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Avenue 5 Is Funny But Needs More Variety

Avenue 5 Is Funny But Needs More Variety

The HBO series Avenue 5 is a sci-fi comedy about a cruise ship that gets knocked off course on its way to Saturn. Humor writer Tom Gerencer was impressed by the show’s witty dialogue.

“There were some extremely funny lines in Avenue 5 that I couldn’t help laughing out loud on,” Gerencer says in Episode 463 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “My hat is off to the great comedic minds behind the scripts.”

Avenue 5 is the brainchild of Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey was amused by Avenue 5‘s zany absurdism, but prefers the humor of Veep, which operates on many different levels. “For me, it doesn’t matter how much I like the flavor, I want more than one flavor, and I just felt like the jokes were almost all the same flavor,” she says.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that Avenue 5 would benefit from a more varied approach. “I feel like there should be one character who’s normal and sincere, and who we identify with,” he says. “So that there’s a contrast between the absurdity and non-absurdity. Whereas I feel like everything in this is absurd—all the characters are absurd, all the scenes are absurd, and everything about the ship is absurd.”

But science fiction editor John Joseph Adams loves Avenue 5‘s wacky humor, and is looking forward to seeing where the show goes from here.

The Office and Parks and Rec both ended up as two of my favorite comedies of all time, but the first seasons were not good,” he says. “I think the first season of Avenue 5 is way better than either of those. So if Avenue 5 has any kind of growth from Season 1 to Season 2 on par with what either of those shows did—which were run by similarly talented teams, so it’s reasonable to expect that they could make such improvements—I think that could be amazing.”

Listen to the complete interview with Tom Gerencer, Erin Lindsey, and John Joseph Adams in Episode 463 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on accents:

“I kind of have a thing about accents. I notice them a lot, I do accents, I’m just really into them. One of the things that always impressed me about Hugh Laurie is that in his however many jillion seasons of House, you almost never, ever questioned that he was American. His American accent is amazing. And so these first couple of episodes, you have him running around playing an American captain, and my first question was, ‘Why?’ And my second question is, ‘Why is he so bad at it? Has he lost his touch?’ So he totally sold it. He did a great job of a Brit doing an almost-but-not-quite-perfect American accent. And it turns out that that’s in fact what’s going on. Which I loved. I totally loved that.”

David Barr Kirtley on plot:

“I feel like in Season 2 they’re going to have to have a story, and there’s not really a story in Season 1. You go and look at the episode synopses, and it’s like, ‘I’ve never seen such short episode synopses.’ I just feel like there needs to be some sort of mystery on the ship, something where you’re wondering what’s going to happen next. The structure right now really reminds me of Gilligan’s Island, where every episode there’s some hope that they’re going to get back sooner than they thought, and then something goes wrong, and then it turns out it’s going to be longer than they thought, and it’s just kind of that over and over again.”

Tom Gerencer on cruise ships:

“I was playing video games, and loving it, and there’s this little boy next to me, and he’s playing video games in a suit, and these two kids run through the arcade, chasing each other, and one of them bumps the little kid in the suit with an elbow, and barely touches him. … The father of the kid in the suit bends down and grabs one of the children who was running, and starts shouting, ‘My son is a child prodigy! He plays the violin in concerts around the world, and if you’ve damaged his arm I’m going to sue your parents until there’s nothing left!’ He screamed this in this 8-year-old boy’s face. That was an eye-opening moment for me. I was like, ‘Who am I on this boat with?’”

Tom Gerencer on the Starship Titanic novel:

“I started googling it, and at some obscure online bookstore I found a copy of it that said it was by Robert Sheckley, and like an idiot I emailed the guy who owned the bookstore and said, ‘Hey, if that’s true that’s a really rare book. Can I buy it?’ It disappeared off the site that day, and the guy never answered any of my emails after that. I was like, ‘Hey, I was checking back on this,’ and he never answered me again. … It was ironic to me because the Titanic was something they said was unsinkable, and it sunk, and then Douglas Adams made this game about it that was supposed to be awesome—because he’s Douglas Adams—and then that vanished, and the two books also vanished.”


