Weekly Geekly Rundown for November 14, 2025
Sorry It's Late
New Intro for my Geek Chat Videos. What Do You Think?
So…I put together a new intro video for my Geek Chats and I wanted to get your thoughts. The song is No Time to Explain from Good Kid who amazingly allow a DMCA Free license for all their songs. They are one of our family’s favorite bands and definitely reflect the Geekerati vibe.
Barley and Lasers: An Aside on Imperial vs. Metric and Why I Love Both
This week my opening miscellanea section is about how I like both the Metric and Imperial measurement systems and how I think everyone should learn and use both. Let’s just say that when you have a wife who teaches middle school math, and when you try to reinforce statistical learning in your political science classes, you want to find a way to make decimals (metric system) and fractions (imperial system) easier to visualize so that students can better interpret linear relationships. All slopes are fractions after all.
One of the things that challenges my students (other than statistical notation which always puts them in a panic) is that they often don’t know how to calculate with fractions. Decimals are much easier to calculate with than fractions, which is one of the reasons that I am more sympathetic to those taking remediated mathematics in the UC System than many others. This isn’t to say that I don’t think UC students shouldn’t be proficient in basic mathematics up to and including Algebra, I do, but I have heard many a story about the frustrations middle school students face trying to remember what they learned about fractions in 5th grade. The thing that a lot of critics don’t understand, or at least pretend to not understand, is that the mind forgets what it doesn’t regularly practice. This loss of remembered information is called the Forgetting Curve and was theorized by a German psychologist name Hermann Ebbinghaus way back in the 1880s. It’s a theory that has held up well over time, even during the replication crisis it was one of the theories that replicated well.
We tend to forget things over time if we don’t continue refreshing that information via practice and repetition. There’s a reason they created a game show called Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? Because if you aren’t constantly engaging with 5th Grade material, it’s likely that the 5th Grader knows more about that curriculum than you do. Let’s just say that even Ken Jennings was afraid he might not know the million dollar answer when he was on the show.
Back to my engagement with university students though. I find that giving them refreshers in fractions and decimals (using examples from the Metric and Imperial systems) is a great way to reignite their mathematical brains. And teaching them to convert from the metric to the Imperial and back provides so many additional benefits.
That’s when I hit the “metric only” students with the whopper that undermines the “but metric is better” argument. Both systems are arbitrary, because any system of measurement starts with an arbitrary starting point. Sometimes I’ll show my students videos highlighting the connection between the Imperial system and grains of barley, which is a fun road to travel, especially when I connect it to concepts like the stickiness of institutions and the need to be able to understand the achievements of the past. After all, none of those medieval buildings that are still in use throughout Europe were build using the metric system, so if you want to talk about them you’re having to covert anyway.
This year, I was able to add a video by my favorite mathematician that demonstrates that not only is the metric system arbitrary, using “the Earth” as your basis of measurement is no less arbitrary than some random dude’s foot, it also demonstrates that the calculations they used to create the meter were inaccurate and the meter itself doesn’t measure what it claims to measure. The metric system was supposed to be based on 1/40,000,000 of the circumference of the Earth (actually 1/10,000,000 of 1/4 the circumference of the Earth as it passed through Paris on the way to the Equator, but who’s picking nits?). The exact intended size? “One ten millionth part of the meridian quarter from the north pole to the equator.”
I’m not saying that’s not useful, but I am saying that’s an arbitrary place to start. Oh, and they got the distance wrong and in reaction to that we’ve kept the measure but have been looking for some unchanging basis to use as the foundation of the meter. For a while, this was “length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p10 and 5d5 of the krypton-86 atom.” You know, because using 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of krypton radiation in a vacuum is way better than barley. That standard didn’t remain long and now a meter is “length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second” because that adheres nicely to decimals…right?
