Weekly Geekly Rundown for December 27, 2024
Final Rundown of the Year!
A final wish that you have a Merry Christmas (for my family Christmas Day is only the First Day of Christmas) and that your new year is blessed with time with family and friends.
Veritasium is one of my “go to” YouTube channels. I find that Darek Muller is generally effective at conveying complex ideas to a general audience. The only exception I could find the episode Veritasium did on Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem and Condorcet’s Paradox (thanks to Tomas McIntee for having an entry on this). The video is okay, but it’s pretty clear that Muller was still working through the ramifications and the logic behind the analysis. To be fair, Social Choice and Individual Values was the most difficult text I read in graduate studies. An understanding of Statistics and echoes of calculus are only rudimentary preparation for logical notation. Reading Erick Maskin and Amartya Sen’s book on the topic was a much needed study aid for me.
One "merely okay” video out of over 400 isn’t bad though and it’s not a case of Gell-Mann amnesia either where the one I like least is the one I know something about being the only one I’m critical of because he’s discussed other topics I’m familiar with and delivered. I am sure that on the tougher topics, he struggles as much as he did in the voting video but he wasn’t wrong in that video just not as clear as some of the masters of the topic are.
Which brings me to his video from three months ago discussing some of the misunderstandings many of us have about commercial flights. He starts with questions about the height at which planes fly (and why), discusses how the doors on the planes “aren’t locked,” and moves on to the cellphone “airplane mode” conversation.
At about two minutes into this video, I was about to say I would never fly in an airplane again. I was wondering where this was going and if he was giving ammunition for ne’er do wells to cause mayhem. I’m not afraid of flying in general, but the emergency exit door catastrophe is probably my greatest fear when I am flying. I’m always afraid some random person is going to get claustrophobic and run to open the door. I was in a panic from the moment he said, “they aren’t locked.” At least I was until he showed how and why they work. Then I returned to my normal, “the most dangerous time in flying is take off and landing” mentality.
This is an interesting video that touches on a number of topics regarding how planes work and I learned a bit about the means planes use to pressurize the cabins. I also learned that flushing the toilets temporarily changes cabin pressure, not by a lot but in a way that made the question interesting.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Now that Luke is writing regularly on his personal Substack ill LYTeracy, it provides a good place for me to direct you for glimpses at what he’s writing/reviewing lately. His most recent post shares some of the listicles he’s written for SlashFilm and they are a good sampling of Luke’s filmic passions as he ranks his top 10 Dwayne Johnson films which has a nice plug for one of my favorite and underappreciated “The Rock” movies The Rundown.
My favorite of his lists, check his Substack for all three, was his article on 10 Classic Horror Movie Flops that Deserve a Modern Remake. The list includes a couple of my favorite horror films like Q: The Winged Serpent, The Tingler, and Lifeforce as well as a couple that I think just missed the mark like The Keep.
The Tingler is one of the great Vincent Price films and it has one of the genuinely creepiest scenes of any film in the Price oeuvre. The Tingler is about a parasite that feeds on our fear and can grow to the point that our own fear can kill us. It’s a wonderful premise and William Castle incorporated a wonderful gimmick with it that would work well in some of the new 4D theatres. It’s my second favorite film in the very small “death parasite/explanation” horror genre, with The Asphyx being the king of that small niche.
While Luke is right regarding why people remember Lifeforce, that’s not why I like the film. My enjoyment comes from three very different angles. I like it because it sort of puts paid to the argument that Stephen Spielberg was responsible for all the flashy bits of Poltergeist while Tobe Hooper was responsible for the gritty bits. If you watch Lifeforce, you might be forgiven that the opposite is true and that if Spielberg directed any (and I don’t believe he did) then it was the gritty bits. There are so many ghostly lights in Lifeforce and they look straight out of Poltergeist. The second is that I love to use Patrick Stewart’s performance in this, and in Gunmen, as my go to examples when people compare Shatner and Stewart as actors. They’ll typically compare Stewart’s Shakespearian work or I, Claudius to Shatner’s work in Incubus or The Devil’s Rain. To which I say, “sure, Shatner can ham it up, but have you seen Gunmen?”
