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-->April 9, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Because it is On... it is a snark on Pages.
This is not a review. Nor is it a critique. This is a rant. A full on, undisguised, "God damn it all" rant. You want to see me be unreservedly and unfairly negative on a subject without even acknowledging the other side of the story? You got it!
And what is the target of my ire? What has earned so great a share of my anger? What has me so utterly cheesed off that I'm willing to go into it with the words "Fuck" and "you!" together before I even explain why?
Apple Pages.
That's right. I'm pissed as hell... at a crappy Word Processor.
My God I'm a geek.
Apple Pages is part of iWork (alongside Keynote), and it seemed like it was the long awaited successor to Appleworks, which was Clarisworks for a long time (largely because they didn't want to confuse fans of Appleworks, the Apple II's all purpose office suite of software. Though that original Appleworks wasn't as good as the old Apple Writer II. Damn, but I loved that program. But I digress.) Appleworks hasn't seen any new versions in quite some time. After Keynote came out, however, the rumor came up that Apple was finally taking on Microsoft in the one area Microsoft dominates on the Macintosh -- office productivity software.
Note, I'm not saying Microsoft Office is the best software on a Mac, or even the best office software. I'm just saying it's the dominant software.
Anyway, Pages looked like the long awaited second stage of Apple taking its platform back. Keynote is a gorgeous piece of software -- easily as capable, more fun and prettier than Powerpoint -- but it's presentation software. I mean, who cares? Word processing, on the other hand... that's something everyone needs to do. And unless you're the kind of person who knows from all this and vastly prefers to work in the most stripped down text editor possible, you want your word processor to be mature without bloat.
Microsoft Word has bloat. A lot of it. Superfluous features no human needs. "Helpful" systems that inhibit your productivity. A "Mac" that looks more like a Banana Junior offering to help you format a letter.
Yes. We have something even sillier than Clippy. But again, I digress.
The thought was Apple would produce a Word Processor without bloat -- that would take advantage of Apple's rendering engines to be pretty to work with, and clean enough to not get in the way of your composing your documents. And, of course, it would be a triumph of User Interface. Apple's User Interface engineering's really what made them famous, after all.
Though, it's worth noting they've been forgetting that over time.
I got a copy of iWork so I could help evaluate it for the school. Yes, we paid for it. And I loaded it on and have spent the last couple of weeks doing all my non-Websnark writing in it (Websnark I write directly in an MT window. Font tags and all.)
These are two weeks I won't get back. No matter how desperately I want to. As God is my witness, this program sucks.
First off. It's not a word processor. Oh, it claims to be. It says "Word Processor" on the back of the package. It says "word processor" on the website. It sounds for all the world like they want you to... oh, I don't know... process words with this piece of shit. It's only when you actually look at the ad copy more closely that you begin to see the problem:
The word processor with incredible sense of style.
The easiest way to look good on paper, Pages lets you create documents that look like you had a design team working round the clock. But, no, itĖs just you, taking advantage of a new word processor with great style, an easy-to-use powerhouse that gives you all the tools you need to create superb-looking documents.
All that, it's worth noting, is true. Pages is optimized to help you create superb-looking documents. It comes packaged with a ton of templates designed to lay out graphics and columns and shit oh so easily.
What this program sucks like a thousand vacuums set on "too fucking high for safe cleaning of homes" at doing is the creation of content. It is wholly oriented to presentation.
I'm a writer. I write. Sometimes I get paid for it. The words I put down matter to me. And I like to have the tools at hand to simply create and convey them. I have no more interest in setting them into ad copy layouts than I do putting them into a plastic binder. I want my word processor to stay out of my way until I get stuck, and then help me jolt my brain into being unstuck. Most of all, I want the word processor to be as intuitive as humanly possible. To just do what I need it to do, in ways that require a minimum of thought and a minimum of fuss, while giving me the feedback I need to keep track of what I'm doing.
Impossible, you think? Well, here's a short list of Word Processors that have managed to do this, to the point that deciding between them is usually left to whim, technology (I can't easily use Wordperfect for Mac, for example, due to its Classic-only implementation) editorial fiat, or some other intangible:
Mariner Write. Nisus Writer. AbiWord. Openoffice.org. WordPerfect for Mac. WriteNow. WordPerfect for Windows (any version), Wordperfect for Linux. WordPerfect for DOS 4.2 through 6.0+ inclusive. Appleworks (Mac version). Mellel. Steveperfect. And yes, Microsoft Word. Many versions. (Though none of them were ever as good as Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac, which has to be the best Microsoft product ever.)
So, please don't assume I'm overly picky. I have used every last of the above programs cheerfully, and found they've provided the feedback I needed and the features I used, and (mostly) either got out of my way or let me turn off the features I didn't like. I might not be easy to incredibly impress, since I have so many choices, but I'm not that hard to please.
And then we have Pages.
Fucking Pages.
First off, it has incredibly dense controls for document appearance. Ways of setting not just the margins and the columns but the word spacing, the character spacing, the kerning, the ligatures. Templates aplenty. Powerful style selection features. I was actually impressed when I first booted it up.
And then I decided to change the font I was working in. No offense, but I don't like to write in helvetica. I prefer a serif font for composing. It's a little easier on my eyes.
