Grubb Street wishes you and yours a safe and happy Holiday Season.
 |
| Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Luc Olivier Merson (1879), MFA, Boston. |
Let's round out this festive season's holiday plays with a Wodehousian romp. The Lovely Bride and I, along with our friends Janice and John, set out for the northern reaches of Seattle for lunch at Saffron Grill in Northgate (Indian/Mediterranean fusion, which was quite good), then doubled back to Greenwood and the Taproot Theatre for Happy Christmas, Jeeves, And it was all quite enjoyable.
Happy Christmas is not based on any one particular Bertie and Jeeves story so much as it is based on all of them. Indeed, one of the criticisms of Wodehouse's stories is their similarity - High-class toff Bertie Wooster gets himself in trouble, and only his sage and unflappable valet Jeeves can extricate him. And while this is true, but it is a little unfair, sort of like saying that The Simpsons have one story, and they just keep telling it different ways for 35 years. So this particular creation, from the pens of McElrath and Kessler-Jeffrey, features all the characters, hallmarks, and tropes of the traditional Bertie/Jeeves stories, mixed together and served as a Christmas Pudding.
Here's a deal - Bertie would like to do nothing more than spend the holidays alone, curled up with a new book by his favorite author. Such is not to be, of course, because his dreaded Aunt Agatha descends upon him with the demand that he put his hapless cousin Claude on a train to South Africa (spoiler- Claude doesn't go), and then the situation is made worse by Bertie's old chum Bingo Little having fallen in love with a waitress named Mabel, but doesn't know how to get HIS aunt's approval of the cross-social-class match. Add a few cases of mistaken illnesses and an escaped ferret and you culminate in an inspired collection of door-slamming and hallway-chasing.
And it's a lot of fun. And I should add that for this particular matinee performance, the understudies took over. There was a flurry of addenda slips in the program book, and folk stepping up into the leads. Jon Lutyens emerges as a pitch-perfect Jeeves, all manner and decorum even when armed with a net and a broom. Joe Moore was a delight as Bertie, all loose-limbed, slack-jawed, and goggle-eyed. Moore had been listed as Cousin Claude in the program, but after being promoted, that role was nicely assayed by Giao Nguyen. Kim Morris is a juggernaut-class Aunt Agatha, all sound and fury. William Eames was the endearing and infuriating Bingo Little. Nikki Visel was the very precise and proper (and cougarish) Lady Bittlesham, Bingo's Aunt and author of books on proper etiquette. Mabel was Rachel Guyer-Mafune, and this would be the fourth production I've seen her in at a fourth different theater. She's a hard-working actor.
They're all good. Delightfully so. And the direction was top-notch, dealing with the challenges of a small theater with a thrust stage and flanked on three sides by the patrons. This performance had pacing, and would set up and delivered jokes and humorous situations, with enough breathing room to let the audience catch up. The acting was broad, the action was slapstick, and there resulting confusion completely enjoyable. The audience was enchanted and engaged.
I liked it a lot, so much so that afterwards, I sat down to pen this, since it runs for only one more week (they did extend it over the weekend). This was the best Christmas show (Though Snowed In was nice as well). So if you need something to do in your post-Christmas break, here's a breath of fresh air with a very familiar setting. Happy Christmas to all!
More later,
Despite the playwright's name, this is not a Christmas play, though it is the kind of play that fits well within the holiday season - light, frothy, traditional, safe. Something to take in as a break from cookie baking, or to take the out-of-town visitors to. And indeed, it felt like a full house was in attendance this past Sunday afternoon.
But as a play I found it frustrating, in the same way I found By the Skin of Our Teeth frustrating. It is classic theatre in the expected style, and parts of it are excellent, but it ultimately misfires for me.
Here's the skinny - Charles and Ruth Condomine (Arlando Smith and Gina Hammond), both on their second marriages after the deaths of their first spouses, throw a dinner party with the Bradmans (Sara Waisanen and Nate Tenenbaum). Charles is working on a new novel involving a fraudulent occultist, and to that end has invited a local medium, Madame Arcati (Anne Allgood), to hold seance. All the others are skeptical, even mocking, but Arcati proves to be the real deal, and summons the spirit of Charles' first wife, the ebullient Elvira (Kirsten Potter). Whackiness ensues.
But, like Skin of Our Teeth, it should work, but it doesn't. This is a venerable old warhorse of a play, long-running in London's West End, subject of numerous revivals and innumerable summer stock and school versions. It should burble with wit and verve, but instead most of the banter shouts along at a uniform volume level and speed, such that I'm worn out trying to keep up. The pacing feels off. The three main characters in this love triangle are not expected to be particularly likeable, but by the same token, none of them seem to deserve their ultimate fates. They're all shallow. A little callous, but not delightfully so. They all seem to be talking, but there is little actual conversation going on here.
Where the play succeeds in where the talking stops and the physical comedy takes over. Allgood as Madame Arcati is a wondrously comic medium, a loose-limbed crane as she works her spells and flings herself bodily into trances. And Sophie Kelly-Hedrick as the maid, Edith steals every scene she is in as a Monty-Python-Gumby-turned-servant. The stagecraft is top-notch in the Rep tradition, and fits particularly well for the physical comedy. And the Lovely Bride has informed me that the gowns were excellent.
But ultimately, it misfires. Maybe the old plays I enjoyed have grown long in the tooth. Maybe it's just the modern approach to them. But the end result is just OK - not great, not horrible, just fine but not worth a strong recommendation for the holiday season. But just sort of indifferent. Truly blithe.
More later.
So I've been doing a lot of air travel this year, and when I travel, I bring along paperback mysteries. They are small, portable, you don't have to turn them off when landing or worry if the batteries are low. I usually get them at used bookstores, so if you lose them, you're out a few bucks.
And there's something I've noticed that I haven't seen anyone else comment about - the demise of the mass market paperback. I've been in a couple big chains, and the stubby pocket-sized mass-market paperback has been almost completely replaced with the larger-size trade paperback. The only mass-markets I'm finding (even in grocery stores, is the aisle next to the greeting cards) are by established authors and part of larger series that have been running in that format for years. Even a couple of the entries here are trade-sized reprints, purchased while on the road. Is this change-over really a thing? Are we losing the traditional mass market paperback of our youths?
Anyway.
These mass-market mysteries are also relatively short, unlike the doorstop fantasy books of the last several decades. That works out as well, since I can finish a book in one hop from Seattle to Milwaukee, or a round-trip to LA.
I still tend to favor Nero Wolfe mysteries, if you haven't noticed, but I am getting towards the end of the Rex Stout canon, and have actually bought the same book twice under different covers because I was unsure if I have read it or not. I've even engaged with Stout's estate-approved successor. So I'm doing a bit more experimentation, this time with some Raymond Chandler I had never encountered before, and dabbling with Agatha Christie.
A Right To Die - Usually, Wolfe's world exists in a 7-year bubble. When we first meet Archie and Nero in the 30's, they've been together about 7 years. In the fifties, they've been together about 7 years. But now we are in the 60's and suddenly we get a direct call-back to an episode in the 30's. Back in 1938, Wolfe cracks the case in Too Many Cooks by appealing to the better nature of a group of African-American waiters. Now, one of those former waiters shows up at his door, quoting the speech that Wolfe had made that night. His problem is that his son is engaged to a white girl, and he wants to find out what's wrong with her. And then, of course, the white girl turns up dead. I mentioned that Wolfe's world is predominately white, but this is one of the times that Stout touches on racism.
Too Many Clients - This is Stout's sex mystery (amusing since the back cover of the paperback edition has a promotion for Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (But were afraid to ask). Much as A Right To Die delved into race relations, Too Many Clients deals with a high-level exec maintaining a sex-den in Spanish Harlem, where he um, entertains young women. When the exec turns up dead, Wolfe starts gaining client after client who wants to know who did it (and confirm that it wasn't them). The sex is polite, gentile, and mainly confined to the erotic art on the sex-den's walls. And since Archie Goodwin, our narrator, is a gentlemen, it doesn't get much further than a passing glance. Very much of its age.
