LIKED
– Someone in the requests post asked for a general investigation into what I like and don’t like in music, and that’s coming later this week, but for the meantime? I really got into listening to Orishas this week. I really like hip-hop combined with traditional musical forms and Orishas do it very well, mixing Spanish rhyming (which admittedly I can’t follow, but their flow and performance is excellent even without understanding the words) with Cuban rumba- and salsa-style beats. “El Kilo” is probably my favorite single of theirs so far, but “Bruja” isn’t far behind.
– I’m really enjoying Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris. It’s funny and clever and hard to put down, and that’s what I want out of a light novel.
– I’ve always had an inherent fondness for poker-dice type games, and Lock N’ Roll is one of the best I’ve seen in quite some time. Current high score is 7622, for those interested in beating me.
MEH
– I got Britannia this week at a discount, which is great, and of course the new Fantasy Flight edition of the game is gorgeous in most respects. My complaint, however, is that this is a game with eleventy billion tokens, and the plastic insert which is supposed to store the pieces is entirely random and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the various types of pieces, so you end up kind of mixing things together in untidy clumps. This isn’t a small deal, because Britannia is a looooong-ass game, and anything that can reduce its playtime – like, say, simplifying the storage of it – is welcome.
– I finally got around to reading all of Jack Staff this week and… it’s not bad, I suppose, but I don’t see why this comic gets so many raves. It’s a perfectly average, okayish superhero comic. If it was a Marvel or DC book it would be completely unmemorable. Paul Grist’s art gives it an additional sort of original character, sure, but I was expecting an A-plus book and got maybe a B-minus. Is this like Walt Simonson’s Thor – is it one of those comics everybody else jerks over and I just read it and think, “eh, whatever?” (Other than Beta Ray Bill, of course.)
DIDN’T LIKE
– Whenever I see one of the old Big Books that Paradox Press used to print (The Big Book of Death, The Big Book of Hoaxes, The Big Book of the Weird Wild West, et cetera) in a used bookstore, I make a point to pick it up because they’re out of print and they’re always awesome: clever stories about real, obscure things, people and happenings. However, The Big Book of Urban Legends is just terrible, because it is full of boring stories about fake things that never happened that you have already heard half a dozen times. It’s like reading a book of knock-knock jokes when you’re older than eight; you know them all already, so it’s not fun or cool. It’s just bad.
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Jack Staff is so visually striking that people dig it well beyond its fair-to-middling stories. Grist’s art has an energy that’s all too rare. I think it’s beloved not so much because it’s great, but because it’s different and bold.
The Big Book of Urban Legends was really neat when it came out in the early 90s. Urban legends were one of those things a lot of people had heard of, and knew a few of them, but usually only a few of their local stories. While everything in there is old hat now, that’s arguably partially because of things like the Big Book of Urban Legends. Remember, we didn’t have Snopes back then.
Just use a small plastic tackle box to hold the bits for your game. Thats what most board game players use when they have a game with a lot of bits like Arkham horror. It really simplifies things.
A short term solution for Britannia, until you can get the tackle box, is little plastic sandwich bags.
So, you into Orishas?
Being a music nerd myself, i always find it entertaining how people tend to go to their opposite hemisphere when looking for cool stuff. Me im totally into north american/canadian/european artists while being bombarded by stuff like Orishas all day long down here.
In any case, Orishas is, in fact, great. Ever listened to Calle 13? the original stuff, not the feat. Nelly Furtado that, while not bad at all, is everywhere, and not really among their best stuff. Give em a try. They lean a bit more towards Reggae, Reggaeton and their derivatives, but in a good way (No Wisin & Yandel bullcrap).
Hey the urban legend book is great and at one point was my favorite of that series. For me that honor now goes to the big book of Bad. It would have gone to the big book of Conspiracy Theories but it’s framing device is boring and unnecessary.
