Weekly Geekly Rundown for January 3, 2025
Before I get deep into discussion of this week’s Oddity, I’d like to point out that I have a bit of a bias against a film that is beloved by many and is a regular bit of holiday viewing for a vast number of Americans. I don’t like A Christmas Story. I find it’s underlying snark and disdain for popular culture off putting. As Jean Shepherd’s voice articulates his anger at Little Orphan Annie selling him Ovaltine via decoder ring message, my own memories wax nostalgic as I recall Captain Cosmic informing regular viewers that the “secret weekend science fiction film” was going to be Mysterious Island. I know that Shepherd was referencing ads like the “Kellogg’s Pep!” ads during the Superman radio show and critiquing the connection between commercialism and entertainment, but there are far more important things to complain about than Ovaltine and Kellogg’s Pep!
That’s only one, of many, moments that hit me wrong in the film, but this Oddity isn’t about not liking a Christmas favorite. This week’s Oddity is about how the creator of that movie, and many other movies/tv shows, created one of the most successful “literary hoaxes” in history.
Anyone well versed in popular culture knows about Orson Welles’ famous Martian attack hoax, but slowly fading from pop culture consciousness is the I, Libertine hoax perpetuated by Jean Shepherd in 1956. Like Shepherd’s commentary about Ovaltine and Little Orphan Annie in A Christmas Story, the story of I, Libertine is a critique of commercialism. In this case though, it’s one that I can get behind because it gets us to discuss how so many of the “bestseller” lists we see are carefully crafted and orchestrated with publishers and are more advertisement than information. That is to say that if something is on The New York Times Best Seller list, it may not in fact be a “Best Seller” and might instead just be something the Grey Maiden has chosen to promote for a variety of reasons.
The plan was to create buzz for a non-existent book entitled I, Libertine and to get fans of his radio show to request that their local bookstores carry the book. Eventually enough bookstores became interested that Ballantine Books’ publisher Ian Ballantine scheduled a meeting with Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon, and himself to outline a novel. Sturgeon supposedly wrote the novel in a one night marathon of typing, but Ian Ballantine’s wife Betty Ballantine wrote the final chapter of the book. The book was eventually published, with a cover by Frank Kelly Freas who often painted covers for various Science Fiction and Fantasy publications.
The book is available in Kindle version to this day and you can listen to Jean Shepherd discuss the hoax in detail in the YouTube video below.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
has been writing a number of personal essays over on his newsletter. After listening to the Jean Shepherd interviews and reading more on him as I did so, I’ve been thinking about incorporating some more anecdotes and tales into my own Geekerati writings. Early on I wrote about my first experience playing D&D and it wasn’t a great one and I’ve been thinking about sharing more things along those lines. Let me know if you think I should.
Moving beyond the personal essay and into Luke’s pop culture writings, he’s written an interesting piece on the 10 Most Common Star Trek Tropes over at SlashFilm. Listicles like this can be hit or miss and that depends largely on the research/knowledge of the writer and whether the site is using the list to make a slideshow that artificially drives up views or not. Luke always does his research, he includes the little known tidbit that per capita it’s not the Red Shirts who die the most, and Slash Film like their lists on a single page. I might quibble on the edges that some of the tropes are actually the same trope reskinned because a bottle episode is a bottle episode whether it’s a Blumhouse single location episode or whether it’s just an excuse to use the existing sets on the lot, but that’s getting pretty pedantic. One of the highlights of the piece is when Luke discusses how the “Mirror Universe” trope has extended beyond the show and become a tool in other creators’ toolboxes.
Luke also has a discussion of the Terrifier movies and where he thinks they fit in with the modern Zeitgeist. I, and others, often argue that horror stories reveal the subconscious fears of the society in which they are created. Movies like It Follows and the Smile series are about social contagion, the first about sexually transmitted diseases and the second about social trends and social media. Scads of movies about how the future generation is a threat have been made over the years (Children of the Corn, The Children, Village of the Damned, etc.). For Luke, the Art the Clown films are a bit about Trump. I don’t agree with him about society reading the films that way, but it is certainly one of the ways that Luke contextualizes these films and to shift a phrase he opens with “catharsis is the point.” Horror films are about catharsis from our fears, they make our fears less powerful because we can control when and how we experience our fears.
I will say this though, Luke’s advocacy for the Terrifier movies as Christian films is a take I find very interesting. He and I had a discussion about the Bill Paxton directed film Frailty a while back. I think it’s a very underrated horror film and that it is a very Christian film. When I read Christian reviewers though, they never seem to get that element. I don’t want to offer a spoiler on a twenty year old film, but after you’ve seen it I’ll be happy to discuss why they are wrong that it makes fun of Christianity. Instead, it asks a very important theological question, one that I think many faithful demure from but I’ve already said too much.
