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Dusk can be a magical time of day — the work day is coming to a close (well, sort of), people are headed home to families, food, couches… and the heat of the day is easing up, the earth getting a chance to exhale.

It’s particularly important in Los Angeles after a smoggy day like today, when much of the smog has burned off and there’s a kind of serenity gained, a chance to take a breath and smell flowers and plants earlier obscured by the frenetic invasiveness of the day’s human contribution.

On days like this, dusk holds a lot of power for me. I gain sync again. My writing muse comes out. My outlook is better.

That’s why it’s magic.

Guilt is when you buy a new book at Amazon.com instead of at your local independent brick-and-mortar store because it’s cheaper, even though you know that by doing so you’re contributing to the death of the independent book store.

At the rate I’m going with this, we’ll get to the 30th song in this oh so important list by about 2009. However, I know you’ve all been champing at the bit for the second installment in what may well prove to be one of the most important blog series ever written. Oh, you don’t like heavy metal? Oops.

For those of you still with us, this time we’re travelling back to the ancient times (1983) for one of the forgotten (or just plain ignored) sorta-masters of the genre:

Cloven Hoof: “Laying Down the Law”
(from their self-titled 1984 debut)

Cloven Hoof were one of the more notable bands to emerge after the first romantic blush of infatuation with genuine homegrown talent that was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or nwobhm for short. The first era of the nwobhm had pretty much fizzled out by early 1982, when the British music press decided that, since they’d given fame to their own country’s heroes, they could damn well take it away, too. By this point, those bands who had risen to prominence in the heady years of 1979 and 1980, had either self-destructed, completely lost their artistic sense of direction, or clawed their way to international superstardom.

But while the British press had pretty much declared the New Wave dead and buried, and decided that America and its well-funded rockers were the ones to watch, the nwobhm was kept alive by its fanbase, and by a whole new wave of musicians who kept the flame of British metal alive for all eternity … or until about 1985, whichever came first.

It’s important to bear in mind that the evolution of this neglected bastard child of rock was accelerating at a very rapid pace, and the colour and texture of the genre was vastly, vastly different in 1983 than it was in 1980, and here’s why. In 1980, bands like Iron Maiden and Tygers Of Pan Tang had a simple agenda: take the hard rock that they had grown up on — British hard rock, mostly — and re-energize it with a good dose of adrenaline. They succeeded admirably at this, and their infectious new sound galvanized people all over the world, who were themselves inspired to dabble in this adrenalized heavy rock.

By 1983, heavy metal had evolved into an international form, with tons of bands in, for example, Sweden, Germany and North America lending their own sensibilities to what had pretty much been entirely a British working-class musical genre just a couple years before. This new heavy metal standard, although heavily inspired by the nwobhm, was very different: it was faster, it was more aggressive, it was more technical, and it obviously was less idiosyncratically English. 1983 was a watershed year, in which, among others, Dio, Savatage, and Metallica all released their first albums.

And what of other British bands emerging at this time, themselves inspired as much by Iron Maiden and Diamond Head as by Rainbow and Judas Priest? The musical climate was as different for them as it was for bands in North America and Germany, and they too were playing something what was rather different than the first nwobhm bands were playing. In fact, it’s distinct enough, and the whole musical climate was distinct enough from the 1979-80 scene that it’s sometimes called the 2nd New Wave of British Heavy Metal. It’s a silly name, no doubt, but it’s apt enough, because this second wave of bands were very different indeed from that first, legendary wave. And most importantly, they were definitely thinking internationally in their asthetic, something that would save many from instant extinction (there was nothing like a tour of metal-mad Germany to pay the bills).

One of the bands from this 2nd Wave of British Heavy Metal is Midlanders Cloven Hoof, who’d been plugging away for a number of years before they nabbed a chance to record their first LP, with the ubiquitous Geordies Neat Records in 1984. With their occult name, and pop-Satanic lyrics, not to mention their elaborate stage attire, it’s kind of hard to think of these guys seriously, and even after an objective listen to their album, it’s hardly an instant classic; it would never make a top albums list of mine, or most other metal fans. However, these trappings aside, there’s a bit of a gem hidden among the grand occult gestures, and it’s a good ‘un.

Take the anthemic strutting of Judas Priest. Add a long and varied guitar solo ripped right from the best German power metal. Coat liberally with the vocals of a singer who somehow manages to pull off hoarse and gruff with melodic and spirited. Complement with a lyric that straddles the line between typical tough-guy heavy metal and just plain ridiculousness. And you get Cloven Hoof’s great classic contribution to metal, “Laying Down the Law”.

“Laying Down the Law” is classic, straight-on, no-farting-around anthemic heavy metal in the grand Priest tradition: catchy, instantly memorable, with the delicacy of a pneumatic drill and the emotional sensitivity of a debt collection agent. It locks into third gear right from the start and barrels forward with the measured ease of someone who’s strutting his stuff and in no particular hurry to get where he’s going (which is probably the pub, or perhaps prison, anyway). It doesn’t concern itself too much with throwing in lots of variation or experimentation, and it doesn’t need to: the band knows they’re on to a good thing and they’re going to work it.

