Zombies

    "They imply that I am a madman or a murderer- probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent."

H.P. Lovecraft
Herbert West- Reanimator

Might

    To be more specific, Might is the ability of members of a combat unit to use Charms and other spontaneous effects that wouldn't be included in a unit's stats.

Damage System

    This is an alternative way of resolving damage that tries to model realism rather than primarily being a player friendly method. My first idea was to create a completely new system of dice rolling where a player rolled a number of dice equal to their attribute and added their ability to each dice.

    This does not yet take into account Hardness as that will be considered later.

   Step 7: Calculate raw damage
   The base damage of an attack is equal to the number of successes scored on the attack roll, representing how well landed the blow was.

   Step 8: Roll Damage
   Roll one die per success and add the character's strength and weapon damage bonus to each die. If the roll scores higher than the target's armour then the roll is a success.

   Step 9: Apply Overwhelming Damage Bonus
   If the weapon has the tag Overwhelming Damage, add a number of successes to the damage roll equal to the weapon's overwhelming damage rating up to a maximum of the successes scored on the attack roll.

   Step 10: Apply Soak and Resolve Damage
   Reduce damage by the character's soak and apply remaining damage levels.

   This system was designed to differentiate between the accuracy of an attack and the consequent degree of injury (scoring a single success attack roll with a grand grimscythe resulting in a scratch would not necessarily cause a much greater injury than scratching an opponent with a dagger) and the likelihood of injury when the character is hit (reflected by the weapon's damage and the character's strength.) I think this system successfully models the difference between these two elements of attack. Although I have yet to play test it.

Zombie Reanimation

    Necromancy can restore people to a disturbing likeness of their mortal selves, at least physically. By artificially recreating a dead body's po they can return it to something similar to mortal life. Any similarity they might appear to have to a live person however is wholly deceptive. They are animated by a recreation of a hungry ghost. In the mortal world the living eat the dead. Through it's bond with the Underworld this process is horribly reversed with the po's existence only sustained by eating the flesh of the living. if the po is deprived of human flesh the body starts to deteriorate.

The Divine Army- The Brides of Ahlat

    The Brides of Ahlat- a god-blooded sorority, each one of them sleeps with Ahlat after a ritual wedding ceremony, over which he presides to _____ their joining. Each bride is herself a daughter of another bride. They are the biggest heretical organisation in the Scarlet Empire and have survived due to their size, backing of an entire warrior nation and powerful Celestial patron.
   Before the ceremony prospective brides perform a series of trials, only those who impress Ahlat are chosen to join.

   The Brides do accept new members. Mortals join their ranks as Initiates and act as auxiliaries, keeping lesser forces away from the other brides of Ahlat or deploying against enemies not formidable enough to warrant the presence of other Brides. Children born to the Brides of Ahlat are raised from birth to be warriors. The majority of the Brides of Ahlat- a force of several thousand- are all god-blooded. In addition to use of spirit Charms, mainly those of Temperance and Valour, they also practice martial arts. Crimson Pentacle Blade Style is very popular since it uses the traditional equipment of Harbourhead warriors.

    Although archetypes don't technically apply to godblooded, several are appropriate for Brides of Ahlat. Warrior and warlord are two of the most obvious, warlord being a senior military member. Monk is another obvious choice especially since many of them practise martial arts. Hierophant and shaman are two other appropriate archetypes, one concerned with the running of the organisation and preaching to masses, both Brides of Ahlat and normal Harbourheadites, and the other for communing with Ahlat himself. Important members of the Brides of Ahlat my have two, or even more, of these roles. Assassin isn't an occupation one would normally associate with them but is still plausible as the Brides may wish to eliminate enemies without overt warfare and are the strongest warriors of their nation. Likewise some of them may act as spies to gain information on, and misdirect, Harbourhead's enemies. The last two are likely to be an elite corps of specially picked warriors.

   As mentioned before the main part of the Brides of Ahlat are godblooded decendents of Brides of Ahlat themselves, sired by their patron. Heroic mortal Initiates form a small part of their organisation. The greatest of the Brides of Ahlat are elevated to full godhood.

Magitech

    Magitech in Version Three differs from existing concepts of magitech. In Version Three rather than using physical forces artefacts work through Essence flows.
   Case in point. In Second Edition warstriders are simply suits that operate by clockwork and other physical mechanisms. There's nothing supernatural about their physical mechanics.
   In Version Three artefacts are in a sense more accessible to mortals. Magitech however is profoundly different. The essence of magitech is that it awakens the material it's made from and uses it to it's true potential. Rather than being an existing suit, with mundane components such as gears etc that need replacing as if they were made of iron, power armour takes the form of objects of one of the magical materials that is large enough to be carried (certainly in the case of warstriders.) When an Exalt attunes to the artefacts (and this is why it takes twice as much Essence to attune to a material they do not have an affinity with and have to take a Lore test) the magitech artefact becomes part of them and at the same time transforms part (or all) of their body. Jade artefacts change their bearer into a variety of animal. Orichalcum transforms the Exalt into the bearing of a faultless champion.

Warstriders

    Magitech power armour- it's not a suit of armour but something that transforms an attuned user into a new shape. Only someone who's capable of attuning their own unique Essence to the object through their anima could use one. It is impossible for mortals, who lack an anima, to use magitech.

Yu-Shan

    The Wyld is a realm of infinite potential, endless perfect formlessness. Yu-Shan is a realm of infinite actuality.
   The fact that Creation is to a degree unstable is what gives it it's value. It's meant to channel the potential of the Wyld into Yu-Shan.

Threshold

    The reaches of the Threshold are in a way similar to the Wyld but in a more controlled fashion. All effects within them are aspected towards one of the Elements. The Elemental Poles acts as fortresses against the Wyld extruding their influence into the surrounding area. The Wyld is the area where the effects of Creation start to break down.

Dragon-Blooded

    Similar to their role as savages in the Primordial Age, Dragon-Blooded inherited the Elementals' powers and duties.

Elementals

    Elementals were created to monitor and protect their environment. They make their haven in their element and keep it vital; protecting the things that exist there- in the case of the East, the environment itself.

Aethyr Assault Armour

    Each movement costs a certain number of motes. The wearer can change location with a physical object they use as a location marker to teleport themselves. Or the armour could be hearthstone powered.

    Revision: The wearer can transport themselves through Elsewhere to instantaneously reappear next to anyone they can precisely locate.

The Primordial Age

    What if people were there to be sacrificed to the Primordials. People were enslaved by the Dragon Kings and sacrificed to the Primordials to worship them.

Film Critics

    They've got their heads stuck so far up their own arses you'd think they'd know shit when they see it.

The BBC Four World Cinema Awards

       If we're ever going to have law and order in England the first thing we gotta do is round up all the film documentary directors and shoot em down like dogs. For years I've been getting pissed off with people who have more interest in how films are made than watching them. And these people seem to be the audience, and the ones making every single film review show and award ceremony. You can't get away from people who insist on including pointless 'behind-the-scenes' footage in their damned programs that are ostensibly about the films themselves. Get a clue- it's got fuck all to do with film. The difference between watching a film a watching one of these stupid review programs is huge. I know that these days they're going to include a few seconds of 'making of' material which serves absolutely no fucking purpose whatsoever. Fortunately it's useless in informing people about how films are made not just what they're made about. If I wanted to know the technical details of film making I wouldn't be watching a review show. I watch a review show (or used to) so I could find out what good new films had been released recently. Now I simply don't bother. How exactly does turning away the audience serve the program's purpose? It doesn't. It's just a load of technical bullshit.
     When I tune out of one of these programs and watch a film I feel like I'm now watching the real thing. These programs are so divorced from their subject matter they're losing their relevance to it. Speaking as a genuine throwback who insists on watching programs on an analogue cathode ray tube with a single speaker (and I like it that way) people are far too concerned with technology as a part of film. People get fucking huge flat screens, surround sound and watch films in 3D and they don't care about film any more now than they used to; maybe even less so. They use their fucking expensive televisions that they put as far away from themselves as humanly possible in their boring, characterless, don't say a thing about me houses to watch bland shit while eating their dinner (I speak from direct observation.) I watch a 14 inch cathode ray TV that I kicked the shit out of when I got annoyed playing Halo and yet I've been moved in front of it. My whole life has changed because of things I've seen on screen and technology had nothing to do with it. Technology and FX and all that stuff is just background, you shouldn't even think about it. People put technology above the work because they're shallow, they have no reverence for what they watch. I love film and I think in some ways older technology is better. I want everything I see to be as realistic as possible. It isn't about knowing how special effects are done. There are some films that leave me in a daze, I don't want to watch or listen to anything else all day because it wouldn't be good enough. If you don't care even remotely that much about films as an art form, stay away from them.

Apocalyptic Spectral Slaughter

Keywords: Mirror (Rout-Stemming Gesture)

The Legions of an Abyssal should fear their master more than any enemy. As long as they do so they will never flee from battle. Many times the ranks of an Abyssal's army have been thought to waver and yet by the use of this Charm they've fought back with unshakable ferocity...
This Charm is used in response to the unit the Abyssal is leading failing a Valour roll. The Abyssal makes a supernatural attack on her own unit, arcs of black Essence tear through the ranks before anyone can flee reminding them of the greater terror that waits at their backs should they fail. Roll the character''s Charisma + War. Each success inflicts one level of lethal damage on the unit she is commanding. If the unit loses a greater number of health levels than the difficulty of the Valour roll they failed, they automatically pass the roll and do not need to make another for the remainder of the scene unless it's difficulty was greater than that affected by this Charm.

