Category: Miscellaneous

Tough Shit, Readers!

Well, for those who don’t like me talking about politics or role-playing games, here’s a subject that touches on both.

The role-playing hobby had several antecedents, but most people credit its start with the Medieval Fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-70s. “D&D” was published out of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin by Tactical Studies Rules, which (like MTV or KFC) eventually just became its initials, TSR. It ended up producing several other examples of geek culture like the 70’s apocalypse game Gamma World and the Space Opera game Star Frontiers. They even managed to license D&D as a Saturday morning cartoon, which like most Saturday morning cartoons of the time can only be appreciated ironically.

At the head of this game empire was designer Ernest Gary Gygax. E. Gary Gygax. EGG. Saying that Gygax created D&D is a bit like saying Stan Lee created Marvel Comics (and let’s not get into that right now). He certainly did promote himself like Lee. Like Lee, he was fond of a greatly expanded intellectual vocabulary and a salesman’s approach to his business. If there is an image of the typical role-player as a know-it-all, do-it-my-way male who might be a bit sexist and involved with macho Conan-type Fantasy, Gygax was a pretty big reason for that. He was very good at promoting the idea that Dungeons & Dragons – or his “Advanced” trademark of it – was the epitome of the hobby his company had created and if you were using some other system, you were doing it wrong. But to people like me who had our heads expanded with the very concept of role-playing in the 70s and early 80s, Gygax really was the standard for how to think and how to approach the game. A lot of us thought so. And then we grew up.

We started asking questions like, “why does armor make you harder to hit when it should make you easier to hit but harder to hurt?”, “Is it Good alignment to kill Goblin children, even if they are Goblins?” and “Why does my 1st-level Magic-User have less hit points than his housecat familiar?” Other people started making games with different rules, and in other genres that D&D didn’t simulate well. (For example, TSR’s licensed Marvel Super Heroes, where you actually lost hero points by killing people.)

At the same time, in the process of expanding TSR’s business profile (such as the cartoon deal), Gygax moved to Los Angeles and sort of “went Hollywood.” According to Wikipedia, “Hearing rumors that the Blumes (his charter financial partners) were trying to sell TSR, Gygax returned from Hollywood and discovered the company was in bad financial shape despite healthy sales. Gygax, who at that time owned only about 30% of the stock, requested that the board of directors remove the Blumes as a way of restoring financial health to the company. The Blumes were forced to leave the company after being accused of misusing corporate funds and accumulating large debts in the pursuit of acquisitions such as latchhook rug kits that were thought to be too broadly targeted. Within a year of the departure of the Blumes, the company was forced to post a net loss of US$1.5 million, resulting in layoffs of approximately 75% of the staff.” However Brian Blume and his brother sold their stock to businesswoman Lorraine Williams who eventually took over TSR and nudged Gygax into selling his stock and leaving the company.

All that financial maneuvering didn’t change the fact that the company had diversified into areas that weren’t panning out, and they were no longer the only game in town for RPGs. In 1996 they were put in a cash crunch when publisher Random House returned large numbers of unsold books and demanded fees, and despite having high sales, TSR again laid off staff and by 1997 Williams decided to sell the company to competitor Wizards of the Coast, most famous for the card game Magic: The Gathering. And while Wizards kept the brand going until about 1999, they released a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the WotC brand, as every edition has been since. And they’ve had ups and downs but have solved some of the problems with old AD&D. (Like, 1st-level characters have more hit points than a housecat.) Notably the fifth edition of D&D stated that in creating character background, “You don’t have to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender.” Despite having at least one example non-binary character in the old source material, this declaration was not popular with some people.

Jayson Elliott registered a new TSR in 2011, since the previous trademark had expired, and under this brand published Gygax Magazine with the cooperation of Gary’s sons, Ernie and Luke, but not that of Gygax’s second wife and widow Gail (and that’s its own big kettle of fish) so that project discontinued along with the involvement of the Gygax brothers, although Elliott continued to hold the trademark and publish Top Secret: New World Order, a contemporary edition of an old TSR espionage game. But then this year Ernie and a couple of business partners relaunched TSR as their own thing apparently over Elliott; as he told it on Twitter, “last year, we missed a filing date, and another company registered it, though we are still using it in commerce. While we could win a lawsuit, we frankly don’t have the money to litigate. So we’re licensing it back from them.” The social media accounts of TSR confirmed that they were charging a nominal fee of about 10 dollars for Elliott’s company to use the name. Although that has just changed.

Basically if you are not already familiar with the flaming shitshow, and I can’t blame you if you aren’t, the new company, TSR3 or as a lot of us call it, “nuTSR” started off by saying they were going to be producing a new Star Frontiers despite not having a timetable for that and the minor detail that Wizards still has the rights to that trademark. Then Ernie Gygax did a tape interview where he said “There’s a ton of artists and game designers and people that played TSR, and recently they were dissed for being old-fashioned, possibly anti-modern trends, and enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity”. (I am not sure why the concept of gender fluidity is so radical when Gary Gygax himself created a Dungeon Master’s Guide item called “Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity”, but here we are.) The company is (in its spare time, I guess) trying to promote a game by TSR veteran Jim Ward called Giantlands which looks like a Gamma World-type project, but the details are sketchy on that too. Family drama got pulled in when Luke Gygax supported TSR’s critics and the TSR Twitter account basically dissed him by saying he was never part of the company and Luke said that was a good thing. Whoever is running that account (apparently someone other than Ernie Gygax) announced that they were going to deny right to the TSR name to any old-TSR Facebook fan page that didn’t take their side. In this, at least, they resemble the classic TSR, whose competitors liked to joke that the initials stood for “They Sue Regularly.” (In the midst of all this, Jayson Elliott announced before the 4th of July weekend that he was changing his TSR Games to Solarian Games, apparently because the brand association is no longer an asset.)

And at one point one of the Twitter trans activists asked the company to publicly state “we here at TSR think that trans women are women, trans men are men and trans lives matter.” And the Twitter account for Giantlands just responded: “Disgusting.”

I mean, I guess I understand why these guys are so defensive. They’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole they created and the only way they can is to do what the Left wants them to do. You’re basically asked to make a ritual statement of your good intentions. So: Do I believe trans men are men and trans women are women?
Well… I’m reminded of that Tim Burton movie where Ed Wood and his crew had to get baptized by a local church to get funding for a film and Wood’s agent is played by Bill Murray and when the preacher asks him “Do you reject Satan and all his evils?” Bill goes, “Sure.”

Frankly all this “critical race theory” and “gender identity” stuff doesn’t matter much to me, but I AM a cishet white guy, and you can’t expect it to matter much to me. I CAN see why it matters to other people. I CAN see why diversity and visibility are important.
I understand that the way I grew up viewing the world has already passed by and other people are taking the stage. And my only advice to the Left in that regard is that one day the same thing will happen to you, and sooner than you think. I mean, maybe you assume that you have a social enlightenment that has eluded your forbears, but I’ve been around long enough to see how my siblings’ generation thought they were going to create The Age of Aquarius and then they grew up, and they had to support families, so they had to get jobs, and then they started asking questions like “Who is this guy FICA, and why is he getting 18 percent of my paycheck?”

Just as most of those people who seem so reactionary now probably thought of themselves as hippies or freethinkers about the time D&D first started. And here’s the thing, I’m one of those guys. Ten years ago, maybe even six years ago, I would have been more aligned with the Trumpniks than the vegan trans people who think the Democratic Party isn’t socialist enough. So why am I not a Trumpnik?

Well, ultimately my greatest loyalty has to be to the truth. That requires preserving a government that preserves the freedom to find the truth. You know, like America, ostensibly. And in the 1980s, the best way to do that was to be a right-winger. I don’t care if the Russians love their children too, it doesn’t matter what they want as long as they have no say in their own government and the thugs in charge just care about their own power. That’s still the case, by the way. It’s just that since the thugs changed their military uniforms for business suits and Marxism for the Orthodox Church, the Party of Reagan has decided they’re okay now. More than okay, they see them as role models.