Hannah Fry discusses this mistake (and how even the light year one is wrong) in this short, and I love that she makes a mistake herself as she describes the issue. She says that they wanted the meter to be 1/10,000th of the distance, but that’s a kilometer and not a meter. I don’t love her mistake because I want to laugh at Hannah, she is genuinely my favorite public mathematician in large part because she helped inspire one of my daughters to become very mathematically (and engineering) minded via her book on the reality of Santa Claus. but because it demonstrates how fallable we all are in our every day moments.
Oh, and isn’t that a lot of work (that really lame fraction isn’t at all easy to convert to decimal as it equals 3.3356409519815204957557671447492e-9) to find something that matches the length of a measurement bar that was wrong in the first place. It’s a huge case of finding a post hoc standard in order to maintain the use of a decimal based system. This post hoc redefinition is a perfect example of what Vincent Ostrom discussed in his seminal essay Artisanship and Artifact where he wrote, “Organizations are, thus, artifacts that contain their own artisans.” Organizations, and institutions of all types, shape those how are a part of them and are in turn shaped by them. This makes me wonder the following. Why a decimal based system? Because it’s easier? Okay. That’s true, but so what? Decimals are easier than fractions, but fractions are very useful. You cannot accurately divide by 3 in a decimal system. As I mentioned earlier, you can “almost” divide by three using decimals, but if you shift to fractions you are 100% accurate. Fractions have their utility too and learning them can be a challenge.
Since I like computers, science, and math I appreciate how scientific notation (a fancy use of decimals) allows for floating numbers in computers and has amazing utility, I’m glad we use metric in computer stuff. However, given how often we use fractions in real life (like you know cutting a pie into thirds etc.), I think the imperial system has value too and I’m sure we could find a particular barley corn that is exactly 1/3 of the inch on the “official foot” stick and use it ad hoc to make our system accurate and that would be no less arbitrary than using the speed of light. Given how non-decimal, and in fact fraction based, the current light measure is we could totally do something like that for the inch. Oh, no! We might have to divide by 12? Now you sound like an anti-THACO gamer (more on that when I discuss some of
interesting game design ideas next week). Complaining about simple arithmetical functions is just a way of infantilizing the populous. I’m doing the opposite. I’m asking them not only to be able to divide by 12, but to be able to take 9/5 of a number and add 32 to it. In case you are wondering, that’s converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Interesting thing about Fahrenheit, while it happens to be the name of the person who created the scale a literal translation of the word (which is also a very ad hoc thing to do since the “word” Fahrenheit as “concept” doesn’t exist in German) might be something like “driving-ness” or “movement-ness” which is exactly what it describes, the movement of molecules as temperature changes and Celsius is just derived from the Latin “Celsus” or mound.So the TL;DR of this whole bizarre screed is that I like using both because learning to convert between them provides an interesting way to make mathematical concepts make sense to students. Besides, since a lot of the world was built before metric, scientists, architects, and engineers have to do a lot of converting anyway. Why leave all that conversion fun to the “professionals?” Let’s make conversion democratic! It also provides an interesting discussion, or at least one I enjoyed and I did so without using the ad hominem attacks of associating metric with Robespierre or Napoleon (both of whom were big advocates). You, on the other hand, might have skipped onward and who can blame you?
The Lamentations of Luke Y Thompson
’s got a couple of quick film reviews up recently that hit my fancy, key among them is his review of Gullermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that my excitement for this film knows no bounds and that most reviews have made it clear that far too few film critics have ever actually read the novel. One critic was even surprised that the “hermit” has a family, never once imagining that Shelley was using that as example 52 (or so) that the Creature is an unreliable narrator. Those who believe the Creature are probably likely to believe the narrator of The Cask of Amontillado when he says he suffered a “thousand injuries” from Fortunato. Let’s just say that Poe’s narrator in Cask is a villain and that when the Creature tells us that his favorite book is Paradise Lost, we should take him seriously and then be skeptical when he tells us the family fled the home before he set it to the torch (this is especially true after his statements to Walton at the end of the book).This is why I was surprised when Luke wrote that it was a spoiler that the Creature ends up at the North Pole. After all, the book begins with Walton’s letters to his siser and in the fourth letter (August 5th, 17__), he states":
Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. — R. Walton in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
That’s pretty clearly the creature, and it is only a couple of pages later when Victor tells us of his pursuit of the beast. I have faith in Luke and so I read his “spoiler” section again, and his analysis afterwards, and realized that it wasn’t ending up at the North Pole that was the spoiler, it was what the Creature does there. This prompted a very good criticism from Luke, which parallels the criticism I have of most adaptations and discussions of Frankenstein. People seem to forget that the Creature is not only an unreliable narrator, he’s a murderer of the innocent. He is evil as shit. He may have “reasons” for his evil, but in the end that evil must be punished. Who told me that? The Creature. I’d say the following is a spoiler, but these words were written two-hundred years ago, so they aren’t. What did the Creature tell me?
