UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE ####

INNA W B L N E U 20

W E E K L Y In this card, I see your past. In this card, I see your present. And in this card I see...oh. Oh no.

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For more information, email [email protected] Editor in Chief Stu Horvath

Managing Editor Owen R. Smith

Senior Editor Steve Haske

Design Stu Horvath UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE TWENTY

Contributors Luke Pullen

Shawn Alexander Allen

Marjorie Jensen

Aurelius Ventro CONTENTS

From the Desk of the EIC

Backward Flow by Luke Pullen

Practice by Shawn Alexander Allen

Cards are Told: The Skills of Poker and Tarot by Marjorie Jensen

Dear Space Marine by Aurelius Ventro

Biographies and Illustrations From the Desk of the Editor in Chief

Whenever you try to trace its outline, it changes, splits, grows, sloughs off parts and creates new ones. It shrieks and wails and blubbers and screams incoherently. It flails appendages blindly, independently of each other. It is immune to reason and it seems to want just one thing: to consume. If you think I am going to talk, yet again, about John Carpenter’s The Thing, you’re mistaken. I am talking about GamerGate. I will spare you the details of its origin and its history. If you’re reading this, you already know. It isn’t worth recounting. This movement that claims to be about ethics with one mouth and harasses women out of their homes with another. It espouses a desire for truth and honesty while distorting facts to fit elaborate conspiracy theories. Its partisans shout that they want change, but GamerGate will never change anything. It will never make anything. It cannot create. All GamerGate can do is destroy. The way it has tried to destroy the lives and careers of Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander, Jenn Frank, Dina Abou Karam, Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and more. The way it systematically silences discussions it disagrees with. The way it seeks to rob journalistic websites of advertisers through a coordinated, bad faith letter-writing campaign. The way it exhausts its opponents with endless, senseless gibbering. The way it fills us with rage we’re too reasonable to dump out on strangers. It whispers with a falsely sweet voice; it tries to sooth, like a siren, like a leucrocotta, like a manticore. We have to stop listening. We must not fight it on its own terms. It sings a carrion song to cover up the roar of a thresher. All that awaits us there is a storm of teeth and claws. It is dying. That is why is mewls so loudly. It is desperate to lure fresh prey into its clutches. Let it starve. The world knows what it really is. We know what it really is. Let it crawl out of its hole, into the light. Let it come to us. Or else, let it stay down there in the dark. All the hate and delusion will focus inward, devouring itself. It will be hard at first. The sounds coming from that pit will be horrible. But eventually, there will be silence again.

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We’ve got four great stories for you this week. First is Luke Pullen’s amazing look at ’s and the games it inspired. Shawn Alexander Allen gives us a look into last year’s Practice conference at NYU Gamecenter - if this doesn’t make you want to go to this year’s in November, nothing will. Marjorie Jensen draws comparisons between Tarot and Poker in our cover story and Space Marine Aurelius Ventro is back from the future with another advice column. Got something to say? Say it to my email at [email protected].

