[reprint+] Pixies?
and Gary Gygax in black and white
If this is your first time here, Hi. I’m Randall Hayes, “your friendly neighborhood neuroscientist.” I write about science and pop culture. Sometimes one my own speculative fiction stories slips in here, too.
Today, in honor of five solid years of this newsletter, this is the first somewhat original content that I published here (meaning something more than an ad for my first anthology appearance), back during the pandemic days of February 2021.
St. Columba Converting the Picts to Christianity. Reminds me of any number of Middle-Earth paintings by Angus McBride.
For this last day in the Mohs 5.5 Mars 99 cent offer, I thought I’d add a little detail about the blue people who keep popping up in my story’s references.
Five years later, it’s still only $2.99. There was substantial link rot in that time, so I’ve replaced those from the original version, which is still archived under the original name.
The Picts
Historically, these people were one of many Iron Age tribes, related to the Celts, who lived in the northern end of the British Isles. The Romans called them Picti (“Painted”) and emphasized their tattoo customs as a way of demonizing them, rendering them savages to be conquered rather than neighboring nations to be respected. The blue dye called woad, derived from a member of the cabbage family, might have been for clothing, or it might have been an antiseptic for wounds, but it probably wasn’t an all-over body paint. Sure made for effective propaganda, though. That canny Caesar.
These associations carried over into colonial-era literature and into early SF, especially the work of Robert E. Howard, who used the Picts as a cautionary example of long term de-evolution, as they fell from an allied nation in the Kull stories, to tribal raiders in the Conan stories, to barely human savages in the Bran Mak Morn stories, before descending to the tunnels like medieval Morlocks. If humanity could rise up the moral ladder of civilization to wealth and technological glory, we could also slide back down. None of this lines up with modern anthropology, but it does fit very nicely into racist ideologies and the anxieties of those at the top of the social hierarchy. And it looks cool on book covers and in movies.
Blue Morlocks from The Time Machine (1960).
The Fugates
Cultural differences like language, religion, and dress are great excuses to oppress people. So are medical conditions that make people look or act differently. Our evolved contagion-avoidance behaviors, which can be really handy in situations of infectious disease, are just as easily triggered by conditions which are not contagious. They can also be manipulated for political and economic gain, as with the “inbred hillbilly” stereotype I mention in the story.
“The Blue People of Troublesome Creek” started as an article by Cathy Trost in the magazine Science 82 (not Science magazine, volume 82), headed with a striking imaginative painting by sporting artist Walt Spitzmiller that I’ll link to instead of importing here because of respect for copyright issues. That concern by the writer of the linked article and the painter quoted in it is ironic in a way, since the family never received any compensation at all. I didn’t mention the now-famous case of Henrietta Lacks, whose tumor cells led directly to a huge number of medical discoveries, and fortunes for biotech companies. I was definitely thinking about that case when I mentioned the Fugates in the story, though.
Many thanks to those few people who have been here since the beginning and who have seen that before, for their patience and perseverance. Below is some new stuff from now, in 2026.
Rise of the Game Master
I learned a lot, reading this graphic novel by David Kushner and Koren Shadmi, who also drew that Rod Serling book I mentioned a few weeks ago.
Gary Gygax grew up near an abandoned insane asylum like the one I lived across the street from in Rochester123. He was an outdoorsy kid, not particularly bookish.
I will admit to feeling somewhat the same way about Tolkien, when I was fourteen.
I grew out of that, eventually.
Dungeon Siege
I stumbled across this movie on Tubi and only started it because of the cast:
Jason Statham
Ron Perlman
John Rhys-Davies
Leelee Sobieski (whose earlier film, My First Mister with Albert Brooks, I really enjoyed)
Burt Reynolds? As a king?
I had no idea it was a popular computer game, but I knew there had to be some reason that such a no-name production could recruit those actors. Or maybe they blew the entire budget on the cast. In any case, I was not impressed. I did like the idea of Ray Liotta remotely sock-puppeting the Krug leaders. And the Cirque du Soleil Elf-azons, twirling around their vines in the forest. That was silly Power Rangers fun.
I’m not that into video games, in part because I’m generally not very good at them. I think the last one I spent a lot of time on was Demon Stone, released 2004. I found the PS2 version somewhere — used, I’m sure. It was apparently re-launched on Steam this past August.
