Weekly Geekly Rundown for January 24, 2025
It’s Been a Rough Year So Far
Starting in about 2016, there hasn’t been a year that didn’t start off as a huge downer. That year David Bowie died on January 10th and it hit particularly hard. Not only am I a fan of Bowie’s music, and some of his acting, but he and I share the same January 8th birthday. It’s odd the things you attach to when you are young, but that was certainly one and his death hit hard. Things only got worse from there until we hit peak 2020 lockdowns. Those were hard enough, but the next year was even harder for me. The job I had worked at for many years didn’t exist anymore. The business had been kind and let me work remote during COVID, but as society reopened my position was eliminated.
It took me some time to find a full time position to replace that one and it was emotionally hard on me. Even harder was how COVID derailed my survey experiment plans for my dissertation. It wasn’t until this past year that I finally got a fully realized, and attainable, plan to replace the original one. Certainly things seem to be slowly getting better year after year post 2020, but this January has been a rough one for the “geeky fan” side of me in a way very similar to 2016.
So far this year we’ve had the fires that affected friends and family (and destroyed the RBM game design studio), Alan Emrich (Victory Point Games and so much more) and Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul, and Mary) died on January 7th, Christopher Benjamin (Potter in Danger Man and The Prisoner and Ritzwalter in Hawk the Slayer) died on January 10th, David Lynch (so many great movies) died on January 15th, Bob Uecker. Joan Plowright, and Howard Andrew Jones (Sword & Sorcery author and editor) died on January 16th, John Sykes’ (Whitesnake) death was announced on January 20th, Barry Michael Cooper (New Jack City) died on January 22nd, and those are just the pop culture deaths that I can readily recall.
I could talk on an on about many of these people and how much I’ve enjoyed their work in pop culture, but I only have room to talk about two so I’ll talk about two that are attached to very special memories.
Bob Uecker
Any fan of the film Major League knows Bob Uecker’s voice and sense of humor. It’s one of the big reasons that film is the classic it is and Bob Uecker was one of the three great local Baseball Announcers of my lifetime. The other two are Vin Scully and Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson. Going to a baseball game and tuning in to their broadcasts during the game is a true pleasure, and in the case of Uecker could lift you out of a deep sorrow.
My wife and I moved to Los Angeles after I graduated from the University of Nevada in 2000 so that she could attend USC’s film school. After moving there, I got a very good job working for the Ludwick Family Foundation and things were going great as 2002 was hitting its stride. Work was sending me on a business trip to the Midwest around the same time as the last Gen Con in Milwaukee, so I coordinated my vacation to occur immediately after the trip to attend that last Gen Con convention. That convention was a wonderful experience. I ran over a dozen 3rd Edition adventures for the RPGA, met game designers like Shane Hensley, Matt Forbeck, and Chris Pramas and purchased Savage Worlds and Mutants and Masterminds, but I don’t know that I could have handled going if it hadn’t been for Bob Uecker.
You see, when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, we brought our pets along with us. We had two cats (Goose and Pumpkin) and a wonderful dog (Oreo) who are all captured in the illustration my wife drew of our typical evening at the time. The morning I was getting ready to leave for the business trip element, Oreo walked up to my head from where she had been sleeping by my feet to wake me up. It was very early, earlier than her walk time. She licked me, looked at me, and then had a quick stroke and died. Oreo had awakened Jody too. It was as if she knew her time had come and she wanted to say goodbye. Jody and I were wrecked.
We spent the rest of my pre-travel time crying and arranging to have Oreo cremated. The place where we were able to get her cremated was in a very industrial part of town and it felt like we were walking onto the set of a post-apocalyptic movie and it did little to brighten our mood as we walked into the trailer/office to hand over Oreo so that Jody could pick up her cremated remains in a day or two. With both of us weeping, I went on the business trip.
I cried on the entire flight to Michigan where the meeting/conference was taking place. I did it as quietly as I could so I didn’t disturb my fellow passengers. At the meeting and subsequent events, I held myself together in public but went to my room to cry at every opportunity. It was worse for Jody. I’d only known Oreo for a couple of years, but she had been Jody’s childhood dog and lived to be almost 21. The meeting ended and I drove from Ann Arbor to Milwaukee. I made a couple stops along the way. The first at the Notre Dame campus, where I was awed by the beauty and found the Grotto a great place to mourn.
