#so here's MY list. which might be too obscure. and has top gun and a marvel movie on it

[itwoodbeprefect]

inspired by @garymerlow's list (and others i've come across since), here's my version of an orderless pile of 100 favorite movies!

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Dear 'Anime Bad' Anon: I Want To Help I pity your situation, so please have a list of weebshit that isn't moeified, or wherein the cutesy art-style serves a greater purpose. (Note: though they won't be soft marshmallow uguuuu, they may still have issues in other ways. Some may have aged badly with regards to how society views or portrays groups or beliefs, some may have upsetting content and dark themes, and some may simply not be to your taste. Note: Anime is a genre, not a monolith, and the disparaging stereotype that it's all cute girls uwuing over their brother s-s-senpai!!! is as much of a disservice as saying all western movies are just vapid cash grab superhero movie sequels with no inegrity or thought put into them. There are indeed a lot of superhero movies, but they're not all identical schlock (megamind vs venom vs kick-ass),  but even more than that, there is a wealth of creative endeavor just beyond the veil of Marvel's cape: just as there are plenty of good anime if you dig past the isekai high school harem wish fulfillment genre that no one wants to keep making but people keep making because it prints money to a very small demographic of the animation equivalent of a mobile game whale thereby allowing this frankly quite-small industry to work on engaging and worthwhile series where the budget permits, Regardless,)

Mushi-shi: -Pros: gorgeous animation, tranquil vibes, episodic stories so you can cram in an episode between classes or on your lunch break. highly recommended by the literal-who typing this out. -Cons: some themes or stories may cause emotional distress, learning to tell apart Urushibara Yuki's characters is a learning curve.

Baccano-Pros: meticulously-researched 20s-and-30s-era mafia violence with a hint of the supernatural, as a treat, told anachronistically with flair and jazz music. practically made to be binge-watched. the novels are finally getting translated into english as well. -Cons: lots of characters to keep track of, fair bit of blood and violence, some scenes or themes may be upsetting, lots of jumping around between different time periods. See Also: Durarara, another series by Ryōgo Narita with a ton of characters and a plot with more threads an overpriced sheet.

Cowboy Bebop-Pros: incredibly well-regarded, space bounty hunters are cool, episodic series that slowly takes on a plot towards the end, fantastic animation, scoring, and even dub work.  -Cons: some scenes or themes may be uncomfortable, some parts have not aged quite so well, the smart doll version of the main character is ugly, you're gonna carry that weight.

Trigun-Pros: starts lighthearted, develops an increasingly investing plot as the series goes along. fictional westerns are cool. this world is made of love and peace -Cons: some scenes or themes may be upsetting, and probably will be. gun violence is naturally present, but that ain't all of it.

Hellsing (standard or Ultimate. or Abridged)Pros: vampires killing nazis. the original adaptation isn't bad, the second adaptation (ultimate) is generally viewed as an improvement. abridged is a youtube parody version that was so popular the voice actors reference it in convention interviews.Cons: a Lot of violence, even trending to the gorey side of things. Uncomfortable Themes Everywhere, but it's a horror-tinged action series about killing nazis, so that's to be expected. 

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood-Pros: while the original anime was quite good, the second iteration is a large improvement. does to alchemy what naruto does to ninjas: It's Basically Battle Magic. the plot starts on a strong note and doesn't let up from there. -Cons: there are distressing scenes and themes that may or may not be tolerable to the viewer. there are moments of cheesecake and even an occasional joke or a moeblob here and there, and it's not all doom and all gloom all the time, but this doesn't detract from the abject horror-despair that comes to permeate this series as it progresses. finally understand why people on the internet respond so negatively to the name 'nina'! 

[Mod: many more recs/reviews under the break, worth reading for those who like more obscure anime and animation]

Grave of the Fireflies-Pros: you will remember how to cry. it's a good reminder that one country's 'triumphs' often come at the expense of another country's people.  -Cons: this movie is incredibly dark, do not watch if you are in a bad headspace. see also: Barefoot Gen, a similar tale but this time from the perspective of an actual survivor from Hiroshima.

Michiko to Hatchin-Pros: an actually diverse cast of characters tangled up in a messy and very humanizing story, interspersed with Shinichiro Watanabe's particular flare for adventure. -Cons: some scenes or themes are very likely to be distressing. can be tricky to find, too.

Mo no no Ke (not the ghibli movie, though it is also quite good.) -Pros: incredibly unique art style and pacing that draws heavily from japanese theatre traditions, every screenshot is wallpaper-worthy. -Cons: may cause motion sickness. it is a psychological horror series, and one that does not need blood, nor gore, to cause visceral emotional response in the viewer. scenes and themes will be distressing- as really, that's the point.

Tokyo Godfathers-Pros: a transwoman, a (self-identified) homeless bum, and a runaway teen girl find a newborn in the baby on christmas. incredibly wholesome, somehow, and grounded in reality, with wonderful animation from the tragically late satoshi kon. -Cons: it is grounded in realism, and sometimes, people are dicks. mild transphobia warning, too, but in-universe- the transwoman herself is portrayed with kindness and allowed to be her own (wonderful!!!) person. still, viewer be mindful.

Kino no Tabi (the first series is my preferred, the second is shinier but lacks emotional impact- in my onion.) -Pros: mostly episodic, very unique series that can be gritty where it counts and kind where it matters. -Cons: some scenes or themes might be disturbing. finding it's not easy, either, and unfortunately, i don't think the novels are being translated right now, either.

Spice and Wolf-Pros: it's mostly about economics. there are shenanigans, a harvest god, and a slowly burgeoning romance, sure, but it's still mostly about economics. -Cons: there are moments of cheesecake and comedy, and moments that may cause distress to the viewer. it may or may not be to your taste.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica-Cons: yeah i know, it's moeblobs.  -Pros: you're gonna watch 'em die, though, in case that may interest you. it's quite a good subversion of the magical girl genre overall. somehow volks hasn't made an MDD of anyone from the series and i will never understand how that didn't happen.

Wolf Children: Ame to Yuki-Pros: watch a family grow together as a newly-single mother does her best to raise her twin children after the tragic loss of their father.  -Cons: keep tissues handy. certain scenes or themes may be uncomfortable.

Lupin III (Red Jacket, Ghibli, and the new 3D animation are all A+) pros: heist comedy elevated to an art form before half (or more!) of the people reading this were born. the english dubbed series that used to air on adult swim is a treat. cons: this franchise started in THE SIXTIES, so naturally, some shit has not aged well. certain series (fujiko mine) are darker than others in themes and material. the 3d movie that released recently is an excellent starting point.

Samurai Champloo-Pros: breakdancing samurai, a fascinating roster of characters, and a superb soundtrack by the tragically passed Nujabes. -Cons: it was made in the weird era of the transition from analog to digital animation and so the /series master/ was animated at a painfully low resolution, so even if there's a bluray out there (I haven't looked,) it will be an upscale, which doesn't always look the best. as well, there are scenes and themes that may make the viewer uncomfortable here and there.

The Works of Studio Ghibli Oh, I'm sorry, Ponyo too suffused with childhood wonder for you? My Neighbor Totoro not depressing enough?  In addition to the infamous Grave of the Fireflies, Studio Ghibli has made a wealth of movies that aren't aimed squarely at the kodomo (children's) sector. -Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind: climate change existential dread, the movie -Castle in the Sky: government obsession with obtaining weapons of mass destruction destroys everything beautiful, the movie -Pom Poko: human-caused deforestation and urbanization is destroying the natural world and all that live in it, the movie -Princess Mononoke: industrialization will be the death of everything beautiful in the world, the movie, with a side of sometimes everyone (and no one) is the villain when everyone is simply trying to survive -Howl's Moving Castle: The Physical Manifestation of Depression is a Liquid Ooze, the Movie, also War Is Bad It's not all depressing, but let it never be said that Hayao Miyazaki was subtle. Whisper of the Heart is a good coming-of-age story, Kiki's Delivery Service is a classic, Tales from Earthsea is divisive among fans of Ursula K. Le Guin but I personally liked it. From one studio alone there is a wealth of opportunities.

And that's really the point. These are just some from the top of my head. There are so very many options outside of the cute-girls-doing-cute-things genre that I couldn't list them all if I was here for a week. Or as Madoka Magica so ruthlessly showcases, even series that appear a certain way on the surface might not be what you bargained for once you look into them! These are all (I think) mostly older, mainstream-appeal series that should be easy to track down, too -- there are all kinds of singular animations like The Diary of Tortov Roddle, crowdfunded experiments like KICK-HEART, Masterpiece World Theatre renditions of classic (western) novels that never get talked about, films like A Silent Voice that confront social issues- and of course, series like Rozen Maiden that helped popularize this very hobby!

There is literally an ocean of content to explore from Japanese creators alone, and it opens up even more if you look into works from other parts of Asia- just look at how popular manwha have become, or Chinese animations like Leafie, a Hen Into the Wild! It's a genre unto itself, with all the breadth of content and inter-industry problems that come with it, and without any of the respect that similar art forms have been granted over the years. The way an entire culture's art form is often disparaged, disregarded, and belittled- and by extension, the way most of Asia's animated endeavors are often rolled up into that reductive dismissal along with anime and manga- is honestly Not Great, and there is absolutely a thread of xenophobia that runs through it. The industry has so very many problems (low wages, poor training, overwork of everyone ever, archaic financial modules, the exclusivity and breadth of merchandising necessary to turn a profit and how it leads to consumer burnout and disconnection over time, and yes, the way minors are portrayed not just in anime, but in Japanese media in general- and how much of that is actually bad (some of it is indeed,) and how much if it is cultural difference (I've heard people call the scene where the family in Totoro bathe together problematic because of the nudity, but I've also only heard people say that from the West)

-- none of the actual problems affecting the people who produce this medium are gonna improve when the general response to "animators frequently have to live at home to survive" is "that's what happens when you're a weeb."  It's 5am and I'm gonna point out the problems in the narrative around how we discuss this genre of entertainment because it's important, damn you! Regardless, thank you for coming to my unasked for and overlong TED talk about animation on a doll collecting drama blog, feel free to call me a pathetic weeb etcetera on your way out- but while you do so, might I suggest you also go watch a choice animated series! My current go-to is Bofuri, which is a cute-girls-doing-cute-things moefied isekai series that I refuse to apologize for watching. Be free. (The battle scenes are great and it captures the feeling of learning to play a new MMO with your friends better than most video-game-based anime I've seen in a long, long time. does anyone even still remember .hack? how about serial experiments lain...?)

~Anonymous

[imaginetonyandbucky]

(Give Me A) Reason to Live

A/N: By popular demand, here is a sequel to Keeping Me Alive.

Summary: After fleeing Hydra, James and Tony found a fragile peace, living together and striking at Hydra from the shadows. Until the news that Captain America has been found forces them out of hiding to face their fears head-on. 

by @dracusfyre

Also on AO3

Tony winced as he straightened, suddenly feeling every hour he’d been sitting at his computer. His back ached, his neck was stiff, and his eyes burned; when he stood, his back popped like bubble wrap.  He reached for his coffee cup only to find it empty, and so was his bottle of water, so he reluctantly climbed the stairs towards the kitchen.

Only to pause when he saw James asleep on the couch. He’d have to go around him to get to the kitchen but startling the Winter Soldier from sleep was always a bad idea, considering the number of weapons that were stashed around the house. He knew some people look relaxed and peaceful while sleeping, but not James; he didn’t look like he ever relaxed, not even while unconscious, mouth set in a stern line.

“Why are you watching me?” James said suddenly without opening his eyes, making Tony jump.

“I thought you were asleep,” Tony said, scowling as he went around the couch to get to the kitchen for food and something to drink.

“Heard you coming up the stairs. Find us a new target yet?”

“Some. There’s a cluster pretty close together near Kansas City, I think we could hit them all in one night,” Tony said as he studied the contents of the refrigerator, wondering if any of the sandwich meat was still good. He sniffed it and decided not.

“You know where there’s a big cluster?”

“Where?”

“DC.”

Tony growled and slammed the fridge door shut. They needed more food, but the closest real grocery store was an hour away, and if he didn’t think he could handle gas station convenience store food one more time. “We’re not going to DC.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too dangerous.” Tony grabbed a pack of crackers and a can of tuna from the pantry instead; he was so goddamn sick of eating from cans and jars and boxes, he wanted to go to a restaurant so badly he could almost cry.

“So instead we are going to keep hiding out in the woods and nibbling around the edges of Hydra? That’s your grand plan?”

“My plan is erode Hydra’s power base and critical infrastructure until it collapses under its own weight,” Tony snapped back. “It’s not like we’re the only people working on this.”

“Right. Your inside man.” James said sarcastically. “Let me know when there’s real work to do, I’m tired of this petty bullshit.”

Tony’s hand tightened on the bottle of water and the cheap plastic crinkled in his hand but he didn’t say anything. He knew they were both tired of being stuck in this house with only each other for company for months now, almost a year, with the only breaks in the boredom being the periodic excursions to break into and occasionally destroy Hydra front companies and bases. He pressed a knuckle to the spot between his eyes, trying to forestall the headache he could feel building. “I found another chair,” he said into the tense silence as he opened the bottle of water and chugged it. “And a bioweapons lab. These targets aren’t petty.” He knew he’d won that round when James was silent for a moment.

“Have you noticed that each target we hit is harder than the last?” James said eventually. “I get what you’re doing, but it’s just making them more prepared for us.”

“If we kill Pierce and the others and don’t destroy the organization, new scum will just rise to the top. We’ve-“ Tony bit off his words and sighed. He put some tuna on a cracker and shoved it in his mouth, chewing tiredly. “We’ve talked about this before,” he said when he finally swallowed. “We’re not ready to take on the entire organization yet.”

He heard a deep sigh from the direction of the couch. “Yeah. You’re right. I just…”

“I know. I want it to be over, too.” Tony steadily ate the tuna and crackers with the dutiful determination of a man doing an unpleasant task, then swept the crackers off the table and looked out the window. The sky was starting to deepen to a beautiful deep blue twilight, promising a clear night, and the weather was brisk and pleasant. “Want to go for a walk?” he offered. “We haven’t checked your traps in while.”

“Sure,” James said after a beat, recognizing the offer for the olive branch that it was. Tony set JARVIS on sentinel mode and picked up his phone, night vision glasses, and a red-light flashlight for the walk. Over the past year, while Tony had been obsessively improving his suit and putting together a high value target list, James had taken up landscaping; he’d been steadily redesigning the forest around the cabin to funnel anyone approaching onto a handful of paths, then booby-trapping the hell out of these paths with cameras and tripwires attached to landmines and sentry guns.

“Nice night,” Tony commented as James cleared out some brush and limbs that had obscured one of the traps.

“Yep,” James grunted as he checked the magazine and barrel of one of the sentry guns. Tony pulled out his phone and tested the control mechanisms for the gun, moving it left and right and up and down to make sure everything was working.

“You know, as much as I obviously don’t want us to be found, I kind of would like to see these traps in action. You’ve put so much work into them,” Tony said. He followed James through the woods, careful to only walk where he was walking. “What else do you want to do?”

Tony could feel the irritable mood lightening for both of them as James answered Tony’s question, pointing out places where he planned to dig out and deepen ravines, move fallen trees, and replant bushes to make sure the unwary would walk right into the traps. It was full night when they reached the far edge of their property line to make sure that the NO TRESPASSING signs were frequently posted and fully visible so no hikers or hunters accidentally got blown to hell. They cut through the woods to the dirt road that led to the cabin and were admiring the stars when Tony got an alert from JARVIS on his phone.

“Something big just came across the comms,” Tony said, showing the screen to James. James nodded and the stroll became a fast walk back to the cabin. The walk had been a good idea; just getting out of the house and getting fresh air had done a lot for Tony’s headache and James sounded like he was in a much better mood as they went back inside. He claimed the shower while Tony polished off the bottle of water and went downstairs to see what the alert was all about. When he pulled up the message, he read it once, then again, then stared at the wall for a moment before reading it a third time, which was when it really sank in. “James!” He shouted, then cursed when he remembered he was in the shower. He almost tripped as he ran up the stairs, then pounded on the bathroom door before barreling in.

“What the fu-”

“They found Captain America,” Tony said. “Up near Greenland or something. They found the Valkyrie and he was still inside and they think he’s still alive.”

For a long moment there was only the sound of water running, then James finally said, “Who found him?”

“Hydra. I mean SHIELD,” Tony corrected. “But you know. Hydra knows.”

“Fuck.” James turned off the water and slid the shower curtain back as he reached for the towel on the back of the toilet. Tony felt the back of his neck get hot and kept his eyes firmly on James’ face, trying and failing to not feel like a creeper for how hard it was to not appreciate the view. Finally James put the towel around his waist, which helped only a little bit because now James was raking his wet hair back and water was running down his chest and had Tony mentioned that they’d been stuck alone in this cabin for almost a year? “Wait, what do you mean they think he’s still alive?”

“Apparently he’s been frozen all this time, but they found a heartbeat. They are trying to extract him so they can thaw him out in a medical facility.” Tony met James and saw something in the man’s eyes that he’d never seen before; it was the kind of hope that made you afraid, because you wanted it so badly to be true that it might destroy you if it wasn’t. The look made Tony’s heart twist and his stomach drop but he refused to think about that because there was more important things to think about.

“So what do you think we should do?” Tony asked. He finally backed out of the bathroom which, he just now realized, he probably should have done as soon as James started to get out of the shower.

“Isn’t it obvious?” James said. “We gotta steal Steve.”

[myhusbandsasemni]

Rescuing the Main Attraction

I’m late to the party. @flashfictionfridayofficial

Warnings for human trafficking and some form of mind control. 

WC: 1687

......................

Underground was starting to get alarmed by the amount of shady circuses he’d disbanded due to human trafficking or slavery. Not only were there an unholy amount of circuses doing that sort of thing, they were all creepy. He already had a list of excuses he was going to use if anyone tried to ask him, as Silas and not as Underground, to go to a circus with them. Not that he actually socialized with anyone other than active or retired heroes who would also be avoiding circuses for whatever their own personal reasons might be. 

Underground hung out near the back, his mask off and his hood on. He hoped no one would recognize him as Silas. Then again, if they did, he would just be a retired hero here enjoying his retired hero pay. No one would really imagine that he had retired only to hide the fact that he was becoming a different hero. Well, except for the conspiracy theorist college students living on coffee, ramen, and the last dredges of their childhood dreams. But he wasn’t too worried about running into any of them here. There was quite the expensive entrance fee to pay to get in.

Underground waited, watching the real performances of trapeze artists and lion tamers. He winced at the obvious animal abuse and muttered to Foxfire, who was wrapped around his chest under the hoodie he was wearing, to send a message to a hero who specialized in animal abuse cases. 

The acts were still beautiful and choreographed perfectly, but something felt off in the background. The dancers smiled, but their faces seemed like masks rather than flesh. The animals called out, but their screams were made of tin. The ringmaster laughed, but no sound left his mouth. Or so it seemed.

Foxfire burbled as she did as he asked. Underground went back to waiting for the main attraction. It took much too long to come. He nervously picked at his fingernails as the minutes ticked past slowly, his gloves tucked in his pockets. The biggest performance was heralded by music and dimmed lights. Underground straightened, tugging his gloves back on and staring down at the ring. The ringmaster addressed the crowd, seeming to whisper into the darkness to make everyone really quiet down and listen.

“Ladies and Gents,” the man said conspiratorially, though there was no emotion in his eyes. 

Silas took that as his signal to slide his mask onto his face. It sealed there comfortably and he watched through the one way material, ignoring the calculations and other things Foxfire was running on the inside. 

“We thank you for coming to our tents today,” the ringmaster continued, his cape swishing as he stood up straight, poised like a snake about to strike. “Now we come to the main attraction, as we always must. Please keep as silent as you can during this part, loves. For the most enjoyment.

“There was a race of people, they say,” the man continued, the lights changing to rainforest hues, “That could curse or bless, bewitch or enchant, amuse or horrify. All with just a vibration in their throats. Just one song and you would have to trust that they wouldn’t steal from you, or kill you. Of course, they were hated, hunted, and silenced. Now, there are precious few left. I have here, among my little family, a descendant of that race. And, as always, she has agreed to sing for you.”

Shrouds of gaudy fabric fell from where they had been obscuring the center, showing a woman in a bird like cage. She was dressed in a feathery outfit, draped across lush pillows. She was a beauty, though, she seemed even more off than the other performers.

Foxfire enhanced the view and Underground could pick out the fear in her eyes and the bags under them. There was a metal cuff connecting her to the bottom of the cage, carefully hidden with feathers and decoration. 

The rest of the victims were brought out. There would be others besides these three. All of them were dark haired beauties. The woman in the cage started to sing. The three beauties started dancing as if they were being forced to, performing moves altogether too in sync. This was a secret part of the human market. The most beautiful ‘exotic’ women were gathered and sold through this circus. Three at every performance. Underground could see the Ringmaster watching the crowd, communicating with potential buyers through signals and looks. Underground sneered from underneath his mask. He was all too happy to clean this all up. But first.

Underground slipped from the tent and prowled among the others. The performers ignored him, most thinking he was one of them due to his grey mask with blue stripes. He started getting looks as he neared the tent he was looking for. He walked up to the two guards of this tent, nodded silently, and knocked them out with perfect jabs to their necks, pressure points pressed with a bit of help from his slight electro manipulation powers. 

He stepped into the tent. It was dark, but Foxfire fixed that by letting a piece of herself roll out from under the hoodie and glow in the dark. There were a set of cages and Underground saw four more ladies in kennels not even fit for dogs. 

“I’m here to get you out,” Underground said softly and warmly to the women, who were understandably afraid. He crouched and undid the locks, quickly opening the cages. He helped the last one out and looked around to all four of them.

“Are you all okay to walk?” he asked, concern in his voice. 

The oldest one, a woman of about 21, nodded. He nodded and pulled masks and cloaks out of his bag. “Put these on, they should keep the performers from noticing us.”

“How do we know if we can trust you?” asked the woman with hard eyes.

Underground nodded. “I’m a hero, though that is never a true proof of trust. I want to protect you and get you to safety.”

“Would you die to complete it?”

Underground paused. This was indeed a question. 

“That is hard,” he sighed. “To die would be noble, but if I am dead then I will not be able to protect other women like you and rescue them as well. So, how about I get you out without any of us getting dead or captured.”

The women seemed a bit surprised by this answer. They looked at each other and nodded. 

“We will go with you.”

With the costumes donned, Underground rushed them through the tents again. The performers didn’t seem to care. They all seemed tired and sick in a way that Underground couldn’t put his finger on. Sort of.. Apathetic. 

“There are friends waiting for you there,” Underground whispered to them as they came to the top of the rise on the edge of the circus. “They���ll be in cop cars and will be able to show you their badges. I have to go back for the others.”

As Underground turned, one of the women grabbed his arm. “Please save the bird woman. She is being forced to do those horrible things,” she said, fear in her voice.

Underground nodded as solemnly as he could. “I was planning on it. Just.. be very careful.”

The women silently nodded and were off to the roads that Underground had pointed to. He took a soft breath and turned to go back to the tent. He checked his watch. The performance was quite a long one to account for the sales of women, but he was cutting it quite close now. He threw off the hoodie and stormed in, Foxfire proudly displayed as a stripe on his chest, taking the steps down and counting out guards armed with guns hiding in the shadows. The ringmaster was so caught up in the sales, he didn’t notice the infuriated hero until Underground decked him across the face.

…………………………

Underground leaned to help the bird woman up. He hissed slightly at the bullet wound in his shoulder, but that would heal. She took his hand and stood unsteadily. She looked around wonderingly at the unconscious guards and empty seats. The place had cleared out pretty fast after the first guns fired. The police outside made quite the racket as they captured known criminals, though there were too many people to grab them all. The only people left were the unconscious ring master and guards. The three dancers had already been gone with the police. 

“Let’s get you out of here,” Underground said, helping her down respectfully.

She clung to him, her legs weak and wobbly. She probably didn’t get to spend much time walking. “Saved,” she muttered. “Saved. Saved.”

Underground nodded. At the entrance of the tent a police officer was waiting with a shock blanket, which Underground took and wrapped around the bird woman. She thanked him softly as the police officer offered the woman her arm.

The victim took her arm and walked off into the crowds of officers, careful of where she put her feet.

Underground leaned on a support, almost exactly where he’d been standing before the whole rescue. He was tired and disgusted, but glad he’d managed to get all the victims out. Still. There were many other people that needed his help and he knew that, despite the abundance of heroes, they wouldn’t get to them all. He watched the police slap handcuffs on the unconscious men in the ring for a moment before pushing off the support and slipping out to go home for the night. He’d have a report to finish for the police and have a quick check in with his medic before he could go to sleep, and goodness knows, he was weary. 

“We did it,” a soft voice said in his head.

He smiled and rubbed his fingers over Foxfire’s cool surface. “That we did. Thank you.”

“No, thank you, Silas. You made my dream a reality.”

Silas smiled. “We made the dream a reality.”

Underground Hero Taglist: @doubi-ixi @my-dump-of-whump @thethistlegirl

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #442

Top Ten Transformers Gimmicks

There was a time when I felt that this blog was pretty much wall-to-wall Robots in Disguise. Seems I couldn’t go more than two or three weeks without some list or another ranking my favourite Autobots, Decepticons, issues of the Marvel UK comic, issues of the IDW comic, my favourite artists, my favourite alternate modes, my favourite ways Optimus Prime came back from the dead… basically, what I’m saying is I used to write about Transformers quite a lot.

Recently, though? The last year or two? Not so much in the way of sentient mechanoids round these parts. I think partly this is a result of the ending of the original IDW continuity; whilst the rebooted Transformers comic is good, I must confess it hasn’t grabbed me the way the (for want of a better term) More Than Meets the Eye era did. I don’t think it possibly could; the interweaving continuity, the shared universe, the multi-layered world-building and puzzle-box writing, all combined to form a perfect storm around my most beloved of franchises. Did it go too deep, too dense? Occasionally. Did it end too soon, rushing into a climactic conclusion without the room to allow every plot twist and character death to sufficiently breathe? Yeah, a little. But on the whole it stuck the landing, not too shabby a feat for a galaxy-spanning epic that, under various creators, had managed to tell a more-or-less consistent story (papering over the cracks of several soft reboots) for over a decade at that point. As I’ve written before, I loved that Transformers so hard, it was almost inevitable that whatever came next would suffer by comparison, because by definition it could no longer be my Transformers.

So, yeah, that’s one reason. But another is, it’s been harder to think of things to write about. I’ve talked about favourite characters and stories; where else do I go but the increasingly obscure? However, I wanted to give it a try. Last weekend should have been TF Nation, the delightful Transformers convention held each year in Birmingham. I usually go; I gave last year a miss, but I’d been fully intending to make the trip again this year. And then 2020 happened, being all 2020 in our faces. This is a weekend where I might have shared my favourite moments from TFN! Pictures of cosplay! Of friends and creatives I admire! Of toys I can’t afford! But no; instead I’m watching my wife play Stardew Valley and writing this blog (which, I’ll be honest, is actually quite a pleasant way to spend the time, but let’s not get too deep into the weeds over here). Anyway, to celebrate TF Nation, and the stay-at-home “Big Broadcast of 2020” online show that they put on, I’m returning to the Nucleon Well once again with another Transformers-themed Top Ten.