   Apocalyptic Spectral Slaughter
An Abyssal general has no mercy for cowards. If a unit she commands fails a Valour roll and tries to flee the Abyssal summons an army of shades that surround them on all sides and slaughter the trapped force until not a single member is left alive. After witnessing such a hellish massacre the opposing unit that caused the Valour roll must immediately take a Valour roll of their own with an equal difficulty or a difficulty of the now annihilated unit's Magnitude if that was lower.

Manual of Exalted Power: The Abyssals

    The games designers dictate rather than describe what the Abyssal Exalted are. Also you have to make the unpleasant choice between being a 'slave'' and a 'renegade.' Since the Manual of Exalted Power books are the primary range of supplements, published in hardback, they really would have benefited from being printed in colour like the main rulebook. This is begging to be put into colour. All the dripping blood would look spectacular.
   Although the pages are dark didn't find this book physically difficult to read. Instead, actually reading it is a more unpleasant experience. Some of the ideas mentioned in a review about Resonance gave me a better impression than the ones actually thought of by the writers. Heavy emphasis is placed on being Abyssal Exalted rather than deathknights. Playing a morbid revenant is one thing, a very cool one, playing a servant of the Void is something else. This book would have been better if playing a servant to Oblivion was optional and all Abyssals literally lived up to their name of deathknights.
   The chapter on Deathlords characterises the off-the-wall style much of the more intense material of Exalted possesses. It's somewhat similar to the way the White Treatise was written.
   The section on Charms, the focus for any player, was mixed. At times they can be brilliantly written: 'Abyssal surgeons can quickly determine if the patient will recover from her ailments or if she belongs in the flesh vats with the rest of the raw materials.' They do have a tendency, like the descriptions of the Abyssal Castes, to lean towards a depressive, moribund angle. Something I suspect that could be an influence of Vampire. Luckily, since this is the most critical chapter, a lot of it works but I feel could still be improved. Two martial arts styles are included; the natural Abyssal martial art: Dark Messiah Style, and Hungry Ghost Style. I think that Dark Messiah Style was rather miswritten, and the material would suit a terrestrial martial art better. The emphasis on 'bullying' direct physical violence lacks the depth for a Celestial martial arts style. The 'obscure and terrible' Hungry Ghost Style is quirky and much more stylish.
   The Craft Charm for making soulsteel was a disaster. This was one of the things I was most looking forward to but all it consists of is one Charm for hammering a ghost into soulsteel rather than an intricate existential process. On the subject of Craft Charms, they're a good example of the writer constrict the players in their actions since several of the Charms can only be used for destructive purposes were you might find that being able to create something indirectly destructive due to the way the character used it, would be more valuable and give the players room to do what they want.
   The chapter on Necrotech was a significant disappointment. Instead of some wonderful piece about how it blurred the differences between life and death like a corporeal version of making soulsteel, all it consists of is stitching together pieces of dead things, which requires no more exotic Abilities than Medicine and Craft (Fire) and then casting a necromancy spell to animate it. There are a lot of different things you can do with Necrotech, there's a full list of how you can use 'creation points' as well as sample creations they thought of, but the whole thing is singularly unimaginative. One fault I have with Exalted is they almost try to eschew having influences. reading Herbert West- Reanimator (particularly chapter 5- which can be found on the Wikipedia article about H.P. Lovecraft) would have ahd a massive effect on this. Necrotech requires mundane maintenance rather than being living engines of death.
   It's worth noting there are several new Solar Charms which mirror Abyssal ones other players might be interested in. Back on the subject, several Abyssal Charms require the Whispers Background in a requirement called Avatar. Although their power stems from Oblivion, having Whispers of Oblivion (available to ghosts) isn't necessary but rather Whispers of the Neverborn. There seems to be a lack of proper differentiation between the sources of the Abyssals' power. The Neverborn are portrayed as being rather more alive and in a more concrete way than I feel is good for the game. They definitely are 'alive' and capable of thought and even action among those connected to them. There's no mystery in how cognizant their consciousnesses are, are the Whispers their thoughts or just the final death scream of dead gods?
   The Abyssals themselves are particularly beholden to the Neverborn and according to the rulebook fully versed by their Deathlord masters in all the knowledge they want them to know. There's no scope within the existing rules for Abyssals who don't know they even have any connection to the Deathlords or know what they are. Storytellers may even decide it's better if no one even knew that the Deathlords as such even existed. One thing I think they would have benefited from is a heavier emphasis on death than Oblivion. Charms that make the Abyssals take on the aspects of ghosts would have been particularly cool. If the player decided they should take the plunge and learn Charms with the Avatar keyword (for 'Whispers of Oblivion') but allow the presence of Oblivion within them to start becoming part of their soul.
   Considering it's importance I didn't actually think much of the Manual of Exalted Power series. This book is an example of why. The game has a lot of potential, but not much actualised brilliance.

Do Teachers Really Know How to Teach?

    I ask this question because of the dramatic shift in my learning methodology over the last year.
   Linguistics is a relatively easy subject to study since much of it is cut and dried. For my personal method of learning Japanese, I'm studying for a JLPT exam, I use an online resource that has the vocabulary syllabus for the previous exams. I learn a set of twenty five words every day from a set of homemade flash cards. On one side is the word and it's meaning, on the other side is the word written in Japanese. Now that I've become more familiar with the vocabulary I've stopped trying to compose sentences out of them and simply go through them word by word, although I would recommend using the words in sentences the first time you use them as it makes it more interesting.
   One of the first things I do after I get up is to run through a set of flash cards, trying to remember how to write them in Japanese and if I can't I turn over the card and put it in a pile I come back to when I've finished and try again. Them I flip them all over and try to write down how the words are pronounced and what they mean. I repeat this about an hour later and then again sometime late in the day. One of the key elements is to make it easy. I don't pressure myself trying to come up with words I can't think of. The easier it is, the more fun and more effective learning is. Another key point is that I do a reasonable amount every day.
   Studying a subject for up to one and a half hours at a time a couple of times a week is not as effective. Also the teachers seemed far more interested in pupils making notes and keeping their books neat than memorising the information. That's the whole point of going to classes: to learn. I test myself in a no pressure environment three times a day and try to make the tests as easy as possible. Save the stress for when you actually do an exam. You'll probably feel a lot more relaxed about it too. Teachers who bite pupils heads off for making trivial errors are bad teachers. If he classroom environment was more relaxed then pupils wouldn't think so much about behaving properly and think more about the subject the teachers are supposed to be teaching them. I've learned more about drawing from a few hours using a rather cartoony drawing book than I did in all my school art classes. Those who can do, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can teach. I never once received proper instruction on how to draw a person. Manga is an excellent way of learning to draw people's faces, the hardest part of them to capture, because it's so simple.

The Longbow: Premature Death of Britain's Greatest Weapon

    What killed off the longbow? The gun? No. That only replaced it.
   This is an article I've wanted to write for some time. Saul David once performed a rather spurious test proclaiming "The longbow was dead" after comparing the point blank effectiveness of a musket against a .45ACP round from a pistol against metal armour. Just what that test proved about the longbow and it's effectiveness vis a vis the gun is lost to me. Not that musket existed at the time the longbow fell out of fashion. It would take several centuries for firearms to get that bad.
   It had long been a curiosity of mine why did such a successful weapon fall out of favour and never recover? One reason is the dramatic rise in cost of yew to make bows imported from abroad. But much more important are the historically obscure facts that agriculture changed at that time from harvesting crops to animal herding, which was a far less physically demanding occupation; and more dramatically that a third of the adult working population died of hunger. Not only were bows more expensive to make but the population for levying soldiers had been decimated and over time those who served weren't in condition to use such a weapon.
    Still it is a wonder why nobody thought of resurrecting it. Perhaps it had simply become such an anachronism in the miracle age of gunpowder that anybody who gave serious thought to the idea would have been too embarrassed to see it through. Shortly after the gun's ascendancy, one man claimed he could out-shoot a group of bowmen using a pistol at a hundred and twenty yards. I sorely wished when I read that than someone took him up on his offer and illustrated how incorrect he was.
   Being made of iron the gun would be a relatively expensive weapon to produce. It burned powder, which was also expensive. Muskets were notoriously unreliable, both under ordinary firing conditions and especially in bad weather. Furthermore they produced copious amounts of smoke that rendered their users blind if there was a still wind.
   These are trifles compared to the more serious and damning failings of the gun. The one that stands out by far the most is it's rate of fire. Troops could fire as low as two rounds a minute, with the best trained men managing only four. Accurate range was also pitiful. The chances of hitting an individual man at even fifty paces were low. At short range it had decent hitting power but this quickly wore off, with one source saying "It was an unlucky man who got injured by a musket ball at two hundred yards." Altogether, this reduced the firepower of infantry to the point where while their predecessors had stood in line to face French cavalry charges a few centuries earlier, charges by men in full plate armour, the British soldier of the Napoleonic era had to form square to defend himself against much less well armoured cavalry of his day. Sure historical proof of the dramatic decline of the efficiency of their weapon.
   It does make one wonder what history would have been like if far from dying out centuries before it became obsolete, the longbow, having proved itself time and again during the Hundred Years' War, caught on and spread throughout the armies of Europe. An unlikely idea, but if anybody possessed an eye for military efficiency above maintaining the status quo (and it hadn't led to the overthrow of the nobility by the peasantry in England) then they might have considered it.
   The place where gunpowder truly created a revolution in the way open battles were fought (rather than sieges) wasn't on land at all. Although firepower at sea was nothing new (the English used it during the first encounter during the Aginourt campaign, where the French had followed the established tactic of chaining their boats together to form a platform for hand to hand combat and were subsequently out-shot.)
   Only in 1849 did gunpowder firing small arms truly start to outclass bows (although in this case the crossbow.) It wasn't till breach loading weapons were introduced did gunpowder weapons finally supercede the bow with their high rate of fire combined with ease of shooting.
   If you had to go to battle where one side had muskets and the other had longbows, which side would you want to be on?