When I got to Milwaukee, I was still a couple of days early for Gen Con and had time to experience the city. The Brewers were playing the Mets at home. Ben Sheets was pitching and Mike Piazza hit a home run off of him in the first inning. I had purchased a ticket behind home plate for the mid-week game and it was an amazing experience. The best part of it was listening to the humor and sorrow of Bob Uecker as the loss unfolded. I was laughing and crying at the same time and left the game feeling finally at some peace with what had happened. Enough at peace at least to focus on having a fun experience at Gen Con. Bob Uecker cut through my sorrow and he was “sitting” in the front row next to me. I will forever be grateful for his storytelling ability. I will also be thankful to Mike Piazza for hitting the homerun that prompted Uecker’s reaction.
Alan Emrich
You may or may not know who Alan Emrich was, but he is a central figure in both the Southern California gaming scene and in videogame and table top wargame development. He coined the term 4X to define a particular kind of strategy game that involves “eXploring, eXpanding, eXploiting, and eXterminating” in his review of Master of Orion for Computer Gaming World. More importantly, for the gamer, he is the co-founder (along with John Meyers) of the ORCCON game convention in Los Angeles and helped to star the Gateway and GAMEX conventions as well. He was even, for a time, the publisher of Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer Magazine (issues 77 to 82) through his company Diverse Talents Inc.
My own personal connection with Alan Emrich comes from his time as the owner and lead developer for Victory Point Games. Emrich set up Victory Point Games as a place for his game design students at the Art Institute of California at Orange County to design and publish their own games. I had purchased one of their games at a local game store in Los Angeles after reading about them in the pages of Battle Magazine. That’s right, I found out about a Los Angeles micro-sized game publisher by reading a wargames magazine published in France. Such is the modern world.
The moment I discovered there was a micropublisher that allowed people to just walk in and playtest their games, I knew I had to drive down to Orange County and check it out. When I arrived, Alan was gracious and showed me around to see their “manufacturing” facilities. It was a wonderful experience. The icing on the cake was when he invited me to playtest a couple of games on the premises and who should show up to play? Chris Taylor, the lead designer on Fallout. We played a couple of games, including a session of Forlorn Hope and then Nathan Hansen walked in to playtest an expansion for his game Battle of 4 Armies. I played that expansion with Nathan and got one of my first playtesting credits (under the name Christian Johnson).
From GAMEX to Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer to Victory Point Games, Alan Emrich contributed to so many moments of fun in my life and he will be missed.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
has a bunch of interesting stuff up over at his personal Substack this week. The first of his articles is a very personal post where Luke discusses his work as a critic and how the older ways that the “Los Angeles Blogosphere” used to engage in a lot of mutual promotion. The era Luke describes regarding Cathy Seipp and her ability to bring people together (across the political spectrum) into a community that cross-promoted one another is exactly the kind of community that I’ve been seeking to build here and it’s one of the reasons I am constantly promoting Luke’s work. Among the other reasons are that I think he’s a great critic and I consider him a friend, but I’m also attempting to build a community of pop culture commentators here.
Look also has an article discussing The 15 Best Movies Like The Hunger Games Series over at SlashFilm. It’s a great list that starts with the Cineaste’s choice Battle Royale, of which I’ve seen the film and read the novel, but includes some interesting takes like Cube, 31, and Logan’s Run. Any list that includes Logan’s Run automatically gets my support. I’ve always felt a tragic sympathy for Richard Jordan’s Francis 6. He’s a character truly trapped by the system who cannot change, even after he sees that everything he held true is a lie. Richard Jordan died much too young, at the age of 56, and is one of my favorite actors. His career is extremely diverse and ranges from excellent films like The Hunt for Red October (a film in which he has one of the best lines) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle to cult classics like Dune and Logan’s Run to pure cheese like Solarbabies. It’s an eclectic career, but one where his name in the credits was always enough to get me to check a film out.
If you were to ask me who my favorite Hong Kong action film actor was, I would not hesitate to say Michelle Yeoh, so I was happy to see that Luke’s critical assessment of Paramount’s Star Trek adjacent Section 31 highlights that as thin as the film is in general, Yeoh is worth the price of admission. He goes into some very good detail about what Section 31 could have become and how it handles retcons in comparison to other Star Trek properties. He also makes me wish the show had gotten a real shot to succeed.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Courtney Howard gives a cult classic thumbs up to the new Drew Hancock film Companion in her review at Fresh Fiction.tv. The film combines the romantic comedy, science fiction, and horror genres to create a film that takes a long spaziergang through genre after genre and manages somehow to carefully balance the tensions to create something fun. Though she mentions, like every review, that there’s a huge spoiler at the end of the opening Act, she is very forgiving. I hesitate to call it a spoiler though as it’s revealed, as she points out, on the poster for the film. As with Abigail, some critics seem to mistake gimmick/conceit for spoiler. I’m not saying Courtney does that, though she is responding/acknowledging those other critics who do.
