AuthorQuest

Analyzing the Disney Villains: Ratigan (The Great Mouse Detective)

2012-02-16T12:41:00.000-06:00

Origin: The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Or Professor Padraic Ratigan to his friends. Of which he has many. It's pretty easy to have a good villain when you're simply lifting one of the greatest, already existing antagonists in literary history. But adding mouse ears and Vincent Price's voice goes a long way towards making this one of the most underrated villains in Disney canon.

Motivation: Ratigan doesn't want money -- he already has a bunch -- nor vengeance nor escape. He wants power. Why? I'm not sure, other than it would be cool to put on his resume. He seems to have a problem with his lot in life -- a mastermind condemned to the sewers because he's a ~~rat~~ big mouse.

And on the plus side, he's not a one-dimensional Lex Luthor -- he has a backstory with Basil, the Sherlock Holmes expy, and we know his past crimes have made headlines. It's just too bad we never get to see any of that. But kudos to Disney for extending the story to something that exists outside of what's presented.

Character Strengths: Not only can he play a classy harp, but he's obviously an analytical genius. He can extrapolate, deduce, and predict with the best of them. It's really too bad he's stuck with cartoonish flights of fancy, because he could really do some damage to the human world.

He's really quite well-liked in geek circles and I didn't know why until I saw the movie. Then I figured it out: he's the Joker. A criminal talent whose prone to fits of psychosis, maniacal laughter, and displays of grandeur. Just like the Joker he knows he's the bad guy and he loves that.

Evilness: Good marks here too. On the surface, he's got charisma, style, and a track record. Make one mistake and, after a near psychotic break, he'll calmly call for his "you have failed me for the last time" henchcat, Fluffy. Which, to a tiny mouse, would be the equivalent of summoning Cthulhu at the ring of a bell.

Plus he has one of the best villain songs I've ever heard. All his characterization takes place in that one number. And not just from telling, but from showing.

You can tell Ratigan is a different villain from Maleficent from their animations alone. Maleficent is always very stiff, like a pillar or a wall. Her facial expression rarely changes. But Ratigan is all over the place -- dancing, swishing that cape, making faces that make his eyes bug and his teeth gleam. Also, did that song say something about drowning widows and orphans?

Tools and Powers: Ratigan's got a lot in his pocket -- a gang of thugs and lowlifes, the whole of the underworld in his palm, a bat with a nightmare-fueled voice -- but I think most of his game is all talk. Sometimes it works -- he made a great ploy to lead Basil to his death trap, but then he does the Bond villain thing where he fails to kill the hero, monologues, then leaves.

He talks a a big game about his most "fiendishly, diabolical, clever plan yet", but it's to replace the mouse queen with a robot (a robot for 1897) that will name him as the new all-powerful ruler. And it's not even him inventing the robot -- the toymaker he kidnapped is doing all the planning and implementation. I'm not sure whether this characterization is intentional or not, to show Ratigan's real impotence. But for what it's worth, it's good villainy.

Complement to the Hero: I don't think I should give as much credit here as one should, since this isn't based on original material. Yes, there's a great yin/yang here, but it's really no different than what occurred in Sherlock Holmes, even with the personality shifts. However, I do like what Disney did by adding the more calm Basil to the raging Ratigan, especially during the climax.

Fatal Flaw: And to that end, the divergence of personalities is what's responsible for Ratigan's downfall. Although I'm not sure what he was thinking with creating a steampunk dummy of the queen. I mean, seriously, no one was going to question this? The thing's wired into a loudspeaker. It can't move. Ratigan's schemes come with a heaping dose of mad scientist that never bodes well for success. The design of his big, thick death trap is composed of several smaller death traps. Which is the very thing that allows the hero to escape. Any one of those implements would have done the trick.

Method of Defeat/Death: With his plot foiled, Ratigan escapes via pedal-blimp to Big Ben. Basil pursues him where they have a harrowing chase through the gears to the clock face outside. By this time, Ratigan's worked up such a rage that he resembles a tiny Incredible Hulk. He furiously claws Basil with violence unprecedented in a Disney movie, pushing him until he hangs off the minute hand by a hand.

Ratigan rears up for the final blow, following all the cliched camera shots, as Basil's friends in the balloon hover nearby to catch him, Ratigan strikes... And it works. Even Ratigan can't believe it. Except Basil's hanging onto the crashed pedal-blimp, just as the clock chimes and Ratigan falls off. But not before grabbing onto Basil's pants. They both tumble into the smoky London night, screaming their last.

Except Basil, who was still clinging to a bit of the blimp's propeller that he uses to float back up to his friends.

Cinematically, not bad. I like playing with the tropes, the homage to the original Holmes/Moriarty final battle, and Ratigan's animalistic psychopath moves. However, there's something to be said for the ultimate cause of death. Mice can climb up walls. I find it hard to believe Ratigan's sense of balance is that bad he could fall from the bell ringing. I know it's supposed to be a callback, but it just doesn't work. It's not related to character or events. Plus, how hard would Basil have to pedal to get his helicopter back up?

Final Rating: Three stars

Why I Try and Keep My Writing on the Down-Low

2012-02-15T16:25:00.001-06:00

I recently discovered the "What People Think I Do" meme and found this little gem. It got me thinking about why I'm so shy to tell people that I'm a writer. The first reason is that I've only been published in a few magazines and anthologies (like "Live and Let Undead", now at fine bookstores everywhere). But I feel that until I get a novel on the bookshelf, I've earned no legitimacy.

I feel that when most people, myself included, learn that a person is a writer, the first thing they ask is if they've been published. The perception of being published versus not is the difference between this

and this

You just need to look at a sampling of query letters received by agents to see why (QueryShark and SlushPile Hell have a fine selection of sample #queryfails). You've got people thinking they were deigned by God, therapy fodder, blatant plagiarists, and dozens of dull, unoriginal stories. And that's just the people who can string together basic sentences. Which only represent 40% of people who say "I'm a writer."

Fact is, unless you're someone like Tobais Buckell, Suzanne Collins, Jim C. Hines, J.K. Rowling, John Scalzi, Seanan McGuire, Neil Gaiman, Sherwood Smith, Patrick Rothfuss, so on, so on, i.e., someone who identifies him or herself as a writer, you are just a sad person in the basement, with the glow of the monitor as your only light source, writing centaur erotica. Or god forbid, fan fiction. Imagine that, someone composing fan fiction calling themselves a writer.

And I don't want angry comments, because I am that guy in the basement right now. The problem with telling people you write is that it opens a lot of question you may not want to answer. I foolishly put "Write science fiction and fantasy novels" on my resume under other interests. Of course, this was a bad idea, because it only intrigues the interviewer to ask questions.

Embarrassing questions like "What do you write?", to which you hem and haw until you finally gasp "Different... kinds of... stuff..." and foolishly admitting that your last novel, after finding the best way to put it in laymen's terms, was about "The Little Mermaid" crossed with "Waterworld".

Judgemental questions like "Are you published?" Well, you can hang your head shamefully at that one while you reply in the negative. And then wonder whether this guy knows anything about how the writing world works, that the best authors can get 500 rejections, that most people don't sell their first novel, or even their second.

Personal questions like "Can I read your writing?" that either won't work because what you're writing isn't finished yet and, unless you're presenting it for critique (which you are not because A) you don't trust this person B) this person doesn't have the literary merit to give you the information you need to improve your work), you never present an unfinished product for show OR what you're writing is inappropriate for friends (see aforementioned centaur erotica).

Can of worms questions like "Have you ever thought about self-publishing?" and that while the idea sounds good on paper, where people like Amanda Hocking and Christopher Paolini make headlines as the exception not the rule, self-publishing is in its infancy and that while the world sorts through the sea of the aforementioned plagiarists and writers "on a mission from God" (spoken in a Dan Aykroyd Chicago accent) it's not a viable option for a novice with neither the time or money to push the marketing that it would need. Of course, you can't say this to the person you're asking for a job.

It shouldn't be embarrassing, but for an introvert like me, it invites the possibility of personal questions and new angles for judgement that I just don't need.

Update

2012-02-13T11:52:00.003-06:00

I got a new job, so working the transition means I have to concentrate on being a good "employee" at the current time. Switching jobs always sucks. You have nothing to do at your old one and nothing to do at your new one. But at least at your old one, you had all your stuff. I am now programming on a laptop, and while it's beefy enough, I don't have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, or phone yet. So my back is getting sore from all the leaning over.

It also means I have to find a new place to write. My old place had a nice couchy lounge area in the corner that no one ever went in. My new place is in a six floor corporate building, and I feel weird going into a conference room. The lobby downstairs is okay, but they have no real wifi (seriously? in this day and age?). Unfortunately, I'm now at the point where I need wifi for writing, because I rely on Thesaurus.com. But there might be a way to do a site dump...

Speaking of writing, the only writing I'm doing is composing the outline for my next novel. The biggest problem with outlines is that this is where you can easily screw up everything with a butterfly flap. It's in a pretty jello state, yes, but once you write down an idea, it's hard to unwrite it, especially in your mind. You have to concentrate on making every plot point interesting, cohesive, necessary, and flowing from one event to the other. Plus you've got to make sure it's commercially sound.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of reading. The great thing about an eReader is that it does enable you to read more books. Before, I had to go to the library, and was only able to get one book, because that was all the time I had to read it. Now I can load up quite a few on my Nook, with no delay in between. Plus it's easier and less conspicuous to take around than a normal paper book. And as an added bonus, I can watch movies on it. It's almost like a tablet, except no apps.

I also just got a new computer: nice big screen, extra memory and disk space. Now I should be able to play Portal 2 in style. The problem is reloading all the software. Instead of buying from a brand, I used AVADirect to build it. I was able to get better stuff for the price, and hopefully it'll last a nice long time. I'll let you know how it goes.

How Accurate is Google's Big Brother?

2012-01-27T11:20:00.001-06:00

I read this article today about how Google changed its privacy preferences so that it can be more accurate. It also cites how inaccurate it is, using the Ad Preferences as a litmus test. Thought I'd check it out and see.

Your Categories

Arts & Entertainment - Movies - Movie Reference - Movie Reviews & Previews
Arts & Entertainment - Online Media
Beauty & Fitness
Computers & Electronics
Games - Computer & Video Games - Fighting Games
Games - Computer & Video Games - Gaming Media & Reference - Game Cheats & Hints
Games - Online Games
Pets & Animals
Pets & Animals - Pets
Shopping - Apparel

Half credit here. I do like movies, and I'm often looking at them. Computer games too, although I'm not sure why so much focus on fighting games or cheats and hints. Also, WTF is up with the beauty/fitness and shopping categories? I shop online, but never for clothes. I don't even shop in the real world for clothes. And why pets? I don't have a pet. I've never looked for a pet.

Your Demographics

Age: 18-24
Gender: Male

About a B+ here. I'm actually 30, but I guess you're only as old as you search.

The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen

2012-01-25T11:54:00.000-06:00

The other day, my wife was talking about the worst movies that her parents had ever seen (the winner was something called Zardoz). But then she said their worst movie probably wouldn't hold a candle to what I've seen. She tells the truth -- The Evil Dead, Night of the Creeps, and Dragon Half are just some of the staples in my DVD library. And those are the ones I like.

Even though it's easy to make a bad movie, no one's really sure how they get made. Some involved people whose head was up their own ass, making "films" and creating a message. Some were by people who knew they were making trash and didn't care. Some were just mixed messages, different cinematic visions, or something out of left field. The strangest coincidences can lead to the greatest movies (The Wizard of Oz's four directors) or the worst (Superman II's multiple directors). There are some movies even MST3K didn't touch (Like Child Bride for one).

I love my movies and I hate pausing or stopping any movie in the middle, even to go to the bathroom. I only watch movies when I can dedicate enough time to its full length. As I result, I'm always griping about how I never have time to watch my movies. It is very, very rare that I stop watching any movie with the intention of never finishing it. I'd like to say it's to be respectful to the story, that stories should be finished. But it's probably more that I have OCD and need to know how something ends, no matter how much I don't care. But there have been a few exceptions, a few I've stopped watching before completion (or wish I had).

There's a distinct difference between a movie that's so bad it's good, so bad it's bad, and just... intolerable. These are my top five intolerables (along with some honorable mentions).

Your Highness

I was excited when I saw the trailer for this one. I love fantasy movies. But a fantasy that's a comedy? It's about time. There's no reason you can't these two great tastes taste great together. Plus Natalie Portman? I was hopeful. I was ecstatic. I had hope that this meant that spec fic would soon be legitimized.

Then this movie took a shit over all that.

And it was almost a literal shit, since that's what all the jokes were about: juvenile fart humor, weed humor, dirty jokes, and swearing. Let's make a list of what does not belong in fantasy -- weed, conventional curse words and slang, minotaur rape. Does not compute. Even the thirteeniest-year-old D&D player wouldn't find this movie funny. Not to mention our main character is the most unlikeable, laziest douche I've ever met. Yes, it makes sense for a prince to be unambitious and hedonistic because of his position. But it's not okay to make that misogynist prince the main character.

I was sooo close to shutting it off. Sooooooo close. The only thing that stopped me was that I was watching it with someone, and I didn't want to be rude, even though the movie was my choice. Which is like making dinner and then realizing you used salt instead of sugar. But you keep eating it because you don't want to say anything, because no one else will. This movie offended me in the worst sense - my literary sense.

You've Got Mail

The first time I saw this, I turned it off just about after the credits were done, when Meg Ryan is flitting about her bookshop, smiling and humming with her chirpy, perky attitude, smelling flowers and fawning over books like they're precious gems. (and yes, I said that and I'm a writer).

Who wants to see a movie about Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks texting? Tell me who needs to see that? I certainly don't. I guess the big deal about this was that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were reuniting for the first time since Sleepless in Seattle. Except people forgot that, in that movie, THEY DON'T SHARE ANY SCREEN TIME. So who cares if they're reuniting? Fortunately, I never got to the part where Tom Hanks becomes the most uncharacteristically unlikeable character he'd ever played. Never thought I'd see that.

And I didn't.

The Gamers: Dorkness Rising

This kept popping up in my Netflix recommendations list, so I finally gave up and queued it. Boy, am I sorry I did. I like geek humor -- there's not enough of it out there -- and I had just come from listening to the utterly hilarious Penny Arcade D&D games on podcast.

This is so totally different than that. This seems to be a low-low-low-budget independent comedy about some D&D players that follows the old trope of "the character is the avatar". Unfortunately, every character is a jerk. One player keeps trying to have sex with everything, even in the throne room in front of the king. There's ten minutes (or what feels like ten minutes) where the a player is arguing with a DM about how he wants to play a certain character that doesn't fit the universe/rules. That goes on for a while, and finally the DM relents, until the player tells him that he wants do something that violates ANOTHER rule of the universe they just went over.

It's like someone made a full movie version of the Dungeons & Dragons audio bit. Except much, much worse. All the characters do is bicker over petty shit. All the potential in this kind of comedy died because it was about the stereotypical, passive-aggressive, argumentative geek. I stopped watching partway through when I realized the movie was just a waste of my time.

(Editor's Note: Apparently, I've talked about this movie before and didn't realize it, until I was Google Image Searching for pictures and my own blog entry was the first hit.)

The Winslow Boy

A long time ago, I read a list of fifty recommended movies that few people had ever seen and should. There were several good discoveries like The Arrival, Pulse, and Birdy. But not all of them, like Testament and Time After Time. And for some reason, The Winslow Boy was on there. I should have known this would be crap when there was no known stars, no science fiction elements, and a lot of British looking things.

This is based on a play about a boy who gets kicked out of his wealthy private school and goes back to his wealthy house, where his wealthy parents fret about what their wealthy neighbors will say and their wealthy daughter marrying the wealthy naval captain and I just don't fucking care. Let the little kid suffer. Give me people with some real problems.

Muppets from Space

I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say this movie ~~takes a shit all over my childhood~~ is confusing, at best. Muppets had been on a decline ever since Jim Henson's death, as one would expect. Yet they continue beating the dead horse to the ground, squeezing

every...

last...

drop.

But the biggest nail in the coffin, the moment we knew it was all over, was Muppets from Space. The plot rips off Close Encounters of the Third Kind and adds the schmaltz of previous Muppet movie Follow That Bird. It's the Muppet equivalent of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" -- a totally unnecessary sequel, focusing too much on the new, unlikable characters, D-List guest stars, and corruptions of the existing characters. All the charm Henson gave to the muppets is gone. It even has the "nuke-the-fridge" moment of Gonzo finding out he's an alien.

No. You can't do that. Gonzo has never had an origin story. He's not supposed to. I know all the other muppets are some kind of stylized animal, but Gonzo is a "weirdo" or "whatever". He always has been, he always should be. Giving him a type is the same thing as giving "midichlorians" to the Force.

The muppets can be good again, but if you try to make them the same as Henson did, you'll fail. If you deviate too much from what Henson wanted to do, you'll fail. It's a delicate balance, and this movie tried to please neither condition. The magic is back, my ass.

Honorable Mentions

Scream 2 - Speaking of unnecessary sequels, boy, this certainly was... one. I never got the appeal of the first Scream movie, but at least it was decent. Someone pointing out all the tropes and errors in a slasher flick is like someone saying wrestling is fake. Everyone knows that. Doesn't change the fun of watching.

But Scream wasn't even about that. Past the one or two bits of self-referential humor, it was a knock-off of "masked-man-with-a-knife" movies like Halloween. And those are tame by today's standards. But then you make a movie that's exactly the same thing? No thank you.

The Family Man - Speaking of unnecessary sequels, let us not forget the unnecessary remake. I liked this movie the first time I saw it, when it was called every It's a Wonderful Life sitcom parody and replication. Could there be a more blatant plot steal than this movie? Starring Nicolas Cage, our time's Kevin Costner? You can call it a modern-day version, or a homage all you want. I'll call it like I see it: "transparent copy".

Jabberwocky - My dad told me this was one of the later Monty Python movies, since I'd already seen Holy Grail, Life of Brian, Something Completely Different, Meaning of Life, and the entire "Flying Circus" series. My dad lied. It's directed by Terry Gilliam and stars Michael Palin, but there's nothing Pythonesque or funny about it. I don't remember a damn thing about it -- my mind tuned out for its duration. When the credits rolled I asked "It's over? Why? What happened?"

A Walk To Remember - Mandy Moore is hot. She's especially hot as a demure, upbeat, moral girl with cute bangs, brunette hair, and long flowing dresses. She's especially hot when I apply my imagination and... oh, wait. Sorry, I need to save that for my next fan fiction. Anyway, this movie told me everything I need to know about Nicholas Sparks works -- characters acting implausibly, bubbly afterschool specialness with strong Christian overtones, and plots that just don't work.

Malcolm in the Middle - I know this isn't a movie, but I had to include it. I hate, hate, hate, hate, HATE this show. Everyone is an absolute dick to each other. For no reason. Nobody is redeemable. Nobody gets punished for being an idiot. Nobody experiences consequences for their behavior. They're bad people who're bad at being people. They're jerks. They're bullies. They're sociopaths. Parents and kids alike.

I hate every fucking second of this show. I hate their stupid expressions, their yelling, that theme music. I hate fucking Frankie Muniz's retarded, jaw-dropped expressions and wide-angle lenses. I hate that boy with the big ears. I hate that shrewish mom who can't stand her own family, which she helped create. I hate that ridiculously ignorant motherfucker of a dad who's got the maturity of a dog. They're trailer trash, and they should all be lined up and shot.

Stuck on You / The Bourne Identity - There's no real reason to lump these two together. The only commonality is Matt Damon, who I don't like as an actor. He did Good Will Hunting and then nothing else, (except maybe for The Departed, but that also had Martin Scorese and Leonardo DiCaprio on its side).

Stuck on You - I don't get why everyone's so in love with the Farelly brothers. Ooh, it's a Farelly brothers comedy. What does that even mean? Who are they? Why is this a selling point? Their movies aren't good: Shallow Hal, Dumb and Dumber, Hall Pass. This is not how you advertise.

The Bourne Identity - I cannot imagine a more tedious action movie. It's based on a book that's twenty-two years old, meant to compete with James Bond. Well, then it should have come out the same time as James Bond. Brainwashed assassins? Been done. Car chases? Been done. Government agent being chased by his own people? Been done. One man crusade? Been done. The story's full of cliches. It's like no one told the movie makers that the 90's happened.

Westworld - I already mentioned my problems with this in my "Top 5 Movies That Need To Be Remade". Basically, it's a great idea that had piss-poor execution. There's no conflict until 80% of the way through, when it becomes a technology-gone-haywire/Terminator rip-off.

(Editor's Note: I wasn't the first hit on this one. Boo.)

Eraserhead - David Lynch doesn't make movies. He makes films. Films are art. Again, no idea why everyone's so in love with this movie. Yeah, it's got some great imagery. Got some fucked-up ideas, some creepy shots. But it's all mish-mashed together with a plot so incoherent, full of deviations, it's has to be constantly interpreted and analyzed, which is the sign of a lazy writer.

Down Periscope - Kelsey Grammer stars in "Police Academy in a submarine". Sounds like a winning formula to me. Especially with the Police Academy movies getting such high marks. And star power like Rob Schneider and Harland Williams. There's no way this couldn't be chock full of hackneyed, played-out jokes, toilet humor, and a script that sounds like it was written on the plane ride over to the studio.

Transformers III: Dark of the Moon - I thought it was necessary to include a contemporary movie in the list, just to show that intolerable movies don't solely exist in the eighties or limit themselves to low budgets. Blockbusters can be just as bad. Five or ten years from now, people are going to look back at Transformers and say "This was a top grossing movie!? It's nothing but CGI and people falling!" And who thought Shia LaBeouf was a good idea for this role? He's going to make some bad career decisions, fade himself into obscurity, and end up on one of Dr. Drew's rehab shows.

Killjoy - You already know what you're in for when you've got a direct-to-video horror movies with African-American urban youth and a killer clown. Channel Awesome's review provides a nice summary of what you're not missing. The only reason I'm including it is this movie was a bit of a stepping-stone in my writing career. In the sense that when I saw it, I thought: "I can write better than this. If this guy could get his script made into a movie, there is hope for me."

Reign of Fire - I saw this one in the theater, and I was excited. I thought "Ah, finally, a movie that combines fantasy and science. We're going to find out how dragons work!" as I was misled by dialogue in the commercial: "two glands in the mouth secrete separate chemicals, combined with exhalation -- natural napalm". In fact, this is the only line that even gets close to anything resembling science. The other 89 minutes is a tedious, post-apocalyptic cheesefest that belonged on the "Sci-Fi"/"SyFy" channel, but somehow got upgraded with Matthew McConaughey goodness.

Analyzing the Disney Villains: Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty)

2012-01-23T05:30:00.000-06:00

Well, let's kick this one off right, with one of the best (and by syllogism, one of the easiest).

MALEFICENT

Origin: Sleeping Beauty (1959)

The mistress of all evil and one of Disney's iconic villains. The question is, does the hype pay off?

