Agent Palmer

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.

Interspersed with Douglas Coupland’s essays and a Tomb Raider history lesson are actual video game walkthroughs. Step by step instructions for some levels of Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, and Tomb Raider Gold. This is more than your average video game guide, this is what video game guidebooks should strive to be!

The fact that a writer like Coupland could write a first-person Lara Croft essay, as well as his additional thoughts and short history of a game and franchise back in 1998 is amazing.

The Cap: The Price of a Life is Roman Frister’s autobiography, written in a nonlinear fashion of his survival through horrendous situations throughout concentration camps and hate during the Holocaust.

I don’t know about other Holocaust survivor autobiographies, but Frister has somehow found a method of lightening the load of this heavy story while also expanding the poignancy to greater heights.

The trailer for Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too? Sets very little expectation as it states, “Welcome to a different kind of music show.”

Furthermore, the series title sequence narration shares, “I’m Geddy Lee. Bass player in the band Rush for almost five decades. But also, a bird photographer, a wine collector, baseball aficionado, you know, a nerd! Which got me wondering whether my fellow bass folk are more than just the shadowy figures we see skulking around the stage. I wanna know, ‘Are Bass Players Human Too?’”