As for why I’m critical of The Keep, let’s just say that Michael Mann lost the plot a little bit and that the film looks a bit hokey. The book is the first in a series of books written by F. Paul Wilson that pit the Forces of Light against the Forces of Darkness. It begins as a vampire story and ends as something closer to The Prophesy and it could have been as cool too. I’m a big fan of Mann in general, and his episodes of Starsky and Hutch are examples of his talent. In a series filled with schlock and shark jumping, Mann brought his A-Game and made some all timers. As I’ve mentioned before, he even lifted work he did in Starsky and Hutch in the movie he did based on Miami Vice.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Before there was BookTube or Oprah’s Book Club, there was Reading Rainbow. It was public television at its best in that it mastered the dual purposes that a public service mass medium should aim at providing. It, as Aristotle says of Poetry in Book I part 4 of the Poetics, delights and teaches. We are both entertained and engage in learning. That is what Reading Rainbow instilled in generations.
Courtney Howard provides a very thorough review of the new documentary Butterfly in the Sky that discusses the creation and cancellation of the classic children’s show. She doesn’t, and I’m going to guess that the documentary doesn’t either, cover the controversy between Burton and Reading Rainbow copyright owner WNED in 2017. It does touch on how the language of the “No Child Left Behind” law, which focused on the narrow definition of the “rudiments” of reading (literacy, phonics, and spelling) over the enjoyment of reading and we all know that educational trends (and PBS content) go where the money is. No Child Left Behind put a huge focus on metrics that also affected how Civics education was funded and that focus on metrics led to a reduction in a lot of Civics education as well.
As the old economics saying goes, “you get more of what you pay for.” If you are paying for tests measuring phonics and spelling, you get more tests measuring phonics and spelling. What you don’t necessarily get is more reading. You see similar things happen with the Common Core English where the example readings, that were excerpts from longer pieces, became the focus of education because there were test written to capture and evaluate those. This has resulted in a generation of Elite College Students who Can’t Read Books. Don’t blame TikTok when all the kids get is excerpts of classics. I’m grateful everyday that our local school teachers have demanded our daughters read full books for their English classes and amazed at the books my daughters have chosen to read. Then again, we are a household that taught a love of reading and didn’t focus on the “rudiments” in large part because Reading Rainbow taught me and my wife to love reading.
I cannot wait to watch the documentary.
I backed Nate Whittington’s game Dungeoneering a few years ago on Kickstarter and have watched it expand and build a relatively loyal following. It’s a cool game and I recommend you check it out. It’s one of the recent crop of New School Old Style Play Games that combine modern mechanics with older style dungeon adventure. Since that time, Nate has added a number of game products to his company’s line and I’m very much looking forward to his 100 Pocket Encounters project that will be launching at some point in 2025. It will be system neutral and focus on the ideas behind encounters and bringing unique ideas to your table. I love random tables, especially when there is thought put behind them.
Matt Thompson over at Critical Hit Parader shares his favorite childhood Christmas and while mine happened a few years later, it was based on the same basic gift…a copy of a D&D Basic Set. Mine was the Mentzer version that came out in the 1980s, but I still have my copy and still hate Bargle the Infamous all these years later. I also got a mish-mash of AD&D products because my parents wanted to get me as much D&D stuff as they could reasonably do but while having only a basic understanding of the books themselves. I got mine just before the D&D got reinvented again with 2nd Edition AD&D, but it was a magical Christmas and one that even a Nintendo Entertainment System couldn’t match for friends and fun.
J.Q. Graziano and I always seem to be on similar pages gaming wise, so it was great to see him do a post on Imagine Magazine. Typical of his posts, this is a highly visual post and as such it will still be worth me approaching the same issue, when I get to it, in my more long winded and narrative fashion. Imagine was only around for a short time, and I only saw it after reading Grognardia and visiting the Bay of E for back copy purchases.
