Weekly Geekly Rundown April 10 to April 25, 2025
So...not quite weekly this month.
I apologize for the delay in getting this newsletter out to all of you, but it’s been a very busy couple of weeks in the Lindke household. My daughters History and Mystery (their nicknames) participated in the State Championships for Speech and Debate two weeks ago and they’ve been getting ready for the National Championships for Business Professionals of America (where Mystery is participating in Entrepreneurship and History in Computer Modeling) and the Technology Student Association. That surge of events, and Junior/Senior Prom, meant that a lot of the past month has been spent deep in the trenches of club fundraising. We had a lot of people help the twins clubs and we are very grateful. We are also very tired.
One of the reasons we are tired is that Jody and I had to make a mad dash from Meridian, Idaho to Blackfoot, Idaho in order to get Mystery some of the presentation materials she accidentally left at home in the confusion of getting ready for the team bus to the State competition. Jody and I came home from our jobs and saw that Mystery had forgotten some of her materials and immediately called her to see what we could do to help and there was no other alternative than for us to drive across the state to meet her and get her the stuff.
While some parents might have rolled their eyes at their teenagers, I was nothing short of excited at the opportunity. Idaho is a beautiful state and there are so many places I have yet to explore. Now don’t get me wrong, the trip from Meridian to Blackfoot is quite a journey. For my English subscribers, it’s the equivalent of driving from London to Middlesbrough or London to Aberystwyth, Wales. Fun fact, Idaho is about the size of England and Wales.
After making the journey, and delivering the goods, Jody and I spent the next day in a much more leisurely drive home. While we raced to get to Blackfoot, and didn’t miss much beauty because we drove at night, we took our time coming home and deliberated on what sites we should see on our excursion. Did we want to drive to that Camas Prairie to see the Camas Lilies and the “Superbloom?” As beautiful as that would be, we were about a month too soon. Should we try to spot Sandhill Cranes in Grays Lake? As amazing as that would be, it was in the wrong direction and happens in the fall.
In the end, we decided on making a stop at City of Rocks near the city of Almo. It was a touch out of our way, but we’d heard so much about it that we decided it would be our mid-trip excursion. Boy howdy and I glad we chose to go. As you can see from the drone footage from our local news station, and maybe a little from the photos I took, it is a breathtaking display of nature’s destructive power. Idaho is an extremely seismically active state. The “Smile” that runs across the southern part of our state, that forms the Snake River Basin, is a rift from a massive earthquake at some point in the past. Craters of the Moon is the remnant of a gigantic lava flow and some of the best caves to visit are ancient lava tubes.
City of Rocks is more than just a place of beauty and serenity, it was a major stop along the California Trail where Settlers making the journey from Missouri to California would stop. Some of those travelers signed their names in wagon grease on a couple of rock formations called Camp Rock and Register Rock. While my hackles typically rise in anger at the smallest bit of graffiti by modern visitors to wondrous locations, I am sympathetic to the need for human connection that these early signatories displayed. There were cell phones and no internet for them to use to communicate their journey to others, and let me tell you City of Rocks was pretty far from anything close to resembling civilization. It’s also a bit too far from water for my tastes. The Oregon Trail sticks much closer to the Snake River and it makes far more sense to me to take that route, but there was “gold in them thar California hills!” so many made the journey.
I shared the story of my journey with some of my students at Boise State and one told me of how he grew up in Oakley, Idaho. This small community of 800 or so people isn’t far from the City of Rock and, though it is tiny, it has a couple of features that might appeal to one or more of my readers. It reportedly has a Haunted Opera House and according to my student the nearby unincorporated community of Basin is believed by locals to be home to a Skinwalker. Idaho has a number of supposedly haunted places, and let’s not forget that it’s also Bigfoot country.
