The Queue: Barnabas Collins

Blame Jil, it’s not my fault.

The first game I remember playing was Combat for the Atari 2600. I was four or five years old, and I remember my dad sitting with me on the couch while I played it. It’s one of a very few memories I have of him doing anything with me by choice.

Theodore Mosley’s Blue Light is a favorite of mine, a weird, deeply felt book about superhumans that draws a lot from his expertise on matters Californian, but is not a book I can easily sum up. Much like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, it uses its almost mythical superhuman protagonists and antagonists to talk about life and the way our world is going with us killer apes at the wheel.  Both novels are masterworks and I recommend them both highly.

Julian May is a favorite of mine, especially her Saga of Pliocene Exile, which is a story about time travelers exiling themselves to the Pliocene to evade being forced into a telepathic unity in ‘modern’ Earth (kind of modern, it’s set about 70 years after alien intervention in the 1980’s or so) and it has one of my favorite villain characters in fiction in the last book, The Adversary. Her Galactic Milleu series details the alien intervention if you’re curious.

There are a lot more but I’m tired and those three are pretty dense.

Weird but true fact, hydrogen bombs produce much less fallout than fission bombs and the fallout that they do produce consists of particles with a short half life which means that the idea that the wasteland would still be radioactive 200 years later is far more ridiculous than the idea that the Hollywood sign would still be around.

Now, it’s true that hydrogen bombs are a fission-fusion system where a fission nuke is used to trigger the fusion reaction. So essentially, we’re using a bomb like the ones from Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the detonator for the more powerful fusion bomb, and so there still is some fallout and lingering radiation. But it’s orders of magnitude less than what you see in Fallout and couldn’t possibly behave as it’s shown in the show and games.

To quote Joel Hodson, Repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax.

You leave me in my temple, I have it just the way I like it.

This one.

The corrosive nature of modern capitalist game dev means that it eats into even indie projects. It’s a rare ConcernedApe who can navigate the world of game design and carve out an independent space with the ability to safeguard their vision from the talons of our corporate overlords, ultimately, and the past few months  have really made it stark for me how bad things have gotten.

Wish I had an answer for all this, but I don’t. It’s just sad to see these firings and layoffs all over the place. These are peoples lives and they’re being destroyed so shareholders can keep devouring money endlessly. It’s like in The Lost Boys, really — One thing about living in gaming cultue I never could stomach: all the damn vampires.

Hey, so that’s my Queue for the week. Take care, everyone. I hope you’re all well.