Why I'd think that would offend you is beyond me.
Anyway, this is when I discovered it had no integrated font controls.
This stunned me. So I opened up its inspector. And the inspector had kerning controls and media controls for graphics or music files or movies and list controls and tab controls and... and....
And no font controls. No list of what the font is. Or the font size is. To get that, you have to open the font control panel. The font control panel which is the same OS X default cocoa font control panel used in things like Textedit. The font control panel designed by a retarded vole who only really wanted to use one font and felt everyone else should do the same.
This stunned me. I mean... this was font choice. I was used to word processing programs giving me multiple routes to go about doing this -- a window in the toolbar listing it. Something in the "inspector." A font menu item that would list all the fonts in alphabetical order. The idea that there was only one place for it stunned me. It was cumbersome
Fine. I decided to change the default document font. I might as well not have to go through this very often, right?
Only... there's no way to do that.
Let me say that again, with italics to properly describe my shock: there is no way to change the default document font.
You see, Pages does everything with styles. And styles are set up in your template. Period. If you want to change the font you work with, you need to change those styles, save them into a new template, and set up your program to open that template by default instead of "blank template."
Here's the thing, though. If you decide to do that... you have to change all the styles. Before you start typing, I would add, because you don't want your content to actually get saved into your template. You can't just change the body style and be done with it. If you do that, when you do a list, your list will draw off of list template and boom -- helvetica. And while you're at it, you should turn off all the crappy things Apple turns on by default in their 'blank' template. Like the extra 12 point space after paragraphs which most people who write online don't use because they need to do two hard returns to make it look right. Or hyphenation. They have fucking hyphenation turned on by default.
So. You spend a good long time creating a template that just gives you a nice, simple, basic sheet of paper, doesn't add in shit you don't want it to add in, working in the font you want to work in. At last, you begin typing. And one of the words you're typing for one of your projects is 'perception,' but you realize it's not exactly the word you want to use. So you decide to hit the old thesaurus.
Only there's no thesaurus.
They have a convenient slidebar for adjusting the spacing between letters but they don't have a thesaurus.
Fine. You open up fucking Dictionary.com and select the fucking thesaurus function and find another word that means fucking perception and you move on and you decide to right justify the next line, so you hit command-r....
And nothing happens.
So you try command-shift-r. Still no go.
So you look it up. And discover that the fucking alignment tools -- which have been command or command shift L, R and C since the beginning of fucking time on the Macintosh -- are now Command-{, Command-}, and Command-|.
Command-|.
If you want to center something, you have to press command, shift, and the straight line key.
It gets even better. Font size has been controlled by hitting either command or command-shift and the greater-than or less-than keys in every program where font has been an issue since Mac OS 2 at least. But not Pages. Oh no! Those are zoom keys. And the zoom keys in those programs -- Command Plus and Command Minus? Those are the font size changers. In other words, they reversed the function of those keys compared to every other program on the market for no reason at all.
And it hit me. This software program breaks the cardinal rule of the Macintosh. This software program actually breaks the single greatest innovation the Macintosh brought to software of any kind. Through all evolutions of the Macintosh Operating System, every program works basically the same way. The same keystrokes do the same thing in every package. The same menu items do the same thing. There is unity. There was a day when you could excitedly tell a DOS or even Windows user "hey, it's a Mac -- all the software works the same way. You know how to use one program, you can use any program."
Pages requires me to learn how to run Pages. It gives me pseudo page layout capabilities (not as effectively as Microsoft Publisher did in 1995, I would add -- and Publisher sucked) but lacks basic tools for writing. It makes me work for the feedback I want and it interrupts my train of thought so I can remember how to center. It's a pretty program, and I admit that it saves files about half the size of Word's files (though it's worth noting that I don't care as much in these days of 120 GB hard drives -- a 300 kb file or a 144 kb file makes little difference to me), but that's not enough.
Oh, and it reads and saves Word files. But then, I have Abiword. And Openoffice.org. And Mellel. And Microsoft Word. So opening and saving Word files really doesn't impress me.
Oh, and it saves HTML files.
I swear to Christ, it renders HTML code that's worse than Word's.
And that's the total crime of this software. Not only does it break all the rules... not only does it lack things any Word Processor should have while loading it down with layout options that prepress professionals would rarely use... but it literally makes you compare it to Microsoft Word the whole time, and Word comes out ahead in essentially every category.
The Word-killer? This piece of shit software is the best advertising Microsoft Word has had in years.
I've evaluated it. I'm done. I'm going back to Mellel for my own projects and -- for those times when Word compatibility is completely required -- I'm going back to Word. If I want something clean and simple? I'll use BBEdit or Textedit. Or fucking Emacs. If I need something Word Processed, I'll use a program designed to create content, not stock flyers.
Someone call me when Apple decides to release a word processor.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:03 PM | Comments (22)
-->Wednesday Burns-White: [w] Best. Iron Man thing. Ever.
![[What?]](http://www.websnark.com/archives/ironman.png)
Imagine: Wednesday busts into giggles, having completely failed to write the first line of the thing she needs to write but is having a hard time writing it, since her brain is frozen. Anyhow, giggles.
