Let's Play... Pool of Radiance

Pool of Radiance

SSI, 1988

originally played on Commodore 64, Amiga

I hesitated before starting this one again. Just look at the simultaneously beautiful and hideously atrocious box cover art and you’ll quickly understand what I mean. The beauty is perhaps less obvious: a classic Clyde Caldwell fantasy painting, an artist well-known to all Dungeons & Dragons tabletop fans, depicting a standard male power aesthetic found all over the best and worst of fantasy art and culture. Metal and man-hair shine with equal precision. The sword half-poised like a cock. The dragon oddly feminised. Taken as a whole, these elements betray both a nerdy powerlessness and a strangely appealing masculine power trip fantasy, one which fully grabbed hold of me as a precociously impressionable twelve-year old. Of course, like all infantile compulsions the negative connotations specifically associated with ‘heroic fantasy’ iconography fully outweigh any sense of aesthetic pleasure derived from what is at best a skilled technical ability which readily evokes a sense of perpetual nostalgia within a certain kind of game consumer and a certain kind of revulsion from most normally everyone else.

an early-game encounter

Interestingly enough, my own experience with this box cover art was not enabled by consumption, at least not in its official capacity. My father brought Pool of Radiance (1988) home one day, copied from a physician friend at work on the basis of the game program being the largest ever released for the Commodore 64: four double-sided 5 ¼” floppy disks. Game piracy was of course not exceptional behaviour in the 1980s. Games were passed around with friends at school on a nearly weekly basis. At this point in the computers-as-pedagogical-tools debate, school computers were entirely misunderstood by teaching staff who had obviously never been trained to use them, so any use by students was viewed by teachers as an appropriate display of computer science aptitude. Friends and I would sit at the back of the classroom copying and playing games and receiving straight A’s.

The more official procedure for our family (i.e.: condoned by parents) to acquire games was to go through ‘The List’, a document dozens of dot matrix computer-printed pages long. My brother and I would select from The List the games we would want to play. My dad’s physician friend would then charge according to how many disks were used, not how many games were copied. I’m not sure whether he actually owned all of the games that were on his list, but he had a whole lot of them. Marriage and kids had not stopped this workaholic emergency room doctor from acquiring a large library full of games. My father brought me over there a few times, and I was instantly amazed by the bookshelves which housed games to the ceiling in nice-smelling oak with brass and silver accent lighting. Treated like a fine library, the doctor’s game collection was my projected masculine fantasy. He must have been buying fifteen games a week for the three different computers set up in his study. On each of the few times I was there, I was allowed to rifle through the boxes and play some of the games released only for IBM and Apple ][, systems far too expensive in the 1980s for my family. Distinct from game consoles, home computers allowed full access to media production technologies such as disk creation. In fact, the early history of home computing was almost entirely informed by a culture of software sharing and copying, as many of the computer clubs functioned essentially as game swap meets. Over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s, the industry had to educate consumers to convince them not to copy their floppies. As a barrier to piracy, a lot of the games employed off-disk copy protection in the form of manuals, maps, charts, printed graphics, and code wheels which were often creatively integrated into gameplay. With the doctor, of course, these materials involved additional fees. Ancillaries, he called them. In addition to using four double-sided disks, Pool of Radiance required two large manuals full of expository text and information about the gameworld, and a code wheel. Needless to say, the game was quite expensive to copy.

educating the masses about the dangers of software piracy

The SSI gold box games were particularly important to my formative videogame habits: extended play sessions, meticulous procedures for backing up save files, attention to detail with a forensic and autistic focus, a logical strategization of progress, and meticulous documentation – admittedly a skill developed playing other RPGs which habitually required players to create their own maps and log narrative and quest information. Ultimately, as a result of the cost of pirating complex games such as CRPGs, and the fact that by the age of twelve I was in receipt of a fairly regular income stream, I purchased a copy of every other gold box game I played. From age seven I had been delivering newspapers, and by twelve I had begun to make a profit buying and selling comic books, a bedroom industry in which I thrived until adults started paying attention to comics as investments and by 1992 had priced me out of even trying. Before Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989) and the other gold box games, however, it was Pool of Radiance which captured everything I could call my attention. My father brought the game home, showing off the disks and wondering in amazement about “where it will all end”. Of course, he meant computer technology and wasn't challenging me to complete the game before he did. As a kid I didn’t think my parents played games, maybe due to the fact that they would sometimes get mad when my brother and I played games instead of doing “something outside”. My mom certainly never bothered with them, and it wasn’t until I was older that my father admitted to having enjoyed Douglas Adams games Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) and Bureaucracy (1987) and strategy games such as Ocean Trader (1983), Trader Trilogy (1982), Starflight (1986), and Elite (1986). So he came home from work and was immediately excited that I was immediately excited by the game. In retrospect, this enthusiasm made sense. A few months prior, my religiously-inclined mother and I had gotten into a huge fight after she had found my first-edition copies of the Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide and Deities and Demigods. Fuelled by a trend in religious hatred against D&D quite popular at the time, my mother had decided to destroy an admittedly satanic-looking book and one which quantified the gods of world religion along with their occult rituals, which I had recently acquired from a friend’s older brother as part of my transition, along with every other D&D player my age, from Dungeons & Dragons to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I never forgot the look on my father’s face as he watched my mom tear the pages out of the books, and it was this look which later made me think that he knew what he was doing when he brought home Pool of Radiance, the first official adaptation of D&D for home computers.

glorious tactical, turn-based combat

Having recently completed The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988), another game I had purchased on my own with four-and-a-half weeks of paper route money, I learned Pool's interface very quickly. Enraptured by the character generation screen, among the more advanced for CRPGs at the time, my brother and I spent the entire first night with the game making characters and printing them off in case we wanted to use them in tabletop D&D adventures. Admittedly, I think these characters were only used once in an actual D&D session, but as every RPG player knows that is entirely beside the point. Affect in role-playing games involves fetishising a numerical matrix which qualifies a character within the game world. The numbers tell the whole story of what can be accomplished in the game; the actual narrative or plot is entirely secondary.