And Four To Go - This is collection of Stout's shorter works, which originally saw print in glossy magazines like Look and The Saturday Evening Post (both long-gone as regular periodicals). This collection deals with a murders set around the holidays - A Christmas Party poisoning, an Easter parade shooting, a Fourth of July picnic stabbing. Each with a host of suspects and motives and a solid reason for the relatively inert Nero to get involved. Also was a fourth story that was an alternate version of a story that appeared elsewhere, with only the age of a female character changed. Interesting and a pity that such few avenues for this type of fiction now exist.
Fade to Black - Robert Goldsborough is the appointed heir (by Stout's estate) to carry on the stories of Nero and Archie. And it's all right - I can't really fault it. All the pieces are there - the brownstone, the orchids, the gourmet meals, the dicey relationship with the cops. But is does feel a little off, oddly because Stout's stories were always in the moment when they were written. Wolfe is always reading some recently-published volume, and the New York of the era is drivable. Fade to Black hews to that rule as well, but it feels weird once we get into later decades. The first line is "The whole business started at Lilly Rowan's Superbowl party", which just feels odd to me. The mystery involves dueling add agencies and stolen ideas, and there is a body, of course. It's not bad, but we are looking at a different place and time.
(As an addition, this volume was publishing in 1990, and the evolution of the mass-market paperback is clear from the earlier books of the 60's. It is a mass-market, but the margins are wider, and the leading (the white space between the lines) is larger. The book itself has more pages and is thicker, though I doubt there are more words. Paper in this later era was apparently cheaper, allowing the book to swell and take up more space on the bookshelf).
(And by the way, this the trade version of the book, reprinted in the 1992, and can be compared against the earlier mass markets. Thinner, taller, but also wider margins and leading. And a higher price tag, even taking into account inflation).
Playback - One other theme that haunts Chandler's pages is broken women - those who have been traumatized as a foundation for their actions. You notice it after reading a few of them. In The High Window it was timid secretary Merle Davis. In The Long Goodbye it was Linda Loring. In this case it is Betty Manning (with a host of other names) who is on the run to California. Detective Phil Marlowe is hired to shadow her, then switches sides and becomes her defender in a cluster of lies and betrayals. The part of LA that Chandler defines here is Enclave Culture - those wealthy colonies along the coast where the old money retires, the young money wants to be included, and the help staff can't afford to live within the town boundaries. That part is the most interesting feature, along with Marlowe's internal monologues.
Pickup on Noon Street - This is a collection of shorts originally written for pulps like Black Mask. There's no Marlowe here, but rather characters named Dalmas and Carmady, both of which have their own internal code that Chandler relies on. LA is here as well, but seedier, seamier sides, which means a lot of hoods and guns, troubled women, and bodies on the floor. I picked up the book at Half-Price, and it came with its own little mystery - a polaroid used as a bookmark of what could be a shoreline or a distant mountain range in the distance, with a non-descript skyscraper along one side.
And that's it for the Plane Books of 2024. The thing that strikes me in this mystery reading is the frame holding the mystery is sometimes more engaging that the mystery itself. Dorothy Sayers has a very political in her writing. Stout (and his successor) takes New York City and turns it into a cozy place for the occasional killing. Chandler reveals the LA outside his window, and Christie gives a tour of the upstairs/downstairs life in the interwar years. The books are centered on the mystery, but what makes them successful is what they're really about.
And I'm looking at stocking up for next year's trips. There will be fewer of them, but they will still be there.
More later.
Snowed In (Again) by Corinne Park Buffelen, Music composed by David Taylor Gomes, Directed by Kelly Kitchens. Arts West through December 22.
It was fun. And so we do it again this year. New cast, similar cabin, tasked with putting together a SEQUEL to the previous show. So we get a mixture of songs from the previous year ("Bonita the Sexiest Christmas Elf") with a few newcomers (Grampus" - a wonderful paen to family holiday gatherings with that Grinchic patriarch), along with interstitial material dealing with family traditions and paralyzing deadline pressure. And Olive (the Other Reindeer) makes a return as well.
And the cast is in fine voice and high spirits - Lauren Drake, Ays Garcia, Alexander Kilian, and Brandon Reil as the "new kids" ensemble, Aaron Jin on the keyboard. And they are excellent, though competing with Sarah Russell's rendition of "I'm Happy Being Hosted" is a tough lift. That's one of the challenges of doing a sequel - comparison with the original flavor. And the choreography was sharp and in places hilarious. .This year's version had less nods to Seattle and more to the season, which is cool as well.
A nit? Sure, but just one. The blocking and set design had a seat for the actors directly in front us in the front row, so I had a case of looking at the back of the actor's heads. And butts. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And it was amusing to see Alexander Killan curled up in a fetal position from the sudden stress of creating an all-new show with the old material. So there's that.
The humor is broad, the actors are spirited, the feelings are grounded. No heavy stakes, no character arcs, no (major) lessons learned. It is very much a Holiday Revue, put together with heart and soul. Yeah, it was fun and a great way to enter the holiday season.
More later,
So, I'm writing this from a friend's house, about 15 minutes south of Grubb Street. Because Grubb Street is currently without Internet.
You may have heard that the Puget Sound was hit recently by a "Bomb Cyclone", which is a scary term and in real life is no picnic either. A Bomb Cyclone is a tropical depression that develops quickly (The Bomb part) over the ocean, creating high winds (The Cyclone) along its periphery. It is not a hurricane, though it can have hurricane-force winds.
And what it does is pull in air from the surrounding area to power those winds. And in the Seattle area, this means that said winds get pulled through the mountain passes to the east of us. The passes are currently closing due to snowfall already, but the winds get HOV access. These winds get concentrated by the passes before blasting into the more settled foothills.
And that's why its a bad thing for those living in the foothills. Whenever we get a bad windstorm, it's because the winds are coming out of the east, being pulled through the mountains. That's the case here.
Power went out at the height of the storm and stayed out for about 9 hours. The Lovely Bride had years ago (after the last outage) purchased a large cinder-block-sized battery and so got to hook up her CPAP machine there. I did not, and didn't want to take the chance of draining her battery too much. But we had some level of preparation. And we still had land-lines phones, functional cell phones, a gas stove in the bedroom and a gas stovetop in the kitchen. So we were not knocked down to "Little House on the Prairie" status. But a lot of folk (like, hundreds of thousands) lost power and a lot of them still don't have it restored, particularly in the valleys leading down from those windswept passes.
Anyway, nine hours. Good work on the recovery from Puget Sound Energy. Our neighbors are on another line, and they are still out, but have an extension cord long enough to plug into our socket near the back yard, so their freezer is still running.
But also, as the storm passed through, a large branch from one of the firs out front came down and neatly severed our Internet cable. So even when power got restored, we still were without Internet. So we called Comcast, and they sent out a guy. Guy shows up and explains that the area still does not have Internet service at large (something about a nearby Node being out), and until they repair the Node, they can't re-hook up the house. Something tells me that the "Node" may be on the same line as our unfortunate neighbors, so we'll have to wait until power comes back up for them, and then they can fix the node. And THEN they can come back an hook up the house again.
No, Comcast has no idea when all this is going to happen. The guy's suggestion was to keep calling in to complain. Yay.
Anyway, we are Internet-less for the immediate future. A road crew from Kent came by the morning after the storm and cut up the fallen branch and hauled it away (just as I was coming out of the garage with a handsaw in hand and my face set with grim determination). So, good work Kent Road Crew. And Wednesday morning consisted of cleaning up the mid-sized branches. Thursday is when we got the bad news that Comcast was neither as cool as Puget Sound Energy or the Kent Road Crew. And by Thursday afternoon I was already looking for a way to get back online.
