Hello everyone,

It’s a new year, so you’re probably getting a lot of newsletters looking back on the previous year. Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that. Navel-gazing and meaningless milestones are two of my least favorite things, so I’m looking ahead instead of back. This year I’m planning to release Diner Punks, and it’s going to be a big project. I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but since it’s probably going to come up a lot in this newsletter over the next year, I thought I’d start the year with just a basic background and overview.

Somewhere between 10 and 15 years ago when I was still active on reddit, someone posted that they wanted to see a game about rockabillies. I took the bait and posted a one-page pitch for a game where the United States literally sunk into Hell sometime in the early 70s and Rockabillies were kind of the Mad Maxes of the new American hellscape. I liked the idea enough that I tried running it at a few conventions, but could never quite make it work.

Sometime later, the Hex crew was at a convention (in Collinsville, IL, so either Archon or DieCon) and we’d been talking about the different flavors of “punk” (Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Steampunk)—I think the context was weather adding “punk” as a suffix actually meant anything—which ended up causing the phrase “Dinerpunk” to pop into my head. I asked the other Hex guys if they knew what it meant and it turned out none of us knew quite what it meant but we all had similar ideas of the aesthetics that the word suggested: Suicide girls in carhop outfits, guys in leather jackets with big guns and muscle cars, and the smell of gasoline and strong coffee.

Sometime later I remembered the rockabilly hellscape thing and it seemed like it might be at least in the ballpark of whatever “Dinerpunk” meant. The initial concept just had too much going on to be coherent, so I started whittling things away, beginning with whole reality shift into Hell thing. This got me a setting that made more sense, but it was still kind of vague and unformed. Over the next several years, I ran versions of Diner Punks at several conventions and those games helped me cut and clarify until I had a game premise that was starting to make sense. A few years ago I set up a World Anvil page and started writing some of the world background, and doing that has brought the premise into pretty sharp focus. Here’s the working blurb:

In 1972, the world blew itself up. Now, a decade(-ish) later, the survivors are just starting to leave the isolation of their camps, communes, and fallout shelters hungry for trade, connection, and a taste of freedom. Welcome to the Boomlands, where road warriors called Diner Punks--part merchant, part outlaw, all swagger--tear across the broken highways of what used to be America dodging fallout, marauding gangs, and lots of local color just so they can keep their communities supplied and in the know.

Diner Punks is Mad Max meets Smokey & The Bandit with a Mojo Nixon soundtrack and a picture of Tank Girl pinned to the visor. Out here, you rely on siphoned gas, rusty steel and rock n’ roll to stay alive. So gas up your post-apocalyptic muscle car, crank up the volume, and burn rubber--because in the Boomlands, the only way forward is full throttle.

I had a timeline for releasing Diner Punks sometime in the summer (the original release month was July, with a Kickstarter in March or April), but that required getting the first draft of the text done by the end of January. That’s not going to happen, in part because the book is going to be much larger than I’d originally planned. Even if I move some of the background and setting stuff into a supplement, hitting the original deadline is unlikely. So for now I’m going to play it buy ear and keep the official release date set for the comfortably vague “sometime in 2026.”

If you’re interested, there’s a playlist on Spotify that I put together to listen do while working on Diner Punks.

I’ve got a couple new shirts up at the Etsy shop. You should buy them! ​

Media Roundup

I’ve sucked at reading recently, but I did finish Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Apparently there’s a movie and video game—both called Stalker—that are based on it, but I’m not familiar with them. The main character’s job is to (illegally) scavenge this site where some aliens landed and camped out for a while. Their presence made the whole area weird and left behind stuff that’s useful. That’s not a simplification, that’s about all the book gives. The sci-fi elements are just there to serve the plot and characters and is never really explained in a coherent way. I’m not sure if that’s a Russian thing or a choice by the authors, and I can’t completely decide if it worked. I enjoyed the book, but would have preferred more world-building and could easily see how some people be turned off by the vagueness.  

I also read the Return of The Blues Brothers comic by Luke Pisano, Stella Aykroyd, James Warner, and Felipe Sobreiro. It was published by Z2, which as far as I can tell is basically a vanity press for musicians who want to write comic books. Stella Aykroyd is Dan’s daughter and Luke Pisano is the son of Belushi’s widow, Judy Pisano, and the quality is exactly what you expect from people whose main qualification is “Daddy built the company.” It’s not terrible, but it has the overall vibe of a mediocre reboot—the best parts are the callbacks, and they’re not really good themselves, they just remind you of something good in the movie. They also try to shove in a lot of new lore that doesn’t really fit. Unless you’re a hardcore Blues Brothers fan, you can skip this (and that’s coming from one of the 5 people who actually enjoyed Blues Brothers 2000).

