Chris Baer – Page 61 – Movement Point

More Pop Peanuts

August 20, 2023September 9, 2009 by Chris Baer

The newest entry in Fantagraphics’ superb Complete Peanuts project, covering 1973 to 1974, arrived in the mail recently. The last volume, 1971 to 1972, saw an increase in specific cultural references that belie the strip’s reputation as being “outside of time”; it’s certainly timeless, but when you have characters mooning over government-sponsored environmental mascots, you’ve dated yourself.

This new volume sees Charles Schultz cranking up the popular culture references: Billie Jean King (who also wrote the introduction to this volume), Bobby Riggs, Olga Korbut, Comet Kohoutek…and, um, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Today, he'd be Judge K and have his own show on TV

The context of the strip makes clear that Landis was involved with baseball—Charlie Brown and Linus have been summoned to the Little League commissioner’s office—but Landis was the Major League Baseball commissioner some thirty years before the strip was published. Probably not a household name even in 1973 and certainly not now.

It’s possible that Landis’ role in Phillip Roth’s 1973 novel, The Great American Novel, helped bring Landis back to public awareness, but the strip in question ran on April 16th, 1973, and Schultz certainly knew of Landis without Roth’s assistance. So this seems more a case of Schultz playing with his knowledge of baseball and planting a name that has enough comic value to make children smile and with enough resonance to evoke knowing smiles from adult readers with a passing interest in baseball.

1974 saw a much more time-bound cultural reference.

Sign Me Up: Washington Metro’s Sign Shop

August 20, 2023August 25, 2009 by Chris Baer

The soul, if you will, of a subway system is in its signage. From the clean lines of the London Underground and its Johnston typeface through the mish-mash of typefaces and styles in New York City’s transit system, signs do more than direct passengers. Subway signs tell a story about the aspirations and history of the system.

Today’s Washington Post story by James Hohmann, (“Metro’s Sign Shop Points Riders in the Right Way“, Tuesday, August 25, 2009) details the efforts of the people responsible for keeping the Washington Metro‘s signs updated and functional:

The sign shop provides a glimpse into the aging system that Metro is struggling to maintain 33 years after it opened. The transit system has about 127,000 signs, which need to be repaired or replaced when they become outdated, vandalized or broken. Or when someone asks for them.

“Every time a new initiative comes down the pike, that number is growing,” said sign shop project manager Paul Kram. “We don’t make policy. We make signs.”

Metro’s signs are just as memorable as the station architecture; while perhaps not as grandiose as the vaulting arches of Metro Center, the signage is distinct and legible, even when the station names grow to unwieldy lengths to satisfy various community constituencies (U St/African-American Civil War Memorial/Cardozo might be an accurate description of the stop, but it’s about six words too long for a station name).

Of note is the trend towards electronic signs, with their limited capacity for stylish typefaces. One hopes that technology will improve sufficiently that we aren’t forced to suffer design limited by the lowest-common denominator of the LCD…

(Image courtesy of wheelo541 via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license.)

Counter Culture: Cards Up My Sleeves

August 20, 2023August 12, 2009 by Chris Baer

Maps? Under plexiglass. Counters? Punched, neatly clipped, and sorted. Rules? Appended with the latest errata from online. Cards? Er, cards?

Cards in wargames are nothing new, of course. As far back as 1974, Avalon Hill released a pair of games, 1776 and Kingmaker, that used cards to control battle tactics or introduce variability and randomness. Our friends in Baltimore also brought us the first of the “card-driven” games, 1994’s We the People. The “card-driven” mechanic, whereby players select cards from a hand to enable actions or trigger events, has spawned hundreds of imitators and innovators. Still other wargames are more than just card-driven—they’re functionally card games, like Avalon Hill’s Up Front (1983) and Attack Sub (1991).

So what’s a gamer to do with all these cards? Why, sleeve them in plastic, of course.

All Sleeved Up

But why does one sleeve cards?

Rainmaker Redux

August 20, 2023July 24, 2009 by Chris Baer

The Washington, DC, area finally got rain yesterday after a very dry July. You’re welcome.

For you see, I, along with two brave compadres, went to the baseball game between the Nationals and the Cardinals last night, triggering the deluge, just like we ushered in the serious rain this past May by going to a game. And this game, a 4-1 rain-shortened win for the Cards, was the make-up date for that game.

Sitting in the right field upper deck, under the overhang, we watched the rain stream down in sheets, steaming as it hit the large banks of floodlights (notice all the water imagery here?). Frankly, the rain provided a more enjoyable experience than the baseball, but we can’t really complain, as we went to the park twice on $10 tickets.

So, for the price of a ticket and some cash for concessions, I’m available for all your rainmaking needs.

(Image courtesy of Cathalain Carter via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license.)

Doctor Who Project: The Aztecs

August 20, 2023July 10, 2009 by Chris Baer

What’s the point of traveling through time and space if we can’t change anything?

You can be forgiven for thinking that John Lucarotti’s “The Aztecs” (Story Production Code F) is about the Doctor and his companions’ adventures amongst the Aztecs. An understandable mistake, because it’s about the Aztecs as much as Moby Dick is about a whale. Which is to say, yeah, of course, but not really.

No, “The Aztecs” is Doctor Who‘s first real examination of time travel and its limitations and potential paradoxes. The Aztec setting is really just window dressing, both scenic and moral, in this story, with endless parades of Aztec warriors processing back and forth whenever Barbara, mistaken for a reincarnation of Yetaxa, an Aztec High Priest, needs to go anywhere, and the issue of human sacrifice serving as the focal point in the Doctor and Barbara’s struggle about whether or not to intervene in history.

The action in the story revolves around the TARDIS materializing in an Aztec tomb with a one-way door that all of our intrepid time travelers manage to go through. This device of rendering the TARDIS inaccessible has been used in every story to date, save “The Edge of Destruction” and “The Daleks,” where the TARDIS was inoperable instead, a narrow distinction. Thus far in the series, the writers have not developed a story where the Doctor would want to stay in the setting and resolve the plot’s convolutions, and “The Aztecs” begins to give us some background about just why the Doctor doesn’t wish to meddle.

Counter Culture: Counters as Tools

August 21, 2023June 21, 2009 by Chris Baer

In our continuing examination of the physical culture of wargaming, we should stop and consider the typical wargame counter:

Unit Counters

It is a representation, a stand-in. It denotes a particular kind of force or unit or grouping manipulable by the player. People argue all day, in places where such things matter, about using representational figures or NATO symbols or made-up icons to depict different types of units, about whether the first number on a counter should be attack value or armor thickness or movement points.

Or perhaps the counter is a status marker, a chit that provides information about the state of the game—broken, suppressed, mired, impassable, out of ammo, out of control. Here be there trenches, dug into the map:

Status Counters

Standard semiotics stuff. Counters are signifiers. This is not a half-inch square of cardboard—this is a platoon of T-64s that has suffered damage but remains battle-ready. Nothing new here.

But in some games, counters also serve as tools to enhance gameplay beyond merely standing in for some object or state that the game wishes to portray.