A few minutes in it’s guitar fiddling time, and while this one doesn’t win any awards for awe-inspiring technicality or astonishing blasts of afterburner-fueled speed, what makes it cool is that it’s long enough that it gets the whole band in on the act, with these really cool riffs that bounce off the bass and drums in pure classic let’s-be-a-team headbanging. The solo is less about getting thirty seconds to wow the audience and more about taking a minute to go on a kind of journey, working its way down and around and up and through a whole structured segment of the song, weaving in and out of some interesting rhythmic changes that the drums undergo into a kind of semi-melodic mini-epic, but never ever disrupting that easy mid-paced strut that makes this piece of leather-bound metal so classically Priest-derived anthemic.

Another solo starts in at the end after a number of refrains of the “sing-along, mates!” chorus-line, the repeating chant of “Laying down, I’m laying down the law!”, just as the fade-out kicks in, as if to suggest that, man, if they had the time, they could have kept this up for another ten or fifteen minutes at their mid-paced swagger and still kept the audience chanting along.

But what’s it all about? Actually, it’s somewhat of a little-used bit of theme this one is based on: Prohibition-era Chicago, where the singer casts himself in the role of a policeman patrolling the streets, itching for the chance to rain punitive justice down on hoodlums, gangsters, and other scum…

You say I’m dreaming to believe in a better way
For this rat trap we call home
I’m the enforcer making sure crime don’t pay
and I’m not alone…

Anything written from the perspective of law enforcement is pretty unusual in metal. Most bands tend to cast themselves in the role of the outsider or the hunted, the victim of the law, either warranted or otherwise. But this is kind of a good example of why Cloven Hoof are subtly unique, and why this song in particular manages to stick its head above all sorts of other mid-paced anthems from the 80s — it’s just got something subtly unique about it.

But let’s not get above ourselves here: the reason this song makes the list is that it’s so damned catchy, so classically and addictively tough and swaggery, and just so damned fun. Cloven Hoof had their dreams of elaborate stage shows and nine-minute epics about battles between good and evil, but here in “Laying Down the Law” they forgot all of that and just got down to the business of blasting out one classic piece of tough, strutting heavy metal that never fails to coerce the listenger to chant along, “’cause I’m laying down, I’m laying down the law….”

Technorati tags: heayv metal, nwobhm, Cloven Hoof.

(this is a boardgame post — if these aren’t your thing you might want to scroll to the next post)

During my day at (d)orccon, I managed to acquire a copy of Battle Line, designed by the guest of honour, Reiner Knizia. GMT Games, the publisher of Battle Line, had a booth there, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it’s a Central California based company.

(I could go on and on about how I kept returning to their booth throughout the day to mess up their stock by drooling over it and practicing emergency discipline mantras to keep myself from spending money I didn’t have to buy everything they had on offer, but I won’t. Move along. This isn’t the parenthetical ramble you’re looking for.)

It’s slightly unusual that a Knizia game would be published by a wargame-based company like GMT, and someday I’d love to learn the story behind how they acquired it, but it’s a little less surprising when you learn that Battle Line is a new version of a German game called Schotten Totten, a card game about Scottish Highlanders competing against one another in a rock throwing contest (or something), which has silly cartoony graphics and is, all things considered, one of the last games I would ever consider buying.

Enter GMT and their wonderful artist (and co-Big Kahuna) Roger MacGowan, who took a very elegant game with simple mechanics but complex strategy (a Knizia trademark), chucked the silly stuff and gave it the signature GMT look, complete with ancient culture setting, warriors, a combat flavor, and MacGowan’s graceful and clean art. All of a sudden, I’m totally there. And for fifteen bucks, it’s not like it’s something you have to fret over justifying buying.

Battle Line is a simple two-player card game that takes less than ten minutes to learn. It includes seventy cards, sixty of which are called Troop Cards, and ten of which Tactics Cards. On top of that, there are nine wooden “flags” which resemble the playing pieces in Sorry! (incorrectly called plastic playing pieces on the game box — they’re wooden). These are lined up in a row in the middle of the playing space, and form the imaginary battle line of a pitched combat between two ancient forces (hence the game’s prosaic name).

As for the forces for each player’s army, these are represented by the sixty Troop Cards, seven of which are given to each player at the beginning of the game, forming their hand. Each troop card is numbered from one to ten, and is in one of six colors. Each number represents a different kind of troop type found in battles between Alexander and the Persians in the ancient world; for example, the cards numbered 10 are War Elephant cards, and they all have the same excellent style of artwork found on the box cover.

Each round, the player plays (must play — you can’t pass, which creates important strategic decisions) one card from her hand in front of any of the available nine flags representing the line of battle (flags can become unavailable, which I’ll sketch out in a mo). Your opponent meanwhile is taking turns doing the same thing on the opposite side of the flags, trying to outmatch the forces you are building up on your own side of each of these flags.

