Thorns

Reading the feminist sff carnival which has lots of interesting links. Reading this one about how amateur RPGs are even more unimaginateively conservative than commercial ones I was struck by how deeply cool it would be to have a Tamora Pierce RPG ("The Song of The Lioness" or maybe one of the later ones with a party of young people whose powers work together(*)).

I've only managed to stop myself trying to make one by remembering how quickly my "The Colour of Magic" NWN module went up in flames.

On a related theme, Part 3 of this essay on "And we shall March" has some (imo) really cool ideas for how Alan Moore could have used the Golliwog in LoEG:The Black Dossier. Parts 1 and 2 talk about where golliwogs and minstrelry etc come from and their history (not a pretty place), part 4 is a bibliography and Part 5 talks about what Alan Moore actually did with the goliwog (bad things, apparently)

Something I am fascinated by is the idea of all the really cool stories that don't get told because our blinkers make us incapable of seeing they could ever exist. I have nothing but admiration (and envy) for the writers who tell these stories, as a reader I love that that moment of seeing the world from a different perspective you didn't know was there, like the best of science fiction or theoretical science (well, it's the same feeling to me :))

(*)Ooh! Or a Planeteers one! Ok, I'll stop now :)