perhaps the first game which allowed LGBT characters 

role-playing options add narrative complexity

This being said, Pool of Radiance deploys a rather complicated narrative form for its time. While not exhibiting the narrative depth or complexity of text adventures, Pool utilised a fair number of narrative text passages which guided an admittedly wholly pedestrian and routine fantasy RPG plot. But as with many media texts from the early days in a medium’s history, we must properly contextualise what the game actually accomplishes rather than dismiss it for the many things it does not. At several points in the game, players can make choices which branch the narrative slightly or bestow useful items. While certainly not demonstrating the narrative significance or complexity of Balder’s Gate (1998) or The Witcher II: Assassins of Kings (2011), Pool of Radiance does experiment with the hack and slash mechanics which characterise a significant portion of gameplay. And what mechanics these are. The game presents a complex tactical combat system modelled on actual D&D rules and with elements not only from SSI’s previous RPGs such as Wizard’s Crown (1986) and the Phantasie (1985 – 1987) series, but also from the company’s many legendary war and strategy game series. Almost anything that you could think of doing could be accomplished in the Pool of Radiance game engine, or so it seemed to us at the time.

encounter with the end boss

While slow, the advanced, turn-based combat presented players with (at the time) a rather extensive amount of tactical possibilities. Unlike most of my friends, I was a dedicated computer game player who didn’t have a console at home except an old Atari VCS and an entirely ignored Odyssey 2. For the entire height of the Nintendo boom in the late 80s, most people I knew made fun of me and my family for not having a NES at home. My brother rectified this situation in 1990, but before that my NES time was limited (admitted not quite the right term in this context, as this was the time of extended weekend sleepovers) to time spent at friends’ houses. I took their abuse in stride because I knew that there were things that computers could do in games that consoles simply could not do. Because of piracy, computer gamers always had access to far more games than even rich kids with consoles. The much greater memory capacity of most home computers allowed a far greater complexity to programming code and resultant game design while allowing greater graphical prowess. Most importantly, computers had floppy disks and cassette drives used to save information. As a result, many computer games were designed around gameplay ideas necessitating the tracking and deployment of player data, be it as a record of gameplay behaviour or outcomes or to save a player’s progress. They often presented a different framework for gameplay and presented entirely different ideas to players than did the infinitely more popular console games, extending over weeks or months instead of single sessions, and adjusting themselves to player activity and altering their worlds as a result of player behaviour. Additionally, computer games could utilize highly advanced control interfaces and control interactions allowed by keyboards in addition to console-standard joysticks and trackballs. As fewer people had access to computers in the home, these games tailored themselves to niche rather than mass markets. Some genres such as strategy and flight simulation didn't even appear on console games until very recently.

Accordingly, I used to love showing off to my friends aspects of computer games that console games simply couldn’t do – the personalization and content creation functions, the extensive graphics and gameplay options. Many of these differences existed with Pool of Radiance. Players have control over the appearance of their characters throughout the game. Hundreds of different inventory items are available, allowing for extensive customization. One of my friends was absolutely amazed that enemies could be killed to the point where they were cleared out of an area in the game, and then the game machine could be switched off and the game resumed later with these same areas still clear of enemies. Two months later, he convinced his mom to buy him an Amiga; although Pool of Radiance had not yet been released for that system, rumours were that the best version of the game would be for Amiga but he would have to wait and in the meantime he had Hillsfar (1989), Heroes of the Lance (1988), Defender of the Crown (1986), Blood Money (1989), Dungeon Master (1988) and every other game that was completely amazing on Amiga. Indeed, this minor procedural detail of housekeeping enabled by player data save technologies is the entirety of Pool's plot: clear an area of the city before moving on to the next one and ultimately defeating the end boss, who in this case is a rather fearsome dragon not unlike the one which graces the cover art. Essentially, players are the city's cleaning service; gameplay is precisely a record of this process of 'cleaning'. Despite a few superficial RPG aspects, there was simply no way for console games such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) or Dragon Warrior (1986) to operate in a similar manner. Code passwords weren't the same. No matter what you did on the consoles, the monsters always came back.

exploring the city, Amiga version

obviously

More to the point, however, this style of gaming was not only appealing to math-heavy, idiot-savant youth such as me and my friends, it was also very practical in terms of being a group gaming activity. Playing the game in a large group of people, individuals can make their own choices about a character, and the visual presentation makes everyone feel as though they are hovering around a digital boardgame instead of a computer monitor. Strategic decisions are complex and variable, allowing numerous opportunities for partnership and disagreement with other players as they think through their party’s situation. While I did end up finishing Pool of Radiance alone at home after several months, I also played a significant portion of the game with five friends at school as well as each other’s houses. As the game allowed six characters in the party, everyone got to create and play their own guy (please note that no girls were included in this group of twelve-year old CRPG fans, either in real life or in the game). Everyone had a copy of the save disk, and disagreements would break out when someone would play alone at home without input from other players, thus disrupting our collective progress. Complex social interactions emerged from our play, but I'll leave such observations to researchers more qualified than I in anthropological study.

sweet tactical combat on the Amiga

We didn’t finish the game together, but we did manage about half of it before everyone got distracted by other things in their lives, or maybe other games, I choose not to remember.

missed call: the influence of cell phone culture on political polls

Politics and prophecy have ancient mutual origins in military tradition. It is obvious why knowledge of the future confers strategic advantage. Once a tradition of mysticism and ritual, prophecy now involves the application of algorithmic calculation to large data sets for the production of useful extrapolations. This is how finance capitalism evaluates companies, how Target uses sales data to know about a woman’s pregnancy before she does, and how campaigning politicians know which doors to knock on or avoid. In the era of big data, we should not be surprised that big money remains the dominant influence.

If it seems as though new, contradictory polls are produced daily, then we can thank the news media for increasingly relying on polling data to provide inexpensive programming. Commercial news is an entertainment product, a consequence of media conglomeration by large multinationals. In this context, polls quantify the drama of the electoral road and turn the relative boredom of electioneering into an adult videogame formatted for inexpensive mass consumption. Of course, without editorial discretion on the part of media agencies, this process often results in the publication of polls bearing dubious statistical legitimacy.

Gauging public opinion requires time to properly accomplish. Survey length and complexity dictates cost, and media organizations need to produce other content while waiting for the survey to be completed. As a result, new survey techniques which greatly simplify survey questions while reducing the time and budget required for data collection have come to the fore in the prediction industry, with the resultant products ready for media consumption. Some polling companies such as Angus Reid and Abacus Data have transitioned to online polls of dubious legitimacy. Most companies, such as MainstreetTechnologies and Forum Research – often cited in Toronto media – use interactive voice response (IVR) technology, a self-aggrandizing term for computerised phone surveys.

