Sunday Long Read: Sky Scrapers

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Outside Magazine's Brad Rassler, who spent some time on the barnstormer circuit and attender the annual High Sierra Fly-In as recreational bush pilots and hobbyists across America take to the wild blue yonder in the age of social media, influencers, and follower counts.

Throughout the lower 48, recreational bush pilots are using their nimble planes and social media influence to spread the word about bold frontiers in flight: touching down on remote federal lands, flocking to little-used runways in designated wilderness, and drag racing one another for pure sport. Their capstone event each season, the High Sierra Fly-In, never fails to deliver hair-raising thrills.

n early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the Freedom Fox, and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.

Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the Freedom Fox’s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.

Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, Freedom Fox, taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”

I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox, an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.


He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.

Palmer seemed happy to be flying without cameras and a YouTube agenda. “How are you feeling?” he asked, this polite ambassador and evangelist of his winged pastime, this member of a band of nine bush-pilot buckaroos called the Flying Cowboys, social media influencers all, using their platforms to spread the bush-flying gospel to the uninitiated.

In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”

“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”

“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, [and] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.

The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.

He gestured at the twitching control stick. “You might get punched in the nuts when I’m landing,” he said, “but don’t worry about it.”

 

Some 100 years later after pilots and aviators became household names, it feels like there's a whole Amelia Earhart /Howard Hughes vibe around these YouTube aces and TikTok flyers. Whether or not that's a good thing, well, the EPA is trying to crack down on the leaded fuel these planes guzzle, and new regulations may put the chocks on many of these fliers. 

And frankly, in the era of climate change, it's getting more and more difficult really to justify recreational flying anyway.

Maybe Snoopy had it right with his doghouse.

Sunday Long Read: Black And White

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Gyasi Hall at Longreads, who takes a fresh look at the six-decade history of Antonio Prohias's iconic, subversive, and surreal masterpiece Cold War comic, MAD Magazine's Spy vs. Spy.

The seventy-first issue of MAD Magazine, cover dated June 1962, contains a noteworthy entry in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy, a comic strip depicting Looney Tunes-style espionage between two pointy-headed, monochromatic secret agents. This particular installment isn’t the series’ best strip: it’s not the one with the most elaborate explosions, the most clever ending, or the one that’s most exemplary of Prohías’ precise and peerless art style. But it is, for me, the most Spy vs. Spy strip ever, the one that best distills the already simplified distillate and sums up the whole enterprise.

One spy, sporting a trenchcoat, a wide-brimmed G-Man fedora, and secret service shades—a collection of clichéd noir signifiers, all in stark black—stands out in a field with a bucket of water. The moon is full and beautiful. The other spy, identical except in blinding white, peeks out from behind a tree, trying to suss out what his rival is up to. Black Spy stares at the moon through an elaborate sextant, adjusting various settings and making mental calculations, finally drawing an X on the ground with a compass before setting the bucket down. As he leaves, White Spy sneaks up to it, peers inside, trying to figure out what this could all mean. In the last panel, Black Spy has snuck back around to give White Spy a swift kick in the ass, grinning triumphantly as his enemy falls headfirst into the bucket, soaked and seeing stars.

This is the essence of Spy vs. Spy: delightfully stupid without ever being mean, delightfully simple without ever being dumb. Prohías’ comics are as perfect an example of the medium as you’re ever likely to find—even more so, I’d argue, than other all-time strips like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, since its wordless pantomime operates so effortlessly using the mechanics of graphic narrative as its sole language. The above strip works so well because it forgoes high-concept gadgetry to make the petty, low-stakes reality of the spies’ eternal struggle that much clearer. It’s a perfect way to frame the proceeding complexities of the franchise as a whole.

And make no mistake: Spy vs. Spy is a franchise, a bona fide phenomenon, as ubiquitous as comic strips get without the nostalgic momentum of the above GOATs, the “who the hell thinks this is funny?” anti-spectacle of something like Dilbert, or the dearth of basic premise that makes Garfield so ripe for memery. Decades and decades of comics, sure, but also video games, segments on TV shows, T-shirts, trading cards, a board game, action figures, plush toys, Halloween masks, NASCAR promotions, fucking Mountain Dew commercials. The famous image of the spies, shaking hands while holding explosives behind their backs with the tenderness you’d afford fresh fruit, is famous for a reason.

But like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble. As consumers and customers, we are often trained not to see art (or tools or people) as complex things with a story, or the evolving context that informs their continued existence. This not-seeing is often a foundational ingredient of success. The image—the idea of an idea—is what everyone will know, what everyone will buy. I would like to look at Spy vs. Spy in chronological order to tell you the story of a simple, stupid thing. Knowing, after all, is half the battle.

Me, I had all three Spy vs. Spy video games on the C64 (but not the bad 2005 PS2 game, they did the spies dirty on that one) and enjoyed them very much. I also remember the animated Spy vs. Spy cartoons as part of MADtv back in the 90's.

Without a word of dialogue, Spy vs. Spy was arguably one of the best examples of showing a story rather than telling it.

Really do need a 2023 remake of those C64 titles though. 

Sunday Long Read: Professional Chow Hounds

Our Sunday Long Read this week is Jaime Loftus's profile in The Takeout of two world-class competitive eaters: Mary Bowers and "Megabyte" Ronnie Hartman, as they talk about everything from hot dogs to horseshoes to human trafficking.

“You know how many times of the day I answer questions about poop?” an absolutely jacked professional eater asks me. “Every single interview.”

I look down at my notes. Shit, why didn’t I think of that?

It’s mid-July, and by now, the professional eating world is well into its 51 weeks of annual obscurity. The Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest held annually on the Fourth of July has come and gone on Coney Island, its usual winners declared in Joey Chestnut (62 hot dogs and buns) and Miki Sudo (39 ½ hot dogs and buns). Brothers George and Richard Shea, the founders of Major League Eating, were there to promote and announce every contestant with typical gusto. The contest aired on ESPN2 this year—Wimbledon took up the main station—and very few competitors outside of Sudo, Chestnut, and their immediate rivals got any airtime outside a passing mention.

So who are these other people?

Their introductions are carefully crafted WWE-grade nightmare fuel, announced as if each competitor is a god come down from the heavens to vacuum meat tubes down their gullets. The intros for these lesser known eaters are largely drowned out by color commentary about the main competitors—still, there they are, forming the outer edges of a Last Supper–style tableau, each with their own stats and training processes and very specific traumas.

What if I were to tell you these are, by far, the most interesting characters in the professional eating world?

Mary Bowers and “Megabyte” Ronnie Hartman, both decade-long veterans of Major League Eating, are unlikely to agree with me on that, since the stars who take center stage are their friends. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve fallen under the spell of Chestnut and Sudo, too—my book Raw Dog: A Naked History of Hot Dogs focuses mainly on the careers of the country’s best known eaters.

Still, there’s so much to navigate beyond each year’s winners. There’s Joey Chestnut’s rivalry with Takeru Kobayashi, the original Nathan’s breakthrough celebrity, and there’s the industry-wide undercurrent of racism and xenophobia Kobayashi was subjected to. There’s Korean American women’s champion Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, who was forced to navigate the 2011 split of the contest into distinct men’s and women’s contests, something no other professional eating event is subjected to. There’s the unceremonious way the women’s contest has been obscured, shoved onto lesser ESPN stations, even as Sudo has risen through the ranks. There’s a guy named Crazy Legs Conti who I don’t have time to get into right now. There’s a lot.

Ronnie and Mary, by contrast, don’t have eating careers defined by high-profile rivalries—they’ve got something better. The Nathan’s Contest isn’t just their chance to achieve their own personal bests, it’s an opportunity to represent causes you don’t expect to hear about on a major sports network: veteran’s affairs and international human trafficking, respectively.

Stay with me.

 

Do it, this is a fun story and these folks are a lot more complex and interesting than most athletes.

