Weekly Geekly Rundown for September 13, 2024 (Friday the 13th Edition)
Is Friday the 13th Really Unlucky?
Since it’s Friday the 13th, I thought it was fitting to do a Weekly Geekly Rundown based around the theme of that most superstitious of days. Back in the before times in the not now, I used to be a 21/Craps dealer in Reno, Nevada. While I came to find most of working at the casino depressing, I have always had a soft spot for the Craps table. The Blackjack tables were often filled with lonely-hearts seeking conversation, or the “expert” card counters who counted so well they left broke. Blackjack tables were pits of despair.
The same couldn’t be said of Craps tables. Since most people have no idea how to play Craps, the average customer who stopped by the Craps table was there to try their luck at this arcane endeavor and hoping that the table would get exciting. And a Craps table can build excitement like almost no other place on the casino floor. That’s in part because of the nature of the game, but I think it has more to do with the fact that croupiers work hard on their banter and their “moves.” I know I did.
You won’t find Blackjack dealers working on impressive shuffles or shouting things like “Five! Fever Five! 23, 32, 41, 14, we don’t care how we get there, just so long as it’s hot! Fever Five!” They don’t work on impressive shuffles because the official shuffle is great at randomizing and makes it harder to engage in shenanigans. It’s taught on purpose and to focus on good randomization. Why? Because the odds are in the House’s favor so there’s no need to cheat. Casinos that cheat get shut down and their management goes to jail. When dealers cheat, the ownership takes them into the back room and “converts” them into the hot dogs sold in the snack bar. Just kidding, the dealers who cheat also go to jail. The Gaming Commission doesn’t mess around.
But craps dealers can work on fancy and freewheeling ways of getting the dice to the player. So long as it is timely, it’s all good. The way you slide the dice to the player don’t affect the throw and the pyramids on the walls of the table help make sure the rolls are as random as possible. You also get a chance to work on fancy payoffs that combine speed and beauty. Craps tables are fun when they are busy.
No part is more fun than the banter though. There are a host of terms for every combination of the dice, “Snake Eyes, Little Joe, Freddy Fever, Nina Nine” and more. It’s endless and filled with room for creativity. When the game is flowing, it’s exciting but that excitement requires that “hands” last a long time and build a narrative.
Customers would often walk up to a game and ask, “is the table hot?”
My response, and it was my favorite thing to say at the casino, was always, “Don’t you know it’s unlucky to be superstitious.”
Which brings us to today’s topic, that wonderful day that is the convergence of so many superstitions. Where did it originate? Why do we obsess about Friday the 13th? I did a bit of Google surfing earlier this week hoping to find an authoritative and “legit” video to share, but the best I came up with was the Friday the 13th Facts episode of Good Mythical Morning. When my twins were young, this show was a regular part of our rotation and they do a pretty good job of catching some of the main historical theories while having fun Mythically.
Satanic Panics and Dungeons & Dragons
I’ll be doing a longer post on Dungeons & Dragons and that Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Needless to say there was a lot of hubbub about the game because a lot of parents had misconceptions of what the game was and were in a media environment that sought to create fear around “what the kids are doing.” Setting aside the news and politics of the era, the media of the 1980s were interestingly conflicted. At the same time that Steven Spielberg was making films about adventuresome kids saving the day, films like Friday the 13th were telling parents that their children would die if they weren’t constantly hovering over them and monitoring their every move.
This video from the Canadian Broadcasting Company gives a glimpse into how stories were reported during the Satanic Panic and if one was to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia, one should apply the skepticism one has regarding the accuracy of this reporting to reporting in general.
Needless to say as ominous as the voices of the journalists are at the beginning of this reporting, when they cut to the kids playing it’s a very different picture that’s painted. Check it out and then read my comments below.
As you saw, this was just a bunch of kids city around a table playing an adventure. The level of attention being paid varies and you can see the relative boredom of some of the younger players. In fact, I would argue that the DM is in many ways intentionally ignoring the younger players in ways that demonstrate how bad a DM he is. The fact that one of the kids uses, and HAS, a ring of three wishes when confronted with Skeletons is one example of both how powerless the kid feels in general even as the DM has given away absurd items.
