Weekly Geekly Rundown for May 30, 2025
When Actual Expertise is on Display
When it comes to pop culture, I consider myself to be a bit of a Renaissance Man. I know quite a bit about a wide variety of pop sub-cultures. I’m an experienced table top gamer, a cineaste, music fan of diverse tastes, comic book reader/collector, long time player of video games, who thanks to a dual major in political science and English literature is fairly well read. Though I am primarily a fan of Formula 1, when it comes to motor sport, I have discovered on more than one occasion that I can chat about NASCAR with fans without sounding completely uninformed. Similarly, when it comes to wrestling, I know enough to appreciate the phenomenon on many levels.
As much as I think of myself as being a “Geekerati,” an expert on all things geek, I am very quick to recognize when I encounter real expertise and to take the time to defer and learn from the process. I marvel in true expertise as much as I marvel in the culture itself. Finding real experts on the things I know about and love, only makes my joy in experiencing them all the greater. To give a slightly awkward and possibly tangential analogy, I’ll put it the following way.
Let’s say for a moment that my knowledge of popular culture topics is the equivalent of knowing enough about magic to know how many magic tricks are done, but not so much that I can see what a particular magician did even when I know the specific move used. When the magician is skilled enough, even though I know that a force was used, I experience just as much wonder as I did the first time I saw the trick. When a true expert is performing a magic trick, the wonder is there whether you know it’s a trick or not.
Similarly, when I encounter someone who REALLY knows about a pop sub-culture in which I am conversant, their knowledge and joy brings even more joy into my life. It also has the added benefit of giving me even more knowledge about the thing I love and so it is a wonderful virtuous cycle.
Of all the aspects of culture I love, the one I think I’m probably weakest in is music and musical history. While I “learned” to play the Bass as a child in my Elementary School Orchestra and participated in Choir in Middle School, those were the end of any formal musical training I received. Yes, I took a course on music appreciation in college and have listened to numerous Robert Greenberg courses on the history of music via Audible and the Great Courses. Sure, my Oma was the daughter of a Kapellmeister with a deep love of Classical Music and Opera that she shared with me. My father played, and still does, guitar regularly and with great skill. My daughters play the piano, much better than I ever played the Bass.
For all this, and because of all that, I consider my knowledge of music and music history to be largely surface level. This is one of the reasons I’m always on the lookout for entertaining and knowledgeable experts to aid me in filling the gap. When it comes to the history of music, Robert Greenberg was a great starting place and I’ve encountered a number of other excellent resources because of him. When it comes to popular music/rock and roll, there are two sources that come immediately to mind. The first is Rick Beato, whose YouTube channels are wonderful for their enthusiasm and ability to break down modern songs “musically.” I’m sure he Rick knows a lot about rock history, but his channel is not the place for that.
The first place I look when I want to learn minutiae about the history of rock and roll, from someone with remarkably similar musical tastes to my own, I head on over to the Professor of Rock channel on YouTube. The Professor is the online personality of Adam Reader, a musician and journalist who was born in Blackfoot, Idaho where his father was a painting contractor. At a young age he attempted a career as a musician, but he eventually moved on from that into being the host of a late-night independent music show on a local ABC affiliate in Salt Lake City. That’s right, The Professor of Rock gained his knowledge and experience as a kind of Rock and Roll Svengoolie. He credits an interview with Kenny Loggins as being a launching pad for expanding his later success in lining up interesting and informative interviews.
Adam Reader has a lot of great interviews on his YouTube channel, but he also has a wonderful and unique way of sharing his own curated “best of” music lists that will leave you not only with a new song list for your iPhone, but with some pretty cool trivia. Okay, that’s a pretty big build up, but just check out his personal Top 10 songs for 1983 and tell me you didn’t learn something interesting. I certainly learned an additional tidbit for my “how influential Toto is as a band” file.