Personally I think she peaked in Kingdom Hearts -- she was a great enemy and a great part of that storyline, especially when you have to fight her in her dragon form. Kingdom Hearts II... not so much. She's an unnecessary addition, peripheral to the story. And at the end, she starts helping the good guys! Good thing we're not considering external sources part of this evaluation, just the source material.

Motivation: Maleficent's evil reign is launched when... her invitation's "lost" in the mail. Not off to an auspicious start, are we? This is one of the best villains in film history, let alone Disney history. Yet, her vengeance comes from not being invited to a princess's christening. Well, cry me a river.

Some say that this petty excuse for villainy just adds to her evilness -- that she could be so cruel for such a small infraction. That she's looking for a fight. Maybe she's got some past history we don't know about. She's clearly not like the other fairies, and there's bound to be some background we're missing. Problem is, we never get it. So it's hard to take her seriously when her primary motivation is something only high-schoolers would stew over. And there are no stakes for losing that goal.

Evilness: Top marks here, as one would expect from someone calling themselves the "mistress of all evil". She's not just going to kill the princess outright. She's going to let everyone around her wait sixteen years. Let them develop relationships with Aurora, establish a history, waste their time raising and educating her. Then at the moment all that's about to come to fruition, kill her. And not from a bomb or a sword through the chest. She's going to poke herself on an innocent-looking spinning wheel and die. What Maleficent lacks in motivation, she makes up for in maliciousness.

And that's not covering anything she does to incompetent minions or Prince Philip who, once the curse is in place, she locks in her tower to ensure he can't undo the curse (although she probably should have put more security on that cell).

Tools and Powers: Maleficent has some totally awesome magical powers. Maleficent sets all the precedents -- dark and creepy castle, magical powers with ambiguous origin and limits (including long-term curses, transfigurations, teleportation, summoning a forest of thorns, and other neat things), ruthless sidekicks, and wicked costuming.

Her best friend is a Raven named Diablo, and he's the only one she displays any positive attitude for. He's quite a capable sidekick too, almost removing the prince from the game, before Merryweather turns him to stone. And of course, we can't forget turning into a giant dragon that breathes green fire.

Fatal Flaw: Sadly, turning into a dragon may have actually led to her downfall. Maybe because it's a larger target to hit. But she doesn't fall until the fairies infuse the Prince's sword with magic. Perhaps her fatal flaw is underestimating the power of her peers. It's not surprising that she did, since all their efforts to stave the curse fail miserably.

My problem is that her downfall in no way reflects her character, her story arc, or her role in the plot. In fact she dies because Prince Philip does something no educated swordsman would ever do -- throw his weapon. You never throw something that's A) not designed to be thrown and B) will leave you weaponless. Kudos for being one of the few Disney characters to bleed though.

Complement to the Hero: Lost points here too. Either the hero is the bland Princess Aurora or the blander Prince Philip. Aurora is the protagonist, but she only has eighteen minutes of screen time as an adult. She doesn't change throughout, so she can't be the hero. Philip... I don't know. I guess he learns that you can't judge a book by its cover? That's a stretch, and it no way relates to Maleficent.

Character Strengths: Although Maleficent has plenty of evil personality, what does she do? She just lives in a castle? Trains goblins? Feeds her bird? She's good at what she does, but unfortunately, she fits the mold of a villain so perfectly that she does nothing else.

She's an excellent magician though. I'll give her props for that. I can only assume that she spends her off-hours like Merlin or The Horned King, perfecting and researching magic. In Maleficent's case, Ol' Scratch probably keeps her on speed dial. She even says she has "all the powers of Hell". If you wanted Maleficent to do something else like steal a diamond, usurp a king, or even the generic "take over the world", she probably could. But why? It's not in her oeuvre.

Cause of death: After throwing everything she can at Prince Philip, who keeps overcoming her obstacles because of those pesky fairies, she makes a last stand at the entrance to the castle and turns into a giant dragon. Somehow Philip fends her off with his sword, until he gets pinned against a cliff and loses his green fireproof shield. The fairies enchant his sword, which he throws into her unprotected chest. As she pitches forward (getting a last snap in), the cliff collapses and she falls (Disney 'death by fall' count: 1). All that's left is a black robe with a sword through it. Pretty epic in terms of swords and sorcery.

Final Rating: Five out of five stars.

Skyward Sword: First Impressions

2012-01-18T15:42:00.001-06:00

I got The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Christmas and last night was the first opportunity I had to play it. I've made it up to where you start searching for your bird, and here are some impressions.

The first fifteen minutes of a video game are the most important, and probably one of the hardest things to get right, because you have to do so much in a short amount of time. You have to engage the player, establish the world, teach the user how to play, and set the tone. For more information, Extra Credits has some great editorials on this, including Pacing, Cutscenes, Tutorials 101, Narrative Mechanics, but I highly recommend Skyrim's Opening for a detailed look at what makes/breaks a video game's introduction.

This is important to me because it's not dissimilar from writing. You only have a few pages to entice the reader, establish your world and characters, and all without bogging the reader down in jargon or back story. Luckily, Zelda has an advantage, since they already have an established history. And it's pretty simple.

Hyrule has been taken over by a MotionPlus attachment. To add the MotionPlus to the controller, pull open the WiiMote sleeve, and, gripping the two side tabs, gently insert the MotionPlus into the bottom of the controller. Wrap the sleeve back around the device, making sure the WiiMote strap is free...

Wait, that's not Zelda, that's the unskippable three-minute instructional video that only a three-year-old with Down's Syndrome would need to watch. Come on guys, the Wii's been out for five years. It's full of peripherals. I know how to put the damn thing in.

Then there's an opening cutscene which lifts its style straight from Wind Waker -- a medieval story scroll with watercolor paints and written text. Not that exciting, especially since the story gives nothing more than "evil things came out of the ground. Ultimate power at threat. Humans are in trouble. Everybody panic." Every Zelda game ever.

The difference comes from the "goddess" (who does not appear to be related to the Goddesses that created the world and the Triforce -- Din, Nayru, and Farore). She protects the humans by lifting them above the land onto a floating island. So now everyone lives in a castle in the sky. That's all you really needed to say.

Then there's a shot or two of what looks like a giant Deku Baba pulsing with darkness, towering over a forest. I expect we'll be fighting that eventually, but it falls flat because A) I don't know where this is or what this is B) It doesn't show up or get mentioned again in the next hour. It's a classic failure of using an action-packed prologue that doesn't have anything to do with the central story or characters.

And that central story starts when we see a blond girl (come on, we know its Zelda, no reason to hide her) sending a message via giant bird to Link, who's resting in a dorm. Past Zelda games have also done this where our first sight of Link is waking up: Link to the Past, Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time. In writing, they also tell you one of the worst, most overused ways to start a story is to have the character waking up, but I got a kick out of the homage. I'm not sure if it's cliche or convention at this point.

And now we get to control Link. He looks a little weird with lips, but otherwise, he moves nice. This is my first time controlling it on the Wii, so there's a few things to get used to. One is the forward roll, which is hard to execute. It's one of my go-to moves in combat, but if you have to Press A, get a running start, then shake the nunchuck to do it? But the room looks great. It's realistic -- with a bed, a desk, bookshelves, so I know he's in some kind of dorm. And this delights me because school is something new for Link.

The other new things are the stamina meter, which is a bit surprising. But your run is pretty decent now -- even better than the bunny hood. And you can do a little dash up walls a la Prince of Persia. I'm hoping that gets enhanced with some kind of item to do a full-on run across.

A little exploring, a little tutorial, and a little setting establishment later we now get to see Zelda. Some games introduce her right away, like Minish Cap or Link to the Past. Some wait quite a long time like Ocarina of Time. Some barely have her at all like Majora's Mask and Wind Waker. But every game features a unique take on her character, and this one is no different.

In a bad way.

She giggles. She holds a hand to her mouth. She looks away shyly. She holds her hands behind her back, twisting ever so slightly. She leans into your face with wide eyes. Oh my god, they turned Zelda into every cutesy, giggling girl from every generic JP anime or video game. At first I thought I was playing Final Fantasy or watching Ah! My Goddess.

And this is compounded by Groose -- the world's most generic anime school bully (even down to the two sidekicks) whose role is to harass Link because of Zelda's attention to him. I'd say that he was an incarnation of Mido if he didn't fit the stereotype to a T (and if he actually looked something like Mido and not a creepy, gold-eyed extra from Elite Beat Agents).

This is not my Zelda. Zelda, in whatever incarnation she comes in, is a strong woman. In Twilight Princess, she surrendered Hyrule to the evil King Zant, something I never thought would happen. Then sacrificed her power to Midna so she could continue her quest and, as a result, became a puppet of Ganon. In Wind Waker, she's the tough-talking, take-no-guff pirate Tetra. Ocarina of Time? One word -- Sheik.

I really hope there's a severe character arc change for her -- I hope everything about the characters change -- because if this Zelda is going to be crying over every tektite that I kill, Ganon can sleepover at my house. We've even got a toilet and a bath.

It even flushes.

Everybody poops. Even Link.

The Most Tragic Peanuts Special

2012-01-17T11:36:00.001-06:00

Charlie Brown has been through some shit in his day. There's no denying it. The poor guy's a loser in every sense of the word, and the worst of it is that his own dog upstages him. He's the tragic everyman. But there's no episode more tragic that that of "Happy New Year, Charlie Brown."

"Happy New Year, Charlie Brown" premiered in 1986. The story was original, although most of the gags came from the strips, like most of the specials. IMDB users have given it 7.3/10 -- one of the moderately successful specials, nowhere near as notorious as "Great Pumpkin" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas". This might be because, if you watch it to the end and don't feel like shit, you don't have an ounce of humanity in you.

Let me explain.

The curtains pull up on a classroom, with Charlie Brown anticipating a homework-free holiday break as the teacher has not assigned any yet. Until she does... And it's no ordinary homework. The teacher assigns a book report on "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy.

I don't know how old Charlie Brown is, but they don't even assign that kind of book in college. It's a family epic exploring themes of human motivation and the meaning of life. It's one thousand one hundred and thirty six pages long (actual quote!) to read in about a week's worth of Christmas break. And there are no shortcuts -- Charlie Brown tries to find a comic book version, a book on cassette, a film strip. This isn't an attempt to cheat, he's just trying to lighten his load. There's no way he should be reading that.

Not to mention that it appears Mr. Brown is the sole recipient of this punishment. Linus is sitting right behind him, but he never mentions being assigned the book or is seen carrying it. I don't know how he avoided this -- they're in the same class. So apparently this is some kind of Greek underworld punishment exclusively meant for our titular character. I mean, it's so heavy he has to carry it with a furniture dolly.

Meanwhile, Peppermint Patty's having a boy-girl party for New Year's, and Brown is inspired to ask The Little Red-Haired Girl. At last! In this world of bleak skies and drudgerous toil, there is a reason to hope! But in typical Brownian fashion, he expects something to go wrong. All he's got to do is shove a letter in the mail slot and Linus reassures him that his fears are unfounded.

Except when they're not. Of course, his prediction comes true. He gets his hand stuck in the mail slot, and has accidentally opened the door. So he must call out in both desperation for salvation and invitation, fumbling over his words, stumbling out his message to no one, pleading to the emptiness of despair. I imagine The Little Red-Haired Girl's mother or father eventually had to come free him, because C.B. states that she never responded.

Speaking from experience, this is possibly the worst thing to happen to someone like me him. For a shy, introvert to take the risk of making a forward gesture to the woman who's become his god, for something to go wrong is devastating. Coming up with words in this high-stress situation is like pulling turnips from a swamp. Turnips that you have six seconds to pull or your family is going to starve to death, but the swamp keeps them under with its sticky suction.

When you're that age, you hope against hope that this is the moment. You dare to think that there may be something better out there for you. That there is a portal out of your miserable existence, but you must have the courage to step through. And then it turns out to be a dive from a cliff, and you're worse off than before. If this was real life, Charlie Brown would have killed himself.

Finally, Patty has her party and Charlie Brown shows up. Perhaps this is a mistake -- he's still got a lot of work to do -- but he's hoping against hope that despite his flubbed invite, she'll still show up. And "War and Peace" is still with him, like Sisyphus's boulder or the ancient mariner's albatross. And keep in mind that when Charlie Brown's finished reading it, he's not done. He still has to analyze it, structure that analysis, and write it up (probably longhand, since this is before home computers were common, and his dad is a barber). In his dedication, he falls asleep at the party.

AND THEN The Little Red-Haired Girl comes, right around midnight (I know this is a dead horse, but where are their parents? Do they live in a world like Star Trek's Miri or a peaceful version of Lord of the Flies?). And Charlie Brown's nowhere to be seen. Because he was trying to fulfill his responsibilities. So Linus plays the Lancelot and invites her in.

When The Big Brownowski wakes up, groggy and disoriented and holding a book of wordy Russian literature he's immediately bombarded with 1) the knowledge that he missed midnight 2) Peppermint Patty in his face yelling at him because he didn't dance with her 3) his sister Sally in his face yelling at him because Linus didn't dance with her 4) the revelation that this is because Linus was dancing with The Little Red-Haired Girl.

And what's Charlie Brown's response? He doesn't get mad. He doesn't snap and take everyone with him (especially Lucy who always deserves a bullet to the forehead). He stands in front of the open door and sadly looks out into the night. It's as if he can see his happiness drifting out into the eternal blackness. And I haven't even mentioned the tragedies of Peppermint Patty and Sally yet -- both spurned by their oblivious lovers and left alone and stewing in their ignorant fury.

The next day, after returning to his doldrum life, we learn that although Brown finished his report, he doesn't remember a thing, and got nothing out of it. So even despite receiving a D-minus for his concentrated effort and dedication, the whole exercise was pointless. In spite of every adverse condition, he remained dedicated to his duty, but was ultimately punished for it in every way that mattered.

Of all the specials, none is more tragic than this one. In the others, there's at least a little glimmer of optimism. In "A Charlie Brown Christmas", the gang unites to show that Christmas isn't being replaced by commercialism. In "It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown", he experiences the titular smooch, although he can't discern if it happened in his dream or reality. Even all the movies end on a note of success, however minor. Not this one.

The ultimate tragedy of Charlie Brown is that he is us. No matter how much we try, we will ultimately fail. Every success is built from 99% of losses and failed attempts, if they even get off the ground. We spend our lives with our parents telling us "you see that guy in the limo? You can be like that guy. You can be president. Just work hard, don't do drugs, stay in school, be moral, and you'll make it, kid."

Enter Charlie Brown.

The Books I Read: August 2011 - December 2011

2012-01-10T15:05:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's been a while since I did one of these, I almost forgot about them. The reason was that I hadn't read enough books to necessiate a post. And you can blame this sucker:

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

I started this in August and didn't finish until December. That's unusual for me. If I buckle down, I can read a book in a week, average. But this mother fucker is 750,000 words, 1,000 pages long. More on that in a second. This book continues the adventures of Kvothe, the redheaded magic-user who can do no wrong, but somehow still seems to. Half of the book continues his life at the University, learning about magic, trying to get a date with Denna, and earning the ire of ~~Draco Malfoy~~ Ambrose Jakis. Most of this half is spent on a complicated caper to rescue Denna's ring from Ambrose, uniting all the minor characters into Kvothe's Eleven.

The second concerns the land of Severen, where Kvothe is attempting to earn patronage of an almost-king. I thought this part was more interesting, maybe because it didn't take place at the same setting where half the previous book was set (it seems like Kvothe spends all his time in school, but spins his wheels). Part of that time is spent trying to save the almost-king from being poisoned (and trying to prove he's trustworthy), then he's sent on a mercenary mission to stop some trail bandits. Then he meets a sex fairy. Then he goes to free-love ninja school.

I'm not good at summarizing things.

I think it's a good book. I think it's the best thing I read this period. Kvothe is as irascible as ever, and you love to root for him and his cleverness, but when he screws up or loses his temper, you think "yeah, I'd probably do that too." The magic never intrudes into the scenario or makes it deus ex. There's a lot more adventure this time. Maybe because Kvothe is growing up. I love a good epic fantasy, and it's rare to find one that focuses solely on one character, instead of several groups like Song of Ice and Fire or Lord of the Rings. But it's just so damn long.

I don't care how good the book is -- and this book is good -- but at a certain point, even if it's the greatest book in the world, it needs to end. And like the last book, it sort of drops off with no real conclusion or climax, except that it's satisfying to know that Kvothe is now in a more stable area in life. Like the first book, the story meanders. Kvothe's central goal rarely gets touched on or developed as he talks with his friends or meets new people or learns new things. Rothfuss has a lot of wrapping to do in the third book. Thank god it's already a planned trilogy and not an unending series.

1984 by George Orwell

This novel helped me discover/realize something about myself: I really have no interest in politics whatsoever. I'm not even talking about today's American current event politics with campaigning and conservatives and old white guys. I have a few hot button issues I care about (education, contraception) and the rest I don't give a fuck about. But 1984 has nothing to do about that. It focuses on a bigger picture with talking heads, you vs. me, economics, and big vs. small government. And I really just don't care.

Politics seems petty to me. It reminds me of Einstein's quote: "Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater." Meaning that the scope of how laws are made, what they affect, and budget/economic restraints are so far beyond my comprehension and power that they hover into the realm of magic. But you didn't come here to hear about politics, you came to hear about the book.

I guess the problem is that all the great elements of this book have been stripped out, snipped & groomed, and applied into other creative works. This book reads like a catalog of ideas that were used in "The Matrix", "Lord of the Flies", "Blade Runner", "Dark City", even "Alien". I bet anyone watching the reality show "Big Brother" (is that still on? Like on an actual channel?) has no idea where the term came from.

So there's nothing in the book that's new or hasn't been improved on. It's full of ideas, but weak on story. There's a whole chapter that's mostly an excerpt from the anti-government manifesto that rebels are reading. It's pages and pages of political discourse, but little characterization and little plot.

Why is it every time I try and read something classic I'm disappointed. Dune was a slog. I've never been able to finish The Great Gatsby after two attempts. It reminds me of The Cinema Snob reviewing "The Tree of Life" (a pretentious bit of Terrence Malick film-making with no plot and implausible characters) when they talk about movies vs. films. Movies have to have a plot. Films are just art with a message. 1984 feels like art. It's trying to shove a message and sacrifices plot & characters to do that (and I've been guilty of that -- Black Hole Son was too preachy to reach an agent). Why else would there be pages and pages dedicated to speeches?

The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir by Josh Grogan

Dear Mr. Grogan,

We regret to inform you that your life simply is not interesting enough to necessitate a memoir. Your story is basically about ~~white people problems~~ insignificant family issues known only to the privileged and ungracious. Your Catholic parents never did anything to you. You committed crimes and got away with it because of your family's stature in the community. And your friends did not.

You had no real conflicts, the worst being your feeble attempt at growing a marijuana plant. Meanwhile, other children are being beaten, jumped into gangs, and raped (re: Precious). Please forward your book onto someone who's life is so much more amazing then yours that he or she will sympathize with your plight, because we cannot provide any at this time.

The theme of this book is Grogan growing up in an traditionalist Catholic family. Then becoming a hippie and rejecting those things (for which he receives no consequences, except sad faces). Then becoming an adult, and finding a happy medium. Nothing happens, and when things should be coming to a head, we are disappointed. There's nothing at stake, just a lot of passive-aggressiveness. I think Grogan needed something to follow up Marley & Me and had nothing. So he wrote everything else that happened in life that wasn't in Marley & Me.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

One for book club. I'm not sure what to think of this one. It's a non-fiction book about one of the first Puritan separatist settlements in New England, mostly focusing on William Bradford, the semi-leader of the colony.

It's told with a witty narrative, sharp and easy to understand. It's made for a modern audience, but my question is, who in this modern audience would be interested in this subject matter? It pretty much goes through the history of the colony, focusing on the why and who. It begins with the departure from England and ends with the death of Bradford. There's no real thesis or point to prove, so I'm wondering why try and make a narrative out of this? The story just isn't that compelling.

Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

Lucy is a transparent novel. You know just what it will be about just looking at the cover. Some primatologist created a girl with human and monkey DNA (and somehow did this in current day with only one man). Said primatologist is dead and now the girl must integrate into the real world. Like Tarzan, but more believable (and, at the same time, less).

At first, I thought it was going to be a YA novel, and maybe it should have been. I would have been much happier reading the YA version of this -- where she struggles to reconcile her dual parentage, her "superpowers", and all the other problems teenagers have. But sadly, the novel only focuses a little on that.

Much too much of the book is spent on the characters discovering what the audience knew on page one. Then they spend a great deal of time on covering Lucy's "secret", which is rendered moot when they decide to "come out of the closet". There's an outpouring of support, which quickly gives away to not-support, as "they" need to decide if she's human or not. This prompts faceless g-men kidnap her and do experiments, since she has super-strength and naturewalk.

It's all very cliche, with a lot of plot holes and unimagined archetypes. Plus there's a lot of characterization that goes nowhere. There's a romance between the foster mother and a doctor that goes nowhere. There's lesbian kissing between Lucy and her best friend that nothing comes of. There's a cute boy on the wrestling team with her that goes nowhere. There's impactful characterization that comes in the last five pages of the book, when it can no longer have relevance. And as you'd expect from something involving apes and the jungle, there's the heavy-handed message that we all need to get back in touch with nature, hug a tree, too much technology, embrace the earth, blah blah blah.

And there's deus ex sprinkled liberally throughout. They miraculously are able to take her, a fourteen-year-old girl with no known parents and sketchy citizenship papers that are out of date, out of the Congo and back to the U.S. The doctor friend miraculously destroys medical evidence -- which I believe is a felony -- with no consequence. They make friends with a woman who is miraculously rich and willing to give them all the money in the world they need. It's a rough novel, with many flaws. Entirely skippable.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

A re-read, because I wanted some classic Crichton in my life. And dinosaurs. When I was littler, I read this book in a single day, which was a great accomplishment for me -- I was 11 at the time (I have small goals). And, come on, it was heavy -- genetic engineering, supercomputers, DNA, fractal mathematics, paleontology. Lot to get my head around.

It's nice to come back to some old favorites every once in a while. I'd been reading some popular works, some ancient "classics" and some real dogs lately, so it was nice to read a book that I consider "mine".

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

I feel like I just didn't get this book. I should -- it's about superheroes, and their inner lives, like Watchmen in prose. But something about it didn't work for me.

I guess the problem is that the entire thing is back story. It's almost entirely written in past perfect. It's like everything already happened and we're just seeing the aftereffects. There are few actual events that happen until halfway through the novel. There's a lot of "thinking/observing" where we're in the character's mind, and the characterization is glossed over -- characters have bulimia, divorces, and none of this is explored. I feel like if you separated the narrative from the dialogue, you'd have two totally different stories.

And yet despite these flaws, I still felt compelled to read it. Maybe because it's a "behind-the-scenes" of Silver Age comic books (the ones that were super ridiculous like creating a race of tiny lizard-men or alien boys cause a ruckus). When Lex Luthor escapes prison, where does he go? What does he do while he rebuilds? What do superhero teams do when they're not fighting crime? How do they recruit? How do newbies get accepted? How do they react when one of their own "dies"?