Zombies

    "...By removing the head or destroying the brain."

    Zombies are a particularly horrifying adversary to face, especially in the Age of Sorrows. Lacking Essence weapons entire villages have been abandoned or devoured by these unholy monsters. On the battlefield zombies possess no training or discipline and are able to only shamble forwards at a slow pace. But they are relentless, feeling no pain from their wounds, experiencing no fear and only stop when their bodies are destroyed entirely. Once within the reach of a zombie's clasping grip there's no escaping it before they pull their victim apart limb from limb and devour them alive.

Strength: 4, Dexterity: 1, Stamina: 2
Perception: 2, Intelligence: 0, Wits: 1

Daft as a Brush: Zombies possess no abilities whatsoever.

Attack: crush attack Speed 6, Accuracy 4, Damage 4B*, Rate 1

DV/Soak: Dodge DV 0, Soak 1L, 2B (special)

Motivation: Feed

    SPECIAL RULES

    Arisen Hunger, Tear Attack
   Zombies are incapable of wielding weapons and have only their hands and teeth to attack with. However they claw and bite so ferociously in their hunger for living flesh their damage is resolved differently to normal bashing damage. Instead of cycling down the victim's entire health chart before inflicting lethal damage, first mark a box with a level of bashing damage, and then if the attack has inflicted another, add the second level of bashing damage to make it lethal damage.

   Risen Dead
  Trying to stop a zombie is almost impossible. You may be able to run faster  but they keep on coming no matter what you throw at them. Only crippling attacks and attacks aimed at the zombie's head inflict any injury. A crippling attack may lop off it's arms or legs, but will do no actual damage on it's health chart. Only attacks aimed at it's head can stop a zombie. Also a zombie is not incapacitated by bashing damage when it reaches it's incapacitated health level but goes on receiving lethal damage while fully active and does not suffer from wound penalties. Only weapons sufficiently powerful to completely destroy it's body such as Essence weaponry or fire can kill it otherwise.
    Mask of Winter took the rather devious step of overcoming the zombie's inherent lack of discipline by chaining his zombies together into gangs with iron collars around their necks. This had the added advantage of making it impossible to cut their heads off at the neck.

Far North, Sean Bean, Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Krusiec

    Despite some poor (and some exaggerated) reviews I'd rate this film as solid. it captures a subtle but distinctive aspect of it's setting (which for one witless reviewer's benefit is somewhere in Siberia at the beginning of the Cold War. The large round structures you see are radar domes.) The film takes place on the frontier where two furtive native women try to survive by avoiding 'civilised people.' The way the natives live, preserving their own way of live contrasts dramatically with the totalitarian Soviet Union who try to wipe them out to claim the land for themselves. "We had to follow orders" explains Sean Bean, a reluctant member of a work unit forced at gunpoint to obey the state.
   I never get that connected with this film but overdramatising it would spoil the unique way the director expresses the region it takes place in. It's just as much about the far north and the conflict between the ways of life of the natives who've found a harsh but at the same time comfortable way of living in their environment and the outsiders trying to take it over for purposes that exist outside it's scope, as it is about the relationships and tensions of the characters who live there.

Editorial: Film Critics (Scum of the Earth)

    The first thing I learned being a film fan was never to trust film critics. I've seen the most mediocre films lauded to high heaven. One source claimed Irreversible was 'one of the most important films in the last 20 years.'
    Members of the audience go out of their way to watch films. Often paying for the privilege of doing so. The problem is that film reviewers view films indifferently. When I think a film sucks I just turn off the TV or watch something else. Because critics approach all films the same way 'I have to watch this film and come up with an opinion on it' they lose their sense of perspective and alienate themselves from the audience.
   Writing about a film, or even sitting through it all isn't obligatory for a member of the audience. Some of the reviews I read are incredibly snotty and even absurdly stupid (see Silent Hill.) I film isn't something you review as a matter of work. It's something you watch because you enjoy it. As a fan I only go after things because I like them. Once I start getting ideas of watching every film I can and putting them up on my website I realise that I need to start taking it less seriously. Once you go into a film with the purpose of reviewing it not watching it because you want to you lose your sense of perspective. Some films I've known were a disaster before I'd even seen one second of them. As soon as the production reel on Cruel Intentions 2 started I knew I would hate it. I didn't watch more than five minutes.

Ability Essence Floe

Cost: --; Mins: Abilty 1, Essence 2; Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Any Ability Excellency

    The Solars' knowledge of a discipline gives them insight into how Essence flows through it. For the Solars, with knowledge anything is possible.
    An alternative to Essence Flow. A character buy up to two Essence Floe Charms during character creation. The character may learn Charms for a given ability using only the ability rating as a minimum trait level. Use of Essence Flow applies specifically to Charms. Since spells are not Charms initiation into a circle of sorcery or necromancy is not a valid use of this Charm.
   Simply put it allows a character to buy Charms for a related ability without regard to minimum Essence needed to know them. Essence Flow is a permanent enhancement of a character's capability resulting from their existing acumen that cannot be cancelled or removed.

   Sorcery/Necrotic Essence Floe
Cost: --; Mins: Occult 3, Essence 3; Type: Permanent
Keywords: None
Duration: Permanent
Prerequisite Charms: Occult Essence Floe, Terrestrial Circle Sorcery/Shadowlands Circle Necromancy
    Through a supernatural insight into the workings of sorcery that very few Exalted sorcerers possess, the character can learn spells from the circle above the one they have been initiated into. They can also create spells of their own for that circle as if they possessed the relevant sorcery or necromancy Charm.

Silent Hill (film), Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Kim Coates

    This film needs reviewing in light of the absurd critical reception it's received. Always go with the audience rather than the film critics. One moron even described the entirety of the film as 'downright confusing.' It's far from it. It's the only truly good film I've seen based on a video game. Although I wouldn't rate it as highly as some people have it's certainly worth the watch and never seemed to me to be 'overlong.' The ending might jilt you a bit but it's cool in it's own kind of way.

Bad Boys II, Will Smith, Martin Lawrence

    I put this one in this list mainly because of the lame reviews it got from most of the media. It's rare to see an action film that's genuinely exciting.

Editorial

    The only way we're going to have sensible motoring in this country is if we forbid vehicles incapable of breaking a speed limit from entering an area where the limit is enforced. That will stop idiots who can't go fast enough from getting in our way when we're actually trying to go somewhere.

From Hell, Johnny Depp, Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane

    Perversely lives up to it's name.

Day of the Dead, George A. Romero

    Romero finest.
    Examination of contemporary culture. Strained interpersonal relations. And more zombies than any of his previous films with gore in splendid technicolour.
    The setting of a three way conflict between research scientists trying to combat the zombie problem, self interested civilians and an army squad under the leadership of the clearly unstable Captain Rhodes in an abandoned nuclear missile base is a microcosm for America at that time in history.
   The thing about this film is that the real enemies are the opposing groups of people rather than the zombies. Although they're a constant menace, the real danger comes from the military.
   Out of the two major scientists, Sarah is more reasonable, although ambitious one trying to completely eradicate the zombie problem altogether. Logan through, is trying a quick solution to 'make them behave' conducting bloody and increasingly disturbing research as the film goes on, much to the viewer's delight.
   Captain Rhodes is a complete lunatic. Sick of being stuck underground surrounded by zombies with 'Dr. Frankenstein' his behavior becomes more and more pathological until it reaches breaking point.
   You do feel like you've been thrown into a story part way through having missed important developments (none of which are part of Dawn of the Dead if you haven't seen that one) but it's still easy enough to get a handle on events.
   The only thing I felt let the film down was the appalling soundtrack which as well as being gross jarrs terribly with the tone of the film.
   The ending however is one of the best moments in zombie cinema. Enjoy!
  

Dawn of the Dead 2004, Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer

    "You fuckers get up and get on down with the sickness."

    It may not try to be profound the way the original does but it pushes my buttons a hell of a lot more. Especially the middle scene where everybody's running freely round the mall to a reworked version of the ending music. People might dump on it and laud the original to high Heaven but in my opinion the original desperately needed a remake and they did a good job.
   Incidentally my aunt worked on this film.

Near Dark, Catharine Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton

    Definitely the vampire film of the eighties. In the bar scene Bill Paxton is absolutely flying. He's like a Sabbat poster boy. There's not too much eighties-ness about this film so it's still fun to watch.

Ichi the Killer Anime

    Although it delves into Ichi life before he became recruited it has a very low standard of quality and is good for little except porn, and isn't even very good for that.

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

    A favourite of moronic pundits. This film is absolute garbage. People who recommended it also like Ninja Scroll which I haven't seen myself but I'm sceptical of by association. The version I saw was dubbed only and the performances made it even worse. People are probably just attracted to this film by the explicit content without any regard for quality.

Akira (the anime), Otomo Katsuhiro

    The biggest classic in all of anime. Not my all-time favourite. It's quite a quiet film considering it's content (I suspect Oshii Mamoru might have got a few ideas from watching this.) Pundits have repeatedly cited how they like the 'violence.' There isn't actually that much. I wouldn't pay much attention to such people, they watch Legend of the Overfiend. Apparently there's a lot of subtext that I haven't been initiated into to appreciate, but the film quickly takes a turn for the more bizzare. The presence of biker gangs is hardly the focus of the film. Instead it takes place in a future, post-world war society and is much more to do with social turmoil (mirroring that of the sixties), local hosting of the Olympic Games and fanatical religious groups combined with a secret government project (concerning Akira) and an underground 'terrorist' organisation determined to get to the bottom of it that the hapless members of Kaneda's biker gang literally run into.