I’ve long been wondering what kind of stories I want to write that are based in Idaho and I think I’m starting to get a good sense.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
has a couple of new reviews up on his Substack, and I published his review of Andor’s second season here earlier this week, but I wanted to share a more personal piece from him for this entry. While “geek culture reviewers” are a dime a dozen today, but they were rare when Luke started his professional film critic career and Luke was one of those few. He was the “Notorious LYT” and borrowed a lot of concepts from pro-wrestling to build his brand an identity. The Notorious LYT wasn’t Kayfabe, he was very real, but he was like the living embodiment of a pop culture critic. He was an avatar of geekdom.He used his brand to become a contributor to a couple of well circulated Southern California Weekly papers, in particular the OC and LA Weekly which at their peak were absolutely among the best journalism in Los Angeles. To get a sense of how good the journalism at LA Weekly was in its heyday, it had Jonathan Gold as a food critic. Eventually, Luke would work for E! Online and was Deadline.com’s official Comic-Con reporter, a position he was hand picked by Hollywood Journalism legend Nikki Finke. He worked at Nerdist and was made Editor in Chief of Voice Media’s online geek site Topless Robot. In a signal of the rise of cancel culture, the site changed its name to The Robot’s Voice in a move to both highlight its connection to Voice Media (read Village Voice one of the premiere American alt-Weeklies) and to remove the sexist connotations of the original name. It’s a move that I think was a bad decision, but it was made in 2015 during peak cancel culture and was example 3,517,312 that cancel culture was and is not a partisan thing.
I knew Luke before he became Editor in Chief through a journalistic circle in Los Angeles. I’m still not quite sure, given how the circle included actual working journalists and I was “just” a blogger, how I ended up getting invited to events. Regardless of how it happened, it resulted in Luke and me becoming friends, which resulted in him becoming the second editor to pay me money to write content about geeky subjects. My friend Jay and I wrote a brief review column for the Sparks Tribune called Celluloid Say-So just before I finished my undergraduate degree and I’ll have to hunt down my clippings some time. I got the Tribune opportunity because I asked. I got the Topless Robot opportunities because Luke asked. I was a slow, but factually meticulous, contributor and I’m proud of the articles I wrote. These articles included a list of the best Superhero roleplaying games out there and a defense of I, Frankenstein that I still stand by to this day.
When I lived in Los Angeles, I would regularly attend Comic-Con as a fan, while Luke worked the event as a journalist. And he WORKED the event. It often takes me over eight hours, not straight, to put together one of these Weekly Geekly Rundowns (which are only Mostly Weekly). I was, as I mentioned before, a slower freelance for Topless Robot. I like to think I was a reliable and valued one, but I know I was a slow one.
My writing process is slow. Luke’s is not. He is a Walter Gibson-esque machine. That’s the highest praise I can give any crafter of prose, but Luke deserves it. When he covered Comic-Con, he covered it in depth and on time. I marveled at his ability to write coverage so quickly and so detailed. In fact, it is something I envy about Luke.
WORKING an event like Comic-Con in depth is a very different experience than attending the event. Attending an event is fun and casual and you get to do things on your own time. I’ve worked a couple of conventions (Gen Con, Dun Dra Con) in exchange for free admission (usually from the RPGA which tells you how long ago that was) and when I ran D&D adventures for the RPGA, I very rarely got to experience the convention as a whole. My days were made up of exhausting four hour sessions of D&D adventures. It was fun, to be sure, but I was working and not playing.
The same dynamic happens when you are covering an event as a journalist. The few times I’ve tried to even briefly put on my journalist cap to get an interview or two in at Comic-Con, I found that the time to locate, setup, and conduct the interview took away considerable “fun” time I could have spent in Hall H or at the Mysterious Galaxy panels (the best panels). Luke’s workload at Comic-Con was high, but he loved it and did painstaking and accurate work. I’m sad he won’t be attending this year and I think the world of fandom is missing out because of it.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
I’ve mentioned before that my introduction to fantasy fiction was a bit atypical. Where most of the people I know will cite Tolkien, Lewis, or some other traditional/hopeful fantasy author as their first “post mythology” experience with the genre, mine was Michael Moorcock. I read the Elric Saga, the Chronicles of Corum and Behold the Man before I read Tolkien or Lewis. For me, heroic narratives are the subversively deconstructive tale. The anti-hero is the norm. My horror experience is equally odd. I read the tales of John the Balladeer and John Thunstone before I read Lovecraft. While my friends were reading Stephen King, I was reading Robert McCammon.
