Books Read 2023

Graphic Novels

A lot of rereads because I picked up print copies…

  • Superman: A Celebration of 75 Years

    Lois Lane: A Celebration of 75 Years

  • Wonder Woman: A Celebration of 75 Years

  • The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years

  • Alias Omnibus by Brian Michael Bendis

  • Batman Adventures: Mad Love Deluxe Edition by Paul Dini

  • Transformers : Evolutions - Hearts of Steel by Chuck Dixon

  • Batman: The Brave & the Bold: The Bronze Age Vol. 1 by Bob Haney

  • Love and Rockets: The Covers by Gilbert Hernández

  • Penny Century by Jaime Hernández

  • Maggie the Mechanic by Jaime Hernández

  • Esperanza: A Love and Rockets Book by Jaime Hernández

  • Tonta by Jaime Hernández

  • Angels And Magpies by Jaime Hernández

  • Perla la Loca by Jaime Hernández

  • The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime Hernández

  • Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? The Deluxe Edition by Alan Moore

  • Transformers: Lost Light, Vol. 1 by James Roberts,

  • Marvel Masterworks: the X-men 3 by Roy Thomas

  • Marvel Masterworks: the X-men 4 by Roy Thomas

Gaming

  • Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games by Matt Barton

  • Boss Fight Books #28 Final Fantasy VI by Sebastian Deken

  • Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Castlevania by Kurt Kalata

  • The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss

  • The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal by Laine Nooney

  • Super Nes Works Volume I: 1991 by Jeremy Parish

  • NES Works Volume III: 1987 by Jeremy Parish

  • 50 Years of Text Games: From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon by Aaron A. Reed

Fiction

Again, some rereads because I picked up print copies…

  • The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

  • Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

  • Sweeney Astray by Seamus Heaney

  • The Midnight Verdict: Translations from the Irish of Brian Merriman and from the Metamorphoses of Ovid by Seamus Heaney

  • The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables Robert Henryson, Seamus Heaney (Translator)

  • The Translations of Seamus Heaney

  • The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

  • The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

  • A Doll's House and Other Plays (Penguin) by Henrik Ibsen

  • Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

  • The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson

Non-Fiction

  • The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

  • Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (edited by Jehad Abusalim)

  • The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948–1985 by James Baldwin

  • Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights by Omar Barghouti

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition (translated by Marie Borroff)

  • Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester by Derrick A. Bell

  • Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? by Judith Butler

  • Life Against Dementia: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 1975-2011 by Joe Carducci

  • Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Edited by Angela Y. Davis)

  • Cinema 1: The Movement-Image by Gilles Deleuze

  • Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball by Luke Epplin

  • Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

  • Silence is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans by Ian Glasper

  • Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

  • Superheroes, Movies, and the State: How the U.S. Government Shapes Cinematic Universes by Tricia Jenkins

  • Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones

  • The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

  • Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing & Prisons (edited by Colin Kaepernick)

  • Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies (edited by Colin Kaepernick)

  • Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution by Neil Lanctot

  • The Ninety-Five Theses and Other Writings by Martin Luther

  • Knowledge Socialism: The Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence (edited by Michael A. Peters)

  • Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World by James E. Lindsay

  • Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Premilla Nadasen

  • Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew by John Oller

  • Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin) by Julian of Norwich

  • Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 12-1565 by Walter Simons

  • Making It So: A Memoir by Patrick Stewart

  • The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia by Grafton Tanner

  • Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972-77 by Louise Toupin

  • As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957–1977 by Val Wilmer

  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford) by Mary Wollstonecraft

Armistice Day 2023

This year I co-hosted our Armistice Day event again. Here are my comments…

I recently read a quote from a book about Shell Shock where the author describes World War I as “a war on the…scale…no one had ever seen…the varying degrees of metal breakdown among soldiers or experienced it in such massive numbers.”

