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Filling in the Cinematic Gaps: Goodfellas (1990)

One of my favorite things in this cruel and uncaring world is to watch a movie in the theater, followed not too far down the list by watching a movie at home after my preschooler has finally gone to $*%#ing sleep. Lately, inspired by my friend Marc’s deep dive into cinema, I’ve been working to fill in the gaps in my cinematic experiences when I can find the time. The latest hole to be patched was Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

I’ve seen plenty of gangster movies and maybe a dozen episodes of the Sopranos, but it’s never been a genre in which I’ve taken a strong interest. Obviously I tend to go for things that are a bit less grounded in reality, and I’m not particularly a big fan of Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, who seem to have acted or starred in 95% of all modern gangster movies.

Gangsters in this genre make me uneasy in the same way I suspect sharks make other people nervous. They’re unpredictable, dangerous, and deadly. Their deadliness makes it hard for me to watch stories about them because I spend the whole time waiting for them to come through the screen and whack me and my whole family. You might think this is odd because I like crime and heist movies. In those movies, the characters are less often murderers and more the thieving kind, and I find that less threatening and uncomfortable. Let’s face it: an awful lot of gangster movies end in an orgy of murder and mayhem.

That said, I overcame my discomfort long enough to sit through Goodfellas and generally, I’m glad I did. This is an oddly placed film in time, having come out in 1990, but it feels very much like an 80s or 70s film rather than a 90s one. The film grain, the acting, and the music choices anchor it in an earlier era, and as the film drifts from the 50s into the early 80s, it never quite stopped holding on to its earliest time periods.

One thing that stood out in the early chapters was how Scorsese leans hard on a freeze frame narrative device, in which Ray Liotta’s character can pontificate about his past without the film’s action running ahead of him. It’s an odd technique that I don’t recall him utilizing nearly so often in his other pictures. It had the overall impact of slowing down the picture to start, which may well have been his intent. At 146 minutes, it felt at times more like a solid 180+ minute picture.

A big surprise for me was that Ray Liotta was the real lead of this picture. Everything about this movie that had drifted into my general pop culture knowledge involved Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro. Many of the lines of dialogue that were likely strong, memorable moments to original viewing have long since been milked of any vitality by the parodies that have followed (especially Pesci’s infamous scene where he busts Liotta’s balls over a simple compliment to the point where we soon fear violence will break out). Liotta’s performance as a somewhat dim-witted and at-times decent man contrasted well with his co-stars, and served as a strong narrator who at times faded a little too much in the background against his more colorful co-stars.

The stand-out performance here was Joe Pesci’s, of course. I loathed Pesci’s character from the first minute he was on screen until he finally took a bullet. Pesci’s performance here was great, definitely the kind of thing he specialized in for years–characters that you absolutely loved to hate. Pesci absolutely earned his Best Supporting Oscar in this picture, and as time goes on, his performance as that unhinged and unpredictable man will linger even as other memories of Goodfellas will fade.

If I had to summarize this movie, I would say: it’s about sharks in suits who spend a lot of time treating women like shit and then come to morally appropriate ends. It’s not a masterpiece of cinema like The Godfather and it’s not probably even as memorable a movie overall as even Casino. Scorsese’s ability to get memorable acting work out of these actors in goodfella wise-guy roles is on display here as usual, but structurally, and from a story-telling standpoint, it doesn’t stand up to the test of time. It ranks in the middle of Scorese’s oeuvre for me, but that’s still better than an awful lot of cinema out there.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

Disabled

April 4, 2018

Commentary, Media, Movies and TV

Did anyone in this movie not end up on the Sopranos?, do I amuse you, do i look like a clown to you

Deepfakes Will Destroy Our Society, but Let’s Talk About the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Foundations Instead

Last night, I felt a hankering to watch the original Iron Man movie, and because this is the era of instant gratification, once we’d finished dinner, coaxed the little dude to sleep, and shut down business operations for the night, we settled in for a viewing via Amazon Prime. Okay, so as instant as it gets when you’re parents, but we did eventually watch it and I think the wife only fell asleep a couple of times.