If I were to have the urban legends book today for the first time I think I wouldn’t think that much of it. Like BitterCupofjoe said this was long before Snopes and fuck, Snopes totally raped this book for source material.
The plastic insert in Britannia is actually for some other game (can’t remember which). I think the new printings do have an insert that works with the game, but if you got it on discount, it might be the original printing (which also has Jutes and Saxons switched in turn order on the board).
As Caduceus said, I’ve found a ziplock bag for each color, and another for points works pretty well.
Like BitterCupofjoe said this was long before Snopes and fuck, Snopes totally raped this book for source material.
More like both Snopes and Paradox Press pillaged the works of Jan Harald Brunvand (actually, Brunvand may have been an editor/compiler for the BBofUL).
“Remember, we didn’t have Snopes back then.”
Or virtually the entire world wide web. (This was 1994, so it was close.)
I haven’t read Jack Staff (or Simonson’s Thor, but that’s on my pile) so I can’t talk about that book specifically, but I’m not big on Grist’s art. He’s done some work on the Doctor Who comic and while not bad per say it just doesn’t appeal to me. I can deal with it for an issue or two, but I don’t think I could put up with it in a series. I’ve got the same problem with Quitely and I developed it with Chaykin after too many issues of Punisher: War Journal.
I know this won’t win me any friends, but…
I think “Beta Ray Bill” is one of the dumbest characters in comics.
And I even have the issues where he first appeared in a long box somewhere. As a Thor-alien, I guess he looks kinda cool (like a giant, muscled space-shrew in a Norse god costume), but that friggin’ name. It means nothing, and other than use in an ironic sense like, “Bill, the Galactic Hero,” “Bill” just doesn’t work for me as one’s superhero moniker. It sounds like the name a ten-year-old Star Trek fan would give to his Terrier, having grown out of naming pets “doggie” and “fishie.”
And Thor’s costume was always borderline dippy for me, anyway, with those circle-things all over his torso (what viking wore an outfit like that, anyway?), but slapping it on an alien…
It just didn’t work for me, and still doesn’t, and I don’t get why he rocks the world for some folks. And that’s just me, I don’t think less of anyone who likes it, I just can’t figure out the appeal.
If you like hip-hop and don’t mind it being in another language, have you heard anything from Japan? I discovered RIP Slyme through the intro theme for an anime series (Gantz), but found several videos of theirs on Youtube that were just . . . fun. I remember when hip-hop was fun. Good times.
ps238principal: I agree with you, I too don’t see the appeal of Bill. I know I own his first issue and I’m pretty sure I own more then one version of it (at least one floppy and I think a trade). I’m pretty sure I’ve read it at some point and even though I’m pretty sure I’ve read it, other then the cover, I don’t remember a damn thing about it. I think it speaks fairly poorly for a character that his first appearence is completely unmemorable. Plus, outside of the Avengers, it seems weird that Thor would spend any time with an alien. Aren’t Loki and the Enchantress up to enough without Thor going off into space to look for trouble? We’ll see once I ever get around to that Simonson Thor trade I’ve got sitting around.
Beta Ray Bill always sounded like it was a space-y take on some backwards hick name.
I think part of Jack Staff’s rave reviews is the fact that it isn’t Marvel or DC. That always seems to earn a comic more cred than it’d get if were from Big Two.
On the other hand, “The Big Book of Little Criminals is crazy good. Best of the series in my opinion, but then I’m a crime history junkie.
Then We Came To The End felt a little too much like a New Yorker short story blown out to 400 pages.
I remember finishing “Everything Used to Be Black and White” and just thinking, “Wow.” Grist is really good at the mechanics of plot–there’s a lot of event in the story, and it all feeds back upon itself and builds to a complex crescendo.
And yes, he’s very visually stylish–not just the rendering, which is the American superhero style distilled down to its essentials, but also a strong awareness of the page and how a story unfolds in pictures.
In short, I think that Jack Staff a triumph of craft rather than novelty.