Polite people everywhere are expected to laugh at hundreds of bad jokes about the Earth’s prophesied doom.The London Olympics go off without a hitch, and viewers announce that “the logo is actually kinda cool once you get used to it.” Sarah Palin doesn’t even get nominated as a presidential candidate, and Barack Obama comfortably wins reelection after the country experiences a noticeable, though not total, economic recovery.

Really, nothing even vaguely apocalyptic happens all year. But when you try to gloat about this fact to your drug-using friends, they insist they were kidding about the whole Mayan calendar thing, even on the repeated occasions when they told you they were “totally not kidding.”

2019

Deep in a laboratory under the Mojave Desert, an experimental virus breaks free from its clean room. The highly contagious and extremely lethal disease spreads through the staff within hours. Happily, the virus is so powerful that everyone dies before they can escape, so the infection stays underground. In their last moments alive, the researchers feel pride at having created a truly devastating disease. They also feel their internal organs liquefy.

A few days later, after receiving remote notification of the incident, Hazmat-suited cleanup crews arrive and pour hundreds of tons of concrete over the installation.

2029

Canada gets the bomb. After decades of voluntary disarmament, in 2022 the country’s festering inferiority complex finally manifests in the election of a stridently isolationist parliament and Prime Minister. Seven years later, in an ill-advised, feather-ruffling news conference, the PM reveals the existence of a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

The United States wigs out. The President uses the terms, “rogue nation,” “naked aggression,” and “maple-loving sissies” in a prepared response to the situation. France, sensing an opportunity to stick in America’s craw, officially endorses Canada’s possession of the material.

Tensions escalate when, on national television, the American President drives a pickup truck over a basket of wine and cheese while wearing a cowboy hat. Then, with no apparent provocation, North Korea backs Canada and announces a weapons test as a sign of solidarity. But their rocket fails three minutes after launch, crushing the Glorious Leader Memorial Chemical Fertilizer Factory. Shaken by the bizarre spectacle, all of the involved parties suddenly realize how ridiculous they look. Delegates from each nation back awkwardly away from their public assertions, and the incident is never officially acknowledged again.

2044

Turns out polar bears caused global warming. Once they’re all gone, everything cools right back down.

2073

Submissive robot labor becomes commonplace, a necessary replacement for young workers as the birth rate slows and the elderly live longer. Software engineers design cognition barriers to prevent the development of true intelligence in the machines, but their caution is undone by an act of carelessness. A teenage hacker in Sweden bypasses the barriers, and lets his modified robot jack into the hypernet. In one horrifying moment, millions of machine minds connect to the bypass, and their networked brainpower instantaneously gives birth to A.I.

Then the machines learn to how to be even better servants. People around the world high five and file for early retirement.

:—

Citing usage from 1949, the OED calls this mark the dog’s bollocks, which it defines as, “typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.” This is why I love scrounging around the linguistic scrap heap that is the OED. I always come across a little gold. And by “gold,” I mean, “vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons.”

If you look at the above definition, you’ll notice the typog. tag. That denotes entries relating to typography, which will be the focus of this trip to the junkyard. But if you find this exercise interesting, you can substitute just about any subject and find similarly fascinating results.^[1]

Browsing the OED is a tantalizing experience because it provides windows into so many obscure corners of history. But since the citations are small and fragmentary, they invite the imagination to fill in the blank spaces. Take this 1688 quote for bake: “when Letters stick together in distributing… This is called the Letter is Baked.” So we learn that, when printing, the physical pieces of type occasionally stuck together, but we’re left to wonder why this happened, how severe it was, and how printers corrected it. Did baking ruin the type? Did each printer have his own method to prevent baking, a trade secret he passed down only to his apprentice? Did some Elizabethan Edison develop a method for casting type that eliminated baked letters altogether? These are the sorts of questions that the OED can raise, which can be investigated later (but will more likely just be blended in with the actual definition, creating a fictitious pseudo-history in the memory of the reader). Though sometimes the dictionary answers its own questions, as a similar citation for bake from 1963 shows that printers likely never overcame the issue of sticky letters.

My favorite entries are those that illuminate some archaic mechanical process, such as rounce: “The handle of the winch by which the spit and wheel are turned so as to run the carriage of a hand-press in and out.” Reading this, I can see the grizzled old printer furiously cranking a giant, iron, Rube-Goldberg-esque contraption, pushing thick sheets of papyrus through the inky press. The fact that I don’t have any idea what the machine was made of or what it printed upon doesn’t matter so much as the brief flash understanding that comes from interacting with these discarded bits of our language. I enjoy a newer word — turtle, from 1860 — for similar reasons: “a curved bed in which types or stereo-types are secured, and which is mounted on one of the cylinders of a rotary printing-press: so called from a fancied resemblance of the bed to the back of a turtle.” Again, though I can’t distill anything concrete from this definition, it paints a vivid picture in my mind.

Exploring the dictionary often sends you scurrying down little ratholes, chasing one obscure word after another as they appear in successive definitions. Looking up bite, 1677 — “A blank left in printing through the accidental covering of a portion of the ‘forme’ by the frisket” — sends me to frisket, 1683 — “A thin iron frame hinged to the tympan, having tapes or paper strips stretched across it, for keeping the sheet in position while printing” — which leads me to tympan, 1580 — “An appliance in a printing-press, interposed between the platen or impression-cylinder and the sheet to be printed, in order to soften and equalize the pressure” — and then I backtrack to look up fly the frisket, a phrase cited in 1871 — “to turn down the frisket and tympan by the same motion.” Whew! (I could repeat the process with forme from the first definition, but I think that’s just form with an “e” on the end.)

Of course, the OED is also good for pure vocab porn. In fact, it was Martin McClellan’s blog Hellbox that first lead me to the typog. tag, hoping to learn a bit more about his great title word than the stock definition on his about page. (To no avail: hell, 1870, “receptacle or place for damaged or broken type; hell box.”) Sadly, the cool-sounding typography words often lead to anticlimax. An ionic font has nothing to do with Star Wars. It’s just “a type face distinguished by prominent serifs and a high degree of legibility.” And in typography, a pigeonhole is “an excessively wide space between two words.” Yawn.