The reason it was on my mind was because I was browsing the deepfakes gifs subreddit and for some reason, someone had taken a bunch of scenes from that movie and mapped Elon Musk’s face onto Robert Downey Jr’s. It wasn’t a particularly believable deepfake, unlike some of the ones with Nick Cage’s face (I’ll never understand Reddit’s fixation with Cage). We’re 3-4 years away from being able to recast any movie with any person utilizing neural network-based software and a boatload of photographic reference. The deepfakes phenomenon started out primarily being used for incredibly creepy porn, but the technology will likely see numerous uses we haven’t predicted, especially given just about anybody can set up and train one with a little effort. The implications for journalism are particularly worrisome, especially when combined with the level of voice synthesis tech that’s been circulating. Talk about “fake news”… but that’s a much more depressing post. My dive into deepfakes got me thinking once more about the MCU’s beginnings. Let’s fiddle for a while and ignore all that smoke, shall we? (more…)

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Jeremiah Tolbert

1 Comment

February 22, 2018

Commentary, Geek Life, Media

Ten Increasingly Plausible Theories to Explain Why Donald Trump is the President

In 2007, Jesus returned to Earth, born unto a poor Afghani couple living in the Helmand province. In 2015, the new Jesus was killed, along with his Earthly family, in a deadly drone strike carried out by the U.S. military. Everything that has happened since has been the retribution of an angry God.
Global warming has reached a previously unknown tipping point. Once CO2 levels rise beyond a certain point, humanity’s self-extinction instinct is activated by a complex biological mechanism inherent in all species since the dawn of life. When triggered, the dominant species is driven subconsciously to destroy itself. In humans, this takes the form of electing the world leaders most likely to burn it all to the ground. If humans can murder themselves fast enough, in great enough numbers, then the planet might just make it into the next million years with an intact biosphere.
A secret cabal of hyper-intelligent cats, having grown tired of living in the shadows and having finally cracked the chemical formulas responsible for the potent highs of catnip, have enacted a plan to clear the slate and make way for their outright domination of the planet. Pretty soon, we’ll start to see dogs dying in mysterious numbers. That’s the sign that they’ve escalated their time table further.
Time travel, as it turns out, is possible. Unfortunately for us, it was perfected during Hilary Clinton’s second term by the top chronal scientists of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1971, NASA’s long-range threat assessment program LoRTaP detected an extinction-level asteroid aimed at Earth, predicted to impact the Earth in 2020. Everything that has happened since was carefully planned by the secret council known as Majestic-12. Republicans would be allowed to run rampant in our economy, shifting ever larger amounts of money in the economy towards the titans of industry tasked with constructing enormous space-worthy life boats in underground complexes scattered around the world. It was a carefully calculated risk, but one that top Democrats agreed to; without allowing the wealthy to strip mine our doomed planet, no one would survive this. In order to prepare doomed Americans for what was coming, it was determined that the most incompetent president in our country’s history must be elected. Once all hope was lost in the American people, only then would they be prepared to board the life boats and abandon life as they knew it. Only after the meteor shattered our world would the people be allowed to begin rebuilding their spirits.
Trump is the Chosen One, and it his destiny to one day engage the Dark Lord in hand-to-hand combat. His rise was prophesied by George Washington himself in one of his many trances chronicled in the Book Of American Splendors. Today, a secret branch of the U. S. government hidden within the Secret Service are tasked with making sure that Washington’s visions come true. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong. The Dark Lord is nowhere to be found, and the Secret Service is growing increasingly worried that the prophecies have finally failed them.
Economic anxiety… among the reptilians!
Ratings for the trans-dimensional faux-reality show America! have slipped as the show enters its 237th season. Worried showrunners have given the writer’s room free reign to throw anything against the wall to see what sticks. Popular characters were killed off suddenly, and the worst villains allowed to rise to power. Things look bleaker than they have ever before, and a trillion households across the multiverse have tuned back in so ratings have, thus far, shown a very promising uptick. Unfortunately, this strategy has left the America! writing staff in a bind; how do you top the carnage of the 236th season?
Twelve year old chaos magician Aidan Nicholson discovered all too late that what he thought was just a funny “what if” scenario hammered out with a couple of his dorky friends was actually the most powerful spell any magician has ever managed to cast. Aidan desperately attempts to undo his work every day, but each attempt leaves things in even worse condition than before.
Richard Nixon’s dying words formed a powerful curse, a malediction based on his late-life studies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He devoted the last of his energies to curse the once-great country that he believed had wronged him. “If you think I was bad, you fools, then I swear that one day you will elect a leader that makes me look like Abraham-fucking-Lincoln.” Little does anyone know, this curse can only be broken by beating Henry Kissinger to death with a sack of oranges.