Once you’ve played three cards on each flag, that’s it. The flag is tied up and no more cards can be added. As you may well have guessed by this point, you win a particular flag by having a stronger suit than the cards played by your opponent, and suits are ranked vaguely like a highly-simplified version of Poker, with three consecutive numbers all of the same color being the highest ranked suit (a kind of straight flush), after which come three cards of one number, then three cards of one color, a “straight” of three consecutive numbers (of any color), and finally the crap set, which is three cards that bear absolutely no relation to each other and induce finger-pointing and sneering in all those who behold it.

(As an aside, these hands are called “formations” in the game, and the different ranked hands have war-related names, like “Wedge” instead of straight flush, but I always call them by the poker term they are based on.)

When both sides have completed their three card set, the player who has won (or who can prove she will win, if for example her opponent has not yet played all three cards at that flag but the two which have been played cannot possibly form a hand as highly ranked as her own) moves that flag from the center, battle line over to her side of the table, scoring for it. The first player to win three adjacent flags (or five non-adjacent flags) in this manner wins the game. Simple as that.

Well, not quite. If that were all that happened the game might tire quickly, but there’s a permutation that, while adding flavor and spice, also adds a bit more violence and nastiness to the game, and these are the Tactics Cards. On every turn, after playing one card from your hand, you draw a new card either from the Troop Card deck (set at one end of the line of flags) or from the considerably smaller Tactics Card deck (over at the opposite end of the battle line). There are only ten of these, and you can never put more Tactics Cards into play than one more than your opponent has played, but when you can play them, they often blow the game wide open by turning the tables on apparently hopeless flags.

Here’s why: Tactics Cards represent special events and variables in war, like the charisma and rallying cries of a leader (like Alexander himself), or environmental factors, like mud or fog. On your turn, you can choose to play a Tactics Card instead of a Troop Card, and the effects printed on these cards often serve to turn the tables on flags which a moment before seemed all but lost. For example, the fog card disables the ranks on both sides of a flag — instead, the sum total of the numbers only are used to determine who wins (the guy with the higher number). So if a player on one side has all but locked in that flag by creating a hand with, say, the numbers 1, 2, and 3 all of the same number, while his opponent has put down a 10 card and a 6 card that are not of the same color (meaning that any hand she completes could never be as high ranking), if she whipped out the fog card on her turn and played it on this flag, she would suddenly be the winner of that flag, because even with just two cards played, 10+6 is better than 1+2+3. Take that, asshole!

In many of the games I’ve played, the sudden appearance of one of these cards turned the tide of the game and wrested victory from the jaws of defeat. Not only do they shake up what might otherwise be just too linear a game, but that element of surprise adds a tremendous dimension to the strategy of playing.

And remember what I said earlier: you must play a card on your turn, whether you want to or not. Because of this, you’ve got to be very careful about how you start filling up those slots on each of the nine flags, because if you don’t receive cards of a particular number and/or color that you were anticipating, you could find yourself forced into completing three-card sets that have much lower value than you originally hoped, just because you were forced on a particular turn to unload a card somewhere, anywhere.

I hesitate to call this a thematic game (especially because it’s a re-themed game anyway), but a lot of the fun of Battle Line comes from the push and pull and back and forth of slowly building your own sets on your side while you watch your opponent build his on his side, and this wary confrontationalism does have a whiff of war about it. Trying to storm in on certain flags while you hedge your bets and wait on others to see what your opponent is going to play is where much of the strategy of the game comes into play. Since there are only sixty cards in the Troops deck, resources are scarce, and during the course of the game you will often see — to your dismay — cards you were hoping to get suddenly appear on your opponent’s side of the battlefield, shattering the chances of completing an all-important set at a crucial flag. And because the game can be won by scoring three adjacent flags, players can find themselves rushing to shore up areas of the battlefield that come under assault much like a real pitched combat ebbs and flows as weaknesses in the line or tactical holding areas suddenly come under fire.

The game plays in less than a half hour, and it only takes the flash of an eye to set up, so it might almost qualify as a really nice filler game if it wasn’t for the startling level of strategy and tactical decisions hidden beneath the surface of its very simple rules. Instead, it lies somewhere in between a nice filler game and a full-blown strategy game, in something of a relatively rare sweet spot.

To me, with its mixture of excellent and strategic gameplay, and kick-ass graphics and theme, Battle Line is a bigtime winner. The guy at the GMT booth told me that GMT’s warehouse is clean out of stock of this baby, and it may be some time before they go to reprint. Now, I don’t know if this was a sales line or not, but I’ve noticed that some online retailers are out of stock of it, so if you find it at your local games shop or wherever, you might be better off getting it now than later. Plus, it’s only fifteen bucks so it’s not as if the purchase will put you in the red.

(image via boardgamegeek.com)

Technorati tags: boardgames, Reiner Knizia, Battle Line.

