Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

Rolling Stone, at the time not predisposed to be favorable to exactly the kind of music Punk was a rebellion against, famously reviewed Queen’s seventh album, Jazz as “Fascist.”

That’s what happens when a band, and yes I think Queen was guilty of this, is so drunk with power that they indulge their every whim, brutally inflicting their excess on their audience.

Movies can be guilty of this too. Don’t get me wrong, I really loved Iron Man. I’ll see it again. But as I was searching for a way to describe the “ok, come on…” feeling I had during some moments (only a few!) the Queen analogy was the one that popped into my head. There are a few moments, particularly when explaining to the audience who Tony Stark is, that I laughed out loud because the people making this movie know they have their audience in the palm of their hand, and can abuse us with stuff like pictures of a young Tony Stark hanging out with a teenage Bill Gates. I laughed because it was funny, because it was so over the top, and because Jon Favreau had the balls to do it. Having read this, you’ve read the worst thing I can think of to say about this movie. It occasionally abuses the fact that we’re coming along for the ride no matter what, but it does so in an amusing manner. Hey, I love Queen too, they’re one of my favorite bands!
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Blade Runner, Phase 1: 1982 - 1992

I was 12 when Blade Runner came out in 1982. Same year as E.T.. Same year as Tron, Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, The Dark Crystal, Sword & the Sorcerer. Something important was happening in SF in 1982, but that’s a subject for another post.

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As I suspect thousands of people are in the week after Gary’s death, my friends and I played OD&D last night.
My friend Jim is 50 now, and was 19 in 1975. He played with Dave Arneson a couple of times when Arneson was out here at Conventions. He was in Lee Gold’s group (which he describes as being many large groups all amalgamated together) when Lee started Alarums & Excursions. Playing with Jim is, no shit, playing with part of gaming history.

So Jim shows up last night after I suggested we play OD&D in memory of Gary with his original D&D “books.” By books here, I mean pamphlets. This was before AD&D, this was before the boxed sets we all grew up with. This was the original.

Jim was running the game section (because no one else wanted to) of a military shop in SoCal when D&D came out in 1974. Jim was already a wargamer at that point, playing games like Panzer Blitz. He loved fantasy and when D&D arrived he quickly became part of the phenomenon. He was in his late teens, just out of high school.
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This is a strange picture to use as my Be Kind Rewind header, but I couldn’t resist. It’s from a scene that made me laugh out loud.
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“This is no fantasy - no careless product of wild imagination.”

The Game Story Series, Part IV

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

Richard Donner deliberately opens Superman, for my money the best Superhero movie made thusfar…at least until the moment where Lex Luthor shows up and brings the whole thing down a few notches, with these words, spoken by Marlon Brando. Casting Brando, the most naturalistic actor of his century, in the role of Superman’s Dad and God-surrogate to Superman’s Jesus Analog, and giving him these words to open the movie, grounds the film in reality. A reality the movie desperately needs because it is the height of fantasy. It doesn’t merely concern a man who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes, it starts on another planet.
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