Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 06/21/24
It’s OK edition
By the time most of you read this, the away team from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker will be safely ensconced in an undisclosed location for the commencement of SoonerCon in Norman, Oklahoma, where we will attempt to establish meaningful connections through trade, mutual respect, a modicum of alcohol, and the trading of stories and tales. Mostly those last two.
Campaign Updates
As of this writing, the Portuguese edition of Blood & Thunder’s crowdfunding campaign is at 37% and Southern Fried Cthulhu’s crowdfunding campaign is about $40 from hitting its second stretch goal, which is to pay the authors more money. I’m just keeping you folks in the loop.
Chessex Stories
Have you been reading my Monday posts on the NTAB site? For the past few weeks I’ve been recounting my time in the role-playing game industry in the 90s. I have wanted to write these down for years, mostly because when me and Weldon tell them, there’s always a variety of reactions ranging from “no shit?” to “I don’t believe it.” Thankfully, folks have liked them so far. I am trying to straddle the line between entertaining and therapeutic. If you’re interested in the gaming industry from the inside out, you might want to give them a read.
499 and Counting
I don’t normally point out the statistical side of social media, but I took a peek recently at the newsletter’s stats and found I’m millimeters away from 500 subs. Since I don’t do a lot of aggressive shilling for this thing, I’ve been quite happy with the one, two, or three new subs a week. 500 though, is one of those nice round numbers that I felt obliged to mention. If you’re a recent subscriber, hey, welcome, and thank you for showing up. If you’re a stalwart member of the old guard, thank you for your continued support, and for occasionally sharing the newsletter on your own social media. Anytime you do that, I garner a few of your readers, so thanks very much!
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: after noting that, despite our cautionary admonishment last week, people are still upset about the new Star Wars series, The Acolyte. Well, make that, people are upset at the people who are upset about The Acolyte. It’s apparent at this point that the people whose side hustle it is to get disproportionally angry in order to generate money have no interest in not consuming media that they despise. We propose that the rest of you simply not consume the bile that others are spewing. The only way to make them stop is to...well, you can’t make them stop. But you can force them into their own feedback loop where the only people they are talking to is each other.
This has been a public service announcement from the N.T.A.B. division of Media Review.
Brats (Hulu)
Andrew McCarthy takes a camera and visits some of his fellow Brat Pack alumni to try and find some closure on his career in the 1980s.
If that one-line summary doesn’t pull you in, my guess is you aren’t ‘of a certain age,’ which is just a euphemism for ‘older than MySpace.’ Honestly, the only reason I clicked through to the documentary was that Andrew McCarthy was doing the asking and the filming, because, like most of us, I lost track of him years ago. I can’t remember the last thing I saw him in. As someone who caught every single John Hughes movie in the theater, I was naturally curious to see where he was going with his thesis statement.
Brats covers the genesis of “The Brat Pack” and the reporter who coined the phrase and there’s a lot of archival footage, deftly cut, to explain to us that while The Brat Pack was one thing to the public, it was quite another inside the Hollywood bubble. McCarthy in particular chafed at being lumped together, somewhat haphazardly, and he took issue with the idea that he and his co-stars were summarily dismissed, en masse, as a fad or a trend.
As a completely biased and emotionally compromised filmmaker, McCarthy decided to track down several Brat Pack members to get some clarity and perspective on the phenomenon. In fact, most of the documentary is a series of interviews with his friends and other people (a couple of great surprises that I won’t spoil for you) as he gradually hones in on some larger themes, including, but not limited to, having friends you’ve known for three or four decades that are still in your life.
I’m not certain if your favorite 80s crush makes an appearance in Brats, but that’s okay; who he does get is pretty great, and while they are all living in nice houses in the backwoods, they are all down-to-earth, unguarded, and more relatable, presumably because they aren’t in the midst of a phalanx of paparazzi and are talking about things that happened forever and ago. After it was over, I wanted to reach out and talk to old friends I’d lost touch with. It also reminded me how much I hated St. Elmo’s Fire.
LOL! Of a certain age? I don't even know who these people are! I am beyond that certain age. I do remember the Rat Pack, though... Hope you're doing well in the heat!