Weekly Geekly Rundown for August 9, 2024
The Volume of a Cylinder is Potentially Infinite?!
A while back I talked about the discovery of the Einstein tile and how one of the things I love about discoveries like this is that they demonstrate how the infinite and the finite intersect in nature. In the case of the Einstein tile, researchers discovered a shape that can be laid out (aka tiled) on a plane without ever having the pattern of shapes repeat. That’s amazing right? What’s also amazing is that the intersections of these shapes create hexagons which do repeat. So we have an infinite repeating pattern and an infinite non-repeating pattern at the same time.
Similarly, when playing around with ways of determining the exact area/volume/etc. of shapes involving circles, we can end up creating a paradox where the area of the shape becomes infinite instead of converging on the real area of the original object. We can also “prove” that the value of Pi is 4, but that “proof” happens because of a flaw in the design of estimation that is similar to the “Curse of the Schwartz Lantern” that can paradoxically create a plane of infinite area as it converges in an attempt to find the real area of a cylinder.
The Mathologer, aka the world’s funniest German Math Professor who lives in Australia, has a wonderful video discussing the Pi = 4 paradox, how to Archimedes “cut corners” to estimate the value of Pi, and how Schwarz lanterns work. It’s a very interesting video, that like most of the Mathologer’s videos, explain complex mathematical concepts without the viewer needing an advanced understanding of mathematics.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Luke Y Thompson was super extremely busy last week working San Diego’s Comic Con. Pop Culture fans know that this is a HUGE convention, but what a lot of people outside of Southern California don’t know is that it is also a big happening for Southern California friends. The Southland can be a very busy place and Comic Con is one of those events where you can catch up with your friends who live across town, and yes sometimes it’s easier to meet up a couple hundred miles away than it is to drive across town. Such is the strangeness that is Los Angeles.
Comic Con is one of the things I most miss about having moved. I loved meeting up with my friends who came from places ranging from Reseda to Tasmania. I remember a trip a couple of years ago, pre-Covid, meeting up with my Tasmanian Devil of a friend Patrick (yes, he lives in Tasmania I wasn’t kidding). We went out for drinks and dinner and encountered some of my friends from the Valley. Such a great experience.
It’s too big. It’s too commercial. It’s also wonderful.
It’s not just a great place to meet friends, it’s also a great place to get interviews and schedule podcast episodes. A lot of people who are hard to find are damned accessible at Comic Con. One such example led to my favorite convention moment.
All of this is to say that I envy Luke attending last week. I know it was work for him, but I also know he was able to schedule some great interviews like this one with NECA about their upcoming line of action figures that includes a Pee Wee Herman model.
One the movie/tv beat, Luke has a review of the new Batman: Caped Crusader animated series on Amazon Prime. He gives the show a very positive review and notes how the show reflects current trends in the comic books, even as it takes place in a “pseudo-past” version of Gotham. There’s a part of me that wishes someone would do an Elseworlds where Batman never becomes a hero, but instead becomes someone obsessed with killing Alan Scott. Though Batman was created before Scott’s Green Lantern, subsequent retcons have made it so that Batman’s parents were killed in a Gotham defended by Scott and I’d love to read that revenge story. That’s a pitch for a different era though.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Abuse is a difficult subject to capture in film, especially if you want to present it in a realistic manner. Victims of abuse love their abusers. Hannah Arendt wrote about the phenomenon at the societal level, looking to explain how people could love the tyrants who abuse them in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Having worked with young people for decades, I’ve seen first hand the conflicted emotions. That’s almost impossible to convey to an outside audience.
Once the skin has been pulled back to reveal the monster, a viewer can never see what fuels the generation of oxytocin that connects the victim to the abuser, and too often we want to ignore that the victim is often also a part of the cycle. Like addiction, which is so rarely handled well, abuse is often presented in a Manichean way. It lets us think “that could never be me,” when in fact the statistics on abuse are that it’s shockingly common.
All of which leads me to Courtney Howard’s review of the new movie It Ends with Us starring Blake Lively and Jenny Slate. You can see how that tension between realism, sympathy, and justice missed the mark. According to Howard the film, like the book, tries too hard to show the perpetrator through the victim’s eyes and too often falls on cheesy and unconvincing moments to hit its marks.
