Chris Baer

My First Friday Night Magic

August 10, 2023July 18, 2011 by Chris Baer

I’m a wargamer from way back, a good twenty-five years at this point. Never dabbled much in minis, play a ton of Euros, and own a nice collection of role playing game materials. I consider myself broad-minded in my gaming interests. But collectible card games? No, thank you.

The perceived wisdom amongst the chit-and-paper-map crowd is that CCGs are money sinks with constantly changing rules and a mostly adolescent (or adolescent-acting) audience. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who got sucked into a CCG and abandoned the true faith, ranting instead about mana screws and the superiority of a red/black control deck.

Still, the grandfather of all CCGs, Magic: The Gathering, has been around for almost twenty years now, and my experiences with some of the computerized versions (notably Duels of the Planeswalkers on the 360) revealed a significant depth of play. The customizable (read: collectible) nature of the card decks, the millions of potential randomized interactions with another customized deck, and the elegant basic rules intrigued me. Luck plays a role, but it’s mitigated by strategy. There’s some good gaming to be had here.

Oh, yeah. A Mythic Rare!

So, having some free time on a recent Friday, I took the plunge and visited my new Fine Local Game Store on Capitol Hill here in Washington, DC, Labyrinth, and participated in their Sealed Deck Friday Night Magic tournament. The Sealed Deck aspect was key—you buy the booster packs you play with on the spot, a twenty dollar outlay, and use those and those alone the whole night. No need to spend hundreds on a competitive deck with the new flavor of the week card. The event, a “sanctioned” tournament in Wizards of the Coasts’ international tournament structure, was well run, and while there were quite a few seriously competitive players showing off their binders with thousands of cards, everyone seemed pleased to interact with the more casual attendees. I got in four hours of play, met some decent people, and thoroughly enjoyed myself for a minimal expenditure. And now I’ve got some cards to build a deck with if I want to keep playing.

I can easily see how the game becomes addictive. There’s a thrill in opening a sealed booster pack and hoping for a rare card, and every new card adds to the potentials for your deck. Even the constantly changing cards (many of which become ineligible for tournament-level play after a year or so) make sense from a play standpoint—the speed with which you can play matches (fifteen minutes each) can make the extant cards seem stale after months of gaming with them. Most of the people I met didn’t play other games, so keeping their gaming experience fresh is both profitable for Wizards and enjoyable for the consumer.

So, while I may not be a convert to the Church of Magic, I think I’ll attend Friday Night Magic at Labyrinth when I can if they’re running Sealed formats. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to inventory my cards and see about buying some sleeves…

Vinegar Victorious! Stamey’s Barbecue in Greensboro, NC

August 10, 2023July 1, 2011 by Chris Baer

There are certain life rules one should always follow: don’t get involved in a land war in Asia; don’t try to conquer Moscow in the winter; don’t argue with anyone with a bumper sticker on his or her car; don’t jaywalk in front of a cop; and don’t, under any circumstances, attempt to discuss North Carolina barbecue. So, consider this mini-review of Stamey’s Barbecue in Greensboro, North Carolina, a meditation rather than a definitive statement.

Because I’m not about to claim that Stamey’s Lexington-style barbecue is superior to Eastern Carolina-style barbecue (or the reverse), nor attempt to rank Stamey’s in the pantheon of North Carolina barbecue. Not going there. All I know is that on a recent trip to Greensboro, I had the opportunity to sample some of Stamey’s chopped pork barbecue from their original High Point Road location and came away impressed.

Chopped Pork Barbecue from Stamey's Barbecue

Vinegar stars here, suffused throughout the tender (oh, so tender) pork. There’s a touch of chili and a sweetish binding agent, but it’s a vinegar sauce without question. The vinegar flavor is strong but not overwhelming, allowing the pork to have its own flavor. No need to drench the meat in sauce such that you can’t tell what you’re eating. I ate it hot, I ate it warm, and I ate it cold the next morning, and I was happy each time.