There is something about Southern Gothic Horror that resonates deeply with me. I know a part of that connection is that my father is from the South and he shared a lot of Southern folklore with me, but a big part is how the conflicts between Urban vs Rural, Race, and Class intermingle in a Southern Tale differently than they do in New England or Western Horror. Sometimes its hard to tell the difference between a “Southern Tale” and a “Southern Horror Tale,” as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Name Desire may not contain any overtly supernatural elements, but they ooze gothic and can be horrifying. Even a story like The Last Picture Show, ostensibly a coming of age tale set in a dying Texas town, have an undertone of decay, fear, and loss. The tales are haunting, but also filled with a kind of desperate hope. They are unsettling, but often have characters worthy of your love. There horror is rooted in both the supernatural and in the real horrors of events like Rosewood or the oil town boom and bust cycle that is the backdrop for The Last Picture Show1. The opening shot of Peter Bogdanovich’s Oscar nominated film is as haunting as any zombie or post apocalyptic film and the scene where Bobby Sheen (Gary Brockette) makes an advance on Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd) uses a technique strait out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
There is a reason that Tananarive Due is among my favorite authors. She captures the power of generational trauma and balances it with the supernatural. I was introduced to her writing by her husband Steven Barnes, one of the authors of Dream Park series and the sole author of the Street Lethal series. I had the opportunity to interview both Due and Barnes in 2007 and it was a wonderful experience.
All of which is to say that the new film Sinners is very much my jam and while audiences have now gone to see the film in droves. I went to see it after reading the positive review Courtney Howard wrote two weeks ago and I very much enjoyed it for many of the reasons she gives in a review that hits all the right notes and gives just enough detail to draw in the Vampire movie fan without spoiling the story.
I’ve been meaning to share this link for some time, but just haven’t found the right newsletter timing.
at has a set of solo rules for a very simple role Solo Narrative War Game called Shot and Spell. Given my love of Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage Trilogy, you know that I’m checking this one out. I haven’t played a lot of Solo RPGs since I was a kid, but I am always game and all games can be adapted to/from multiplayer.’s Substack has been on a roll lately with a ton of game design advice. It also looks like she’s been using R for some of her analysis, which is a significant bonus in my book. One my favorite of her recent articles is a discussion of the tension between mechanics and storytelling when using skill checks. Longtime readers know that I have written on the effect that a mechanics based mindset can have on play. Games like Runequest, GURPS, Hero, and 3.x D&D replaced broad archetype based classes with skill systems and those skill systems can diminish narrative in play if the GM and players aren’t careful.
I Liked D&D More Before it Became GURPS
“Almost all old school dungeon delving is an off the cuff Player VS DM negotiation made in the moment.” — Jim Zub
Kate’s system attempts to fill in the gap by providing narrative tools in a mechanics mindset presentation. It’s a great balance of the tension between the pure narrative mindset and the mechanics based one and I like it as much as the innovations that Kenneth Hite an Robin Laws came up with in the Gumshoe system.
discusses the benefits and pitfalls writers face when writing stories about the victims of serial killers, especially when those killers focus on people on the edges of society. How do you write a story about a victim of Jack the Ripper without falling into cliché? One answer is that you must treat the victim as a whole person and not as a mere vehicle for a moral argument. The movie Klute, while in no way attached to Jack the Ripper formally, examined the life of a call girl who is the obsession of a killer. At no point is Bree depicted as broken or fallen, but is instead a complex person who is balancing ways of controlling her life. The pitfall that so many stories about serial killers and fallen women make is to treat both the killer and victim as cardboard cyphers instead of as people.
I should mention that it is only serendipity that she is writing about horror and opera at the same time that I visited a city of 800 people that has a haunted opera house. It’s a haunted opera house that happens to be performing The Pirates of Penzance this summer. This is a mere coincidence, but a timely one given the brief exchange the good Doctor and I had earlier this month.
Into the Odd is a very simple NuSR role playing game that provides rules for adventure in a world that combines magic, gunpowder, the Weird, and traditional dungeon crawling. While the rules booklet is short, the game itself is even simpler as the mechanics are essentially those of a one page game. Character creation is very simple. You roll 3d6 for three statistics and 1d6 for hit points and then use a cross tab chart to look up where your highest stat value and hit points intersect for a list of equipment and abilities.