So what exactly is the problem with telephone polling in the 21^st century? Telephone collection of public opinion data from a random selection of Canadians has long been the gold standard for the polling industry, as landlines existed in virtually every residence in the country and data could be collected in a cost-effective manner. However, academic and industry studies have noted that the recent decline in the response rate to telephone surveys has greatly impacted the validity of data produced. Reasons for declining response rates are numerous, but often involve technological developments such as line screening and the adoption of mobile phones. Unlike the phone books which graced every home when landlines were common, wireless carriers have not coordinated their databases to produce a national cellphone directory. Furthermore, due to built-in caller ID and pay-by-the-minute billing, cell phone users are more prone to ignore calls from unknown numbers. As a result of these issues, many telephone surveys omit cellphones from their sample sets, as it is difficult and expensive to correlate demographic information with individual numbers.

Youth, urban professionals under the age of 40, renters, and low-income voters in particular are not being captured by polls relying on landline survey data. Governmental research suggests that mobile-exclusive residences currently represent nearly 19% of Canadian households, a number that is sure to rise as nearly 65% of people under 35 report using mobile phones exclusively. As a result, poll data is skewed toward older, wealthier voters in rural and suburban communities, reflecting a bias for conservative candidates. This bias evidences in polls as reported by the news media, but often vanishes once votes are actually counted on election day: witness the last Ontario election, in which poll data almost universally predicted a Conservative victory, while the actual election granted a majority win for the Liberal party. In a similar manner, Olivia Chow’s popularity lies with demographic groups not captured by landline surveys and so may not be reflected in poll results indicating a race between John Tory and Doug Ford.

According to polling companies, the use of IVR along with advanced statistical analysis results in a rate of predictive accuracy comparable to landline telephone surveys and other established methods for gauging public opinion. However, more often than not, polling companies simply do not perform the requisite statistical calibration to legitimate their results, suggesting that their data acquisition methodologies emphasize turnaround time and affordability rather than statistical viability. My own calculations indicate that IVR is only accurate when the results of numerous polls are averaged over a much longer term than the daily surveys being reported in the news media. Importantly, the long term trend is not reflected by individual studies, which vary wildly from the long-term median.

As a result of focusing on short-term results skewed by unrepresentative population samples, the news media often misrepresents public opinion to the voting public. With an increasing number of miscalled elections, hopefully the public learns the sense of editorial mistrust and critical evaluation which the news media, in thrall to the temporal acceleration of market forces, have relinquished. 

Published for rabble.ca 

Let's Play... Elvira

Elvira
Accolade, 1990

originally played on Amiga, PC

There’s no way to go through this one without talking about Elvira’s breasts. Absolutely no way whatsoever. Not just prominently displayed on the box art, informing the font used in the company name, but also right in the middle of the back of the box: “Can someone help me find my chest?” So let’s just get them out of the way now, as with Elvira, the self-proclaimed “hostess with the mostest”, fans are very used to this sort of self-objectified feminism. Elvira uses the objectification of women to her advantage, with an irreverent punk rock wit which made a generation of men want to be her sub. An ironic gesture to the kind of oppressive gender constrictions which women faced for most of the twentieth century. That the female body could be objectified for commercial gain was not the problem; horror cinema is all about the objectification of bodies both male and female. The problem, rather, centres upon the beneficiary of this process of objectification.

Elvira, reprising her TV role as 'lounges gracefully'

Elvira herself is of course not an entirely original creation on the part of actress Cassandra Peterson. She references the many ‘horror hotties’ who are used to bolster ticket sales to a largely (or at least perceived) male audience throughout the medium’s history. More specifically, Elvira performs in a tradition of television hosting in which an attractive horror-themed actress introduces late-night horror and science-fiction films broadcast on television station throughout North America. Most of these personalities were limited to being regional celebrities, but a few such as Vampira and Elvira gained national attention. Not just an attractive body, the quick-witted Elvira constantly served as a foil to male desire at the same time as she was herself fully empowered by it (most visible in the financial returns from her celebrity status). This trope has long been used in both counterculture and mainstream cinema and television. By the late 1980s, Elvira was fully exploited across a range of products, including pinball tables, toys, numerous comic book series, a feature film, and of course videogames. In addition to television duties, she hosted a series of horror film releases on home video which, while tame, were still inevitably watched by every fan of the genre. Sadly, while her likeness has been reproduced relatively successfully in Elvira (1990), her persona and most especially her wit have not been so equally-well rendered. What does remain, however, is an appreciation for horror films by the game developers, evidenced by nearly every scene in the game.

A video store near my friend Ryan O’s house used to rent us absolutely everything in the store. A family run business, the owners clearly didn’t care what children watched, although we never did venture into the porn section concealed behind a red fake velvet curtain to fully test out their permissiveness. By the look of the crazy weirdos who went back there, they must have had some fucked up shit on tape in the back room. So no porn, but we could rent anything else. Violent martial arts films with heads being destroyed with weapons in red plumes of death; cable access and direct-to-video softcore thrillers, often starring the same five naked people and their clearly fake breasts; b-list American slashers and Italian zombie and revenge movies. The Italians with their lack of censorship always made the goriest films. I wasn't a big fan of their slashers (except for the eye trauma), but the zombie films are often amazing. It didn’t matter what the rating was – most of the films were unrated anyway – the clerks allowed my friends and I to take the movie home one for 87 cents or five for three dollars.

confusion guides the game's opening, as you are cast into a jail cell

Obviously it was the covers which grabbed us. My religious mother was always horrified when she saw them laying around the house, but there was never any attempt to take them away. We never had ‘the talk’ about movies the way that we had ‘the talk’ about N.W.A. or Iron Maiden and ‘the talk’ about satanic-looking Dungeons & Dragons books, or ‘the talk’ about the copy of Husler she found under my bed in grade seven. One of my favourite muttertrauma moments happened on my tenth birthday. My father had started a yearly tradition of renting a laserdisc player for my birthday and then keeping it through Christmas. Laserdiscs were rare and precious like holy water to video fans in the '80s. While libraries stocked copies of films, laserdisc was really the first home video medium which intended consumers to purchase titles rather than rent them. Of course, the VHS kids of the '90s who turned over rooms of their houses to libraries of horror, anime, or foreign films may wish to dispute this statement. However, in the early 1980s cassettes were priced higher than laserdiscs for the simple reason of their mechanical complexity as well as the time required for their duplication. Still, nobody except rich people bought into laserdisc as it was not a recording medium. Everyone wanted to try the exciting new hobby of taping their favourite shows, especially when they weren’t home to watch them. Laserdiscs felt like something you purchased if you already had a VCR. Even though VHS had shitty picture and sound quality and the cassettes never lasted for long without being damaged, people put up with the faults of the VCR because they could tape Miami Vice and Monday Night Football.