Jeremiah Tolbert

Dudes? Feminism is for you, too

First, a caveat. My language below may not be elegant or use the proper scholarly terminology because I’m not formally educated in these subjects, but I have some things to say and I hope I say them well enough to convey my message, which is a simple one. My message here is more specifically for my male peers: gamers, nerds, and geeks.

Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed a lot of guys my generation or younger who believe that feminism is something it isn’t, or have taken some extreme form of it to stand for the whole thing (much like people often confuse radical religion factions to stand for a broader religion). These men (not necessarily full-blown Men’s Rights Activists which I won’t even get into here) believe that feminism has nothing to offer them. Ignoring the fact that you’re kind of a jerk if you can’t support something that doesn’t directly support you, I find this really sad. Most of us don’t conform to the traditional notions of masculinity much at all!

Feminism, I’ve come to learn over the years (perhaps embarrassingly late), has its sights set not just the societal structures responsible for women’s so-called “gender norms” but also the ones responsible for toxic masculinity. When it comes to my male peers, not one of us has escaped harm by toxic masculinity.

Ask any of us to describe what a man should be, and I will bet we’d most often describe gruff, taciturn men who never cry and spend their days drinking beer and fixing cars. Real men don’t have much in the way of feelings you can hurt. They fix things. They certainly don’t play games because they’re too busy doing home repairs or replacing engines in cars. I still have this mental picture.

Me, I don’t conform to that notion in the slightest. I’m a geeky, sensitive nerd who would rather play board games than rebuild a car engine. I barely trust myself with a hammer as I’m more likely to break something with it than I am to fix it. And when I wrote “sensitive” earlier, I felt a strong urge to write “overly” in front of it. That is toxic masculinity in a nutshell.

And do you know why I don’t feel any less than a man? Because feminism has taught me that being a “man” doesn’t mean conforming to any of these things. In general, I don’t feel any need to police what makes a person a man or what doesn’t. Especially not myself. You feel manly? Great. Gender norms are bullshit and I believe you should be who you want and do what you want (provided you’re not hurting anyone). It’s a pretty basic rule that I think most people agree with generally. I don’t know why this particular issue trips people up.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a man for myself lately because it’s entangled with my notions of what it means to be a father. I find myself emulating my own Dad more often than I like. I struggle with how I react, in particular, to my son crying. My bone-deep instinct is to encourage him to stop crying at any cost, to tell him he’s not hurt, etc. But of course he is! When I catch myself doing that, I feel a lot more shame than I ever did for not being able to change the oil in my car or whatever.

I feel like none of my peers really like gender norms much. If you don’t like them, then I believe you need to acknowledge the role that feminism has in attacking all gender norms. You’re more free to be the person you want to be because of the hard work of feminists. Feminists aren’t working to just make the lives of women better; they’re working to make all lives better, even yours.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

Disabled

March 30, 2017

Commentary, Geek Life

Why I am Quitting Facebook (Or Attempting to)

If I were to describe my Facebook habits to pre-Facebook me, he would be intrigued and more than a little horrified. I suppose this makes me a bit of a Luddite these days, to question the value of something that has become so omnipresent, but I have serious beefs with the role that social media has started to take in my life. I’ve spent over a month tinkering with things, trying new filters, and ultimately I’ve decided that Facebook has to go.

First– I’m not here to convince you to quit Facebook. If you’re getting more out of it than you put in, and you’re happy with the volume of energy that you’re dedicating to the platform, then please don’t let me change that. However, if you suspect that Facebook might be bad for your mental health or eating too much time, then perhaps read on and see what I have to say here.

Facebook, when it comes down to it, is too easy. Prior to this week, I had it on my phone, my iPad, my work computer, and my writing laptop. Whenever I was using any of these devices, my awareness that Facebook exists was there in my head. There is an endless stream of links, opinions, and general “water cooler talk” available over on the platform, merely a touch or click away. You want to see aww-cute animals? Facebook’s got it. You want to feel outrage? Oh boy, do they have that too. Do you want to feel soul-crushing jealousy at acquaintances living far more exciting lives than you? Yep. Facebook has you covered.