Evil thenceforth became my good….
…But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. — The Creature
The Creature, or daemon as Walton calls it, is no sympathetic hero, yet we often view him (as many do Lucifer in Paradise Lost) as sympathetic. I had sympathy for both when I was younger and didn’t understand how narcissism expresses itself when it demands understanding and sympathy. The narcissist is always the victim of some agrievement. Both Lucifer (the King of it) and the Creature are narcissists who see no value in anyone outside themselves and their own desires, but I’ve said a lot about the Creature in the past and while I think it is worth repeating it is also worth recommending that you read my prior thoughts.
I will say that Luke’s comparison to Kong is very apt. We must remember that in the original, it is the carnival barker who gives us the line “it was beauty that killed the beast” that minimizes the trauma Kong causes. While sympathetic views of Kong focus on what happens after the crew come to capture him, we have to remember what life was like for Kong before the crew. The giant beast isn’t innocently hanging out in his cave not hurting anyone. He’s receiving regular human sacrifices.
Oh, and I think Luke’s idea for a Frankenstein as… is worth writing a role playing game adventure about and I’ll be sharing that some time in December. I’ll ask readers to check out Luke’s column and then tell me what system I should use to implement his idea.
I’m not saying that whoever ends up as a part of the package Sony Pictures might try to pull together for a Labubu movie should chat with
before they take any pitches for the screenplay, but that’s exactly what I’m saying.For the Love of Bad Poetry?
Speaking of Dr. King, she wrote an excellent piece last week about the value of teaching bad poetry in school. I often think about how we in the social sciences don’t learn enough about bad research, which will help us design good research, or even more importantly how we don’t learn enough about “null” results. Too much weight is given in publications to studies that have significant findings that run counter to the “null hypothesis.” Which is to say, in common terms, too much emphasis is given to studies that agree with the author’s theory. A lot of research fails to provide evidence for, or even disproves, many a research question. Yet these studies remain in the dustbin, unread. Thus their findings are never known and we often keep replicating failed studies of the past because we don’t know they were disproven. We need to study both bad designs and statistically insignificant cases. This is because the scientific process doesn’t actually “prove” things, it “fails to disprove” things and accepts that failure to disprove as proof until it is refined. Well, at least that’s how it works if you follow the model presented in the modern study of the Philosophy of Science as articulated by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and a host of others.
Studying bad poetry can let us better overcome our own weaknesses as writers, in general and of poetry in particular. So too does studying good poetry, whatever that is…because the point of arduous critical analysis (of the real kind) is to answer that exact question…or at least to approximate an answer. Hmmm….seems like the study of literature and the scientific method have a bit in common there.
Anyway, I share this particular article of Dr. King’s because it corresponds with a Note I saw written by a subscriber of my Substack who often writes very interesting criticisms of literature. I don’t always agree with this person, but I really enjoy reading the writings the subscriber publishes. Yes, I am going out of my way to not name this person because the individual stated, to my dismay (DISMAY! I tell you!) that they didn’t like poetry. It pained me to read those words, for a moment. Then I realized two things. First, that I skip almost every song in The Lord of the Rings when I am reading it recreationally (and silently), and that a lot of resistance to poetry in general was related to how poetry is taught. You are often handed a text and expected to pour over it silently mapping out the rhyme pattern, discerning between feminine and masculine rhymes, discuss the meter and rhythm of the words. Never once are you asked to read the damn things aloud. This, too, is how Shakespeare is often taught. “Reading” Shakespeare can be a challenge and a chore, but READING Shakespeare ALOUD is a joy.