In a recent GameTek Geoff Engelstein asks an important question about when a game crosses the line from being inspired by another games mechanics to plagiarizing them. Most gamers know that you cannot copyright mechanics. You can copyright the specific wording just not the underlying concept. Sometimes you can patent a mechanic (maybe…see…Magic the Gathering and “tapping”), and you can definitely trademark a board, but the simple act of rolling a die versus a target number? No. You can’t copyright that, in part because Craps has had that mechanic for thousands of years.
That doesn’t mean that fans and publishers won’t punish people who too closely base their games on other properties. I may love Old School Essentials as an homage to B/X D&D. However, I refuse to play Cards Against Humanity. My refusal has more reasons than just the fact that it is a rip off of Apples to Apples, but that is one of the major reasons.
As complex as the issue is, I think that one compromise that I am more than willing to accept is that used by a lot of the Indie RPG game movement. A lot of story games, or Indie RPG movement games, have their roots in the mechanics of games like InSpectres and Burning Wheel. They resolve this by including what is essentially a “works cited” section and acknowledging the influence. That way, if you like the Powered by the Apocalypse games, you are aimed at gams like InSpectres that influenced Apocalypse World. It’s win/win and follows the academic model. Even as something is based on another product, it informs and directs people toward the influence. One of my complaints regarding the D&D 6th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide is that it uses Robin Laws (okay it’s really Aaron Allston’s) different kinds of player model and advice, but never cites either.
Rebekah King discusses the horrific climax of one of Shakespeare’s saddest plays Titus Andronicus in her latest post. The scene where Titus feeds Tamora her own sons is horrific, but it is the culmination of revenge for a great evil. Titus’ tragic flaw was that he held his duty to a failing state over that of his family, when his first duty was to protect his family. The bit is often played for a bit of humor, akin to the end of The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & Her Lover, but the Anthony Hopkins version plays up the terror. Dr. King discusses the more humorous way it’s often performed and how the film Theatre of Blood adapts the scene.
I like how the piece ends with a moment that reminds me how much I like Sweeney Todd as a musical because of how sad the tale is and how it mashes up so many other tales I like. Sweeney Todd is like a mashup of Titus, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Count of Monte Cristo with a couple of beautiful musical numbers.
Monsters! Monsters!
In 1975, Ken St. Andre published his own vision of what a fantasy role playing game should be. He called the game Tunnels & Trolls and it was a set of rules that he came up with after attempting to unravel how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Given how different the mechanics are, I often wondered how he came up with his rules, but then I began thinking about how to play D&D using the Chainmail rules and it all became clear how brilliant Ken St. Andre’s adaption/innovation was.
That game is currently owned by Rebellion Publishing who bought the game rights from Webbed Sphere Inc. after they bought the rights from the Rick Loomis estate in 2021. Webbed Sphere Inc. didn’t really do anything with the property, Rebellion Publishing looks like they will do more with the property and they made a recent announcement that they had products lined up for 2025. The game provides an opportunity for them to dive deeper into the table top gaming space, something they’ve already shown a desire to do with their republishing of older Judge Dredd board games and an in house magazine based RPG series called Adventure Presents. If things go according to plan, I’ll be posting reviews of the Adventure Presents games in January.
By the look of Rebellion’s initial advertising push, I’m not sure if their version will capture what makes Tunnels & Trolls a unique gaming experience. While the rules of Tunnels & Trolls have an elegance that makes it easy to pick up and quick to play, that’s probably what draws me to the game least. For me, it’s always been the slightly punk nature of the game. Not only has Tunnels & Trolls been a largely DIY endeavor, and remained one over time, it’s also had the ironic edge you often see in punk culture. Where D&D eventually came to take itself “seriously,” Tunnels & Trolls never did. People might complain about spells with names like “Take That You Fiend!” but that’s always been a part of the charm of the game. The marketing image Rebellion shared this month lacks that charm. I think that the character in the ad might be “Fang the Delectable” (that’s the name of the sample character used to show you how to play the game), but I’m not sure. Compare the above illustration with Liz Danforth’s rendition of Fang.