Sunday Long Read: The Mother Of All Card Games

Author Ian Frisch tells the story of his mother in today's Sunday Long Read, who took up new, old vocation after Ian's father died in order to support her family: competitive poker.

My mother learned how to play as a teen, from a group of guy friends at her Massachusetts high school, and it wasn’t long before she began playing competitively. She moved to Houston in her early twenties and played there, too, primarily sticking to underground games. But she stopped after marrying my father, moving near her hometown, and giving birth to me and my sister, all in quick succession. My mother abandoned that aspect of her identity in the face of new responsibilities and for the rewards of family life. But she always stowed a deck of cards in our junk drawer. She taught me how to play at our dining-room table, a flash of her former life trickling into motherhood.

By 2000, when I turned thirteen, my father’s tile business was flourishing. That year, he and my mother finished building a wide-set, two-story colonial with a sunny kitchen and a deck that overlooked the broad backyard: their American dream home. Then, eight months later, my father suddenly died—a stroke on the small yellow couch in the living room. He and my mother had worked for so long to save up for that house, had managed to secure a mortgage they weren’t quite qualified for even while he was alive. And now our family had no income.

My mother realized that the best way she could pay the bills on time was to start playing poker again. She ran the numbers: She could make more money at the card table than at the minimum-wage jobs that were the alternative. She reunited with cards like long-lost best friends—passionately, longingly, both nostalgic and hopeful. She began chasing games wherever she could find them: inside basements with underground tables in our area, in regulated card rooms in New Hampshire, at high-stakes tournaments in Connecticut casinos. She played on weekdays and weekends, logging enough hours most weeks to count it as a full-time job.

My sister and I supported her eccentric vocation. Our mother was home every day when we returned from school—a small token of stability in a household that needed it. Most evenings, she left us at home, but we didn’t mind; dinner was always waiting for us in the refrigerator, our clothes were always washed and folded, the house was always clean. Most mornings, on my way out the door for school, I’d spot the previous night’s earnings spilling out of her purse. The routine became normal for me. She never spoke to us in such terms, not then, but family survival was what motivated her—to save the home that stood as a physical manifestation of her and my father’s upward mobility, to not give up on all she’d accomplished so far. And she always seemed to come out ahead, each year taking home roughly $25,000 in winnings.

My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.

To some people, poker is just a card game, a way to pass the time. For me and my mother, it’s a window into our identity, our way of understanding a world that at times can seem unforgiving. I began joining my mother in basement games around town in 2003, when I was sixteen. Ever since, poker has formed a bond between us, a mutual love, a prism through which I can see her not just as my mother but as a three-dimensional person who carries deep heartache and immense responsibility. Though it took me years to realize it, I now understand exactly how high the stakes were each time she sat down at a card table: It was the only way she knew how to keep living. 

 

I will say that Zandarmom is the better poker player in my family, she's always been good at reading people. Zandardad is pretty decent, and my brother can't bluff to save his life because he always laughs when he tries to tell a lie.

Here's to the moms out there doing what they have to do every day to get by.

Sunday Long Read: The Woman Who Won

More than 35 years ago in 1986, a woman named Barbara Lowe became a five-time winner on Jeopardy! and then she vanished from the program's massive archives. The episodes were considered lost until recently as our Sunday Long Read from Claire McNear at the Ringer details, and the story of Lowe is a byzantine tale of quiz show drama. Well, partially.

 

For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

In the 1990s, Game Show Network re-aired Season 2 of Jeopardy!; eagle-eyed fans noticed that the five episodes featuring Lowe were unceremoniously skipped. When the show launched a 24-hour streaming radio program and a Pluto TV channel that broadcast old episodes, Lowe’s episodes still failed to appear. In markets where affiliate stations play reruns on the weekends, Lowe’s episodes are omitted, again and again.

But the why of that matter, and what exactly happened during those games to incur the enduring wrath of the nation’s foremost quiz show, has long proved elusive. This is particularly bedeviling to Jeopardy! superfans, for whom detailed knowledge of operas, world capitals, and even television ephemera looms large. There are few corners of pop culture where facts and certainty are as celebrated as they are on Jeopardy! Yet one day in 1986, something happened—and nearly 40 years later, no one could say what. For the show’s most devoted fans, hunting for clues about Lowe—Jeopardy!’s biggest mystery and, some claimed, its greatest villain—became a calling unto itself.

Now, for the first time, Lowe is ready to open up about what happened, having caught wind of her place in Jeopardy! lore when one of those superfans tracked her down to see whether maybe, just maybe, she might have recordings of her games. She says she didn’t have the heart to tell him that when she’d moved a couple of years earlier, she’d thrown out a stack of VHS tapes that included her Jeopardy! appearances.

“He said that my episode is regarded as the holy grail of episodes,” Lowe tells The Ringer. “I was absolutely hysterical about it. I thought, ‘That’s insane.’”

And yet Lowe’s episodes were finally found late last year. The discovery of the lost tapes and Lowe’s first interview addressing her experience answer some questions and raise a host of new ones for the people who spent decades looking for the footage. Why were her games shrouded in secrecy for almost four decades? Was there really bad blood between the show and the five-time champ? What transpired during her time on set? And how did this saga come to take on a life of its own?

 

This one's not quite as mysterious as people make it out to be, but it's still a good story.

Sunday Long Read: On Like Pong

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from Charles Russo at SFGATE as he covers the oral history of the first mass market video game ever made: the ubiquitous Pong, the creation of video game company Atari as it celebrates its 50th anniversary, and the world that changed as a result.

 

Nolan Bushnell had a glimpse of the future on his hands.

So in a savvy marketing maneuver, he decided to package it in a 6-foot-tall shell of amorphous yellow fiberglass. It smelled of noxious chemicals but exuded science fiction. He called it Computer Space.

Bushnell and his business partner Ted Dabney had created the world's first coin-operated video game as a side hustle while working in Silicon Valley for electronics heavyweight Ampex. They completed a prototype in the spring of 1971, a decade before arcade classics like Donkey Kong, Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man would fully capture America’s imagination (and quarters). In fact, at the time that Bushnell and Dabney wheeled a working version of Computer Space into Stanford University hangout the Dutch Goose, very few Americans had ever seen a video game before.

"We just had one little rocket ship on the screen, but it was impressive," Bushnell told SFGATE. "I thought we had a huge win on our hands."

Computer Space never quite took off into the stratosphere, but the two aspiring entrepreneurs knew they were on to something. They had formed a futuristic-sounding startup named Syzygy and departed Ampex in pursuit of an industry that did not yet exist. Informed that a candle-making company on a hippie commune in Mendocino was already operating under the name Syzygy, Bushnell rebranded with a Japanese term akin to the phrase "check" in chess. Their scrappy Silicon Valley startup was now known as Atari.


After soon setting up shop in a small facility in an industrial section of Santa Clara, Atari created a new game that was as captivating as it was simple — and that would effectively launch the modern video game industry to the world.

Aiming for a name that was catchy and succinct, the innovators at Atari simply called it Pong.

It’s easy to underestimate just how massively lucrative the video game industry is today. A recent New York Times report stated that it was worth “nearly $200 billion in 2021 — more than music, U.S. book publishing and North American sports combined.” If that seems hard to fathom, consider that Microsoft is right now trying to acquire A-list video game company Activision for the colossal sum of $69 billion. The sheer size of the proposed purchase price is staggering, going well beyond — for comparison's sake — what Elon Musk spent to purchase Twitter ($44 billion) or what Disney paid to acquire the Star Wars and Marvel franchises ($4 billion each).

This month marks 50 years since Atari released Pong as an arcade game nationally to the American public. It was created and first released months earlier here in the Bay Area, before quickly having a much wider cultural and economic impact.

“Pong proved that there could be a market for a video game industry,” author and pop culture historian Tim Lapetino told SFGATE. “It demonstrated that there could be companies and whole ecosystems based around video games.”