This week: my favourite Transformers toy gimmicks!

Transformers, of course, are cars and whatnot that turn into robots or what-have-you, but across the years Hasbro has experimented with different modes and features to keep the toys fresh and unique, and also to sell a bunch of new ones to impressionable kids. Some of these are sublime; some, frankly, ridiculous. So this week I will explore my ten favourite ones; my ten favourite sub-brands of the franchise, so to speak. Some of these I think are genuinely fantastic as a concept; some, I just liked because it seemed cool, or was made cool by the fiction; and some are just daft crap that I enjoy. Make of it what you will! I’ve decided, incidentally, to focus on “gimmicks” here as being different modes of transformation, or other associated features, rather than define them by what they turn into. So there are no Insecticons or Dinobots, because whilst bugs and beasts are cool, really those are both normal types of Transformer that turn from one thing into another thing. Make sense?

Good. Now roll the eff out.

Combiners (1985): what’s better than one robot? How about, like, five or six, and they all clip together to form another massive robot? Clipping machines together to make bigger machines seems like a cornerstone of any sufficiently advanced civilisation, and whether we’re talking the complexity of OG combiner Devastator, the hot-swappable fun of the likes of the Aerialbots or Stunticons, or even Dreadwind and Darkwing combining in vehicle mode to form Dreadwing, it’s always great. Plus it makes you want to buy all the toys so you can make the big robot! Everyone’s a winner!

Headmasters (1987): robots whose heads – get this – come off and turn into little robots. What’s not to love? And the little robots (what are the heads) then can sit inside the big robots’ vehicle modes, and, like “drive” them and stuff. Although they had some plot gymnastics to perform to make sense of the fiction (quite why the heads had to be Nebulons and not just other Transformers I don’t know), but as a toy gimmick, they were fab. And that’s before you get to most-wanted Fortress Maximus, whose head turned into a robot whose head turned into a robot.

Pretenders (1988): man, I loved Pretenders, even if the concept outstripped the toys a lot of the time. Basically humanoid shells that hide Transformers, later iterations also allowed for animal shells, vehicle shells, even transforming shells; we got new versions of classic Transformers, and one of the all-time great villains in Thunderwing. All this despite the first lot of toys being bulky and awkward, and the whole idea of “disguising yourself as a thirty-foot human” being somewhat suspect in the first place.

Triple (and more!) Changers (1985): if a robot turning into a thing is cool, then turning into two things must be twice as cool, right? Right! Boggling the mind as to how this chunky figure could also be a car and a helicopter, Triple Changers were great, even if you ended up with a helicopter that really, really looked a lot like a car. Of course, they got bigger and better, with Six Changers, who turned into six different things that all looked a lot like each other.

Powermasters (1988): back to the “Masters” concept of little robots that interact with bigger robots (it’s such a shame Pretenders couldn’t have been “Disguise Masters” or something), the idea that the toys transformation – the big gimmick behind the whole range, remember – is unlocked by an “engine” robot is very cool, the smaller toy acting as a key. A tad clunkier than that, in real life, but still great fun, and of course it brought us one of the best toys of the eighties in Powermaster Optimus Prime.

Targetmasters (1987): robots turning into guns is quite cool, but for me the Targetmasters aren’t quite as successful as their other “Masters” siblings, probably because the guns aren’t quite that exciting to transform or play with. But the concept still rocks, and some of the toys were really good, and it was nice to see the Movie characters get folded into the line too.

Jumpstarters (1985): I loved the original Jumpstarters (Top Spin and Twintwist) because they were weird, with their sci-fi alien designs amidst a sea of Earth vehicles. But their gimmick was they transformed themselves. Pull ‘em back and they jump – literally – from vehicle to robot. Self-transforming Transformers are always cool, even if usually it means that their robot modes end up blocky and simple (Jumpstarters are the opposite, pretty cool robots with chunky and unreal vehicles). Also want to shout out other pull-back-and-go Transformers such as the Battlechargers (never had them, sadly) and the utterly, utterly fantastic Throttlebots. God, I love the Throttlebots. I had all six! How much did I rock.

Cities (1986): I guess now these guys are all called “Titans” aren’t they, and they have their own carved-out portion of the TF mythos. But back in the eighties, they were just big burly dudes, the biggest you could get; Transformers that turned into actual cities, playsets that the smaller Transformers could actually interact with. Metroplex was the OG city-bot, and we’d squint and pretend that he really was Autobot City from The Transformers: The Movie. Huge toys are always fun, of course, as are playsets for your other toys, so these ticket loads of boxes. Fortress Maximus, the later Autobot Headmaster base, was ginormous and never came out in the UK, giving him a mythic status few toys ever had; as I said above his head turned into a robot which had a head that turned into a robot, a sort of Babushka doll of robotic head-swapping. Shout-out too for any bot who had some kind of “base mode”, such as Powermaster Optimus Prime and his funky trailer.

Sparkabots/Firecons (1988): these were not necessarily the most fun toys to transform (the Sparkabots, anyway, I never had a Firecon), but their gimmick was cool – or rather hot. They breathed fire! Well, not really, of course; they sort of shot sparks, in what I thought was a slightly underwhelming fashion even as a seven-year-old. But having a Transformer that could, in some way, fire for real was a huge thrill. Also, Guzzle was always just legitimately cool.

Action Masters (1990): yep, I’m going there. What, did you think I’d have Micromasters on here?! Yeah, okay, the very concept of Transformers that don’t transform is inherently silly and counter-intuitive, but the toys themselves were cool, finally offering cartoon-accurate renditions of classic favourites, with nice articulation and fun vehicle playsets. There was definitely a sad sense of a brand in decline about them, but taken on their own, they were good, fun toys, full of character, and I’ve always thought they’d still be cool as a side-line to the main (actually transforming) toys.

I feel bad for slagging off Micromasters up there. They were good, I suppose, but their small fiddly nature and basic transformation just wasn’t as fun as some other toys. Plus there were so many, and they usually came in sets, so I never really had that same bond with individual characters that I got from other Transformers; they were probably the first toys I owned whose names I forgot. And they felt, even at the time, like such a response to Micro Machines that it was almost embarrassing. Action Masters were probably a response to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but at least, y’know, Soundwave didn’t come with nunchucks and a skateboard.

Anyway, I think we can all agree, Transformers are cool, and I should write about them even more.

[housedeleycourt]

Guilty or innocent : Leycourt edition

Asked someone to marry you? The pale indigo elf, sat across from the shadowy interviewer,hands clasped together, perched atop his knees. The question received a scoff first, “ An odd first question. Ah, but to humour you, no. I have not had the pleasure or strain of being in a committed relationship as of yet.”

Kissed one of your friends? A small inhale as the elf mulled over the question asked, “Actually I have not. Even platonically, guess I’m not the most affectionate person.”

Danced on a table in a bar/tavern? A sharp inhale between perfectly,porcelain, teeth “Ooh no, I am not the one for dancing atop tables, I tend to encourage others to do so. Let it be known though, I do enjoy dancing.”

Ever told a lie? A charming smile graced his generous lips, a knowing twinkle in those lavender orbs. “Why of course, sometimes it is all my job requires of me. Nobles can be most petty at times.”

Had feelings for someone you can’t have? “Romantic feelings, always. Purely sexual feelings, those too but often I can fulfill those. But romantic, yes a few times too many.” His answer was spoken with genuine honesty, giving the otherwise sketchy elf, a trustworthy aura.

Ever kissed someone of the same sex? “Yes, I love freely. I most enjoy the embrace of a woman, but every now and again you meet someone of the same sex or of no particular assigned gender, so irrevocably divine, you just have to steal a kiss.” A long-fingered hand, brushed aside the stark white curls that fell into Dhemetrius’ lavender eyes.

Kissed a picture? “Innocent. I am in need of pictures actually. I have received one from a dark haired beauty, who is now happily married and like the gentleman I am, I burned the image lest it fall into the wrong hands.” There was a twinge of self pride in those spoken words.

Slept until 5pm? “Naturally, used to be a regular occurrence, up until recently. In the last few months, I’ve seen many more sunrises than in all my two-thousand plus years. I am sincerely trying to be a good pupil for the Stillword Siblings. Do tell them this, won’t you?”

Worked at serving behind a bar or at a restaurant? The slender elf shook his head, “Innocent as can be.”

Stolen something? “Many things, not all of them for myself. A job is a job, no?”

Been fired from a job? “Innocent, as I am self-employed.” The way I which the elf spoke the words “self-employed” suggested that the term may not be used to describe his actions by others who were familiar with his line of work.

Done something you regret? The elf’s countenance grew reflective, the light in his eyes dulling as he became more pensive. “Yes, but I’ve kept this list to only a handful of things.”

Laughed until something you were drinking came out of your nose? “Er, not my nose but I have spat out a few good sips from uproarious laughter.”

Caught a snowflake on your tongue? The two more, light-hearted, questions did their part to bring the dark elf out of his stoic reveries. “Yes, as a small child, many moons ago.”

Sat on a roof top?  “Guilty. They offer an excellent vantage point.”

Kissed someone you shouldn’t have? Color crept into the elf’s cheeks, as he recalled fond memories. “Yes. But the lady herself allowed it, dare I say, I believe she enjoyed it. Sadly, I must add that we hit it off better that one night than any other we shared. I fear I fell under her enchantment and became a doddering, love-stricken puppy. Not the most becoming I know, and I’m sure I caused my own fall from her graces. But by Elune, she is such an ethereal, sensual, glamorous, gracious woman. I admire the man who does not lose face under her charm.”

Sang in the shower? The question received a nonplussed look “Innocent.”

Been pushed into a body of water with all your clothes on? Ivory brows furrowed, “No, I don’t believe I would take kindly to that and those who know me or of me certainly know this as well.”

Shaved your head? The man looked as though the interviewer had just said the most deplorable words ever uttered. “Never! How could one think of defiling such glorious curls, my hair is a blessing. To add on to that, I do not believe my features would allow me to so effortlessly pull off that look like my acquaintance Eres does.”

Made a lover cry? “Innocent. To the best of my knowledge. I would certainly hope not.”

Shot a gun? A quick nod, sent his white curls bouncing. “Oh most definitely, yet I do not prefer them myself, far too noisy. It’s hard to have the element of surprise with a clunky, loud, weapon such as a gun.”

Still loved someone you shouldn’t? “I can’t say that I believe I have known love, so innocent i am.”

Have/had a tattoo? With a flashy grin and a grandiose gesture to his entire being the elf replied. “I have several, from my neck down to my waistline. I would have had them continue further but you see, my leg hair tends to be much thicker than that of my arms, and so I fear any tattoos there would be mostly obscured.”

Liked someone, but will never tell who? “Mm, no I usually make my affections known, just as of yet they’ve been unreciprocated.”

Been too honest?  Lavender orbs rolled in minor annoyance “Contrary to what you may assume of me, yes I tell the truth far more than one might think.”

Ruined a surprise? “Innocent”

Been told that you’re beautiful by someone who totally meant what they said? The elf uncrossed his legs and shifted into a more comfortable position, his back straight against his chair, hands Reston on either side of him, his haughty gaze searching the shadows for the one issuing the questions. “Guilty, It is with great gratitude that I admit I receive many compliments.”

Stalked someone? Another scoff from the elf, “Pfft, innocent.”

Thoughts about murder? A strange, dark light entered those lavender eyes, the darkness seemed to embrace the shaldorei like a well-fitted suit. “For personal reasons, no.”

How about mass murder? “Innocent.”

Cheated on someone? “Innocent. All relationships I’ve had, however fleeting, have been open and transparent. No cheating has occurred.”

Gotten so angry that you cried? Pearlescent teeth flashed in the low lighting as the shaldorei bit his bottom lip before venturing a reply “Guilty.”

Tried to stay away from someone for their own good? “Innocent. Well, that may not be entirely true, there’s this silver-haired,goddess, who’s had my eye for quite some time, but her brooding,death knight,bodyguard is a strong deterrent, that and from what I’ve observed, she’s too glorious a flower for me to dare contaminate.”

Thoughts about suicide? “When I was younger yes I contemplated it, but then in a moment of clarity I realized my death, might’ve actually brought my father some joy. So, I decided against that course of action, insisting on living to spite him. Because of that decision, you have the exquisite pleasure of pestering me with all of these nonsensical inquiries. You’re welcome.”

Had a lover? “Yes, several. Guilty, go ahead restrain me. I won’t bite but a little.” A cheeky grin danced on that handsome face.

Gotten totally drunk during a holiday?  The elf laughed, “ I don’t need a holiday to drink, a stressful day, a good day spent with the company of friends, or really any day is a good day to drink. Or, that’s how it used to be for me.I really am putting in the effort to be a sober, upstanding member of society.” The last few words were spoken with genuine emotion, no evidence of sarcasm was detectable in the shaldorei’s tone.

Tagged by: No one! I just really wanted to do this for Dhemetrius!

Tagging: Nobody, only to not be a nuisance, I’ve seen this a lot here on tumblr so if you want to do it feel free to hijack it from me.

Mentions: Now I debated on doing this, to leave it more like a guessing game but, not to be misconstrued as rude or something worse I’m going to tag the people mentioned, @veari @eresildris @ames-stillword @aryadevstillword @seilune @ofchaoticenergies

[berniesrevolution]

On the list of America’s irrational fears, Palestine is near the top. This is no small feat for a “country” with no actual territory and a population about the size of South Carolina. Despite its lack of an air force, navy, or any real army to speak of, Palestine has long been considered an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed power with one of the most powerful militaries in the world and the full backing of the United States. Since there’s no military or economic justification for this threat, a more nebulous one had to be invented. Thus, Palestinians are depicted in the media as hot-blooded terrorists, driven by the twin passions of fanatical Islam and a seething hatred for Western culture. So engrained is this belief that the op-ed page of the New York Times can “grapple with questions of [Palestinian] rights” by advocating openly for apartheid, forced expulsion, or worse.

This worldview demands an Olympian feat of mental gymnastics. It can only be maintained so long as most Americans have no firsthand contact with Palestine or Palestinian people. Even the smallest act of cultural exchange is enough to make us start questioning the panic-laced myths we’ve been taught since birth.  

Of course, the best way to discover the truth about Palestine is to visit the country yourself, though most Americans don’t have the free time or financial resources to do so (this is not a coincidence). This means that those of us who are fortunate enough to visit have a responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard, without lapsing into pre-fabricated narratives, even “sympathetic” ones. We can’t fight untruth by telling untruths from the opposite perspective. What we can do, however, is report what we saw and heard in Palestine. We can try to provide a snapshot of daily life and let people come to their own conclusions.

With this in mind, here’s what I learned during a recent trip to the Holy Land…

The Palestinian doorman of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem is a large and friendly man who insists his name is Mike. My fiancée and I are skeptical, as we’d expected something a bit more Arabic. We ask him what his friends call him.

“Just Mike,” he says, and taps an L&M cigarette against the wooden desk. He’s sitting in a dark alcove with rough stone floors, nestled halfway up the staircase that leads from the fruit market to the Palm’s small arched doorway.  A pleasant, musty oldness floats in the air. You could imagine Indiana Jones staying here, if he’d lost tenure and gone broke for some reason. To Westerners like us, it seems too exotic to have a doorman named Mike.

Before we can ask him again, though, Mike pounces with a question of his own. “You’re from the States, right?” He speaks English with a thick accent and slow but almost flawless diction, an odd combination that is causing my fiancée some visible confusion, which seems amusing to Mike. I tell him that we’re from Minnesota, a small and boring place in the center-north of the USA. His grin gets bigger, which makes me self-conscious, so I also explain that Minnesota has no mountains or sea, and the winters are very cold.

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike. “I lived in El Paso for thirty years. Border cop, K9 unit. It was a nice place. Had a couple kids there.” Now it’s my turn to gawk, and I start to race through all the possible scams he might be trying to pull. Mike seems to guess what I’m thinking. “Really. I even learned some Spanish.” He scrunches his brow in mock concentration and clamps a hairy hand over his forehead. “Hola. ¿Como estás?Una cerveza, por favor.”  He opens his eyes and laughs. “Welcome to Jerusalem, guys. Damascus Gate is that way. Enjoy.”

I don’t know why I’m so surprised he knows a handful of Taco Bellisms, or why this convinces me of his honesty. However, now it’s impossible to walk away. We have too many questions. The first one: Why’d he return to Jerusalem? Mike looks down at his cigarette, smoldering into a fine grey tail of ash. He flicks it against a stone and a bright red ember blazes to life.

“This is my home. I had to.”

Later, as we sip sweet Turkish coffee outside a rug shop in the Old City, it occurs to me that Mike was the first Palestinian person I’d ever spoken with face-to-face. His life story seemed unusual, but I have no idea what’s “usual” when it comes to Palestinian lives. I’d never thought about them before, to be honest. The world has an infinite number of stories, and the days are not as long as I’d like. It’s not like I’d chosen to ignore Palestine. I just hadn’t chosen to be interested in it.

Which was odd, because Palestine has been all over the news since I was a kid. There isn’t a single specific story I recall, just a murky soup of words and phrases, like “fragile peace talks” and “two-state solution” and “violent demonstrations.” They all swirl together, settling under the stock image of a bombed-out warzone as the headlines mumbled something about Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I remember reading about rockets and settlements, refugees and suicide bombers, non-binding resolutions and vetoed Security Council decisions. Not a single detail had stuck. I could feign awareness of some important-sounding events—the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Summit—but I couldn’t say what decade they happened, or who was involved, or what was decided.

For years, I’d been under the impression that I knew enough about Palestine to be uninterested in what was happening there. This isn’t to say I felt any particular animosity toward the Palestinians. But it’s impossible to fight for every cause, no matter how righteous, if only for reasons of time. Every minute you spend feeding the hungry is a minute you’re not visiting the sick. Life is a zero sum game more often than we’d like to believe.

As we headed toward the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion, I began to feel uneasy. The Israeli police (indistinguishable from soldiers except for the patches on their uniforms) who stood guard at every corner still smiled at us, and they were still apologetic when they forbade us from walking down streets that were “for Muslims only, unfortunately.” Their English was excellent. Many of them were women. They were young and diverse and photogenic, a recruiter’s dream team. But all I could see were their bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Above every ancient stone arch bristled a nest of surveillance cameras. Only a few hours ago, I’d been able to block all that from my sight, leaving me free to enjoy the giddy sensation of strolling through the holiest city on earth.

The road ended at the Lion’s Gate. Just as we approached it, a battered Toyota came rattling through. It screeched to a halt and a squad of Israeli police surrounded the car. All four doors opened and out stepped a Palestinian family. The driver was a young man in his 20s, with short black hair cut in the style of Ronaldo, the famous Real Madrid footballer. When the police told him to turn around and face the wall, he did so without a word. It was obvious this was a daily ritual. The policeman who frisked him looked as bored as it’s possible to look when patting down another man’s genitals. Soon it was over, and the family got back in their car. One of the policemen pulled out his phone and started texting.

If I’d made a video of the search (which I didn’t) and showed it to you with the volume off, you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. The Israeli police didn’t hurt the man, and he barely made eye contact with them. There were no outrageous racial slurs or savage beatings. The only thing you’d see is a group of people in camouflage battle gear standing around a small white sedan, with a middle-aged woman and a couple of young girls off to the right. Unless you have hawk-like eyesight and an exceptional knowledge of obscure uniform insignias, I doubt you’d be able to tell “which side” any of the participants might be on. All you could say for sure is that the police wanted to search the family’s bodies and belongings, and the family looked very unhappy about it, but the police had guns and cameras, and that settled things. It’s interesting what conclusions different people might draw from a scene like that.

Later that night, after we get back to the Palm, I tell Mike about what we saw. He asks what we’d thought. “It was fucked up,” we say.

Mike sighs. “You should see Bethlehem.”    

Jerusalem is so close to Bethlehem that you barely have time to wonder why all the billboards that advertise luxury condos use English instead of Arabic as the second language before you arrive at the wall.

The wall is the most hideous structure I’ve ever seen. It’s a huge, groaning monument to death. Tall grey rectangles bite into the earth like iron teeth, horribly bare, cold, sterile, a towering monstrosity. The wall makes the air taste like poison.

We’re in the car of Mike’s cousin Harun, who is Palestinian, but his car has Israeli plates so we aren’t searched at the checkpoint. We inch past the concrete barriers and armored trucks. Harun holds his identity pass out the window, a soldier waves us through, and a few seconds later we’re in Bethlehem, a short drive from where Jesus Christ was born. It feels like entering prison. I don’t say prison in the sense of an ugly and depressing place you’d prefer not to visit. I say prison in the literal sense: a fortified enclosure where human beings are kept against their will by heavily armed guards who will shoot them if they try to leave. This is what modern life is like in Bethlehem, birthplace of our Lord and Savior.

Looking at the wall from the Israeli side breaks your heart because of its naked ugliness. On the Palestinian side, the unending slabs of concrete have been decorated with slogans, signs, and graffiti, which break your heart for different reasons. One of the hardest parts is reading the sumud series. These are short stories written on plain white posters, plastered to the wall about 10 feet up. Each story comes from a Palestinian woman or girl, and most are written in English, because the only people who read these stories are tourists.

One in particular catches my eye, by a woman named Antoinette:

All my life was in Jerusalem! I was there daily: I worked there at a school as a volunteer and all my friends live there. I used to belong to the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and was a volunteer there. I arranged the flowers and was active with the other women. I rented a flat but I was not allowed to stay because I do not have a Jerusalem ID card. Now I cannot go to Jerusalem: the wall separates me from my church, from my life. We are imprisoned here in Bethlehem. All my relationships with Jerusalem are dead. I am a dying woman.

The flowers are what gets me, because my mother also arranges flowers at church. Hers is an Eastern Orthodox congregation in Minneapolis, about 20 minutes by car from my childhood home. That’s about the same distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, although there aren’t any military checkpoints or armored cars patrolling the Minnesotan highways. Until today, I would’ve been unable to imagine what that would even look like. The situation here is so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in real life that all I can think is, “it’s like a bad war movie.” For the Palestinian people who’ve been living under an increasingly brutal military occupation for the last 70 years, an entire lifetime, I can’t begin to guess at the depths of their helpless anger. What did Antoinette think, the first time the soldiers refused to let her pass? What did she say? What would my mother say? There wouldn’t be a goddamned thing she could do, or I could do, or my father or my sisters, or anyone else. We’d all just have to live with it, the soldiers groping us, beating us, mocking us. No wonder Antoinette gave up hope. In her place, would I be any different? We walk in silence for a long time.

We end up in a refugee camp called Aida, where more than 6,000 people live in an area roughly the size of a Super Target. Here, the air is literally poison. Israeli soldiers have fired so much tear gas into the tiny area that 100 percent of residents now suffer from its effects. If they were using the tear gas against, say, ISIS soldiers instead of Palestinian civilians, this would be a war crime, since “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” are banned by the Geneva Protocol. However, such practices are deemed to be acceptable in peacetime, since there’s no chance an unarmed civilian population would be able to retaliate with toxic agents of their own. Without the threat of escalation, chemical warfare is just crowd control.

Before we continue, there are three things you should know about Aida. The first is that there’s no clear dividing line between Aida and Bethlehem, so an unwary pedestrian can easily wander into the refugee camp without realizing it. The second thing is that it doesn’t look like a refugee camp, at least if you’re expecting a refugee camp to be full of emergency trailers, flimsy tents, and flaming barrels of trash. The third thing is that the kids who live there have terrible taste in soccer teams.

We meet the first group as soon as we enter the camp. There are five of them, all teenage boys. One of them is wearing a knockoff Yankees hat. They’re staring at us, and at once I’m very aware of my camera bag’s bulkiness and the blondeness of my fiancée’s hair. A loudspeaker crackles with the cry of the muzzein, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply we Americans have been conditioned to associate the Arabic language with violence and death. The boys exchange a quick burst of words, raising my blood pressure even higher, and cross the street toward us.

“Hello…  what’s your name?” The kid who speaks first is tall and stocky, wearing the same black track jacket and blue jeans favored by 95 percent of the world’s male adolescents. He’s also sporting the Ronaldo haircut, as are several of his friends. Two of the kids start to pull out cigarettes, so I pull out my cigarettes faster and offer the pack to them. Is this a bad, irresponsible thing to do? Sure, and if you’re worried about the long-term health of these kids’ lungs, you should call the American manufacturers who supply Israel with the chemical weapons that are used to poison the air they breathe every day.

I tell the kid my name is Nick, and he shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Shadi.” He’s carrying a rolled-up book, as are his friends, so I ask if he’s going to school. “Yeah bro, exams. We have three this week.” His friends laugh, and then engage in a quick tussle for the right of explaining that they’re heading to their math exam now, which is a boring and difficult subject, and I agree that it is, although at least you never have to use most of it after you finish school, a sentiment that earns me daps from Shadi and his friends, and we stand there giggling and smoking on the street corner of the refugee camp, though for a few moments we could be anywhere in the world.

My fiancée and I, both teachers by trade, start to pepper the kids with questions. Shadi says that he has one year left at the nearby high school, which is run by the UN refugee agency that was just stripped of half its funding by Trump. After he finishes, he plans to study at Bethlehem University. The other guys nod with approval, and speak of similar hopes. I ask them who their favorite footballer is, and they all say Ronaldo, at which I spit in disbelief, because everyone knows that Ronaldo sucks and Messi is much better, visca el Barça! Shadi and his friends break into huge grins, since few elements of brotherhood are more universal than talking shit about sports. Seconds later we’re howling with laughter as Shadi’s buddy makes insulting pantomimes about Messi’s diminutive size. A small part of my brain is loudly and repeatedly insisting that everything about this moment of life is batshit lunacy, that there’s no reason why I should be standing in a Palestinian refugee camp, yards away from buildings my country helped bomb into rubble, with my pretty fiancée and expensive camera, talking in English slang with a group of boys whose lungs are scarred with chemicals made in the USA, the exact kind of reckless young ruffians whose slingshots and stones are such a terrifying threat to the fearsome Israeli military, and the craziest thing of all is that here in the refugee camp, surrounded by derelict cars and rusty barbed wire and 6,000 displaced Palestinians,  we are not in danger, at least not from whom you’d think. Here, in the refugee camp, we can joke around with people who speak our language and know our cultural references and actively seek to help us navigate their neighborhood. None of this is to say that Aida is a safe, comfortable, or morally defensible place to put human beings, but only that the people who live there treated us with such overwhelming kindness and decency that I have never been more ashamed at what my country does in my name. I tell Shadi and his friends to take the rest of my cigarettes, but they smile and decline.

“We, uh, have to go now,” says Shadi, as his friends start to walk up the street. “Do you have Facebook?” We do, because everyone does, and as we exchange information, I wish him good luck on his math exam. “No way, bro, I suck at math,” he says. We both laugh, and I pat him on the back.