Jin-Roh The Wolf Brigade, Oshii Mamoru, Okiura Hiroyuki, Kamiyama Kenji

    The most understated film I've seen. Although it's directed by Okiura Hiroyuki it follows the format of Oshii Mamoru's films. More of a spy thriller than an action film. Although there are dramatic moments they're never sensationalised. It's more about turns of the plot and appreciating the characters' motives.

The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson, Mark Wahlberg

    A bit like Donnie Darko for the i-generation. I didn't really get into this film at the beginning. It's kind of insubstantial at the start. That improves but I never connected with it that much.

The Messengers, Danny and Oxide Pang

    Truly disappointing venture by the Pang brothers.

Black Magitech

    Black Magitech is a product of imprisoning tormented ghosts in a new body made from their warped and violated remains. Black magitech possessed of an Awakened Animating Intelligence is a truly horrible thing to behold. The spirits trapped within it are fully aware of their own torment. The victims of black magitech are not truly dead, instead they go on living within their bodies and their suffering goes on as well long after they should have died.

Trappings of Death

    Abyssals can only wear clothes that 'belong to the dead.' Some take this more literally than others, from wearing the clothes they wore when they were killed, with gory wound marks, to clothes taken from corpses- both buried and unburied- to garments actually made from corpses. The same goes for other items they wear, making them cursed as defilers and graverobbers. Abyssals who spend long sojourns in the Underworld also take clothes from other ghosts.

Magitech

    Genesis is the art of manipulating living things' Essence patterns to control and create life. It's used in advanced forms of medicine.
   Magitech is about manipulating magical life.
   Two types of magitech creatures were common in the West. The first were obviously sea creatures. The second were flying creatures. Both worked on similar principles of motion through a fluid element and flying creatures could quickly span the gaps between isolated settlements on the ocean.
   A Warstrider makes a wearer perfectly adapted to the environment the substance suits. Wood Jade is formed into creatures that live in the forest. Adapting to using a Warstrider is handled by it's animating intelligence. The essence of magitech is making an object of one of the magical materials with a spirit, either a little god or a elemental, making it alive and intelligent in a limited fashion. Royal Warstriders carry an Awakened Animating Intelligence. Such a being is able to make command decisions on it's own not just carry them out like the intelligences of lesser magitech.

Nexus

    Vice itself has become big business in Nexus. Business which has it's own set of companies. People with a lot of money turned up at Nexus looking to impress their competitors and live large. People realised there was money to be made in offering clients staying in the market rich service, richer than their competitors. Lower classes of less prosperous merchants started imitating them, establishing their own services around residential districts.
    "It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money."
   Eventually Nexus grew into a fully fledged city with a complete array of trades and professions to support the populace. In Nexus anyone with a big enough purse can be treated like a king. And there are plenty of ways to get that much money and even more ways to lose it.

    Nexus position at the confluence of three rivers gives it another role: it acts as a bottleneck for the drugs trade. All the drugs grown in plantations up country are funnelled down the rivers and delivered to the Guild in Nexus. From there they sell to suppliers representing countries from all over Creation. They grow opium, cocaine and marijuana like corn. Skullweed for brewing Bright Morning is collected by agents who are willing to dare entering the Black Chase. Word has it that the Guild sponsors graverobbers who loot tombs in Sijanfor artefacts and bodies to sell to the Deathlords and soulthieves who abduct powerful ghosts for use in making soulsteel.

    The point the market became a city came when people started basing their enterprises in the market instead of their home towns. The sprawling 'market' began to attract it's own resident population. The first merchants to set up Nexus as their base of operations started their own 'enterprise' now known as the Guild.

The Recruit Film Review, Al Pacino, Colin Farrell

    I only gave this AB+ because of how it compares with Spy Game.

The Addams Family

    "Are they dead?"
    "Does it matter?"

     Pugsley and Wednesday Addams

Fair Folk, World Walking, Shinmas, Nirguna, Assumptions

    The Fair Folk are Essences that have passed through shinmaic principles that the five Graces embody.

   By passing through Nirguna makes passing through the other four shinmas and possessing all four Virtues possible. It is Nirguna that makes realising the other four shinmas possible.
   Pure dream stuff cannot exist in Creation so the Fair Folk must look like something from one of those dreams. The Fair Folk body is just an appearance and it has to expend Essence just to make it's appearance be believed by those in Creation since dreams only exist in people's minds. If no one continues to believe it, it would cease to exist.
   Lunars can also manipulate dreams like the Fair Folk do.
   Rakshas don't have 'bodies.' They just create the illusion of having one.

    Assumption Charms are how the Fair Folk enter Creation. A Creation-born would need some sort of apposite in order to enter the Wyld.

   Since their appearance is an illusion they have to spend Essence in order to maintain the lie of interacting with the physical world which as sentient dreams, emotions and desires they are not actually capable of doing. The more like their real selves they are in Creation the more difficult it is.
    The more real their appearance is the less like their real selves they are, the easier it is for them to exist in Creation. Their appearances are not real things but only appearances conjured through glamour. The more powerful this work of deceptive glamour is, deceptive to the Fair Folk as well as to onlookers for to appear to have a form when you are a dream is self-deception, the less at odds they are with Creation.

Wyld, Waypoints, Fair Folk, Lunars, Luna, Shaping Attacks, Moonsilver Artefacts, Creation of Moonsilver, Wonders

    A waypoint marks the extent a Fair Folk affects an area. That's what defines it's boundaries

   When a Lunar receives Exaltation they become something very strange, a coherent form of Wyld energy (to be able to live in their environment and combat the Fair Folk Luna was the same.) Unlike shaped Fair Folk they are self sustaining and do not need to feed on dreams or Virtues in order to maintain their presence in Creation, needing only the sustenance an ordinary mortal does. Likewise they enter the deep Wyld freely existing as a self conscious idea the way other Fair Folk do. Because they are effectively in the depths of the Wyld even when in Creation they can change their form at will.

   Lunars make moonsilver artefacts out of Fair Folk Graces (as a questor would make a Wyld artefact) or the Essences of lesser Fair Folk. They can create a moonsilver Wonder out of the Essence of a powerful unshaped Fair Folk. The Fair Folk or it's Grace as an entity is destroyed but it is still dream and is gossamer (such is the fate of the Fair Folk that are vanquished by the Lunars) which is then transformed into moonsilver and formed into the artefact the Lunar wishes to create. Only the most _____ gods of dreams whose power is as terrible as it is legendary, can be formed into the greatest of moonsilver Wonders such as Royal Warstriders.
   When vanquished by a Lunar their identity is destroyed and they become nothing but gossamer. The Lunar may then convert this into moonsilver to make their desired artefact. The Fair Folk fear this fate above all others and hate the Lunars for trying to inflict it on them and will fight the Lunars bitterly because they know their very survival is at stake, and consequently they will show no mercy if they win.
   By destroying all five of a Fair Folk's Graces they render them, their Essence into gossamer.
   One obvious roleplaying idea that comes to mind is playing emanations of an unshaped played by the storyteller.
   The Fair Folk take assaults by the Lunars very personally. Since their identity is what they are, it's the difference between them and an inchoate quantity of gossamer, they take any attempt to destroy it very seriously. Other Fair Folk challenge it and try to control it through never ending shaping combat, predators exist who try to consume other Fair Folk and make them their own, but actually trying to undo a Fair Folk so it won't exist even as part of another being is a horror more sinister to them than anything they could otherwise imagine. Luna used to hunt Fair Folk having to overcome raksha who's Essence was as great as her's through guile and trickery and was infamous among the raksha for it. Having ascended to Yu-Shan after the Primordial War, this task she handed down to her champions.

   As a person travels further into the Wyld it's power becomes more and more real. In Creation the power of the Fair Folk that does not affect matter is mere illusion, no more real than the onlooker's dreams. In the Wyld however, people are whittled down to their core Essence. Since all is Essence in the Wyld shaping attacks are real and people's Essences are completely exposed to the Fair Folk's magic.

Coach Carter, Samuel L. Jackson

    Michelle Pfeiffer, Hilary Swank, Antonio Banderas, even Tom Berenger. They've all been in films that follow the carbon copy stereotype of a teacher who meets a class of young delinquents and tries to ingratiate themselves to them to make them appreciate the value of education and turns their lives around.
   Why am I writing a review of this film? Firstly this is based on an actual story. Secondly the character in question doesn't try to appeal to the students he's charged with by making himself look cool. Quite the opposite. Instead he tries to inculcate them with his values, not only approaching the game he was hired to teach with an intensity that makes a mark on the viewer but insists on them measuring up to academic standards. The result stands out among films of it's type (appropriate for a film about a coach rather than a teacher.)
   At times the acting is a little off, even from Samuel L. Jackson, but this has little effect on that this is a film about a person rescuing students from a system 'designed for them to fail' done properly. The fact that it's a true story adds gravity to the considerable weight that the director and cast already imbued the film with.

Nexus

    In many other cities there are areas where criminal enterprises operate. But no where do they operate blatantly like they do in Nexus. Unlike in other countries, there are no laws against such businesses so all manner of immoral enterprises can operate free of interference from the law. Gambling houses, whore houses and drug dens all exist in the open and advertise themselves freely.
   Whole streets are devoted to exploiting the vices of the city's inhabitants.

   The city was founded at the centre of a network of burgeoning trade routes making it the place for merchants to buy and sell their wares. Rather than travel all the way to their destination they could simply sell in the new market town and trade for whatever commodity people back home desired. As a result of the shorter trade routes, trade in the area boomed. Soon people started turning up and setting up markets for any new and exotic commodity they could think of, looking for a buyer. It had grown from being a place where people could drop off their goods to where they went looking to start a new market.
   In many other parts of the world (or rather all of them) many of the business in Nexus would be considered criminal enterprises and outlawed. In Nexus however anybody can set up a business to supply anything.
   Far from being disreputable, 'hostile takeovers' are the usual method of getting ahead and most of the city's leading merchants acquired their power (and maintain it) by eliminating their rivals. Not only re businesses illicit but so are the ways they are run. Management is what would be described elsewhere as gang warfare. Violence in the street is just as much a part of life in the city as the vices it caters to.