In many ways, Pong was the big-bang moment that occurred after early gameplay pixels had begun to form together for years prior. A key pioneering moment in that regard occurred at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, shortly after Digital Equipment Corporation gifted the school its latest state-of-the-art computer, the Programmable Data Processor-1. Weighing over 1,500 pounds and taking up the space of a small automobile, the PDP-1 boasted a whopping 9 kilobytes of memory. Yet its most notable characteristic was that it operated through a monitor, a new and innovative feature that made for a uniquely user-friendly interface.

A few of the bookish (read as: nerdy) members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club immediately began experimenting with the PDP-1. Underclassman Steve Russell, an avid science fiction reader, suggested that they design a game that could play out on the monitor. By January 1962, Russell had finished his prototype of Spacewar, a two-player game in which a pair of rocket ships battled in a cosmic landscape. His classmates improved upon the gameplay with their own design upgrades, and before long, Spacewar was so popular that the faculty had to limit the hours that students were allowed to play it.

“Spacewar was just one of those things that captured the imagination of what could be,” says Lapetino. “It caused a shift in the understanding of what computers can do.”

More than just creating one of the very first video games, Russell and his classmates had developed a template for video game systems. Beyond the game itself, they had designed an external handheld control pad so they no longer had to bang endlessly on a keyboard. Better yet, they realized that the code for Spacewar could be copied and played on other computers, so it soon spread to other elite computer science programs around the country.

"If you were going to play Spacewar in the '60s," Bushnell explains, "there were four places in the world you could do it: MIT, Champaign-Urbana, Stanford and the University of Utah."

 

Having grown up on the venerable Atari 2600 as a kid in the early 80's, I was there when Atari became a home console behemoth, and then burned itself out, leaving the market open for a new path as Apple and Commodore joined the fray, and then Nintendo and Sega years later. I've always been a gamer, and none of it would have started without Bushnell and Pong. 

Here's to the oldest of the old school.

Last Call For The Failbert Files

Author, cartoonist, professional racist shitbag and "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams went on a racist tirade on his YouTube channel that was so vile that it actually got him fired from the funny pages and the bookstores.

 

Andrews McMeel Universal, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” said it is cutting ties with the comic strip’s creator, Scott Adams, after his racist remarks about Black Americans led hundreds of newspapers across the country to drop the satirical cartoon.

In a joint statement, Andrews McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said that the syndication company was “severing our relationship” with Adams and condemned his remarks, saying “we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”

The publisher of a forthcoming book from Adams also said Monday that it would no longer move forward with publishing the title.

The Penguin Random House imprint, Portfolio, said it won’t publish Adams’ upcoming book, “Reframe Your Brain.” The book was set to release in September.

“My publisher for non-Dilbert books has canceled my upcoming book and the entire backlist,” Adams wrote Monday on Twitter. He also said his book agent “canceled” him.

Portfolio published Adams’ previous titles, including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” and “Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America.”

 

Observations:

 

1. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA this is the funniest this guy has been in the entire 21st century so far!
2. Asshole.
3. No seriously, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
4. Adams has been a MAGA jackass for years now if anyone had bothered to notice, and Dilbert was pulled from nearly 80 newspapers the last time he went on a racist tirade back in September.
5. He claimed that his UPN Dilbert show was canceled in 2000 because he's white.
6. If you haven't seen the Dilbert Show, it was Rick and Morty for Gen X. We thought it was edgy back then and for 2000 it was. It got canceled because the ratings were terrible, even for UPN.
7. Asshole, still.
8. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA what an asshole. Even Ol' Teddy Beale despises him.
9. Racist ASSHOLE. 
10. Why wasn't he canceled sooner after finally, after three decades, introducing the first Black character in the strip as Dave, the engineer who "identifies as white" back in May? Guess we'll never know.
    

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Sundar Long Read: Less Is Moore

Our Sunday Long Read this week is M.H. Miller's GQ interview with absolute comic industry legend Alan Moore, the genius behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and more, whose works elevated comics from mere four-color adventures to critical works on life and culture itself, his ur-heroes asking the questions about what humanity would do if given powers and abilities far beyond mortal men, and how superheroes are the most flawed of us all. 

 

Alan Moore, who is perhaps the greatest comic book writer to ever live, does not give many interviews. “No offense, but I am unused to publicizing my own work,” he told me from his home in Northampton, in England’s East Midlands, during one of two Zoom interviews in September, around the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s death. He was dressed, both times, in a red sweater, and occasionally dragged on an enormous rolled cigarette that smoked up the screen. Behind the couch he was sitting on were reproductions of the Enochian Tables, texts from a 16th century form of magic founded by the occultist John Dee. “Whereby,” Moore said, “he was convinced that he was capable of speaking to a range of entities that he had to describe as angels, because describing them as anything else would have probably got him burned.”

When Moore made his debut in the American comics industry in the early ’80s, taking over the little-read Swamp Thing for DC Comics, he instantly made the medium more literary and expressive, injecting it with postmodern techniques that offered a self-awareness and seriousness that previously didn’t exist in the realm of superheroes. Over the following years, he created some of the most enduring works to ever grace the comics form: Miracleman, which took an obscure British knock-off of DC’s Captain Marvel from the 1950s, and transposed him, convincingly, onto Thatcher’s England; Watchmen, a nightmarish parable that imagines how a group of masked vigilantes would actually function in the real world (not very well, it turns out); V for Vendetta, about London after a nuclear war has plunged the government into outright fascism, and the anarchist revolution that emerges as a result (a series that, among other things, popularized the Guy Fawkes mask as a contemporary symbol of dissent); From Hell, a meticulously researched account of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel murders; and the late-period masterpieces Neonomicon and Providence, which posit that the Cthulhu Mythos, the universe in which H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction was set, was not altogether fictional.

Moore will likely always be best remembered for these works, but he has since abandoned comics. Long before superhero stories became the bread and butter of Hollywood, studio executives were exploiting Moore’s writing. The 2001 film of From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, was especially derided, but Moore purists would argue all adaptations of his work—including the critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning Watchmen limited series from HBO, which diverges rather boldly from its source material—are at best reductive misinterpretations and at worst offensively awful. Not only has Moore had nothing to do with these adaptations—he famously hasn’t watched any of them. It’s no wonder, then, that Moore has been a tireless advocate for creators’ rights. After failing to maintain ownership of the characters and stories he created for mainstream comics publishers (predominantly DC) he’s disowned much of his most beloved material.

But he remains a prolific author. His 2016 novel Jerusalem, largely set in Northampton’s Boroughs neighborhood, where Moore was born and raised and where he’s spent the majority of his life, is over 1,200 pages of shifting perspectives, styles, and timeframes. It is both a kind of cosmic autobiography and, taking inspiration from William Burroughs, an attempt by Moore to write his way around death. A collection of stories, Illuminations, was released this month, and includes the novel-length “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” a vicious satire of the comics industry, dedicated to Kevin O’Neill, Moore’s collaborator on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, another classic comic with a disastrous adaptation (Sean Connery, its star, never acted in a feature film again).

The times Moore has talked to the press, he has been outspoken, railing against the absurdities of superhero fandom and the rapaciousness of the comics industry. “When I first protested having my intellectual properties stolen,” Moore says, “the reaction from a lot of the fans was, ‘He’s a crazy, angry guy.’ He’s just inexplicably angry about absolutely everything. He wakes up in the morning, angry with his pillow. He eats his breakfast cereal while being angry with it. He’s angry about everything, so, therefore, nothing that he seems to be upset about is of any consequence. This is just an angry person. Alan Moore says, ‘Get off my lawn.’”

 

And that's really the point. More than anyone else on Earth, Alan Moore hates superheroes and breaks them down into their component foibles, follies and all too human failures. Heroes have been a cautionary tale to him, tales worth reading if only to armor ourselves against the world we live in now.