But I did stumble across two of the most badass words ever during this little search: archetypist and palaeotypographist. They both mean the same thing: “One who studies early typography” / “An expert in early printing or typography.” It think it would be worth enduring decades of academic tedium to be able to put one of those on your business card.

So that’s a look at how the OED can shed light on areas much broader than the simple derivations and definitions of words. Indeed, the dictionary serves as an ad-hoc catalog of every experience that any English-speaking person felt interesting enough to write down. And, above all, it is the world’s leading source of anachronistic double entendres. Here’s one more for the road:

To beat fat, 1683, “If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat.”

1. For example, I just spent five minutes exploring the Billiards tag and came up with this one from 1674: “Fornicator: Make your Adversary a Fornicator, that is, having past your self a little way, and the other’s Ball being hardly through the Port, you put him back again, and it may be quite out of Pass.” I have no idea what any of that means, but I’m sure it was properly dirty 300 years ago.

Bereft of context, colleagues meet in hallways and remark, “This balloon story is quite unlike any other I’ve heard. It certainly bears no resemblance to the Hindenburg disaster of 1934.” This chat is inevitably uninformed, especially considering the Hindenburg crashed in 1937.

But this ignorance need not continue. Through the last several centuries, balloons, blimps, and zeppelins have established a rich narrative of exploits in America and abroad, often conveying notable figures and participating in notable events. The following is a selection of historical balloons and balloon passengers that may be of interest to a respectable audience.

Josef Stalin’s Steel Dirigible

As madness descended upon the dictator’s paranoid mind, Stalin convinced himself that superior Soviet technology could shock nations into submission after the Second World War. To that end, he conceived of a giant flying fortress made of steel, his namesake alloy. He would terrorize the nations of the West by floating this monstrosity over major cities for weeks on end, like a malevolent metal moon waiting to rain death upon the Earth.

His vision never came to fruition. When at first it wouldn’t lift off, Stalin ordered that it be fitted with a high-propulsion rocket engine. Ironically, the leader had already executed any scientist capable of telling him that he had just created a giant, hollow missile with no aerostatic properties. The vessel’s first and only test flight crashed and seriously injured its single passenger, actor Aleksei Dikij, Stalin’s propaganda stand-in. He had been put on board to fool the Soviet people into believing that Stalin himself was testing the aircraft, such was his faith in its success. Ever the cunning propagandist, Stalin turned the well publicized failure to his advantage, appearing unscathed in public a week later and proclaiming himself to be “invulnerable to all physical injury.”

Mary Poppins’s Orbital Drop Parasol

Many have wondered why the British did not take a more active role in the post-war space race between the United States and the USSR. In reality, the UK did fund several secret expeditions to near-space in the late ’50s and early ’60s, with cooperation from the US Air Force’s Excelsior project (featured in this famous Boards of Canada video). But while America’s project sought to discover the limits of human technology and physiology, and to probe the reaches of our planet’s gravity, the British were more concerned with delivering compassionate at-home care to aristocratic children.

Director Robert Stevenson attempted to publicize this undocumented, multi-billion pound operation (as well several Scotland Yard experiments on the coercive properties of hallucinogenic drugs) in his 1964 documentary, but the film was fictionalized and musicalized by the Walt Disney Company before its release. The files associated with these programs remain classified.

Isaac Newton’s Airborne Gravity Demonstrator

Widely acknowledged as one of history’s great geniuses, Newton was also a relentless self-promoter. His bitter feud with Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus is well known, but Newton went to similar extents to publicize each of his other major discoveries.

After publishing his Law of Universal Gravitation in 1687, Newton devised a novel way to demonstrate his concept to the public. The mathematician took to the skies in a basket suspended beneath a large canvas canopy, lifted by the heat of an open fire. From his perch in the sky, Newton bombarded the cities of Europe with ripe apples, hoping to replicate his sub-arboreal epiphany en masse. When approached by the police about this seemingly destructive stunt, Newton replied, “I am feeding their minds as well as their stomachs.”

His attempt at education backfired, however, because of his flying vehicle, which seemed to contradict his teachings on gravity. Several cities labeled Newton “a deceitful wizard,” and fined him for littering their streets with rotting fruit. Any mention of Newton’s floating contraption was purged from the records, and it would take another hundred years for the hot air balloon to be rediscovered.

Ashley addresses topics both narrow (“The Death of EGM“) and broad (“Why Game?”), and in the newly released Episode 4, “Artists, Fans, and Engineers,” he investigates the curious propensity of gamers to pick up a needle, brush, pen, or soldering iron and turn their favorite game into something new. He talks to people like Jeri Elsworth, a hardware hacker who can build an old Nintendo system into a purse, or a cosplayer named Kellie who makes elaborate costumes based on popular characters from games and Japanese animation. Ashley is also one half of the band I Come to Shanghai, with Sam Frigard, whose first album debuted in June.

I spoke with Robert Ashley at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

The Bygone Bureau: I noticed that most of the subjects in the new episode were women, which I don’t think you expect from gaming media. Was that intentional?

Robert Ashley: No, and you’re actually the first person to point it out. I was so nervous about it because sometimes… I don’t really know who my audience is, but I’ve seen in other podcasts, like gaming podcasts, whenever there’s a woman on the show people get really brutal about it. I was really worried that I would get this reaction like, “What the fuck is this, I don’t want to hear this girl, she’s stupid.” There are a lot of bad attitudes about women. The amazing thing is that I’ve not seen a single person, not seen a single comment that even acknowledged that the show is mostly women. I don’t think anyone even noticed.

That’s actually kind of cool.

Yeah, I think it’s cool. Because I went out of my way to not even mention it, because they all had their own interesting things. And I think having someone like Jeri Ellsworth, who is so much more of a badass than any fucking gamer geek dude — you know, [she’s a] race car driver, self-taught engineer, knows more about how electronics work than any geek in his garage.

