The Geeklies: Weekly Geekly End of the Year Accolades
Favorite Geek Related Things from 2023
End of Year Thoughts
It’s the end of the year and that means that it is time for “best of” or “favorites” lists from the larger commentariat. While my community might be small, it’s growing and when I look at my analytics it has some very regular participants. I wish more of you would comment from time to time, but I also know that the first rule of the internet is “don’t read the comments section.” Our community is small enough that the Geekerati comments section is likely to be genial, and I’d like to hear from you about some of the things you loved that came out in 2023.
By and large 2023 was a good year for me. Sure, there was some financial strain left over from the pandemic. My wife and I moved in November of 2020 and I spent a year looking for work in our new community. I found a great job in 2022 and I’ve experienced job growth in 2023 and our family is doing well. I do data analysis and research for the county government and teach political science as an adjunct professor at the local university.
One the fun side, we drove around a lot of Idaho this year and I really love the state. I grew up in the Mountain West (Reno, NV) and Idaho has everything I loved about Reno without my least favorite part. Visits to the Shoshone Ice Cave, Mammoth Cave, Craters of the Moon, Idaho City, and Twin Falls merely scratch the surface of some of the cool things we did this year and it looks like 2024 will be even better. It will be better, in part, because I will finally finish my dissertation after which I will be Dr. Geekerati.
On the geek front, 2023 was a pretty cool year and I’d like to share with you some of my favorite geek highlights.
Favorite Reviews from Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard
As you know, I regularly post reviews from Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard here at the Geekerati Newsletter. I even, from time to time, publish reviews by Luke. In fact, we’ve got his review of Iron Claw coming this weekend. No spoilers on the review, but given Luke’s deep knowledge of pro wrestling I think it’s one of the best takes on the film I’ve read and will be one of the best published reviews available.
My Favorite Luke Y Thompson Review
As I was reviewing which review by Luke to recommend as my favorite for the year, I reread a lot of his reviews at other sites like SuperHeroHype and A.V. Club, but as self-serving as it may seem I like the review he did of the Cinderella 4K video for this newsletter best of all of them. It has such an interesting take on the subject matter. It’s not every day you read a review that compares a Disney Princess to a weapon of mass destruction.
Cinderella Barbenheimer – The Princess Doll as WMD
It seems odd that as a young boy I would have been excited to see Cinderella, except for one thing – I implicitly trusted Disney. The company's obvious intent to become something kids give automatic …
My Favorite Courtney Howard Review
You might accuse me of recency bias with this pick, since I just posted a link to Courtney’s review of Rebel Moon over at FreshFiction.tv last Monday, but it is an absolute banger and it begins with a perfect sentence, “REBEL MOON – PART 1: A CHILD OF FIRE plays like we’re watching Zack Snyder plagiarize his homework in real time.” Having now watched the film, which I hadn’t at the time I first read it, I find myself in complete agreement with her description of the film and her chosen metaphors, even as I disagree with her final assessment.
She gives the film 1.5 out of 5 stars and I’d give it 3, in part because I recognized even more places where Snyder lifted from science fiction and fantasy history. For example, it’s clear that he lifted from Warhammer 40k and Krull, and if you lift from Krull that automatically gets you an extra star in my book. My wife and I were talking about Rebel Moon last night and she described it as 3 (or as many as 7) different films that were spinning around one another and colliding from time to time. Any of these individual films would be very good, but the other films keep getting in the way. I think that’s right and I thing that Courtney sums that up perfectly in her review. She’s a heck of a good reviewer and her analysis of Rebel Moon highlights some of the reasons I share her reviews every week.
Geekerati Newsletter’s Top 3 Performing Posts
This section is completely self-serving, as it’s just a list of articles from this site, but it also shows the diversity in content we produce here and in what appeals to readers.
The most read article on the site with 4x the number of views as the next article on the list, was the detailed discussion I did regarding how Hasbro hurt the D&D brand earlier this year.