I’ve been reading the No Film School website and newsletter for quite a while now and think that over that time they’ve released a number of good articles. I have recently noticed a bit of a shift as their competitors transform into almost exclusively AI, or SEO maximizing, content. They’ve begun publishing a more lists with minimal descriptive content or reasoning for inclusion. I know that my (aspirationally) Weekly Rundown is in many ways a version of a listicle, but I always hope to add enough added value that it’s more than just a series of unconnected links. I like to provide the seasoning and reasoning for my selections.
My personal experience with listicles comes from when I was doing freelance articles for
over at The Robot’s Voice. I would often pitch, or be pitched, list articles for the site. They were the hot web item at the time because lists could be split nicely to increase advertisement exposures, a practice that was done reasonably at TRV but was done to a ridiculous degree by many sites who had each item as a separate page…all for the clicks. Even as I was writing these lists though, each entry was a kind of separate mini-article that provided content and context. In one particularly brilliant editorial decision, Luke asked me to transform a defense of I, Frankenstein that I had made in online conversation with him into a list and that’s exactly what I did. The lesson I learned was that like most forms, the listicle could be adapted into something creative and reach beyond SEO.
I mention all of this because Jason Hellerman, over at No Film School, has put together a list of seven pretty darn good films under the title “7 Best Battle Royale Movies.” I think it’s a good starting point for a conversation on the genre, but each movie gets only minimal content other than the title and a link to a trailer. As I wrote above, there are some interesting (if obvious) choices in the list and they deserve some conversation. For example, Death Race 2000 is provided as one of the choices and it’s clearly a proto-Battle Royale film, since it predates the film the pseudo-genre is named for. This led me to wonder whether The Most Dangerous Game or Hard Target or Ice T’s Surviving the Game met the muster. Certainly they could have been included as a part of the discussion. After all, the mission of No Film School is to provide those who aren’t going to film school with a knowledge base to make their own films, and not SEO maximization. We need more scrappy “help you DIY” sites and fewer sites that merely chase the clicks.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Speaking of scrappy DIY, Luke has an interesting discussion up at his
newsletter discussing the Underground Cinema of Gregory Hatanaka. Luke chats with his friends Wade Major and R.H. Greene about the producer, director, distributor who is a kind of smaller scale Roger Corman. Hatanaka helped to revitalize the distribution of a number of older Hong Kong films, has producer credits on over 100 genre films, and has directed dozens of other films. These films include Mad Cowgirl, a film that Luke starred in and served as first assistant director on. Exploitation films are often made to shock audiences and I’m sure more than one person was shocked by at least one moment in Mad Cowgirl. Even if you aren’t a fan of exploitation films in general, the discussion of Hatanaka’s career is worth taking the time to listen to because it’s three highly knowledgeable people talking about something they love and someone they respect.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
In some pretty shocking news, Courtney Howard was the first critic I saw speak out against the carefully crafted embargo for the new film Ballerina. That embargo required all critical sentiment and formal reviews to delay publication until June 4th, while allowing spoiler-free enthusiasm starting May 22nd. Given the tension between paid promotion via TikTok influencers and the actual critic market, this is a pretty big scandal and should be getting more coverage than it is.
To put things in perspective regarding Courtney speaking out about this embargo, she is not in any way a critic who dismisses the main stream from a position of pretense. She is a person who loves film and will unambiguously praise what she likes, as is the case with her review of the new Mission Impossible film. She’s a film enthusiast and not a film snob. Over time readers and viewers will learn who has opinions worth listening to and who doesn’t, but in my opinion any critic who was willing to release a review under these conditions (even if they genuinely liked the film) isn’t a critic who is worth listening to in the future. I understand the desire to remain employed and to maintain access, but this kind of restriction is untenable.
A much better route to take is the one taken by Penguin Random House with the new novel Heir of Strahd. I’m a bit late getting my review to all of you, sorry about that it will be out next week, but I can tell you that Penguin has been willing to endure any and all kinds of reviews of the book. Let those who have interest find the art they want to consume. I received a review copy of Strahd and was told I could do my review at any time and was given no restrictions regarding tone.
