Two Things on the ModRetro Chromatic - Written 120224

Tonight I found a ticket back to the 1990's, courtesy of Palmer Lucky and his company ModRetro.

This is a fully functional, magnesium alloy-shelled, backlit Game Boy Color with the same exact screen size as the original Nintendo device (the first time any company besides Nintendo has done this for such a game system). It has a sapphire glass lens, and it's powered by three AA batteries. It can play all Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.

This is like one of those dream-come-true situations from when I was a kid and I would pose what-if scenarios with friends. Like, "What if a tech billionaire decided to make the ultimate Game Boy Color just because he loved the system?"

Some dreams oddly enough do come true.

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It works pretty darn well, and it looks amazing. It's like someone took a stock Nintendo screen and just lit it up.

Usually modified GameBoys and third party retro devices have larger screens and use software to get the display to look as close to the original aspect ratio as possible. ModRetro actually manufactured backlit screens with the exact same dimensions as the original system.

If you're a fan of the GameBoy you should really consider giving this a shot. GameStop carries the variant you see here, or ModRetro's website sells the full line. 

New accessories and firmware updates will be coming in the new year, after more people get to use the device.

Being a Fan of Media Today - Written 111424

Ten people passionately enjoy a thing that everyone else ignores, and they hold to it for the rest of their lives. 

Eventually one of the ten becomes a filmmaker or a popular personality in mainstream culture and references that thing the original ten really enjoyed. The next thing you know every mindless NPC seeking to fill the hole where their personality should be with some object or idea flocks to it and overwhelms the people who originally maintained it. Then corporate media decides to remake it, over-saturate every market with products based on it, and then dumb it all down for mass consumption. Then finally grievance grifters who see the opportunities related to the mass appeal of the thing come in and call it bigoted to stir up controversy and get their names in the news. Then they demand that it be changed and reshaped to represent and please them.

Meanwhile, nine of the original ten people who genuinely and authentically loved the thing are left to watch the rest of the world work to ruin their joy.

This is what it feels like being a fantasy, science fiction, horror, tabletop game, video game, animation, monster, or any other kind of fan today. 

Halloween Past - Written 103124

I remember living in Providence, KY before my family moved to Michigan. 

It was in school there that I first learned about R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series; where I watched a lot of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Nickelodeon in general; and it was the town where I became friends with a girl who, for some reason, I thought was a witch because she always wore an eyeball ring and laced dresses. 

It was a place where one year my grandma helped us quickly spin up Halloween costumes so we could go trick-or-treating. I dressed up like a pirate, because it was easy to put that costume together, and we went out into the darkness on an especially cool and windy night. I remember the lights of the houses, the smell of the clean air, and gazing up at the tree-covered hill by the school which looked like a massive haunted shadow. I imagined that a cemetery full of ghosts was there in the blackness beneath those trees.

All of that exists now only as a series of images and sensory memories. I can remember my grandma's voice then, the chill of that Halloween night, the taste of candy, and I can remember feeling endless as we wandered the sidewalks of that perfect period in celebration of the spirit of the holiday. 

I didn't appreciate Providence as much as I should have, but it will live in my mind and heart for the rest of my life because of times like that Halloween and the great things my loving grandmother would do for us.

Providence was also the only place I have ever seen a ghost, but that's another story for a different time.

The Nuckelavee

A sudden and unexpected scraping and clopping strikes up behind you as you walk upon the road at an unsettlingly late hour. You quickly turn to behold a shape, which at first is difficult to comprehend, but as you do you can feel your body tense and the sweat of dread begin to flow.

Walking toward you is what seems to be a horse, slowly and unsteadily moving with its head hung low. Upon its back is a rider, though something seems horribly wrong as this person shifts and flops about like a flimsy doll atop the mount. Their head rolls and snaps around like it's strung onto the body with a string-like broken neck. 

And then, as it gets closer, you see the skin, or lack thereof. The horse and rider both are completely barren of it, with muscles and organs and veins exposed to the air, glistening grotesquely under the meager lights of the road and the starlight above. What's more, there is no separation between rider and horse, for they are hideously fused.