“Fuck math. But hey, you’re gonna do great, Shadi.”

“Thanks bro. Fuck math.”

I hope he gets every question correct on his exam. I hope he goes to university and wins a scholarship to Oxford. I hope he invents some insanely popular widget and it makes him a billion dollars and he never has to breathe tear gas again.

We continue walking through Aida camp. The buildings are square, ugly, and drab, but the walls are decorated with colorful paintings of fish and butterflies and meadows (along with a somewhat darker array of scenes from the Israeli military occupation). We meet a group of cousins, aged four to 10, all girls, who ask if we can speak English. When we offer them a bag of candy, they take one piece each, and run away yelping when a man limps out the front door of their house. “Thank you,” he says, his face a mask of grave civility. Cars, all bearing green-and-white Palestinian plates instead of the blue-and-yellow Israeli ones, slow down so their drivers can shout “Hello!” We meet another group of kids, boys this time, who grab fistfuls of candy and make playful attempts to unfasten my wristwatch. We make a hasty retreat from this group. The streets are scorched in spots where tear gas canisters exploded.  Narrow strips of pockmarked pavement lead us down steep hills and into winding alleys, and soon we’re lost.

This is how we meet Ahmed. He’s a tall man, about 40 years old, with a small black mustache and arms as thin as a stork’s legs. A yellow sofa leans against the concrete wall of the three-storey apartment building where he lives. Ahmed is sitting there with an elderly couple. He asks if we’d like a cup of tea, and although we’ve been warned about the old “come inside for a cup of tea” scam, we accept his offer. The elderly couple greets us in Arabic, and I try not to notice the large plastic bag of orange liquid peeking out from beneath the old man’s shirt.

While we climb the stairs to Ahmed’s apartment, he tells us that the old people are his parents. “They live here,” he says, pointing to the door on the first floor, “because they don’t walk very good. My mother has problems with her legs, my father is sick from the water.” He traces the pipes with his finger, and we see they’re coated in a thick reddish crust. “Here is the home of my big son,” he says when we reach the second floor. “He has a new baby.” We congratulate him on becoming a grandfather. “And I have a new baby, too! Come, I show you!” One more flight of stairs, and we arrive at Ahmed’s apartment.

It looks remarkably similar to a hundred other apartments we’ve visited. Framed photos of various family members hang on the living room walls, which are painted the same not-quite-white as most living room walls. There’s a beautiful red rug and a small TV. A woman is sitting on the sofa, nursing a baby as she folds socks. “My wife,” says Ahmed.

She speaks a little English too, and says that her name is Nada. She has a pale round face and long black hair. Her eyes are soft, kind, and completely exhausted. Yet if she’s annoyed or embarrassed by our presence, she doesn’t show it. She just hands the baby to Ahmed and goes to make the tea.

“I’m sorry for my house,” says Ahmed, cradling his son like a loaf of bread with legs. “We try to be clean, but…” There’s not so much as a slipper out of place, but I know what he means. “We rent this flat. And my son, and my parents. All rent. Before we have a farm, animals, olive trees, but now, we rent.” I ask about his job. He smiles and shakes his head. “I want a job,” he says, “I love to work. With my hands, with my mind. I love to work. But here, haven’t jobs.” For a second he looks like he’s going to continue this line of thinking, but he stops himself. “I help my wife, that is my job.” Ahmed laughs and passes his baby to my fiancée. “And he, he helps in the home?” She demurs while I protest in mock indignation. I do the dishes every morning before she even wakes up! Still laughing, Ahmed rubs his shins, and again it’s easy to forget we’re sitting in a refugee camp in Jesus’ hometown.

Then the baby wheezes. It’s a dry, scratchy wheeze. Ahmed squirms in his seat, looking embarrassed. The baby begins to cough. My fiancée rubs his back as the coughing turns wet and violent.  Machine gun explosions blast from his tiny lungs. As an asthmatic, I recognize the sound of serious sickness. The baby writhes in my fiancée’s lap, struggling to breathe. He’s gasping and it’s getting worse fast. At moments like these, personal experience tells me that a nebulizer can be the difference between life and death. I don’t insult Ahmed by asking if he has one, because it’s clear that he doesn’t. All I can do is rub the boy’s chest with my finger, a stupid and useless massage. He kicks and stretches as if trying to wiggle away from the unseen demon that’s strangling him.

Nada hurries back with the tea. “I’m sorry,” she says, picking up the baby. She coos to him in Arabic and rubs his back, both of which are comforting but neither of which can relax the inflamed tissues of her infant’s lungs. “My baby…” Unable to find the words in English, she looks to her husband.

Ahmed rubs his cheek. “When she is pregnant, one night the soldiers come. They say the children throw stones. They always throw stones. So the soldiers shoot gas in all the houses. In the windows, over there.” His voice gets quieter. “And she is very sick. When the baby is born, he is sick too.” I ask him if it’s possible to find medicine. “Sometimes yes,” says Ahmed, “but very, very expensive.” For the first time, there’s a note of frustration in his voice. “Everything is expensive here. You see this,” and he picks up a pack of diapers, “it cost me thirty shekels. 10 dollars, almost. And the baby needs so many things. It is impossible to buy. I haven’t money for meat, how can I buy medicine?” He points to a plastic bag with four small pitas. “This is our food. One bread for my two sons, and two breads for my wife. She must make milk for our baby.” When I ask him what he eats, he holds up his cup of tea.

Somehow Nada has soothed the baby out of danger. His breathing is almost normal again, just a quiet raspy crackle. She’s still staring at him, her big brown eyes wide with worry. I don’t know how many times she’s done this before. I don’t know how many times are left before her luck runs out. 

Somehow she’s keeping her baby alive with nothing but the sheer force of her love. I ask to use the toilet so I don’t have to cry in front of her.

(Continue Reading)

[schraubd]

David's Personal Top Ten Video Games

This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. It is a personal list, reflecting the games that have stuck with me the most over the years. I'm not enough of a gamer to claim it is anything comprehensive, and it has a strong bias to the sorts of genres that I like. Nonetheless, I'd stack these games against any that have been made in my lifetime. Anyway, without further adieu ....

Honorable Mentions:

Portal 2: How can a game with virtually no “dialogue” (if that means conversations between two characters) have some of the best spoken lines in all video game history? I have both the original and a capella versions of the Turret Opera on my iTunes (yes, I have “Still Alive” as well).

Railroad Tycoon II: A brilliant simulator that makes you actually feel like a turn-of-the-century robber baron (by far, the game is most fun to play when set in the late 19th century). If every man goes through his “trains!” phase, this was mine. As in real life, I am not good at playing the stock market.

Horizon: Zero Dawn: Robot dinosaurs! Incredibly, Horizon: Zero Dawn takes a core concept that sounds like word association from an over-caffeinated twelve-year boy and makes an entirely serious game about it—and it works. It works so well, in fact, that I loved it despite the fact that the plot and entire world-building background centers around my single greatest phobia (no, not that—being alive for the extinction of humanity).

10. Sid Meier’s Gettysburg: I find it odd that very few games have sought to replicate Gettysburg’s spin on an RTS—focusing combat around regiments rather than individual units and prioritizing morale over raw numbers. But the thing I like best about Gettysburg—and sadly it’s mostly unique too—is in how it concentrates on controlling territory (and terrain). Many RTS games, for me, might as well have a blank screen over 80% of the map between my base and my opponent’s base. You build up your force, and then try to swarm your opponent before he or she swarms you. But in Gettysburg, the goal of missions is not “wipe out your opposition”. It’s to capture and hold a ridge, or dig in and hold an exposed farmhouse.

My only critiques are that I want this game to be bigger. I want it to encompass dozens of map spanning the entirety of the Civil War. I want to be able memorize even more obscure Union and Confederate generals and wonder if they really were “mediocre” or if that was just a game balance decision. The random battle generator is okay, but this game screams for user-created expansions which I’ve never been able to find.

9. Crimson Skies: A pulpy fun flight simulator taking place in an alternate history 1930s where America has fractured and Zeppelin travel rules the day. The game doesn’t hesitate to lean into its concept (phrases like “broad” and “floozy” abound), and it does a great job world-building in a relatively short period of time. Somehow, I could meet an enemy “ace” for the first time in the middle of a mission and yet still feel like we had a history of epic dogfights together of which this was only the latest. Meanwhile, each of the locations the game takes you to (Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, Hollywood, the Rocky Mountains, and New York City) are a blast and a half.

A sequel, High Road to Revenge, was released on Xbox and leaned a little too hard into the arcade-y elements (power-ups, automatic evasive maneuvers with the press of a button, and so on). But the original PC game was just right—planes flew exactly like how someone who knows nothing about planes thinks planes fly, which is just perfect. You felt like an ace pilot because of your skill (even though behind the hood the game is really holding your hand). Piloting a gyrocopter through half-built New York City skyscrapers, or a prototype single-engine through the Hollywood "O", is great. Doing it to evade local security, then doing a loop and turning both guns on them -- well, that's the cat's meow.

8. Mass Effect (Trilogy and Andromeda): As far as I’m concerned, the definitive space opera (even muscling out Halo). Fabulous voice acting (listening to Martin Sheen play evil Jed Bartlett is one of the great joys of my life) and memorable plot lines pair with a morality system that at least inches away from “basically decent person or utter asshole.” The universe feels genuinely alive, like there’s an ecosystem and civilization that you’re very much apart, but also moves in your absence.

I can’t really separate out the core trilogy games from one another (each sequel seemed to simultaneously step slightly forward and back), which is not I think an uncommon position. What may be more uncommon is that I think Andromeda stands right in there with the core series. Yes, it was disappointing that it took us to a brand new galaxy and only gave us two new species (while eliminating many of the more backgrounded Milky Way aliens). But I was much more disappointed that there will be no DLC or sequels to continue the story and tie up loose ends.

7. N and N++: There can’t be any serious controversy that N is the greatest Flash game ever made. While Flash demands simplicity, N is not so much simple as it is elegant. It is the perfect balance of speed and control, thoughtfulness and twitch-trigger reflexes, serene relaxation and butt-clenching tension. Once you master the floaty physics and the unique enemy styles, you will truly feel like a ninja—stripped to its core essence and deprived of all the usual but unnecessary bells and whistles. A virtually unlimited supply of levels guarantees you endless gameplay.

And so it is unsurprising that N was one of the rare flash games that made a successful jump to a full true game (in the form of N++), one that has a strong claim on being the greatest platformer ever made. The developers were wise not to disturb the basic formula: run, jump, and slide around a level, dodge obstacles and traps that will kill you instantly, reach the exit. Repeat ad infinitum. But N++ adds just a splash of additional flavors and spices into the mix. A perfect trip-trance soundtrack that sets the mood perfectly (and may single-handedly stave off keyboard-smashing frustration). A few new enemy types that deepen the game without ruining its austere grace. And perhaps most importantly, it adds a bunch of extra, semi-secret challenges (which can be used to unlock still more levels) waiting for the very best-of-best players.

Of all the games on this list, I might be in absolute terms “best” at N++ (there are a non-trivial number of levels in the game where I have a top 100 or even top 10 score on the global leaderboards). And yet there is not the slightest chance that I will ever perfect this game, or even come close to it. Nor is there any chance I will become permanently sick of it. A simple concept, executed brilliantly. The perfect N++ level is also the perfect description of the game.

6. Final Fantasy IX: The question was never whether a Final Fantasy game would make this list, only which one. I’ve long had a soft-spot for FFIX, which I feel is often overlooked inside the series (in part because even on release it seemed players were already looking ahead to the Playstation 2). Yet it’s hard to find fault in Final Fantasy IX as an emblem of a straight-forward JRPG. It has a moving story, fun gameplay, beautiful music, loads of quests to do and places to explore, a fabulous supporting cast (Vivi might be my favorite Final Fantasy character ever written), and a lead character you don’t want to punch (*cough* Final Fantasy X).

Final Fantasy IX is often described as “nostalgic”, and despite the fact that it was only the second game in the series I had ever played, I got that feeling instantly. Try listening to the soundtrack for “Frontier Village Dali” without feeling a little melancholic. You don’t even have to have played. But I recommend that you do.

For the record, my ranking of Final Fantasy games that I’ve played goes: IX, VII, XII, XV, X, XIII.

5. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood: One difficulty in judging games within a series is how to compare an earlier game which still had some rough edges but represented a quantum leap forward versus a later game which didn’t do anything super-novel but tweaked the formula to perfection. That, in a nutshell, is the difference between Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. Now, for me, this is an easy call for idiosyncratic reasons—I played AC:B before AC II, and so I experienced the former as both the perfected model and the quantum leap forward as compared to the original game. But I respect that for those who played the series in order, this is a harder call.

What should be easy for anyone is to agree that together, Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood represented the AC series reaching its full potential. Ezio continues to be the best protagonist the series has seen to date. Renaissance Italy likewise is the ideal setting for both AC’s vertical and horizontal platforming elements and its shadowy-conspiracy/secret-history plotline. As a franchise, Assassin’s Creed really launched the parkour/open-world exploration genre, and Brotherhood was the first game where every single element of what that genre could be came together. Other more recent games have been tons of fun (Black Flag and Syndicate are I think highlights), but these two games are the reason this series is so iconic.

4. Might and Magic VI: The same problem posed by AC2 versus Brotherhood emerges with Might and Magic VI and VII—except here, I did play them in order. Like the previous entry, I do think that VII ultimately improves upon the formula set out in Might and Magic VI. It’s more versatile, has more replay value, a touch more balanced (and that’s not getting into ArcoMage) … all in all, probably a better technical game.

But Might and Magic VI is for me iconic—it may well be the first RPG I’ve ever truly loved (and given the way this list is stacked in that direction, that’s saying a lot). Virtually all the things that characterize what I love in games today, it had in at least skeletal form. Open world exploration? Check: It was the first game where I felt like I was a true pathfinder—meticulously crawling over every corner of the map to find each obscure bandit’s cave and goblin fortress. To this day I still have the lay of the land in Enroth basically memorized. Overly detailed worldbuilding text to read? Absolutely: my obsessive-streak came out in reading every single artifact description, conversational option, and quest backgrounder (it is canon that Enroth, and the entire planet it resides upon, was blown up in a magical explosion—a fact I’m still resentful towards 3DO for long after it disappeared into bankruptcy). Slight genre-bending? The splash of Sci-Fi onto the fantasy setting was delightful to discover for someone who had never played any of the prior entries in the series. And some of the music—well, the White Cap theme is a thing of beauty, and on my computer “Adagio in G Minor for Strings and Organ” is still listed as “Church Dungeon Music.”

3. Heroes of Might and Magic III: If comparing earlier, more revolutionary games against newer more polished ones presents a problem in the Assassin’s Creed and Might and Magic series, it presents no trouble at all in Heroes of Might & Magic. That’s because the third installation in the series both represented a huge jump forward from what came before and is unquestionably the best entry in the overall sequence.

Sure, some of the expansions are a bit goofy, but they still work—sharpshooters and enchanters are massively overpowered, but they’re generally used in missions that would otherwise be impossible. But the main campaign is fabulous—a surprisingly intricate and interwoven plot that bridges Might and Magic VI and VII compliments outstanding strategy gameplay. And that doesn’t even get into the acre of standalone maps provided, plus countless more available on the web thanks to a map editor so intuitive, even I can use it (I’m terrible with map editors).

As a result of all of this, Heroes III is maybe the only game on this list that can compete with N++ regarding infinite replayability. This is fortunate, because—given the fact that Heroes III was a full-budget release and was not supposed to be “simple”—it ages incredibly well. Even the graphics hold up (no need for that remastered remake—which doesn’t even include the expansions!).

2. Witcher III: As you may have noticed, this list has a strong bias towards RPGs. My preference is toward “Western” RPGs (which have a go-anywhere/do-anything exploration mentality) compared to “Japanese” RPGs (which are more linear and story-driven), but Witcher III does an incredible job of synthesizing the best of both. It has a huge open world to explore, one that feels alive and dynamic—but there is also an incredibly rich story filled with deep, well-written characters (of which Geralt—the player character—is but one).

Gameplay-wise, Witcher III really hits the perfect balance. I simultaneously felt like the biggest bad-ass in the room, but also like a single slip in concentration or bit of overconfidence and my corpse would unceremoniously end up at the bottom of whatever cave I was in. But Witcher III particularly stands out in how it subverts certain common RPG tropes. You are a hero, but you’re not particularly well-liked. You’re a powerful warrior, but you’re still ultimately treated as a pawn in larger political machinations. Your interventions do not always save the day, and sometimes don’t even make things better. If a mission starts with a villager worrying that their beloved has gone missing, nine times out of ten that person has been devoured by a monster well before you ever get there. While many games claim to place the hero in difficult moral dilemmas, Witcher III is a rare case of following through (some games might give you the choice to let a trio of witches eat a group of kids whom you recently played hide-and-seek with, but few make it so that might actually be the more moral of the options in front of you). There’s even a quest where you help a knight rescue a lady in distress from a curse, then lecture him that he’s not entitled to her romantic attention as a reward (talk about a timely intervention in the video game genre!). Over and over again, the game reinforces the message that being really powerful and doing “the right thing” isn’t enough to fix a fundamentally broken system.

Most impressive is the emotional impact that Witcher III dishes out. Sometimes this is a result of rich character development that pays off over the course of the entire game (as in “The Last Wish” quest). But sometimes it shows up in even relatively minor sidequests—the epilogue of the “Black Pearl” quest was one of the more brutal emotional gut-punches I’ve experienced in a video game. Ultimately, this was a game where one always felt like each character was a person—they were imperfect, they had their own interests, hopes, dreams, strengths and foibles, and while you were a little better with a sword and gifted with some preternatural abilities, you were still only one player in a much bigger narrative. As a result, Witcher III might well be, in my estimation, the perfect RPG.

Oh, and Gwent is ludicrously addictive. Let’s not forget that.

1. TIE Fighter: I don’t think this list has a particularly “modern” bias. Still, there’s something impressive about the number one game on this list also being the oldest by some measure. TIE Fighter originally came out in 1994, and the definitive Collector’s Edition was released in 1995. It is, to this day, one of the best games ever made. And that’s not a retrospective assessment. Star Wars: Tie Fighter holds up even played right now.

For starters, it is one of the few elements of the Star Wars universe to get the Empire right. I’m not saying that the Empire is the real protagonist of the series. I am saying that they wouldn’t view themselves as evil—as much as naming spacecraft “Executor” and “Death Star” might suggest otherwise. TIE Fighter is quite self-assured in presenting you as being a force for law and order in the galaxy, battling not just seditious rebels but pirates, smugglers, and other anarchic forces that threaten to tear civilized life apart.

Let’s start with something often overlooked in TIE Fighter: the music. It’s probably the only context that the phrase “kick-ass MIDI soundtrack” makes sense. But that’s not even the half of it. The iMuse system dynamically and seamlessly arranges the musical cues to reflect what’s going on around you in the mission—you can literally follow important mission updates (e.g., a wingman being shot down, or reinforcements arriving) simply by the way the melody shifts. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered anything quite like it since. To this day, the number that accompanies an incoming enemy capital ship fills me with exhilarated dread.

Gameplay-wise, TIE Fighter is almost shockingly rich. The core mission requirements are challenging, but by no means out of reach. But embedded in each level are a series of secondary and secret bonus objectives. These unlock a parallel plot of the Emperor’s Secret Order—but always present a brutal risk/reward calculus. That’s not unrelated to the fact that you’re often flying, well, TIE fighters (not noted for their durability)—but the challenge extends well beyond physical peril. TIE Fighter actually gives you an “invincibility” option if you want it, and yet even with it on some of the later missions and bonus objectives will strain every piloting skill you’ve ever developed.

Most importantly, the secret objectives usually are more involved than “blow up everything in sight.” They reward initiative and exploration. Maybe your primary mission objective is to destroy a rebel space station. But just before it goes down, you spot an escape shuttle fleeing the station. Take it out? Maybe—but maybe the occupants are VIPs best taken alive. So you switch to ion cannons and disable it for capture. Yet that extra time you just spent has given the rebels enough breathing room to summon reinforcements—now an enemy cruiser is bearing down on you. Take out its missile launchers and clear path for bombers while praying that your own Star Destroyer will arrive soon to back you up. All on the fly. All while dogfighting starfighters, dodging mines, giving your wingmen orders … it’s insanely, beautifully chaotic.

Did I mention this is all happening in 1995? 90% of games released today don’t have that kind of depth or spontaneity. In terms of playability, replayability, and just plain fun, TIE Fighter stands alone, and unchallenged.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2HbDTEl

[whovian223]

October was SHUX month.

SHUX is a 3-day boardgame convention in Vancouver that was simply phenomenal. I had so much fun, and would have had even more fun if I hadn’t felt so terrible.

Maybe next year!

You know what conventions mean, right?

No, not being told by multiple people that I need to take a shower.

That means a bunch of new to me games!

The Cult of the New to Me was very excited to hear I would be attending this convention. They wanted to see all of the new stuff that I would be talking about when I came back.

They also appear to be a bunch of lazy gits, because while they get mad at me for playing too many *new* games (not just new to me, but games that just came out), they never appear to actually play any “new to them” games themselves. I’m sensing some kind of scam here.

Are they just here for the free cookies?

Anyway, prepare for a *really* long post. There are ten games on this list. Usually, I go into a bit more of an explanation of how to play, but that’s a bit abbreviated this time.

Leo Tolstoy ain’t writing this blog.

So without further adieu (my adieu got covered in vegetables and thus I had to throw it away anyway), let’s get started!

Point Salad (2019 – AEG) – 1 play

Designers: Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich

Artist: Dylan Mangini (A friend of the show!)

Players: 2-6

Let’s start off this monster post with an easy one.

I’ve heard so many great things about the crunchy little set collection game called Point Salad.

Of course, when I say “crunchy,” I mean because it has so many vegetables in it, not because it’s a brain-burner at all.

Let me tell you right now, you won’t be testing your brain much.

But that’s not the point! It’s salad! There’s nothing wrong with that being light.

You have a deck of double-sided cards. One side is point-scoring and the other side is a delicious…delicious…Ack! I can’t say it!

It’s a vegetable, ok? It’s a vegetable card.

Some cards are removed depending on player count, though a 6-player game uses all of them.

This isn’t the way the cards are put out for choosing, but it does show you both sides of the cards.

The deck is divided into three roughly equal piles, with their scoring side up.

Then turn over two of each pile so that you have a 2×3 grid.

On your turn, you can either choose one of the scoring cards or you can choose two veggies from the market. You can also flip one of your previously-taken scoring cards over to its veggie side.

Why would you do that?

Maybe you have some veggies that are giving you too many negative points? Many of the scoring cards give you (for example) 3 points for each carrot but -2 points for each onion.

You refill the veggie market after your turn, and play goes around the table until all of the cards are drafted.

When you’re done, you’ll have a tableau like this.

A winning tableau! With the tie-breaker, of course… (poker chips not included with the game but are very valuable for scoring)

Total up the value of all of your point cards, and whoever has the most points is the winner!

What a fabulous little game. It’s quick (maybe 10-15 minutes?), it’s colourful, it won’t tax your brain but there are some decisions to make which is nice.

The artwork is amazing (yay, Dylan!).

I need to track down a copy of this so I can play it whenever I want.

This is a wonderful game.

5×5 City (2018 – Okazu Brand) – 1 play

Designer: Hisashi Hayashi

Artist: Ryo Nyamo

Players: 1-4

Another relatively easy one to describe!

Believe me, it gets worse (for me, I mean…for you, it should get better!)

5×5 City is a tile-laying game where you are building a…well, a city on a 5×5 grid.

Funny how that works.

Hopefully those numbers don’t show up on the streets!

In the game, you have a Building Plan that you’re going to be drawing tiles to fill out.

Each number will correspond to a Building Plot card that is drawn.

Rather generic.

For each Plot card when it’s drawn, you will then lay out the number of tiles shown on that Building Plan for that Plot number (so two tiles for a “9” and three tiles for a “2”, for example).

Then, in turn order, you’ll draft a set of tiles to put in your city in the area denoted by the Plot number (no putting a useless tile in the corner unless that’s where the Plot number told you to go!)

You can flip a tile over to make a park if you wish, which may give you some benefit or just avoid a bad placement.

What determines where you want to put things?

The Building cards that are on display. These will give you the points scoring for the game.

These are only 4 of the 10 cards, all of which are used (though which side is up to you)

These are 2-sided and either side can be used. The “A” side is recommended for new players.

At the end of the game, you will have a full city on your 5×5 card. You’ll score it based on the Building cards, and whoever has the most points is the winner!

We don’t need no stinkin’ houses in our city!

This was also a fun little tile-laying game, but didn’t dazzle me like Point Salad did. I did enjoy my time with it, but I’m not sure I’m a city-building kinda guy.

I’m more into city destruction.

The art and components are also kind of weird.

I almost thought I was playing a prototype.

It’s a quick game (took us 30 minutes), though, and definitely a good filler to warm you up for the big guns coming later in the day (or in the post!)

Explorers of the North Sea (2016 – Garphill Games/Renegade Game Studios) – 1 play

Designer: Shem Phillips

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

Surprisingly enough, while Raiders of the North Sea is in my Top 15 games played of all time, I have never played the other North Sea games.

SHUX19 gave me a chance to rectify at least one of those holes in my experience, with Explorers of the North Sea sitting in the library on Friday morning.

This game is a tile-laying game rather than a worker placement game, but you are still Vikings exploring the North Sea for booty. This time, though, in addition to raiding settlements (which is even more abstracted than in Raiders), you are also journeying into the unknown and bringing back livestock, along with defeating Enemy Ships and establishing outposts.

Somebody got an early start!

You choose a starting board and then will be laying out tiles from your hand of three tiles in order to build the world in front of you.

You will be putting vikings in your longship, dropping them off to make room for livestock (see that nice little sheep at the top of that pic?) to bring back to the Mainland.

Some of them may even end up going to Valhalla if you defeat an Enemy Ship (unlike Raiders, nobody dies when you attack a settlement).

Each turn, you will be putting out one tile and then placing the appropriate thing on there (it will either be a livestock, settlement, or enemy ship).

Then you can take up to 4 actions: Load your longship with Vikings, Unload a Longship (both Vikings and Livestock, which you will then deliver), Move Longship one space (plus destroying an Enemy Ship that’s on the tile if you have at least two Vikings on board), Move Vikings on land (and raid a Settlement if you have the strength), Transport Livestock from one land tile to an adjacent one, or Construct an Outpost (which takes 2 actions).

I think I see England!

The game ends when the last player has placed their final tile and all of the tiles are gone.

At the beginning of the game, each player chose a Captain card from two of them that they were dealt.

That’s a hefty-looking Barbarian

This card shows the end-game scoring as well as the bonus that specific Captain gives. The bonus will point you in a direction that you’ll take during the game.

You get points for Livestock delivery, Outposts, destroyed Enemy Ships, raided Settlements, Viking deaths, and controlled islands.

Whoever has the most points is the winner!

