Weekly Geekly for March 14, 2025

Have you ever had one of those days?

It’s π-Day, π-Day Gotta Get Down on π-Day

My wife teaches Mathematics at a local middle school, so we are active celebrators of π-day. We buy a new π related tee-shirt every year (this year’s comes from the good folks at TeeTurtle) and acknowledge with wonder one of the great ratios that exist in nature. In this case, I personally love that π demonstrates that you can have something infinite contained within a defined space. As an irrational number, π is infinite but it is the ratio between two very specifically defined things. The circumference of an object has a known value and so too does the diameter. These are not infinite and the space within a circle is objectively a limited area and yet the number that represents the relationship between these two defined thing is infinite and I find that to be beautiful.

My wife has found that it can be difficult to describe π as a geometric concept to Middle School students who want to know how we can know what its value is. Thankfully, a few years ago she found a video on the YouTube Veritasium channel that describes how we calculate π, how our means of calculation have changed over time, and how we can use pizza to show modern ways of calculating it are conceptually accurate. Any time you can use pizza in a Middle School classroom as a part of a lesson, you can guarantee there will be higher levels of interest by all students involved especially if your class session is just before lunch.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

When I initially entitled

LYT

’s personal subsection of the Weekly Film Cavalcade, my review of film reviews, “The Lamentations of Luke Y Thompson” I was playing around with alliteration. I wanted to call it “The Lamentations of LYT,” but wasn’t sure if the brand he’d given himself in the early 2000s was still recognizable. I always liked his use of The Notorious LYT as his critic handle. It was one of the many things that stood out in his early career when he was one of the only critics doing deep coverage of genre material. There are now many more critics covering the beat, but very few with the depth that Luke brings to the table.

I never really thought I’d use the space to share some of Luke’s genuine lamentations, but here we are. In the past week, Luke and his wife lost a dear companion. It was a companion that saved both his and his wife’s life and I find Luke’s two obituary pieces to be wonderful and sad. They are wonderful in that they share the joy and love a pet companion can bring into your life. They are sad because all such relationships are temporal. Like Luke, my life was saved by an animal companion my wife brought into our relationship. Like Luke I was absolutely gutted when she died. I still cry from time to time thinking of the loss, and it’s been years since she died. I still have an Oreo sized hole in my heart that will never heal. My heart has gotten larger as the love my wife and I have for one another has continued and grown. It grew larger when we welcomed two daughters into the world.

It grew larger still with each and every animal companion we’ve added to our menagerie, but that hole is still there. My heart goes out to Luke and his wife and I pray that their hearts continue to grow because I can tell that the hole Francis left in their heart is as long as the cat’s full name.

The Cat Who Saved Me, Part One

The Cat Who Saved Me, Part Two

Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat

I had hoped that Luke was going to be able to review Novocaine for us here at Geekerati last week, but that was obviously not possible. Thankfully, Courtney Howard has a detailed positive review over at FreshFiction.tv. For those who aren’t familiar with Novocaine, it’s the latest entry in the classic “regular seeming guy with an unknown advantage stumbles into an action movie” genre. In this particular case Jack Quaid plays Nathan Cane, a man who can feel no pain. The character name and film title are as obviously connected as Telford “The Vanisher” Porter’s name, or Jack Russell’s, were to their particular talents.

Not only am I fine with such lantern hanging names, I actually prefer it when writers acknowledge and embrace the gimmick fully. Give me ten films with “unobtanium” over one film with a semi-realistic sounding scientific name for an obviously impossible thing. Such acknowledgements help, rather than hinder, my suspension of disbelief. Your mileage may differ, but it’s true for me.

Courtney’s review is well written, as always, but there was one moment that stuck out to me. In one of her more critical moments she writes, “We are repeatedly told it’s almost Christmas and yet the production design is virtually devoid of holiday decor, reflected only in the lowlife’s disguises.” While a part of me wants to say, “yeah, that’s a legitimate complaint,” there’s another part of me. That part remembers the first winter Jody and I spent in Los Angeles (the movie supposedly takes place in San Diego, but SoCal blah blah). Let me tell you a tale.