Whatever I might think about the Left, they’re not nearly as much of a threat to the American way of life as what passes for the Right, especially given the Democrats’ lack of ability to consolidate the government as well as Republicans do even when they’re not in charge. But given their general unpopularity, reinforced by the incompetence they display when they are in charge, one of the few things the Right has going for it is general dislike for the Left.

So in terms of the subject at hand, there may be a lot of people in the gaming hobby who don’t like how “woke” Wizards of the Coast and other companies are getting, or “wish we could just ditch politics and get back to games.” Well look, nothing says you can’t. Nothing says you have to buy Wizards’ D&D or quit playing AD&D Second Edition, one of my gaming groups still uses it. I doubt the people who protest the visibility of people of color (as in, green) or nonbinary characters in the game would be using such characters themselves or have dealt with too many ethnic or sexual minorities in real life. This is the kind of thing that sorts itself: Those who are comfortable with a large variety of people seek each other out; those who aren’t, don’t.

But the kind of people who actually get exercised about that sort of thing – to the extent that they’re willing to use it as a selling point – are generally not politically neutral but trying to signal people who aren’t just politically incorrect but who are unsavory or even criminal.

For example:

Somebody following the nuTSR account noted that that Twitter account is following a “Vargr i’ ve’um” or “Thulean Perspective” whose first profile lists him as “Dissident, gentile, game-designer” and whose second profile claims he is “Officially labeled ‘a disturber of the peace’ by NPCs.”

(Just to bring the meta-commentary full circle, ‘NPC’ is a game term for non-player character, as in, any character or monster run by the game master in an RPG or the engine of a video game, and used as a pejorative by the alternative-to-being-right who think that anybody who disagrees with them is basically getting all their opinions programmed into them by Teh Librul Media. Just as they attack empty-headed media celebrities while worshipping a fake billionaire whose profile was largely a result of the mainstream media pushing him as a celebrity.)

“Thulean Perspective” (sorry, I haven’t bothered to put in all the little Scandinavian accent marks) is a social media profile for Varg Vikernes, who has produced “MYFAROG”, or Mythic Fantasy Role-playing Game, which for some reason he thinks sounds cooler in abbreviation. He was much more famous as a pioneer of Scandinavian Black Metal music, endorsing anti-Christianity and Norse paganism, laced with Nazi-adjacent views including what he calls “racialism.” He became most notorious after endorsing the burning of historic churches in Norway and finally killing “Euronymous”, a former Black Metal colleague. Vikernes was tried and given a 21-year sentence (the maximum possible in Norwegian law) and served 15 years.

Say what you will, he walks the walk.

So if you’re that disgusted with the cosmopolitan leftist agenda, there is certainly a means of rebellion, but how far do you want to go with it?

Certainly both sides have escalated the culture war in this country, but it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s people who tried to hang the Vice President in 2016 cause the Electoral College didn’t go their way. If the Right wants to know why the Left is so oversensitive and so willing to assume that everyone they don’t like is a fascist, well, it’s because so many of them want to give that impression, saying that they aren’t bigoted while at the same time using Republican state legislatures to pass laws against trans people and some minority voting blocs, while also saying the January 6 Beer Belly Putsch was just a bunch of Trump-loving tourists engaging in free speech and certainly nothing warranting an investigation. It’s the sort of disingenuousness that the Left calls “gaslighting” and I call “don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.”

My take:
Why is D&D under the Wizards label instead of Wizards using the TSR label or Hasbro (WotC’s owner) using the Hasbro label?
Cause Wizards of the Coast, due to Magic and their previous RPG efforts, still had a positive reputation in the industry. A reputation that TSR had by that point squandered.
Whereas Hasbro has a mixed reputation but is mainly associated with family board games.
WotC could have kept the TSR brand to sell D&D along with their Magic product under Wizards, and when Hasbro bought them out, they could have put everything under the Hasbro label. There are reasons why they didn’t. The reputation of D&D is what Wizards and Hasbro are trying to preserve, and it is now associated with them. The reputation of TSR as a business is in hindsight mostly negative.

“nuTSR” isn’t bringing back the E. Gary Gygax tradition of intellectual depth in gaming, it’s bringing back the Gygaxian tradition of presumption and bad business decisions, and only in the latter does it exceed the old master.

The politics aren’t so much the issue, or wouldn’t be if EVERYthing wasn’t a political football these days.
The salient issues are:
A TSR that existed in conjunction with a more established TSR whose holder accidentally let the rights to the IP lapse
Said second TSR basically paying the first (TS:NWO) company a token sum so that they didn’t challenge their IP, cause as the guy said, he didn’t have enough money to sue even if he wanted to
Second TSR trying to promote itself as an old-school successor to classic TSR when they don’t have that company’s most famous property
Not having the other properties (like Star Frontiers) under complete development – or confirmed copyright
Trying to launch a Kickstarter for their Gamma World-type game under dubious circumstances including all of the above

All that, given that everything is a political football, combined with the dubious political tastes of E. Gygax and his business partner just make the thing more skeezy.

And in the meantime this company basically leans into its political incorrectness and victimhood in order to get a customer base without actually delivering anything concrete, which as the alternative-to-being-right goes, is pretty much on brand.

The main lesson I take from all this – other than, Twitter is too aptly named – is that you don’t ever give up your intellectual property, no matter how little money it’s making. Cause some things cost a lot more in the long run.

REVIEW: Loki

In some respects, the return of Tom Hiddleston to the Marvel Cinematic Universe character of Loki was more anticipated than the last two Disney+ Marvel series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Except this is and isn’t Loki from the movies. As a recurring foil in the Thor movies, Loki actually experienced a certain amount of character growth, if only because he realized Thor was starting to see through his schemes, so by the end of Thor:Ragnarok he was there to support him in finding a new home for the Asgardians. But then their ship got attacked by Thanos and Loki ended up dying trying to protect Thor. Then in Endgame the heroes had their “time heist” which required the Avengers to go back to just after they’d defeated the Chitauri invasion and captured Loki, but in a moment of confusion, that Loki escaped. So Loki has effectively been “reset” to just after where he was character-wise at the end of Avengers.

Specifically, Loki stole a Tesseract, which I guess is not THE Tesseract the Avengers needed to build their own Infinity Gauntlet, and wound up in Mongolia, where he was immediately arrested by the “Time Variance Authority” and drafted to help hunt other rogue variables under the supervision of Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, which brings to mind the question of what a Marvel movie would look like if it was directed by Wes Anderson.

Loki does have something like that droll sense of humor, but to judge from only the first episode, it’s just setting up the basic premise. Apparently some triad of cosmic beings set up “the sacred timeline” in order to prevent the sort of chaos that happens with a multiverse (for examples of such, try to map the continuity of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Or lack thereof). However Loki‘s main writer, Michael Waldron, is also writing Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so that title already tells you where things are going. In fact based on the rumors about the crossovers in the next Spider-Man movie, it seems as though this narrative and the end-credits scene of the last WandaVision are moving towards a storyline that will string together the various Marvel projects in Phase 4 the way the Infinity Gauntlet arc did with the prior movies, not to mention using the “multiverse” to justify Marvel finally getting to use all those intellectual properties that they sold to other movie studios and that Disney bought back.

Loki the “variant” plays into this once Agent Mobius puts him face to face with his own evil and causes him to realize that his own desire for control over others stems from a lack of control over life. In his attempts to escape, he ends up playing the reel of his life in the “sacred timeline”, and, realizing he can’t go back and that the TVA basically collects Infinity Stones in their desks, sees that there is no point in continuing as he was. This works mainly because Mr. Shakespearean Actor Hiddleston sells it so well, but also because Owen Wilson is a serious grounding influence, or as serious as Owen Wilson ever gets.

This relationship is clearly going to be the core of the series, and that alone is worth the price of admission, although with Loki, even more than the first two Marvel Disney Plus series, it’s hard to tell how it will play out from just the first episode.