Yahsee, my current gig (Senior Writer for Elder Scrolls Online - I don't know if I mentioned that), requires I get online to communicate with coworkers and put things into the engine. So no connectivity, no work. It was a forced vacation, and while I still had some PTO left for the year, I was planning on spending it elsewhere. And after two days of quietly reading in a warming waterbed, I was pretty much chomping at the bit to get back to it.
So, I made some phone calls. Some friends were still without power at that point, but one had both power and connectivity, and I hauled my desktop down to his place and set up on his usually-unused dining room table. And then had to get a "wifi usb dongle" to hook everything up to the friend's Internet (at home I use a long Ethernet cable plugged directly into the router). But now I am back in business, such as it goes, for the foreseeable future. Just in time to lay down my tools for Thanksgiving.
I will update this when/if we get to the stage where I return to my former haunts. In the meantime, I am in a bit of exile here. But at least I can contact the outside world again.
More later,
[The Updates: On Saturday our neighbors got their power and Internet back. Comcast's website said they could get to us by Wednesday. The Lovely Bride called them and got an appointment for the next day. Sunday morning a young man came out on his lonesome and hooked us back up. Good work, young man!]
So a few weeks back I wrapped up my final gaming convention of the year, Gamehole Con, in Madison, Wisconsin. I usually do only one or two conventions a year, but with the 50th anniversary of D&D, I ended up at five of them. For me, that's a lot of travel.
And one of the things I like about going to conventions is seeing what is out there as far as new games are concerned. While our local game stores are good, they don't always carry the depth and variety I see at conventions, in particular from small publishers. So I tend to go indulge in a bit of shopping therapy. Plus, you're often buying from the publisher and sometimes from the creator, so that's nice.
Not everything here is from the convention. one is a local purchase and one from a kickstarter. But the bulk are from the convention, so let us start with those:
Gamehole Con swag: Program Book and a Rust Monster Plushie The program book is a spartan and effective twenty pager, with ads from the supporting sponsors, maps of the site, policies, and a list of exhibitors and guests (no bios, which is fine).. The events themselves are online with QR Code, which creates a nice versatility (the site itself is very searchable as well). The plushie is a standard for GHC as well, and a freebie to guests (I still have the Mimic from several years ago). The traditional Monster Manual rust monster is this year's plushie. The Lovely Bride has already named him Palladium.
[Note from the distant past - when the Rust Monster first appeared in D&D, there was no illo to go with it, so, since it showed up with various oozes, I assumed it was a pile of rust with Cookie Monster googley eyes. We didn't hear about the plastic toy until later.]
Wardens of the Eastern Marches, Alex Kammer with Josh Hoyt and Jason Knutson, Gamehole Publishing, 28 page saddle-stitched digest, 2024. Gamehole Publishing (Yes, connected with the Gamehole con) is launching its own organized play at the convention, and this was a free giveaway. The Eastern Marches are the setting for a bunch of adventures they've published over the years (see next entry). This tidy little booklet gives an overview of the world, as well as the basic ground rules for their organized play. All the information in the book can be found here, but it's nice to have a hard copy.
The Brain Gorger's Appetite by Alex Kammer, Gamehole Publishing, 40-page softbound, 2016, GHC Purchase. Into the Deep Dark by Alex Kammer, Gamehole Publishing, 46-page softbound, 2017, GHC Purchase, Trillium, City of Enchantment by Alex Kammer, Gamehole Publishing, 62-page softbound, GHC Purchase, 2018 All three of these were published over the years by Gamehole Publishing, and sold at the convention. I meant to pick them up last time I was there, and finally did so this time. The three adventures are part of a larger arc, set in what is now the Eastern Marches (see above), and involve a mind flayer brain gorger named Marlipp. The trilogy starts in the small town of Okney's Hold, journeys into the Underdark Deep Dark, and ends up in the faction-ridden city of Trillium. It's old-school adventures wired up for 5E action.
Lands of Runequest: Dragon Pass by Jeff Richard, Greg Stafford, and Jason Durall, 190-page hardback, GHC Purchase, Runequest doesn't get as much coverage out here in the local hobby stores, so I'm always glad to see it at conventions. Dragon Pass has its roots Waaaay back in the White Bear, Red Moon board game, and it is a highly diverse chunk of land at the crossroads of Glorantha. Lottsa sentient creatures, factions, and politics rolling around. Dragon Pass probably has the greatest weirdness-per-acre of any location in Glorantha. Nice to see the update.
No Time to Scream by B.W. Holland, Bridgett Jeffries with C.L.Werner Chaosium, 104-page hardback, 2024, GHC Purchase, Call of Cthulhu shows up in the local stores more often, but hey, I was there at the convention booth and they had a sale. No Time to Scream consists of three straight-forward one night-and-change adventures. Though aimed at novice Keepers/GMs with instructions and advice on how to play, the scenarios work well for pick-up games and (insanely) quiet evenings with more experienced players. Works best with pregens, which are provided and also available as an online download (which makes the assumption that the buyer has access both to a computer and a color printer (having a color printer readily at hand is one of the plus sides of the return-to-office push. That and free pens)).
The Order of the Stone by Jared Twing, Lynne Hardy, and Paul Fricker, Chaosium, 152 page hardback, 2024, GHC Purchase. This one feels like an old-school CoC scenario - three chapters, ancient cult, entrapped eldritch god, world-ending threat, hiking distance from Arkham. At first glance, it looks pretty good, with a collection of Lovecraftian set-pieces - ghost ship, small port town, rural wilderness. It's really good to see Chaosium do new old-style adventures in addition to updating the classics for the new system. Player handouts available online, which still has the challenge of No Time to Scream.
Seeds of Decay by Darryl T. Jones, Splattered Ink Games, 436-page hardbound, 2004, Gift of the Author. A big adventure about tiny heroes. The Dobbers are a diminutive people living in the Alwaysgreen Forest, threatened by an eldritch evil that is spreading like rot. Set up specifically for Dobbers and other tiny-size creatures, its two parts cozy game and two parts heroic horror. This is the deluxe edition (gold-foil on the cover). The author is also the artist, so it is a very good-looking product. The hat on top of it is for an upcoming product A Time-Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting. Nice hat.
Mazes by Chris O'Neill, 9th Level Games, 240-page hardbound digest, 2022, GHC Purchase. I mentioned Sentai and Sensibility in an earlier write-up, and I found the core mechanic (a single type of die tied to each character class) intriguing, but buried beneath a pile of setting-specific verbage. So when I discovered the system this was based on at GameHoleCon, I had to buy it. This is a revised edition, and is based on the original fantasy version of the game. It is much deeper than Sentai, and uses a number of interesting new systems. I'm currently digging through it. Its presentation is excellent, and it feels like a solid game.
Scurvy Buggers by Irene Zelinski, 9th level games, 76-page softbound digest, 2024 GHC purchase from designer. I got this from the designer at the Con, and we chatted. This was a pirate (I'm sorry - PYRATE) version of the game system, and it may be that I was already reading the Mazes game, but the rules went down a lot smoother for me than for Sentai and Sensibility. This is very much Black Sails and Our Flag Means Death with genderfluid pyrates. Zelinski expands the one-type-of-dice per class mechanic to include ship types as well. Neat idea.
Dead Man's Cove, by Tyler and Luke Stratton, Limithron, 1-page folder scenario, GHC Purchase, Buried in the Bahamas, by Luke Stratton, 22-page saddle-stitched digest, The Sinking of the Cthgan, Limithron, 8panel fold-out scenario, all GHC Purchases. It may occur to many readers that I am a sucker for pirates. Pirate Borg was a definitely superior evolution of the Mork Borg system, reshaped to fit the curves of the golden age of piracy. I have these in pdf from the kickstarter, but I really wanted to get hard copy as well. They are radically different in approach, and reflect very much a "maker" culture of craft where the presentation formats are elastic. I think I can keep them with my core book, which is a challenge when you have so many different physical approaches to the supplements.