   Nexus isn't a city in the formal sense, the product of a state with it's own laws and culture.
   It's a city that grew from a huge market site where people lived. The docks are the most historic feature of Nexus, the first part of the city to be established by traders who met from three different directions of the River Province. Behind the docks is the vast market that is the beating heart of the city.

Fair Folk, Lunars, Shapeshifting, World Walking

    Lunar Exalted do not appear to exist definitively on either side fo the gate of Sundraprisha. They exist as physical beings but can change shape at will. A feat not even the Fair Folk can perform in Creation.
   In the Wyld things do not exist in physical locations but rather in existential states.

   "Reality is a dream. We are real."
Sensory cognizance in the Wyld is a mere effect of the Fair Folk's ability to manipulate it. The phantasms they create in reality and the bordermarches are mer illusions. No one can actually perceive the Wyld. Sensory cognizance is a result of the Fair Folk or the character using Charms that affect the Wyld. Thoughts can be communicated directly through the use of Charms creating mental impressions that are completely 'real.'
   It is in this arena that Lunar Charms are designed to work, giving them a way to combat the Fair Folk. In the Wyld a behemoth is just an idea in the mind of a formless entity. Lesser beings than Chaos Lords exist within the greater ones that constitute waypoints. In a sense they live within their mind. As such they are to a great degree subject to it, or if they are stronger, can subject it.
   One doesn't exist anywhere in the Wyld in the sense that one does in Creation. A Freehold is a mind of an unshaped Fair Folk that lesser components of such beings can enter and leave.
   A Fair Folk can force an idea through the Gate of Sundraprisha to make it take on a physical form. Lunars have the blasphemous ability to walk through the Wyld in their physical form, for they are a physical entity and a self-aware concept (like the Fair Folk) at the same time. Solars can 'world walk' through their overpowering connection to Creation. By using Charms they are simply too strongly tied to Creation for the Wyld to confirm or deny.

    Shaping attacks and direct feeding on Virtues represent actions taking place between Fair Folk although such interactions are impossible to perceive directly and are visible only through mindscapes.

   Rather than               with one another through the process of physical interaction they do so directly. Although what one perceives as being indirect interaction is in fact one mind communicating directly with another.

   Conflicts between Emanations and minions in a Freehold do not truly represent conflicts between entities but trains of thought through the unshaped's mind. An Exalted champion can enter an Unshaped's mind by entering a Freehold (since that's what an unshaped is) and combat with it by assaulting it's Emanations.

   The Lunars have a fundamental connection with the raksha in that they hold the possibility for infinite potential. And yet because their nature is similar to the raksha yet different, their Exaltation makes them hostile to the raksha,

   The movements, rearrangements of an unshaped raksha's waypoints are not physical movements, since physical has no meaning in the Wyld, but simply means the order in which a character has to pass through them.
   The Wyld turns normal notions of existence on their head. Physical existence is merely an illusion within the Wyld while thoughts are reality. One raksha can consume another by imagining itself doing so as often happens when two raksha meet in order for one of them to grow greater and protect itself from consumption by another. This form of interaction is characteristic of use of the Sword. However two raksha can avoid deadly conflict through interaction through the Staff. One may supplicate itself to another through the Cup or join and work together through the Ring. Telling the strength of another raksha is inherently difficult since they often attempt to disguise it in one way or another. Either boasting false strength to scare away potential predators, or hiding their strength to conceal weakness, allow them to assess a foe or lure them to a point where they can be attacked. It's into this hellish realm of predatory horror that Lunars venture.

   "We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimise casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains."

The Wyld, Shapeshifting, Elemental Poles, Beastmen

    Any who passed from Creation through the Gate of Sundraprisha would find their Essence exposed to the raw energy of the Wyld and ravaged beyond endurance. Mortals experience a similar state to this when they venture into the Wyld and fell it's mutating influence. Exalted can throw up defences to protect themselves as they have learned to master their own Essence; only the Lunar Exalted are naturally immune to it as they were made to live in this environment. In them in an inherent understanding of Shinmaic principles that allows them to exist unchanged in the Wyld. It's through understanding of these principles they practise their powers of shapeshifting for in a sense they are always in the Wyld and can alter their forms as easily as if they were within it's formless depths.
   By changing their Essence through the warping power of Lunar Exaltation they could change their form. They discovered that by consuming the Essence of other creatures they could understand them as easily as their own and learn to assume their forms as well.

   A mortal could not enter Pure Chaos were it even conceivable their purpose would survive that long. Pure Chaos is not a physical location, it is a metaphysical state. To enter it you must pass through the Gate of Sundraprisha and that means comprehending the meaning of Nirakara and either undoing or superceding it's relevance to the mortal in question. Lunars are capable of doing so by manifesting themselves as ideas, a feat they are capable of even in Creation. Solars can do the opposite and maintain their forms even in the depths of the Wyld.

   The Wyld is defined as a realm of pure Essence. Creation also holds such places called demesnes, but their aspect is fundamentally different and baneful to the Fair Folk. Demesnes are a product of Heaven, if they are Elementally aspected belonging to one of the quadrants, their Essence is derived from the element of Earth. In Creation raksha might tell stories as a way of luring mortals but in a realm of matter any 'reality' they may seem to possess is an illusion as the Fair Folk deal only in Essence and matter is a trivial, distasteful thing to them. In the Wyld however, everything is Essence and they are real, they can make a 'story' by manipulating the four artefacts of raksha magic and their Charms. Of course only a powerful Fair Folk noble would be able to make sweeping changes to the environment.
    The five Elemental Poles change life around them to fit their aspect. Humans who live near one of the Elemental Poles in the Threshold for too long or in a demesne thus affected are know as beastmen. The Pole of Earth is a natural environment to humans and has no such corrupting effects. Terrestrial Exalted, like the dragons they were spawned from, suffer no ill effects from being in close proximity to the Essence of which they are aspected.
    Beastmen often adapt to their adopted environment, acquiring mutations that make life easier, but living outside it difficult or impossible. A water aspected beastman might grow small gills allowing them to stay underwater longer. If they spent long enough near a source of Essence these might completely replace their lungs, allowing them unlimited ability to lve underwater but making it impossible to live above it.
    It's within the power of the Fair Folk when within the Wyld to makes experiences tangible things. Thus they could form an artefact out of 'the feeling I get when I breathe the summer air.'
    The Wyld is an environment so alien, an environment beyond the concept of shape, that how to roleplay within it is very difficult to conceptualise and even impossible. The roleplaying concept of Exalted is based on the fact that things exist, whereas in the Wyld they do not.

Sorcery Artefacts, Hearthstone Powers, Charms, Solar Essence Raising

    Item powers Essence for a spell. Roll 1 die against the Essence needed to use the spell. If they succeed they can shape the spell without spending Essence. Subtract one from the die every time the item is used.

    Solar Training Item
    All the time the item is in the Solar's possession counts as time spent training to increase their Essence.

    Spell Supplementing Item
   Provides Willpower cost for shaping spells. After it is used roll the character's Essence against the number of Willpower points used to power spells. If they fail they lose all temporary Willpower and gain a negative psychological mutation with a value of twice the number of Willpower points needed for the spell they tried to use. The full amount of Willpower must be spent when the item is used.

Sidereal Conspiracy

    One of the most damning facts about the Sidereals' involvement in the Usurpation was their lack of it: they did nothing. They did nothing to prevent the attempt at wholesale murder of the Solar ruling caste by their footmen despite the fact that they saw it looming and were well aware of the consequences. They did nothing to inform the Solars of the earth-shattering treason that was about to be attempted or protect their Solar masters. As a result the Sidereals complicity in the Usurpation is a perfectly preserved secret. No one suspects the Sidereals' foreknowledge of the incident and their lac of effort to prevent it: all blame being aimed a the Dragon Blooded who single handedly perpetrated the outrage. In true Sidereal style they played their hand without anyone realising they were doing anything.
   Some Sidereals had misgivings, another reason the Five Maidens didn't entrust them with active involvement. The Dragon Blooded were far lower in the chain of power and made better conspirators. A handful of Viziers made active attempts to prevent the Usurpation but they were heavily outnumbered.
   Only once the full weight of the Usurpation made itself felt the reality of what they had let happen sank in and a major 'schism' of Sidereals broke off and declared themselves beyond the Five Maidens' authority. Naturally this is a heinous crime and conflict between the two sides has never ended.
   The initial ambush and subsequent campaign to eradicate the Solars was only the first but most important step of the Dragon Blooded's purge of the Solar's rule. Everyone who had alliegance to the Solars had to be deposed. The other Celestial Exalted would have soon followed. The Sidereals themselves, long-standing advisors to the despised and now defeated Solars would have found themselves the target of a plan of extermination just as ruthless and thorough. Instead they hid their very existence from Creation to avoid the Dragon Blooded's revenge. Using false identities crafted with their mastery of Astrology they infiltrated Dragon Blooded society and slowly removed all evidence that there were such things as Sidereals in order to remove suspicion.

The Editorial: Maths, Square Root Method

    Normally calculating a square root without a calculator is a bitch.
This morning I looked up what an acre was and found it was an unwieldy figure of 4840 square yards and wondered what that actually meant. I created a method for calculating the approximate value of a square root. The method is easier to show than if I just explain it.