REVIEW: Army of the Dead

I have already gone over how much I don’t like Zack Snyder. More than once. Well, actually 300 was pretty good as a straight translation of Frank Miller’s militarist cartoon, and Watchmen was about as good as you can get making that series as a feature-length movie instead of the 12-part HBO series it should have been. But when Snyder moved his ultraviolence to the realm of actual four color superheroes, especially Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it was clear that he didn’t get the point of those characters and the limitations of his tropes became that much more obvious. I have been told his remake of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn Of The Dead was actually pretty good (if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t). So there was a certain amount of buzz when Snyder announced his next project was the straight-to-Netflix Army of the Dead.

What I don’t like about some movies is how they rely on what Siskel and Ebert called “the idiot plot” – as in, the plot can only proceed if the characters are idiots. In this case an Army convoy carrying a payload from “you know where” gets derailed by a pair of newlyweds on the road when they perform a maneuver you would know not to try if you’d ever seen The World According to Garp. As a result the “payload”, a zombie who seems as buff and invulnerable as the Hulk gets out, kills the soldiers and infects at least two of them, becoming the ‘patient zero’ who zombifies most of Vegas. At this point, you have another patented Snyder slo-mo montage for the opening credits, and the soundtrack is Richard Cheese singing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ as topless zombie showgirls eat a tourist in his hotel room. So already it’s going pretty good.

The movie stars Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), and he’s actually pretty good as a burned-out veteran who lost his wife in the zombie plague then helped another housewife find her daughter in the chaos of Las Vegas only to see both of them get taken down by zombies just as the government literally dropped a barrier around the city (another essential plot point that makes absolutely no sense if you think about it at all). Now his daughter is a volunteer at the refugee camp the government set up outside the barrier, and those people are all supposed to be sent to Barstow before the military nukes the city and gets it over with. But before that, a billionaire casino owner hires Bautista to break into his casino and pull out its cash reserves from the safe, promising 50 million dollars to him and his crew. Naturally it turns out to be not that simple.

I don’t take Zombie Apocalypse shit very seriously, and it’s clear that Snyder doesn’t either, but there are some real moments of pathos within the black humor, such as the old man who finally hits the jackpot at the slot machine just as the zombies are flooding the casino. But overall, I’d say this is the best Zack Snyder movie I’ve seen, in that the ultraviolence actually works with the genre (if you ever wanted to see what a severed head looks like when it hits the ground from a great height, here ya go). And Snyder actually manages to cut down on the muddy shots and slow-motion action. Most of the time. And it comes down to the fact that Army of the Dead is actually fun, and that is not a word I normally associate with zombie movies, and even less with Zack Snyder movies.

It’s also a really good movie about Las Vegas insofar as it teaches the most important lesson about going to Vegas: The trick is not to make the money. The trick is to get out of town with it.

Back To Abnormal

The Sunday before last, I got a rough experience in “the new normal.”

I work evening shift (covering after-hours) for a call center, starting at 5:30 pm. I got in my car at 4:15 pm thinking I could get some fast food from a drive-thru, and then swing back home in time to finish my food before my work-at-home shift started. I forgot that “fast food” is one of those obsolete terms like “theatrical release” or “free and fair elections.”

The McDonald’s nearest my house had at least ten cars rolled around the building and that line didn’t look to be moving any time soon. At 4:30 I flipped around to the Jack In The Box where there was only one car at the drive-thru but had to wait several minutes overhearing the customer and the intercom cashier having some conversation that sounded even more stoned than usual for a Jack In The Box customer and/or employee. So when the girl finally pulled forward I wanted to order just two things and the cashier said, “I’m sorry, but the order ahead of you is literally 250 dollars, and the kitchen is going to be occupied. Can you wait 20 minutes?”

“No.”

(Actually, I wanted to say ‘Fuck You gently with a chainsaw’, but that would have taken too much time.)

If I have to spend more time at a drive-thru waiting for food than I would in a sit-down restaurant, doesn’t that defeat the whole concept of DRIVE-THRU FAST FOOD?!?

By this time it was just about 5, the Mexican drive-thru joint in the neighborhood is closed Sundays, so is the sushi joint, and the only other thing I could think of was this place on East Desert Inn that used to be a Del Taco and is now a fried chicken-soul food joint called Golden Bird Chicken. I was reluctant to do so because they had at best ‘eh’ food and their service was as slow as an arthritic tree on the handful of occasions I had tried them. I went inside because (this is another omen) they didn’t even HAVE drive-thru service the first couple times I went there, that’s how fucking slow they were, they put a garbage can in the drive-thru lane because they knew they couldn’t work that fast. I had to wait behind one guy in line and I ordered two barbeque chicken sandwiches cause I figure all they would need to do is take some chop-parts, sauce them and put them on a bun. There was only the one manager on duty, I didn’t see anybody at the grill for several minutes and it was about 5:15 when I asked if they were getting to my order and the manager asked his one employee on staff if they had the makings for BBQ chicken sandwiches and the guy said “no.” Gee, it would have been nice to know that BEFORE taking my debit card. So I waited a little longer for a transaction cancellation but the manager apparently couldn’t coordinate between the previous customer and the one guy who braved the drive-thru long enough to him to cancel the Goddamn transaction for the food I was NOT getting, and he was making me late for work.

So I said, “Congratulations, I just paid you 8 dollars for nothing” and walked out. I barely had time to get to work and I ended up having to order something delivered from a pizza joint, which of course had to be eaten on the side cause I was at work.

By the way, to anybody who lives in Las Vegas: FUCK Golden Bird Chicken. I am NOT going back there, and if you’re thinking about trying them, DON’T.

But if you look at social media, you might have seen a few other complaints about this issue, but most of them are from the managers of chain restaurants themselves. Several people now have to live on the government’s Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), a feature of the CARES Act signed by President Biden, where they get $300 a month. Several Republican Senators are asking Biden to reduce or end the benefits even as some states are reviewing their own unemployment benefits.

Apparently in the Chamber of Commerce’s own analysis, “the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.” Divide 300 by 40 hours a week. That’s 7.5 dollars an hour. Gross pay. Just slightly more than the Federal minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009.

If business in this country can’t compete with THAT level of pay, then maybe this Trump economy wasn’t as gangbusters as we all thought.

As I’ve said: All minimum wage means is that if it were legal for the company to pay you less than that, then they would. And that’s because your job, relative to the cost of hiring your replacement, is only worth that much to the company or less. If it was worth more, they would pay more.

As flawed and hypocritical as the Left can be, they have hit on a key hypocrisy of the Right: They don’t want a laissez-faire economy any more than the Left does.

Yeah, maybe a lot of these fast-food places are actually run by franchisees, and maybe the manager at Golden Bird Chicken is running with the money in his till and that’s it, but a lot of the joints that plead poverty are still associated with major chains, and their collective resources are being used to put themselves at priority ahead of the smaller operators. Like, if you wonder why the food at your favorite bar got so expensive all of a sudden, it’s because the shift to delivery and crash in sit-down eating thanks to Trump Virus (TM) meant that the chains with more buying power than the local bar needed more chicken and other meat and were able to snap up the food supply.

Much like how Walmart used its collective resources to drink every local store’s milkshake and make them uncompetitive and now everyone wonders why Walmart is the only store in town and no one can afford to shop anywhere besides Walmart.

What certain business owners are really complaining about is that The Law of Supply and Demand is real, and now it’s finally starting to work both ways. The Left doesn’t like that aspect of capitalism (or capitalism in general) because the worker usually gets the wrong end of the deal, but certain economic principles are called “laws” because they apply and have been proven to exist regardless of culture and place. It used to be that workers had to put up with shit conditions and wages because there were always more workers than jobs, but apparently that’s no longer the case. So of course wages are going up. Not as much as some people would like, but they are. I mean the Speedee Mart gas station near my place is posting for jobs starting at $12 an hour. I never thought I’d see wages like that at a convenience store. That’s close to what I started at with my current job when I joined a few years ago and I’ve had raises since then.