Luke’s long been a fan of GI-Joe and did a recent review and photoshoot with a HasLab release of figures. There are some pretty cool shots in the piece, I’m particularly fond of the one with Rip cord on his belly looking for a foe to his left, and the articulation on these figures is fantastic. If only the films could capture the wonder of the toys.
Self-insertion characters are something I’ve fought against my entire role playing game playing career. They aren’t a new concept, heck first edition Villains & Vigilantes recommended that all player characters be alternate personas for the players. Given that it also asked the Gamemaster to then rate the players for their real world stats made it a potential friendship ender from day one. After all, who wants to tell their friend “sorry, but you’ve overrated your IQ by 30 points and only have a 9 Intelligence.” Yes, that’s an actual academic link. Check out the article.
That wasn’t the only reason I’ve advocated against self-insertion/alter-ego player characters. My primary reason is that it limits potential play because no Gamemaster wants to hurt his friend’s feelings and it is much more upsetting when your alter ego dies than when Darg the Fighter (my first unborrowed B/X character) gets skewered by Kobolds. It gives the character a kind of plot armor that limits potential play experience. PreGens helm limit that problem and have added benefits too of having sufficient backgrounds to be experienced, but not such detailed backgrounds that one wonders why they are still low level/inexperienced.
has an excellent filling us in on the latest happenings in the Sword & Sorcery genre. One of the illustrations looks a little too “epic” for me to classify it as S&S, but it’s an epic illustration none the less. On the other hand, the cover illustration for Old Moon Quarterly Kevin highlights reminds me of my one of my favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs novels Outlaw of Torn with a major Sword & Sorcery addition (skeletons).
Ooh, I just noticed it’s in the public domain and might have to put together my own printing of that one, and yes that means a solid introduction and likely annotations. After all, you’ve got to include added value if you’re going to do a reprint of a public domain piece and a solid introduction is the bare minimum.
I recently went down the rant rabbit hole regarding the use of terms like “factoid” (instead of trivia) and “diegetic” (practitioners say source), so
’s recent discussion of using the term remarque to describe original sketches done by artists on a print or in a book. The post has a number of examples, including one from Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings that could never be described as a mere sketch and an Elric image from a printing of The Vanishing Tower. Whelan’s long been a favorite artist of mine and his attention to narrative details within the books he provides covers for is a big reason. While some have been critical of a couple of his Stormlight Archive covers, I find that they capture powerful moments from the books and will be ordering a couple of prints eventually.
Over at
Adam Bell has a guest essay discussing how there is no such thing as a truly Solo Game and I think it’s well worth reading. The headline isn’t clickbait and Bell’s points are more that any game, whether designed for group or solo play, can be played as a group game. My own Fantasy Gamebooks as Role Playing Games series is based on that premise and I’ll be bringing some of those back this year. His claim is similar to my claim about how people underrate Candyland as a game. Candyland is more than just its rules. It also has components that should be fuel for the budding game designer. Candyland rules as written, is still good at what it was designed for but it’s even better at teaching people how to make their own games.
The Good Dr.
has a very interesting discussion about how and why to write for music on her Substack this very morn. Her discussion gives advice for writing for, as opposed to about, music professionally and it reminded me of the “Great Courses” lecture Dr. Robert Greenberg gave on Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons in the The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works course. It’s an excellent course and great supplement to his course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, but as per usual I wish he hadn’t said “greatest” and just said “great” in the title. In his discussion of The Four Seasons, Greenberg mentions that the pieces are based on a series of sonnets and he points out that there is a bit of discussion around which was the actual inspiration. Whatever the case, whether the sonnets were written to describe the music or the music written to embody the sonnets, it is a masterful combination of the two. As much as I love Summer and Winter, that appreciation is increased by the reading of (translations) of the sonnets.One of the points that Greenberg makes repeatedly in his lectures, over many of his courses, is that the rhythm of music is culturally connected to the rhythm of language. For the same reason that Haiku are richest in Japanese (so my daughters who studied Japanese from Kindergarten to 7th Grade tell me) and sonnets are best in Italian (Shakespeare’s writing of sonnets in English is hard mode and a display of his talent), the rhythm and meter of a culture’s music is connected to its language. Listen to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and you can hear the languages and culture he was raised with as he amplifies traditional folksongs into dazzling displays of skill and complexity that retain all of the cultural foundations demonstrating that “Austrian” music was no more sophisticated than Hungarian. The works of Debussy may be impressionistic, but as such are manifestations of both French art and language.
