In this episode, we talk about Plants vs Zombies, Seven Terraces Pinot Noir and Werewolves of War.
Time to grab your last-line-of-defense lawnmower and your sword cane, it’s time for Geekery and Wine…
To hear this blog narrated go to:
The Geek side
I am someone who loves the special buy websites. (I’m lookin’ at you Groupon and Living Social Deals). My wife and I had virtually stopped going out to eat and going downtown once we had kids and the introduction of Groupon deals was enough of a carrot to finally get us to go out and enjoy a fancy dinner or wine tasting or chocolate tour in downtown Denver now and again. But by nature I am an explorer, so soon I was not only getting us 50% off at our favorite Peruvian restaurant I was also booking introductions to snow-shoeing classes and bargain condo times during ski season.
Two things led to yet one more and I was enticed into Groupon Goods. Whereupon I found really, really inexpensive tablet computers for my kids. And yes, originally it was just for my kids…but I digress.
My daughters are total troopers on long car trips. My oldest can go through her comics collection and my youngest can draw pictures for hours. But I also thought it would be nice for them to be able to play games and make use of the digital books I have in my Amazon Kindle Library. So after getting the tablets, I downloaded a few games and books for each of them. And one of them was Plants vs Zombies.
Dun, dun Duuuun!!!
And this was a huge mistake…I realize that now, at least as far as my leisure time was concerned.
You see I didn’t just buy tablets for my two daughters, I got one for me too. It was the price of a good pair of sneakers and I had recently been envying my dear friend’s new tablet upon which he kept his digital comics collection. (The one I talked about on our trip to San Diego Comic-Con, A Journey to Nerdopolis)
It only made sense to get one…right? No more filling-up long, white slide-boxes in the basement AND my daughters and I could play games against each other, too. (Insert, wife’s disapproving dead-pan stare here).
Sigh…
So, PopCap Games’ Plants vs Zombies was originally released in 2009…yeah. Although it was not released for Android until 2011. I realize that for some folks this game is so long in the tooth I might as well be talking about Space Invaders but, hey, again, a new device gave me the opportunity to enjoy a whole slew of games I’d never tried before. Imagine someone finally getting a Wii. They have to try Wii Sports Resort, right? Well, this tablet was my own personal games…if not Dance, Dance…revolution.
For those who don’t know, Plants vs Zombies is a tower-defense game. You are tasked with defending your home (specifically your backyard, but later your roof, as well) from hordes of cartoonish zombies (some with traffic cones or buckets on their heads, others on pogo sticks and on Zambonis…like I said cartoonish). To beat the horde you plant an assortment of equally cartoonish botanicals which have nonsensical yet ultimately logical defensive capabilities. For example, pea plants shoot peas at the zombies, and corn launches gobs of butter, immobilizing their target.
In Adventure Mode, things progress quickly adding new wrinkles at each level. A plain backyard gives way to an added swimming pool (meaning swimming zombies….just go with it), followed quickly by fog and/or darkness and lightning.
What amazed me was how quickly the strategy of the game consumed me. I would think about the game while driving or making dinner, “Ah, but if I move my sunflowers forward and move my cabbage launchers back, then…”
And on and on.
My daughters ultimately downloaded the game, too, and much to the chagrin of my wife, we talked battle strategy at the dining room table. It was amazing!!!
Little did I realize how differently my eldest daughter and I consume games. I am a hit-the-ground-running-finish-this-sucker kind of gamer. My daughter would read the descriptions and point out the wonderful bits of humor in the writing of the Zombie Guide that I otherwise would have missed.
All of us ultimately got in on the chase for gold. Throughout the game, the player collects coins which can then be redeemed for additional levels and mini-games. It was this second mini-game within a game to see which one of us could unlock the whole thing first.
It was me. Which then became, “Dad, can we borrow your tablet to play the Whack-a-Zombie mini-game?”
Ah, the things we do for…braaaaaains…
AUTHORS NOTE: An update finally came down the pike and I was able to get Plants vs. Zombies 2. The new game adds a further dimension to the original. It isn't merely more of the same like so many other sequels. Is it good? Yes. But it is so good that it deserves its own blog entry so, for now, I will conclude to...
The Wine side
…eventually the wine side…there is a bit of a story here first.
