Pushpin the Barbarian.

Some ages ago my wife gave me an excellent Christmas gift: A set of bulletin-board pushpins shaped like medieval weapons, a product of novelty company Nuopinc. The only problem was, I didn't have a bulletin board.

Well, I do now! 

Makes it look like we had a bar brawl with li'l tiny Conan the Barbarian and his pals in here. 

I'm not saying that I got the bulletin board just to display my swords and axes and daggers. I had to switch desks with my wife due to dog-related issues, and her desk doesn't have as much surface area for the piling of papers. So I thought a bulletin board would help, and as the French say, WAH LAH! or Ze idea, I have!  I recalled that I had these awesome pins. 

I'm not posting them here to make you jealous, by the way. That's just a bonus. 

If you want to get a set of your own, I think you can get it from Vat 19, but I'm not sure. Both that site and the manufacturer's site look a bit bewhiskered, like the businesses died during COVID and no one told them. My wife said she got my set at Think Geek, and sure enough my autopsy of that terrifically fun site back in June 2019 mentioned these pushpins and my plan to get a corkboard just to use them. Well, it didn't work out like that; I didn't buy a corkboard until I actually needed one. But I have the best pushpins in town. 

They're particularly good for posting something regarding a task I don't want to do. Take THAT, doctor's appointment card! Stabby stab stab!

Man, my G.I. Joe would have had some fun with these weapons back in the day. Some bad guys would have wound up with axes in their skulls, you can bet on that. 

The Wordle menace.

Once there was a guy named Wardle who wanted to do something nice for his gal, who loved word games. So he invented a little five-letter word guessing game he called Wordle. 

Well. 

Since then, as you probably know, that little game has become as addictive as crack and as big a fad as the Pet Rock. The brilliant little twist, allowing people to post results of the once-a-day puzzle without giving away the answer, makes it a natural for social media. Now people are playing it all over. Josh Wardle, the inventor, sold it to the New York Times, a former newspaper, for million. It's become hot enough to get lampooned by New Yorker cartoonists. 

But more than that, it's been ripped off mightily. Wardle's idea was not entirely original (see, for example, the TV game show Lingo, which originally aired in 1987), so while the Wordle name and design is trademarkable, the game is not. So now we have Facebook's own Daily Word Puzzle, which is available as a five-, six-, and seven-letter game. 

Then there's WordHurdle, which has five-, six-, and the even tougher four-letter variant. Four-letter words don't run through letters as fast, and there are many four-letter words, so that version is the trickiest. It can inspire you to say your own inappropriate four-letter words. The site also has a game called Phrazle, in which you have to guess an entire phrase.

For a real challenge, there is the evil Antiwordle. In that game you don't win; you just try to stay alive as long as you can by not guessing the right word. The problem is, when you use a letter that isn't in the word you can't use it again; when you use a letter that is in the word, you must use it again; and when you use a letter that's in the word in the right position, you must use it there again. My worst score so far is three; my best is fifteen.

And even that's just the beginning. Quordle has you solve four five-letter Wordle-type word puzzles at the same time using the same letters.

Octordle has you solve eight five-letter word puzzles at the same time using the same letters.

This just opens the door for Hexadecordle, you realize. 

I have only played it once, but there's also Lewdle for dirty words only. (They call their own repository of possible answers the "Dicktionary.")

Words not your bag? Well, there's Nerdle for math kids, or Globle and Worldle for geography fans. By now there's probably Nukedle for atomic weights and Spacedle for constellations and Xdle for algebra and Garble for gibberish. I can't keep up with them all. 

Where will it all end? It'll fade at some point, when the smart kiddies who made Wordle a hit go on to something else. Management at the Times will panic, and in trying to "improve" Wordle will ruin it, just as they did with their newspaper. And then we'll go on to some other damn thing, I guess. 

Silly-con valley.

 

The BodiSocc, a one-piece garment, is becoming popular among Silicon Valley types
who hate dealing with laundry.

You know they'd go for it because it:

• features technologically advanced fabric
• is anti-cultural
• is good for the lazy
• has a stupid name
• is childish

Live and let dice.

Some people will know exactly what these are:

And they will probably have a guess why there is no twenty- or eight-sided dice in the set -- because those are probably still in the dice sets belonging to my old friends, decades after the fact.