For my birthday, my father and I rented laserdiscs of The Evil Dead (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Black Hole (1979), and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Two of them were for the birthday party with my friends, and two were for later. I picked Evil Dead and Raiders for the party. The Indiana Jones film went fine, and everyone was a big fan of the face melting scene. There’s something about Stephen Spielberg’s early career that I find rather interesting, namely that he really did love grossing out and disturbing children. After making Raiders, with its somewhat infamous and thoroughly entertaining face-melting scene, Spielberg famously ghost directed Poltergeist (1982), a film with so many fantastically gory scenes that the film industry invented the new rating of PG-13 to indicate films meant for teenagers and yet which included violence, gore, and softcore nudity. A perfect rating for the Elvira: Mistress of the Dark film which came out in 1988 to the delight of tween boys everywhere. I’ve always been fascinated by this fetish of the gaze in early Spielberg, an interesting element of his filmmaking practice which in his institutionalization in Hollywood has entirely disappeared along with any attempt at making interesting films. Obviously a hit at a party full of a dozen boys aged nine to twelve, Raiders segued into The Evil Dead without any notice from my parents hovering on the periphery. It was during the tree rape scene that my Anglican minister mother brought a tray a cupcakes into the room, placed them on the coffee table, and stared intently without saying anything. The film wasn’t stopped, but I wasn’t allowed to have birthday movies on laserdisc again.

Lists are sometimes a good thing. I used to walk through video stores making them. Often the cover art was enough to be convincing. Favourite covers included The Company of Wolves (1984), Sole Survivor (1983), The Supernaturals (1986), House (1986), The Gates of Hell (1981), Hellraiser (1987), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Sleepaway Camp (1983), Scanners (1983), The Visitor (1979), Chopping Mall (1986), Death Spa (1989), Basket Case (1982), Frightmare (1983), Creepers (1986), The Howling (1981), Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Return of the Living Dead (1984), Zombie Lake (1981), Night of the Zombies (1981), Visiting Hours (1982), Future Kill (1984) – still the film with the highest awesome-cover-to-shit-film ratio – Mausoleum (1983), Revenge of the Dead (1983), Burial Ground (1981), and Squirm (1976). Are any of these movies any good? Of course not, with only a few exceptions. But their appreciation is a process greater than the characteristics of any one film. The thing about genre appreciation of this kind is that no individual text is complete or interesting in isolation. An intertextual matrix of relations between texts, their social usage, and the individuals who consume them guides the production of meaning and affect. In this sense, a genre text is never really complete, and this is true even for influential films such as Psycho (1960) and The Shining (1980). Themes, conventions, and tropes animate texts in an equal and polyphonous discourse of social uptake and use value, and indeed come to define the genre and differentiate it from the mass of other possible textual experiences.

I didn't make it

With this idea of intextual referentiality that Elvira the game proper can be fully appreciated. The game takes pleasure in presenting a variety of awful things to players: decapitated heads, bloody stakes hammered into vampire hearts, eyes gouged out and necks ripped open, knifeplay and hangings, and maggot and other atrocities as inventory items. The tone of the game indicates that Horror Soft are clearly invoking in particular the history of Hammer horror films such as Dracula has Risen From his Grave (1968) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Players are tasked with retrieving Elvira’s chest (see the clever pun?) so that she may cast spells in order to defeat the game’s ultimate bad guy, in this case a bad girl. This spellcasting component most obviously marks Elvira as a genre hybrid. Unlike most role-playing games, Elvira does not present players with the ability to cast spells directly by means of mana points or spellbooks. Instead, as in an adventure game, players collect reagents and bring them to Elvira for her to create items which function like spells. Arguably, movement and exploration functions more like an adventure game than most RPGs. While appearing to be a standard grid-based game like Eye of the Beholder (1990), or Might and Magic Book 1: Secret of the Inner Sanctum (1987), as in many graphical adventures most rooms are only presented from specific vantage points and do not allow for the illusion of a 3-D representation of space. However, unlike most adventure games, other than Hero Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero? (1989) which became the Quest for Glory series (1990-1998), combat is an involved, somewhat tactical affair much like in a role-playing game, functioning in real-time much like Dungeon Master (1987) or Eye of the Beholder. Awkward and imprecise, Elvira's combat is perhaps the least interesting thing about the game. Once players have learned to time their actions against opponents after a few hours of playing, there is relatively little variance to encounters except the amount of damage their can cause and withstand.

combat involves timing mouse clicks for attack and defence

Elvira does indeed have the “look and feel of a graphical adventure”, especially if that adventure is in the degenerately comedic vein of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) or Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls (1990). British developer Horror Soft – later to change their name to Adventuresoft (in fact, their original name) with the release of Simon the Sorcerer (1993), their most famous game – were clear genre aficionados, displaying a sophisticated knowledge not only of adventure and role-playing convention, but also a thorough love of horror cinema and all things macabre. While not as well known as their later, more mainstream Simon releases, Elvira demonstrated that licensed properties did not have to be quickly-produced, haphazard attempts to cash in on creative energy expended in other media. In the world of digital games, this is a very rare thing indeed.

you'll probably end up in the soup

Most of the game plays like a classic adventure game with lots of inventory objects to find and manipulate. Many of the game’s set encounters – a vampire asleep in her bed, a man who turns into a werewolf, a mad chef keeping Elvira out of her kitchen – are not combat encounters but rather inventory puzzles. These portions of the game are quite good if you like late '80s, early '90s graphical adventures. Luckily, Elvira is not a pixel hunt game, as objects are always visible (or hidden behind other visible objects). Puzzles are usually quite logical and hints are often given during conversations. Save often, as players can easily fuck themselves over by destroying inventory items or getting killed in combat. After combat has been mastered, however, the game can be finished in a few hours. All really neat and tidy, really. Except for the massive amounts of triumphantly visceral gore. 

the end: wanting, but not getting

Elvira would be a fun remake, but we'll probably never see it. A fairly competent sequel Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus was released in 1991, and the company made one more horror game Waxworks (1992) before turning to wizards and British humour and mainstream success.