There are no classes in the game as characters are more determined by their abilities and equipment than anything else. Success is typically determined by rolling against a stat value as the target number, with a major exception being combat. In combat all rolls automatically hit and the only variable is how much damage they do. This system was adapted from a B/X Blackrazor blog post and has been used by other games like Mausritter. An assumption is that the damage roll itself incorporates how hard/whether a person is hit. Given that hit points aren’t a measure of how much damage you can take before you die, rather the amount of damage you can take before you might suffer injury or death (akin to Warhammer Fantasy) having only damage rolls speeds up combat without making it much more lethal than Basic D&D.
There’s risk and heroism here and a great foundation for a number of games. It’s a truly elegant system that stands out as a good abstract system in a sea of highly granular ones. While you can find playtest rules for the game online for free, I highly recommend the final published version as it has streamlined the system wonderfully.
On the morning drive to school today, my daughter History played one of her favorite Shawn Mendes songs and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It’s a wonderful traditional pop song that has a catchy melody, good singing, and a hypnotic beat. I think the hook is particularly strong.
Speaking of strong hooks, it’s been about a million years since I heard the Blues Traveler song Run-Around. It brings up memories of when Jody and I were first dating. I can still remember driving around Reno, or even more memorable driving from Reno to Great America via Donner Pass, while singing this song together at the top of our longs. Since the sun roof of my Volkswagen Bug was broken, it would slide back as we drove towards the summit and I’d have to manually slam it shut with a “Thunk!” That thunk often coincided with the beat of a song. Magic memories.
And as Triumph taught the world long ago, music has a Magic Power. This isn’t new knowledge as Socrates had long discussions about how music shapes the soul. More than that, for me at least, music is a wonderful conduit into the past. People often talk about how a sound takes them back in time and helps them remember specific moments. For me, it’s music that does that. Sometimes those memories are happy, sometimes sad, but they are always more vivid when I hear a song.
My mom’s birthday is coming up (May 4th), and I don’t know if I’ll get the next “Weekly” out on time, so I’d like to share my mom’s favorite song. One of the last gifts I was able to give my mom was tickets to see Van Morrison play in Reno and I hope he played Brown Eyed Girl. Whenever I hear the song, I think of my mom. The playful melody almost captures her free spirit and sense of humor.
I’ve mentioned a couple of movies worth seeing earlier in this Rundown (Sinners and The Last Picture Show) so those are off the table as the formal recommendation. With that in mind, I’m going to go a bit out of the normal range here and recommend a film that has a big cult following today, but had a hard time connecting with audiences in its day.
Streets of Fire is an odd film. It describes itself as a Rock & Roll Fable, but many critics would classify it as neo-noir. I think director Walter Hill’s Rock & Roll Fable is more accurate. The film is like a live action version of Rock & Rule or an adventure from a long forgotten Pulp magazine come to life. It takes place in a dystopian future that somehow looks exactly like the 1950s in a city that is a mashup of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Streets of Fire is pure cinema, by which I mean that it is a story written expressly to demonstrate what can be done in cinema. It is well shot, has great sound, very solid performances, but all for the purpose of making a film. It doesn’t feel like it’s attempting deep meaning. It doesn’t feel like a money grab. It just feels like a director and screenwriter got together and said, “you know what I want? A Rock and Roll action musical that takes place in a post-apocalyptic 1950s” and I love it for that. There may be better Rock & Roll movies, but none of them would make as good a role playing game campaign or action comic book series as Streets of Fire.
It features music written specifically for the film, including a doo-wop number called I Can Dream About You by “the Sorels” that is so on point that my minds eye places the song in the film American Hot Wax about the creation of Rock & Roll.
Streets of Fire has a fantastic case with Michael Paré at the peak of his celebrity, Diane Lane showing us for a second time that she’s a hell of a singer, a young Willem Dafoe chewing up the scenery like he’s been on a 30 day cleanse, and Bill Paxton. There are others like Amy Madigan, who I loved in Uncle Buck, and Deborah Van Valkenburgh who worked with Hill on his previous film The Warriors (also a must watch).
As an aside, Peter Bogdanovich cast Cloris Leachman as an older woman in an unhappy marriage in this film and she is absolutely radiant in her performance. She was nominated for best Supporting Actress (she won) and she is radiant in a performance that is a shift from her typical comedic role.
Hey, thank you for the shut out! Glad you liked some of my rumblings and mumblings about the hobby
Thank you for the review and mention.