"What?" Because, you see, it's a slow night, and she has the headset on, and Eric's all, like, you know, playing City of Heroes, and how would he know what she's laughing at? He's playing City of Heroes.
"Oh my god. Little Gamers today." And then more giggling.
"What?"
"Best Daily Grind thing ever." Which is true.
"What's it say?"
"Um. Visual joke. I... I can't, see."
"So snark it."
"But I have nothing to say about it. It just is. I can't giggle for a whole post."
"One of the guiding principles of this thing is that you're allowed to post, like, 'dude, look at the funny picture of the dog.'"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Okay," she said to him, so she did.
Also, it's not like he's going to post anything, what with the City of Heroes and all.
Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 9:44 PM | Comments (1)
-->April 8, 2005
Wednesday Burns-White: [w] Look at me with longing eyes and I will always know the score.
Okay, see, the thing is? It's so happened before. Probably within your memories, and almost certainly within your lifetimes. The world didn't end last time, nor was the character diminished. And it definitely didn't screw with how we understood the character, so it's not like future generations are going to get screwed over so much by the retcon, either. It might even help.
Do you understand? Do you hear what I'm saying? See this psycho Fairuza Balk face?
This is not the first time Cookie Monster's been driven to promote balanced eating. Not by a long shot:
Me promise that when you eat varied menu,"Healthy Food" went into rotation in 1987, folks. (Warning: clips from this and other songs from Sesame Road may contain explicit lyrics.)
You get more out of every meal.
You need balanced diet,
Come on and try it!
Yeah, I know. It's mindnumbingly pedestrian and obvious. It flies in the face of Cookie's basic id nature. Cookie's supposed to be the ultimate in monofocus, right? Writes to Santa and eats the pencil? Types at Santa and eats the ribbon, then the typewriter? Phones Santa, eats the phone, and pulls off a miracle in then-contemporary telecommunications? (Yeah, I know. I hate that it's out of TV circulation myself. Douglas fir give me heartburn, too. It's on DVD.)
Hey, we're getting off light. Sesame Street has a precedent for dropping characters perceived to be harmful in some fashion, okay? Roosevelt Franklin "was abandoned because he was thought by some to be a negative cultural stereotype and because the schoolroom in which he spent most of his time was considered to be a bad example." Don Music got "complaints about his alarming tendencies toward self-punishment. Apparently, kids were imitating his head-banging tendencies at home." (It'd take some hunting through 1998's Sesame Street Unpaved, the CTW-issued puff book cited above, to confirm it, but certain live-action segments went by the wayside for similar reasons over the years. Cake pratfalls down stairs? Dude.)
If you're gonna get upset about the American version of Sesame Street this week? Okay, there are plenty of reasons to get upset over Sesame Street. The way Mr. Hooper was an Event, but David just kinda vanished, say. Elmo's just bloody obvious. The scaling back of the show's target market's also bloody obvious; it sucks that they have to dumb down the one show which never assumed we were freakin' morons. In fact, Elmo's focus-stealing stems from that. And so do the other cardboard "characters" which began to populate the show. Baby Bear. The mindnumbingly heavy focus on Telly, who was at least suitably neurotic back in the day. Did you see how they mishandled Grover and his friends in that one direct-to-video special a little while back? Appalling. Fuckin' Rosita de la Great Big Hug thing. Plaza Sŧsamo's awesome, but this? Fuckin' Rosita? So not. (And, hell, I'll just go with you on any of the generic, bland monsters from about 1991 onwards. The real character development on monsters seems to be going on over with the international markets. The ones which don't just dub Big Bird and Elmo, anyways.) A little character depth? A little nuance and unforced charm? In the ten games we've played, she's only beaten me twice? Hello? Yeah. Yeah, see, no issue there. None at all.
And Noggin dropping those fantastic, grainy, perfectly bumpered late-night reruns from a few years back? Yeah, I'm with you every step of the way here (and if you taped 'em? My family wants a giant gushing word with you). That? That was for us. And it's not like Sesame Workshop don't know from the market here; we're getting Roosevelt Franklin figures from Palisades, after all.
(Look, my people got Sesame Park, okay? I have no bloody sympathy. Canadians can't deal with the grim urban reality of the Sesame Street ghetto, they told us. Yeah. Because, you know, couple generations of kids didn't do just fine with having the Spanish segments replaced with French ones, or just watching cable (MPBN, represent, yo) and being able to tell you what on earth a salida was. Fuckin' inane Francophone beaver. Fucking beaver. Beaver, bear and biplane. Grim rural reality. I want me some North of 60 or Due South? I will watch me some of that. No sympathy at all. No.
None.
It got cancelled, by the way. But I digress.)
Look, he's still going to be Cookie Monster. It's like how, when Cartoon Network picks up a show to run on Toonami or Adult Swim, the original Japanese materials don't just somehow vanish from existence. They'd pretty much have to stomp this character, or purge him, to eliminate his basic appeal. And, in a few years, when the current wave of perceived urgency settles down a little, we'll probably see him go nuts again. And there's way, way, way too much stuff in circulation now to remind us of what was.
