Vaporize politicians! Zap skinheads!

GayBlade manual cover, 1992, image credit Ryan Best

GayBlade was a role-playing game developed by Ryan Best in 1992. According to the manual: “GayBlade takes players into an ancient and dark dungeon on a terrifying Quest—to rescue Empress Nelda from the disgusting right-wing creatures inhabiting the dungeon. Fortunately, the rescue party is made up of heroic Drag Queens, Queers, Lesbians, and others who will stop at nothing to get their beloved Empress back to luxurious Castle GayKeep. But can they succeed when so many others have failed before them?”

When the game starts, players in table-top RPG fashion, roll to create a team of characters (Jones,1993). Each type of character has a different ability set encouraging players to create a balanced coalition team. “Armor” in the game includes leather jackets, aprons, tiaras, and condoms, and “weapons” include purses, mace, press-on nails and blo-driers. Enemies in the game include TV evangelists, young republicans, rednecks, homophonic cops, etc., as well as some STIs. The evil forces are led by Lord Nanahcub (or Buchanan backwards) (Nissenbaum 1993). The castle includes 1300 rooms, 13 levels, and 100 bad guys (USA Today, 1993). Much of the coverage of the game asserted it was the “first” LGBTQ game, however this is because its creator and journalists covering the game were unaware of Caper in the Castro.

We stumbled across this game during our archival research into early 1980s and 1990s gay and lesbian newspapers, looking hard for any additional LGBTQ specific games. This otherwise undocumented piece of LGBTQ digital game history was actually widely covered at the time of its original release. According to creator Ryan Best it achieved a large amount of press coverage (particularly for an indie queer game in 1993): “It took me by surprise how much press coverage GayBlade received. My phone was ringing day and night with calls for interviews,” Best said. “Coverage included National Public Radio, USA Today, dozens of national and international GLBT newspapers, Der Spiegel magazine, and I was interviewed by Howard Stern on his radio show.”

We were able to find some of these articles including coverage from the Bay Area Reporter, Village Voice, The Advocate, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and UPI Newstrack.

Article about GayBlade from the Village Voice, July 13 1993, page 46,

What would Jack say?

Well...what would Jack say?

  

Fear of The Angry Red Planet

The anonymous op-ed in the Times as well as Woodward's book (which I have not read but am proceeding from his summaries on talk shows) emphasize the peril to the actual American empire of Trump's ignorance. As any thoughtful imperialist will tell you an empire is a complicated matter and not child's play. A president is not required to come into office with a comprehensive mastery of the subject but he or she must have a verifiable grasp of the state of their knowledge and their ignorance.

In this White House the imperialists whose asides from the stage have provided a relentless commentary, from the beginning, to the soliloquies of their commander-in-chief have, none of them, anything like the credentials normally required for their roles in the management of the actual empire. But they all can take an inflated measure of their own worth by comparison to the president. And it appears that they have.

The disastrous record of the previous Republican administration has left that party's reserve of certified strategists depleted. Had another candidate won its nomination they would have needed to promote most of the roster from the farm leagues.  But Trump, running against everything since MacArthur, was left to pick among the misfits and the reckless climbers.

So the emperor knows nothing and the palace is both disloyal and out of their depth. How have we arrived here?

We should start by acknowledging that the empire as it actually exists is in crisis. America's colonial strategy has never moved beyond the one it used to destroy the population and occupy the lands of North America. What success it had in the 20th century was by outspending all rivals and the economic history of the 21st century demonstrates the radically diminishing returns on that.

Politically, at home, the actual empire has required a fantasy empire to rally enough of the working class to give it broad support and to staff its legions. While the Obama administration pursued an assortment of wars and the patching of financial markets the Republicans were free to sell fantasy to their mass audience. And no one excelled at salesmanship like Trump. Through a strategy no more complex than protecting his right flank he swept the remains of the GOP from the field. He knows that the actual empire that his staff is so intent on bringing him around on is a much harder sell than the one in the imagination of his rally audiences. And he knows that the Republican party is an empty husk without it.

The impersonality of financial abstraction escapes any attempt at conscious political transformation, so that people who have lost control of their life hang on dearly to a sense of illusory belonging. The nation, religious faith, and ethnicity provide protection from insecurity and loneliness, and serve as tools to attack competitors. ... Aggressive belonging is their only form of cohesion.  Franco “Bifo” Beradi – And

This “aggressive belonging”, which Bifo diagnoses in our digital era is, in the American homeland, much older than the internet and fundamental to Trump's performance. However deranged the particular impulses which his advisers feel compelled to protect us from it is this underlying drive which is his bond with his audience and the very substance of their ideology.

Yup, that's how I'd handle it

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CJ gets her man

What's up, Caped Crusader?

Let the tinkle flow!

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