The other night I watched Nightmare Alley, the 1947 noirish thriller starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. It’s set around a travelling carnival, and really does emphasize the seamiest and dirtiest side of the noir genre.

So I’m watching this movie and I start seeing the word “geek” written on the sides of a lot of the caravans, and I’m thinking “geez, I thought geeks were social outcasts now, but this is nothing on the Forties, when they were obviously such outcasts that they were literally treated as circus freaks!”

I didn’t know the half of it. To my shock and amazement, when the “geek” himself finally showed up on screen, he was this lumbering sub-human person who feasted on live chickens right before the audience (great piece of entertainment, you know — I always love that humanity has historically found entertainment value in witnessing the slaughter of animals for sport or spectacle). Just why the hell, I wondered, is this freak of nature who feasts on raw chicken being called a “geek”? Was this the grim punishment for being an adult comic book fan in the Forties, perhaps?

Wikipedia sums it up thusly:

A geek is an individual who is fascinated by knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virtual in nature. Geek may not always have the same meaning as the term nerd. The Merriam-Webster definitions are “1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake 2: a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked 3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity,” though these are only three of many definitions.

This really gave me pause when I read the Merriam-Webster definitions, because there written boldly was the whole issue that had given me pause. Just how the hell does a word go from meaning “a circus freak who bites the heads off live chickens” to “an obsessive enthusiast” (which is the Oxford definition)? The only explanations I can come up with are hardly flattering to geeks — that so-called “obsessive enthusiasts” were so reviled by the general community that only a word whose meaning was as vile as “geek” could be sufficient to level at them.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear oh dear oh dear. Anthropologists and etymologists could have a field day with this whole issue, and you know what? I think I’ll leave it to them. Suffice to say that it was quite an eye-opening experience to watch a geek — one of us, man, or so I thought — turn out to be nothing more than a circus freak who consumes live chickens for the delectation and amusement of some frankly astonishingly crude and barbaric Middle-American citizens. Hadn’t this sort of behavior gone out of fashion with the fall of the Roman Empire?

I’ll tell you, I’m going to have trouble dealing with the term in the same way ever again.

But I’ll tell you something else, that on second thought, is eating a live chicken really so bad? Maybe, maybe it just tastes good… Say, I’m feeling a little peckish. I’m a geek. Maybe I should go and try eating something really fresh for a change…

Technorati tags: geek, Nightmare Alley.

Oh, you know what?

In my recent report on Orccon, an entire section was mysteriously excised from the final product, rather like accidentally leaving your supporting actor’s Oscar moment on the cutting room floor.

So here it is (it goes just after the paragraph in which I recount meeting Liz):

So it’s obvious that Liz beats me hand’s down in a geek contest (I can still feel the burn of her sneer when she told me she had games scheduled for 10pm that night, long after my departure — the shame, the shame), crushing my feebleness between her endless scheduled games days and trips to the comics shop to read indie comics (while I pathetically nerd over superheroes in tights). What I didn’t mention was her obvious powers over all the men who surrounded her. I shall relate:

So I walk up to this table at which are sat four perspiring fellas and one goddess. Now, I’m not one of those people who feels surprise when beholding a female at a gaming convention anymore — I think we’ve all gotten used to the pleasing fact that more and more women are brave enough to endure man-odor and attend. But you just don’t expect to meet such a sublime paragon of the sex over a game of Game of Thrones. You just don’t. I remarked thusly (while completely distracting her from her game): “You’ve thrown the hormone balance completely off at this table.” And she had. The other players will no doubt try to deny it, but the beads of perspiration and nervous hands were not because their little wooden pieces were being trounced by other little wooden pieces. Can I put this delicately? This is the first game I’ve observed where five males were uncomfortably crossing their legs, in unison. And it’s not because they needed to pee…

‘S funny — on the way back to my car I could have sworn that I kept seeing dragonflies at the edge of my vision. Strangest thing.

I only managed to get to over to the Westin hotel at LAX on Saturday for the revamped Strategicon’s Orccon (then spent Sunday working in a distracted haze imagining all the awesomeness I was undoubtedly missing out on).

In fact, there are probably a lucky few still there as I type this, holding on for dear life for the last half-day of the con. For most of us, President’s Day is one of those holidays “celebrated” only by the post offices and the banks of the country, which just makes our normal daily routine that much more inconvenient because all of a sudden you can’t send letters or deposit money … but you still have to do all the rest of what amounts to a regular old workday.

Anyway, flash back forty-eight hours to Saturday, a day entirely devoted to gaming and geekery, which is just fine by me.

And here’s one thing I noticed: as the day wore on there was this very powerful increase in energy, such that as the sun vanished into the Pacific, the buzz at the event — and the crowds — were many times greater than it had been when I arrived. The gaming rooms were literally teeming with people, and what had been a quiet and sedate open gaming room (mostly empty) at noontime was suddenly way, way too small for the purpose by six in the evening. And the din — man, it was noisy in there.