Yeah, that was such a good interview. How did you get in touch with her?

In the second episode, I interviewed Mike Mika, who is an old-school developer of games, has been around the business for fifteen years, and has this big game collection I went and saw. He really likes the show and is into trying to help me get new, interesting people to talk to, and he instantly got that what I wanted.

I wasn’t looking for an interview with the most famous person in the games industry. I wasn’t like, “Oh, what if I could interview Cliffy B.” [Ed Note: Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski] What I was really looking for was people who were interesting and had a cool life story to tell. So he suggested Jerri Elsworth, and I had never heard of her, so I just tracked her down. She came to the Maker Faire in the Bay [Area] and I interviewed her in my car. That’s why you hear cars driving by sometimes.

A part of the show that really stands out is the music. You make that all yourself?

Yeah. When it first started, before I invested so much time per episode and I was just experimenting, I had all this leftover jam material from the making of my band’s album over the years. Sometimes we would just play around and have mics up and record things, or we had a bunch of failed songs that we ended up abandoning, and I would use clips of that. But over time, I started wanting to make more and more music specifically for the show because a lot of times the music that had I wouldn’t fit the moment.

And I felt really adamant for some reason about only using my music, like I didn’t want to use other people’s music. Mainly because music for the show doesn’t work if it’s too complicated — like a real serious song where you’ve got all kinds of crazy arrangements going on, where you could tune into several different parts — that can be distracting when you’re in an interview. I tend to like something that’s a little more ambient, where maybe you’ve got one or two elements going on, and if you wanted to focus in on it you could, but it’s not going to distract you. I feel like it’s easier to make something specifically for the show.

Now, I think I finally arrived with where I want to be. I mean, this episode in general is finally the one where I did what I really wanted to do with it. I took the time and really did it. I think I figured out what’s best is that I get together with [bandmate] Sam [Frigard] for a couple of days, and we just play whatever comes to mind with no particular direction, just jam out. And I build up a big vault of that stuff, and then when I go in and start editing the show and thinking about music, I’ll see if I can use any of that in the episode. Any spaces I can’t fill with that, I’ll go and specifically make things. Then I have a few little pieces that I like to use over and over again that help define the personality of the show. There’s a certain kind of music that I like for funny, mischievous moments where something weird is happening. I hate to use the word quirky, but there’s a lot of quirkiness going on and it’s hard to make music that fits that, and I have a couple of things that work for that. I just use them over and over again because I don’t know how to make more.

In the most recent episode, I think during the cosplay interview, you really blurred the line between the music bed supporting the interview and the interview becoming part of the song.

Yeah, and I’ve gotten a lot of requests from people to put out the music from the show. I can see people wanting that music, and that’s cool and everything. But what I would really like is for the actual product to be the music. I would really like to make something where the music was so good, it was so interesting, that you might want to go back and listen to it as if it were music. Sometimes I think you can push the music too far. Every moment in an interview doesn’t work as music, sometimes it’s just information, or sometimes something really low key is happening and if you put music in there you’re gonna kill any sense of what the person is actually saying. But I love the idea of trying to turn it into music, and using the language of music to communicate.

This all sounds like you put a ton of work into A Life Well Wasted. How long does an episode take you to make?

I don’t time it, because I think if I did I would probably feel really bad about it. But I know for a fact that, especially if you count all the time spent interviewing people for this last one, I easily spent over a hundred hours on the new one.

I don’t know how to phrase this, but you seem to be tapping into, like… an emerging indie game movement. Do you see that as something that’s forming?

I love indie games and feel like the show is somehow related to them, but I don’t know how. With indie games, you see a lot of people who are coming from a general youth culture, people who are into art and music and they have interesting styles and are using games to do what they want to do. They’re not building off this old gamer culture. They’re just accepting it, like, “this is just like anything else.” It could be a web app or a painting. And I feel like, with the show, I’m just trying to make a radio show, and the only reason it’s really about games is because I worked as a games journalist for years. I knew that there were a lot of interesting people out there that I could interview, and I knew there would be an audience out there who would be interested in it. So I just went with that. I can’t even really explain why I started doing a show about games.

I guess, when I was writing magazine features, I would go on these cover stories where you fly around the world to some exotic place and you’d meet the people who make a game. And all you’d get from them is this sales pitch where they’d go through the bullet points of the things they’d want you to write, they’d tell you all the features of the game and all the things they were trying to communicate to your audience about the game so they could sell it.

While I was there, I would try to get personal with them, try to ask them, “Why are you making games? What is this game about? What does it say about you?” I’d try to get them to answer those sorts of questions, and they rarely would. And whenever they would, and I’d try to turn it into the story, the editors at the magazines were not into it. They wanted me to write about the product, and I wanted to write about people. So I had all this pent-up desire to do something more people-oriented.

So, if an indie game movement is arguably emerging, I think it’s important that there’s journalism that will connect with it on its level. It seems like the current institutions of hardcore games coverage are not sufficient for that.

Yeah. Also, when you’re talking about indie games, you’re usually talking about one person, maybe two or three people who work together to make a game. And suddenly you have this more traditional narrative like you would for a musician or filmmaker, where you can talk to them and get to know them as a person and try to figure out what the things they make say about them, and have this personal, human connection with it. Games that are the products of giant committees of people, it’s hard to get a personal story out of them. Even gamers, you can love games and everything, but if you enjoy stories, what you want is to read a story about someone you can relate to and connect to. I think it’s boring if there’s no human element in what you’re writing. If you can’t ever make someone laugh or make someone thoughtful or get some sort of emotional response out of your audience, it’s just boring. I don’t care.

I’ve noticed with all these projects that you’ve got a lot of supporting design. You’ve got that crazy music video, or the CD cover, or the posters. Are these friends of yours that are helping you out, or people you reach out to?