Frank Oz doesn't even perform him anymore, now, anyways. Likewise poor Grover.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go put more butter on my ham, demand the establishment of a delicious buffet, and fail to be harmed by the puny weapons of the lametastic alien fleet. Oh, wait.
Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 7:56 AM | Comments (33)
-->April 7, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Lessons Taught, and Lessons Learned.
A lesson was taught over in the comic book world. It took pretty much all of the 90's for said lesson to fully develop and flourish, but in the end it could fully be understood.
That lesson was "it's a bad idea to take an established character, invert it for the sake of short term publicity, and then screw with it in the name of creating 'the new age of comics.'"
A decade back, it was Zero Hour. It was Hal Jordan being driven insane, killing off the Green Lanterns and Guardians, consuming the power of the Central Power Battery, and attempting to rewrite all of history to his specifications. When Jordan fans screamed bloody murder at the editor of the comic, he said -- almost exactly -- "excuse me for making the comic book popular again."
Years later, they have just finished the absolute worst example of "pushing the reset button" ever, to bring back a Hal Jordan they can claim is wholly unstained and is a full Green Lantern. Perhaps it's because they've realized that the only people still at all interested in buying their comic books are adults, and they pissed off that demographic when they screwed with Hal in the first place. Hand in hand with that, they rebooted the rebooted Legion, again, and from all reports are doing a good job with it so far. I don't know because they didn't 'reboot it' by setting the next issue immediately following the Magic Wars's conclusion, so it's still not any Legion I'd recognize, so honestly who cares?
Does this sound snobby on my part? Well, it is. But my point isn't "they should make the Legion what I want it to be if they want me to read it." My point is "they're not going to get me back by grandstanding it again, so they might as well work at keeping the fans they have instead of trying so hard to convince the old guard to come back." It's true of Hal Jordan too.
They learned their lesson, though. They learned that screwing with the beloved yields a short term of interest followed by a long term of ennui.
But they didn't learn the actual lesson that was taught.
I wasn't a Kyle Rayner fan. I wasn't a Postboot Legion Fan. But they had Kyle and Postboot Legion fans. And, believe it or not, they were growing. Maybe not in readership, but in number. I look at Livejournal, and I see icons made out of Postboot Cosmic Boy, and Kyle Rayner. Yeah, no one was particularly happy with how it had all happened, but with time was coming loyalty, and foundation. Ten years from now, they could have gone full circle, and used Hypertime to actually inaugurate a "Silver Age Earth" where the Crisis never happened, the age of super heroes started in the sixties and seventies, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen were still heroes (and still alive), and the traditional Legion still existed in the far future. If it proved popular, they could even have had crossovers and created a whole "Silver Age" imprint, while still developing the "Bronze Age" heroes of the 90's and 00's.
Instead... they're doing the Crisis again. And to do it, they're "shaking the foundations to the core." They're killing off the comic relief heroes, "dramatically," to give something for the top tier heroes to angst about. They're bringing antiheroes back to life (including one we saw beaten to death, set on fire, blown up, and carried offstage) to give our heroes something to angst about.
And they're revealing that one of the good guys -- selfish, but good, but with years of evolution as a character away from his selfishness -- has been EV-AL all along, playing our heroes for chumps.
In other words... they're now in the process of alienating a whole new set of the increasingly smaller group of comic book readers in the name of creating "a whole new foundation/attitude/whatever." The difference is, they're doing their shocking twists with far less important characters, in the hopes that no one will care in the long term.
Only they will. I still know people who gave up on DC because they screwed over Hawk and Dove, whenever the Hell Armageddon 2001 was. (Four years after the year 2001 has passed, anything which continues to piss people off from that was clearly a bad idea).
If DC honestly wants to increase and improve sales and build readership, they should create an entire line of comic books to be sold in Supermarkets, targeted to kids and teenagers and priced so that a parent feels good about dropping three or four comics in the shopping basket. If they're going to target all their efforts on the people who bought comic books when they were kids in the 70's and 80's -- a reductionist system at best -- they need to stop alienating those people every few years in the hopes of getting some mainstream press attention and "popping a rating."
Oh, and for the record? Making a comic book universe darker isn't revolutionary. It's just the comic book equivalent of First and Ten. And having started with Identity Crisis and seen it progress into Countdown, I can say without any reservation that DC is jumping into First and Ten with both feet.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:17 AM | Comments (48)
-->April 6, 2005
Eric Burns-White: And so, for the first time...
...we've actually closed comments on a Snark. Chances are likely you know which one. If not, you're happier not knowing, trust me.
Suffice it to say, it was getting intensely personal towards people other than myself, and that's not kosher. If folks want to scream at me for doing this, feel free.
(This isn't an invitation to pick up that conversation in this Snark's comments, mind. The whistle's been blown on it, and it's over. Because I'm a giant mean baby.)
Essentially, if you want to agree or disagree with something I say in a Snark in the comments, you're allowed. If you want to debate with each other in the comments on something related to the topic or to a tangent that grows out of the comments or whatever? Cool. If you want to insult me? Generally fine so long as it doesn't escalate into people insulting each other.
Personal insults to each other get shut down. If a warning doesn't suffice, we close comments on that snark. If they persist cross-snark, there's banning of users. Why? Because this isn't a schoolyard and that's not what we're doing here. There's eight hundred thousand other forums on the web, plus personal e-mail for being mean to each other.