I mean, Kenneth Branagh’s performance of St. Crispin’s Day speech is fantastic. He doesn’t pause at enjambment. He speaks the speech, as one would pray, as one would pronounce it and not as it is printed on the page. The presentation matters, and is an art of its own, but it is the verbalizing of the words that shows how rich they are.
Reading aloud is how we fully experience the beauty of Browning’s My Last Duchess, Byron’s She Walks in Beauty, Shelley’s Ozymandias, the horror of Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, and the sorrow that is Wordsworth’s Surprised by Joy. Most prose can be read silently, but poetry demands to be spoken.
Dr. King includes one of William Wordsworth’s poems in her “bad poetry” categorization, and I think she is right to do so. I am, in general, a fan of Wordsworth when he writes of nature, tragedy, or “gentry” things. When he attempts to write in the vernacular of the “commonparlance” though, I am of a camp with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and think that Wordsworth is mistaken that it is the Rustic life itself that gives the best vocabulary and rhythm to the poetic. As a German might say, this is Unsinn! or Quatsch! Wordsworth’s own The Idiot Boy, which I revisited during and after Dr. King’s piece, is such a poem and in it Wordsworth attempts to not only show the value of simple language.
I find it jarring for a number of reasons, most of which parallel Coleridge’s criticisms in Biographia Literaria (a must read for everyone really), including one that stems from my own resistance to the infantalization and fetishization of the “common” by many of the cultured elite. Coleridge defends Wordsworth a tad against this particular criticism in Biographia (even as he points out that it is a big motive for others) when he says that “These, however, were not Mr. Wordsworth’s objects” as he discussed three motivations for finding pleasure in “rustic” language. Coleridge points out that while the thoughts of the common person have great value, they are better expressed when they are based on a strong linguistic foundation. For Coleridge, such a foundation can be found in The Bible (and there is a reason that I…a Catholic…have a King James Bible), and the same was true of Tocqueville who noted how peculiar the literacy of the average American was when he wrote, “he is, in short, a highly civilized being, who consents, for a time, to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and a file of newspapers” and “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.”
Tocqueville even praises what he believes to be the peculiarly American habit of Pamphleteering, a habit that lives on today with blogs and Substack accounts, when he writes, “In America, parties do not write books to combat each others’ opinions, but pamphlets which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity, and then expire. In the midst of all these obscure productions of the human brain are to be found the more remarkable works of that small number of authors, whose names are, or ought to be, known to Europeans.” In his commentary, Tocqueville is synthesizing Wordsworth and Coleridge to show how the rustic can have merit if it has a solid foundation, and that the solid foundation doesn’t require a formal education (sorry Sam) even as it requires exposure to great literature.
So, too, I would add in agreement with Dr. King, it should include at least a small exposure to bad art as well, so that we can make comparisons. Thankfully, or lamentably, the world is filled with a lot of bad literature…much of which I enjoy.
All this talk of critics who haven’t read Frankenstein and the value of the rustic etc., has reminded me of a critique Harlan Ellison wrote about many critics (of the “rustic” sort):
You must understand: any schmuck who goes to a movie and whose ego gets in the way of good sense, who runs one of those “cinematic insight” raps—as shown in example in Woody Allen’s new one, Annie Hall—and then has the good fortune to con some editor into accepting such drivel, can be a film critic or reviewer. They do it not out of any deep and abiding love for motion pictures, nor even because of an understanding of what it takes to create a film … they do it because they can get free screening passes to the studio press showings. They are scavengers. Cinematic illiterates who pontificate without a scintilla of talent for moviemaking of their own.
— Harlan Ellison, “1st Installment,” Cosmos Magazine 1977
Game Masters are Not Authors!!!
