Well, my obsession with James Bond is going into overdrive lately. I just picked up a Sean Connery DVD boxed set, which included "A Bridge Too Far", "Cuba", and "Never Say Never Again" (the "unofficial" James Bond movie which was NOT produced by Cubby Broccoli and allowed for strange copyright reasons involving the movie "Thunderball"). Considering I only paid $9.99 for all three (which I would have gladly paid for just "Never Say Never Again"), I think I got a bargain, although I've never seen "Cuba".

I watched it this afternoon, and I must admit, it's probably in my top 3 Bond movies of all time. It has a decent villain and great underwater scenes. Where it really scores (literally) is with its Bond babes. Kim Bassinger does a very nice job as the love interest. Barbara Carrera also does excellent work as ajaxtalbot's favorite femme fatale. It only really struggles in the music department (I've even revised my previous opinion of the scene where Bond squares off against the villain in a videogame--it's really not as bad as it sounds).

One of these days, I'm going to have to watch and rate all of the Bond movies.

Per threatening orders from that most demanding of Knomemasters, ajaxtalbot, I came up with my game plan for next year's conventions over this past weekend (the preregistration deadline for GenCon is probably closer than I imagine).

Of course, I will continue the triple threat of Sex, Lies and Ultraspies (Ministry Q, Submariners, and Racing Spies). Ministry Q will get a double dose of love, both at Con of the North in February and later at GenCon in August (with different adventures no less). I have some solid ideas (Ministry Q at CotN will feature the Vampires vs. Werewolves portion pulled out of the "Hard Week's Night" adventure, Submariners at GenCon will borrow heavily from the published adventure "Operation: Atlantis" for DC Heroes), some hazy ideas (Ministry Q at GenCon will riff off from the "Little Boy Lost" episode of I Spy), and some fantastically vague ideas (Racing Spies will take place in the American Southwest, should have some type of shootout at the OK Corral situation, and Motorcyle Apaches).

That leaves me one last event to run at GenCon. After serious deliberation, I've decided to make it a superhero game (generally well attended) that takes every really bad trope from the so-called "Iron Age" of comics. Of course, it will have to be illustrated by Rob Liefeld, feature corrupt politicians, anti-heroes on the run, gratuitous violence, and involve enough time travel to make your brain hurt. I'm even planning on letting the players design their own characters within certain guidelines. I'm going to hand out five small cards with illustrations of various Iron Age characters (every one created by the master himself) which will not only have an appropriate number (none of that complicated "divide in half and add six" math that confuses so many!) but also keywords related to that character (easily usable as Jobs or Gimmicks). Players will be awarded Yum Yums based on how well they design a character according to the Iron Age tropes (and combining the elements of their character cards). I'm calling this masterpiece "Jawgrinder".

In case you don't remember, I wasn't very pleased with the way many of my games went off last year. Some of it may have been the players, but I think a lot of it was what I was bringing to the table as a gamemaster. This year, I'm going to be more prepared and practiced than ever. Which means I'm going to make sure every event is playtested. This might involve kidnapping my friends at gunpoint to role play. Stay tuned!

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. For me, it involved a quick trip south to be with my wife's parents, and leaving the kids there so my wife and I could race back to work on Black Friday. Still, it's not so bad. In Black Fridays past, I was the retail drone going in to work at 4:30 am so that other idiots could get junk at about what it was worth.

At least I work later today, and it will actually be lighter than usual traffic at my location for a Friday. A lot of our customers will be burning themselves out at places like malls and electronic superstores.

There's just so much to be thankful for in this job!

I recently finished the next in the "Union Trilogy" of James Bond novels by Raymond Benson. It was called "Doubleshot" and had a fairly standard doppelganger plot. You know, the one where the secret agent has an exact double about to commit some nefarious deed, only to be replaced by the actual secret agent who tricks the bad guys into thinking he or she is the double.