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It’s Never Been Easier to Make an Adventure Game

It’s Never Been Easier to Make an Adventure Game

In the early years of personal computers, the adventure game genre reigned supreme, exemplified by classic titles such as King’s Quest and The Secret of Monkey Island. Toronto-based artist Julia Minamata grew up playing this style of game, which emphasizes storytelling and story-based puzzles.

“With an adventure game, you move through it at your own speed, and it’s more like a book than an arcade game,” Minamata says in Episode 459 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I found—as an artsy, bookish kid—that interactive storytelling was the kind of game that was more appealing to me.”

Video game journalist Kurt Kalata loves adventure games so much that he wrote and edited The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures, a massive tome that details dozens of different games. It’s exactly the sort of book he wishes he’d had as a kid growing up in the ’90s. “I remember keeping an [adventure game guidebook] around as my Bible, even though it was mostly just how to play the games and how to beat them,” he says. “I wanted something that was like that, but actually about the games.”

The adventure game genre has been moribund for years, but the arrival of tools such as Adventure Game Studio has created a flourishing indie scene. Minamata is hard at work on The Crimson Diamond, a 16-color adventure game inspired by Sierra’s 1989 murder mystery The Colonel’s Bequest.

“What caused me to come back to the genre was when I started seeing games that were being produced by solo developers,” Minamata says. “Yahtzee Croshaw made Chzo Mythos, Francisco Gonzalez made the Ben Jordan series. These are one person using Adventure Game Studio, and that was really inspiring to me.”

And while tools like Adventure Game Studio can help simplify the coding process, there’s still no shortcut when it comes to creating great artwork. Kalata spent months making a Monkey Island-inspired game called Christopher Columbus Is an Idiot, but hit a wall when it came time to polish the visuals. “Everything there was scribbled in MS Paint, and eventually it came to a point where it was like, ‘I don’t know if I can devote time to this without making it a commercial project, and to make it a commercial project I need good art,’” he says.

Listen to the complete interview with Julia Minamata and Kurt Kalata in Episode 459 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Kurt Kalata on point-and-click games vs. text parser games:

“[With a point-and-click game], you only have so many tools to interact with the world, so eventually if you just try enough things, you will solve it, and that was a comfortable blanket feeling for me. You could try everything, and eventually you would find it. And the text parsers in Sierra games weren’t particularly good, compared to Infocom games, which had a better vocabulary. I think if the game was a little bit more up front about telling you which things it understood—and also if you didn’t have to guess about what it decided to call a noun, or it at least had more synonyms for certain words—it would have been better.”

Julia Minamata on game designers:

“Before the current situation that we’re in right now, I did go to Pax West, and I was able to meet Lori and Corey Cole, which was really amazing, and I got to meet Douglas Herring, who was the artist for The Colonel’s Bequest, which is a main inspiration for my game. Al Lowe was also there, so that was really cool. They were on an adventure game panel together, so I got to see them, and chat a little bit with Lori and Corey Cole. … So it was really cool to see, and going to events to show my game—just kind of running into people here and there, and seeing people who are still developing [games]. It was just really inspiring.”

Julia Minamata on The Colonel’s Bequest:

“The artists were given a lot of leeway in terms of what they were generating. They were given some reference material, some photos of similar houses, but they were pretty much left to their own devices. With stuff like King’s Quest, what would happen is Roberta Williams would sketch out a basic ‘Here’s a tree, and this is where the stream is, and here’s where the rock is,’ and she’d pass it off to the artists, who would in turn interpret that to be something more professional. But what was great about The Colonel’s Bequest is she didn’t do that. She just said, ‘Go and do the thing,’ so [the artists] were able to, from the ground up, create this amazing atmosphere.”