The slaw was the true revelation for me, though. I’m very finicky about slaw, and Stamey’s vinegar-based slaw, hit with a touch of the barbecue sauce to cut the acidity, ranks amongst the finest I’ve had. The super finely chopped cabbage provides a nice texture, and as it’s just slightly more acidic than the barbecue, the slaw provides a nice counterbalance.

I’m probably not well equipped to discuss the hushpuppies, as the extent of my prior experience with these fried cornmeal delicacies comes from childhood trips to Long John Silver’s, but if an object can be both light and agreeably dense at the same time, Stamey’s puppies accomplish the task. The hushpuppies had a nice golden crust, holding a bit of oil that brought out the taste of the slightly moist cornmeal interior. I ate more than my share of them.

I also had a chance to sample Stamey’s Brunswick stew but came away underwhelmed. The ingredients were certainly fresh, but I failed to see the appeal of the thin, blandly seasoned dish, especially when more chopped pork awaited.

If only I had thought to buy a Cheerwine to go with my $6 meal. Next time…

Doctor Who Project: Planet of Giants

August 10, 2023June 14, 2011 by Chris Baer

Oh, please don’t keep talking on the twentieth century level. I’m talking about time travel!

Having escaped the French Revolution with his head (if not his fancy hat), the Doctor tries yet again to get Barbara and Ian back to the twentieth century. Given that they’re so close, just a few hundred years off, he attempts to “sidestep” into the 1960s with a simple frequency change on the TARDIS controls. And it works! They’re in England even. Of course, they’re about an inch high when they leave the ship, starting the second season of Doctor Who on the “Planet of Giants” (Story Production Code J), but hey, it’s a start.

Because the TARDIS door opens mysteriously upon materialization—a time Susan declares “the most dangerous moment” in the operation of the TARDIS—the “space pressure” exerted upon the TARDIS at this point shrinks the Doctor and his three companions, a fact they finally realize when they confront giant ants and earthworms and matchboxes.

The travellers split up upon arrival, with Barbara and the Doctor going one way and Ian and Susan the other. This particular grouping allows both Susan and the Doctor independently to come to the realization that they have landed on Earth in a shrunken form.

Indeed, this story presents Susan as a canny and calm time traveller, piecing together clues about their predicament, showing knowledge of TARDIS operations, clambering up corroded drain pipes, striking oversized matches, and even reminiscing with her grandfather about that time they suffered through a World War I zeppelin air raid together.

Until, of course, she screams and screams when she sees the dead giant ant and the not-dead giant cat. In her defense, it is a very giant cat.

Doctor Who Project: The Reign of Terror

August 10, 2023June 3, 2011 by Chris Baer

I get the impression they don’t know where they’re heading for. Come to that, do any of us?

And so the first season of Doctor Who concludes with a six-part story set in far off and fantastical…France?

Revolutionary France, to be precise, during the period of Robespierre’s rule that gives our story its title, “The Reign of Terror” (Story Production Code H). The Doctor has brought Ian and Barbara “home,” as he promised (or rather threatened) to do after dealing with the Sensorites. France seems to be close enough to England for the Doctor, but by the time he realizes he’s off by two hundred years, he’s already been knocked unconscious, dragged out of a burning building by a French ragamuffin, and forced to work on a chain gang. And then he winds up looking like this:

Not entirely sure which is the greater indignity…

The Doctor has the sensible notion not to leave the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, but then, persuaded by Ian’s offer of a drink to make their parting amicable, off they go. Once Ian realizes that they’re not in England (or even the twentieth century), it’s his turn to wish to return to the TARDIS:

Ian: You know, I think we ought to get back to the ship while we still can.

Doctor: Nonsense. It was your idea to explore, anyway. Besides, that might be very interesting. Walk will do us good.