Back when Tigers used to smoke my wife and I moved from the alpine heights of Reno, Nevada to the glittering metropolis that is Los Angeles. We went with graduate school acceptance letters in hand to USC and properly filed FAFSA forms and an apartment in the Crenshaw District. Though the less said about our apartment complex, the better. I’ll just let the Los Angeles Times give you a glimpse of our glorious former home. It was rough living, but in a place where dreams come true. Besides, Jody and I love each other dearly and anywhere we are together is a wonderful place to live.

We are both very much Christmas people. How can you come from a place of regular White Christmases and not be? And Reno is a place of regular White Christmases. As our first semester ended, Christmas time was just beginning and we were eager to experience the glories of a Southern California Christmas. We’d seen images of them in film before, so we knew they were something special. In later years, we experienced them and know that they are something special (hence Courtney’s comment). However, that year there was almost no Christmas celebration in Los Angeles. It was eerie. I drove everywhere trying to find it, but I finally figured if any place would have Christmas at the ready it would be Universal City Walk.

Today, Universal City Walk is a great place to go in the Christmas Season. They work hard to incorporate imagery from the Grinch movies and create a celebratory environment, but that year there was no such decoration. It was a cool day when we went, mildly overcast. As we entered, we saw no decorations. We looked up hoping to see a single Christmas light, all to no avail. Until we rounded a corner to find a giant illuminated King Kong in a Santa Hat. It was the only decoration in the whole area and upon seeing it Jody wept at how out of place that single lonely Christmas decoration looked among all the grey and empty.

So when someone says that it’s unbelievable that a Southern California city (which while supposedly San Diego is actually Cape Town, South Africa) lacks Christmas cheer, I remember that gloomy day. One of the darkest days in our whole relationship. But at least we had the Chesapeake Apartments to go back to.

All that said, I’m very much looking forward to seeing Novacaine.

Retroist

has an interesting podcast discussion of one of my favorite cult films, Streets of Fire. Released at the peak of Michael Paré’s career, but without much support from audiences at the time, Streets of Fire is a wonderfully bizarre Rock and Roll Fantasy that eventually found its audience. It was released in 1984, a year that also saw the release of the similarly underappreciated Dreamscape with Dennis Quaid (father of Novocaine’s Jack Quaid). I don’t know why it didn’t connect with audiences. Maybe they thought it was more like American Hot Wax and was merely a Rock and Roll film rather than a live action Rock and Rule

There’s a lot to love in Streets of Fire, but the true showstopper is Diane Lane who plays the Rockstar Ellen Aim and is magnetic in her musical performance. Anyone who has seen Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains (1982) knows that Diane Lane was perfectly cast as the charismatic Rockstar. The Stains was a perfect critique of bands like The Runaways and a precursor to the Riot Grrrl movement in music. In a way, I imagine that Ellen Aim is a more mature Corinne Burns. Anyway, I highly recommend listening to Retroist’s podcast on Streets of Fire, watching Streets of Fire, and checking out Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains.

Retroist Streets of Fire Podcast

MonarcWriter

discusses how pinball machines can be implements of emergent narratives that is a must read for any Dungeon Master. Though I’ve long been a Dungeon Master who relies heavily on pre-published adventures, which are often mere railroad narratives, I deviate from those plots in response to my players and believe D&D is best when it’s an emergent, rather than constructed, narrative. MonarcWriter examines how pinball machines can offer divergent narrative experiences. Very cool read.

Design Inspiration: Pinball and Emergent Narratives

While I’ve avoided the various Winnie the Pooh horror movies that have been released since the character entered the public domain, thanks to

Dave Thaumavore

’s latest interview I am now truly excited about the Brambletrek roleplaying game. Brambletrek is a reimagining of Pooh lore for the purpose of creating a cooperative role playing game. While I’ve got a lot more exploring to do before I make a final purchase decision, I am very impressed with the concept and with the character design. The art by Marta Kowalczewska and Jan Cruz is delightful, so I’m very much leaning into backing this project.