As I said in one of my first posts:
“(C)onservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week. “

This country didn’t suddenly get socialist. On the whole, you’ve still got the same Ayn Rand-meets-Puritanism approach to welfare in America, and the government’s current level of unemployment benefits is actually more stingy than what businesses had been paying, just as our “socialist” minimum wage was already less than what the market would bear even before Trump Virus, when most fast-food joints had to pay at least a dollar over the Federal minimum to hire people. But now that the country has created a situation where many people weren’t allowed to work, the dynamic has tipped.

And just think, this change happened all because of Donald Trump, our most freeist market, capitalest president EVAR!

I mean maybe this isn’t capitalism in the libertarian, laissez-faire sense, but in the sense of “the economy works because actions have consequences”, maybe it is.

All this gets into how the Left can be philosophically wrong yet be on the right side of the political debate. Like how they say “healthcare is a human right,” which is bullshit. Not that we don’t NEED healthcare, I mean that it’s the wrong argument. You have people running certain parts of government who don’t think we HAVE rights, such as the right not to get killed by a cop for a non-capital crime, or the right to vote if it’s not for a Republican, so don’t try to persuade those people with rights you made up. Nobody, even on the Left, thinks that an interstate highway system is a “human right”, but we paid for it – at least we used to – because everyone saw it as a common benefit. That’s how you need to phrase this.

You don’t pay people 300 bucks a week (which is conditional in any case) because you want to encourage mooching. You do it because it would take the economy that much longer to recover if we had that many more able-bodied and gainfully employed people made homeless in less than a year because The Greatest President The Business Community Ever Had decided that coronavirus wasn’t real and therefore we didn’t need to account for face-to-face services having to shut down across the country.

But hey, at least you got that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, huh? How’s that working out now?

If even $300 a week is more than 25 percent of unemployment recipients got from working, by the CoC’s own estimate, then that shows how much they got from working. As a right-winger, I can conditionally tolerate unemployment supports until we get this country and economy back to normal. The fact that the business community thinks that $300 a week is spoiling people means that the status quo pre-COVID really wasn’t normal.

And as with a lot of other things, the solution is not to go back to normal, but to find something better than normal, because ‘normal’ was how everything got fucked in the first place.

GAME REVIEW: The Hammer and the Stake (Quickstart)

Here’s one from left-field, so to speak.

I was reading Facebook recently and my old gamer friend Jerry Grayson posted a Kickstarter campaign for an indie press role-playing game called The Hammer and the Stake by the company Weaponized Ink. The premise, from the ad: “Following the Great War and the disastrous Treaty of Trianon, Count Dracula engineers a fascist vampire-coup in Hungary and Romania and establishes himself as the autocrat of the newly created Nagy-Magyarország (‘Greater Hungary’).

“Proletariat freedom fighters work to overthrow Dracula’s despotic-aristocratic regime. The threat is very real, Dracula’s magic is powerful enough to make manifest the worst fears of Marx.

“Time is of the essence. If Dracula’s minions are left unchecked, the people will literally lose their identities and become lumpenproles – beaten down degenerate servants of the Dracula regime.

“You play one of the heroic socialists fighting to liberate the people from both the invisible hand of Adam Smith as well as despotic vampire overlords.”

The funny thing is that if you took the whole vampire mythology out of this premise, it’s still fairly similar to what actually happened to Hungary after 1918.

I want to go into that background but if the real-world history doesn’t appeal to you, you can skip over this next part. Of course if a game dealing with Marxism, 1920’s Hungary and vampires doesn’t appeal to you, you probably shouldn’t be reading any of this.

The History

In 1848, Hungary unsuccessfully rebelled against the old-world Austrian Empire, but they were a strong enough plurality in the Empire to where Austria decided to give them autonomy. By 1867, they came up with a compromise: Austria would restore the Kingdom of Hungary (and the historic Crown of St. Stephen) and in exchange the Hungarians would accept Austria’s Emperor as their King. This led to an unusual (and ultimately unworkable) arrangement called the “Dual Monarchy.” Essentially, Austria-Hungary was two nations with one monarch (and even then he had two official titles). The two nations had two capitals, two parliaments, two sets of laws, everything. How did this work when the dual nation had to have one military command and Austria-Hungary ended up starting World War I? Not that well. Austria-Hungary was the main ally of the German Empire (the ‘bad guys’ of World War I) but Germany ended up having to bail out Austria-Hungary in its various campaigns against the Serbs, the Italians, the Romanians and even the Russians.

When Germany’s coalition, the Central Powers, was defeated by the Allies in 1918, the various subject nations of Central Europe, including Poland, rebelled and sought independence. With various peace treaties, not only did Germany lose it’s Polish and French-speaking territory, Austria and Hungary lost everything outside their modern borders. In the case of Austria, that was the Polish province of Galicia, modern Slovenia and Croatia, Tyrolean Italy and the modern Czech Republic. Hungary had controlled Slovakia, a north Serbian province called Novi Sad, and the historic Romanian province of Transylvania. Hungary didn’t want to lose its “Greater” territories any more than Germany did, because there were still large groups of ethnic Hungarians outside the postwar border. The remaining Allied coalition of France, Romania and the south Slavic states tried to advance into Hungary to enforce post-war borders even as Marxist revolution sparked in Russia and other places including Germany and eventually Hungary. Marxists led by Bela Kun and other Jewish intellectuals took over the transition government and in direct communication with Lenin’s Russian government called their state the “Hungarian Soviet Republic.” The Allied land grab made the revolution both easier and more difficult, because the liberal-reformist government that the Marxists overthrew had no plan to defend Hungary’s territory, yet as hostilities continued, the threat of Leninist-style socialism in Central Europe galvanized the Allies even as the Kun government sought to create ethnic Soviet satellites in Slovakia and elsewhere, undermining Hungarian nationalism for the sake of international revolution.

The main fighting occurred between Hungary and Romania with Romania eventually taking the capital of Budapest, with Kun and his comrades being forced to flee. Hungary ended up with a fascist-adjacent government that continued to press for the restoration of “Greater” Hungary and only somewhat succeeded by allying with Nazi Germany after 1940. The right-wing government also persecuted Jews for their disproportionate presence in the Marxist revolt, but they didn’t attack them nearly as much as the Nazis. In fact, it was after the Hungarian fascist regime refused to turn over its Jews to the Nazi death camps that Hitler overthrew the government. Of course by that time the Soviets were on track to take Budapest.

Then there’s the bit where Hungary, Marxism and vampires link up in the real world: Bela Lugosi, the legendary Dracula actor, was not only a Transylvanian Hungarian, he was a union organizer in a film actors’ union in Hungary, which may have been one of the first screen actors’ unions in the world. Since the unions were aligned with the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lugosi ended up having to flee the country when the revolution was quashed, and he ended up in the States.

And now you know… the rest of… the story.

The System

The product currently available for The Hammer and the Stake (on the DriveThruRPG site) is called The Workers’ Primer. It specifically says “THIS IS THE PLAYTEST!” It also says that to get full rules you would go to the Discord or Facebook pages for Weaponized Ink, which seem to be more update pages than anything else. So keeping all that in mind, the book currently is 53 pages in PDF, very little layout and very little art.

The opening section goes into how the “Greater Hungary” of this fictional world is that much more backward and repressed than historical 1920s Central Europe on purpose. “Dracula, now elevated to lord of Greater Hungary, tears away the structure of progress to permanently keeps the people as his slaves.” Page 8 has a map confirming that this isn’t the only difference. There is still a Soviet Union, but Finland is still owned by Sweden, Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom, and France is called the “United Angevin Kingdom.” In the south, Italy and Albania have cut big chunks out of Yugoslavia. But the Nagy-Magyarország described in the setting isn’t on the map, just the borders of real-world Hungary and Romania. (This territory also has a crayon mark around it, which implies this is something they’re going to correct later.) So clearly this isn’t just “take the real world and add vampires”, it’s a straight-up alternate history, but at this point there isn’t much background or explanation for it.

