Cliffhanger

So the group is on a two-masted cog, the good ship Empire of the Sunset, in the middle of a really furious storm. Sheets of rain and murderous squalls. Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening. About a quarter of the crew has already been swept overboard, which might be just as well, because the PCs are not well liked, after all that spitting into the communal stew (very public, too) and mouthing off to the first mate. In fact, there would probably be a mutiny under way by now, if the sailors weren't a bit preoccupied at the moment (or dead), because the captain keelhauled a full quarter of them, plus the first mate, on false charges. One mast has just been struck by lighting, and crashed on the deck, where it smashed open the cage of the mountain lion the Empire has been transporting. The mountain lion that has been poked with sharp sticks for entertainment purposes and was able to grievously wound a PC and a sailor while in the cage. Someone should have put up a warning sign.

This is also the moment where a fat tentacle appears at the ship's rail, belonging to God-knows-what kind of hellbeast. Maybe that's the reason the ghost ship that hounded us for the last quarter of an hour is suddenly gone.

It is also the moment where the game master says "Let's wrap up for tonight."

Well played, sir, well played.

There is only so much space on a USB stick

And that's why the SEC (commission regulating banks and stock markets in the US) deleted all their data about preliminary investigations into pillars of society like Deutsche Bank or SAC - instead of keeping it forever, like the authorities are wont to do with any other kind of data. Read about it in Matt Taibbi's new piece.

Taibbi on Bachmann

Matt Taibbi's exposé on Michele Bachmann, the possible tea party/ religious nuttery candidate for the American presidency in 2012, is easily the scariest thing you will read today. Bachmann is very, very crazy and the thought of her being somehow connected to the Oval Office is very, very scary - if she were angling for the presidency of Angola or Haiti, we could all have a good laugh, watch the carnage and send in the UN later to extinguish the pyres, but, regrettably, we are talking about the United States. And she makes Palin look like an unrefined prototype, a proof-of-concept at best: Palin is the mudskipper to Bachmann's frog.