Mark Wallace, so-called

@markwallace.bsky.social

713 Followers 528 Following

Writer, game designer, anguish flâneur. Words: NYTimes, Salon, LARB, Rumpus, GQ, etc. Blog: yrpgm.bearblog.dev/blog/ Games: markwallace.itch.io News: inlooking.substack.com Once wrote a book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513227/the-second-life-herald/

Darren McGavin in white shirt and dark tie at a typewriter, from the first episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 1974. What a badass ❤️
Cover of Granta #98, featuring a large blue swimming pool against the backdrop of a gray sea with hills in the distance under an overcast sky. Scotland or Wales, I believe. Always evocative, Granta.
A quaint little pink house surrounded by big city buildings that have been filtered into B&W to heighten the effect of its isolation. Ideal setting for a Mausritter x Blades in the Dark game, right?
picture of an orange chore coat with its inner and outer pockets stuffed with books and pens. What's that you say? I'm drooling?
Cover of OMNI magazine #1, featuring a car in the distance, red tail lights, driving along a road at dusk, with a fence looming into huge forced perspective on the right. Hard to convey in words how hard this cover goes. It was the future, threatening to leave you behind.
Jackie Earle Haley, Dennis Quaid, Dennis Christopher (on bicycle), and Daniel Stern all looking so fucking 1979 in Breaking Away, one of the all-time greatest movies ever fight me
The rulebook for the Death in Space TTRPG, featuring a stylized foil sun on black ground with a red spaceman, and a copy of The Week Junior with the KPop Demon Hunters on the cover. Which is cooler? You decide.
Same photo of Elliott Gould looking sad at the bar that I usually post. I mean, it's a great photo, so... And my moral philosophy!
Some 15mm Napoleonic lead figures. On cardboard bases. It was a long time ago.
Opening screen of the 1977 computer game ADVENTURE. Which I played the shit out of that year. "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."
John Cho and Kal Penn in the movie poster for Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
50 apples and a quince drying on a towel, artfully shot in portrait mode against the backdrop of a dun California hillside
Cover of the 1975 rulebook for Empire, Napoleonic wargaming, with a drawing of Napoleon on horseback addressing his troops. First played when I was 8 or 9.
A California license plate in yellow on black reading 0SLP2BK. Beastie Boys, yo.
A page from the William Gibson novel Agency in which the POV character talks about the fall of democracy and the insulating power of the kleptocracy. Apologies for not typing the whole thing out on my phone.
A large grey sloth, clinging vertically to a tree, peering deep into your soul, seeing your secrets, knowing your guilt. Or perhaps just asleep.
The shop sign for Hobson's Choice Cleaners in San Francisco. Because there's only one choice, really.
A shirtless Paul Richter holding a big sword out in front of him in the 1924 Fritz Lang movie Die Nibelungen. I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed the first hour of the 2024 film Hagen, which is a retelling of some of the same tales. Might even watch the rest of it someday.
A plaque that says, in French, "The Irish writer James Joyce stayed in this hotel in October 1922. He started writing his novel Finnegan's Wake." That's a big fucking bed to lie in, I tell you.
Ancient Roman busts arrayed alongside a huge black iron steam boiler with contraptions along the top that echo the rank of disembodied heads.
Elliott Gould looking dejected in a bar with a drink from the amazing movie The Long Goodbye.
A six foot tall and stinky corpse flower, kind of like a giant lily but smelling really bad. At least, that's what my wife said. I didn't see it, I had to work.
A cute little green-and-yellow parakeet or budgie perched on a wicker chair on our porch. No, we do not need another pet right now.
Scene from Severance in which Mark and Hilly wait for the goat people to approach.
John Cazale and Al Pacino looking sweaty and nervous in Dog Day Afternoon. What a film! Don't tell me you've never seen it. Actually, do tell me, and I'll be the biggest cheerleader for the treat you're in for.
Wooly Willy, the toy with the magnet that let you arrange iron filings on dude's face. Yes, it really was a toy. No, I never opened mine up to check out all the iron dust inside.
A half peeled-off sticker warning of "microwave harassment in this area" and talking about "suppression of natural states of divine nonchalance causing normalcy and other disabilities," with a phone number: 1 (888) 717-7517. Go ahead. I dare you.
Cover of the Swords Trilogy by Michael Moorcock, featuring a Ken Barr painting (think Frank Frazetta, if you don't know Barr) of an armored knight on a black steed (it's totally a steed and not a horse), with a sword raised at the end of one muscle-bound arm and a scantily-clad maiden clutched in the other.
New York Times Spelling Bee showing the word "antlion"
Vast miniature railway layout with a little rail bridge at the right
The cover of Flight 714, showing Tintin and Captain Haddock exploring a cave with two huge idols
Cover of WG Sebald's stunning book, Austerlitz, showing a boy in frilly 19th-century costume? idk I'm sick this week give me a break sorry
Matchbook cover depicting Manny, Moe, and Jack, the Pep Boys, against a red background. All three have 1930s-era greased hairdos, yellow dinner jackets, and double-breasted waistcoats. Manny is smoking his cigar. You remember the Pep Boys from before Manny had his cigar taken away, don't you? I do.
The Bee Gees in signature white outfits and teeth, on the cover of the Stayin' Alive single
Island Records cassette release of Pulp's Common People
Her Space Holiday's Marc Paul Bianchi looking blankly at you through his horn-rim glasses and from under his perfect hair, while a reel-to-reel oversees the scene. I'd make soulful electronica songs if I had thatcool of a look too. Right? You feel me?
The Jackson 5 standing amid three capital letters spelling ABC that are as tell as they are. Blue background. Orange A. Yellow B. Red C. Naturally.
Sleeve of the 45 rpm single for David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes, featuring Bowie in a silvery iridescent Harlequin suit, listening to a silver shoes like it was a phone. We know Major Tom's a junkie.
grainy black and white photo of Kurt Cobain shouting into a microphone. no notes.
It's Your Thing 45 rpm single on T Neck records with an orange label with pink and blue stripes. A little boring, I know.
A young Iggy Pop buttoning a white shirt on the cover of the Lust for Life / The Passenger single. Great songs.
A woodcut or engraving, as might appear as the frontispiece of a book, of the ancient Green physician Galenus of Pergamon. He has a beard and a toga, like all ancient Greeks. (Frontispiece! Good word, right?)
Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel embracing
The incomparable David Bowie, young, holding his long feathery hair away from his face, transmitting the message that it's fine to be just who you are.
Cover of Swervedriver's album 99th Dream, showing a planet-like sphere with band members' faces reflected in it, and a satellite hovering nearby. In Super Stereo.
A comet (no shit) streaking through the starry sky above the vast and formidable Pacific Ocean at dusk. Fucken A.
Cover of Simple Minds' New Gold Dream, featuring a cross with a glowing heart in it
Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World
A long-suffering ceramic doll whose head has carelessly come off her shoulders and is lying at an awkward angle in the dirt beside an olive drab house, near a blue metallic tree sculpture your grandmother would be embarrassed to have on her mantel. Actually, the tree isn't that terrible. Poor dolly, though.
The little useless announcement telling me I am user #281,377 on Bluesky. Doubtless important.
Cover of the kickass Pixies album Surfer Rosa, a sepia-toned image featuring a bare-breasted Flamenco dancer in a dilapidated room with a cross hanging on the wall.
The head of Ash, the android from the original Alien movie
Cover of the ELO album Out of the Blue
A small sign that reads "candidate filing parking only"