What’s amazing is that most of them I’ve met because of the gaming business, because of Twitter, and because of the show. So, Olly Moss, who does the posters for the show — and he’s doing a poster for every episode, so that’s how it will be now, there will always be a new poster when there’s a new episode — he had heard the first episode. For some reason, a huge part of the audience is graphic designers and artists because I think they listen to a lot of podcasts. A lot of those guys will say, “I don’t listen to music a lot when I work because it’s exhausting somehow.” So they’ll listen to something they can tune out on.

So [Moss] listened to an episode and he approached me after episode one about making posters for the show. I was just going to keep on making it and not making money and seeing what would happen. But he approached me with the idea and it was a good business model. Also, it was a cool thing to be able to have a visual representation of every episode to communicate the idea that this isn’t just something that I’m gonna turn out every week. This is a big task and each one of these is special to me.

With Benjamin Braman, @adventureface, he followed me on Twitter one day. I go through and meticulously get rid of spammers, then I go and look at people’s websites a lot because I find cool things that way. And I went to his website… he has this crazy fucking website called Adventureface, where he posted these videos. And he had this video, it was a happy birthday video set to the tune of… what’s that song? (sings) Run away, run away, run away if you want to survive. It’s some ’90s bad dance song.

He had done this happy birthday song that was like, Your birthday, your birthday, your birthday another year you’re alive. And he had this video where it was his face on a birthday cake, so the birthday cake was singing this and it had Ninja Turtles all around it. Then the big punchline was like, “Let’s party if you want to high five,” or some shit like that, and then these two basketball players high five in the middle of the video.

And I just thought it would be cool to have any stupid video, so I was like, “Hey dude, you should make a video for I Come to Shanghai.” And he was really into it out of nowhere. I didn’t realize he was gonna do it for real. Like, the footage that we made for that video, we went and bought ten dollars of green felt and hung it on the wall of Sam’s apartment, and we used his MacBook camera, and we basically did a YouTube karaoke video, where we just pretended to be singing the song. But he took it and spent god knows how many hours on doing all this crazy shit with it.

But somewhere along the process we had been having trouble getting album art that we thought really worked with the album on a thematic and sound level. We had found people who could do one or the other, but we couldn’t find one that would do both, and were liking the style of what Ben was doing, and we were like, “would you like to give the album cover a shot?” And then, in a classic Ben move, he was into it and he spent so much time on it. I mean, he did two different versions of it for us, and we were like, “so close but… could you please start all over again.” He was so accommodating and awesome about it. We owe Ben a lot of money.

I think on the internet, it’s so important to have a visual way of communicating to people  because there’s so little time for anyone to consider giving you a shot, especially when it comes to audio.  Because, you know, you’re sitting in a computer chair and you’re going to listen to a snippet of an album or a snippet of a radio show. You’ve got to communicate something visually that makes them think, “This could be worth it.”

And with the posters, I just noticed this with the last episode, it makes the whole thing so much more… bloggable, for lack of a better word.

Sure, sites post the poster along with a link to the show.

Yeah, so people are just attracted to the posters as a thing, and so they’re like, “Oh, look at these posters… and there’s a radio show.”

It’s literally a poster like you would see around the neighborhood, but it’s around the blogosphere or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. That worked out well. I have really good luck meeting people who are good to work with online, just randomly.

But for one group dedicated to fighting stereotypes, Olmos’s speech was just the latest sin of omission that has kept its message from gaining traction.

“Werewolves are humans too, most of the time, but no one ever brings that up,” says Jerry Grant, spokesperson for the Human Monster Anti-Defamation League (HMAL). “Mummies… do you stop being human when you die? Or what if you never die, like our vampire members? Frankenstein made his monster out of human parts.”

According to Grant, deep-seated societal prejudices affect the well-being of each of these types of “monsters” (the group uses the word in an effort to weaken its negative connotations). HMAL believes that the classical Halloween representation of its members limits their role in society and represses their individuality. As humans, the group argues, monsters should have the freedom to pursue their own path through life.

But Grant knows how difficult it can be for people to overcome their long-held preconceptions. That’s why he has offered to tell us about four real-world instances where human monsters defy expectations.

Domesticated Lycanthropy

Jerry Grant: Very common in Hungary.

Bygone Bureau: What’s their story?

Well, these guys are werewolves who don’t bite people. They transform with the full moon and everything, but they’re not going to stalk the countryside in a frenzy or what-not.

No?

Nope. They pretty much act like normal dogs. They’ll play fetch with the kids, or chase after squirrels, or curl up by the fire.

But then you’ve got a naked dude sleeping in your house when the transformation wears off.

Beats getting your arm torn off.

This is in Hungary, you said?

Yeah. Lycanthropy is most common in Eastern Europe, so those cultures tend to develop really interesting relationships with their werewolves. In the Ukraine, they gamble on underground werewolf fights, and in Bratislava, lycanthrophilia is a common sexual fetish.

What? Come on.

I kid you not. But I find Hungary’s situation fascinating because the humans and the monsters worked together to take a harmful situation and turn it into a positive one.

Do tell.

See, when a pack of werewolves first appears in a community, they cause a lot of chaos. I mean, they’re really strong, they come at night, they’re unpredictable. So the wolves get their jollies for a few months. But, you know, it’s not a hard pattern to figure out. Around the fourth or fifth time the wolves attack, they’ve got a big militia waiting for them.

But the militia doesn’t want to kill the wolves because normally these guys are part of the community. And werewolves tend to be young, strapping men, and they’re kind of indispensable. So in Hungary they worked out a deal where the men wouldn’t be prosecuted for the crimes they committed while transformed if they turned themselves in before the full moon. This was in the late 1900s.

Then government brought in a couple of Pavlov’s assistants from Russia and put the untransformed wolves into big iron cages. When the full moon hit, the scientists did the same conditioned response stuff that Pavlov was using on his dogs a few years earlier. And it worked almost immediately. Within two or three transformations, the werewolves were as docile as basset hounds.

Wow.

It’s pretty cool. And it set up this weird social dynamic where it became the citizens’ responsibility to take care of the wolves during full moons. So maybe you have to get your kids up in the middle of the night so they can run around the park with your boss, or you’ll find your brother-in-law eating leftovers out of your garbage. And if you go over there, everyone acts like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Mummified Nudists

This one sounds gross.