It’s not all bad. It can make you feel more connected. It helps us keep informed on the lives of people that we would probably not stay in touch with as well without it. It definitely plays a role in informing people and sharing knowledge. But as a “social” tool, I think its flawed, at least for me. “Wow,” sometimes I would think. “I have so many amazing and cool friends all over the world.” But I really examined this, and I realized that I didn’t really know how most of these people felt about me. I don’t talk one-on-one with most of them, and I don’t really have a relationship to them. I have a relationship to a platform that mediates all of my interactions with those people. Facebook chooses what you see, and no amount of tinkering can strip away that algorithm, I found.

It got to the point where I would be around friends in the actual physical world but I would spend part of our time together reading social media. We’ve all been at meals where everyone stares at their phones, and this is the great damage that Facebok has done to me. Because of that endless scroll, you almost feel obligated to keep up. Afraid that you might miss something that will deliver a good little dopamine hit in any of those categories above. I don’t want to make any weak drug analogies, but I definitely began to use Facebook in an addictive way. Wake up, check Facebook. Check Facebook all day. Read Facebook one more time in bed. Repeat. And the longer I went without checking it, the more uncomfortable I felt. I was missing out! The world was moving without me if I wasn’t there, reading and reacting.

Being wired in to the action helps paper over feelings that my own life isn’t going places as much as I would like. As a Dad, I get out and interact with the real world a lot less often than before, and working from home all day doesn’t help. Ultimately, instead of easing feelings of loneliness, Facebook seemed to be exacerbating them. Or, to be more accurate, the way I was using it was.

I want deeper, more personal connections in my life. I don’t need a large number of them, but I also don’t want a third party involved in those connections, shaping them in invisible ways. I want to get to know you, not the you that you project to the public on Facebook. What I’ve come to realize is, my truest friends are the ones that I communicate with regularly outside the mediation of social media. The rest just began to feel artificial, a cheap facade, and I was spending ever-increasing amounts of time on wishing it to be more solid than it was. Far too much time.

It has not been uncommon for me to spend three hours a day reading social media and responding to it. That’s time that could be better spent playing with my kid, reading, or writing. And reading, that’s really what has suffered. I used to read endlessly, but it began to feel like a chore in comparison to the easy quick fixes of social media. I read most often on my iPad, and there was always that siren call of “what’s going on in the world? What am I missing while I’m reading this book?”

My habits around social media developed with no thought to the consequences–no thought about the opportunity costs. For every activity you devote time toward, there are dozens more that you don’t. That’s opportunity cost, and I’m not comfortable with them right now, especially not comfortable making them without careful consideration. I don’t like it when habits form unintentionally.

So here I am, trying to break the habits and form new ones. It’s not made easier by the fact that I’m unable to delete my profile due to some developer apps I have set up for clients. I’m allowing myself to continue to use messenger because that’s one-on-one interaction that I want to foster. This means that I do open Facebook still. And if I’m not careful, I start scrolling and clicking reaction buttons like I never quit. (This explains why you may have seen likes appear and disappear from me lately. Quitting is a process.)

One immediate impact from trying to remove Facebook from my life has been an increase in blogging. Remember blogging? That think we all did before Facebook and Twitter came along to chop up our thoughts into even tinier increments? Even that seems like it was a fad, as everyone makes 20+ long tweet threads that are a pain in the ass to read on a micro-blogging platform. Even I do it, for the simple reason that probably 12 people read this blog, but several hundred (at a minimum) see my tweets. There’s always that dopamine hit of people liking and retweeting.

I like blogging, too–I like taking more space and time to think and share my thoughts. Most importantly, this is a choice I’m making. Less Facebook. More books. More blogging. Deliberate choices instead of accidental habits is the theme of my life right now as I attempt to develop a much healthier lifestyle. I’m choosing what I eat more carefully, and carving out at least 30 minutes a day for exercise.

I want my head space back. I want to spend my time in the real world, being more intimate with it and the people that matter most. I want to live in the now and in my immediate space. I want to get to know my own thoughts better. Doing so can only make me a better writer, and hopefully a better person.

