S A Brown

25 years ago today, ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US began its worldwide invasion on @newgrounds.com.

Playing Dirty: The State of Florida Versus Mike Diana, a new drama about a notorious comic book obscenity case - The Comics Journal About midway through The State of Florida Versus Mike Diana, the new play by Lenny Schwartz that ran recently at the Daydream Theatre Company in Providence, Rhode Island, a group of the title characte...

Interesting!

Here's a guy I haven't thought about in some time. Fascinating story. There was a documentary a few years ago, which I've been meaning to track down.

For those too young to remember 1991, Diana is one of the worst cases of comics persecution in US history.

Art installation mostly made of metal with a large shiny orb and a control panel with a red button

The Orb is an art installation by @chriscombs.net . When you press and hold the red button, it slowly destroys a chatbot 😈

I said some words about labs and the importance of old tech - hopefully the words I spoke align with what I actually think...

... this is a thing of beauty.

Frankenheimer’s Prophecy (1979) probably doesn’t fit into the category of ‘lesser known,” but it’s my favorite of the decade’s environmental horror subgenre, along with Frogs and Squirm

Comic. [Instructions on package] High Altitude Cooking Instructions: 3,500-6,500 ft: Add ½ cup water, increase cook time to 12 minutes. 6,500-9,500 ft: Add ¼ cups water, increase cook time to 18 minutes. 250,000-450,000 ft: Orient reentry vehicle for aerodynamic stability. Deploy parachutes at 10,000 ft. Descend, keeping crew capsule tightly covered, for 3-4 minutes. After splashdown, follow sea level cooking instructions.

High Altitude Cooking Instructions

xkcd.com/3187/

Great Philosophers on Santa’s Naughty and Nice Lists (With thanks to Dr. Henry Gorman) - - -Aristotle: Be good for goodness’ sake. Plato: To be “good” or “nice” is to cultivate one’s knowledge of Sant...

John Locke: If you have been very Nice and your parents do not buy you a Nintendo Switch, you have license to replace them with parents who will.

Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we’re missing when we stop taking risks.

for your holiday reading pleasure:

i wrote about why i’m getting back into tapes, and what we’ve lost by letting ourselves get addicted to platforms built around surveillance and instant gratification. 🎶 @404media.co

🛒🎄 Ride your shopping cart back to a bygone era with the “Attention Kmart Shoppers” collection at the #InternetArchive.

These tapes of In-store announcements & seasonal jingles are pure time travel.

🛍️ Wrap your holiday spirit in classic shopping nostalgia ⤵️
archive.org/details/Kmar...

guys, if you ain't seen The Prisoner, prepare to have your mind blown

No, I was completely tuned out of Iran-Iraq. Paid close attention to Lockerbie and the Tripoli raid, and I knew who -that- guy was, but it was probably 1989 before I registered Hussein

I've always chalked that 'atomic bomb' omission from the version I had as a playtesting change. But I've always been curious about it. If I'm remembering correctly...

yes! I bought that right when it came out; pre Gulf War. At the time, I had no idea who that guy on the cover was. I got an early edition of Axis and Allies, and my (possibly faulty) recollection is that the back of the box had an image with the technology card that included "atomic bomb"

I have no idea which version of F&E I have; I picked it up at a con 15 years ago, after putting off buying it for years, and never got around to playing it. I loved Federation Space when it came out--it integrated nicely with SFB. Someday I'll actually punch those F&E counters ...

you raise another interesting question (from a company history standpoint) that relates to the artifact analysis problem: why did so many companies obscure their editions and printings, especially of boxed games? Was this driven by cost, or the result of mix-and-match components thrown together?

The original post was about TTRPGs--the books produced by various companies--and that got me thinking about RPG boxed sets, and then from there I started down the SPI and Task Force Games rabbit hole, thinking about the various editions of their titles. There are so many examples to choose from ...

... pretty much any production decision reflected in the final material product would be ripe for study. I don't want to assume that every variation of a game like SPI's Oil War was about cost-cutting. Fortunately there's a lot written about SPI's marketing, so there are sources to consult.

... along with variations in rules books (some with detailed designer annotations, others more simplified), quality of components, and the 'shortcuts' to the dominant design standard (chits are a perfect example, similar to the chits that were included with some early TSR boxed sets) ...

I had completely forgotten about flatpacks! I used to see those in my local game store's used section and thought they were such a strange format. But to your original question, absolutely! I think looking at the publishing formats (a game-as-artifact interpretive approach) is one angle ...

Baby shoes (haunted)

Maybe I'll try to write something on this.
After I get my -other- homework done

SPI and other companies that relied heavily on mail order seem perfect for this kind of analysis. With magazine editions, "designer editions", etc., produced for different marketing channels. There was a fair bit of variation in the quality of components

I'd love to know if there are any good articles or chapters on games as physical artifacts. I've been looking for a while now (although not very diligently), hoping that somebody, for example, has explored how packaging choices were made to reach different audiences, esp. in the 1970s and 1980s.

Well, well, well, looks like someone has finally beaten Hemingway at his own game.

the greatness of the waitresses' "christmas wrapping" "A&P has provided me / With the world's smallest turkey"

This time of year, my brain is always about 10% thinking about "Christmas Wrapping." I haven't heard the song yet in the wild, but it always excites me when I do. A few years ago, I wrote about the song's greatness! anniezaleski.substack.com/p/the-greatn...

There is such great worldbuilding in those two seasons. I wonder if someday we’re going to get an annual “Sky Clearance” holiday, just like in the show. People all over the world partying in the streets as another batch of obsolete satellites is shot down…

We pulled the plug on this documentary 15 minutes in. The AI recreated "voice" of Ed is gross. I didn't realize they'd done this before starting it and it was SO obviously AI we just turned it off. A dumb, and unnecessary, decision filmmakers.

Entropocene Check out Entropocene - <p>A collection of Elgin Award nominated speculative poetry chapbooks, plus various published and unpublished works. Thematic verse covering: time, telepathy, utopia, science, ...

My new speculative poetry collection Entropocene comes out on 12/18 and is now available for pre-order

bookshop.org/a/197/978196...

Comic. [Two people in front of projected satellite image. A small portion of the image is pixelated squares.] PERSON 1: Wait, when was this imagery taken? Is this censorship the work of the contractor? One of our people? *Foreign actors!?* PERSON 2 with ponytail: Do we know who’s operating a facility at that location? PERSON 1: We can’t find *anything*. [caption] My hobby: Setting up big colored panels in the middle of nowhere as a prank on remote sensing people

Satellite Imagery

xkcd.com/3173/