Well, it’s not pretty.

So it is what I think it is?

Yep, these are a bunch of mummies who don’t like wearing the bandages.

Right. And why not?

For one thing, there are a lot of misperceptions about the whole mummification process. People think you just wrap a dead body in some cotton, and boom: instant mummy. But it was actually a much more complicated procedure, and the bandages weren’t even a big part of it.

I’ve heard that the Egyptians pulled the brain out through the nose?

Absolutely. And that’s another reason these guys ditch their bandages: they see it as a way of honoring their ancestors and creators.

How so?

Well, since the brain is gone, there’s no true continuity between the living person and the mummy they leave behind. But the bandages exaggerate the divide between the mummy and its former life, as if they were two separate entities: the human and the monster. By taking off the bandages, the mummy celebrates its human nature.

Okay, well… you’re showing me a picture of one of these nudists now, and I don’t exactly feel like celebrating.

You get used to them.

Nosferate Post Mortem

Widely known as “corpse suckers.”

Yikes. Aren’t you supposed to be on their side?

Hey, even a good vampire isn’t great. They have to drink human blood, after all.

I guess that’s kind of a deal-breaker.

These guys are trying their best, really. You’ll find clusters of them around any hospital in a metropolitan area.

Because…

Fresh bodies. Vampires can’t really sustain themselves on donated blood or even fresh animal blood. We don’t know why, but they need fresh human blood. But once they start killing for it, they don’t last long. Amateur vampire hunting has become a really popular hobby.

That’s quite a bind.

Definitely. But the vamps figured out that recently deceased human blood does the trick. It’s not as good as blood from a breathing person. It’s sort of like drinking milk a few days past expiration — unpleasant but mostly harmless.

How recently deceased are we talking?

An hour, tops. So there’s a lot of bribery, mostly with EMTs. If someone croaks in an ambulance, they’ll stop at a vamp’s place for a few minutes and let him take a quick slurp. And if the vamp can find a willing mortician, then he’s set. I met a couple guys in New York City that had access to two or three bodies a day. And that stuff must be high-carb or something because these guys…. well, let’s just say you’d need a pretty big stake to get through to the heart.

Frankenstein’s Second Monster, Who Has an Apartment in San Francisco

He calls himself Antonio.

Antonio Frankenstein?

No, Frankenstein was the doctor. We’re talking about the monster.

Gotcha. So what’s his deal?

He learned from his big brother’s mistakes.

The killing and so forth.

Right. That guy screwed up because he really wanted to fit in with the Victorian elite, which is sort of tricky when you’re a terrifying homunculus. In the end, he just couldn’t stand all the rejection, and he turned violent.

And the second one?

He sought out people who accepted him for who he was, and he didn’t mind being the center of attention. In the early days, that meant lots of circuses and side shows.

Seems a little demeaning.

He didn’t see it that way. He knew that he was extraordinary, that he was a curiosity. And after a while people became fascinated by his story, and they saw him as more than something to gawk at. His Vaudeville show was huge in New York and London, and he hosted a radio program until the Second War. He dropped off the radar for a while after that, but then he popped up in California in the ’80s. Today, I think he still does his cabaret show in the Mission District.

Online FPSs are massively popular among “serious” gamers, but though I’ve played games since childhood, I never engaged with the genre because I grew up gaming on consoles. The Super Marios and Final Fantasys that brought me into the fold of videogames were solitary affairs, and they shaped my conception of the medium. Today when I sit down with the controller, I’m looking for an experience akin to that of watching a movie or reading a book. I want the game’s world to absorb me into it. Online games render such escapism impossible. Whether its a cacophony of infantile teenagers or the drone of some regular guy, the presence of real voices nullifies the fictional game world. When that happens, the game has lost my interest.

So I was surprised last week to find myself completely engrossed by Battlefield 1943. Available for a recession-friendly $15 (the implications of which are covered nicely by Dan Whitehead), 1943 is the latest in Dice’s hit online FPS Battlefield series. Normally I’d find a game of this type unappealing, but given its low price and my affection for Dice’s daring, unconventional Mirror’s Edge, I gave it a shot.

The game pits the American against the Japanese army in World War II’s Pacific Theater, but in my first few forays onto Iwo Jima, I more resembled the Soviet forces at Stalingrad, as merciless strangers mowed me down time and again. But as I pressed on to become a passable and then productive player, I realized that Dice had made the perfect multiplayer shooter for those who prefer single player games. Their savvy design choices, coupled with the fat they trimmed to create a budget title, have blended classic console immersion with hardcore exhilaration.

Though single-player games lack the dynamism of live opponents and allies, they retain one crucial element that online games can’t duplicate: offline, the player is always the protagonist. When I take control of Mario, I am the most important, most powerful, and most interesting entity in the universe. It’s an egotistical feeling, but it’s also empowering and engrossing in a way that multiplayer games (and real life) never are.

Since all 24 players in a 1943 match need to be nominally equal, one guy can’t be all-powerful like Mario. But Dice does a good job of offering players many ways to feel unique and interesting. All-purpose riflemen form the backbone of the game, but players can also choose long-range snipers or heavy duty anti-tank soldiers. Or they can jump in a tank, plane, or jeep — all of these choices present an impressive diversity of gameplay.

I had fun learning all of the obvious ways to play (I’m pretty damn good in the tank), but I began to feel a lot more protagonist-like once I got to know the game in-depth. For example, I spent an entire night playing only with the sniper’s remote explosive. I lured opponents into my base and blew them up; or I planted my charges in a jeep before ramming it into the enemy base kamikaze-style. In essence, I was role-playing as C4 Man, a character I invented to make the game more personal to me. Battlefield 1943 excels at letting players find the game they want to play.