This is a neat little game but nowhere near as interesting as its predecessor. It’s cool that you are essentially building the world for yourself and you do have to try and concentrate on a few things rather than spread out over everything if you want to get a good score. Enemy ships only get you 1 VP, for example (2 if you’re the Barbarian), so that might not be a great strategy on its own (though it can lead to Viking deaths, which can be lucrative!)

You essentially do have to control islands, though, either by outpost or by Vikings (though if you use Vikings to control, then you won’t get many points from their deaths, and doesn’t it sound harsh to say it that way?)

I enjoyed it, but unlike Raiders, I don’t feel the need to own it.

I’d definitely play it again, though!

Tapestry (2019 – Stonemaier Games) – 1 play

Designer: Jamey Stegmaier

Artists: Andrew Bosley, Rom Brown

Players: 1-5

And here’s where the fun begins.

I finally got the chance to play this really obscure game that probably nobody has ever heard of.

It’s called Tapestry.

What? You have heard of it?

Good for you. You must really be deep into board games.

All kidding aside, Tapestry is a civilization-building game where you and up to 4 other players are trying to build the best civilization to score you those juicy little elusive victory points.

Unlike many of these types of games, though, you’re really not doing much on your turn. Or at least that’s what it seems like.

The income mat…

Each player starts with a capital city mat, a player/income mat, and a choice of two civilizations.

The Capital is pretty bare, but then again I was the Nomads so many of my buildings were on the boards instead!

Nomads do like to wander, don’t they?

Each civilization has a special power or ability that you will use to take over the entire world!

Ok, maybe not *that* so much, but you are trying to expand your territory.

The board shows the entire world that you can spread across like a cat lying on your keyboard when you’re trying to type.

Players will be filling in this board with various hex tiles that will build the world.

You may notice the four tracks around the board.

That is what you will be spending the majority of your time playing Tapestry doing.

On your turn, you will either spend resources to move up one of the tracks, or you will take one of your four remaining Income turns (you can take five during the game, but the first turn for everybody is an Income turn, so there are only four left).

I was the warmonger in our game, the Red one that’s just ahead of the blue marker out of frame of the picture.

What are these tracks? They are Military, Science, Exploration, and Technology.

Advancing on the Military track will let you conquer and place red armories onto your Capital city mat.

“Was that so hard? You are my Science Guy.” (10 points to whoever gets that reference)

Advancing on the Science track not only may let you put grey houses in your Capital, but also may give you new Tapestry cards and/or roll the Science die. The Science die may let you advance on a different track (though you don’t get the benefit for doing so except sometimes you can).

Advancing on Technology will let you get Technology cards, or maybe a Tapestry card, or put yellow markets in your capital, or maybe other buildings as well!

Somebody’s getting impatient…

Advancing on Exploration will let you either draw territory tiles or place them on the board. It can also give you farms for your capital along with many other bonuses (especially when you hit Level 4 and take off into space!).

Each advancement costs a resource, and further levels of a track cost extra resources (along with at least one of the associated resource of that type of track). Hopefully some of these advancements will give you resources, or you may run out really easily.

The Nomads did things normally. No steam engine before discovering how the stars work!

When you do, it’s time to take an Income turn. This is where you will get resources and victory points based on the spaces on your building board that are empty (due to you building those structures) as well as getting points for your Capital city.

You will also be playing one Tapestry card from your hand, which will either give you an immediate bonus or an effect that will last until your next Income turn.

For example, I had one that I didn’t play that prohibited me from advancing on the Military track but gave me 3 points every time somebody else did.

The only reason those buildings are there instead of on the Capital is because I was the Nomads. They normally don’t go there.

As the game goes on, the board fills out and you can chain more and more actions when you advance on a track.

The game ends when everybody has taken their fifth Income turn. As you can guess from the way I described it, that means that you could be done while others are still going.

And that’s a feature not a bug!

Whoever has the most points at the end of the game is the winner.

I would have to play Tapestry again to cement my feelings on the game, but after the first play I wasn’t that impressed. The Tapestry cards are really random for one thing. Yes, you can get more Tapestry cards so that you have a choice when it’s time to play one, but you are still at the mercy of a terrible draw.

Also, while this is a first impression, it does seem very weirdly balanced.

One of my opponents was the Futurists, the civilization that let them start at Level 4 of all the technology tracks, and he ran away with the game, finishing over 100 points higher than me in second place.

More plays may help with that, but while the game was interesting to experience, I’m not sure I would call it fun.

Still, would like to play it again just to make sure.

Sierra West (2019 – Board & Dice) – 1 play

Designer: Jonny Pac Cantin

Artists: Jakub Fajtanowski, Michał Długaj

Players: 1-4

Sierra West is an interesting action-selection game that has four different modules that you can play which will vary up the experience a bit.

It looks like somebody took a few bites out of it. You better send it back!

The basic gameplay is the same, though, with each player having a player board with room for four cabins on it, as well as a campsite.

The Homestead track. Only one person can get to the top!

There is also a Homestead scoring table where you will be going up on thee tracks to try and get the most points.

These points are multiplied at game’s end by your position on the Wagon Trail.

Blue’s in the lead! Not sure where Yellow went. On a vittles break?

The action selection is really interesting as you have a hand of 3 cards and you have to decide how to play them onto your player board in order to do the actions. You have two different pioneers that you’ll be moving along the cards that you played.

It took me hours to figure out how to place those cards.

One goes along the bottom path and one goes along the top.

The top pioneer will move and get a boot (movement either up the mountain or along the trail), then get some food, then the mule (a special bonus that can do things for you), one boot, and finally some stone.

The bottom one will get two stone, be able to pay a resource and dig (that’s how you get a new cabin or claim a mountain card), then two more wood, and finally another shovel. You can move them in any order.

If a pioneer reached the end of the path (you can always stop), then they may be able to do one of the three “Summit Actions” revealed on top of the three cards. This is how you typically move up the Homestead track but depending on the mode you’re playing, you could do other things as well (We were playing the Outlaws & Outposts module, so some of the Summit Actions were shooting bandits or reloading your gun).

That mountain will slowly come down…

Claiming a mountain card will add a card to your deck (possibly for points!) as well as slowly tear down the mountain as more cards are revealed to be picked up.

“Special” cards (what these are depends on the module) are added below the Wagon Trail when they are uncovered on the mountain, and are the timer of the game (along with possibly allowing you to do stuff or giving you benefits depending on where your wagon is).

Once the final special card is placed below the trail, you finish the round and do end-game scoring.

Most points wins!

I really abbreviated that (though it doesn’t seem like it, I know), because there are cabins you can get to give you bonuses (and prevent point loss) and animals you can hunt that will give you resources (and prevent point loss).

I’m not familiar with how the other modules work, but the Outlaws & Outposts one was really pretty fun.

It’s another optimization puzzle in a way, as you have to figure out how to get your wagon moving as well as your homestead score up as near the top as possible.

Cute!

The artwork on the cards and the various pieces is really good.

This is just a charming game and I would definitely like to play it again.

Sadly, I played my friend’s copy right before he traded it away, so I’m not sure if anybody I know has it anymore.

But I’m open to it!

Another winner from Board & Dice.

Corinth (2019 – Days of Wonder) – 1 play

Designer: Sébastien Pauchon

Artists: Julio Cesar, Cyrille Daujean

Players: 2-4

Corinth is the latest Roll & Write game about Trading in the Mediterranean (sorry, Tom Vasel). Everybody’s rolling dice, and then drafting them to fill in stuff on their sheet.

The starting sheet shows all that you can do.

A player rolls all nine white dice and places them on the Harbor board according to their number.

A weird dice placement system that still works.

The highest pip value rolled is placed in the top slot (Gold Coins). Then each number is placed starting from the bottom, as shown above. This means that some of the spots may be skipped!

Then each player in turn order takes a group of dice.

Whichever one they choose, they get to mark off a number of items of that type on their sheet equal to the number of dice they took. Pip value does not matter.

When they take a group of dice, players can instead move their steward (to right on the score sheet) a number of spaces equal to the pip value of one of the dice they took. This can get other bonuses as well as extra scoring.

At the end of their turn, players can spend gold coins and goats that they’ve earned to build some buildings which have different effects as well.

After a certain number of times each player has rolled the dice (6 times in a 2-3 player game or 4 times in a 4-player game), the game ends and you score your sheet!

I should have named it “Davidius” or something like that.

I’m not a huge Roll & Write fan and while this game was pleasant enough, it didn’t really change my mind much. I’ll certainly play it and it was an enjoyable experience, but it’s not one of my favourite genres.

Still, as Roll & Writes go, this is a pretty good one. You can’t do everything and those who try will be punished. The Steward action seems pretty powerful, though. The winner of our game scored quite highly with that one.

It’s fun as far as the genre goes, but it won’t make you like it if you don’t already.

Zorro Dice Game (2020 – Pull the Pin Games) – 1 play

Designers: Brian Henk, Clayton Skancke

Artist: Loïc Billiau

Players: 2-6

The Zorro Dice Game is a game that’s on Kickstarter right now (until November 16, so there’s still time!).

It’s a quick little dice game, kind of push your luck and kind of team-based in that you are all trying to fight the various villains that are on the board.

However, only one player can win.

You are essentially trying to see who becomes the next Zorro (because I guess the old one retired? I don’t know).

Oh, I guess he’s getting old and he wants a new successor. Because like the Dread Pirate Roberts, Zorro is more of a role than it is a real person. (Editor – It helps to read the rule book before typing).

I stopped a runaway stage coach and all I got was a pair of gloves. Where are the groupies????

Anyway, each player will take a turn trying to perform heroic feats to prove your Zorro credentials. You do this by rolling dice, up to three times (just like Yahtzee) to try and get the needed requirements.

If you perform the feat, you get the piece of equipment, but be careful. You can only keep two pieces of regular equipment.

When you go to perform the feat, you can have one additional player try to help you. You get three rolls and you can use any of your equipment and also your partner’s as well as any Hero dice that you’ve accumulated. If you’re helped, your partner can do a fourth roll and use any of their Hero dice as well (though it’s unclear whether they can only roll what you didn’t keep or not).

The Scoundrel is the top card, the Villain is the next one in the pile

If you complete two of the same colour Heroic Feat, you get a Heroic Die and the next player will fight the Scoundrel of that colour, which emerges because they’re getting tired of their plans being foiled I guess.

Many thanks to The Boardgame Family on BGG for letting me use this picture!

Defeating a Scoundrel gets you a piece of Premium Equipment! This kick-ass equipment runs rings around the basic equipment. Two wild resources? That’s amazing!

As soon as somebody gets a second Heroic Die of any colour (meaning somebody else performed 2 Heroic Feats of the same colour or you performed a third one of that colour), the Villain appears.

This is the end of the game.

Starting with the next player, each player tries to fight the Villain once. Whoever fails gets knocked over.

Whoever succeeds stays standing up. If more than one player succeeds, they duel to see who becomes the next Zorro. These duels involve players just trying to roll as many swords as possible (so it helps if you have equipment that gives you swords!)

The final winner of the duel(s) is the next Zorro and wins the game!

This is a neat little dice game, a fun filler for before/after the main games have been played. I don’t know if I would want to build anything around it, even a lunch-time game (though that’s a possibility), but it’s neat for what it does and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

We had a 3-player game, and I think it might be more interesting with more players (it does play 2-6). Would have to try it and see.

There is an expansion (Heroes and Villains) that is part of the Kickstarter, though the copy we played at SHUX didn’t have that so I don’t know what it’s like. The expansion makes it a 1-8 player game instead of 2-6.

For $15 + shipping, this isn’t a bad buy if you want something to fill your idle time with.

A decent game that I don’t regret trying out.

March of the Ants (2015 – Weird City Games) – 1 play

Designers: Tim Eisner, Ryan Swisher

Artists: Tim Eisner, Ryan Swisher, Peter Wocken

Players: 1-5

March of the Ants is tile-laying game about conflicting ant nests and the tunnels they inhabit. It is a bit conflict-heavy (which is why I wasn’t sure about playing this one with Paula Deming and her husband Lawson after our interview at SHUX, but it turned out ok) but it’s also kind of neat.

We can all coexist! As long as we’re in the right tunnel.

The Great Tunnel is laid out on the table and all players will have ants there. There can be no fighting in the Great Tunnel (it’s kind of like Switzerland).

The game takes place over 3-5 seasons (depending on how long you want the game to last) and each season will consist of a number of phases.

Each player has a nest where larvae and food can be put, along with a guide to what actions you can do and a place to hold your adaptations (because you have to evolve or die!).

The actions you can take all cost a food, so they can be limited in the early game (or maybe I just suck at it). Each action also has a reaction possibility for the other players (which is pretty cool, actually).

You can Explore (draw a tile and place it connecting a tunnel where you have an ant). You can March (move up to 5 steps, moving larvae to tunnels you inhabit first and then moving ants). You can Forage (draw two cards).

You can play a card (pay the coast in larvae and/or ants as called for by the card). These cards can be events, Colony Goals (scored at the end of each turn if you meet the conditions) or Evolution.

Evolution cards are added to your Ant Body to give you bonuses or extra benefits.

One evolution for each of the three parts of your body!

The final action is Resting. This effectively passes you out of the action phase.

Collection sites are the circles on each tile.

In the Soldier Phase, tunnels that have ants from two or more factions and more ants on them than collection sites are considered “contested.” Battle ensues and it’s actually a neat mechanic because the defender is whoever occupies the “Control” collection site, even if that’s the only ant they have on the tile.

Invaders are everybody else.

You total up the number of ants you have, any evolution bonuses, then each player can play one of their cards face down. These cards have a number on them that is the “ferocity” and is added to their strength.

The loser loses ants equal to the Army Strength of the winner. The winner loses half of the Army Strength of the loser rounded down. (War is hell, even in the ant world).

This can happen again if there’s another faction of ants, but you will only battle each faction once even if the hex is still contested.

The Harvest phase is where you collect all of that stuff from collection sites on tiles. You then have to feed your ants. (What, was this designed by Uwe?) Then there’s the Queen’s Decree, where you can produce either larvae or food for the next round.

Finally, the Slumber phase is where you total up all the points for the round.

Continue this for the set number of rounds, and then determine the winner with the most victory points!

While I really enjoyed playing this with Paula and Lawson, the game itself didn’t really make me want to play it again that much. I found it too tight and very hard to do things through the first half of the game. With only four rounds (we played the medium-length game), it seems like half the game was getting set up to do other things.

I did enjoy the tile-laying aspect, though. The artwork is great on the tiles! It really makes you feel like you’re deep underground in an ant tunnel.

I wouldn’t mind playing it again to see if my first impression is still the same, but I’m not clamoring to do it.

Paladins of the West Kingdom (2019 – Garphill Games/Renegade Game Studios) – 1 play

Designers: Shem Phillips, S J Macdonald

Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski

Players: 1-4

What’s this? Another West Kingdom game, where Architects of the West Kingdom is my Top 4 game played of all time?

Can designers Shem Phillips and S J Macdonald hit another one out of the park?

Initial signs point to yes, though I definitely need more plays of this first (and my copy to arrive, which it hasn’t yet, damn you Starlit Citadel!!!!)

You’ve built a lavish city in Architects, but now it’s time to defend the city against the onslaught of outsiders, as well as improving your city both religiously and economically.

He looks like a nice guy

The really interesting aspect of Paladins of the West Kingdom is your Paladin deck that you will be using throughout the game. The game is played over 7 rounds and you have 12 Paladins in your deck. You’ll be using one per round.

Each Paladin will give you a special bonus as well as a number of workers for that round.

How do you get more workers?

By going to the pub of course!

Purple workers are wild, in more ways than one. They can be used as any colour but they get you Suspicion when you obtain them.

Players will choose one Tavern card to give them the workers on that card to use in the current round as well.

You will be playing these workers on your player board, going around the table doing one action at a time. Some actions require workers of certain colours (or the purple ones as wild) and some only require workers of any colour. Many require both.

Your objective is to clear off as many of the items on your board as you can, as they will help you do things.

You can “Develop” to move the green workshops from the left side of your board onto actions on the right side. These workshops will take the place of certain of the workers for those actions, making them cheaper.

You can commission your black monks to go out onto the main board. Doing this will give you further benefits depending on where you place them. Garrisoning allows you to put the red garrisons on the board.

Absolving lets you move those jars (of holy water? Not sure) over to the right, getting rid of Suspicion and getting you another benefit. Fortifying adds strength to your walls.

the Outsiders are on the bottom

You can also attack or convert Outsiders who are approaching your city. This will give you special one-time bonuses (for attacking) or end-game victory points (for converting) them.

Food can be very important in this game, depending on your strategy.

You can also recruit Townspeople for either a one-time benefit or putting them to work to give you benefits for the rest of the game.

I didn’t concentrate on Strength very much, obviously.

The main focus of Paladins is to move three attributes (Strength, Influence, and Faith) up the tracks to score points. Each action on the right side of the board requires a certain amount of one attribute and will give you a certain amount of another.

This is clearly shown on the board, though new players may have trouble remembering what does what.

Yes, I missed the first round in this pic. So sue me!

Each round, either a King’s Order or a King’s Favour (or in Round 3, both) are turned over. The King’s Orders are the first three, and will give you victory points at the end of the game for completing them.

The King’s Favours will open up new one-time (per round) worker placement spots that are a bit stronger than the ones on your board. Once somebody takes it, nobody else can though the workers are cleared at the end of the round so it will be available next round.

After the 7th round, all the points are totaled up and whoever has the most is the winner!

This post ignores a lot of the intricacies of how to play this game (that will come in the review, I guess), but hopefully this gives an overall picture.

Once again, you can’t spread yourself too thin or you won’t get a lot of points from doing anything. In my game, I commissioned one monk, but I garrisoned and absolved almost completely. For those actions, you only get victory points if you get near the end of the track, so if you do a little of one, a little of another, and a little of another, you won’t get any points from it whatsoever.

But maybe you’re scoring points other ways? That’s certainly possible!

There are so many avenues to scoring. I played a 4-player game, and we all did it a bit differently. The scores were 65-62-58-55.

This is easily the most complex game I’ve seen from Phillips (and definitely from Macdonald). The rules themselves are fairly easy to pick up, but how to use them to win is a brain-burner.

In fact, that’s my only concern about this game: time.

Our play took a little over 3 hours. I’ve heard other people talk about 3 hours games as well.

I’d have to play it a few more times to see if we get the playtime down, but it just won’t get played as much if it’s a normally 3-hour game.

The mechanics, though, and the artwork and everything else.

Those are awesome.

I have a feeling this will be on this year’s Top 10 Games Played.

War of the Worlds: The New Wave (2019 – Grey Fox Games) – 1 play

Designer: Denis Plastinin

Artist: Igor Savchenko

Players: 2

Finally, the last new game of October. Wow, my fingers are tired (I won’t tell you that I wrote this over a period of a week). This one is a Kickstarter that I finally received a couple of weeks ago.

War of the Worlds: the New Wave does one of my favourite things: combine a deckbuilder with some other mechanism. In this case, it’s total destruction!

The Martians from War of the Worlds are back, and once again they’re invading England (what is this, Dr. Who?).

It’s kind of dark. I guess the Martians knocked out all the power!

England is divided into a bunch of zones, and there are 30 civilians that the Aliens have to kill.

Yes, literally 30 civilians. They’re very important!

(no, really, I’m sure they represent thousands of people…)

The minis only come in the Kickstarter, but I think you can order them from Grey Fox Games as well

At the setup, the Alien Saucer, the Tripod, and the Invasion Ship are placed in the designated area at the top of the board. Three civilian markers go in each area that has three squares.

The cool thing is that the Human player cannot eliminate any Alien unit on the map. They are just relentless.

Instead, while the Aliens win by wiping out all 30 civilian markers, the Humans win by doing 30 points of “damage” to Alien buildings or Tripods (Saucers can’t be attacked). Thus, the human forces will slowly disappear from the map (though military units and buildings can be built) while the Aliens will never leave.

Each player will get their own starting deck of cards and their own offer deck where they can buy cards from. There are no “public” offerings of cards.

The cards will do everything from building a building (eliminating the card from the game, so you only get one!), an action that your units can do, or creating an army unit (and then moving that unit next time you get the card in your hand).

The game can get very tense as turns go back and forth. The Humans are at a huge disadvantage at first, and many civilians will get wiped out before they get on their feet. But spreading out and doing a bit of damage here and a bit of damage there will help them prevail.

Two measly civilians! That was annoying.

This was the final situation when the Humans did their 30th point of damage to the Alien (me). They were down to two civilians but they were protected enough to be able to pull it out.

War of the Worlds is a really tense and exciting game, at least in our first one. We’ll see whether it keeps it up.

I love deckbuilders that have maps or some other method of doing things other than just the cards.

While this won’t rival my Top 5 games of all time (3 of which are deckbuilders that do other things), I can see this really livening up a lunch hour. It’s a 2-player game that can be played in an hour or less.

That’s perfect!

A review will probably be forthcoming in a month or so as I get enough plays in, but so far it’s a winner.

Whew!

That was a massive post (almost 6500 words). I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

What new to you games did you play in October?

Or any opinions on these?

Let me know in the comments.

        New to Me #boardgames - October 2019 @alderac @stonemaiergames @BoardAndDice @pullthepingames @WeirdCityGames @GreyFoxGames @DylanMangini October was SHUX month. SHUX is a 3-day boardgame convention in Vancouver that was simply phenomenal. I had so much fun, and would have had even more fun if I hadn't felt so terrible.

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/top-10-horror-collectibles-ever-hardcore-fan/