The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett, Del Rey, 592-page trade paperback, gift from the author. I met Peter doing a livestream dungeon adventure on Saturday night, and he gave me a copy of the book. Imagine a world where demons show up every night in a twisted version of the initial day of a Minecraft game. The only thing that keeps them at bay are magical wards, and humanity sort of lies low behind its magical walls in the darkness. The Warded Man is the guy who manages to incorporate and utilized the wards, challenging the demons on their own ground. Yeah, this goes on my TBR pile.
Shadow of the Weird Wizard by Robert J. Schwalb, Schwalb Entertainment, 288-page hardbound and Secrets of the Weird Wizard by Robert J. Schwalb, Schwalb Entertainment LLC, 296-page hardbound, 2024 Kickstarter. About ten years ago, Rob Schwalb wrote the very excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord. This is an update to the system and a new world for that system. Demon Lord was very grimdark, while Weird Wizard is much more in the heroic mode - still a deadly world, but not a doomed one. Call it Greydark? Without too much digging (and yes, it rewards digging), it advances the design of Demon Lord just as Demon Lord advanced the design of D&D Third and Fourth Edition (and in a case of ironies, Demon Lord showed up around the same time as 5th edition, and Weird Wizard showed up with D24 (Yes, I'm still trying to make that a thing). Secrets is both the campaign setting and monster book, and takes the entire system out for a spin. The thing I can dun them for is that the tables use a light grey typeface that is hard on these old eyes. But a lot is going on here, and I'm going to be spending some time with it.
Godzilla The Encyclopedia by Shinji Nishiakawa, Titan Books, 216-page softbound, purchased at Midgard Comics. I bought of copy of this a while back, gave it to a friend who is a BIG Godzilla fan (we plowed through most of his DVDs from the Showa to Millennium era), then went back and bought a copy for myself. Titan is known primarily for their comic book collections, but this one started as a series of articles and just expanded from there. It's write-up of almost every monster in the Godzilla films, and every version of Godzilla, Missing are those that had an original version elsewhere (Rodan is there, but only appears here for when he first fought Godzilla), and the American versions. The writeups are two-page spreads, beautifully illustrated, that cover both in-world facts as well as design discussions of how the various Godzillas changed over the years. This is an incredibly excellent book if you're a Godzilla/Kaiju fan.
That wraps it for now. And more things have shown up while I was putting this together, but for the moment, more later.
I usually wait for a few days for the dust to settle, but the vote margins most of these races are pretty decisive. Let's take a look
Yes to Initiative Measure No. 2066 - Protect the natural gas industry This is tight, and usually late ballots skew to the left. However, it has been pretty stable for the past few days.
NO to Initiative Measure No. 2109 - Repeal the capital gains tax.
NO to Initiative Measure No. 2117 - Destroying carbon tax credits.
NO to Initiative Measure No 2124 - Bankrupt the state-run long-term care insurance.
President - Donny Trump and JD Vance. Hey, color me surprised. For what its worth, Washington State generally pummeled the heck outta the GOP - it looks like none of his minions got close to the levers of power on this side of the state.
US Senator - Maria Cantwell
US Representative Congressional District No. 9 - Adam Smith
Governor - Bob Ferguson
Lieutenant Governor - Denny Heck
Secretary of State - Steve Hobbs
State Treasurer - Mike Pellicciotti
Attorney General - Nick Brown
Commissioner of Public Lands - Dave Upthegrove
Superintendent of Public Instruction - Chris Reykdal
Insurance Commissioner - Patty Kuderer
Legislative District No 11 State Senator - Bob Hasegawa
Legislative District No 11State Representative Position 1 - David Hackney
Legislative District No 11 State Representative Position 2 - Steve Berquist
State Supreme Court Justice Position 2 - Sal Mungia The other tight one, but the late ballots had it for Sal.
Superior Court Judge Position No 41 - Paul Crisalli
Kent School District No. 415 Proposition No. 1 Capital Projects and Technology Levy - Yes, much to my surprise. This one is razor-thin, and could flip back as we move to fruition.
Final thoughts before we cover the Political Desk with a tarp for the winter? Well, Washington State did a fine job protecting itself from Washington DC. And if the new/old administration does half the things that they promised to do, there's going to be a lot of buyer's regret for the rest of the country. But that's the nature of democracy (see Brexit). In the land of Ivar's, we'll keep clam and carry on.
More, as always, later.
OK, after By the Skin Of Our Teeth, I was looking at redemption here. Not to bash on the Thornton Wilder play TOO much, but even the best reviews touted the actors and the stage settings, and not a one called out Thornton's words to praise (the general consensus was "Allegory!"). So I stand by my previous review, and looked at the Rep to pull out of a middling first showing.
And they did so. Primary Trust is a perfect little play, well acted and directed, and is the first play in a long time that made me say "Wow, I wish I had written that". Its a Pulitzer winner, which usually leaves me cautious, but it is really, really good.
Here's the summary - Kenneth (Stephen Tyrone Williams) is a lonely man. He works in a used book store. He drinks and eats dinner at a local Tiki bar. He doesn't have any close friends, except maybe Bert (Andrew Lee Creech). And Bert has his own challenges (no, I'm not going to do spoilers on this one. I go into these plays mostly blind, and I have no idea if I would have reacted differently if I knew what was going on before). Anyway, Kenneth is trapped in the routines of his life, and the story is how he gets untrapped.
And that's about all there is to it. It is a real simple, sweet story. And it is so well-written and well-presented.
Let me rave on the actors for the moment - Stephen Tyrone Williams is a kind, endearing Kenneth. He's well-intentioned and introverted and uncomfortable and a little broken and scared of the world around him. Williams has previously been in Rep productions - August Wilson's Fences and the Piano Lesson, He captures the chaotic internal voice of Kenneth, turning on a dime from budding confidence to overwhelming panic attacks and back again, pulling the audience along. He's just really good in this role.
Allyson Lee Brown matches him step for step as a cascade of waitstaff at Wally's Tiki Bar, a flood of customers that the bank that hires Kenneth (The Primary Trust of the title) and one waiter that helps Kenneth break out. She has the improv skill of morphing characters one after another, literally filling the town of Cranberry, New York. Andrew Lee Creech is Bert, Kenneth's only mental support network, and captures that nature of the bud who is always there for him. Rob Burgess is excellent both as the owner of the bookstore, and later as the bank manager, each with their own quirks. And Justin ("Lizard Boy") Huertas rounds out the cast ambient music throughout.
This is a good cast, and hits that point I like to make about Repertory companies, that you get to know the actors, not just the characters they portray. And they have good material to work with.
Eboni Booth is an incredible naturalist writer, and her characters emerge through their dialogue. The interrupt, they fill in each other sentences, they apologize, and they talk about nothing in an amazing realistic sense. She uses repetition to her advantage to show passage of time ("Welcome to Wally's!") and the nature of the community the play is set in (just about everyone says "Pardon My French" at least once). And the actors are up for it, their portrayals feel like real conversations.
The Lovely Bride pointed out that all the characters were nice. And she's right, All of them. There is no bad guy in this play, except for Kenneth's own crippling insecurities and blocks. And we find out why Kenneth is broken, and not only the WHAT of Bert but the WHY of Bert as well.
The stagecraft was great and not intrusive onto the action itself, scenery floating in and out. The main set is a sort of "Our Town" street, but it becomes Wally's, the bank, a snooty restaurant, a street, and it does so without poking too hard at the reality of the play itself. No big puppets needed.