The second most read article on the site was my article discussing the state of the Planetary Romance genre. The writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs were what got me into the genre in the first place, but it’s a genre that holds a weird place in Science Fiction and Fantasy because it incorporates elements of Sword & Sorcery while maintaining the positive tone of romantic fantasy. There is still work being done in the genre and I hope it is due for a new resurgence.
I was surprised to find a Weekly Geekly entry was the third most read article of the year and reread it to see if I could figure out why. It might be because I featured a Kickstarter project for a Lovecraftian Sword & Sorcery RPG, but I kind of hope it was because it included a link to one of the few Geekerati video reviews I did this past year. In this case, it was the conversation I had with Luke Y Thompson about Superhero Films as Wish Fulfillment. The Kickstarter is long done, and I will review the game soon, but I’d really appreciate it if you watched the video.
Favorite New Comic Book
In all honesty, ever since DC Comics published Identity Crisis and had Sue Dibny murdered in a storyline that was both overly brutal AND a rip off of two issues of Marvel’s Squadron Supreme mini-series, I’ve been a far more selective regarding the comics I read. My selectivity predates a lot of the current cultural battles taking place over content, but it is just as emotional for me. Elongated Man and Sue were two of my favorite characters, Ted Kord was a third, and the way they were treated in that series is unforgivable to me. It was the first time that comics seemed to say to me, “Hey, long time fan. We hate you. We’ll show you this by brutalizing and murdering one of your favorite characters. Didn’t we subvert your expectations?” It was the natural outcome of a trend that had been building since the publication of Watchmen, but which has been negative for the industry as a whole. Watchmen worked because it stood apart from comics in general, and Moore’s Supreme showed he also appreciated the four-color form even as he could critique it, but making every comic Watchmen-esque was the wrong path to take.
To be fair, comics are beginning to push through their brutal deconstruction period but they still have a way to go in my opinion. That’s why I’m super selective in what I’ll even begin to read. That aside, one writer who has provided hours upon hours of entertainment for me as a reader has been Jim Zub. I’m particularly fond of the work he did on the Munchkin comic and his D&D comics. His depictions of Minsc and Boo showed that some writers still understood how to write for fun rather than for “literary” value, even as they provided real literary value. My appreciation for Zub was one of the reasons I was excited to see how the newest Conan comic book series by Titan Comics would be. Conan has been published by a couple of comic book publishers, mainly Marvel and Dark Horse, but this latest publication is the first time that the company that owns the rights to the character would be publishing him in comic book form.
It’s hard to write Conan well. It isn’t too hard to adapt existing stories well, but it is hard to write new stories featuring the character. While I’m in the minority who think that Sprague de Camp did a good job, there are plenty of others who haven’t done the character justice and many of those failures have happened in the pages of comic books. Titan Comics exhibited bravery in having Jim Zub write an original story for the opening arc of their new title. They exhibited even more bravery in letting him have it be a Conan vs. Zombies story. Let’s just say that while Conan has faced undead before, having anything resembling modern plague zombies in a Conan book isn’t particularly Howardian in general. Yet it in this case it worked. Jim Zub managed to maintain the classic Sword & Sorcery Howardian feel while adding a fresh look at the zombie horde story. Instead of zombiciding Howard, he Howarded zombies and it worked remarkably well. I’m eager to read what’s coming next.
Favorite Newly Rediscovered Old Comic Book
Marvel’s Secret Invasion was one of those books that came out when I was still harboring the most resentment with the entire industry after the Dibny affair. Sure, it was Marvel and not DC, but both companies had been on a "who can outfridge the other” streak and the Dibny affair was a natural outcome of that. So I was hesitant to read everything Secret Invasion when the event happened. I only read the main mini-series and the few books I was still reading. With the release of the new Disney+ series loosely (very loosely) based on the mini-series, I decided to give it another chance.
I opened up my Marvel Unlimited app, I may be more selective in what I read but I subscribe to both Marvel Unlimited and DC Infinite, and used the Marvel Guides website to provide the road map as I read every related issue. I’m damn glad I did. It was a lot of fun to read. I do wish they’d shown more of the final battle and think it was the perfect opportunity for a (original) Crisis-like series of splash pages, but that’s a small complaint. The writing was a lot of fun and I especially liked the battle in the Savage Land. I think a part of that joy was using Hawkeye/Ronin in that battle as a means to critique, in meta fashion, the very fridging phenomenon that had been alienating me. I felt seen as a fan, or at least felt that some of the writers shared my love of some classic third string characters.