Once again, the writers contrive to split up the travellers, with Ian, Susan, and Barbara (who instinctively change into period clothing they find alongside bread, wine, maps, and daggers in a trunk in an abandoned house) captured by revolutionary soldiers and dragged off to await the guillotine; the Doctor, meanwhile, has been knocked senseless by royalist sympathizers hiding the house and remains undetected by the soldiers, who set the house ablaze. Then you get the kid, then the long walk to Paris, then the chain gang (from which the Doctor escapes by smacking the road works overseer over the head with a very large shovel). It’s a six-part story for a reason.

A Profile of Richard Thompson, Creator of "Cul de Sac"

August 10, 2023May 24, 2011 by Chris Baer

Our overwhelming appreciation of “Cul de Sac” is well documented here at Movement Point, so we were pleased to find a profile of creator Richard Thompson in this past Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine.

Michael Cavna’s article, “‘Cul de Sac’ creator Richard Thompson faces life’s cruel twists with artful wit,” (May 19, 2011) traces both the development of the strip and Thompson’s experience with Parkinson’s Disease.

When you’ve got such comics page legends as Bill Watterson and Garry Trudeau writing encomiums about you, you know you’re doing something right, and though Richard Thompson might slough off such praise, he’s definitely doing something right:

Thompson “has this huge range of cartooning skills…,” Watterson says. “Richard draws all sorts of complex stuff—architecture, traffic jams, playground sets—that I would never touch. And how does he accomplish this? Well, I like to imagine him ignoring his family, living on caffeine and sugar, with his feet in a bucket of ice, working 20 hours a day.

“Otherwise, it’s not really fair.”

The complexity of Thompson’s strips can indeed stop a reader with their wonder. Take the recent run of strips featuring Alice and Sophie on a jungle gym, watching Petey’s soccer practice. That’s some serious perspective going on there:

While I respect that the printed comics page currently exists in the troubled realm of the printed newspaper, whose imminent demise has been predicted for at least a decade, I must confess that I find the Post‘s almost callous treatment of the home-grown “Cul de Sac” puzzling at best.

During the week it rides the Style section along with “Doonesbury”—certainly hallowed company, and fitting for a strip that has better writing than any other strip in the funnies. But on Sundays, comic strip Prime Time, it’s stuffed into the recently revamped (read: downsized and tabloid-ized) Sunday Style section, next to the advice columnists, sometimes in color, always smaller than “Judge Parker,” “Beetle Bailey,” and the egregiously popular and insufferably banal “Zits.” That’s no way to treat what should be the Post’s marquee comic title (not that they do much better by “Doonesbury,” breaking it to run vertically alongside “Pickles” of all strips…)

I can only hope that at some point, the Post moves “Cul de Sac” to the front of the Sunday Comics section. Above the fold. It’s far too good to be buried a page after the wedding announcements.

(“Cul de Sac” strip detail from Richard Thompson’s blog.)

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young B-29 Flight Engineer

August 10, 2023May 10, 2011 by Chris Baer

Once upon a time, museums were much less formal affairs, such that a young lad could sit down at the flight engineer’s station in a partially restored B-29 Superfortress and play with the throttle controls:

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder . . .

The time? The mid-1970’s. The place? The National Museum of the United States Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.

The Air Force Museum has a walk-through B-29 fuselage on display currently, painted in the likeness of the Korean War-era “Command Decision”. I would imagine this display to be the same one I sat in some thirty-five years ago, though at present the fuselage is completely restored, the various crew stations sealed off with plexiglass.

If you note the “Larry + Cathy” graffiti scratched into the paint just above our intrepid and amazed youth, I suppose you can see why they had to seal it off, but there’s something lasting about actually sitting in that seat, moving the throttle and mixture controls, that conveys a sense of history as a living entity, rather than a dusty display. I doubt my lasting fascination with all things aero would be quite so potent had I not had the moment happily captured above.

I’m sure, at that moment, I imagined myself to be not unlike this gentleman, an actual B-29 Flight Engineer.

Oh, to slip the surly bonds of earth…

(Image courtesy of Gary Minnis via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license.)