Tag: RIP

RIP Hulk Hogan

Wrestling superstar Hulk Hogan has died, his manager confirmed. He was 71.

Hogan, whose given name is Terry Bollea, attained pro wrestling stardom in the 1980s and 1990s and was perhaps the biggest star in WWE’s five-decade history. He was the main draw for the first-ever WrestleMania in 1985 and was a fixture for years in its signature event, facing everyone from Andre The Giant and Randy Savage to The Rock and even company chairman Vince McMahon.

He won six WWE championships and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005 by Sylvester Stallone.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Julian LeFay

Legendary Elder Scrolls creator Julian LeFay passes away at 59. Julian LeFay, the designer largely credited with helping shape the vision of fan favorite Elder Scrolls franchise, has passed away at the age of 59.

This is a hard one to hear. I was friends with Bennie for years, and it will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that we even worked together for 18 months on what was supposed to be a launch title for the Sega Dreamcast.

He left Bethesda to come work for Fenris Wolf after we signed a $1.5 million deal with Sega to provide its first RPG for its new Katana system after our original producer at GT moved to Sega of America and made signing us one of his first orders of business. I’d licensed the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller, and Julian was not only tired of working at Bethesda after his friend Vijay had left for Microsoft, but was very excited to take his innovative design concepts into a science fiction space for the first time.

And, of course, he liked the idea of working with me and my partner, as we’d hung out together at various CGDCs and E3s for four or five years by that point. He, Vijay, Bobby Prince from id, and Carter from Spectrum Holobyte were the people I spent the most time with at the Westin and the various other locations outside of the CGW crew.

Unfortunately, Sega of Japan eliminated Sega of America and cancelled all ten launch titles that SOA had in development, including ours, about one year prior to the launch of the Dreamcast, in favor of spending the $100 million that had been budgeted for those games on putting the Dreamcast logo on the front of the Arsenal FC jerseys. This was, of course, a terrible decision that was much-mocked in the industry, and helped contribute to the failure of the Dreamcast to compete with the original Sony PlayStation despite its technical superiorities.

I still remember Julian, Kurt (from SOA) and I laughing about the fake headline in a parody newsletter given out at CGDC that read: “SEGA REFUSES TO REVEAL PLANS FOR SELF-IMMOLATION” or something to that effect. It wasn’t quite so funny when I got the phone call from Kurt telling me that a) he had been let go, b) SOA was being shut down by SOJ, and c) Traveller was canceled. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for my time in the game industry, as GT’s collapse followed Sega of America’s by about 18 months.

So Julian and I never finished our game. We talked once or twice about possibly working together, and I think he ended up getting back together with Vijay toward the end, but things never managed to quite work out. It’s truly a pity, because I think that what we could have – what we WOULD have – achieved would have been truly epic, in fact, more epic than Epic.

It is truly the end of an era. Julian LeFay is gone, but he should never be forgotten by the gaming community. He never received the plaudits of Richard Garriott, John Romero, or Sid Meier, but he was genuinely one of the great designers of the era. He always imagined things on a larger scope than most of us were able to conceptualize. He set the standard for complex randomized environments and laid some of the conceptual foundations for both the MMO and all modern games that incorporate random elements as part of their design.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Jim Marshall

Jim Marshall, a defensive end whose 19-year tenure with the Minnesota Vikings helped define the team’s hard-nosed identity, has died, the team announced Tuesday afternoon. He was 87.

“The entire Minnesota Vikings organization is mourning the loss of Jim Marshall. No player in Vikings history lived the ideals of toughness, camaraderie and passion more than the all-time iron man,” Minnesota’s owners said in a statement.

Marshall played 282 games (starting 277) during an unusually long career for any era; the former number is still a record for defensive players. He was weeks shy of his 42nd birthday when he played his final game in 1979.

Bud Grant: “Jim Marshall was special.”

He Never Got His War

One of the more intellectually respectable neocons, Michael Ledeen, has died without ever seeing the US invasion of Iran for which he advocated for decades:

Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his daughter’s house in Texas. He was 83 years old. Ledeen was a vigorous participant in contributing to the demise of the communist Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain allies in Eastern Europe.