What was called Shell Shock during World War I is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The language we use to describe the horrors of war have become needlessly complex and take away from the severity of it. Think about how many people use the phrase “PTSD” rather frivolously. I’m not a vet, but I have been through significant, life changing traumas that make me very resentful towards people who use the term in a superficial manner. I hear this criticism from our veteran students as well.

There is a George Carlin clip from the early 1990s that is frequently shared online where he talks about the de-evolution of language and uses the example of Shell Shock. What was Shell Shock in World War I becomes increasingly complex and less declarative language that ends up meaning something that is vague and not direct.

The top comment on that clip focuses on Carlin noting that the phrase Shell Shock “sounds like the guns themselves.” I think about that a lot too.

Something those of you in the audience that have been my students can attest to is that I am constantly telling students to be more declarative. Narrow the scope of your argument. Use precise language. Shell Shock is precise. How we talk about this issue in modern times is not.

During the Modernist era, war, particularly in the Intermodern period between the world wars, was constantly on the minds of writers. Beyond war, Modernism also focuses on how individuals can become deathly alienated from society. One of the best works of literature during this period that describes the horrors of shell shock is Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

The co-protagonist, Septimus Smith, has horrible nightmares, when he can even sleep at all, and feels a deep disconnection from those around him including his wife. He feels alienated from society and after hearing a car motor backfire, shows how shell shock robs someone of their ability to properly process themselves and those around them.

Reading from Mrs. Dalloway

New Top 100 Lists

A project I have worked on this year is creating a top 100 list, like the ones I did for the hardcore era, for the 1960s and 1970s. They are now viewable on SN.

1960s

1970s

Top 100 Retro Games: Baseball Stars

Baseball Stars
Nintendo Entertainment System
SNK
1989
#9

During the 8 bit era there were so many baseball games both licensed and unlicensed. I had already fallen in love with baseball via WPIX Yankees games and Micro League Baseball on my Apple II. I loved the depth and strategy of the game and got mixed results from NES games. Major League Baseball had real teams, but wasn’t that great. RBI Baseball was really fun but a bit mindless and random. Bases Loaded, and especially Bases Loaded II, almost got it down right. The pitching and batting interface was excellent and worth investing time in a season, but the fielding, especially when playing now, is very poorly implemented.

I played all of these games a lot trying to make the best out of them. Everything changed when Baseball Stars came out.

The first time I encountered Baseball Stars was at a friend’s house. He had rented it earlier in the day and when I came over to hang out. I sat down and began watching him play the game.

I remember the home run image, with all of its pomp, really drawing me in. A few innings later, my friend climbed a wall to make a catch, which absolutely blew our minds. When he fell over a wall later, we could not even believe what we were seeing in front of us.

I rented the game myself a few days ago and then bought it a few weeks later. One of my favorite aspects of Baseball Stars is all the little things about it that really made the game sit apart from others: you could climb walls, you could stop runners, and trick the AI, and generally the play control was so smooth. There was a woman’s team, and you could buy women to play on your own team. The additional RPG elements that allowed you to level up your players as you played through a league season added depth that allowed me to play the game on and off for at least three summers that I can remember.

Like I said, I kept playing Baseball Stars for a lot of my adolescence. Every summer, I would put together a team of friends and people from school. In private, some of them thought this was cool. Many just thought it made me a dork.

Because you could put women on your team, I could put a few crushes in my lineup. My heavy hitting, after some leveling up, lady catcher was my big middle school crush. All of my pitchers were her friends.

The bottomline is Baseball Stars gave me an outlet to have a space where I had friends that I did not have in real life. Looking back, that is unfortunate, but at the time, it was part of surviving.

I cannot stress enough how much video games saved my life back then. Games like Baseball Stars gave me that outlet to get away from the horrors of my day to day life at school and, once my father was unemployed and then having to commute three hours a day in a horrible economy, at home. I escaped into them and, at times, still do today.

I hate how so many episodes of this podcast have this sad tinge to them. It is one of the realities that made me want to do it though.