Okay, Game Masters might be authors. After all, James Barclay’s Chronicles of the Raven were based on his DragonQuest campaign and Scott Lynch has run his share of role playing game sessions. Heck, Brandon Sanderson has a second role playing game coming out in support of his own fantasy work (and he plays a bit too). Speaking of whom, while most focus on Sanderson’s epic fantasy and compare him (in a way he is doomed to fail) to Tolkien, I find his Alcatraz books far more charming. The books are more Dahlian (or at minimum Riordanian) and he does much better in the grand comparison.
Setting aside that Game Masters can be authors, the games they run should not be attempts to shoehorn their players into a grand plot or preplanned story.
of has an excellent post about the difference between creating a mileiu and drafting a plotline. Creating a dynamic world, or must a few people who populate an environment, are really all you need. As a DM, I tend to start every D&D campaign I run with the Veiled Society module published by TSR in the 1980s. The module is simple, and overly linear, but it has about seven fantastic characters. I ignore the linear plot and let the player’s reactions to the principal event, and a couple of subsequent events that may or may not occur, determine who the villains are. The stories created by my players have more meaning for them than if they experienced the story of the module author, or one that I predetermined.I may resent every time a player rolls up a gnome or bard, or God forbid the dreaded Gnomish Bard, but that is their choice and that choice creates story.
Wait?! There’s a Rule Minus 1?
Of course there is and
has an interesting article discussing what it is and why it’s important for running a long term campaign. What’s interesting to me is how many tools have been created in an attempt to address violations of Rule -1 over the years. Every time you see a new safety tool advocated for in game play, this is because Rule -1 has been violated in a particular way that the new tool seeks to address. Of course, some of these safety tools can lead to violations of Rule -1 in the opposite direction as trust erodes completely from the game. I’m not saying that playing a game like Paul Czege’s My Life with Master don’t require great care and understanding, and a strong avoidance of Adam Koebelesque behavior, it does. You must know, and respect, your players boundaries when running that game and your job as Game Master isn’t to “push your players’ boundaries” nor is it to provide therapy…unless you are using the game in therapy as a licensed therapist, then that’s fine. Your job is to host a game where people have fun and come back again. All of that requires adherance to Rule -1. How you enforce that rule is up to you, but if you want to read abut how important it is, read the Dungeon Punk’s piece. recommends three paranormal horror films, including one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever watched. It disturbed me so much that I’m hesitant to approach it again. I might approach it again at some point, but I will have to be ready to engage with very well performed trauma. The other two recommendations have already been added to my “to watch” queue. grapples with a problem that we’ve all faced from time to time in her most recent post. Sometimes we just don’t have the will or motivation to write, or worse we don’t have anything to say that we believe will add to the conversation. When one’s writing isn’t the thing that keeps the “wolf away from the door” (thanks Matt Forbeck for that turn of phrase), it can be difficult to find the motivation or energy to share your opinion…especially when your opinion is “meh, it was okay.” I often experience a similar emotion. I write very long posts, or at least they seem much longer than the posts I read from other people, and for a time I got very little engagement. I wasn’t writing for money, but I was writing to converse with others and Shouting at the Wind was a very disheartening experience. I had fewer than 100 subscribers for the entire first year of my Substack. I’ve grown since then, but boy was it rough getting up the energy to write.
All I’ll say is that even though I haven’t become a massive success with 10s of 1000s of subscribers, I have found a wonderful community here, and that made slogging through that first year very much worth it.
(one of my favorite Substackers) shared this 150 word review of Frankenstein from that touches on some of the shared disappointment for some of the Frankenstein fandom community. Worley’s own Note, where he stated, “Casting the doctor as a standard-issue toxic-male tech-bro is both predictable and reductive; Oscar Isaac plays this role better in Ex Machina” really hits hard and makes me worry about the film, which I plan to watch this weekend. Spending too much time seeing ourselves in the Creature (which we certainly should as we all have the potential for this kind of evil rooted in envy) and not enough seeing the Creator as a whole person (after all Walton likes him and Clerval loves him) is a shallow telling. already had me interested in seeing Hamnet, but ’s piece has put it up to the top of the to be viewed pile…right after Frankenstein.