Let's Play... Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters
Activision, 1984

originally played on Commodore 64

A confession: I received my first handjob playing Ghostbusters upstairs at a family friend’s house.

It was one of those early-life sexual encounters which has much more to do with discovery than anything like pleasure. My family was over at a friend’s place in the woods outside of the city, a large log cabin-style house with a pool and a trampoline in a large lot which required a riding lawnmower that nobody knew how to properly use. I think my mom worked with their mom at the hospital, or something, maybe not nurses maybe a church friend. Family friendships during childhood are always a little bit hazy. There were normal ones, to be sure. The kind of family friends where you actually are friends with the kids around your age. More often, however, these relationships were tense, strained affairs, provoking a sense of acquired dread and no answer to questions about why we are hanging around these people. My family visited this house in the woods a lot during the summer months, as we didn’t have air conditioning at home and TV was teaching us about global warming while selling everyone on cars and meat three times a day. Their pool wasn’t very big but it did the trick and the kids stopped complaining. In this case it was three kids, a girl named Heather a year older than me, a girl a few months but a grade younger than me named Rebecca, and a baby who I didn’t care for because it never shut up.

opening sequence singalong, with synthesized speech!

On one of these days in the summer after the sixth grade, I was fed up after playfighting with my brother and Rebecca in the pool so I went upstairs to play on their computer. On the way to the house in the forest, my parents had picked me up from swimming lessons, where a strict dress code involving a Speedo was enforced. After nearly drowning in a fast-moving river as a five-year old, the swimming lessons were the only thing my parents ever signed me up to do. I absolutely hated that motherfucker Speedo, for so many reasons related to me being a pre-teenager when baggy pants and baggy shorts were taking over with skateboarding and hiphop. Rebecca kept making fun of me and smacking me in the nuts with a pool noodle. Smart as I and most guys are at such times in our lives, I misread as teasing what she was trying to do and left the pool, offended. I had thought that Heather was already upstairs playing, because she wasn’t in the pool. I couldn’t find her, so I decided to game anyway. A box for Ghostbusters was laying on the floor and my family had seen the film that week on cheap Tuesday, so there was no decision about it really.

don't cross the streams!

I’m not sure how much people who weren’t there will appreciate just how big the Ghostbusters phenomenon was in the mid 1980s. Like most kids my age, I dressed like a Ghostbuster for Halloween, collected the stickers, and watched the cartoon on Saturday mornings. Ads for Ghostbusters products were everywhere, so a videogame adaptation was inevitable. A decade into the twenty-first century, we’re now long accustomed to commercial franchise culture, with seemingly every entertainment property being not simply a book or movie or game but also multiple toy and product lines and phone apps and fast food tie-ins and themed credit cards and everymotherfuckinggoddamnthing else that an idea can be printed on and exploited. We’re now totally bored by the cultural excesses of capitalism, which has rendered even novelty obsolete. Getting swarmed by the cultural artifacts of a single entertainment franchise was a relatively new thing back in 1984, a year not so far away from the Star Wars (1977) blockbuster film phenomenon of the late 1970s and early 1980s which started the whole franchise thing in the first place. Back then it seemed like a really cool idea to have ideas from a movie spread to every conceivable consumer product. It made the movie feel more tangible, something manifest not just as a construct of the collective or singular imagination but also in the material world. For many reasons, this industrial articulation has since come to the fore in the entertainment industry, arguably signalling the positioning of blockbuster entertainment products at the forefront of finance capital. Indeed, the blockbuster film is the court mask worn by capital as it seeks to distract and contain its subjects, false kings and queens entitled by their own pleasure.

catching ghosts with a vacuum strapped to the hood of Ecto-1

Ghostbusters the videogame is itself a bit of a show. The opening sequence features synthesized voice and music from Ray Parker Jr’s hit theme song. Prefiguring the popularity of karaoke in North America, a bouncing ball jumps around song lyrics as players are supposed to sing them. Needless to say, this feature was quite popular at school, as even the teacher requested its performance during music portions of the class. There we were, shitty plastic recorders in hand, trying to learn the teacher’s transcription of the Commodore 64 version of the Ghostbusters theme song while wondering why we weren’t just playing the game while letting the computer sing. Sublime transcendence.

More than anything else, Ghostbusters teaches players the value of a dollar. As a small business owner – a symbol of Reagan’s trickle-down America satirically exploited in both film and game – players manage the business side of the Ghostbusters operation as well as engage in actual ghost busting. Clients pay handsomely for services, but the expenses of professional paranormal containment quickly escalate. While played somewhat for laughs, players will have to upgrade the Ghostbuster car and outfit it with the latest in ghost detection and ...ah... busting equipment.

the expenses of busting ghosts, aka small business 101

Exceptionally simplistic in retrospect, gameplay involves driving around the city catching ghosts from the streets of New York with the vacuum on the hood of Ecto-1 or using foot traps and proton packs when buildings become haunted. I was always fascinated by the driving sequences, not because they were fun but because there was a slight psychedelic effect with the Ghostbusters logo on the roof of Ecto-1 which caused it to lag behind the movement of the vehicle. Obviously a programming error, this lag suggested to the young me that the logo was itself haunted by a ghost, much like it was in the cartoon. Little changes until the endgame, when the Ghostbusters have to survive the Staypuft Marshmallow Man and defeat Gozer on the roof of the skyscraper, much like they do in the film. Except there’s no Gozer and the endgame plays automatically once players skip past the Marshmallow Man’s legs. All very anticlimactic, really.

driving around looking for strategy elements

Heather’s not up here, Rebecca said coming into the room and sitting down beside me. I didn’t look away from the screen because I was trying to get past Staypuft and into the skyscraper. With absolutely no warning whatsoever Rebecca moved my towel and put her hand in my lap and squeezed really hard like she was seeing if it would break. I was frozen in place. So how big is it when you get a boner?

climactic endgame with the Staypuft Marshmallow Man

It was a strange feeling: Rebecca squeezing my penis as the Staypuft Marshmallow man jumps around onscreen and I have to get through his legs. Even when she took it out of my Speedo and stood it up in her hand I didn’t stop playing immediately. After playing for twenty-five minutes I had collected more money than I ever had before, and my car was fully upgraded. This was the closest I had ever been to the end of the game and I wanted to see it happen. In the end she won of course. Only one of my Ghostbusters made it past Staypuft before Rebecca asked Is this what to do? and I stopped paying attention to the game. We went back to the house a few more times that summer, but nothing like that ever happened between Rebecca and I again, even when we played other games alone upstairs. The last I’d heard anything about her, she had married a teacher and worked in real estate.