All of which is to say I am grateful to Dr. King for her article today, though I have to admit that every time I read her posts my mind wanders to the English Civil War and the words of King Charles I, “I go from a corruptible, to an incorruptible Crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the World.” As an American Catholic, I often consider the influence the English Civil War had upon the founding of our nation. As an instructor, I frequently ask my students to compare Hobbes to Locke and to be mindful of both the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution and how those relate to each.
My recent Batman as Espionage campaign post was based on using the Night’s Black Agents rules to run a street level superhero game campaign. I’m fond of the idea and will run with it more this year and thankfully the good folks at Humble Bundle have offered up a very affordable Night’s Black Agents bundle for just such an occasion. It’s only $18 to get all the rules and it’s a great rules set.
I play tested Night’s Black Agents and Kenneth Hite was kind enough to invite me to contribute to the Double Tap expansion. It was one of the first times I was invited to contribute to an RPG and it could have been my last. I was late and didn’t contribute as much as I hoped that I could. One of the most important things to tell any freelancer is that it’s okay to say no. I was deep in my MBA and dealing with some major changes at the non-profit I managed, as well as writing for a couple of pop culture publications from time to time, and running my Kickstarter. I should have said that I didn’t have the time to commit, but I loved the game and really like Ken, so I made the wrong decision. I did still turn in some material, and I’m proud of what got published, but this was definitely a lesson learned and one that made me admire Ken and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan even more.
B.A.T. Undercover -- A Gumshoe Setting
This is a game setting article that requires the use of one of Pelgrane Press’s GUMSHOE role playing games. The GUMSHOE games that best fit with this setting are Night’s Black Agents, Mutant City Blu…
While you might think that this would be a natural place to recommend Night’s Dark Agents, and I do think you should buy it, I’m instead taking a moment to recommend one of the most underrated games of all time.
Good Guys Finish Last
In the couple of YouTube videos I’ve done discussing Superhero roleplaying games, I’ve always made sure to mention that the folks at Better Games were vital in the development of modern storytelling rpgs. They don’t often get as much credit as they deserve, but their games remain innovative and vital today decades after they were created. They were truly decades ahead of their time. Characters in Better Games Free-Style Role-Play games have no numerical statistics, instead they have a number of narrative descriptors that describe how their characters function. If you like narrative focused games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark, this is where that movement really started.
It’s an innovation that works in a number of settings ranging from Fantasy to Horror, but my favorite example of it was in Better Games two comic book inspired games Good Guys Finish Last and Villains Finish First that were published by Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer magazine when Better Games owned the rights to that title.
Good Guys Finish Last has been rereleased by postworld games with a much improved layout updated by jim pinto and I highly recommend checking it out. While I could go on and on about how important Better Games was to the storytelling game scene, I will share jim pinto’s introduction instead. Given that jim has gone on to design a number of excellent games in the storytelling game space, his praise speaks volumes about the direct influence Better Games had on the genre.
To give you another example of what characters in Free-Style systems look like, though you are free to look at the link to my blog post above, here is a glimpse at a character sheet in Good Guys Finish Last. You’ll notice that all of the abilities are named and the only number listed is the modifier. I wish jim had opted for the actual wound chart for each character, rather than listing numbers, as that shows which keywords add to which damage type and help give the game even greater narrative focus.
While Vivaldi’s Spring composition from Four Seasons is the most recognizable, likely in part to the fact that it is in the bright and cheerful key of E Major, it is the two Minor key compositions that have captured my heart over the years. From the tonal suggestion of oppressive heat in Summer to the chill somber stillness of the first snowfall in Winter, these two pieces magnificently contrast haunting melodies with furious arpeggios that are true tests for the soloist. Where Spring jumps straight into the musical action like a Ramones song, Summer and Winter are more like Metallica’s Orion.
What, you didn’t think I could mention Orion without recommending it did you? While many hold Fade to Black, Ride the Lightning, One, or The Call of Ktulu as their favorite “pre-Black album” Metallica song, I’ve always been partial to Orion (and Phantom Lord, but that’s another conversation). As much as I enjoy Metallica’s speedy, and even their pop-y, songs it is songs like Orion and Fade to Black that demonstrated that Metallica understood how to compose as well as how to rock. There’s a huge connection between Jazz and Blues and Rock-n-Roll, but songs like Orion remind us that there is also a connection to classical music and Metallica is a perfect gateway band from the many genres of “metal” to the many periods of “classical” music.