Top 10 horror collectibles ever hardcore fan should have

If there’s one thing that sparks this geek’s interest other than sci-fi, it’s horror. It’s probably true with most sci-fi fans or geeks in general because these two genres are closely intertwined. Horror deals with the creepy unknown and a large part of science fiction deals in speculating what’s out there. One such franchise that deals with both sci-fi and horror is the Alien franchise. It’s a household name when it comes to both genres but unfortunately butchered through the years. But there are those of us that are more fascinated by monsters and creatures that go bump in the night instead of starships and going to warp speeds. You might call them sick, but they’re just, well… different, for keeping tons of horror replicas and memorabilia in their respective man-caves. To each his own really, and it’s not that slightly psychotic tendency for gore and murder that should concern us about an individual with a Texas Chainsaw Massacre Leatherface mask in his collection, but rather his love for the horror genre, his/her knowledge of the histories of film and TV behind his/her morbid collection and the attention to detail manufacturers like NECA often put into their collectibles. Many horror collectibles are beautiful in their own horrific ways like McFarlane’s horror toy line. The guy may have created Spawn, but his twisted mind just couldn’t stop there. My only claim to horror collecting is my Ghost Rider collection which many of my guests already consider to be morbid. All those flaming skulls and I still don’t think they’re enough. Supernatural collectibles meanwhile are rare in these parts, but with enough time and dough, I’ll have a trunk of flannel, guns, stakes, knives and the optional salt. You can check out our Supernatural Holiday Gift Guide for those of you lucky enough to get your hands on them. But let’s discuss the hottest horror collectibles sought-after by horror fans such as myself. It gives me chills just imagining setting them up in their dedicated hallway or room much like The Conjuring’s Ed and Lorrain Warren's museum. If you have the dough, feel-free to grab life-size busts or statues of your favorite horror franchise or if you’re starting out, dedicate a shelf for dolls and detailed action figures. There are dozens of horror franchises out there, and it’s kind of difficult to get a definitive list. To keep it simple, let’s just work with toys and statues. Here are the most popular ones out there and you can check these out if you want to get started. Again, this is not a definitive list as there are other famous franchises that need attention. Annabelle (Annabelle) – is the latest chilling entry in the horror genre from the Conjuring series of films. The actual Annabelle doll is much less creepy than the cinematic version since it’s only one of those formerly popular Raggedy Ann dolls that happens to be haunted. Hollywood wants The Conjuring and Annabelle films to be creepy, so we end up with overly-made-up Ms. Woody MacWood face instead. Still, I do find some innocent-looking dolls placed at the right angle look more macabre than some of the items on this list. Annabelle feels a bit too artificial but creepy nonetheless. Mezco Toys came up with a scaled 46-cm/18” prop replica of the creepy doll and is available for around $94 here. Just her alone on the top shelf is sure to give your guests the chills. Necronomicon Ex Mortis (Evil Dead) – is another popular horror article that has frightened us for almost forty years. It first appeared in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead starring Bruce Campbell in 1981. If you’ve been living under a rock for all these years, The Necronomicon is an evil book of the dead made and bound in human skin with a cover resembling a human face. If it still doesn’t ring a bell, Think Army of Darkness, the most popular film in the Evil Dead franchise. This book of the dead is still very much alive in the latest TV series from Starz in Ash vs. the Evil Dead. There are several replicas out there and even a special-edition DVD cover for the Evil Dead films. Saw a creepy replica on display at a mall when I was in high school and already felt that sick feeling of taking it home and putting it on display. If only I had the small fortune required to do so. It would make a nice coffee table piece in your den of horrors. Keep it at your own risk as the Deadites are always after it. If you want one, be sure to shop smart for a boomstick and a portable chainsaw. Also, don’t forget that 7” Ash Williams Ultimate Scale action figure from NECA which has plenty of accessories you can get right here. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead is a gross, gory but fun horror franchise. Chucky (Child’s Play) – is the doll that puts Annabelle to shame, though they might even look good together on your shelf. While Annabelle is more recent, Chucky is more iconic originating from way back in 1988 in the film Child’s Play. Chucky has become quite the horror icon since then. He’s actually frightening, funny and lovable and he handles that well even with his Good Guy persona. Though the series has gone downhill since Child’s Play 3, all his films are considered cult classics. There are several dolls available from various manufacturers, but the priciest to date is the life-size Seed of Chucky doll from Sideshow Collectibles which was priced at $4,850 on eBay. If you want something more recent, and cheaper, you could start with Mezco’s 15” Chucky Good Guy doll which is creepy enough to begin with. Pair him up with Mezco’s Talking Tiffany doll or their 15” Scarred Chucky. Or get both to complete the collection. Sam and Pumpkinhead (TRICK ‘R TREAT / Pumpkinhead) – What is Halloween without its governing spirits? The most recognizable figure for Halloween is the serial killer Michael Myers, but we’re looking for more supernatural symbols. The 2008 cult classic TRICK ‘R TREAT gave us the lovable but sinister Sam. A child-like entity dressed in a one-piece orange jumpsuit and a cute button-eyed burlap sack for a mask. Sam looks quite innocent with his child-like physique, candy sack and lollipop but actually indirectly leaves horrific incidents wherever he goes. Behind the mask is a frightening skull and pumpkin combination for a face. As for Pumpkinhead; before Ghost Rider came out, he was the original cinematic spirit of vengeance. Many people see him as an iconic monster, but when I first saw the design, he felt to me like an Alien knockoff, probably because I saw Aliens on VHS at around the same time. I also don’t get the name since he doesn’t look anywhere near a pumpkin as much as Sam does. But people like him and more than a few websites view him as one of the best obscure monsters out there, so he makes this list. Sam was available from Sideshow Collectibles in a limited 5000-item run so if you want one, prepare to shell out as much as $600 on eBay. As for Pumpkinhead, McFarlane Toys came out with a whopping 18-inch scale figure which would cost you around $400 on eBay today, if it does become available. Or you can get a more affordable over on Amazon here. [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="50042,50043"] Life-size Alien Egg and Xenomorph (Alien)– disappointed we may be with the latest Alien installment, Alien Covenant which removed AVP from canon, there’s no denying the powerful horror aspect that the Xenomorph and its various forms bring on the table. Honestly, I’d rather see an actual sequel starring Sigourney Weaver while she still looks young enough to pass for another horror-action adventure. Alien xenomorph toys and models may be a dime-a-dozen, by now but what really brings in the kicks for collectors are life-size models and statues that should bring any horror man-cave to life… sort of. A life-size 1:1 scale xenomorph warrior should set collectors back by as much as 9,999 dollars if ordered from popcultcha.com. Xenomorph busts from different films in the franchise are available on eBay for less than $3000. But for a very small price of $400, you can get a life-size Alien egg from NECA to go with your bust or statue. The egg comes with a Facehugger too which I actually find much scarier than the actual xenomorphs in the way they resemble large spiders. If you have the dough, you could set up a room with up to three eggs inside. If you don’t have the dough, you can start with a bunch of Alien 7” action figures from NECA and complete it with their 15” Alien Queen. All figures are exquisitely detailed. Regan MacNeil (The Exorcist) – If there’s anyone in this list that I don’t want in my horror collection, it would be a life-size Regan McNeil from The Exorcist. She’ll definitely be the creepiest of the bunch, and the film is so good, so creepy and so horrific that I couldn’t personally bear to watch it again. I have a slight fear of the dark because of this film. But to try and dispell that fear, I either imagine myself as a Ghostbuster, Simon Belmont or a hunter from Supernatural. Not a bad idea if you find yourself in a dark room with everyone in this list. But back to Regan, we can’t exactly blame young Linda Blair for looking so horrific. The devil made her do it with the help of the special effects guys. The special effects and sounds are just so good, no amount of modern CGI can probably match the chills from watching the classics like The Exorcist or The Omen. NECA has recently released an Exorcist diorama with poor Regan fully possessed and laying upright on her bed. She has a button when pressed makes her do the classic head spin. Despite the small size, the figure is detailed enough to remind everyone how chilling the film is. But if you really want to scare yourself or your guests sh*tless, you can go to eBay and grab a life-size bust for around $300. This list is in no particular order, but Regan makes top 1. Or go for a creepier life size like in the picture right on Amazon. You have to see it to believe it! Pennywise the Clown (It) – Clowns aren’t that scary. We love Ronald McDonald, don’t we? But it’s probably how the make-up is applied or how creepy the guy wearing the red nose is to begin with. Stephen King’s It is quite a terrifying film which probably started or aggravated coulrophobia in the United States. Pennywise and that clown doll from Poltergeist. As mentioned, Tim Curry is creepy enough to begin with so slap on a clown costume, and you’ll have a creepy clown from your nightmares. The latest incarnation of the film brought a whole new world of horror, and if Tim Curry's version didn't freak you out, this one surely will. There are plenty of Pennywise masks, costumes and figures on eBay but a bunch of detailed 12-inch ones that can set you back up to $500. If you want to have a better variety to choose from with makeup, window peepers or Funko dolls check them out here. Freddie Krueger (Nightmare on Elm Street) NECA Movie Maniacs figure. Freddie Replica Glove Ruby’s Toys – Our nightmares are enough source of horrific material without someone like Freddie Krueger making it worse. There’s nothing like 80s horror flicks where the special effects aren’t too reliant on modern CGI. The practical effects of Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween are the stuff of legend giving these characters their iconic status which is why the remake didn’t make create near the stir the originals did. Among the celebrities on this list, Freddie Krueger is legend and should be a staple in your horror collection. There are plenty of figures available out there from major horror manufacturers. McFarlane Toys are quite detailed if you want an affordable statuette for your collection. The 7-inch figure from NECA is also a sight to behold and includes plenty of accessories and comes in a nice box. It will set you back a reasonable $30 but will make a great addition to your horror collection. What’s also iconic is Freddie’s glove. It should add a little completeness to your horror room next to your Freddie Krueger figure. The glove from Rubies with real metal claws will set you back around $70, but it’s a small price for a true horror fan. Or get a signed claw edition from Robert Englund himself. Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) and Michael Myers (Halloween) – the original or should we say most famous movie slashers that inspired films like I Know What You did Last Summer and Scream. Like Sam and Pumpkinhead, they take equal billing when it comes to supernatural slasher horror films. Both killers have plenty of figures and statues on sale online. Both serial killers also wear iconic masks and just love sharp objects. For these two, there’s no need to keep a life-size statue because setting up their masks in mannequin busts plus their movie knives should be enough. Mezco and NECA and McFarlane sell Jason and Michael figures of various sizes but what you want are the 12 or 18-inch ones for more impact. Such figures will set you back around $150 dollars. But that should be a small setback if you’re a true horror fan. Sideshow's versions are pretty sweet, but you will pay a higher price for that quality here. Around the holiday season, prices always drop too so keep your eye here for them. Funko ReAction - What? No Dracula? No Frankenstein? Unfortunately, they’re not considered so horrific nowadays. Thank you Hotel Transylvania. But feel free to grab these horror staples in detail through the Funko ReAction Universal Horror line. The Universal line includes Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Mummy. The Funko ReAction line also has many of the folks in this list including Freddie, Jason, Michael, and Sam. Funko is also a great way to begin your horror collection. You could grab these detailed 3.75” figures for less than 20 dollars in various online stores. Haven’t you ever imagined playing a scenario with Ghostface, Pinhead, Freddie, Jason, Michael, and Sam going after the Disney Princesses inside a life-size Amityville dollhouse? Sick, I know. Get pairs as the boxes look too good to open. [gallery size="medium" ids="50052,50053,50054"] We’d like to add a special mention to the Kotobukiya Horror Bishoujo line which re-imagines Hollywood horror legends into their sexy female counterparts. They’ll make pretty good startup figures not just for horror fans but for sci-fi and anime fans as well. As with most Kotobukiya figures, these look amazing and are a great deal for the price.

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

[greetingsfromthebottomofthewell]

NES GODZILLA CREEPYPASTA - CHAPTER 4: DEMENTIA

[directory]

unforgiving cold

[source] [triggers]

When I got back to the game, I was getting very upset and confused.

I thought about the way the monster looked at me. The game COULDN'T have heard what I said, that's impossible. It had to be a random occurrence. But why did it happen precisely at the moment I insulted the monster?

Nothing about this game made any sense. The new Godzilla monsters, the weird replacement monsters, out of place imagery like the green temples, quiz levels, and the red monster chases. It didn't seem to add up in any kind of meaningful way.

If it was a prank, it wasn't funny in any way I could understand, and they clearly put far too much effort into it.

If they were trying to make a genuine sequel with new Godzilla monsters, then why did they add..everything else?

Maybe it was some kind of art experiment? Some group project made by a bunch of really talented and crazy people, and they lost the cartridge somehow? Or maybe they intended for some random person to find it?

It was all just fruitless guessing. As far as I could tell, there was only one way to figure out what the deal with this game was: To play it through to the end. Maybe, just maybe, there would be something in the credits, an explanation by the creators as to why they made this. Or it could be something much more cryptic and strange, maybe even something horrifying.

Before I got a good look at the Dementia board, I considered replaying Trance to see if the red monster would look at me again. But I decided against it. I wanted to keep moving forward. I was also somewhat worried that backtracking might cause the game to become even more strange.

The Dementia board music sounded a lot like the Saturn music, except it was slowed down, and played with a piano-sounding instrument. Like most of these new map themes, it had a dangerous suspenseful feel.

While listening to the music, I looked at the Dementia board. There were four boss monsters this time: SpaceGodzilla, Manda, Gigan, and Baragon. I was surprised that there were two new Toho monsters this time. But the best surprise was still to come.

I started the Quiz level. Here's another list of results in the same format as the last one:

Quiz 2

Can you Swim? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Happy

Do you like fish? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Sick

Can penguins fly? Answer: No, Reaction: Sad

Can it spin in all directions?(There was no clarification of what Face meant by "it" so I just guessed)Answer: No, Reaction: Surprised

Do you breathe oxygen? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #8

Does it taste good when you bite a woman?(I don't know who came up with this question, but I really hope they're getting mental help)Answer: No, Reaction: Annoyed

Is it night where you are? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #6

Do you like cats? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Confused

Is water wet? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Angry

Have you ever broken a bone? Answer: No, Reaction: Happy

Do you like your job? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Hurt

Would you like a new monster? Answer: Yes, Reaction: Weird Face #11

I wasn't entirely sure at the time what Face meant by "new monster", but I couldn't resist answering "Yes", just to see what would happen.

The result was mind blowing.

The game took me back to the board and I had a new playable monster in the form of Anguirus! Ever since I was kid, I always wanted to play as Anguirus, since he was my second favorite Godzilla monster (And plus I never liked Mothra all that much).

I moved my new Anguirus piece over to the level right next to it, eager to test out my new monster.

Before I get into the level description I'll talk about Anguirus a bit:

Using the up and down buttons you could choose whether Anguirus stood in a bipedal stance or crawled around on all fours. It wasn't a huge difference, but being able to stand was helpful in boss fights, and crawling sometimes helped dodge obstacles and attacks.

He could punch and kick like Godzilla, but no tail whip. Instead he had something far more interesting: The ability to curl up into a spiked ball of death and roll around. You could still take damage, but it was lessened. It was a good way of clearing out stage enemies, but unfortunately doing this also drained the power bar.

But the spiked ball wasn't his only special ability. When you pressed Start, he would fire a beam of energy from his mouth. It resembled Titanosaurus' sonar attack, and if this were a hack it may have been inspired by the Roar attack from Atari's Godzilla fighting games.

Also of note is that when playing as Anguirus, the "Level" meter gets glitched up. Judging by the life and power bar, I'd say he's on Level 10.

Now onto the level:

As you might have guessed from the level icon, these levels are green palette swaps of the ground and background tiles from the Blue Mountains. But what immediately caught my attention was the water, which has a transparency effect.

Was that even possible for an NES game? I know the Super Nintendo could do it, but I had never seen a transparency effect in a game on an NES.

The Green Mountains music was played with the same instrument as the Blue Mountains, but the melody was totally different. It was a very simple song with a lot of abrupt pauses, followed by a loud note every few seconds.

Anyway, I went through the usual strolling through the level. And again there were no monsters or anything, but pretty soon I had reached a cliff above the water.

There was nowhere to go but into the water, so down I went. The water transparency made things a bit harder to see, but it's tolerable. After going underwater I encountered two new enemies: a giant piranha and some kind of spiky bottom feeder thing. I liked the piranha because I could easily tell what it was.

It was a sane enemy design that would appear in a real game, and there were very few enemies like this.

They didn't take much hits to kill, but they were quite annoying, and could considerably trim down your life if they got close enough. They also tend to travel in packs.

As for the bottom feeders, they're easy to deal with. They swim along the bottom of the screen towards you, and are easily crushed with the roll attack or jumped over. In this screencap you can see me about to run one of them over, and there's a pack of piranha behind it.

After I beat that level, I moved Godzilla onto the blue castle icon. I started the level and I got a title screen, with the text "UNFORGIVING COLD".

The level itself looked like a castle dungeon made of blue bricks,with rows of identical white statue faces on the walls.These statue faces had a permanent look of horror on their faces.

There was also some flickering gray static, which didn't really obscure my vision, but it adds to the very unsettling mood of these levels. The music was a twelve second loop of a low pitched choir vocalizing, that sounded very familiar to me.

Whenever I played through one of these levels I got this sudden, horrible feeling of anxiety. I had the feeling that the farther I progressed through the level, the closer I was getting to something unspeakably evil.

There weren't any enemies, but these were the some of the longest levels in the game. I only played one level, but it took seven minutes to complete.

I didn't want to admit it to myself at the time, but I realized something playing the blue castle level: This game has the power to make the player feel certain things.

I don't mean in the sense that you get irritated playing a crappy game, or get unnerved by something scary in a game. What I mean is that certain events in this game can instantly make you start feeling something.

I know that sounds completely insane. I don't blame you for not believing me, I wouldn't believe any of this either if I didn't play the game myself. But there is something very, very wrong with this game, and I still don't know how to explain it.

So...then it was time to fight Baragon's replacement.

Although Baragon was originally the smallest monster in the game, his replacement was the largest. It was so tall in fact, that the "ground" was noticeably lowered, and Not-Baragon's head still barely avoided collision with the bar at the top of the screen. And he was just as frighteningly bizarre as he was huge.

You may be wondering how he attacks without arms. Well, he has the most powerful kick in the game. But his other fighting technique is much stranger.

First he blasts a cloudy breath of pixels down at you, which causes you to freeze, then he walks back to the right corner of the screen and...extends a huge gatling gun from his abdomen.

That might seem amusing to you, but it certainly wasn't to me when I was playing the game. This attack is almost as annoying as Gigan's saw, and Not-Baragon could have been unbeatable if he consistently used it. Thankfully he only did it twice while fighting him.

Once you unfreeze, you can run up and start damaging the gun, which does extra damage to him. This helped me to destroy him, and then it was time to play the third level type. I decided that I was going to use Anguirus to fight Manda and Gigan, and then fight SpaceGodzilla as Godzilla (it was only fitting).

Before getting into the battles, I'll describe the third level type: The Arctic.

The Arctic is exactly what you'd guess from the name, an icy tundra with a few watery segments.

The music reminded me a bit of "Northern Hemispheres" from Donkey Kong Country, in 8 bit form. A very dangerous sounding song, it made me think about being trapped in a tundra and freezing to death.

There were two new enemies in this stage. The first was a creature frozen in a block of ice. They block your way and you have to use the heat beam to thaw them out of the ice. They look a bit like a smaller version of Not-Gezora, only without the eye.

When freed, they do a strange crawling movement and push you backwards. It doesn't cause any damage but it's a bit annoying.

After dealing with the Iceman, I kept walking for a minute or two and came upon a water segment. I jumped in, and this time I managed to get a screencap showing how the water splashes when you jump in. Dunno how they programmed that, but it's pretty impressive. Another interesting thing is how the screen changes focus when you go underwater.

Here you can see the other new enemy, a little thing I call "Spike Walker". They walk towards you and explode randomly(or instantly if you attack them), sending spikes in every direction. The spikes don't do much damage but they did get me dangerously close to falling into a pit a few times.

Oh, speaking of the pits: Down into the water, the game has a platformer element: bottomless pits. There weren't any of these in the original game, since it was strictly an action game, but the pits were a neat addition.

After getting back on land, I encountered a very unexpected miniboss: Maguma, the Walrus Kaiju. I know this game had some obscure monsters to begin with, but wow. Not that I'm complaining, it's a pretty cool cameo for an unappreciated kaiju.

Maguma's fighting tactics were very simple, he had a freeze beam, and he could charge into you. Not very challenging but certainly more entertaining than the Matango miniboss in the original game.

One really interesting thing about Maguma is that he doesn't die when you defeat him, he turns tail and retreats. This was the first time I had ever seen an enemy monster change direction, let alone retreat. I tried to chase after him, but he dissapeared after I got in the water. Poor bastard.

And that does it for the Arctic. I'll talk about the Manda fight next.

I forgot to mention before, but the music that played during the new monster fights is re-used from themes actually in the games.

So far the themes have been:

Titanosaurus: Gezora's music Biollante: Hedorah's music Orga: Baragon/Moguera's music Manda: Varan's music Spacegodzilla: MechaGodzilla's music

As for the fight, Manda was a fairly crafty opponent. When it realized one tactic was ineffective, it would immediately change to a different one.

Manda used quite a few tricks, like spitting fire, biting, and the most irritating of all, constricting.

It doesn't mercilessly drain your life down like Gigan's cutter, but it was by far Manda's strongest attack.

One last thing to note (that I found pretty cool) was that the Atragon showed up during the fight to help me out. Manda crushed it with ease, but it was still cool.

After I slayed Manda, I played through an Arctic level for health power-ups and then it was on to Gigan's replacement. When the fight started, I was very confused, because there was nothing there. I thought this was going to be like the Titanosaurus "fight" in Pathos, but just about the time it would have been going back to the map, a piranha appeared onscreen.

But it wasn't there for long. As soon as it appeared, the speakers emitted an ear-splitting screech, and Not-Gigan flew in and ripped the poor fish into pieces.

Well, that's one way to get the player on their toes. That abrupt entrance scared the hell out of me and got my adrenaline rushing. Which in retrospect was a good thing, because Not-Gigan was one of the fastest, most unrelenting opponents in the game.

Not-Gigan was tough, but my new skills with Anguirus helped to even the score. This was still an incredibly intense fight! Not-Gigan's attacks consisted of a some kind of blood laser he spews from his mouth, and a downward slash. I was expecting some hellish variant of the buzzsaw attack, but thankfully there didn't seem to be one.

The Howl attack was invaluable in defeating him. I would have taken more screencaps of the fight, but I really had to concentrate.

After that, there was just one monster left to take down: SpaceGodzilla. As mentioned earlier, I used Godzilla for this fight.

Spacegodzilla's fighting technique was rather frustrating, but admittedly a very clever idea.

SpaceGodzilla would use his energy to create two flying crystals, which would reach the ground and become crystal spires.

These spires not only block you from reaching SpaceGodzilla, but it also allowed him to constantly recharge to full energy, and blast you with a deadly fully charged Corona Beam until you broke the spires.

SpaceGodzilla would eventually drain his own spires of energy until they shattered, but if you waited for that to happen you'd probably lose a lot of life. Heat beams actually seemed to re-energize the spires, so you had to use physical attacks.

When you finally got close enough to hit SpaceGodzilla, he was no pushover. When I punched him, he hit me back just as hard. SpaceGodzilla does everything in his power to knock you back to the left corner of the screen, so he can create more spires.

By the time this was over, I only had about five life bars left. But it didn't matter, because I didn't need to fight anymore. I needed to run.

Here we go again. I decided right then that I really wanted to see the end of this game. As terrifying as these levels could sometimes be, I had to beat them to get though.

I decided that no matter what happened, no matter what the game showed me, I was going to get to the end. And I also made sure not to say a damned word while playing a chase level from here on.

For this chase I tried out Anguirus, since his roll attack allowed me to move faster than Godzilla or Mothra. The chase started off like the first two, except there was a river of blood below the ground. I was beginning to get the hang of it, and the extra speed from the Roll helped me get an edge on the red monster. Especially since I didn't have to worry about a power limit, and could keep rolling endlessly.

Like the previous levels with water, the ground inevitably reached a stop. So I rolled off into the blood. To my surprise, the hell beast didn't follow after me, it just stopped at the edge of the ground and grimaced. "I guess it can't swim" I thought to myself.

So I went "underblood" and continued moving. There wasn't anything around, but I knew something was up. The chase wasn't going to end that easily, could it? Surely something else had to show up. And sure enough, I heard the bellowing roar, sounding slightly different...

...And the monster was following after me in a new aquatic body! I had no idea it was a shapeshifter. After it reappeared, the chase started to get into the difficulty I had expected. Being submerged slowed me down, putting me and the beast at about the same speed. The only thing that would keep me alive was fast thinking and reflexes.

I encountered some bottomless pits, in which mines floated up from. I assume that if you hit one, it would damage you and knock you back. Considering how fast the red monster swims, hitting the mines would be instant death, so I went through great effort to avoid them.

But that wasn't all I had to be wary of. Halfway through the chase the hell beast revealed yet another surprise: a tentacle formed of intestine and tipped with a clawed set of jaws burst from its mouth, trying to pull me in and devour me. I only barely avoided both the tentacle and the mines, but I could tell the beast was getting desperate, because the chase was nearly over.

And about a minute later, I had spotted a bit of ground that served as the exit. I leaped with all the might I could muster (without breaking my controller). The beast screamed with rage and jumped out of the blood river in one last attempt to drag me down, but I escaped its grasp. This time.

I fell back on my bed and took a deep breath, satisfied with yet another successful escape. Now I was headed to the fifth world: Entropy.

[previous] | [next]

[everybodygetawesome]

Top 10 Memorable Motorcycle Moments in Movies!

Do you know what’s awesome?  Movie Motorcycles.   So...motorcycles.  Why are motorcycles loved by the people who ride them?  Sure enough, I get why people who don’t ride them see the activity as an entirely unnecessary risk.  Motorcycles are dangerous and I can’t place my finger exactly on what the addiction of riding a motorcycle is.  Sometimes it’s uncomfortable and sometimes it’s downright painful.  I assume that everybody out on the road doesn’t see me, is drunk, on their phones, and might kill me at any given moment.  

But motorcycles maintain an inexorable pull on people who ride them.  Tractor beam.  Sucked me right in.  (Movie?  Anybody?) Motorcycles in movies, though, that’s much easier to understand...characters who ride motorcycles just look cooler.  By the way, I’m not out to look cool...cool-looking people have no helmets, bare sleeves, and a cigar.  Since I’m terrified of head injury, roadrash and lung cancer, I have on full leather gear and a full face helmet, and no cigar, and probably look like I’m trying *too* hard, when really I just want all of my skin to stay attached to my body.  

So, to be clear, the motorcycles and their riders listed below are absolutely NOT the way motorcycling should be done.  Only 2 of the Top 10 riders and two(ish) of the Best of the Rest listed wore a helmet and ATGATT (all the gear, all the time) throughout the movie.  So if you were thinking of learning to ride, DON’T EVER DO THIS STUFF.  I promise to go back to my responsible riding just as soon as I get done writing this.  

As per previous rules, no internet was allowed in coming up with the list, but I did need the internet to help with some of the details.  Now, you might be wondering how I came up with the list in the first place and, admittedly, this was incredibly subjective.  I tried to come up with movies wherein if somebody mentioned a movie, one of the first thing I thought of was a specific motorcycle.  The higher on the list, the more the motorcycle was associated with the movie. I will concede here, that there’s a very fine line between something that’s cool and something that’s stupid and cheesy.  But if you fall on the wrong side of that line, it might be memorable, but it absolutely doesn’t make the list. ”Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man” is what inspired this paragraph and, by the way, if you want to watch something unintentionally hilarious, I highly recommend this movie.  “Biker Boyz” too.  I have no real barometer as how something falls on one side of this line vs the other but you know it when you see it.

I will take a rather unusual stance here and concede that my list may not be as good as it could be.  Normally, I consider my opinion on pop culture to be beyond contestation (bonus points if somebody can get that obscure pop-culture reference), but I feel like I’m missing some big ones here. Well, whatever.  Let’s go grab some wind...

The Best of the Rest

Bond’s Chase - “Skyfall”

Wait, what?  Bond doesn’t make an appearance in the Top 10?  No, he actually doesn’t.  You’d think that since James can do everything and since Q cooks up sweet gadgets, there’d be a good/memorable motorcycle scene somewhere.   Not so much.  Most of the time it’s the villain henchmen riding and the few scenes that do involve James are somewhat forgettable.  There is the scene in Die Another Day I think, where James and the Chinese Special agent are handcuffed together and basically coital as they ride through the streets of Shanghai and shoot bad guys and the whole thing is too silly to take seriously.

So we’re left with “Skyfall” which I actually contend is one of the two best 007 movies ever.  The motorcycle scene is cool but it’s just sort of forgettable and wasn’t even close to the most famous ride in the movie...that title goes to the silver Aston Martin kept in storage.  Hell, James is more memorable riding into the casino on that boat.  In my humble opinion.  So a best of the rest appearance, yes.  But a Top 10 appearance?  My apologies, Mr. Bond.

The Batpod - “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises”

Yeah, yeah...it’s not a “real” motorcycle.  It’s a custom chopper.  Shut up and don’t judge my nerding out over comic book movies.   Like you don’t want one.  Batman, was, I supposed, wearing pretty protective riding gear though I don’t think it was dedicated riding gear.

Topper Harley’s Dream Lover - “Hot Shots”

If only this scene could have involved more foolishness.  The movie it’s self is a national treasure, but the motorcycle just didn’t figure into it as much as we all wished it could have.  It’s not the first motorcycle in a movie you think of, but it does make you giggle when you get there.   Iowa State Rugby has just disowned me for this omission.  It’s almost as unfortunate as taking a bazooka round at Little Bighorn.

Maybe we should start to get serious here...

Kiddo’s Stalking - “Kill Bill Vol. 1″

A great regret of my life may be not putting this in the Top 10.  I just didn’t quite associate the movie enough with the motorcycle and there’s another Tarentino movie that’s going to show up in the top 10.  While Beatrix Kiddo is in her motorcycling leather for much of the movie, the motorcycle it’s self, tragically, just isn’t a major fixture.

She does look cool though.  I feel like if there was some memorable line or something from the scene, if she would have fired off a witty retort to a squid (a squid is a squirrley kid who’s not wearing any protective gear and rides like a jackass), that would have made the scene a little more memorable.  To me anyways.  But tearing away to Tomoyasu Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” was an awfully good start.   I’m so on the fence here.  But another Tarantino Motorcycle Made the Top 10.  Speaking of that...

Top 10 Memorable Motorcycle Moments in Movies!

10.  Grace - “Pulp Fiction”

The Bike: Harley-Davidson Fat Bob Chopper

I will readily admit that I don’t think of motorcycles when I think about the movie “Pulp Fiction”.  This was such a small part of the movie, I could easily entertain objections that it’s on my list.  

The thing is though, for the last 20 years (can it really be 20 years?) whenever I see a chopper on the road, I always mutter under my breath, “It’s not a motorcycle, baby, it’s a chopper”. Did you know it isn’t a motorcycle, it’s a chopper?  I didn’t.  It occurred to me that I’d like to know things like that.  I’d like to casually but firmly correct somebody about something such as this which are obvious now but when I was 14, I had no idea.  Bruce Willis telling me it wasn’t a motorcycle placed an inkling in my head I should know these things.

It’s a Tarentino movie, so don’t watch it at work...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ue996GQMC8 

9.  Riggs Lays it Down - “Lethal Weapon - 3″

The Bike: 1984 Kawasaki KZ1000 Police

Riggs, of course, needs to wreck half of Los Angeles to catch somebody and finally gets on two wheels to do so in the third installment of the franchise.  In coming up with this one, Riggs’ very memorable shot coming through the smoke with the windscreen having been torn off by a semi (of course) is arguably the most memorable shot of the whole movie which is why it makes #9.  

I was told in my motorcycle safety course that there are very few times when it is acceptable or advisable to lay it down.  If you laid it down, essentially, you consciously decided to crash.  One of the very few times it IS acceptable to lay it down is when you are about to drive off the cliff.  Since sliding off a cliff is certain death, taking your chances trying to find something to grab on to as you slide towards your doom is the better option.  Otherwise, I am told, if you are headed towards a car, you will hit the car that pulled out in front of you at a higher rate of speed if you slide vs ride as the coefficient of friction is higher between the ground and your tires than it is between the ground and the rest of your motorcycle.  Also you stand a greater chance of being run over by the wheels if you are at ground level.   Heading towards a cliff, though, changes the situation slightly.  There is no car to run you over and even you hit the cliff at 5mph, you’ll die when you go over.  You’re better off trying to grab something as you slide towards the cliff and slow your speed.  