Robin Williams -- the unsayable: thoughts on comedy, suicide, and modern capital

I’ve never written about a celebrity before, never having been moved, except perhaps with the detached professional guise of a film and media scholar, by the relatively crass marketing of a famous person as a human image or the banal, interchangeable films they tend to inhabit. Certainly there are favourite actors and performing artists who have made particular influences on my life. Some of them I even had the luck and pleasure to meet and work with. But celebrity culture is an inward-facing mirror which doesn’t really appeal to me in or of itself. I don’t consider it evil or a waste of time for those who enjoy the soap opera lives of the tabloid famous, but on a personal level I do find most of it exceptionally boring. Not the desires which lead people to obsess over celebrities, the desires which lead to lines of fans waiting outside of film shoots or premieres, or to express their desire creatively through jpegs and fan fiction. That’s not boring at all. That stuff is legitimately interesting, mostly because as a representation of the flows of capital more generally celebrity culture is the leading edge of a particular revolutionary politics which renders (or reflects) most of civilisation as a docile and manageable collective. What I’m bored by is all the talk following talk following what is, essentially, nothing.

Everyone keeps reminding us how fame is so often ephemeral and insubstantial. How it does little to appease the demons of those who have been made famous. We watch in necrophiliac fascination as celebrities turn against themselves and increase their fame by self-destructing live over realtime media. Drug and sex scandals which disrupt or emphasize our love of the self projected onto an object-person for our consumption. Palliatives for our own troubled lives, certainly, or perhaps a dose of intrigue for the absurd tedium of the contemporary leisure society in the early twenty-first century. How could they possibly throw everything they have away just to pursue temporary vices? we ask ourselves and sit happy in our self-satisfaction.

And then the suicide of Robin Williams lit up my digital feeds with one, overwhelming network of affect. A shared emotion distributed widely over small data packets. A person often described as the funniest person on earth was so tortured by what was not public, by what could not be made public, that he took his own life. An actor who was forced into the childhood psyche of a generation of North American youth born between the mid-1970s and the 1990s by means of Hollywood’s globe-leading position at the forefront of the complex of technological and financial interests which comprise modern (and postmodern) life. A comedian known for insanely energetic physical antics and a lightning-fast wit who became the voice of a modern middle-class who wanted to watch life on television. Someone who has brought so much joy to so many people that it is incomprehensible to many that he took his own life.

And so the story continues, and that is why I felt the need to write about his death. Robin Williams was an example and a possibility for the weird and disruptive hyper kids who had to navigate life in the age before pharmaceuticals and the stranger-danger, penal-colony policies of parents picking up their children from school turned everyone grey and docile and paranoid and corporate, looking for answers in simple questions with readymade solutions. I was introduced to Williams when my mom watched Mork & Mindy on television and she let me stay up late, and then again at the age of ten or so when I discovered the scatological excesses of Williams’s HBO stand-up tapes on Beta. Live, Williams seemed to be in full control of his lack of control, and his manic, adult-onset Tourette’s was a revelation to a pre-adolescent living in Mulroney’s vision for a clean and sober Canada focused on the numbers game. Robin Williams acted exactly as we were told not to act. Manic, hyperbolic, enthusiastic, continually in search of play. These are not the virtues of the successful office bureaucrat or entrepreneur, whose pageantry makes the world go round despite the lack of resources to see the spinning continue for much longer. Robin Williams was the turning point between kids who were policed by teachers and kept acting up and kids who were policed by society with insurance-covered drugs in convenient child-proof packages.

Comedy is an interesting thing. Often springing from tragic individual lives, comedy emerges to placate the wounds of the social, often by shocking the wounded and the non-wounded alike into a new kind of self-recognition. It is among the most dangerous of our political pleasures, and we often see it among the first victims of undemocratic or totalitarian censorship. Comedy is disruptive because it takes an ontological pleasure in this tragedy, of seeing suffering through to transcendence. It is often a defence against the self-hatred which plagues many creative and intelligent people who by their natures are wracked and sometimes hobbled by self-loathing and doubt. Most importantly, it is and must be a social phenomenon. Comedy does not isolate, except perhaps those who don’t get the joke or don’t wish to try. It is a bridge for the perils of contemporary habitation within the various and often conflicting flows of desire produced by a multitude of individuals. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon, as the holy fool, the trickster, and the clown permeate much of the world tradition for myth and storytelling. These figures often serve to redeem their societies through the revolutionary subversion of pleasure. Of course, the Dostoevsky of The Brothers Karamazov only partially anticipated the dynamics of modern capital and the society it created. 

The celebrity life of Robin Williams serves witness to this capacity of contemporary life to make martyrs of us all, to celebrate the dissolution of our own revolutionary self-interests into the Q1-Q4 marketing strategies of the massive industrial conglomerates in control of so much of our technological media. Hollywood tamed Williams not simply through formulaic scripts and hackneyed characterisations, but through sheer success. The You’ve Made It! feeling which permeates the everyday among the mansions, cafes, and nightclubs of Hollywood and soothes – even if only temporarily – the unpleasured suffering of the not-famous. Money rolls in, everyone talks about you, and you’re in every big movie with your face splashed across the ad campaign. And then the act loses its edge as focus groups and mid-level executives weigh in on where everything all fits together in the contemporary marketplace. The authentic becomes the marketed, not inauthentic but differently authentic, an authenticity of massification, of mass duplication. But isn’t this what we’re all looking for as we troll our jobs and our friendships and the media we choose to play with looking for a moment of temporary relief from ourselves, from this process of looking? An incessant search, and one which always finds the same emptiness leading forward into more searching. Frankly, I do not wonder why many of those creative people who have found commercial success tend toward self-destruction. Self-improvement and self-loathing are mutually-contingent phenomena.