I think the moment I wanted to take the DM absolutely to task was when he describes the escape from the dungeon, an escape created potentially by the ring of three wishes, only to have that escape kill the player’s character arbitrarily. What the hell man? That moment reminded me of my first D&D experience, an experience I shared in May of 2023. I had a crappy DM, and so too did this kid.
Setting aside the bad DM for a moment, I do have to say that I liked the character selections made by the players and think that Falinger Bandrask is a pretty damn cool name for a Cavalier. When I heard that name in the narrative, my first thought was “now that’s a legit D&D name!” I will say though that since it’s a Cavalier, the name should be SIR Falinger Bandrask but that’s just me being pedantic.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
has a couple of interesting articles that are dead center in the Luke Zone. He’s got a positive review of the new MAX series the Penguin over at SuperHeroHype where he highlights, among other things, how strong Colin Farrell’s performance is.
[Hold on, I just have to say this. I hate that HBO calls itself MAX now. Why? Because when I think of MAX, or The Max, or Skinomax, I think of Cinemax. It’s like they are advertising a rival.]
Okay, rant over. Luke’s review highlights the challenge of wanting a comic book story to be “something else.” One of my chief complaints about bad comic book films is how they don’t trust the source genre enough and seek to make it another genre. In this particular case wanting a Sopranos style, instead of four color style, works because the source material fluctuates between the two story modes. There’s the gadget based superhero/spy Batman that we see in the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League and Jim Aparo stories and there is “Dark Knight Detective” we see in Dennis O’Neal’s and Chuck Dixon’s stories and those inspired by them. Batman is one of the few characters who can exist in the spaces between genre without failing.
The recent Fantastic Four movies largely failed when they failed to embrace the actual story of the series. While the Fox franchise had moments, its failures were all where they abandoned the source material. Galactus as a fucking cloud? Really?! The reason the Roger Corman produced Fantastic Four is the best filmic version of the IP is because as poor as the production value is, and it’s POOR, the story is close to the comic. It remains fun despite its flaws whereas the modern films avoided fun and thus are flawed.
The Penguin doesn’t feature Batman, even as the death toll escalates, which bothered Luke a little. Given that I think of Batman as the single worst crimefighter of all time, it bothers me less. During his time “protecting” Gotham, the crime continually gets worse and worse. When Nightwing wandered over to Blüdhaven, and only got 2 hours a sleep a night because he was working as a cop and as a hero, the crime went down. I love Batman, but his obsessions inhibit his ability to serve. Since I work in Criminal Justice, as a Research Analyst, it makes a kind of sense. Batman “is vengeance” and “the night” and that approach doesn’t tend to decrease crime long term. Bruce has more capacity to stop future crime, but Batman is obsessed with punishing the criminal now due to his own tragedy but not punishing too much because he wants to help. It’s psychologically compelling stuff, but makes me think I’d prefer to live in Gotham if it had either The Spider Master of Men as its guardian (all vengeance all the time) or Nightwing as its advocate.
Luke’s review of Transformers One, also for SuperHeroHype, is largely positive though not as enthusiastic as I might have thought it would be. There is a touch of disappointment in it as if he wished for a little more. He points out that the movie isn’t as cynical as the older hand animated film, but it’s still a film that can bring a tear to your eyes at the end. The Transformers franchise has, like comic book movies, suffered from a lack of ability to take the IP at face value.
When I first saw the trailer for Michael Bay’s first Transformers film, I was enthused. It looked to me as if Bay was going to explore what it would be like if Transformer’s “really” came to the Earth. I was in my edgy phase of life, so that seemed like a good idea. Turns out that the best bits of the Bay films were when he trusted the cartoons and comics and the weakest were when he tried to shoehorn realism into them. I loved it when Mark Wahlberg wielded Excalibur in an epic moment, but hated it when Bay seemed to forget that he had the blade for the rest of the film. When Optimus rode Grimlock, because reasons, I cheered, but I wanted Grimlock to talk and Grimlock out. But that wouldn’t be a “realistically” animalistic Grimlock, so nope.
Here’s hoping this film trusts the source material more, though Luke’s last paragraph has me wondering on that note.
Speaking of Transformers, Luke’s got a really cool article about the new Lego Bumblebee building set/action figure. I love living in the future.