It's the background brought to the foreground, and maybe that's where I find it falling flat. It's a novel in inverse, and that's atypical -- it's not action-oriented. But like I said, maybe I'm looking at it in the wrong way. And someone else will enjoy it more than me.

Live and Let Undead is Available

2012-01-06T08:10:00.000-06:00

Just letting you all know that Live and Let Undead: A Zombie Anthology is now out on Amazon! You may exchange illusionary money for words on paper. But not just any words. They've been put in a special order, scientifically formulated to please to the human brain, that is guaranteed to leave you refreshed and satisfied. That way, when ~~the zombies come...~~

...

My lawyers have advised me not to continue the previous blog post. Those responsible have been sacked.

Buy Me!

My New Nook

2012-01-05T15:38:00.003-06:00

I'm sure you'll all be delighted to know that for Christmas, I got an eReader. A Barnes & Noble Nook Color, to be precise. And you should all hear about my adventures with it, especially given how much I've ragged on eReaders in the past.

The first thing one does with a new piece of technology is orient oneself to the interface. Since I own an iPod Touch, most of the tricks are known to me -- hold down the power button to turn off, slide to unlock, touch and drag. Then came the setup, register, customize, all that good stuff. Then how to operate. It came with a children's picture book, which was awesome, cause I have children. And it has a "Read to Me" feature, which I especially love because then I can ~~tune out for ten minutes while the book reads itself~~ love my children.

It's not perfect though. I purchased "Go, Dog. Go." (for the over-exorbitant price of $13.99), and sometimes the audio cuts, like it couldn't load fast enough. The animation stutters too. And it shouldn't. I mean all that happens is the picture rotates or skews. The Internet browser's not terribly fast either. I mean, I know it's not supposed to be a tablet, but you could chug a little faster than this. Especially for $13.99.

The hard part was figuring out how to get a book onto the Nook. But a Nook can't read so a Nook can't cook... Wait, I derailed. There's no instructions about how to get library books or borrow books. It seems Barnes and Noble wants you to think the eStore is the only way. For the rest of it... well, it's hit and miss, and it has a great deal to do with formatting. And some of the other books have text that's way too small. Like it just scanned the page. I'd love to use it for more kids books, but they haven't figured out how to work with those two-page spreads.

I was able to check out A Christmas Carol in PDF format from the library, but it was unreadable. There was some sort of background glitch, where the background wasn't transparent. And I couldn't scroll to the next page, it kept going back to the cover in an infinite loop. I had to check out the Table of Contents to get where I wanted to go. A different ePub book worked fine, but that format is not always available.

While we're on the subject, let's talk about the library and how they handle eBooks. It is bad. For one thing, there are limited copies. Limited copies? It's a digital format! The whole principle behind digitalization is based on the ability to copy bits. And if I can't copy your bits to my bits, you're doing something wrong. So if you want the book, you need to put a hold on it, just like a library book.

Sigh.

And I'm not even going into all the rigamarole to learn this. You can't just download the book to your Nook from your Nook. You have to download it to your PC, then use Adobe Digital Editions (for that happy, happy DRM smell), because apparently, the book "expires" after the check-out time, which is only 21 days, maximum. And you can't renew a book. And you can only check two out at a time. Library? Fuck. You.

Well, it's not all bad. So far, it looks like the files are just that -- files. Files don't have an "expiration" and I don't think there's any interface between Adobe Digital Editions and the Nook. So I can put them on the eReader, check them back in, then keep them forever. Unfortunately, it means any idiot out there who doesn't know this is going to let those 21 days expire, making the waiting list longer and longer and longer.

Sigh.

To be honest, I haven't really used the Nook that much since Christmas, and won't for a while. I have a book for Book Club to read, and one I just checked out of the library (the real one). Plus I got two books for Christmas. Paper versions. So, more to come.

Hot Girls You Don't Know About: Jessica Frech

2012-01-04T15:28:00.000-06:00

If you watched TV during the holidays, you may have seen a Hyundai commercial featuring a cute brunette with a big white guitar. It's no great song, but it's a bit of an earworm. You might have thought she was annoying, or just didn't pay attention. But if you're like me, you became entranced with her goofy smile, her quizzical eyes, and her melodic singing. And you wanted to know more.

This girl is Jessica Frech. The Hyundai commercial was my first exposure to her, but she actually gained notice from her music video "People of Walmart". It's strangely unrelated to the Hyundai commercial, even though it's in the same style.

She reminds me a bit of Lindsey Stirling in that she plays music and loves what she does. But the difference is, she's also funny. She dresses up in different characters, all her songs are humor-based, she takes requests/challenges from the audience. Plus I love her singing voice. It's not quite a country twang, but there's lots of "ah" vowels in her voice. And it adds to her charm.

You can find more of her at http://www.jessicamusic.com/.

The Power of the 1%

2012-01-03T10:32:00.000-06:00

It's not a big argument, but one of the criticisms of the #Occupy movement is that it's ridiculous to assume that 1% of anything could have so much power.

Well, let me demonstrate what 1% of something can do.

Three months ago, PostSecret released an $1.99 iStore App where users could post pictures + messages of their secrets. All anonymous. Searchable by location. Secrets could be favorited and hearted. But it acted as essentially a large bulletin board for humanity. Shortly before the end of the year, it shut down. Anyone who bought that app (especially in its last month of lifespan) found that they had wasted their two dollars.

"55% of the secrets were created in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortunately, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening." (from the PostSecret blog)

There were 30,000 secrets posted a day. 1% of that is 300. But that's 300 random, at any time, posts that required constant vigilance to eliminate. I know what's out there on the Internet. It's horrible. It's not for the timid. It demonstrates some of the worst humanity has to offer. Aliens would shoot us outright if they saw it.

PostSecret is a good thing. It's connected people. It's given people hope. It's stopped them from committing suicide. When someone posts a secret, there are a hundred readers out there that now know they are not alone. It's let people give Christmas presents to those who were lost. It's found dates for people. It's given people courage to say what might not be popular, but might be right.

And the 1% ruined it.

The Year in Statistics

2011-12-31T11:17:00.000-06:00

Let's take a look at the year end statistics for the blog, just because it interests me.

Demographics

This year, we got 20,000 page views and 14,000 visitors. 93% of those were new. That's a slight improvement from last year, which had 2,000 views and 1,700 visitors. Just slight. That's mostly thanks to two big spikes, which I'll talk about in a minute.

Most of you come from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. No surprise there. 38% of you use Firefox and 28% use Chrome. Good for you. But there's still 14% of you using IE. For shame. Also .08% of you are are using something called RockMelt. What the hell is that?

There was a significant increase in mobile device usage too. I gotta start making sure my site looks pretty on mobile devices now.

Keywords

This is always my favorite part, because it tells me how you all are getting to the site, and what you're interested in. Apparently, it's Tara Perry. 2.41% of the keywords used to find the site were "Tara Perry". Perhaps I should post more pics of her. Then "Squall and Rinoa" was popular, thanks to the Featured Fan Fiction Feature ("Sub Zero" was also in there). Then "Felicia Day", "Supergirl", and "Good Fantasy Movies".

So video games, comic books, and hot geek girls are always great page view bait. I was kinda surprised that mermaids weren't in there. I spent nearly the whole year posting pictures and talking about them.

Page Views

Here's the top ten visited websites this year:

Renaissance Fair Part 1
Penny Arcade Dickwolves
Tara Perry
Eric's Top Ten Fantasy Movies
Milk and Honey
Featured Fan Fiction: Crimson Lies
Top 5 Movies That Need to Be Remade
Alphie
Disney Princess Warriors

My two biggest peaks of traffic (which is more like an anthill -- neither got past 200 visits) were from Dickwolves and an outlier on November 27. I couldn't discern exactly why that day caught a spike in traffic. I think it had something to do with Facebook, but I can't tell why. The Disney Princess Warriors was the top pageview that day, but only by about 50%. Maybe it was via image search.

And the other sad part is that only three of the top ten were from this year. That doesn't make sense to me, except that I'm simply garnering search whuffie. But I suppose it's better my legacy is working out for me than these articles I worked so hard on fade out into the nothing.

Analyzing the Disney Villains: The Intro

2011-12-29T08:12:00.000-06:00

Hooray! It's the new year. How about a new series? Since I'm done with Featured Fan Fiction, I gotta have something else to write about.

You know what I love? The concept of good versus evil. What makes someone evil? What's the definition of evil? If someone steals food to feed their family, is that evil? Are the heroes so good even though they're constantly trying to kill the bad guy?

Remember this gem that circulated the net about a year back. A famous television listing by Rick Polito for "The Wizard of Oz": "Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again." Or Scalzi's offering for "Star Wars": "Disaffected farm boy destroys military installation, killing thousands." (Find more gems here) The empire is just another government and these rebel separtists are trying to constantly usurp their objective of galaxial unification. Every good guy is someone else's bad guy.

A hero is only as good as its villain. Everyone remembers Darth Vader, nobody remembers Luke Skywalker. Hannibal Lecter had four movies of awesomeness all about him. And he's the bad guy! Mr. Potter, Norman Bates, Hal 9000. Sometimes you don't even need to see the villain, like the xenomorph from Alien, the shark in Jaws, and Man in Bambi.

Disney's famous for characters -- heroes, villains, and secondaries alike. The heroes and heroines have been analyzed quite a bit, especially princesses -- is Ariel a lovesick ditz or headstrong adventurer? Why are the princes such lifeless duds? Is Mushu racist? Where is Pocahontas's nose?

And villains are fascinating to begin with, because they all represent our dark sides, which we all have if we get too much power. Think about it -- if anyone got the powers of Superman, they would go just like in Megamind. So what do you get when you combine nostalgic Disney movies with a love for the theme of 'good vs. evil'? You get "Analyzing the Disney Villains".

I'll be judging each Disney villain from their trove of animated movies, and evaluating what makes them good, what makes them bad, and giving a final rating. What sort of criteria do you use for that? I couldn't find much online so I made up my own.

Motivation - what does he or she want? This includes the stakes for losing that thing he/she wants, and the root cause of that motivation.

Character Strengths - No bad guy is completely lacking of good qualities. At least they shouldn't be. Two-Face is a good lawyer. Verbal Kint was a good storyteller. Moby Dick is good at... being a whale. This category will also include anything they might enjoy that doesn't contribute to their greed or malice, but their character.

Evilness - On the opposite end, how bad are they? What do they do that defines them as evil? Do they eat kittens? Run a Ponzi Scheme? Double dip the chip?

Tools - What powers does the villain have? What are the tools at their disposal? How does the villain stop the hero from getting what he/she wants?

Complement to the hero - A good villain should be the other side of the hero's coin. That just makes the hero's journey that much harder. Draco Malfoy is everything Harry Potter could have been, if he'd sided differently. Batman and The Joker. Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. But sometimes you get villains that float out there, like Lex Luthor or any James Bond villain.

Fatal Flaw - Heroes don't win because they were faster with a sword or dumb luck. They win because evil brings about its own end. Like Julius Caesar's hubris or Jack Torrance's blind alcoholic rages. A good fatal flaw is the key to a villain's downfall.

Method of Defeat/Death - This one will be more or less objective. I'll be rating on the cinematic-ness of the villain's death. Some will be harder than others: Jaws's head blows up by gas tank, Jaws bites a power cord and gets electrocuted, Jaws's head blows up again by grenade, Jaws gets stabbed by a ship's prow. All look pretty good on screen, but Jaws was cinematic to begin with. Meanwhile Count Dracula usually gets killed by sunlight, where he either crumbles to ash, kind of explodes, or disappears in a puff of smoke. Sometimes he's staked or stabbed which often leaqds to a milder climax. And sometimes he's just sort of... killed ambiguously.

Final Rating - And finally, I give a X out of five star rating. Consider it the seal of approval for either using a daguerrotype of this villain in a story, or a villain that could use some improving on.

Final note: I WON'T be doing EVERY animated Disney movie, for a few reasons. One is that some of them simply don't have villains: Fantasia, The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, and Dinosaur (which was just a shill for CGI and a rip-off of The Land Before Time). Likewise, I won't be doing any of the cartoon compilation movies like Fun and Fancy Free or Saludos Amigos (with one exception). And I won't be doing any of the movies I haven't seen and refuse to see. These are the bombs that were made after the Disney Renaissance in the 90's. Those include Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt. Maybe you love them, maybe you think the list is complete without them. If that's the case, write your own analysis. I don't give a fuck.

So now as ~~the magical negro~~ Jiminy Cricket says, on with the show!

Merm-8 Is Finished

2011-12-28T11:01:00.000-06:00

Boy, you'd think I'd make an announcement like this on time...

I finished the manuscript for my latest novel, Merm-8 (tentatively titled until a publisher tells me to pick a better name), on Friday, December 23, 2011.

Still a few things I gotta do before I start sending it out. One, I have to finalize my query letter and list of potential agents. Two, I gotta wait until after New Year's because no one's going to pay attention to anything work related until January rolls around and the holiday hangover. Three, I need to write a synopsis. Lots of agents ask for one up front, of varying lengths (one page, 2-3 page, 3-4 page). Plus I have to format varying formats of the manuscript for e-mail, in three, 10, and 50 page forms.

Granted, it's all meta work, and it should be fairly easy, so I should be able to get it done before January. Gives me plenty of time to figure out what to write next.

Sorting the Penny Arcade Guys

2011-12-28T09:02:00.000-06:00

This is more for my own benefit that anyone.

Mike Krahulik	=		=	Gabe	=
Jerry Holkins	=		=	Tycho	=

Thanks guys, I love what you do. I just can't keep names straight. :)

Things I Like: Lindsey Stirling a.k.a. LindseyStomp

2011-12-27T10:56:00.000-06:00

Just watch the video.

You watched it? Good. Now, hopefully, you know why I'm writing about this girl.

Her name is Lindsey Stirling. She came to notoriety in my circle of life when she did a medley of Legend of Zelda songs. She's a violinist (obviously), she's a composer, she's a dancer, and at 23, she was a finalist in "America's Got Talent". I really don't know how to describe why she's so compelling.

It's not her dancing, although I could wax poetic on that. She follows no steps, no pattern (although I'm sure she practices rigorously). In one shot, she's doing a Muhammad Ali shuffle. In another, she's standing on a rock drawing the bow. In another, she's doing her signature "lean-back-all-the-way" move.

It's not her playing. I enjoy classical music, but mostly as background noise. Mostly I like genre-crossing styles, and Lindsey certainly does that. Not just her for covers like "Take Three" and "Party Rock Anthem" where she combines pop and classical. It's her originals too, combining techno backbeats with a snappy violin riff. Her expressions range from impish charm to rakish glee to the curious wonder of a three-year-old.

It's not her bubbly personality, her clever fashion design, her entrepreneurship, her youth, her beauty, her talent, or her neat hairdos. It's just... when she plays...

She just seems so happy.

Every video she's got a huge smile on her face, like she can't help not smiling. And you can't help smiling either, because there's so much of it, it bleeds through even the distant wires that carry it to you. Even when she's trying to be serious, you can see a smile breaking through.

I don't think I could ever reach the level of delight she seems to have when she's performing. I wish I could reach 1/8th that level of passion she displays when I'm doing... anything.

Also, I just want to touch her hair to see if it's real.

Lindsey's YouTube Channel
Lindsey's Home Page

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T11:02:00.000-06:00

Featured Fan Fiction: The Complete Set

2011-12-22T08:12:00.000-06:00

Well, I've finished my Featured Fan Fiction series, so here's the complete set. If you need more to whet your appetite, try looking at the authors and stories I've favorited on FanFiction.net. There's more there than what I've featured, and it's all worth a look.

-The Intro

-Mortal Kombat: "The Coming of Winter"

-Final Fantasy VIII: "Sowing the SeeDs"

-Final Fantasy VII: "Sunshine in Winter"

-Neon Genesis Evangelion: "EVA-R"

-Final Fantasy VII: "Devotion"

-Final Fantasy VIII: "Crimson Lies"

-Trigun: "When Dreams Change"

-Final Fantasy VIII: "Balamb Garden's Yuletide Vacation"

-Final Fantasy VII: "Deus Ex Jenova"

-Neon Genesis Evangelion: "The One I Love Is..."

-Final Fantasy VIII: "Castles in the Sky"

-Mortal Kombat/Tekken: "Ashes of the Phoenix"

Merm-8 Query Letter

2011-12-21T15:55:00.000-06:00

Right now, I'm working on my query letter for Merm-8. Like most other writers in the world, I am not good at the query letter. I worked very hard on it for Black Hole Son, which was a challenge in itself, since its got two main characters and two storylines. Merm-8's working out to be a littler easier, either because the storyline's simpler or there's only one main character to worry about. But now I figured out why I'm having trouble...

I cannot advertise my book and say what it's about at the same time.

It's just too difficult. It's two different audiences. I think the biggest problem is that I'm not an advertiser, I don't have that skill. It's not part of my skill tree. Probably advertising involves quite a bit of hyperbole, or stretching the truth. Or let's call it what it is -- lying. And I hate lying. I'm not good at lying (despite writing fiction). I hold a dedication to the truth.

I don't have an advertising bone in my body. If I ever do get a book published, I'd probably be better at convincing people not to buy it than to pick up a copy. If I spent enough time crafting, I probably could gain some advertiser skills. But I'm basically writing back cover copy, which I haven't studied much of.

I can summarize it pretty well. I can do that fairly well, although, again, like most writers, not great at summaries. I am a long form writer and I feel like there's so much in the book that it's impossible to indicate how awesome it is just from a sentence or too. But I can try. I can tell someone what my book's about. At least I can say what happens.

It takes place on a flooded Earth. Gene is a Han Solo-esque mariner who owes a large debt to the mafia. While escaping from them, a mermaid swims into his ship. He and his personal AI (his assistant) bring her to a sea station. They give her to a scientist friend to study in secret. Gene hopes he'll get some credit when his findings are published and meanwhile searches for jobs. Unfortunately, the populace discovers her existence. Some are excited and some are scared, since mermaids are traditionally bad luck for sailors. Right after they find her origins, a giant silver ship attacks the station.

(spoilers below) Gene rescues the mermaid, but his scientist friend accuses him of theft. Gene has to knock him out before the station collapses. They shipwreck on a deserted island. While he fixes the ship, the mermaid learns to talk, and they begin to bond. Soon the silver ship comes back. Gene finds out it is attempting to destroy the mermaid, because it comes from a secret island full of fantasy creatures, created by a geneticist. Gene fools the ship and tracks it back to the island. They meet some of the creatures and learn the purpose of the island: to be an escapist fantasy. After he brings back the mermaid to her habitat, the mafia Gene owes a debt to shows up. They take his AI and prepare to take over the island. Gene faces the choice of leaving the island consequence-free for himself or saving the island. Gene returns to the mermaid to help him take out the mafia and save the island from a ticking doomsday device.

See? That's no so hard. Problem is, it's boring. This wouldn't sell any books. It wouldn't excite any agents. It wouldn't be seen on any back cover. It's full of declarative sentences and practical words. It's not zazzy, it's not edgy, it's not anywhere close to making you want the product.

There's an inherent contradiction, at least within myself, about stating fact and stating lies. It's like oil and water -- I can't combine the two. Must be my strong, judicial, moral values. When I do it, it sounds corny, hackneyed, and false. Like the worst Las Vegas travel writer trying to upsell the worst buffet diner, where the shrimps are brown and one of the options is fruitcake.

Video Games Should Be Fun

2011-12-19T10:17:00.000-06:00

I've been into watching Extra Credits recently. It's a documentary-style editorial series about where video games are going, what's wrong with them, what's right with them, and what we can all do about it.

One of their videos was "Games You Might Not Have Tried", and one of their categories was "Flash Games" that you can play online. I'm always looking for ~~ways to waste time at work~~ new games so I thought these would be worth a check-out. After all, these people seem to know what they're doing. They've released editorials on "How to Play Like a Game Designer" and "Gamification" and "Narrative Mechanics" so it's clear they know what they're doing, they take this seriously, and they love games. I thought the games they recommended would be a shoo-in for fun.

I was wrong.

The games they called out were "Today I Die", "Every Day the Same Dream", "One Chance", "The Company of Myself", "The End of Us", "Freedom Bridge", and Passage. If you've played them before, you might know what I'm talking about. If not, feel free to go play them now, so you know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to play them, I would understand.

They're closer to "interactive art" or "participatory visualization" or "thematic stimulus-response" or something a pretentious fashion designer would say. My point is: these aren't games. How do I know? Because they don't even fit the definition of the game. When you open any new board game and read the instructions, what's the first thing you see?

The objective.

Any game has a clearly stated objective or winning conditions. These games don't. Some of these games, there's no way to win or lose. "One Chance" has a way to "win", but it is so unforgiving, it doesn't even let you try again -- it keeps you at your death screen every time you load it (unless you cheat the system). "Freedom Bridge" you can't win. "Passage" is simply getting from one end of the screen to the other.

"Today I Die" lets you "win" but with no clear objective, so the win is only half-fulfilling. There is such a large learning curve of figuring out what you're supposed to do and what objects represent, that you are almost forced to look at the walkthrough. And once you do that, you may as well be watching a movie, because the temptation to use the walkthrough is just too strong. The rest are incomprehensible, art house, hipster crap. Only "The Company of Myself" seems to have a clear objective. Not surprisingly, "The Company of Myself" was also the only one that seemed like a video game, using elements of platforming and puzzle solving.

The only way I would know I'm progressing in "Every Day the Same Dream" is that there's a lady in the elevator who tells you "You have X steps before you become a different person." What does that mean? I don't know. I hope 'steps' mean tasks I have to do. What are those task? Don't know. What are the tangentially related to? Don't know. You have to guess. You have to try different things, different options, choose not to do something then do something in a different direction, press the buttons at different times. In other words, trial and error.

Trial and error is not fun. That's what scientists do when they're trying to prove a hypothesis. And like Thomas Edison said, it is 99% failure. Who wants to play a game that you fail at 99% of the time? It's not like you lose. It just means that you do something that has no effect. At least if there's a game over, there's a clear losing condition and you know not to do that next time.

And the tasks you do make no sense. You have to go to work without putting on clothes so you can get fired. Then the game repeats. You wait for a leaf to fall, then you grab it. The game repeats. You have to exit your car on your way to work -- which there is no indication you can do, because objects you can interact with are captioned... except this one. Then you pet a cow. WTF? You have to repeat the game a minimum of five times (but it's guaranteed to be more, since you can't figure anything out).

The objective is the most important thing in a game, and that must always come first. Second is the obstacles. You must know what's stopping you from getting to your objective. In "The End of Us" you're a meteor, but you don't know what you're supposed to be doing. There's nothing to collect or run into (like I'd expect a meteor would do).

Then a second meteor comes in. Are you supposed to kill it? Run into it? Avoid it? Circle it? Is it supposed to run into you? Are you supposed to let it? Are you supposed to merge and become bigger like a Katamari? Is it your opponent? Your companion? Are you trying to mate with it? Then the meteor stops running into you and starts duplicating your movements. Then it starts mirroring your movements -- going left when you go right.

