What a strange month. I’ve wrestled with some type of influenza most of this month. I even called off sick one day. I never miss! I guess it goes hand in hand with our typical ugly Indiana winters. Gray slush, stark treetops, biting cold and the feeling that I just stepped out of a Russian gulag every time I step outside. I’m struggling with Rush’s “Limelight.” Such a beautiful song to play, but despite my beautifully structured guitar hands, I just can’t get my ring finger top knuckle to articulate. All I get is dead strings. Doh!
Rainbow Six Siege: Permafrost: My friend, Dalton Gallaher, coaxed me into trying this ridiculously fun last man standing game mode in Rainbow Six Siege. A group of players put into a winter wonderland complete with blowing snow and Christmas lights, chasing each other around circles of buildings with different weapons dropping at random. At the end of ten minutes, the one with the most kills wins. Using Discord to talk to each other, we would become so concentrated on our grisly tasks, we would be eerily silent. If only I could be this good in regular Rainbow Six Siege!
Baldur’s Gate: It doesn’t quite require a college degree to muddle through this first iteration of Baldur’s Gate, but one might think so. THAC almost needs a key legend to decipher, but not really: To Hit Armor Class is simply the recipe that dictates the lower die roll the greater a chance to break through an enemy’s armor and get a hit on him. I’m at 136 hours now and in chapter 6 (of 7?) I’ve grown to love all my characters and I can see carting them with me into Baldur’s Gate 2 and 3. There’s no hand holding in this old style RPG, and the difficulty and the graphics (it is a 1999 game) might be a deal breaker for non-Boomers who aren’t familiar with these types of games, and purists will tell you it’s not necessary to play through 1 and 2 to get to today’s hot topic, Baldur’s Gate 3. This game is like reading a much-loved fantasy novel and despite its 1,000 page tome characteristics, never wanting it to end.
The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb: A high school teacher living in New England with his wife, who works in the school nurse’s office, decide to move to Littleton, Colorado after she has an affair. Her family is from there, and a move out west might patch things up and reinvigorate the marriage. It’s 1999 and as they arrive, settle in, and both get jobs at Columbine High School, the unthinkable happens: The Columbine School Shooting. He is away from school the day it happens, but the wife is hiding in a cupboard in the library where the gist of it all happened. She survives, but is stricken with PTSD so badly, it tests the bounds of their marriage on a level that makes the affair seem microscopic. Wally Lamb’s writing is mesmerizingly good. I could easily sit on a sofa with a good set of cans on and read this book all day long, never putting it down. Despite its dismal theme, it’s just a fun book to read. This book is why book lovers exist. I remember reading his, She’s Come Undone which was about a girl suffering from obesity. He wrote it from her point of view so artfully that critics and reviewers found it unbelievable that Wally Lamb was not a female!
Lost in Space 2nd Season on Blu Ray: I’m well into this season with my grandson, Eric. The colors are bombastic, and give testament to the notion that when this originally released in 1966, color televisions were still a novelty in all of their 19” glory. The Blu Ray edition rips the rose colored glasses of nostalgia away, as we can make out the flimsiness of the show’s props, make up lines, and the naked effort put into the show’s productions (which consisted of escalated budgets in its time and allegedly contributed to the show’s ultimate demise.) Dr. Smith’s buffoonery and nefarious shenanigans which were always at the expense of the Robinsons’ safety are in full swing here, and we get to see Will Robinson grow out of his little boy self into an intellectual and scientific curious pre teen who probably epitomized every American boy in the mid 1960s. Owning and watching these now with my grandson makes me feel like I am still one of those mid 1960s boys.
Slay the Spire on Steam Deck: After spending a few dozen hours on this artsy indie style card deck builder of a game and getting to the third city, I’ve discovered the great secret. It’s all about the defense! When given the chance to upgrade or acquire new cards, go with blocks and defense. That’s what will see you through those terrible boss fights at the end of each level. Of course I fail, but each time makes me want to boot up the game for another round.
The Wolfman (2010) on 4K Blu Ray: Of all of the classic Universal monster movies, this is probably the best one by far. This is a perfect iteration of the evolution of werewolf movies since 1941’s venerable Lon Chaney, Jr.’s The Wolfman. Benicio Del Toro, who starred in this film, stated in an interview that he had a deep love for the original and even had the famous Lon Chaney, Jr. picture of the wolfman’s face full front as a poster on his wall as a kid. The Victorian setting in London was grandiose and authentic enough to feel as if you were visiting it in a time machine. The wolfman running atop the London rooftops and clinging to a gargoyle as he howls with the full moon in the background is enough to establish a paradigm as a perfect scene in a modern horror movie. Danny Elfman, who did the score, is a composer I’ve always thought of as a creator of “mini-orchestrations.” He does a lot of quick tinkly piano stuff. I think he outdid himself in this movie, however, his music being as much a star as the actors themselves. Like the film itself, the movie is a great evolution of the music that was used in horror films of the 40s. It is oddly similar, just more modern. And lastly, Rick Baker’s make-up. Baker, being the first recipient of the Best Make Up award at the Academy Awards for 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, did the honors here of using make up that simply made the original The Wolfman look as if it were made in the new millennium.