After page 8, the book goes into the rules. The core mechanic of The Hammer and the Stake is where you take two six-sided dice and bet against a number. In other words, craps. In the game terms glossary, they also refer to this mechanism as The System (‘A shooter is trying to beat The System’). However (also not unlike craps or roulette) only one player at the table rolls the dice. They don’t say how the players decide who this is, or whether the shooter position is allowed to change during a game.

The only input other players have on task resolution is wagering what number comes up on the dice, where the number of wagers a player can make is based on their relevant Attribute (so if Physical is relevant and the character has Physical 2 they can place two wagers on the roll) and the range of numbers they can bet is based on their rating in a relevant Skill (where a Skill rating of 1 means you can only bet on 12, and a Skill rating of 5 means you can bet on any number but 7, which automatically fails). You can also bet banked Experience Points on a wager but this is another one of those bits that needs editing- on page 12 it says a successful wager with XP gets the point back, but page 17 says you get the point back plus an additional XP. But it also says that you can wager on rolling a 7 regardless of your skill level, then says “An XP wager is lost if a 7 comes up the number before the wagered number.” I’m not even sure this is grammatical. And the rules already confirm a 7 is normally a failure, but does it count as a success if you actually bet on it?

Not only that, it’s an unorthodox role-playing system – and not in a good way – because most games assume that every player gets to roll dice. In this system you basically bet that a certain result comes about and then wait to see if the other player succeeds for you. Is this mechanic the game designers’ attempt to simulate democratic centralism?

The system also has some narrative-style modifiers. Pages 20 to 22 go over how one uses Advantages and Hindrances to set up the stakes of a scene and the characters’ end goals. In game, an Advantage allows a player to ignore the results of one roll. A Hindrance expands the range of failure, so that one Hindrance cancels a success on a 3 and four Hindrances would cancel success on 3 through 6. As with other narrative games, the factors are agreed to by the GM and players, and are pretty subjective. A violent crowd might count as an Advantage if a character is trying to slip away from a Vampire’s goons. Cover or poor visibility would be examples of Hindrances in combat.

The game says that The Hammer and the Stake defaults to scene resolution rather than task resolution. The Skill used in the scene should be relevant to the hardest task in the overall goal. Thus, if a player wants their character to sneak into a building and then place a bomb, the GM decides which of the two actions is harder and then has the player roll on that skill. This may be why only one player gets to roll; the game says the GM should only require rolls in high-stakes situations with serious consequences and “in general, scenes are resolved with a single roll that involves multiple characters and multiple actions.” Given that the roll is supposed to be based on the skill deemed relevant for the scene, I assume that the players pick the shooter based on which character in the scene has the best Skill rating, but this isn’t made clear.

Combat in “THATS” is an extension of this concept, with the use of consequences, that is, wounds. Unarmed attacks and most firearms do one Minor Wound, a rifle does two Minor Wounds, a shotgun or sword does a Major Wound and a machine gun or other heavy weapon does a Lethal Wound. “Minor” means that the character suffers one level of Hindrance, where multiple Minor Wounds in excess of Physical Attribute upgrade the Hindrance by one level. Any Minor Wounds after that point increase the Hindrance on a one-for-one basis. A Major Wound acts as a Hindrance but if the character takes Major Wounds in excess of Physical rating, they are taken out by the pain. Regardless of whether the character remains conscious, they must seek medical attention after the battle scene or die within an hour. A Lethal Wound means the character is taken out and will die if they are not attended to in a number of minutes equal to their Physical Attribute. It’s also mentioned that during a combat scene other characters can attempt other actions such as running for cover or rescuing civilians, which I presume is where their wagers come in.

The game also refers to this overall system as the Fides system, which is a bit ironic – I assume this is taken from the Latin for “faith” but it also resembles Fidesz, which is the name of the neo-fascist party that’s actually running Hungary now.

Characters

At page 32, the game details the character creation mechanics that the previous pages alluded to. Before you even go over those, your first step is to pick a faction within the setting’s CRF (Carpathian Revolutionary Front). There are eight of them, including a feminist group that is “no longer formally part of the CRF” and a group of Christian socialists who are considered the group experts on the occult and vampirism. There are a variety of views represented so that you’re not just dealing with The Judean Peoples’ Front versus The Peoples’ Front of Judaea. Each sub-society also has its own game benefit (or Faction Ability) that can be invoked in specific circumstances to either add a bonus wager or give the player a bit of narrative control in the scene.

Character Attributes are simple: Mental, Physical and Social. They are given a 1-2-3 priority such that the primary is rank 3, the secondary is rank 2 and the tertiary is rank 1. Remember, if a roll depends on a raw attribute, the character only gets so many wagers times that Attribute rating. It’s implied that an Attribute can get as high as 5 with XP.

Characters get 15 Skill points that are assigned on a one-for-one basis, with no Skill being no higher than rank 5, where that’s the best you can get in the system above). You can also get a Specialization for any skill of 4 or higher by spending two Skill points. It’s not mentioned here (but is mentioned on page 18) that a Specialization that is relevant to a roll allows the player to spend one XP (that does not come back) to substitute one die on the roll, but the result only applies to your character. You get two Abilities, although one must be the Faction Ability. The general Ability list is on pages 40-41.

“Fifth, and finally, pick a name and a revolutionary handle (code name). Develop a background.”

It’s also mentioned here and earlier on pages 17 and 18 that a character starts with 3 XP and gets 3 XP each game. The character is allowed (or encouraged) to wager them on throws; an XP wager can negate a Hindrance, or allow an additional wager in excess of the character’s Attribute. If the wager is a success the character gets the point back plus an additional point (again, that’s not totally clear). XP can be saved between sessions. An Attribute can be improved at a cost of current rating x 5. Skills can be improved at a cost of current rating x 2 (it’s not mentioned how or if you can buy a Skill you don’t already have). Specializations and Talents can be purchased for 10 XP each. (‘Talents will be explained in the full version of the rules.’)

Setting

Page 43 starts the section “Building The Revolution: Getting Into The Setting”. Marxists are very big on using propaganda to demonize fascists and reactionaries (which often means anyone who disagrees with them) as monsters and bloodsuckers. Since the bad guys in THATS are actual bloodsuckers, this works. Given that this is a world where vampires exist, there is brief speculation on whether Marx in his works referred to the parasite class rhetorically or if he knew the occult truth and was speaking in code. The text refers to a CRF Commissariat that screens cells for internal subversion and potential counter-revolutionary behavior, such as certain underground book clubs selling philosophically fascist material. (‘Those book-clubs no longer exist.’)

The text focuses on Budapest as a setting, even though the CRF knows that Hungary is a front government and Dracula is actually running affairs by proxy from his Transylvanian stronghold, which is why they’re the Carpathian Revolutionary Front and not the Hungarian Revolutionary Front. Budapest is historically two cities, the aristocratic Buda on the left bank of the Danube River and the more industrial Pest on the right. In the real world the two municipalities united ages ago, but in this world the two cities are separated and guarded by the Border Police, as Buda is effectively a “gated community.” Pest is best described as “grey, bleak and industrial” and also “squalid and grim.” Security patrols (and public hangings) are prominent and meant to cow the population into submission. The press is forbidden, the cinema is endangered and radios require a permit. For similar reasons, as mentioned in the introduction, the level of technology is deliberately reduced from the historical norm. “Many middle-class bourgeosies (sic) families who remain comfortable and paid in hard currency think the return of gaslights has made their fair city ‘quaint’ once again. They also gossip that the increase in bicycles has beatified the city, and permitted them to avoid any real traffic while they ride in their petrol-powered cars. These same families also bitterly complain about the homeless workers and their families cluttering up the streets and bridges.”

Then they give you “A Handful of Aristocratic Enemies” – actually two. They are a template for Secret Police and another for a “Nosferatu Human-Thrall” which has some vampire powers although it isn’t clear if this character is an example of a full vampire or merely a “Renfield.” Based simply on Skills the secret policeman is a lot more tough; it’s mentioned that a vampire is vulnerable to holy, magical and wooden weapons but it doesn’t say whether they are any less vulnerable to other weapons.

