Destiny, Tremo, and The Supergirls
To hear this blog narrated go to:
To hear this blog narrated go to:
Greetings everybody!
In this episode, we’ll be talking about a ton of stuff including Dungeons & Dragons and why HP Lovecraft may have been a crazy oenophile even though he was a teetotaler.
So, grab your Gjallahorn Rocket Launcher and that highlighted, dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon, it’s time for Geekery & Wine!
This week:
The Geek Side
It all starts with a mysterious box in the mail.
My college roommate, dear friend and the best man in my wedding, a wedding that had fairly recently celebrated its 20th anniversary said that he had “checked with my wife to see if it was okay” and now had sent me…something.
“What was that something?” I asked.
ANNOUNCER: “The answer may surprise you!
“An Xbox One.”
Whaaaaat?
Thousands of fur-clad barbarians on horseback charging across the snowy tundra fill my mindscape!
Battle, Conquest, victory…RAWR!!!
Well, that and feeling sweaty and awkward in a polyester tux in college choir singing Verdi’s Dies Irae.
“Dude, that is HUGE!” I said, “Wait, my wife really okayed this? Hang on…”
I walked upstairs and found out, yes, she was cool with this.
Well, huhn.
The game we would be playing on this XBOX One was Destiny and we would game together again. We would be able to talk on headsets while we went on quests. And there would be rocket launchers.
Come to think of it…it seems that many aspects of our friendship were and are based on rocket launchers…more on that in a bit.
Okay, Okay…this may require some backstory…
Although Bran and I met at the softball diamonds when in junior high school, he worked at the concession stand and I was at the park to watch my father play slow-pitch softball, our friendship really began in earnest with Dungeons & Dragons in high school.
Bran and I were fortunate enough to be core members of perhaps the best homebrew D&D/RoleMaster groups ever assembled. What made it so epic? We had popular guys, nerdy guys, jocks, party hounds, and anarchists in the same group. And because the social cliques were all over the place the player characters (or PC’s) came at problems (and each other) in funny, twisted and bizarre ways.
Any role-playing group generates fantastic tales of adventure. But this group sometimes took the adventure back into the real world.
Roman-candle fights, “the fake purse tied with fishing line” gag and a homemade shoulder-fired rocket launcher were only some of the shenanigans we engaged in in high school.
Some of my readers/listeners may be saying right now, “Hey, hey hey…those were all guys…no girls?”
We tried. We honestly did. But it was the clichéd situation where girls would come in and watch the game to see what we were doing, get bored and leave. That’s not to say that I didn’t have D&D campaigns with female group members in high school, I did. But this…was not that group.
Among this group was Bran. His cousin Travis, Dungeon Mastered (or DM-ed) our games. Other members included Travis’s brother Trent, as well as Tim, Cory, and Pat.
There was something about those amazing weekend nights, sitting around a dining room table fighting evil (and sometimes plotting evil) that was etched into the stone of our youth. Those listeners who were awakened to the awesomeness of D&D through Stranger Things on Netflix realize its pull is no joke. The intensity of those old campaigns was just like what you saw in that series, except we were in high school.
And while I love all those guys and the memories we made together, it’s my friendship with Bran that’s deep in my bones.
Now, in short, one of my dearest friends, missed those old campaigns and wanted to hang out with me 1,700 miles away.
I know, some may be saying, Previously, on Geekery and Wine “You said you never considered yourself a console-guy. Computer games were meant to be played with a keyboard and mouse …all hail the ASWD! This is a second time you are giving in to the dark side of consoles!”
And you would be right.
Yet, Bran was also my college roommate that forcibly (well, gently-forcibly) made me change my “tech religion.” I was an education major so it was all-Apple-all-the-time, until he stopped me, taught me some keyboard shortcuts and walked me through building my first PC. If anyone was going to change my mind about tech it was Bran.
Bran was the friend who, as teenagers, was my sounding board while trying to figure out Life. We discussed everything together and our favorite format was the ultra-long walk around our hometown. We would start talking about this sci-fi book or that role-playing game and more than an hour later be we’d be saying, “Wait. Where the heck are we?” Not an easy feat in a hometown of 23,000 people.