Kurt Kalata on the future of Monkey Island:

“I was involved with the Limited Run project, and I know they were hoping this whole project would generate some interest at Disney. Disney is so big that they didn’t even really know what [Monkey Island] was, because it’s just ‘some old game from the ’90s that people like.’ So we were hoping that there was enough money generated that they’d be like, ‘OK, people are interested in this Monkey Island thing, and here’s the original designer who would be interested in doing something with it, so maybe make some sort of connection happen.’ … The stars have to align. Someone who works with [these companies] has to be a fan of these games. Somebody has to care.”


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‘Dune Messiah’ Feels Like a First Draft

‘Dune Messiah’ Feels Like a First Draft

The 1969 novel Dune Messiah is a sequel to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. TV writer Andrea Kail is a diehard fan of the original Dune, but has always found the sequel disappointing.

“Overall, as a book, it just feels like it’s very unformed,” Kail says in Episode 537 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It just felt like, ‘These are the ideas, and I put these ideas down, and here’s a first draft. Now let’s go back and fix it.’ And then, no, never went back to fix it.”

Dune Messiah picks up 12 years after the original novel, when the young hero Paul Atreides has become a despotic emperor. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley loved the concept of the book, but felt that Paul’s supernatural powers made the story less exciting than it might have been.

“The reason I wanted to read this is because I was really fascinated by this idea that you take the messiah hero from the first book that everybody loves and show him having flaws and becoming a bad ruler,” he says. “But I was a little disappointed in that I felt like Paul wasn’t actually flawed. Because he has no choice, because he’s doing his best to try to avoid the worst futures he can see, I felt like that made it less interesting than if he was actually making choices and succumbing to the temptations of power.”

Science fiction author Rajan Khanna enjoyed the book despite its flaws, and says that certain scenes from it are still burned into his brain from the first time he read it. “It doesn’t live up to the first novel, but I also think it’s really hard for anything to live up to that novel, because it’s one of my favorite novels of all time,” he says. “But I do think that there’s a lot of cool stuff in there.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel had mixed feelings about Dune Messiah, but that hasn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for the Dune series as a whole. “The universe that Herbert created is amazing,” he says. “I had a little bit of a problem with the execution. The first two thirds it’s kind of slow, but then it picks up in the last third. I have some problems with the ending, but still I’m excited to continue reading the next book.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Rajan Khanna, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 537 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrea Kail on reading Dune Messiah:

Dune is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. It was one of the three foundational books of my childhood that formed who I was. And so I read it when I was maybe about 13 or 14 and just gobbled it up. And of course, the first thing you do when you finish a book that you love is you go run for the sequel. So I ran for the sequel, and I read Dune Messiah, and it was not the same. It was a very different experience. It was very perplexing. It was depressing. I just didn’t know what was going on. And I read them all—I went on to read the next two that were available at the time—but it just kind of put me off the whole thing, so to speak. So coming back to it now, I was hoping for a different experience, reading it again as an adult. And I didn’t actually get that. It was sort of the same experience.

Matthew Kressel on point of view:

So much [in Dune Messiah] happens off-screen, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because Herbert does this point-of-view switching in the middle of the page, which almost no writer does today—or at least in speculative fiction that I read, I hardly ever see that point-of-view switching. And what I mean by that, if people aren’t clear about it, is that you’re in someone’s head and then you’re immediately in someone else’s head on the same page. Most writers, they’ll put either a scene break or a chapter break to switch that, but Herbert doesn’t do that. So it’s not like he can’t be in their point of view when this happens, he just decides not to.

David Barr Kirtley on female characters:

I thought all the female characters were not well deployed in this novel. I’ll just talk about Alia a little bit. She’s a young teenager at this point in the story, but she was born with the knowledge and memories of this whole line of wise old women. And she just acts like a teenager. It was such a weird characterization of her, given what’s established about her, that her mind has this whole archive of all these different lives and wisdom. But it seems like that doesn’t affect her characterization almost at all, in a way I found really, really odd.