The wine that I have for this month is a beauty, at least the 2007 and 2008 vintages were. I was introduced to this wine through an experience that terrified me and pushed me to be a better person.
When my friend Zack told me he was getting married I wasn’t exactly sure what would happen next.
Oh, I knew there would be a ceremony and all the lovely things that go along with it, but I didn’t know what my part in it would be. I know, it’s a very self-centered thing, but since I have been in junior high school, weddings have always meant, “Hey bud, I’ve got a job for ya.”
I’ve sung at weddings for over 30 years. That is a lot of sappy love songs. But Zack had a friend who currently played professionally in a local blues band, so…off the hook there.
Zack and I had met in our 30’s, so probably not going to be asked to be the best man or even a groomsman; normally position is instantly locked-up if the groom has a brother, but Zack had only sisters. Plus, usually high school or college friends get tapped for that.
Ugh…not usher…please, not usher.
“I want you to be the minister,” said Zack.
Say what, now?
Being that I had been a school teacher for 11 years and an actor and singer longer than that, my great friend wanted me to lead the ceremony.
I was humbled. I was honored.
I was scared…out…of…my…mind.
This was a memory people carry forever. What if I froze or messed up in some way. There was precedent there. I had on one occasion completely forgot whole lines of:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.”
Plus, how was I even remotely qualified for this? Weren’t their laws?
Zack told me about the Universal Life Church and how I could get ordained online. https://www.themonastery.org/ He had done it himself. Piece of cake.
It was. And I did.
I constructed a ceremony based on literature I knew Zack and Honey, his wife-to-be, loved as well as the most traditional of vows. I included some of the passages that meant a lot to me when I got married more than a decade before (including the aforementioned Shakespeare Sonnet 116). The couple and I talked it over and they liked what I came up with.
Then came the bachelor party.
I mean, really, how often does the minister get invited to the bachelor party?
We started in the lounge and cigar room of Del Friscos, an old-fashioned steakhouse in the Denver Tech center and here is where the wine came in.
Seven Terraces Pinot Noir from Marlborough, New Zealand was what I finally settled on while sitting in a worn, overstuffed leather chair next to a crackling fireplace. I felt as though Dr. Watson could stumble in at any moment, breathless, with “a delicate matter of some urgency that needed attending to.”
I’d chosen Pinot Noir because I’d always thought it was the most flexible wine and I really didn't know what we were going to be eating that night. One could drink a pinot noir either with food or not. Additionally, it stood up well next to meats but didn’t overwhelm the flavors of chicken and fish dishes, especially when the dish was well-spiced.
In the glass, it had a rust color and tasted a little bit of ripe plums. This can be taken with a grain of salt, though. It seems to me that I become very suggestable when people start talking about the small flavors or "notes" of wine. If I can taste it for myself and not be influenced by another’s opinion, I can come up with what something tastes like on my own. But, if someone springs in with "Don't you taste a note of dark cherries?" I swear my taste buds SEARCH for that flavor and my brain won't stop until I think I can taste cherries or the other person is confirmed to be clinically insane.
As I was saying, I thought I’d tasted ripe plums with just a hint of pennies, like when you were a little kid and put one under your tongue. That's the flavor and it wasn’t unpleasant.
Red Alert, BIAS warning!
I have really great associations with New Zealand wines. I was an exchange student there for a semester, specifically the semester when I was doing my student teaching. I had an elder statesman teacher who was going to show me how New Zealand wines were superior to Australian wines. Long story short...he did. Although his impromptu wine class specifically focused on Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs. A shout out to YOU, Mr. David Pavish wherever in the world you may reside! You helped a young budding ee-no-file begin to find his way.
So, to sum up: I have great associations for the country of New Zealand and their wines in particular. That was combined with the request of a friend to officiate his wedding ceremony, a task which delighted and challenged me. Those things fused with a fantastic bachelor party where I met the acquaintance of some great guys and got to raise a glass with a dear friend.
Neat trivia fact: That dear friend commemorated the occasion of his wedding by gifting me a sword-cane by way of saying thanks. I still own it and love it to this day!
