There is no divide between people who play games and people who don’t; we all play games, or at least have played them in the past. But there clearly is a divide between people with varying amounts of experience of different sorts of games, and hence different expectations; between those, let us say, who flick through the rulebook for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Board Game, thinking “okay, straightforward underlying game mechanic, minor tweaks to bring it closer to the TV series, questions about the best strategy to adopt”, and those who look at this slim 20-page booklet, in fairly large font and with quite a lot of illustrations, and respond with “blimey, that’s a bit big and complicated”. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’
Games Without Frontiers
Posted in Musings, tagged Buffy the Vampire Slayer, games on December 24, 2022| Leave a Comment »
Western Death Cult
Posted in Musings, tagged Buffy the Vampire Slayer, classics, politics on February 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »
The discipline of Classics considered as an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Institute of Ancient Wisdom, one of the oldest and most prestigious organisations in Sunnydale, comes to the school to deliver some curriculum enhancement activities and recruit new members. Willow is entranced by their erudition and sophistication, and the promise of, well, ancient wisdom. Cordelia is attracted by the aura of power and social status. Xander is suspicious and hostile at first, but then they explain that he too is an inheritor of their great traditions, simply by virtue of being himself, and so he should help defend them. (more…)
Some Guys From Spart
Posted in Musings, tagged 300, alt-right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frank Miller, Generation Identity, Sparta on May 8, 2018| 3 Comments »
“The best are those who are raised in the severest school.” To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never read Thucydides (whence that quote comes; Archidamus at 1.84), or Herodotus, or Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, or any of the other ancient accounts of Sparta and its values, but she didn’t have to; she could draw on a substantial popular tradition of images of Spartan life and attitudes, including her favourite admonitory story of the Spartan boy and the fox. As a child I was never sure what the lesson was supposed to be – don’t get caught? if you get caught, never confess? – but in retrospect I think it was more a kind of mood music: big boys don’t cry, that’s just a scratch, a family of starving Bangladeshis could live on that for a week (on failing to eat one’s crusts), and in my day we’d have been sent to bed without any supper for less than that. The Spartans tell you why you shouldn’t ever have more than one slice of cake. (more…)
Chimes at Midnight
Posted in Musings, tagged blogging, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, historiography on March 10, 2017| Leave a Comment »
We must be old. We cannot choose but be old. We have heard the chimes at midnight at the the end of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme music – twenty years ago? It was a simpler time, when one girl (albeit with supernatural strength) and her friends could avert the apocalypse, time and again, because the apocalypse was a bunch of demons trying to open a gateway to hell, or the mayor of a small town trying to turn himself into a demon, not an entire global system of doom. Even as the threats became more powerful and apparently unstoppable – deranged hellgods, a rogue military experiment, sexually frustrated adolescent boys – they remained identifiable, nameable, and ultimately susceptible to the judicious application of violence. If only… (more…)
History as Nightmare
Posted in Musings, tagged Buffy the Vampire Slayer, history, modernity on November 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I actually have several ideas for posts lined up – my thoughts on the Thucydides adaptation, some musings on the reception of Thucydides outside the Western tradition – and absolutely no time to spare to write them at the moment, as I have to finish marking several different piles of student essays in time to get some sort of a paper scribbled for the conference on Monday. Normal service will be resumed at some point; meanwhile, I’ve been meaning for ages to post a copy of my old paper on ideas of the past in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; one of my favourites of everything I’ve ever written, as it happens. Never managed to get it published, for various reasons; it did reside on my personal webpage at the university for a while, but that has long since stopped working properly…
Sphinx 