What would a Limp Bizkit song sound like if the son of a founding member of the CIA, and dupe of Kim Philby, was the drummer? The folks at Drumeo have provided an answer to that by inviting Police drummer Stewart Copeland to play his interpretation of the rhythm section of Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle). Speaking of Stewart Copeland, his father, and The Police, I’ve always wanted to write a fiction series about a rock band that are secretly spies and who use their concert tours as cover for meeting contacts behind the Iron Curtain. I mean, after all, there’s now way that The Police were that band right?
Pop music is like fashion and political science research in that it goes through phases. One of my mentoring professors, the late Martin Johnson, would always remind people that if they wanted to do cutting edge and fresh political science they should look to texts long forgotten. One of the examples he used was Green and Gerber’s work on voter turnout. This research is important, rigorous, and has a connection to real world politics. It is also a replication and extension of Harold F. Gosnell’s foundational work Getting out the Vote published in 1927. Martin’s advice led me to the works of the Columbia School (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee) on voting and citizenship. Work that was displaced by the Michigan School, but remains as insightful regarding voter behavior. Every time I see some new application of Foucault in English or political theory, I lament that the scholar followed the modern trend and didn’t look back to Schumpeter, Burke, or Wordsworth. There’s a lot to be found there that has yet to be fully explored.
Musical generations are shorter than philosophic/academic ones and pop tunes from the 70s are ancient by modern standards. Of late, I’ve seen a refreshing return to the disco/pop movement of the 1970s in modern music and I love to hear actual instruments and danceable melodies accompanied by a catchy groove. That’s why I’m recommending both Sabrina Carpenter’s (overplayed?) Espresso and Bruno Mars’ and Lady Gaga’s Die with a Smile.
Of course Bruno Mars has been at the forefront of incorporating 70s musical movements into modern pop and that’s one of the reasons I’ve liked him so much. I could easily envision Die with a Smile as one of the numbers on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, one of the slower dance numbers at the dancing school.
The Thin Man series is a fantastic film franchise. People often critique modern Hollywood for focusing too much on IP and sequels, but some of the best films of the Golden Era of Hollywood perfectly match that description. So many classics are adaptations of books and book series and in the case of the Thing Man series, extend the stories beyond the book. Dashiell Hammett is my favorite author, but I have to take breaks between books/stories because his faith in humanity is non-existent. Over the course of his life he encountered much of the worst of the early 20th century. He served in World War I, worked for the Pinkertons, and was an active Communist. Each of these lessened his faith in humanity, even (maybe especially) his shift towards Communism. The utopian and liberal vision he believed in was shattered when those who supposedly agreed with him defended Stalin, showing that even this movement was as corrupt as any other human endeavor.
While his view of humanity at large was a dark one, his ability to write and craft characters across classes was amazing. He may have lamented the cruelty of humanity, but his characterizations of even the criminal element showed he loved people. That love is always present, if only in the humor of the characters, in his stories, but so too is the dark foundation. Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich managed to channel the humor of Hammett’s book The Thin Man without incorporating the despair. The darkness is still there, and acknowledged, but there is also more love.
That conflict between love and cruelty is even better transmitted in the New Year’s movie entry (The Thin Man is a Christmas movie and After the Thin Man is a New Year’s film). The underlying conflicts in this film include organized crime, the personal cruelty of a husband who loves his wife’s wealth as much as he hates her, personal ambition, and long held resentment. All the darkness of humanity is there, but so too is the love. Nick Charles was a cop who worked the Mean Streets of San Francisco, but he is respected by those he policed because he treated them as people first. One of the best scenes in this film is when he is celebrating New Year’s with his wife Nora and a group of low level criminals come over to his table to join in on the celebration because one of their parole officers said it would be good to hang out with a better crowd of people. Not only does Nick handle it well, but Nora Charles (the true heart of the franchise) embraces it with humor and grace. Myrna Loy is one of the greats of the Golden Age of Hollywood and she shines in these films.
(Yes, I know this is two Thin Man films in short order, but you really should watch them all.)
Thanks for the shout out, Christian! I'm glad you enjoyed the article.
I think Cliff Burton played a big part in some of the more interesting early Metallica compositions, and he was the main writer of Orion. I love your fiction idea about a rock band who are spies. It made me think of "Declare" by Tim Powers, which features a fictionalized Kim Philby in an alternate, secret history. I also thought about the song "Philby" by Rory Gallagher, which I love. Lastly, I watched the first three movies in the Thin Man series last year for the first time. I found the dialogue & relationships between Nick and Nora to be so witty and charming. Thanks for another great and varied newsletter article!