Favorite New Role Playing Game
There were a ton of new role playing games released in 2023. According to my friend Alan Bahr, who is a very knowledgeable publisher of TTRPGs, by December 12th of this year there were “2,953 rpg products were released that were tagged as core books” on DriveThruRPG. That’s just in one year. Some of them might have been recently uploaded older games, but I imagine most of them were brand new. That’s a lot of new games (though not all core books are new games they could be expansions) and more than any one person can play in a lifetime, let alone a year.
Lately, I’ve been of the mindset that a game isn’t officially published until it has a physical copy. I’m on a physical media kick. Yes, I’ll include print on demand on an evergreen pdf via DriveThruRPG as being officially published, but if a game has a physical release six months after the pdf release I consider the physical release as the “officially” published version. After all, one of the advantages of releasing a game early on pdf is that you can make copy edits and get feedback on the pdfs. That makes them ashcans, or pre-release copies, and not official releases.
All of that preamble is to justify my choice for my favorite new role playing game in 2023. The pdf for the game was released in 2022, and if I want to be strictly accurate the game was originally released in 1982 by Target Games. Target Games was founded by Fredrik Malmberg, who happens to be the founder of Titan Comics and is in control of the Conan IP, which connects this choice to my comics choice. This newest edition (published by Free League) wasn’t released in physical form until July of 2023 , and what a physical release it is. It’s beautiful and stylish and it has updated and streamlined the rules set in a way that makes the system comfortable for newer gamers.
Dragonbane (Drakar och Demoner) is based on Steve Perrin’s Basic Role Playing and Magic World rules published by Chaosium in their Worlds of Wonder boxed set. These rules took Sweden by storm and made Drakar och Demoner (and not D&D) the most popular fantasy role playing game in Sweden. Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system is skills based and doesn’t officially include any class/level system. Dragonbane is still largely skill based, but it includes archetypes that adapt the skill system into one more familiar to D&D players and one that makes the transition smooth. It’s a great system, based on a solid RPG foundation, and I highly recommend it. Even if it does, include Ducks as a playable race.
Who am I to complain though? As I mentioned in the article where I wrote up a Teenage Mutant Ninja Tortle class for Basic D&D, Ducks and other anthropomorphic characters have been around since 1978.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Tortles
With the pending release of a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, I thought I’d visit the frenetic foursome’s nearest parallel in old school D&D and present a Teenage Mutant Ninja Tortle class fo…
Favorite New Video Game
Given how much I loved the original Baldur’s Gate games, any new addition to the franchise was going to have to be of extremely high quality to get my approval. Baldur’s Gate 3 delivered and it delivered in spades. It’s not only my favorite game of 2023, it’s my favorite game of the 2020s. Rogue Trader might give it a run for its money, but that judgement will have to wait for me to finish my third play through of BG3.
What makes Baldur’s Gate most impressive is that it is one of the few products that seems to appeal to every kind of D&D fan. If you’ve been paying attention to the TTRPG space, you’d notice that the longstanding edition and playstyle wars have blown up of late. In part, this is due to modern political polarization, but even more so because of the influx of newer players who want a Critical Role style experience rather than a tactical or puzzle challenge experience. There have always been several types of D&D players in the past, Robin Laws book on Gamemastering has great advice for how to navigate a mixed group, but this new batch has more theatre kids than prior waves and it has led to some conflict. Somehow BG3 manages to have something for every kind of gamer and while there was some culture war controversy early on, that seems to have been pushed aside because of the sheer fun of the game.
Do I wish there were fewer Tieflings in the game? Sure. They are everywhere. Yes, it makes sense with regards to continuity. It does happen post-Descent into Avernus, but it’s still a lot of Tieflings and I’m not much of a Tiefling fan. It also has more halflings than the Lord of the Rings. But those are minor quibbles. From a tactical perspective, the game is a blast. From a “role playing” experience, the game is a blast.