I am pretty proud of the fact that when I began playing Baseball Stars this summer, I remembered the code to get a pretty good team from memory. It does not guarantee domination though as some players will have pretty oblong skill sets that need to be leveled up. I did win the quick league I created, but I picked up a few losses along the way. The ability to do RPG style leveling up in a sports game felt revolutionary, just like it did in fighting games like River City Ransom, even though now it would be mundane.

The game still plays well. The play control is so good and very smooth. Fielding was often the aspect of the game that was not as good back in the NES days, but Baseball Stars absolutely nails it. I can pick this game up now and feel like I am 11 years old again. I sat down each afternoon and played a game in my league, and it felt totally natural to play this game despite it being over 25 years old. Much like other games of the era like Tecmo Bowl, there is a timeless quality to Baseball Stars that will make it playable forever.

PODCAST
STREAM

Top 100 Retro Games: Alien Storm

Alien Storm
Sega Genesis
Sega
1991
#63

Alien Storm is another in the seemingly endless line of late eighties and early nineties side scrolling platformers that dominated the arcades and both Nintendo and Sega systems. A lot of these games have very similar styles to them involving multiplayer action, area of effect attacks, and generally a good sense of humor. A great asset to Alien Storm is that it never takes itself too seriously. It would be easy to go “dark and gritty” with a game like this, and Sega avoids this masterfully.

I remember Alien Storm being yet another in a very long line of SEGA side scrollers that were fun and highly playable. However, maybe because of this, it did not seem all that memorable and ended up in the pile of games in my closet that got sold off many years later. As I said, it was not until the PS3 collection came out that I really came back to it and then really enjoyed playing the game.

This is a quirky, fun, game that does have some visual and input issues, definitely, but generally holds up regarding both graphics and play control. I dig its sense of humor for sure and the Contra style body horror at the end of the game. More on that in a bit.

So, the plot of Alien Storm goes something like this: Aliens have invaded Earth! You could stay there is a….storm...of them...The Alien Busters...really...must stand up to them save Earth.

The cover for Alien Storm, I think, is showing a scene from an early stage of the game with an alien coming out of a mail box. It looks as silly as it sounds. Notice that the female protagonist is nowhere to be found. The farther away from that era we get, the most asinine the excuses for it sound.

Alien Storm has been reissued on a number of Sega collections for modern consoles plus the Mega Drive Mini.

For my most recent play through of Alien Storm, I played it via the Genesis collection on the PS4. I also streamed it to completion. I think Alien Storm has really held up over the years and is still very playable. There are a few flaws we will get to, but overall this is still a great game.

The game reminds me of so many other games of the era like Streets of Rage and Contra. It is yet another side scroller with area of effect attacks that can be replenished. I have played a lot of these games in the past few years and gotten really comfortable with them.

I also love how the game does not take itself so seriously. I mean, for crying out loud the aliens become mailboxes! Some of the aliens look like Slurms, but not the Original Party Worm, Slurms Mackenzie.

I love the last level in this game and its Contra style body horror. It also opens up into various paths, which eventually I figured out. I did have to use an extra life code to get through this one. I think, like Streets of Rage, this is yet another game that is much better in multiplayer mode.

I would highly recommend Alien Storm. It is a very underrated game on the Genesis and worth replaying now. Given that the new collection is available on pretty much every system out there, you might as well check it out.

PODCAST

STREAM

International Student Scholarship 2023

A few weeks ago I was proud to award my annual scholarship for a student from our international student community. Faculty were asked to not offer remarks, so I have included mine below…

This year’s International Student Scholarship is being awarded to Lara Melo. The nominating faculty member, Professor Renita Brady, noted that Ms. Melo is “an extremely enthusiastic student with a love of learning and a love of experiencing.” Professor Brady noted that Lara’s most impressive trait was her willingness to share aspects of her Brazilian culture to faculty and members of her student cohort. She is a member of the International Student Association as well.