Also, If Jack Travis is also firing a fully automatic machine gun at you, you present a harder target to hit if you lay it down, so we can see, here, that Martin made an excellent choice, given several potential hazards...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ49ym9clB0

8.  Rooney Mara helps revive Cafe Racers - “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

The Bike:  Honda CL350

One of two entries on our list who rides with All the Gear, All the Time.  See, I really don’t know why people don’t want to wear proper motorcycling gear because Rooney Mara looks like a badass when she does it.  She even tries to get Daniel Craig in on ATGATT at the end of the movie but it doesn’t go well.  

Anywho.  Certainly the revival of the Cafe Racer style motorcycle wouldn’t be attributed to the movie, but it didn’t hurt.  (Cafe Racers are light, nimble motorcycles with dropped handlebars leading to a bent over riding stance...I guess these are what the cool, hipster kids are into now).  While there was no single moment involving the motorcycle, Rooney Mara’s dark, brooding character wouldn’t have been the same had she pulled up in a SmartCar.  Mara’s ride seems to be as aloof as she was throughout the movie.  A little tortured, too, as I can’t think of too many things less comfortable than taking a motorcycle with drop handlebars and an odd stance up through remote Sweden in the middle of winter.   But does she care?  Don’t be an idiot.  Of course she doesn’t care.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l23hFSfp0b4

7.  Tom Cruise’s Need for Speed - “Top Gun”

The Bike:  Kawasaki GPZ 900

Okay, so lets get this out of the way...it is rather silly to try and race a jet on a motorcycle as Tom Cruise appears to be doing.  Especially when he was fairly easily chased down by Kelly McGillis in her not-hotrod later in the movie, but if you’re going to sit there and tell me you didn’t secretly want to zoom away on a crotch rocket into the sunset to the sounds of Kenny Loggins’ “Highway to the Danger Zone”, I would easily call you a liar.

Go on then, take a trip down memory lane... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTj-jJDkYkM

6.  Trinity and the Keymaster - “The Matrix Reloaded”

The Bike:  Ducati 996

So, as motorcycle chases go, you can’t really top this one.  When Trinity goes against traffic, you kind of almost cover your eyes.  The problem is, and the reason it’s only number 6 is because I made the mistake of watching the “making of” this scene and...it just takes away from the whole thing.  So don’t.  Just watch Trinity get her swerve on.  

It is fun that they flipped the script and put the dude on the back.  Of all the scenes in movies that made me want a sport bike, this was the one that topped my list.  At the end of the day, sport bikes just aren’t my thing, but it does make you want to stop whatever you’re doing and go buy a Ducati.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF9AC2Ce2ow

5.  Steve McQueen’s Getaway - “The Great Escape”

The Bike:  Trumph T6

I was so happy at the start of the scene when Steve McQueen was dressed appropriately.  Okay, granted, it was a stolen SS uniform and that’s what the Germans were looking for, but at least he had a helmet on.  Steve’s attempt at being inconspicuous by ditching his gear was somewhat foiled when he jumped his stolen Triumph over a barbed wire fence which looks rather suspicious.  

Steve McQueen was well known for loving motorcycles, he had over a hundred in his personal collection and was a very capable rider himself.  Bet he wished he was wearing full leather at the end of that scene...

It’s certainly not as hair raising as Trinity’s ride above, but it’s arguably more iconic and, apparently, McQueen himself lobbied pretty hard to do the jump at the end but was under contract not to. And he is the King of Cool.  So there you go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zwW7iWinrk

4.  Marlon Brando’s Wild Ride - “The Wild One”

The Bike:  1950 Triumph Blackbird

The very first recognizable motorcycle movie had Marlon Brando, long before he was making people offers they couldn’t refuse, he was riding into town, hitting on otherwise innocent waitresses, and getting into good old-fashioned (emphasis on old-fashioned) fisticuffs in the street (the old-timey insults are kind of tremendous) and generally being a brooding jerk.   There’s motorcycle racing and fights around motorcycles and it’s obviously pretty dated.  But it was the first movie in which motorcycles were the central feature, and that commands respect.  My only complaint...arguably the best line in the movie was said in the wrong place.  While standing in a bar he was asked “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”   Instead of leaning against jukebox, the director should have had him answer while scowling over handlebars: “What do you got?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGn_od9owp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyq4HZZ4H50

3.  The Terminator 2 Dueling Scoots - “Terminator 2 - Judgement Day”

The Bikes - Harley-Davidson Fatboy FLSTF/Honda XR80 Dirtbike/Kawasaki KZ1000 Police Model

I rewatched “Terminator 2″ and that movie straight up, holds up.  The special effects don’t suck, even today and in 1990, they were rediculous.  While I will concede that motorcycles aren’t the first thing that people think of when they think of that movie, when you rewatch it, you remember how tremendous that scene was.  

What Mr. Brannon’s 6th Grade class was most fascinated with was Arnold’s one-handed re-cocking of his shotgun while on the back of that iconic ride and who didn’t pretend to do so while mounted on his trusted Huffy.  What kid didn’t pretend to outrun a T-1000 on his same trusted Huffy through Brookside Park in Ames, Iowa?   You didn’t?  I weep for your misspent youth.

It’s too bad they ran over the dirtbike.  It took a hit from a semi and stayed up. The thing is, though, when I was thinking about motorcycles in movies and coming up with this list, the first thing I remembered was the T-1000 on the back of the Kawasaki riding up a flight of stairs and then right the hell out of a window.  And I remember that horrifying scene where the T-1000 gets his motorcycle which is really only the line, “Say...that’s a nice bike.”   And you are left with only your imagination to devise what happened to the luckless motorcycle cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In an incredible twist of irony, one of only two riders on this list wearing a helmet was a Terminator.  And fine work by the Kawasaki Police bikes, with two appearances on the Top 10.

Go ahead - waste some time at work:

http://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/c724bc3f-a0ce-4cf7-b060-d39a2b7beb49

Here’s Arnold getting his ride...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYOoWCv_PYE

And this is one hell of a scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgphD_ZO_jI

2.  Prince’s Iconic Ride - “Purple Rain”

The Bike: Honda Hondamatic CM400a

Wait, what?  A Honda?  This wasn’t some badass custom Harley Road Glide in a royal shade of purple?  Not at all...have a look at the stock version:

See, you have to remember that Prince was only 5′4 or whatever.  You can’t have His Royalty struggling to hold up a 900lb touring monster.  Not if you want that iconic photograph above.  So you switch out the stock seat for a king queen seat, put a big faring on the front to make it look bigger than it is and give it a paint job nobody would ever forget.  

And nobody did.  If you say the words “Purple Rain” to anybody born after 1985 or so (and even people born after that), the first thing they’re likely to say back is Prince.  And the first visual image they have is that motorcycle on the album cover.  If we are talking about motorcycles in movies that nobody forgets, we’d be absolutely remiss if we didn’t put this one in the top 3.

The motorcycle scene, I’m afraid, has been pulled from YouTube due to copyright stuff...honestly, the scene quite didn’t hold up over time.  Maybe it’s just better to keep the regal ride the way you had it in your mind...

1.  The Captain America Chopper - “Easy Rider”

The Bike:  A custom chopper - no model

Yeah, don’t overlook the obvious here.  There is one king of movie motorcycles and it’s the Easy Rider Captain America Chop.  

This motorcycle almost became the most expensive ride in history - at one point nearly selling for $1.7 million.  The buyer backed out when questions about authenticity arose and the story of the “Easyrider” chops is a rather notorious one.  

The interwebs tell me that there were four original motorcycles used for the movie and that 3 of the original four were stolen before the movie even hit the silver screen.  One of the actors, Dan Haggarty (Grizzly Adams DID have a beard) ended up rebuilding the fourth, or at least he SAID he did.  He authenticated two and then changed his mind.  Peter Fonda (seen above) also authenticated one bike but then said later that Haggarty had duped him and changed his mind.  Eventually, the buyer who had offered almost 2 million dollars for it changed HIS mind and backed out over questions regarding the authenticity.

The story of the motorcycle building is also pretty interesting and the good folks at NPR dug up some more history if you’re interested:

http://www.npr.org/2014/10/11/354875096/behind-the-motorcycles-in-easy-rider-a-long-obscured-story This is *The* movie motorcycle.  So go ahead and appreciate it.  And don’t worry, the opening scene still holds up.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1cDECkN2xg

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DGB Grab Bag: Traveling Jagrs, Mythical 1917, and Nutso Billy Smith

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: This KHL player – This is technically from last week, but qualifies for this week's list due to the time zone difference.

The second star: The Travelling Jagrs add a member –

You've seen these guys before. They're a roving pack of Jagr impersonators who represent every one of the star's many stops around the hockey world. Now that he's in Calgary they need a new member, and the auditions seem to be going well.

The first star: Nathan Walker's butt makes history– He's the first Australian to ever play in the NHL, which earned him a call from the prime minister, during which he awkwardly had to talk about his own butt until the PM said "Well that's fantastic."

Bonus points to the Australian ambassador to the U.S., who shows up as a supporting character in this story and somehow has this actual name.

Be It Resolved

The first week of the season featured plenty of impressive performances, some of which even closed in on all-time records. In fact, you probably got pretty used to seeing stats like this:

Or this:

Or this:

And eventually, you probably stopped and went: Wait, what the heck was going on back in 1917?

You wouldn't be alone. The NHL has this weird thing about its history. The league has been around for 100 years, as they're constantly reminding us this season. But for the most part, they tend to ignore the first quarter-century or so and just skip right to the Original Six era starting in the 1940s. Plenty of casual fans have no idea that there were once teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Eagles and Hamilton Tigers, and unless you're Dick Beddoes you don't know about Joe Malone and other stars of those early years. To hear the league tell it, history basically begins when Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard showed up, and everything before that was some sort of warmup.

And then we see all these stats show up this week, and you think "Gee, the 1917 version of the NHL sounds fun as hell."

I think the league should embrace this. Ideally, they'd do that by marketing their entire history, not just three-quarters of it, but that ship has sailed. The league has spent decades making it clear that they don't want to do that, so I'm not going to bang my head against a wall.

No, I think the league should go in the other direction. So be it resolved, the NHL needs to start making stuff up about the 1917-18 season.

It's a perfect opportunity. Nobody knows anything about what was going on back then anyway, so you may as well have fun with it. The NHL should just start dropping random "facts" about their inaugural season and see how long it takes everyone else to catch on. Stuff like:

In 1917, it was a minor penalty for a goaltender to let his skates touch the ice.

There were five pucks on the ice at all times, but you could only score with the one that had bees inside it.

Player awarded an automatic penalty shot any time an opposing goaltender made a save.

The league only started with only four teams, but quickly dropped to three because one of the arenas burned down. (Wait, that one is actually true.)

Goalies wore full face masks, but they were made out balsa wood and didn't have eyeholes.

Jaromir Jagr won rookie of the year.

Literally everyone involved was drunk at all times. (Also probably true.)

Have some fun with it, NHL. You've never told us anything about that first season before, so you've got a blank canvas to work with. Don't let it go to waste.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

While Walker is the first Australian-trained player in league history, he was born in the UK, meaning there has still yet to be an Australian-born NHLer. According to the hockey-reference.com database of player birthplaces, that leaves 16 countries that have produced one and only one NHL player. That includes this week's obscure player: Willi Plett.

Plett was born in Paraguay to Soviet parents but raised in Ontario, where he didn't start playing organized hockey until he was nearly in his teens. He was a big kid who could also play, and he was picked in the fifth round of the 1975 draft by the Atlanta Flames. He debuted that year, playing four games, then scored 33 goals as a rookie in 1976-77 to win the Calder. He'd top that with 38 goals in the team's first year in Calgary in 1980-81, a season that saw him become the first player to ever have that many goals and at least 230 PIM. (He's since been joined in that club by eight other players.)

He was traded to the North Stars in 1982 because in those days, everyone who could fight had to serve some time in the Norris Division. He played five years in Minnesota, then ended his career with a season in Boston after they nabbed him from the Rangers in the waiver draft.

Overall, Plett was a skilled tough guy, or maybe a tough skill guy depending on how you wanted to look at it. He crossed the line once or twice, including a nasty stick-swinging incident with Wings' goalie Greg Stefan that earned him a big suspension, but he was generally considered a respected enforcer in an era packed with them. He finished with 834 games, 222 goals and 2,572 PIM, one of only six players to record 200+ goals and 2,500+ PIM.

(And yes, his name was "Willi", not Willie or Willy. It's an Eastern European thing. What, you want to tell this guy that he spells his name wrong?)

The NHL Actually Got Something Right

Given what happen in Las Vegas two weeks ago, it felt like there was really no right way for the Golden Knights to handle their home opener on Tuesday. A big splashy ceremony would have felt inappropriate, obviously. But at the same time, it's the first home game in franchise history; you can't treat it like any other game, because there haven't been any others. The team was left to walk what seemed like a near-impossible line.

And they basically nailed it. On Tuesday, they managed to be respectful without being maudlin. They found a way to say what needed to be said without making it all about them, and hit the right notes in the process.

Does that fix anything? Not even close, as others have argued. But we knew they weren't going to be able to do that. So they did what they could.

When these things are done well, they always seem easy in hindsight. But this couldn't have been. As Elliotte Friedman pointed out, the Knights no doubt spent weeks preparing a big show designed to make an impression on their new home. It's almost a tradition that new teams have to do something embarrassingly over-the-top to mark their first game, as Grab Bag readers already know all about. Instead, the Knights had to scrap all that (including a mascot unveiling) for something more fitting.

And it worked. Full credit to the team and league for making it happen. And if they want to loosen up a bit and have some fun at tonight's second game, that's cool too. Things won't ever go back to normal in Las Vegas, but they'll inch their way in that direction, and the NHL can be a small part of that.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

Today is Friday the 13th, which conjures images of a madman in a goalie mask hacking and slashing innocent people to pieces. Or, as NHL fans of the 1980s called it, Billy Smith.

Yes, it's our old pal Smith, the craziest goaltender to ever strap on the pads. When he wasn't winning four straight Stanley Cups, he was blazing a trail that would be followed by guys like Ron Hextall, Patrick Roy, Ray Emery, and others. He was nuts.

How nuts? Well, today's video features a selection of suspension-worthy stick fouls involving Smith and just one of the NHL's other 20 teams from a single playoff series. It's still five minutes long. You do the math.

Our clip begins with Game One of the 1983 final between Smith's Islanders and the Edmonton Oilers. We're midway through the first period, with the Islanders leading 1-0, and the Oilers have the puck deep in the New York zone. Glenn Anderson circles the net on a wraparound, then mysteriously falls over for no reason. Huh. Might want to see a replay on that one.

On a second look, we get a clear view of Smith executing a one-handed slash to Anderson's knee. Let's just point out two things. First, that play is dangerous and downright dirty, and should absolutely be a penalty if not an outright suspension. Second…I mean, that's a pretty cool move, right? Think of the combination of timing, hand-eye coordination and arm strength you need to pull that off and score a direct hit. I bet he couldn't do that again if he tried!

We skip ahead to late in game two, as Wayne Gretzky sets up behind the net. We used to call that Gretzky's "office," because it was where he did his best work. Unfortunately, he then skates out to the side of the net, which is Billy Smith's office, in the sense that it's where he performs amputations.

Yes, Smith manages to pull off the exact same move again, hacking Gretzky on the knee. That leads to a stare down, followed by a scrum. I can't tell who every player on the ice is, but the Oilers have Gretzky, Anderson and Jari Kurri, while the Islanders have a Sutter. So, advantage New York.

The announcer, longtime Islanders homer Jiggs McDonald, is great here. "Smith with a swing at the puck, and Gretzky has gone down like he was shot." Those 1980s pucks sure were tricky, always disguising themselves as the MVP's kneecap.

"You have to remember back to the time when Billy Smith… did it to Anderson." Ah, yes, back to those distant and hazy times of literally 48 hours ago. We were all so young then.

"He didn't hit Anderson obviously that bad." These announcers are great. "They're acting like a bunch of little kids now." Seriously, so great.

Hey, can we just point that legendary linesman Swede Knox is looking sharp out there? Not a hair out of place.

Meanwhile, a policeman who weighs 120 pounds and is clearly packing a loaded gun just casually climbs over the glass behind the bench to settle some fans down. He's never seen again. My guess is he's still there.

Gretzky is furious, getting in the face of referee Wally Harris to plead his case. I can't read his lips, but I'm pretty sure he's explaining that dangerous stick-related fouls need to be called consistently, even when they're committed by star players late in crucial playoff games.

Smith does indeed get five minutes, which needless to say outrages our neutral announcers. "Look how low the stick is!" If I'm ever charged with a violent crime, I want these two to be my defense lawyers.

We cut to the end of the game, as Edmonton's turns the tables by spearing Smith, causing the goalie to execute a full backflip in his crease while shedding all his equipment, Beetle Bailey-style. You'd think this would make the Islanders angry, but Dave Semenko is standing nearby so everyone just pretends they didn't notice.

For the record, the NHL responded to all this by being furious at…the Oilers. For complaining too much about the Anderson slash. As league VP Brian O'Neill put it, "[Oilers coach Glen] Sather has created a situation where Billy Smith is a monster. Billy Smith has had his problems, but he's made an effort to tone it down." Seriously, right? He's slashing guys in the knee now instead of directly in the eye. If he tones it down any further he'll be hacking ankles, and at that point why even bother?

We skip ahead to later in the series, as Anderson gets his payback by blatantly running Smith on a loose puck. That leads to Smith dramatically dragging himself back towards his crease like a wounded Terminator before making a miraculous recovery once he realizes there's no penalty being called.

Our last moment comes from the final game of the series, as Smith nudges Anderson and gets rewarded with a swat to the head that once again causes him to temporarily die. Smith basically admitted to taking a dive after the game, telling reporters ''I was hurt about as much as Gretzky was hurt in the second game…when I hit Gretzky he lay down and he cried to the referee, so I just took a chapter out of his book. I put myself on my back, and I squirmed and kicked and I played dead just like he did."

I mean, can you imagine someone dropping that quote today? We'd all lose our minds for a week. Back then, everyone shrugged and went "Yeah, seems reasonable".

By the way, the Islanders won the series in four games, and Smith got the Conn Smythe. I think he won this round, you guys.

[Turns earnestly towards camera.] If you'd like to learn more about Billy Smith losing his mind, please enjoy clips of him getting into it with Scott Stevens, fracturing Curt Fraser's cheekbone, and fighting everyone from Tiger Williams to Eddie Johnstone to Lanny McDonald.

Smith was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993, the only goalie to make it in that decade. HHOF officials could not be reached for comment, as they were all suffering from mysterious knee injuries.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com .

DGB Grab Bag: Traveling Jagrs, Mythical 1917, and Nutso Billy Smith published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

DGB Grab Bag: Traveling Jagrs, Mythical 1917, and Nutso Billy Smith

Three Stars of Comedy

The third star: This KHL player – This is technically from last week, but qualifies for this week’s list due to the time zone difference.

The second star: The Travelling Jagrs add a member –

You’ve seen these guys before. They’re a roving pack of Jagr impersonators who represent every one of the star’s many stops around the hockey world. Now that he’s in Calgary they need a new member, and the auditions seem to be going well.

The first star: Nathan Walker’s butt makes history– He’s the first Australian to ever play in the NHL, which earned him a call from the prime minister, during which he awkwardly had to talk about his own butt until the PM said “Well that’s fantastic.”

Bonus points to the Australian ambassador to the U.S., who shows up as a supporting character in this story and somehow has this actual name.

Be It Resolved

The first week of the season featured plenty of impressive performances, some of which even closed in on all-time records. In fact, you probably got pretty used to seeing stats like this:

Or this:

Or this:

And eventually, you probably stopped and went: Wait, what the heck was going on back in 1917?

You wouldn’t be alone. The NHL has this weird thing about its history. The league has been around for 100 years, as they’re constantly reminding us this season. But for the most part, they tend to ignore the first quarter-century or so and just skip right to the Original Six era starting in the 1940s. Plenty of casual fans have no idea that there were once teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Eagles and Hamilton Tigers, and unless you’re Dick Beddoes you don’t know about Joe Malone and other stars of those early years. To hear the league tell it, history basically begins when Gordie Howe and Maurice Richard showed up, and everything before that was some sort of warmup.

And then we see all these stats show up this week, and you think “Gee, the 1917 version of the NHL sounds fun as hell.”

I think the league should embrace this. Ideally, they’d do that by marketing their entire history, not just three-quarters of it, but that ship has sailed. The league has spent decades making it clear that they don’t want to do that, so I’m not going to bang my head against a wall.

No, I think the league should go in the other direction. So be it resolved, the NHL needs to start making stuff up about the 1917-18 season.

It’s a perfect opportunity. Nobody knows anything about what was going on back then anyway, so you may as well have fun with it. The NHL should just start dropping random “facts” about their inaugural season and see how long it takes everyone else to catch on. Stuff like:

In 1917, it was a minor penalty for a goaltender to let his skates touch the ice.

There were five pucks on the ice at all times, but you could only score with the one that had bees inside it.

Player awarded an automatic penalty shot any time an opposing goaltender made a save.

The league only started with only four teams, but quickly dropped to three because one of the arenas burned down. (Wait, that one is actually true.)

Goalies wore full face masks, but they were made out balsa wood and didn’t have eyeholes.

Jaromir Jagr won rookie of the year.

Literally everyone involved was drunk at all times. (Also probably true.)

Have some fun with it, NHL. You’ve never told us anything about that first season before, so you’ve got a blank canvas to work with. Don’t let it go to waste.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

While Walker is the first Australian-trained player in league history, he was born in the UK, meaning there has still yet to be an Australian-born NHLer. According to the hockey-reference.com database of player birthplaces, that leaves 16 countries that have produced one and only one NHL player. That includes this week’s obscure player: Willi Plett.

Plett was born in Paraguay to Soviet parents but raised in Ontario, where he didn’t start playing organized hockey until he was nearly in his teens. He was a big kid who could also play, and he was picked in the fifth round of the 1975 draft by the Atlanta Flames. He debuted that year, playing four games, then scored 33 goals as a rookie in 1976-77 to win the Calder. He’d top that with 38 goals in the team’s first year in Calgary in 1980-81, a season that saw him become the first player to ever have that many goals and at least 230 PIM. (He’s since been joined in that club by eight other players.)

He was traded to the North Stars in 1982 because in those days, everyone who could fight had to serve some time in the Norris Division. He played five years in Minnesota, then ended his career with a season in Boston after they nabbed him from the Rangers in the waiver draft.

Overall, Plett was a skilled tough guy, or maybe a tough skill guy depending on how you wanted to look at it. He crossed the line once or twice, including a nasty stick-swinging incident with Wings’ goalie Greg Stefan that earned him a big suspension, but he was generally considered a respected enforcer in an era packed with them. He finished with 834 games, 222 goals and 2,572 PIM, one of only six players to record 200+ goals and 2,500+ PIM.

(And yes, his name was “Willi”, not Willie or Willy. It’s an Eastern European thing. What, you want to tell this guy that he spells his name wrong?)

The NHL Actually Got Something Right

Given what happen in Las Vegas two weeks ago, it felt like there was really no right way for the Golden Knights to handle their home opener on Tuesday. A big splashy ceremony would have felt inappropriate, obviously. But at the same time, it’s the first home game in franchise history; you can’t treat it like any other game, because there haven’t been any others. The team was left to walk what seemed like a near-impossible line.

And they basically nailed it. On Tuesday, they managed to be respectful without being maudlin. They found a way to say what needed to be said without making it all about them, and hit the right notes in the process.

Does that fix anything? Not even close, as others have argued. But we knew they weren’t going to be able to do that. So they did what they could.

When these things are done well, they always seem easy in hindsight. But this couldn’t have been. As Elliotte Friedman pointed out, the Knights no doubt spent weeks preparing a big show designed to make an impression on their new home. It’s almost a tradition that new teams have to do something embarrassingly over-the-top to mark their first game, as Grab Bag readers already know all about. Instead, the Knights had to scrap all that (including a mascot unveiling) for something more fitting.

And it worked. Full credit to the team and league for making it happen. And if they want to loosen up a bit and have some fun at tonight’s second game, that’s cool too. Things won’t ever go back to normal in Las Vegas, but they’ll inch their way in that direction, and the NHL can be a small part of that.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

Today is Friday the 13th, which conjures images of a madman in a goalie mask hacking and slashing innocent people to pieces. Or, as NHL fans of the 1980s called it, Billy Smith.

Yes, it’s our old pal Smith, the craziest goaltender to ever strap on the pads. When he wasn’t winning four straight Stanley Cups, he was blazing a trail that would be followed by guys like Ron Hextall, Patrick Roy, Ray Emery, and others. He was nuts.

How nuts? Well, today’s video features a selection of suspension-worthy stick fouls involving Smith and just one of the NHL’s other 20 teams from a single playoff series. It’s still five minutes long. You do the math.

Our clip begins with Game One of the 1983 final between Smith’s Islanders and the Edmonton Oilers. We’re midway through the first period, with the Islanders leading 1-0, and the Oilers have the puck deep in the New York zone. Glenn Anderson circles the net on a wraparound, then mysteriously falls over for no reason. Huh. Might want to see a replay on that one.

On a second look, we get a clear view of Smith executing a one-handed slash to Anderson’s knee. Let’s just point out two things. First, that play is dangerous and downright dirty, and should absolutely be a penalty if not an outright suspension. Second…I mean, that’s a pretty cool move, right? Think of the combination of timing, hand-eye coordination and arm strength you need to pull that off and score a direct hit. I bet he couldn’t do that again if he tried!

We skip ahead to late in game two, as Wayne Gretzky sets up behind the net. We used to call that Gretzky’s “office,” because it was where he did his best work. Unfortunately, he then skates out to the side of the net, which is Billy Smith’s office, in the sense that it’s where he performs amputations.

Yes, Smith manages to pull off the exact same move again, hacking Gretzky on the knee. That leads to a stare down, followed by a scrum. I can’t tell who every player on the ice is, but the Oilers have Gretzky, Anderson and Jari Kurri, while the Islanders have a Sutter. So, advantage New York.

The announcer, longtime Islanders homer Jiggs McDonald, is great here. “Smith with a swing at the puck, and Gretzky has gone down like he was shot.” Those 1980s pucks sure were tricky, always disguising themselves as the MVP’s kneecap.

“You have to remember back to the time when Billy Smith… did it to Anderson.” Ah, yes, back to those distant and hazy times of literally 48 hours ago. We were all so young then.

“He didn’t hit Anderson obviously that bad.” These announcers are great. “They’re acting like a bunch of little kids now.” Seriously, so great.

Hey, can we just point that legendary linesman Swede Knox is looking sharp out there? Not a hair out of place.