Then there's a part where you're trying to run over stars, changing them to different colors. The other meteor changes them to its color, so it's like trying to claim territory. But are you supposed to? What does getting the stars get you? What impact does it have on the end of the game?

As far as I can tell, zero. Then there's a countdown as the Earth looms closer and you seem to be about to hit it, while you're continually bumping or not bumping into the other meteor. Then the other meteor disappears, apparently collided with the earth, and you go on alone. Did you win? Did you lose? Did the stars have something to do with it? There's no way to know. No clear objective. No clear obstacles. No clear game.

You know what's a game I enjoyed? Nurse Quest on Adult Swim games. It's a simple point-and-click adventure game in the tradition of "Secret of Monkey Island" and "Leisure Suit Larry". There is nothing innovative about it at all. Games like it have been made for decades, since the first Wumpus Hunters and the Sierra King's Quests.

But I had two thousand times more fun playing it than all these other games combined. It was funny. I liked the jokes. I liked the challenge. I liked the mystery. I liked the discovery and reward. I liked that it was (mostly) clear on what I had to do next, both with objectives and contextual clues. Yes, I had to go to the walkthrough sometimes, partially because I'm a moron, but more because I wanted to get the game done and it wasn't doing a good enough/fast enough job of giving me the hints of what to do next.

Extra Credits's central purpose and theme is to move video games into the realm of legitimate media, like movies, books, and other art. They want to make video games a recognized form of entertainment. They want to go beyond the brown-gray space marine games, industry short-sightedness, and tea-bagging misogynists. I know they didn't pick these games because they were necessarily good or fun, but because "you should try them". I don't know what this means, but if it means the games won't be fun, maybe Extra Credits needs to take a look at what they're doing and why.

No SOPA Radio

2011-12-16T13:45:00.001-06:00

I don't know much about making political opinions -- the details are too complicated for me to process in my state in life. I've got to worry about kids, wife, work, and how to do anything than to find out how a bill works and who's working with it.

But people smarter and savvier than me are against SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act), a bill currently rattling around in Congress. That includes everyone under Doug Walker, Lindsay Ellis, The Spoony One, Hannah Harto, and just about every video I've posted from YouTube.

I wish I could do something that's a bit less "out there", but they've convinced me because I love these people. I want to see more out of them -- they're going to do great things. But they won't do it if they're shut down. They finally convinced me to write to my senators and representatives.

Why? Because of the vlog "The Spoony One" posted. He's a great storyteller, and I was surprised to learn that he met with staffers of my senator - Al Franken. I was even more surprised to learn that Mr. Franken was in favor of the bill. And that's not cool. That's what finally convinced me to write to my representatives.

Below is the letter I wrote to the three people who represent me -- Rep. Erik Paulsen, Sen. Al Franken, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. I altered it a little bit for Mr. Franken because The Spoony One mentioned him specifically. It's not hard to write a letter. Took me about an hour, and each rep has a clearly indicated place to contact them on their webpages.

How to contact your senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
How to contact your representative: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

I don't even mind if you use my letter. Just make sure you alter it so you're not plagiarizing. I think the most important is at the bottom. Make sure you tell them that you're watching this bill, you're watching how they vote, and that you will be making a voting decision next year based on how they respond to this bill.

Strength in numbers is what we're looking for. Their elections are based on numbers, not messages.

Stop SOPA.

Dear Mr. Senator, I have never written to one of my representatives before. I have little to no interest in affairs of state at any level. I only vote during presidential elections, during which I face my great impotence in decision-making skills. Suffice to say, I don't know much about politics. But I do know the Internet. I work on the Internet. I play on the Internet. All my favorite stuff, except for my family, rests on a computer. One of those favorite things is "The Spoony Experiment", a video series hosted by Noah Antwiler (a.k.a. "The Spoony One"). He was part of a group who traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak with representatives about voting against the SOPA bill. And I was disheartened to learn that several congresspeople from my state (which I consider generally savvy about technology and intellectual property) were in favor of the act. As much as I was against the bill, and as much as everyone on the Internet is encouraging people to write, I had no intention of doing so. Until I saw Noah's video recap of his experience. I believe you must vote against SOPA, because it will do more harm than good. There's nothing that concerns me more than that most of the people trying to pass laws on it don't know how it works. They don't know what a DNS server is and what "de-listing" does (especially that it does not prevent people from access). I believe this law will do nothing to stop piracy. It will give too much power to people who wish to take down sites with no due process. That is too much power for anyone to have. Any time power can be abused, it will be. It doesn't matter if the bill is "targeted" towards a different audience. Look at this article on Cracked Top 7 Biggest Dick Moves in Online Gaming. If you ignore the salty language, you can see a preview of what happens when any human gets too much power. If a site blocks a trolling Internet commenter, that commenter can get the website delisted if it uses material that is covered under the first amendment for fair use and parody. And there's no recourse for the accused party to defend themselves. When the DMCA came about, there were many cases of content being wrongly taken down, so there is precedent. I'm mostly concerned about the lack of due process, the vague wording, the inadequate methods of how to enforce, and the fact that this law is a national attempt to fix an international problem. Piracy cannot be stopped. It has always been in existence as long as there has been media. That doesn't mean it should be made easy, but SOPA is not the way to do that. SOPA will cause more legitimate businesses to suffer than it will to punish criminals. But I'm sure a hundred other constituents have already summarized this for you, and I don't need to reiterate it here. That's not the reason I'm writing this letter. The reason I am writing this letter is to tell you that I will be watching the bill. I will be watching how my representatives are voting. And if they do not vote the way I believe they should, I will be making a point to participate in the next election and remove them. Because at that point, it is clear they are not operating in my best interests as a citizen. I have never done any such thing before, but the fact that this bill threatens something I love, I have no choice, but to take action. Good luck to you, Eric J. Juneau

BTW what does "No Soap Radio" even mean? Who invented that name?

Recommending a Game System? For Kids?

2011-12-15T10:31:00.000-06:00

My brother-in-law was talking to my wife about what kind of video game system to maybe get his kids (one first-grader boy, one near kindergarten girl and one one-year old girl, who I presume won't be playing). I'm the closest thing to a video game authority within four generations and eight degrees of separation, and yet, I have no idea what these kids might like. My kids still have trouble wrapping their heads around a computer. I show my two-year-old the iPod and all she does is finger through the menus. She occasionally accidentally presses an icon, then immediately backs out with the center button.

I've tried getting my almost-four-year-old to play Wii, starting with Wii Sports, since that seems the easiest to manage. She gets kinda bored though. The first game I showed her was golf, and now she keeps madly swinging the wiimote like a golf club for each game - baseball, bowling, and so on. I did manage to teach her to press A when prompted though. Unfortunately, she hasn't gotten her head around Angry Birds yet -- she keeps flinging the birds backwards.

I'm so out of touch that I have no idea what younger kids want -- I play games like Left 4 Dead and Portal 2. But I may as well take a look. In my mind there are three possible candidates - the Wii, the Wii U (comes out in 2012), and the XBox 360 + Kinect. I don't believe the Playstation Move is anything but a hyped-up, tacked-on Wii, and I haven't heard a damn thing about it. For some reason, Sony is not good with peripherals. Likewise, handhelds aren't good because we want to encourage a multiplayer experience.

Why only motion-controlled experiences? One, that seems to be the way game systems are going. Won't be much longer till we're in a holodeck. Two, that seems to be an easy way to introduce gaming to the less-experienced. Instead of a controller with four face buttons, four shoulder buttons, two joysticks, and start/select buttons, you simply duplicate a real-world motion. Of course, that's a problem when you're two and can't even do the real-world motion right.

Wii

Wii is oldest and has the biggest game library. However, it seems like the Wii's best games don't utilize much of the motion controls -- Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Skyward Sword. It should also be noted that its best games are also Nintendo games. Continuing a trend, Wii boasts the world's worst third party support.

If you're not buying a Ninteno-brand game, you're looking at a glut of shovelware and licensed titles that ruin the system's reputation. I only have one non-Nintendo game in my library (Okami). And when there's no competition, creators get lazy (Mario & Sonic at the blah-blah Olympics). One of the highest rated games that's not Nintendo that uses motion controls is "World of Goo", which is a downloadable title. I find that interesting, but it's not really relevant here.

What I do find relevant is how well my kids can play the games. The answer? Mixed. Any game that uses motion controls seems to me that it responds just as well to frantic waggling as it does to precise movements. This is good for a kid that's not that coordinated, like mine.

But it's bad for teaching. Nothing's more frustrating than trying to do something you know how to do and failing (I'm looking at you, Zack and Wiki). Childhood is all about failures to launch, so a system that doesn't forgive you for the slightest slight is going to result in a frustrated child. Of course, there's always games that use the regular controls, which are pretty simple too -- not much more than one or two buttons. But my almost-four-year-old is still unclear on the concept of holding down a button to make the race car go.

Wii U

Nintendo says this system is supposed to come out in summer 2012, just a year after it was first announced. I'm a bit dubious that they're going to make that deadline, just as I'm dubious that the system is going to be a top shelf competitor. I mean, if Nintendo's stock plummeted after the announcement, plus the company posting lowest numbers in the last few months, what is Nintendo's future?

If the Wii U is it, I'd say I was excited. It's taking out some of the inaccurate waggle-waggle and instead using an iPad style interface. Let me tell you, I love this. I loved the secondary screen functionality in Zelda: Four Swords, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, and Zelda: Wind Waker. Those games integrated with the Game Boy and made the multiplayer experience that much more deep. My wife and I could both stare at a screen, but we could share different information with each other, and work together. It's just a shame that I had to spend so much to get it.

The Wii U controller will have a large touchscreen, plus camera, and microphone. That sounds like what I'm looking for. I think it'll be easy for kids to get behind too, plus, if everyone's working together, the parents can help out the young ones. And touching a screen is more intuitive and precise than standing up and whacking an imaginary tennis ball.

My biggest beef is what games will it have? Lego City Stories -- my kids love legos, so this might be a sell. Then Super Smash Bros, which has become Nintendo's new launcher -- one not developed by Nintendo, but published by them, I might add. And a Pikmin game (which my wife can't play because she gets sad when the Pikmin die). But that's it.

So final verdict -- I don't know what to think. I wish Nintendo would release some more details so I could make a judgement. In fact, being less closed-door in general would do a lot for their sales. They could learn a lot from their Western counterparts, which have more liberal policies regarding open development. I always thought that Nintendo's biggest flaw, one that's easily fixable, is that they are way too tight with their product. It's the same reason that Beta VCRs failed, the same reason IBM compatible PCs sold better than Apples.

Kinect

I have a hard time with validating my recommendation for this system because I've never set foot in front of a Kinect. Not at a friend's house, not even at a mall demo. I have no idea how it responds, how it feels, how it plays. The one commonality I keep hearing about any motion-controlled game -- Wii, Xbox, or PS3 -- is that games are unpolished, the controls are inaccurate, and the system is constantly misinterpreting your actions.

What I do know is there seems to be some pretty good games for children on it. Dance Central, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, Disneyland Kinect Adventures, and the Wii Sports Clones. Sesame Street alone would get my kids interested -- what I wouldn't give to play with Grover and Elmo talking to me, looking almost real. Instead, we got educational crap like Astro-Grover and Jim Henson's Muppet Adventures. If you think 2-dimensional cartoon illustrations of muppets are bad, you should see pixelated EGA versions.

So I think the Kinect is worth a serious look. There's no controls to worry about, no peripherals to hold. There's just you and the screen. That seems like an ideal interface for a toddler/young grade schooler. But as I said, this is coming from someone who's never even touched the device.

My Big Pulp Reading

2011-12-13T09:19:00.000-06:00

On Sunday, I participated in a teleconference for Big Pulp, which was an author reading for their latest magazine, which I have a story in. It was an entertaining experience, and mildly exciting. It's nice to hear one's contemporaries -- to hear what they're writing, what people are writing about and how they react. In college, I used to participate in NOTA (my college's literary magazine) readings, which will surprise anyone who knows me.

It wasn't a big crowd, only 13 call participants. And if you can't see faces, it's hard to know how people react. It's more than just the story, it's also the way you read. If you read too fast, too monotone, too quiet. Lots of things can go wrong. I myself found, as I was reading, lots of things I could have improved on the story -- make the writing tighter, go further with the time travel differences.

Fortunately, I've got two advantages. One is I have some slight nerve damage in my face so I had to have speech therapy as a a kid. As a result, I speak a little slower than normal naturally. I don't know how much slower, it's a different perspective between my own head and "out there". Two, I read to my kids all the time, so I'm practiced. Although, they don't really give feedback. Plus, I often find myself drifting off during the two hundred and fifty-sixth iteration of "Corduroy", so I hope that's not showing through.

Oh, Corduroy. Will you ever find that button?

Anyway, I thought I'd mention that as a waystation in my quest to become an author. It's always important to get your name out there. And maybe someone will remember me as that guy with the weirdly high male voice who read that funny story about the multiple time travel futures that's not as original as I thought.

Misfit Toys

2011-12-12T10:34:00.000-06:00

Here's what I don't get. You know in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" where they have the Island of Misfit Toys? That's where Charlie-in-the-Box blows the conch shell and they all go hunting for the spotted elephant. Then the cowboy on the ostrich shoots it with the water gun that shoots jelly. He sticks its polka-dotted trunk on a pike and they all dance around it? Wait... wrong island. That's Lord of the Flies.

That's the one. It has the stuttering boat that can't f-f-float and the bird that doesn't fly, it swims. They're all misfits. Except one, far as I can tell. What's the deal with the doll? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with her. The only reference made to her situation is the line in their song "The Most Wonderful Day of the Year" when they're wishing they could be the kind of toys that Santa Claus delivers. Her line is "A dolly for Sue -- the kind that will even say 'how do you do?'"

And she's a fairly prominent citizen on this island. She's the only girl toy and she has a lot of lines. She's the one most emotionally affected. Oh, come on. You don't get a little misty when she intones "I don't think I have any dreams left to dream" while big mercury teardrops fall down her face. But it bothers me that we never learn her deal. She doesn't have square wheels or clown shoes.

Or maybe it's something we don't want to know. Maybe it's something horrifying, too mind-destroying for a child's television special. Remember the Twilight Zone episode with the Talky Tina doll? Is there something going on under that skirt?

And maybe the most important question of all -- some family's going to receive that doll for Christmas. Santa dropped it right down the chimney without even a background check. What are they going to do when they learn the doll's horrible secret? A secret so horrible even we, the omnipresent audience is unable to know about.

God save you, family.

Featured Fan Fiction: Ashes of the Phoenix (Mortal Kombat / Tekken)

2011-12-08T15:18:00.000-06:00

I saved the best for last. This is not just my favorite fan fiction, this is one of my favorite stories of all time.

I love it so much that I dedicated a portion of my free time in college compiling, typesetting, and forming a print version of it for my own personal bookshelf. And this wasn't just doing a straight print command from the browser. I wanted a nicely formatted and professional looking edition (for a three-ring binder). This was not easy. I was using Microsoft Word 95 for Christ's sake. And I didn't know a thing about macros then.

Think about that, for those of you who used Office for anything other than churning out a three page paper. This entailed sectionalizing each page, monkeying with the margins, altering each little space, customizing headers, dealing with multiple fonts, and repeated screw-ups when I made a global change and accidentally overwrote something. This is a 600-page document! With table of contents, title page, and appendices at the end. When it was finally done, I put it in a white binder with the image you see above.

And you know what? I never cracked it open.

Well, I'd already read it. And it was in a large binder -- not exactly convenient to tote around. And you know, when I glanced at it a few years later, I realized I'd made the font too small to be comfortable, in my effort to conserve paper and space. I later used Lulu to make a real print edition and this took just about as much work. But at least I had my experience on my side.

Why? Why go through all this? How could I, for any other reason, than that I love this story so much. It takes place after the emperor Shao Kahn has invaded the Earth Realm. Everyone stands frozen in time as their souls are sucked out one by one. Only a handful of people survive -- chosen heroes by the good guys -- but Kahn's extermination squads of centaurs and mutants are hunting them one by one. The heroes must survive long enough, both from the extermination squads and themselves, to get to Sanctuary, a protected area on Native American grounds. There, they can safely plan the counterattack and unite. Or will they?!

That's the set-up and fantastic as it is, the characters are even more so. The main one is Lei Wulong -- an international cop fighting alcoholism (which is not a big help when trying to survive an apocalypse). He's a character in Tekken and about as perfectly formed as he can be. Also in play is Jun Kazama, a gentle healer. Then there's Liu Kang, the main hero of Mortal Kombat. What's interesting about him is that he's not sympathetic, not friendly, and not even in the serious Bruce Lee kind of way. He's an asshole, and he's supposed to be one of the heroes.

That's on the good guy side. On the bad guy side is also a stellar sub-plot, the star of whom is Lee Chaolan. Lee is the adopted brother of Kazama Mishima -- Tekken's main bad guy -- who's working for Shao Kahn. He used to be the head honcho of Big Company, but when his brother won the tournament, he got knocked down. And it's interesting to see the characterization of a man who was once so high up, now taking orders and beatings.

But if I go on about characters, I'll be here all day. There are so many of them, from Tekken and Mortal Kombat and some games in-between, like Killer Instinct and Soul Calibur. All the greats are here, but they're so different, and yet so the same, and yet so awesome. There are giant martial arts battles, sorcery, betrayal, danger, romance, and action. There are fantastic plot twists only a man like Victar is capable of. The story goes from survival to character study to detective story to courtroom drama to epic frickin' battle with dragons and ninjas to war movie.

The fun part about this fan fiction is seeing all the little easter eggs, the little character tweaks, the different situations. In the games, all you ever see of Reptile and Kabal is beating people up and shooting energy balls out their fingers. You don't imagine Sub-Zero would be a scientist, but he is, and it works. You don't imagine Stryker as a mute PTSD survivor or Nighwolf as a computer programmer/shaman, but it works. It's the same reason they keep making video game movies -- because every so often you see some little glint of the game you loved so much brought to real life, and you smile.

Every page is full of that. When I first opened this story, I knew all about Mortal Kombat 3, but I knew nothing about Tekken. I mean zero. I knew the game existed, but that was about it. This was a serious disadvantage, because the backdrop is from Mortal Kombat 3, but the characters and plot lean more toward Tekken. And this means I miss out on the existing character relationships. But this story is like Lord of the Rings or Les Miserables. So while the characters do have some connections with others, they are their own. Obviously, in the game, you don't see Lei Wulong with a bottle of brandy, and you don't see Liu Kang with a temper. What I'm saying is you don't need to know about MK or Tekken to enjoy the story.

And it's truly a beautiful story. On par with Patrick Rothfuss, Neil Gaiman, and George R. R. Martin. You should be reading it right now. I wish I knew what Victar was doing these days. I hope he's still writing. Maybe he's really Joss Whedon and Victar is his beard. Stranger things have happened.

Victar's MK Fan Fictions
Victar's Fanfic Archive

Goodbye to EscapePod

2011-12-07T10:25:00.001-06:00

I've decided to stop listening to EscapePod and PodCastle, and there's no reason you need to know this. But I'm always running out of shit to say, so I figured this was something to write about. This isn't out of the blue though. There are two good reasons.

One is a problem I feared would happen, despite editor reassurances that it wouldn't. Two years ago they split fantasy stories off into their own podcast -- PodCastle. I like both fantasy and sci-fi and I like getting the best of both. And that's hard to do with short stories since I'm not in love with them, they have so much harder to work. PodCastle is fun, and I listened to that for almost two hundred episodes. But with stories on both sides, I feel the gravy has thinned. And I can't stand to skip through stories that "almost" hit the mark.

Steve Eley, with a hat

The other is Steve Eley. He was the man with the singular vision to start an audio-only, science fiction podcast and keep it going through 200 weekly episodes. He had interesting things to say. He picked good stories. He was a great narrator. I used to love him.

Unfortunately, he was prone to neuroses typical of geeks and all. I've talked about one of them before -- his constant need to apologize for a FREE service he's providing that's gotta cost him time and money and contains no advertisers except for the occasional sponsor. I don't know why he felt he owed anybody anything. George R. R. Martin certainly doesn't.

As time went on, and the podcast expanded to two other podcasts (more on that later) he kept making excuses for extras that were late, complaining about his health, his job, and his time, then closing to submissions, going on hiatus, and so on. I have no problem with that, but the way he said was in a self-deprecating way that it was clear he was taking too much responsibility and managing himself poorly. I don't care that he went on hiatus or closed submissions -- magazines do that regularly. What I do mind is that he felt the world was on his shoulders and said so periodically.

Eventually, he just threw up his hands with the EscapePod podcast and gave the captain's chair to Mur Lafferty, a silky-voiced maiden of the writer and podcast community. I don't know what he's doing now, if he even has anything to do with EscapePod and its subsidiaries. All I know is I miss him. It hasn't been the same since he left.

Mur Lafferty, hatless

Laffery's editorial hand marked a definite shift in the provided style, and I knew the end was coming when the last story that Eley bought was also the last good one. Not to mention that instead of doing a classic science fiction story for their 300th podcast, they did a promotional short story from Tim Pratt, a common author on EscapePod, that was a tie-in from a YA novel he couldn't even find a publisher for.

The fact is I can't stand the stories on EscapePod lately. The intros are the most interesting thing, but they go on for five minutes. Half of that is biography of the author and plugs for the narrator. I can't get through ten minutes of story until I'm totally lost because I haven't been paying attention, because it's been so boring. I declare to my car "I just don't care" and click next on my MP3 player.

They're plodding, they're ill-formed, they lack interesting characters, and they seem -- forgive my sexism -- too girly. They feel more concerned with imagery and being literary than having plots and being fun. It's like the stories have nothing at stake and don't have characters that have pizazz. When Eley picked the stories, they were fun. Death Trap architects and guns that shoot advertising and time travel and alien bounty hunters. Eley liked fantastic ideas. But now it's family problems and medical procedures with ethical questions and lots and lots of children.

I've got other things to listen to -- Loveline, Writing Excuses, The Moth, and for fiction I've got We're Alive , and audio books, so I'm good. It's time to say goodbye to EscapePod, it's just not as good as it used to be.

Daily Farland's David Kick

2011-12-05T14:35:00.001-06:00

I subscribe to David Farland's Daily Kick, which is not so daily or kicky. It's basically a mailing list for writing tips blog. I can't remember how I first heard of this -- I've never read any of his books -- but sometimes it has good articles, like how to sell to new markets and things people miss when writing female characters. But lately, there are two trends that have really been bothering me. Things that are making me think about unsubscribing.

One is probably due to what's on his mind -- eBooks. He's written a lot about the failings of the paper industry and the advent of the eBook (some of which I've written about, citing his content). Granted, some of it's exciting. But he's also fond of the topic because he's created his own eBook company. And its first publication is a book he wrote.

Of course it's in his best interest to promote the future of eBooks -- his company sells them! I understand that eBooks are awesome, but I'm still learning how to put scenes together. He's writing about post-modernism and fine art and stress diagrams -- things that are way beyond me and beyond the act of putting words on paper (or a screen that looks like paper). It's nice to put this kind of thing in the back of my head, but it doesn't help me get an agent.