Superstitious Candles
It’s the beginning of the Scary Season, so I got an email from Etsy reminding me that they carried all my seasonal needs. Those needs apparently included a Hand of Glory. To be fair Etsy called it a “Palmistry Candle/Palm Reading Hand,” but as a fan of both Seabury Quinn and Manly Wade Wellman I knew that this was no mere “palmistry candle.” This was the hand of a hanged man transformed into a candle for nefarious purposes.
This reminded me that I desperately needed to revisit Wellman’s John Thunstone story The Dead Man’s Hand, originally published in the November 1944 issue of Weird Tales, and I’ll be writing about it when I finish my Northwest Smith series. This is one of the Thunstone stories that makes me think, almost, that John the Balladeer and John Thunstone are one and the same and that the silver strings on the Balladeer’s guitar were made from Thunstone’s walking stick. Thunstone is my favorite Wellman character, with the Balladeer coming in a close second. That’s right, I like one and exactly ONE Bard.
Seabury Quinn’s tale, The Hand of Glory, was published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales and features his Occult Detective Jules de Grandin. Quinn is a far underappreciated pulp author among modern readers. He was once a king among pulpsters, but now hardly any outside the pulp community know who he was. He was a writer whose style was closer to Robert E. Howard’s than Lovecrafts, even as his subject matter was more Lovecraftian.
De Grandin is one of many children of Sherlock Holmes, right down to having a Dr. Biographer sidekick, but he stands on his own and was featured in over 90 stories. One thing that separates de Grandin from Holmes is that there is no attempt at scientific dismissal of the Occult for magic is real in his tales and Walpurgis-Nacht is a night of real power when dark things happen, as they do in The Hand of Glory.
Friday the 13th Marks the 50th Anniversary of Kolchak: The Night Stalker
While the first television movie was released two years before it, the first episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker was released on Friday, September 13th, 1974. Kolchak was an interesting series that featured a “newspaper reporter” who investigated seemingly supernatural events. He was a kind of modern day Occult Detective, but one who no one believed. Why? Because he was never quite able to gather the proof. The show has long been a cult fan favorite, in part because of its A list caliber writers. Starsky and Hutch had Michael Mann and Michael Fisher, but Kolchak has Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, Robert Zemeckis an Bob Gale, and David Chase of Sopranos fame (look at how that ties in to both Luke’s review and Friday the 13th). The more recent attempt to remake the show failed, in part because those remaking it didn’t trust the material as it was and wanted to update it and make it sexier.
Happy Birthday to Der Raumdeuter, Thomas Müller
While other people will say that Messi, Ronaldo, Beckham, Rooney, or Zidane are their all time favorite soccer player, mine is hands down Radio Müller. He is one of the most prolific goal providers in the history of the sport, and has more than a few goals himself, and has won every major team accolade there is. He’s won the World Cup, the Champions League, the Team World Cup, the Bundesliga Title, the German Cup. Every cup possible for a player in the Bundesliga has been his. Oh, and he has a winning record against Messi.
He is a tremendously talented player, but plays better than his talent because his tactical mind is supremely good. Time and time again, I’ve watched him be in the right place at the right time to stretch his body to the limit to make what looks like an accidental play. If you saw only one such play, it would be easy to dismiss them as such, but he has created so many accidents that the only explanation is that they are intentional. A part of why they look accidental is because they often require him to push the limits of his physical ability in ways that make the effort look ungraceful. Messi, Ronaldo, and Zidane look poetic when they move. Thomas Müller looks like, as my wife would say, Raggedy Andy. He’s flailing around pushing the limits of his body and putting everything into it, but that flailing is in its own way another example of why Soccer is called The Beautiful Game.
Thomas Müller turns 35 today. The amount of coverage Bayern Munich is giving him leads me to believe that he is likely to retire this year. I will be happy if he does because he will have retired before his body fails him, but I will also be sad because I know that there are magic moments that will no longer happen when he’s gone.