When TSR released the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game in the early 1970s, they created a new mode of gaming, the role playing game. What is interesting is that they failed to rapidly follow up the success of their “fantasy” themed role playing game with a succession of game releases in other genres. While many of the first role playing games were shallow imitations of D&D...some were even Vacuous to use Gygax’s terminology, it was other companies who first entered the marketplace with non-fantasy RPGs.
It wasn’t long after the publication of D&D that Ken St. Andre drafted a set of rules for a science fiction themed role playing game entitled Starfaring, and Marc Miller published Traveller in 1977. Where Starfaring was whimsical, and is a quintessentially 70s artifact that feels a bit like John Carpenter’s Dark Star the rpg, Marc Miller’s Traveller set the standard for science fiction rpgs. In fact, Traveller truly set the standard for any rpg product line that was going to compete in the rpg marketplace. Marc Miller’s creation had a large following among the Space Gamer readership, and the publication of support materials for the game led to the growth of FASA -- one of the classic old RPG companies. Traveller’s success extends to the present and Mongoose publishing has produced some beautiful new rule books for the game and Marc Miller keeps the original in continuous print. Heck, you can even get the facsimile edition for free.
Even though Traveller established science fiction as a viable genre for role playing games, it took TSR five years after the release of Traveller before they released their SF entry into the RPG marketplace, the Star Frontiers game. When Star Frontiers came out, there were those who tried to compare it to Traveller, but I have always felt that the comparisons were slightly off base as they represent different kinds of SF. Traveller’s rules and back story, as well as the overwhelming influence D&D had on the early RPG market, gave the game a specific feel. Characters created in the game are typically former military who are now retired, or as James Maliszewski has pointed out a good many were former Mercenaries. Traveller campaigns had narratives along the lines of the Firefly television show, though it would be more chronologically accurate to say that Firefly has a Traveller feel to it. Traveller‘s own backstory was heavily influenced by Asimov’s Foundation series with it’s dying empire. Traveller campaigns were often gritty SF adventures filled with mercenaries and retired Imperial Officers spanning the Spinward Marches in pursuit of wealth and notoriety.
The D&D influence could also be seen in many Traveller campaigns, where players essentially wandered around the galaxy as pirates raiding Imperial space ships for their loot. This isn’t to say that all Traveller campaigns were “spacey dungeon crawls,” the official adventures certainly weren’t, just that some people played it that way.
The science fiction background of Star Frontiers was quite different from that of Traveller. Where Traveller took place in a galaxy dominated by an interstellar Empire in a fairly settled area of the galaxy, Star Frontiers took place on the Frontier of civilization where a major corporation “Pan Galactic Corporation” -- later multiple corporations -- was sponsoring the exploration and attempting to profit. The Pan Galactic Corporation had come into existence to promote exploration and trade among four major alien races -- Human, Vrusk, Dralasite, and Yazirian. These races have only just begun to interact with one another, and have banded together on the Frontier of explored space. At that Frontier, they soon discover a new enemy...an enemy that threatens to destroy any civilization that chooses to explore the Frontier. That enemy is the Sathar, a wormlike race with hypnotic powers on the edge of explored space. The exploring races have only recently completed their First Sathar War, during which they formed the United Planetary Federation, and are now having to deal with terrorist attacks and sabotage by agents of the Sathar...agents from among their own people. In response to the Sathar’s new warfare strategies -- espionage and terrorism -- the UPF has formed the Star Law Rangers who track Sathar agents and attempt to foil their plots.
