World's Most Beautiful Leg

Dig this crazy WWII propaganda poster gallery from Life magazine. I thought I was well versed in the genre - indeed, ol' Rosie is represented here, as is the famously gruesome "This is the Enemy" series - but I have never seen most of these before, including several from Axis powers.

I love the first page's poster where the artist - who signed the work with a Nazi SS sigil - caricatures the incoming Americans as being murderous lunatics headed by the Ku Klux Klan. Or this one, encouraging American soldiers to surrender now so they can score with the ladies later.

(Also: Life magazine still exists as a discrete entity? I did not know that. Good on them!)

Namechange

I hereby declare that the name of the puzzle-solving group that gathers together at my house sometimes, and is mostly-but-not-entirely made of members from the "Immoral, Illegal & Fattening" MIT mystery hunt team, to be Shabbas Llamas. This comes from an excellently incorrect clue answer we generated on Sunday, thanks to hahathor.

For lack of a better name, I two months ago described ourselves as "Immoral Illegal & Fattening (and friends)" for listing purposes in the issue's leaderboard, since we placed among the previous issue's first ten solvers. I regretted this as soon as I saw it in print; it struck me as an unauthorized use of a name that I don't own, and felt yuckier given that IIF's team captain is listed in the magazine's masthead.

I like this solution much better, and hope nobody thinks ill of me for the unintentional slight!

Long in the tooth

Reading the most recent post on Play This Thing, where the writer (not G. C.) refers to the relatively recent Knytt as being the first freeware game they ever downloaded, reminds me of a small discussion I attended at last month's GameLoop. It was about game visuals, and most of the handful of attendees were actively employed as artists for modern video games.

Two things happened there that neatly confirmed the fact that I have moved into a new age demographic among game-players. The first was when the discussion's leader said "I'm going to date myself here, but..." followed by an allusion to Sonic the Hedgehog. This is a game that was published as I was starting college, so I don't automatically consider it a very old game, even though our prickly blue friend is old enough to vote now.

The second occurred when I casually mentioned the art style of arcade game cabinets as part of a larger point, while I was participating in the discussion. Nobody in the room knew was I was talking about - they may have been lifelong gamers, but it was well before their time! They all gazed at me like tell us about the war, grandpa, so I felt obliged to pull together a tiny art-history lesson about it. If you're at all familiar with my recent video projects you can correctly imagine that I took some enjoyment out of this.

Honestly, I'm kind of grinny about this realization, especially since I'm setting myself up to dive deeper into independent game journalism (c.f., c.f.). Having an air of experience isn't at all a bad thing!