   4840      1
   484        10
   121        40

This number is easy to work with 40 is a third of 120

   120 / 3/2= 80      40 x 3/2 = 60

   80+60= 140. 140 / 2 = 70 correct

I tested this with 6750
Here the last digit is helpful for dividing the number

665 / 5 = 135 (6 x 20 (hundred / five) = 120 + 15)

135   50

Seven divides almost exactly into 50 and exactly into 135 to create a ratio of 19:7
19 - 7 = 12

135 / 19/12   50 x 19/12
=85 5/19      =76 1/6
Totals added divided by two = over 80. Actual figure about 82.

The Editorial: Learning

    Everyone says that learning Japanese is hard. Even the people in my class go on (to my annoyance) about how hard it is. Well the truth is: it isn't. It's as easy as you make it to be. For a log time I tried to learn from A Guide To Reading And Writing Japanese. I tried to learn straight out of the book and learning faceless strings of definitions.
   Despite my obsession over them my Kanji was still pretty poor, I spend more time working over them than learning them in an effort to make a large, comprehensive alphabetical Japanese English dictionary, everybody seems to arrange them according to stroke order. This went on during my Japanese course. It wasn't until recently that I started looking and the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. They don't have any information regarding their syllabus on their website so my teacher directed me to another website that has their former vocabulary lists. My first step towards understanding how to learn Japanese came from transcribing the dialogues in Take Off In Japanese. This was a very useful exercise but gave me unaccountable head pains.
   When it really took off was when I started to learn the now out dated, but probably still accurate, vocab lists from JLPTstudy.com. Every day I write out cards with the Japanese word and it's meaning on one side and the Japanese writing of the word on the other. Then I make sentences using the words. Since I know quite a few of them already once I've used a word I put it into one pile, if I didn't know it I put it into another pile. Then I come back to the ones I didn't know until I've remembered them. The key to doing this is to make it fun. That's right learning can actually be fun (unlike writing on a damned computer) When I write sentences I don't write ones that make sense or even pay proper attention to grammar. I even write sentences so they're surreal and absurd. If you make something interesting you'll learn it much better. I don't particularly think much of the classroom environment or conventional ideas of education. One of the major problems is the idea of notes. Notes are the bane of a serious student. The whole purpose of taking lessons is to remember things. Notes are only a secondary educational tool to use as back up to cover what you don't remember. The idea of revision is overrated too. It seems people spend time sitting through boring, pedestrian, often pedantic lessons and them worry over the last few months of the year when revising for their exams. A lot of emphasis is placed on working hard. In my experience learning would be better facilitated by making it easy.
   The lack of a pressurised environment where exams are the ultimate goal is far better at letting people learn. I learn from home, casually and do about forty minutes work a day on vocab, including cutting bits of paper for my cue cards. This seems rather childish doing hand crafts but actually helps. Contrary to my earlier methods, an essential part of studying a subject is to work in a learning environment not a testing environment. As soon as you start to think about anything other that the actual subject you start to lose it. When learning a language don't wrack your brain trying to remember a word, just turn over the cue card and look at it. Never try to push yourself when learning. As soon as you do you make it a mental strain and that impedes your ability to learn. I find that by doing less than an hour off casual work I can keep it fresh and happily work on it every day (rather than approaching it in big chunks) and absorb information far better than I would if I was stressing myself.
   In context I'm covering twenty-five Kanji a day. I may not learn them all perfectly, but at the end of the week I do a recap. It actually helps to have something going on in my life other than just learning from a 'book.' The fact that teachinng is far more effective when students are enjoying themselves led to a perverse notion that children should work and earn the right to an education. Education would be a privilege, and an enjoyable one, rather than a tedious chore forced on them. The fact is that I have to pay to take Japanese classes and my exams from my own pocket and appreciate the value of work and education a lot more as a result. Crucially I actually want to be in the class room. This is someone talking from a great amount of life experience but nevertheless working this way suits me far better than formal education did.
   Here's my bitch. I hate maths. Most of all I hate the way it's taught. It's exemplary of the pedantic approach the academic establishment has. When I was at school doing a design and technology project the teacher seemed to be more concerned with the presentation of our work than with the work itself. This is one of the major issues I have with education. Once I was repremanded by a teacher for not taking notes. Issues at the time aside, the important thing is to let the information sink in. People approach lessons as time to take notes they can come back to later. Even in the library during revision time I see pupils writing out sets of notes from text books. Our history teacher during GCSE's gave us directions on how to write titles in correspondence to their importance. I may have taken such things a bit too seriously being rather literal minded at the time, but making notes is what the writers of text books should be doing. The pupil's job is to learn it and get all the information into their head. Learning should take place during term time, not a few months or weeks before final exams. By the time you get to the exams you should know everything. Having information on paper, no matter how well presented won't do you any good. In an exam all you're going to have is what you already know. Term time should be an intensive learning experience so that exams are easy, they are only a measure of your ability not the ultimate goal of learning. The ultimate goal of learning is to do just that not to get high grades in exams. Of course results are important, and the reason I'm learning the JLPT syllabus is because I want to take exams and get good results, but the real aim of the whole thing is to be proficient at writing and speaking Japanese.
   Going back to why I hate maths apart from my personal grudge against the subject, two things stand out. Firstly is the ridiculous way of marking exams that puts method before results. It was the same in my electronics course work. Mark are given primarily for working not for getting the right answer. You could probably get every question wrong and still pass. How ludicrous is that! If someone handling the Apollo 13 mission (or any other space flight for that matter) made a mathematical error that caused the astronauts to be killed no one would give a fuck if they showed their working. Similarly in electronics coursework you're not marked on the basis of whether you managed to get your circuit to work (which is the point of the whole exercise- who's going to hire an electrician who can't construct a circuit properly) but how well you kept notes (there they are again) of what you did during the course of your work. They expect you to make a circuit, things to go wrong and you write about how you corrected them. You could be a prodigy who can make a complex circuit, working out the design completely in your head without making a single mistake and you would probably fail miserably.
   Secondly is the way they teach people to solve maths problems. They always seem to work on the basis of a plodding, 'trench warfare' approach of working out the smallest units, then the next smallest ones until they finally get to the end. When doing maths away from the stultifying atmosphere of the classroom I tend to start with the largest part of the number and work towards the smallest. This way I know immediately roughly what the answer will be. Another key thing in maths is to take short cuts. I have to work out prices of numbers with awkward combinations. Say if you want to add £2.75 to a price, the conventional method is to add 5 p, then 70, then two pounds in a way that's very likely to cause numbers to overflow and add to the next figure in the calculation. The obvious way of doing this problem is to add £3, then take away 20 p, then 5p, or just take away 25 at once if it helps. Don't limit yourself by following a boring procedure when you know you can do better. Multiplication works the same way, look for short cuts. If multiplying a figure by 14, normally an awkward calculation, multiply the figure by ten to give you a rough idea of the outcome, add half that number again to effectively multiply by 15 and then take away the original figure to multiply by 14. Once I was thinking about how to work out the volume of a one foot cube of steel in metric measurements. A 1 foot cube is 12 x 12 x 12 inches. 12 x 12 is 144. So multiply that by 10 (to make 1440) then double the original figure and add that to the result. 1440 + 288, add three hundred (1744) subtract 12 (1732)
   Then to work out how to convert that size into metric measurements the number of millimetres in an inch is 25.4. This plays into the hands of a clever mathematician. 25 x 25 is 225. To multiply that again by 25, divide it by four and multiply by a hundred. 200 divided by 4 is 50 (25 4's in a hundred, or just halve it and then half it again), 20 divided by 4 is 5, and 5 divided by four is 1 and a quarter. Use the way numbers relate to eachother to do sums faster. Think big and start with the whole of the result them whittle it down till have the right number. Doing maths isn't about being a human calculator, it's about using your imagination to make it easy and also more enjoyable. You can make pupils actually like a subject and they'll be better at it as a result.

Lookshy: Shinobi, Gunzosha Commandos

    I got the impression from a mention in Scroll of Kings that the Rangers were a highly elite fighting force and started getting some preconceived ideas about what they would be like. It wasn't for a long time that I got my hands on the Scavenger Lands and had a look at them properly.
   Lookshy stands out in Exalted for having a fairly solid cultural identity (namely Japan.) Although I didn't think they played on this to it's fullest extent. My vision of Lookshy is centred on medieval Japan and I decided to do something about the Rangers. Obviously the thing to do would be to base them on ninjas so I did. But I couldn't use a name as obvious as ninja, so they're called Shinobi instead.
   The Shinobi come from Dragon-Blooded clans and are taught hereditary skills in the villages they live in away from the city. The closeness to nature and isolation from civilisation gives them excellent opportunity to learn and practise their skills. The fact that Forest-Blooded Terrestrials have the skills best suited to become Shinobi is an excellent advantage and most Shinobi come from this bloodline.
   Shinobi are exclusively Dragon Blooded. Enlightened mortals may practise the martials arts that Shinobi are known for but they lack the ability to learn other Charms that are essential for their use on the battlefield.
   The three ranks of Shinobi are as follows:
   Genin: regular, rank and file (although highly trained) soldier Shinobi.
   Chunin: leaders of small units of Shinobi, often 'fang' sized.
   Shonin: leader of an entire clan of Shinobi. A veteran Dragon Blooded of fearsome skill who commands dozens of warriors.

   Gunzosha Commandos are another group worth mentioning here. One thing that struck me is their numerical allocation. The Scavenger Lands has 125 Gunzosha Commandos to a unit of about 1300 Seventh Legion warriors. 1 out of 10 is a far too high ratio for such an elite unit. 125 per field force is more realistic and conveys the rarity of such dedicated individuals. Also the effectiveness of Gunzosha Commando Armour should be reviewed. Rather than just being armed with unnamed Essence weapons and great swords and great axes, Gunzosha Commando Armour could make Essence weapons attunable through the suit allowing them to wield devices like Concussive Essence Cannon in a way that normally only Exalted can. Essence weapons are regarded as standard issue among their ranks. Enlightened mortals are welcomed among Gunzosha Commandos as they have a potential longer life expectancy.
  