One last thing. There was some controversy recently regarding whether or not to include “if you fail you become a Mind Flayer” mechanics when running table top D&D. The recent Obelisk adventure advises broaching this subject carefully with your players. Baldur’s Gate 3 does not take the side of the anti-Body Horror crowd and (Spoiler).
Favorite New Movie
This choice was easy for me. It’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. While some view the “canon event” line as a subtle attack on certain aspects of fandom, I didn’t read it that way. I read it as a critique of some of the modern writers and how they change the surface of the character while cannibalizing prior characters. One of the reasons I like Jaime as Blue Beetle is that while he is connected to Ted Kord, he isn’t a rehash of Ted Kord in a different Fortnite skin.
A lot of the “canon event” commentary in Spider-Verse seemed to be an attack on this lazy writing and an argument that the films should be their own thing and that Miles is not Peter and that making Miles another Peter undermines Peter’s sacrifice. The death of Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man was one of the few times a comic book actually made me cry and a big part of that was because it shifted away from the rote “canon event” storytelling that the various relaunches of Spider-Man had gone through and that Ultimate did in abundance prior to that finale.
My only critique of the film is that there was not enough Spider-Ham. He did finally show up though and he’ll be partnering with Miles to bring down the system in the next film.
Favorite Never Before Seen Classic Film
I won’t write much here. Instead, I’ll just share my video review.
Favorite New (to me) Television Show
I love a good spy story and the best spy stories combine the realism of a John le Carré novel with the action of an Ian Fleming one. Both le Carré and Fleming worked for British Intelligence during the tenure of Kim Philby and both were influenced by his legacy, and by The Service, in different ways.
For le Carré his past led him to a kind of ambiguously anti-patriotic but pro-democratic cynicism. If Philby hadn’t been responsible for exposing the identity of some of le Carré’s agents in 1964, one can imagine the ever talented Philby taking le Carré’s cynicism and using it to turn him into a KGB asset. Thankfully, that never happened but it could have because that cynicism makes one vulnerable because it’s the kind of cynicism that only those who have done horrible things, or at least have seen horrible things, done in the name of “the good” possess. It is a cynicism rooted in morality and betrayal of that morality.
For Fleming, who worked in a very different part of The Service, his experience and work gave him a deep sense of patriotism. He also worked in a department that came up with plans for special operations in WWII. He was also hired (along with Roald Dahl) to help influence Americans to become more supportive of England. Any encounters that Fleming had with Philby were a part of espionage in WWII. This is in sharp contrast to le Carré’s Cold War involvement in The Service. WWII was a far more black and white conflict than the Cold War and that contrast can be readily seen in the work of both authors.
My favorite spy fiction combines these world views. It has the cynical realism of the Cold War veteran and the action of the World War II planner. It’s why I love the Bourne books, but only really love the first Bourne movie. Slow Horses, which is in its 3rd season on Apple TV+, is a perfect combination of the two. There is plenty of action, but there is plenty of cynicism, conflict, and personal politics.
Admittedly, comments on Substack are a strange thing. Unless you have a Substack yourself, I feel like it's an easy feature to overlook. Don't worry though, I'll be happy to comment on your articles!
I finally got to try Dragonbane this year and really liked what I saw. I was surprised by how much of the BRP was in it, but I really liked the vibes and mechanical pacing. Hope to play more of it in the coming year.
I've been eyeing the Conan comics, but I'm not in the habit of following comic books on the regular. Maybe I'll check it out once it's in a collected volume.
Great recommendations as always. I look forward to seeing what you cover in 2024!
Best TV for me this year was The Sandman. It could have gone wrong in every possible way, and yeah, even if I'd have aesthetically preferred the Endless to still have chalk-white skin, it's an amazing job of adapting the nigh-unadaptable.
Also been loving the Doctor Who TV movies. Feels like the magic came back. I liked Whittaker and her companions, but that Flux storyline and the Timeless Child retcon were tough going.