So that’s why I’m quitting Facebook and why I’m limiting how much time I spend reading on Twitter. It’s possible that one day I’ll let myself use the service for a few minutes every few days to keep up better with extended social circles (I do care about you all, honest). If you think of me as a close friend, or would like me to become one, I hope you’ll get in touch with me via email or text or phone–any direct method of communication is alright by me. I’ll be reaching out to some of you myself as time allows. If all goes well, I should have more of it on my hands very soon.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

4 Comments

March 3, 2017

Commentary, Personal Life

addiction, Facebook, opportunity costs, social media, time management

Futuristic Foods and Where to Find Them

I learned over the holiday weekend that my story “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus” made the Tangent Online recommended reading list. It received two stars out of a possible three. My posting this news is not a tacit endorsement of Dave Truesdale or any of his behaviors. Anyway, I’m proud of this story and its reception. It came out during WorldCon in Kansas City and a lot of people mentioned enjoying it to me, which made me really happy.

Speaking of future food, io9 has an article today called “Eight Futuristic Foods You’ll Be Eating in 30 Years” which, see above, is a subject that holds considerable interest to me. I think the list is kind of disappointing and arbitrary, but I do wish I had done more with bugs in my story. I do there there’s interesting material there. What about you? Would you eat bugs or food made from processed bugs? I think this may be one case where the processed version is preferable to the natural form.

This next bit of news has absolutely nothing to do with food — I have a new story out today on Drabblecast called “Garen and the Hound.” This story is another Garen the Undreaming story — the first appeared in last year’s Swords v. Cthulhu. It’s a short short, an easy read or listen. I’m hoping to write another, longer Garen story later this year.

Finally, a personal note from me to you. I am glad that you survived 2016, and I wish you the best of luck in 2017. I hope to have some interesting things for you to read in the coming days. 2017 is gonna be the year of the blog comeback. I’m calling it now.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

Disabled

January 2, 2017

Commentary, New Fiction, Uncategorized

Luke Cage Made Me Uncomfortable And That Taught Me Something About Systemic Racism in Media

Netflix’s latest Marvel series, Luke Cage, left me feeling somewhat uneasy in the first episodes. I wasn’t really sure why. I’d enjoyed all of the Netflix/Marvel series to degrees, but none of them had left me feeling quite so discomforted in the early part of the story. It was somewhere in perhaps the second or third episode when I finally began to put my finger on what was making me feel so strange watching the show. That led to even greater discomfort.

Why was I having trouble? I didn’t always get the cultural references being made. Some of the slang was unfamiliar as well, and I couldn’t identify with a lot of the life experiences of the characters. And then that last matter: there were very few white people on the show. Almost none in those early episodes. That couldn’t actually matter, could it?

My first reaction with myself was to get defensive. Why should that bother me? I’m not a complete stranger to that experience. I lived in Kenya for half a year in college, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to be the only white person around in my travel there. There were times when it was fine, and times when it was uncomfortable, but this felt different. I aim to not be or act consciously racist, although I know I struggle with innate bias like many do. And so on the thoughts went. Basically, the boiled down to “I’m a good person, I’m not racist, the problem isn’t with me, it must be with the show.” Yawn.

If I stopped at that level of introspection, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Thankfully, my thinking went a little bit deeper. As I explored the feeling, it suddenly struck me: oh. Wait a second. What if this is what people of color feel when they watch 90% of American televsion, rarely ever seeing themselves represented, and when they do, it’s a stereotype, a caricature of a real person? Oh my God, it must be something like this. It must be like this with nearly every single show, movie, book. Day in, day out. This is what it feels like to not see yourself represented in the media.

Holy shit.

I was supportive of the cause of more diversity and representation in our entertainment, but I didn’t understand it very well until now. I hadn’t walked a few episodes in the shoes of a person of color, so to speak. I hesitate to even make that analogy, because my short, weekend experience can’t begin to compare to a lifetime of that. I gained a little perspective, that’s all. But it helps me understand and empathize better, to connect with the words I’ve been hearing and reading for so long, but never fully understanding.

My discomfort passed quickly. I found I enjoyed the show even more for the fact that I was witnessing many things and viewpoints new to me. Ultimately, I think the character of Luke Cage is my favorite of the Netflix heroes. More than any of the others, he personifies an ideal, a struggle. To be good and do good for others. Honestly… he makes Daredevil look like a self-obsessed jerk.

All that said – nothing else I could say about the show really matters in light of that little glimpse I received, I think. You could very easily say that this isn’t a show for me. And you’re probably right that in some sense that this show was made perhaps to let people of color feel like I get to feel with nearly every damn show on the television. My experience is secondary to the primary experience. But I thought it worth mentioning. And I hope more white geeks like myself have a similar experience. It was eye-opening for me. And I really want to read about how the show made people of color feel. I can’t wait to listen to their thoughts and experiences with the show, so I can understand all of this even better.