Rather bizarrely, considering the point of the whole enterprise, I got very little gaming in, but I did participate in a Space Dealer tournament. Now, Space Dealer has generated a lot of buzz since it took so many people by surprise at last year’s Essen Game Fair in Germany, and the sheer novelty factor of a European board game with a space theme (try to fill a hand counting the number of Eurogames with space themes — I dare you) is enough in itself to cause a certain stir.

But the real element that grabs people’s attention — I’ll call it a gimmick; more on that in a sec — is the fact that this game is entirely played in realtime, using little sandglasses which are, at least in theory, one-minute timepieces. The game itself is timed to last exactly thirty minutes (a cd with “space music” and a robot voice warning you of the remaining time is included in the box, but we just used a stopwatch at the con) at the end of which, that’s it, game over.

Succinctly put, Space Dealer is a game of building commodities and then sending them out in a little space ship to your opponents’ star systems to fulfill commodity “needs” that they have. In the middle of the table is this octagonal track which doubles as a kind of track of the star system (four corners of which represent the star system of each player) and also the scoring track. On the table in front of each player is a rather interesting card strip where you place cards from your hand first to develop technologies or commodity production centers, and then to deploy those cards, from whence they are used to manufacture commodities that you send off in your little spaceship. The cards are arrayed in a row in front of you once they are activated, and most of these cards — in addition to being your manufactories — also show the “needs” of your own solar system, which the other players can see and will try to fulfill by bringing their own spaceship round and dumping off the commodities for those cards that haven’t been filled.

Once a card’s needs have been met, the player who’s done so places a scoring block in that player’s color on the card and scores a certain number of points for herself, and then a certain number of points for the player whose card’s needs have just been met (which is generally proportionately less than the player who’s brought the commodities: for example, 3 points for the commodity-bringer, 1 point for the player who’s card was just fulfilled). In this way, every time a score is made from a supply run, usually two players are receiving scores. Once that need is met, it’s out of the game and no one else can score for it, which turns Space Dealer into something of a race. The guy who won the second game (hands down I might add) beat me cleanly to nearly every need that I was on my way to fulfill, so there’s strong competition to get your commodities to those needs before someone else does, and snag those points.

For every action in this sequence you want to fulfill, one of your sandglasses is placed on the spot and, when the sand runs out, that activity can be performed. It’s very linear: you build a technology/production card with one sandglass, then you manufacture the commodity that card provides with another sandglass, then you travel one star system with one sandglass, until you finally reach the star system of the player who has a need your equipped to fulfill. Then you use another sandglass to get your empty spaceship back, and so on. Thus the realtime nature of the game.

In quintessential Germanic fashion, all the commodities are just little colored wooden cubes, and the needs printed on each card that you’re sending your spaceship out to fulfill are printed with a row of squares. You have to deliver all of the needed colors simultaneously in order to score for that particular need, and the more colors printed on that particular card, the higher the score when you fulfill that need.

It’s a rather simple game mechanic, and it’s the realtime nature with those crazy sandglasses that makes the game stand out (other than the very rare sci-fi theme). But after two plays I have very mixed opinions of the whole realtime mechanic. I found for one thing that it severely cut down on player interaction — I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that was so quiet. I don’t think I actually ever heard the player to my right speak even once during the entire 30 minutes of my second game, and from my point of view that just can’t be right. And because each player is so concerned with performing a task as quickly as possible, and racing to get those needs fulfilled soonest, it’s very hard to really stay all that aware of what the other players are doing, so I feel that there’s an enormous chance for rules to be misinterpreted or mistakes to be made (not necessarily intentionally) and go unnoticed. I would definitely say that Space Dealer needs to be played only by people who very firmly understand the rules, because once the clock is ticking, it’s just not that easy to get questions answered or to have other players even notice if you’re doing something wrong.

At the end of the day, most of Space Dealer’s unique appeal comes from the realtime aspect, and it’s this very aspect which I think is something more akin to a gimmick than a real strong mechanic. By the end of my second game, I’d kind of had my fill of the thing. Some of the other mechanics are nice in the game — I like the way each player’s table area is set up, and the way these cards are both commodity manufactories and needs at the same time, but ironically enough these other mechanics are sort of marginalized by those damned sandglasses, and I think that ultimately I just got tired of sitting and staring at the sands run through and then rush like mad to move my little cardboard spaceship around.

Some freeform thoughts from the rest of the day:

I bought a mostly unpunched copy of the legendary Magic Realm from a dealer who was — wait for this — dressed entirely and convincingly in cowboy attire. I’m not talking about Roy Rogers glitter-girl attire, I’m talking Snake Plissken in Tombstone attire. He was also a really nice guy and gave me a kick-ass deal on a game I’ve wanted for a long time. His six-shooters in his holster may have helped me to be a real nice guy too.

