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Posts Tagged ‘nostalgia’

Diary #662

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , on March 7, 2023| 5 Comments »

I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in the spring of 1981 or maybe a bit earlier; I started my first campaign in the summer of 1981, and I’m sure it will surprise absolutely no one to hear that I rapidly began filling up notebooks with additions, modifications, and what I thought of as corrections to the game system; by the early ’90s the game I was running for my players had diverged so much from the “official” system (was it 2nd edition then?  I wasn’t really paying attention) that they could only barely be considered the same game.  When Grace and I became roommates early in 1998, I was delighted to discover that she had played a little herself and was eager to expand on that experience.  Matt, too, enjoyed it, and I was happy to run a solo game for him as well.  But eventually, life intervened as it is wont to do; by the late Oughts we rarely got the chance, and by the early teens we had let it lapse altogether.  It wasn’t for lack of desire; it was just that I was so busy with everything from blogging and activism to trying to build a house to dealing with financial disaster to going through a divorce and moving to Washington, that I simply didn’t have the energy.  Those who have never played may be unaware that the game takes a lot of preparation on the part of Game Master (AKA “Dungeon Master”) – creating a world and everything in it, and preparing adventures for the players to enjoy – and I had precious little creative energy to spare.  Oh, sure, some people enjoy running premade adventures created by others, but to me that was as unsatisfying as a TV dinner, and besides those were created in a version of the system  I couldn’t even have recognized.  By the late Teens I was really missing all the fun; I considered starting a new game several times, but things just never came together.  Then finally this winter, I brought it up to Grace again, and she was enthusiastic; around mid-January we started playing every Sunday, and though neither of us is young any more, we can still recapture a little of the youthful joy of fantastic adventures in a magical land of imagination.

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Links #654

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2023| Leave a Comment »

They’re trying to kill me, they’re trying to kill me.  –  Akeem Terrell

I’m sure most of y’all are already very familiar with most of The Pointer Sisters’ hits, but were you aware that they had recorded this one for Sesame Street?  The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker (x3), Cop Crisis (x3), and Mike Siegel, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Diary #630

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on July 26, 2022| 1 Comment »

My road trip was apparently more fatiguing than I had at first realized.  On Wednesday and Thursday, I had to catch up on chores, and on Friday I had to do two weeks’ worth of grocery shopping because we were out of quite a few things. Then on Saturday I found myself completely out of energy, despite oversleeping every day since my return; I had a couple of errands to run, but after that I decided to start my edibles early and soak in the hot tub, then catch up on my writing.  It was Sunday before I found myself mostly back to normal, and I put in a good afternoon installing flashings on the cottage eaves in preparation for the gutters, which I plan to start tomorrow as it’s supposed to be unusually sunny and hot today and much less so the rest of the week.  Anyhow, though it may seem a bit silly, the high point of last week was receiving in the mail a disc of the first season of Professor Balthazar, which I’ve awaited for some time.  These cartoons were created by a Croatian animator in the late ’60s, and I saw them as part of the ABC Saturday morning show Curiosity Shop in the early ’70s; I only found out recently that they were only licensed for that show, and could be obtained separately (sadly, it appears no copies of Curiosity Shop have survived).  So I ordered the first disc and put the other two on my Amazon wishlist, and after several months of delay it finally arrived on Thursday.  I’m pleased to say it was every bit as sweet and charming as I remember it from half a century ago, and I’m looking forward to getting the others soon.  If you’re unfamiliar with the Professor and his whimsical adventures, have a taste at his YouTube page.

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Diary #627

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , on July 5, 2022| 2 Comments »

When I was a wee lass, I tried never to miss the Sunday Morning Movie, a local TV institution for many years which generally featured old monster movies.  It was the venue in which I first saw the Godzilla movies, It Came from Outer Space, and many others, including this one, which was among my favorites as a child.  Looking back on it now, I think what drew me to it most was Ross Martin’s sympathetic and touching portrayal of the brilliant humanitarian who becomes a monster; I’ve always thought Martin was very underrated as an actor, and while looking at his IMDb page recently (while we were watching The Wild, Wild West), I saw this flick listed and realized that he was the actor whose performance had so appealed to me in childhood.  So I added it to my Amazon wishlist, and a reader sent it to me last week; I’m keen to watch it again not for the rather melodramatic Frankenstein-derived plot, but to watch Martin’s performance again through adult eyes.  And, truth be told, because I’m really very sentimental and it’ll be fun to revisit a slice of those long-gone days.