I opened my email yesterday to find an article by
lamenting the amount of role playing game, and table top game, lore that is being preserved. I’m pretty sure that the shutting down of the longest running table top related fanzine (Alarums & Excursions) has more than a little to do with Richard’s urgent plea. The fact of the matter is that the American gaming community does a terrible job promoting and sharing our hobby’s history. The vast majority of our experts are collectors who seem to value their collected artifacts more than they value sharing the history of the hobby. Jon Peterson is a worthy historian, but he hordes his artifacts as much as any of the non-historians. watermarking and trickling out samples of documents instead of working with creators to provide an archive.This is an area where the British really have us beat. John Curry’s work at the History of Wargaming Project provides inexpensive reprints of hard to find classic works that are foundational to the wargaming and role playing hobbies. The Wargames Research Group has provided free pdfs of generations of their rules sets, which can otherwise be hard to find.
Lee Gold did the world a service in the US when she began offering pdfs of Alarums & Excursions for sale at a very reasonable price, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to buy them all before it’s too late. The giants of our hobby don’t live forever and we need to do what we can to preserve their work. Yes, we need to be mindful of copyright and intellectual property considerations, but we can do that without needing to go the full Hasbro. For example, I recently communicated with Wayne Shaw about sharing his character creation and powers rules for the Superhero 44 role playing game and he gave his permission to share them. I got my copies from the UC Riverside library, and they are available in pdf via piracy, but I wanted to do a double presentation where I provide the originals and retype them as I put together a fusion retro-clone of Superhero 44 that incorporates his changes. That kind of history is necessary. We need archives of our hobbies if we really want to share their stories.
has a good rundown of some of the new products available in the gaming hobby, including the new Daggerheart rules from the folks at Critical Role. I bought a copy of the deluxe set for later review here, but I was slightly disappointed when my friendly local store wasn’t sure that they’d be able to offer the pdf that Critical Role provides to consumers who buy direct. I am a big fan of what Richard Iorio and others have called “bits and mortar” programs where publishers give pdf codes to friendly local game stores to distribute with sold products. The also mention Modern Age: Powers, which I’ll be reviewing very soon because it’s a super hero game and I LOVE super hero games.
In my recent posts discussing the challenges of bringing new people into the hobby via licensed games, I’ve mentioned GURPS a number of times. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System and it’s a universal system created in the 1980s that can be quite intimidating for new gamers who might get overwhelmed with all the options/possibilities.
has written a brief, but informative, post that serves as great advice for those who might be thinking about introducing the game to novice players. The core mechanics are very simple, and potentially influenced by Superhero 44, but use a bell curve distribution for task resolution that can be a little less intuitive than the standard flat distribution of d20 games.
Speaking of probability distributions,
has a very interesting article on how to “weight” die distributions to create drama and narrative effects in solo role playing games. Naturally, these adaptations can be applied to group play as well and I recommend reading this article and applying some of the design concepts to your own efforts. has pretty much read my mind with the advice she provides in her latest article, “The GM as Alchemist.” The key point of advice is to remember that as a Game Master you are a facilitator of play, but you are only one of the storytellers in the group. Not only is every other member of the group an active storyteller in a role playing game, so too are the dice or any other random task resolution system. The uncertainty reveals story and so do your interactions with other players. You might well, and probably can, get a novel out of your role playing sessions as the narrative emerges in play, but you should avoid trying to force players to “act out” your story.
