Space Monkey Cowboy Mafia

One of the people in my gaming group did a crazy thing to me. Apparently, most of my players are fans of a sci-fi/western series called Firefly, and to appease the crowd I went and saw the movie that recently came out (Serenity). To my surprise, I liked it, and I even signed up for the "not happening just yet" online game that one of my people is wanting to run. Anyway, Tuesday I got a package in the mail from Amazon. I opened it up, and lo and behold they had sent me the complete run of Firefly on dvd. Grey, you're a twerp!

So, I've been watching it. All in all, I'd say it's a pretty good show. Not something to let the kids see, as it goes by FOX visual censorship standards, but it's well-written and well-executed. So of course, the series got cancelled after fourteen episodes...

The basic premise of the series is that after Earth finally becomes used up, there is a huge rush of colonization. People get stuck together on colony ships for long periods of time, so by the time they actually get to terraform and settle new worlds they're all a kind of cultural mishmash where everyone speaks English with occasional Chinese phrases. The older and 'more civilized' colonies band together into the Alliance, and the rough-and-tumble border worlds band together into an Independence faction. There is a war, of course, and the Independence (or 'browncoats') get their backsides handed to them.

Six years later, a former browncoat has become the captain of a (comparatively) little Firefly-class transport ship called Serenity with a crew consisting of a former comrade and her husband, a hardbitten and clueless mercenary, a perky little engineer, a high-class courtesan, an elderly priest, a mild-mannered medic, and his mentally-fragmented little sister who just happens to be a wanted fugitive. Since the Alliance has made it almost impossible to make an honest living (especially with the huge reward out on the medic and his sister), the crew of Serenity find themselves scraping from one questionable job to another just to keep in fuel and food. Of course, more often than not the jobs develop major hitches, but the writers manage to keep it pretty fun. The characters seem to be pretty consistent and well-acted, and even the annoying ones give you reasons to like them. The mercenary is a case in point, as he has no manners and even fewer scruples, but he's so unapologeticly himself that it's really hard to dislike him for it. He's ignorant, prejudiced, thinks most situations can be resolved with bullets, and wouldn't know an ideal if it bit him, but you always know where you stand with him.

Anyhoo, this is a long post for no particular reason. The cafe is up for sale now, and there hasn't been much interest yet. The temperatures here are below zero at night and not much above in the daytime, and we've discovered the hard way that our building's heat doesn't work very well. Today we closed early when I figured out that it wasn't getting above 48 degrees in the dining area, and tomorrow I'll probably keep it closed. Until this cold snap ends, there's not a lot of point. Not many people like eating frozen food...