GMT Games is fucking awesome. They had a booth — right next to the cowboy dude — and I was drooling and reaching for various types of plastic and bills to buy, well, everything when a little voice screeched in my head that, No, begging on street corners is not an acceptable and totally justifiable price to pay for some frickin’ awesome games. I walked away having spent just 16 bucks on a now-out-of-print copy of Knizia’s Battle Line a smugger, more self-righteous geek.

My friend Tewhill and I sat at the hotel bar for over half an hour after getting fair-piss weak beer while the bartender did a runner. I swear, the bar was unattended for almost an hour while we sat there and, you know, got kinda pissed off. (I walked by there two hours later and it was still empty.) Some guys just really push their luck. I hope he chokes on a moldy peanut.

There was a way-cool homemade schematic/map of the Serenity ship with each level (printed in color and embedded in Plexiglas) stacked on the level below with struts. It was really sweet, but I couldn’t fawn all over the creator because he was GMing the crew planetside while they delivered some stolen ore or something, doubtless on their way to having River run off and the Preacher get shot and nearly die so Jayne could riffle through everyone’s luggage while Mal found himself in the unfortunate situation of having to be a penniless hero, rather than a wealthy bad guy. Or something.

I discovered the Pulp Gamer podcast (http://www.pulpgamer.com, natch) purely as a result of seeing the dude happily plugging away on his portable rig in the open gaming room. Looks like a good podcast and I’ve downloaded a couple of episodes.

Liz Rizzo was nerding it away in a huge session of Game Of Thrones, and I happily forced my way into the table, distracted her, and probably ensured that she lost soundly. Now, here’s the thing: if you go to her blog you’ll hear her speak with the most profound frankness about things like her purple friends, socially-conscious Hollywood schmooze fests, filmmaking, and, uh, a little more about her purple friend. But the open secret here is that she’s just a total geek like the rest of us. Don’t be fooled — she’s played Magic Realm more than I have. Don’t tell her I said this because I need to be really nice to her since she now has a job at a post-production house in Hollywood, and I’ll never know when I’ll need to pull a favor to get some post work done….

Finally, in the bathroom for a last whizz just before heading for home, I overheard this remark from a guy with long hair shaving at the sink: “Dude, have you ever noticed, Lars Ulrich is kind of a douchebag? But that’s okay, because he kicks ass.” Ah, the pleasures of gaming cons!

Technorati tags: Orccon, Space Dealer

Except for a brief period of time in the mid-80s which was, let’s be honest, horrifically embarrassing anyway, heavy metal is by definition a cult genre. The vast majority of bands write a very specific kind of music for a specific group of scruffs, and the adoration of the masses is pretty far from their minds (except, again, during the Embarrassment Era, when pop metal was a big thing and many hours spent primping in front of the mirror — dark days).

So, in that way people have of always obsessing over organizing anything and everything into lists — top ten favorite 70s movies, top twenty favorite episodes of ST:TNG, top eleven and a half favorite spaces at Trader Joe’s — I’ve been thinking lately of a kind of thirty essential list of heavy metal songs that anyone really ought to hear before the world shatters into a trillion pieces and all life on the planet is thrown into the void to suffocate and die.

I should warn you all that it is probably the single most subjective list you could ever hope to see, because it simply has no criterion at all upon which it’s based. It’s just my mind pondering thirty songs from the genre that, gee, it would be a good idea to listen to before armageddon. It does not represent thirty of the most popular metal songs, or the most famous, or the most highly-regarded, or the most lucrative, or even thirty of the most obscure songs (though many are indeed pretty obscure to casual fans), or thirty from a particular era, or style, or … well you get the picture, which is that there is no picture. Casual listing of the undisciplined mind.

And each post I will choose one of these thirty Songs to Hear Before The Planet Explodes and talk about it, and why it rocks out with its cock out, and why its particular fiddly guitar solo is better than other fiddly guitar solos, and why the screaming and raving of the singer is better than the screaming and raving of another singer, etc etc etc.

Oh, and one more thing — there’s no order here. It doesn’t start with the least most important Song to Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, and end with the most important Song to Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, or anything like that. Favoritism wounds tender feelings, so if any song makes it in to the List of Heavy Metal Song To Listen To Before The Planet Explodes, it’s just as important as all the other 29 songs To Listen To Before The Planet Explodes. For all metal that is true and not poseur metal (”True Metal forever! All poseurs must die! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” … erm, ahem) is our children and we cherish each and every one.

Right, then, with that thoroughly unprofessional rambling preamble out of the way, on to number 30 (or number 1, depending on your point of view):

Cutty Sark “Heroes”
(from the 1985 album of the same name)

Cutty Sark (”we’re named after the boat, dude, not the whisky!”) made kind of a strong splash in their home country between their first four-song EP in 1983, and their second and final album in 1985, although I rather think they were virtually unknown beyond their borders at the time, and never broke into the North American market. The story stereotypically ended with a nasty spat with their record label, and then no record deal at all when the only offers came with the usual demands of primping, prancing, and popping up their image. Rather than go glam, they went bust, and that was that. The cool thing is that they were friends at the time, and I believe remain in touch to this day, so at least it’s not a situation of big egos blowing a band apart.