Before it is upon you, you notice the face of the head of what you had believed to be a rider. It is no human face, for its mouth is wide and snout-like, and from it runs a stream of foul-smelling black, tar-like ichor. Only a single red eye sits within that head.

In what will be your last moments on Earth, you have just encountered the nuckelavee.

Words from a "Primitive Screwhead" - Written 102424

I am aware that Bruce Campbell isn't really happy with Army of Darkness and tends to push for the Evil Dead movies more. There are good reasons for this, of course, as Universal tends to take total ownership of movies and they make it difficult for creators to maintain sufficient ties to and control of their work.

That being acknowledged and stated, Army of Darkness is one of my favorite films. I hold that it's the best Bruce Campbell movie ever made. 

As a kid who grew up reading comics, I loved every time I saw the Army of Darkness ad in the back of an issue; the gorgeous, full-page Michael Hussar poster that I feel is the greatest movie poster of all time (it hangs prominently in a place of honor in our living room). Ever since I started in the tabletop gaming hobby I knew that I wanted my gaming to feel like the movie (unfortunately the license RPG wasn't to my liking, though). It greatly influenced and inspired me, and almost every day I think about it - along with the Roman Empire, The 13th Warrior, and Tolkien's work. That Joseph LoDuca and Danny Elfman score often plays in my mind, as well.

This Halloween season, even though it has felt incredibly difficult to feel the spirit and enjoy it, I will try my best to think often about the Medieval dead (a potential title that was considered for the film), dark tomes which call up hideous and horrifying things beyond our comprehension, and big-chinned heroes mocking stupefying nightmares with idiotic swagger as they casually fire off their boom-sticks.

I may be a primitive screwhead, but I am proudly a fan of Army of Darkness.

Introduction to a Gaming Campaign

Returning, brutally fatigued and wasted, from far distant lands and endless wars, you and your companions ride through the gritted mountainous teeth of the edge of the world into the familiar deep green of your mist-haunted valley homeland. The ancient trees which begin to surround you and your path seem to ceaselessly exhale a grim whisper. As you ride down you are slowly overtaken by the roar of frigid falls, pouring a marriage of spring flow and ice melt into the land below.

Absorbing the refreshing scent of the vaporous spray and the green of the damp wood, you round a massive oak and are suddenly greeted by a disheveled and bent crone. She leans against a crooked, moss-garbed menhir-like projection which looms out over the rapidly descending river behind her. Her eyes are obscured by crude wrappings. 

She overpowers the raging water to chide you for your long absence and projects through a thick, wet cough about a horrible sickness that has swept across this land. Her booming voice is disturbingly weak, and yet it is venomously mocking.

The cracking interruption of a falling tree distracts the lot of you, but gazing about frantically, you see nothing of the sort. You eyes return to the crone to find that she has vanished.

You ride on and begin to feel haunted by the liquid hacking of that woman, which you think you hear occasionally in the near and far distance. 

A bend in the path, further down, coincides with a break in the trees. Through it you see the looming mountains which encircle this vale, a sea of mist-drowned trees, and what roughly looks like the skeleton of a village. A shudder overtakes you, for that village was a place you once called home. It was the home toward which you are now riding. 

The cry of a servant seizes your attention, and the entire company turns to behold a tragedy of horrors. Chained to the trees which line the continued descent of the path are skeletons, garbed in the tattered remnants of clothing. Child skeletons, shackled and wrapped tightly to the splintery bosoms of the rain-soaked trees.

A wet cackling can be heard through the trees, and a familiar creaking voice declares, "Welcome. Welcome. For you are home!"

Game On Against the Tyrants of Change - Written 102024

When I was a kid a game store used to be full of socially awkward people who lived their hobbies and appreciated culture that no one else cared for.

There was the girl with a binder full of color pencil drawings of warrior angels from Magic the Gathering; the large-spectacled and frequently unbathed kid with a mullet and fishing vest who quoted Terry Pratchett like his work was gospel; the older working class guys and military veterans who just loved slinging dice and talking about the good old days; the kids in cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts who knew all the music and skits that Dr. Demento played; and then weirdos like me who had things in common with some of these other folks and found the gaming hobby fascinating, magical, and took comfort in finally finding a way to let out all of the dreams and ideas they had bottled up with no place to explore and enjoy them.