Exploding Shurikens

    Exploding Shurikens (low level artefacts) have several blades (often a large number) of varying designs attached to an artefact core. The blades themselves are disposable. A variant houses dart-like projectiles. When the weapon is thrown it travels to the target and then explodes, sending the blades flying in all directions, in an arc or against a single target as the thrower intends. Some exploding shurikens have dozens of blades and are highly lethal. This weapon makes up for the lack of lethality of the individual projectiles by their sheer number. In addition to being able to launch many blades at once a thrower can hurl three shurikens simultaneously, making them highly dangerous.
   After throwing the core is still intact and can be retrieved and reloaded. Some assassins and other unconventional troops mount them on long ropes made of magical materials so they can be recovered quickly without having to change position. A few enterprising fighters have even turned them into unwieldy but surprisingly effective close combat weapons by using them like flails while the blades remain attached.

Artefact clothing, armour, power armour and Warstriders

    Terrestrials of the Threshold learned that they could take on the characteristics of an animal by wearing a jade hide in the shape of it's skin. In ordinary artefact armour this direct physical effect is limited, pelts of northern animals protected against the cold. This evolved into the magitech artefacts known as Dragon Armour where they became half like the animals they represented and finally the ultimate expression in the Warstriders. Magitech armour is inseparable from the wearer, it's truly a part of their body and they experience everything through it at first hand. With a Warhawk it's possible to experience unrestrained flight. In a Warkraken they can swim through the darkest depths. Attuning to a Warstrider doesn't just connect them to a suit of armour- they actually become a creature and live as it does. This is why Magitech is so advanced and valuable.

    The Warstriders were created by the Celestial Incarnae and the Elemental Dragons for the Exalted to fight against the Primordials.
   Because Warstriders become part of the wearer's body it is not armour and does not prevent them from using martial arts.
   The original Warstriders dating from the First Age were great heroes given form. At the pinnacle of this art where the Royal Warstriders, reserved for the Celestial Exalted, not least because of the massive difficulty in making them. All Warstriders made for the Celestial Exalted were they forms of heroes the Exalted could become by attuning to them. The Royal Warstriders even had their own spirits the Exalted who piloted them became.

Call of Exalted: Character Creation and Development

    Although I like the organic way of creating a character by making them immediately from the standard traits in ordinary character creation where they already have a background and are some time after being Exalted, a while ago I experimented with another method of character creation which suits Call of Exalted and develops the character in a different way.
   I started off by writing the character as a heroic mortal, one with quite low trait levels- using the Attribute points for heroic mortals in the Exalted rulebook (or scroll of heroes) and only eighteen ability points attributing merits and flaws as well. Making a character in this way really brings out what the character was like before their Exaltation (and requires attention to the period of their life.) Then I bumped them up to full Exalted level with the proper number of points in Abilities, Attributes and Backgrounds. Working out the character's Charms was much easier than totally spontaneous character creation since I already had an idea of what they were doing, what Charms they would need for it and what their Ability levels were.
   It's a significantly more gritty approach to character creation but it brings out aspects of a character to a degree they wouldn't be otherwise. For example this character had Legendary Intelligence which I wouldn't have given them if I created an Exalt straight away. I also came up with a new permutation of Esoteric Knowledge. This method plays out the character's Exaltation as part of the creation process and makes a character immediately after they ave been Exalted rather than some time after and have had time to have adventures and start to shape their powers more. It also makes the game more Occult, for instance with the character I was creating the Sidereals became much more unearthly and mysterious beings (fitting for a horror game.)

Film Review: Ip Man

    Not even worthy of a place on my website. Get stuffed.
    It's not even a good martial arts film. I've seen martial arts cinema at it's finest and this has nothing to do with it.

Music Review: Piece of Mind, Iron Maiden

    This album does have a few songs on it that listeners might find off-putting. Die With Your Boots On grates at your nerves a bit and I'm not even going to go into how dire track seven (may it's name never be spoken) is; it's unfortunate they included that one on the album since their are eight other songs. However it starts out well with Where Eagles dare, you immediately get the feeling you're listening to a good album (the song has some very early eighties sound effects but I don't mind) followed a couple of tracks later by Flight of Icarus. But it's the centre piece that really makes the album. Normally battle metal isn't renown for it's maturity, lyric content is often basic and sometimes cringe inspiring if someone else was listening to it (see Invaders from Number of the Beast or Where Eagles Dare.) However the song that was the penultimate track on Best of the Beast proves that people can do it right and make a truly incredible song. Put the volume up though because it seems to have been recorded more quietly than the other which is a shame because it would be absolutely amazing otherwise.
   This is one of the band's more fantasy orientated albums and is very useful to listen to if you're writing something along that line.

Music Review: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Iron Maiden

    The first time I heard this I felt a bit jilted feeling that Iron Maiden had fallen in love with synths and electronic music. Although it does have a strong existentialist tone that will do you're head in if you listen to it too much, it's one of Iron Maiden's most listenable albums. The music definately has a more polished sheen to it than you might be used to from them and the last song carries a bitter edge but in an appreciable way (unlike Fear of the Dark.)
   Apart from a short moment at the end of Seventh Son of a Seventh Son it's devoid of any cheezy lyrics that occasionally plague the band. The music might not be as good as you've been led to expect but this album is definitely solid if not quite as good as some of their more daring releases.

Music Review Fear of the Dark, Iron Maiden

    You might think that Iron Maiden's early work was an uninterrupted string of first rate heavy metal. I can't say what I think of most of their work from the nineties but be careful: this is by and large a bad album. There's only one song on it that I listen to that measures up to Iron Maiden's standards. I heard the first song before but it starts a theme of social commentary that reaches an all time low in Childhood's End. They've made a few songs with dodgy lyrics before but I was always ready to forgive them for it because of the quality of the rest of the album. That quality is lacking here. You're better off just buying the single.

Film Review Stay Alive

    When I first heard this was a teen slasher movie naturally I wasn't enthusiastic, but this is markedly more intelligent than other films of it's demographic base. There isn't any drooling over the fact that women have tits like in All The Boys Love Mandy Lane and other such purile crap. This is definately a cut above most other horror films of it's type.
   Many films have been made based on video games. This is something of a twist on that idea. It's a curse movie with a leaning towards action but still has mystery and detective work although this is more supplemental to the film's pro-active story. The characters are all at least reasonably intelligent and the film is devoid of any cheezy stalking that makes you distance ourself from it like in some bigger budget but less intelligently made horror films. Also they are characterful and diverse so you'll probably find one of the members of the story to empathise with which is actually quite a rare thing in a horror film and genuinely adds something to it in a way that reminded me of Cloverfield. The characters aren't overdone like Blair Witch 2 which leaves them room for having real personalities rather than being stereotypical.
   Rating 7/10

Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero

    Everyone get hung up over the content of this film and it's become a rock solid horror cult classic. Except I disagree.
   I've seen much better films than this made for less money (it apparently cost $650,000.) Despite the fact that it had a large budget by the standards of underground films (if I can use that term) it looks atrociously cheap. Being made in an earlier decade doesn't save it either Tetsuo was made in the late eighties and for what must have been a fraction of this budget.
   I admit I hate the seventies, but even considering that, it's execution, not just it's appearance is disappointment for a film that's been cited so much. Romero himself made a better film in Night of the Living Dead. I didn't even watch it long enough to see the bit when they're in the mall but doubt I would have been impressed.

Child's Play

    On a first misguided viewing of one of these films it created an instant prejudice against comedy horror.

    Child's Play

   Don't be put off by the beginning of this film. It sounds utterly cliched and badly acted but that soon passes. The film may in many ways be of only average quality but the persona of Chucky is enough to make it enjoyable. They clearly weren't making this film to be takes too seriously, in terms of how they manage the various aspects of it I think it's a creative success albeit a relatively modest one. It sets the stage for the next film so if you thought this was OK I'd recommend it.

   Child's Play 2

   My true initiation into the World of Chucky. I watched it one night in an indifferent state of mind which turned out to be ideal. The brings out elements of the first film and exaggerates them, like you'd expect from a good standard sequel. The main character makes friends with a teenage blonde but thankfully they didn't make the mistake of success going to their heads and casting a brainless bimbo. The gratuitous violence of the earlier film and Chucky's evil charisma which are what made the first film notable are more strongly present here. If you don't mind a film being very low key and not taking itself particularly seriously then I'd definitely recommend it. The violence is more amusing than potentially upsetting- you'll understand what I mean when you watch it.

   Child's Play 3

   Hopefully the least well-known of the original trilogy, the first part of the story should have really ended with Child's Play 2. (I've lost the damned cursor again because of this stupid Blog so I may get a bit annoyed.)
   They say that the third album is the hardest. It certainly is the case here. They move the story on eight whole years necessitating a dramatic revamp and redesigning of the film. They seemed to be working with a bigger budget this time but it seems to have been a disadvantage because they tried to make more of a hard-edged genuine rather than a low budget comedy that sports amusing, inventive violence with carefree glee. There are a rare few of those genuinely pleasing 'Chucky moments' that made the first films memorable. Instead they misrepresent his character in a similar way to Ryuk in L Change the World.

The Editorial

"If we are ever to have law and order in the West, the first thing we gotta do is take out all the lawyers and shoot 'em down like dogs."

Major Rufus Cobb
Jesse James

In my experience the first people we should shoot are those gol-dang computer programmers. You'd think that writing a template for a simple website would be easy, that anyone working for a major organisation like Google could do it. Well that is far from the case. Not only are computers damned confounded, infernal machines but so are their creators. They can't even manage the simple task of changing the type face without it turning into a struggle against the ineptitude of the half-wit on the desk that some damned confounded idiot has tried to make think for itself when it's got even less common sense than the idiot who built it. There's already something that uses common sense and thinks for itself, it's called a human being. If computers simply did exactly what they were told like all machines do instead of trying to outwit us when they are patently incompetent then they wouldn't be nearly as half so troublesome.