These four dice were in my first set of dungeon dice, the basic set needed for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. To determine the results of actions in the game, a participant must have a four-sided die, a six, an eight, a ten, a twelve, and a twenty. (It's best to have two tens in case you have to roll a number between 1 and 100; one die is designated the tens and the other the ones. Or you could roll the same ten-sider twice.) I got these from a local toy store, which probably didn't know what the hell the kids were up to now but the older ones wanted these, plus the books for the games and lead figures to paint. The dice came with a red crayon, which was used to rub color into the numbers of the dice. Later in my career I went to the beloved Compleat Strategist on E. 33rd Street, which is still there and still carries a breathtaking array of games and gaming equipment.

There is an etiquette to dice in role-playing games. Messing with a man's personal set of dice is like messing with his car or his gun. Players get very attached to their dice, especially if they were used to make an epic lucky run in a well-remembered game. Then the player will revere the set of dice even if they let him down for weeks and get his or her favorite character killed. They were there for me in the Vault of the Unbegotten, by Crom! Gamers are probably more superstitious about dice than craps players are.

You might borrow a fellow player's dice if yours are on a cold streak, of course, and if you suddenly get a critical hit that turns the party's fortunes around in a desperate battle, you might even want to steal them. Enemies, they say, steal your money; friends steal your books. And your dice.

Once I finally understood what role-playing games are and how they worked, they became my favorite kind of games. I did not and don't much care for board games. In my house, playing a game meant either losing, which was no fun, or winning, and being beaten up for being "smug." (Smugness, I have found, is an easy characteristic to project on anyone who has just beaten you.) Role-playing games were cooperative, meaning the players were usually united in a quest, and no one else in my house was interested in them, which was another plus.

Of course, if you decided to go all Leeroy Jenkins at a delicate spot in the adventure and get the party wiped out, you might be threatened with bodily harm in real life.

I have a lot of affection for those summer afternoons spent rolling dice in parents' basements and rec rooms. I also have a bunch of other dice from other sets in a dice bag -- actually a repurposed velvet jewelry sack -- but the blue set above is always special; my first set. I haven't even played a D&D campaign in eons, but I still use them as randomizers when I can't decide which task on my list of tasks to do first.

Sometimes I tell people I'm a recovering geek, but I'm not sure I ever have recovered. The nerdiness went underground in my twenties but would pop out here and there. Maybe one day I'll start a campaign in the old folks' home. "Okay, players, this one's called 'The Secret Potion of the Senacots, or Questamucil.'"

D&D: Virus of the East module.

Dungeon Master: Okay. You have at last found the Secret Storehouse of the Merchant Kings. The weather remains gloomy. There are signs of other life present within the storehouse.

Bob: What kind of signs?

DM: Other carriages, wagons, and beasts of burden in the parking lot.

Sally: We find a place to park the War Wagon.

Jasper: The Valiant!

Bob: By Plymouthe.

Pete: My thief looks around for any vehicles that might contain riches.

DM: (rolls die behind screen) You see a sign on a post that says "Ye Premises Watched by Beholdervision. All Perpetrators of Criminal Activities Shall Be Annihilated."

Bob: Forget it, Pete. We can't take a beholder.

Pete: Could be a bluff.

Sally: We have a mission, Pete. I say let's go inside and get what we need.

Bob: Can your cleric read the scroll again? Jasper, make a list.

Sally: All right:

From Merchant Kings you must acquire

Five items for your mission dire.

A chest of gauntlets sized for all

To stop yon terror's horrid pall.

A bag of webs need for ye cause 

Protection for ye mouth and schnoz. 

For sustenance the pearls of might 

Of pinto, kidney, black and white.

Elixir of cleansing made with booze

To rub ye hands with thus ye use.

A roll of vellum nice and floofie

To clean excreta from ye tushie.

Gather ye stuff to fight the beast

That grips ye town from farthest East.

Jasper: So, gloves, masks, beans, hand sanitizer, and TP. 

Bob: Let's move out. I'll take the front, Pete will watch our backs.

Jasper: I want a cart.

Bob: We don't need a cart. We can carry it.

Jasper: People always say that and then they find a dozen other things they need. 

Sally: Well, we don't want to have to fight while holding a case of beans. Not like we have a Bag of Holding. Are there any carts?

DM: (rolls dice) There's only one nearby. One wheel looks a little wonky. A small party of goblins is eyeing it.

Jasper: I go grab it. 

DM: Okay. (rolls dice.)

Jasper: What? 

DM: Your mage has no gloves. 

Jasper: Damn it! Did I get hit?

DM: You'll find out in an average of five to six days.

