[UA] NPC character concept

[S. Ben Melhuish]

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This is a (relatively long) excerpt from a Salon.com article today.

"For [Dave] Bridger, keeping a grip on his own identity may be another 
challenge.  When he's tired or distracted and the cellphone chirps to 
life, Bridger might even have to pause and ask himself:  What is my 
name today?

"Legally, the man who goes by the name Bridger appears to be Davis 
Wolfgang Hawke, a former white-power activist who renounced his birth 
name, Andrew Britt Greenbaum, in 1996 at the age of 18.  But in the 
late '90s Hawke also went by the moniker Bo Decker.  At the time, he 
was head of the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party, one of the 
fastest growing neo-Nazi groups in the United States, which he later 
renamed the American Nationalist Party while a student at Wofford 
College in South Carolina.

"But he hasn't really used the names Decker or Hawke online for years.  
Those identities imploded in 1999, shortly after word got out that his 
father was a Jew from the Boston suburbs, and people started calling 
him a 'kosher Nazi.'  The ANP and its leader crawled quietly under a 
rock.

"Yet as his world was crumbling around him, Hawke vowed he'd make a 
comeback on the political scene.  In an interview with Rolling Stone in 
late 1999, Hawke predicted he would run for 'major public office' 
within a decade.  But first, he would need 'a lot of money to back me 
up.'

"So what does a former American Nationalist Party member do to make 
some quick bucks?  In Hawke's case, he turned to penis-enlargement 
pills -- and a host of other dodgy products, including human growth 
hormone, free government grants, inkjet-printer refills, extended car 
warranties, "eBay secrets" -- marketed via spam e-mail campaigns.  
Today, Hawke's spam operations -- Quiksilver Enterprises and Amazing 
Internet Products -- while nowhere near the biggest sources of junk 
e-mail on the Internet, may be among its more profitable spam-based 
enterprises."

* Failed madness meter notches?  Check.
* Strange rural subcultures?  Check.
* Big-time paradoxes?  Check.
* Semi-plausible link with old-school occultism (quicksilver --> 
alchemy)?  Check.
* Desire to change the world, in some way or other?  Check.

(Full article is at 
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/07/29/spam_nazi/index.html -- 
you may have to watch some kind of ad or something to read it if you're 
not a subscriber.)

- -- Sben

Pile gear!
http://www.cafeshops.com/pile

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