Meanwhile, a policeman who weighs 120 pounds and is clearly packing a loaded gun just casually climbs over the glass behind the bench to settle some fans down. He’s never seen again. My guess is he’s still there.

Gretzky is furious, getting in the face of referee Wally Harris to plead his case. I can’t read his lips, but I’m pretty sure he’s explaining that dangerous stick-related fouls need to be called consistently, even when they’re committed by star players late in crucial playoff games.

Smith does indeed get five minutes, which needless to say outrages our neutral announcers. “Look how low the stick is!” If I’m ever charged with a violent crime, I want these two to be my defense lawyers.

We cut to the end of the game, as Edmonton’s turns the tables by spearing Smith, causing the goalie to execute a full backflip in his crease while shedding all his equipment, Beetle Bailey-style. You’d think this would make the Islanders angry, but Dave Semenko is standing nearby so everyone just pretends they didn’t notice.

For the record, the NHL responded to all this by being furious at…the Oilers. For complaining too much about the Anderson slash. As league VP Brian O’Neill put it, “[Oilers coach Glen] Sather has created a situation where Billy Smith is a monster. Billy Smith has had his problems, but he’s made an effort to tone it down.” Seriously, right? He’s slashing guys in the knee now instead of directly in the eye. If he tones it down any further he’ll be hacking ankles, and at that point why even bother?

We skip ahead to later in the series, as Anderson gets his payback by blatantly running Smith on a loose puck. That leads to Smith dramatically dragging himself back towards his crease like a wounded Terminator before making a miraculous recovery once he realizes there’s no penalty being called.

Our last moment comes from the final game of the series, as Smith nudges Anderson and gets rewarded with a swat to the head that once again causes him to temporarily die. Smith basically admitted to taking a dive after the game, telling reporters ”I was hurt about as much as Gretzky was hurt in the second game…when I hit Gretzky he lay down and he cried to the referee, so I just took a chapter out of his book. I put myself on my back, and I squirmed and kicked and I played dead just like he did.”

I mean, can you imagine someone dropping that quote today? We’d all lose our minds for a week. Back then, everyone shrugged and went “Yeah, seems reasonable”.

By the way, the Islanders won the series in four games, and Smith got the Conn Smythe. I think he won this round, you guys.

[Turns earnestly towards camera.] If you’d like to learn more about Billy Smith losing his mind, please enjoy clips of him getting into it with Scott Stevens, fracturing Curt Fraser’s cheekbone, and fighting everyone from Tiger Williams to Eddie Johnstone to Lanny McDonald.

Smith was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993, the only goalie to make it in that decade. HHOF officials could not be reached for comment, as they were all suffering from mysterious knee injuries.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you’d like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com .

DGB Grab Bag: Traveling Jagrs, Mythical 1917, and Nutso Billy Smith syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[nothingman]

By John Feffer | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

Dystopias have recently achieved full-spectrum dominance. Kids are drawn to such stories — The Giver, Hunger Games — like Goths to piercings. TV shows about zombie apocalypses, pandemics, and technology run amok inspire binge watching. We’ve seen the world-gone-truly-bad a thousand times over on the big screen.

This apocalyptic outpouring has been so intense that talk of “peak dystopia” started to circulate several years ago. Yet the stock of the doomsday cartel has shown no signs of falling, even as production continues at full blast. (A confession: with my recent novel Splinterlands I’ve contributed my own bit to flooding the dystopia market.) As novelist Junot Diaz argued last October, dystopia has become “the default narrative of the generation.”

Shortly after Diaz made that comment, dystopia became the default narrative for American politics as well when Donald Trump stepped off the set of The Celebrity Apprentice and into the Oval Office. With the election of an uber-narcissist incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, all the dystopian nightmares that had gathered like storm clouds on the horizon — nuclear war, climate change, a clash of civilizations — suddenly moved overhead. Cue the rumble of thunder and the flash of lightning.

The response among those horrified by the results of the recent presidential election has been four-fold.

First came denial — from the existential dread that hammered the solar plexus as the election returns trickled in that Tuesday night to the more prosaic reluctance to get out of bed the morning after. Then came the fantasies of flight, as tens of thousands of Americans checked to see if their passports were still valid and if the ark bound for New Zealand had any berths free. The third stage has been resistance: millions poured into the streets to protest, mobilized at airports to welcome temporarily banned immigrants, and flocked to congressional meet-and-greets to air their grievances with Republicans and Democrats alike.

The fourth step, concurrent with all the others, has been to delve into the dystopias of the past as if they contained some Da Vinci code for deciphering our present predicament. Classics like Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, George Orwell’s 1984, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale quickly climbed back onto bestseller lists.

It might seem counterintuitive — or a perverse form of escapism — to turn from the dystopia of reality to that of fiction. Keep in mind, though, that those novels became bestsellers in their own time precisely because they offered refuge and narratives of resistance for those who feared (in order of publication) the rise of Nazism, the spread of Stalinism, or the resurgence of state-backed misogyny in the Reagan years.

These days, with journalists scrambling to cover the latest outrage from the White House, perhaps it was only natural for readers to seek refuge in the works of writers who took the longer view. After all, it’s an understandable impulse to want to turn the page and find out what happens next. And dystopian narratives are there, in part, to help us brace for the worst, while identifying possible ways out of the downward spiral toward hell.

The dystopian classics, however, are not necessarily well suited to our current moment. They generally depict totalitarian states under a Big Brother figure and a panoptical authority that controls everything from the center, a scenario that’s fascist or communist or just plain North Korean. Certainly, Donald Trump wants his face everywhere, his name on everything, his little fingers in every pot. But the dangers of the current dystopian moment don’t lie in the centralizing of control. Not yet, anyway.

The Trump era so far is all about the center not holding, a time when, in the words of the poet Yeats, things fall apart. Forget about Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism — also a hot seller on Amazon — and focus more on chaos theory. Unpredictability, incompetence, and demolition are the dystopian watchwords of the current moment, as the world threatens to fragment before our very eyes.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s talk of a trillion-dollar infrastructure boom. His team has a very different project in mind, and you can read it on the signpost up ahead. Next Stop: The Deconstruction Zone.

The Zombie Election

In February 2016, when Donald Trump won his first primary in New Hampshire, the New York Daily News headlined it “Dawn of the Brain Dead” and likened Trump’s GOP supporters to “mindless zombies.” Not to be outdone, that conspiracy-minded purveyor of fake news, Alex Jones, routinely described Hillary Clinton supporters as “zombies” on his Trump-positive website Infowars.

The references to zombies spoke to the apocalyptic mindset of both sides. Donald Trump deliberately tapped into the end-of-days impulses of Christian evangelicals, anti-globalists, and white power enthusiasts, who view anyone who hasn’t drunk their Kool-Aid as a dead soul. Meanwhile, those fearful that the billionaire blowhard might win the election began spreading the “Trumpocalypse” meme as they warned of the coming of ever more severe climate change, the collapse of the global economy, and the outbreak of race wars. There was virtually no middle ground between the groups, aside from those who decided to steer clear of the election altogether. The mutual disgust with which each side viewed the other encouraged just the kind of dehumanization implied by that zombie label.

Zombies have become a political metaphor for another reason as well. What’s frightening about the flesh eating undead in their current incarnations is that they are not a formal army. There are no zombie leaders, no zombie battle plans. They shamble along in herds in search of prey. “Our fascination with zombies is partly a transposed fear of immigration,” I wrote in 2013, “of China displacing the United States as the world’s top economy, of bots taking over our computers, of financial markets that can melt down in a single morning.”

Zombies, in other words, reflect anxiety over a loss of control associated with globalization. In this context, the “rise of the rest” conjures up images of a mass of undifferentiated resource consumers — hungry others who are little more than mouths on legs — storming the citadels of the West.

During the election campaign, the Trump team appealed to those very fears by running ads during the popular TV series The Walking Dead that deliberately played on anti-immigration concerns. Once in office, Trump has put into motion his campaign pledges to wall off the United States from Mexico, keep out Muslims, and retreat into Fortress America. He has put special effort into reinforcing the notion that the outside world is a deeply scary place — even Paris, even Sweden! — as if The Walking Dead were a documentary and the zombie threat quite real.

The concentration of power in the executive branch, and Trump’s evident willingness to wield it, certainly echoes dystopian fears of 1984-style totalitarianism. So have the extraordinary lies, the broadsides against the media (“enemies of the people”), and the targeting of internal and external adversaries of every sort. But this is no totalitarian moment.  Trump is not interested in constructing a superstate like Oceania or even a provincial dictatorship like Airstrip One, both of which Orwell described so convincingly in his novel.

Instead, coming out of the gate, the new administration has focused on what Trump’s chief strategist and white nationalist Stephen Bannon promised to do several years ago: “bring everything crashing down.”

The Bannon Dystopia

Dystopians on the right have their own version of 1984. They’ve long been warning that liberals want to establish an all-powerful state that restricts gun ownership, bans the sale of super-sized sodas, and forces mythic “death panels” on the unwary. These right-wing Cassandras are worried not so much about Big Brother as about Big Nanny, though the more extreme among them also claim that liberals are covert fascists, closet communists, or even agents of the caliphate.

Strangely enough, however, these same right-wing dystopians — former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the (non-existent) death panels, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) on gun control, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on soda bans and other trivial pursuits — have never complained about the massive build-up of government power in far more significant areas: namely, the military and the intelligence agencies. Indeed, now that they are back on top, the new Trumpianized “conservatives” are perfectly happy to expand state power by throwing even more money at the Pentagon and potentially giving greater scope to the CIA in its future interrogations of terror suspects. Despite falling rates of violent crime — a tiny uptick in 2015 obscures the fact that these remain at a historic low — Trump also wants to beef up the police to deal with American “carnage.”

So far, so 1984. But the radically new element on the Trump administration’s agenda has nothing to do with the construction of a more powerful state. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon spoke instead of what was truly crucial to him (and assumedly the president): the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Here, Bannon was speaking specifically of unleashing Wall Street, polluting industries, gun sellers, while freeing a wide range of economic actors from regulation of just about any sort. But Trump’s cabinet appointments and the first indications of what a Trumpian budget might look like suggest a far broader agenda aimed at kneecapping the non-military part of the state by sidelining entire agencies and gutting regulatory enforcement. Bye-bye, EPA. Nighty-night, Department of Education. Nice knowing you, HUD. We sure will miss you, Big Bird and foreign aid.

Even the State Department hasn’t proved safe from demolition. With professional diplomats out of the loop, Pennsylvania Avenue, not Foggy Bottom, will be the locus of control for international relations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is being reduced to little more than an ornament as the new triumvirate of Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner take over foreign policy (though Vice President Pence hovers in the background like a chaperone at the prom). Meanwhile, with a proposed $54 billion future hike in its budget, Trump’s Pentagon will remain untouched by the wrecking ball, as the new president presides over a devastating shrinkage of the government he dislikes and a metastasis of what he loves. (Think: giant, shiny aircraft carriers!)

Thus far, the Trump administration has acted with highly publicized incompetence: administration figures contradicting each other, executive orders short-circuiting the government machinery, tweets wildly caroming around the Internet universe, and basic functions like press conferences handled with all the aplomb of a non-human primate. Trump’s appointees, including Bannon, have looked like anything but skilled demolition experts. This is certainly no Gorbachev-style perestroika, which eventually led to the unraveling of the Soviet Union. It’s nothing like the “shock therapy” programs that first knocked down and then remade the states of Eastern Europe after 1989.

However, since deconstruction is so much easier than construction and Bannon prides himself on his honey-badger-like persistence, the administration’s project, messy as it seems so far, is likely to prove quite capable of doing real damage. In fact, if you want a more disturbing interpretation of Donald Trump’s first months in office, consider this: What if all the chaos is not an unintended consequence of a greenhorn administration but an actual strategy?

All that dust in the air comes, after all, from the chaotic first steps in a projected massive demolition process and may already be obscuring the fact that Trump is attempting to push through a fundamentally anti-American and potentially supremely unpopular program. He aims to destroy the status quo, as Bannon promised, and replace it with a new world order defined by three Cs: Conservative, Christian, and Caucasian. Let the media cover what they please; let the critics laugh all they like about executive branch antics. In the meantime, all the president’s men are trying to impose their will on a recalcitrant country and world.

Triumph of the Will

I took a course in college on the rise of Nazism in Germany. At one point, the professor showed us Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1935 documentary that covered the Nazi Party Congress of the previous year and featured extensive footage of Adolf Hitler addressing the faithful. Triumph of the Will was a blockbuster film, our professor assured us. It spread the name of Hitler worldwide and established Riefenstahl’s reputation as a filmmaker. It was so popular inside Germany that it ran for months on end at movie theaters, and people returned again and again to watch it. Our teacher promised us that we would find it fascinating.

Triumph of the Will was not fascinating. Even for students engrossed in the details of the Nazi surge to power, the nearly two-hour documentary was a tremendous bore. After it was over, we bombarded the teacher with questions and complaints. How could he have imagined that we would find it fascinating?

He smiled. That’s the fascinating part, he said. Here was this extraordinarily popular film, and it’s now nearly impossible for Americans to sit through the whole thing. He wanted us to understand that people in Nazi Germany had an entirely different mindset, that they were participating in a kind of mass frenzy. They didn’t find Nazism abhorrent. They didn’t think they were living in a dystopia. They were true believers.

Many Americans are now having their Triumph of the Will moment. They watch Donald Trump repeatedly without getting bored or disgusted. They believe that history has anointed a new leader to revive the country and restore it to its rightful place in the world. They’ve been convinced that the last eight years were a liberal dystopia and what is happening now is, if not utopian, then the first steps in that direction.

A hard core of those enthralled by Trump cannot be convinced otherwise. They hold liberal elites in contempt. They don’t believe CNN or The New York Times. Many subscribe to outlandish theories about Islam and immigrants and the continuing covert machinations of that most famous “Islamic immigrant” of them all, Barack Obama. For this hard core of Trump supporters, the United States could begin to break down, the economy take a nosedive, the international community hold the leadership in Washington in contempt, and they will continue to believe in Trump and Trumpism. The president could even gun down a few people and his most fervent supporters would say nothing except, “Good shot, Mr. President!” Remember: even after Nazi Germany went down in fiery defeat in 1945, significant numbers of Germans remained in thrall to National Socialism. In 1947, more than half of those surveyed still believed that Nazism was a good idea carried out badly.

But plenty of Trump supporters — whether they’re disaffected Democrats, Hillary-hating independents, or rock-ribbed Republican conservatives — don’t fit such a definition. Some have already become deeply disillusioned by the antics of Donald J. and the demolition derby that his advisers are planning to unleash inside the U.S. government, which may, in the end, batter their lives badly.  They can be brought over. This is potentially the biggest of big-tent moments for launching the broadest possible resistance under the banner of a patriotism that portrays Trump and Bannon as guilty of un-American activities.

And it’s here in particular that so many dystopian novels provide the wrong kind of guidance. Trump’s end will not come at the hands of a Katniss Everdeen. A belief in an individual savior who successfully challenges a “totalitarian” system got us into this crisis in the first place when Donald Trump sold himself as the crusading outsider against a “deep state” controlled by devious liberals, craven conservatives, and a complicit mainstream media. Nor will it help for Americans to dream about leading their states out of the Union (are you listening, California?) or for individuals to retreat into political purism. Given that the administration’s dystopian vision is based on chaos and fragmentation, the oppositional response should be to unite everyone opposed, or even potentially opposed, to what Washington is now doing.

As readers, we are free to interpret dystopian fiction the way we please. As citizens, we can do something far more subversive. We can rewrite our own dystopian reality. We can change that bleak future ourselves. To do so, however, we would need to put together a better plot, introduce some more interesting and colorful characters, and, before it’s too late, write a much better ending that doesn’t just leave us with explosions, screams, and fade to black.

John Feffer is the author of the new dystopian novel, Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original with Haymarket Books), which Publishers Weekly hails as “a chilling, thoughtful, and intuitive warning.” He is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and a TomDispatch regular.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 John Feffer

Via Tomdispatch.com

via Informed Comment

[pinkarcadecandy]

THE MOST EXCLUSIVE RESTAURANT IN AMERICA

AUGUST 29, 2016 ISSUE

Damon Baehrel’s methods are a marvel, and his tables are all booked until 2025. Or are they?

By Nick Paumgarten

“He is an unheralded genius,” a food critic said of Damon Baehrel. “He really should be in the upper echelons of the greatest chefs who have ever lived.” Illustration by Eleanor Davis

The first time Jeffrey Merrihue came across the name Damon Baehrel, he was amazed that he hadn’t heard of him. “I didn’t understand how the secret had been kept,” Merrihue said recently. “The people I go around with, it’s hard for us to find something that is genuinely unique and new.” The people Merrihue goes around with are gastronomes, the trophy hunters of haute cuisine, the kind who travel the world to dine at famous, or famously obscure, restaurants. After a trip to Cape Town this spring, to a restaurant called the Test Kitchen, Merrihue, who lives in London and produces promotional videos for restaurants, became, he says, the second person to have eaten at every restaurant on the so-called World’s 50 Best list. He’s also been to eighty of the restaurants to which Michelin has granted three stars.

Around Christmas in 2013, a friend of Merrihue’s alerted him to a Bloomberg News piece about an unranked contender, which Bloomberg called the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” It described a gourmet operation—in Earlton, New York, a half hour south of Albany—in the basement of a woodland home. Once called Damon Baehrel at the Basement Bistro, the place was now simply called Damon Baehrel, after its presiding wizard and host, who served as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper. Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, sh, and dairy, from his twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp. He made his oils and ours from acorns, dandelions, and pine; incorporated barks, saps, stems, and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream; cured his meats in pine needles; made dozens of cheeses (without rennet); and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone. He had christened his approach Native Harvest. The diners who got into the restaurant raved about it online. But at the time it was booked through 2020. “We spend our lives looking for places like this,” Merrihue said.

Undaunted, Merrihue sent an e-mail to the address provided on Baehrel’s Web site. A man who identified himself as Terrance, a friend of the chef ’s, wrote that Baehrel had stopped taking reservations. “That wound me up even more,” Merrihue said. “I pride myself on getting into restaurants.” Still, it didn’t look good. “I thought, I might die before I get a chance to eat there.”

A year and a half later, Merrihue heard from Terrance again. Baehrel had an opening, three weeks later, on a weekday at 4 .. Merrihue hastily assembled a group, a “fantastic four of fine dining.” The three others were Kevin Chan, the editor of the Web site Fine Dining Explorer, who claims to be the first person ever to eat at all of the 50 Best; Andy Hayler, a well-known critic who says he is the only person ever to eat at all of the Michelin three-stars; and Mijune Pak, the editor of the Canadian Web site Follow Me Foodie. Chan ew in from Hong Kong, Pak from Vancouver, Merrihue and Hayler from London. They met in Manhattan and hired a limousine to take them the two and a half hours to Earlton. There was a fifth person as well—“my brother, who has no credentials,” Merrihue said.

The brother arrived early. The gate to Baehrel’s property was closed. Once the others had arrived, the gate swung open. The driver left them and headed into the nearby village of Coxsackie for some pizza. They walked up a driveway to a house on a hill. Around back, they came upon a manicured entrance to the basement. Baehrel, in an apron, greeted them enthusiastically.

He told them that he had just served a fteen-course lunch to fourteen diners. Over the next seven hours, he served Merrihue and his companions twenty-three courses. “I hate long meals,” Merrihue recalled. “But we couldn’t believe it—it just ew by.” In the end, they paid around four hundred and thirty dollars a head, including a corkage fee. (They’d brought their own wine.)

“The consensus was that it was absolutely outstanding,” Merrihue said. “It is the most memorable meal I have ever had. Would it have been my favorite if it had been made by twenty people? O.K., no. But top ten, maybe. I have never seen anywhere where one person does everything.”

“It was incredible,” Chan told me. “High quality, precisely cooked. The avor prole. Each course so well thought out. It’s almost too surreal to believe.”

All four wrote glowing reviews online. A few months later, on Merrihue’s site, FoodieHub, he named Damon Baehrel the best restaurant in the world for 2015. “He is an unheralded genius,” Merrihue told me. “He really should be in the upper echelons of the greatest chefs who have ever lived.”

“The depth of your wrongness is so deep that it is unknowable.”

Is Baehrel unheralded? You can read, and watch, a lot about him on the Internet. There are stories from Bloomberg, the Daily News, the Daily Mail, Town & Country, Fox, Reuters, China Central TV, and ABC News, as well as raves from foodie bloggers who have been there and, in spite of a purported dining-room photo ban, posted the requisite dish pics. His story caters to such gastronomes, as they vie for superlative experiences—most extreme, most local, most remote, most odd. Here’s a Fäviken, the exotic farmhouse restaurant in rural Sweden, except it’s just one guy, in Earlton, and it’s booked through 2025. Its implausibility may be as important to its appeal as any range of textures or tastes. In June, the blog Opinionated About Dining released its list of the top hundred restaurants in the United States, based on a survey of globe-trotting pilgrims like Merrihue. Baehrel came in fifth, ahead of any other restaurant east of Chicago. (Blue Hill at Stone Barns was seventh; Eleven Madison Park was fifteenth.) MSN.com just named it the best restaurant in the state of New York. One evening in May, I happened to be watching “Jeopardy!,” and under the category “Almost Fanatical Devotion,” in which the other questions had to do with Stephen Colbert, Soul Cycle, and Phish, the following appeared on the screen: “There’s a 10-year waiting list for Damon Baehrel’s Earlton, N.Y. restaurant & its 5-hour this ‘menu’ of small portions.” A contestant guessed correctly: “What is the tasting menu?”

There are armchair gourmets, too, among the devotees. In June, Baehrel honored the Make-A-Wish request of a teen-ager from Nebraska. The boy has a condition that prevents him from being able to eat food, and, perhaps as a consequence, he has a fascination with food preparation. He wished for a day of working in the kitchen alongside Chef Baehrel, whom he’d discovered on the Web. The family brought along special air lters, and the boy wore a mask.

In February, I got in touch with Terrance through an e-mail address on the Web site. His reply began, “Thanks for contacting Damon! I’m Terrance. I’ve arranged Damon’s reservations from my NYC office since 1993.” He added, “I’m not an employee, just a friend. I’d be happy to present your inquiry to him.”

Terrance arranged a time for me to talk on the phone with Baehrel, to discuss my desire to write about the restaurant. Baehrel had an avid, guileless way of speaking that put me in mind of Ned Flanders, from “The Simpsons.” “How lucky am I to get to do this?” he said. “Most chefs aspire to get out of the kitchen. Not me.” I told him that I wanted to see him at work, on a night when the restaurant was full. I imagined something like the setup in an Agatha Christie movie: a convergence of exotic strangers on a remote locale.

Baehrel told me that he couldn’t make room for me as a paying diner, and there wouldn’t really be space for me to hang around and observe. He didn’t want to spoil the experience for his guests, who have been waiting for years, and have often travelled a great distance and are paying a great deal.

Instead, Baehrel invited me to meet him on one of his days off. “I’ve got great news about Monday February 29,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We were able to re-arrange almost everything that day so you and I can get together.” He suggested 11 .., as he had an unmovable appointment earlier. I asked if it was something I could observe, such as a delivery or a meeting with a supplier. He wrote back, “I got a chuckle out of when you suggested I may be ‘meeting with a supplier.’ Not sure if you realize, I have no suppliers. No ordering or waiting for delivery trucks . . . ever.” The morning obligation had to do with an adult son, who is severely disabled. “My wife takes care of him,” he told me. “We can’t go away. One of us has to be home all the time.”

I drove up from Manhattan. It was a wet, blustery day. The G.P.S. steered me off the Thruway onto narrow winding back roads pegged with “Repeal the S.A.F.E. Act” pro- gun yard signs. After a while, around a turn, I came upon a tidy wood sign painted with Baehrel’s name and a logo of acorns, pine needles, and cattail spikes arranged around a sumac bob. I was a few minutes early. The gate was closed. I waited. Beyond the gate, a newly paved driveway curved through a wide lawn, past garden plots and trees hung with sap buckets, and up toward a simple two-story drab-green clapboard house. At eleven, the gates swung open.

I parked in a small lot. In addition to the house, there were a neatly painted red barn with a brick patio, a small greenhouse, some cold frames, a tractor, and a big silver Dodge pickup. Out back, a brook ran from a broad marsh and through several acres of woods. From the lot, a brick path led under a white arbor to a doorway of leaded glass and wood, with the name Damon Baehrel over the door. I knocked, and he answered immediately and chided me for knocking. “Come on in!”

Baehrel had on a brown apron and a tunic with his name and “chef/grower” stitched on the chest. “I’m going to cook for you,” he said. “When I say I’m the luckiest person in the world, I really mean it.” He’s in his early fties. He had puffy cheeks, slightly sunken eyes, straight brown hair, and a kind of goofy, high-strung optimism at odds with the popular notion of chefs as chilly sophisticates or imperious pirates.

“He says he feels empty inside.”

“The gate is closed,” he said. “No one is going to bother us.” The dining room was snug, seating no more than sixteen guests, with a table set up in the middle as though for a single party of six. It was tidy, not really rustic, more varnished than one might expect. The walls were painted a brushed ochre. A stained-glass panel in the wall read “Good Food” backward. Baehrel had installed it that way so you could read it in a nearby mirror. Along the back wall, a broad table was arrayed with bowls of seeds, nuts, leaves, roots, berries, and mushrooms; Mason jars of sap and our; and vials of oil, all marked with painter’s tape describing the contents and the vintage—“Acorn oil 8/15,” “Golden Rod our ’14.” The Native Harvest tag had been his wife’s suggestion. “I was inspired by Native Americans,” he said. “I wanted it to be based on the people who were here in this country before we were.” Supposition was his guide: he said that he had never actually read anything about Native American cuisine.

He worked through the items on display. Lily tuber, cattail stems, milkweed, bull thistle. By watching deer in the woods, he had discovered that the inner barks of certain trees have a salty taste. While chopping wood, he found that a particular lichen takes on an oniony flavor for three weeks a year. He made a cooked powder from it. “You’re gonna love it!” Baehrel relies heavily on starch and stock made from rutabagas. He uses wild- violet stems as a thickener. He inoculates fallen logs with mushroom spores. He’ll spend seven hours gathering three-quarters of a pound of clover—enough to ll a steamer trunk. “I do it at night, with a headlamp,” he said.

He had me sit at a table in the corner, a two-top, from which I couldn’t see the door to the kitchen. He wanted me to have the dining experience. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m a professional. I’m not going to kill you.” He filled my glass from a pitcher. “It’s sap. Sycamore sap.” It tasted like water, with a hint of something. A few minutes later, he came out with another pitcher. “This is sparkling maple sap, with dried lemon verbena. I have lemon trees in containers, but I don’t get many lemons. Just the leaves.” He said he harvests about a dozen saps: maple, birch, sycamore, hickory, walnut, butternut, beech, hardwood cherry. “Sycamore sap, when concentrated, is a little salty. You can brine things in it. Hickory sap is very briny and salty. Good for long cooking. I’ll brine a pork shoulder in hickory sap and pine needles for nineteen days. Cherry sap is salty and sweet, bitter, with herb hints like marjoram and lavender.