The other is that he's constantly praising Stephenie Meyer (writer of the Twilight books), but never seems to say why. Guess what? He was Meyer's writing instructor in college. He says he remembers considering her final grade and thinking, quote: "This young woman has a very interesting and unique voice. If she ever really gets consumed by a tale, she could go very, very far."

In another e-mail, he talks about how all authors are disdainful of others' work. Case in point: Stephen King's famous quote "Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity. Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend." Farland says King doesn't understand because Meyer isn't writing for people like him. Her themes of teen love and sex are why Twilight is reaching so many people (you'll note that he doesn't say that Bella makes all the wrong decisions regarding those issues -- being manipulative, emotionally blackmailing people, and being an all-around monster. She's like a housewife of Orange County.)

Let me tell you, I've never read the Twilight books, but I've read a lot of analyses of them, with intelligent arguments by critics I respect. There are a lot of theses that tear down her writing, but I haven't found any that praise it. And frankly, from the passages that have been cited, I don't see how you could. And I'll stop here before I get into a Twilight rant -- I wouldn't be saying anything that other, better people have already said.

So I find myself getting sick of Farland pushing his own agenda. I'm sure he's a good writer. I'm sure he's terribly good at what he does. I'm sure he's a master storyteller. He's treating writing as more of a business instead of an art. Which is fine -- it is partially a business. But he seems to be advising you to be like Meyer, and look at how much people hate her. I'd rather not leave that kind of legacy.

Merm-8 Final Revision Started

2011-12-01T14:55:00.001-06:00

Ah, yes, the final revision. The story's all made, and now I'm looking for those niggly little bits of punctation and foul-sounding word choices. I'm also using Natural Reader software so I can have the story read to me. By an monotone computerized voice. This will help me find missing words and things that I can't catch while reading, like sentences that sound good in my head but may fall flat to someone else reading.

Yep, gotta shine up the manuscript, get working on the query letter and then onward. To GLORY!

Stories Someone Should Write: Pinocchio Grows Up

2011-11-29T11:01:00.001-06:00

Everyone knows the story of Pinocchio. Wooden puppet gets turned alive, and wants to become a "real boy". Presumably so he can masturbate. I've seen the movie and read the book.

What I wonder is, what happens when Ol' Pine Eyes gets his wish and becomes real. He's still only got about eight days of reality under his belt. It's not like much has changed since then. He didn't really learn wrong from right. He learned heroism and sacrifice, but not much about morality. He's still the same old cigar-chompin', stage-actin' boy we all know and love.

I'm sure there's a lot more story after Pinocchio becomes human. Maybe the fox and cat can't talk to him anymore. Maybe he does something about the existing wooden puppets that he could talk to when he wasn't human. Maybe he's got other powers besides nose-growing.

I'd love to see a story that starts with an old man on a bed, talking to his grandson, where he tearfully confesses that he is Pinocchio (a la Hook) and the story recants his growth from automaton to humanity. That would be pretty awesome.

Featured Fan Fiction: Castles in the Sky (Final Fantasy 8)

2011-11-28T14:02:00.001-06:00

Ashbear is the premiere Final Fantasy 8 writer and this is her top story. In fact, this might be THE top story.

Let me explain. When I was younger and had way too much time on my hands, I wanted to read good fan fiction. Unfortunately, FanFiction.net, the premiere source for fan fiction, does not have a way to rank stories. You can add favorites, you can post reviews. But there's no objective way to tell whether a story is well-liked or not. I always thought the site should at least have some sort of "Blam" functionality, like Newgrounds has, where works below a certain rating are deleted. So what did I do?

I looked at the Favorites list of every writer of FF8 fan fiction and tallied them up. That's 466 pages of data. And Ashbear's Castles in the Sky had the most entries. That's pretty impressive for any writer.

The premise behind Castles in the Sky is that Rinoa was in a car accident (doubly ironic since her mother died in one) and is now blind. Squall is hooking up with another SeeD called Lauren. And there's emotional issues, angst, and romance all over the place. But the key is that all the characters act accordingly to the plot. The mood is a little like Twilight, if it was good. It's better than any soap opera.

Personally, I like Crimson Lies better for the darker tone, but it's the difference between apples and oranges. Ashbear makes her characters shine brighter than the sun in any story. Castles in the Sky has lighter humor, such as Squall's run-ins with the touchy-feely duchess and Zell's interminable bounciness. There's also a good deal of characters holding the idiot ball and jumping to conclusions when a simple question/answer conversation would have cleared things up. But Crimson Lies had that too.

Castles in the Sky (FanFiction.net)
Castles in the Sky (Archive of our Own)
Ashbear's LiveJournal

The Empty Cube

2011-11-22T11:20:00.001-06:00

There's something broken about modern business. I can't make friends at work. I can't make personal relationships. Why? Because I might disappear at any time, like in Logan's Run or 1984.

There's probably a term for it. Hiring practices, termination, lay-offs. It's ruining company morale and worker morale. I think it's because these policies haven't changed in decades, even though the world has.

I've been laid off. I've been fired. I've quit. I've been under three month contracts. So I've gotten the full experience from the employee side. They tell you to come to a meeting that's not on your calendar. It's always at the end of the day, about a half hour before you're supposed to leave. Maybe it's in the HR office, where you've never been before. Your supervisor, or your supervisor's supervisor says, very matter-of-factly, that they are terminating your employment.

No one sees you leave. No one knows where you are the next day. You just disappear, as if you were never there in the first place. People stare at the empty cubicle and wonder. Did you get in a car accident? Did you quit suddenly? Maybe your dad is sick, and you decided to take time off to be with him? Maybe you won the lottery?

Fact is, you don't even know anyone left, until they call a department-wide meeting, uncomfortably pack you in the only space available, and tell you that several people have been laid off (or whatever polite term they use) and not to talk about it with clients yet.

Or maybe you just get an e-mail with the person's name in the subject header, and nothing else. Then you read that "Today was so-and-so's last day at [COMPANY]. I will be letting clients know..." And nothing else about their fate. You go through so much adversity together, so many hard projects. But all that past gets thrown away in a finger snap.

You won't be seeing that person ever again. You don't know what happened to their projects. You won't be able to say goodbye to the person you worked with for more than two years. They've just vanished--their empty cubicle, still with their little knick-knacks, is their grave marker. Maybe you talk about it on the way back from lunch with some co-workers. "Hey, does anyone know what happened to so-and-so? Did she get laid off or what?" And no one knows.

It's like in The Hunger Games when Katniss and Gale are hunting and see the two escapees get picked up by a hovercraft like a dystopian crane game. They're plucked out of existence and never seen again.

Even if you leave of your own volition, it's like life support. No one ever stayed at a job because all their friends were there. It is a job -- if someone else is offering you better pay, you don't think twice about going somewhere else. The company shows you no loyalty, why should you?

So that's why I don't make friends at work. I stay focused. I stay professional. I stay cold. There's no point to make friends at work because either you or the person you know will get scooped out of time and disappear forever.

Featured Fan Fiction: The One I Love Is... (Evangelion)

2011-11-21T13:36:00.000-06:00

The One I Love Is... is my favorite Evangelion fan fiction. At first it seems like a typical Rei/Shinji/Asuka romance triangle thing. Believe me--it's hard enough to write one couple pairing. Most ficcers barely get farther than one chapter with that sort of thing, and they run out of steam. Not the case here.

What I love about it is that it starts from a specific point in the series: where Rei sits in Eva-01 (Shinji's giant robot) to test synchronization. Since Eva-01 contains the soul of Shinji's mother (spoilers!), the idea of attraction is implanted in her head, and she attempts to pursue a romantic relationship with him... in the imperfect, cutely androidish way she knows how. And of course, the hair-trigger tempered Asuka reacts in kind, and the battle ensues. It takes one small thing, twists it, and ends up with a completely different story.

It's simple, lovable, and each character acts plausibly. Most times in this sort of fic, you see Rei as a robot, Asuka as a bitch, and Shinji suddenly grows a spine. Not so, in this case. And like in Deus Ex Jenova the characters have sexuality which is more prominent with young adults. And the characters make mistakes. Both Asuka and Rei's attempts to woo Shinji result in them irreparably destroying their relationships, which prevents them from doing what they were supposed to be doing in the first place -- saving the world.

And that's the other thing I like. The story doesn't just take place in a single time bubble. From where it starts, it reaches the same end that the series does, but not in the same way. And it reaches a plausible and satisfying climax.

Maybe that's what makes this story so good -- it offers a conclusion to the incomprehensible puzzle of Evangelion more satisfying and entertaining than the series itself. I've said before how the mark of a great fan fiction is that it takes the existing universe and improves on it. The One I Love Is... does that.

Rakna, the author, appears to still be writing fan fiction, albeit slowly. There's a lot of distractions on the Internet you know. Cat videos and such. I don't blame him.

The One I Love Is...
Rakna's website
Rakna's LiveJournal
Rakna's Facebook

New Zombie Short Story and Big Pulp

2011-11-18T10:55:00.000-06:00

Well, with Merm-8's 3rd revision done, and no touchies until December, I'm now back on the short story kick. Which is nice for a change. I do have that trunk novel I'm working on, but short stories will give me more resume-building material in the short run. I finished revising Defender based on the critique I got from "On the Premises" and sent it out to a fledgling market that deals with e-books. Sounds like I have what they're looking for, but their pay rates are based on percentages of gross. Should be interesting to see if that pans out.

My new short story is another zombie story (this makes number three for me), based around an idea in Left 4 Dead. That idea is the safe houses. Gameplay-wise, they demarcate the end of a level, give the players a chance to breathe, and act as a checkpoint.

Story-wise, they're fascinating places. Graffiti covers their walls, like an Internet message board, leaving messages of doom, humor, and information. There are supplies littered around -- coffee cans full of bullets, sleeping bags, old food stuffs. You can tell that people have been here, spent a lot of time here. But only temporarily. Something motivated them out.

Those are the most fascinating places in the game to me. There's a story there -- who built them? Who keeps them supplied? What kinds of people are writing those messages? Where do those red doors come from? Obviously, I can't write it as fan fiction, if I intend to sell it. But this is why I love video games, cause I get such great ideas from them.

In other news, Big Pulp Winter 2011 issue will have my story "Influx Capacitor" in it, which is awesome. Already added it to the side bar. Preorder now!

Featured Fan Fiction: Deus Ex Jenova (Final Fantasy 7)

2011-11-16T15:40:00.001-06:00

I mentioned this story briefly as an inspiration for Milk and Honey, but that was just the sex part. Deus Ex Jenova is not about sex, though it has sexuality. In fact, it doesn't have that much sex except at the end, as an addendum and a response to the prudish nature of modern American literature, when most classic literature was basically pornography without pictures. They had to make do with veiled metaphors and alluding language.

But I digress. It's much more than just a spot of naughty. It's a full-fledged story that employs several no-no tropes, like resurrecting Aeris (don't worry, that's not a spoiler), original characters that save the day, main character death, and OOC-ness. But everything it does, it justifies. And makes up for it by a rocking story full of action and an illustration of human anguish.

For one thing, it clearly defines the main characters with both plausible old characteristics and new ones. Cloud has become more taciturn (and this was way before Advent Children). Tifa is fun-loving, temperamental, bossy, and closed-off emotionally. Aeris is cheerful, passive, and motherly. These are exactly how I imagined the characters to act after Meteorfall in the story. And best of all, the characters have sexual identities.

Plus, the characters change over time. They learn, they evolve, they make mistakes, and they are not in the same place they started when they end up together. And remarkably, it does all this while staying in the same universe. Even enhancing it by filling some plot-holes the game left (which is common for JP games).

For anyone who played Final Fantasy VII, this is a must read. I don't know what Max Zhang is doing right now, nor his co-creator R. Richardson (who's impossible to Google). IcyBrian lists his site on Geocities, and become fossilized. He actually left me a comment when I posted about Milk & Honey, but I never heard back from him after I e-mailed back. Hit me up again, Max. I'd love to pick your brain about writing and what you're doing now.

Deus ex Jenova
Max Zhang's Website (Internet Archive)

And the Award For Best Thing I've Seen All Day...

2011-11-11T08:51:00.001-06:00

The Super Mario Brothers, Mario and Luigi...

With NUNCHUKS!

Rhinos

2011-11-11T08:15:00.001-06:00

Hey, all you rhino poachers. You know how you keep killing rhinos to get their horns so you can sell them on the black market? You know, you don't have to actually kill any rhinos. Just fake some white powder and leave the rhinos alone.

It's not like your consumers are going to know -- they didn't actually see you kill the rhino. And it's not like you believe that rhino horn is a real thing -- you just want the money.

And there's no test to find out whether what you've got is pure unadulterated rhino horn. It's not like you can test its pH balance with a little strip of lemon juice paper. It's not like a drug deal where you take a little of it first to see how pure it is. And if there is, rhino horn is just keratin -- same thing your fingernails are made out of. Just use that. It's a placebo anyway -- fake or not, it's effectiveness is based on psychology. So leave the rhinos alone, 'kay?

I just thought of this this morning. And this was before I saw this article.

Merm-8 Third Revision is Officially Complete

2011-11-07T16:26:00.003-06:00

I finally got done with those arduous Macros on Sunday night. My last one is "overused words" which includes a lot of "look"s, "since"s, and "even"s. The problem is, most of the time, it's either very hard to reword it, or it doesn't matter. If a character looks at something, there's not a lot of other ways to put it.

So now that I'm done with this, I let it incubate for 3 weeks. Then I'll use a program I found called "Natural Reader" that I'll use to read the story out loud to me. This will help me find all those little things I miss, the little skippable words, that get glanced over if you stare at a manuscript too long. I've only done this once before and that was years ago. I was reading out loud to myself then, and I just felt stupid. Plus since I write at work, speaking out loud isn't going to go over so well.

In the meantime, I've a got a bonus critique of Defender to go through. This is the short story basis for my White Mage Story, and it's helping me do a few things differently. Most importantly not to sound like a D&D rip-off while still being a D&D rip-off.

Code Monkeys and Nerd Humor

2011-11-07T11:57:00.000-06:00

I recently watched Code Monkeys on Netflix. It was a short-lived animated sitcom about a video game company. The animation is done in 8-bit style pixelation and abound with video game references (for example, they have to jump over a pit of spikes to get to the meeting room, and the top status randomly flashes lines relevant to the plot, like an aggression meter or points scored). This is the kind of show I would be all over.

Except...

None of the characters are likable. The main character's co-workers is one of those "Stiffler" guys who constantly makes sexual and homosexual remarks, humps everything, and without fail, tells the hero to do the exact wrong thing. He puts a turd in the microwave, which explodes. The IT guy is obese, naked, and egomaniacal. The one black guy is angry all the time. The company is led by a stereotypical Texan who doesn't know anything about video games and seems only concerned if you're gay or not. He has a jock son who berates the other workers, but is dumb as a rock. The two girls are bland and only exist to be girls interested in video games.

Why is it that so much nerd humor, especially plot-oriented works, revolved around people being douchebags to each other? That totally goes against likeability, and that is a key element to any successful series. Look at Friends, Cheers, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I Love Lucy, The Simpsons. These are all likeable characters you'd love to spend time with. In fact you do, a half hour a day or week. Sometimes more if its in syndication. But none of these are geeky shows.

I think this is why nerd humor fails to gain an audience. I find the writers too often, scrapping for characters, just turn them into jerks so they can have some potty humor, some plot contrivances, and to get the show moving. Not valid.

It is quite possible to have likeable characters and nerd humor in the same melting pot. PvP, an online comic, has a great cast of likeable characters, none of which are jerks. They act a little jerky to each other, some are snobby, some are sarcastic, but they all like each other. They're lovable, they have relationships with each other. No one acts like a kowtowing bitch.

In The Guild, there is a vast blend of characters, from the ditzy to the hyper to the egomaniacal to the perpetually angry. They're highly identifiable, like personality silhouettes. Most of them are non-empathetic jerks. But it gets made up for by the fact that they are get knocked down pegs during the course of the show. Vork's single-minded frugalness, Bladezz's stardom, Zaboo's child-like ADD -- they make fun of themselves, and they learn from their fatal flaws.

Then there are some nerd shows that didn't make it because no one got along, and they were all jerks. Heroes - even in the first season the character relationships showed up. The only person I wanted to see was Hiro, the lovable geek who was the one person who actually enjoyed his power. The rest were criminals, greedy, or idiots. No one got along, they were always in conflict with each other.

I rented a movie on Netflix called "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising", about some D&D players. I guess it was a low-budget film, but the plot was awful. None of the main characters got along--it was like they went out of their way to be absolute dicks to each other and screw each other over in the most petty ways possible. Like being characters that you can't be, or constantly trying to have sex with NPC's - in the middle of the throne room. I stopped watching midway through. And I NEVER do that.

There's a place for geek humor -- look at The Big Bang Theory. My wife can't get enough of it. It's amazing that it was created by the same guy who made "Two and a Half Men" -- the two couldn't be more opposite. Those guys are a lot more likeable -- they're not egotistical, they're awkward, they have trouble in social situations, they try and fail, then try again. That proves there's A) an audience and B) it can be done well. So let's get some more of it.

If Quake Was Done Today

2011-11-03T16:08:00.002-05:00

I do loves me some Quake. Quake was the first game with true 3-D, instead of 2.5-D environments combined with sprites. Quake had a great atmosphere, great music, and great gameplay. You can tell I liked it by the sidebar -- one of my first fan fictions was for Quake. It even won a fan fiction award, so I some of my writing talent to Quake.

Plus there's this little ditty I saw:

see more Comixed

Yeah, they don't make 'em anymore. Nowadays, you got sponsorships, achievements, AI, customizability, online compatibility, integration with proprietary networks, co-op play. It used to be about the games, man. Which is why the above tickles me. There is so much hand-holding and hint-giving that you're not even playing the game at all, just following instructions. There's no skill learning like rocket jumping or shoot-strafing. There's no exploration or secret-finding.

True, there's more stories and acting, but it's like a D&D campaign run by a robot. In order to show you these scenes, you have to be on a train. Spoony just talked about this, and there are plenty of YouTube videos showcasing the ridiculous hand-holding of today's video games. For example, a sniper rifle shot to a guy's leg kills him. Or it arbitrarily forces you to stand by a door while some inane piece of dialogue plays out. This is a game, not a movie. And then if you do manage to die, you have to listen to the whole unskippable dialogue over again.

But enough about that. Just watch the video, and remember by-gone days.

Once Upon a Time

2011-10-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

There's been some buzz lately about these "real fairy tales" + "dark and edgy" shows that are popping up. "Once Upon a Time" is ABC's entry. "Grimm" is NBC's, which has something to do with a detective. It's a natural evolution of "Twilight" and its spin-offs like "The Vampire Diaries" and "Supernatural", all of which evolved from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", which evolved from "Interview with the Vampire" and so on. Plus non-serial works like "The Brothers Grimm", "Shrek", "Wicked", "Tin Man", and "The 10th Kingdom".

I saw the free-to-watch pilot of "Once Upon a Time" on IMDB a few days ago. I haven't watched a real show meant for a real channel for some time -- I've been catching up with stuff on Netflix like South Park and Doctor Who.

And I've got to say, I'm not impressed. The writing is dull, melodramatic, and predictable. If you're going to do a "fairy tales are real" trope, you've got to bring something better and newer to the table than "Once Upon a Time" does. Like "Fables" or anything by Neil Gaiman or even Harry Potter. There are hundreds of books about "what if fairy tale creatures were real". IO9 did a much better job recapping than I can, but I'll give it a spin because this show gets my goat.

The plot switches back and forth between fairy tale world and the real world. This makes me wonder about the quality of writing. First, it's predictable. Second, it takes so long to get through the events. Third, what events there are pedantic talking. It takes an hour to tell us what we already know -- something's taken fairy tale creatures and put them into real world equivalents.

Also, apparently, everyone lives in the same universe -- Geppetto, Snow White, Rumplestiltzkin, some blue fairy. And they all know each other. Can't imagine what that system of government must be like. There's got to be a dozen queens, four dozen princes with the last name "Charming", and I don't want to even think about the princesses.

I think the biggest problem is that the characters are unlikeable. In the real world, our main character is Emma, a female bounty hunter. Isn't that done to death? No bounty hunters look like that--didn't you see "Dog"? In her first scene, she goes on a date with a guy she's trying to collar, then has the world's loneliest birthday party with a single cupcake and a candle.

And the world's smallest violin plays.

I guess she has some "super-power" where she can tell if someone's lying. She clearly hasn't earned this power. She doesn't use it in a plausible way (like earning millions in business deals). She has no friends and we don't know why. The only answer must be that she's cold and heartless, just waiting for something to warm her up, like family or the right man. Never seen that before.

And in fact, all the women are either uptight, cold career bitch (like the Evil Queen/Mayor, Emma, or Little Red Riding Hood who's now a slut) or a free-spirited artist/nurturer (like the kid's teacher/Snow White who talks to birds). Plus all they all look alike. They all have round faces, big eyes, and straight brown hair. I can't tell them apart.

Like this

I have no one to sympathize or identify with. No one has any weaknesses or quirks. Everyone is a bland stereotype or a douchebag. (In the near future, I'll talk more about the necessity of likable characters). This must be aimed exclusively at a female audience, because except for the kid, I can't remember any males who talk to each other. It fails the Reverse Bechdel Test.

Does he look generic enough for you?

Even worse is the whiny kid. Emma is his birth mother, and he falls into the age old trope that he's come to find her and intelligently manipulates the adults to help him. He whines about how he doesn't want her to leave, he whines about how his adoptive mother is mean, he whines about how there's some secret in the town, he whines about his big book of fairy tales that's supposed to be this show's codex. I hope he gets killed off, cause he brings nothing to the story.

Plus, I already know everything. I know the main character is the baby that was "saved" by being sent to the real world before the curse. I know that the girl who wraps her head in a red scarf is Little Red Riding Hood. Could they be any more obvious? She lives in a hotel called "Grandma's Place". They're trying to include bonus "Easter eggs" with these little references, but all I'm doing is yawning. This sort of thing I'd expect to see on Nickelodeon or ABC Family.

So in conclusion, I don't think I'll be picking up on this series. Seen it all before, and it's going to take too long to get into anything interesting. If I need a fairy tale fix, there's plenty of books and comic books out there I need to catch up on.

Things I Like: The Nostalgia Chick & Her Friends

2011-10-27T14:41:00.000-05:00

The Nostalgia Chick (a.k.a. Lindsay Ellis) is one of the vloggers on That Guy With the Glasses. Yes, yes, I know I talk about that site too much, but hear me out. She's more than another snarky deadpanner who criticizes 80's movies.

See, to understand her, you must understand her origins. She was taken into the site as the female equivalent of the The Nostalgia Critic who, due to his penis, couldn't otherwise target those female-centric blasts from the past. So she started with videos like "Labyrinth", "Thumbelina", "She-Ra", and "The Babysitters Club". Her specialty is compare-and-contrast, like "Cruel Intentions vs. Les Liasons Dangerouseses" and why "When Harry Met Sally" works and "Sleepless in Seattle" doesn't.