I have to admit -- the fact that we went 664 Snarks before hitting one where this happened is pretty damn good. The fact that we went just shy of 4,200 comments on Websnark before this happened is remarkable. This is a testament to you guys -- to the fact that the debate here is extremely high signal, low noise. And the fact that there is massive coolness 99% of the time even when we disagree with each other is what makes Websnark such a fantastic place.
Well, that and Wednesday. Because Wednesday knows from the Cool.
Anyway. Commence fascist comparisons in five... four... three... two... and fascism is go.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (102)
-->April 5, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Infernal Intervention! We are spooky ghosts! And selfish! Really!
| If you're going to Infernate, Infernate all the way, I always say.
Hello, and welcome to Websnark's Infernal Infervention. We're six hundred and sixty six posts into this thing. That's a lot. Many. More than one by a bunch, as the kids say. We have approached -- I swear this is true -- three quarters of a million words worth of snarkage. Three quarters of a million words. Since August. I mean, holy fuck. Comments are even better. As of this writing, we're up to four thousand, one hundred and five comments. That's a lot of conversation. People seem to like doing the thing of talking. Doing the thing of talking seems to appeal greatly to said people. We've gone from seventeen people and my cat knowing about Websnark to tens of thousands of daily readers. Any way you look at that, that's amazingly cool. Most days, I'd just be humbly pleased at this. I'd IM Wednesday and we'd talk about the utter coolness that comes from having people read us, having some sense of impact, having the sheer fun we have every day with this Blog. But this is the Infernal Intervention, so fuck that. It's selfishness time. We want. What do we want? Plenty, damn it! We're byproducts of Western Civilization, and there's things out there. And what do we expect? What do we expect from you people? Huh? Huh?
And then... um... ignore it, because dude. Anyway. We'll start with Wednesday, who is probably already skeeved as Hell that I wrote this in white on red, so we'll give her a nice clean sheet of her own:
Hah heh hah! Drink deep of Wednesday White's selfishness! And... um... if any of this is actually something you want to give her -- which I think would shock her, mind -- shoot her e-mail to confirm it, first. I mean, it'd be embarrassing for fifteen copies of Sketchbook Pro to show up at her house, right? (Yeah, that's gonna happen.) And now, there's me. What do I want... when I am being... selfish? Hmmmmmmmmmm? Hm. Actually, that's harder to say that I thought. Hang on, let me jump over to a white "sheet of paper" format too, just to keep everything clear:
You see? You see? SELFISH! Selfish and demanding! And you! You're going to give in, aren't you? You're going to get us these things that we want, and you are going to like it! Yes! Yes you are! There's nothing you can... do... about.... Oh, who the Hell am I kidding. Can we get this weirdass red thing turned off? |
Thanks.
Guys, we're happy as Hell to just be here, and we're happy as Hell just to be telling you that. No, neither Weds nor I want or expect anyone to get us anything, so long as you just keep showing back up.
So why make a big deal out of "selfishness?" Well, it's not so Weds or I can get things sent to us. It's to inaugurate the newest site element here on Websnark: a Paypal Donations Link.
We're not in any danger of shutting down. Yeah, there are costs involved, but I actually have a good job. However... well, this site takes a lot of time to do, and a lot of effort, and some folks have always wondered if there was a way they could show their appreciation. And I've always told them "sure -- keep reading," and I stand by that. But in today's world, there's nothing wrong with putting up a tip jar on the off chance that someone will want to use it.
(And I'm not ruling out doing a fundraiser drive if an expected medical thing doesn't get covered by insurance, but that won't come up until mid to late autumn at the earliest.)
Completely away from everything... thanks, guys. Thanks for being with us through this first seven hundred and fifty thousand words. I'm still having fun, and I hope you are too.
And just be glad we didn't do a special post for post number 69. I mean, dude.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:30 PM | Comments (29)
-->Eric Burns-White: Fair Warning.
Back in November, when we hit our 333rd post here on Websnark, we discussed the concept of Interventions. Specifically, we invoked an Intervention of Ralph, the Demon Prince of Apathy. Who, predictably, didn't give a fuck. We also mentioned the 111th post, Random reader question randomly answered, which due to numbering weirdness is trackback post #106, but which is in fact the 111th post. That was the Divine Intervention Post, which in In Nomine terms meant it was essentially selfless. And that actually was born out, I think -- it was a very short post on why we give a damn, and it was very much outwardly oriented.
Why do I bring this up?
Because numbering oddness aside, this post you are reading is the 665th post on Websnark. Or as we like to call it, "the Guy Who Lives Across The Street From the Beast."
Which means the next post is 666. The Infernal Intervention. Which in In Nomine terms means it's the selfish one. Or, as the demons like to claim, the post of Enlightened Self-Interest.
Don't expect us to be throwing the horns or hooting and shouting or junk like that. This is all about selfishness. It's a celebration in the truest American style -- Materialistic.
So. Don't go into it expecting equanimity or a plea to think of the children. That'll come later, after Liberal Guilt consumes me. And you know it will. Because I am weak. And fraught with guilt.