But they did leave two albums and an EP behind, which to the adventurously curious turn out to be this wonderful mixture of great uniqueness and instantly recognizable familiarity all at the same time — and, remarkably, actually in print from German reissue label High Vaultage, albeit not in the most ready supply. You could say that their music typifies a high-quality example of true classic early 1980s heavy metal, but with enough individuality and deft manipulation of the genre’s staples to really set them apart from the crowd.

“Heroes”, eponymous track of their second and final album, ideally represents everything that was strong about the band, which aside from the usual requisites (strong songwriting, tight drumming…) was the unique vocals of Conny Schmitt, and the blazing guitar firepower of Uwe Cossmann.

Any attempt to describe Conny’s singing style is only going to make him sound bizarre, so suffice to say that after perhaps an initial breaking-in period the listener starts to get quite comfortable with his sound, and then to realize that his expressiveness is an integral part of what drives these songs beyond mere copycat conformity.

Uwe, conversely, is easy as pie to describe. You know how Viv Campbell is a huge part of why those first couple of DIO albums rock out so hard? It’s the same kind of situation here — Uwe is just all over this song, which starts with a really a swaggering guitar intro before leading into the vocals, proceeds to shatter hyperactivity records with a hugely enthusiastic and grinding main solo, and then … well, then just refuses to stop, as Conny comes back in for the final couple of verses, and Uwe just keeps plugging away in the background, keeping things intensifying at a steady rate until they literally snap at the end. If you’re a big fan of flashy guitar (especially which puts the quality and variety of sound above pure fiddly neoclassical technicality) then you are immediately trawling ebay for a copy of this, because you know that any band that writes songs in this style is going to have guitar heroics all over it. But it’s not just heroics, because Uwe isn’t playing just so you have to listen to him twiddle — the lead guitar is an essential and almost nucleic part of the song structures on Heroes (and indeed on all their songs), an organic kind of lead guitar which doesn’t sit quietly in the background strumming its chords until its 30 seconds of swaggering allow it stand up and massage its ego, but rather a guitar whose purpose is there to tell the story of the song just as integrally as Conny’s vocals are.

And the story, for the geek inclined, is a really cool one. What I can make out of it is that “Heroes” tells of a man who tries to become a hero and make a positive change in the world around him, and through his own inadequacy and even blind arrogance becomes a failure overcome by the world’s ills. The listener is cast as a spectator, watching this would-be hero amaze everyone with his fearlessness and his selfessness, then watching him defeated and finally broken when he finds his will unable to endure a world that refuses to be healed.

Actually, the lyrics are fairly abstract — this is my own interpretation of what amounts to something very subjective.

The hero in the song is referred to as “a Batman”, but whether or not the song is literally about Batman or if the name is simply a kind of euphemism for all would-be superheroes who try to fix society’s ills remains unclear.

Say, I just thought of something as I was writing this. You know what this song kind of reminds me of? Watchmen. It has that same sense of tragedy that comes from witnessing people who decide naively to confront evil, only to be consumed by it.

“Heroes” is pretty damned near a perfect classic heavy metal song, both exuberant and optimistic and turgid and cynical. Have a listen before the planet explodes. And just try to get through it without throwing a little air guitar. I dare you.

Technorati tags: Cutty Sark, heavy metal

Orccon, one of the four annual game dork love-ins put on by the Strategicon people, is approaching this weekend, a chance for tons of gamers to get together, throw insults at one another, declare their love/hate of American style games, and share the body odor.

Actually, I have to say that I’m really looking forward to this, because it’s the first shot out of the gate for the newly-managed and newly-energized Strategicon group, a kind of gaming institution here in the land of smog and sand. His Majesty Lord Knizia will be presiding over events, lending his distinctive German analytical fame to the proceedings, and giving Strategicon a certain amount of international lustre. So it’s kind of all eyes on La-La Land as a hopefully better and brighter era is ushered in for gaming cons in this corner of the hemisphere.

As the first of a new chapter in gaming con history for Los Angeles, it couldn’t come at a more opportune moment, right on the heels as it is of the announcement by those jerks at Gencon that last Autumn’s Gencon SoCal was to be the last. I took this announcement with more or less the dignity of a toddler who’s tipped his milk off the high chair, because a concatenation of stellar incidents and a general alignment of the planets all designed to screw me over made sure that I was forced to miss out on GenCon SoCal. This was bad enough when I just thought I’d missed it for a year, but the last ever? That was pretty bloody crushing.

With GenCon SoCal fast fading into a nostalgic memory, and the sting of missing out on the last ever still smarting, I’ve set my sights squarely on the Strategicon chaps to replace that huge aching cavern of sorrow in my chest with a brimming pool of joy and gaming euphoria. And Reiner.