Update: I recently sought out the current year of Seven Terraces and was able to find it at Drink Dispatch (drinkdispatch.com) I would love to say that I got the wine and we are both living happily together. But the course of true love never did run smooth. (Shakespeare, AGAIN?) The first shipment came up with an “interruption note.” The wine got as far as Illinois and was damaged. So, it took two tries to get the four bottles that I ordered.
Was it worth it? Did it still hold up?
Oh my, yes indeed! It is a great bottle of wine, running at about $17.
Audio Goodness -- Werewolves of War
What first drew me to this short story by D.W Hall wasn’t so much its content but its form. The books I’d done previously had all been full length, lasting upwards of 6 or 7 hours. At the time (sometime in 2011) when I was looking on the Audible site I didn’t see much that was simply short fiction. Many times when I was listening. I was in the car. I was going to the grocery store (20 minutes each way) or prepping and cooking a meal (25 to 40 minutes). Wasn’t there a need for short stories? When I was a teacher I remember Edgar Alan Poe’s definition of a short story was a work that could be read in a single sitting and as an author, it’s what I most liked to write. Maybe there would be joy in the narrating, too.
So I began to look around, thinking that perhaps a classic was in order. In college, I was a vocal performance major (hoping to become an opera singer) when I started and I knew that part of voice study was studying and performing classic Italian arias and art songs. Additionally, any classical actor wants to play Hamlet or Lady Macbeth. Wasn’t there an equivalent to be drawn here?
Therein lay the problem. If I had chosen, say, Dracula, there were well-over 30 different performances already on the Audible website. How in the name of all-that-is-clearly-pronounced would I get my story to stand out?
Within the “classic” notion there are many genres, obviously. What about classic science fiction? The stylized ideal with bubble helmets and flying saucers was really appealing. And there was a lot of literature out there that was originally published in now-defunct science fiction magazines that was in the Public Domain.
Public Domain basically means “belonging to the public,” and if I could find something that was unrecorded it would be like finding an old art song in a dusty garret, a lost reliquary inside a forgotten tomb.
Nebraska Elliott and the Lost Venusian Jungle Planet!
Yeah, well…moving on…
I found The Werewolves of War by D.W. Hall, originally published in Astounding Stories in a 1931 issue and taking place in 1938. It is a war tale. An alternate future wherein America must stand against the United Slav Army, the city of San Francisco has fallen to this terrible force and only a few brazen pilots can stem the tide of the enemy and beat them back.
I also looked at it like a proto-Steampunk long-before Steampunk was a thing. Comedian and uber-nerd, Chris Hardwick jokes that Steampunk is what happens “when Goths discover the color brown,” but this could also be seen as how Steampunk evolves into the 20th century, which I found pretty fascinating.
And a tale of war. I never really pictured myself as a teller of war tales. As a kid, I was fascinated with my dad’s LP’s of Victory at Sea, ones that featured “the sounds of 16-inch guns! Naval Combat Planes and torpedoes being launched!” All set to a Richard Rogers classical score. Nevertheless, I’m not sure if anyone would have cast me based on my voice. I guess that’s the advantage to being the publisher and casting yourself.
On the minus side: This is a fairly long short story clocking in at a little over an hour and although there wasn’t very much short fiction when I looked for it in 2011, the short fiction I found was not terribly well reviewed. Perhaps deeper pools of narrative are more satisfying to the bulk of listeners.
And…sadly…there are no ACTUAL WEREWOLVES in this piece. It is the name of the pilots’ fighter wing. There are acid bullets but no silver ones. Some listeners may feel disappointed when they discover a sans lycanthropy story.
On the plus side: the recording itself was really fun! I wanted to capture that pulp feel, the steely-eyed men and their deeds of derring-do. When I found the right intro music I just felt like there was something missing. The intro bumper was a great piece of music but it didn’t put me in the story. So I went into my library of sound effects and found the sounds of anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes buzzing and mixed them into opening sequence – just like Victory at Sea! I have to say, it made me really happy and absolutely craving other works from DW Hall. Was he some kind of forgotten master? I would look into his work more for future pieces.
Find Werewolves of War on Audible at audible.com. And be sure to check out all current and future projects at last word audio.com.
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Next Time on Geekery and Wine: Black Panther, really old wine and Nimbus.
Until then…
My Geeks
My Nerds
My dear, dear friends…
Adieu