You know, 'fraught' is a fun word to type.
Anyway. Infernal Intervention is next. Let's all be there!
(Eat snacky smores.)
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:44 PM | Comments (8)
-->Eric Burns-White: On the other hand, I drank the kool-aid. I DRANK THE KOOL-AID!
There's drama in webcomics again, for those who aren't paying attention. This time, it seems to be twofold -- in one direction coming from William G's recent review of Penny Arcade and PvP (and most recently a Something Positive review), and on the other side there's drama at the Daily Grind.
My thinking, for the most part, is to give the latter a bye. Maybe Weds wants to get into it, but I'm backing away slowly. I'm kind of the opinion that if the contest stresses you at all, drop out of it. Either these things are entirely for fun or they're not.
Note I am studiously not saying either side in the debate is right or wrong. If this makes me a wuss, I revel in it. I just don't see why anyone would do this if it makes them all riled up.
On the William G essays... I'm similarly of little opinion. Well, that's not true. I have an opinion about PvP, Something Positive and Penny Arcade (which you can tell by the fact that... well, I talk about them a lot). So does William G. They don't match up, entirely. There are points we disagree on.
This is what we call "the critical dialogue," and it's actually a very good thing. Different critics bring different tools, views and opinions to the table, and do different things with them. Our disagreements form the cosm of the discussion, and the discussion -- in the end -- allows for the improvement of the art form as a whole. That is, in fact, the point. No one should ever expect critics or reviewers or anyone else to always agree with them.
I have to make note of one thing in William G's review of Penny-Arcade and PvP, though, because I think A) it's interpretable many ways and B) I think the discussion might be a worthy one. To whit:
Basically, they're cult works much in the same manner as Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Star Trek, or WWE Raw. If you like this sort of stuff, then you're already part of the cult, so nothing I just wrote means anything to you.
It's easy to typify Rocky Horror or Star Trek or WWE Raw as cults. An extremely small portion of the moviegoing public is into Rocky. The television watching public has very small portions that are seriously into Star Trek or wrestling. Even when those latter two were at their most mainstream, they weren't mainstream.
However, if the medium is "webcomics," we can't possibly refer to Penny Arcade or PvP as cult comics. Not in terms of the medium.
I assume that William G. actually meant that there is a cultish dimension to Gamers, and that may be. (Or may not be -- again, it's its own medium. If we group all of entertainment and leisure time activities into one large morass, then fans of any segment of it are essentially cultists. If gaming or webcomics are media unto themselves, then they form mainstreams and fringe within those media.) However, I have to approach these as webcomics, and consider them from the point of view of that medium and that audience.
And by those lights, both strips not only are mainstream, they define the mainstream.
Last week, Mike Krahulik claimed they got 518,650 unique IPs in one day on a typical Monday. Not hits. Unique IPs. Which means that that's not even counting (say) all the AOL users who happen to be behind a specific IP number via NAT or the like, or people who read it via scraping, or via RSS type stuff. That's not "you get two hits per visitor," either, because those are specifically the visitors. I believe him, too, because when they recently linked me, my own UIPs jumped over two hundred thousand for the day. (Please note, my UIPs are normally "less" than that, much like walking to the store is "less" swift than taking a Porsche with no speed limit.) You can say what you like -- you can't claim they're "fringe."
It's the same with Scott Kurtz -- especially since Kurtz's comic is essentially mainstream in tone. Yes, there are geek references and game references and Mac references and the like. That is the Internet mainstream. However, PvP is essentially a workplace humor strip. It isn't even a wish fulfillment workplace humor strip. The PvP crew isn't building mad scientist inventions and struggling to keep Miranda's future self from taking over the world. They boil down energy drinks and espresso to make dangerously highly caffeinated drinks and can't quite manage to pay their bills on their current readership.
If we're going to critically analyze the medium, we have to understand where the signposts are. We have to understand the community and the audience. And most of all, we have to understand that when we're on the web, the geeks aren't the minority. Half a million readers isn't 'cult' anything. Hell, to my knowledge, that's more than the readership for almost any 'mainstream' comic book. (I'd say any comic these days, but I don't know the current X-numbers, and I'd rather be cautious than wrong on this.) If we want to progress the art form as a whole, we have to recognize where the art form is.
I'm not debating William G's opinion, like I said before. It's his, I think it was considered and I think it was honest, and that's all I ask from a critic -- and exactly what I think all of you expect from me, on my end. But we need to make certain our opinions don't overshadow the fact of what we're criticizing, lest our critiques seem out of touch and therefore dismissible.
Because no one gets any benefit from a dismissed review.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:59 AM | Comments (73)
-->April 4, 2005
Eric Burns-White: The Aesthetics of Stupidity in RPG Development.
So, I'm writing this thing.
Like most of my RPG ideas, it came from having a bright idea and snowballed. It's how it works, for me. One day, something like "what if the paladins are really a divine secret police and the whole Lawful Good thing is just a front?" and a week later I have thirty thousand words on woods magic and the political evolution in Buttstonia's religious community. Or a comic strip. Or Websnark. But let's stick with RPGs for the moment.