 

I enjoyed this one immensely.

 

Sunday Long Read: Toying Around For Years

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from Matthew Braga at The Walrus Magazine, who asks the question: What makes a game or toy stand the test of decades like the classics have: Monopoly, Lite-Brite, Spirograph, Yahtzee and more?

IFRAH ABID’S eight-year-old son, Moosa, loves The Avengers. He’s obsessed with his Iron Man action figure and can talk at length about its many suits. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Tooba, meanwhile, went through a Roblox phase, playing a video game that’s all the rage with kids her age. But, early in the pandemic, when everyone was spending more time together at home, Abid went looking for something the whole family could enjoy. “[Millennial parents] don’t know about new toys,” said Abid, who lives in Kitchener, Ontario, and is host and producer of the interview podcast Across Her Table, which focuses on women with immigrant roots. “We were like, ‘Let’s go back to what we know.’” She thought back to her own childhood, to those old games the family played while crowded around the table—Monopoly, Pictionary, Uno. She decided to try to introduce them to her kids. Now Moosa and Tooba love them too.

It was a similar story for Robert Lee and his two daughters. Allie is six, Annie is four, and they both love all things Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, and Baby Shark. But, for Christmas two years ago, their mother bought them a Lite-Brite and a Spirograph—simple art toys invented back in the ’60s that she remembered from her own early years. These weren’t the toys that Lee’s daughters typically saw in the YouTube videos they watched. They didn’t have flashy advertising campaigns or tie-in television shows, meaning the kids would never think to ask for them on their own. But Allie and Annie loved playing with them all the same.

Kids get older, and fads come and go. But some toys persist, almost stubbornly—artifacts passing from one generation to the next. In the toy business, these products are considered “classics.” It’s an amorphous category filled with all sorts of games and toys that have just a few things in common: namely, they are survivors in an industry where trends rule all. The Rubik’s Cube is, in many ways, the perfect example of a classic toy. More than 450 million are estimated to have been sold since 1978, with up to tens of millions of units still moving in a year. Etch A Sketch (180 million sold since 1960), Lego, Potato Head, Barbie, and, of course, Play-Doh are classics too. These toys are instantly recognizable but rarely advertised. They’re often low tech or analog. In fact, in a world full of screens, their tactility is increasingly part of the draw. Often, classic toys encourage what academics say is high-quality play, like problem solving or imaginative thinking. And, as some experts have found, such toys are highly nostalgic—conjuring warm, fuzzy memories in the parents who do the buying. This is how toys turn into tradition.

In 2016, Jane Eva Baxter published an article in the International Journal of Play that considered the role of nostalgia in keeping two particular items alive: the rotary-style Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone and wearable Mickey Mouse ears. Toys, she wrote, are often thought of as tools of preparation. It’s the reason parents buy Lego (to encourage creativity and cognitive thinking) or dolls (to simulate caregiving). It’s why most daycares and kindergarten classes have colourful blocks with the alphabet printed on the sides: to teach, to set kids up for future success.

But learning and development can’t be the only reason certain toys stick around, wrote Baxter, who is chair of the anthropology department at Chicago’s DePaul University and an archaeologist and historian of childhood. After all, here were two items—a rotary phone and mouse ears—that have persisted despite having no clear connection with the present. “The emotional connection adults have to this iconic toy has kept it in the marketplace despite the fact that a rotary-dial landline phone is technologically irrelevant for children today,” Baxter wrote. The same could be said of Mickey Mouse ears. The toy hasn’t appeared on TV as much in recent years, is no longer featured prominently in Disney’s theme parks, and is based on a character who is “increasingly peripheral to the Disney brand.”

Speaking from her home in Chicago, Baxter explains that parents, not toy producers, were the ones driving these sales. “There is this nostalgic element of either wanting to share something from their own childhood or give something that they felt they lacked in their childhood, because they think it will be good,” Baxter says. Especially now, in a largely digital world, there is something about these analog toys “that parents see as desirable for their children [and] that we find desirable for ourselves.” In fact, when Fisher-Price tried to modernize its iconic toy phone by removing the rotary dial, there was a consumer revolt, and sales fell. Nostalgia, Baxter concluded, is what keeps certain toys alive.

If you’re Toronto-based Spin Master, one of the largest toy makers in the world, nostalgia is also good for business. Founded in 1994 by two recent graduates from Western University, Spin Master quickly made a name for itself creating playground fads. One early success was 1997’s Air Hogs, a pump-powered, hand-thrown plane that could fly the length of a football field on nothing more than pressurized air. Then there was Bakugan, a 2007 mania centred on battling creatures from another dimension (think a mash-up of Pokémon, Transformers, and Yu-Gi-Oh), which involved an anime series, collectible trading cards, transforming toys, and a board game.

And, of course, there’s Paw Patrol. Created in 2013, Spin Master’s star franchise follows the adventures of a group of rescue dogs and their leader, a human boy named Ryder. Paw Patrol has spanned nine TV seasons, a Hollywood film (the second is now on the way), and, most importantly, a sprawling line of toys, merchandise, and games. The brand practically prints money for Spin Master, which today is worth around $4.4 billion and has 2,000 employees spread across nearly twenty countries.

But the company learned an important lesson from Bakugan, which had generated more than $1 billion in toy sales by 2014, before its popularity started to wane: what goes up eventually comes down, especially when it comes to fickle young audiences. That’s where the classic toys come in. Having one of these brands in your portfolio is every sales department’s dream. They practically sell themselves. 

 

Toys and games are worth billions, because we love to play. Nostalgia has always been a big seller. And it will continue to be for a long time to come.

HoliDaze: A Pair Of Legends Pass

Two very notable deaths this week, first, football broadcasting legend John Madden passed today at age 85.

John Madden, the NFL coach, broadcaster and namesake for the billion-dollar video game franchise, died unexpectedly Tuesday. He was 85 years old.

The legendary coach helmed the Oakland Raiders from 1969 to 1978, winning a Super Bowl over the Minnesota Vikings in January 1977. But he became as known for what he did after leaving the game in just his early 40s, when he ascended to the broadcast booth and later lent his name to the most successful sports video game franchise of all time.

He is survived by his wife, Virginia, and sons Mike and Joe, as well as several grandchildren.

"On behalf of the entire NFL family, we extend our condolences to Virginia, Mike, Joe and their families," NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. "We all know him as the Hall of Fame coach of the Oakland Raiders and broadcaster who worked for every network, but more than anything, he was a devoted husband, father and grandfather."

"Nobody loved football more than Coach. He was football. He was an incredible sounding board to me and so many others," Goodell continued. "There will never be another John Madden, and we will forever be indebted to him for all he did to make football and the NFL what it is today." 

 

Certainly I grew up with Madden's marquee game calling, particularly watching his Detroit Lions Thanksgiving games at my grandparents' house, and watching CBS's Super Bowl broadcasts as well as playing Madden NFL on consoles in the 90's and 00's.  It just wasn't the same without him once he retired.

And speaking of things never being the same since he retired, that brings us to our other extremely notable passing this evening, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

 

Harry Reid, who rose from abject poverty in rural Nevada to become one of the most influential state and national leaders, died on Tuesday, sources confirmed to The Nevada Independent. He was 82.

Additional details were not immediately available.

Reid was thought to be nearing the end of his life when he underwent surgery in 2018 for pancreatic cancer, which has one of the lowest survival rates. Last summer, however, Reid announced that he underwent an experimental surgery and was declared in “complete remission” and cancer-free.

Over more than three decades of service in Congress, Reid earned a reputation for fighting relentlessly to protect his home state and everyday Americans. As Senate Democratic leader for a dozen years, he played an instrumental role in passing the Affordable Care Act and shepherding through Congress pivotal economic recovery legislation in the wake of the Great Recession.