Nowadays you mostly have young autistic guys and girls dressed in bad gender-bender cosplay who seriously seem to want you to ask them about which identity costume they're wearing this week, kids who live on Twitch and want everything to be a reference to their Internet lives, and hipsters who think everything needs to be a European board game without exception. There are maybe some kids like the ones I described above, like the ones I grew up with, but they seem lost in the shuffle caused by the intrusion of popular culture into a once niche hobby.

It's a different world now with alien and terrible people in it. Sure things change as you get older, but the way that the cultural shift has warped my hobby and game stores is something malevolent and far worse than just natural change. It's a very conscious and deliberate shift being fueled by people who demand accommodation for their religious devotion to chaos and outrageousness for the sake of outrageousness. They don't care about games or gaming. They care about making you live and breathe their message and ideas.

It's a pretty god damned dark time we're living in.

Magical Gaming Stones and Some More About My Gaming Hobby - Written 102024

When I began playing Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, back in middle school, I was introduced to several types of fascinating gaming paraphernalia. The items that really stood out to me and really stirred my imagination were the set of dice I purchased from a random assortment of old Chessex dice in a dish within the display case at the front of White Cap Comics, a Ral Partha pewter Elf miniature that I was able to choose for my first ever character, and lastly a handful of colorful gaming stones.

Something about the disparate assortment of oddly shaped dice, the three-dimensional metal object which represented a fantasy character in the midst of action, and the richly colored variety of gaming stones made the experience of gaming more magical. I had tools with which I could delve into realms of fantasy and explore worlds beyond my own.

At the time I didn't have access to many of my belongings because of family issues, but having those dice and gaming stones and that miniature at hand felt very special. It's interesting how simple things can change your life.

I fear that the nature of the hobby and the world today will deny kids the experiences and sincere joy I had. Maybe there's a kid out there who has just as little as I did when I was their age and will love the simple things they organically find will all of his or her heart. I hope so.

In Defense of the Works and the Person of J.R.R. Tolkien - Written 100624

I have been a very protective fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien since I was a kid. These days being a protective fan is considered a bad thing, because we're all supposed to embrace the mediocre people who all want a piece of the thing we love and have made a part of our lives long before social networking influence and mass internet marketing were things. Cultural rape is cool now, and those of us who disagree are considered the enemy or the new, excessively used and therefore now meaningless term, "Toxic."

I first read The Hobbit for a book report in the seventh grade, choosing it randomly from a list based on the title. I naively didn't look beyond it to any connected books or try to research the author, and frankly, I didn't originally think I agreed with how the dwarves and elves were portrayed, based on my narrow idea of fantasy at the time which was informed by fairy tales, C.S. Lewis, and shows like David the Gnome. It did stick with me, though, and I came to find that Tolkien's elves and dwarves were the best.

A year or two later I saw a copy of The Return of the King, with a glorious painted cover, at the local library and recognized the author's name. I checked it out and soon discovered that I was entering the story at a very late point. I felt disappointed and distraught, because I needed to know why Gandalf was with someone named Peregrin Took and why they were riding with haste toward a city called Gondor.

I don't exactly remember all of the details, but I think I explained this mistake to my uncle who then gave me a box set of the most important books I would ever read. In that box was the familiar edition of The Hobbit from my book report and it was accompanied by a trilogy of books collectively called The Lord of the Rings.

I read all of these books with excitement and became a changed person through the experience. Around this time I was also discovering Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. My life was becoming more magical, and my imagination leveled up a thousand times in just a couple of years.

Time moved on and real life became more difficult. My family went through some hard times, and things became horrifically uncertain. Through all of that, though, I had Tolkien's work and an imagination bolstered by that work and fantasy gaming. 