It's really standard fare in the spy genre, particularly on television shows. I can probably think of at least a half dozen variations of this theme covered in the Avengers, for example. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work in novel form (although I must admit "Point Blank" in the teen spy Alex Rider series was a variation on the "replacing important people with obedient doppelgangers" plot that didn't suck). Unfortunately, Benson writes next to nothing about the action surrounding the doppelganger, choosing to focus on Bond stumbling around from one plot point to the next.

After suffering through this novel, I felt compelled to watch the Avengers' episode "They Keep Killing Steed" (One of the better Tara King efforts). One of the reasons doppelganger plots work so much better on television is that you actually see that the doppelganger looks just like his or her victim (because they are played by the same actor). If it's an actor as talented as Patrick Macnee, you can also tell by his basic mannerisms that, even though the doppelganger looks just like the main character, he is not actually John Steed. No wonder they kept going back to this plotline again and again.

I did have to laugh because the back cover promo for "Doubleshot" said that this adventure would take Bond to the "seedy" side of Soho. Basically, it meant that Bond visited an adult bookstore.

I bought the Hero System books last week. Even though it wasn't my first (that would actually be Top Secret, followed by Traveller and AD&D) this was the first role playing game I really fell for in a major way back in the day. Back when I first picked it up, it was 90 pages long. Now, it's not just one huge book, but two. It's amazing how much it's bloated over the years, and I think Hero System fans really like it that way.

I mostly bought the 6th edition for nostalgia purposes. I own every edition except the first (which I'm convinced is just a few dozen mimeographed copies lying in a few select people's collections). I doubt I will ever run it again, although I certainly wouldn't be opposed in joining a group that played it.

I will say that in looking through the new books, there's something comforting in seeing that not really all that much has changed. If you knew the second edition, you could adapt to the 6th edition pretty quickly.

It's even taken some cues from QAGS (Hero Action Points = Yum Yums).

I just attended my "Standards of Effective Practices for Beginning Teachers" conference today. This is a Minnesota process that you must go through (basically, showing how well your learning so far has addressed these ten standards). It went well, even if it was a little more rigorous than I thought it would be (quick, come up with the exact answer I want you to say!). With any luck, I know my student teaching placement in about a month. With my luck, it will be in kindergarten!

I've been working and reading quite a bit lately, but writing not so much (particularly to my livejournal).

The fall semester is well underway. I'm taking one class (Teaching Literacy in the Elementary School) and that will be it until I begin student teaching in the spring. This class has a clinical component to it, meaning I'm going to an elementary school one morning a week to help out with their reading program for kindergartners through 3rd grade. It's been very inspirational for me, because it's been something of a worst case scenario so far. The classes are absolute chaos (one teacher has either left or was fired during the four weeks I've been there), and I decided to pick the one that seemed to be the worst (I'm always working on the learning edge, doncha know). So what's my inspiration? Knowing that I should be able to do a better job (or at least no worse) than any of these people! Next week, we start presenting our own lessons, and I'm really thinking about trying to do it in front of the entire class (leading edge, remember?) rather than small groups.

I've made an effort to really ramp up my reading this year. One of the things my literacy class has taught me is how much of the reading I've done the last ten years or so has been about efference, basically reading to acquire information, rather than aesthetics, which is reading for pleasure. Prior to this year, I mostly read game books, some non-fiction, text books and other material in an effort to acquire information.

So in that vein, here's what I've read lately. I finished Point Blank by Anthony Horowitz, the second in the Alex Rider teen spy series. It was pretty decent, even if it borrowed heavily from Ian Fleming's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It even had a cloning plot which didn't require too much suspension of belief for me. For my birthday, my oldest daughter gave me the third and the fourth in the series (she definitely has ulterior motives in that she like to read them too). 

Speaking of Fleming, I finished Moonraker, his third James Bond book. You can tell Fleming is struggling to come up with ideas, as for the second time in three books, he has James subdued via automobile accident. Bond gets first involved in the plot by tricking a card cheat (which will come up again in Goldfinger). He also really goes into the mastermind monologue this time. Obviously the book has absolutely nothing to do with that glorious action/near parody produced in the '70s with space shuttles and laser beams and Jaws.