You see, Bran is my Spock.
Back to the modern day…and Destiny.
The way I first heard of this game was truly magical. I was still teaching high school theatre when Destiny came out in 2014 and I had to hear my theatre technicians talking about going on missions and their plans of how they were going to go on missions after rehearsal when they were backstage. It didn’t apply to me at the time, so I just thought, “Meh, another Massive Multiplayer online world.”
So it kept building in my consciousness…
By the time I got the game and the XBOX One, Brandon had purchased Destiny on sale with all the expansion packs. It was awesome. And it seemed like every free moment I had I was texting him, “Got time for a mission?”
As a strange aside, texting one of your best friends about gaming late at night or early in the morning is odd to say the least. You find yourself getting ready to send a text like “You awake?” and wondering, “Wait a minute, is this the video game equivalent of a booty-call?”
About Destiny (first released Sept 9th, 2014)
In Destiny, you become an alien with the ability to infinitely reincarnate thanks to your “ghost” a small AI that hovers around your character and fills the role of info-dumper and story catalyst. “Explainer-in-chief” might be another nice way of putting it.
Originally, Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage was the voice-actor for Ghost, but I guess many found him to be a bit dry and uninspiring. And between the Alpha and Beta release of Destiny, he was gone. They did try to keep him on by adding a vocal synth and it helped somewhat but, it wasn’t as spritely as current Ghost, Nolan North (who incidentally voiced Nathan Drake in the Drake series on PlayStation).
If you want to check out the side-by-side comparisons of the voice actors check out “Destiny Ghost Voice Comparison - Dinklebot vs. Northbot” on YouTube, if you read Geekery and Wine in print form at geekeryandwine.blogspot.com I’ll have the hotlink there, too.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeyeQnKTFUU).
Your character is one of three classes, Titan, Hunter, and Warlock. And one of three races: Human, Awoken (a blueish race) and Exo (having a robotic exoskeleton). And it is a 1st person shooter. There are different kinds of guns, swords, grenades and, of course, rocket launchers. The overall power level of your character is expressed in number-form as your Light. The higher your Light, the tougher the opponents, the better your loot and the more game worlds open up to explore.
When Bran and I first started playing I was always worried that I would be the weak member of our duo so I would go down to the basement and practice. Practice then that became “How can I gain an edge that will help us do better in battle?” and finally…my impishness got the better of me and I just wanted to make sure that when we first logged on, my Light was a liiiiiitttle bit higher than Bran’s.
I know, I know. I’m horrible. But I have only a younger sister and he is an only child so, yes, of course, there is always going to be a healthy sibling rivalry between us. And we laugh about it often.
A next fascinating aspect of Destiny is how its creators curated actors from so many sci-fi shows that I love. Nathan Fillion as Cade-6, of course, is the one that everyone comments on, but there is also Gina Torres completing a mini Firefly reunion. Lance Reddick from Fringe as well as Bill Nighy from Hot Fuzz are also fantastic additions.
Side Note: Since Destiny 2 has come out, I thought, at first, creators had tried to extend the Firefly “collect-em-all” philosophy by adding Jewel Staite as the split personality-ed Failsafe but found out later it was, in fact, multifaceted actor Joy Osmanski. But then after doing a bit of research for this audioblog, I found out that they had indeed added another ex-Firefly-er—Morena Bacarin as Sagira the Ghost of Osiris. There are so many amazing voice actors in the Destiny series, like Lenny James from The Walking Dead, and Oded Fehr and Erick Avari from the 1999 film The Mummy.
Destiny (and Destiny 2) are great games whether you are trying to figure out, “Where do I know that voice from or just using it as an excuse to stand on an alien planet with your best friend and shoot rocket launchers.
The Wine side
So, Tremo was a fun online find for me. I’d originally ordered it through Barclay’s Wine (barclayswine.com), at a stage when I was ordering mixed packs and mystery packs (more on that in a future episode).
The label, which features a red fish on a stark black background evoked something out of Lovecraft and, when I found it, I thought it could be my secret weapon of entertaining.