A Game Master is not a playwright or director, rather a judge and facilitator. The best example from my own play that I can bring in is that I almost always begin every D&D campaign I run using the module The Veiled Society. I’ve run the adventure no fewer than 10 times. It has never been the same. Who the antagonists are changes from group to group as the players speculate what is going on. The first time I ran it, the module’s intended villain became the patron of the PCs in opposition to an attempted coup from a younger generation. The last time I ran it, that same intended villain was murdered by the Vampire Lord who was actually the threat to the city of Specularum and the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. Oh, you can look all day in the module for a Vampire villain. You won’t find one. That was based purely on the speculation of the players and me running along with Kate’s recommendation and saying “Yes, and…”
With the end of the school year, my wife and I have decided to start a new viewing project. We intend to watch every “episode” of Midsomer Murders. We’ve watched individual episodes in the past, but we’ve never watched the show from start to present and as fans of “cozy” mysteries we had to give it a go. The mystery genre was formally invented by Edgar Allan Poe, sorry T.S. Eliot as much as I love The Moonstone it is the ratiocination of Dupin that wins the day. I say this even as Wilkie Collins and I share a birthday and as I argue that one cannot understand The Sign of Four’s comedic references without having first read The Moonstone. There are certainly stories with mysteries in them before Poe, but his stories created a formula that established the genre.
While the arch-genre is the work of Poe, the cozy mystery is the creation of Agatha Christie. Where every Poe murder tale contains either some element of the Weird, one really ought to remember that Dupin and his companion are reading “forbidden books” at the beginning of Rue Morgue, or elements of body horror. All of Poe’s stories contain some element of horror, personal or societal. Christie’s mysteries might contain horrific elements, but they need not. Often, they contain kindness and people of warmth whose efforts at ratiocination do more than solve a murder, they heal a community. They typically accomplish what Poe failed to do with Marie Roget, they provide closure. My favorite of her characters in this regard are the delightful couple Tommy and Tuppence and the prototypical elderly woman sleuth Miss Marple who uses her knowledge of people and community to unravel the truth. Dr.
’s most recent Tea and a Tale is “The Blue Geranium” and it’s a wonderful little listen and it’s just the right length for my daily drive home. was one of the first writers I started following here on Substack. I’m too poor to be a paid subscriber to all the people I’d like to help financially, but Sherman is kind and offers his creative labor to all of us who are willing to give the time even as we cannot give our money. He alternates between personal essays and poems and every time I read him I feel a little better about the world and our place as humans in it. That doesn’t mean he writes cheerful things, he doesn’t. Sherman writes of injustice and monsters among us, but he also writes about people who love and have humor. In doing so, he paints the full picture of humanity.
I think the fact that my mom died of heroin addiction gives me a deeper attachment to his writing than I might otherwise have. Reading his words, I often feel a shared sorrow rooted in loss. In his most recent bit, written for Memorial Day, Sherman reminds us that soldiers aren’t the only casualties of war and that the casualties are often far from the front lines. I did not cry when I got to the end of this piece, as I often do with his work, but my heart grew three sizes larger as I came to think about a “shy and funny” person in my own life.
In many ways
regularly produces the content that I wish I was producing. It’s the kind of content I wanted to produce when I started by Geekerati Podcast with my friends Shawna Benson, Bill Cunningham, Wes Kobernick, and Eric Lytle. I wanted to share conversations and history about some of the wonderful pop culture of my childhood. Retroist’s podcasts always seem to hit the spot of what I’m looking for. In this case, it’s a discussion of a game I spent far too much time playing as a kid Golden Axe.
It’s been a while since I shared a
post, but this was one that had to be shared. I haven’t solo role played in a very long time, but when I was a young new gamer with few friends who played D&D, I spent many an afternoon playing Moldvay/Cook Basic adventures and watching my characters succeed, fail, and perish. I only wish I had the artistic talents of because then I’d have more than character sheets to remember the experience by.’s new begins with a discussion of a very limited set of LPs of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack that were made available recently. They likely sold out, but they are beautiful. He also discusses a song by an Emo Band named Melt Wizard, which he speculates (and I think he’s correct) is a reference to the movie Big. Speaking of which, I don’t think History and Mystery have seen Big and that’s something that’s got to change. It’s a wonderful movie that screens very differently as an adult. In fact, I’ve always wanted to see an homage of the film made that is told from the parents’ perspective. It puts some of the language in his calls into context and would be a very terrifying drama.