Pooh Goes Solo—No Death, Just Naps

Prior to reading Dr.

Rebekah King

’s celebration of Vincent Price’s performance of one of the most famous speeches in all of Shakespeare, I’d always held Lawrence Harvey’s performance in the Peter Sellers cult film The Magic Christian to be my favorite performance of To Be or Not to Be. The performance in The Magic Christian plays around with the same ideas that Dr. King discusses in her discussion of how a well known soliloquy can be made fresh once more. Where The Magic Christian’s answer is to begin with the standard and end with camp, the answer provided by Vincent Price’s Theatre of Blood is to begin with camp and end with deep sincerity. My sense is to favor the Princean approach which inverts an inversion an in doing so creates a touching artistic moment.

Why the best version of a Shakespeare speech is in camp horror classic 'Theatre of Blood'

While I’m waiting for my copy of the Fire and Ice miniatures board game to finish production, I can pass the time by reading

J.Q. Graziano

’s latest entry where he shares an interview with Frank Frazetta discussing his work in the film industry and the challenges of working with Ralph Bakshi. It’s a really cool interview and a reminder of the value of hunting down obscure fanzines that might end up lost to the sands of time.

LOST INTERVIEWS: Frazetta On His Films!

Least Interesting American Ancestry.com Results Ever

As for the rest of this Newsletter, it’s going to be a celebration filled with Irish/Irish-American elements of popular culture.

Why?

Is it because I’m of Irish descent?

Nope. Take a look at that Ancestry.com genealogy image above. That’s me. German, English, Scottish, Welsh, Icelandic, and Cypriote(?).

I am, however, a very typical American by temperament and that means taking advantage of any cultural opportunity to have a day of celebratory drinking and the next on the calendar is St. Patrick’s Day and while I’m not going to go out and drink any green colored beer, I will be sharing some Irish adjacent elements of popular culture.

I was of three minds for this week’s role playing game recommendation. I thought of recommending the old Dragon Warriors role playing game that was published by Corgi books back in the day in a series of paperbacks. I also considered Pagan Shore for Chaosium’s classic Pendragon role playing game. Neither of these capture the feel of the Kenneth C. Flint novels of the Tuatha Dé Danann I read as a kid. I want a game that can capture the battle of demigods against the forces of chaos and the game that comes closest to that is Onyx Path Publishing’s game Scion: Hero. The Scion Companion includes rules for people descended from Tuatha Dé Dannan and the setting is great for anyone who wants to have adventures akin to those of The Iron Druid in their regular gaming sessions.

Scion’s mechanics are similar to other Storyteller games like Vampire the Masquerade or Werewolf the Apocalypse, and the demigods that your players will play are akin to superheroes. The Storyteller system is one of the first narrative games and players roll pools of dice to determine success or failure. These die pools are made up of a combination of ratings in attributes like strength and skills or abilities like climbing. So a character with a strength of three and climbing of two might roll five dice. Each of the dice that turn up with a number 7 or higher counts as a success. You need at least one, and sometimes more, successes to complete a task.

That’s a very reductive glimpse at the mechanics, but by having a “number of successes” mechanic Storyteller games allowed for more naturally narrative descriptions of actions as tasks with more successes could be described in more narratively awesome ways. Damage is also more abstracted in Storyteller games and there are thresholds for “automatic” successes as well. I’ve been a fan of the Storyteller system since I first encountered it in Vampire: The Masquerade and designers keep finding new and interesting settings for it.

One of the things I like about Scion is that if your campaign lasts long enough, your players’ characters will become quite powerful but they’ll need all of those powers to resist the forces of destruction. Onyx Path published a version of Ragnarok where players could find out if the addition of the children of the Tuatha Dé Danann can turn the tide and save the world.