For those who don’t know, the reason this Strategicon is the first of a new era is that Strategicon is under new management. Gaming management. And like college-bound computer nerds at math camp, they’re desperate for the approval of their peers. Which is why there’s a sort of extra buzz surrounding this event, and why it seems to jammed with activity and gamingness. And Reiner.

For a little background on the Strategicon tale, check out Eric Burgess’ very nice boardgame podcast Boardgame Babylon for the tale. Eric will be a kind of major player in the convention proceedings, emceeing lots of the Reiner events (and perhaps holding Reiner’s sceptre and crown when he gets weary), and he’s in thick with all these Southern Californian boardgaming types, so he’s got the lowdown (besides, he’s a good podcaster).

Also, as any self-respecting nerdy enterprise does, Strategicon has its own website (duh): here.

Maybe I’ll see some of you there. I’ll probably be the one begging in the lobby for food money after spending my worldly all in the dealer’s room…

Technorati tags: Orccon, Strategicon, boardgaming.

One of the catchphrases bandied about in the Web 2.0 internet world is “semantic markup”. Even for those who are familiar with the word “semantics”, though, when I bring up the term to many laypeople I’m met with a blank and slightly frightened stare. Semantic Markup is a really important cornerstone of modern web design and methodology, so it’s really worth getting people to understand what it is, and why it matters. The problem is that most of the time those who don’t understand the term are too intimidated or embarrassed to pipe up and ask for a clear definition, so the concept can often become just another one of those techy terms that no-one gets, and no-one therefore really values.

One example I’ve seen lots of times in web design books to illustrate semantic markup is the difference between using i and em to produce italicized text (well, basically — see below). Most modern web dudes argue that em should be used because rather than describing the appearance of the words in question it describes the meaning, or put another way, em defines why the enclosed text is differentiated from the other text around it while i simply differentiates it without indicating why.

To which lots of laypeople will reply with the argument, “if they’re both making the text italicized what’s the difference?”

The fact that they’ve answered this way means that they’re not thinking about the real scope and purpose of either markup language or the web, and if you’re not thinking about the big picture, you’ll never be able to figure out what place semantic markup has in that big picture. So let’s take a second to explore a bit of background before we consider the issue of semantic markup.

First though, a hypothetical dictionary definition: “Semantic markup is a methodology which dictates that all content of a document should be enclosed with tags that most define that content’s meaning and function within the document.” That makes sense … unless you don’t understand what markup really is.

So let’s back up a bit and succinctly describe what our modern perceptions of markup languages and their role in communicating content across the internet and beyond really is in this post Web 2.0 world of ours. XHTML (which is really just a version of XML for web pages) is supposed to be a device-independent language which uses tags to provide semantic structure to a web document — and by semantic structure I mean tags which define the meaning and structural purpose of the enclosed text.

However, note the term “device-independent”. In other words, these documents are documents which are supposed to be written without any foreknowledge of the device in which they may ultimately be digested. For many of us, XHTML is going to be read on a browser agent, a web browser like Safari or Firefox, using our eyes. But device-independent documents may very well be read on portable devices, or not even read at all, but spoken, like with screen readers which speak the text aloud.

In other words, the real purpose of semantic markup is to provide meaningful structure to a document not just for people who read it, but for anyone at all who might need to digest the document in any kind of way at all — even if that “person” isn’t a human being at all, but a machine (like a Googlebot or the API of a program — semantic markup is particularly important to bots visiting a site for search engine ranking).

That is why the meaning of a document’s structure is important, and not its appearance, and why the two terms should be treated as mutually exclusive.

To return to the classic em versus i example, making text appear italicized has no meaning to someone who can’t see the italics. But ascribing emphasis to a segment of text communicates its meaning regardless of how the user is digesting the information. Communicating the meaning of the emphasis is what makes it semantic. How it is dealt with by the so-called user agent (i.e. browser or screen reader or whatever) is an entirely different matter.

All web browsers have prebuilt styles for displaying all HTML markup, from em to code. I’m pretty sure that all of the current crop use italicized text by default to render content enclosed in an em tag. This makes perfect sense because the de facto method for communicating emphasis in writing (in Western languages at least) is through italicized text. Whereas as a matter of fact using the em tag to make things like corporate names italicized is probably breaking the rule of semantic markup, unless the author of the document specifically wants emphasis placed on those corporate names. I’m guilty of using the em tag for any and all needs of italicized text, and I know a lot of other people are too. Perhaps I should consider revising this to use the em tag only for words and phrases that are designed to have emphasis placed on them, and save the visual needs of italicizing corporate names and the like for the i tag, since that’s purely a visual construction.

Anyway, to make a long story short, selling people on the notion of semantic markup is diffcult unless they know that web sites are supposed to be device-independent. If they can learn to think of the content of the web sites as independent from the style of web sites (a cornerstone of enlightened web design), they can begin to grasp the concept of why choosing the most appropriate tag to define the meaning of the structured content is a really valuable thing, and why the difference between em and i is a lot greater than appearances might suggest!

Technorati tags: semantic markup, web design.