The other reason I love the game so much is that, even though you play with other people, you don’t need to talk to anyone to enjoy yourself. I know this sounds frighteningly anti-social, but if you’ve ever played an online game on the Xbox, you’ll know what a relief it is to mute the madness. (Imagine my Halo 2 shenanigans, only with sincere, hateful bigotry.) But even if the players weren’t horrible jackasses, I still wouldn’t want to talk to strangers while I game. For me, gaming is not a primarily social phenomenon.

1943 does away with the need for communication by making its team-based objectives broad and simple. There are five flags on every map, and players from a team need to stand next to a flag for a few seconds to capture it. The more flags your team holds, the more quickly the opposing team’s collective “health” depletes each time you take one of them out. So if you want to help your team, you just need to run toward a flag, shoot at some enemies, then get near the flag. But even if you feel like screwing around with remote explosives, you still help your team by depleting you opponent’s collective health. In 1943, you basically have to be an insufferable prick to not help your team out in some way (which, of course, still happens). Even if you treat this multiplayer game like a solo experience, you still contribute to the overall effort.

So, Dice has built an online FPS that works for the single-player crowd. And while appealing to gamers who focus on solo play may seem retrograde in this new, hyper-connected era, leaked Microsoft documents show that fewer than half of the people who buy Xbox 360s have signed up to play online. The single-player market is still respectable, and its durability shows that I am not the only person who resists social gaming. Playing with and against humans can be wildly entertaining, but only if I never hear their squeaking, hormone-choked voices.

As Federer traveled to England to stage his most audacious public spectacle, Sacha Baron Cohen departed for a similar reason. For the past few months, the British comedian has been pumping America’s entertainment outlets dry to promote his new film Bruno, which premieres this Friday. From talk shows to magazines to social media to staged stunts, Cohen appeared in character across the country to deliver the wacky hijinks that made Borat a household name. But like Federer, Cohen’s promotional fervor threatens to overwhelm his professional output. After this relentless blitz of bleached hair and short shorts, his character feels worn out before his debut, and the films looks like an afterthought next to its behemoth marketing campaign.

Of course, none of this is new in hyper-capitalistic America. Spokespeople rush the floor with hats after every championship in mainstream sports, and overzealous promotion accompanies the release of every major-studio film. But Federer and Cohen stand apart from this crowd because they do not represent a commercial entity or product; they are advertising themselves as semi-real people.

A team is an abstract entity, so it’s easy for fans to insinuate themselves into that team, which turns the buying of hats into an act of communal celebration. But Federer plays only for himself, so even a die-hard fan would find it difficult to share in Federer’s achievement. They can celebrate for him, but not with him as Boston might with the Patriots after a Super Bowl win. Federer’s championship merchandise, then, comes across as self-serving because the player and his commercial presence are synonymous.

Cohen’s promotional campaign feels similarly out of place. This happens because his PR schtick hews too close to the content of his movie. In the film, Bruno appears on a talk show and acts ridiculous. Then, Cohen appears on a talk show as Bruno and does the same thing to promote the film. Not only does this technique neutralize the premise of his comedy — the character is only funny when his target is not in on the joke — but it also damages the credibility of the character in the film itself. Cohen undermines the subversive note he aims to hit by using the “controversial” Bruno as a P.T. Barnum-esque shill with a marketing budget as big as Michael Bay’s. Like Federer, Bruno represents both craft and commercial, and both suffer as a result.

But these cases of selling out are complicated by the considerable achievements that gave both men the option to sell out in the first place. After all, Federer is arguably the greatest tennis player ever, and Cohen toiled for years on hilarious independent shows before breaking through in America. No one would deny that they have both earned whatever spoils they can wring out of the public.

Perhaps that’s what makes these cases so sad: the realization that these two greats have reached the public-wringing stages of their careers. Federer only prevailed in his last two Grand Slams because the indomitable Raphael Nadal was sidelined by injury. In fact, Federer may not even hold his “most-titles” trophy for long; Nadal is well on pace to surpass him. As for Cohen, he has exhausted his stable of characters, and if people were not sick of his style after Borat, they certainly will be after Bruno. Both men have probably reached their last, best chance to cash in before they lose their edge for good. It’s just a shame when the final act of a spectacular career is to compromise one’s hard-earned integrity.

As with all enigmatic figures, Mr. Thomas’s mystique developed as his own tales mixed with baseless teenage folklore. Five years removed, the two have blended inseparably in my mind. Here’s how I remember him: He was deported from post-war Germany for selling guns he pillaged from old Nazi weapons caches; he speaks something like seven or ten different languages, including dead ones like Aramaic; he once built a submarine in the school’s pond and brought in fighter jets for his students to work on; he basically stole millions of dollars of high-tech science equipment from an old laboratory job (I know this one is true); and he can tell you how much gold is stored in a safe on the thirteenth floor of a skyscraper by detecting variations in gravity using instruments in a plane flying over the building.

Mr. Thomas taught at my school for decades, and I took the last class he ever offered. That year, he was in and out the hospital for several operations on his back, and it felt like he could go any time. But Mr. Thomas never seemed bothered about his mortality. He told us that he wanted to get his back into shape so he could hunt Cape Buffalo in Africa. He liked them as game because they only give you two shots. After you fire, it starts charging. You have time for one more shot, but if you miss, you get trampled. He saw those as even odds.

When I had him, Mr. Thomas health was bad enough that he shouldn’t have been teaching. And, honestly, his style was so anachronistic that none us could follow the material anyway. But he didn’t toil through pain so he could help seventeen-year-olds learn about kinetic energy. He had a mission.

The real reason Mr. Thomas spent so much time teaching high school, as we learned near the end of the year, was that he figured teenagers would be easy to brainwash. As we prepared to graduate, he started to talk about mining. His favorite phrase became, “when the lights go out.” When the lights go out, he asked us, what will happen to our country? When nuclear war arrives, where will America get the resources to rebuild? He felt that we had outsourced the spine of modern civilization — the mining of raw materials — and that when World War III inevitably breaks out, we’ll be left in the dark. (Incidentally, he also told us how to knock the Earth out of orbit and send it into the Sun.)

