The blog's title comes from the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Unknown Armies, making it a reference to a niche market (P&P RPGs) and a niche genre within that market (P&P RPGs not about elves, dwarves or laser blasters). So it's rent from the kind of ego-boosting obscurity that certain kinds of nerd thrive upon. The game is a horror game set in the modern world, with the twist that all the horror has human origins as winkingly acknowledged by the game's tagline "You did it". This is the opposite tack to the one famously taken by the critically-adored Call of Cthulhu, more or less the closest thing pen & paper gaming has to Citizen Kane. Based on the famously overwritten works of H.P. Lovecraft, CoC posits a world in which humanity doesn't matter and the cosmos is an uncaring mechanism with no emotive force. In UA, in comparison, the problem is that humanity matters too much: The universe as it currently exists is created by human will and personality. Which makes everything from war to aging to melanoma somebody's fault, and attempts to use this responsibility to improve things are . It's a toss-up which is scarier, the godless world in which you don't matter, or the one in which you could conceivably end up as God, but so could anyone else, and either way you're all still far too human to make it work.
Anyway, in the UA setting "wizards" (never called as such) get their powers from being so completely obsessed with some seemingly-innocuous element of the human condition that they can bend reality to their will (grad student joke goes here). Thus we have automancers, bibliomancers, personamancers and so forth. The "-mancer" designation is noted as being grammatically and logically incorrect (it should refer to gaining knowledge through magic, rather than the other way around) but generally gets promoted because people know about "necromancy" and it sounds cool. Videomancers, unsurprisingly, wrench the occult knowledge from broadcast TV and films to power their personal mojo. Ironically, the sheer obsession the various -mancers have with one particular element of the world blinds them to the larger truth of human experience, and they are almost never in a position to legitimately affect the wider world.
The title was chosen in a moment: to satisfy the aforementioned love of the obscure reference, to signify that in my personal blend of pop-cultural touchstones obscure '90s RPGs play a rather distinctive role, and from some vague idea of reviewing the films randomly generated by Cinemageddon's featured torrents in the light of topics brought up in class (to which purpose I may well turn the blog, now that its role in my grading is complete - no point in wasting a good blog name). Unfortunately, I simply couldn't link The Hour of 13 to the class discussions in a way that felt natural, and so the blog became a repository of extended versions of my in-class thoughts and rants on such diverse topics as Stephanie Meyers' abusive ignorance of vampire mythography, the role of MST3K in the rise of internet-comment culture, and, well, even more kvetching about Meyer's vampires. In retrospect, my scope is not quite as broad as I first thought.