The universes of the Traveller rpg and the Star Frontiers rpg have parallels in history. One is of an empire in decline, the other is of mercantilism on the rise. The tones of the settings are very different, but so are the rules. Where Traveller characters are retired from former professions and already have a number of skills at which they are proficient -- especially if the characters were generated using the Mercenaries or High Guard supplements -- Star Frontiers characters are relatively inexperienced. Even in the Expanded Star Frontiers rules, the characters have training in only two major skills -- and that training is at the lowest level. The characters start near penniless and are in need of employment. Players can be thankful that the Star Law Rangers are always looking for recruits, that the corporations are always looking for someone willing to risk Sathar attack while exploring planets on the Frontier, and then there’s always the possibility of playing a group of Sathar agents...
Star Frontiers is a game that has a background that is rich in ideas for development...but it is also a game where one has to dig in order to find these ideas. Trying to find out the history of the Star Frontiers universe is not an easy task. Prior to the publication of Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space there was not a clear timeline of the development of civilization. One had to induct heavily from the introduction in the Basic Game rule book, read and reread the racial descriptions, and scour every module for minutiae to get a sense of what was going on. Zeb’s Guide did some of the work for you, as it advanced the timeline to a point after the modules and to a point where the Sathar had developed mind controlling organisms that latch on to the victim’s back to take over the nervous system (fans of Puppet Masters and Iron Empires take note). Taking the Frontier beyond an outline and into a fleshed out campaign setting takes time, but it is worth it.
I’ve read the rules many times and played in a couple of fun campaigns. It’s an easy system, though I’ve recently come up with an even simpler version of their Basic Rule with my own Extremely Basic rules (above), but I might just use the setting and play the game with another game’s rules set. Maybe take a look back at the old d20 Modern/Future system, after all they did write a Star Frontiers setting section for the d20 Future book and had a web expansion with stats for the Sathar, maybe Alternity, or Savage Worlds. Heck...I might just use the Traveller system for it, when I get my copy of the 5th edition. It’s a great game too.
Since I used this song in my test new intro (and will use it in the intro if you all like it), I figure I should share the whole song by Good Kid. As I mentioned, they are a household favorite and I thank my daughters History and Mystery for showing me that pop punk was still alive and creating some very entertaining music. As The Who would say, “The Kids are Alright.”
There are times when I think of friends I’ve lost. It’s one of those things that happens increasingly the further you get from High School or University graduation. I’m not referring to friends lost due to arguments or distance, though like everyone I have those too. I mean those lost to the fate that awaits us all. We never know how we will meet that fate, but when we lose a friend to it that pain never really goes away. Such is the case with my friend Ron Peck.
Ron taught me so much about life and he was the coolest person I ever met. Not cool in the “popular” way, but cool in the “curated” way. He was the person you asked if you wanted a recommendation about something that was obscure, but good. What made him cool is that he could answer this without ever being pretentious. He was the one who told me the old joke about Chukar hunting, “You hunt Chukar the first time for fun, and the rest of your life for revenge.” For those who aren’t from the Mountain West of the United States, a Chukar is a beautiful partridge that flies in a highly erratic patter that makes it difficult to hunt. In Nevada, they also live on mountainsides where the soil is soft and challenging to hike.
One of the bands he introduced me to was Tubeway Army and their song Are Friends Electric reminds me of Ron both because he introduced me to them and because Ron’s personality was a lot like the one Gary Numan shares in his interviews.
Enough sadness and onto the modern. I recently shared songs from Die Spitz, who visited Boise not too long ago, and between bands like them and Good Kid I think that Rock and Roll is far from dead. That prediction is strengthened by the rise of the band Castle Rat and their frontperson The Rat Queen. One of the things I find interesting about the band is that Riley Pinkerton (the aforementioned Queen) has been working in the music industry for some time, but finally found a fit for her personality and musical tastes that had an eager audience. Castle Rat aren’t huge yet, nor are Die Spitz (which means “the point” and is pronounced dee spitz or dee shhpitz if you want to go full Valter Benyahmin which I do from time to time when discussing the Frankfurt School with students).
Anyway, Castle Rat is a ton of fun and is channeling a great era of Metal music that I thought was lost in the fuzz of Nu Metal.