Ledeen served as a special advisor on terrorism to President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and later worked as a consultant for the National Security Council. Writing for the Asia Times, author and journalist David P. Goldman argued that Ledeen’s “personal contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows.”

Leeden did not advocate military intervention in Iran. He was in the business of replicating Reagan’s anti-Soviet playbook for Iran’s clerical regime. 

Clown World just never stops lying. Ledeen had about as much to do with America’s victory in the Cold War as the average Zoomer born after the fall of the Soviet Union. And he was a rabid advocate of a US military empire in the Middle East; for all his subsequent denials, he stands condemned by his own words.

Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq “I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror.” One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror. – Michael Ledeen, August 6, 2002, National Review

He also took credit for the color revolution in Ukraine that resulted in Russia’s Special Military Operation that has led to the loss of 66,000 square kilometers of territory and over one million Ukrainian lives.

Michael Ledeen offers his own praise for the Orange Revolution by, um…taking credit for it:

The mild support we gave to the democratic forces in the Ukraine proved far more powerful than most of the experts expected. The revolutionaries required a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement. They did the rest. The same can and should be done elsewhere in the world (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea…)

Not to mention EUR 130 billion in military aid…

Ledeen ended every column with “Faster, Please” in imitation of Cato’s demand for war with Carthage, so the subsequent attempts to retroactively whitewash his warmongering are obviously false. While it is best to avoid unnecessarily speaking ill of the dead, we cannot allow his fellow neoclowns to establish the false narrative that Ledeen was anything but an Israel First warmonger who sought to make use of US military power in defense of a foreign nation.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Tale of Two Remembrances

Castalia House’s Morgan recalls his friendship with the late author, Howard Andrew Jones:

It was late 1997 or early 1998 that Howard Jones had contacted me. I was the Official Editor of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association at the time. Periodically someone would contact me on how to get their pastiche Conan novel sold or how to get on the syndicated Conan T. V. show which was showing at the time. I never saw that show.

I received an e-mail from Howard who introduced himself and told me that he wanted to be to Harold Lamb what Glenn Lord was to Robert E. Howard. Glenn Lord was the agent for the Robert E. Howard copyright holders for around 28 years. Those Zebra and Ace non-Conan Robert E. Howard paperback collections. Glenn Lord was the agent who made the deals. He was a breath of fresh air.

Thus began a decades long friendship with Howard. We discussed fantasy fiction and historical novels we liked. We discovered new authors through each other. He seemed to like Fritz Leiber more than Robert E. Howard when I first knew him. We both tracked down old obscure hardbacks of historical fiction from the pulps. I seemed to like Arthur D. Howden Smith more than he did. Despite that, he had a copy of the first Grey Maiden story by Smith and sent me a photocopy of it. He also lent me a bound set of pulp stories including Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s “He Rules Who Can,” Joseph Ivers Lawrence “Swords on the Northern Sea,” and a Sargasso Sea story by F. van Wyck Mason.

He got Harold Lamb’s fiction back into print with University of Nebraska’s Bison Books. Before this, there were two collections of Harold Lamb’s cossack stories from the 1960s. Bison Books produced eight large volumes of Harold Lamb’s fiction from both the pulp and slick magazines. Howard organized them in a logical manner. We had discussed at one time of co-editing a volume of sword & sorcery fiction covering the early and middle years as an introductory volume to new readers.

At the same time, he was the fiction editor for Black Gate magazine. He championed getting new sword & sorcery fiction published. Sword & sorcery had been banished by the big publishers (for probably ideological reasons) but Howard knew there was a desire for it.

John O’Neill of the late and much-lamented Black Gate magazine also paid tribute to his former editor:

Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.

We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.

In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much content, especially without a budget?

Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers, and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, Ryan Harvey, and others. Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I still believe should have been presented to Howard.

Before long Howard’s own writing career had taken off with such magnitude that he had to step back from day-to-day duties at the magazine. Over the next fifteen years he released fifteen books, including three featuring Dabir and Asim, four novels in the Pathfinder universe, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy, three volumes in The Chronicles of Hanuvar, and the Harold Lamb collections Swords from the East and Swords from the West.