I can see certain similarities, but Danforth’s Fang looks much more unprepared for the horrors he’s certain to encounter. After buying his equipment, per the rules, he doesn’t even have shoes. Now that’s a low level character if I’ve ever seen one.
While I’m not sure whether Rebellion’s Tunnels & Trolls will be a worthy successor to the original, that’s not a problem because Ken St. Andre has already provided us with a worthy successor. In fact, he provided it almost 50 years ago when he created Monsters! Monsters!. Here’s a description of the game from the DriveThru RPG entry:
In 1976 Ken St Andre, the creator of the 2nd oldest role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls created another RPG called Monsters Monsters! It was first published by Metagaming Concepts and then again by Flying Buffalo in 1979. The game remained unchanged from then until now - with the release of this completely NEW, rewritten and re-edited edition of one of the oldest RPGs in existence, Monsters! Monsters! now in a 2nd edition after 40 years!
This 2020 2nd edition of Monsters! Monsters! retains much of its original appeal and structure, but with all new art and new options like stunting and monster chaos factor. The new M! M! rules also lists 49 monster kindreds you can play, gives you their dice modifiers and now each has a special power unique to its kindred. Each monster is described in a separate section. Its also better organized and easier to use. (For example - now the monsters are separated into humanoid and non-humanoid types) There are two different types of character sheets, one that includes portraits you can add. There is a Spellbook, weapon and armor lists, new abilities and chaos factor, 18 cut-out full-color standee figures and much more!
And to really cap off the rules, we are including in the book a brand new 26 page Monster! Monster! GM adventure in the ruined dwarven city of Hael'Ku. Filled with treasures, danger and mysteries to solve... Download your copy of Monsters Monsters! today!
Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! are two of the earliest role playing games ever produced and they were created as a direct response to Dungeons & Dragons. Lawrence Schick wrote that T&T was the second role playing game ever published in the invaluable history of rpgs Heroic Worlds, but Jon Peterson’s analysis regarding the Rules to the Game of Dungeon demonstrate that it may have been beaten to the punch by another small print run game.
As I mentioned earlier, Tunnels & Trolls was created as a reaction to Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends of Ken St. Andre wanted to play D&D and handed him a copy to run. He couldn’t understand the rules, and having read the “Little Brown Books” many times I can see why. Ken St. Andre describes how he created the game in the introduction to the reprint of the 1st edition as follows:
The key point here is that he wanted a simple game that was not derived from miniature gaming. In that way, his game is very different from Dungeons & Dragons. While we may play D&D with a theatre of the mind approach, or not, the mechanics of the game are very much rooted in miniature skirmish rules. I’m working on an extensive post on this that includes references to Geoff Engelstein’s excellent Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, but it will be some time before I run it.
What is important here is that T&T and D&D have different mechanical DNA. Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! aren’t based on miniature skirmish rules, instead combat (when it’s done at all) is based on abstract die roll comparisons where the higher roll wins and the difference is the damage. For example, a player character might roll 4d6 and add 12 to the roll for high attributes, while a monster might roll 4d6 and add 20 to the die roll for its monster rating (only in the first round in some editions after which it would be +10). It’s very abstract and open to interpretation.
The Saving Throw mechanics of T&T are also very different from D&D at the onset. First, because they were attribute rather than attack type based (modern D&D “borrows” from T&T in this respect) and second in that they are given a “level of difficulty” so you might have to make a 2nd Level Strength (or Luck) Save in Tunnels & Trolls. The basic formula for a saving roll on 2d6 in T&T is:
or for higher levels the following equation minus the stat.
So a first level character with an average (11) Luck would need a 9 or better on 2d6 to save. That might seem very unlikely at first (approximately 28%), but the fact that Tunnels & Trolls is the first “exploding die” system (in this case exploding on doubles) increases the likelihood significantly and adds a nice random element to the game.
Given that Rebellion’s new version of Tunnels and Trolls is yet to be published, and because I want Ken St. Andre to see some royalties on my recommendation, I’m shifting away from recommending Tunnels & Trolls and into recommending Monsters! Monsters!. This game is a mechanical spinoff of Tunnels and Trolls, it has the same DNA and foundation, but the players take on the role of monsters instead of humans. Have you ever wanted to play a Reverse Dungeon where the monsters take out their frustrations on Humanity? Then this is the game for you. I highly recommend buying Monsters! Monsters! and giving it a spin.