Reid also spent considerable time focusing on water, energy and public lands, issues at the forefront of a state that was undergoing rapid growth. In 2020, Reid said more than half of his congressional papers dealt, in some form, with the environment.

A savvy dealmaker and sometimes polarizing figure who made as many enemies as he did friends, Reid still earned the respect of colleagues in both parties — sometimes turning former enemies to friends. Soft-spoken with a sharp tongue, Reid compelled those around him to listen.

Reid took a no-holds-barred approach to politics, directly calling bankers to bail out the faltering CityCenter project on the Las Vegas Strip and falsely claiming Mitt Romney hadn’t paid his taxes in 10 years.

He helped Nevada punch above its weight on the national political stage by advocating that the state hold the first-in-the-West caucus in the nation in 2008, a move that has left Nevada’s presidential nominating contest just behind those in Iowa and New Hampshire. The caucus has brought droves of presidential contenders through the state every four years for the last four election cycles, elevating the state’s profile nationally.

He also turned the Nevada State Democratic Party into a well-oiled political operation — nicknamed the Reid Machine — responsible for securing numerous Democratic victories in close races over the last decade.

 

Everyone talks about all the fights Reid lost to Mitch McConnell, but frankly Reid was a Democratic player well after he left the Senate stage, and he won some critical legislative battles for Obama, including Obamacare and the nuclear option on appointing judges.

 

Oh, and Reid himself was an amateur boxer, who later became Nevada Gaming Commissioner, survived a Vegas mob car bomb attempt, and even had a movie role in Traffic.

Both of these men defined the roles they filled, and both will be missed.

Here's to you, Madden and Reid.

Sunday Long Read: In A Maze, Mint

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Nicola Twilley at the New Yorker, with the story of one of the premier designers of our age: Adrian Fisher, a man who makes...mazes.

Yes, those mazes. 

Dude's famous.

 

On the afternoon of March 25, 1980, Robert Runcie was enthroned as the hundred-and-second Archbishop of Canterbury, senior prelate of the Anglican Communion. For his first sermon following his ascension to the Chair of St. Augustine, Runcie told the assembled ranks of bishops, bewigged members of the judiciary, and assorted royalty about a recent dream. “You know how sometimes in an English garden you find a maze,” Runcie said. “The trouble is to get to the center of all those hedges. It is easy to get lost.” The Christian church, in Runcie’s slightly strained analogy, was in such a maze, and could progress toward its goal only by turning back, toward the periphery, in order to engage with those still outside the church’s embrace.

“He said, ‘I had a dream of a maze, and in this maze blah, blah, blah,’ ” the maze designer Adrian Fisher recalled, when I visited him late this summer, at his home in Dorset, in southwest England. In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight years old and working for I.T.T., a multinational manufacturing company, where he was responsible for productivity enhancement. He was increasingly drawn to the idea of designing mazes; he’d even formed a company, Minotaur Designs, with a wealthy labyrinthologist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate. But public commissions proved elusive. “At first, I thought it was impossible,” Fisher said. “How do you start? How do you do it?”

Runcie’s dream gave him an idea: Fisher wrote to the letters page of the London Times, briefly outlining the maze’s long history as a Christian symbol and noting that, as in the Archbishop’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically reached not by “pressing toward the center” but, rather, by “returning almost to the edge,” in order to find the proper path. In his signature, Fisher styled himself a “Maze Consultant,” and, before long, this stealth marketing had reeled in a customer, and Minotaur’s first public commission. Lady Elizabeth Brunner, a former actress who was married to a chemical magnate, invited Fisher to tea. Over scones and jam, she wondered aloud whether he might create an Archbishop’s Maze, inspired by Runcie’s words, in her garden at Greys Court, a Tudor manor house in Oxfordshire.

Fisher didn’t yet have official stationery, or even a typewriter, so he submitted his proposal as a handwritten letter. His design was circular: a brick path, set in a lawn, that formed seven concentric rings winding toward a sundial in the center. At first glance, it seemed to replicate the traditional Christian pavement labyrinth, the most famous example of which is found in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. Medieval labyrinths of this kind aren’t puzzles; there is only a single path, arranged in a snaking pattern of concentric folds, and to process along it to the center is to participate in a physical allegory of the soul’s progress through life and toward salvation. But at Greys Court a maze walker—or aspirant, to use the technical term—encounters a junction within seconds and has to make a choice. Fisher cunningly combined the appearance of the old Christian labyrinth with the function of the puzzle maze, whose solution, taking its cue from Runcie’s metaphor, involves turning away from the center initially, to journey around the entire periphery.

The new Archbishop dedicated the Greys Court maze in October, 1981, and the resulting publicity generated more maze commissions. With new customers lining up, Fisher took out a business loan, bought a computer, a printer, and a secondhand car, and reinvented himself as a full-time maze designer. The course of his career, built on equal parts passion and self-promotion, was set. “See, you create events out of nothing,” he told me. Fisher realized that if he wanted to make mazes he first had to make people want mazes. From his Runcie letter to his (successful) campaign to have Britain declare 1991 the Year of the Maze, he has devoted the past four decades to creating both the market and the product. Today, at the age of seventy, he seems to have no intention of retiring. By his own count, he has created more than seven hundred mazes, in forty-two countries. He is the world’s leading maze-maker by a margin so large that he has no real competition.

“He’s the only one who’s managed to make mazes a business rather than a hobby,” Jeff Saward, a historian of mazes and labyrinths, told me. Saward, who edits the research journal Caerdroia—the Welsh name for a turf labyrinth—estimates that, when Fisher started out, there were no more than fifty public mazes and labyrinths in the U.K. There was just one text on the subject: “Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Development,” by W. H. Matthews, from 1922. Matthews, a civil servant who had fought in the First World War, wrote the book in the Reading Room of the British Museum on his return from the trenches. Despite his fondness for mazes, Matthews was convinced that they were no more than a historical curiosity. “Let us admit at once that, as a favorite of fashion, the maze has long since had its day,” he wrote. The book, proving his point, sank almost without trace, and its poor sales became a family joke.

Yet today maze observers agree that there are more mazes than ever before, and more being built each year. Mazes, under Fisher’s watch, have become part of the British heritage business, de rigueur at stately homes, where, along with tearooms and gift shops, they can raise money to pay for otherwise crippling repair and tax bills. They have also diversified: Fisher helped invent the corn mazes that pop up alongside pumpkin patches on farms across America each fall, and reintroduced mirror mazes to piers, theme parks, and malls worldwide. He will happily design a labyrinth inscribed with religious quotations for a megachurch in North Carolina; a maze adventure with an artificial volcano, lake, and safe room for a Middle Eastern princess; a thumb-size maze tattoo for an anonymous female client; and a vertical maze for a fifty-five-story skyscraper in Dubai, with meanders that double as balconies. He does eighty per cent of his business overseas, and he told me that he has won nine Guinness World Records for superlative mazes of various sorts. “Of course, I wrote the rules about how a maze qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records,” he added.

 

You know what they say, it's the journey, not the destination.

All The Disinformation That's Fit To Stream

One America News Network has been a player in the new right-wing disinformation swamp for a couple of years now along with NewsMax under Trump, all with the basic heading of "When Fox News is too liberal for you!" It's been one of the most vile cable boutique purveyors of Qball right-wing conspiracies, too much for even YouTube to deal with, while its terrible white supremacist contributors are encouraging violence while on the loose.

Well, turns out OANN has a major corporate bankroller and distribution patron in AT&T, who quite literally commissioned the channel for its DirecTV service and provides some 90% of the network's revenue stream.

 

One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world's largest communications company.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

“They told us they wanted a conservative network. … When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”OAN founder Robert Herring Sr in a 2019 deposition

Dallas-based AT&T, a mobile-phone and Internet provider, also owns entertainment giant Warner Media, which includes CNN and HBO. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 and in August spun off the satellite service, retaining a 70% share in the new, independently managed company. AT&T’s total U.S. television subscriber base, including satellite and streaming services, fell from 26 million in 2015 to 15.4 million as of August.

