the Pearl S. Buck translation

Just watched this last night - really, really, really good. Can't help but think this would be great inspiration for Crimson Skies.

Have also finished watching Black Lagoon seasons 1 and 2 - pretty good overall. Suitably over the top with an equally bizarre collection of characters: gun-smuggling nuns, maid assassin, twin teenage serial killers, "Chinglsih", chainsaw-wielding cleaner mixed in with neo-nazis, yakuza, terrorists and pretty much anyone else with an excuse to carry a gun. Not sure if "good fun" is an apt description, but it was pretty entertaining.

AJC

From what I've heard an OVA has been greenlighted for the next installment. If you like the series, you may like reading the manga, the ordering is a bit different than from the series, but it's basically all there. Plus the latest book has the start of more craziness as the Garcia family returns to city, more maid assassin action, more mercenary action, more Hotel Moscow, let's see the body count rise.

Thanks for the heads up - should be interesting to see where they take an OVA. Never thought about looking into the manga - will have to do that.


Regards,

AJC

Jsut read Way of the Shadows by Brent Weeks. The back of the book sounds like a cliche ("kid raised from the street by ruthless assassin. Can't have any close friends"), but believe me, this book is bad ass, and gritty. Has it's own world, which has an amazing amount of bleakness to it, with a fair bit of redemption, unique magic (almost ED - ish in a way), and very slick characters and development. Don't read it though if you don't want to read about kids getting hurt, as there is some of that in there.

It's how I imagine Kratas would be.