The conversation about Robin Williams and suicide is rapidly passing, and as expected we’re watching nostalgic clips on television instead of working to understand mental health issues with any degree of enthusiasm or sensitivity. We need to accept that some of our most interesting people are doomed to self-destruction, but this does not mean that we need to accept death. Self-destruction can manifest as a living force, and one with an austere and significant revolutionary potential. This dynamic is scattered across the history of revolutionary activities, whose gestures have so often been co-opted into the power structures which excluded them. I cannot help but view Hollywood as the benchmark for such progress in capital – the avantgarde is made safely digestible for mass consumption. This is both its terror and its revolutionary impulse, in one simultaneous gesture of productive consumption. No wonder that Hollywood film making is one of the most capital-intensive industries currently in operation. As the whole industry is fuelled by desire, the whole industry can manifest and vaporize like changes in the weather. This is why the large conglomerates play everything safe, and why comedy in particular is rendered docile, a domesticated leisure item which sits well with the livingroom furniture. And yet other potential dynamics remain in play: the Janus/Dionysian duality of Comedy centres it at the vanguard of the possibilities for the revolutionary disruption of normalcy by means of an avantgarde which breathes life into the corpses made by capital.

Robin, you’ll be missed.

Find more information about suicide and suicide prevention here.

the moose goes to court

“I can make it. Thank you, but I don’t need your help.”

Between cases, Sarah Davies was enjoying a smoke break as the moose very slowly climbed the cement stairs of her courthouse. Almost twenty people were running around him with cameras and microphones.

“Please, I insist,” said a woman with a news microphone. “At least let me take your briefcase.”

“Thank you, I can manage.”

“Do you feel that the judge will listen to you this time?” A man from an American news channel spoke through a camera lens.

“My case has merit. If the court is just, I will be allowed to speak.”

“What does your wife think about the allegations? E! is reporting that you have begun a trial separation.”

“Were you at the hotel, sir? Honesty can only help your case at this point.”

“I won’t comment on gossip in the tabloids,” the moose said. “These allegations of numerous girlfriends and multiple families is slander propagated by my opponents. Maria and I have never lived together, so we don’t understand what you mean by trial separation.”

“Don’t you want to see your children?”

“Not really, no.”

The reporters murmured among themselves as cameras streamed a hectic scramble of arms and faces to the world.

“Why are you so determined?”

“You’re after the fame?”

“It’s clear to everyone that your opponents are going to win this case. You’re just wasting everyone’s time.”

The moose stopped and turned to the crowd of reporters on the stairs below him. He stood proudly, his left front leg on the top stair of the courthouse and paused before speaking.

“No. Not because of the fame. Because we are being wronged.”

A young boy looked over the shoulder of the moose and saw a Canadian flag waving in the wind. The moment inspired him deeply until he saw that the flag was printed on a garbage bag which had been caught around part of the metal fencing which surrounded the part of the courthouse which was under construction. The torn plastic fell awkwardly against the wind. It’s always under construction, the boy thought before thinking about dump trucks.

The moose turned away from the reporters and continued into the courthouse. He did not want to respond to any more of their questions.

“What was Oprah like in real life? Did you swim in her pool?”

“Are you and Branson really going into space with one of the Kardashians?” 
“I heard you’re going with Irena Shayk.”

“We aren’t wasting time with models in orbit around the planet, that’s for sure,” the moose said, watching his hooves on the steps while he carefully tested his stability. “Richard is determined that this mission is an integral component in the development of the cancer fighting gene therapy which his team is working on.”

“Have you repaid the damages caused to the hotel bar?” 
“Was she worth it?”

“Who are you wearing?”

Sarah Davies felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She pulled it out and read the text on the screen. Is he there yet? She put the phone back in her pocket, finished her cigarette, sighed, and returned to her desk inside the courtroom.

“Please have a seat,” the court bailiff pointed to the chairs arranged behind a wooden table.

“I am not able to sit down,” the moose said.

“Sir, You will have to sit through the proceedings. When the judge asks you to stand, you will stand. Failure to comply means that you will be in contempt and I will have to arrest you. I’ll tell you right now though, after what I’ve heard about you I want to arrest you.”

“No, you don’t understand. I am unable to sit down. If I lay on the ground you will probably think me undignified, and the judge will not be able to see my head over the table.”

“My dog can sit.”

“I am not your dog.”

“You certainly are not. Scruples would never be found in contempt. You, on the other hand, are already in my bad books. One word from the man on the bench, and out come the cuffs! You can trust me on that one.”

“If I were to tell the court when I am sitting and when I am standing, will that do?”
“Fine. Do you as you like. We’ll let the judge decide.” The bailiff walked over to his

post and stood against the wall facing the middle of the courtroom.

The moose surveyed the area where he was expected to give his deposition. Three cameras and twelve microphones on a desk. He was used to that. What he wasn’t used to was the fact that he would have to move the chairs out of the way in order to reach the media. Such details were usually handled by his manager, but the moose could not see that lazy bastard anywhere in the courtroom.

Richard’s probably doing blow right now off that harlot Mandy’s tits, that’s what, the moose thought and then he thought about Mandy’s breasts for a while. That’s hot. But, she’s been trouble since Atlanta. I would have dumped their asses a long time ago if I didn’t need their contacts.

The moose moved the two chairs into the aisle between his desk and that of the legal council for the provincial government. His glance toward the lawyer for the Ministry of Transportation may have appeared to the people in the gallery as being sidelong, but it was not. He stood in the area vacated by the chairs and faced into the largest camera. Men in the gallery behind him were speaking to each other.

“If the judge allows this case to proceed, we’re going to have to take this into our own hands. You know what I mean, Robert.”
“Yeah, I know. My guys are ready.”

“This stupid thing wouldn’t have even got this far if the moose had to do this in French. According to provincial legislation, he should have to do this in both languages.” 

The moose watched the people stir around him for a few minutes. Everyone in the room except for the two bailiffs were talking amongst themselves. After a few minutes, he glanced around a bit nervously before speaking to the room.

“I am sitting down now,” the moose said while remaining standing. The people around him stopped whispering to each other and turned their attention to the front of the courtroom.

Sarah Davies began typing at her desk. Her job was to record every word spoken in the courtroom by people of importance to the case. Most often she handled depositions, such as this one. She wrote so much for her job that she was the only one among her friends who did not blog or network socially. Her friends often blogged about that.

The bailiff cleared his throat. “All rise as His Right Honourable Charles Henry Galbraithe enters the chambers.”