AT&T spokesman Jim Greer declined to comment on the testimony about OAN’s revenue streams, citing confidentiality agreements. He said that DirecTV broadcasts “many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum.”

“We have always sought to provide a wide variety of content and programming that would be of interest to customers, and do not dictate or control programming on channels we carry,” Greer said. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

Although the contracts are confidential, in court filings Herring cited monthly fees included in one five-year deal with AT&T. According to an AT&T filing citing Herring’s numbers, those fees would total about $57 million. Greer said that figure is inaccurate, but declined to say how much AT&T has paid to air OAN, citing a non-disclosure agreement.

Herring and his adult sons own and operate OAN, a subsidiary of their closely held San Diego-based Herring Networks. Their AT&T deal includes Herring’s other network, a little-watched lifestyle channel, AWE. The Herrings declined interview requests.

Herring, who just turned 80, is a self-made businessman who amassed a fortune in the circuit board industry, then turned to television and boxing promotion. OAN’s influence rose in late 2015, when it began covering Trump rallies live, at a time when some of the media still saw the New York celebrity businessman as a longshot presidential contender. The network continues to shower Trump with attention and often provides a friendly platform for his Republican allies.

As president, Trump frequently urged supporters to watch OAN. In his final two years in office, Trump touted the network, known as @OANN online, to his 88 million Twitter followers at least 120 times.

 

So in addition to owning a national mobile carrier, HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel and TLC, plus DC Comics, Warner Pictures, New Line Cinema, Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera and a couple of video games studios to market all those characters, AT&T also secretly created, all but owns and all but runs one of the most vile, awful, racist white supremacist propaganda conspiracy outlets in America, beloved by Trump himself.

As a consumer, you get to choose which company you give your dollars to (for the most part.) AT&T decided a long time ago to make the choice that Donald Trump was good for business.

You want to maybe consider making such a choice yourself here.

Marvel Is Back, Baby

After the box office and streaming success of Black Widow, and the Disney+ series (WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki) it looks like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has people back at theaters, hopefully safely and masked.

The movie industry is still in an extended period of recovery as the ongoing effects of the covid-19 pandemic make bringing audiences back to theater seats—and even just getting movies made and out to those theaters in the first place—a challenge. But in spite of that, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has proved that Marvel Studios’ continuous grasp on the collective cultural psyche can overcome even a lot of the weirdest challenges the last 18 months has thrown at the box office.

Final figures for Destin Daniel Cretton’s martial arts adventure over the Labor Day weekend have come in (via Deadline), and Shang-Chi has drawn in just over $90 million for its four-day debut. It was previously estimated to pull around $50-60 million, due to the extenuating factors. That includes relative audience hesitancy to return to theaters as rising cases of the Delta variant of covid-19 have seen mask mandates and vaccination card checks hit key theater markets over the past few months. The figures are record-breaking, not just for the pandemic-era box office, but full stop: Shang-Chi is now the biggest Labor Day weekend opening at theaters since 2007's launch of the Rob Zombie Halloween remake, nearly tripling its take of $30.6 million.

Internationally, the film has been harder to judge. Current totals stand at around $146 million for Shang-Chi, which is still very impressive, but not as seemingly grand as other pandemic releases recently, including Marvel’s own Black Widow. While Shang-Chi did better domestically (Widow opened to $80 million in the U.S.), Black Widow performed slightly better internationally, earning $158 million across 46 international territories. But there are extenuating factors here as well: Shang-Chi opened in slightly fewer international markets (42), and neither movie was released in the Chinese market, which has become increasingly valuable for Disney. But in Black Widow’s case, the film also debuted simultaneously on Disney+—and is now currently at the center of a major legal battle between its star Scarlett Johannson and Disney because of it—as part of the streamer’s $30-a-movie “Premiere Access” option, which the studio leveraged in box office reporting to give Widow a combined $215 million opening weekend total.

Whether or not Shang-Chi will see the same rapid drop-off as Widow did at the box office in the weeks to come remains to be seen. But no matter which way you slice it, it’s very good news for a movie whose release Disney previously touted as an “experiment” for the studio to test the waters of audience confidence (to the ire of star Simu Liu), as the covid-19 pandemic continues across the world. Its success has already had an impact beyond Disney itself—yesterday Sony announced that instead of delaying the release of Venom: Let There Be Carnage again as previously rumored, it would instead shift the release of its Marvel movie forward two weeks, to an October 1 debut. Even as the uncertainty around the rest of the fall movie release window seems to remain as in flux as it has for the past 18 months, Shang-Chi’s overwhelming defiance of expectations has provided a shot in the arm to an industry still trying to navigate its way to a future beyond the current “new normal” of the pandemic.

 

I'm definitely looking forward to both Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel on Disney+ (and What If...? continues to be excellent) but I wonder if The Eternals will be Marvel's first box office misstep in November, I just don't have a good feeling about that film.

Then again, Kevin Feige has made several billion, so maybe he has a good thing going.

We'll see.

Last Call For The China Game

China apparently feels the need to crack down on kids playing video games, restricting those under 18 to just 3 hours a week, on weekend evenings, as parents are apparently furious that mobile games especially are not being controlled.

Regulators in China are taking their disapproval of youth gaming to the next level with sweeping new restrictions that limit minors to a handful of state-approved online gaming hours a week.

According to Bloomberg, authorities have ordered gaming platforms such as industry giant Tencent and Netease to restrict gaming for minor users to between 8:00 p.m. on Fridays, weekends, and holidays, a dramatic decrease from prior restrictions that limited accounts belonging to minors (those under 18) to 1.5 hours a day. News of the restrictions comes via Chinese state-owned media organ Xinhua, which cited the government’s National Press and Publication Administration.

The new rules will require all gaming platforms to be linked to a state-operated “anti-addiction” system and require that all users be verified with a real-life identity. Regulators also said they will step up compliance checks to ensure companies enforce the new rules.

As Ars Technica reported, it’s widely understood that the restrictions will apply to all games and all devices. However, the measures appear to predominantly target online ones and it’s not clear how regulators could restrict offline gaming even if they intend to. Reuters wrote that many users on Chinese social networking site Weibo were skeptical that young gamers couldn’t easily evade the new rules by such means as the use of parental accounts not subject to the same restrictions.

Previously, Chinese state media announced that restrictions on video game playing by minors would be enforced via requirements that platforms implement face recognition systems. Theoretically, such a system could be required for all game platforms in the future, providing a way to enforce age requirements in offline games.

Tencent quickly moved to roll out a “Midnight Patrol” system Daniel Ahmad, an analyst at occasional Tencent partner Niko Partners, told the Verge. The system worked by identifying gamers who remained active after midnight and prompted those who remained online for long amounts of time or spent lots of money to submit a picture of their face to verify they were actually 18 or older.

The NPPA statement in Xinhua characterized the new restrictions as “protecting the physical and mental health of minors... and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation.”

“This ruling is the strictest one to date and will essentially wipe out most spending from minors, which we note was already extremely low,” Ahmad told Bloomberg. Netease stock slid by over 9% in pre-market trading in New York, Bloomberg wrote, while UOB Kay Hian (Hong Kong) Ltd executive director Steven Leung told the news agency that three hours is “too tight” and will “have a negative impact on Tencent too.”

“I thought regulatory measures would take a break gradually, but it’s not stopping at all,” Leung added. “It will hurt the nascent tech rebound for sure.”

 

Seems that China doesn't want to get that dirty, awful, US kid entertainment all over its authoritarian utopia. Bread and circuses, just the ones the CCP approves of, and not even China can stop people from playing games.

 

The more you tighten your grip, the more these star systems slip through your fingers, as a very wise woman once said.