Conclusion

The premise of The Hammer and the Stake is communist propaganda presented more-or-less straight, amd even though the antagonists are genuine bad guys, I have problems with this approach, because Bela Kun and the other communists of Hungary were bloodthirsty incompetents, they were no less so than the ones in Russia and other countries who had more time to kill the people they didn’t like, and when Marxist revolutionaries did succeed in Russia, China and elsewhere, they created gulags, mass famine, “struggle sessions” and a global death toll that everyone agrees was in tens of millions, and no one can agree on the exact figure of how many tens of millions because of politics and a desire to question exactly how many of those dead were killed accidentally or on purpose, as if it makes a difference.

But that’s just quibbling.

There’s certainly tons of atmosphere and potential in this game’s premise, but the real issue is in the game itself. I mean, if you want to turn people off of capitalism by convincing them it’s a pointless game that can only have one winner, you’ve already got MONOPOLY. If you want to make socialism look like a constructive alternative to the present, you don’t want to communicate to players that they have no agency. Again, having only one person who can roll dice is not only against most people’s assumption of a role-playing game, it works best if you’re already familiar with craps, and the end result of that means the game in play would come off as a lot more Rat Pack than Red Army.

There’s also the point that in its current stage, The Hammer and the Stake is a bit raw; there is an example presented for how The System works from the perspective of the active shooter but it really needs an example of how a player character team places multiple wagers and how they can be used to create multiple successes. The text implies this is possible but it isn’t clear in showing how it works. There are also bits alluded to but not detailed, such as how stress or mystical attacks can spiritually drain a character and turn them into a passive “Lumpenproletariat.” Not to hold this against the authors, since they did explain this is a work in progress. But as such, I’d have to give The Hammer and the Stake a grade of Incomplete.

However, if the concept appeals to you, you can go to DriveThruRPG, buy the Quickstart, and organize to seize the means of platelet production!

REVIEW: The Nevers

In my review of the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, in the wake of near-universal hatred for the Joss Whedon-directed theatrical release, I’d said that at least the Snyder Cut would give a chance to determine whether Joss’ version was making the best of bad material or butchering something that otherwise would have worked. (My verdict was ambiguous: the first movie was a dull grey slog, and the Snyder version is twice as much dull grey slog with somewhat more character development.)

But even before demand built up for the Snyder Cut, Whedon was working on a new project for HBO, The Nevers, and ended up leaving that for reasons unexplained but probably related to the avalanche of hits to his backstage reputation in Hollywood. So with the series premiering on April 11, we have a similar question as to whether the remaining production team (including Buffy veterans Jane Espenson and Douglas Petrie) have a good idea that they screwed up or a bad idea that they can only do so much to redeem. However the pilot episode was both written and directed by Whedon himself, so it should convey the intended approach.

One valid critique of Whedon is that he tends to go for the same themes a lot. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there was only one Slayer per generation, who was always a young girl, but each Slayer was monitored and trained by a mostly male, entirely British order of Watchers. Well, in The Nevers, almost the entire cast is British cause it’s set in London, 1899, where a few thousand people, mostly women, were “touched” by what appears to be fairy dust sprinkled by a passing alien lifeform and/or spaceship. As a result they were altered, some more obviously than others, with what are called “turns.” The main character seems to be the widowed Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), whose main power seems to be psychic visions (or as she calls them, ‘rippling’), but this being a Whedon hero, she also kicks serious ass, and this being the Victorian period, she kicks even more ass when she’s wielding an umbrella. Her much less prim best friend Patience Adair (Ann Skelly) has some command over electricity but uses it to create anachronistic inventions, so yes, there is steamtech.

Actually there are several Touched who are not women, including a black doctor and a white male aristocrat, but for the most part the cases seem to be concentrated outside the ruling class, something that didn’t escape the attention of Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) who wants his mysterious council to protect the British Empire and counter the ambitions “for those whom ambition was never meant.”

This approach is already giving me a sour vibe. One of the reasons people could gravitate to Buffy as a feminist story is actually that it wasn’t such an obvious one. The characters were good characters before they were symbols, and that drew you into the message. You don’t even need to lean too much on the patriarchy vs. women theme in this setting, given that “Victorian” is a modern adjective for “puritanical and repressed.” And yet, Whedon still sees the need. In the words of Willow Rosenberg, The Nevers isn’t dropping hints, it’s dropping anvils.

Otherwise this show has a young decadent who’s a friend of Amalia’s wealthy patron, a truly nasty surgeon (with an American accent), a street detective who’s already doing a better job playing Mister Vimes than the guy on AMC’s The Watch, and an insane (or at least extremely irritating) serial killer who has assembled her own little team of supervillains. Indeed, this show seems to allude to superhero comics a lot more than Buffy or Firefly did, with Amalia being more civic-minded than the early Buffy, with her and her patron creating a little urban “orphanage” where people like her can have sanctuary and support.

This show has some potential (so to speak) and a lot of stuff that could work very well, and it certainly appeals to the premise of “What if you had Buffy, but Steampunk and with cool British accents?” Plus which, it’s HBO, so you get at least one shot of tits and people say “Fuck” more than once. The problem is that while all the critics seem to think The Nevers borrows too much from Whedon’s previous tropes, to me it doesn’t feel enough like a Whedon show. The dialogue and action don’t have the snap, crackle and pop I’ve come to expect from his best work. With the notable exception of Amalia and Patience, the warm character relationships aren’t there and it’s a lot harder to care.

In fact The Nevers is almost as much of a dull grey slog as either Justice League, which means either the Victorian Era is too depressing for some people, or Whedon learned the wrong things from Snyder. Even when Buffy, Angel and Firefly were handling very serious subjects, they didn’t usually take themselves too seriously (and with Buffy, they started to suck once they did). If one is going to take a fantastical approach to the 19th Century, one might be better off starting with the tongue-in-cheek approach of The Wild, Wild West. (the 60’s TV show, not the Will Smith movie, for Gad’s sakes)

Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist

The after-the-fact coverage of the Atlanta shootings March 16 just happened to be on Saint Patrick’s Day, and on March 17, and as I was getting up, the buzz on Facebook was largely about how certain people wanted to push an apologist line about how the shooter told police he had a “sex addiction” that compelled his actions. And then as I turned on the TV and went to MSDNC, Nicolle Wallace had a couple of people on, one black, one white Irish guy from Detroit, and they pointed out that if the suspect was going to attack women for “sex addiction” he could have gone to strip clubs or other places associated with sex, rather than attacking two Asian massage parlors and killing eight people, six of them Asian women.

But another thing the panel brought up is how Wallace and one of her guests were both Irish-American, and the white guy brought up that yes, there was some discrimination against Irish people when they first came to this country. It really pales in comparison (so to speak) with the attacks on non-white people today and over history, but it still ought to be addressed.

In more recent times after Catholic Ireland became independent, a lot of Irish moved to ‘the mother country’ in Britain to get work (a pattern that repeated with people from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and other parts of the former Empire) and suffered their own discrimination. Sex Pistols singer John Lydon (son of immigrants) titled his autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Considering that, and again, the later pattern of non-white immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the other big stories from Britain is the Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry about how they were essentially frozen out of the royal family over Harry’s decision to marry and have children with a biracial woman who is darker than the usual Brit but still fairly Caucasian.

Bringing up how Irish were discriminated against shouldn’t be whataboutism or negation of the point in question. It should point out to white people that if even other white people can get hit with prejudice and legal discrimination, that should tell you how bad it is for everybody else who’s not white. For black people, American Indians, Indian Indians, the Chinese during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor (for which we created internment camps), the Vietnamese refugees after 1975, all of it.