This one falls into the "Go see" category, a pleasant way to spend the darkening, rainy afternoons and evenings. And sweet. Really sweet.
More later,.
We're a week out. I've been covering politics and elections for twenty years now in this space, and realize that I've gotten more serious and less snarky over that time. It's something I'll have to work on (regaining my snark).
The press has been particularly frustrating this election season. Yes, I know about a couple major newspapers were cowed into submission by the GOP into "No Endorsements", but it goes deeper than that. The Seattle Times published it endorsements in the open, but its individual endorsement articles are behind a paywall (which is amusing since its endorsement of Bob Ferguson is a master class at timidity and praising with faint damns). The Stranger has just been purchased, and just fired its news editor, Rich Smith. And you would not know from the Kent Reporter that there even was an election (plus they soft paywall as well). Small sites tend to be more localized and partisan, and they still provide some good general data, but lot of old standbys have gone by the wayside. They will be missed.
Here's an interesting comparison of Stranger vs. Seattle Times endorsements, for your edification and amusement.
I do stand by my opinion of the GOP's "Flood the Zone" approach of doing so much so badly that no one can keep up with their crimes and errors. We've seen a new accusation of sexual assault, the revelation that the impeached former president withheld funds for blue-state disasters, military threats against anyone that looks at the convicted felon funny, a couple mental meltdowns on sympathetic podcasts, and a Nazi-ish Madison Square Garden seeping with hatred and rage. And that's just been in the past week. Yeah, it's been taxing. I just do this thing once every four years and I'm exhausted.
And there has already shenanigans and low-level violence on the ground. Most of them have been GOP-related, and their argument that there is election fraud, and to prove it they will commit election fraud. There have been fights and threats. In Washington State, we've had some ballot boxes vandalized already, so now you have the added task of checking to make sure you ballot was received and counted. Because there are jagoffs out there.
AND you can find one of your nearby ballot drops and voting centers here, or you can mail it in. No postage necessary. The deadline is 8 PM November 5 for the drop boxes, postmarked Tuesday, 5 November for the mail ins. You can even register to vote and vote the same day at the voting centers.
Anyway, summing up the past week of posts, I've put in a simple format for you. These are my endorsements and belong to me. Go fetch your mail-in ballot and take us across the finish line. As I've stated before, I don't care who you vote for. But I would want you to vote.
The Heywood Initiatives: NO on all of these budget-busters:
NO to Initiative Measure No. 2066 - Supporting natural gas by preventing regulation that encourages other energy sources
NO to Initiative Measure No. 2109 - Repeal the Capital Gains tax on people much richer than you while killing funding for education.
NO to Initiative Measure No. 2117 - Destroying carbon tax credits and in doing so kill funding for transportation, energy conversations, and emissions-reduction.
NO to Initiative Measure No 2124 - Bankrupting our state-run long-term care insurance, because they can.
So NO on the bundle of them.
President: Kamala D. Harris and Tim Walz. I never realized I had more guts that Jeff Bezos. Learn something new every day).
US Senator - Maria Cantwell
US Representative Congressional District No. 9 - Adam Smith
Governor - Bob Ferguson
Lieutenant Governor - Denny Heck
Secretary of State - Steve Hobbs
State Treasurer - Mike Pellicciotti
Attorney General - Nick Brown
Commissioner of Public Lands - Dave Upthegrove
Superintendent of Public Instruction - Chris Reykdal
Insurance Commissioner - Patty Kuderer
Legislative District No 11 State Senator - Bob Hasegawa
Legislative District No 11State Representative Position 1 - David Hackney
Legislative District No 11 State Representative Position 2 - Steve Berquist
State Supreme Court Justice Position 2 - Sal Mungia
Superior Court Judge Position No 41 - Paul Crisalli
Kent School District No. 415 Proposition No. 1 Capital Projects and Technology Levy - Yes. Put this long electoral nightmare out of our lives.
That's it for the pre-election write-ups. I'll do a follow-up with results a few days after the election (We're mail-in, remember, so it takes a while to get the results, and in some cases lead changes). Then we're back to talking about games. And theatre. And if you're very good, collectible quarters. See you next time.
More, of course, later.
OK, here we go again folks.
Kent School District No, 315 Proposition No. 1 Capital Projects and Technology Levy is the fourth attempt to get money for the school buildings. Each one has gone down in flames, and each one has come back retooled, asking for less funds, being clear about what they're spending it on, and reducing the number of projects. The amount they're asking for is not excessive. I will note that this time they included an athletic field revision for Mill Creek school, which was one of the complaints of the No people the last few times. It's purely transactional, but it's politics.
I'm not a big fan of replacing athletic fields, but I am a fan of roofing, building sidings, boilers, and emergency generators, along with upgrading their tech to modern levels. And this is a reduction on the property tax it replaces. So, I'm with YES
The No side is hauling out their standard scare tactics. Property taxes! Can't trust the school district to use the money like they said! What happened to the AC improvements? They dun the current measure for removing stuff that they complained and campaigned against last time. Pretty much they don't like the current Kent School District admin, and are willing the starve the schools until they get what they want (Accountability! is a great buzz-word. So is transparency, which they didn't use this time.
There have been some yard signs around (YES for education!), but the local paper of record, the Kent Reporter, has been notably absent from the reporting on this. And it is the last thing on the ballot, separated as far as possible from the budget-busting initiatives at the front end. But hang out for the after-credits scene, here - and vote YES (Yep, I put it in bold twice).
More later,
This one is fairly short, in that there are no Republicans running here, and two out of the three positions don't even have competition.
Legislative District 11 straddles I-5 and I-405 and stretches down to Panther Lake and Grubb Street - we're in the far SE corner. Bob Hasegawa is our incumbent State Senator and is running unopposed. David Hackney is the State Rep Position 1, and recently showed up in a Seattle Times article about crime (he's against it. He also supports Bob Ferguson's pitch to spend $100 million more on cops and public safety). He's also running unopposed. Steve Berquist is State Rep Position 2, has a secret identity as a school teacher, and is running against a Libertarian candidate. I'm recommending Berquist for the usual reasons (he's done a good job, particularly on education issues), but I'm pleased to see other parties running for office that are NOT the big tickets. Hey, they even have yard signs!
And that's it for local news. More later.
Now we're down to the state level. Washington State elects its entire executive branch every four years, so the potential for massive turnover is always there. However, the state's been doing pretty good, has recovered well from COVID, and regularly gets high marks in various ratings as to the health and well-being of its citizens. So yeah, I am up for the Democrats in general.
Governor - This is an open position with Jim Inslee choosing not to run for a fourth term (and that's a good thing, in my opinion). The Democratic candidate is current Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who has been an activist is protecting consumers in the state. He's gone after corporate shenanigans, took on pharmaceutic companies over fentanyl, cleared out the rape kit backlog, and been a bridle on Trumpian nonsense for the past four years. He has been an activist, aggressive, AG, and don't see that changing when he becomes governor. It is kinda amusing that a lot of positive political candidates come out of the AG offices these days, but that's probably a beard-stroking analysis for later. So, Bob Ferguson.
A positive word, though, about Dave Reichert, who is likely the best candidate the GOP has put up for the past twenty years. The former King County Sherriff, former US Rep, he was not endorsed by his own party because he wasn't crazy enough. He may or may not support Trump depending on who he's talking to but I will take him at his (current) word. But I am happy to not recommend him purely on his political views (Tried to defund Planned Parenthood, doesn't support marriage equality, anti-climate science). Of late, he's been making a case for divided government (even though that has been a mess at the national level). So, no thanks.
Lieutenant Governor - The Lieutenant Governor presides over the State Senate, and does more than a little nudging on its priorities (like the current housing crunch). This is the department of "Don't Mess Things Up". And Danny Heck has succeeded admirably with not messing things up and actually moving the ball forward on things in a bipartisan fashion. So yeah, let's keep him.