Whenever I see a movie about abuse and wonder how realistic it is, I think about when my mom asked me if I’d seen Trainspotting. I had seen it. I thought it was brilliant and heart wrenching. Like the Jessie love arc in Breaking Bad, it showed addicts with empathy and love, but with realism. I still weep thinking of the scene where the baby dies. I don’t weep just because it’s sad, but because I know it is “true.”
When I told my mom I had seen it, she asked me “Don’t you think it really glorified heroin use?”
That question still haunts me. Were the actors in Trainspotting attractive? Yes. Were the characters funny and lovable? Yes. Did it make their heroin use look glamorous? What the fuck?! No.
I later learned that when my mom asked me this, she was already a heroin addict. That in her addiction she found that film glamorous told me a lot about addiction. It also told me that the version of addicts we see in film is too often simplistic, judgmental, and cruel. That it was the fact that the characters were lovable that made it look glamorous to my mom, who wanted to be lovable.
I think that is what the book and film makers are attempting with It Ends with Us, but based on Courtney’s review and others I’ve read, it looks like they failed. Then again, I still hear far too many people blaming addicts for their addiction.
Hitting The Hot Button
I’ve been reading
for a long time and I’ve been a regular reader of his substack since I think it’s first post. If I was in a better spot financially, I’d be a paying subscriber. His coverage is worth it, even what you get as a non-paying subscriber. In a recent post, he writes about why he is a critic and the personal need to write and share that fuels it.One of my favorite moments in his personal note was when he talked about things he could do to have more readers. He writes:
The newsletter has gotten enough traction to cause trouble… not enough to cause fear on the regular, which is the coin of the realm. I could build it bigger by shaking the industry by the lapels, by name… but I won’t do it. I learned that I didn’t want to be that person.
This got me thinking about two things. The first was how similar his reasons for writing in the first place are to my own. I just want to share my opinions about the things I think and the things I love. The second was how his quote echoed my philosophy here. No, I have no illusions that I could generate his readership, but I could get more readers by stepping into certain arguments I find tiresome and “picking a side” in geekdom. There are a lot of hate sites that get traffic, either by hating producers or hating fans. Their currency is anger and fear.
This thought of “fear as currency,” advanced by David in his piece, reminded me of an article by Richard Rushfield on
about Nikki Finke. She was definitely a figure in the Hollywood reporting echo system who “governed” by fear. Rushfield’s piece on her is very good and I recommend reading it. I don’t recommend doing regular Google searches for his older Nikkileaks reports, save that investigation for the Internet Wayback Machine or you might get a surprise or two.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
over at recommends that readers take the time to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic A Wizard of Earthsea and I agree whole heartedly. I’ve mentioned a couple of times that my introduction to fantasy, outside of mythology, wasn’t the typical happy fare. I read Moorcock before I read Tolkien, so for me deconstructive and subversive fantasy is the cliché stuff while the straightforwardly heroic is the fresh and new. Le Guin’s series was my transition series, the series that had enough shadow for me to recognize it as fantasy and enough heroic aspirations (aspirations because the hero isn’t very “heroic” at first) to point me towards other fantasy. 
One of my mentoring professors, Martin Johnson, often asserted that if you wanted to do research in Political Science that was fresh, insightful, and new, all you had to do was look back at the classics. He was right. Gerber and Green got a ton of mileage reinvestigating Harold Gosnell’s work on getting out the vote. There work is seminal, but their insights built upon a long overlooked classic study. Readers who do this with literature are often very well served.
I want to thank
for reminding me that the One-Page RPG jam is currently going on and I’ll be producing two One-Page RPGs in the coming weeks participating.
