RoBoTNiK

Lots to post about that I may not get to: L's college reunion. A rather odd conference in Maine. Parents and in-laws in town this week. narcissime's abominable taste in women. djwilhelm's quite respectable taste in men. Commencement yesterday! Party tonite! But I need to post this first, it being a national day of mourning and all that.



What do you know? I find myself mildly bereaved by Reagan's death. Not because I'm a big fan. Almost the opposite. More because I am rather conflicted in my feelings about him. Intellectually, I deplore most of Reagan's achievements, both the ones that pinko intellectuals like me are supposed to deplore, and even the ones we acquiesce to in retrospectives on the News Hour and NPR. For instance, as I've said in my own lectures about Reagan, and as I've heard about a hundred times this week, he "made Americans feel good about themselves again," Granted, I have no memory of America in the 1960s and 1970s, but it's hard for someone my age to believe this was ever really a problem. Honestly, Americans should look into finding a president who makes them feel bad about themselves for a change.

But while I have no intellectual disagreement with the final anti-Reagan shots many of my friends are taking, I take little pleasure in them. I can't bear to watch the beatification of St. Ron currently in progress on every TV channel, but I do want to observe his death in some way. Hence this post.

Reagan is my default president, the first one I remember being elected and being president, and the one to which I instinctively compare all who follow. I was an Alex P. Keaton conservative in high school, and Reagan was probably much of the reason. Which is not to say there was ever a point when I didn't think he was a senile, probably dangerous old coot who couldn't quite tell the difference between the movies and reality. But for me, in a proto-po-mo-ironic-Gen-X kind of way, that was a big part of his appeal! How could I of all people fault somebody else for spending more time in a world of fantasy and pop culture than in real life?

Tangent: Liberal pundits often point out, as if they'd caught him in something, that all of Reagan's best lines were from movies he'd been in or seen. As I say, I can hardly fault him for that. So are all of my best lines. You've heard the stories about Reagan watching The Sound of Music instead of prepping for Reykjavik, or mining the movie Ghostbusters for lessons about the 1984 election. I'll bet while Reagan was president, every third thing he said was a line from a movie or a TV show, and every third thing Nancy said was, "What's that from?" (In this one small thing, Lisa can empathize with Nancy Reagan.) Don't be fooled by his G.I. generation birthdate! Reagan was the first and so far only Generation X president.

In college my politics did a 180, but I remained fascinated by Reagan and the Reagan years. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Reagan's foreign policy, and when I first arrived at Harvard thought I might write my PhD dissertation on the same. I've long felt towards Reagan much of the same push-pull I feel towards the United States in general—the same itch to figure it out that brought me here, and made me devote my career to studying the USA. Warm-hearted and diabolical, well-meaning and destructive, charming and insane—that's Reagan, and America, to me.

Next Post: Quintuple Dutch: The Alternate Reagan Film Festival.

No posts about real life these days. It's kicking my ass too brutally. Escapist retro fantasy juvenilia only until further notice.

My man Gamma Fodder wrote a great post last week waxing nostalgic for our D&D group of old—including him, me, sneech515, and dreamsanon. I still laugh when I think of Chris' father blowing that stick out of his magic-user's hand. Good times! He also dug up the following picture of a modern day D&D club, a natural complement to the 1980 D&D club pic I posted in January.



To me, these kids look a few experience points more with it than the kids from 1980, but I guess that's partly because their hairstyles aren't two decades out of date. (You can see the two side by side in Chris' post.) I am amused that the ethnic and gender diversity hasn't changed diddly in twenty-four years: again we have one Asian kid, one black kid, one kid that might be Hispanic, and one maternal looking teacher the only female in sight. Here's to ya, boys. Hang in there!

In other "who'da thought you'd still be obsessing over this crap in the 21st century, Rob?" news, a new edition of Paranoia, one of our faves from those days, has been announced for this summer. I offered my thoughts on the new Paranoia XP over at The 20' by 20' Room and the very first comment was from none other than Allan Varney, the author of the new edition. He says he's going for a more serious tone, citing Brazil and Memoir Found In A Bathtub. Which are pretty much the magic words if you want to sell me. We actually converted our version of Alpha Complex to Terry Gilliam's Brazil back in the day, replacing IntSec with the Ministry of Information, etc. And I read Memoir Found In A Bathtub (a black comedy of totalitarianism by Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem) in 1988 or so because it reminded me of Paranoia and decided it was just about the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen.

I am mesmerized tonight by two little videos which appear to be flawless run-throughs of the old Nintendo games Super Mario Bros 3 and Mega Man 2. (Both links go direct to streaming videos.) I played the crap out of both of these games in the NES years with my siblings and then with foogie in our frosh dorm room at Crazy Go Nuts University. There's considerable nostalgia mojo just in hearing the music and watching Mario and Mega Man pogo around. But can these videos really be actual games, "filmed" in a single "take"? Or have they been edited or manipulated? They are, I repeat, flawless performances. It's cooler to imagine they represent actual play, but I really don't want to think about the hours necessary to hone one's game to this kind of robotic precision.

For more Nintendo nostalgia, you can do no better than Seanbaby's NES and Mega Man pages: "Metal Man. He was some robot that was made out of metal. He was the dork of the group. I mean, all of the other guys are made out of metal too, but they have other cool stuff. It's like you getting a costume that says, "Human Man," and trying to fight crime." Hee.

Tangent #1: A trivia fact for those that didn't know me in the early 1990s. In the fall of 1991, I painted a portrait of the Mario Brothers on the back of my red leather university jacket. It looked hella sharp and was not at all dorky! despite what you might now suspect. It was in fact exceedingly cool and I will stand by that interpretation. If you didn't recognize Mario and Luigi (and in 1991, most people over the age of eleven didn't), the icons were strangely compelling, cheerful yet unsettling in that iconic Japanese design way. And if you did recognize them, then you had to give me props for being way out in front of the hipster appropriation of Japanese kiddie culture. foogie and I actually set off a bit of a campus fad for jacket-painting, I think. (OK, by the end it might have gotten a little dorky.)

Tangent #2: I've got both videos playing in separate windows on my desktop as I type this. Mario and Mega Man have very distinctive jumping arcs. Even without the raccoon ears that give him the power of flight (for some reason), Mario's broadjump beats the fuck out of Mega Man's. But Mega has that adorable anime leaping pose.

Edit: Word on the street tells me that the Mario video, at least, is faked. My faith in humanity is simultaneously damaged and restored.