In this country, anti-Irish prejudice, like our other prejudices, has a longer provenance. Putting up “No Irish Need Apply” signs was enough of a tradition that they wrote songs about it. And in the time leading up to the Civil War, one of the major political movements was the American Party, who were actually called the “Know-Nothing Party” because as was the custom of the day, they organized into societies taking oaths of secrecy, obliging them to say “I know nothing” when asked about the movement. Of course, 19th Century English was also lacking in irony. But the other reason the name fit was because “members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation’s highest values.”

Stop me if this seems in any way familiar.

This sort of nativism was eclipsed during the Civil War, because we had other priorities, but the guy who led the Union at that time was also against the Know-Nothing sentiment. Abraham Lincoln had said: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

Again, a surprisingly relevant quote for today.

Now there’s also been some reconstructed history about how Irish indentured servitude in the American colonies meant that we have some claim to being slaves. That isn’t the case. But it ought to demonstrate some need for empathy, not “well, my people had it rough, so don’t complain so much.” Yet you not only have that attitude, you have ‘white separatists’ from Slavic families that would have been killed by the Nazis and Italian families that would have been attacked by the Klan. And then there’s Stephen Miller, and I don’t know what HIS fucking deal is.

Point is, we do have a pretty strong history of immigration (in addition to institutional racism against African Americans and native tribes), and in almost every case they came from countries where even white people couldn’t “pass” because they dressed different, spoke English “wrong”, had the “wrong” religion, whatever. In the days of the Know-Nothing Party the Catholic immigrants were Irish and Germans. Later they were Italians. Now they’re Mexicans and Central Americans.

And yet, the modern Know-Nothing Party, the Donald Trump Fan Club formerly known as the Republican Party, actually increased its share of black and Latino vote in the 2020 presidential election compared to 2016. Which seems odd given that both Republicans and Democrats wanted to brand Trump’s party with a certain form of identity politics, but people who talked about the subject told foreign interviewers that politics weren’t just “black and white.” One Texan told the BBC that while he grew up in a Mexican-Lebanese family, “”Neoliberal expansion has really hurt both Mexico and the US, and when you have family that live there, and you can see how it’s hurt people living, their jobs, their wages, it really has increased the narco-war, and this is one of the things Trump came in saying – ‘hey, we’re going to tear apart these trade deals’ – and then he actually did it.” Others pointed to the Republican stance against abortion, or against socialism, which was critical to the Cuban and Venezuelan communities that helped Trump win Florida.

This fact both undermines and supports the Left’s need to make everything about race. Even for non-white communities, not everything is about race. The recent waves of immigrants were discriminated against, just as the Irish were in their time, and as we see even now, they’re assimilating and voting for regressive politicians. Just as the Irish did. Because they don’t see how this stuff has anything to do with them.

Just ask the Jews who grew up in Germany during the 1930s (if there are any left). You can be a perfectly assimilated member of the society and think you’re just like anybody else only to have your rights taken away because some know-nothing faction took control of the government. That’s why everybody needs to be on guard against it.

May the luck of the Irish be with you.

REVIEW – Star Trek Discovery: Season 3

So: As I was saying, the main problem with Star Trek Discovery in its first two seasons is that they made the decision to have its main character be intimately involved in the history of at least one Original Series character despite the fact that she was never mentioned before, and therefore Discovery had to be placed in the Original Series period when the stories, the technology and the overall presentation went out of their way to not look anything like TOS, even compared to the pre-Kirk series Enterprise. Case in point: In the Enterprise story arc that occurred in the Mirror Universe, they at least had some reference to the sexy uniforms the cast wore in the original “Mirror, Mirror” episode. Whereas when Discovery entered the Mirror Universe, the Terran Empire uniforms were all Italian Fascist chic, and the overall look resembled the Lady Gaga video for “Alejandro.”

Now while Season 3 did end up going back to that, namely to work out the fact that Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is now both a dimensional and time paradox, moving the series far into the future (far past even Star Trek Picard) is the best thing that ever happened to Discovery, because now they don’t even have to pretend to care about continuity. The old standards no longer apply. Which was very much the theme of this season.

First, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) appeared a year before Discovery in the future timeline and had all that time to get used to the new environment and life with smuggler-with-a-heart of-gold Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who taught her that the Federation had mostly collapsed after an event called “the Burn” in which most of the dilithium in the galaxy exploded, along with the ships that were using it. So even after Discovery shows up and she finds them, their main quest is to find what’s left of the Federation and help ‘get the band back together’, which I’m sure is going to be the continuing premise of Season 4.

In the midst of this, the crew finds the 32nd Century Starfleet Command, led by Admiral Vance (veteran actor Oded Fehr) and discovers not only that the refugee Romulans fully reunited with the Vulcans (changing the homeworld’s name to Ni’Var) but the Andorians after splitting off from the Feds ended up joining the Orions to create “the Emerald Chain”, which was set up as the main antagonist of the season. This was one of the better decisions they made, because the Orions always had the potential to be the capitalist/pirate/crime syndicate villains that Gene Roddenberry set up the Ferengi to be despite how embarrassing they were. Unfortunately while Chain leader Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and her lieutenant Zarek had both malice and style, they were apparently too ruthless to be left alive.

But the dilithium shortage created a situation where the Federation’s mode of civilization is now more the exception than the rule in a frontier-like environment, and Discovery’s spore drive not only allows it to bypass the limitations of other ships but makes it indispensable to the Federation and the quest to discover the source of the Burn. The Burn really was a great device to change the nature of the whole Star Trek setting. Unfortunately, the revelation that it boiled down to a child’s reaction to his mother’s death made the whole thing sink like a lead balloon.

Yes, it did give the actors involved some great emotional scenes, but the fact that this event was what led to the destruction of galactic civilization seems more than a bit anti-climax. Although the Su’Kal storyline did end up creating Discovery’s greatest special effect, in which the holo-program Su’Kal is living in made Saru appear as a human, so that for the first time Doug Jones got to play his character without makeup, and he actually looked WEIRDER.

And then they just sort of wrapped the whole thing up a bit too neatly. Osyraa, the main rival to the Federation government, was taken out, and in passing they said the Emerald Chain was breaking up. And with Saru helping take care of Su’Kal, Vance gave command of the Discovery to Burnham. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Partially because it sort of confirms Burnham’s Mary-Sue status in Star Trek, but also because, contrary to the opinion that they’d been setting up this ascension from the beginning, you could make a good case, especially in Season 3, that the show was setting up the premise that maybe Michael WASN’T cut out to be a ship’s captain. Remember that the series basically started with an act of gross insubordination against the original Captain Georgiou. And in both Seasons 2 and 3, Saru experienced substantial growth as a personality and proved himself to be just as much captain material as Christopher Pike, whom Starfleet insisted on making the interim captain during Season 2 despite not having served on Discovery. Thus when the crew ended up in the 32nd Century, they unofficially decided to make Saru their full commander, a decision confirmed by the contemporary Starfleet. Meanwhile Burnham had spent all that time before the reunion traveling with Book as a rogue trader and getting used to the idea of a life outside the Starfleet command structure. And as Saru’s executive officer, she was obliged to direct an away team mission while Saru was at Starfleet, and while she did an excellent job, in a later episode Burnham went against Saru’s direct orders, and when Saru found out about this and consulted her friend Tilly, she reluctantly counseled him to go by the book rather than let Burnham off. And the interesting thing is that Saru finally decided to remove Burnham from the XO position and install Tilly there, because he saw that there is no point in being in command if you have no regard for the command structure, and Tilly realized that better than Burnham did. So in flipping around at the end and removing Tilly and Saru from Michael’s path, I suppose Discovery has confounded audience expectations, but not necessarily in a good way.