The very first song I thought of as St. Patrick’s Day approached was House of Pain’s paean to Boston Pub Culture Jump Around. It’s an infectious song and well worth listening to even if you’re avoiding green beer. This song played at almost every party I attended as an undergraduate and a part of me wishes it got more love today.

Jumping from Irish American hip hop to Irish American punk rock, we’ve got the Dropkick Murphys and their hit song I’m Shipping Up to Boston. The song was featured in the film The Departed and the driving melody was perfect for the frantic narrative of the movie The Departed (more on that later).

I’ve featured Stiff Little Fingers’ Alternative Ulster in the past, but St. Patrick’s Day seems a natural time to crank up the volume on this staple of the Irish post-punk scene. While I don’t believe that music has to be overtly political to be punk, or post-punk, political anger is one of the better foundations for it.

I don’t think any discussion of Irish alternative rock and roll can be called legitimate if it doesn’t include discussion of U2. The band’s sound has evolved over time as they’ve experimented with new genre and modes, but Boy has long been my favorite album and their performance of The Electric Co. from their live concert at Red Rocks is a very good version of the song.

Like Dropkick Murphys, The Pogues use traditional Irish folk melodies as the foundation for their punk sound. I was torn between featuring Fairytale of New York or If I Should Fall from Grace with God. In choosing Fairytale, I’d have been choosing the path of the sorrowful wake acknowledging Shane MacGowan’s death in 2023 of pneumonia. Instead, I chose the path of the celebratory wake in honor of my friend Ron who introduced me to the music of The Pogues. Ron died long before Shane MacGowan, having taken his own life, but I shall always remember him with joy in my heart for the many “Two for Tuesday” chicken meals we shared at the Riverboat Casino in Reno, Nevada when we were undergrads. We ate like kings and chatted until dawn.

I’ve featured Hozier a couple of times here in the Newsletter. I adore his combination of Blues and Irish Folk music. When people say, as they do from time to time, that there are no great instrumental and acoustic songwriters like in the 70s I always think of Hozier. He’s a balladeer of the classic variety and I’m always in the mood to listen to him. I figure, I’ll end St. Patrick’s Day listening to this song.

I consider Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs (aka Unceasing Path) trilogy staring Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai to be the pinnacle of the Hong Kong crime story genre. The charisma of the leads and the depth of the conflict demonstrate all that is wonderful about Hong Kong film making. Lau and Mak’s direction is more grounded and realistic than peak 90s Hong Kong cinema, even as it maintains the same riveting stylized cinematography, and demonstrates the apotheosis of a film movement that combined the artistry, subtlety, and mood of French New Wave with stylized action of greats like Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, Walter Hill, John Ford, and the gonzo elements of American 80s action.

Two of the films in the trilogy were masterfully adapted to the American milieu in his 2005 film The Departed. While I firmly believe that Lau and Make’s trilogy are overall superior to Scorsese’s film, The Departed is also a masterpiece. It also adds some interesting dynamics rooted in Catholicism and American cinematic history. It is a perfect example of cinematic localization directed by a master of film. The film is gripping and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Billy pulls all the right emotional strings. I am rooting for him to succeed and weep for the life he has been forced to live in order to fight crime.

It’s a grim film, as is the next recommendation, but I’ll save the happier films for the straight up St. Patrick’s Day film recommendations article I’ll be running tomorrow.

Shifting from Boston to Martin Scorsese’s home city of New York comes another of my favorite Scorsese films and once again Irish characters are at the center. Gangs of New York is a film that I think every American should watch. Every political season we hear that such and such conflict is new and/or worse than ever before. Whether that political tension be immigration, crime, poverty, corruption, you name it, Gangs of New York shows that things can and have been much worse in the United States. The film shares elements with The Departed, in that a character pretends to be something he is not, but the conflicts are very different. Justice for society is not the motivating element here, justice as revenge is and the film is a brutal masterpiece. It can be a hard film to watch, but it’s a film I watch at least once a year.