Film Review Ashes of Time Redux, Wong Kar Wai

    This is a remastered version of a much older film, which was actually longer but apparently of lower technical quality. The film and sound quality of this film aren't what you'd expect from a film such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon however this exceeds any other wuxia film I have ever seen.
   The reason for this is Wong Kar Wai is a genuine artist. Although he has a thick layer of style in 2046 here he lays on artistic expression as a director particularly strongly. He uses colour to create a visual richness in the landscape that made it particularly inspiring for my adaptation of Exalted. The soundtrack combines modern instruments with traditional Chinese melodies as well as featuring cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma. The result of his free use of his powers as a director might be overwhelming to those new to Asian or art cinema. I found it a turn off the first time I tried to watch it. Years later I recognise it as the masterful film that it is.
   Despite being a wuxia movie the plot is primarily a romance with the kind of depth that you'd expect from his other films, although here he has less time to dwell on it as there are serious action scenes, one of which is rather difficult to follow on first viewing. Although he does bring the same degree of intelligence and involvement to these as he does to the romantic story.
   I wouldn't recommend this for people who are solely accustomed to mainstream western cinema unless you're really looking to break out your own boundaries. It probably suits the slightly more mature end of the audience although the action and emotional intensity make it vibrant even by his own standards.

Trait Minimums for Sorcery

    I was a bit (or maybe very) over the top when I suggested the Sorcery trait minimums should be increased to Occult and Essence 5 for Terrestrial Circle Sorcery, 7 for Celestial Circle and 9 for Solar Circle. Mainly it was just my megalomania and reacting to the low prerequisites that the games writes made. Having Occult and Essence 5 to be initiated into sorcery does make it an impressive achievement and maybe suitable to Call of Exalted where everything is far more occult. But in a normal game it makes it too exclusive and means you can't start the game as a sorcerer which would frustrate many players (including me.) However I think that the existent prerequisites are too low vis-a-vis other Celestial powers- all of the post-Form Charms for Border of Kaleidoscopic Logic Style are Essence 8. Considering Sorcery is supposed to be the apex of Exalted achievement, having Solar Circle Sorcery requiring no more than Essence 5 just isn't good enough, especially considering Solars gain Essence more easily.
   So to make sorcery appropriately powerful I think these new minimums should be used:
   Terrestrial Circle Sorcery: Occult and Essence 3
   Celestial Circle Sorcery: Occult and Essence 5
   Solar Circle Sorcery: Occult and Essence 7

Film Review, Twilight

    Please.

Film Review, Let The Right One In

    I was surprised to learn this film was set in the eighties. The book it's based on was written then and they decided to set it at the same time rather than updating it. The way they portray the era is evident when you know it but extremely subtle and could easily be viewed as a contemporary film.
   The film starts off edging towards the understated and disturbing. It's a relatively quiet film, focusing on the life of the main character and the nature of another character's vampirism.
   This is not a lost in the woods type horror film like I thought it would be, all about survival drama like so many other horror films. Instead it's set in an urban environment as is much more about supernatural influence on eeveryday life that high drama and action. I'm not a particularly great fan of vampire films, not that I'm prejudiced against the genre but simply because of what it's produced. I haven't seen a vampire story like this one before and it's a better film for it. I've never seen one that focused on children before.
   There's nothing uptight or exclusive about it's focus on young characters, adult are not included as mere footnotes. The fact that it's a continental film definitely adds something to it and gives it a sense of distinctiveness.
   Although it doesn't focus on primarily being exciting I would never call it boring, eventful scenes are simply not dressed up like they would be in an American film. Instead fact of the characters' existence and their relationships to eachother in all forms take precedence.
   In all it's a good alternative to 'Hollywood' supernatural films.

Zatoichi, Regional Influences, Lookshy, the East

    As a comparative note between Zatoichi and Ladyhawke, Zatoichi also uses modern synthesized music but it doesn't sound tagged on, even next to the traditional music in the rest of the soundtrack.
   Zatoichi is a major eye opener for the design of building in Lookshy. There's a myriad of design styles visible in the background. The last time I watched it I spent more time looking at the background than the characters on a few occasions. There's a wealth on information for someone interested in it. As well as the fact that it suits perfectly Creation's eastern architecture, most obviously that of Lookshy. It's not such a question of what materials they use, it's how they use them that's important in determining regional styles.

Scroll of Exalts, Second Edition Review, Compass of Terrestrial Directions The North

    You might argue that Exalted characters were better put into each of the Manuals of Exalted Power. There are a good number of characters of each type and it's interesting to see them all written up next to eachother (as well as giving readers a sample of all of them.) Including a character section would have added another chapter to each book so.
   Mainly I want to talk about the Alchemicals. The first couple of characters are very interesting and give a vibrant new angle to the game. The real reason I want to talk about the Alchemicals though is that it's illustrative of some characteristic flaws in the writing of Exalted. In Dreadful Adjudicator of Law it describes a mystery behind the character's identity (that people would probably guess at) the takes away an opportunity for the Storyteller to turn it into a mysterious conspiracy as so often happens in the game. The opposite mistake in Thousand-Faceted Nelumbo is giving an out of game explanation that a certain detail has deliberately been left unresolved to let Storytellers use it for their own purposes.
   Exalted has an annoying habit of being over-detailed in some areas that should be left to the imagination of participants, such as the exact depths of the floodwaters from the various rivers around Nexus, while being afraid of committing to their own work in a way that undermines faith in their writing, such as the alternative identities of the Bull of the North in the Compass of Terrestrial Directions. In New Breeds of Bull it says he could also be a Lunar, a deathknight, or a Fair Folk noble after categorically stating in the main rulebook and in all other material he is a Solar. Although the North did have one of the few (possibly the only) civilisations I could get my teeth into on pages 95-98 in the Zalvanesh Divers.
   Going back to the Scroll of Exalts I think it would have added another dimension to the Manual of Exalted Power series if the characters had bee included in their books. Among the characters listed are all the ones on the front covers of various books. And of course you wouldn't know what their Charms did unless you had the relevant source book.

Regional Influences, Second Edition Review

    The fundamental nature of Elemental Essence in Version 3 is different to the Second Edition. This is because of the more oblique nature of their design from the influences listed below. Elemental aspects are not so direct. In Second Ed it's a simply matter of 'the Pole of Earth is about Earth so at the centre of Creation is a mountain, Earth aspected martial arts are literally about Earth' and to an extent so are Dragon-Blooded powers.
   In Version 3 Elemental influence expresses itself more subtly. Artistic and architectural styles are influenced by their location but not to the extent that 'it's near the pole of earth so use rock.' Instead the way cultures around the Elemental Poles are influenced by their environment is a deeper, less direct and more profound one.
   For the Pole of Earth, in fact the whole of the Blessed Isle, the main influence was Wong Kar Wai's outstanding wuxia work Ashes of Time. Watch that film and you'll really understand how an area can be profoundly Earth aspected while not being so in a crude way like 'it has to have stone, mountains etc.' The reason for this is not a disdain for such evocative, primal ideas but that they simply do not fit with the game. As I have said before if Exalted use conventional fantasy notions like archetypal, you could even say stereotypical, dragons then that would work. But it's precisely because Exalted avoids such conventions that it's attractive and applying an idea like that would not suit it. Instead you have to do things differently. Thus instead of thinking of the Elemental Poles as 'inertly' Elemental, they are related to the life of Creation, principally animal life, via their association with Gaia and the Elemental Dragons. Even the presence of the forests of the East, the most wild environment of all, is just a setting for the life that exists there rather than being a force in itself. The nature of the Elemental Dragons and the Exalted they created is linked intrinsically to animals rather than the inert matter of one of the directions of Creation. So rather than using boring (and conceptually difficult to handle) jade from the sea, the jade found in the West is living matter.
   Unfortunately the nature of jade and Elemental is both poorly described in original sources and difficult to up with sound ideas for, although I have one or two which might work out.
   The next film which influenced me, in quite an accurate fashion, which helped with the setting for the East was Zatoichi. it expresses my ideas for the Wood setting, especially in the Scavenger Lands. It's not a simply matter of the presence of an element, whether it's fire or earth, in a film like Ashes of time it's very evocative of that element while not being directly so (deserts are a big feature on the film) and they both adhere to, or in the case of Ashes of Time created my ideas for the setting of a particular quadrant. The Blessed Isle is based on historical China, while Lookshy is based on Japan. One flaw with the Second Edition was a complete failure to create and kind of cultural identity for any of the countries it described. This is mainly evident from language and the use of names, language structures for names are scattered at random throughout Creation failing to give any culture a real sense of identity. Lookshy is something of an exception, since they thankfully created some kind of cultural homogeneity.
   A closer study of the art and architecture in both films, as well as knowledge of the cultures they come from, will help demonstrate the effect they have on influences regions of Creation. For a long time I tried to create my own little country somewhere in the north east. I tried to work within the existing setting and nomenclature of what I think is High Realm (not the most imaginative name.) On that note it's similarity to the stereotypical fantasy in the film Rolemodels makes me extremely uncomfortable. Of course what I create was rubbish-largely because their description of the Terrestrial directions is rubbish. It wasn't till I saw Ashes of Time that I realised I shouldn't be trying to trying to fit my ideas in with that the game already says. I should be redesigning the Blessed Isle.
   Paying attention to background aspects of films such as these two and Hero played a major role in reshaping the identity of Creation. And I can't write any more because this stupid dolly sized keyboard is annoying me so much if I have to use it anymore I'll kick this stupid computer out the fucking window.