In keeping with the spy theme, I've also been reading the so-called "Union Trilogy" for James Bond by Raymond Benson. I've never read any of Benson's take on Bond, as I had already given up on John Gardner's take on the superspy after he had a fairly decent restart to the series, but quickly devolved into stupidity. I figured Benson has two major points against him in writing Bond. 1. He's an American. 2. He's a gamer (he even wrote a supplement for the 007 RPG).

As it turns out, my prejudices were on target. I've finished the first in the trilogy, High Time To Kill. The set up of climbing Mt. Everest (actually one of its sister mountains) in a race to retrieve a macguffin sounded promising. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver on many different levels. Benson throws in so many product placements you begin to wonder if he's getting sponsored to do it. Then, not just once, but twice his James Bond decides to take a break to have sex even while the mission hangs in the balance. I mean, you almost thought Gardner's Bond was going to settle down and have some kids, but this was unforgivably in the opposite direction.

As for my own writing, I'm working on creating a believable "evil" conspiracy for Racing Spies. Actually, they aren't all that evil, just motivated in a particularly negative direction. If only I were more motivated to write about them in any direction.

I'd like to take yet another episode of "I Spy" and "Ultraspy" it. This one was called "Father Abraham", and was about a young physicist who decides to sacrifice himself to feed the commies bad information and interfere with their solid rocket fuel program. Our two intrepid heroes, Kelly and Alexander, are directed to break him down, basically interrogate him until he spills the beans in a convincing enough manner.

They then escort him around Rome, with the backstory that he is a brilliant, but embittered and alcoholic American physicist responsible for a breakthrough in solid rocket fuel, hoping the enemy will take the bait. Unfortunately, the young physicist's father, a powerful and influential general, gets word of his son's shenanigans and confronts him about his unAmerican ways (he would rather see him dead than turn traitor, hence the "Father Abraham" title).

Kelly and Alexander think the whole thing has been blown, but the confrontation between father and son is just the sign the commies are looking for that the situation is for real, and they kidnap the guy (it's amazing how many one punch knockouts they have in this series!) for interrogation. To further complicate matters, Daddy comes to the rescue before the physicist can give away his "information". Kelly and Alexander have to knock out the father and return the physicist to his captors, where he can finally spill and beans, and they can finally get back to rescue him (even from his own father, who witnesses the "betrayal"). In the end, father is set straight, and the physicist is set to disappear, supposedly killed in the scuffle (but with a posthumous medal to make Dad proud).

Obviously, between this episode and the one I detailed previously, some of the writers for "I Spy" had some real Daddy issues.

The Ultraspy Version
Take out the rocket fuel angle, and make it an Ironman-like battle suit! The young guy, who is a certifiable genius, has invented a great suit of battle armor. Unfortunately, only one has ever been created, and the government has spent millions of dollars trying to create others to no avail (some kind of psychic link between the guy and the suit). The guy, feeling guilty for all of the money he's wasted and useless because he can't create any others, comes up with this plan to derail the commies in their own battle armor program.

Everything else can proceed pretty much along the same storyline, except the commies should be equipped with some high tech gear of their own, and Dad should definitely show up for his rescue in the battle suit, which could be subsequently claimed and used by the commies. 

In addition to reading a lot during this brief break, I've also been watching some stuff I've had for a while on DVD. Mostly, I've been checking out "I Spy" seasons 2 and 3. It occurred to me that I could "Ultraspyify" most of these episodes to come up with some nifty adventure seeds for my "Sex, Lies and Ultraspies" roleplaying game.