Everyone in the room stood up and went silent.

“I am now standing,” the moose said and remained standing.

A tall man with grey hair and fat jowls walked from a door which opened on the far side of the room. He walked briskly and his black robes continually tripped him as he moved to his bench and sat down. The moose wondered why the man with the most power was the one who least able to run away should anything important happen.

“Please be seated,” the bailiff said. Everyone in the room sat down and remained silent.

“I am seated now,” said the moose. He saw that the bailiff was looking him over very sternly.

“Indeed,” the judge did not lift his eyes from the files in front of him as he spoke. He opened a file on his desk and read for nearly a minute while writing sporadically on both the file itself and a notepad beside it. After it appeared that he had finished reading, he chuckled to himself and wrote a long joke about two priests, a rabbi, an asthmatic duck on assisted living benefits, and a Mogen Clamp in pen on the back of his right hand. “Well, this will be fun,” he finally said. “Whenever you are ready, please begin your deposition. You have three minutes.”

With some minor difficulty the moose opened his briefcase and shuffled through his notes.

“Your honour, I am here today as a spokes– ah, to speak representing the plaintiffs in

the lawsuit first brought against the provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador back in January of 2011. The appeal brought before you today is a response to the Superior Court’s decision. I was among many of them when the decision was announced and witnessed their outrage and disappointment.”

The moose leaned into the microphones to ensure that he would be heard by everyone.

“When the Court ruled in favour of the government in the case brought forward by the Right to a Safe Life for Moose action group – many of whose members are included in the group for which I have been entrusted to speak – some of the younger brethren among my community wanted blood. They felt that the legal system had abandoned them. More accurately, our case was never seriously considered by the justice system available to us at the time. We lost because we were not recognized. And this was after so many people in both the provincial courts and the news media had made heartfelt assurances about that fact not being true.”

“Nonsense,” said a woman who was seated in the gallery, provoking a great deal of

 casual murmuring.

“Despite the loss,” the moose continued, undeterred. “The RSLM was able to join efforts with numerous other groups to regroup and launch this present appeal. Over the past few weeks, you have heard from our legal experts on the matter. While it is true that I acted as one of the principle consultants for the team, I am not here to go over their arguments again, as they are already a matter of court record.”

The moose paused for a second and looked at Sarah Davies. She sighed to herself, looked down at her computer keyboard, and pretended to type something important when he winked at her in an exceptionally unsurreptitious way.

“I am here to personalize our cause. With great effort, I was able to learn your language–”

“Ha! Tu es drôle. C’est une blague, oui?” said a man in the gallery.

“–and your methods and system of justice. I felt that it was important for me to learn your ways so that I may participate in your system.”

Noise from members of the gallery rose to a loud chant and the judge silenced them by snapping his finger in the air repeatedly.

“Alright, alright,” the judge said loudly. “Enough with that. Moose, you have a minute left.”

“Your honour, I am now standing,” said the moose and remained standing. 
“Careful,” the judge said and glanced at the bailiff, whose smile did not seem to bother trying to mitigate his anger.

“I’m sorry, your Honour. I’ll sit back down. I am now seated,” the moose said and remained standing. “I deny that you can limit my time here. First of all, the RSLM wishes to bring to the court’s attention several problems as current exist with the legislation. Section four reads, and I quote, the holder of a big game licence to hunt, take or kill female only animals shall, upon request of a wildlife officer, produce the head of the animal.”

“Yes, what is your specific problem with the legislation?” the judge did not lift his eyes from the newspaper in his lap.

“Certainly good relations between neighbours cannot be maintained when legislation of such a barbaric nature is enacted.”

“I really don’t see the problem here. Moose have not been granted rights other than presented by this legislation.”

“Nearly everyone in my community feels that we have a right to live and walk among the rural areas of Newfoundland proper.”

The judge rolled up the sleeve of his robe and looked at his watch. His pen fell from his

hand and off the desk and his spine made an audible crack when he bent over to retrieve it. Nearly a minute passed before he was successful.

“While it was not our intention to come to this province,” the moose continued, despite not being able to see the judge. “The fact remains that this is our land now, as much as it belongs to anyone else. With property under the law comes the right to life and free enterprise. My community is demanding nothing from either the provincial government or the people of this province, except for the freedom to be safe in our travels.”

“He should talk,” a man in the gallery said to a woman who was not his wife. “Did you see the size of the car he rolled up in?”

“Thousands of my kind are killed every year by motorists in this province. It is clear to us that neither the province nor the motorists themselves care about this issue, or they would alter their behaviour. Roads are still being built by the province, which is ignoring the appeals from several prominent moose action groups and other associated interests. Drivers continue to speed around in the dark, when members of my community are most active. And perhaps most egregiously, you continue to line your streets and highways with salt in the winter. Again, I don’t want to repeat what has already been heard by the court as published in government records, but you know that our diet leaves us salt deficient. Like you and those number papers you give to each other to get things you don’t make yourself, my community spends at least half of the day in search of this important resource.”

“You are trying my patience,” the judge said as he rolled his eyes. “The Supreme Court has already determined that the province is liable. Consequently, your species needs to be managed and controlled. End of story.”

The moose continued undettered by the judge’s frantic movements under his desk. “We are perpetually drawn to this magic and curious treasure, which you have so conveniently provided for us along your highways of death. The only conclusion that the more reasonable members of my community can make is that you are purposely and cruelly engaging in a drawn-out spectacle of torture and–”

The judge slammed his pen on his desk. “Alright I’ve heard enough. Your minute is over and it’s my turn to talk.” He stood up behind his desk. “This really is the easiest thing I’ve done all month. Your species does not qualify for citizenship under Canadian law. As such, neither your right to property or personhood can be recognised by this or any other court. Your appeal is denied.”

The moose stamped his foot. “Your Honour, I cannot stand for this.”

“Bailiff, would you please remove this animal from the courts. A smell’s starting to rise.”

“With all due respect, Your Honour,” the moose said, slamming his briefcase closed. “Personal insults are hardly justified.”

“Get out or I will turn you into hamburger myself,” said the judge and dropped his

pencil. The moose looked around the room nervously and decided that leaving under his own power was the best thing that he could do.

As he pulled the sleeve of his robe back down to his wrist, the judge read the note which he had written on the back of his right hand and chuckled to himself. “Mogen Clamp. Oh dear, oh dear.”