Jasper; I won't touch my face! Come on, Allie Kazam's got a huge intelligence.

DM: Okay, make an intelligence roll.

Jasper: (rolls) Son of a bitch!

DM: I'd say you've already stuck your fingers in your nose.

Sally: Why didn't you let me do a Detect Disease, stupid?

Jasper: Crap!

DM: You see a couple of fat orcs coming out of the storehouse, both coughing heavily....

Apologizing for this one already.

Geek no more.

Bad news on the dork step: ThinkGeek is closing down.

Parent company GameStop is shutting down the online store, your #1 stop for geek shopping for the last twenty years. Cruel fate! Where will people who need Star Wars, Star Trek, or Dr. Who merch go now? Or fans of anime, computer and console games, RPGs, cosplay, SF and fantasy, comic books and cartoons? Not to mention those seeking all kinds of weird gizmos, science toys, and whatnot? Especially the whatnot.

This will be tough on my own personal Santa Claus, the lovely and thoughtful Mrs. Key. She's gotten me quite a few presents over the years from ThinkGeek, some of which I've profiled here, like:

World's smallest operational Pac-Man Arcade Game!

Justice League paper clips!

Pac-Man ghost PJ pants that I didn't know glowed
in the dark until I got up in the night to use the
can and almost had a heart attack!

20-sided-die mug!

20-sided-die snack bowl! (Comes apart into two bowls;
one for dip, one for chips)

Medieval weapon pushpins! (Gonna buy a corkboard
just to use them)

Complimentary Timmy the Monkey stickers!

Lawful Good T-shirt!

BATPANTS!!!!!!!

And that doesn't include the 20-sided fuzzy dice for the car, the vanishing fireplace mug, the reusable hand-warmer that eventually could no longer be reused, and other things I couldn't find. All these were great gifts, often stocking stuffers, and all are the kind of gifts that will be harder to find now.

GameStop says they'll have "some" merchandise on the company site, which I assume will be only merchandise related to video games. Okay, I guess they know their business. But I'm no gamer. I'll miss getting ThinkGeek loot.

I sure hope this doesn't mean I have to grow up now. 😱

Jack and Stan: My take.

When Stan Lee died last year, I got sick of the hagiography pretty quickly.

Polite people, of course, prefer not to speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead is still warm, but it's silly to ignore the fact that Stan was a personal wrecking crew to some very talented people, a glory hog, and before being rescued by Disney movies, his Marvel Comics stock was tanking and the company was in danger of falling apart. It had bounced back from its debt-ridden depths, and Lee was not the man behind the worst of the financial shenanigans, but if the Mouse had not stepped in to snap up the works in 2009, Marvel might have sunk without trace in a quagmire of unreadable comics and bad Sony movies.

The thing that irked me most, though, were several cartoons of Jack Kirby (who died in 1994) welcoming Stan into heaven. When I heard Kirby speak in the eighties, he sounded like a guy who would have been promising St. Peter a great action-packed portrait if he could arrange to keep the gates closed when Stan the Man showed up.

It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, so I don't remember the Kirby event very well. I certainly don't recall Kirby sitting on the panel complaining "Stan Lee is a bastard" and such. But he gave Stan as little credit as possible for any of their supposed collaborative efforts. Jack explained how he had created the Fantastic Four, for example, and detailed meticulously how he came up with the Silver Surfer, whom he imagined as an angelic herald from the Bible, and how that led to Galactus -- because you can't have an angelic herald without a god. Jack gave Stan no credit for any of this.

When Kirby jumped ship to DC Comics, he created a minor toupee-clad character named Funky Flashman, a fast-talking promotional jerk, as a sort of foil to escape-artist hero Mister Miracle. It was an obvious and unflattering portrayal of Stan. So there was clearly not a lot of love.

I don't know if Kirby and Lee ever made up, but I doubt it. The irreplaceable Mark Steyn had this bit of information in his obit for Lee:

With the exception of Spider-Man, almost all of Lee's household-name heroes were drawn by a fellow called Jack Kirby, who never enjoyed the star cameos Stan did in the Marvel movies. Kirby lived modestly in Irvine, California, and spent his days sat on "an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw". He ought to have died the wealthiest guy in Irvine. Instead, his widow had to beseech Marvel for a modest pension sufficient to cover her mortgage, groceries and medical bills.

Stan was worth $50 million when he died.