While I recommend watching the entire video, if you only watch one moment watch the goal that takes place at minute 6:20 in today’s milestone video. It’s a beautiful Müller bicycle kick. Which is to say that it’s kind of a bicycle kick, but it’s not as elegant as Pele’s would have been, but it’s Raggedy Andy beautiful.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
Because this is a longer entry, I’ve only got room for a couple of Glimpses this week but I recommend checking out
, , and on the regular. Depending what your interests are, they might just have you covered. has launched a Game Jam where we can submit adventures based on his Knave 2e role playing game. I backed Knave and am planning on participating in this event. I’d love to potentially get Ben to promote something from this space. The Geekerati site is growing, but I love the interaction I’ve been getting with that growth and would like to see more. Seeing 8 comments means more than seeing 400 views to me because I’m trying to build community. Ben built a great community and I’m going to join in.
The Retroist continues to discuss interesting retro stuff and his latest post is on a book of case studies in Brand Identity. This isn’t a new book, rather an older book and it gives a glimpse into marketing past.
’s most recent entry has a discussion of the Moonstone miniature wargame. I backed it at the “just give me stickers” level because money has been tight lately, but I wish I could have done more and the Newsletter’s discussion of the game is giving me serious FOMO.’s latest is a typically good read and in it he discusses the Led Zeppelin song “The Battle of Evermore” reminding us of the bands Tolkienien connections. I will say that for all the Tolkien references, the biblical ones (which are also there in Tolkien) shouldn’t be overlooked either. It’s just yet another example of a band we were told were satanic, who were far from it and whose fantasy images (like those of Poul Anderson) hinted at an overlooked piety.
Role Playing Game Recommendation
Let’s see. It’s Friday the 13th and that guarantees that it’s a horror based role playing game. Normally, I might try to sneak Chill into this space. I love the game and its underappreciated, but sometimes you’ve got to acknowledge the mover and shaker in the field. Call of Cthulhu defined what horror role playing games could be when it was released in 1981 and though the game has gone through 7 editions, it is almost completely backwards compatible.
I believe that like Champions, the game was released at the Origins Game Fair which was in San Mateo in 1981, I don’t know that for certain. I am waiting to hear back from Sandy Peterson to see if my guess is correct. Regardless of the exact time and date, Call of Cthulhu’s release demonstrated that horror could be effectively translated to the role playing game genre and it helped to feed an explosion of interest in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and other pulp figures. While my horror leanings may tend toward Poe, Blackwood, Howard’s Pigeons from Hell or the tales of Manly Wade Wellman, Lovecraft has a well deserved place in the pantheon of horror authors.
Music Recommendation
I’m only offering two simple musical recommendations this week. The first is tubular bells by Mike Oldfield. While the song features prominently in 1973’s The Exorcist, which is why it’s being included today, it is a beautiful progressive rock composition. There is nothing inherently “scary” about the melody and it has some divinely beautiful moments. I am particularly fond of the baseline.
My daughter “History” shared this hilarious mashup of Rob Zombie’s Dragula with the film Matilda. It works way better than it should and I’ve watched it quite a few times. In my head canon, this is now the actual performance in Matilda.
Classic Film Recommendation
C’mon. It’s obvious right. Today is Friday the 13th and so the recommendation is Friday the 13th. The original film was released in 1980 and the “horror” at the center of the film is one that was deeply imbedded in the psyche of America in the 1970s and that has returned today. It is the fear of children being killed or dying horribly. It was the root cause of much of the Satanic Panic of the time and it is the root cause of a lot of worry today. Even as America has become significantly safer for everyone, children included, our news covers every tragic event involving a child and has created an aura of fear.
This aura of fear provides the foundation for the horror in Friday the 13th. At first, we think that fear is being channeled by the murders of young camp counsellors that take place throughout the film, but it is only at the end that we see the second layer of that fear. This is a film advocating helicopter parenting and demanding that parents be there every moment. Whether it’s to make sure teenagers properly take care of younger kids or whether it’s to monitor the younger kids themselves, the argument of the film is “if only parents had paid more attention, then this wouldn’t be happening.”
If only we monitored everyone 100% of the time and limited their freedom in the name of safety, we wouldn’t have to kill those who fail to live up to our over inflated expectations.
Yet the truth is, usually, that the Kids Are Alright.
Thanks for the Seabury Quinn info! I love Manly Wade Wellman and will need to search out some Quinn stories. Also, I was surprised and delighted by your Müller commentary!