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Diary #625

Posted in Diary, tagged , , , on June 20, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Last week I wrote about how much I appreciate my readers’ generosity, and I got ample proof of it again before the week was out.  On Wednesday I drove into Seattle as I do every three weeks, and I discovered this collection waiting for me (along with Vangelis’ last album) from a reader who often gets me nice things (and the note he included gave me an extra smile).  Then the next day, I published a request for help with travel funds (because the skyrocketing price of fuel and everything else has really exacerbated my typical summer & travel anxieties), and within hours I had received about 70% of what I estimate the trip will cost me.  And let me tell you, there is nothing as good for anxiety as feeling supported and cared for!  As I sit at my desk writing this, there’s a dramatic difference in my emotional balance from when I wrote the request just a week ago; I feel calm and I’m looking forward to the journey, whereas last week I was trying to decide whether to rethink the whole thing.  So thank all of y’all for being so amazing; it’s no exaggeration to say that y’all saved my whole trip.

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The Trek Connection

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , on June 6, 2022| 2 Comments »

As I’ve mentioned before, Star Trek was my first love.  It was the first TV show I appreciated on a level beyond merely watching, the first one that really made me think about things, the first one I cared about enough to actually learn about.  It was also the first one I “collected”; what that meant to me in those pre-home video days was, I asked for a copy of Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance (yes, the picture is of my copy, which I of course still own) and read it cover to cover, noting which episodes I’d seen and which I hadn’t.  I also collected James Blish’s episode adaptations, and came to know some of the stories in print years before I ever got to see them on the tube.  I knew the show backwards and forwards, and by the time I bought the DVD collections in the Oughts I had probably already seen every episode over a dozen times (and that doesn’t even count the ones I listened to on my TV band radio).  So as you might expect, I tend to recognize actors who were on Star Trek when they appear in other 1960s and ’70s TV shows.  In fact, it’s part of what I enjoy about watching those shows.  I don’t just mean the regular cast, though of course it’s always fun to catch a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits with a pre-Trek Shatner, Nimoy, or Doohan.  No, I mean that when we recently re-watched The Wild, Wild West, at least half of the episodes had an actor or actress who prompted me to say to Grace, “Hey, that’s the girl who played __________ in [episode X].”  And now that we’ve moved on to Mission: Impossible (Trek‘s sister show, produced by Desilu on the next soundstage over), it’s even more so; there are few episodes that don’t have a guest star who appeared on Trek (and I’m not even counting Nimoy’s appearance as a regular in later seasons).  Sometimes it’s more than one, and we recently watched one in which there were no fewer than five.  I don’t really understand why it pleases me so to recognize the faces (or voices); I reckon it’s just the pleasure of familiarity, like going back to one’s home town.  But just in case there was any doubt in your mind about my level of nerdiness, I hope this post has rectified that.

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Diary #621

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on May 24, 2022| 1 Comment »

When I arrived at my Seattle apartment on Sunday, I found a package waiting for me from Amazon, courtesy of regular reader & gift-sender Robin Aguilar.  It contained Joe Satriani’s latest disc, plus the DVD of the space vampire movie Lifeforce (1985) and this set of a 1977 TV show most of y’all have probably never heard of.  Those who weren’t born yet then may find it hard to believe, but before the debut of Star Wars that same year, science fiction had been very out of fashion since Star Trek went off the air in 1969.  And in those pre-home video days, that meant often the only science fiction shows available for viewing were Trek reruns and old movies in syndication packages broadast mostly on Saturday afternoons and late at night.  There were certainly a few adventure shows featuring sci-fi elements, such as The Six Million Dollar Man, but new straight-out sci-fi series were rare and generally short-lived.  This one lasted only ten episodes, but I liked it very much and had a bit of a crush on Katie Saylor, a leggy blonde who played the Atlantean woman Liana.  Given that I haven’t seen this show in 45 years, I have no idea how I’ll appreciate it through adult eyes, but thanks to Robin I’m going to have a chance to find out!