About a year or two later, while playing D&D at the local game store, I overheard two adults discussing a movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. They discussed Elijah Wood being cast, and I remember thinking that the kid from Flipper would never work as Frodo. I dismissed the discussion and went back into the fantasy world of my imagination.

When The Fellowship of the Ring eventually did release it blew me away. It wasn't what I had imagined and it wasn't like anything I had constructed in my mind when I read Tolkien, but it was nevertheless a beautiful fantasy movie to behold. My family was going through another difficult and tragic time when this first movie came out, and having the memories of the film and listening to its soundtrack kept me sane.

I attended the midnight releases of The Two Towers (I slept on a friend's couch after seeing it on a school night with him and his sisters) and The Return of the King. While Star Wars was the trilogy of my early childhood and remained special, The Lord of the Rings became the trilogy of salvation which held me together as my time as a teenager wound down. These films and the books upon which they were based meant everything to me, and I invested so much time into becoming a lore expert of Tolkien's work. The books always held a higher place, but the movies were a more immediate escape and balm for me when things got rough. I even portrayed Tolkien in a Senior year biography project, and I went on to ramble in a muddled English accent (possible only thanks to a childhood filled with exposure to Doctor Who, Monty Python, Blake's 7, Are You Being Served?, and other BBC programs) about the man's life for over twenty minutes, all the time waving around an unlit pipe.

Ever since then I have continued to hold onto my love for Tolkien's work. I have butted heads with numerous people who were just movie zealots talking ignorantly out of their asses about what Tolkien's work supposedly actually means, and I have exposed many people who have lied about their interest in Tolkien just to be a part of a popular thing. Again, I am a protective fan, and I especially don't suffer fools when discussing Tolkien or anything I care about.

Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy was a complete disappointment. It was so bad that it made me reconsider my appreciation for the trilogy I enjoyed as a kid. I decided that I still very much cared for those movies, but nothing was ever going to be more important than the original works. As far as I was concerned the trilogy from my childhood, the Ralph Bakshi film, and the Rankin-Bass movies were the only adaptations I would ever care about or allow.

Next came Amazon and their bloated, excessive series The Rings of Power. It is nothing more than expensive garbage fan fiction made to satisfy the ego of that talentless, cueball dip shit known as Jeff Bezos. It's badly written, disrespectful of Tolkien's lore, and it's full of modern day inserts which have no place in anything related to Tolkien.

The future looks grim for anyone who actually cares about Tolkien, as there is a new anime (ugh) that has been made as a prequel to an aspect of The Lord of Rings coming later this year. It looks to be as awful as it sounds, and it's made a ridiculous main character out of a person who had maybe two sentences to describe them in the original appendices to The Return of the King.

Considering everything, and looking back fondly on my first experiences with Tolkien's work, I believe that no matter what Hollywood and the dumb-dumb bandwagon consumer crowd try to do to Tolkien's work, that work will outshine and outlast it all. Tolkien and his legendarium will live forever, and these derivatives and adaptations, regardless of quality, will fade ultimately into nothing.

Here's to J.R.R. Tolkien and the immortality of his amazing secondary world!

On Corpse Roads - Written 090624

Cut into rugged hillsides and dug out of pastoral fields with the boot heels of dozens of generations across many a century are the paths reserved for the transit of the dead. These lichways and corpse roads run somberly across the lands of folk who honor their significance, and along them the expired, both blessed and damned, are conveyed to the hallowed places where they shall be laid to rest within the cold soil bosom of the Earth.

On crisp nights when frost threatens to coat the world and the moon is absent from its seat of lordship in the heavenly dome of its dark domain, shades traverse these paths; strange shadows mysterious yet driven. They waft spectrally along their way for unfathomable, otherworldly reasons which are beyond the ken of any living man.

If one should spy such a wandering specter as it traces the lichways of the countryside in its wraithlike fashion one should hasten home and gird themself in meditations of the sacred to separate their being and soul from the attraction and curiosity of the intensely ghastly and seemingly Tartarean.

These gruesome silhouettes which travel the dead roads should be ignored and avoided at all costs. Those who fail to heed this wisdom will soon find themselves on their own terrifying journey toward the grim site of their final respite.