In this case, as in Abigail, the conceit is at the forefront. I roll my eyes every time I read or hear a critic say that Abigail would have been good if only it hadn’t spoiled the twist that Abigail is a vampire. Let me say this loud enough for the people way up in the nosebleed seats. The fact that Abigail is a vampire kidnapped by idiots lured into a trap is not a spoiler. It’s a conceit. Calling it a spoiler is like saying that finding out that The Most Dangerous Game is about the protagonist being hunted by an evil aristocrat for sport is a spoiler.
There is a twist in Abigail, and no it’s not the one that happens as the stakes are raised. It’s the one that is revealed at the end of the film regarding the relationship between Abigail and… well that would be a spoiler. Let’s just say that one of the motivations of a character who is not revealed in the trailers is a central component of the final resolution of the film and is one of the reasons the Final Girl gets to be the Final Girl. Abigail is a fun film that plays with its obvious conceit. Similarly, it looks like Companion has fun with its conceit. I cannot wait to see it.
Mendelson’s Melodic Meanderings
was less than impressed with the recent Wolf Man film from Blumhouse Pictures, so much so that he made a Monster Squad reference to mock it. Having read both Scott’s and Luke’s review (published here), I think I’ll likely fall more into Luke’s camp than Scott’s on the critical side but I think it’s important to go in with all the angles covered and Scott’s review is both well written and fair.
The fact is that our world is filled with complex magic systems that are often overlooked or ignored when they could be leveraged into powerful narrative tools and Dr. King demonstrates that Nosferatu does just that.
takes a look at the Dragontales fiction anthology published by TSR in 1980 and in particular at the story The Wizards are Dying in his latest post. One of the things that I think is underappreciated about games publishers, ranging from TSR to Flying Buffalo to Paizo to New Infinities, is how central they were to developing or promoting a lot of excellent writers. I came to know the writing of David Gemmell through Gary Gygax’s New Infinities company. They published three of the Drenai novels including Legend, which they published under the title Against the Horde. The combination of Thermopylae and Christianity had a deep impact on me and I was an instant fan of Gemmell’s work. takes on James Maliszewski and Ben Milton in a recent post entitled “Role-playing games are about role-playing.” If you’ve read this newsletter, or talked with me for five minutes, you’ll know that I’m 100% on GMaia’s side here. Like GMaia, I admit that there are semantics at play, but roleplaying is about roleplaying. After all, I think that Candyland is a roleplaying game and I agree with Steve Jackson (yes, the creator of GURPS) that Monopoly is a roleplaying game too. You are taking on a role and behaving as if you are in that role. When my daughters began to act out their quest for “Boxie’s House,” they were roleplaying. I’ve been on a bit of a “take the Darkest Dungeon” mindset of late when discussing game play. By this I mean that players should consider themselves as the Taliesin of their characters rather than have the characters be self-inserts of themselves. Tell a story and “take on” a role instead of placing yourself into the narrative. Let the narrative evolve and play a role.
If you are looking for a role playing game that has a well thought out mechanical system and one of the best mythological backgrounds, you absolutely MUST check out Runequest. The most recent edition of the game is beautiful and certainly worth your time and money, but I’m recommending that you check out the second edition of the game in this particular post.
What makes Runequest such a breath of fresh air in the gaming marketplace is its combination of extremely tactical combat, influenced by designer participation in the Society for Creative Anachronism and provides a more detailed blow by blow combat system than D&D, with the fantastic mythological setting of Glorantha.
When it comes to combat, parries and dodges are real things in Runequest while, depending on the edition of D&D they are merely modifiers. Similarly, in Glorantha your character’s faith matters in ways far beyond that of Clerics in D&D. While there is no formal “alignment” system in Runequest, a system that too often gets transformed mistakenly into a morality system, there are allegiances. Your characters become members of actual faiths and membership in faiths can lead to tremendous benefits and power. No game captured the epic heroism of bronze age tales better than Runequest. If you wanted to make a character based on Achilles, it wasn’t long before your character felt like Achilles…Runelord of the Cult of Thetis and all. The game managed to emulate the grim and gritty lives of the common man with the godlike powers of the chosen of the gods and that was quite the feat.