Secretary of State - OK, I will be honest, I'm a strong supporter of Steve Hobbs. He has maintained the integrity of our election systems that Sam Reed and Kim Wyman had built up, and kept our elections free and fair. But he's also a gamer, and an extremely vocal one, and has pushed to protect small game stores and game producers, as well as expand RPGs in school libraries and prisons.. We've got a lot of small companies out here, and I appreciate the support. I did attend a fund-raiser for him at the Mox Boarding House, where he not only committed to his support for the industry, but also went into extreme gamerly detail on the cases that his staff have handled over the years (A student voting in two places, people who died between when they mailed their ballot and when it was counted). He did so with the pride of DM telling about you about his latest adventure. So yeah, Steve Hobbs.
State Treasurer - Now we get into the more boring but just-as-important positions. Meat and potato stuff. The ones that handle the money. The State Treasurer is the state's CFO, collects the cash and distributes is Mike Pellicciotti has done a bang-up job, such that people who rate us on our financial stability and such give us high marks. Moody's gives us a AAA rating, Standard and Poors gives us a AA+, and we have strong state pensions. Not bad. So, Mike Pellicciotti.
State Auditor - The treasurer spend the money, the auditor makes sure it is spent correctly. Auditor is a watchdog operation. These are the accountants looking over the books. Pat (Patrice) McCarthy has been an auditor for twenty years, starting with Pierce County, and has picked up the torch in 2017, and has done a good job, not only checking up on pandemic funding, but also uncovering fraud and waste in the government (like $7 million in misappropriated funds for a local housing agency). McCarthy has a earned the position.
Attorney General - With Ferguson running for governor, the AG is an open position, and there is a game of musical chairs. Nick Brown has risen to the top of that scuffle, and is an excellent candidate for the position. He was Inslee's General Counsel. He was the first Black US Attorney for the state. He's pushed hard on the fentanyl crisis, consumer protection, and sex trafficking. Pro choice, pro gun safety, pro-consumer. Brown has large shoes to fill, but I think he can pull it off.
Commissioner of Public Lands - This race is another win/win for voters, in that both candidates are good. Jaime Herrera Beutler was both a State and US Rep. She also voted to impeach Trump on the second go-around, and the state party will never forgive her for that. Dave Upthegrove has botanical name and has been on the King County Council and a State Rep for a neighboring district. . Either could run our extensive state forest lands. The big diff is dealing with our mature legacy forests (Not the old growth, but stuff has hasn't been lumbered since WWII). Upthegrove supports keeping them intact, Beutler wants to let in the logging companies that have been funding her campaign. On the other hand, few year's back Upthegrove got shirty with some traditional enviros that supported someone else in the primary. So, jump ball on this one, but I'm still going to give the edge on policy to Dave Upthegrove.
Superintendent of Public Instruction - Chris Reykdal is the incumbent and has navigated the department through some really choppy water of later - the COVID pandemic being part of this. However, he's got the numbers back up to pre-COVID times, and we have more graduations than ever. Also, school meals, CTE training, retaining teachers, and improvements for rural schools. And he takes a hit every time people have to pay their property taxes. (Did I mentioned that paying for the kid's education is literally in our state constitution. Yeah, it is). Reykdal has also been a bulwark against conservative culture warriors and voucher advocates. So, yeah, I'm going with him.
Insurance Commissioner - The previous guy who held this job for many years turned out to be a jagoff and as such is not running for re-election. The Democratic party actually does that - it's an accountability thing. Republicans? He'd be on the conservative talk shows complaining about persecution, demanding a trial, then pushing it back as far as possible. But that's just a personal rant. Patty Kuderer is an excellent candidate to hold the position of wrangling our insurance industry. Her background is from the state legislature, where she's been active in employment discrimination, which makes her a good choice to help the office recover from its previous commissioner. She's pro-consumer protection , pro reproductive healthcare, and pro-transparency with the insurance companies. Yeah, let' give her a shot.
OK, this was a long one, but it is all downhill from here. More later.
More later,
Let's look at Congress. We have two races on the ballot, one at the state level for Senator, and one for the 9th Congressional District. The 9th is a rough trapezoid with the corners at the International District in Seattle, Sammamish in the north, Auburn, and Federal Way in the south, and includes Mercer Island and Bellevue. So yeah, a lot of people in a relatively small space.
Let's do Senator first. Maria Cantwell has done a real good job in her tenure, and I would normally recommend her to keep her job but as a matter of course. But I want to enthusiastically recommend her based on her performance this senatorial season. This has been first and foremost due to her pushing through the CHIPS and Science Act, which has encouraged semiconductor research, development, in the states in the States. This act has seen amazing benefits already, and will continue help our home-grown computer chip industry. That's a good effort on her part, and a recommendation to keep her and encourage more of the same in the future.
The 9th Congressional District is in one of those really good positions with two good candidates. Adam Smith has been the House Rep within our ever-shifting borders for nearly thirty years now, and in his seniority has a good position as the Senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. He's done good work in that time. Melissa Chaudhry, on the other hand, is from the more progressive wing, and has extensive experience in charities and NGOs. I recommended Chaudhry in the primary as new blood, but I have to admit that Adam Smith is competent, capable, and has done a good job, which is one of my base-line requirements. So I'm telling you both candidates have merit, and you need to do a bit more digging to find out if you think they are worth voting for. Myself? Walking around both of them for a day or so, I have to go ultimately with Adam Smith. But I'm going to say this is going to be real close.
More later,
Kamala Harris/Tim Walz. Well, Duh.
I mean, seriously, I was going to vote for Biden anyway, even with the age issues. The current administration has spent the past four years digging out of the holes that the previous admin put us in, and has done an excellent job. Let's face it - the economy is better than most of Europe post-Covid. Stock market is up. Crime is (generally) down. Illegal immigration is down (but still there and still illegal). Inflation is really down (but still inflation). As legacies go, it's been pretty good.
And Kamala Harris has been there for the good stuff. Presiding over the Senate, she cast the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, and has helped with the recovery over the wishes of a brattish, do-nothing GOP. (The Republican-controlled House is the LEAST productive of any governing bodies since the 1960s, with the possible exception of ginning up investigations that do nothing but generate copy for FOX news). So yeah, she gets the credit for a good administration.
But she isn't just a continuation, she's a Biden-Plus - the good stuff you've gotten as a result of the Great Recovery and her own plans for first-time homebuyers. Decriminalization of pot. Protection of women's rights. Cap insulin prices across the board. Expand the Earned Income Tax credit. If she gets a fragment of her plans enacted, she's doing pretty good.
She has a LOT of experience in all three branches of the government - Judicial (Attorney General of California), Legislative (Senator), and Executive (the current gig as Veep). The resume is pretty damned solid. And let's add to the fact that she's pretty much put together her organization in 100 days, and has exceeded the expectations of even Biden's team.
But what's interesting about endorsements is the number of name-level Republicans, government, and military folk that are supporting her. A lot of them have "former" and "retired" in their title (as in "can't punish me for speaking my mind"). A lot of them have had first-hand previous experience with the convicted felon that's her opponent, and they want nothing to do with him. But the big thing with these types of endorsements is this: You can still vote for Harris and be considered a good Republican.
The other guy is, well, the other guy. He was the previous administration, and pretty much a complete collapse - screwing up COVID (while sending medical supplies to Putin), kowtowing to foreign authoritarians, threatening our own allies, running up the debt more than any other president, helping overturn Roe v. Wade. The wall that never got built, the infrastructure week that never happened, the replacement of the ACA that never occurred. Pretty much a dead loss as an administration. Mind you, he gives an entertaining speech, as he dances between subjects like a drunken badger on meth. Most of the people who worked for him are not supporting him, and many are publicly going for Harris. He does have his ardent supporters, who hope he hangs around long enough to pass some dreadful conservative legislation. They just want someone with a pulse. Though we don't know for sure because he won't share his medical records (Harris did, of course).