Anytime we had friends over we would all bring a bottle of wine and I would break out the Tremo and everyone loved it. It seemed to me that Spanish wines particularly Tempranillos of the Rioja region are very drinkable. They go with everything and don’t have the harshness of a big, bold Cabernet Sauvignon.
And then, a few years ago I put together a role-playing group, to play at my house and I thought, since I was hosting, and this was a roleplaying group for adults, that it was time to move beyond the “orange-tinted Cheeto fingers and copious amounts of Mountain Dew” games of our youth.
“Dammit, there should be wine.” I said to myself, “And dammit, it should be Tremo!”
This group would change game systems and genres depending on who was Game Master (the general term for the person in charge of the table that week). There wouldn’t ever be one person who was the DM and we wouldn’t solely be playing D&D.
We started playing Call of Cthulhu, an RPG created by Chaosium in 1981. The characters are investigators in an H.P. Lovecraftian world trying to stop the Giant Unknowable Evil (with capital letters on all of those words.) while not losing their lives and sanity in the process. But just to let you know: the player characters in this game always ultimately succumb to the Great Unknowable Evil because they are mere mortals. The conflict and tension of the game are created by how long they can hold out before ultimately being defeated.
Oh yeah, the wine…
It is from Valencia in the Rioja region of Spain and can be either a straight Tempranillo varietal or Tempranillo with “Maceration Carbonica.” (also known as CARBONIC MASCERATION!)
Carbonic maceration is simply a winemaking technique, in which whole grapes are fermented in a carbon dioxide-rich environment before being crushed. Rather than just fermenting the juice which is what generally happens. The result is a smooth wine that is fruity – sometimes like strawberries and plums and sometimes like raspberries depending on the vintage. What does it run? I think with the Groupon discount I was able to get the cost down to about $11 a bottle.
Our Call of Cthulhu game was the story of a group of filmmakers in the 1930’s trying to create a horror film on an isolated island off the northern coast of England. I wanted the group to have a wine that was thematic. And the Tremo fish reminded me vaguely of the Erol Otus illustration of The Deep Ones that’s in the 1980 AD&D reference book Deities and Demigods in the Cthulhu Mythos chapter.
My character, the leading man of the film, died spectacularly at the end when some tentacled monstrosity picked up the building I was in, crushed it and then returned to the briny deep. And our film crew captured the whole thing and kept it in the final cut of the film. The studio dedicated the picture to my memory and the scene faded to black. You can’t ask for much better.
And now I can’t think about Tremo without associating it with HP Lovecraft.
And then recently something nightmarish happened. I thought, “It would be nice to see if this wine is still everything I thought it was. And wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a taste of history.
Alas, much like the Lovecraftian imagery that I associated with this wine, it now appears to be gone!
Was it the faintest figment of my heated imagination?
Groupons were purchased and unable to be redeemed. The site said that this newly purchased voucher was expired! Going to the Bodegas Alegre website, Tremo is not listed as a wine they produce.
It’s as though it doesn’t exist! It never had existed! The Mad Sommelier Abdul Alhazred put his tasting notes upon it and now it is utterly gone. Only trace images of bottles past are on the web. Hastur the Unspeakable has bought the last case for his ski vacation with Nyarlathotep at the Mountains of Madness!!!
…okay, let’s tap the brakes here.
How did it all end up? The Groupon I found from Wine Insiders on Tremo just needed a moment with their customer service department. There was even a section in the FAQ for a specific email to send messages to if one got an expired message on a recently purchased Groupon.
They were delightful to deal with. Check them out at wineinsiders.com.
Audio Goodness: The Supergirls
I had found a beautiful review in Entertainment Weekly of a book called The Supergirls, Fashion Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic Book Heroines. It got an “A-“and said:
“Sharp and lively—and just obsessive enough about women who wear capes and boots to be cool but not creepy. [Madrid] clearly loves this stuff. And he's enough of a(n) historian to be able to trace the ways in which the portrayal of sirens and supergirls has echoed society's ever-changing feelings about women and sex.”
Comic books? Super-powered heroines? Neat!
I grabbed it, read it, and loved it. So I then tracked down the author Mike Madrid and emailed him. I sent him a sample of what the book could sound like and asked what he thought.