She's a smart cookie. She's got a degree in film and she has ambition. So she's expanded her repetoire to documentary-style like "The Smurfette Principle", a metaphysical look at why she's there, and who's come before her. Plus whole story arcs like "The Dark Nella Saga" and the "Todd in the Shadows/Obscurus Lupa/Nostalgia Chick" love triangle. It's to the point where her entry in the web page menu has expanded to Team NChick.

Team NChick consists of Nella and Elisa Hansen. Nella is the BFF who frequently gets the best lines, like in Suburban Knights where she has a cameo as Ellis's stunt double to take a punch, or the Labyrinth video ("Hey, Lindsay? Do you want some cock?" ) or a prominent role as "Dr. Block" (lab partner to "Dr. Tease", who we'll get to in a minute) and "Dark Nella". To be honest, I didn't like Nella at first. To be perfectly honest (don't worry, this will become a compliment), I thought she was ugly and fat, with her bad hair and thick glasses. She reminded me of a frumpy Velma. I know, I'm a sexist who judges on appearances.

Then I saw more of her, through the Dark Nella saga, and her other appearances, like the specials. And I fell in love with her enthusiasm, her bright eyes, her geek charm, and her archetype of an oblivious doormat. Despite Ellis's role at the forefront, Nella shines when partnered with Ellis who takes a more passive, backseat, observant role. Or maybe that's just because Nella's character is so animated and passionate. All she wants to do is be herself. She's self-actualized, something I lack in myself. Nowadays I look forward to seeing her in videos.

The other main co-star is Elisa Hansen, the tall, auburn-haired, Phantom-of-the-Opera-obsessed roommate. She's played "The Makeover Fairy", lead singer of "The Misfits" (Jem's rival band), and "Dr. Tease" a mad scientist obsessed with sexual experiments. No, not that kind. The kind that involve clipboards, lab coats, surprise interviews, and Asperger's syndrome. And, I'll just say it, she's *hawt*. She's leggy, she's got great eyes and a great smile. In any other world, she'd be unapproachable, but she has this weird fan-girl/goth energy that makes her a little crazy.

But back to Ellis. I could talk about her videos all day. Doug Walker did a good job when he selected her as his female counterpart. She's broken away somewhat from her Nostalgia critiques (where is the "Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer" review?!). I even bought the Dune RiffTrax she did with The Spoony One, another of my favorite vloggers. Instead of simply summarizing and critiqueing, she's using her knowledge of film to analyze what works and what doesn't in Roland Emmerich films, pop-girls like Ke$ha, and Disney vs. Dreamworks. What I'm trying to say is that she does good work. She's not just a counterpart, she's her own thing. She's not afraid to make the low-brow dick jokes just as she's not afraid to make intelligent examination of top film-makers.

But that's not why I like her. Lindsay does something the others don't. She's had a lot go down in her life and she's not afraid to open a vein about that. Example?

She had an abortion. And she made a documentary about it.

Of course, that's not one of her vlogs. It was for her end-of-term project. Most decide to make a movie about zombies or pretentious black-and-white art piece. Lindsay decided to make a film about her experiences, which are powerful. It's not about religion or politics. It's not propaganda. It's an honest look at what she went through. (Note: I haven't seen it, so I'm just reciting what's on the website. I'd like to see it though)

Not only that, but at the end of her TLC video she takes off the pigtails and makes some confessions regarding Lisa Lopes, the then-current death of Amy Winehouse, and some of her own struggles with friends and addiction. In a blog post, she writes about the adolescent pandering romanticism of The Band Perry's "If I Die Young", comparing it to the reality of dying young based on what she's experienced in own life.

Like Wil Wheaton, she's not afraid to speak openly about the hard personal issues. It's not easy to do that. I still haven't mentioned that my dad died a month ago. I prefer keeping my dark secrets to myself. The process of releasing them is worse than keeping them inside. But putting it on the Internet, it's like making a personal sacrifice in order to help other people. It takes great courage to do that, and that's why Lindsay Ellis is an awesome person.

Postmodern Mainstream Literary Realism (for Adults)

2011-10-26T16:04:00.000-05:00

Let's talk about 'postmodern mainstream literary realism' for a second. What does 'postmodern mainstream literary realism' mean? Basically, anything that's not genre fiction (Sci-Fi, Westerns, romances, fantasy, etc.). They're all terms for the same thing, I just lumped them together. If you see it on the NYT best sellers list, it's PMLR.

And I hate it. I can't stomach it. I can rarely read such stuff. It's pretentious, it's wordy, it's nonsensical, it's dull, it's repetitive, it's boring. I've made numerous attempts to read The Great Gatsby that ended up in failure. Then there's The Almost Moon, Heart of Darkness, The Catcher in the Rye, East of Eden. These are often the lowest rated books in my trove. Some literary books I like, e.g., Reservation Blues and The Help. But what I'm really talking about is stuff they made me read in high school and college.

Can anyone tell me what is on this cover? And where it is in the book?

I could never figure out why such books get such high accolades and praise, while they remain so unreadable. Why is it J.R.R. Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and others get continually snubbed? Now I know, thanks to an article by David Farland (to which most of this content is credited).

William Dean Howells almost single-handedly created the PMLR movement when he wrote an article decrying certain tropes. Famous historical or mythical creatures. Exotic settings. Uncommon events, like murder, arson, pillage, ghosts, beasts, escapes, shipwrecks, monsters, 5,000-year-old ladies, witches, sexual innuendo or any of the like. And no moralizing. He praised stories that dealt with mundane. The common man living an everyday life. Truthiness and honesty were the new calls to arms. Show the world as it is. Write with beautiful imagery instead of exciting events.

Personally, this sort of manifesto makes no sense to me. Why set restrictions on literature and art? Why reduce your subject matter to only the most banal conflicts and characters?

Why should anyone listen to this guy? Because Howells was the editor of The Atlantic Monthly at the time. At the time, one short story sale here could keep a writer in 'pork & beans' for a year. So of course, writers who wanted to eat paid attention and did a face-heel-turn. Thanks to this, Star Wars novelizations that outsell NYT bestsellers 3-to-1 never make a peep. It's like the MPAA using ratings to keep non-studio films down.

What happened was that, since the magazines picking up this PMLR movement were The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, etc., popular fiction & poetry moved toward elitism. This started the careers of poet snobs like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings (ooh, sorry, ee cummings, I forgot you're too good for punctuation) that used imagery to create the story.

This is not a pipe. It's a PICTURE of a pipe.

Except that doesn't work, unless you're making a comic strip. I mean, come on, read any of those poems I linked to and figure out if they mean anything profound. The only way you can translate their meaning is by continually analyzing, discussing, and guessing. And sometimes you need the writer to just up and say it, which is like having Rubik solve the cube for you.

Or how about Hemingway and Faulkner? I know your teachers assigned that stuff in high school. I already talked about these two before. Faulkner wrote about nothing. He wrote pretentious prose and words that were English but didn't go together. At least Hemingway was readable, but his stories were not stories. Hemingway left too much to be interpreted. They were half-finished or missing the parts that would cement the meaning. We call that "unformed" stories. And it's not like he did this to leave it mysterious. He knew what the proper beginning/ending was (in the case of "A Clean Well-Lighted Place", or (in the case of "Hills Like White Elephants") what the subject matter was. He purposefully chose to leave those parts off. Why? I don't know. Maybe he was a douche-bag. He certainly was one in real life.

That's where the elitism comes in. Can't you imagine a bunch of Ivy league professors with monocles and handlebar mustaches, smoking and drinking fine scotch, staring at these texts. No one knows what it means, but it seems like it should mean something. Everyone interprets it differently and each thinks he's right, which is like that old joke about the blind men and the elephant. It becomes more fun to argue about the work than to read it.

Everything became so existential and unmoralizing, absent of theme or clarity. It was like no writer could take a stand on something they wanted to say. These people write and write and write, and end up saying nothing. Except maybe something angsty about how life is meaningless. "Life's a bitch. You have sex, then you die." They were proto-emos.

And if any of you took creative writing in college, you can see what ended up happening. My professors concentrated so much on IMAGERY. Everything had to have an image associated with it. A piece had to have "beautiful imagery". We had drills where we each had to spout a powerful image gleaned from some story. And then a few days spent on point-of-view and stylistics and way too much time spent on poetry. Does any of this sell books? No.

Guess what I learned in the real world? It's about characters. Plot and characters, plot and characters, plot and characters. It's about character creation. It's about plausibility. It's about grammar, punctuation, sentence structure. It's about query letters. It's about high concept. It's about tools in the tool box. It's about writing something that people want to read. It's about not using adverbs. It's about characters that want something. It's about good villains or tough obstacles. It's about avoiding pitfalls like character soup, too much backstory, and readable prose.

Here's the real sad part. Howells didn't make his proclamation based on any sort of research or looking at past, overused trends. No. Howells was a socialist. He made his proclamation to further his political agenda. He wanted more work about economic issues, to serve as propaganda. He had no interest in furthering literature as an art.

And it shows. Genre fiction's never been more popular, only no one will admit it. Nearly every top-grossing movie is genre-based. Except for Titanic, which is romance, you have to get to #39 (The Da Vinci Code -- a mystery) before you get something that would be on the NYT best sellers list. You might say that's simply popular vote, not critically acclaimed. Oscar nods feature the occasional angst story like "The Kids Are All Right" and "Winter's Bone", but there's also "Black Swan", "Toy Story 3", and "Inception".

There's plenty of great works before and after PMLR that have witches and ghosts -- works of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare. I don't care that the elitists don't like it, but you have to at least acknowledge it. You can't look at a book that's outselling every other and say "Oh, that one doesn't count. It has elves. They don't exist," or "Unless it takes place in the real world, it's commercial fiction meant to appeal to the masses."

The only restrictions you should place on a book are that it must not be boring, it must not be incomprehensible, and it must have something to say. PMLR is a genre just like any other -- it has its own features like its settings (contemporary, in the real world), themes (it doesn't moralize), characters (non-special, everyday joes), and style (high imagery and unformed-ness). Acknowledge that. Live that. Learn from that.

And I'll be in my spaceship if you need me.

Featured Fan Fiction: Balamb Garden's Yuletide Vacation (Final Fantasy 8)

2011-10-24T16:05:00.000-05:00

I think this is the only true comedy in my list. Sunshine in Winter is close, but that is more of a tragic romance. This is more like a Shakespearean comedy of errors. Plus it's Christmas-themed to boot.

It puts our favorite FF8 characters through all the great holiday stories. Squall becomes Mr. Scrooge. Zell is in "It's a Wonderful Life". Seifer plays "Phantom of the Opera" (okay, maybe they're not all Christmas-themed). Quistis deals with her relationship with a boring man and the mystery of Seifer. And Christmas carols proliferate throughout. It's a feel-good story -- a rare gem in a medium filled with angst and drama.

These may seem cliche, but in fact, the story deals with them in a clever way. There's a lot of story threads in this piece, and they're all wonderful. I especially love the Maison Ikkoku tribute/theft. The writers actually tried to take it seriously, without taking it too seriously. This story inspired me to write "A Caleb Carol".

The best thing is the humor. I think it's a great read around Christmas, and fills the heart with love. I wish I knew who the "selfappointed stabmeisters" were -- they seem to be a collective, but there are no tracebacks to any of them. I bet there were some good writers in there.

Balamb Garden's Yuletide Vacation

Things I Like: Hannah Hart & My Drunk Kitchen

2011-10-20T15:56:00.000-05:00

YouTube is overloaded with TV shows, webcam series, and just about everything. I can't remember where I heard of it, but one of my favorites, even though it doesn't update very often, is My Drunk Kitchen hosted by Hannah Hart.

What is My Drunk Kitchen? Pretty much what you think it is. A cooking show with copious amounts of alcohols, usually wine or mimosas. What makes it fun is the host, whose patience for baking extends slightly longer than a mosquito's nose. She makes grilled cheese but forgets the cheese, puts cookies in a muffin pan, and calls tacos "a most versatile fruit".

Besides Hart's fairy-like charm as she flits from stove to fridge to bottle, she's a master editor. Some vloggers simply cut out pauses and it makes the narrative frantic and jumpy. Hannah does it the right way, keeping things entertaining, but also chronological. It's amazing how much humor you can get simply from cutting to certain shots. And it's not just her shows. Her twitter, her tumbler, her other videos, all contain hilarity, and it's clear she's just a fun girl to be around.

I remember one time I had nearly a whole bottle of cake-flavored vodka. (BTW, this isn't, like, in college or anything. This is last month. That stuff is evil, it tastes like Schnapps.) I had two choices -- go to bed, which I usually do, and then wake up with a hangover and stay in bed for half the day, trying to avoid the kids. Or stay up later and let my body metabolize the alcohol. I chose the latter -- better to be sleepy than in pain.

And what do you want to do when you're drunk? Hang out with other drunk people? So I watched all the "My Drunk Kitchen" videos and laughed my ass off while Hannah did her thing, dropping pans, making fun of weird sounds, checking out her eyeball, and drinking a shitload of wine, while I tried to sober up eating a metric ton of Cheerios. Actually, I had a measured amount, but then I spilled a bunch. So I was like, fuck it, and just kept eating and went to bed when I ran out, which was 1 in the morning.

So that's how that works. For a sampling, look no further. Here's one of my favorite episodes.

Pawn Stars Lies

2011-10-19T12:05:00.000-05:00

Okay. Television. There's a lot of reasons why you're having trouble getting viewers. TiVo, over-saturation of options (not just cable, but Internet too), stilted writers, lengthy commercial breaks, piracy, and a slew of other things. So you've got to do your best to make people watch. Here's the quickest way to get me not to watch.

Lie to me.

Para ejemplo, I was watching Pawn Stars the other night. During one of the commercial teasers, they were talking about a jet fighter G-Suit someone brought in, and they showed the "expert" they always bring in looking around it and it ends with: "And what's this under the helmet?".

I, being an idiot, wanted to see what was under the helmet, despite the fact I have no interest in jet fighters, G-Suits, pawn shops, or historical artifacts. Maybe it was the cold I have talking. I was hoping it was a secret note from a past lover.

When they came back from break, they didn't go to the G-Suit right away. They went to some police badge (BTW, why do they only show the people trying to sell stuff? I want to see the people who buy this crap). And they go on and on, and then back to the G-suit. They go through the sale and they don't do the "And what's this under the helmet?" thing.

The rest of the show goes on, so I figure, maybe this'll be something one of the fat cronies discovers later. Maybe it'll be the stinger over the credits. I sit through another long commercial break where the History Channel advertises all its shows that have nothing to do with history.

And the episode eventually falls to a close with the big fat guy sleeping in his chair.

I'm pretty sure he's some kind of Star Wars alien

Man was I pissed. Never am I going to forget how I wasted my time waiting to see what was under helmet and got diddly-bop in return. Fuck you, show. You can do whatever you want to me, but if you fail to deliver on what you promised, you can suck it. This isn't like movie trailers where you have scenes that are just for the trailer (although I don't much care for that either). It's like writing -- you make an agreement to the reader on page one that this is going to be what the story's going to be about, this is the writing style, these are the characters. Failure to adhere to that agreement results in you sucking.

Thanks, Pawn Stars. You have lost a viewer.

Protobeer

2011-10-17T09:44:00.004-05:00

So I inherited a Mr. Beer container and some equipment. Since I'm a big fan of alcohol in mass quantities and not having to pay for things, I thought this might be fun.

I have ingredients for two brews. My first one was a blonde ale. I made it according to the directions, which I later learned are sorely inaccurate. It does not have the right timing, it doesn't have the right amount of priming sugar to add.

I did some things wrong on my own too. I didn't sanitize the bottles sufficiently. I may not have cleaned the keg enough. And I have no idea how old the yeast I used was. Still, this is an experiment in beer-making -- hence the term: protobeer.

The result? Well... it's drinkable, I guess. It tastes like mineral water. Or a poor man's version of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It's cidery and watery at the same time. Personally, I was just happy that it was carbonated. And there is alcohol in there, so that's good.

My next phase after following the included instructions is to make beer following the real instructions. I will also be using unhopped malt instead of a booster pouch. I have no idea what the difference is in terms of taste, so that'll be fun.

Merm-8 Revision 3 Finished

2011-10-13T15:03:00.001-05:00

All right! Barely a week after I complained about the revision taking so long, I actually got done. I'd go out to celebrate, but I have a cold and taste is at a minimum right now. I'd rather wait and enjoy it. I can't even taste the beer I made right now (more on that later).

It's a pretty good revision too. I even managed to reduce the word count. My artifacts weren't that bad, and most of the changes took place in the beginning. That might've been because I ran out of steam, or it might've been because my writing improved. I know what prefer to believe.

Now the question is do I let it incubate, or do I run my macros? I'm pretty exhausted from staring at this manuscript for a few months. But do I want to do it while it's still fresh in my head? Or do I want to let it incubate and come back to it fresh? Which one is better?

Because as I do the macros, at this point, there are so many that my eyes tend to cross. The macros are nearly entirely mechanical and stylistic in nature. Things like highlighting adverbs, sentences that start with the same word, digits that should be written out, and so on. Some require some hard thinking. Some don't.

Ah well. This post is more to establish the benchmark. Onward! Excelsior!

Things You Should Know About: MarzGurl Picks Apart Twilight

2011-10-13T14:35:00.000-05:00

MarzGurl is one of the Channel Awesome (A.K.A. Doug Walker's That Guy With the Glasses) vloggers. She specializes in anime and the works of Don Bluth, which are a lot more comprehensive than I thought. Plust she looked smoking hot as Princess Mononoke in Suburban Knights. Channel Awesome's more known for their videos, but right now MarzGurl is doing something I think is fairly important.

She's examining Twilight, the book, as she reads it. She was curious what all the fuss was about, as any good geek should do, and is posting a literary analysis as she goes on.

I'm really impressed with the level of detail. She's looking at exactly what is wrong chapter by chapter, specializing in Stephanie Meyer the writer and Bella the character. And it's not just good because Twilight deserves to be bashed (and if you don't believe me, click the link). It's good for writers. It shows the level of detail you need to go into when making a novel, unless you want to reveal yourself as an incompetent fraud.

For example, in the first few pages, it's immediately clear that Meyer has no idea what time her story is taking place. Bella starts in Phoenix, AZ and going to upper Washington state. Even though it's not relevant to the plot (what plot?), MarzGurl does a great job illustrating that, by the context clues, there's no way to determine what time of year it is. The temperatures and precipitation cited are inconsistent with the real world. It's clear that the author herself doesn't know, and doesn't care. And that's bad writing.

Not to mention the great descriptions of how apathetic, ungrateful, shallow, whining, and manipulative Bella is. Before we even learn about Edward, she has three other boys pursuing her, and she doesn't give a rip. Yet she claims to be unattractive and plain.

Not to mention Meyer's writing style. I've never read her books, but I can see right away, by the passages MarzGurl points out, how inconsistent and nonsensical her prose is. People don't sound like they're talking to each other. They don't sound like real people, let alone teenagers (she did get one part right - that they're self-centered). Plus her characterization hops from one mood to the other, with no motivations. There's a lot of "and then" connectors, but "but" and "therefore" like there should be. She can't decide if Bella wants to be noticed or unnoticed. She can't decide if Edward wants to be around Bella or not. She can't even decide what time it is.

So check it out. Twilight fan or not. You'll be glad you did.

MarzGurl Picks Apart Twilight: The Novel

The New Sink

2011-10-12T08:49:00.000-05:00

One of my heroes is Adam Carolla. He's a working man with good horse sense from working with conservative blue-collar types and liberal Hollywood types. One of his favorite issues is the "pussification" of males today. That men don't know how to change a tire, can't move a couch, and that they seem to take pride in this (e.g., "I couldn't change my oil to save my life!") They are constantly hiring out basic DIY jobs to others that because they don't know how to do hard work. And this is diminishing the work-ethic of America.

I used to believe this, until I tried to put in a kitchen sink. Then I realized it's not simply a matter of unwillingness. It's about applied knowledge.

Well, of course, the first thing we did when we bought the new sink (and faucet) was make sure it measured right, and we checked the current set-up to make sure there were no parts on one side that didn't match on the other. We saw two hoses going from the faucet down to the shut-off valves glued onto copper pipes. Seemed like a simple enough procedure: shut off the water (via the shut-off valves under the sink), disconnect the tubes, pry up the sink and place in the new one, connect the new faucet to the tubes. All done.

Mental approximation of sink set-up

The first problem was that the faucet hoses would not plug in. Why? I don't know. The instructions indicated they would connect directly to the shut-off valves. And from there were two junky, plastic tubes (again, glued on, not screwed on as expected) resulting in a female-to-female connection that wouldn't work. Enter trip #1 to the hardware store.

Since we had no idea what we were looking at, I stayed at home and waited while my wife went, taking a digital picture of the set-up with, in case we were missing something simple. No, not really. She called back saying the shut-off valves weren't supposed to be glued like that, thanks to the cheap, save-a-buck-anywhere construction that new homes get these days. So she said to pop off the shut-off valves.

I worked on that for ten minutes. I really tried too, I thought I should be able to pry them off with my new going-to-the-gym strength. But I ended up cutting up my hands. I called her back saying it was impossible. She borrowed a pipe-cutter from the hardware store (now we're just going to destroy shit) and bought two new shut-off valves. Unplanned purchase #1.

No blueprints included.

So we took off the old plastic junk and put on the two new valves (making sure to shut off the house water first. We're stupid, not dumb.) Unfortunately, the shut-off valves keep leaking. Half an hour of running up and down the stairs, shutting the house water off and on, yelling up to announce my actions. No matter what we try, how much we tighten it using lion-like strength, it's not working. Now we cannot turn the water on in our house, because we have no way to shut-off the copper pipes. (My three-year-old tells me "Dad, we're out of water!")

Luckily, a plumber in the area came over to fix this. He installs newer shut-off valves -- the third generation -- so we can turn on the water again. (My wife and I are secretly hoping he can install the whole sink, but he says he doesn't have time to do that). For his ten minutes of work, we paid $$$125. Basically we paid him for his knowledge and tools, not for any hard labor or difficult task. We could get that knowledge and tools... with classes and many purchases for things that would have a one-time use. And we haven't even made forward progress yet.

After some prying of the old sink, double-checking that the sink fits, and clean up of icky water/bacteria residue, we are now ready to start assembling the sink/faucet before implantation. But there's a problem. The rounded base just sliiiiiiightly overlaps the left sink well (because it's not symmetrical) when we put it in the center hole.

See the base? It's a liiiiiiiitle too long, dammit.

Now we could drill a hole into the sink--it's designed for that--but, again, we do not have a drill bit sufficient to drill into granite composite. We are not thrilled with this concept, because we're fielding worse than a drunk Bill Buckner (it's October, I'm allowed one Bill Buckner reference). Plus it's a nice new sink we don't want to ruin. Enter trip #2 to Menards.

Apparently we needed a one hole faucet.