On the game side of things, I read Satanic Panic #1 and #2 by Eric Bloat. The zines consist of some background on the Satanic Panic of the 80s and random game bits—creatures, items, etc.—that are somehow related to it. I’m not sure who these books are for. The background bits are so shallow that anyone who lived through the Satanic Panic or had done even surface-level reading about it already knows it, and anyone who’s unfamiliar would have to dig into other sources to glean anything useful. The game parts are for a bunch of different systems and genres and just kind of random. The zines look good, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with them.

On to the moving pictures:

I enjoyed the final season of Stranger Things, but my main takeaway was that I hate people who make videos complaining about Stranger Things (and don’t even get me started on the people who are mad that an imaginary secret episode they made up wasn’t released).  

I just finished the 12 Monkeys TV series. I avoided it for a long time because Terry Gilliam is one of my favorite directors and a Scyfy (or however they spell it this week) reboot of one of his movies felt a little like blasphemy. Turns out it was pretty good. The future isn’t as surreal and the mental hospitals aren’t as terrifying as in Gilliam’s version, but that kind of works for the longer form. The first season is more or less an expanded version of the movie plot, but some bad guy time travelers escape into the past to keep the ending from sticking. There are some slow and repetitive bits in season 3 and 4, but they bring it all into a satisfying ending. The actors are mostly people who you think you might have seen before but can’t quite place—they guy who plays James Cole has a “guy you call when you know you can’t afford Jeremy Renner” vibe, the lead actress is a blandly pretty blond, and there are a lot of character actors who you’ve seen in lots of small parts. The two actors I actually recognized were both great. First off, you’ve got Emily Hampshire (from Shitt’s Creek) as Jennifer Goines—the TV version of the Brad Pitt character from the movie—and she’s the best part of the show. Playing crazy gives her a lot of chances to go big, and she nails it every time. The other was Todd Stashwick. You might not recognize the name, but you’ve definitely seen him before. He’s usually a second-string bad guy—the main villain’s lieutenant or something—and spends most of his time beating people up and being intimidating, but he’s got a Jeffrey Dean Morgan vibe that makes him kind of charming even when he’s the being evil. In 12 Monkeys, he starts out as the head bad guy and eventually becomes a B-team member of the core cast, so he gets to show that his range extends beyond threats and fistfights. Definitely worth a watch.

The remake of The Running Man is a couple hours of nice action with a little bit of a cyberpunk vibe and overall a more grounded feel than the original version. Making it less like ultraviolent American Gladiators and more like Jackpot or Guns Akimbo by moving it out into the street helped make the world feel more solid.

I thought Paul Rudd and Jack Black were playing themselves in the Anaconda reboot, but the fact they’re not doesn’t hurt the movie one bit. Its’ every bit as funny as the trailers make it look, and I highly recommend it.

Elvis From Outer Space is a movie about Elvis returning from outer space to meet his secret daughter. The most recognizable actors are Sonny West (Elvis’s bodyguard) and that Asian Elvis Impersonator who shows up in a lot of places, the budget had to be at least $78, and the overall vibe is that they took a Skinamax movie, cut out all the sexy parts, and padded the runtime with Elvis impersonators and amateur CGI. It is objectively terrible, but I enjoyed it, largely because I felt like the people who made it are kindred spirits (remember, I wrote a whole game about Elvis) and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Army of Thieves is a prequel to Zak Snyder’s Vegas zombie flick that shows the origin story of the German safecracker. Except for a couple of TV news reports and references to the zombie outbreak, it’s a standard heist movie that checks off all the boxes. Nothing super interesting here, but a good way to kill a couple hours.

Caught Stealing is apparently what happens when Darren Aronofsky decides to make a Guy Ritchie movie. He did a pretty good job of it. I especially liked Cotton Weary and Kingpin as Orthodox Jewish gangsters.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was, in fact, a retelling of Frankenstein. It was good, but I’m not sure it was needed.

The new Deathstalker movie has a conspicuous lack of gratuitous nudity and a special effects budget that goes a lot farther now than it would have in the 80s, but otherwise hits a tone that’s very close to Deathstalker 2, which we all know was (and still is) the best movie in the franchise. If you like the originals, you’re going to like this one.

After watching SLC Punk, I’m even more confused about how I completely missed this movie when it came out. It was exactly the kind of movie I would have watched in the 90s, and is a very, very 90s movie. I also watched the sequel, which is watchable but definitely not something to go out of your way for.

I also got onto a stand-up kick and watched a bunch of specials: Dave Chappelle: Unstoppable, Josh Johnson: #, Dan Cummins: Get Outta Here Devil, Sarah Squirm: Live & In The Flesh (Sarah Sherman), and 3 more by Tom Segura: Ball Hog, Sledgehammer, and Teacher. I enjoyed them all, but the Sarah Sherman one is really weird and really gross and probably not for everyone.

Are you a member of my Patreon? If not, consider joining if you like free stuff, exclusive content, and advance previews of stuff I’m working on.

That’s it for January. See you next month.

TYTYVM

Steve