Sunday Long Read: Hate The Game, Not The Players

Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio takes a long look at the state of esports in 2019 and finds that increasingly, the multi-million dollar competitions and leagues popping up around competitive PC games looks more and more like the excesses of the dot-com bubble from 20 years ago.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There’s big money in esports, they say. You’ve heard the stories. Teenaged gamers flown overseas to sunny mansions with live-in chefs. The erection of $50 million arenas for Enders Game-esque sci-fi battles. League of Legends pros pulling down seven-figure salaries. Yet there’s a reason why these narratives are provocative enough to attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

“I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,” Frank Fields, Corsair’s sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields’ face as he continued. “Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.” Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, “as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.”

Fields is not the only longtime esports veteran who is worried the industry is a bubble, or more accurately, an industry comprised of several bubbles. Seventeen other experts on the North American esports industry shared similar concerns with Kotaku, some describing it merely as “inflated” and others as “completely unsustainable.” Several spoke on the controversial topic because they love esports and want to see it succeed organically, in a sustainable way. There is, of course, a genuine love shared by thousands of people for playing games competitively. Right now, many who spoke to us for this story said, the stuff that makes the esports industry seem like a tantalizing investment rests on unsubstantiated claims—or blunt-force lies.

As investors pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the ballooning esports industry, many feel their way forward with statistics that indicate that paydirt is just around the corner. “League of Legends Gets More Viewers Than Super Bowl,” reads one 2019 headline from CNBC, glossing over the fact that they’re comparing apple viewership metrics to coconut viewership metrics. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report leaked to Kotaku claimed that, in its first year, the Overwatch League could conceivably generate $720 million in revenue, about the same as World Wrestling Entertainment. By 2022, says Goldman Sachs, viewership of pros playing competitive games like League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive may be on par with the National Football League’s viewership today. But according to many people Kotakuspoke to with knowledge of the industry, a lot of these statistics are at best rosy-eyed and, at worst, inflated, unverified, or misleading.

For 12 years, Twitter never posted a profit, and until it went public, Uber lost $4.5 billion in one year. One quirk of the world of startups is that investors love investing in unprofitable companies or industries. Yet longtime esports professionals don’t want to see their beloved livelihood go the way of the dotcom bubble. The esports industry is held together with wax and string, which, sources say, hasn’t stopped it from flying too close to the sun.
Frank Fields is, to put it lightly, skeptical of the numbers that supposedly show how big the esports industry is. With an increasing sense of unease, Fields has seen stranger and stranger numbers come across his desk at the hardware manufacturer Corsair, where he handles several million dollars’ worth of outbound sponsorships. As he watched investors dump tens or hundreds of millions at once into the esports organization du jour, Fields has become concerned they’re “jumping the gun.”

“It doesn’t make sense to put that much money into an industry that’s not making that much,” he said. “The sooner we recognize that we’re fooling a bunch of non-endemic people, the better off we’ll be long-term. We’ll be able to fix this bubble before it pops.”
He’s already seen an esports bubble inflate—and burst. At 32 years old, Fields has been in esports for over half of his life, which is most of the history of esports’ existence. Speaking over the phone after GDC, Fields recalled hauling his gaming rig on a 17-hour drive from Ohio to Dallas for a Dota side event at a 2006 Counter-Strike tournament. The prize pool was $1,000, a pittance compared to last year’s $25.5 million prize pool for Dota 2’s biggest tournament, The International. It was at that event, however, that Fields noticed that entire hotels had been rented out to house Counter-Strike pros. For the first time, he could fathom the growing infrastructure of the esports industry. Prior to that, esports events were empowering conferences of high-skill fans, but undoubtedly smaller in scope. Tournaments for PC games like Quake and Starcraft were held in computer cafes in North America and Asia, especially South Korea; fighting game tournaments for games like Street Fighterwere largely held in arcades.

It was also around the mid-2000s that the first bubble of esports began to bloat. David Hill, a former president of Fox Sports, had caught a whiff of competitive gaming fever after noticing his grandson’s fierce fandom for it, according to a Dot Esports feature. Two years after joining DirectTV in 2005, Hill launched the Championship Gaming Series. It was a worldwide sports league, but for video games—a pretty cutting-edge idea at the time. This level of organization for esports was unprecedented, as was its tremendous funding. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. injected it with a huge $50 million investment in 2007, Dot Esports reported.

As it turns out, it was a little too huge. According to Dot Esports, one commentator for the first-person shooter Quake received a $300,000 salary in exchange for live commentary that was poorly received. Counter-Strike players received a reported $2,500 a month plus housing in Marina Del Rey. That added up to about $1.8 million in salaries per year. “I know from firsthand experience running a team that a lot of these teams have never even made that much in revenue,” Fields said.

The Championship Gaming Series burned bright and fast, only lasting until 2008, around the financial crisis. “We invested wholeheartedly in the venture and presented viewers with a top-notch production, but the economics just didn’t add up for us at this time,” it said in an announcement posted to its website. Investor confidence in esports plummeted.

“This was the first bubble of esports,” Fields says. “Players couldn’t get jobs, because the companies supporting them went bankrupt.”

And it looks like we're headed that way again, only this time there's a few more zeroes at the end of the numbers, and when it blows, it's going to be ugly.  I'd like to see esports saved from itself, I enjoy playing PC games like Overwatch and League of Legends with my friends and watching really good players compete, but the level of money thrown around has me convinced that it's going to take a major meltdown to get people to be serious. 

I was just starting my IT career when the first dot-com bubble blew and I recognize the signs.  I hope Fields is right about fixing the industry.

Sunday Long Read: Wakanda Forever

Author Rahawa Haile takes a hard look at Marvel's latest film, Black Panther, and the movie's multiple messages of Africa's past and the Afrofuturism that the fictional nation of Wakanda represents.  There's definitely spoilers for the movie, so proceed with caution if you haven't seen it yet, but if you haven't, go.

By the time I sat down to watch Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, a film about a thriving, fictional African country that has never been colonized, 12 hours had passed since the prime minister of Ethiopia resigned following years of protest and civil unrest. It would be another 12 hours before the country declared a state of emergency and enforced martial law, as the battle for succession began. Ethiopia has appeared in many conversations about Black Panther since the film’s release, despite an obvious emphasis on Wakanda, the Black Panther’s kingdom, being free of outside influences — and finances.

While interviews with Coogler reveal he based Wakanda on Lesotho, a small country surrounded on all sides by South Africa, it has become clear that most discussions about the film share a similar geography; its borders are dimensional rather than physical, existing in two universes at once. How does one simultaneously argue the joys of recognizing the Pan-African signifiers within Wakanda, as experienced by Africans watching the film, and the limits of Pan-Africanism in practice, as experienced by a diaspora longing for Africa? The beauty and tragedy of Wakanda, as well as our discourse, is that it exists in an intertidal zone: not always submerged in the fictional, as it owes much of its aesthetic to the Africa we know, but not entirely real either, as no such country exists on the African continent. The porosity and width of that border complicates an already complicated task, shedding light on the infinite points of reference possible for this film that go beyond subjective readings.

I live with the profound privilege, as a black woman in America, of knowing where I come from, of having the language of my oldest ancestors be the first one I learned. When it comes to Black Panther, I know what it means for Namibians and fans of Nnedi Okorofor’s Binti series to see Himba otjize slathered on the hair of someone who sits on the king’s council. What it means for me as a person with ties to the Horn of Africa to see numerous meskel, the Ethiopian cross, dangling from another leader’s belt. What it means for the most advanced science laboratory in the world to always be alive with South African song. I am grateful for it because I have spent my life seeing the story of Africa reduced to its most stereotypical common denominator. And I know, with every cell in my body, what it means for Wakanda’s tapestry in this film — woven from numerous African cultures — to be steeped above all else in celebration, in pride, and in the absence of shame.

Coogler’s Black Panther tells the story of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the superhero Black Panther who becomes the king of Wakanda following his father’s death. He is protected by the Dora Milaje, an all-women group of formidable soldiers led by Okoye (Danai Gurira) whose lover is the conservative, refugee-averse W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya). T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), is a science genius who designs his weapons, his Black Panther suit, and all manner of related tech. His ex, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’O), is a spy for the kingdom, committed to helping the most vulnerable in Africa, despite the king’s insistence on keeping Wakanda hidden from the world. M’Baku (Winston Duke) is the leader of the Jabari, a tribe within Wakanda that has rejected the methods of the monarchy and chosen to live up in the mountains. Finally, Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), serves as the film’s rage-filled antagonist, driven by revenge and a desire for black liberation by any means necessary.

Black Panther spends the majority of its runtime examining what a hidden nation like Wakanda — wealthy, technologically advanced, and home to the planet’s most powerful natural resource, vibranium — owes black populations spread across the globe. I’ve thought extensively of the burden placed on Coogler, on what an American production of this magnitude owes the continent that cradles its story, keeping in mind what centuries of false narratives about Africa have failed to convey. I believe it is this: A film set in Africa — unable by its very nature to be about Africa — whose cosmology, woven from dozens of countries exploited by empire, consists of its joys. It is a star chart of majesties more than simulacra.

How then does one criticize what is unquestionably the best Marvel movie to date by every conceivable metric known to film criticism? How best to explain that Black Panther can be a celebration of blackness, yes; a silencing of whiteness, yes; a meshing of African cultures and signifiers — all this! — while also feeling like an exercise in sustained forgetting? That the convenience of having a fake country within a real continent is the way we can take inspiration from the latter without dwelling on its losses, or the causes of them. Black Panther is an American film through and through, one heavily invested in white America’s political absence from its African narrative.

And Haile is correct, the movie is easily Marvel's most thought-provoking and layered film to date, Coogler's meticulous craftsmanship shows in every frame.  The questions the movie brings up are challenging and uncomfortable, escapism with a purpose and a destination.

But they are questions that have been asked before, just not with this voice and in this way.

Goodbye, Batman

Legendary Adam West, TV's original Batman, has died at the age of 88.

Adam West, the gray-stockinged star of the 1960s Batman TV show, has died at the age of 88.

“Our dad always saw himself as The Bright Knight and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans’ lives. He was and always will be our hero,” his family said in a statement. West died peacefully in his home Friday night after a battle with leukemia, and is survived by his wife Marcelle, six children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

West first caught the eye of the Batman show’s producer after he appeared as a different kind of caped crusader in a series of commercials for Nestle’s Quik.

“You can’t play Batman in a serious, square-jawed, straight-ahead way without giving the audience the sense that there’s something behind that mask waiting to get out, that he’s a little crazed, he’s strange,” West later told the Archive of American Television. He and his co-star Burt Ward added a manic, hilarious energy to the Batman and Robin characters on Batman, which ran for three seasons from 1966 to 1968. The show championed such noble causes as drinking milk, eating your vegetables, and always wearing a seatbelt.

After Batman was cancelled, West struggled to find more onscreen work, making several guest appearances on television but never finding another role as high-profile as the one that had made him famous. Reportedly, he was disappointed when Tim Burton did not tap him to reprise the character in 1989’s Batman. He eventually settled comfortably into a second career as a voice actor after accepting a job to voice the mayer of Quahog on Family Guy—a character also named Adam West.

“The only thing I thought is that it would be the end of me, and it was for a bit,” he said during an appearance at Comic-Con in 2014, where he discussed the end of Batman. “But then I realized that what we created in the show. . . we created this zany, lovable world.

“I look around and I see the adults—I see you grew up with me, and you believe in the adventure. I never believed this would happen, that I would be up here with illustrious people like yourselves. I’m so grateful! I’m the luckiest actor in the world, folks, to have you still hanging around.”

Say what you will about Batman over the years, we all knew him first as played by West, something that still stands 50 years later today.  West, Burt Ward, and Catwoman, Julie Newmar, got together last year to voice an animated movie for the 50th anniversary of the classic 1966 series, and it's actually pretty good.  I'm glad West got to make the film.

Here's to you, Caped Crusader.

Sunday Long Read: Star Chamber

The Silicon Valley Startup Shuffle model can be applied to just about anything, from vaporware hardware to financial double-dealing to organic mayo, but what has to be the biggest ongoing scam is, of all things, a video game about space that at this point may turn into one of the biggest ripoffs in crowdfunding history: Star Citizen.  Julian Benson at Kotaku UK lifts the lid on the gaming industry's biggest elephant in the room, and wonders like I do when it will all come crashing down and take PC gaming with it.

For the past seven months, I’ve been talking to the people who have been makingStar Citizen. This includes its directors, a number of anonymous sources who’ve worked on it, and the man who drives the whole project: Chris Roberts. From the outside, Star Citizen appears to have been wildly successful; to date, it has raised more than $124 million from passionate fans. The money has allowed its developer, Cloud Imperium Games, to open studios around the world and employ more than 325 talented developers.

Behind the closed doors of CIG’s studios, however, it’s been far from an easy ride, according to staff. They have all faced a unique challenge: how to nail down the scope of a game whose budget and ambition is always growing. Star Citizen has now been in development for five years, and over that time it has suffered through significant changes and unrest among its staff, huge delays and, 18 months ago, a radical restructuring of all its studios. CIG has released several discrete demos over this time, but there is still not even a date for the final game, which was originally planned for 2014.

Star Citizen’s development has been high-profile enough, expensive enough and, yes, troubled enough to spawn a whole ecosystem of theories as to what’s going on at Cloud Imperium Games, from theorising about the project’s technical challenges to wild accusations about what’s happening to the money. Various community scandals have added yet more fuel to the fire, turning Star Citizen into a lightning rod for controversy. The questions I wanted answers to were: what exactly has been happening over the past five years? What are the reasons behind Star Citizen’s various delays, and what specific development problems has it encountered? Have things been mismanaged? And, as many Star Citizen backers are now beginning to wonder, can it ever actually be finished?

Chasing this information has not been easy. There’s a reason that many of the sources in articles like this are usually anonymous: people fear both legal and professional repercussions for speaking out. In the course of contacting over 100 different people while researching Star Citizen’s development, I was told by multiple sources that they were worried about legal repercussions if they spoke to the press. Speaking out publicly about a previous employer carries professional peril, too; prospective future employers may see you as a risky hire. Nonetheless, over the course of the year we found that many of the people who had worked on Star Citizenwere willing to talk about their experiences, which painted a picture of a development process riven by technical challenges, unrealistic expectations and internal strife.

The other side to the story, of course, is that told by Cloud Imperium Games’ current staff: its director, Chris Roberts, its project leads, and the developers who have survived the upsets that drove others away. At the stage where CIG allowed us access to Roberts and other members of the Star Citizen team at its Manchester studio, we already had a pretty clear picture of the problems that have dogged the project thus far. Roberts and his team did not deny any of them (though they did contest the severity of the problems’ impacts). But despite everything, most of the staff we talked to still passionately believe in this unwieldy, ever-changing dream project. Many of its backers still believe, too, even as others have been demanding (and mostly getting) refunds.

Plenty of people have sermonised about Star Citizen’s future. We can’t pretend to know how it will work out in the end. But we can know how it got to where it is today.

Keep in mind that people have invested $120 million in a game that hasn't come close to being out yet, and is still in extended alpha testing now.  At best the game won't be out until 2018.  At worst, this is a portrait of Chris Roberts and his ego, and it's doing the kind of damage to people that we usually reserve for Big Pharma, banks, campaign finance cons and Silicon Valley disasters.

And yet people I know continue to hope and dream this game will come out someday.

It's amazing, and more than a bit sad.