Another example of the “I’m not sure where they’re going with this” is Discovery‘s continued attempts at diversity. They had previously introduced Dr. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his husband Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) only to kill Culber in Season 1. They came up with an ingenious method (using Stamets’ connection to the spore network) to resurrect Culber in Season 2, but after that Culber broke off the relationship since he no longer felt like he was in love with Stamets – he had the memory of their relationship, but not the experience of it. I thought this was an interesting angle to take with the character – if you die, is there a soul outside the body that just comes back if the body is restored, or is the person a purely material thing, and therefore Hugh is really not the same individual? This is a question that poses potentially disturbing answers (whether you’re an atheist or believer) and the show didn’t really get into it after Hugh volunteered to go with Paul into the future. They only touched on it a couple times this season, namely near the end when Hugh volunteered to go down to Su’Kal’s planet to help bring him out of his isolation. The relationship also ties into the new character introduced in Season 3, the 32nd Century Terran prodigy Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), who was promoted as the first non-binary character in Star Trek. From a SF standpoint, Adira is more interesting in being a Human who is somehow able to host a Trill (apparently they improved the transplant technology after all those years) and a Trill who has a past life that is still separate and conscious – her boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander) who had begged Adira to take the symbiont when he was dying. The two characters seem to be something of a primer for the audience in how to deal with trans people in their lives – especially since Adira is first introduced to Burnham as female, but then is put in Stamets’ engineering team and ends up confessing that they prefer to be addressed as “they.” (Apparently this paralleled del Barrio’s own decision to come out in real life.) The fact that Adira’s main connection to the crew ends up being the cis gay couple of Stamets and Culber also seemed deliberate. And Gray Tal’s continued individual existence is finally revealed when both Hugh and Adira end up on Su’Kal’s planet and Hugh can finally see Gray through the holo-program. And the fact that Gray no longer has a physical presence once the program is terminated leads Hugh to promise Gray that he will help find a way that he can be “seen” – another message to the audience that seems deliberate. Now, these moments are part of the great emotional scenes I referred to earlier, but they’re not exactly being subtle with the meta-text. Which just gets to how I have the same problem with Discovery that I have with Star Trek: Picard – I like the characters, and I really like the actors, but the writing falls down.

The main reason I bring most of this up is that the new parental relationship Paul and Hugh have to Adira/Gray led to an actual bit of tension between protagonists, when Burnham rescued Stamets from the Emerald Chain and he told her they had to get Culber and Saru off Su’Kal’s planet, and Burnham told her that would lead the chain to a huge dilithium source that was also the origin of the Burn. When she told Stamets that Adira had gone to the planet to give the two men radiation drugs to keep them alive, Stamets completely lost it, and Burnham had to subdue him then launch him in a pod towards Starfleet Command Center so that Osyraa couldn’t use the Discovery to reach Su’Kal’s planet. And while that case of Burnham’s ruthless on-the-fly decision making was actually the right move (and probably contributed to Vance’s decision to give her the ship), they’re making it pretty clear that Stamets hasn’t forgiven Burnham for it, and that may cause her problems going forward.

That and the rebuilding-the-Federation premise is what gives me hope for Season 4, but I’m still ambivalent. I’d said in my review of Season 1, “Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.” This show does take chances, but that doesn’t mean they always work out. This is part of why the show attracts so much flak, and given that it’s hardly the only Star Trek show to have bad moments and false steps, it’s hard to say how much of the hate is a politically incorrect fandom and how much is the ambivalent product.

It doesn’t help that the show’s semi-official nickname seems to be “DISCO.” Which might not even be the worst choice. If you were to apply the three-letter abbreviation format that these other shows have, so that the original series is “TOS”, Voyager is “VOY” and Enterprise is “ENT”, that would make Discovery “DIS.” Or “STD.”

Even so, Season 3 is certainly the best Discovery so far, again because the premise of kicking the cast out of standard Trek’s timeline eliminates the conflict they created for themselves in being so much unlike other Trek material. I’ve seen at least one YouTube video making a detailed case that the “Temporal Wars” referred to in both this series and Enterprise demonstrate that both series are in their own timeline that, like JJ Abrams’ Trek, ultimately has nothing to do with the Prime universe. This does not seem to be the canon position, but it helps me feel better about Discovery. At least with Season 3, there’s a better chance the show will be appreciated on its own terms.

REVIEW: Star Trek Discovery – Season Two

Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.

Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.

And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.

As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.

Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.

The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.

Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.

As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.

This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.

And a lot of what it comes down to is this:

You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.

The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.

Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.

Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.

The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)

It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.

Goodnight 2020

Fuck 2020

Fuck that year

Fuck the holidays with no good cheer

Fuck impeachment, fuck Donald Trump

Fuck Republican enabler scum

Fuck Xi Jinping, Fuck Wuhan,

Fuck off Italy and fuck Iran

Fuck Trump for denying the virus we got

I said ‘Fuck Trump’ twice? Fuck, why not?

Fuck trying to analyze these rhymes

In this post I say ‘Fuck’ 93 times

Fuck people who gave the virus to kids

I’d say ‘Fuck Boris Johnson’ but the virus did

Fuck having to spend all day at home

Fuck wearing masks, fuck you if you don’t

Fuck closing buffets, fuck closing movies

Fuck closing bars where we can see floozies

Fuck it when any cops shoot a child

Why does ‘Fuck Tha Police’ never go out of style?

Fuck Twitter for posting their fraudulent Twits

Fuck Facebook cause it won’t let us show tits

Fuck, this year was worse than 2016

Fuck 2020’s no-kids Halloween

Fuck this election, Mitch McConnell sucks

Someone needs to kill his fuckin’ Horcrux

Fuck it if you think Biden’s win was a steal,

We’re not building a wall, and Q isn’t real

Fuck Trump again, you wanna ask why?
Cause he’s a talking hemorrhoid, really, FUCK THAT GUY!

Let’s hope this one is a much better year,

Fuck 2020, GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!!

Christmas Music That I Can Actually Stand, Continued

Here’s some more “holiday” songs I can think of that I actually like, though in some cases I had to dig. And on this week let me just say:

Happy Festivus!

The Pretenders, “2000 Miles”

If Die Hard is a Christmas movie cause it happens to be set at Christmas, this song is a Christmas song because it’s set at Christmas time. It wasn’t written for a Christmas album. “2000 Miles” was the last song on Learning to Crawl, released in 1984 after Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and bassist Pete Farndon both died from drug abuse. Not only that, by this point, lead singer Chrissie Hynde had fallen in love with her mentor, Kinks singer Ray Davies, who broke up with her after they’d had a child. With the center of her band collapsed, Hynde had to get new personnel and from that point the Pretenders were that much more her personal property. Honeyman-Scott was actually the inspiration for this song. Learning to Crawl is a transitional album about taking stock of where you are in life, but unfortunately it’s also a transition between the Pretenders as a badass postpunk rock band and a relatively mainstream, sleepy pop group, although on “2000 Miles” that’s kind of the point.

Weird Al Yankovic, “Christmas at Ground Zero”

One of the few times that Al made a serious point with dark humor. Another good example is his Miley Cyrus parody, “Party in the CIA.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t039p6xqutU

Elton John, “Step Into Christmas”
A catchy song that unlike most Christmas standards hasn’t been played to death by radio and stores. From the golden days of Elton John, when he was still pretending to be straight but still wearing costumes that made Liberace look like a Trappist monk.

The Who, “Christmas”

Another Christmas song that’s not really about Christmas. It’s in the early section of the rock opera Tommy, in which the parents lament that their autistic son isn’t capable of recognizing the reason for the season, and as such, this is one of the few Christmas songs that’s actually about the Gospel: “How can he be saved/From the eternal grave?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BWiYJ3yykw

Eagles, “Please Come Home For Christmas”
This track (actually a cover of soul singer Charles Brown) endures better than a lot of other blues-rock stuff that has been played over the years, mainly because, as with Nat King Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song”, the various elements come together best on this particular version as opposed to the subsequent covers.

Run-DMC, “Christmas in Hollis”

Most of my musical taste runs to classic rock, aka “dad rock.” But this is a really cool song by rap pioneers Run-DMC. Of course, given what rap sounds like nowadays, Run-DMC might as well be dad rock.

Carol of the Bells – One of the “traditionals” that I actually like, especially as a choral.

Fear, “Fuck Christmas”

Dedicated to Melania Trump.