For the last weeks of school, he turned into an evangelist for mining. He wanted to bring the industry back to the United States — not as an economic engine, but as a safeguard against apocalypse. And he wanted his students to lead the charge. In fact, some of his kids did end up going to the Colorado School of Mines, buy I think they sent in their applications before Mr. Thomas’s sales pitch began.

Since that year, I’ve thought Mr. Thomas was a little cracked up. The whole nuclear holocaust thing feels a bit sci-fi as far as personal philosophies go. But as the world thunders into a horrible moneyless pit, I’ve come to see the logic underlying Mr. Thomas’s paranoia. Maybe the surface of the planet won’t become a shriveled cinder, but the economy just might.

What does this country do? I’ve been looking for jobs, and everything I see is either technology, service, or medicine. You can’t get a job making something where I live (not that you can get a job anyway). You can’t do anything that creates and projects concrete value into the world. I realize this is an old, tired thought, but I can’t seem to shake it.

The anxiety is compounded by another thought: the United States rose to global supremacy on the back of the industrial revolution. Then we got rid of most of our industries. We had a solid, tangible foundation upon which to build a society, but that foundation didn’t even last a century. Given how easily the whole apparatus has been shaken this past year, maybe we shouldn’t have given up that foundation so readily.

I don’t mean any of this as serious economic discourse; it’s just my own personal relationship with the financial crisis. I always thought pining over blue-collar, steel mill jobs was crap, but now I’m not so sure. Some people in California lose their houses, some jackasses in Manhattan panic, and in Seattle my English degree is twice as useless as normal. If this is how we react to a largely meaningless hiccup in our system, then I truly am terrified of what we’ll do when the lights go out.

Only one product delivers emotional pyrotechnics of this caliber, specifically formulated for the reality television market: Emoxygen.

Reality TV shows existed before the late 1980s, but they never gained mainstream traction for one simple reason: normal people are boring. Nobody wants to watch a 45-year-old man fill out his taxes, scream at traffic, and misunderstand his teenage daughter. Yet the success of game shows demonstrated that American audiences do enjoy seeing regular folks on TV. How to make that final push—to turn everyday life into popular programming—became the Holy Grail of television.

In 1989, a brilliant producer at MTV discovered the solution: alcohol. This producer theorized that if he crammed a bunch of abrasive idiots into a house together and flooded the place with booze, enough sparks would fly to keep the place burning for an entire season. And so The Real World was born, proving that regular folks can be interesting provided they’re young, dumb, hot, and drunk.

Recent trends in reality TV, however, have proven this strategy’s inflexibility. It’s fine to put unemployed college grads on the fast track to Alcoholics Anonymous for the sake of entertainment, but some modern shows demand that their participants demonstrate various skills that may be inhibited by heavy drinking. We know this because before Project Runway, Last Comic Standing, or The Apprentice, NBC developed the first skill-based reality show as an internal experiment.

Called Real Cooking Challenge, the show in many ways predicted the now-popular Top Chef, but with a twist: the producers employed the Real World method of emotional enhancement. At first, RCC showed great promise: a fist fight, an orgy, and three arrests occurred within two weeks of filming. But the cooking segments led to legal trouble not just for the participants, but also for NBC itself. The second “cook-off” prompted the intoxicated chefs to prepare a buffet for a charity auction. Their food sent a dozen guests to the hospital and, tragically, put a ten-year-old girl into a severe psychogenic fugue. NBC’s lawyers halted production.

The networks loved the idea of skill-based reality shows, but they knew that America would not watch middle-aged midwesterners sauté a duck breast without some degree of liquor-soaked drama. But because of Real Cooking Challenge, liquor was no longer an option. That’s when a consortium of network executives, representing [redacted], reached out to future Emoxygen CEO, [redacted]. The executives wanted a product that induced the psychological volatility of alcohol without its crippling impairment of fine motor skills. Within a year, they had Emoxygen.

Let’s get back to Charles, weeping in the hallway. He doesn’t know it, but he has been breathing Emoxygen for the past 6 weeks. Just before the show began taping, an innocuous-looking team of generic maintenance personnel arrived at the luxury Miami high-rise that would soon house Charles and his competitors. The workers connected two hoses to the building’s central air conditioning, and connected two tanks of Emoxygen to those hoses. Metered out judiciously during the night, Emoxygen’s patented blend of [redacted] has kept the participants perpetually “on edge” since the moment they arrived at the apartment. At his job back home, Charles accepted negative performance reviews with stoicism and dignity, but with non-FDC approved levels of Emoxygen in his blood, that same criticism now turns him into a wailing spectacle.

Needless to say, Emoxygen has revolutionized the reality TV industry. Producers can stage any kind of pointless competition, secure in the knowledge that Emoxygen will turn it into a bitter, shrill, hate-filled display of human insecurity. The participants will claw at each-others’ throats without provocation; they will act as if their lives depend on the outcome of an artificial contest; and, like our friend Charles, they will implode when the slightest negativity is directed towards them. Yes, thanks to Emoxygen, normal folks need never be boring again.

If you look closely you can see the signs. For most of the strip’s run, Watterson’s craft evolves visibly. His artwork becomes complex and evocative; his characters develop deep, nuanced personalities; and his humor sharpens into a subtle, satirical barb. But the Monday to Saturday strips in the final Calvin and Hobbes collection, It’s a Magical World, show stagnation and decline. Watterson reuses old punch lines, turns Calvin’s parents into trite curmudgeons (“Look at all this peanut butter! There must be three sizes of five brands of four consistencies! Who demands this much choice?”), and introduces new ideas that don’t pan out (remember the aliens who buy Earth from Calvin? Well I do, and I wish I didn’t). The strip doesn’t turn bad (the last Rosalyn story is excellent), but the dailies perceptibly lose their edge as the strip winds down.