I’ve mentioned many times that I started reading fantasy novels with Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga, but the thing that attracted me to those novels was the amazing art work of
. His art is beautiful and evocative and so often captures the essence of the book. While I might not typically judge a book its cover, if it has a Michael Whelan cover it’s likely getting a purchase. My attachment to Whelan’s art eventually led me to the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. While these tales have elements that ring dissonant to modern ears, they are filled with wonder and imagination that is rarely rivaled in literature. Burroughs was an extraordinarily creative writer, but he was also a very accessible writer. His Tarzan character may be more famous, but John Carter and his peers are where my hear lies.
As a fan of popular culture, I love discussions of genres and subgenres and the differences between them. I’ve written here about the difference between Sword & Sorcery and Planetary Romance, but I came across the recent
post on horror subgenres and I’m going to be putting some thought into it as well. Certainly, one can get carried away (as metal fans do) with creating subgenres to the point of confusion, but such classifications tend to be useful and I look forward to putting more thought into this particular question.’s most recent discusses a sketch book/coloring book from the former TSR artist Jeff Butler. J.Q. makes the connection between Butler’s work and the Monstrous Compendium for 2nd Edition AD&D, and it’s right to do so, but I primarily think of Jeff as the workhorse behind so much of the art in the Marvel Super Heroes Role Playing Game. While the books featured a good deal of work from the Marvel Bullpen, they contained a ton of Butler illustrations and he had clearly mastered the “Marvel Style.”
In my recent post on the Amber Diceless Role Playing Game, I briefly mentioned that Erick Wujcik had hoped to publish the game with R. Talsorian Games who were known for exploring new ideas in gaming. No better example of that exists than their Castle Falkenstein role playing game.
Castle Falkenstein is, like most games designed and produced by Mike Pondsmith, way ahead of its time. Yes, in the post-success of the Cyberpunk video game world, R. Talsorian and Mike Pondsmith might seem a far cry from the scrappy independent designers you might be expecting here. But the truth is that Mike Pondsmith’s story is one of being an overnight success that took almost 40 years. His original Cyberpunk game was a masterful game inspired by both Champions and Traveller that synthesized those games into a lethal experience that had MOOD. Man could Mike Pondsmith evoke mood.
Castle Falkenstein is a Steampunk role playing game, designed before Steampunk took off, in which the setting and mechanics are deeply intertwined. Given how tactically oriented Cyberpunk was, and is, one might expect some of that to leak into this game, but it doesn’t. Pondsmith is one of the most talented, and for a long time underrated, designers in the role playing game market and this storytelling oriented game is a perfect example of how to mesh milieu and mechanics and the mechanics don’t even appear until page 181 of the rulebook. Pondsmith wants you deeply saturated in the setting before he brings in the mechanics. Those mechanics are card based, because cultured people don’t play with dice as those are for riff-raff and ruffians, and are easy to learn and execute. All of the supplements are excellent, but as a fan of the Wild, Wild, West television show, I highly recommend Six Guns and Sorcery.
This week’s selection of songs is a little different than some of the more recent entries, not for the style of music since a couple of bands/songs have been featured before, but because of how I came to put this list together. I was scrolling through YouTube one night this week while thinking about which book on the “too read” pile to start reading and a video of a young garage band performing at a house/birthday party showed up in my feed. I clicked play and listened. The sound was, as one would expect from a performance in a backyard, rough, but the band’s enthusiasm and appreciation for Shoegaze and Dreampop won me over. As of the last time I checked, the band had only 88 views on this particular video.