The biggest names in the Avengers movies were all Kirby creations, if you asked him: Captain America (with Joe Simon), Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye -- even Groot started life as a Kirby monster. Oh, but not Spider-Man and Dr. Strange -- Steve Ditko created them. I'm not saying Stan Lee had no part in the creation of these characters; other people would know better than I. I'm saying that neither Kirby nor Ditko would give Stan much credit. Something about Stan Lee, at least in the sixties, was not inspiring a lot of love among the artists.

At DC, Kirby had a gigantic creative explosion, a pile of "Fourth World" books that seemed to contain every idea he'd ever wanted to use at Marvel, maybe some he shouldn't have. He started proudly by reforming DC's lowest-selling title, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen; people are amazed to hear that it was in Jimmy Olsen's book that the great villain Darkseid of Apokolips was first seen. (Darkseid was totally ripped off when Jim Starlin created Thanos, a bad guy currently causing some fuss in the Avengers movies.) At DC, Kirby set himself a workload as artist and writer that was probably more than even he could handle, fountain of crazy ideas that he was. The books New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, and even Jimmy Olsen were really wild, unlike anything seen before in DC or maybe anywhere else.

But, to be fair to Lee, Kirby needed a good editor, and DC didn't give him one. Letting Kirby go his own way gave us some truly bad ideas, including the infamous Don Rickles series in Jimmy Olsen.

Yes, that Don Rickles. Benton Grey, who's been running a great series on Bronze Age DC comics on his blog, summed it up neatly:

Apparently Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, Kirby’s assistants, were huge fans of then popular insult-comedian Don Rickles, and they thought it would be fun to have him appear in a comic for a few panels and insult Superman. They wrote up some dialog and showed it to Jack, who loved the idea. He, in turn, took it to Carmine Infantino, who never met a gimmick he didn’t like. The editor got permission from Rickles and decided that this needed to be promoted and made into a two-issue feature. Then, out of the unfathomable, beautiful madness of Kirby’s mind came what followed. Apparently, Rickles himself was none-too-pleased with the final result, and I can’t say I really blame him.

The problem was, Kirby was a lot better at writing ponderous operatic hero fantasy than stand-up comedy, and his assistants weren't much help (and I say this as a guy who loved Evanier's work on Blackhawk and other DC properties).

Amazingly, the series continued publication for three more years, but Kirby left a year after this storyline.

Kirby and Lee were probably better together, even if all Lee did was prevent Jack's excesses and sillier ideas from running amok. I have always felt that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were much better together than apart for the same reason, curbing each other's worse impulses. Possibly the same was true with Ditko, judging by his work with DC. What happened to Kirby was like if John Lennon had kept the rights to all the music and Paul was stuck begging for work. Guest starring Steve Ditko as George Harrison.

So I don't quite see Stan Lee as saint material, no.

(Fair warning: This deep dive into dorkitude continues tomorrow, on a different but equally dorky topic....)

Nerd snaps.

Yo mama is so fat, I saw her bearing a howdah.

I was reading about Ungoliant in The Silmarillion and I thought of yo mama.

If yo mama was an Egyptian queen, they'd bury her in the Food Pyramid.

I heard yo mama lost some weight -- got downgraded to a dwarf planet.

I saw yo mama the other day -- that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swol'n parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in her belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that mother ruffian, that vanity in years. She says hi.

I heard the doctor was trying to calculate yo mama's weight with f(x) = b^x but he ran out of numbers.

Gizmodo reports that the big jump scare in the new M. Night Shyamalan movie is a picture of yo mama.

Yo mama's so dumb she would invade Holland and leave her supply centers unsupported in the Mediterranean before a big Italian build round.

I was thinking of yo mama the other day when I heard the fourth movement of Holst's The Planets, and realized that was the closest thing to movement I ever associated with her.

I was looking up the pronunciation of "Chalchiuhtecólotl" and found out it was "yo mama."

I gather that yo mama is a fan of Sir Davy, the great chemical scientist who isolated various elements for the first time -- she was in the park yelling, "Humphry!"

My textbook says that some of the primary fatty acids are dodecanoic, tetradecanoic, eicosanoic, octanoic, octadecanoic, and yo mama.

I saw yo mama in Tod Browning's classic film Freaks. She was the one the freaks called "Ewwww! Gross!"

Yo mama suffers from excessive lack of intellectual and adaptive function and tremendous adipose tissue resulting in morbid obesity, has little moral rigor or regimentation of appetite, and her general appearance is disturbing. I pity you.