In the future, I hope we get a lot more shows like Luke Cage. I hope they make me uncomfortable in exactly the same way. I eagerly look forward to watching them. As for my own writing, I know that I will take the lesson seriously. It’s going to change the way I think about some things. How exactly remains to be seen, but I am determined not to squander the perspective I gained.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

5 Comments

October 3, 2016

Commentary, Personal Life

Stepping on Acorns

I go on a lot of walks. It’s the only form of exercise that doesn’t leave me feeling like death, which probably means it is barely exercise at all, and my expanding waistline supports this notion. I suppose it would expand a lot more quickly without the walks, so they do serve a purpose. I walk, I listen to podcasts, I think. And at a certain time of year, I step on acorns.

This is absolutely not a metaphor for any other hobby or professional pursuit. I really do this.

You might be asking, why would I want to step on acorns? The right acorn, stepped on in the right way, is practically an orgasmic experience of textured vibration and sound. The perfect acorn crunch is like the best bubble wrap pop times one hundred. Really, why does anybody do anything? It’s pleasurable, and there’s satisfaction in a stepping done well.

I’ve collected below a few tips and tricks to the practice that I think would be beneficial to the beginner.

First, you have to go on walks in places where there are acorns. A treadmill is no good. Indoor tracks or malls, no good. You miss 100% of the acorns you don’t see. Find the acorns, and walk. A nice neighborhood full of mature trees like the one I live in is a good option. If you live in a place without trees, such as the desert, I’m afraid this activity might not be for you. There’s almost certainly some other kind of local analogue you can take up. Let me know what you find.

Next, you have to keep your eyes open and scan the ground ahead. You have to know where the acorn trees generally are, and generally the season of the year in which acorns litter the pavement. You can walk randomly, sometimes accidentally stepping on acorns, but for the best results, step with purpose. Over time, you’ll find that you’ll develop a sense for acorns as you walk and it won’t take so much effort.

The actual stepping can have a variety of outcomes:

Sometimes, you miss the acorn entirely. There’s not much sense in altering the rhythm of your steps to get that acorn that’s fallen out of your path. Sometimes, the acorn falls on the grass, and you can’t crush an acorn into the soil. Sometimes, you step for the acorn, misjudge the distance, and you come down hard on empty air. Them’s the breaks, no pun intended. You have to let go of the acorns you miss. There will always be more acorns.

Sometimes, you step down on an acorn and it’s all rotted out, mushy, and it makes no satisfying crunch. It just kind of… deflates. It’s a disappointing when a step goes awry in this way, but it’s basically out of your hands. The acorn went bad through no fault of your own. You came to it too late, alas.

Sometimes, you step down on an acorn and it doesn’t crunch at all. It’s a hardy sort, and mostly just hurts your foot, even through the soles of your footwear. That acorn wasn’t ready yet. Hit it up on your next walk. Some acorns, you can’t crack for days. You might come to enjoy the challenge. You might just kick the acorn into the storm drain out of frustration. Who knows, maybe that acorn was destined to be a tree, and there was nothing you could do to stop that. Wish it luck and move on.

The worst feeling is when you step on an acorn and you realize it wasn’t an acorn at all– it was a snail. Acorn crushing is harmless; each tree drops thousands of them, and most people don’t want a forest in their front lawns. When you step on a snail, you get the same satisfying crunch, but it comes at a terrible cost of guilt and grief, not to mention an agonizing and instant death for the snail. Sometimes, this happens because you’re not paying enough attention. Sometimes, you step on a snail accidentally, because of poor lighting or bad eyesight. I don’t have any really good advice to avoid this, except to try not walk where you have seen snails in the past. Best to avoid those regions entirely and apologize sincerely to the snails. You can’t take back the pain you’ve caused, but you can try not to do it again.

When your steps are just right, when the acorn’s fallen in the right patch of concrete, and when you walk with purpose, setting your sights on the right nut–you get the perfect crunch. It happens maybe one out of every ten, twenty acorns. The sound, the feeling of it under your foot, it’ll be a mix a pleasure and the satisfaction of a job done entirely right. Nothing beats that, and you can do it a dozen times a day.