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Arcane Is a Work of Art

Arcane Is a Work of Art

The Netflix series Arcane, a collaboration between Riot Games and Studio Fortiche, is an animated show based on the popular computer game League of Legends. Science fiction author Zach Chapman loved Arcane, despite having never played League of Legends.

“You don’t have to have any knowledge of the game,” Chapman says in Episode 536 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “In fact, less knowledge of the game is even better. It doesn’t need any of that. It just works really great as a standalone show.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was blown away by the show’s visual style, a distinctive blend of 2D and 3D elements. “I’m looking forward to seeing more of this art style,” he says. “You can freeze any frame, and it looks like a really good illustration from a Dungeons & Dragons manual. So I think it’s super cool.”

Fantasy author Lara Elena Donnelly was excited to see an animated series that contains complex characters and adult themes. “There are parts of it that almost feel like you’re watching a Scorsese cop movie where no one is good,” she says. “Everyone has their own agenda, everyone thinks their way is the best way, and they’re all trying to play each other. It has a lot of sophisticated power dynamics that are very surprising in an animated video game adaptation.”

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey also enjoyed Arcane, but warns that the show doesn’t really hit its stride until Episode 3. “I think the first couple of episodes can lull you into a sense that you’ve seen these plot beats before and that you’ve seen this story before,” she says. “You haven’t. It will surprise you again and again.”

Listen to the complete interview with Zach Chapman, Lara Elena Donnelly, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 536 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Zach Chapman on character design:

It’s very clear that the [characters] were designed by a video game company. A lot of the characters look like Activision characters. Jinx, to me, looks like Junkrat—though I’m pretty sure she came before Junkrat. And Ekko looks and kind of acts like DJ from Overwatch 2 … There’s a beauty to the design that goes down to a very minute level of detail that’s just really impressive. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where there’s this shark-looking street vendor, and he gives Vi some food and some intel. And the design of that character has more personality than any of the designs in Blood of Zeus, for example. He’s in one scene and he looks amazing.

David Barr Kirtley on character death:

What convinces Victor that his experiments are too dangerous is that his lab assistant, who has a crush on him, gets incinerated by his experiment. And I think that character had maybe one previous scene where she had made any sort of impression on me. So when she dies, my reaction was split between horror and like, “Wait, who was that again?” So I felt like either that character should have been developed a little bit more or some character that we cared about more should have been incinerated, for that moment to have the impact that it might have had.

Erin Lindsey on Arcane Season 2:

I really don’t know who’s going to be left alive. I think Jayce has to survive, but I could totally see Mel dying. That’s part of the brutal irony of having her symbolically and literally reject her family legacy as she sits there and removes the ring of her house, when her house is this overseas power that’s known for its brutal ruthlessness. And her mum wasn’t in the room, so her mum definitely survives. And she’s probably going to be cranky about it and use this as an opportunity to leverage her position and take over. And I can see Jayce—since we’ve already established that traumatic events change his personality drastically from one minute to the next—I can see him also using Mel’s death as the thing that turns him to the dark side.

Lara Elena Donnelly on Studio Fortiche:

I’m so happy that this got made. I’m astonished that it got made a little bit, because there’s just nothing else like it on television. Watching it, I was just like, “How did they say, ‘Yes, let’s do this. Let’s do nine almost-hour-long animated episodes of this show that’s not for kids’?” It’s just amazing to me that it got made. I’m so happy it got made, and I want them to make more of it. And they are making more of it, and I’m 100 percent going to watch it. When they’re done with Arcane, I would love to see them do more animated TV and movies, because they just produce absolutely breathtaking work.


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In ‘Synchronic,’ Time Travel Is Anything but Nostalgic

In ‘Synchronic,’ Time Travel Is Anything but Nostalgic

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have created three of the best indie sci-fi films of the past few years—Resolution, Spring, and The Endless. In their latest movie, Synchronic, a paramedic played by Anthony Mackie discovers a designer drug that lets him visit the past.

