Notes on Board Games

Ha ha ha, if there is anything like a "Drag King" it would be the 'gamer gurlz' movement where women try to cloak themselves in the trappings of traditional adolescent male nerd culture. Not males participating in condensed masculinity, but women trying to appropriate it in order to tap into the financial success that anything cute with XX chromosomes can have with men. Geek prostitution, if you will.

See, with very little effort I can vomit out some alt-right gamergate nonsense that probably just triggered half the site. We can't just throw out woke terms and apply them to games to make us feel smart. We gotta make sure the words make sense and are appropriate.

Or maybe I'm binging on too much "Ash vs Evil Dead" and have overdosed on toxic masculinity and should be ignored

So yeah... this is going a little...



I mean, I get it. Intertexuality is sublimity but we're laying it on a little thick here.

Shellie’s comments make me think of RuPaul’s famous line: “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.”

Added to the Required “Reading” List: Paris Is Burning, a great documentary about drag/ballroom culture. Play is of course its own kind of drag—we are trying on different states of being every time we sit down in the magic circle.

And it’s a different kind of drag to hear people say we’re “overthinking” it, or making connections where there aren’t any. Connecting the dots is, like, the story of our bodies coming together at the cellular level, the story of every side of a die, etc etc. God help me when I can’t make connections anymore—I’ll be alone in my certainties, and invulnerable.

AND Frank Frazetta’s work definitely strikes me as camp—gaudy, steroidally hyperbolic, male-gazed to hell and back, kind of beautiful too. It wouldn’t be out of place in a lot of art museums if he’d toned down on the Viking helmets, wrought-iron thongs, and goblins.

IANA media expert, by any stretch, So this take on Camp might be 'Well, duh,' for those of you who are.

Modern me can explain what I know about pointillism to 15-year-old me. "Artist paints with a three-hair brush." But modern me can't explain to 15-year-old me why that Frazetta painting is kind of campy, because 15-year-old-me thinks that stuff is AWESOME! The only thing that would make it cooler to him would be to paint it on the side of a van.

15-y-o me would have the same problem explaining why 60's TV Batman is camp to 7-year-old me. 7-y-o me thinks that the fistfights with the cartoon "KA-POW!" are the way all TV fistfights should be. (Heck, 58-y-o me thinks 7-y-o might have a point.)

In both those cases, all the time machine RobertBs have had to marinate in enough of a particular culture to judge something as campy. So, pointing to that Frazetta and asking, "Is this campy," is at its core, asking, "Have you experienced enough of this particular style that this extreme example of it is now a parody of the style, intentionally or not? And if the answer is 'yes', then we might share enough of a cultural background to have a 'deeper' conversation about a lot of other, similar things."

I guess that in the end, the question is more a request for a cultural signal, than it is a request for "Is x a type of y." You could make a neural network judge if a piece of music is an example of Bluegrass. I don't think you could get it to determine that a band like The Cleverlys is having fun with the form.