Stu Horvath, Kearny, New Jersey October 22, 2014 Backward Flow By Luke Pullen he trike is a pixellated metal cock crawling across the desert. It penetrates Tthe darkness at the edge of my vision, tracing a tiny path across the planet’s golden skin, dark granite clefts, orange rashes of spice blistered with red sores ready to burst. It lifts the black veil from the desert’s contours so that my fleet of greedy harvesters can crawl to the spice. It finds my enemies so that I can crush them with steel tracks and bury them under fire until nothing at all remains, no color staining the sand but my own. When my city is a vast concrete scab swollen with spice and my enemies are mapped and surrounded, the trike keeps pushing. I force it mindlessly against every remaining mystery until the map is complete. The trike is painted in Atreides blue. Atreides are the good guys, so they are blue. In fact, blue is not the color of the Atreides at all. My Dune education was backwards, starting with Westwood’s Dune II and ending, recently, with Frank Herbert’s novel. The original, it turns out, is full of surprises for someone who grew up on the games. In this case: Atreides wear black uniforms emblazoned with red hawks. Their flag is black, green and red. The change doesn’t surprise me. Can you really have good guys in black and red uniforms? Isn’t the flag a bit Middle-Eastern for a personification of Anglo-Saxon power and virtue? Herbert’s book bristles with these little barbs of disquiet. The trike is a striped metal condom encasing nothing. I’m at the murky dregs of adolescence, mind at sea on a tide of antidepressants and unable to feel or think. My waking moments are or Diablo II or Alpha Centauri. At least, these games are the concrete colonies on my mind’s terrain, the paving laid over a field of unhealed wounds. Blood and terror and unrequited love are welling up somewhere within, but I can coax the three-wheeled rover out once again and make sing. The voice of this planet is passive-aggressive: chimes and moans and growls, sand that will keep blasting against concrete until only the desert remains. The planet is distant. It broods. I dimly understand that my relationship with Arrakis is an abusive one, but I keep pushing. When I eventually see ’s film, the drug-addicted scrotum monster he uses for a Guild navigator will tell me what I already know: that the spice is something terrible, stolen by my harvesters from a place that will always hide secrets just beyond my vision, no matter how far I send the trike. I realize now that Frank Keplacki’s score for Dune II and Dune 2000 has more in common with the gilded luster of Lynch’s baroque abomination than Herbert’s stilted prose, but it remains true to the mythos: arabesque pastiche mashed with bloody animus, half paean and half dirge. Herbert seems to revel in the mystical and antiquarian, but he also surprises and teases.

ake young Paul Atreides. Clearly the hero. He is the Kwisatz Haderach, Tthe chosen one gifted with prophetic powers and destined to overthrow the emperor, and he follows the traditional arc of the hero’s journey, being thrust from his sheltered aristocratic life into the planet Arrakis’ desert wastes, from whence he will return at max level, with points in mind control and messianic prophesy, to assume his rightful place as Padishah Emperor. Paul’s journey involves an initiation into the society of the , obscure tribes of the desert. This initiation, like everything in Fremen society, is violent and unforgiving: Paul must fight to the death with a member of the tribe for the right to survive. This contest has no relation to any real desert-dwelling society, but it fits ideas about the “savagery” of non-sedentary peoples. The Fremen are quite a strange concoction, Beduin as noble savages imagined by Thomas Hobbes: one with nature, physically perfect and relentlessly violent. Not only are they engaged in constant internecine warfare, but, in a eugenic twist, they destroy the “weak,” whom they see as a burden to survival in the unforgiving wastes. Paul’s initiation is also a cliché of the pulp tradition going back to cowboy romances, not to mention nineteenth century “racial science.” Paul’s fight