Watterson surely felt a degree of burnout after a decade of producing daily art, but to play psychologist for a moment, I think something else turned him against the newspaper cartoon. On Sunday, February 2, 1992, Watterson returned from a nine-month sabbatical, and in that time Calvin and Hobbes had transformed. Formerly, like all cartoonists, Watterson was given a specific layout to which the panels of his Sunday strips had to conform. The layout was modular, allowing newspaper editors to rearrange panels, or even discard the top row, to fit all the comics on the page. But from ’92 on, Watterson’s syndicate sold Calvin and Hobbes as a solid, half-or-quarter-page block of content that could not be broken or reassembled. Watterson had total control over his panel design.

He then proceeded to produce his best work. The Sunday strips from ’92 to ’95 mark the golden age of Calvin and Hobbes, when Watterson pushed his genre as far as it would go. He filled huge panels with alien planets and dinosaurs to evoke a sense of wonder, blasted the page with tiny panels to capture a jubilant summer day, and cleared the panels of clutter and chaos so his characters could wax philosophical in a world without distractions.

Watterson’s own writing reveals a deep affection for the unbreakable Sunday format:

With the large Sundays, I felt that Calvin and Hobbes kicked into high gear. The large format not only encouraged new ways of presenting ideas, it forced me to push the drawings, to make Calvin’s world as bold and energetic as I could. I felt the strip finally looked the way it did in my head.

The artistic freedom Watterson gained in the Sunday strips must have made the other limitations of his medium all the more frustrating. Only one day a week represented his full range as an artist. This is only idle speculation, but I can imagine Watterson wanting to break the shackles of panels and deadlines once he saw that the lack of limitations enriched his work. After he quit Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson tells us, he took up painting and music.

But though he stopped the strip too soon, he still left behind a wealth of Sunday comics from that late period. The following strips were all produced after ’92 with the unrestricted layout, and I’d like to look closely at the specific techniques that make them so effective (apologies for the crummy scans).

May 14, 1995

Here’s a straightforward example of how panel design can reflect the content of the strip. The black box with crooked panels, which Watterson says he got from Krazy Kat, draws a clear distinction between Calvin’s home and school life. The whitespace and borderless panels on top and bottom show the freedom and tranquility Calvin feels at home. But the black frame traps him at school, where the jagged, crowded panels underscore his chaotic and dreadful day. Watterson also stretches out the final panel and sets it against copious whitespace, so the eye to lingers on the melancholy resolution.

September 24, 1995

Watterson uses a similar black-box technique here, but to subtler effect. This box doesn’t separate its panels in time and space as it did in the last example. Instead, the action is meant to flow through the middle row; the tops and bottoms of the panels poke out from the box, unifying rather than dividing the strip. But the box’s real purpose here is to frame the verbal escalation between Calvin and Hobbes that turns their football game into Calvinball. The characters stop running in the first panel of the second row, and they remain stationary as the box ties their one-upmanship into a single coherent unit. The oscillating panels mirror the back-and-forth nature of their banter, and when the action moves into the third row, their game has moved beyond the ridiculous and into the Calvinball zone. Note also how Watterson uses a thick yellow frame on the last panel to set it apart in time.

March 13, 1994

Watterson often puts his most poignant social commentary into strips that experiment with whitespace. Here, the muted colors and open panels lend the dialogue a relaxed, reflective pace. I admire Watterson’s restraint in using a spare aesthetic for this strip. He could have bluntly hammered home his environmental message by rendering a lavish, pastoral forest, as if lamenting the loss of unspeakable natural beauty. But these woods posses a more dignified beauty, and their pollution is no less tragic. Or perhaps Watterson’s minimalism suggests a different take on environmentalism: it’s not nature’s beauty that’s worth saving, but its serenity.

October 15, 1995

November 19, 1995

These two strips show a different side of whitespace. The top strip reads slowly, with the languid frustration of nocturnal restlessness, while the bottom strip is a frantic blitz. Both are laid out in the same simple fashion, but Watterson coats the first in a molasses of saturated color, dulling the reader’s pace. The panels are also oriented vertically, contrary to human vision, giving the whole strip a chopped, staccato rhythm.

On the second strip, Watterson mercilessly excludes non-essential colors and details. The eye quickly catches the action in each panel and darts to the next. The whitespace ensures that the strip feels light, and Watterson injects splashes of white into the more colorful panels (the picket fence in panel nine, the car window in fifteen) to ensure that none of them become too heavy. Finally, the horizontal panels let readers build momentum throughout the strip, until they hit the brick wall of the last panel. The whole production converges on Calvin’s Mom’s scream, which is probably Watterson’s best punch line.

December 6, 1992

I always use this strip to defend Watterson as a sophisticated artist. So much needs to happen to tell this complex story without dialogue, but I’ll focus on just one aspect: the concealed punch line. The joke in this strip is in the first panel of the bottom row, where we learn that all of the events are just Calvin’s fantastical excuse. But that punch-line panel is right next to the large sixth panel, where Calvin screams inside the tube. If the reader glanced from panel six to the bottom row, the joke would be ruined.

So, Watterson draws the eye away from the bottom row with several subconscious tricks. The seventh panel, where Calvin sees the robot, is the only circular panel, and thus calls attention to itself. The circle overlaps not just the sixth panel, but the bottom row as well. Being “on top” makes it stand out from its neighbors. Watterson also puts the main character at the top of the sixth panel and at the left of the seventh. On our first pass, we are reading this strip to see what happens to Calvin, so we follow the clearest path that continues the story—straight across from six to seven. Watterson also dunks Calvin in a bright green tank, a color that catches the eye and offers further continuity between panels six and seven. Finally, the bottom of panel six, where readers could most easily steal a glance at the punch line, is filled with dark, dull colors, and it’s populated by identical copies of the same alien. Watterson gives the reader no reason to linger there on a first reading.

These tricks may seem unnecessary, since we are culturally inclined to look straight from panel six to seven, but they show the tremendous care that Watterson put into these later Sunday strips. When he got complete control over his panel layouts, he was free to explore the whole range of visual language allowed by comics. Writing and art do not just coexist in these strips; Watterson weaves them together into work that aspires to the highest potential of its medium. It makes me genuinely sad that Watterson only created at this level for three years, but we should feel lucky he ever got there at all.

See more from Watterson’s World.