I’ve long been a fan of the Pixies and Black Francis/Frank Black and one of my favorite of his songs is Los Angeles. The song shifts from the potential of there being an idyllic version of Los Angeles in Patagonia to imagery pulled from cyberpunk. It’s a song that demonstrates both love and disdain for the beautiful geode that is the City of Angels. I liked the song before I lived in LA and love it even more now. There are quite a few versions of the song on the interwebs, but I thought this performance in front of a German audience was one of the more interesting because it is clear that the audience has no idea who Frank Black is or what exactly they are listening to.
For some reason the Australian rock group Icehouse started releasing some of their old music videos on YouTube and they came up on my recommendations and I clicked on Electric Blue and was instantly overwhelmed with a wave of nostalgia. It’s one of the “most 80s” songs ever produced, not a surprise as Daryl Hall was one of the writers, and I was certain that I remembered it from a movie. So I did what any self-respecting person would do and asked my Amazon Echo what movies the song was in. Echo told me it was in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris and the next time I asked it I was told it was in the 1981 horror film The Hand starring Michael Caine. Every time I asked it was a different answer, but all were wrong. It wasn’t in a movie soundtrack and the tendency of AI to Bullshit was on display again. Regardless it’s a pretty cool song, if you like 80s songs and I do.
My daughter, History, has been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 lately and in addition to wondering if I can get her to play Mike Pondsmith’s original role playing game, I’ve been thinking about music that “sounds cyberpunk” and one of the songs that came to mind was The Human League’s 1978 song Being Boiled. The song is pure electronica, but it’s got an urban edge to it that I think a lot of people missed out on at the time. I mean, when your band’s gimmick is that a geek programs the music while an attractive man and two attractive women sing to the computer generated sounds, one might miss out on the industrial anger…at least in 1978. Today, you can hear it and who says sericulture?
Of course no song screams cyberpunk desperation to me, and Rockerboy nihilism, than Ke$ha’s 2012 hit song All That Matters (The Beautiful Life). The focus on distraction from alienation, the driving drum line, the repetition, and the desire to escape reality in the brief moment of club culture is the essence of the cyberpunk critique of society. There is so much pain in this song. It’s one of the saddest songs I’ve ever listened to and it captures the post-2008 crash perfectly. This is what Johnny Silverhand listens to.
Speaking of songs that critique culture and politics in a way that is still topical, Living Colour’s song Cult of Personality is one of the best pop metal songs of its era. In a time when most pop metal was either ballads or songs about partying, Living Colour released a song that was overtly political and that featured a shredding guitar solo that was on the verge of dissonance. Vernon Reid’s guitar work is pure fire. It alternates between a driving refrain to some very interesting arpeggios and Corey Glover is a great front man. You can keep your Poison, I’ll take Living Colour as my pop metal band of choice.
With films like Johnny Pneumonic and The Lawnmower Man, Hollywood tried to capture cyberpunk sensibilities by adapting existing intellectual properties, but one of the most successful attempts to capture the genre was Kathryn Bigelow’s science fiction actioner Strange Days. By channeling the growing millennialism of the era and combining it with tropes from film noir and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, Bigelow made what should have been a genre defining film but it failed to catch on with audiences. The soundtrack is on point, Ralph Fiennes is great in the lead, and Angela Bassett is the iconic cinematic Street Samurai. This film has become a cult classic, and rightly so. Though in my more whimsical moments I like to point out that it shares the plotline of the equally classic cyberpunk film Brainstorm and one of Shatner’s Tek novels, but those lack the nihilistic paranoia of millennialism.
Christian, thanks for your support and the shoutout! Seeing community threads spreading across mediums, people, and places is always a pleasure.
Great edition, Christian! Love all the RPG news & reminisces. Can't wait to read about your Imagine Magazine experiences when you get around to them!