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November 03, 2005

The Ghost City of Cyprus

Very interesting photojournoblogging from Michael Totten about an abandoned city, still standing, but surrounded by barbed wire fences and forbidden to enter.

Via the Shrill Shill, who just added an update to his post noting that the FMA is "slap in the face" much like that "silly 'Holocaust' kerfuffle" was.

(Ummm, not really.)

Update: Ghost City Detroit.

I just got a totally cool idea for my next GURPS campaign.

Thanks to Thanks to Marc of Hubs and Spokes.

posted by Ace at 02:08 PM

Comments

Cyprus? Hell, we've got our own ghost city here in Michigan, just crawling with photographers...

Posted by: marc on November 3, 2005 02:14 PM

Damn, Marc, why'd you have to go and do that? Isn't that the impression everyone has of Detroit already? It's bad enough that Rush calls us "Little Fallujah. " I bet not ONE person on this blog would recognize some of the new/nice neighborhoods that are in Detroit. Because, according to the rest of the country, they don't exist. We may have a shitty mayor, and some run down buildings, but there IS more to this city than that.

Posted by: carin on November 3, 2005 02:34 PM

Ace, you nerd, get out of my head. I just sent that link to my players and another RPG buddy with three plot hooks for the city.

Was thinking of running it with Spycraft.

Posted by: Larry on November 3, 2005 02:38 PM

Heeeey, isn't that where they filmed Robocop?

"Bitches, leave!"

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on November 3, 2005 02:56 PM

NO! It was filmed in Dallas.

Posted by: carin on November 3, 2005 03:01 PM

carin:

sorry - I don't mean to offend. And if you look into dETROITfUNK, you can tell that the author (and in fact most of those who do urban exploration and have blogs around Detroit) really love the city and hope for its resurgance, as do I.

But the fact is still that Detroit remains, in large sections, a ghost town, to the point that a proposal was once made to leave the downtown skyscrapers abandoned as a sort of american ruins. So in a sense I look at Detroit as the end result of generations of leftist- and racially driven-politics. It's a cautionary tale that people need to know about.

Posted by: marc on November 3, 2005 03:18 PM

Detroit is a poster-child for the failure of liberal politics. That being said, it's just gets my goat that it's always the abandoned building being shown. There are actually BRAND NEW BUILDINGS in Detroit. In the Downtown area. OFFICE buildings. The waterfront is being overhauled. We have two beautiful new stadiums (if only we had two new teams to play in 'em.) There have been renovations to some very glorious old buildings (The Fox Theater, for example.) Maybe tomorrow I'll drive around town and take some shots. I live in a beautiful neighborhood IN DETROIT. Not one crackhouse anywhere.

Posted by: carin on November 3, 2005 04:30 PM

The Detroit pics could just as well have come from parts of Albany NY. Democrats managed to turn that place into a "workers paradise" too.

Posted by: Purple Avenger on November 4, 2005 02:40 AM

Hi all,

Robocop may have been filmed in Dallas - I have no knowledge of this myself, but also no reason to doubt carin's word - but the story was definitely set in a fictionalized, cyberpunk-clichéd future Detroit.

<GEEK>

The places look like they'd make excellent maps for GURPS adventures, and the inspiration they stir up seems as good an excuse as any to test-drive the shiny new GURPS 4th Edition rules, but my first thought on actually seeing the pics of both Cyprus and Detroit was along the lines of, "man, Zipper Interactive and Guerilla/SCEE should be down there with digital cameras and laser scanners getting new maps for SOCOM 4 and the next Killzone!"

GURPS' best genre books have always been modern day conspiracy/High Weirdness stuff - Cabal, Black Ops, Technomancer, Voodoo, etc. And Cyprus fits beautifully into such games, having been owned by the Templars themselves at one point. An ex-King of Jerusalem bought it from them, and his heirs ruled it for centuries, long after the rest of the Crusaders had been expelled from the Holy Land. Richard the Lion-Hearted himself was married in Limassol on the way to the Crusades. So who knows, really, what the true significance is of that particular seemingly-mundane spot, among all the many historical sites in Cyprus, being the one cordoned off and forbidden to all but 33rd degree initiates of...er, the general public.

So with all that in mind, here's a scenario for ya, Ace: the moonbat blogosphere, convinced that the Ghost Town is where the Evil Neocon Conspiracy is hiding Osama bin Laden until they need to exploit his capture in the next election cycle, cranks up its fundraising machine to sponsor a discredited major-network anchorman's comeback exposé tour into the place to blow the lid off the cover-up. He finds no Osama, but following maps obtained from unimpeachable sources in a Nicosia Kinko's, he blunders into O'chubb'fuugly'blogr, Daemon Pharoah of Pathetically Unjustified Megalomania, breaking his arcane binding-sigils and rousing him from the torpor of eons. Your hastily-assembled crew of hard-bitten "executive security firm" special operators and ivory-tower scholars of esoteric occult lore must team up to slice like a fuckin' hammer and "clean house" in a Ghost Town showdown with the Daemon Pharoah and his hellish minions!

Have fun with it, and best of luck with the campaign! :)

</GEEK>

Posted by: Lord Rove's Henchman on November 4, 2005 04:08 AM

So basically you mean we do a raid on Howard Dean's crib?

OK.

Posted by: Purple Avenger on November 4, 2005 04:49 AM

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This is super-obscure and I only barely remember it. Given that, I'll give you the hint that it's by the Red Rocker.
And I guess you think you've got it made
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In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
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Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.

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Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

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