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone returns in a polished re‑release, featuring smoother startup and gameplay, proper widescreen scaling, borderless/windowed modes, optimised shadows, full XInput controller support with rumble and hot‑plugging, adjustable audio, and a new in‑game settings menu for modern PCs.
I do not know what most of those technical game phrases even mean. I am so very old.
Also, when did used games stop being a thing?
Five Years! Five! Five Years!
-with apologies to Jeremy Piven,
Grosse Pointe Blank
The second DS movie has Dolph Lundgren, with a Three Hearts & Three Lions-type time-travel, portal fantasy angle.
Lundgren, a Swede (not a Dane like Holger Carlsen in Lindke’s post above), plays a sad old soldier, teaching martial arts4 to kids in some modern city, popping pain pills on his way to the jacuzzi after class and toasting the dog tags hanging from a photo of his old unit.
Another 365, guys . . . wish I could trade places with you.
It was during those scenes that I realized something. I have been talking and writing about meditation for years with students and the general public. I can’t remember mentioning (or even thinking about) what my very first meditation experiences were.
They were in martial arts classes. I started with Shotokan karate at UK5 and continued during my first year in Rochester. Those meditations were formalities — part of the ritual, like cleaning the dojo floor — not long enough for a novice like me to do anything other than catch my breath (which I definitely needed, even in my twenties, because they were good workouts). But those 1-minute pauses did pique my interest, so that when I stumbled across some mention of the Zen Center on Arnold Park, I had just enough experience to know that I wanted to go deeper.
Unlike Lundgren and a lot of other people I know, I never treated martial arts as a sport or a competition, any more than I thought reading about battles or playing wargames made me a general. But I think taking those classes did make me less panicky in tense situations. And they were an excellent workout, way better than shoveling snow.
Plug for Another Substack
This Game & Word post has some good thoughts on how D&D influenced video games.
In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released Dungeons & Dragons, and in doing so, they created a shared ludic language that would shape video games for decades to come. Now, D&D didn’t invent the idea of fighting monsters for treasure—that’s as old as Beowulf. But it systematized that idea and made it programmable.
In their “side-quest” history of the Satanic Panic I learned something else, which was never mentioned in the graphic biography: Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness?!? Really?
Final Fifth Year Plug
Whereas the original Halls of Arden Vul in 2019 was a beast of a book, Rick Barton and mapmaker Andreas Claren are now dripping out the next series of 4 modules one at a time.
BV1: The Thicket
BV2: The Tomb of Kallia (including NF-1 to NF-30)
BV3: The Eye of Thoth
BV4: Lost Zhamandor (including NF-31+)
I’ve played through the first one, The Thicket, in Rick’s home game. I’m not in the business of game reviews (neither writing nor reading, usually), so I was not aware until just now that there are condensed Bullet Point versions, for whatever reasons of marketing or addressing fan concerns that drive the decisions of a publisher who is trying to make a living. I remain a dedicated amateur.
And that’s it. Thanks for reading!
Next week, science communication at the Morehead Planetarium.
from a lecture series put on by the Monroe County, NY, public library system. Since I used to live at 1541, I find it funny that “You belong on South Avenue!” was a common slur during one speaker’s childhood days.
More on the Willard suitcases mentioned by third speaker Robert Reilly.
This is not just me being morbid. I have a longstanding interest in psychiatric history.
Dolph Lundgren was actually a Swedish national karate champ, and a chemical engineer, so if someone decided to make a straight-up adaptation of 3H&3L he would have been a logical choice to play Holger Carlsen.
Not now. He looked like absolute shit in The Rats: A Witcher’s Tale, and while some of that was artful costuming, the man is also almost 70 years old. I’m sure he could still kick my ass, but that’s not saying much.
Sensei Elmar Schmeisser has apparently gone on to become a big deal in that world, writing multiple books. He taught a demo class in Winston, though I’m not sure what year that was, because their promo photo does not look like a 76-year-old man. He looks exactly the same as when I knew him in the early 90s (except he was in color then). I found the resemblance to Shadmi’s drawings of Gygax above to be moderately hilarious.
If I remember correctly, Elmar was also really into the Society for Creative Anachronism.