Speaking of lost Metal songs…a lot of people share the music of classic bands like Metallica, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and Dio, but when I went to check on sharing one of my favorite songs (Don’t Burn the Witch) from Venom I saw that it only had around 360,000 views in the past year. During many of the Satanic Panics, the only band that scared people more than Venom was Slayer. Venom was a highly influential band to the big three of the Thrash Era and you can here the influence of songs like Black Metal and Don’t Burn the Witch in the songs of Metallica and Megadeth. As with every Satanic band I can think of, the Satanic elements were for shock value and show and the music is pulse pounding and great driving music.
Shifting from Metal into modern popular music, and from a song that has 360k plays version 204 million on YouTube, I’ve been listening to Alex Warren’s Ordinary a lot lately. It combines elements of folk music, pop, and Christian spiritual songs in a pretty delightful combination. Like Hosier’s Take Me to Church, this is a song of love and longing. It’s less sexual that Hosier’s entry, but both songs have nice emotional pulls.
I’ve included a number of Better than Ezra songs over the many Rundowns I’ve written. They aren’t my favorite band, I discovered that was The Cure when my CD collection was scattered to the winds when someone broke into my car back when I lived in Crenshaw. I never thought of The Cure as my favorite, but when you’re going through your list to replace CDs and you lose count at 20+ by one band…yeah, that’s a favorite. I see a lot of echoes of the Alternative movement that Better than Ezra was a part of in a lot of trending popular music. The storytelling and the incorporation of folk and country melodies is on the rise. Kevin Griffin, the lead singer of Ezra, has a stunning voice and has written/cowritten a lot of songs for artists other than Ezra. These include James Blunt, Christina Perri, David Cook, Chase Rice, Train, and.. Meatloaf.
Speaking of absolute favorites, and lost friends, one of my go to nostalgia songs is Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Nuff Said.
I mentioned that my daughters introduced me to the music of Good Kid, and how that reflected our family’s vibe. That’s true, but one of my proudest dad moments was when my daughter Mystery came up to me holding her phone and said, “Hey dad! Have you heard this song?” and proceeded to play Megadeth’s Tornado of Souls. “Why, yes. Yes, I have.” I said and then we talked about how great the song was and how the speed of it can help get you moving. Mystery spontaneously discovered this song, and it was further proof that “The Kids are Alright.”
When most people picture a noir film, they often think of classics like Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard. These are fantastic films, and great examples, but watching them can lead one to believe that all noir movies have a villain. This is especially true if you start including films based on books like Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which unlike many purists I do. But what makes them noir isn’t the villains, it’s the normal people and the way that the world around them can corrupt them or lead them to despair. They are films about the dark side of humanity. Sure, sometimes they are about an insurance salesman who helps his client murder her husband, but sometimes they are about trauma and misunderstanding. In a Lonely Place is that kind of noir film.
In a Lonely Place shows a Hollywood that still exists, no longer exists, and maybe never existed at all. It’s a world where a screenwriter is famous enough to be recognized on the street and where an agent fights hard for his client beyond basic contract negotiations. Who’s the first screenwriter that comes to your mind? Would you recognize them if you saw them on the street? It is also very rare that an agent is presented as really fighting for their client, or who is so beloved of their clients that they not only get a book published about them, but are the focus of fond memorial in a podcast. There’s some great dialog in the film, dialog that comments on the film industry, comments on the trauma of war, and the trauma of ordinary lives. The film has a “white knight,” but it also has very real people dealing with trauma in a way that complicates their lives and almost leads to tragedy.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I’d be grateful if you’d share, like, and subscribe the video if you are willing.
Yeah the topic of safety tools eroding trust is a complex topic I didn't even want to try to touch in that long ramble I did.
I'm a big fan of them when used well, I've been playing long enough to have seen X cards go from the worst tool I've seen to okay over the years as the idea was refined.
But at the end of the day I still advocate for Red Green Yellow systems taken from the Kink community and if I'm worried about it I place colored index cards.
This isn't a solution as usual you still have to have some two way communication which can be tricky to do well.
Also I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who is like metric, imperial, whatever best fits the need of the moment.