reveals his superior, aristocratic savagery to the simple natives. As an upper- class white man, Paul isn’t just better at being civilized; he is better at being uncivilized. Naturally, he eventually becomes not only the leader of his adoptive tribe, but the messiah of all the Freman tribes, after using ethnic superiority to explain the need for unity against their Harkonnen oppressors. The Fremen were already the perfect fascist army; they awaited only their bloody white savior, their Lawrence of Arabia in Furs, to show up in an SS uniform and lead a jihad against the urban interior. There are those barbs again. Unlike the generic pulp hero, who reaches his logical fruition in the late Robert Heinlein’s solipsistic Oedipal fantasies of self-authoring, Paul’s relationship with his parents is more conventionally Oedipal. The Kwisatz Haderach is a project by the mysterious Sisterhood to unite some Jungian-sounding masculine and feminine principles into a pliable organic superweapon, and Paul is its premature launch, one generation too soon, due to his mother choosing to have a boy instead of the girl she was supposed to. Paul is the creation of women – fulfilling his Jungian destiny and robbing him of agency all at once. The natives of Arrakeen, Arrakis’ seat of power, have had their belief in a messiah implanted in them by Bene Gesserit missionaries. Paul’s hypermasculine jihad draws on powers that are not his own, and will end, it is intimated, in a wave of bloodshed that is beyond his control. He also uses his abilities to manipulate his followers, even to the point of convincing a young woman to go to bed with him: “I have seen the future, and it involves us in bed” seems an unlikely proposition, but it works for Paul. Herbert, then, is a bit more sly than he first appears. And yet – the jihadis remain easily manipulated, uncontrollably violent savages. Women are either 1950’s housewives or, in the case of the passionate, violent and sexually available Fremen, the products of what are clearly rather lurid fantasies. “A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob,” Herbert has a character say. He is merely repeating the chauvinist liberal-conservative platitude that you need leaders to control the rabble and pluralism to control the leaders. It feels like this book has no desire to go anywhere but the place it started; this is the literary equivalent of the Bioshock games. Circles within circles. Lies within lies. he trike is a child’s finger drawing trails through the sand. I am the Tchild, kicking at digital sandcastles and crushing my enemies with red Harkonnen tanks. When I am nervous, I lick my lips. I am always nervous. My mouth is ringed by an ugly rash my classmates call my “moustache”. It stings and itches; on hot summer days it feels so raw I want to tear my face off. Being a Harkonnen means being swallowed by a soothing armored shell. It means power armor and rotary cannons. It means a giant, nuclear-powered tank spitting fiery plasma and crushing people under its tracks before exploding in a glorious atomic halo. Harkonnen are the blood-red conquest of a hostile planet, concrete plastered over rocky islands amidst a desert sea. Harkonnen are meant to rise. When I speak, words pour out of me so quickly no one can understand what I’m saying; but Harkonnen always obey without question, and conquer. Harkonnen are meant to fall. Dune conspicuously lacks the futuristic death machines that make Dune II what it is. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Dune is that there is no science in its fiction. This is a universe in which technological change was strangled by what Herbert calls the “Butlerian Jihad,” which destroyed the machines that made humanity “soft” and instituted a quasi-feudal reign of resurgent religion and duelling aristocrats. With advanced technology banished and the mysterious spice mélange flowing from Arrakis, people can develop supernatural mental and physical powers. Where once computers had calculated paths between the stars, now the monstrous Guild navigators have paths revealed to them by the spice. In a world in which flesh surpasses technology, the decadent Harkonnen are clearly on their way out.