After watching the backyard performance, I searched YouTube to see if I could find an official video by them and I was able to find a couple on their YouTube channel. I selected Medusa as the formal choice for this week because it’s a pretty well constructed video that captures their sound very well. I think the band has some talent and could develop into a pretty successful band as they understand the kinds of mix and layering that work well in Shoegaze compositions. I do think that they will have to expand their chord selections and chord progressions to create additional melodies. Their current song catalog is a little too one beat, but can be expanded.
Though Moonbear’s sound is still in the developmental stage, it is clear that the iconic Shoegaze band Ride is a heavy influence. The selection of sonic textures Moonbear is aiming at, as well as the vocal stylings, have similarities to the song Vapour Trail which is one of my favorite Ride songs and well worth a listen.
Moonbear could also consider bringing in more influences from bands like Slowdive to expand their compositional choices. Tonally and thematically, Slowdive is similar to Ride, but they are good references for expanding chord choices. I love that young musicians are looking to Shoegaze for inspiration, the layering and pure workmanship of the bands in the genre are well worth exploring and when Nu Metal displaced Shoegaze as a genre, I always thought the musical ideas were cut short.
I cannot share any Shoegaze songs without featuring a song from my absolute favorite Shoegaze band Catherine Wheel. My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing Catherine Wheel when they performed in a tiny show at the Jot Travis Student Union at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was one of our first dates and it was a wonderful time. I don’t think there were more than 100 people in the space and the vibe was very similar to the backyard performance I shared above, though the sound mix was much better. The band members were professional and approachable and did not phone it in at all. Even though the audience was tiny, Catherine Wheel played a full set and then did an encore after the headliner’s very short performance. Let’s just say that I liked the band before the concert, but I liked them even more after.
In 1999, Mark A. Altman and Robert Meyer Burnett wrote and Robert Meyer Burnett directed Free Enterprise, the ultimate pop-culture geek romantic comedy. Altman and Burnett combined shallow and deep pop-culture references with Doug Liman (Swingers) inspired visuals to create a compelling tale of a permanent child growing up and discovering that you can grow up and still keep all the best parts of childhood. The film embraced geek culture and presented a realistic romantic relationship.
Given that the film was made during the heyday of quality romantic comedies, Nora Ephron's Shop Around the Corner inspired You’ve Got Mail had just come out, Altman and Burnett managed to present a fresh perspective on the romantic arc. It predates, but is similar, to the arc that would later be used in Peyton Reed’s The Break Up. The main difference being that Free Enterprise’s resolution and continuation of the romance is explicit after the permanent child grows up where The Break Up’s resolution is suggested in a way that leads to Butch and Sundance style debates regarding what happens at the end. For the record, while I’m an optimist in my view of what happens after The Break Up, I’m a realist when it comes to Butch and Sundance.
There is also the place that Free Enterprise plays in the revitalization of William Shatner’s career. The film came out during the peak of Shatner criticism by many of the supporting cast on Star Trek. Having attended more than a few Star Trek conventions, and having endured Walter Koenig’s reading of his unfinished novel more than once, I have my own opinions about who the most arrogant people in the original series are. Let’s just say that I still cringe when I hear to poem/song Itsy Bitsy Spider quoted by anyone. It and the “There Are No Eyes Here” line from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland are phrases that I associate with minor psychological trauma due to the reader. In the case of Itsy Bitsy Spider, it was Walter Koenig, in the case of The Wasteland it was the eerie child’s voice reciting it and mispronouncing it as “There are no WHYS here.”
All that aside, Free Enterprise is a delight and Shatner’s ability to self-deprecate makes it even better. His performance as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar is to die for.
Very interesting! You touched a lot of my personal interests. Def Leopards Pyromania album was the first cassette I ever bought (Professor of Rock video), I think I was about 8 years old or so. Played it so much I annoyed everyone in the house. I was restricted to only listening to it on my room; I was gifted a 'hand me down' stereo of my own because of that album.
Sadly it seems like only you heard my lament that no one cares about our history. They rather roll around on their hoard of artifacts like Scrooge McDuck.