We take the kids with us this time, since it's a thirty minute journey one way. They're starved for attention and are almost due for naps, and dad's been yelling at them this entire time because he's hot, hungry, frustrated, and needs to poop but is too angry and determined to get this shit done to poop. But of course, this goes as well as one expects, with the wandering, the wanting of treats, the running around, the hiding behind boxes. We quickly choose a faucet that fits a one-hole sink, but it's $$$40 more.

Once home, we put the kids down for naps--at least that's one distraction eliminated--and eat a little nosh. Now we are moving ahead. The faucet fits nicely into the sink. The sink fits nicely in the counter, although it takes three tries. One of us has to be below it, holding it up, while the other does the impossible job of perfectly aligning it onto the Plumber's Putty, which neither of us have ever worked with before, and don't know how thick to make it. It looks like we've laid the sink on baking bread.

We make the putty thinner and lay it on again, while we fasten the "sink clamps". I don't know what they are--the old sink didn't have them, I don't know how they attach to either the sink or the wall, I studied the picture for ten minutes and still don't understand how these things are supposed to work. Fortunately, my wife does, bless her heart, and fastens them all. But not before we break one during the alignment process, which means we have to pull the damn thing out again and get putty everywhere.

It's now mid-afternoon. We started at eight o'clock in the morning. But things are going smoother. The pipes and tubes connect without spraying water everywhere. It feels like I'm working on an engine, since I'm on my back, amongst the sewer-y aura of the open PVC pipes. And my back is soaked with water absorbed by the towel we laid down. In the process of reconnecting things, we discover that the new sink is too short for the PVC pipes we had, just by an inch. Wife makes trip #3 to the hardware store to get a new one. Unplanned purchase #4.

Finally, my wife caulks the sink while I try and get the kids ready to go out to dinner. Caulk gets everywhere. The area by the backsplash, where the water mostly splashes, doesn't get sealed well because the faucet is there. Plus it's too narrow to get the caulk gun through. Lots of paper towels were used that day. After that, not much to tell. The water ran, and the pipes didn't leak, so now we got a new sink.

But look at what we had to go through. I'm not even thinking about what we spent on the sink and faucet. I'm still thinking that we spent about $200 before we even started. How cheaper was it to put in ourselves? How many days did I take off my life from the stress? How irreparably did I damage my relationship with my family?

I'm not ranting about this because I'm venting or making fun of my own masculine incompetence. This is to prove a point. There is a reason that men aren't doing these jobs anymore. It's too difficult. This is not shit you can do in a day or save money on by DIY. There's no way that, by looking at the garbage disposal, that it just twists off. That's a four-layer ring/disc contraption that I've never seen before, nor know how it works. I would have been trying to unscrew everything, probably damaging it in the process and never knowing how to put it back together.

Work is becoming more and more specialized these days. I'm sure the same principle would apply if anyone tried to do some programming. They'd take one look at the gobbledygook of code and their eyes would bug out. But I know exactly what it's trying to do. The problem is, I spent so much time learning that language I had no inclination to learn plumbing or home repair or anything working with my hands.

I guess this is why we never see Mario do any real plumbing.

Rut

2011-10-10T08:49:00.001-05:00

As you can tell, I haven't been doing well with keeping off the Internet these days. Perhaps more so, I feel like I've been in a rut. Except for my designated time at lunch, I haven't been doing any writing. Of course, that's why I have my designated lunch period.

Maybe the autumn allergies are getting to me--I wake up every morning with a runny nose and grumpy demeanor. And haven't been getting proper sleep because one kid has a nightmare and the other coughs all night. I'm starting to get sick of revising Merm-8, just because I've been working on it for... how long? (checks blog entries) Started integrating critiques in July and started revision 3 in August. Maybe I'm getting a little sick of the universe. Not that I hate it, but I find myself drifting towards the universe I'm making for future stories.

Some days I'm more in love with the idea of writing than the actual writing. My ideas exist perfectly in my head, and when they get down to paper, they change. Ever so slightly. But the mood I expect to project comes out wrong. Sometimes I dread the actual composition process, but once I get into it, I don't mind it so much.

I haven't written any short stories meant to be published since I stopped working on that 50 foot romance story. I'm not sure why I'm avoiding that. Maybe because it's harder? I'm sick of keeping track of the rejections? Maybe I'm not getting enough encouragement to continue?

It would be nice to get some positive feedback once in a while, but that's the life of a writer. You've got to do it for yourself above all else.

Good Writers Don't Use the Internet

2011-09-22T14:33:00.002-05:00

I would apologize for not writing much on the blog lately, but I don't want to be one of those bloggers who acts as if they care, as if they have a large audience hanging on their every word, who goes on an extended absence, says they're sorry, and then continue their extended absence. There are plenty of more interesting sites out there, and you should be using an RSS aggregator, like Google Reader, to tell when there's an update anyway. It's better than visiting it once a day, then being disappointed that you see the same post you saw the day before, and the day before, and the day before.

The truth is that work's been busy, I'm working on meta-projects, such as pre-writing, a personal cookbook, and all the other miscellaneous things that come up. I'm still working on Mermaid Story, in the middle of the 3rd revision. But other than that, not really doing any writing. Part of that is being distracted by the Internet.

Yes, yes, I know. Nothing kills a writing boner faster than that dang Internet. I've picked up some bookmarks that are terribly time-consuming, like The Daily What and all the videos on TGWTG.com, especially Brad Jones, Paw, and The Spoony One. Hell, I'm watching one right now.

It's not that these are taking up all my time, it's that these are more interesting than the drudgery of composing, generating ideas, and proof-reading. I'd rather watch videos of critics revisiting all my favorite past loves, like TMNT, crappy Nintendo games, horror movies, and realizing how much crap they shoved at kids. (And the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm looking at you, Dora).

But as much as I try to hide behind nostalgic love and a "teaching moment" to learn where these pieces went wrong, the fact is I'm not producing work. Not written work, at least. Not that work that more than a handful of people are going to see. So I've got to make sure I allot more time for reading and writing, and less for watching the Top 10 Greatest Tales from the Crypt Episodes.

I Believe in the Oxford Comma

2011-09-19T09:37:00.002-05:00

Doctor Who is Fantasy, not Science Fiction

2011-09-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

Can we all agree that Doctor Who is about fantasy, not science? The things it's about transcend the rules of the natural world. It's not about scientific principles or technological premises. It pretty much fulfills the axiom "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Now look, I'm no Doctor Who expert. I've seen the first season of the reboot (Christopher Eccleston) and part of the second (David Tennant). I've never seen anything science fiction with a space/timeship that spends so little time in space and so little deviation from Earth's 19th and 20th century.

The Doctor is a wizard. He can die and come back to life. That sonic screwdriver? It's a magic wand. It does everything. It locks doors, turns off computers, knocks out people, destroys things, charges batteries, scans things, lights things on fire, cuts, lights things up. The only thing missing is a shout of "Wingardium Leviosa!" Its functions are never explained, its method of operation never touched on. It's magic.

Regeneration? Magic. Exactly how is that supposed to work? Is there any concept of death for Time Lords? If it was a time thing I might understand, but life does not and cannot work that way. The TARDIS? Magic. Seems to go wherever it wants. I've never seen such a dangerous instrument piloted so badly. Psychic paper? Do I need to say it?

And half the episodes have nothing to do with science. They're rooted in fantasy. Werewolves, ghosts in the machine, portals through a fireplace, gargoyles, ghosts with Charles Dickens, clockwork robots, more ghosts. The ones that do deal with science have such bad science that it's impossible not to notice.

In "New Earth" they discover a hospital with thousands of capsules full of humans that are infected with "everything". What? Everything? Yeah, that's how they explain it. Every disease. Ever. And they're all still alive. But the only way to get infected is to touch them. Apparently, "every disease" does not include anything airborne. But one touch and you shrivel up and die immediately.

So the Doctor cures them all. How? He pours every bottle of the hospital's IV fluids on himself, then touches the infected. They touch others and spread the "cure". Yeah. That's how medical science works.

And then on the episode I'm on now, they're facing the devil. The DEVIL. How am I supposed to take this as anything but fantasy? You're fighting the DEVIL.

Daleks? Sure, they're kinda scientific. Cybermen? Yeah, not much fantasy about them. They both run on batteries. But really, you gotta spend a little time out of England. I don't care that the series takes the turns it does, but for God's sake, don't call it science fiction if there's no science.

And if I have angered you, please enjoy this acapella version of the theme song.

The Books I Read: June - August 2011

2011-09-08T13:39:00.002-05:00

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Before George R. R. Martin released his latest doorstopper, this was the big epic taking up every fantasy geek's time. My interest became piqued when Penny Arcade made a joke about the second book in the trilogy. As was my friend's, who let me borrow the first book, The Name of the Wind. I loved it right away.

The book is framed story about the life of a boy/man named Kvothe, a son of traveling actors. After his troupe is killed by a supposedly mythical person, he has to learn how to live and survive alone. His primary goal is to learn who killed his parents, why they were killed, and probably revenge. But all this often gets side-tracked as he learns magic (called "arcanum" and related to Voodoo and quantum mechanics), becomes homeless, and enters college on a shoestring budget.

It is an awesome book. But it is long. I think it took me a month and a half to read. And the sequel's even longer. I didn't know much about Patrick Rothfuss before, but I love him now. It's a great book for epic fantasy, and the only way it feels like a long book is if you keep looking at where your bookmark is.

Some people don't like that the plot meanders so much. I don't like books that do that either, unless they've earned it. And Kvothe earns it because everything he does is so fascinating. He's a charming man, but he's not a douche. The world is fascinating, the characters are fascinating, and all the distractions and "interesting side-tracks" are what makes the book fun. It's like if Harry Potter had pubes.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

One for book club. My least favorite of the books for this period. It seemed like I already read this book when it was called "A Thousand Splendid Suns" -- oppressed people, Romeo X Juliet love, backwards family living in the past that doesn't understand you.

The story is about a Chinese boy living in Seattle during WWII, when Japanese were being sent to internment camps. The boy likes a Japanese girl, who gets interned. Meanwhile he's got to deal with stereotypical bullies, his fundamentalist father, and where his nationalist loyalties lie. Oh, and while this is happening, the story flashes to the present in 1986, where they can somehow digitize LP records. And the main character has petty, meaningless problems with his own son.

I've never read anything more pedantic and predictable. This story is like so many books oriented towards book clubs. It was tedious, and I never gave one rip about the character, because he acts like such a puss. I was never convinced he cared one whit about the Japanese girl. I would have rather read the story about her, and her experience in the internment camp. She had the more interesting obstacles to overcome.

But seriously, I don't recommend this book. There is nothing new, there is nothing interesting. There are no new ideas put forth, there is no emotion therein.

Abortion Arcade by Cameron Pierce

A free book from the bizarro genre. There really is no definition for bizarro fiction that can sufficiently explain it. I've read a few others. Bizarro puts the "B" in B-movie schlock. Let's just say there are people using amputated breasts as suction cups for climbing.

There are three novellas in this book: one has humans farmed by zombies, one is kinda "Teen Wolf"-ish, and the last is kind of an avantgarde piece with symbolism, but it doesn't really make sense. Actually, none of the stories make sense. But that's not really what bothers me--stories don't have to make sense as long as they're cohesive. But the first novella ends before it concludes (and it was my favorite, so I was sad), the second had no firm plot and poor characters, and the third was just incoherent.

Like B-movies, they're shocking for the sake of being shocking, with gross concepts, blood, and "eww" moments. Not my favorite bizarro work.

Goth Girl Rising by Barry Lyga

Okay, seriously, I need to know who this guy is. When I first wrote about "The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl", I talked about much it reminded of "Blood: I Live Again". This story is the sequel, and again, it has a bunch of commonalities with the sequel I WROTE.

1. Both take the POV of a totally different character in they mythos.
2. Both of the main characters have suicide attempts in their record. By wrist cutting. Both take place before the story starts.
3. Both spent time at a mental hospital. Mine during the middle third of the novel, his before the story.
4. Both have dead mothers. Both died of cancer.
5. Both have ignorant, screw-up fathers who don't know how to be parents.
6. Both find a way to redemption and resolution through a significant other. Mine, however, fails to achieve that redemption.

Of course, the similarities are really character based. The plot lines couldn't be more different. Mine focuses on college instead of high school. A large portion takes place in a mental hospital, then a cult in the Carpathian mountains. And there's magic and shit too.

I found this book remarkable because the first was semi-autobiographical. But the second takes the POV of a girl. And a seriously messed up girl. An obnoxious, self-centered girl -- that works as a secondary, but as a main character?

Like the first, there's a lot of thinking, ruminating, and introverted rants as teens do. I suppose it's part of the character, but it just goes on too long. It fills the book, and the plot elements tend to be diminished. But I liked the plot events that did happen. Although they weren't real exciting, they were true to characters. So I guess this is better as a "true" book than a "good" book. If that makes any sense.

The Nex by Tim Pratt

Since Pratt couldn't find a publisher for this book (and for stupid reasons, like it's an techy adventure tale with a female protagonist), he posted it online. I do like Tim Pratt's short stories. They're some of the best on EscapePod and PodCastle. This book is pretty good too, but doesn't feel... I don't know, original enough? I can't help but draw parallels to "Alice in Wonderland". Which is fine, but this is much a milieu book. It's more about discovering a fantastic world than about the characters. Which is fine, I guess, if you're into that sort of thing. Maybe I'm getting too old.

The characters consist of a shapeshifter and a non-corporeal entity composed of micro-particles. I've seen those done, but never together. The main enemy is a power-hungry dictator, but there's nothing special about him. The macguffin is a device that can teleport yourself or something else anywhere, and works on applied phlebotium.

The main character's character is not particularly touched on. The main character's power is a little too powerful. The ending is wrapped just a little quickly. But really, it's a fun novel. They go to fun places. They do fun things. The voice is fun. And the price is right. I'd say there is no reason not to read this book.

Looking for Alaska by John Green

A re-read, and my choice for book club. You can read my original review here. It's interesting the things you pick up on during the second read. The narrative does not begin with any kind of interesting hook. And the main character is kind of unlikeable, as his motivations are barely explained, except that he's going to boarding school to escape the dull, unambitious students at public. And there are some scenes that I forgot about that make a large difference in his character and the plot.

I don't think everyone "got" the book as much as I did. I chose it because I thought it well represented my teenage male psyche: crushes on unattainable girls, being in love with the idea of a girl more than the person, the introversion, the willingness to follow, the loneliness. I'm not sure why response was not enthusiastic from anyone. Maybe it's hard for girls to understand guys. Maybe because I was trying to inform instead of entertain, and that never goes well. Next time I'll be picking a book I haven't read. Lord knows I've got enough on my list to choose from.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Will Become Superman (1978)

2011-09-06T14:41:00.000-05:00

What hath God wraught?

Time will not be kind to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. I have come to this realization. Its the Marvel equivalent of Christopher Reeve's Superman. It lit the fuse for superhero movies, but hasn't nearly the explosive power its successors will (X-Men, Iron Man, etc.). The movies were a well-loved phenomenom now, but the trilogy is finished. And a reboot is months away, only ten years after the first. Why?

I hardly need to say much that hasn't already been said. Sure, they're good movies. Sometimes great. Good casting. Well imagined. Fun special effects. And far be it from me to disrespect anything with Bruce Campbell in it. But Sam Raimi is the guy who made The Evil Dead, Darkman, and dozens of cheesy syndicated TV shows like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. He is not used to big-budget productions.

But everything in it is comical. Sometimes comically good, like the upside-down kiss, to the comically bad, like Green Goblin's outfit. There are so many moments that are just stupid, awful, or stupidly awful. Characters toss the idiot ball back to each other, doing things no one with a lick of sense would do, for the sake of the plot. That's plausibility, my friends. That must be there, or everything falls.

I've never seen superheroes cry so much until SM3. Yeah, Sam Raimi's trying to appeal to the humanity of these characters, but the first movie was the time for that. Maybe some of the second. But not the third. The thing that cannot be forgiven is that Raimi stopped being true to the spirit of the material. And the spirit of the material is chop-socky comic book action. It's not Sandman lamenting over his daughter or Norman Osborn arguing with himself or Mary Jane being a bipolar pill. It should be called "Peter Parker, the Spider-Man".

You know what people wanted to see through all three movies? Venom! You know what we didn't see? Venom! I'm all for a writer staying true to his/her vision, but part of a successful work is giving the audience what they want. And the audience wants Venom. So what'd you do? You stuck him on that kid from That 70's Show for a few bullshit scenes at the end. Fuck you, Raimi, for not delivering.

The Nostalgia Critic's already cited the Top 11 Dumbest Spider-Man Moments. Here's the quick rundown: too many American flags, irrelevant characters, hokey extras, bad CG, lack of Venom, terrible romance, bizarre AI on Doc Ock's arms, the first movie's comic book dialogue, emo Peter Parker, Willem DaFoe hamming it up, and the dance scene.

To me, it sounds a lot like the 1978 Superman. Good casting, fun special effects (for its time), but comical in all the wrong places. Lex Luthor, with his moll and single bumbling henchman, seemed more like The Three Stooges. Marlon Brando has fifteen minutes of screen time and as many lines, while eating half the budget. The bad romance with ~~Buster Keaton~~ Clark Kent. Plus all the things I find wrong with Superman in the first place.

So that's why it seems to me that the Spider-Man movies will go down as a first try. A reflection of what it could have been, and what it will be.

My Fantasy Football Team This Year

2011-09-02T11:02:00.002-05:00

So I had my Fantasy Football draft last night. Here's the 2011-2012 edition of Juneau's Juggernauts.

Philip Rivers (QB) - San Diego Chargers
-A modest leader. He is taking the role of the quarterback after the former was shot during a failed revolution. Although unfamiliar with the position, Rivers must attempt to be a strong presence in a chaotic land. But will he be able to succeed when he finds out that one of his futrue opponents is his own father?

Miles Austin (WR) - Dallas Cowboys
-Miles Austin is the pseudonym of a yorbagatrax -- an alien trying to learn human ways. He learned that the biggest difference between the strongest sovereign territory on the planet and any others is the existence of a form of entertainment known as "American football". And like any good scientist knows, the best way to learn about something is to do it. But with fellow player Steven Jackson becoming suspicious, how much longer will his disguise last? (I say "his" for simplicity's sake, since a yorbagatrax has five genders.)

Jeremy Maclin (WR) - Philadelphia Eagles
-A man trying to do right by his daughter. He has a former past with the drug "Bash", a powerful, highly addictive muscle enhancement that has the power to create hallucinations of structures that look like boobs. Now clean, he's joined the team in hopes of proving he still has what it takes to be an athlete. But how long will he stay sober when he finds out Owen Daniels is the creator of "Bash"?

Rashard Mendenhall (RB) - Pittsburgh Steelers
-Absent last year due to being kidnapped and forced to participate in a killer martial arts tournament. He was the only survivor, after defeating Kinzo Matsuzishi, the tournament champion, who planned to merge his corporation with an extradimensional dragon. Mendenhall, with his signature Power-Pack Punch move, defeated Matsuzishi in the bowels of Shimatta's Caverns, keeping the Earth Realm safe for another 900 years.

Steven Jackson (RB) - St. Louis Rams
-A follower of the Star Wars movies, his dream is to become an actor in Hollywood. However, the twin assassin sisters, Yolanda and Baranda, stand in his way. Jackson escaped into the league to avoid them, but every so often, he sees the glow of their neon cloaks skulking around the stands. Is that them in the hot dog bin? Are they in the mascot costume? What's in this water? Do I know you? Is that a poison autograph pen? What about my pickle?

Owen Daniels (TE) - Houston Oilers
-Delivered a pizza into the stadium and got lost. They put a suit on him, and sent him out during a preseason game. No one noticed the difference.

Garrett Hartley (K) - New Orleans Saints
-Really a wizard.

Jon Beason (LB) - Carolina Panthers, James Harrison (LB) - Pittsburgh Steelers, D.J. Williams (LB) - Denver Broncos
-The defensive line. A triple threat, the three met in college during a Super Smash Brothers tournament. They discovered that with their combined powers, they can call on the awesome power of Commander Jupiter! Protector of the Earth and fighter for great justice. Unfortunately, league rules prevent summoning of gods or demi-gods during play.

Yeremiah Bell (S) - Miami Dolphins
-Has a record of reaching 128 kill screens in arcade games. Football is part of his rehabilitation. Plans to become a puppeteer after the season. Owns a pet xebec. What's a xebec? I don't know, he won't tell us. Also plans on suing Taco Bell with his winnings for copyright infringement.

Robert Mathis (DE) - Indianapolis Colts
The son of a slain mob boss. By winning the season, he intends to restore his family legacy to its rightful place by cornering the market on jock straps. Well, one has to start small. First, he takes over the league, then the world. Now if he could only stop buying all those Transformer toys.

London Fletcher (LB) - Washington Redskins
As the star linebacker, he is the lone wolf. He has fish and chips before every game, and afterwards, he takes a wicked googly down the tube to the loo. He spends most of his time trying to convince people he's not British.

My Writing Tools

2011-09-01T14:02:00.000-05:00

Hey, why not a writing post? Every artist needs a medium to present their art. And they need tools and resources to make that art. In my first post, I'll talk about what tools I use. In the second, I'll talk about my writing process. In the third, I'll talk about my useful writing bookmarks.

The Computer

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad with an AMD Athlon II. It has a 6-cell battery (lasts about 2-2.5 hours), 15.6" widescreen, 4GB of RAM, and Windows 7. It's nowhere near a top-of-the-line laptop, but I don't need one. In fact, I shouldn't have one. The last thing I need is the ability to play video games when I should be writing. Left 4 Dead does not count as zombie research.

I used to have an IBM T40, which I called "Ol' Clunky", but served my purposes at the time. If I had too many browsers open, it would slow down to unusability. Plus the battery had declined to the point where I couldn't have a 45 minute writing session without needing to recharge. For both of these, my price point was $500. I have a hard time spending money on writing tools when I've yet to earn anything resembling decent cash from it.

To be honest, I'm not that fond of my new ThinkPad. Mostly has to do with the new keyboard. The keys are closer and the trackpad is wider. This means the meat of my thumb is often unconsciously pressing at the same time my finger is. There used to be keys linked to "Back" and "Forward" on the browser, but not anymore. For the function keys, I have to actually hold "Fn" to activate them. Otherwise they do the default laptop hardware actions, like switch video modes, hibernate, etc. I'll have to pay close attention to the keyboard layout on my next lappy.

The Software

Speaking of being ~~cheap~~ frugal, let's talk about materials. For my word processor, I use Microsoft Word 2003. I used to use Microsoft 2000 and OpenOffice, but dammit, I love that you can hide the headers and footers in page layout.

Like this

You'd think I'd use OpenOffice. You can't beat the price. But it takes forever to load and the interface, while extremely customizable, isn't that user-friendly. The other thing is that I can't use my macros. They won't compile -- something about Microsoft's Visual Basic. Not that it surprises me. Nonetheless, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

There is specific software to write a novel. One is yWriter, designed by the guy who wrote Hal Spacejock. I've installed the program and given it a look. Seems pretty nice, but it has more than I need. You can break down scenes, summaries, project notes, characters, locations, and items. Set deadlines, writing goals, and import files. My problem is that it feels more like designing a video game than writing a novel. Takes the organic-ness out of it, and since I'm an outliner, I need all the organic-ness I can get.