“My biggest challenge is creating enough our,” he went on. “I make it from cattails, pine—the inner bark—dandelions, clover, goldenrod, beechnut, hickory nuts, acorns. A huge part of my life is making our. It takes one to one and a half years to make acorn our. Acorns from the red oak have bitter tannins. White oak is more like a nut. In fall, I gather the acorns up in burlap sacks. Around New Year’s, I put the sacks in the stream, tied up. I leave them there all winter, under the ice. By spring, the tannic bitterness is gone.”

I asked him how he’d figured this out.

“Soaking didn’t work. I tried a circulation tank, and that didn’t work, either. I press them by hand, in a vise, or with stones. No machines.”

The first course was served on a slab of sawed wood. It was a small rectangle of what looked like salami atop a curled cracker. He said, “It takes me sixteen to eighteen months to make cedar our. I use a pull knife, a two-handled grater, to shave off some cedar under the bark. The shavings are bitter, tannic—inedible. I soak them in water. Every four to six weeks, I soak them. After a year or a year and a half, I can grind it into cedar our. So the crisp is made from cedar our, with a little hickory-nut oil, duck- egg-white powder, water, sea salt, which I sometimes render.” He produced a jar of sea salt from the sample table. “I made the batter and baked the crisp today.” The rectangle of meat, he said, was blue-foot chicken cured in pine-needle juice, pulp, and powder for eighteen months.

The morsel was delicious, though it was difficult—and would continue to be, during the next four hours—for an amateur and glutton like me (in fact, for anyone who is being honest with himself ) to tell whether my appreciation, fervent as it often became, had been enhanced by the description of the work and the ingredients that had gone into it. The tongue is suggestible. New words register as new flavors. As numerous blind wine tastings over the years have demonstrated, you taste what you want to taste.

He cleared the slab and arrived with a plate with a spoon on it, and in the spoon a piece of fish with a chip on top.

“I wanted to show you the power of the sycamore sap,” he said. It was Scottish salmon, which had been brined for thirty-nine days. The chip was a slice of black burdock root. “I peel off the fibrous outside of the root, slice the inside, and bake it.” A drizzle of sauce bisected the plate and spoon. It consisted, he said, of pickerel-weed seeds and unripened green strawberries stored in homemade vinegar of a low acidity, then blanched in water in a stone bowl. “With another stone, I mashed them into a paste. Added homemade green-strawberry vinegar and wild-sorrel vinegar and grapeseed oil. That’s the paste. The copper-colored powder is the ground leaves of wild marsh marigold.” Of course. Every milligram seemed hard won.

Baehrel is steadfast in insisting on his total self-reliance.

Photograph by Jonno Rattman for The New Yorker

He told me, as he had told others through the years, that he got his meat and dairy from a Mennonite farm in the area, and his sh from a seafood broker who delivered it several times a week. He said that I would not be able to talk to the Mennonites, as they were extremely press-averse. Having told me he had no suppliers, he seemed almost embarrassed by the acknowledgment that he did have some, after all.

Over the next several hours, as he brought in course after course, he appeared and disappeared (“I’ll get you some more sap!”) like a character in a resort-hotel farce. But the dishes were a dizzying array of tastes and textures. Oyster mushrooms, palate- cleansing ices (one was made of wild carrot juice, stevia tea syrup, pickled baby maple- leaf powder, violet leaves, and lichen powder), cured turkey leg, mahogany clams, lobster, prawns, swordfish ham, brined pork with goat sausage—all of it subjected to a jumble of verbs and nouns, many of them new to me. Bull-thistle stem, chopped barberry root, ostrich fern. I deployed an index finger to dab up every woodland fleck. The platings were whimsical and inspired. The sprigs and needles that adorned the mid-meal platter of cheese and cured meat brought to mind Saul Steinberg or Paul Klee.

The fifteenth, and final, course was something he called Earlton Chocolate. It consisted of the fermented leftovers of his “coffee,” which he makes in the autumn from hickory nuts and acorns. (He does not serve actual coffee.) The nut dregs become a kind of paste. “It gets gloppy after three months, then it relaxes.”

That observation kind of explained how I felt after four hours, especially without coffee. Embarrassed by all the labor undertaken on my behalf, I offered, as one does, to help clean up, and Baehrel laughed. Now he invited me to see his kitchen. It was quite small, about two hundred square feet, and immaculate. It didn’t look or smell as though anyone had prepared a gourmet meal in there. My first thought, as a failed clean-as- you-go guy, was a tip of the toque.

Baehrel is from Massapequa, Long Island. His father was a Nassau County cop. On weekends and in the summer, the family went upstate to Earlton, and when his father retired they moved up there for good. Baehrel’s mother, who was from Brooklyn, was an avid gardener, and he credits her with his early expertise in native plants. He remembers being fascinated by the big red sumac bobs on the side of the road, and his mother using them to make sumac-ade, but no one paid any particular attention to cooking or food. “My dad, he likes plain stuff,” Baehrel says. “We grew up eating roast beef, baked ziti, leg of lamb.” In terms of the precocity of his palate, Baehrel recalls, “I was the kind of kid who melted my ice cream. When it was warmer, it had more taste.”

Baehrel was also into motocross, and for several years, in the eighties, he raced professionally. He told me that he’d turned pro as a teen-ager and entered races all over the country. “I made a little bit of money, but would’ve done it for free,” he said. “So much of it was mental. What it taught me was how to divide your mind up to multitask.” I asked if he could connect me with anyone from that era I could talk to. “Oh, God, that was a long time ago! That’s a lifetime ago—wow, I’d have to think about it. Geez, I wonder if anyone is still alive.” In a motocross chat room, I found the name of Carlo Coen, a local racer from the eighties. He replied to me through e-mail that Baehrel had been a “track friend”:

He was fast, competitive. He could run up front. Great family. His father would work the starting gate at local Claverack Motocross track. Still running today. Good times.

In 2002, Baehrel said, he shut down the restaurant for renovations and got back into competitive motocross, entering races around New England. “I made some money,” he said.

“The family’s plan was that I’d be a lawyer or a businessman,” he told me. But he never went to college. He met his wife in the area. They were married in 1986. Baehrel’s parents had sold him a plot of land across the street from their own—a thousand dollars for six acres. (He bought the additional six acres in 2011.)

“We built this house by hand that spring,” he said. “My mother, my father, my wife-to- be, and me. There were nets on the windows to keep out the mosquitoes. The restaurants opening now, these multimillion-dollar places—young chefs don’t want to start off small. There’s an attitude, there’s arrogance. They forget that this is hospitality.

When we started, we had no investors. We couldn’t get a loan. Although, eventually, we got a loan.”

The main thing, in the early years, was a catering business, which they called Sagecrest. At its peak, in the mid-nineties, they were doing a few hundred weddings a year. “We did two thousand weddings over twenty years, all over upstate New York and New England,” he said. “We had hundreds of part-time employees.”

“You can kill me, but you can’t kill the navy-blue-blazer-and-khaki-pants combo.”

Baehrel has said that he invented Native Harvest in 1989, when he opened for business. A few years before, he had an epiphany that everything he needed was on the property. “Every our, oil, and seasoning. I wanted to create the components. I was walking around in the woods. It was autumn of ’85 or ’86. Leaves were falling from the trees. The worms were there. That means you’re going to have soil. I don’t know if you know this, but worms are the source of all life.”

After this epiphany, he said, “I didn’t sleep for three days.” (He says he has never taken drugs: “Not even aspirin.”)

Over time, he made inferences: “I knew that pine needles fall to the ground and sour the soil. They make it very acidic. Very few plants will grow. So why can’t I take the acidic reaction and transfer it to things?” He began to make pine-needle juice, powder, and pulp and use them to cure meats.

The inventing seems to have happened gradually. People who dined at the restaurant in the nineties have described a more conventional operation. Between 1995 and 2001, he had a sous-chef, a local named Mark Esslie, just out of college. Esslie, over the phone, recalled seventy-hour workweeks and hectic weekends of weddings and summer parties. “Damon’s a phenomenal chef,” Esslie told me. “I would put him up against anyone in the world, in terms of talent.”

In the late nineties, Baehrel had waiters and bought from local suppliers. Esslie had hoped to take over the catering part of the business, which he said was very lucrative, but when that didn’t work out he left the food business and went into finance. The price of a meal at the restaurant has steadily risen. When Esslie was there, and when Baehrel first offered the tasting menu, it was thirty-five dollars for eight courses. Five years ago, it was around a hundred and fifty dollars, far below the current four hundred dollars a head.

Baehrel has often described himself as self-taught, acquiring his culinary expertise through trial, error, and observation, and not from books, or even from other chefs. He watches TV only for weather reports, has no cell phone, and can’t remember going to a movie in decades. “It’s been twelve or fourteen years since I’ve been out to a ne-dining restaurant,” he said. “I’m dying to have someone bring me something. A sandwich!” He told me that when he was a teen-ager he’d worked for some French restaurants in the area. “They are all gone, and everyone is dead. I learned what not to do.”

One of the restaurants, which Baehrel didn’t mention, was an old-school French bistro called Chez René, in Glenmont, ten minutes south of Albany. It was owned by René Facchetti, a Breton, who sold it around thirty years ago.

“He learned from me,” Facchetti told me, when I called. “He has never mentioned this. He was my cook, my assistant. I knew his father and mother. I’m the one who taught him to pick watercress, chanterelles, and all these things in the woods.”

Facchetti’s wife, Corinne, said, “Never once has he acknowledged my husband. Why can’t he acknowledge us? There’s no such thing as a self-educated chef.”

It’s hard to know why Baehrel is so steadfast in insisting on his total self-reliance. There’s mythmaking in it, clearly, but of a kind that seems unnecessary.

I can’t say when, exactly, I began to question the myth. It may have been at the end of that meal, when Baehrel took me on a tour of the property, sticking to the perimeter of the lot, making a great fuss over bits of incidental vegetation that would seem hardly ample, even in high summer, to provide for, say, dozens of guests a week. I asked him what was in the red barn, and he said not much. He declined to show me his living quarters. (He had said that his wife and son would be returning during my visit, but by the time I left they had yet to come home.) Whenever I asked Baehrel questions about his past, his family, his influences, or even the rudiments of his business, he changed the subject to whatever ora or provender was at hand. Dandelions, violet stems, burdock. “More sap?” He took me by the cold frames alongside the barn. There wasn’t much in there. He said that on snowy winter nights he sometimes crawled in under the translucent corrugated covers and lay on his stomach in the warm soil.

In the days that followed, I called the diners whose names he had given me: Merrihue and others like him. They raved about the restaurant, but all of them, it seemed, had been there only for a special seating, either on a day he was usually closed or in a slot he’d shoehorned in between regular seatings. I wanted to hear from people who had been there recently when other parties were there.

Several months later, I’ve yet to find any. Within days of my visit, I talked to a range of people who, either after their own meals or after failing to get a reservation, had concluded that Baehrel couldn’t possibly be serving as many diners as he claimed, or be fully booked through the year 2025, or make do with what he foraged on his patch of land.

“No, you die first.”

I came across a story by the restaurant columnist for the Albany Times Union, Steve Barnes. It ran last November: “BS alert! A 10-year wait for reservations! Locally!” Barnes referred to Baehrel’s fully booked claims as “utter bogusness.” He noted that Baehrel had once told him that the White House had inquired about the Obamas coming to his restaurant. Barnes had published this news and then learned from a friend in the White House communications office that it wasn’t so. (A White House spokeswoman wouldn’t conrm any of this.)

Dominick Purnomo, the owner of Yono’s, one of Albany’s fancier restaurants, told me, “I’m doing the math, and it’s just not making sense.” The last time Purnomo was in Baehrel’s basement, five or six years ago, with a group of eight, he recalled, “We asked to see the kitchen, and he declined. I’ve never been to a restaurant where you can’t see the kitchen.” Baehrel told them that a group had just left, and that another was coming at 10 P.M.

Many people who’ve dined there report similar instances of Baehrel’s mentioning earlier or later seatings—highly improbable, in light of materials, labor, energy, and the likelihood of, say, a bus of Japanese tourists travelling to Greene County for a twenty- course dinner starting at 11 .. Anyway, when I visited, Baehrel said he did “less and less as I get older. In a good week, maybe thirty-five to forty guests. But I never talk numbers.” He was scaling back, he said, to four days a week. “It just takes me more time and effort to execute these cooking techniques and everything, and I’m doing more courses—probably three times as many courses as I was seven or eight years ago.” He disdains the industry practice of referring to customers as “covers.” “I never thought of a dining guest as a cover,” he said. “I must be weird.”

Baehrel has described the skeptics as jealous peers—what he calls the Albany club, whom he accuses of a long campaign to undermine him. He suspects them of hacking Yelp to portray his restaurant as closed. One club member is Barnes, who, after failing to secure a reservation over the course of six years, had a testy e-mail exchange with Baehrel’s wife, writing, “No one I have ever even spoken to has been to Damon Baehrel in that period. That’s not a restaurant as it’s commonly understood; it’s Brigadoon.”

This spring, Barnes’s colleague Susie Davidson Powell, the Times Union’s food critic, managed to get a table and publish a piece. “If the workload and culinary science seem fantastical, it’s true of the dining experience, too,” she wrote. “It’s hard not to imagine Baehrel as a real-life Wonka with a tribe of Oompa Loompa helpers in his Earlton woods.” Still, she related what Baehrel had told her. He mentioned a few previous guests: the band Journey and, on another occasion, René Redzepi, the world-famous forager and chef at Noma, in Copenhagen. After the review went to press, Powell heard from Redzepi, through Twitter, that he’d never been there. Baehrel then denied having said it. The paper published a correction. Recently, I heard from the members (and ex- members) of Journey. None of them can remember having been there.

In each instance, Baehrel has a plausible explanation. People must have misheard him, he says. It was Redzepi’s former partner who’d come; he always says he wishes Journey, his favorite band, would come; it was an Obama supporter who had tried to arrange a visit for the President and the First Lady. People hear what they want to hear.

Yet the implausibles pile up. Three dozen cheeses! Cheese experts I spoke with considered it highly unlikely, especially in light of Baehrel’s claim that he makes cheese without rennet, the standard curdling enzyme; he said that he used organic coagulants, such as nettles or carrot-top hay. Even for a full-time cheesemaker, three dozen would be a lot, especially if they aren’t mere variations on one or two basic cheeses.

Baehrel wouldn’t let me meet or talk to his friend Terrance, his wife, his Mennonite meat supplier, or his seafood broker. “After contact is established, it’s all me!” he wrote. He declined to give me their names. (I had that of his wife, Elizabeth, who goes by Beth; he had included her name as a co-sender of a mass-marketing e-mail.)

In June, I wrote Baehrel to tell him I’d need to talk to these people for fact-checking purposes. He replied, “I do not and cannot make it public information any of the current associations or past business arrangements I have or have had. I can assure you my meat comes from farms & seafood comes from the ocean.” He added, “I would also not reveal things like who I purchase propane from (a propane supplier) or where we buy our toilet paper, insurance or anything else.” He didn’t want me to talk to the Make-A-Wish family, either. (I was able to verify that story with the foundation.)

A few weeks ago, he provided a fact-checker with a surname for Terrance, who he said had since “moved on”: Hyll. We couldn’t find anyone in the country by that name. Informed of this, Baehrel wrote in an e-mail, “I have not given you or [the checker] the complete personal or business name of our former reservation & appointment assistance.”

“I joined an online fraternity.”

SEPTEMBER 16, 2013

“The whole element in this day and age of putting everything out there—it’s a different generation,” Baehrel told me. “We like to keep to ourselves and leave a little bit to the imagination.” At the same time, he’s an evangelist for his way of cooking, often welcoming writers and television crews. For all his protestations of being a humble chef of the woods, and his professed amazement that anyone should have heard of him, he seems to seek the validation of the establishment. “Food writers weren’t coming,” he told me. “They weren’t interested. You want to share it. But they didn’t believe it.

They’ll say they haven’t heard of it. How can that be, when I have guests on the waiting list from over eighty countries? The New York Times, Gourmet, Food & Wine: No one was interested.” In 2013, he was a semifinalist for a James Beard Award. He failed to advance, perhaps because very few Beard judges could get in to dine at his restaurant. Nonetheless, the omission contributed to his contention that there is a kind of conspiracy against him.

For years, Baehrel says, he fielded interest from publishers who wanted to do a book with him. He turned them down, because they wanted him to team up with a writer. He was also put off by their questions about whether celebrity diners might be willing to write promotional blurbs. Then some occasional dinner guests, Ken and Virginia Morris, had an idea. The Morrises run Lightbulb Press, a publisher of financial-education manuals. A recent title is “Guide to Understanding Annuities.” They had never published anything like what Baehrel had in mind—a coffee-table book outlining the precepts of his Native Harvest cuisine—but they thought, Why not try? Baehrel started writing. “Damon does the drafts, and we put it in a format,” Ken Morris told me. “We will share the proceeds.” The book—“Native Harvest”—is due out in December. I’ve read a great deal of it. It is, characteristically, a recitation of ingredients, principles, and practices.

The Morrises’ first meal at the restaurant was ten years ago, with a cousin who lived in Schenectady. It wasn’t hard to get in back then. They returned on their own another time, and on the third visit Baehrel walked them through his process. “He’s a crazy genius,” Ken Morris said. “How does he conceptualize these things? How does he figure them out?”The Morrises put Baehrel in touch with friends who run California Winemasters, a festival that benefits cystic-fibrosis research. Baehrel went out there. “His station was cleaned out in an hour,” Morris said. The trip increased his renown. He and the Morrises hope the book will do so further.

In 2012, Eric Steinman, a writer in Rhinebeck, New York, who was interested in Baehrel, got a table three weeks after inquiring, and he went with his wife. One other couple was there. A few months later, Baehrel let Steinman watch him cook. “No doubt, he’s talented there,” Steinman told me. Nonetheless, Baehrel refused to provide information or corroboration—the Mennonite farmer, the seafood guy. Steinman said, “I got a call from Terrance. It was Damon, representing himself as Terrance.” He added, “Damon has a very particular tone and cadence.” I had heard this suggestion—that Terrance is Damon—from others as well. “What the hell is that?” Baehrel said, when I ran it by him. “That’s nuts!”

There were other nagging matters: a supposed visit from the comedian Aziz Ansari (which Ansari denied), a laudatory quote attributed to the Per Se chef Thomas Keller (which Keller disclaimed). There was one guest who, on one of those nights when Baehrel said he had another party coming, realized, after leaving, that he’d left something behind. He had to drive back and climb over the gate to get in. The house was dark. Baehrel was cleaning up: no sign of the late seating. Steinman looked into suppliers in the area and couldn’t nd any who were serving Baehrel. I, too, called an array of food suppliers. None were doing business with Baehrel. One said that he used to sell him cheese and charcuterie but hadn’t in years.

Steinman wrote a sixteen-hundred-word piece for his magazine, Edible Hudson Valley, giving no hint of his skepticism, even though, as he told me, “I couldn’t in good conscience tell an editor, ‘This is real.’ I think it’s sort of a J. T. LeRoy thing.”

Consider, once again, the reservation backlog. You have to first accept that anyone would reserve anything ten years out. Then you do the math. Baehrel, or, if you will, Terrance, has cited, in e-mail responses to people seeking reservations, “125,000 new reservation TABLE requests from 72 countries that came in between late December 2013-March 15, 2014 which is when we stopped accepting new requests for an extended period.”

A hundred and twenty-five thousand requests in three months—that’s an average of around one a minute (twenty-four hours a day). He has also claimed to have two hundred and seventeen thousand pending “TABLE requests”—from all fifty states and more than eighty countries. That’s a lot of countries. Say each request is for an average of four people. That’s almost a million diners willing to wait many years for the privilege of travelling to the sticks in order to drop four hundred dollars a head. “No one is more surprised than me that this has happened,” he told me. “This isn’t something I sought out.”

W hen I described the situation to a friend of mine, he suggested a “stakeout.” But that seemed crazy. Doughnuts and coffee? Full camo? This wasn’t a crime story.

If Damon Baehrel is in some measure a fairy tale, what, exactly, isn’t true? And, if it isn’t entirely on the level, what’s the hustle? What’s he up to, out there in the woods? The perception of exclusivity and privileged access enables him to charge big-city prices, but if he were serving only a handful of diners each week it wouldn’t add up to a huge haul. For what, then?

“Turn over and I’ll do your back.”

JULY 3, 2000

Baehrel has concocted a canny fulllment of a particular foodie fantasy: an eccentric hermit wrings strange masterpieces from the woods and his scrabbly back yard. The extreme locavore, pure of spade and larder. The toughest ticket in town. Stir in opacity, inaccessibility, and exclusivity, then powder it with lichen: It’s delicious. You can’t get enough. You can’t even get in.

If Baehrel didn’t exist, foodies would have to invent him. And to a certain extent they have. In the fall, the ABC News digital series “Garage Geniuses” visited the restaurant for a segment that came out in April. At one point, the camera lingers on Baehrel’s handwritten reservation list for the year 2025. There are no specic dates, no contact phone numbers or e-mail addresses, or, for that matter, national or state affiliations— just names and a number denoting the size of each party. My attempts to contact twenty-nine of these people—Ginny Grizzle, Donetta Helper, Vi Rollin, King Mona, Cherri Burbank, with nary a Tom, Chris, or Mary among them—came up empty. This seemed damning. But a call to the producer of the segment, David Fazekas, revealed that it was he, and not Baehrel, who had come up with this phony reservation roll. “Damon wouldn’t let us see his actual list, so I wrote it myself—like a reënactment in a documentary,” he said. “There are services on the Internet that generate fake names.”

The media has certainly been complicit in gilding the Damon Baehrel mystique. Baehrel himself, when called out for various inventions or exaggerations—inflated numbers, mis-dropped names—has tended to blame the messenger. “I don’t know where they get this stuff,” he says.

A gourmet meal is a kind of magic act, a sleight of hand and heat, often performed with a little misdirection and some fast talk. Many restaurateurs mythologize their cuisines and pretend to be doing better than they are, to stir up interest. In April, the Tampa Bay Times published an investigation into the farm-to-table claims of local restaurants, which found that many of them were bunk. Perhaps it is a matter of degree. At a certain point, one has to draw a line between a chef who is running a restaurant, with all its tedious arithmetic of supply, demand, and cost, and instead is hosting elaborate private dinners, by appointment only. It’s this distinction, or perhaps the failure of the food press and rankings mavens to make it, that riles other restaurateurs.

Many of Baehrel’s dishes are trompe l’oeil, with foraged ingredients subbing for more traditional ones. Consider a favorite of his book publishers, the Morrises—what he calls “the phony egg.” “I use native components to build an egg,” Baehrel told me. “The egg white is cattails. The yolk is pickled heirloom tomatoes in a broth of wild parsnip juice. I use willow bark to make the home fries, and squash as bacon.” Though he did not serve this one to me, I have seen photographs of it. It’s uncanny. I have no reason to doubt that the phony egg is phony in the way he says it is. But in the context of all the other questions surrounding his operation the egg can seem like a provocation. Why not just serve an egg?

I went back for a second visit, in late May. I’d asked, repeatedly, for a better look at his process of culling and preparing the comestibles. A photographer came along with me. The property had burst forth with greenery since I’d last been. Baehrel rolled up on a utility vehicle and invited us inside for a pitcher of sap and a bottle of Pellegrino— which he said he keeps on hand for the Morrises. “You want to see how this happens?” he said. “I’ll show you the cheesemaking, the cured meats.” He said he’d never shown a journalist any of what we were about to see.

There were two cars in the lot—a BMW S.U.V. and a truck. His wife and son, he said, were up at a cabin they have in the Adirondacks. He took us out to the barn, pointing to sprigs along the path: wild barberry, garlic, bergamot, sorrel, sage. “Oh! Check it out. See all the wild strawberries!” A door led into a sort of side garage full of shelves: his root room, which was a more extensive version of the dining-room display table—Mason jars of our, oil, vinegar, and sap, bowls of wild seeds, wine boxes of soil with sprouting potatoes and rutabagas. The supply was spare and very orderly.

“Nothing to be concerned about. We just want to show you our phony badges and then leave.”

DECEMBER 13, 2010

He took us through the front door of the barn, into a large prep kitchen—his base of operations and the former headquarters of the catering business. On an island in the middle was a bushel of beech shoots. He was trimming and baking the leaves, to grind them into powder, and clipping the branches into finger-length sections, to create a beechwood broth. On the stove behind him were a couple of large pots. “I make my cheeses in clean pots, in small batches,” he said. “I don’t have boilers or evaporators.” I had asked about a cheese cave, as cheese experts had suggested that one would be important. “No cave! No, between my one cooler here and other storage in my house, I probably have twenty-five in the works. I usually make a cheese or two a week.” They were on racks in a fridge with a glass door, displayed with great symmetry and with their frog-tape labels facing out, denoting milk source, date, and curdling agent. I counted three dozen, and a block or two of butter.

He led us into a walk-in refrigerator. Several sausages of various shapes hung from a rack. Elsewhere on shelves were a leg of lamb; a rabbit carcass under a layer of conifer sprigs; a single cooked lobster on a bed of ice; swordfish ham; a few pieces of salmon, air-sealed in sycamore sap; a pork shoulder brining in pine-needle juice; four marrow bones in a bag with mustard greens.

I asked again about the source of the meat. “Yeah!” he exclaimed. “A bunch of different farms. I have one particular farm that I’ve worked a lot with—they’re Mennonites. About a half hour away, in Schoharie County.” I hadn’t been able to find any Mennonites in Schoharie County. He said they might be closing, owing to the difficulty of paying minimum wage. “They are thinking about maybe going to Michigan. But very low key.”

Later, back outside, as Baehrel led us around the property and identified plants, my attention wandered, and I thought about my first visit, months before, and a particular dish, the sixth course, which had so engaged my attention that the only surreptitious

photo I got of it was of a plate licked clean. It consisted of a small layered cube of wild daylily tuber and wild honey mushrooms—a phyllo of the soil. He’d sliced the tubers thin and soaked the mushrooms in fresh maple sap, then stacked them in more than a dozen fine alternating layers. He then roasted it on a slab of oak wood, dribbled it with grapeseed oil and wild-fennel-frond powder, and added a drizzle of dried milkweed pods cooked in fresh birch sap, which he’d mashed in a stone bowl with some rutabaga starch, and a second drizzle that he called burnt-corn sauce, made from liquefied kernels that he’d scraped off the cob onto a stone, dried, then thinned out with sycamore sap. Somehow I got all this down in the notebook. Beneath it, I’d written, “Sublime.”

Now, down by the road, near the gate, Baehrel guided us alongside his garden beds. In one of them, a single sprig of asparagus rose from the earth. He snapped it off and handed it to me. It tasted like—asparagus. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.

This article appears in other versions of the August 29, 2016, issue, with the headline “The Country Restaurant.”