I know that a Cosmere roleplaying game is coming out soon, but if I wanted to play a game that could emulate Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series of books perfectly, Runequest is among the first games I would pick up for that adaptation. Cults and Orders of Radiants are pretty good analogies for one another and the importance of mythic origins to character abilities also makes it a good fit. I’m not saying that Chaosium should try to convince Brandon to give them the rights, but I am saying that someone deeply versed in the Cosmere should give it a shot.
Time for the weekly musical interlude. I’m in an odd mood this week, so I’ll start with the angriest I’ve ever seen Roland Orzabal and that’s in this performance of Ever Met a Day on the set of the television show Runaround in 1980. While other member’s of Graduate (a precursor to Tears for Fears) just look happy to have a gig, Roland looks like he could murder someone because he’s been forced to play on a kid’s show. To be fair, the kids look like they have no idea why the band is there either. The thing is that this song is really cool. It’s an almost punk Tears for Fears that hinted at what could have been musically if the band went a different direction.
I realized that I’ve featured a lot of punk, post-punk, pop-punk, and more on this site, but I don’t think I’ve ever recommended a Ramones song. That seems a sort of crime. So here’s a personal favorite from their catalog, Commando.
From the blistering pace of the Ramones to the haunting melodies of The Sisters of Mercy. There are two songs that I think of when I reflect on the joys of driving on the coastal freeways near Los Angeles. The first is Eve 6’s Open Road Song, which I sang many times while driving down 395 (not coastal) to go from Reno to Disneyland. The other is Black Planet by The Sisters of Mercy. In the haunting melody, you can almost hear the waves crashing and the winding road that makes up Highway 101 as it works its way north along California’s coast. Black Planet and Anaconda are my favorite Sisters songs and you should check both out.
And every now and then you just need to cut loose. While I’m a fan of Metallica, I think they lost something special when Dave Mustaine left the band. Not vocally. As compelling as I find Mustaine’s vocals, the tones he evokes aren’t for everyone. The melodies he creates are something else altogether. He manages to balance almost baroque lilting sounds with the guttural dark tones of rage and he combines that with some blistering solos. You can hear a little echo of Metallica’s The Four Horsemen and Phantom Lord in Tornado of Souls and I marvel at what this would have been if they could have stayed together. Then again, we got this because of the breakup.
If you were to ever ask me what song I thought was the origin of Punk Rock, I’d point straight to Buddy Holly’s Rave On. Yes, it’s a Rockabilly tune that seems muted compared to bands like Dwarves or Helmet, but if you think of it as a song that’s only “dialed to 6” when it should be “dialed to 11” and can imagine what that 11 is that 11 is a Punk Rock song.
That just leaves the Weekly Film Recommendation. I thought about recommending one of my favorite werewolf movies here, but I’m going to save that for a list of 10-15 recommended werewolf movies in the next week or so. I also thought about recommending a David Lynch film, but he’s getting so much attention lately. Instead, I decided to recommend a Joan Plowright film. Plowright is one of the most charming actresses in cinematic history and she absolutely shines in Enchanted April. Director Mike Newell has a number of excellent films in his filmography (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and I constantly fluctuate between this and Four Weddings as to which is my favorite.
Enchanted April is a romantic remarriage film that captures the complexity of human interactions and how there exist people who are “connectors.” These are people who make the lives of those around them better because they connect us with other people, people we might not have met otherwise. They aren’t “networkers” because they aren’t building their own networks, instead they are connecting others in wonderful ways.
This film is about connectors and the love they enable and the healing they can provide. While the film has many romantic arcs, Joan Plowright’s arc is the one that pulls most at my heartstrings because it is the one that most highlights the need for human connection. Plowright is subtle and charming in the role and was nominated for an Oscar. She lost to Marisa Tomei who won for her role in My Cousin Vinny which just goes to show how deep the “bench” was in the 1993 Oscars. All of the supporting actresses deserved to win that year. I can understand why Tomei won, My Cousin Vinny is as close to perfect as a film can get and it’s because of her, my only critique of her victory is that it was for a supporting role when it is clearly a lead role.
Wow, Christian, I feel your melancholy. The amount of celebrity/personal deaths in the last couple of years is seemingly unending. Thanks for sharing your story about Oreo. Losing a beloved fur-companion is one of the worst experiences in the world.
Thanks for the mention. I forgot that you had said before that Gemmell was connected through TSR. I actually just picked up 3 Gemmell books from a used bookstore I discovered yesterday! (Stormrider, Bloodstone, Winter Warriors). Of all his books I've read so far, Morningstar is still my favorite.
Thank you for sharing in your space your opinion on my post! I am honored you found it somehow interesting!