The editor of
has a very interesting column on how games can reflect the local community. In his case, he’s talking about the particular nature of British role playing games compared to their American counterparts and he makes some solid observations. Games like Dragonroar (with combat Hamsters), Dragon Warriors (an absolute classic), and Warhammer Fantasy Role Play all share a cultural sensibility. The same is true of regional play too, even in the post-internet world. The fact is that a lot of current fights in the rpg space about “what does or doesn’t belong in a fantasy role playing game” are more about regional differences (as well as textual personal Appendix Ns) as it is about any culture wars or edition wars. We need to remember that Arduin was radically different from Gygax’s D&D, or the D&D of the Mid-West. So much so that Gygax created a magic item called the Vacuous Grimoire to disparage the setting/rules.
Speaking of Appendix Ns
has a very interesting post about building an Appendix N and using it. If you don’t know what Appendix N is, Ethan covers it in his piece. It’s a piece that’s got me thinking a lot and I’ll be writing a post inspired by it about how having an Appendix N is beneficial to any campaign.
I figure since I gave
a little flack a couple of weeks ago regarding merchandization of fandom, I should point out some of her other writing as well. After all merchandization and “selling out” is something “real fans” have been complaining about forever and that even media-tie in author/hack Ron Goulart had some thoughts about. Yvonne is a very good psychologist and her piece on Media Diets and mental health during Covid is very much worth rereading in the post-Covid era. The fact is that we are still experiencing many of the negative effects of opinion based media she highlights in the piece.#RPGaDAY 2024 — Week 2
https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2024/08/rpgaday2024-rpg-that-is-easy-to-use.html
An RPG with Great Writing — It depends upon what you mean by “great writing.” If you mean mythical and inspirational, then I have to recommend Greg Stafford’s King Arthur Pendragon. If you mean “gives fantastic advice for GMs,” then it’s Aaron Allston’s Strike Force.
An RPG that is EASY to Use — Since I’ll be writing a One Page based on it this week, I’ll recommend
’s Lasers and Feelings.An RPT with ‘Good Form’ — I’m going to interpret “Good Form” as a combination of accessibility of rules and thoughtful layout design. To me, that screams Tom Moldvay’s Basic D&D.
An Accessory You Appreciate — Spidermind Games’ “Level Up” table accessory. This has revolutionized my D&D sessions and was way cheaper than a new table.
An Accessory You’d Like to See — I’d love to see some cloth battle maps with nice “tiles” that can be laid on them for terrain. I love the feel of cloth battlemaps, but there just isn’t enough good “dungeon wall” style terrain specifically designed for them.
An RPG You’d Like to See on TV — My all time favorite role playing game is DC Heroes, but I think I’d like to see TSR’s excellent and quirky Marvel SAGA Edition.
RPG with Well Supported One-Shots — Savage Worlds. It’s the game that cornered this market and has kept it going. It’s not only one of the best RPGs on the market, it is one of the best for One Shot play. While I’m at it, I might as well recommend my One Shot for Savage Worlds “Blood on Ice.”
Role Playing Game Recommendation
When I was discussing the Wyrd Science article above, the one about local communities having games that display their unique culture, one of the first things that I thought of was how Chaosium’s game Runequest was such a strong representation of this phenomenon. The game mechanically is rooted very heavily in the experiences its designer had in SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) fights. The back and forth and flow of combat don’t feel anything like D&D and instead have more verisimilitude regarding emulating blow by blow fights. Thematically it is rooted in Glorantha, Greg Stafford’s rich and inspired Mythological creation. I don’t think this combination of granular combat, hippy mythological vibes, and rich bronze age fantasy could have been written anywhere outside the California Bay Area.
Runequest is one of the great role playing games and Glorantha is one of the great game worlds.
Music Recommendation
It’s time to return to a little bit of a post-punk vibe after the short jaunt into the one hit wonders of the 2010s last week. While there are many definitions of post-punk sounds, for me what really makes a band a post-punk band is the combination of punk DIY attitude with a bit of Phil Spector’s wall of sound. Punk was straightforward rock with relatively low production value and maybe people who can’t play their instruments, but post-punk is straightforward rock and roll with layers and where the people have finally learned to play.
One of the quintessential post-punk bands is Gang of Four and listening to their 1979 Peel Session you get a sense of what post-punk is as a genre and how influential the band would be.