Woke on the wrong side.

I kind of like Cracked. It posts a number of articles every day. Maybe a third of them are worth reading for me, a guy not in their key demographics -- college students, geeks, and SJWs, it seems.

Okay, I'm part geek. On my father's side. But I'm no purebred. I can't code and I've never been good at math.

The problem is that Cracked suffers from a deep well of political correctness, which I despise. Any historical piece they do is unreadable to anyone who doesn't look at history through the bloody glass of hatred. They run some very funny stuff, but any number of them might include about seven jokes that could be summed up as "because, racism" "because, sexism" "because, [fill in blank]". It's the opposite of humor, but it's supposed to be funny. Their determination to protect people's feelings is only extended to certain people; a cursory glance at the site shows an equal determination to be rude and unfair and even cruel to the "wrong" people.

And that's what has given me a new look at this millennial attitude. Like a lot of Gen X and older folks, this fury by millennials over every possible slight, real or imagined, past or present, personal or general, fair or not, seems like a disaster for civilization. Crybullies, they're called, and it's a good term for when they silence those with whom they disagree and try to ruin the livelihoods and even lives of those they despise. But now I'm finding it to be pretty sad. People who are that mad all the time cannot be happy.

For the socially aware millennial, every day must be like walking into a field of broken glass and acid pits and random fires. Everything can be offensive to them or some cause they support. I find that I feel that way when I read Cracked, because I don't know when some irritating microlecture is going to fly out from behind a merry wall of F-bombs. It's like they can't be happy until the rest of us are not happy. There's a tremendous amount of hate coming from people who would tell you they're all about love.

So when Cracked asks for money to support the publication, despite the fact that they have online ads out the bazooty (the site makes my phone stall so it can download ads), I have to shrug and say, sorry, folks. I'm white, male, heterosexual, Catholic, and American, and many of your writers essentially go out of their way to insult the things I hold dear every day. I'm not going to get my shorts in a wad over it, but I'm not sending you money either.

I would prefer to support just those Cracked writers whom I admire. Like Mark Hill, who wrote a story about a patrolman who talked hundreds of people from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge -- it was a really good story, a great job of feature writing, and one of the best anti-suicide pieces (without touting itself as one) that I have ever read. Or Lydia Bugg, whose piece about crucial but ridiculous things you should know about your dog made me shoot coffee out my nose. But these writers also have to pay obeisance to the gods of PC, lest they be cast into the outer darkness.

All my thoughts can be dismissed, as they will be, because I am undoubtedly a racist homophobic sexist etc. etc. etc. My answer to that is that I have principles, informed by my faith and my belief in what Dennis Prager calls Americanism; I know my own prejudices and I fight them in myself. We are all prejudiced, no matter how "woke" you are (honestly, "woke"? Are toddlers leading this thing?). Ultimately our worst instincts put us each in a tribe of One, and everyone else can go to hell. Because, human nature.

I'd also point out that microaggressive racism has been shown to be malarkey, just for the record. Do read the piece; it is a classic of real feature writing.

Geek mall.

I get e-mails and occasional catalogs from ThinkGeek.com, an excellent site to buy things for people who are geeks and refuse to grow up.

If they'd had this when I was a kid, I'd have never had any money ever. Come to think of it, I never did have any money ever, but I would have been saving any money I did get to blow it on Think Geek. 

For example, you never knew that you needed silver Batman cuff links, but you will now:

So do I, although dapper as I am, I do not even own a shirt that can take cuff links. However, were I to be a member of a geek wedding party -- a generous one, as these are $50 -- and received these as a groomsman's gift, I would buy such a shirt for just that purpose. 

Most of their products are appropriate for family use, but I did find some things, like the Harry Potter Corset, to be in questionable taste. 

I suppose that might be more appealing to young folks who grew up with the Potter franchise, but I was an adult when the first book came out, so it's hard for me to see a kids' series turned toward naughtiness. It would be like the darker, grittier Hundred Acre Wood.

I also think the design is kind of lousy, with the stupid little tie. 

If your dad is a geek or a dork or a nerd, you must browse their panoply of dad gifts before Father's Day creeps up on us. Where else can you find a Tie Fighter Tie? 

Nowhere, that's where; it's an exclusive to Think Geek. So it's either that for Dad or a new pocket protector, I guess; your choice! (Oddly enough, Think Geek has no pocket protectors for sale at this time. They do have a Sonic Screwdriver, so there's that.)