There is a Heav'n. And there is a Hell. And there is more in each of these than is dreamt of in any philosophy. The multiverse is a place of extremes, and within it can be found those extremes, incarnations of forces the likes of which no mortal can comprehend. Good is not a societal creation, but an absolute which is watched over by creatures of innate purity which put the simple idea of "perfection" to shame. And if such paragons exist in the multiverse, whose very existence brings light to the dark regions they have never seen, how much more foul must their opposite numbers be, the incarnations of evil? In the infinite layers of the Abyss, where chaos and evil hold equal sway in the form of the vicious Tanar'Ri and their doomed and damned servants, anything can, will, and usually already has happened, for the Abyss is an infinite potentiality in an already infinite universe. It came thus to pass that a mighty half-demon, child of an elder pit fiend, came to rule one of the endless layers, and took a half-demon mate from its servants, and they sought to bring forth a child who was each of their deadliest aspects. Just as each was half demon, so did they each pass on but a half of their own essence to their child, and thus the young spawn was thin blooded and weak, barely a tiefling and far beneath a true demon. The child was named Tanaris Karolich, which in the parents' tongue meant "it may not be as good as a demon, but give it a chance and maybe it'll make something of itself, by some miracle." Raised as little more than a slave, the child grew strong and dark, and when a group of adventurers passed through the Abyss the child joined them and fled to the prime material. Long had Tanaris lived under the thrall of demons, and thus believed himself to be as weak in all things as he was in his home. On the prime material, however, he found humans, mortals, and found the power that was in his blood. A mere tiefling he might have been born, but among the mortals, he was as a god, for Tanaris had the strength of ten men, could run faster than a great cat and snatch arrows from flight, could grasp complex magic with the speed of an archmage and turn mighty spells back upon their casters, and no weapon or spell shaped by mortal hands could slay him. He slew his new companions, laughing all the while, and bathed in their blood, and took the name Wyvern, for while he was but a shadow of the power of his demon kin, still was he a deadlier beast than any who crossed him could imagine. For a mere decade did Wyvern travel the world, and this time was but an eyeblink to an immortal such as he. Aimlessly he wandered, glorying in his power over mortals, doing what a demon does among humans and reveling in his atrocities. As all beings of power in his era did, he at last came to the attention of Naglfr, The Chronomancer, who moved through time as mortals crossed a room and twisted destiny to suit his needs. The Chronomancer offered Wyvern power for his service, and caring nothing for his own vow, Wyvern agreed. Thus did Naglfr lead Wyvern to the ancient order of the Tatoos, who inscribed their magic upon the flesh of their members. Wyvern had held the strength of ten men; now he was as twenty. He had had the brilliance of a wiseman; now he was as a sage. He had possessed the mighty flesh of a demon; now, at will, he could become the dragonkin of his namesake, taking to the sky or rending steel with equal ease in his new body. As a Tattoo, Wyvern served several masters but always reported, when it suited him, to Naglfr. Wyvern passed through the service of Hessek, the Dark Godling; of Lord Vitari the weredragon; and at last, of the dreaded Church of the Evolving Light and Darkness, and their Apostle of Magic. It was in this service that Wyvern encountered the heroes he would plague for months, the ones chosen by destinty to repulse the Carrot invasion, the ones who Naglfr had sworn to make fail. As the Carrot Invasion became imminent, Naglfr came to Wyvern and claimed the tiefling's service, and though Wyvern tried to refuse, the Chronomancer put a powerful geas upon him, and forced Wyvern to serve, as Wyvern had been forced to serve his father long before. Even controlled, Wyvern was a demon, and to scheme and plot was to him as breathing, and so he sought a way to be free of his slavery. Many times did he sabotage the Chronomancer, giving aid to the chosen ones as often as he plagued them. When at last destiny culminated, and the heroes faced Naglfr in mortal combat, Wyvern fled rather than fight, and deprived of his most powerfl warrior, Naglfr himself fell to his enemies, his head taken by a foe wielding the Chronomancer's own mighty Windblade. Free at last and with a new, untouched world to despoil, Wyvern hatched a plot of his own. He had faced servitude one time too many, and swore to become a demon lord in his own right, as had his father before him. Wyvern went into the planes and sought out other tieflings, beings of power who, simply due to their diluted blood, would be forever denied their rightful power, and offered them power on a new layer of the Abyss he would create. Each one agreed, and Wyvern returned to his new world to enact his plan. In his time as servant to the Chronomancer, Wyvern had had access to all of Naglfr's great magic knowledge, and had found the means to create the raw stuff of emptiness, liquid portable hole, on a grand scale. He would build a factory, and in this factory he would manufacture pure nothingness, and when he had enough, he would cover the world, turning the entire plane into an eternal bottomless pit and bringing it into the lower planes of the multiverse as a part of the Abyss. Naglfr's enemies, though, had long since become those of Wyvern as well, and they pursued him, destorying his factory before Wyvern could create enough liquid to cover the world but not before he created enough to cover several sizeable kingdoms. Wyvern retreated to a volcano, and there prepared to open a gate to the elemental plane of fire, and thus blast his liquid hole into the sky and rain it down upon the world. Still was he pursued, however, and at last, in the chamber of the liquid, he faced his enemies. Strong and cunning and all but unkillable, Wyvern confronted his mortal foes, but was caught unprepared by their popwer and ferocity. His forces were crushed and his equipment was destroyed, and as he stood defiant against them, Wyvern was pinned by arrows against the very silo which held the deadly liquid. With wounds that would have slain even his own parents, Wyvern still fought on, for their weapons and spells could not destroy him. As he pulled the arrows from his own body, however, he found to his horror that the tank behind him had been puctured just as he had been, and streams of pure emptiness sprayed from it, through his body, and to the floor in front of him. Wyvern could do nought but look up at the face of his slayers in shock as the tank ruptured and the evil that was Tanaris Karolich was erased utterly from all existence.

