We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Sorry I'm late.

September 5
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green attempts to arrange a sex scandal involving Randel Portman and nova Raphaela Moore.

Moore lives in San Francisco; Portman was in town to give a speech. A hacker on Green's payroll spoofed the hotel switchboard, then called Moore (with a Fireman-themed voice-masker) inviting her to "his" (Portman's) hotel room. Whether it worked or not is up to the players and the Storyteller.

Either way, Raphaela Moore's interest in the political process has been piqued. She later modifies her appearance and attaches herself to Bernard Morrison's campaign.

This could lead to excellence or serious injury, given that Moore is a Mega-Social maniac who has to make an effort to interact with people in a genuine way, rather than through her "social jujitsu" abilities.

I've been genuinely demotivated to work on this.

August 28
[Aberrant] Randel Portman finds out about Mark Green's meeting with the Senate Committee on Nova Affairs.

St. Rebecca of Whitherby lists a number of dirty tricks Green can play on the PCs, many of the "let's you and him fight" variety.

Sorry I'm late, but I've been tired and demotivated lately.

July 10
[Aberrant] "The Voices of Clytemnestra" (the OpNet identity of Utopian nova Corby Carter) discourse.

It's entirely possible that Clytemnestra is still known as a "blogger" in a world where the Web was replaced by the OpNet. After all, the term "weblog" was invented in 1997, and "blog" was coined in early 1999. That could be just a rounding error of history.

"Objective Clytemnestra" talks about the Washington Post's recent connection of Mark Anthony Green to the Institute for Historical Review (a Holocaust-denial group) and calls Green's response a doctrine of original virtue: "One man, however fiercely he supports the propaganda of another, bears no responsibility for that other man's crimes."

The response in question was a statement of "'regret' for the 'insensitivity' of his youth" and the observation: "The people of the institute are historians; would you have some kind of original sin attach to them from a 20th century war?" (My answer is "Given that they're attempting to whitewash the reputation of that war's nigh-unquestionable villains, yes I fucking would.")

In contrast, "Narrative Clytemnestra" mentions that one Jules Courtnay, an André Corbin fanboy who carried his admiration of the Bender to the point of imitation, was arrested last month for killing his wife (in imitation of Corbin's alleged murder of Slider): "If Corbin's the innocent victim here, Jules has... struck out on his own and started redefining what being André Corbin means. If the sporty, nova-ish guy can't keep up, too bad." Finally, "Emotional Clytemnestra" sums up its opinion of original virtue with a quasi-paraphrase of Nietzsche: "If you wave your pom-poms for the monsters long enough, eventually you get to play on the monster team."

There's a certain irony there. Contrary to his optimistic statements on N-Day, candidate Portman is not 100% sanguine about how all novas will interact with baselines, and "Corb" (as Carter's delightful boot-slaves friends call him) is on his list of those to watch.

It started after N-Day, when Portman's wife Jennifer had to become something of an expert on novas purely in self-defense, as her poli-sci and history students interrupted her classes with nova-, Fireman- and quantum-power-related questions. Her old and new fields of study led her to conclude that hyperintelligent novas, "sphinxes" as she called them, would truly transcend their humanity, and would probably be unable to avoid rearranging human society to their liking. She told Randel about her theory, and they've opposed possible sphinx manipulations as best they can ever since.

They suspect Corb of being an "adder", a tool of the sphinxes, or a "smart egg", an incipient sphinx. The second guess is correct. His 2006 self-publication, Principles for an Ethical Society, lays out in public a proposal for the sort of societal reorganization that a full sphinx would conduct with discretion, and carries encoded in its complicated mathematical proofs a subliminal sales pitch. It also carries a hidden message from its caterpillar to any butterflies that may read it:

I know I am as a child to you. Before you attempt to interfere, please remember that the mass of humanity is much less than a child to you. You may grow lonely for my company in time.

All in all, it carries the feel of early Borgstromancy about it, from the period where RSean/RebeccaS were just starting to weave their spells.