Howard was a wonderful writer. He believed in heroes, and that steadfast conviction informed all of his writing. But despite all his success Howard never lost touch with his other major talent — finding and nurturing new writers. Howard was an enormously gifted editor, and a tireless champion of underappreciated writers.

Many men have lived much longer, and left behind legacies that will not be remembered nearly as long, than Howard Andrew Jones.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Ben

America’s dog, Ben, who travelled the country as an officially accredited regular on College GameDay, died on Thursday of cancer at the age of 10. He was a very good dog.

And speaking of dogs and cancer, one thing we’ve learned is that the combination of radiation, Ivermectin, and an all-meat diet can be extremely effective. If you’ve got a dog who has been diagnosed with cancer, it’s definitely worth trying the latter two at the very least, in combination with whatever standard vet-recommended treatments are prescribed. Or, in lieu of them if you can’t afford the vet’s recommendations. However, don’t expect your vet to endorse the alternative treatments; it’s best to keep quiet about them.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP James Earl Jones

The man truly was a legend. In addition to all of his acting accomplishments, he was a lieutenant in the US Army. 93 is a very respectable run, and it’s not as if they’ll be needing him for Star Wars anymore. To cap it all off, that appearance on The Big Bang Theory was an incredibly funny take on celebrity and fandom. Even if you don’t like the show, you really have to see that episode.

Right across the border from my favorite city on Earth…

DISCUSS ON SG

An Elegaic Opus

Some artists just know how to exit stage left.

A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. In late 2022, as a parting gift, Ryuichi Sakamoto mustered all of his energy to leave us with one final performance: a concert film featuring just him and his piano. Curated and sequenced by Sakamoto himself, the twenty pieces featured in the film wordlessly narrate his life through his wide-ranging oeuvre. The selection spans his entire career, from his pop-star period with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his magnificent scores for filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci to his meditative final album,12. Intimately filmed in a space he knew well and surrounded by his most trusted collaborators, including director Neo Sora, his son, Sakamoto bares his soul through his exquisitely haunting melodies, knowing this was the last time he would be able to present his art.

I’ve loved Sakamoto since he was teaming up with David Sylvian, who is probably my all-time favorite musician and singer. Not that I’m any expert on pianists, but he’s my second favorite after my friend Cornelius. I think this documentary will be a must-see.

Recorded and filmed as he was dying of cancer, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Opus” — the Japanese film composer’s posthumous album and documentary of the same name — is clearly meant to be his final farewell.

As an album, it is fitting that the 20-song, hour-and-a-half recording of sparse piano played by Sakamoto is a retrospective, taking the listener on a journey through his half-century career.

One standout is the first-ever recorded version of the playfully lyrical “Tong Poo” from his early days with techno-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, also known as YMO. They were pioneers of 1970s electronic music and a Japanese act that landed on the global stage.

The album “Opus” is set to be released Friday from Milan Records. It showcases solo piano versions of the film scores that form the pillars of Sakamoto’s legacy, starting with the majestic theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” a film set in the final days of imperial China leading into its communist rule.

It won an Academy Award for best original score, making Sakamoto the first Asian to win the honor. The 1987 film, starring John Lone, also won best picture. The score also won a Grammy.

Elsewhere, the track “BB” is Sakamoto’s homage to Bertolucci, a tender love poem for his brilliant collaborator.

“Opus” also features the forlornly pensive music Sakamoto did for Bertolucci’s 1990 “The Sheltering Sky,” which juxtaposed emotionally lost American travelers with the ruthless vastness of northern Africa.

And it includes the music for “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a World War II prisoner of war camp, directed by Nagisa Oshima, in which Sakamoto also acted. It has become his signature piece.

Sakamoto’s sound has an unmistakably Asian feel that’s challenging to define, but evident through the utilization of certain harmonies, pentatonic motifs or scales. His sound is also evocative of Debussy but, to be fair, this is all Sakamoto.

Minimalist is another way some have described his ability to speak in the silences between the notes.

All the songs on “Opus” were immaculately recorded in Tokyo’s NHK 509 Studio, performed without an audience in 2022. The piano pedal shift, and, at times, his breathing, are present.

DISCUSS ON SG