To recap: stepping on acorns successfully requires a mixture of planning, intent, practice, and luck. But I know that if you dedicate yourself to the process like I have, you too will be doing it at a professional level in no time at all.

This is definitely about a real thing. But it might also be a metaphor about other things.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

Disabled

September 12, 2016

Commentary

Geeks Dudes, You Need to Learn to Withold Your Opinions Sometimes

I have a 12 year old nephew who I’ve somehow, accidentally on purpose gotten addicted to Magic: The Gathering. I tell my sister that I did her a favor. I crack out the old chestnut, “It’s a good thing, sis! If he’s into Magic, he’ll never have money for drugs!” For me, the only downside is, at any and every family gathering, he wants me to play, and I was never actually very good at Magic. This is all background information for a little incident at our FLGS (friendly local game store, for short).

The nephew mows our lawn, and sometimes afterward, he asks me to take him to an FLGS to get cards. Today, the mower was dead (battery issues) so on the way to taking him home, we dropped into the store. He has never really bought singles before this, and was unclear how it worked. Magic singles in this particular store are put in large card binders that you must flip through. The particularly juicy cards are stored in the glass counter case.

As he was flipping through the binders, a couple of guys in their mid-20s came in and began to look around. One of them decided to look at Magic singles also. This guy decided to strike up a conversation with my nephew.

“What kind of deck are you building?”

“A blue/red aggro thing.”

“Like, with spells, or creatures?”

“With creatures you get out fast and pump up to make more powerful.”

“Blue/red? There aren’t a lot of good cards for that. That won’t work.”

And with that, gamer dude moved on to looking at board games, not realizing that he’d just shit all over the deck ideas of a twelve year old. The nephew was a little disheartened, but he tried not to show it. Eventually he gave up, bought a couple of cards, and we left.

On the drive back to his home, I told the nephew how Magic: The Gathering was in the early days when I started playing. Not very many people had the internet back int he early 90s. There were no deck lists, and there were really only a small handful of sets to draw from. The weird codified rules of Magic hadn’t come to be yet, and you didn’t see the same decks consisting of the same powerful cards over and over again. We often played with 200-300 card decks–sometimes every card we owned. We were free to experiment and try different things.

I said: “I want you to know that when people try to give you advice like that, you don’t have to listen to them. They may be older than you, but they’ve forgotten how to just have fun when they play this game. All they care about is winning at Friday Night Magic. Remember that the most important thing about Magic is to have fun.”

I encouraged him to keep making his own decks, and to keep experimenting. “If everyone played Magic like those guys, nobody would ever invent a new deck again. There are a lot of different card combinations out there to be discovered.”

I’m sure that guy thought he was being helpful, but it’s people like him, and play styles like that, that drove me out of games like Magic: The Gathering. If the collective idea of fun is limited only to winning, and not diving deep into the game’s many possibilities, then a game loses a lot of its luster for me. The same thing as happened with the X-Wing miniatures game for me. It’s ruled now by specific lists and specific play styles codified by “top level” players somewhere else. Where’s the inventiveness and creativity?

You’re welcome to your play styles and your obsession with winning over all else, but hey, maybe don’t put that on a kid? A kid who might crack the code and make the next championship deck if he keeps his mind open. You never know. He certainly won’t do that if he listens to people who tell him to keep “coloring within the lines.” (Is that a Magic pun? Oh well.)

In general, geek dudes, myself included, tend to be full of all kinds of opinions about how games and our hobbies are meant to be enjoyed. It’s one of the many things we debate amongst ourselves as part of the hobbies. However, these attitudes and behaviors do not play well with newcomers. We do a lot of harm to our hobbies when we act like we own the goddamned things, when we project our opinions unsolicited onto others. My nephew did not ask for advice on his deck ideas. That girl browsing the graphic novels did not ask for your advice on which book she would like the most. And so on, and so on–the internet is full of anecdotes like this one of much greater seriousness.

I’ve seen so much policing like this take place in hobby stores. I’m certain I’ve even been responsible for incidents. I’m sure my intention was to be helpful, but you know what they say about intentions. You can bet after seeing the impact things had today on a kid’s enthusiasm, I will be much, much less likely to do so in the future.

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Jeremiah Tolbert

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August 8, 2016

Commentary, Geek Life

geek life, Magic: The Gathering

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