No discussion of post-punk would be complete without some mention of Joy Division. They are a magnificent example of how an almost progrock wall of sound can mesh with punk sensibilities. The legacy of this band is vast and not limited to the musical world. Joy Division was one of the bands listed in the role playing game Vampire the Masquerade’s musical Appendix N. It’s “music to vampire by.”
Stepping away from the semi-progressive post-punk to surf rock influenced music, The Jesus and Mary Chain have songs that deserve listening and examination.
For me, the post-punk genre hit its peak with Catherine Wheel. While Catherine Wheel is often viewed as part of the Shoegaze movement, and they are, their music extends beyond that by keeping more of the rock sensibilities of the early post-punk bands than most Shoegaze bands. I’ve never understood why Catherine Wheel wasn’t a bigger band, but I think one reason is that there music covers too many genres. They are a band that wrote excellent music, except you never knew if you were getting a pop tune or a prog one.
To have a bit of fun here, I’m going to once again recommend one of my favorite SNL skits. The Punk Band Reunion at the Wedding skit is a masterpiece and “Fist Fight in the Parking Lot” combines influences from Black Flag, Corrosion of Conformity, and Suicidal Tendencies so seamlessly. It’s like a montage of the hardcore scene.
Classic Film Recommendation
When one thinks of the oeuvre of John Ford, one doesn’t typically think of romantic comedies, but he directed a few excellent entries into the genre. His film The Quiet Man is a masterpiece in the genre and is a great demonstration of how a clash of cultures can influence romance. As big a fan of The Quiet Man as I am, I never would have guessed that John Ford would have directed a Screwball Comedy during the heyday of the genre, but he did and it’s a good one.
Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking takes Edward G. Robinson and casts him both within, and in contrast, to his stereotypical tough guy gangster. Robinson plays two characters in The Whole Town’s Talking, an accountant and an ominous gangster and the subtle charm of his accountant character is a much better representation of Robinson’s charisma than his tough guy.
The film’s central conflict is that Edward G. Robinson’s unassuming accountant character happens to look exactly like America’s Most Wanted bank robber and criminal. This creates the “screwball” situation that allows the romance between Robinson and co-star (deservingly top billed co-star) Jean Arthur. The romance develops naturally and Jean Arthur’s famous sarcastic tone serves her extremely well in this film and as great as Robinson is, she steals the show.
The optical effects used when Robinson’s two selves are in the same space are extremely well done. Ford uses door frames and wall corners to hide the seams in the splices and rarely needs to do the kind of optical overlay that makes one of the two twins fuzzy. Naturally, there is some use of body doubles but there is much less than I expected.
The film contains two central conflicts that are resolved in ways that never betray the core personalities of the characters. Robinson’s accountant never becomes an action hero, yet he manages to defeat his twin and avoid imprisonment. He also manages to get the girl.
Since the era of the screwball comedy’s heyday corresponded with The Great Depression, the economics of that era are always present in the background. The opening scene of the film features Robinson’s boss talking with a manager about the need to downsize the company and devising a way of figuring out who to fire. The scene perfectly demonstrates the separation between the “owner” class and the worker class and later in the film, the owner is unable to recognize Robinson as even working for him. Economist Ronald Coase’s classic work The Nature of the Firm explains why this separation exists in larger firms, but it’s a separation that almost leads to our protagonist going to prison for crimes he didn’t commit.
I highly recommend the film. It’s pace is slower than some screwball comedies, but Robinson and Arthur dial the charm up to 11.
Thanks so much for the mention, Christian! Really glad you something out the piece, :)
Thanks for the mention! Great newsletter here.
Your point that play styles in RPGs could be different city to city or region to region and not just across countries was something I had originally planned to look at
Especially in the context of say music, where historically you can easily see local subcultures of different genres develop and emerge, that share DNA with the bands 30 minutes up the road but for specific local reasons have gone off in a totally different direction
One of my laments about the internet is how much as I live how easy it is to discover music from everywhere and anywhere now, those local scenes are too often now being exposed to a national or international audience too early, long before they’ve had a chance to really simmer and develop a unique taste.
I imagine that’s the case with most things now and RPGs would be just the same. I’m not sure a younger British gamer would instinctively have the connection to that kind of Warhammer style anymore just by dint of growing up here.