One of my favorite episodes that I've seen so far is called "Little Boy Lost". It stars Opie (a young Ron Howard) as a kid neglected by his rocket scientist father (played by Napoleon Solo, aka Robert Vaugn). Opie decides to get Dad's attention by stealing a miniature guidance system and running away from home. Our two intrepid agents, Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, are assigned to find the kid and the guidance system before the Russians (or at least some vaguely Eastern European types) do. Added into the mix is a sweet hearted secretary who is a little too sweet hearted for her fellow man (she bleeds pink, if you know what I mean, and is an obvious dupe for those swarthy Eastern European types). In the end, the hip cat agents find and befriend the boy at an amusement park, beat off the communists, and retrieve the guidance system. I do like how the episode avoids syruppy sap at the end (that would have been the '80s style) as father and son still seem to have some issues.

The Ultraspy version should have the kid possess "special" powers, and I'm thinking teleportation (a la I Dream Of Jeannie) might be fun. Keep the kid hanging out at an amusement park, but add in some Paladin-types from the movie Jumpers looking to eliminate one of their own who has gone bad. Also, I'd give the commies some "special" powers of their own (I'm thinking at least a wolverine-type sniffer/tracker combat monster type). Change the setting from Malibu to the Brighton Resort area in southwest England and most of the rest of the story would be good. The only thing that doesn't ring very British is the "Poor me, my father ignores me" vibe. I suspect most upper class British children would actually expect that sort of treatment. It could easily be altered with a "I'm special, but Daddy doesn't want me to show it. I'll show him by taking away what make him special" vibe, particularly given the kid's powers.

Voila, an ultrapyified adventure awaits! 

Since I'm finished with my summer classes and have yet to begin my Fall class, I've had some time to read, and I've actually made the most of it. Here's what I've gotten through so far:

The Gunseller by Hugh Laurie: Early on in reading this book, I was really hating Laurie for not only being a talented actor, but a talented writer as well. Fortunately, the story, which was about a secret agent-type named Thomas Lang who becomes involved in a terrorist plot designed to increase weapon sales, falters a little in the middle (so Laurie does have some faults to my mind) but concludes very nicely indeed. The protagonist, a capable and dangerous smartass, is my absolute favorite archetype.

On Writing by Stephen King: After running across this as a strong recommendation for the second time in as many months (the first was by Kelly Gallagher, a teacher/writer whom I greatly respect, the second was from cybersluagh), I decided to pick this up and check it out. I'm not really sure about the advice on writing (it strikes me mostly as a "this is what works for me" manual) but the autobiographical incidents from King's own life are priceless. It did make me realize that I don't want to be a novelist at this point in my life, even though I (like King) have vivid memories of the first novel I read where I thought "I can do better than this." It was Sahara by Clive Cussler. I probably read a few other stinkers before then, but no one makes as much money off from his or her crap as Cussler.

Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz: Speaking of crap (just kidding, sort of), I picked up a couple of the early Alex Rider series about a teenage spy. I read Ark Angel, a later novel in this series, for my literature methods class, and found it light and fun reading. Stormbreaker is the first in the series, and it was quite a bit rougher (which is actually nice to see Mr. Horowitz has improved in his craft).

Destroyer #55, Master's Challenge by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir: During my adolescence, I read more Destroyer novels than I should admit to, and I couldn't resist picking one up when I found myself at a used bookstore during vacation. It was actually as much fun as I remember them--kind of like Alex Rider but with more sex, drugs and rock and roll (to think I was reading them at the exact same age all of these "teen" novels are geared toward. Bah, in my day, we didn't have no stinking "teen" section in the book store!).

Damnation Decade by Robert Toth: This is one of the few roleplaying products (minus all of the quality Hex Games stuff, of course) I picked up during GenCon (for D20 Modern, no less). It does a pretty good job of interweaving many of the classic '70s movies into quite the hodgepodge setting. I really like the overall "In Search Of.." motif (I have to see if that series is on DVD, I am such a child of the '70s!), but I dislike the author changing the name of literally everything (people, countries, oceans, etc.) in this setting.

It's nice to see that my reading habits have picked up quite a bit during this break. I'm ashamed to say they've really slacked off quite a bit for the last ten or so years.