A few days ago, I had a bright idea. It's occurred to both me and others before that Nobilis and In Nomine have some intriguing hooks into each other, conceptually, even though they're very different games mechanically.
However, in Nobilis, ordinary people are, at best, plot elements. At worst, they're cattle. In In Nomine it's somewhat better -- the Destiny and Fate of human beings is typically the point -- but the point's been made before that the humans really don't stand a chance in an angelic or demonic game, and... well, yeah. That's true. Dude, they're angels and demons. The guy from the 7-11 shouldn't be able to go toe to toe with them.
Well, one of my favorite games from the last couple of years -- which I've said to you guys before -- is Dead Inside. It's incredibly personal, incredibly evocative. The core concept of the game is the loss of one's soul, and what that one has to do to get it back.
I'm reminded, tangentially, of the old White Wolf jokes. The ones White Wolf developers are sick to God of hearing, I would add. The jokes that they should come out with a Role Playing Game called "Guy: The Slacking," about the one guy in the World of Darkness who isn't any kind of unusual being, isn't under the influence of some Cabal, isn't the cornerstone of some aspect of horrible reality... he's just this guy trying to make a living without noticing that there's packs of mages and werewolves and mummies and shit in the streets.
Well, Dead Inside almost comes from that point of view from the very beginning. Here's this guy, and someone steals his soul. It's like Midnight Nation, the Role Playing Game. It's horrifying without needing the apocalypse to do it.
And I thought -- that deadly thought -- "what if regular human beings have to cope with the Dead Inside issues on the human side, while angels and demons are dealing with the epic Nobilis scope on the divine side. What if it were all one thing?"
So, I wrote a Livejournal Entry about it. It went, in part, like this:
...there are ways to connect all three games if one can find a metasystem capable of handling the differences. Though the cosmologies are all independent of one another, that's not a dealbreaker if DI's spirit world was actually a Chancel, which itself had pathways to the Far Marches, which also had pathways interconnecting the Vale's two Chancels (Beleth's side and Blandine's side, which have an open border between them).
If you interconnected the Tethers to any given Word together into an interconnect web of entry points to each Superior's Tether, and made the Superiors and Ethereals on all sides Imperators, then the Magi of Dead Inside could become Soldiers, and the DI themselves would become proto-soldiers, but also one step away from being Undead -- which means Saminga is behind Magi and DI being able to crack humans and steal their souls. The human nature of Lilith (a Noble of Lucifer instead of a Superior in her own right, yet somehow able to act as an Imperator and create Lilim) implies that Lilim, in their dealmaking, might also be soulstealers.
What scares me most is how well all this works.
What scares many of you is how much of a geek I really am.
And I was right. A lot of people did think I was a geek. Because, well, I am. But they were also excited. Not because of the concept, mind. There are only five people on the planet, to my knowledge, who have Nobilis, In Nomine, and Dead Inside, and at least two of those people it's because I bought one or more of the above for them, goobing enthusiastically about how they're gonna love this game! No, they were excited because it's exciting to see someone make connections, get enthusiastic, and create. We love to see it, because it feels visceral to us. We feel like we're creating with them.
Over the next day, I wrote almost 5,000 words on the core concepts of this idea -- the very core ways the three extremely different systems fit together, and I posted that too.
And almost no one said anything.
Which makes sense. It's not mechanics or gaming. It's a process document. It's the detailing of standards. It's the outline you do before development, and it's unedited. And of course, there are only a tiny number of people who'll understand all the terms in it. I mean, I go from the assumption the reader will be familiar with "Impudite," "Imagos" and "Aaron's Serpent" right out of the gate. And that describes almost no one -- and almost certainly no one I don't actively know. Coupled with that is the fact that a standards document in gaming reads like stereo instructions, and what can you expect? Excitement?
Here's a thrilling example of what I mean:
- Nobilis is diceless, of course. At the level these games take place, there is little chance for randomness and every chance for metaphor.
- Soldiers (made by becoming Anchors or rarely by soul cultivation or soultaking by Dead Inside) are more powerful in their own right than both In Nomine and Nobilis would normally allow, but far less so (generally) than angels or demons (referred to in this text as Celestials) or Ethereals (capitalized to echo Celestials). However, Soldiers can potentially become Sorcerers, whose power approaches that of their former masters, and it is rumored become Immortals whose power would equal that of a Celestial or Ethereal. Some say this is the way that Lilith, a human, became a Superior. Others say she is some kind of Anchor of Lucifer's, and her Word of Freedom is bitterly ironic. Generally, Soldiers will be NPCs or act similarly to Anchors in Nobilis (under the control of players, allowing Celestials to see what is happening in more than one place, and the like), though their ability to affect the Spirit World with Miracles and the like without Disturbance or causing humanity to freak out is extremely valuable to all their masters.
Exciting, isn't it? I bet you'd be even more excited if you knew what a Noble, Soldier, Celestial, Ethereal, Anchor or Word was, in these contexts.
Part of the problem of reconciling these three cosmologies is they're at diametrically opposed levels of power and scope. Let's take Nobilis and In Nomine for a moment. Let's say you make two basic starting characters, and make them focused more on the physical than anything else. In In Nomine, your corporeally-focused character can smash his opponents really well, hurling them across alleyways and making them hurt. At the same time, even a human being could fire a 16 mm shell at them, and if they hit, the demon's vessel would be paste on the side of the road.