ynch’s film is problematic in its portrayal of homosexuality, to put it L mildly: at the height of the AIDS scare, his camp Baron Harkonnen was a depraved sexual predator covered with cysts and pustules. Here, Lynch was at least true to his . The film’s ornate parade of grotesques is Herbert’s gallery of stereotypes, only filmed in long shot. The Harkonnen are not machinelike conquerors: they are fat, sick, effeminate and corrupt. Herbert freely associates transgressions against gender boundaries with incest, cruelty, illness and indolence, and the Harkonnen’s endemic homosexuality is supposed to be another feature of their rot. The barb is the Baron’s nephew Feyd Rautha, played with bright-eyed aplomb by Sting in the film. Feyd is slim and aggressive where his cousins are fat and slow. Feyd is a killer. In this respect, he is like Paul. In a grotesque mirror image of Paul’s violent initiation into Fremen society, Feyd chooses to fight in a gladiatorial contest, but cheats – he has noble Harkonnen strength, but cannot escape his house’s corruption. In fact, Feyd was supposed to marry the girl Paul never was in order to father the Kwisatz Haderach – he is Paul’s Harkonnen mirror image. Herbert makes it clear that Feyd contains the germ of Harkonnen’s tainted nobility. One implication is that the Harkonnen are what the Atreides might become. In an echo of the work of 14th century Maghreb scholar Ibn Khaldun, Paul and Feyd are on different sides of the same cycle. The conquering jihadis will one day settle, and become rich and indolent, just as the emperor’s elite Sardaukar legions, once fierce desert warriors, have become feeble compared to their primitive Fremen cousins. Herbert sees in my victorious army, my grand spires perched on the rocks, not only a past soaked in blood but a future consumed by decay. Dune knows what sort of scabbed and sullen child revels in conquest, but it also looks at his need to build himself a city of refuge with contempt. Indeed, for all its subversion of the hero’s journey, heroic masculinity is central to Dune. This is story of tight-laced aristocrats, warriors and mystics, and anyone outside of those categories – feeble civilians, corrupt merchants, “parasite” courtiers – is an enemy or an object of disgust when mentioned at all. Notably, the loathesome Harkonnen are new money whose wealth is based on trade, while the heroic Atreides are related to the imperial family. Again and again, Herbert emphasizes self-consciousness, discipline, courage, and knowing one’s place. I don’t think this is meant as satire – Herbert, an early Western student of Zen, clearly loves his renaissance fair pomp and faux- Oriental mysticism – rather, the arc of Dune is a tragic one. Just as court society cannot help but become a weeping sore flocked by parasites, the jihad cannot but be a reign of terror as Paul succumbs to his own power and the mindless masses drown themselves in it. Ultimately, the villain is femininity, whether in the form of the scheming Bene Gesserit witches, Paul’s faintly Oedipal relationship with his mother, the effeminate influence of civilization, or the moisture that is fatally toxic to the monstrous, phallic sandworms whose “spice”, literally ejaculated by the planet, allows Dune’s heroic feats of masculinity in the first place. That said, it’s not clear how things could be any different. Womanhood – depraved, manipulative, corrupt, weakening – is contagious, and it deforms Paul just as it threatens the sandworms via terraforming. This does not mean that Herbert’s women cannot be heroic – just that they must be either be more manly than most men, as in the case of Fremen like Paul’s mistress , or repressed (but mentally strong) housewives like his mother. Professional shit-disturber Slavoj Žižek once wrote that Dune is a deliberate display of the “libidinal obscenity” at the heart of power. I’m only half convinced. Herbert’s sexual metaphors for power fantasy are certainly incisive, even comical, but his unconcealed contempt for anybody who does not conform to his rigid, hierarchical Zen ideal reveals an authoritarian desire to be perpetually turned on by discipline while insulated from any femininity he can’t control. In other words: Dune’s psyche is just as crippled as its technology. This should not be surprising: any human condition that does not encompass our relationship with technology is a lie. Westwood’s Dune is about power as an armored erection that crushes all opposition, because that’s how games understand potency. Herbert’s Dune is technological fetishism stripped of its technology; it is masturbation. No wonder some fans crawl out of the woodwork to condemn every adaptation with impatient disgust – they want fleshy triumph and they are offered mechanized folly. How, though, would the machinations of the Bene Gesserit, or the story of power fantasy as self- destructive cycle, fit into a videogame? Crusader Kings comes close, but lends itself more to farce than tragedy. Dune is still with us: sweat in the pores of Dark Sun, Fading Suns, Warhammer 40,000, Morrowind, The Mandate, Iron Empires, Grimes; but mostly in the sense that the spice must flow. The game industry continues to trickle anaesthetic dreams of conquest into sterile imaginary deserts. The planet’s ecology unravels. Autonomous ornithopters murder children of the desert in the name of the Emperor. Jihadis scheme and die. Huge fresh slabs of concrete, laid across the desert by abused and exploited guest workers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, serve as foundations for impossible monstrosities paid for with imperial capital. Herbert’s appropriated mysticism-as-elitist-fantasy is now a consumer good. Google pushes its trikes further through the veil. There is no wormsign. The trike is an immortal cybernetic prosthesis. I’m sitting here, sweating, scratching these itches that seem to spring up everywhere when I’m hot. I’m finished with Arrakis, in all its incarnations; the sands are too busy. And yet I’ll still be there, sometimes, pressing silently against the darkness at the edge of the map with a clutch of metal pseudophalli, waiting for my death wish to be fulfilled. U Practice By Shawn Alexander Allen

y the time you read this, Practice 2013 will be almost a year past. The Btalks are online for everyone to see, in fact. Yet, even with a year of conferences having come and gone and the chaos of the game industry moving at a mile a minute, the weekend of Practice 2013 still sticks out in the forefront of my mind. If you’re unfamiliar, Practice is a yearly game design conference put together by the faculty of the NYU Gamecenter. These are a growing group of zealous intellectuals in the design sphere that want to curate around some of the brightest in the broad spectrum of games today – both to educate and create a dialogue. More to the point, Practice differentiates itself from the sea of expos and conferences that exist to cover and explore games in a variety of minutia by working solely to peel back the layers of why we enjoy the concept of play. It allows designers to go deep in describing in their own terms why and how they make games the way they do. Over the past year, I have felt that the concepts of designing games and the importance of play can both feel like a hard thing to describe, especially when up against other forms of culture like fine art, music and film. But Practice is the best conference to present a case for games being a part of that higher culture. By eschewing the baggage surrounding the video games industry, Practice can scour the spectrum of all games and play to examine them at their very core – board games, live action RPGs, sports and story heavy videogames all butt up against each other and more in the lectures and panels here. Long coffee breaks in between are also set up to continue to foster the conversation, as often the most interesting revelations happen in the hallways between talks. Many threads that emerged in conversation at last year’s Practice highlighted the differing perspectives of its numerous speakers from disparate tastes, design ideals and backgrounds. There was the importance of the choices we make in the spaces that we play in, the many forms of narrative, both extrinsic and intrinsic to games interaction, as well as the acceptance of growing permanence in player choice. Susanna Liu and Katya Hott gave a talk about break dancing competitions, or bboy jams, and how they have grown into a global phenomenon from humble roots. The narrative of how competitors fit into bboy jams changed as the events grew out of tiny venues with low payouts into larger stadiums with more money on the line. As a result, competitors couldn’t interact with judges or other teams as much on the grander scale. Everything felt more sterile and that changed how events played out. However, at the same time the culture gained global prominence. Warren Spector, known for Thief, Deus Ex, Epic Mickey and others also talked about the importance of a interactive space itself, highlighting one’s ability to interact with it on your own terms without the hand of a clever designer always in your way. Among Specter’s most important elements of play: allowing a player to finish the design through how they interacted with the game, likening the best games to a set of blocks with only a few rules holding back how you would interact with them. Specter had to fight himself to not outright condemn the existence of heavily scripted story games like Heavy Rain and Telltale’s Walk ing Dea d . Games need to be more open and less guided along strict narrative paths, he said, arguing that a door should always be a door, unfettered by extraneous rules that would gate a player and trigger a different cutscene at each point in a level. Before he was done with his discussion of creating simulations of objects and space, a conversation had started via Ve r su designer Emily Short on Twitter that continued both online and off for the rest of the conference, slowly chipping away at his entire talk. Short, along with ’s and Jake Rodkin, used Specter’s talk to dive deep into discussing game narrative in a more direct fashion. They honed in on how to go about creating and maintaining a story, as well as how much to control a player’s experience at any given moment. Vanaman and Rodkin seemed more for designing a large degree of control of player outcomes (as evidenced in the design of The Walking Dead, which they worked on); Short brought up the point that a systems level approach – of behavior dictating further behavior from others – made more sense. Despite Walk ing Dea d ’s reputation as an emotional story-scripted game, I find Ve r su much more fascinating for many of the reasons Specter addressed in his own talk. As a text-based narrative project, characters react to their environment and actions that other characters – including the player – have taken, with sometimes drastic results (like someone committing suicide or storming off). This was something far different from the much more scripted nature of Walking Dead and other more traditional narrative-heavy games. On a different topic, a designer named Keith Bergun gave a talk about strategy games – ones he really wanted to focus on having interesting choices in while maintaining very strict definitions for what actually made a choice interesting. Bergun came up with the notion of “the sauce” – a thing or things that don’t necessarily make your game design inherently better, but rather pile on and obfuscate whatever your core design is. Bergun rejects sauce, and is more interested in creating a boiled down design to discover the essence of a game (and not waste the player’s time, either). The sauce itself, however, would quickly become a meme. In fact ’s followed up on Bergun’s idea during the same panel. , Muir’s current project, is in itself focused on aesthetic value to create a sense of weight in the world – to convince players to own and welcome the death of characters and to actually want that type of permanence. That way, through creating impact across generations of heroes in a player’s game, Muir wished to create a bond between the players and their avatars that included accepting their unavoidable death. Rob Daviau also talked about death, discussing the design and balance of Risk Legacy, which required permanent change and destruction of the game’s cards and board. Separated from the virtual world, Risk Legacy had no resets, no save files to load. The game asks that players destroy a card, and when that card was destroyed, it’s gone for good. Daviau’s way of balancing a game that had player-driven permanent alterations was to let the players do the remaining work themselves. The game guides players along by making it feel like ritual, adding a seal that must be broken with a warning, a card deemed never to be unlocked (and more that would unlock over time). The point is to make players to feel weight in how they drove the narrative of their games. In contrast was by Cecilia Dolk and Martin Ericsson’s talk on creating a live-action RPG within the Battlestar Galactica universe. Martin expressed a love of participatory culture, as in what one would find in classic tabletop roleplaying – or a BDSM party – where the world and rules would be up to the players to police, steering clear from a more purely authored experience. 868 HACK designer Michael Brough gave an in-depth lecture on roguelikes, exploring their unique qualities as well as how he tried to solve a great deal of issues inherent to the genre in his own games. Calling back to Bergun’s notion of what makes an interesting choice, Brough cited choosing to quit a PhD program in order to make games as a real world choice – something more meaningful than which weapon does more damage. (Brough also had some insight into what assigning experience point values to enemies might do. A player could kill just for the sake of accruing more experience when conflict could have been avoided, perhaps turning their behavior toward being sociopathic.) Robert Yang brought up a different kind of narrative and choice, this time tackling developer practices. What began as a technical mythbusters of sorts for Half-Life changed course midway through to discuss ethics behind coding. Yang discussed how insensitive and harsh language in code could be off-putting to others, making a point to say that programmers should think of the language used when coding their games to avoid perpetuating a continual abuse cycle in the often-insular game industry. After three years it seems that Practice has found its stride – and as a game designer, it continues to inspire and amaze. As a game player, the event represents what you might think of as the fashion week of the industry, where a condensed amount of creators come together, inspire each other, and then go off to analyze their games of the future. Players will undoubtedly see the results of said influences trickle down into the industry as a whole, and that is good reason to be excited. I for one can’t wait to go back. U Cards are Told: The Skills of Poker and Tarot By Marjorie Jensen here is a mystique to cards. T Professional poker players and Tarot readers are often wrongly believed to have special talents – incredible luck or psychic abilities. Both Tarot and poker have been legally banned as games of chance or fortune. However, both card-based professions involve teachable skills that bear comparison, and these skills can enhance storytelling via symbolic meaning and representation. The first standardized Tarot deck (the Visconti-Sforza deck) was created for a game of chance, not for divination, when the game of tarocchi was invented during the Italian renaissance. As various cards made their way into English printing presses in the 1500s, so did sermons and laws against cards. Early modern prohibitions of gambling included Tarot, or rather the tarocchi game. One of the earliest links between gambling and divination in English literature appears in Tottel’s Miscellany, an anthology of poetry published in 1557. Some lines of the poem titled “The lover forsaketh his unkinde love” read:

Perchance thou provest now, to scale blinde Cupides holde, And matchest where thou maist repent, when al thy cards are told

With the inclusion of Cupid, who appears in the popular Visconti-Sforza deck from the 1400s, and the language of “telling” – a word frequently used when referring to the actions of oracles in the renaissance – this passage seems to be referencing cartomancy. However, “cards are told” is an idiom that referred to showing your hand or other unrevealed cards in the 1500s. So, while at first blush this language seems to point to fortune-telling, it instead links Tarot with other card games. For instance, in our modern lexicon, poker players use the term “tell” to indicate a player’s non-verbal reaction to their cards. Fortunetelling and reading tells involve a great deal of skill. Fluffy bunnies (a term used in Wiccan circles referring to the sophomoric and unserious), teen witches and other inexperienced Tarotists refer to a reading as simply telling a story. The skill-set needed to be a professional reader goes beyond spontaneous storytelling. Understanding symbols and correspondences improves storytelling and learning these skills involves a good deal of research and/or apprenticeships. Deep knowledge of systems and symbols in Tarot is key for those who wish to pursue the art as a profession. An experienced reader not only tells the story of the cards that are on the table, but also notes which cards are missing. An absence of a particular suit can signify as much the suits that are present in a spread. Tarot readers are also aware of countless other relationships – which numbers appear in the reading and which do not appear, the balance between Minor and Major Arcana, the balance between court cards and pips. Here, without reading the cards that are dealt in the Celtic Cross spread, the reader can see the absence of any court cards, the lack of high-numbered wands and pentacles, and how the Major Arcana that are missing are from the middle of the trumps (between 6 and 17). Overall, there is a lack of balance between suits, as there are more swords than there are other suits (four swords opposed to only one card of every other suit). To interpret this information, the reader applies knowledge of correspondences or systems. Magical traditions are varied, and readers can use associations from alchemy, astrology, Kabala (which comes in myriad flavors), numerology, as well as art and literary history. One beautiful thing about divination is its diversity – many Tarot readers are eclectic and draw from more than one tradition. To assign significance to the missing cards, one could say that the querent (person being read for) needs to seek out more spiritual, sensual and social connections – there is an overreliance on using logic, reason and wit in the past and present. The underrepresented elements are reflected in the missing Majors: the second line (middle seven trumps) contains archetypes for delving into the full inner self, not just the mind. The querent lacks guidance from individuals who are balanced and at the height of their individual, elemental strengths. In short, one skill of advanced Tarot readers is pattern recognition. Poker players also need to excel at pattern recognition to succeed. When playing Texas Hold’em, poker pros must be aware of what hands can be made with the cards on the table – what numbers are missing, what suits are unseen. Here, the unseen makes my hand and the hands of the other players. In addition to the pair I’m holding, the 10 on the table gives me three-of- a-kind. I’m hoping the river card (the final card) will be a 7, 8, or Jack to make my full house. Another player could be holding a straight with a 9, which would beat everyone at the table without the fifth unseen card. A third player could be holding two clubs and hoping the unseen card is a club to make their flush draw, which would beat even the player holding the straight. If I get my full house, I’ll beat the flush and the straight, but right now both of those hands would beat my three-of-a-kind. Significance is assigned through betting instead of magical associations. Value of the cards held (three-of-a-kind) is weighed against the likelihood of making a better hand (full house) with the missing card. I would have probably bet heavily earlier in the hand – before the Jack was revealed – so that some players who might have had good hands after the dealer revealed the Jack should have folded. Poker players must interpret other players’ betting patterns and use their bets to represent their hands, to make other players believe they are holding certain cards. The connection between action and the unseen is similar to magic ritual: signification created through a sequence of associations. Betting in Texas Hold’em is also based on reading tells – what could be called the art of reading people. Players interpret the non-verbal cues, like how opponents hold chips, facial expressions and other gesticulations. Those in the know often say pros have highly developed intuition. Intuition isn’t considered a teachable skill and some people are naturally intuitive. However, it can be developed with activities like meditation and visualization as well as years of experience at the card table. Both Tarot and poker are about creating stories using a variety of skills. Poker players present a narrative of what they are holding to the table while reading the narratives of their opponents while cards are revealed and unseen elements are analyzed. Tarotists read not only the story of the cards on the table, but also use associations to interpret the missing cards as part of a narrative. In both cases, cards are told, and money is exchanged. U Dear Space Marine By Aurelius Ventro Editor’s note: Each month, Unwinnable’s resident advice columnist dispenses wisdom from the ages in response to your email and Twitter questions. He just happens to do so from 38,000 years in the future. With the help of the ancient computer CHAD and the mecha-tentacled Magos Valence Mak, Tech-Marine Aurelius Ventro of the Imperial Fists delivers the enlightenment of the Emperor to your unworthy human eyes – as only a Space Marine can.

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Dear Space Marine,

I’m a little embarrassed to write to you, but I have no one else to help me. My girlfriend just told me she has Chlamydia. She claims it’s my fault but I’ve never had sexual relations with any other girl. I don’t know what to do! I love her but don’t know if I can stay with her now that I know she’s been with other men. Help me, Space Marine! I have nowhere else to turn!!

Your friend, Anonymous (via Gmail) Dear Pathetic Human Male Cowering Behind a Veneer of Anonymity,

First, as you know: I am a Space Marine. I have not been, and never shall be, “your friend”.

Now, as to your query. Again I find myself perplexed that humans of your time directed so much of their industry toward primitive mating rituals. Throne, you lot would have been easily conquered. You were already enslaved by your genit***00101010110 T4LK 4B0UT PU$$YWH1PP3D***als.

More perplexing, however, is your reference to your intended mate “having” Chlamydia. For in the grim darkness of your far future, one does not “have” Chlamydia – one is Chlamydian.

Were your feeble augurs able to pierce the Warp, you would perhaps have glimpsed a binary star system in the Segmentum Obscurus. Around these two suns orbits the planet Chlamydia – womb to some of the rawest, ruddiest warriors of the Imperium. Though they are but mortal, the Chlamydian regiments are known throughout the Emperor’s domain for their burning, throbbing desire to bleed the enemies of Mankind.

In the capital city of Trachomatis sits the Venereum, seat of power for the planetary governor, the noble Sir Vixx. From his throne overlooking the frothy River Proctitis, he commands the Strategic Tactical Initiative – perhaps the most infectious recruitment model in the Segmentum. This rigorous training regimen leaves many recruits weeping, oozing with sores. I have witnessed their training exercises in person, Pathetic Anonymous Human Male. It is not a pretty sight. In melee combat, the Chlamydians wield vicious rods, attempting to penetrate their opponents’ box formations. A single prick from a poison-tipped staff can leave a festering, pustulant wound. (Hence their battle-cant: “Just the tip!”) And their ranged attacks are no less savage: Fertile lands become barren as the Chlamydians discharge their energy weapons, inflaming the area.

But where the Chlamydians truly prove their mettle is in sniffing out the foul taint of Chaos. Witness their destruction of the corrupt Azithromites, or their campaign of death among the Doxcycline Cult. As it is said throughout the Segmentum: Wherever you find a Chlamydian, taint cannot be far.

Were I you, and I thank the Emperor and my gene- father Rogal Dorn I am not, I would count myself lucky to mate with a Chlamydian female. For although your gene-stock is assuredly disposable, hers is to be prized. Having even a little Chlamydian in you is better than none at all.

In Dorn’s glory and in the glory of Him on Earth, I remain

Aurelius Ventro Tech-Marine, 4th Company “Fists of Dorn,” Imperial Fists Chapter

***TRANSMISSION ENDS*** Luke Pullen is lost in time and space. He sometimes writes words. Gaze upon the abyss with him @gorice_xii.

Shawn Alexander Allen is an artist, game designer and writer, currently working on a videogame called Treachery in Beatdown City. He also hates writing bios. You can follow him on Twitter @aNuchallenger

Marjorie Jensen is an educator, writer and editor of Arcana: the Tarot Poetry Anthology. She lives with her partner (and fellow Unwinnablist) Rowan Kaiser and two cats in Oakland.

Aurelius Ventro is a Tech-Marine from the 4th Company of the Imperial Fists Space Marine Chapter who won’t be born for another 38,000 years, but that doesn’t mean he can’t dispense wisdom from the 41st millennium. Solicit responses to your pitiful mortal queries at [email protected] or at @DearSpaceMarine. The only human he follows on Twitter is @johnpetergrant.

Amber Harris is an artist, lover of lore and a Magic: The Gathering fangirl. She is trying hard to convince her parents that creating art for a living is a good idea. You can find her art atcowsgomoose.tumblr.com . Follow her on Twitter @amburgersupreme.

Illustrations: Cover: Pamela Colman Smith Letter from the EIC: Still from The Thing courtesy of Universal Pictures Backward Flow: All paintings by John Schoenherr, except for the cover painting for Dune II, courtesy of Westwood Games Practice: Deus Ex image courtesy of Eidos Interactive, Walking Dead image courtesy of , Rick Legacy image courtesy of Hasbro, 868-HACK image courtesy of Michael Brough Cards are Told: Tarot cards by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider Waite Tarot deck Dear Space Marine: Amber Harris CLICK A PLANETARY BODY TO GO TO A DESTINATION

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