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Sentimental Journey

Posted in Biography, Diary, Philosophy, tagged , , , on January 20, 2022| 1 Comment »

After Hereticon ended a week ago today, I flew into New Orleans to visit old friends; since my first visit was scheduled for Friday, I decided to go down to the flea market in the French Quarter to see my friend Solomon, an Ethiopian man whom I’ve been buying Indian dresses from since I was a stripper in the late ’90s.  Due to delays in picking up my rental car I arrived fairly late, after most of the vendors had already packed up and gone for the day; however, since Solomon was a friendly and popular guy who’s been a fixture in the market for over 20 years, I asked one of the few who was left about him.  And when I was told he had died just a few weeks ago, I was unprepared for how very sad I felt.  It’s not like he and I were drinking buddies; I never even knew his last name.  But he always had kind words and compliments for me, and never failed to recognize me; everyone in the market liked him, and for my part I never even considered buying my dresses from anyone else.  And when I heard the sad news, I couldn’t help crying; it was as though a part of New Orleans itself had died.  Perhaps that’s part of why I was so sentimental for the rest of the visit; it did my heart good to hear the local accents, to see the displays of king cakes at the doughnut shop where I bought my breakfast, and even just to drive the streets I once knew so well.  I even took some time to go to a branch of the grocery store chain where Grace and I used to shop, and bought some things that just aren’t available in Washington; of course I had to send them home by priority mail so the TSA couldn’t steal them by belching out the magic word “liquid”.  Later that afternoon, my friend Olivia contributed to the nostalgic mood; when it was time for dinner she said, “I made gumbo; I hope that’s OK.”  Nothing could’ve been better!  Because even though I do love my little farm and all my Seattle friends, and have absolutely no regrets about choosing to relocate, one long root of the tree of my life will always be inextricably embedded in the swampy soil of south Louisiana.

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Who Thoughts

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on August 19, 2021| 2 Comments »

If you follow me on Twitter, you have undoubtedly noticed that every day since March, I’ve been tweeting my thoughts about Doctor Who as Grace and I watch the entire series from 1963 to the present.  On Saturday we finished the classic series and have now started New Who, so I think it’s time to unveil something I’ve been working on behind the scenes:  everything I’ve posted to that Twitter thread, collected in one big page.  Practically since I started, my Whovian readers have been asking for this compilation; I’ve been doing it all along, but I wanted to get to what seemed like a natural point to unveil it.  I’m also working on some supplemental materials, including an attempt at a unified chronology of The Doctor’s adventures, but those will have to wait a bit longer until I feel they’re ready to be seen by eyes other than my own.  Then next year, I hope to get it all compiled into a book in time for release the following year, the program’s 60th anniversary.  If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even make a little money from it, and maybe it will introduce more readers to my other work.  But in the meantime, I’m just enjoying writing something light, fun, and even a bit academic for a change.

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Representation

Posted in Biography, Favorites, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , on July 26, 2021| 5 Comments »

A lot gets said these days about “representation” in popular media, by which people mean that it’s a good thing for children or adolescents to see people like themselves among their heroes in TV or movies.  Usually, this is used to mean obvious characteristics like gender, skin color, or disability, and sometimes less-obvious traits like queerness.  But for me, none of those traits meant anything if the characters displaying them were law-obeying, apartment-dwelling, boring-job-having authoritarian squares of the type television has always been infested with, and whose lives mine was never, ever going to resemble even if the character could’ve been my doppelganger in every superficial “representative” way.  By 1980 I couldn’t find a single network TV program which interested me in any way, and even before that the characters who interested me most were always outsiders, weirdos, and outlaws such as vigilantes, monster-hunters, and fugitives, or else characters who had figured out how to fit in while still doing things in their own idiosyncratic fashion.  Anyone more perceptive than I was at the time could probably have figured out that I was going to end up living outside of the law and at odds with the Establishment, so it’s no surprise that one of my favorite shows since my mid-teens has followed the adventures of an eccentric, anti-authoritarian outlaw who stole a spacetime ship from his people and proceeded to wander about the universe, following his conscience rather than some set of arbitrary rules, and teaming up with a long succession of other misfits to ruin the schemes of tyrants, bureaucrats, psychopaths and other violent busybodies while freely associating with weirdos and freethinkers who rarely get along with their local “authorities”.  Yes, representation is important, and never more so than when the type being represented is those who refuse to allow themselves to be sorted into herds and driven to build up power for those who would rule others.

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