September is probably one of the most interesting times of the year in my life. In addition to the obvious... classes resuming, the weather becoming how I like it for just a few brief weeks... September brings two significant events: the Jewish new year, and my rebirthday.

Once more, I will celebrate both of these events this September. First, for the goyyim in the audience, a word about the new year. I am not particularly Jewish, and in a very real sense, Rosh ha Shanah and, ten days later, Yom Kippur, qualify as three of my least favourite days of the year because on these days and these alone I face mandatory synagogue attendence. I dislike... despise, really... official places of worship, and synagogues are among my least favourite. At best, I will spend several hot, stuffy, and uncomfortable hours surrounded by literally hundreds of kibbitzing senior citizens in the depths of Cote St-Luc. At worst, I will instead be attending services at the long term care facility where two of my grandparents live (which is very much akin to holding a religious ceremony in a mortuary). The very best I can hope for is that it won't be a day of horrible ghastly heat, which it is, most years. Yom Kippur is precisely like Rosh Hashanah except that (A) it's a day shorter but (B) we fast rather than feast, and I don't do well without sugar in my system. The only consolation I have on these three days is that, and this is a totally unbiased opinion, I look damn good in a suit.

One might reasonably ask why, all said, I find the new year an interesting time. This is a good question, and the answer is deeply tied to this journal. Simply put: penance. In the ten days between the new year celebration and the somber Yom Kippur, Jews are expected to go forth and apologise for all the nasty things they did during the year. This is one of the few, quite possibly the only Jewish ritual which has any significance to me; I find it fascinating and make every effort to make a proper Apology for all the stuff Ive done since the last apology. This not only forces me to look back upon the year and who I was during it, but also gives me the opportunity to look at the people I know and ask myself who among them is still a close enough associate for me to give a damn if I did anything to them. Lastly, it gives me an excuse to send out just one more mass e-mail to all my friends, the purpose of which is just to subject them all to my ranting.

Before you ask, no, this is not one of the things I apologise for.

More interesting than the high holidays, to me at least, is my rebirthday. It's reasonable to assume that all my readers are already familiar with my being Eric 4.1, natural sucessor to all previous (and generally inferior) models. My rebirthday (which is, in fact, September 10th, the day this is being written) is the anniversary of the day when Eric 3 was officially replaced with Eric 4. naturally, the process of one's entire personality altering takes more than one day, but as near as I've been able to reconstruct over the last few years, September 10th, 1999 was the most significant day during that transition period. If I really wanted to split hairs, I'm actually capable of narrowing it down to a period of about two hours, but I see no reasons to get bogged down in details. This rebirthday marks my becoming five years old (1999 to 2004... do the math if you don't take my word for it).