The Tools

When I start up my computer, I have a batch file (a .BAT file) called writing.bat that opens up all the programs and files I need to do my work.

First is Google Chrome. I find this to be the better browser. Clearly, IE ain't it for reasons that I don't need to reiterate. Firefox is nice, but it's bulky. It's great for developers, and the plugins are great. But it starts up slow, updates too often, and takes a lot of memory. But if not for Firefox, there would be no Chrome. Chrome is fast, its efficient, and can do anything Firefox can do.

But that's enough browser pandering. What do I use the browser for? I'll go into my bookmarks later, but I always keep a tab for Thesaurus.com open. Otherwise, Wikipedia and Google are frequent mainstays. And, I must admit some guilt here: I keep a page on Devilfinder to look at pictures of pretty girls as a distraction. Hey, I'm a guy.

Then I have it open three Word documents. One is the current draft of my novel that I'm working on. One is the novel's timeline/chapter breakout. And last is my novel notes. More on those in a later post. Finally, it opens Winamp and a timer.

The Other Stuff

I use Winamp to play my background music. This changes drastically depending on what I'm writing. I like atmosphere, so when I was writing the first draft of Merm-8, it was all ambient ocean sounds -- little waves, big waves, underground caves, etc. For my story about centaurs, I listened to forest sounds. Merm-8's non-rough drafts involved a mix of ambient tracks from Overclocked Remix which comprised half water-themed and half-fantasy, since the novel is half-ocean and half-fantasy. There is also a playlist of lyrical songs from my archive of MP3s that I feel fit the story. These eventually get condensed to the story soundtrack.

And if I'm not listening to something related to the story, it could be classical, movie soundtracks, video game soundtracks, pop, electronica, or low-tempo chill. Just something so I'm not distracted by the sounds around me.

My timer is provided by TimeLeft. It's an old bit of freeware, but it still works. It's a bit clunky, but once configured, I just let it run. Forty-five minutes of straight writing. When the timer goes off, I finish my sentence and shut down the lappy.

But not before I let Dropbox do its sync. I recently learned of Dropbox as a way to backup files across computers. So far, it works pretty good. I was using Google Docs before, and a shared drive on my home network that only worked when I was on my home network. And in both cases I had to consciously transfer my files. Dropbox does it for you. And it retains file shape, so a Word doc stays a Word doc, unlike Google Docs.

Live and Let Undead Book Trailer

2011-08-30T09:45:00.000-05:00

"Live and Let Undead", a zombie anthology which I have a story in, has a book trailer out. Awesome! Watch for my namecheck at 2:10. And go buy it when it comes out!

Froggy's Baby Sister Sucks

2011-08-29T09:59:00.000-05:00

You know, I am really sick of men/boys/males condescending to girls for... really, no reason. The reason I'm cheesed off is that there's this book I'm often reading to my two girls -- Froggy's Baby Sister by Jonathan London. You can hear the full-text read aloud here. It bothers me because its got some stereotypical lines where the male lead does not like his baby sister for the sole reason that she's a girl. That wouldn't be so bad if the story showed she was just as awesome because she's a girl, but it never does. Even if it did redeem that, I'd still have a problem.

I don't know how to feel when Froggy learns the new baby is a girl, and I have to read to them "A girl? Yuck!" When Froggy teaches her to catch flies, he says "Not bad... for a girl."

Yeah, at the end, Froggy learns to love her, but not because she's a girl. Yeah, the book is aimed at young boys, but that means nothing really. Aren't we beyond this immature gender bashing? All the kids outside my neighborhood play with each other regardless of if they're girls or boys. This is the sort of thing that gives girls personality disorders and low self-esteem.

What are my girls thinking when I read "A girl? Yuck!" Are they learning that girls aren't as good as boys? Are they going to grow up with fundamental knowledge that they're disgusting? Am I planting a seed? Are they going to think that, whatever they do, they're just a subset of humanity. Even if they're the best at what they do, it's only going to reach the "good enough for a girl" ceiling.

Why is this even still an issue? Women are breadwinners and men don't mind doing the work My wife's playgroup has two men who are the stay-at-home dads. One has a wife who's a doctor. Out of all my friends, neighbors, and relatives, there are more girls than boys, and almost all the girls are the eldest. Despite their superior numbers and age, are you going to tell them that they're second-class citizens?

I'm sick of it. My girls are not going to grow up with this idea that men validate their existence. My wife validates my existence, and I validate hers, not because we're a boy and a girl, but because we're right for each other. Boys and girls are different, definitely. Girls are more talkative and sensitive. Boys have more upper-body strength and less inhibition. There are differences, but that doesn't mean one's better than the other. And neither are "yucky".

Comedy You May Have Missed (Part 2)

2011-08-26T12:01:00.005-05:00

(Go to Part 1)

Firesign Theater

The best way to describe Firesign Theater is Monty Python for the ears (although Monty Python did make some audio performance albums). My history with Firesign Theater revolves mostly around one album. Or really one side of an album -- "Nick Danger, Third Eye".

For a long time, this was the only thing from Firesign Theater I listened to, because it was the only one I could understand. The style is fast-paced, surreal, and filled with in-jokes about old-time radio dramas (there's a line where the character's in snow and someone says to him "come in out of the corn starch". SFX guys used corn starch for the sound of walking through snow). Coherent story takes a back seat to humor. The best thing about it was that you had to listen to it multiple times to get all the jokes. The worst thing is that you had to listen multiple times to get it.

Nick Danger is the easiest to understand, because it's a traditional Raymond Chandler parody. But it devolves into ridiculous non-sequitir involving a time machine, clones of everyone, and a Zucker Brothers fix-it-up ending. Eight-year-old me has trouble processing that. But the older I got, and the more I listened, I rediscovered all the things you missed. Like when someone says "I assume you've come to see my mistress, Mr. Danger." in a way that sounds like his mistress is "Mr. Danger" when really he's talking to Mr. Danger. That's a classic case of a misleading clause that's comically read wrong.

You need to really concentrate to fully appreciate the humor of Firesign Theater. It's best enjoyed with the eyes closed, free of distractions, where you can visualize everything that's happening. Just as people did in the era before television.

Official Firesign Theatre Site

Smothers Brothers

Who are the Smothers Brothers? Only the best American comedy duo ever. Better than Lewis and Martin. Better than Abbot and Costello. Better than George and Gracie. Better than Harold and Kumar. For one, they're actual brothers. For another, they incorporate music into their performance. For last, they have a framework, not shtick they repeat (like the Three Stooges slappings or Abbot's flustered stuttering). That framework is that Tommy's the "slow, endearing" one and Dick is the "straight" man trying to maintain a solid performance.

For some reason, I always got Tom and Dick confused. Tom looks like he should be named Dick and Dick looks like a Tom. I knew them from their comedy albums. ("And that parakeet flew into that pot of boiling, hot milk... and I don't like Cream of Asparakeet." "That's a pun, isn't it?" "No, that really happened.") But they're more known for their comedy-variety hour. It was on before my time, so I never got to see it. But apparently, it was quite controversial for being youth-oriented, satirizing the Vietnam War and other counter-culture issues. Not something I expected from two nice boys singing folk music.

This is where I got my penchant for two equals in a constant state of bickering. You can see that in a lot of my written works like Gatecrash, Influx Capacitor, and Playable Character. I personally think that kind of relationship is hilarious. Maybe it's because of me and my sister. Maybe because it lets you be funny without resorting to insults, condescension, or un-values like racism and self-deprecation.

Official Smothers Brothers Website

Comedy You May Have Missed (Part 1)

2011-08-24T11:04:00.002-05:00

I have no idea if I'm funny. My wife thinks I'm funny. I have written comedy before. Some absurdist (CS Wars), some functional (Playable Character, Influx Capacitor) Most of my comedy comes from a MST3K/Monty Python root of silliness and sarcasm. But comedy is very difficult to translate to the narrative written word.

...

Timing!

See? But I inject as much humor as I can into my writing. Much of my humor comes from sources that kids today wouldn't know if it bit them on the bum, dadgummit. So here's some of my influences. You probably don't care, but I do, dadgummit! And if That Guy With The Glasses did it, why can't I?

Bill Cosby

The 70's and 80's were a time of big change for comedians. Cable provided a new avenue of exposure, free of FCC regulations. And the "say anything" attitude of the hippies had integrated into entertainment. Free speech was getting load tested thanks to comics like Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, and George Carlin. What this meant was a lot of weed humor, foul mouths, rednecks, and neurotics. Not my cup of tea.

But Bill Cosby was immensely funny while still being respectable. My first exposure to him (like most people) was on The Cosby Show. I never understood why they called it The Cosby Show when no one was named Cosby. Very confusing. But the show was about the ridiculousness of children's behavior, the difficulty of maintaining a happy marriage with multiple children, and the importance of family. It was one of the last shows to feature a man that loved his wife and kids. Then there was Roseanne, Married with Children, and The Simpsons made it popular to make poor life decisions.

Don't make the mistake -- Bill Cosby isn't wholesome. In fact, I rather disliked him. I thought he was a mean father. He was strict. His wife was a bitch. The children were doing the best they could for their age, and there was little forgiveness for their mistakes. So as a child, I wasn't too interested.

But then I discovered my dad's old comedy records (yes, records -- the big, black discs). He had Bill Cosby's first album, "Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow... Right!" with the famous Noah's Ark bit I'd heard about, but doesn't translate to text. And some live stuff and a "Best Of".

Early on, his style is "Newhart-esque" "what if" scenarios. I don't like Bob Newhart, but I liked Bill Cosby. As much as he makes fun of having kids, he makes fun of himself as a kid with memorable characters like Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold. He tells stories like they're tall tales, which I love.

My favorite thing about Bill Cosby is that he's so fun to imitate. You can almost hear his Richard Mulligan rubberface through his voice. Most other people, all you have to do is a country accent or a stutter to do a bad impression. But like Christopher Walken, Cosby has his own way of speaking -- that curmudgeonly, perpetually perturbed, grandfatherly accent full of nonsense words and scat-like consonants. I love using it on my kids, but they have no idea what I'm talking about.

This is Richard Mulligan. He was on "Empty Nest".

BTW: You should watch "House of Cosbys".

Official Bill Cosby Website

Mad Magazine

Mad Magazine has an interesting history. It started off as the brainchild of William Gaines, the godfather of adult comics. He created the horror comic genre with works like "Tales From the Crypt", "Weird Science", and such. In his day, comics were aimed at kids and kids only. Not many people realize he was his generation's Larry Flynt, challenging the ridiculous censorship laws of America. The graphic depictions of violence and sex were not kosher with the senate subcommittee.

That included Mad, which started as a comic. They had to divert the Comics Code (a self-imposed ethics code that no longer means anything. Kinda like movie ratings.) so they made it into a magazine. That meant they could publish what they wanted, even though there wasn't anything offensive I saw.

It's hard to describe what Mad is. There are satires (all of which I was unable to appreciate until I was old enough to see the movies or TV shows they were making fun of), one-page comics, funny articles, lots of lists and pictorials (much of which you see in today's Internet humor, with the plethora of Top Tens and Infographics), and incredibly detailed parodies of current events and pop culture. In lots of places, it was like an activity book, with the puzzles, humorous questionnaires, and the fold-in at the back of each issue. Al Jaffee was my favorite.

Mad caught my eye in 1989, when I saw the cover which depicted Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which I was into at the time. Don't know why my dad bought it for me, but he did, and I became a fan. The thing I had trouble wrapping my mind around when I was young was that, as much as they made of fun of everybody, especially the fools who wrote in to complain about the content, they made fun of themselves. Frequently, they'd refer to their magazine as bird-cage material, and Bill Gaines as a grossly obese man, often the punchline of an article. This didn't make sense to my eight-year-old self who was constantly exposed to feel-good messages of "you're special" and "be yourself" and "everyone loves you".

But then I got it. It was like a light bulb, and I started adopting their sarcastic, cynical, acerbic sense of humor in my own personality. It taught me the value of parody and satire.

Official Mad Magazine Site

To Be Continued...

Featured Fan Fiction: When Dreams Change (Trigun)

2011-08-22T16:08:00.001-05:00

Trigun is like Evangelion. It started as a shounen story -- meaning its audience is young boys (middle school/high school). Just like Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, Ranma 1/2, Bleach, and Naruto. Nothing too serious, usually with lots of goofy guys, grumpy girls, and comical situations. But halfway through its run, it stopped being shounen and went a different direction. A mature direction with lots of violence, adult situations, and angst.

Personally, I think this is a winning formula. It starts off light and fluffy and becomes dark and depressing (and confusing). It's how you know things have changed, that the characters are evolving and the goal posts are being pushed back. This also creates great fan fiction.

When Dreams Change focuses on Trigun's main enemy, a person you barely ever see, but is the hand that moves the plot. His name is Millions Knives (or Knives Millions, depending on how you translate -- both are equally ridiculous). Knives is the brother of the main protagonist, Vash, both of whom are sorta aliens who start as human babies and grow up on a generation ship.

The basic theme of the series is "do you kill the spiders to save the butterflies?", made apparent when the two brothers diverge. Vash is the good, but unlucky guy with a no-kill policy. Knives wants to either genocide or enslave the inferior humans (after he's mistreated on the ship).

He's a fascinating bad guy, much like Hannibal Lecter or Othello's Iago in the way he manipulates events to both destroy his brother's ideals and gain power. But he's the secondary character in When Dreams Change. The real main character is a Mary Sue.

Whoa, what? Did he say that? One of the deadly sins of fan fiction? He's recommending a Mary Sue?

Well, I don't have verification of that, but it feels like a Mary Sue. It's a self-insertion fic that starts right at the point of entry. There's no explanation of why she's there. There's no back story, until it's slowly revealed throughout . She's not perfect. In fact, she's rather bitchy, cold, and unlikeable. (I'm not doing a good job of selling this, am I?) But as the story goes, her troubled past comes out (and boy, is it troubled), and you learn why. And it works, it's plausible, and it's earned.

It reminds me of if a young girl went on a road trip with a Terminator Hitler. It's long, but worth it, and you know how I like those slow burns. It was well-written--I felt like I was there, like I was feeling the character's pain. There's charm in the journey. It's a great example of an injection story done right. I just hope that's not the real author's back story.

When Dreams Change
Cymberleah's Twitter(?)

Done Incorporating Merm-8 Critiques - Begin 3rd Draft

2011-08-12T10:06:00.000-05:00

I finished incorporating all the critiques I received from Merm-8 into the novel. It took a long time, especially the ending which needed to be severely revised. The problem was that the sacrifice was not earned or hinted at so I need to sprinkle more hints throughout, and then totally revamp the structure around the final reveal.

The biggest problem was that I kept changing my mind. At first, I wasn't going to do the sacrifice, and I had to weave my way around making it work. Then the way I weaved it, I thought "hey, there can still be a sacrifice. Might as well put it in." So I did. Took a long time to get everything plausible though.

And now the battle is to go through it again, make sure everything works, make sure there are no linger artificats from previous scenes and shufflings. My work is cut out for me.

Common Sense in "Defense Against the Dark Arts" Class

2011-08-10T11:21:00.000-05:00

Professor Horatio G. Leechjigger, long robes billowing enters the room.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: Good morning, class. I'm your new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. Now, my expectations for you this semester are...

Harry Potter walks up, casually, from his seat, and goes toward the end of the room. No one knows why--the students look at each other, confused. He stands in front of the professor, who is equally confused.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: Uh, yes, may I help you?

Harry Potter crosses his arms.

HARRY POTTER: All right, out with it.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: What do you mean?

HARRY POTTER: Come on, what's your deal?

Harry Potter starts tugging on the professor's clothes.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: I beg your pardon? (with that quirky, British pompousness) I assure you, Mr. Potter, there's nothing wrong with me. Dumbledore himself hired me-

HARRY POTTER: Don't fuck with me, old man. You think I'm stupid? My teacher freshman year had Voldemort on the back of his head. You know Voldemort, right? The dark harbinger of evil who killed half of everyone everywhere?

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: I assure you, young man, I-

HARRY POTTER: Then it was a loudmouth celebrity who took the position to sell copies of his book. He's now in the insane asylum. Third year, it was a werewolf. Fourth year, a death eater spy.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: Mr. Potter-

HARRY POTTER: Fifth year was Dolores Umbridge. She made us write sentences with our own blood and tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on me. She got eaten by some centaurs, after she decided it was a good idea to hurl some racial slurs at them. And finally, sixth year, Professor Snape took the job. You might remember him. He's the guy who killed Dumbledore.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: Yes, that was a terrible tragedy. You know-

HARRY POTTER: No, you know. You know that you've got some secret you're not telling us. And it's not going to come up until there's a giant snake at my throat. So go ahead. Tell it before I have to get nasty. Are you a pile of bugs under that robe? Mutant goblin? Double agent for Lord Voldemort? O.J. Simpson?

Harry starts taking off his clothes.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: Mis- Mister Potter! Please. Stop that at once. This is highly irregular.

HARRY POTTER: Shut it, git. Give it up. You got a bomb under there? Illegal papers? I bet you're Canadian, aren't you?

Professor Horatio G. Leechjigger is now naked in front of the class. The students start giggling.

HARRY POTTER: Oh... that's your secret. I see. Uh, never mind, go... go on teaching. Sorry about that.

Red-faced Harry Potter returns to his seat. But he's not as red-faced as the professor.

PROFESSOR HORATIO G. LEECHJIGGER: It was a reducio spell that went wrong, okay?

RON WEASLEY: (whispers to Harry) I'd put an invisibility cloak on that.

HARRY POTTER: Not exactly an Ollivander wand, is it?

...

Sure, it's about eight years late, but it's still funny.

Top 9 Things DC Can/Should Do For Their Reboot (Part 2)

2011-08-10T11:03:00.008-05:00

6. Make a bad guy into a good guy. Want to cause conflict and drama? Switch relationship roles. I'm not talking about when Two-Face gets rehabilitated and goes back to work. We all know he's going to turn evil again just as soon as his plastic surgery gets ruined *again*. What if Two-Face fought for good? He is a former D.A. after all. It's still in him. The Penguin doesn't do much. What if he became the new Alfred? Can you imagine if Bane became a vigilante in the name of justice a la Casey Jones? Villains are so in right now. It worked for Megamind, and Darth Vader's got more Facebook fans than anyone else in Star Wars.

It's not going to work for everyone. You can't make the Joker into a good guy because his motivations are purely to be the villain. He knows he's a bad guy and that's the role he wants to play. He doesn't want money. He doesn't have a conviction or thirst for vengeance. But most everyone else does. And the best villains' strength comes from the conviction that they are right. Which leads to...

7. Make a bad guy into a good guy who's a bad guy. Every man is the hero of his own story. Mr. Freeze is trying to find a cure for his wife. He's not trying to kill everyone, but he needs money to do it. More money than he can make honestly in a lifetime. Batman's the only one interceding who's capable of stopping him. He's the asshole. And Superman turns into a whole different story when you think of Lex Luthor as attempting to rid the world of dominance by an alien god.

Show the villain's perspective. Batman's put so many henchmen in the hospital and jail. Someone's got to have a grudge on him for that. All those henchman don't want to be there. Maybe there's one that needs to feed his drug habit, but he's got a wife and kids, so that he needs money. And then there's characters like Solomon Grundy and Swamp Thing who are chaotic neutral. Don't forget about Morpheus, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman Is he bad guy? A good guy? No one knows, he's simply a force. Half the plotlines in that series don't even star him, they involve the characters affected by him, in both present day and mythology.

8. Superhero Groups When my uncle died, one of the things he left behind (I'd say left to me, but really, this was just junk he left at my grandparents house) was a box of comic books from the 70's and 80's, all DC. I don't know where he got them. I don't know when he bought them. But I'm reading them.

There are a lot of army ones like Sgt. Rock and Unknown Soldier (he was in the Air Force), and some really terrible ones like Eclipso and Matter-Eater Lad. And a hell of a lot of "Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen" for whatever reason. It's hard to read a lot of them -- they're so dated and cheesy. Seriously, Superboy, how many times are aliens going to visit Earth? Jimmy, stop visiting that lab scientist. And everyone, just keep a big box full of Hostess twinkies in the closet. Seems to stop just about anyone.

But the series I found most interesting was the "Legion of Super-Heroes". This was a team of Super-Heroes consisting of (for the most part) Superboy, Ultra Boy, Mon-El, Sun Boy, Duo Damsel, Phantom Girl, Karate Kid (not the Ralph Macchio one), obvious Marvel knock-offs like Timberwolf & Shadowlass, and other B-listers who could never have been in a comic on their own. All this took place in the 30th century (Superboy periodically time-traveled to get there, then wiped his memory each time afterward with a post-hypnotic suggestion. Plausible.).

But the thing was, none of them worked alone. When they were together, it was awesome. They worked together, they played off each other's powers, they fell in love, they debated about new entrants, they had fights, they tooled around the headquarters goofing off, they argued over politics. That's what led to fun characters I could believe and interesting plot lines. And it's natural to believe that heroes would want to pool their resources. Union Dues is a great modern example of such a thing done well.

The relationship between a superhero and the people he's trying to protect is like that of an adult and child. You respect them and attend to them, but you don't pay them a lot of heed because they are inherently inferior. ("You are like a BAY-BEE! Making noise, don't know what to do!"). If the humans get saved, so much the better. But there are always more. They're like Pikmin. But superhero and superhero, beings on equal terms, that's where the legitimate drama arises.

One caveat to this. Do not simply invoke crossovers. Those are always lame, contrived, and ridiculous. They either fight for no reason or forget about each other as soon as the comic's over. (See Linkara's review of Batman vs. Spawn).

And finally...

9. Experiment, experiment, experiment. You know why there was so much great music in the 70s, and not in the 80s, 90s, or today? Because people were willing to take risks. They were trying new things, experimenting with sounds, and daring to break away from what others had already done. They didn't play it safe, they didn't rely on what worked in the past. They were willing to put new stuff out there and see how people reacted. There were no focus groups. There were no "creative executives". There was just "the people".

And thanks to "the people", we got hard rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath, singer-songwriters like Billy Joel and Don MacLean, Country rock from Bob Dylan and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the creation of genres we still use today, like progressive rock, power pop, R&B, rap, and punk.

But what people forget is that for every Jimi Hendrix there were dozens of Hall & Oates's, a few hundred Hocus Pocus by Focus, and thousands of Abracadabra. And those were the money-makers. There will be plenty of money-losers in that group.

Stephen King put it best. There are bad artists, competent artists, really good artists, and geniuses. Geniuses are not made, they're born, and there are few of them. Then the numbers fan out from there. But the fact is, you never know who the geniuses are. Do you think anyone in their right mind would even touch something called "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" today?

You need to be less concerned about presenting returns to your shareholders and more about making art and taking risks. The greatest stuff in the world was almost always found by accident, but only after a long period of trial and error. And the key to creativity is by not repeating the past.

And here's a bonus comic for making it so far: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal