In Search of a Unified Field Theory for Geek-Movie Evaluation

I want to state up front that this is a working theory and this blog post should not be misconstrued as me signing off on it, or even putting it into practice. I'm asking for field research, here. Okay, to business.

Everyone online is wrong about everything, okay? One of the things they are wrong about is the subjectivity of reviews, doesn't matter for what: their premise, the wisdom of the crowd, if you will, is to say that the things that a person does or doesn't like about a film are deeply personal, and so any critical comments regarding the film are, by the associative property, a criticism on the deeply personal things that a person feels or believes.

For the record, I do think that legitimate criticism is subjective, owing as much to the reviewer's depth of knowledge as much as the creative work being criticised, but that's not quite the issue at hand. We're talking about being able to praise or trash a movie, without regard to anyone's feelings, and also not hurting them intentionally or otherwise with collateral criticism. 

This used to not be a problem. Back in the 90's, before the Internets, I could trash Star Trek: the Next Generation and still be called a Trek fan (I never was a Trekkie, but I was always a fan). Back in the early aughts, Rick Klaw and I were on a panel talking about Sci-Fi television and how bad most of it was, and the audience, hostile and flabbergasted in equal parts, kept throwing out suggestions to us, and we'd swat them down like Crash Davis at the batting cage. Afterward, people still bought our books. 

Nowadays, you can't throw shade on any franchise for any reason without someone sending you a "Let People Enjoy Things" meme. 

A Memo To the Meme-Makers of 'Merica: Please Think Before You Do It

We interrupt the blasted hellscape of 2020 to re-arrange some deck chairs on the Titanic. This will not make anything better, and it won't solve any problems. All I know is this: I get disproportionately incensed at the little things, because I really can't do much about the big things. There's currently a surplus of bile in my stomach from all that's going on, and shit like this doesn't help. 

What am I going on about this time? I'll tell you what. 

It's that "Pop Culture Pick-Your-Car" Meme.

If you have a nerdy friend, you've probably seen it scroll by on your Facebook feed. If you know only nerds, then you've likely seen it a dozen times. It's this damn thing, right here:

See it yet? I'll give you a big hint: Every single one of these cars is a car except one. No, it's not the Hearse. It's not the panel van.

It's the mother-fucking time machine. 

Why this irritates me, I don't know. But if the point of the meme is to pick a fun cool car, then the whole list has to be cars. We're allowing for Ghostbusting, for pop up machine guns, and for AI robots in the hood. But it's all still cars. The Delorean from Back to the Future is a time machine that can fly. Thus making the rest of the list superfluous. 

"But Mark! It's still a car! God, you're so pedantic!" 

You know what else is a car? The 1966 Batmobile. Surely it's got a place on the list, yes? Or what about the Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit? Steve McQueen's Mustang from Bullitt? The British Flag Jaguar from Austin Powers? The Bluesmobile!? I'd argue that any of those cars, or a dozen others you could come up with would, in fact, be a 100% better fit on this list than the TIME MACHINE.

I know, I know. This is supposed to be harmless fun. A distraction. A way to check out for two minutes and think about movies and TV shows that made you smile. I can't do that. I just can't. I stare at the list and think, "WHY WOULDN'T I CHOOSE THE TIME MACHINE!?" 

The irony of this is that I think it's a fun idea for a meme. I do. And I like these things, in general, because they are harmless, sometimes spark fun discussions, and make for a pleasant five minute distraction until the real world comes rushing in and we all go back to day drinking. I just want the people who make these things to not...suck at it so badly. It's a good idea, but take a second to think it through, please, for all of us anal-retentive types out there. 

And don't ever think that I'm one of those guys who likes to point out problems but never any solutions. Thirty seconds of Google-Fu found the original source for this meme and what do you know? The Batmobile WAS on it! Along with Herbie the Love Bug, but hey, no one is perfect. 

So I reconfigured a few cars to get the Batmobile on the sheet. The fixed version is here:

Now we can have a more nuanced conversation. And the Batmobile? I Gotta say, it' s not my first choice, here. Street parking in that thing would be a nightmare.  But's it's nice to have been considered!

For those of you who don't like the above list and want to make your own, there's this big-ass poster to cut and paste:
 

Just promise me you'll keep the Delorean off the list, okay? For me? 

Stop Talking About 6th Edition Or I'll Burn This Place to the Ground: A Rant

I am starting to see it more and more, now: despite the fact that there are no stated plans to do this, a small but insistent clutch of Internet pundits and YouTube Personalities are calling out for a 6th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Nate Howe's article on CBR and Professor Dungeon Master on the Dungeon Craft Youtube channel are the most vocal champions, but there are a lot others out there. I'm no Internet influencer or Big Name Personality in the Gaming world, or any other world, really; I'm just a guy with a small following and a 'zine I am working on. But I have to say this, as respectfully as I can, in the hopes that my small cadre of fans might see fit to amply my voice with the following directive: please shut the fuck up about this.

D&D: Your Dice Will be the Death of Me

In anticipation of the newest hardcover book to drop out of the Official Hopper, the rocket surgeons over at Hasbro have let us in on the newest Official Dice Set that is dropping alongside of the book. Here is a picture of that product.

It's nice, right? Good packaging, and clearly based on the last set to come out, which was the Avernus dice for last year's book. Red dice, for devils, and with a felt-lined box and with some bonus cards or a map or some other damn thing that no one cares about. But, whatever. This is fine, right?

So, why do I want to Thunderwave whoever is in charge of their dice program?

Let's back up a bit. Strap in. This is a dice rant.

It's Official: We're the Cool Kids, Now

I don't know exactly when it happened; maybe sometime last year, around the middle of the summer, but there was a gigantic clicking sound that knocked my vinyl glow-in-the-dark Cthulhu piggy bank right off of my shelf. By the time I'd picked it up, the world had changed.

No, I'm not talking about The Snappening. This wasn't Thanos doing his infinity-gauntlet-beatnik-hand jive. But someone somewhere did something. Maybe it was a tipping point. Maybe it was Joe Manganiello making some talk show appearance in a Tomb of Horrors shirt. Maybe it was Stephen Colbert getting to play D&D for charity with Matt Mercer and geeking out about it. I don't know what, but we aren't a sub-culture any more. Hell, we're not even popular culture. D&D and tabletop gaming are officially mainstream now. And I can prove it with math.

1+1=Pandering 2U

The first salvo was quiet, and you like as not didn't hear it unless you're deep into The Nerdist, Monte Cook, and the Amazon series Carnival Row, one of Amazon Prime's new exclusive series set in alternate history steampunk Victorian London and starring Orlando Bloom. Yeah, I know, I'm practically ovulating just typing those words in sequence.

The series is okay to great, depending largely on where you come down on the topic of alternate history steampunk Victorian London television series starring Orlando Bloom. But it seems that Legendary used its relationship with the Nerdist to do a little demographic mining by getting Monte Cook (yes, THAT Monte Cook) to whip up a splat book for his Cypher System set in the Carnival Row Universe.

This isn't a half-assed effort, either; they put what appears to be production art (though it could well be original material) and stills from the show into this detailed setting designed to get you steampunking with all due expediency. If this sounds like something you'd dig, you can get it for free right here.

If you didn't hear about this, no worries. It's cool, and surprisingly fast (though having the inside track certainly helps with the timing), but the real indicator that we are across the Rubicon is the newest tabletop RPG from Wendy's.

Yep. Wendy's.

I don't know who did it (there is no writing credits listed) but I can very well guess why. Gamers eat fast food, and many of them drive to games every week, and I'm sure a great many of those folks pass by a Wendy's and maybe even swing into the drive-thru lane for a quick burger and fries on their way to thwart evil. I mean, I'm sure of it; I have no real numbers, and neither does Wendy's, for that matter. But someone is clearly (forgive me) rolling the dice that they are achieving heavy market saturation by putting out a complete, full-color role-playing game, available as a free downloadable pdf (and they even did a small print run for New York ComicCon), complete with branded dice (again, at the convention), in the desperate hope of looking cool to their customer base.

The premise of Feast of Legends is simple: you are part of the Kingdom of Wendy's Trademarked realm, which involves flames and fresh meats. Your enemies live in a deep freeze, where their meats are frozen and bear passing resemblances to Wendy's real-world fast food competitors and their somewhat concurrent brand mascots. You resist the powers of cold and ice by belonging to one of the Orders of Wendy's Trademarked Menu Items, which gives you different powers and abilities.

Are you getting this? See, it's a role-playing game! You like those, right? Only, we've cleverly inserted all of our registered trademark shit into it. But you still want to play it, right, because we're subverting expectations by taking pot-shots at our competition, even though the very same battle is being waged daily on Twitter in 280 characters or less.  So it's clever, right?! But we're not trying to be, you know, which is why we paid at least three people to design this game system, do full-color artwork and fifth edition-style layouts, and package this into the most expensive, and yet also most legit-looking freebie in the history of happy meals.

I haven't felt this conflicted since I first saw the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in 1983. On one hand, I knew that something significant had happened, and on the other hand, I felt like (for the first time, and most certainly not the last) like they had completely missed the point. A little yoda-like old man, called the Dungeon Master? Uni the Unicorn? This was not my world. I didn't know who this was for, really; the younger siblings of the older kids who were actually playing AD&D?

That's how Feast of Legends makes me feel. Only with much better artwork.

The tone of the game is somewhere to the left of tongue-in-cheek, and to the right of outright parody. They play it straight, but the very idea that I can be a character belonging to the Order of the Chicken Nugget is absurd, and that may be what they were aiming for. I don't know.

The game itself is beer and pretzel fare; good for a few hours, and best used in the hands of an expert seat-of-the-pants game master with a quick wit and a penchant for punnery. This, then, becomes a performance piece as your group attempts to out-funny one another, and oh, yeah, the monster is attacking, roll to hit, while you're at it. I can't see playing it more than once under those conditions.

I mean, to make it work right, you'd really need to re-write the enemies so that there's no doubt as to who your players are fighting. And I'd make more of them, too; a horde for every shitty fast food company out there. And of course, the navy is controlled by Long John Silver, who can't stay on deck because he's constantly slinking off to the poop deck, which is, let's be honest, what LJS makes everyone do; shit like a goose). Get it? He's pooping on the poop deck! I got a million of them!

This almost works as a pocket universe to get your existing group sucked into, and play it straight until they figure it all out. Again, one or two nights only. They put a lot of background material in the book, and it's still not enough. To do anything to it would require more effort than the task is worth.

Content-wise, the setting is designed to riff on A Game of Thrones ("you kids are still watching that show, right? About the blonde with the dragons? What's her name again?")  It's too bad that the twitter bots didn't do a pass over the manuscript, because the parodies of the other fast food places don't go nearly far enough. But you can see McDonald's if you squint. It's just not that funny.

So, from a cultural standpoint, this is the Hardware Wars of the 21st century. It gets some stuff right, but it gets a lot more wrong. But this is the place it occupies in the zeitgeist at the moment, a kind of Well-What-Do-You-Know-About-That that's more of a sociological signifier for the uninitiated than the faithful. But they still want you to play the game. And, you know, maybe stream it, with hashtags. Because that's what the cool kids are doing.

And speaking of streaming, the folks I feel the most sorry for are the Critical Role cast. They had to do a dog and pony show with this rule set (I think it was a charity event, but still...). That's not even a double-edged sword. That's a good old-fashioned dagger in the back ("Dance, you circus freaks! Dance for your corporate overlords! Ah Hah Hah HAH HAH HAH!"). This cannot possibly be what Matt Mercer envisioned for himself, nor anyone else on the show, for that matter. It's one thing to be a working voice-over actor in L.A. with a side gig that gets you more likes than your day job; it's quite another to be so good at the side gig that you are courted by the very people who would not put you in one of their commercials. Queen Wendy, indeed.

Well, it's already made the news cycle, and generated a crushing wave of publicity for Wendy's when they most needed it. You can expect that we'll see more things like this in the next 2-3 years. The flood of products and games and pandering is only just beginning. Now we are a demographic, and they have identified a dollar amount that they can reasonably expect to extract from us, like squeezing a naval orange. It's only a matter of time. What form will the Destructor take? No idea. Your only hope is to clear your mind. Don't think of anything. Please...

My Thoughts on Consent in Gaming

I wanted to do this on Facebook, but the comments have been shut down. So I'm going to crap on my own front porch to make this point.

Over in one of the Conan RPG Gaming Groups, someone excitedly posted a link to this new free book that was just released called Consent in Gaming. It's co-written by Sean K Reynolds and Shanna Germain and published by Monte Cook.  This free PDF is available on Cook's website and at DrivethruRPG.com (click on link to get). But what is it?

It's a short read that outlines strategies for dealing with controversial or potentially problematic situations and themes at your gaming table. It spells out a basic code of conduct for players and GMs that they can adopt and talks about the underpinnings of why this is important. The last page is a handout you can give to players during a Session Zero that asks if there's any topics or subjects they'd rather not have to deal with.

Apparently, some folks are upset. I've only seen the folks on the Conan RPG Gaming Group, but one guy jumped in and said, more or less, "So what? Big Deal. Historical barbarians raped, and they're gonna rape in games, and people shouldn't be upset about them raping in games, because it's just a game, and rape rape rape rape rapeity rape. Oh, and Rape. Cucks." *

A couple of people got behind this sentiment, but even more folks quickly tried to hammer away at that brilliantly-executed and insightful statement, the male misogynist gamer's version of "fuck you, I'mma get mine." But--get this--before everyone could dog pile on him, he rage-quit the group.

The cronies quickly changed their tune to "Look at how upset the libtards got, ooooo, so funny."

That's when the thread got closed down. I missed all of the action. From the posts I'm seeing, there are a bunch of Bro-heims  and Older Gamers venturing into Greybeard territory out there really pissed that this thing even exists. They are offended that it was written, thinks that this is what's wrong with the world today, and then they vomit up a few words designed to start a fight because they would rather throw shit at their fellow gamers than stop to take a deep breath and realize that NOT EVERYTHING IS AIMED AT YOU.

Clearly: if you're a guy, with a group you've been playing with for twenty years, and it's the same four assholes, and y'all grew up together, and your campaign is held together with the bonds of mutual shame and degradation, then no, this is probably not something you need.

But what if you're a new GM? Maybe you've been in the hobby six months, and your only interactions have been poorly-run Wednesday night Adventurer's League games as the Android's Dungeon? What if you're trying to start a D&D game in your high school and you have watched a shit-ton of videos on YouTube but you're still not quite sure if your homemade GOR setting is right for the Millard Fillmore High School Drama Club?

I wonder, he said aloud, if maybe--just maybe--when playing with a group of strangers--if some of the things in that book wouldn't be useful to new players? Or old players gaming with new people?

In today's world, with all kinds of people bumping into one another, and D&D being one of the more popular Geek Activities at the moment, I can think of a dozen situations right off the bat where it's a good idea to have a few basic ground rules (really not much more off-putting than common courtesy) in place for dealing with strangers. In several of the gaming groups I'm in, new players will routinely post that they had a weird experience with the a game or a player or a DM and the crowdsourced solution is almost always found in a lack of communication or a mis-communication or someone unwilling to communicate for whatever reason. Consent in Gaming goes a long way towards solving that problem.

Okay, I can see that a couple of you aren't convinced. You probably have used the word "cuck" un-ironically in a sentence. Well, I'm a first generation gamer, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that if such a document were presented to me, and I were asked to note anything that might make me uncomfortable for the upcoming horror game we were all about to play, I would use it right away because of this: My wife has cancer right now. We're fighting it. And it sucks.  So, follow my train of thought, here--when I go play role-playing games, I want to turn my screaming brain off for four hours and play the game. I don't want to think about my family's situation. That is 100% why I am playing in the first place.

That form has a blank for Cancer. I would check it. Because I don't want to talk about cancer in the game. I don't want to deal with cancer in the game. Not right now. Not while I'm dealing with it elsewhere.

You're getting hung up on the word "consent." And truthfully, I think it's a problematic word that they are trying to do too much with, here. But the general thrust of the idea is this: if I don't want to deal with cancer in the game, I shouldn't have to.

Now, any real and reasonable GM would simply avoid those topics completely. But there's a lot of realworld stuff out there that you may not be thinking about because it's not your experience. Any reasonable person would say, "Of course, Mark, no problem. It's not likely to come up but I'll make sure that it doesn't."

Because that's just being a nice person.

But if you're the guy out there who is currently standing in the digital town square with your dick waving in the wind, screaming, "You know what? You don't like it, tough titties! It's my game, I'll run it how I want to, and if you can't handle it, you've got the problem, not me, Snowflake!" If that's you, right now, then you can fuck right off. This is a hobby. It's supposed to be fun. And this kvetching and moaning and feeling like you're being yelled at, when in fact, you aren't, and never were? That's all you, making this not fun.

NOTES
* Okay, that's not really what he said. In deference to this guy, a person I don't know, I'm going to quote him exactly so that you get the proper context for this:

Bahahahaha yes bevause savages and barbarians follow the rules. Wtf is this liberal cuck bullshit. Barbarians rape pillage and burn. So thats what they gonna continue doing thank you very much.

This was almost immediately followed up with:
.....stfu, i dont care about how you view your modern day version of conan, barbarians raped pillaged and killed as a living. Its what they did from the sacking of rome to the pillaging of the nordic countrysides, whats left behind after a barbarian or savage raid is death, destruction and lots of raped women and captives. Because thats actual history. So if you want any sort of historical accuracy youd play as savages and barbarians and not this la dee da version of conan meant for liberals.

So, you know, a reasonable argument.