And he seems tired. Worn out. Non-linear. He says he's doing "the weave", and we just can't get the depths of his sagacity. He'll be claiming to do zen koans next. I feel real sorry for him, and I wonder why the mainstream media isn't talking more about Woodrow Wilson (who was incapacitated late in the administration, and access to him (and his decisions) was controlled by a small group of people).
Eight years ago I put forward the idea that his approach was to "Flood the Zone" - say and do so much that is wrong that no one can keep up with you. Just keep piling crime upon crime, insult upon insult, weirdness on weirdness. Stage an embarrassing photo op at a closed MacDonald's? By the time people call you on it, you're out there talking about Arnold Palmer's junk. And while that is sinking in you mention how Hitler had the best generals. Because if you ever stop delaying and denying, the entire mass of insults and lies will collapse and crush you.
There are others running. Jill Stein and the Greens are running to deny Harris a majority, so then people will pay attention the THEIR issues (because that always worked in previous elections). RFK Jr is still on the ballot in Washington State because he didn't drop out fast enough, and will probably drain off some Republicans that can't bear to vote for the guy that promised RFK Jr a place in his administration. The rest are minor players in this particular passion play. Thanks for showing up.
But like I said, I was pleased to put my name on the list of Gamers for Harris, and declare my support. And I think she's going to be a great president.
More later,
TLDR: NO on everything. There. That makes it easy.
The top of the Washington State ballot is not the presidential race, but rather a collection of initiatives. The initiative process is a pretty cool thing that Washington State does, in that it provides an alternate method for passing law. We have the Legislature, but the initiative process allows citizens to propose and pass state law. It is a nice bit of direct democracy, but the system has some challenges and can be gamed.
The challenge is that you need to get a certain number of signatures to but it on the ballot - 8% of the total votes for Governor the last election. And given the population of the state, that comes to roughly 325,000 signatures this time around. Which means you need a lot of dedicated volunteers to gather those signatures, or paid signature-gatherers, or most likely both, in order to succeed. As a result, the initiative process is normally the domain of people with a lot of money and resources at hand. Initiative gadfly Tim Eyman made good book on monetizing the process with initiatives that rarely won, but almost never stood up in court. Eyman got himself in trouble skimming off the top of his fundraising, and is no longer active in the process.
So, this year we have a wealthy hedge-fund manager, Brian Heywood, who is fled California because of the taxes and wants to get rid of them here as well. He and his mob collected the requisite signatures and got initiatives on the ballot for six items. The Legislature has the option of just passing them right there, and three of them we passed without having to go to the voters. Then he added another one, so there are four measures on the ballot this time. And all of them involve saving money for the wealthy and gutting state funding, and leaving you with the bill.
Here's the quick and dirty.
Initiative Measure No. 2066 wants to repeal laws controlling natural gas regulation and/or promoting electrification. Natural Gas is a big polluter, so I see the point in encouraging more electric power through inducements. But I am personally involved here in that we use gas for cooking and hot water here at Grubb Street, which has proved to be a good thing when the power goes out (windstorms give us about two outages a year). But a blanket measure that gives a blank check to the natural gas operations, effectively putting them above the law? Yeah, no. I'd rather see this one fought out in the Legislature one piece at a time. Vote NO.
Initiative Measure No. 2109 eliminates the Capital Gain tax. This is a tax that takes a small sliver of the earnings of the wealthy, which is why Heywood wants it gone. If your assets are below $250 million, it's a moot point (unless you're planning on winning the lottery soon). Cutting it guts funding for education, which is something we are required to fund (it is in the state constitution), and have been kinda half-assed over the years about doing it as it is. Vote NO.
Initiative Measure No 2117 eliminates the carbon tax credits. Carbon tax credits are a method to (long-term) reduce pollutants. The government sells indulgences to organizations that are churning out pollutants, which range from big businesses to things like UW (steam heat). Over time, the amount of credits are reduced, encouraging folk to upgrade their systems to healthier alternatives. Killing the credits defunds transportation, clean air, renewable energy, conversation, and emission-reductions (I'm just quoting the initiative language, here). So NO on this one
Initiative Measure No. 2124 makes long-term care insurance optional. Affordable long-term care is a growing issue, such that even the national Democratic party thinks it is a good idea. Making it optional is a great invitation to making it useless, and with defund Washing's public insurance programs providing long-term care benefits and services. I've been kicking in to long-term care for a while now, and think its a pretty good thing. Vote NO.
Everything these initiatives attack are "eat your broccoli" laws, which is good for the long-term health of the people of Washington, but have a price tag on it. And the people behind these initiatives don't want to spend any of THEIR money on YOU. You aren't going to get much if these initiatives pass (No, your gas prices are NOT coming down as a result of these), and things will be just a little bit crappier around here with them in place.
More later,
OK, folks, it all comes down to this. Election Day. Early voting has already started in a lot of states, and the ballots are out for Washington State. This year is important. Every year is important.
(And my ballot arrived while I was out at GameHoleCon, and excellent convention in Madison, WI, so I'm getting a late start on it this year. The Lovely Bride has already voted, and I will drive her to one of the convenient nearby ballot boxes to drop her vote in).
I really don't care how you vote, but I want you to vote. I'm obvious in my political views, so you'll find few surprises in this I provide these recommendations in the hopes of creating an enlightened and aware set of voters. They haven't drifted that far from the primaries. What I really want is competence and ability. These are people we are trusting with our money, out safety, and sometimes our lives. So this is important. It's not a wedding proposal, it's not a Saturday night date - it's a job hire.
But I want you to vote, not just vote for what I recommend. I provide other people's endorsements as well, and I'll update them as I go forward.
Here's the summarized endorsements from the Stranger, now under new management. The full endorsements are long and detailed and most of the candidates don't tick off all their boxes. That's the nature of life.
Here's the Seattle Times' endorsements, who has been grudgingly dragged more centrist over the years. The Times and the Stranger have been drifting closer together as time goes by.
There are others, with their own political interests. Washington Conservation Action is here. Progressive Blue Voteguide is here. The Urbanist is here. Crosscut/CascadePBS does a nice job summarizing the candidates and issues here. I will add more as I come across them.
I'm (politely) left of center. I'm going to be endorsing Democrats, which is a relatively easy thing to do in Western Washington. The GOP (nationally) is a bit of a snake pit, and even those that are not involved in some messy political stance or personal scandal are problematic because they DO support the folks who do..
But ultimately, it's all up to you. Even not voting is a choice (though I'll admit that its a bad one).
This is your chance, people. Don't pass it by. Don't blow it. For folk in Washington State, or wherever early balloting is permitted, you have two weeks. For everyone else, get out on November 5th.
More later,
The vast bulk of these come from Kickstarters resolving, and arriving on the doorstep. So I may comment on the process as well as the product.
Let's start.
Ryder's Intergalactic Guide to Robots by Jake Parker, JP Creative, 128-page landscape-formatted softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Jake Parker did Kepler's Guide to Spaceships last year, and I thought well enough of it to get the next volume. Parker wraps a story around a collection of autonomous robots, worker mechs, AI-guided vehicles, and warbots. I love the variety, and am sure there is a full universe in here somewhere, just waiting to come out.
Sentai & Sensibility, by Bug Boll, 9th Level Games, 108-page digest-sized softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. This is one of the stranger games I've picked up, but I'm glad I have. It's a combination of Japanese tokusatsu (live action with extensive special effects) with Regency Romance, in Boll's words, "Power Rangers as written by Jane Austen". You are one of the Gentlefolk (gentry), who can become a heroic Ranger when danger threatens, and with the rest of your allies (sentai) you combine to form a colossus (Voltron) to battle kaiju (giant monsters). The rule system is interesting in that your class (Station) determines the die you roll, and different type of challenges (Dance Moves) require different results, such that the physically weakest class is also the best at social interactions. The challenge is that all of this is buried under a mass of unique terminology set for the Regency era, so you're learning new terms to go with new mechanics. The Kickstarter comes with a deck of cards (characters, classes, and rules) and some standups, which are very nice, but now I have to make sure they don't get separated in my mess of an office.
The Electrum Archives Issues 1 & 2 By Emiel Boven and Ava Islam, Cult of the Lizard King, 70-page and 78-page Digest-sized softbound books w/ four-panel paper maps, 2024, Kickstarter. This is a game system masquerading as a campaign setting. It is set in Orn, a desertified world that has seen several rulers and conquerors (and their ruins) over its long history. It is alien in many ways, and its magic runs off of ancient ink, which is also the coinage. Five attributes, three character classes, and a whole lot of weirdness which really tickles my Tekumel-based biases. The rules are presented cleanly and clearly, and while the players need a bit more investment (Spell names are random-rolled, and you get to figure out what they mean with your GM/Seer), it looks absolutely fascinating. My only gripe? I saw it for sale at GenCon a month before I got it in my hands. Yeah, it would be nice for the original funders to get their copies.
Historica Arcanum: Era of the Crusades, Sarp Duyar & Doga Can Sayilkan (Project Leads), Meta Creative 272 page hardback, and Historica Arcanum: The Sigil of Jerusalem, 240-page hardback, two full-color maps, slipcased, 2024, Kickstarter. Meta Creative, out of Istanbul, rates up there with Free League for producing beautiful-looking books. They've concentrated on historical fantasy, expanding out the 5E system into Cairo and Jerusalem in the 13th century. There are new classes, the the system is growing outwards with new Professions, and a Deck of the Damned to make combat more stressful (with the stress mechanic developing in a similar fashion to CoC's Sanity Rules). Sigil of Jerusalem repeats some of the player-facing material, and launches into a conspiracy in Jerusalem itself. Metis does itself a great favor in its release schedule, as this showed up on my doorstep JUST as they were launching their new Kickstarter.
Campaign Builder: Castles & Crowns, by Richard Green, Tim Hitchcock, Brian Suskind (Lead Designers), Kobold Press, 272-page hardbound,2024, Kickstarter. Kobold hews closer to 5E than a lot of the other D&D Descendants listed here. This is the second volume of their Campaign Builder series, and deals with the elites - nobility and the court. And it is a toybox of new heritages, subclasses, settings, factions, kingdom types and monsters. It works closer to traditional Western European D&D, but has a lot of good foundational material for kingdom building. Yes, I Kickstarted this, even though I could have mooched a copy off chief Kobold Wolfgang Baur, but I wanted to see what was in it.
Never Going Home by Braden Aten and Matthew Orr, Wet Ink Games, 118-page softbound, 2019, Purchased from Grandcon (Grand Rapids) from Pete Petrusha, who had a booth there, This was originally Kickstarted, but I don't know why I didn't go in for it at the time. It is an original system using both dice and cards for resolution and resources. The setting in 1916 in the trenches of WWI. In the Battle of the Somme, a tear between worlds has unleashed a horde of nastiness on the battlefield. Where your unit is. Your squad has to deal the the atrocities of the battlefield as well as horrible things that crawling into our reality.
Sol System by a small host of talented people, Green Ronin Publishing, 112-page softbound, 2024, Midgard Comics. Designed for The Expanse RPG, this is very much an old-school sourcebook, with tons of subject matter and just a smattering of RPG rules. It handles a lot of the factions, corporations, religions, and criminal operations in the sol system, an expansion of the trade rules from the original book. This is much more in the "readable" column than the must use to play column, but given that the company is upgrading the core rulebook to handle the current situation in the universe, it's pretty cool.
Astro Inferno by Andreas Ruu, Haxan Studios, 384-page hardbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Astro Inferno is the most recent arrival here, and requires a bit more thought. It is both stylish and convoluted. Set in a post-apocalyptic demonic SF universe, it uses a lot of unique mechanics and, like Sentai & Sensibility, buries them under a mass of setting-related names and descriptions. It is a beautiful art-game, with excellent production qualities, and a variety of hard-to-read fonts, including that jagged-lightning typography favored by heavy metal bands. Long ago, at TSR, we received a copy of Wraith, from White Wolf, which used this iconography for its cover, and could not decide what the title was - we finally settled on "Noseroids". It's the same thing here. Yeah, this one's going to be a tough climb to wrap my brain around.
And that's it for the moment. I will be at Gamehole Con later in the week, and will probably find some more cool stuff there.
So definitely More later. Noseroids.
The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder Directed by Damaso Rodriguez, Seattle Rep, through 20 October,
Anyway, Skin of Our Teeth:
I wanted to like this. I SHOULD like it. It ticks a lot of boxes that I grouse and complain about in this space. It is traditional theatre, as opposed to dance troupes and improv groups. It uses talented actors I have seen before on the boards, living up to the "Repertory" part of the name. It has a huge cast in a world where five-person plays push the limits. It has community volunteers on stage. The author is well-known. It won a Pulitzer back in '42. It had a successful revival recently on Broadway. It runs 2 1/2 hours with three full acts, making it a blockbuster in theater terms.
And it landed with a thud for me.
Let me summarize. The Skin of Our Teeth is a the story of the immortal Antrobus family, who represent the human race. Everything is allegory here. George (Carlos Lacamara) is the patriarch, and represents progress and authority. Maggie (Emily Kuroda) is his wife, domesticity and family. Son Henry (Chip Sherman) is violence, daughter Gladys (Rachel Guyer-Mafune) is the future. Their story takes place in three periods where the world is ending, by ice, flood, and war. There is a lot of anachronism and absurdity. The first act takes place as the glaciers are bearing down on the Antrobus's suburban home in New Jersey, where they keep mammoths in the house and invite the great philosophers in for coffee and sandwiches. The most accessible character is the maid, Sabina (Sara Hennessy), who breaks the fourth wall to complain to the audience about the absurdity of the play itself. Allegorically, she is human nature, and is really the main character here.
So first act, threatened with extinction during the Ice Age. Second act, rinse and repeat. Third act comes to the resolution that, in the words of Rosanne Rosannadanna, "It's always something". The program book comes with a handout explaining that we're being non-linear and absurd in places, and that's part of the point.
Plus in the middle of this, the play being presented is plagued (in the script) with mishaps, miscues, and labor troubles, ending in most of the cast breaking character, having some honest moments, and recruiting volunteers to finish the play itself. The last is a good comment on the relationship between play and audience, but with the pacing it just sort of trundles along.
The main actors are fine, but their characters are flat, and only when they break away from them (portraying the actors who are portraying the characters) do they seem to come to life. The secondary tier of support characters are excellent, with callouts to Sunam Ellis as the nervous stage manager and Laura Crotte as the Atlantic City fortune teller. The teeming masses on-stage are pulled from the Rep's Public Works program, and some subscribers get to read quotes towards the end. I like that part.
The stagecraft is excellent. I usually bash on the overproduced nature of these things, but here the collapsing roofs, advancing ice sheets, and arrival of a ferry/ark all work out just fine. Also, a dinosaur and a mammoth. And a hydro race.
Ultimately, all this had more meaning some 80 years ago, and was experimental and engaging in 1942, but now it tends to creak from its age. There were two intermissions, and after each there were more empty seats in the house. The Lovely Bride would never insult the actors by leaving, and I wanted to see if the third act redeems that which came before (it does. A little).
But really, the history of humanity? It all boils down to "It's always something".
More later,