“We were talking about, ‘What if there were a substance that made you experience time the way Einstein described it?’” Benson says in Episode 437 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “That is to say, that there’s no distinction between past, present, and future, and actually everything happens simultaneously, and time is more like a frozen river rather than a flowing river, and this substance—this drug—would allow you to experience that.”

The film is suffused with mood and color, much of which it draws from its New Orleans setting. Moorhead says it was important to set the film in a place that would be instantly recognizable at different stages of its history.

“With New Orleans, there’s just nothing like it,” he says. “It has this bizarre French and Spanish colonial history, as well as being very American—jazz and civil rights. Just an enormous history that is very, very, very specific to New Orleans. It occupies this wonderful bit of real estate in the American psyche.”

Benson says that time travel films tend to romanticize the past, focusing on manners and fashion rather than health care or social issues. “When you look at things like Back to the Future, it’s an amazing movie, but it does really gloss up the 1950s,” he says. “It’s something that’s been running through our media and our culture for a long time.”

Moorhead hopes that Synchronic will help combat that sort of reflexive nostalgia and give viewers a greater appreciation for the present. “It’s totally fine in any individual product to gloss up something or romanticize it,” he says. “It’s a choice. It’s not a moral failing of any individual product. But what we wanted to do was examine the other side of that.”

Listen to the complete interview with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead in Episode 437 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Justin Benson on indie films:

“Someday we’ll have a movie that everyone knows about the day it comes out because it has a $20 million marketing budget, because that’s how you do that. But that’s really scary too, because it better be really good. It better be awesome, because it’s the thing that kids are going to talk about in school on Monday. It’s actually kind of funny, because you get a little bit of a pass as an indie filmmaker, because if it doesn’t make an impact, people are like, ‘Oh, that’s what happens to indie films.’ You’re only really as good as your best film, in a way, and if something comes and goes, it doesn’t really hurt you. It just happens. But if there’s a lot of marketing put behind a bad movie, that’s a threatening prospect.”

Aaron Moorhead on characters:

“Some of the most exciting times for us when we’re on set are when our characters just get to talk to each other about something that isn’t specifically in the logline of the movie, and you will be shocked at how rare that is. And by the way, the things they talk about inform the later plot, and inform their character, and push the movie along, it’s just that in that exact moment they’re not discussing what to do about a time travel pill. There’s a common wisdom in writing that if the dialogue isn’t pushing along [the plot], then you might as well cut it. But if you cut it, you get something soulless, and you don’t understand these people. Because you can only express yourself so much through action. Our primary means of expressing ourselves as humans is through the way we communicate with others.”

Aaron Moorhead on the pandemic:

“We’ll probably be able to attend a local screening [of Synchronic] here in LA, where I believe there are two or three drive-ins, because we do want to see what it looks like. But the thing that’s funny about the drive-in experience is that there’s no way to be ‘in person.’ Most of them don’t even allow you to stand on top of your car and address the audience or anything like that. So being there just means that you are in your own car watching the movie you’ve seen a billion times. So that’s the thing. We’re going to go, because it’s our premiere, but there’s no function to actually being in-person at a drive-in, because there’s no in-person aspect to it. There’s no in-person Q&A.”

Aaron Moorhead on randonauts:

“[Random numbers] come from a computer, and it’s very complicated how they arrive at them, but still you can find how they derived that randomness. But there is a way to get actual randomness, which is to measure quantum fields, because quantum fields are actually random. And so [randonauts] are able to take these measurements and get actually random numbers that truly cannot be predicted in the future. They take those numbers and turn them into coordinates, and they go to those coordinates, no matter how hard it is to get there, and in doing so they have broken out of their deterministic tunnel, because there is no world in which they would have gone to that place if they had not followed those numbers.”


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