In Nobilis, on the other hand, a basic starting character focused on the physical (or Aspect) could potentially hurl a hand-to-hand combatant from the Earth to the Moon, and if a human fired a 16 MM shell at them it would miss, or it would have no effect at all (through the Rite of Holy Fire), or, if the Noble wanted to show off, he could catch it, turn it around, and throw it back. Down the barrel. At any range where they had line of sight.
Get into the mystical power side of it, and In Nomine Servitors of Fire can produce green flame from their hands or possess fires or scour cruelty with purifying flame in a given room. A Power of Fire, on the other hand, can engulf entire cities with flames that they decide will only actually burn left handed seamstresses, or trivially fill a paper bowl with an eternal flame that doesn't actually consume the paper.
It's a question of scope. Now, look at Dead Inside, where the average starting character would be disintegrated by a starting Calabite from In Nomine... well, pretty much ten times out of ten. And you see the essential difficulty.
So. Here we have a project of appeal to almost no one, to reconcile three diametrically opposed cosmologies, worldviews, and power levels into a single conception, with tremendous levels of work that need to be done to it, for almost no reward, recognition or even players. The cost of entry for any outside person is high (they would need to buy Nobilis Second Edition and Dead Inside at a minimum for system details, and should get at least the In Nomine core rules and possibly various other guides for background details).
It is, in other words, a wholly worthless project. A realization I came to, almost bitterly, on Saturday.
It is now Monday, and I have written 5,000 words on the Nobilis implementation of Angels.
This is not a standards document. This is full on development, written in a decent, readable style and detailing actual, practical mechanics. As an example:
Resonance Limit: Inhuman (a limit of Spirit): Seraphim, more than all other Choirs, are removed from humanity. They can perceive the Truth of the Symphony far clearer than any other beingĖs Second Sight, and they have far less ability to empathize with mortal (or even lower angelic) shortcomings or compromises. This intolerance makes it hard for them to deal with humanity or understand their limitations, and causes human beings they deal with to react badly to them. In particular, it is significantly harder for a Seraph to develop the love necessary to form a bond with an Anchor. (Hate, on the other hand, comes easily... but given how little Seraphim consider human frailties to begin with, a hated Soldier of a Seraph has a hard row to hoe indeed.)
THE DISSONANCE CODE OF THE SERAPHIM
1. Deception is a Stain on the Symphony.
2. The Most Holy do not Stain the Symphony.
3. One cleans the Stains others leave as well.
You see the difference, of course. You might not understand much here, but you almost get the sense that you should understand it. And you get the feeling (I hope, anyway) that if you had the full document in front of you that you could work out contextually almost everything I said.
So. Why? Why am I writing this? Why am I writing a merging of three incompatible games, including significant mechanics work, to develop a setting that no one will ever use?
Because I want to see it done.
This is exactly the same urge as computer scientists have when they decide to wipe out the core memory of their brand new Sony PSPs and install BSD on them. This is the urge to prove it could be done, to build something that makes aesthetic sense to you. To nail something that seems impossible and to make it work well.
If you think about it, I'm even handicapping myself. I've decided to run angel/demon style games using Nobilis, and human level games using Dead Inside. I know both games and would be comfortable running both games, but I'm probably about as expert as anyone on Earth in In Nomine. I can generate mechanics for that game in my sleep. I even wrote an entirely new Word system for In Nomine once, designed to bring Nobilis-style flexibility into In Nomine's power level. To do this thing in the other two game systems, instead, means doing a ton of research, of testing of concepts, of development work.
And that's the point. Maybe this is proving to myself that despite largely sliding out of the RPG world, I could still do core mechanics development. Maybe this is like doing a Masters thesis in RPG game design. Maybe this is just the project car I have sitting in my garage. I dunno.
All I know is, when I'm writing the mechanics, I have a smile on my face.
Is there ever a better reason to do something stupid?
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:45 PM | Comments (25)
-->April 3, 2005
Eric Burns-White: Also? Breasts. I mean, dude.
Sin City was astounding.
Truly astounding. Astounding in the way you think movies should be, but so rarely are. It was more than Noir, more than comic bookish, more than Frank Miller (though the Milleresque dialogue was -- of course -- spot on. Lots of "get up, Old Man" that sounded right out of Dark Knight Returns.
The cinematography deserves an Oscar. So does the editing. So does makeup.
So do other things, but it'll never happen. Never in a million years. But this was the ultimate Noir story for the twenty first century -- it understood Noir in a way that 99% of Modern Noir fails so badly at. The core concept -- the One Good Man who must deal with a world of failure and death and destruction and horror and corruption and (most of all) despair -- was better than updated. It was commemorated. It was exemplified.
And even though we had more than one One Good Man... every one of them, at the time they were on screen, were it.
It was good. It was very good. You should definitely see it if you like things that are good. Or at least things I think are good. And if you don't like the things that I think are good... um... well, it might be odd that you're here, reading what I write.
I also bought lots of Preacher while I was out. Not that I think you care about that.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:22 PM | Comments (23)