How did I celebrate my rebirthday? Suffice it to say, I own some new Necrons. As a corrolary, of course, I have to type this whole entry with two fingers since I've superglued my hands together trying to build them...

As far as I know, nobody else in the world celebrated this momentous event, although one person did ask if they're supposed to buy me a rebirthday gift, to which the answer is "no, but spontaneous displays of affection are always appreciated." Well, affection or cash, whatever. Happy new year! Vote Lis for Games Club President! And be sure to read the

Bonus Feature

The Cardboard Tube, Volume 3, Issue 3
Translation, Please!
"I'm going to hunt down the people who have strong opinions on subjects they don't understand. Then I'll bop them with this cardboard tube." -Dogbert

Eric's Note: This column was first printed after the John Abbott Anime Club had been bugging various other clubs and organizations; they had somehow gotten it into their B.E.S.M.ed heads that the things they had to say had value, and when they met a lack of respect, they fell back upon the time honoured tradition of "repeat what you just said, but keep getting louder until they agree with you." The column before (actually in most of the previous Bandersnatch), people had thus taken potshots at the Anime Club as a whole at at particular members in particular. I made up an angry letter from them so that I could mock them further, and had a wonderful time watching the faces of Anime Club members as they read the column. I love being me.

Let me open by saying, I am by no means a perfectionist.

Before I get into what that confession has to do with this Cardboard Tube, I would like to address an e-mail I got after last issue, which I reprint here letter for letter.

"Ur last isue was carp, dont make Fun of th anee culb."

The letter's reply address didn't work, so if the person who sent this letter is reading this... what's an anee culb?

Anyway, this letter sent me thinking along lines best expressed by a web comic called Bob the Angry Flower (www.angryflower.com). This site has a strip entitled Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots. In this strip, the author vents his frustration with people misusing the apostrophe, who I confess annoy the flarn out of me, too.

I am fully aware that I'm not a flawless writer. I make mistakes... sometimes. I take pride in the fact that, in general, my work requires less copy editing than much of the things that get printed in our beloved Bandersnatch. I take pride, because quite frankly, some of what you people come up with scares me.

Let's take a look at the e-mail recopied above. Through my incredible powers of deduction, I can only conclude that this is in Speedtalk, a language first named by Robert Heinlein, who foresaw that people on the internet wouldn't bother to hit the right keys. For example, if saying "this food is very good" is too long for one's attention span, Speedtalk would come out as "fud gud." Disconcerting as this can be to read, imagine having a conversation like that. So, we plug the e-mail into our PET (Personal Electronic Thing, only ninety-nine, ninety-nine, ninety-nine), and we get

"Your last issue was a carp, so don't make. Fun of the anee culb."

Clearly, this is not much of an improvement. It would seem that I am being accused of spontaneously generating fish. Moreover, Speedtalk doesn't decode what the anee culb is. However, as the sentence clears up, we begin to get an inkling. Since the result is incomplete, it's time to face our terror and try L33t.

L33t (pronounced "leet, short for "elite,") is a new language, dating back to the early days of the internet. Depending on what history of L33t you read, the language is up to 39 years old and has gone through names such as Quaker, Frag, Speedtalk 2, Fastspeak, and Counter-Talk. Basically, the language involves replacing letters with shapes that look vaguely like letters to someone with minor dyslexia. Case in point, the number 3 looks kind of like a capital e, in cursive, written backwards, if you're drunk. Other abominations in this tongue include the words haxxor (hacker), pLr3ak (freak/phreak), and, chillingly, (on|\|3k73d (connected). Most upsetting is the fascination that L33t speakers have with using a z instead of an s when a word is made plural, as in the infamous phrase, "ph33r my l33t ski|z."

To the people who actually *choose* to use L33t, I don't actually have anything against you people. Some of my best friends are comp-sci people. Really. I just hate your language.

Anyway, we plug the now familiar e-mail into the PET and we get

"Ur last isue was carp, dont make Fun of th anee culb."

It turns out that the e-mail has absolutely nothing to do with L33t. Although it makes no sense, it's apparently not deliberately so.

Linguists will now note that I am rapidly running short of languages which I might use to decode this e-mail. I have exhausted the languages that I myself speak (English, French, Hebrew, Yiddish) and the two most popular internet languages (which I can read and speak but try not to). I hesitate to try some of the other languages found online, such as Tolkienian Elvish or Runic. This leaves me with one option, which I suspect even the casual reader considers to be what I should have done in the first place: conclude that the letter is not in another language but, rather, just really really poorly written.

Now, the problem with Gibberish is that it can't just be plugged into a translator for instant understanding. As anyone who has played You Don't Know Jack will attest, Gibberish phrases can often be translated into quite a large number of possible translations. A rather simple phrase in Gibberish, such as "gang aft a gley," might easily become "gang and a glaze," "gone through a gate," or "punks behind glue," just to name a few of the more plausible possibilities. The careful reader will note that the sample phrase is, in fact, Gaelic, and means "often go awry." Who would have guessed that?

At last, we plug the e-mail into the PET and translate to decode Gibberish. And what does it translate as now?

Oops, out of space. Well, I'm sure some of my more enlightened readers will be able to solve it on their own.

And now, culled from my various writings and, in some cases, made up just for this, more selected entries from the Imperial Plagiarized Encyclopedia!

Approximate:
The scientifically and academically accepted phrasing of "I'm making these numbers up."

Boom:
1: A graphic and frequently violent manifestation of a strongly exothermic reaction and/or the result of the exchange of a large amount of kinetic energy in a short time.
2: A thing which can reasonably be assumed that, if it did not happen yesterday and did not happen today, will probably happen tommorow, because there is always a boom tommorow.

Credible:
The condition of a thing which is deemed insufficiently incredible.

Dramatic Inconvenience, Law of:
The principle which states that events will happen at the most comedically or dramatically inconvenient moment, ie, the phone will ring at the moment one becomes unable to answer or a place of business will become busiest when only only one person is available to watch over it.

Earth:
That thing what you stand on to keep from falling into the planet's molten core.

Fnord:
This word does not exist; do not attempt to look for it or attfnordempt to define it.

Grok:
To gain a complete understanding of a thing; to become one with a thing; to eat a thing.

Horrible Ghastly:
The most appropriate descriptor for any person, event, or thing which is both horrible and ghastly simultaneously.

Infinity:
Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.

Joke:
Something said or done to provoke laughter; a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist; the humorous or ridiculous element in something; an instance of jesting; something not to be taken seriously.

Kung Fu:
An ancient art which, through years of rigourous physical, mental, and spiritual training, highly trained individuals can create some of the worst movies ever made.

Lunch:
1: A meal, typically taken in the middle of the day and/or between the meals of breakfast and dinner, which is usually smaller than those meals.
2: Any occasion of eating which is of great significance or holiness.

Mustelashock:
The condition of a creature which has been rendered temporarily catatonic due to overexposure to shiny objects.

Nifty:
1: The quality of being very good, very attractive, very desirable, or very entertaining.
2: A thing which is very good, very attractive, very desirable, or very entertaining.
3: Descriptor of an object which can be reasonably defined as being as good as it could possibly be under the current circumstances without changing its nature.

Overkill:
The condition of having used an excess amount of force to accomplish a goal; widely considered to be fictional.

Perfection:
The condition of a thing when it cannot possibly be improved in any way without changing the nature of that thing.

Question:
An interrogative expression often used to test knowledge, with the purpose of either uncovering an answer believed to be obtainable or to stimulate thought on issues where an answer is assumed to be unobtainable.

Reality:
Everything that refuses to go away when one stops believing in it.

Shiny:
Oooooooohh...

Thump:
The sound created when an object of ideal mass collides inelastically with an ideal surface.

Universe, the:
Everything. No matter what direction you look, that's still the universe. Yes, even in the cupboard, and under the bed where nobody ever really goes. The universe, by definition, conatins and includes everything that can possibly be contained and included by anything, and is an intinite space remarkable in its sheer infiniteness and spaciness. Some maps of the Universe may exclude Wyoming and/or New Jersey.

Vorpal:
The quality ascribed to any object which has been found to be much sharper than it looks, particularly if the discovery of actual sharpness involves a beheading.

Wheel:
The single simplest machine ever developed by humanity and, as such, the first in a seires of very poor ideas.

Xtreme:
One of the Really Stupid Words, the unjustified use of which, under Wilde-Heinleinian law, is punishable by death.

Yesterday:
The space/time point at which all deadlines are due.

Zealot:
One who has remarkably strong opinions on any topic which they do not fully understand.

And, for those of you who have been particularly keen, we now present The Cardboard Tube, Volume 3, Issue 1,

Low Resolution
Eric Lis
"I'm going to hunt down the people who have strong opinions on subjects they don't understand. Then I'll bop them with this cardboard tube." -Dogbert

Well, the first month of the new year is almost done, and I have to say, I'm kind of disappointed. No obelisks. No evil computers. No manned missions to Jupiter. I don't regret the lack of flying cars, though. God knows I don't trust you people to drive safely when you're on the ground, let alone a hundred feet above it.

Anyway, the new year is, traditionally, the time when people take a good, hard look at their life, frequently in the companionship of a good, stiff drink, and try to think of something that they would like to change with their lives. Traditionally, these lies are called "resolutions," as in, "gee, this is low resolution."

In my continuing study of humanity, I decided (around January 7th) to actually make some of these "resolutions" and try to keep them. If other people can find fault within themselves and try and fix it, after all, I certainly could. If nothing else, it's a lovely gesture to come up with something worth fixing, whether it gets fixed or not.

The first one that came to me, after some ten seconds of thought, was a nice and simple resolution: I would make no more unreasonable goals for myself. This lasted nearly four seconds before I realized that the resolution itself was a paradox and had to go watch old episodes of "Reboot" to break the logic loop. It's like I always say: when you aspire to world domination, all other unreasonable goals seem simpler in comparison.

My second attempt at a resolution was better: I would try to catalogue all the facets of my own personality which could fairly be described as having distinct personalities. This is something I've been working at for quite a long time, and so it seemed perfectly good as a choice. Upon thinking about it, however, it occurred to me that it wasn't much of a resolution if it was something I'd been doing already. Besides, I couldn't agree with myself about how to get started and the extra opinions that I had to offer myself were of no help.

It was around this point that the main problem with resolutions occurred to me. Let's make some assumptions. 1: A resolution is something about ourselves or the world that we want to change or improve. 2: A resolution should be something which we haven't been working on already. 3: A resolution should not focus on or be dependent upon changes made by other people. 4: A resolution should solve problems we face or prevent new ones from arising. If we take all of these resolutions to be valid, which seems reasonable, what's left? The average person has four kinds of problems: things they can't change, things they don't want to change, things they're already trying to change, or things they aren't aware of. If that's so, then resolutions cannot possibly apply to any of the problems in your life, and so the entire process is useless. Or is it?

Yes, it is.

When you know that the new year's resolution is just a gag, it must be hard to come up with something serious. Sure, I could come up with something silly, like watch more cartoons, or do well in school, but I promised myself that I would put some real thought into this and not take the easy way out. I knew that even if I just gave up and made a silly choice, it couldn't be something simple. It would have to be a spectacular (or at least, decent) trick. I had said that I would try to come up with a resolution, so the quest continued.

At last I hit upon the answer. It had become clear that coming up with a serious and effective new year's resolution was useless and going nowhere, but I had made an oath to try and come up with a good, serious resolution. I had left myself one fallback plan: the Chaos Conquers All Rule. According to the Path of Enlightenment to which I aspire in place of the conventional moral code that most people live by, the Chaos Conquers All Rule states that if an oath was made only to oneself, it is acceptable to break it as long as the way in which it is broken brings amusement or confusion to others in a friendly manner. If coming up with a good, serious resolution was hopeless, then by Forsteri, I would come up with a good ridiculous resolution. Here it is. Ready?

"I, Eric Lis, will keep my new year's resolution all year."

Yes, it's like I always say: there's nothing better than a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the whole process of the new year's resolution is a big annoying paradox, then I would make the paradox would work for me or get bored trying. In the end, I have flawlessly kept my new year's resolution so far, which is more than a lot of people have done.

I guess the point of all this is that I learned an important lesson this winter break. Society has made up all sorts of weird rituals, like the new year's resolutions, or the criminal code. There are times when these rituals just can't work, and so people who are cunning and eccentric have no choice but to take the silly way out rather than follow the path well traveled. And when we're left with only one solution, what is it?

That's right: to go use the computer and forget about the whole thing.

In response to the utter lack of wonder in response to Entry 28, we today discuss nature and demeanor. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the (now obsolete) World of Darkness system of personality categorization, White Wolf's roleplaying games explained character behaviour in terms of a character's nature, who they are, deep down, and a character's demeanor, which is how they act and appear to others. I've always found this idea fascinating; before seeing it in the books, it had never really occured to me to look at minds in terms of what they are and what they appear to be (this statement must be clarified by pointing out that I first read this when I was 14; it hadn't really occured to me to look at the human mind as anything yet). The most interesting part of the nature/demeanour system is that it addresses one of the fundamental aspects of behaviour which D&D misses: people are sometimes the diametric opposite of who they appear to be. Nature and demeanor might be identical, but they might also be things that are polar and logical opposites.

Picture, for the sake of argument, the stereotypical Evil Corporate Guy. This character is a heartless, scheming, lunatic who enjoys torturing others and profiting from pain; let's assign him the nature "monster" to reflect an utter lack of humanity and general not-niceyness. However, ECG isn't stupid, and understands that if he stabs people in the street (say, four or five people a day), he will be put in prison, and so he acts like a nice, friendly person; let's assign him the demeanor "defender" to reflect his donating to charities, funding urban renewal, and being an outspoken voice in the popular media on all the current social topics. So, Evil Corporate Guy is a monster/defender... he acts the part of being good, which is all most people see, but is secretly quite the opposite. Clearly, an image such as this is much better able to capture the inherent duality... some might say, deceptiveness... of human behaviour than a more simplistic alignment system. We will, of course, choose to ignore subsequent levels of complexity, which people would invariably argue that they possess, since such would not be part of the game.

Now we look at ourselves. Depending on who you ask, you will get various guesses as to my nature: Autocrat, Bureaucrat, Celebrant, Conniver... I see myself, however, as the Architect, defined by the WoD as "You desire to create something lasting and incredible." The driving force in my life (meaning, as always, for the last five years) has always been the creation of Stuff, be it through my writing, my sculptures, my storytelling, or even essay-writing. Note that here, I am not saying creating something new and original, just creating. The underlying message of my life is: I Make Stuff... stories, characters, messes, problems, mistakes, schemes, artworks, whatever. The identity and quality of what is being made is of secondary importance to the fact that something is being made.

Demeanor is much easier for the lay-person to judge when observing another, since by definition demeanor is what other people perceive a character as. Popular guesses as to my demeanor include Jester, Showoff, Reveler, Poltroon, and Manipulator... and indeed, I have always believed Jester to be the one. I choose to see myself as someone who sees humour everywhere (or tries to) and attempts (beyond the limits of sense and taste) to get others to share the joke. Naturally, this fits in well with my nature, since the comedian always needs new material (or at least, new ways to present the same stuff). My games aren't written for high drama, they're written to get a laugh out of my players. Sure, the stories are supposed to be grand tales of incredible feats and high adventure, but if I can get one of my players to laugh so hard he falls off a chair, my work is done. The Architect in me crafts immense storylines spanning years of gametime and realtime, stories of galactic armies and wars for the fate of worlds; the jester in me makes the villains of the stories in marauding carrot armies.

The final important question to ask regarding nature and demeanor is: does it work? Is the character playable in the way it is designed? We've all designed characters who, as it were, seemed like a good idea at the time. Since the human mind is prone to perceive itself poorly, I choose to look outwards for the test of whether or not my nature/demeanor is one that suits me well and allows me to function in the world. I measure my success in simple terms, the same terms I'd use to measure the sucess of my design of a character: is it fun to play and is it fun for others to play with. I enjoy being me... that's part of it... and other people seem to like me being me... that's the other part. What have here, therefore, is a sucessfully designed character, at least in terms of nature and demeanor.

I'm still working on developing some disciplines, but hope springs eternal.