But this wasn’t a title that was a decade in the back lists, this was published about a year before and his response to my query was unclear. He loved the sample, but told me that his publisher “didn’t have any plans to do an audiobook at this time.”
Ah, nuts. I’d struck out. “So it goes, Billy Pilgrim.”
And so I’d consigned the clip to the trash bin as maybe something I could send out as a sample to show the quality of my work.
About a month later I get an email saying, “Thanks for your emails to Mike, why don’t you send me a copy?” Cheers, Tod. T-O-D.
Wow.
This would be my first experience dealing directly with the publisher. It was kind of weird at first. I thought that since there were authors who spoke directly to creators like me that that would be the way it was always done.
Not so. Hence the, “My publisher has no plans to produce an audiobook at this time” part of the conversation.
After a couple of days, Tod liked the recording and said, “Let’s chat.” And we set up a phone call.
Meeting Tod was exhilarating from the first three words. I heard the words, “This is Tod,” and they sounded…well, not how I thought they would sound…not “un-Tod-like” per se…just…umm…
“You weren’t expecting Tod to be female, were you?” she said.
Whenever we spoke on the phone I was keen to have Tod take me seriously and so I amped up everything I said. Not only was the book going to be “good” it was going to be “amazing!” We would not just be “successful,” we would “achieve world domination.”
And there she stopped me.
“No World Domination,” she said.
And she explained to me the company philosophy on her website exterminatingangel.com:
“Making a living, not a killing. Reorganizing our lives on a human scale. Dreaming how we want our lives and our world to be.”
So…no World Domination. Got it.
And as a grace note, Tod also communicates in email with no capitalization. It was a bit like having a correspondence with the poet e. e. cummings.
Over the years I even got to meet her and her husband, film-director Alex Cox, in person, when I drove to and watched WONDER WOMEN! THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICAN SUPERHEROINES at the University of Colorado campus in Boulder where Alex was teaching at the time.
With the audiobook itself, what I tried to do was to make the characters feel as though they were in their appropriate eras. Wonder Woman from the 40’s sounds different from the Wonder Woman of the 70’s. That “Linda Carter” lady had quite an influence!
But I asked myself when recording it. “How close should I sound? Should I try to almost impersonate Linda Carter for 70’s Wonder Woman or other film actors for their modern-day counterparts?
No.
What I wanted to do was to capture the essence of the character without feeling like I was doing an impersonation. Which unless it’s pitch-perfect will be something that is ultimately nit-picked about the book.
Another worry and perhaps the only real criticism I heard about the book in print form was the fact that there were no illustrations. This would be a book about female superheroes in a medium that is dependent upon a visual component and that wasn’t in the text.
But what was in the text was the pure joy that Mike Madrid had for the subject. He’s a lifelong fan of comics and has since published two other volumes on women in comics and written pieces for Fashion Canada in addition to being interviewed for the documentary I mentioned earlier.
From a meta standpoint, my daughters were getting older and I wanted them to have a window into geek and nerd culture. I thought The Supergirls might be that window.
I was a little concerned that a book on comic book heroines might be better voiced by a female narrator. But my thoughts on how to deflect those critical bullets were two-fold. One, the author was male and as a narrator, it was his voice that I most needed to capture, his passion for the subject and why it was culturally important. And two, this book had been out for more than a year. If someone was going to step up and create it they’d had the opportunity and passed.
If I stepped in and made this book, it would be, for me, the perfect combination of subject and medium. The important thing was to convey the passion surrounded by a Lasso of Truth.
Oh, sweet line! What am I going to say when I finish the audio blog about Wonder Woman Unbound…ugh!
Check out The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic book Heroines by Mike Madrid, narrated by me, Colby Elliott at Audible.com. And check out all of the cool new upcoming projects at lastwordaudio.com. If you’d like to stay updated sign up for Monkey Missives.
Next Time on Geekery and Wine: Plants vs. Zombies, a great Pinot Noir and Werewolves of War.
Until next time…
My Geeks
My Nerds
My dear, dear friends…
Adieu
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